Playing And Mourning

Music may be usefully divided into two categories: works whose primary activity is that of playing and works whose primary concern is that of mourning. If one accepts that, as a verb, the play's the thing, then one accepts as well the presence or necessity of rules. Without rules, no matter how arbitrary, there can be no game. And playing cannot be easily distinguished from games. If one accepts rules, then one accepts the exception, the freedom from rules. One accepts rule-breaking and in the specific case of a musical rule like voice leading, one accepts the free note; in the case of a canon, one accepts the free voice. Here I think of the tenor voice in Tallis' Miserere Nostri, here I think as well of quartet of flutes in Ives' Unanswered Question.

If one accepts mourning, then one accepts life and its sanctity. To mourn is to regret the absence of something, of someone. To mourn is to embrace life so that its absence is felt as a loss. But if one accepts life, then one must accept death as well for we cannot properly talk about life without mentioning death. To accept death is to accept memory, for mourning is an act of recalling. To accept memory is to accept forgetting, for memories are finite and one can forget. We mourn because without a life's presence, we can build no more new memories. Its store cannot grow. Only a forgetting is inevitable.

Transcriptions have for the longest time been utilitarian. They provided a means of transmitting information and functioned as a surrogate for memory. Transcriptions after the advent of recording technology have, more often than not, been seen from the point of view of irony. And yet, listening to Sciarrino's Bach transcription:



... irony is not a word that immediately comes to mind. Seeing irony in all transcriptions results from seeing all transcribing as an act of mourning: that one mourns the loss of notes that one can never reproduce with authenticity; the way the 19th century may be seen as a collective mourning of the loss of Beethoven. Transcribing in the post-iPod generation is motivated not by mourning but by play. Seeing this opens up a whole new avenue for understanding what it is a transcription attempts to do.

Playing. Mourning. Remembering. Forgetting. What we do in life. What others do in our stead when we die.