flute - Jennifer Wilhelms percussion - Craig Bray I am the beat that waits for you to see me I am waiting in a museum on the wall others are looking back at me, my smile is convincing: they are here. you are what is not not here and so neither am I so there. I am not you are not beating is. Emmanuel Levinas wrote in Otherwise Than Being (1974): “Music…bends the qualities of the notes emitted into adverbs.” Here he borrows from Husserl’s phenomenology: there is an unfolding of living experiential time, a jagged eruption of new nows flushed with the contamination of past reminiscences, opened by an unbreachable interval that is immanent to experience itself. In this eruption alone—these notes resound adverbially, as if they had no nominal or verbal content to speak of, but could only modify what it was to be, that is, they could only supplement, prop up, and pervert an un-notated being. Musical notes are in the business of supplementing—as adverbs they can be fashioned into an especially luxurious ornament, since they ornament ontology itself. They ornament and inflect the beings that are manifest to experience, to be opened and revealed to the light of the living present. The notes are bent into adverbs because they cannot speak unto themselves; they are not beings or intentional objects. There is no musical note that can purely speak its sense before consciousness, standing up as an object that speaks a systematic language immanent to its own notated formation. Its bent into contamination, bent to speak something it cannot know, to speak the experiential becoming of the verb to be. And it is nothing more than their purely technical constitution that brings them to be the privileged ornament to the living present. Much like the other arts, Levinas writes: “The palette of colors, the gamut of sounds, the system of vocables and the meandering of forms are realized as a pure how; in the touch of color and pencil, the secrecy of words, the sonority of sounds—all these modal notions—there is resonance of essence.” In Otherwise Than Being, the technicity of art is first purified, and made to service above all the faculties of manifestation. But Levinas is not talking about music in general here. Levinas names a cello piece by Xenakis, and for him it ornaments not only the faculties of manifestation, but the essence of the cello that is made to speak its notes. So when this piece, Nomos Alpha, ornaments the cello itself it ceases to function as a pure ornament to experience: it is now exegetical, or musico-exegitical. In the same way that, for Levinas, “writing about writing is poetry itself,” this piece by Xenakis explains or interprets the cello, putting its notated technical substrate into the service of our experience of the instrument in itself: “The cello is a cello in the sonority that vibrates in its strings and its wood, even if it is already reverting into notes, into identities that settle into their natural places in scales from the acute to the grave, according to the different pitches.” But for a phenomenologist, as every being must be experienced in order to be, Levinas concludes this passage by reminding us of the temporality of such an experience: “Thus the essence of the cello, a modality of essence, is temporalized in the work.” We might say, that for Levinas, the great work of modern music, in the temporalization coextensive with the diastasis of living time, ornaments itself, manifesting itself. In Clara’s poem, despite the obvious aesthetic affinity she might have with Xenakis’s abstraction and atonality, we are confronted with a truly absurd objection to such a situation. A beat, a know-nothing bit of music, stands up and whispers in our ear: I am the beat that waits for you to see me. As if a beat, of all musical elements, stood to be revealed to me, as a thing, like a noun, caught in a reserve, silently waiting like a fixed spatial object, hanging on the wall like a painting. A beat on the wall, waiting for the crowd to come. In the poem, we, or precisely, you and I, are not beings, the beat is. If we do not properly exist in the face of the beat, or turning away from its presence to our living consciousness, what is left is nothing more than the beat. Written on the wall. And the beat is a written one. Scrawled out in an invisible score, it stands out in the silence of language to address us: I am waiting for you to see me. Can’t you see me? I’m waiting. A written pulse, a beat, a tick, a point, or a blast, or a trance, all patient and waiting. But stuck in reserve, we know that the beat itself, on the wall, is not a being; it anxiously awaits the coming of the crowd, the spectator who will be traversed by the saying of the beat, its becoming. But, in Clara’s realm of sonorous abstraction, in her giant spider of noise, this beat does not peacefully say itself for the living present of a listener. It is a memory that won’t stop reminding you of its absence, its invisibility, its nonpresence. It sticks away like a jagged remainder to the listening of music, pestering you: did you see me? All I do is wait for you, a hanging groove, addressing you, from a score you don’t know, reminding you to come. If, in Levinas, the technical makeup of music’s being, its bits of writing, its beats and scales, come to the service of the living present, manifesting themselves as a temporalized being of beings, an internally consistent living temporal ornament of sound, the beat that hangs on the wall is a beat that hangs outside the work, an addendum, annoying, signifying the insufficiency of musical experience itself—I am a beat, I need you, I wait for you, as an inhuman articulation still to pass, haunting the envelope of the work. -Michael Gallope, musicologist home
I am the beat that waits for you to see me I am waiting in a museum on the wall others are looking back at me, my smile is convincing: they are here.
you are what is not not here and so neither am I so there. I am not you are not beating is.
