Do you notice a mistake?
Mark Andre’s work weaves together many different threads, many distinct dimensions, inextricably: his music is an existential, spiritual, and bodily experience, created in the tradition of Helmut Lachenmann. It is rooted in a religious (and even mystical) substrate of art as it tends toward a unified whole – it is a quest for transparency, for instrumental invention; its attention is with the unstable, the fragile, the friable; it hovers at the very threshold of what is audible (subtle whisperings, and, at the other end of the spectrum, explosive booms); coiled in it is the creation of a complex causality that plunges into and flows from the Ars Subtilior of the 14th century and from the theories of Edgar Morin. For the clarity of this essay, we will be temporarily dissociating the two temporarily unweaving this radical fabric, starting with faith and then science – the main threads of both warp and weft, and weaving them back together as we move through the chronology of his catalogue.
Mark Andre’s conceptually dense explorations link music and religion – and, more specifically his own Protestant faith; in the late 1990s, in a moment of a distancing from and even abandonment of theoretical discourse, this manifested in the use of essentially biblical texts and ideas, most of them taken from the New Testament:
– Kenosis (1999) for wind trio draws on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (2:7) “…but emptied himself [ἐκένωσεν], taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness”.1 Paul uses the image of ekkenosis, the action of emptying oneself (which is translated in the musical structure), to describe how Jesus Christ abandoned God’s attributes in assuming human form.
Zum Staub sollst du zurückkehren (2005), for seven instruments, takes up the assertion in Genesis 3:19 that “…you are dust/and to dust you shall return.” Dust (here, sonic dust) can also be translated as ash, which is the title of another of Andre’s works, asche (2004), for five instruments.
…22:13… (“Musiktheater-Passion” in three parts, 1999-2004), is a reference to the thirteenth verse of the twenty-second and last chapter of the Revelation to Saint John: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” The Protestant theologian Pierre Prigent, whose writing on John’s Apocalypse2 was a key source for Mark Andre, emphasized that Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, were essentially synonyms for first and last as absolutes, but only when “last” was not understood as an ending or a conclusion of God. The idea of a perfection or culmination in first and last letters appears in the Jewish theological tradition as well: the Hebrew word for “truth,” emet, written אמת, is considered a symbolic expression of God, in that it is written with the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph, mem, and tav). Alpha and Omega, first and last, are cognate with God in other verses, as well (1:8, 1:17, 2:8, and 21:6), but in the one Andre chose for the title of his piece, they apply to Christ, the One here linked with the One beyond, their names made interchangeable.
…22:13… is divided into three sections: …das O…, …das Letzte…, …das Ende…; in other words, of the three word pairings in the verse, it retains only the second each time. Other sources are layered onto this central source: Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, whose title is drawn from Revelations 8:1, is evoked in …22:13… when the verse is sung in Swedish: “When [als] the lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” Silence precedes the thundering and the voices, the flashes of lightning and the quavering of a golden censer, which an angel fills with fire and throws to the ground, at which point seven other angels blow seven trumpets, creating sorrow and plagues, turning water to blood, sowing terror among flames, and finally announcing the Day of Judgement. Andre refers to another source in this piece: the sixth and second sets (in this reverse order) that Garry Kasparov played against IBM’s Deep Blue on 11 and 4 May 1997, which the chess master conceded after the nineteenth and the forty-fifth move, respectively. The score plays with this by adopting a chessboard structure – reminding the listener, in turn, of the part in Bergman’s film when Antonius Block, the medieval knight, returns from the crusades to find his country ravaged by the plague, and challenges Death to a chess match. In the third part of …22:13…, Kasparov’s concession recalls The Acts of the Apostles (2:2), “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,” a wind that four angels, “standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth so that no wind could blow on earth or sea or against any tree” in Revelations (7:1). Andre layers a final source into the piece, the cattle cars of the “ghost train” that departed from Toulouse on 3 July 1944, carrying Jews, Christians, and veterans of the Spanish Civil War, which arrived at the Dachau concentration camp fifty-seven days later, on 28 August 1944. The sacrificed angels join this convoy of deathly, ghostly presences.
