The Space of Absence in the Music of Giya Kancheli

by Dylan Trigg

In addition to being a sermon on nihilism, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) shows us that when absence co-joins with motionless, then there arises a vastness that is both intimate and foreign. This is immediately evident when we consider The Zone, Tarkovsky's metaphysical centrepiece of the film. Tarkovsky's prophetic vision of a post-industrial wasteland littered with the remains of relics from an absent space, was later realized by the fallout of Pripyat, the abandoned city on the fringes of Chernobyl. Like Pripyat, The Zone is a space infused with an air of lost presence and arrested decay. And yet, in Tarkovsky's Zone we are attuned to an entirely ambiguous space that evades both analysis and description. As such, the foreign intimacy of the absent space infers both a collusion of space and time: - the past surreptitiously merges with present and vice-versa.
As a case in the complexity of absent space, Tarkovsky's Stalker is a paradigm. But rather than being an exception that is exclusive to one medium - be it film, painting, or photography - the vast intimacy of absent space is equally, if not more, applicable to music. The possibility of suspending time, of distorting time, of compounding a present past with an absent present, is entirely conducive to a sonic architecture. Composers have long sought to meditate passages between absence and presence, the dynamic itself a leitmotif which induces feelings of either solemn profundity or garish discomfort. One of the reasons why Bruckner's oeuvre is either loved or loathed is because it relies so earnestly upon an escalating structure whereby the humane gives rise to the spiritual. Fending off the entombed vulgarity of mortality, Bruckner's symphonies admit to the base foundation of being, but nevertheless strive to disrobe themselves of this element in a manner that expresses itself in a linear arch ascending over man. What is dated in Bruckner therefore, is a na�e aspiration that consummates itself in an absent void. The cathedral is constructed and hopes to ingest itself upon the spirit alone. In a secularised - godless - existence, the desire for the spiritual is no less vehement than it is in an age of piety. Only whereas the saint submits to his doubt in the privacy of the confessional, in our own age doubt, scepticism, and a violent oscillation between hope and grief announce themselves publicly.
Giya Kancheli is a Georgian composer whose collective work is a testament to an existential spirituality that neither conceals the grief of being nor the lamentation of loss that being entails. Kancheli's musical landscape derives from a world that unfurls in accordance with the fall of the Soviet Union. The gradual fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of glasnost enabled Kancheli to confer titles upon his work that hitherto had seemed overly political: Bright Sorrow, Mourned by the Wind, Life Without Christmas. Though, rather than solely being of a political content, the potency of Kancheli's resides purely in its existential expression: - the political becomes the existential and in turns sounds the voice of revolt, anguish, and loss. Symbolism then - the clothing of the idea in a visible form - becomes the means through which the Soviet composer was forced to communicate. Allusions, inscriptions, and the repetition of intervals that impart a covert meaning: during the height of the censorship, such was the language of Soviet music that to misunderstand the inherent symbolism within the music would be to omit the music itself.
We are, of course, in an age where symbolism, unless a regime still prides itself in oppression and totalitarianism, is no longer needed. The artist is able to reproach his land in an explicit manner without fear of retribution, at least we hope. In a post-Soviet era, musicians of a once oppressed land are thus now finding their poetic fruition through means of contemplation, reverie, and impetus that finds its origin in a sense of lamentation. This is perfectly pronounced in the works of, amongst others, Schnittke, Silvestrov, Artyomov, and Gubaidulina. In Kancheli, the sense of lamentation, both for a land torn by oppression and for the exile this entails, reaches its sublime apotheosises. And yet, Kancheli's music is understood best, not necessarily from within the temporal context that it derives from, but as a permanent structure of consciousness itself. On this sense of timelessness that Kancheli's music evokes, Schnittke writes thus: "In the relatively short period of 20-30 minutes of slow music, we experience a whole lifetime, an entire history; at the same time, the drag of time is absent - we glide high over centuries as if in an aircraft, with no sensation of speed."
As an element of Kancheli's music, the disembodiment of time is as dependent on the presence of silence as it is the presence of absence, and from this silent absence derives the vastness, already familiar in Tarkovsky's Stalker, that is both intimate and foreign. Even in the early compositions, the vacillating polarities between presence and absence, which would later adopt the form of an explicit dynamic stasis consisting of abrupt orchestral attacks preceded by mournful silence, are implicitly announced. In the case of Symphony Three (1973), then we are already in a tonal landscape which alters violently between the stampede of feet and wordless chants sung by the Georgian singer Gamlet Gonashvili. The silence therefore emerges in the space in-between, in the occasion where the march gives rise to an absence whose intimacy is suspended by the presence of the voice. That the Third Symphony was composed in 1973 whilst Kancheli was still in residence in his teaching post at the Tbilisi Conservatory, is perhaps indication of its symbolic content. We are never entirely sure quite what the respite in sound conveys or what the subsequent outbursts allude to, as such, there is an indeterminacy that is both frantic and mournful.