Emmanuel Levinas wrote in Otherwise Than Being (1974): “Music…bends the qualities of the notes emitted into adverbs.” Here he borrows from Husserl’s phenomenology: there is an unfolding of living experiential time, a jagged eruption of new nows flushed with the contamination of past reminiscences, opened by an unbreachable interval that is immanent to experience itself. In this eruption alone—these notes resound adverbially, as if they had no nominal or verbal content to speak of, but could only modify what it was to be, that is, they could only supplement, prop up, and pervert an un-notated being. Musical notes are in the business of supplementing—as adverbs they can be fashioned into an especially luxurious ornament, since they ornament ontology itself. They ornament and inflect the beings that are manifest to experience, to be opened and revealed to the light of the living present. The notes are bent into adverbs because they cannot speak unto themselves; they are not beings or intentional objects. There is no musical note that can purely speak its sense before consciousness, standing up as an object that speaks a systematic language immanent to its own notated formation. Its bent into contamination, bent to speak something it cannot know, to speak the experiential becoming of the verb to be. And it is nothing more than their purely technical constitution that brings them to be the privileged ornament to the living present. Much like the other arts, Levinas writes: “The palette of colors, the gamut of sounds, the system of vocables and the meandering of forms are realized as a pure how; in the touch of color and pencil, the secrecy of words, the sonority of sounds—all these modal notions—there is resonance of essence.” In Otherwise Than Being, the technicity of art is first purified, and made to service above all the faculties of manifestation.
But Levinas is not talking about music in general here. Levinas names a cello piece by Xenakis, and for him it ornaments not only the faculties of manifestation, but the essence of the cello that is made to speak its notes. So when this piece, Nomos Alpha, ornaments the cello itself it ceases to function as a pure ornament to experience: it is now exegetical, or musico-exegitical. In the same way that, for Levinas, “writing about writing is poetry itself,” this piece by Xenakis explains or interprets the cello, putting its notated technical substrate into the service of our experience of the instrument in itself: “The cello is a cello in the sonority that vibrates in its strings and its wood, even if it is already reverting into notes, into identities that settle into their natural places in scales from the acute to the grave, according to the different pitches.” But for a phenomenologist, as every being must be experienced in order to be, Levinas concludes this passage by reminding us of the temporality of such an experience: “Thus the essence of the cello, a modality of essence, is temporalized in the work.” We might say, that for Levinas, the great work of modern music, in the temporalization coextensive with the diastasis of living time, ornaments itself, manifesting itself.
In Clara’s poem, despite the obvious aesthetic affinity she might have with Xenakis’s abstraction and atonality, we are confronted with a truly absurd objection to such a situation. A beat, a know-nothing bit of music, stands up and whispers in our ear: I am the beat that waits for you to see me. As if a beat, of all musical elements, stood to be revealed to me, as a thing, like a noun, caught in a reserve, silently waiting like a fixed spatial object, hanging on the wall like a painting. A beat on the wall, waiting for the crowd to come.
In the poem, we, or precisely, you and I, are not beings, the beat is. If we do not properly exist in the face of the beat, or turning away from its presence to our living consciousness, what is left is nothing more than the beat. Written on the wall.
And the beat is a written one. Scrawled out in an invisible score, it stands out in the silence of language to address us: I am waiting for you to see me. Can’t you see me? I’m waiting. A written pulse, a beat, a tick, a point, or a blast, or a trance, all patient and waiting. But stuck in reserve, we know that the beat itself, on the wall, is not a being; it anxiously awaits the coming of the crowd, the spectator who will be traversed by the saying of the beat, its becoming.
But, in Clara’s realm of sonorous abstraction, in her giant spider of noise, this beat does not peacefully say itself for the living present of a listener. It is a memory that won’t stop reminding you of its absence, its invisibility, its nonpresence. It sticks away like a jagged remainder to the listening of music, pestering you: did you see me? All I do is wait for you, a hanging groove, addressing you, from a score you don’t know, reminding you to come. If, in Levinas, the technical makeup of music’s being, its bits of writing, its beats and scales, come to the service of the living present, manifesting themselves as a temporalized being of beings, an internally consistent living temporal ornament of sound, the beat that hangs on the wall is a beat that hangs outside the work, an addendum, annoying, signifying the insufficiency of musical experience itself—I am a beat, I need you, I wait for you, as an inhuman articulation still to pass, haunting the envelope of the work.