Mark Andre’s sibylline approach can often be seen in the titles of his works, which are often a single word – a preposition, a prefix, or an adverb. For example, the word “ab” (from) is used in two pieces, ab I (1996, originally written in all capital letters), for contrabass clarinet, cello, and piano, and ab II (1996-1997, idem), for contrabass clarinet, cimbalom, cello, piano, percussion, and live electronics. Similarly, Andre uses the German word in as the title for a piece for bass clarinet (2002). Other, more recent concertos, are similarly brief and inscrutable: an (at, 2014-2015), for violin and orchestra, and über (above or on, 2015), for clarinet, orchestra, and live electronics, “zu” (to), and “durch” (by, through, during, by means of), of which only the composer is able to reveal the biblical origins. A more direct biblical connection is evident in …zu…, a string trio written in 2004 in reference to a phrase that appears in Luther’s translation of Revelations into the German vernacular (1:6 and 18; 4:9 and 10; 5:13; 7:12; 10:6; 11:15; 14:11; 15:7; 20:10; 22:5): von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit (“forever and ever”). These are the words John uses to designate a dominion beyond time, the reign, the glory, the power, and the wisdom of God which Andre translates into music with a circular canon. According to Andre, durch (2004-2005), for saxophone, percussion, and piano, evokes The Gospel of Luke (13:23-24): “Someone asked him, ‘Lord, will only a few be saved?’ He said to them, “Strive to enter through [durch] the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.” Transition – religious, existential, compositional – passage, intermediation, state change, in no way process-driven, are the building blocks of Mark Andre’s oeuvre, all of them ultimately building up to the Resurrection of Christ. Moreover, the Rhineland mystics used the word durch to describe the process of becoming, of tending toward the Absolute. Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Johannes Tauler all used the word Durchbruch (“breakthrough”) to describe this process of becoming in which a person sheds their illusory and painful – because limited – consciousness, and enters or returns to the mysteries of the Godhead, the Unity, allowing the Unity to grasp itself and to be grasped from within as Absolute Unity. In Andre’s work, particularly his orchestral work, from a depth of silence, of holds, of stilled gestures, of shadowy and sometimes magmatic forms, to discrete attacks, some strictly stable, bloom or burst and then ebb away, sharp strokes and attacks, vertical ephemeral sparkles and explosions of varying density and thickness.
The triptych …auf… (2005-2007) for large orchestra and, in the third piece, live electronics, brings in this same intermediary: “The German preposition and adverb auf connotes the idea of a threshold, a form of transition, of passing, for example, in compound verbs such as aufgeben (“to give up”), aufhören (to stop), aufheben (to abolish or keep). In this piece I wanted to evoke the idea of the threshold between sound spaces and families, a threshold that also has an existential or metaphysical element.” The term Aufhebung (annulment or rescinding) also resonates in …auf…, the synthesis within the dialectic that simultaneously preserves and abolishes, abrogates and sublimates. Similar to Helmut Lachenmann, Mark Andre sees in moments of negation – or silence – the very essence of this dialectic, when the felled tree has not yet become paper or table. Finally, …auf… also refers to the Resurrection (Auferstehung) as the evangelists told of it, to the glorified body, to sins redeemed and to freedom from death. In this Resurrection of Christ, such a triptych is only the “metaphysical transient,” the “almost nothing,” the merest whisper of the immense sound to come. And yet, if its title retains only the auf in Aufhebung or Auferstehung, it is because Mark Andre is working not as a philosopher, not as a theologian, not even as a simple believer – rather, as a musician, he is pointing to a basal movement within each human’s existence.
It is also worth mentioning the diptych hij in this context, made up of a first piece for orchestra (2008-2009) and a second for twenty-four voices and live electronics (2012). The title is an abbreviation of Hilfe Jesu. The cycle iv, which Andre began composing in 2007 and mostly calls on instrumental soloists or traditional ensembles (wind trio, string trio, string quartet, etc.), is a kind of research experiment on timbre and extended techniques, careful to open up “other inner creative spaces that have hitherto remained unexplored,” and suggests a “meta-problem” – a problem of transcendence: the idea of intro-version, in which the musical experience is charged with a tension that is more metaphysical than theological in the strict sense of that term, even if Andre evokes a “search for the existential and metaphysical traces of the presence and the power of Jesus of Nazareth.”
Winnowing away (and lowercasing) the letters of these titles is an ecumenical gesture – the work is addressed to Christians and non-Christians, believers and non-believers, without proselytizing – allowing for all sorts of resonances, mainly at the existential level, opening the senses in all spatial and temporal directions. In these orientations of space and time, it is impossible to distinguish the sound from the gesture producing it, from the concept or the body of compositional strategies that structure it, from the emotional tone, from the expressions it creates or inspires in the musician or the listener. “This type of preposition is almost a semantic graveyard, at once open-ended and incomplete, and recalls vast, wide-open, hidden spaces.” In other words, the word is like a trace, a vestige, a ruin of its origins, as the ellipses hugging the prepositions and adverbs of these titles attest.