The Third Symphony ends with a protracted coda, a reluctance to submit to dissolution, but equally a tenderness with regard to the sentiment of loss. It is a loss that is only available to one who has sought to purge themselves of a struggle framed by grief and sorrow. In this way we are fully able to identify with the absent presence in Kancheli by referring to what such a landscape was preceded by. The aftermath of silence, the fall of light, the surge of nothingness from which the vase of being simmers. Such a landscape, in which the tracks of the exiled predominate those that inhabit the actual land, form the mantle upon which Kancheli's aesthetic rests. It is in the space in-between that the voice of grief finally sings.
As such, Kancheli's compositions frequently lean nostalgically towards memories founded in homeliness and the nest. How otherwise can the dynamic stasis emerge if not without the presence of the positive to retort from? In the case of his especially pessimistic Fifth Symphony (1976), then the role of the negative is brought to a virile climax. Contrasting childlike passages on the harpsichord with caustic downward glissando passages on the strings, the impression is of lost purity, an absence of hope and retreat into the fatalistic impression of despair: short-lived passages that endeavour to ground themselves in harmony, wistful passages raped by the shriek of self-consciousness. Even more explicit than in the Third Symphony is the seemingly self-implosive desire to collude both hope and failure. The dejection of hope is contrasted perfectly by the volatile oscillations between semi-baroque passages that lead only to discordance and strife. But not gliding into absolute Serialism, the aesthetic underpinnings of Kancheli lend themselves to an ethereal disharmony that is only possible within the landscape of the familiar. Like both Max Klinger and Alfred Kubin before him, Kancheli takes full advantage of placing disparate objects in unfamiliar contexts, in turn producing an uncanny sorrow that plays on both the nostalgic and the fatalistic. It is only when the viewer is close enough to perceive the perversity in the composition, that its otherworldly disjunction becomes wholly apparent, only when he notices the placement of foreign relics in a native landscape that its collusive absence unfurls.
There is a further disjunction in architectural terms between the Classical formalism of Kancheli's compositions and the absent space in which they inhabit. The use of tonality and overt structure establish a context in which objects can be freely displaced or otherwise distorted. It is an architecture that is entirely recognizable in its form and yet intimacy it lacks the detail which renders it homely. Like the paintings of de Chirico, Kancheli lingers in period that verges on dusk without actually succumbing to it, and as such protracts itself upon its own demise. We hear rustles, distant voices murmuring, the furrowing of pages, the dirge of movement, silence paraded like a funereal parade bloated in its own grief. The dark territory of Kancheli, which reaches its summit in his Sixth Symphony (1981), is founded in this emergence from the negative, from the space in-between - that is, as the absent aesthetic.
In replacing the positive with the negative, so that the negative forms the structure through which the positive emerges, Kancheli's music therefore frequently slides into pessimistic resignation. Demolishing the certainties of faith and hope, in propounding the negative as the positive, the space of absence which emerges out of the framework of Classicism thus aligns itself with both nihilism and pessimism. Nihilistic because the objectivity of absolute value is reduced to a artifice that at best attains the momentary transience of a subjective claim; pessimistic because the conclusion of this void is one of resignation rather than revolt. The stance of pessimism, however, does not preclude nostalgia, and if anything serves to prolong a sense of nostalgia which is founded in a space still flourishing with the chime of hope. The recourse to a single boys voice in the conclusion of his Life Without Christmas cycle (1990-94), acts as a refrain which serves to remind us of a hope that is never realized; it is a voice that is hinted but never fully comes into fruition, as such induces a dynamic of thwarted hope. Likewise, the kitsch passages of Trauerfarbenes Land (1994) that are violated by fortissimo claps on the orchestra, suggest a reluctant nostalgia framed by the disparities between progression and regression. It is as though the nostalgic is defaced by the guise of the kitsch, and so must be annihilated in order to craft fertile space.
Returning to the spectacularly bleak Sixth Symphony, then these elements of nihilism, pessimism, and absence unite in a eruption of grief, resignation and scorn. The complexity inherent in the Sixth Symphony owes itself to a distortion of form rather than a perversion of content. Indeed, in its sense of tonality and convention, there is something entirely conservative about the Sixth Symphony. But this is an aside. Already in the Prelude, Kancheli has established a background in which silence becomes the form through which the slightest nuance of sound emanates symbolically against a plaintive backdrop. There is a motionlessness that is both mournful and nostalgic. The two viola players, each concealed behind a screen at the composers request, mimic the drone of a Georgian chianuri. An absence of movement, an absence of sound, the occasional flicker of the harp ascending a semi-tone: the evocation of subdued grief, each note seeking to dive deeper than its predecessor, is suddenly ruptured by the downward attack of the orchestra. The attack is so terse that when the violas reappear it as though nothing has changed. Henceforth, the aspiration towards ascent is gradually thwarted by the increasingly frequent staccato attacks of the orchestra, each of which nostalgically recollects what was previously destroyed. It is as though Kancheli is trying to establish his home in the space of absence, as though the emptiness is the conditions under which hope can flourish, Rilke:

"Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying."

