ARTICULATION AS MUSICAL DIMENSION OF TEXT. THE RELATION BETWEEN WORD AND MUSIC IN SALVATORE SCIARRINO’S WORK
University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
juliaponzio@hotmail.com
Abstract
I will start in from the definition of Rhythm given by Benveniste in Problems in general linguistics, when he links the etymology of the word rythmos with the Greek word Rein, which has not to do with the division of time or with the scansion of time in equal parts, but rather with the concept of schema, of form. But Rythmos, says Benveniste, means the form in a particular sense because it does not mean the form as something fixed, realized. Rythmos means the form in the moment of its formation, that is to say the form in the moment in which it takes form. The image with which Benveniste explains this particular way to intend the form, is the one of waves: their form is inconstant, always in change, always different in itself. I will use this idea of rhythm in order to elaborate a semiotic analysis of “madrigalism”. Madrigalism is an interesting case of interweaving between music, word and writing, because by madrigalisms musical writing tries to graphically mime or describe the meaning of words. Madrigalisms is semiotically very complex: in it the relation between music and word cannot be thought as a classical relation between signifier and signified because madrigalism does not work in absentia, it does not mean a word if the word is not there, present, visible near it. If in a musical text which contains madrigalisms the singed text is erased or lost, madrigalism disappears, it does not remain as signifier which makes reference to an absent signified. Madrigalism works in presence, in the moment of the encounter between word and music. It can be described as a grafting, as a montage. I will try to reflect on this operation of grating, on this particular encounter between music, writing and word, through Benveniste’s idea of rhythm, starting from a piece that in the contemporaneity uses and problematizes the idea of madrigalism, which is Sciarrino’s 12 madrigali per voci a cappella su haiku giapponesi.
Musical form of Madrigal is a very good starting point for an analysis of the complex relation between musical sign and verbal sign.
In this paper I try to analyse this relation, in order to highlight, starting from it, an idea of rhythm which displaces the pivot of semiotic analysis from a semantic ground to a merely syntactic ground.
In this text I will speak of madrigal starting from a contemporary work, which is Salvatore Sciarrino’s 12 madrigali per voci a cappella su haiku giapponesi (twelve madrigal for voice a cappella on Japanese haikus), presented to the Salzburg festival in 2008.
The use of the musical form of madrigal and the poetic form of haiku is not new in the work of this composer, but Sciarrino uses this two forms together for the first time in this work.
Sciarrino explains in 2008 that his interest in madrigal is linked to a particular relation between word and music it inaugurates in Wwestern music history (Sciarrino 2008). This relation has to do with the abandonment of the strophic structure of music, that is to say, with the abandonment of a composition practice of a musical text, which is indifferently adaptable to every stanza of a poetic text, or even to every poetic test with a certain metric structure. "Arie per cantar sonetti" or "arie per cantar stanze di canzone", for example, are texts adaptable to every sonnet or every canzone. Madrigal represents, therefore, the end of an indifferent relation between text and music. The musical text of a madrigal is indissolubly linked with a verbal text: it establishes between text and music a relation in which no substitution is possible. In a madrigal, every single part of the text has its own proper musical phrase. Madrigal, therefore, situates the place of the relation between musical and verbal text, in the sense of the “proper”, but in such a particular way that this relation deeply changes the sense of this proper, the sense of belonging, the sense of property.
Answering the question why he calls Madrigals some pieces which have not the formal structure of the madrigal as a form historically codified, Sciarrino says:
Because they are for ensemble of voices, because they have some links, though week, with that world. And they have even some madrigalism, that is to say they express the will to represent a precise concept by a melodic figuration or by other types of figurations. Something like this also appears in this work. For example in one of the madrigals something rhythmically very clear appears when the word “rhythm” is sung. Madrigalism is a technique linked with the voice because it is linked with the meaning of words (Sciarrino 2008).
