vagantes for solo piano: three studies in indeterminacy

I have been planning a trilogy of piano pieces in the manner of Gaspard de la Nuit for a very long time. Not that I really do ‘suites’ of loosely-related pieces, I’m more of a monolith-obsessive; so my Gaspard-equivalent is in essence a single piece articulated into three sections …which I nonetheless will permit to be performed separately.

Helen Waddell, the Irish classicist, wrote a pair of companion books, the Wandering Scholars (1927), and Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (1929). The primary subject of the two books are the itinerant poets and thinkers the Goliards, and Waddell translates many of their texts, including a selection from the Carmina Burana (or Benediktbeuern Codex), into vivid and poetic – if somewhat charmingly dated – English. I first read them in the 60s, and they have grown in importance to me ever since.

However, for the purposes of my new piano piece, I have avoided the rather drearily christian mediaeval texts that are the books’ central concern in favour of Classical references: the Republican Cato the Elder, in de agri cultura; the Augustan Vergil, in the Aeneid; and the letters of the Gallo-Roman bishop Sidonius Apollinaris, who describes coming upon the ghost of the Silver Age poet Petronius (elegantiae arbiter says Tacitus) in an olive grove in Marseilles. Nothing very pious there, fortunately; all three texts have to do with things bucolic: making wine, wandering lonely roads, haunting olive groves. Consequently, I have characterised my piece as consisting of three elegiae.

I had previously suggested to pianist James Iman that I write him a piece. His recordings of composers as various as Betsy Jolas, Klaus Huber, and Don Martino had struck me as outstanding, and his interest in variable form works such as the Third Sonata of Boulez and the Gilbert Amy Sonate seemed to resonate with the edifice I was beginning to design. While I do, from time to time, write pieces just because I must – chronology horizons or ‘…flickering instantiation…’ for instance – it is useful to have a performer in mind so that I can test out ideas with them and send material as it emerges, for feedback.

Vagantes is obviously not entirely an abstract work. While each of the three sections offers an opportunity for exploring a specific structural method, this technology is in service of a particular vision, one of distant antiquity and its ineffable difference.

The epigraphs are:

I water, drawn from a quiet sea

—[Cato]… uses it in his recipe for Coan wine, which begins by drawing water from a quiet sea on a day when there shall be no wind [Helen Waddell, Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, 296].

II wandering on long roads, companionless

—[of Dido] the pitiful sorrowful dreaming in Virgil’s loveliest lines of herself always alone, always abandoned, wandering on long roads companionless [Helen Waddell, the Wandering Scholars, xxvii].

III a familiar ghost, at home among the olive trees

—Helen Waddell on Sidonius Apollinaris spying Petronius Arbiter in Marseilles, three centuries after his death [Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, 299].

I chose these three fragments for their tone of melancholy and isolation; the first evokes a secluded beach, the second an uninhabited landscape, and the third a lonely spectre. All three have as an element of their affekt a sense of detachment, even of marginality – of place, of society, of time. It seemed to me from the outset that I would need to utilise structural solutions for them that involved inscrutability – formally, indeterminacy – of one kind or another, as suited to their characters.

For I – water… it seemed to me that the most relevant kind of vagueness would emerge from essentially improvising the music over a precomposed template. While we cannot know anything (or at least, very little) about music of the Roman era, it is reasonable to assume that their music entailed a fair degree of extemporisation. This is certainly the basis of much modern performance of mediaeval music, and I think it is permissible to extrapolate backwards to the first centuries B/CE. In order to achieve the kind of tidal fluidity I required I wrought a rigorous structural chassis which ensured that the kind of harmonic and temporal fields that characterise my music would be present …and then invented the music ex nihilo, gesture by gesture.

I realised, while engaged in composing the music, that the whole water section was destined to be about 25’ long. While I submit that as a freestanding work, this scale would have been meaningfully commensurate with the sense of perimeter-less seclusion, water was required to stand as the first of three such sections, and both James and I came to feel that at full length it would make programming the entire vagantes work difficult. I therefore excised the final two structural units, which were essentially recapitulatory anyway, and drew the section to a close shortly after the ‘tide turned’. I treated the ‘outgoing tide’ as a kind of amnesia: the music evaporates leaving only mute repetition and the bare structural substrate.

Section II – wandering… possesses a quite different species of indeterminacy. I took two separate elements, that of Dido’s “wandering on long roads” and James’ interest in music that offered multiple routes, and came up with a piece that has an entrance and an exit, and, in between, 24 separate ‘paragraphs’ of variable length (“long roads”) that can be played in any order (“wandering”). This delegation to the player of responsibility for the details of Dido’s peregrinations can be seen both as a manifestation of the “companionless” element of the characterisation – the pianist is both alone on stage and alone in determining the route the music takes – and a parallel to the unsettledness of Dido’s “pitiful sorrowful dreaming”. In effect, as composer I have diminished my responsibility for the shape of the music just as Dido’s distracted state diminishes her capacity for finding her way.

Incidentally, there are, with 24 sections, 6.2 x 10^23 different routes through the material. It is my fervent hope that they all get essayed eventually (just think of the royalties!), but given that a complete run-through of all the permutations would take about 14 million trillion years, the pianist would still be at it as their constituent particles decayed into radiation.

Section III – a familiar ghost… takes a third slant on indeterminacy: near-absence. Ghosts, if they existed, would be a kind of lingering trace of someone long gone, either with or without agency depending on one’s preferred fantasy. Whether such a presence could be considered to be there or not is similarly moot. I have taken this ambiguity (there/not there) and created a structure where the ghost of Petronius is manifested, not by independent material, but by particular ways of articulating the musical landscape it haunts. These articulations are somewhat robotic and regular – ghosts, at least in the West, are said to repeat stereotypical behaviours with a particular frequency – and gradually erode over time, as if Petronius’ spectral presence dwindles as we perceive it. Or christianity cancels his shade.

There is a certain pathos in the ghost of the Arbiter of pagan elegance having to walk amongst christians. At the same time, we know from the Darkening Age¹ just how iconoclastic and contemptuous the early christians were about paganism, and there is an air of chagrined, furtive, nostalgia to bishop Sidonius’ confrontation with the ghostly Petronius, epitome of amoral urbanity. I have tried to capture the regret that colours this encounter, with their two small, symmetrical, deprivations.

The score bears another epigraph, only tangentially related to the music but nonetheless pertinent. It reads:

A Vagus, or Wandering Scholar, “shall never be up in time for matins, for there are phantasmata abroad in the early morning, which is the reason why early risers are never quite sane” (The Wandering Scholars, 197).

It’s a known fact, at least to all my circle, that I am an extremely late riser. I detest mornings – all that prim “newly-mintedness”. The majority of my music has been written between midnight and dawn. To discover that the Goliards felt likewise draws a link between us that bridges close on a thousand years. Night owls rule!