The expanded air in Rilke's poem re-emerges in Kancheli as the negative space in which the composer seeks to dwell despite the onslaught of orchestral violence and splintered aspirations. The overwhelming absence of Rilke's poetry, its unremitting longing, finds it sonic counterpart in these passages of Kancheli that seek to convert the negative into the positive, each of which relies upon the other for its existence. Likewise, in Stalker the distorted trinity consisting of the Writer, the Professor, and the Stalker himself, forms a dialectic in which each aspect of negation reflects upon the other to produce a synthesis that is both positive and united. If we treat the Stalker as an impassioned Christ like figure who reproaches his motivations and desires, and as such is reduced to the martyr incapable of appeasing the ego, then we can equally correlate this figure to the childlike passages of Kancheli which seem self-consciously aware of their pious naivety. The Writer meanwhile, would seem to suggest the voice of experience: disillusioned and cynical, he reciprocates the Stalker's piety in a manner that only rejects his desire for salvation amongst the ruins. As an intercession between these polarities of 'surrender and abandonment', the Professor embodies the ethical stance, the self-reflective voice of morality that seeks to reason, by way of a formal narrative, the bridge between despair and hope. In the scene where the three figure travel to the Zone by cart, then despite (or perhaps because of) there persistence of silence, this disparate trinity seems to reconcile in an affirmation of negation and hope, as though the dynamic stasis between silence and violence is necessarily dependent upon the other for their endurance.
We might well hope to find some firm reconciliation between the polarities of grief and hope, as though by way of a Socratic dialogue the glimmer of truth might emerge. Turning to the composer, writer, or artist, then we expect to be pushed in the direction of truth, of eventual clarity. An austere truth, seething with the frail shroud of prostitution, but truth nevertheless. It is perhaps our final aspiration to be at home, whether it is in the space of absence or amongst the fa�de of presence. Such things are no doubt reproduced aesthetically and in terms of architectural form. By dint of a disdain for the smell of exile - the spectral guise of splintered memories - we shy away from spaces that induce loneliness, despair, solemnity, and a sense that our voice grows unsung whilst nature reclaims her land. What to learn in the space that has already been perverted by experience? This is a question which is as important as it is absurd. And yet, despite our discomfort with torn landscapes we nevertheless persist in revisiting them as one might pay homage to a habit forsaken through conformity. In the same way, there is no space more alive, more foaming with truth, beauty, and vulgarity, than an empty space. Civility would increase were we establish homes in the space that no longer exists. Motionless terror, the unification between the sacred and the profane, the giving up of ones ends for a higher order, alchemy, industry, the admission of the violent, the sacrifice of the self, an ethics of egotistic nihilism. How cautiously we tread to avoid the wreath of experience!
If the artist is able to teach us anything, then it is only through the lens of a distorted scope. We breathe the heavy air, sometimes in the hope that aesthetic pleasure might be a surrogate for sensual experience. Such is our disappointment, that greater extremity is required in order to raise a point worthy of mediation. Kancheli is a beacon in an age of exhaustion, a seer of the absence and a voyant of the derelict, Celan:

"In the almond - what dwells in the almond?
Nothing.
What dwells in the almond is Nothing.
There it dwells and dwells."

