Arpisms
flute (2025)
No. 4 from the Second Flute Tetralog
Over the last several years I seem to have been focused on writing works for single reed instruments and/or piano. This was not an intentional strategy, I simply got asked to provide pieces for players I admire, and was pleased to oblige. By late February this year, though, I was getting a bit weary of constantly having to consider the same sets of performance capabilities while forging musical behaviours, and I began to crave some variety.
My go-to instrument, after the piano, has been for many years the flute. It was not really a surprise when, out of the blue, the concept of a flute piece popped up in my imagination, more or less fully-fledged. A long time ago I came across a remarkable book: Three Painter-Poets, edited and translated by Harriett Watts (Penguin 1974), which contained extended text works by sculptor Hans (Jean) Arp, Kurt Schwitters (of Ursonate fame), and Paul Klee. Of the three, the Klee texts were the most traditional, and the Schwitters perhaps sufficiently familiar these days from recordings (Ribble Bobble Pimlico! – although these ‘poems’ are distinctly different from his performance texts). The Arp texts, on the other hand, were richly imaginative and, at least in Watts’ translations, evocative. When I first read them I isolated three words from the Arp poems, rainpagodas, flowersphinx, and withered bells which I felt could be the prompts to a series of three atmospheric studies. Now, nearly fifty years later, those three words re-emerged as the possible basis for a flute solo, one that amalgamated all three moods into a single musical text.
I had intended to title such a piece rainpagodas, but in retrospect this seemed a limiting choice. Instead I decided to group the three ideas together under a single moniker, and realised that their commonality was – of course! – their author, Hans Arp (he was obliged to call himself Jean after Alsace was returned to France in 1919, but continued to use ‘Hans’ in German). Having renamed the piece Arpisms, it struck me that the three idioms could be very effective if intercut, and I created an architecture that alternated them in the already-established order: ecstatic showing-off (rainpagodas), painfully constrained introverted microtonal melody (flowersphinx), and to balance, entropic disintegrations (withered bells).
Arpisms is dedicated to flute players Elizabeth McNutt and Laura Chislett.
Program note
It was in the mid ‘70s that I first came across the book Three Painter-Poets, translations by Harriett Watts of poetic writings by Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Paul Klee. I say ‘poetic writings’ because their works are barely ‘poems’, in the traditional sense of the word. Among the texts of Hans Arp I came upon three evocative neologisms, rainpagodas, flowersphinx, and withered bells. I considered searching out the original German words, but that would have been dishonest—my rudimentary German would have been nowhere near adequate to grasping the complex imagery implicit in each word, so I chose to respond to the English translations. The brief German epigraph to the score, ‘Regenpagoden nach regenpagoden … stürzen aus Wolken nieder’ (Rainpagodas upon rainpagodas ... plunge down from the clouds), is present because it appears in Harriett Watts’ book.
In Arp’s ‘poems’, the words function quite differently to standard parsable language; they coexist as a mosaic of sounds and images that combine to evoke an ambiguous, indeterminate mood. Similarly, in the piece the music is a mosaic, constructed out of brief phrases that vary in their degrees of resemblance: some are identical and repeated, some are kin in various ways, and some are contrasting. Each little corpuscular wiggle of pitches is an ‘atom’ of the music. The neologisms have distinct characters: the rainpagodas material is dominated by cascades; the flowersphinx by microtonal melodic wisps; and the withered bells by disintegrating sonorities. All three are further segmented into subsections, three apiece, and the piece alternates them, in the order:
rainpagodas 1, flowersphinx 1,
rainpagodas 2, flowersphinx 2, withered bells 1,
rainpagodas 3, withered bells 2, flowersphinx 3, withered bells 3
In Hans Arp’s relief sculptures he makes considerable play with types of framing, the content of his work restrained by an arbitrary outer limit. Similarly I have used the top and bottom of the flute register as ‘frames’ and the music either bumps against or launches from these outer edges. Arp’s poetry is densely florid with hyperbolic imagery, and the flow is often caused to falter under the weight of its complexity; at the same time his texts are frequently extended to the point of breathlessness. I have shaped this piece to try and reflect all these aspects of Arp’s poetic language, the overloaded, the fitful, and the flamboyant.