In his answer Sciarrino speaks about madrigalism, which is a composition procedure in which music follows words not only from the point of view of expressivity, but also from a graphic point of view. In other words, in a madrigalism the graphic notation of music mimes the meaning of the word linked with it (as for example the word “eyes” represented from two whole notes, or the correspondence between the word “see” with a graphic movement of the notes on the pentagram, which recalls the movement of waves).
How can we semiotically define the relation established between word and music by madrigalism? What sort of link is the one, which connects, for instance, two whole notes with the word "eyes"? It is very difficult to frame the relation established by madrigalism between word and music, in the terms of a classic relation between signifier and signified. It is difficult because madrigalism does not work in absentia. Madrigalism doesn't work as a sign which stands for a word, if the word is absent: its iconic relation with word appears only if the word is present, only in the moment in which the presence of the word establishes and marks a relation with the music. If in a musical text, which contains madrigalisms, we erase the line of the voice, madrigalisms disappear. The verbal text cannot be reconstructed starting from the graphic resemblance with the musical text of madrigalism. In a madrigalism, once the verbal text is erased, does not remain any signified, any reference to an absent signifier. The musical text in the case of madrigalism, far from verbal text, does not work as a code whose system of codification is lost. Madrigalism works in presence, in the moment of the encounter between word and music: it is a graft, an assembling operation, a montage.
It is very interesting that Sciarrino quotes in the interview of 2008, as example of a madrigalism used in Dodici madrigali, the madrigalism on the word Rhythm: “something rhythmically very clear appears when the word rhythm is singed” (Sciarrino 2008). I will connect here this madrigalism on the word rhythm, quoted by Sciarrino, with the definition of rhythm given by Benveniste in an appendix of Problems of general linguistics (Benveniste 1971: 281-288). In its ancient meaning, according, to Benveniste, the word rythmos did not mean an ordered sequence in the duration of events or movements, the scansion of the march that controls time dividing it in equal and countable parts. The etymology of rythmos comes from rein, which means to flow (as a river). In its ancient meaning, Benveniste says, rythmos has something to do with the concept of schema, of form. But while schema is defined as a fixed, realised form, as something posed as an object, rythmos defines the form in the moment in which it is assumed: it is the mobile, fluid form, it is the improvised, momentary, modifiable form. This idea of rhythm configures an idea of time totally different from the one of a simple series of instants on a line. Rhythm is a relation, is the moment of the encounter in which nothing remains the same. Rhythm means a not originally relation, a relation which does not come from a past, which is not ratified by a convention, which does not come from a process of recognition. Rytmos defines a relation, an encounter between elements which, coming in contact, begin to belong to each other, without any possibility to justify their relation. It defines a relation that does not unify. For these reasons, the text that enters in this relation can work otherwise if this relation is interrupted. Far from its verbal text, a musical text which contained madrigalisms, played with instrument, for example, continues to fully work, as if nothing is missing: it continues to signify otherwise. Madrigalism establishes a relation between world and music in which the concept itself of property, of belonging, is deeply modified. In this relation “proper” and appropriate does not coincide, like in Heidegger’s idea of Eigentlichkeit. This alteration of the idea of proper, makes the relation unstable and always about to change. The elements which constitute the form of madrigalism, once separated, does not refer to each other in absence, but begin to signify otherwise. Rythmos in Benveniste’s sense, indicates therefore both a relation and a fissure, that is to say it indicates a relation, which does not close a circle but which, on the contrary, opens a space. Rhythm is in this sense articulation. The relation between word and music which madrigal constitutes, implies therefore this alteration of the idea of proper which let us think rhythm as articulation. Articulation is a fundamental element in the execution of musical text, it is what let the musical text to breath, what differentiates human musical execution from the one of an electronic device.
To the interviewer who asks why in Dodici madrigali he uses so a historically codified form as the madrigal, Sciarrino answers: “Actually I’m not looking for a relation with tradition, but for a new form of creation” (Sciarrino, 2008).