The motionless vastness of this landscape, evident in Celan, Kancheli, and consummately Rilke, is the space that both procures intimacy and terror. Reverie, as Bachelard has so often written, invites grandeur. Of course, to experience the soar of the contemplative, then we must give ourselves over to ourselves, ascribe preference to the ethereal and mutable. The fixed must give way to the free and the rigid must be disowned. In the contemplative, nothing but the illusive emerges. But such is the plethora of lack in contemplation, that inevitably the spectacle of grandeur orientates itself in memory rather than matter. The inertia of memory allows us to navigate in a space that is able to be manipulated according to our dictates; we call upon our desire and in turn to nourish our cravings for seduction. The 'elsewhere' of space is always pertinent to nostalgia and melancholy. Kancheli, all too familiar with the potency of the distant, relies upon passages the induce this inert canvas composed of fading relics and uncanny signposts that no longer signify an actual place, Bachelard writes: "Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere we are dreaming in a world that is immense." In the inertia of reverie, this passage informs us of a truth that is available to either the flâneur who takes it upon himself to reflect upon the emptiness of the world (viz. Pascal, Schopenhauer, and Montaigne) or the melancholic whom such a static energy is his natural disposition. In the Exil cycle from Kancheli's recent ECM series, the frozen architecture between viola and soprano permits an immensity that is founded in both inertia and nostalgia. It proceeds to modulate nowhere whilst forever pointing to an elsewhere, a space that no longer is present. By dint of an accident of birth, the exiled confers upon himself an immensity that need only be experienced before it can it be realized. Indeed, in exile the recourse to memory is superfluous so that an immense motionless is evoked - it is already latent by being elsewhere. What is immense, therefore, is the space between ourselves, the space that hangs between the existing and the existent. Aged into decay, the sagacious prince who can no longer stomach his oceanic turbine of memories, draws an immense gulf between being and nothingness. When such an age develops we no longer live in-ourselves but, rather beside ourselves. And even then, the opportune of harmony falters upon the disjunction between the being-here and the being-there, until there is only the white noise of mourning that seeks to reconcile this fathomless void.
In the fourth chapter of my Poetics of Decay, which I have entitled The Spectre of Exile, I have outlined a theory of consciousness that is founded upon the precepts of despair and absence - a virile hunger to consume the present so that we can relish the absolute of the past. It is a self-refuting aspiration since it annihilates the very thing we seek to consume. But what my chapter shows, in the most lucid manner possible, is that time belies an increasing void that serves to rupture the self from itself, so that the self becomes a landscape of desertion that is unearthed upon reflection. Immensity, as Bachelard says, is always of an interior experience. Turning to a well known poem of Baudelaire's, Le Cygne, then one finds this abstract notion of self-vacuity portrayed in manner that poetically illuminates the inner absence of immensity. The contrast between the land in which we inhabit and the space that is no longer, arouses a sense of impossible yearning through which no consumption of exile can nourish. In the case of Baudelaire, the impossible object of yearning is Paris itself.

"The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes
More quickly shifts, alas, then does the mortal heart);
I picture in my head the busy camp of huts,
And heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts,
The grass, the giant blocks made green by puddle-stain,
Reflected in the glaze, the jumbled bric-à-brac."

As with the more refined passages of Kancheli, what is notable about this excerpt from Baudelaire is the melancholy of detail, the mutable quality of the background: whilst the foreground seems engaged in progression and movement, it is amongst the alcoves of the forgettable that the essential emerges. And yet, what is profoundly intoxicating about the loss of a space is the inconsistency with which we react to such a bereavement - the mere transfiguration of time is neither absolute nor devoid of indifference As such, the possibility of returning to a space that accords itself with our own interior experience is an exception:

"Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood
Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,
Old neighbourhoods, are allegorical for me,
And my dear memories are heaver than stone."

For Kancheli, this homecoming constitutes a mourning erupted by bursts of grief and anger, a refusal to concede to the dissolution of time and a baroque lament in the face of a frayed world. Nothing has changed, and yet nothing is present. The memento mori that emerges as the leitmotif in his Vom Winde beweint (Mourned by the Wind) (1984), fulfils the role of establishing a dissonant tonality that thwarts any subsequent aspiration to resolve itself. Aesthetically, the morbid inertia of the viola implicates the fragility of life amongst ruin. Tentatively and without wishing to extinguish itself, the inhalations increase until there is almost a sense of catharsis, a renewal of courage against the memento mori of loss. The heavy air of Baudelaire's Paris hangs down upon Kancheli's Liturgy in resigned unison. It is a heaving sigh, repressed but violent, that every exile finds upon returning to his homeland. And suddenly, in the space of the elsewhere, the accelerated stagnation of time induces an immensity that is framed by an architecture that reveals a familiar form countered by a otherworldly content. Nowhere is this immense motionless more apparent than in the opening bars of Kancheli's Vom Winde beweint.
Kancheli's music disorientates, presents an opaque disjunction between the conventions of tonality and the absolute refusal to submit to abstraction. Even so, like the archetype of Prometheus upon his rock, at points in time we are able to recognize ourselves in the face of the unknown. Certain historic figures reveal the shape of consciousness in a way that can only be articulated through violence or art, and when art and violence unite then the shape of this consciousness is able to rendered from afar, that is, as an object. Aesthetically, the space of absence has found its objectified essence through the music of Giya Kancheli. It is, to be sure, an essence that is as true as it is immense.

Dylan Trigg is a writer of decay, dissolution, and ruination. Principally concerned with themes of silence, exile, voyeurism, mourning, decline, the aesthetics of absence, the phenomenology of home, and the exhaustion of reason, his The Poetics of Decay is particularly notable for being the first work to expound an aesthetic account of modern ruins founded upon a philosophical foundation.
More information can be found at his website http://www.dylantrigg.com

Copyright © 2003 Dylan Trigg All rights reserved

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