‘Da-da-dah…’

Programme note for Density 2036: vi

It would be easy to begin by observing that the starting-point of Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5, itself the genesis of Claire Chase’s 23-year commissioning project for solo flute, is a three-note motif. But that would be disingenuous. That ‘F-E-F sharp’ isn’t some mere lump of musical material, a mute object to slap a label on so that it can be usefully mined and manipulated by a musician, or a musicologist, or a listener, or anyone else. And the piece doesn’t just begin, either. It comes to life, and those three notes are its first stirrings.

No sooner does the nascent F sound than it’s on the move: a leftward flick to the E, a quick whip back to the F sharp. This sonic wriggle is the rippling of a sinew, the twitching of a tail, the flutter of an eyelid blinking open for the first time. And with it, or rather through it, dawns something like a musical consciousness, an awareness that is of a world — the austere musical landscape into which the figure has been thrown, helpless — but also of itself, the self in the song: it sees, and it sees that it is seeing.

High and dry on the F sharp, the newborn idea stretches an experimental toe downward, feeling for the C sharp below, once, twice. There, made secure by that anchoring fourth, it would be prudent to stay. But the little thought is curious. It wants to explore. And so it slides off its narrow ledge into the cloudy waters of the G natural where, shocked at the cold and at its own audacity, it finds itself suddenly afraid. The rest of the piece oscillates continually between comfort and loneliness, confidence and self-doubt, as the music seeks security, finds it, and finds itself dissatisfied.

But all this activity is only possible if, as Varèse himself put it, the music first ‘pulsates with life’. And Density does. It glows with an inner heat, an élan vital, a throbbing insistence at its core without which the sounds would collapse into mere wind, mere displacement of air. Density is powered by an aortal tug-o-war. One end of the rope is manned by the tritone, the first of which is that initial hesitant, groping climb from C sharp to G. And straining at the other end of the rope is the three-note idea. Again and again, in different registers, that ‘da-da-dah’ digs in its heels, resisting the pull of the tritone, sending blood surging through the arteries of the piece, push-pull, push-pull. That stubborn little turnabout is the engine not just of Varèse’s four minutes, nor just of the last six years of Density 2036, but of the entire span of Chase’s project.

Its genetic traces are everywhere in Density VI. It’s in the playful counterpoint of Olga Neuwirth’s ‘Magic Flu-idity.’ It echoes in the laugh of Pamela Z’s ‘Louder Warmer Denser.’ It courses through Phyllis Chen’s ‘Reservoirs of Interior.’ It’s remembered, or perhaps dreamed, in Sarah Hennies’ ‘Reservoir 2: Intrusion.’ And its descendants throng Tyshawn Sorey’s ‘Bertha’s Lair,’ a variation of which is performed this year not on the contrabass flute for which the piece was originally written, but on, inter alia, the platinum flute on which Varèse initially shone his spotlight.

Three little notes. Three mere flickers, really, from which flow not four minutes of music, but a hundred years of it. F, E and F sharp is a far cry from the Urlinie, the three-two-one countdown to the tonic that Heinrich Schenker argued lay at the heart of every piece of Western tonal music. No tonic in Density 21.5; no major thirds either, or nearly. But like the Urlinie, this little fragment is the Keim, the germ, the nucleus from which, as for Schenker, a profusion of music grows, ‘... as man, animal and plant are figurations of the smallest seed...’ It, too, stirs with a life that is its own and, like all living things, it strives not just to exist, not just to stay alive, but to grow, to change, to thrive, and so it clambers over tritones, and leaps across decades and continents, and embeds itself in the rafters of performance spaces, and the walls of practice rooms, and the cold metal of flutes, and in the thoughts and ears and fingertips that are here, in New York City, in 2019.