Mark Andre’s Protestantism, imbued with the Revelation, finds further depth in the opera wunderzaichen (2011-2013) for soloists, orator, mixed choir, orchestra, and live electronics. It was written in the Kabbalistic tradition of the German philosopher and theologian Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), who brought concepts from Jewish mysticism to a Christian audience. The title of this work, which unfolds in four “situations” (rather than acts), can be translated as “wondrous signs, ” and was borrowed from Goethe’s description of Reuchlin’s writings. Below is a brief synopsis.
Situation 1: Ben-Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv. Pilgrims and tourists are lined up, waiting to enter the Holy Land. Among them is Johannes, a Kabbalist and the author of a textbook on Hebrew. Watching the border agents check the travellers’ documents, he wonders about his identity: he is living with a transplanted heart, an “intruder.” When it is his turn to speak to an agent, his behaviour appears suspicious. He is held for interrogation.
Situation 2: The police station. A police officer is interrogating a woman. Johannes, who gives his name as Reuchlin, continues to behave strangely, claiming he was born for the second time about twenty years ago. Evoking the unity of all living beings, he tells a Kabbalistic parable of a potter who shatters his pots to reveal their hidden faults as the officer searches the internet and learns that Reuchlin is long dead. He refuses to allow Johannes or the woman to enter the country.
Situation 3: A fast-food restaurant. The police officer and two other officers wait on pilgrims and tourists. Johannes tells another parable, this time of a man living alone in the mountains who knows the essence of the wheat from which all breads in the city are made. He learns the name of the woman, Maria, and dies of a heart attack. The police officer turns into an archangel.
Situation 4: Johannes has left his body. From a distance, he watches the crowds on their search for God and meditates on resurrection, language, love… He feels that he is an intruder, in the world and in himself. Maria grieves for Johannes. He wants to speak to her, but she asks not to be touched. The loudspeakers call for Johannes in the departure hall.
The libretto, co-authored by Andre and Patrick Hahn (dramaturge with the Stuttgart Staatsoper), is in German, Hebrew, and more exceptionally, in the basic English of travellers. It borrows from the Bible, from the treatises of Johannes Reuchlin (Augenspiegel/ Eyeglass, De verbo mirifico / The wonder-working word, De arte cabbalistica / The Kabbalistic Art) and from two works by Jean-Luc Nancy (L’Intrus/The Intruder and Noli me tangere). The libretto also cites Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, as well as Bazon Brock, Paul Celan, Peter Nadas (La Mort seul à seul), Jean Paul, Gershom Scholem, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In it, religious dimensions, genres, and themes are easily perceived: angelology, the parable, which, as Jean-Luc Nancy wrote, “speaks only to those who have already understood it,” the spiritual dimensions of numbers, letters and names; resurrection, absence (Abwesenheit) as an other form of presence, to name just a few, as well as the allusion to the Book of John (20:17) in Maria’s version of the Noli me tangere of Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she discovers the empty tomb, through which the touch of the body of the Risen is expressly withdrawn. These traces of the sacred are also musical, as Mark Andre composes with the concrete sounds of a religious landscape: while traveling in Israel on a “metaphysical road trip” in 2011, the composer recorded not only the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, whose dominant note, a D, flows through one of the situations of the work, but also the Western Wall, the Capernaum Synagogue, as well as the natural sounds of Lake Tiberius, the Dead Sea, and the desert.