The reference to the form of madrigal, in Sciarrino’s work, is therefore a reference not to the form as schema, that is the form once immobilized from tradition and history, but a reference to the form as rhythm, to the form as figure. Differently from madrigal, in a strophic musical composition, what is important is the metre of poetical composition. Therefore in a strophic musical composition, rhythm is intended in the sense of the schema. Rhythm in the sense of schema is linked which the traditional idea of a linear time, the time of distension animi which is the time of narration: Augustine, for example, in Confessions uses a metric structure, that is to say a schema of alternation between short and long syllables in a verse (Deus creator omnium) in order to build his idea of time.
On the contrary, rhythm in the sense of form in the instant of its formation, does not have a horizontal direction, as the classic idea of time, but it has rather a vertical direction. This idea of time has more to do with the instant of the encounter than with a narration of the encounter, which justifies the encounter itself, analysing the reasons of the being together.
The form of madrigal to which Sciarrino makes reference, is therefore the form of a relation between word and music, which is not justified by a schematic correspondence. This relation does not allows any possibility of substitution, but, at the some time, it establishes a link which counts for the encounter, and that therefore does not work in absence, thereby opening the possibility of new encounters, as in the case in which the verbal test is set to music again, or the musical text transcribed otherwise.
The madrigalism on the word rhythm, produces therefore a double madrigalism: the music graphically mimes a word, but doing so it graphically also mimes the form itself of madrigal, that is to say the structure, the form of the rhythmic relation it introduces between word and music. Rhythmic relation is a fissured, articulated relation, in which there is always the space for a breath, for an embellishment, for a fioritura, for a diminution.
The core of Sciarrino’s work on madrigal is the question of the space between musical and verbal text, and in particular the question of the strange temporality and the strange property relation that madrigal constitutes.
Madrigalism, which reveals the rhythmic structure constituted by madrigal between text and music, also let emerge the place in which this rhythmic structure is constituted. Madrigalism is a graphic mimesis in which musical writing mimes the meaning of the word to which it corresponds. It is totally not important, if this mimesis, this resemblance, is perceptible for a listener who listens to the music without the score.
Madrigalism let appear, therefore, a relation between text and music at the level of writing. The vertical or instantaneous temporality, the rhythmic relation, concerns musical writing.
Sciarrino writes in Le figure della musica
[Writing music ] means to use symbolic-graphic systems, that is to say to use systems developed and ordered in the space. This implies the use of logical and spatial structures. Musical writing offers the possibility to fix, to control, to project in a simultaneous reading what in the time we hear, on the contrary, as a succession”. (Sciarrino 1998: 123)”.
Musical writing, Sciarrino says, confers to the music an architectonical sense. What happens to the poetic text, to its temporality when it comes in contact with this architectonical structure? If musical text is a fissured, articulated time, where the spaces between sounds always open the possibility for breath and fioritura, the insertion of the verbal text multiplies the spaces, thereby projecting the text in a tridimensional structure. The rhythmic relation which madrigal establishes between music and word, as is evident in limit case of madrigalism, is also projected inside verbal text, deeply changing it. In this projection, the syntactic dimension exceeds the semantic dimension, and the vertical instantaneous temporality get the upper hand over the time of narration.
This complex process by which the encounter between music and verbal text modifies the temporal structure of verbal text is very clear, for example, in Sciarrino’s musical theatre. The wiring of opera, of melodrama is traditionally linked to the narration of a tale. In Sciarrino’s musical theatre, on the contrary, time never flows because all happens in only one instant. As for example in Lohengrin, composed in 1983, which is significantly subtitled: invisible action in a prologue, four scenes and one epilogue. This text, presents an apparent action –the love story between Elsa and Lohengrin- apparent because at the end it is revealed to be only a dream, or a delirium of Elsa, confined in a psychiatric hospital. The time of the action, therefore, is at the end contracted in the closed and narrow space of a hospital’s room.
