64-minute piece by Antoine Beuger, composed in 2004, and beautifully realised by Apartment House. "It’s from a series of pieces I composed, each for a different number of players, from two to twenty. And the number in each piece is really important, because everything that happens can only happen in a situation where there are, in this case, six people. The question I was really involved with in this whole series was how is it to play with this particular number of musicians? It’s quite easy to see that to be two is somehow different from being three. But with five, six, seven, it becomes less easy to grasp the difference. But there will always be differences."
French philosopher and musicologist (1903-1985) Vladimir Jankélévitch left behind a remarkable uvre steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance. Music, Jankélévitch argues, is not a hieroglyph, not a language or sign system; nor does it express emotions, depict landscapes or cultures, or narrate. On the other hand, music cannot be imprisoned within the icy, morbid notion of pure structure or autonomous discourse. Yet if musical works are not a cipher awaiting the decoder, music is nonetheless entwined with human experience, and with the physical, material reality of music in performance. Music is “ineffable,” as Jankélévitch puts it, because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains. Jankélévitch’s singular work on music was central to such figures as Roland Barthes and Catherine Clément, and the complex textures and rhythms of his lyrical prose sound a unique note, until recently seldom heard outside the francophone world.
