Playing And Mourning Part 3

Transcriptions may either be motivated by play or by mourning. Berio's are mostly made conscious of the rueful nature of looking back, not that he attempts to recapture the past, but he seems resigned to the technologies that have made it impossible for us to escape the pervasiveness of our memories. Sciarrino's seem on the one hand to be acts of playfulness (his elaboration for solo flute); on the other, they also seem to be acts of graffiti (his puppet opera/ biopic on the life of the murdering-prince Gesualdo). But is the memory too strong, too vivid? Is the reason why we embrace Feldman because Feldman, in his music, embraces forgetting? Are the Number Pieces of Cage important because we can never remember what they sound like?

The orchestrations by Brant (of Ives) and Bartok (of himself: the pianos/ percussion sonata and then concerto) embrace the original in every way except that they both fail to capture the inherent messiness in both pieces: by adding instruments, one curiously trims the loose edges. But the messiness in Ives' Concord and in his own orchestral music is what should have been left untouched (or is this musical disarray something that only Ives could capture in sound?); the striking imbalance and self-imposed poverty in Bartok's original is missing, and its absence is sorely felt in the orchestral transcription, which seems suddenly too neat, too coordinated. How do you transcribe as though you had forgotten the source material? How do you remember what has no shape; how do you memorialize mess, or are memorials inherently neat?