This contraction of the narrative aspect of the text, this passage from a horizontal-narrative temporality to a vertical-instantaneous temporality, is what conducts Sciarrino toward a particular type of poetic text, which is Japanese haiku. In 12 madrigali, Sciarrino produces an interesting encounter between the form –the rhythm- of madrigal and the form –the rhythm- of haiku.
With reference to another of his works, Quaderno di strada (2005), Sciarrino describes very precisely how he works on a verbal text before setting it to music. Verbal text, Sciarrino says, has to be adapted in order to be set in music. This adaptation process is described as an operation that has to do with cuts, with eliminations of parts of the text. In Quaderno di strada, Sciarrino sets to music some fragments, as for example graffiti read on cities walls, part of letters or articles or poem’s lines, collected in different moments and places on a notebook. For each text is indicated the author, or the original collocation, but they result profoundly modified because parts of them are cut. Sciarrino describes this modification of the text as a process, which reduces the text to something that is very similar to the structure of haiku.
Sciarrino writes:
The verbal flash of haiku, inserted in longer musical piece, let the verses rotate on themselves, so that the sense is subverted. Every word enters in contact with another one, also if it is very far, thereby creating new images, short-circuits (Sciarrino, 2008a: 26).
Roland Barthes, in the last years of his life, in La preparation du roman (Barthes 2011), deeply works on Japanese haikus.
In this text Barthes describes haiku as exemplar act of annotation of present that is to say as writing of the instant, of the event (Barthes 2011: 23 and following). Annotation, of which haiku is an exemplar act, consists in the extrapolation of a single experience from the whole flowing of experiences. In this notation practice, writing gives to the experience a form –form in the sense of rhythm and not in the sense of schema. This form is the form of the event. Haiku is an annotation that shares with musical notation the fact it determines a vertical relation between the lines of the text, rather than a horizontal narrative structure. A “good” haiku, Barthes says, does not tell a story and does not express a concept. The space between the lines of a haiku, according to Barthes, is empty: in it we can’t find any logical or temporal connection, but nevertheless these lines are not indifferent to each other. The lines are at the same time both linked and separated by white spaces that constitute a relation that both Barthes and Sciarrino describe as a short-circuit, or a tilt. What Barthes describes as short-circuit or tilt is a double rhythmic relation: the first between the subject and the object of writing, and the second between the lines of the poem. A haiku is in this sense the result of an encounter, which does not happen to a transcendental subject, to a subject in general: a haiku is the result of an encounter between singularities. What happens in this encounter, according to Barthes, is an individuation event (Barthes, 2011: 39). Individuation is the event of an encounter, it is a window opened between two universes, which determines what Barthes, with a very musical word, calls nuance. Nuance is what makes something or someone irreplaceable in a relation. Nuance is an encounter between singularities whose link is circumstantial: it realizes a montage of universes which gives sense to each other also if they are not made for each other. Nuance realises a link that cannot justify itself, in other words it realises a not schematic form, a fluid form, a rhythm. For these reasons, this link, as in the case of madrigalism, does not work in absentia. It is lost once the encounter is finished. And this loss is an irreparable loss.
The space between the three lines of a haiku is empty, it is a silence, as the space between two notes of a musical composition, or the space of the two lines of a counterpoint, or the space between the line which indicates the melody to sing and the line which indicates the word to pronounce.
To reduce a text to a haiku means therefore to dig in it spaces in order to make articulation emerge. Articulation is according to Sciarrino what makes possible to set a verbal text to music. Articulation is therefore, in Sciarrino, the place of the encounter between word and music.
Sciarrino writes:
The mysterious and powerful link between sound and word. Word and sound, sound and word: this is singing. To invent a song does not mean only composing for a voice. Is necessary before composing, to clean our minds, to make transparent the intervals which have been crossed by all the music of the world, by mountains of songs, and by what constitutes the gigantic rubbish dump in which we live. Ecology is the birth of a consciousness in order to act and to find again ourselves. Therefore ecology of sound means coming back to silence, but above all to find again an expression without dryness and without rhetoric. When the voice trusts to silence, it remains only mouth, hole, saliva. Slightly opened lips, border of a obscure void, border of thirst and hunger (Sciarrino 2008: 27).