At first listen, the work of Mark Andre seems to draw on Helmut Lachenmann’s notion of “instrumental musique concrète.” Uncommon extended techniques abound. In …zu…, for example, on the strings, he asks the musicians to play behind the bridge, on the bridge, on the neck, all the way up to the scroll, as well as directly on the bridge between the strings and the body, with differing degrees of pressure (Druck: D) in the left hand (scale of 5/5 D to 1/5 D) and differing degrees of bow pressure (Bogendruck: BD) (from +5BD to -5BD, with “normal” pressure in the middle); Bartók pizzicato on an open string and with dampened strings; with the bow stick on muted strings; toward the tip and toward the frog on the length of the string with no determined pitch; with the fingernails, fingertips; downbow with jeté stroke; a scale of sound perforation, from no sound to a sound emerging (on a five-degree scale). Or, with the wind instruments: diatonic cluster, pseudo-flutter-tonguing, tongue ram, pseudo-slap, slap with more or less sound (three-degree scale), glissando with or without breath, graduated scale from breath and sound (four-degree scale), pure breathing, 3-, 7-, or 10- centimetre distance between the player’s mouth and the mouthpiece, multiphonics, micro-interval oscillation, percussion on the mouthpiece, harmonic perforation (three-degree scale), alternating inhalation and exhalation…
Let us take, for example, a solo piece, …in…, for bass clarinet, in which the score has the performer turn their back to the audience toward an open piano with the sustain pedal down. The instrument is amplified, and, if it is not, is located at approximately one meter from a tam-tam that reverberates and dilates the timbres. Mark Andre gives precise breathing notes for the clarinettist (inhale, exhale) as well as for breath placement (in the mouthpiece, away from the mouthpiece, on a 5-degree scale), the unstable equilibrium between sound and breath (5-degree scale), as well as breath alone, multiphonics, percussive sounds (with the palm of the hand, key sounds, mixed or exclusive) teeth on the reed, simulation of an asthma attack… but also the tessitura of a sung vowel or the head resonance of an unsung vowel. Here again, this instrumental work contains that same verse from Revelations we find in Musiktheater-Passion, but with only a few hints remaining. Overall, the vocabulary seems to be shared with Helmut Lachenmann (even though, according to conductor Sylvain Cambreling, a favorite interpreter of the two composers, the “spiritualization of the material” of Lachenmann is distinct from the “materialization of the spiritual” found with Mark Andre, which aims more at the transmission of ideas from soul to soul).
This is not at all the case for grammar. Certainly, the work of Mark Andre plumbs the absolute, the abyss; Ein Abgrund, which is not about union with God (who would thus be an object), but about being one with God (unum et non unitum, as Meister Eckhart taught). But his music also, and to the same degree, incorporates the teachings of science, which stands with uncertainty at the threshold beyond which we as yet know nothing – since Gaston Bachelard and Karl Popper, epistemological uncertainty flows beneath the foundations of all scientific knowledge. Mark Andre nevertheless follows it in its recent advances. Thus, most obviously, Modell (1999-2000), for large orchestra in five groups, was born of exchanges with CERN researchers and of graphic representations of particle collisions, whose mass and location determine the density, duration, and proportions of sound events. However, let us return to Andre’s early theoretical writings and their recusal of classicism’s linear causality, which is also at work in serial structuralism:
“The most significant point of convergence between musical and scientific utopia seems to me to be the emergence of complex causality. The principle of causal determinism, which commanded both science and music in earlier periods, has continued its supple transformation into statistical probabilistic causality; the very idea of causality remained rigid, linear, stable, closed, imperative: everywhere, always under the same conditions, the same causes producing the same effects, there could be no question of an effect disobeying the cause or the metacause; there could be no question of a retroactive effect affecting the cause and, without ceasing to be an effect, becoming causal, its cause becoming its effect while remaining the cause. By this token, retroaction links up to the idea of the loop; that is, of organizational autonomy. Organizational autonomy determines causal autonomy; that is, a sort of endocausality that cannot be reduced to a relationship of cause and effect. There therefore exists a causality that engenders itself in and through the very process of production. The character of exocausality and endocausality – at once disjointed and associated, complementary and antagonistic – implies a complex of interrelated mutual causality. Introducing internal uncertainty (or the principle of uncertainty in quantum mechanics) into causality remains the major event in music as in science (physics, astrophysics), redefining and reactualizing the concept of complexity, of organizational activity.”
This passage draws on the thinking of Edgar Morin in Volume 1 of Method, adopting its vocabulary and even paraphrasing it. Logically, in his compositions, Mark Andre updates complex contexts where retroaction and recursiveness shatter linear causality and open up a kind of constantly transforming circular causality, where effect influences cause, and where generally improbable states become locally and temporarily probable. It is doubtless this temptation of the “compossible” that Andre perceived in the work of Jean Barraqué, where the series is not itself, but is always becoming, formed and forming.