In order to compose for voice is necessary, according to Sciarrino, to find silence, or better a particular form of silence. When Sciarrino speaks about silence as the possibility of the mysterious and powerful link between word and sound, he is not speaking of an absolute silence but rather of the silence opened between the sounds and the words that is the silence which articulates creating a relation and making transparent the intervals. When voice trusts to silence, Sciarrino says, it remains only mouth: not a mouth closed in an absolute silence, but on the contrary a mouth with disclosed lips, as the lips of someone who is about to speak or to sing. This silence with disclosed lips is already articulating a form. This particular sense of articulation is described by Sciarrino in Le figure della musica, by what he calls window forms (Sciarrino 1998: 97), where again "form" has to be intended as rhythm and not as schema. In window forms, a rip opens an universe on another universe, breaking continuity. Exactly as it happens in Lohengrin: in the narrow space of a hospital room a window is opened on a dream. The prologue of this work is titled: prologue through an opened window. A universe is opened on another universe without a narrative link: between Elsa’s real situation and her dream, there is no coherence, no narrative flow, no linear time. Is exactly as, Sciarrino says, when we open more than a window on our computer desktop.
The window form, Sciarrino says, is a montage, a seam whose scar remains evident, made of two universes that, on one hand, are not made to be together and, on the other hand, from the moment of their encounter on, are not indifferent to each other. It is an instantaneous montage, as the one of photography. Windows, Sciarrino says, are two spatial forms cut in time. What Sciarrino calls window form, is a relation between two universes, which lean toward each other in a reciprocal donation of sense. This relation of sewing, of montage, determines, according to Sciarrino, a totally discontinuous time, an articulated time. In this articulation realized by window forms, music is already in relation with word, also if the text is still not been set to music.
Sciarrino experiments this idea of a relation between music and text, which goes beyond the simple act to set a text to music, in many pieces, for example in Alfabeto oscuro, composed in 1993 which is a part of Musiche per Dante. This piece, written for a little orchestra, therefore without voices, has at its beginning, as indication for its execution: “come parlando” which means “like speaking”. The effect of come parlando, is obtained, in this piece, by the pronunciation in the instruments of the consonants of the Divina commedia’s first verse. Consonants produce a cut, an articulation effect, an effect of continuous traumatic interruption. Therefore the come parlando mimes articulation, the syntactic relation, the rhythmic relation of words. In this rhythmic relation Sciarrino finds an eloquence before word which is the link which connects word and music before the operation to set to music a text: the eloquence of instruments in Alfabeto oscuro, Sciarrino says, is given precisely from the impossibility to speak.
Musical dimension of text, that is to say what makes possible the encounter between word and music, is therefore this articulation, in which writing goes beyond narration and becomes position of signifiers. In this writing as position of signifiers, which constitutes the musical dimension of text, the link between signifiers has no more to do with the semantic reference to their signified, but it has rather to do with rhythm, that is to say with the circumstantial movement in which signifiers enter in relation, through silence spaces, opened as windows on other interpretative universes.
References
BARTHES, R. 2011. The preparation of novel: lecture course and seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 et 1979-80), translated by Kate Briggs, Columbia University press.
BENVENISTE, E. 1971. Problems in general linguistics, University of Miami Press.
SCIARRINO, S. 2008. Intervista al compositore Salvatore Sciarrino. Un’idea fissa: riformare il teatro musicale, in L’Osservatore Romano, 27 settembre 2008.
SCIARRINO, S. 2008a . 12 Madrigali, perché oggi, in Music@, anno III, n. 9, Luglio-Agosto.
SCIARRINO, S. 1991. Carte da suono (1981-2001), CIDIM, Roma.
SCIARRINO, S. 1998. Le figure della musica da Beethoven ad oggi, Ricordi, Milano.