According to the composer, this kind of causality gives rise to the crisis of three aesthetic trends: the acoustic model, which would be only an update of Ramist theory, including in the realm of spectral music; the parametric, serial model, whose decomposition of sound into parameters and parts would henceforth be impossible, precisely because of mutual causality; and the experimental model of musical objects, which is insufficient – even though Andre uses “concrete” sounds, as in wunderzaichen or with the hiss of train wheels stopping and starting in …22:13…. In an article titled “The Question of Architecture in Composition,” Andre proposes two other models: deconstructive and dialogical. The first is built on a first quadriparti:
Deconstruction Fragmentation
Construction Defragmentation
Following the thesis of the astronomer Edwin Hubble, which states that the cosmos is organized around disintegration – a cosmological model that is complex and polymorphous and renounces the precision of totalizing knowledge – Mark Andre has put forward the deconstructive model of music without closing it within principles of composition alone. “It is an ongoing search for metaphysical states, experiences, and at the same time a quest for the foundations.” Fragmentation and defragmentation are internal causal operations (consequently, an endocausality), that do not call into question structural planes and the hierarchy of constituent elements, contrary to deconstruction and construction, which are exocausal operations.
As for the dialogical model, it presupposes the presence of a recursive organization (called morphostasis) and of ongoing reorganization. It is built on a second quadriparti:
Order Organisation
Non-order Interaction
For Mark Andre, musical works, between deconstruction and dialogic, but also dialectic, describe a dense arc, subtle, complex, all tensions, all resolutions.
Three types of sound are at work here, three categories, three groups, easily audible as such, in their archetypical form, but also, and above all, interpolated and interlaced:
The first type of sound implies one last look at the theoretical writings of Mark Andre. One of them examines fourteenth-century Ars Subtilior using the concept of the “compossible” exposed by the “subtle doctor” John Duns Scotus in § 78 of the Tractatus de Primo Principio. “The (com-)possible is much more than the faculty of choice in a statistical set (the totality of states of fact, past, present, and future), but a window opened on the compositionally unthinkable.” If God gives Godself in God’s infinity, produces finite essences, and combines the two into compossibles, each finite organization is linked to an open, infinite organization of eternity. In the thirteenth century, Franco of Cologne, in his Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, abandoned the rhythmic modes that still governed the metric organisation of the Ars Antiqua motets, and had already devised notation dividing the longa in perfect mode (three breves) and imperfect mode (two breves), designated by the same symbol – the breve was recta or altera, while the semibreve (whole note) was either major or minor, and then divided further, down to the brevity of the dragma and fusa. Musical time was thus compossible, divided between the finite (the base unit) and the infinite (its principle of division), which radicalizes the complex “placements into time” of Mark Andre. The finite and the infinite, as they are explained by John Duns Scotus, and as they are used in the musical structures and the notation of the fourteenth century masters, run through his cycle Un-fini (1993-1996), for example, which is made up of four works of chamber music.
As for the two latter types of sound, they call into question the construction, the algorithm, and the mensural system, and the structures fly to pieces. To the detriment of a dialogical model, a dialectic comes into place, which tenses states and corrodes them, making “a graveyard of structuring markers.” The passage from one type of sound to another gives the work an organic way of being, traversed by births, growths, and deaths, renaissances, other growths, new losses of energy, all the way to the ultimate shattering. The force of Mark Andre’s work can be found in what it builds for itself as a whole as it unfolds, from beginning to end, alpha and omega. It does not presuppose any plan, any form, that would precede the material, and that the material ought to follow, inexorably, but unceasingly creates its own universe, a cosmology that is expanding and disintegrating. This is why the idea of the threshold, Schwelle, whose first letter gives its title to S1, affects the dimensions of musical discourse so much. Touch and ways of playing, which we evoked earlier on, are a large part of this, in that they make it possible to cross the threshold of types of sound with morphologically distinct qualities and identities. More generally, the idea of the threshold can be found in his search for sounds that are neither purely instrumental or exclusively electronic, but intermediary, as in …auf III…, where, in the interstices between two acoustic spaces, one virtual, taking recordings of sacred places and modelling them, and the actual architecture of the concert hall, where this virtual space plays out – as in …üg… (2008), for ensemble and electronics.
A final step remains, of withdrawal, which live electronics operate gladly, according to a process called convolution, a morphological and sonic phenomenon – Faltung can also be translated as folding or puckering, which, it may be recalled, evokes a combination of these two functions. The acoustic characteristics of the decay transient are applied to the attack transient, to its beginnings. “All of these transformations, calculated in real time, put to work different sonic forms of the orchestra (impulses) and “fold” them through other responding sound forms.” Impulse arrives in another place. This folding, of course – and for the last time – is existential: it tells of convolution as opening to others; as well as metaphysical… the alpha arrives at the omega; in an instant, time is abolished, a brief mirror of eternity.
Do you notice a mistake?