How can music be seen? Popular wisdom (or personal experience) says that we can view music through our eyes, if only under the influence of… chemistry. Beyond the linguistic implications of such a question, there lies a desire for a state in which our five senses transcend their limitations and become each other, switching places so that we may understand what they’re perceiving, listening with our eyes, seeing through our fingertips, and so on.
Extended Play was originally an installation that involved every sense a person has available. Nine custom turntables were set up in a room, divided into three groups of equal number, each one assigned to either violin, cello, or piano, playing their respective parts of a ten-minute composition at three different speeds. The turntables repeated or stopped according to the room’s movement; in other words, the listeners that walked around or stood by to hear the music. Physically being there must have been quite the experience: we’re perceiving all those sounds, as individuals, but in the company of others we’re actively participating in how they’re produced and therefore, received. Everything must’ve played out in different ways, at different times, denoting multiple circumstances in which the audience are actors.
In that (or this) particular play, the album serves as script, as guideline, as blueprint. If we were to combine every element of the “screenplay”, every page, then we would have a single book, a single result. If we take them apart, we could find out that each component is, potentially, an entire result by itself. If we move into spatial terms, Janek Schaefer has extended his play; every atom of the work is displayed for us to see and listen: we are granted the possibility of both experiencing each segment independently and imagining how deeply they can interrelate once they’re put together. The first piece is “Vinyl Cello Duo”, indicating the “artificial nature” of this instrumentation in which the players aren’t there with us, breathing and gesturing; we’re the ones in control instead, pressing the stop button, moving around, thinking, talking, and so on. Together with “Vinyl Piano Trio” and “Vinyl Violin Duo”, this vinyl triad is as vivid in separate acts as the resulting whole.
“Acoustic Ensemble” is, therefore, only one full version of the play entitled Triptych for the Child Survivors of War and Conflict. Three acts which are, at the same time, one. If I were prone to over-interpretations, I would say that in that concept we have evidence of a connection to the divine, to the sacred, closely related to another factor: life is maybe the most important thing left for children that survive armed conflict, and what is more sacred than life itself? This piece conducts us through the violence of war in the spirit of contemplation: contemplation of life, of the inevitable, of the near-cinematic subconscious silence that reigns beneath the rushes of adrenaline, of the light that seeps through the cracks of vine-surrounded ruins, a light which for many would signify the presence of god. The sound of it, if we’re still spectators of this play, is that of minimal melodies and an open rhythm that leads us to a special kind of meditation; each “instrument” enters and exits the whole at various moments, sometimes occupying our attention fully on their own, sometimes doing so in conjunction, and at others introducing us to meaningful hints of silence. In this spirit, it’s a sound somewhat similar to certain works by Arvo Pärt.
The play concludes with the code to read the whole work, in a very literary maneuver that lets our mind free at first, leaving explanations and futile introductions for last. “Radio Jodoform” can then be used to read the work backwards, exploring the artist’s inspiration upon wartime radio emissions from the UK for the Polish resistance fighting the Germans during World War II, emissions which had very specific meanings. To contextualize, let’s quote Schaefer’s words from his website:
“On a trip to The Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, I discovered the Jodoform log book […] which revealed the piece of music that was broadcast on the day my mum was born [the year was 1942, the place, Warsaw]. This turned out to be the Polish folk song 'Tango Lyczakowskie' which strangely related to a Ukraine/Polish conflict in 1918 where children had to go to war to defend their town in South East Poland!”
This tango is the basis for the play, for the score that’s contained in the album. Like so many cities involved in war, the tango was deconstructed, analyzed, and afterwards reconstructed as something completely different and with another purpose in mind. Codes, secret meanings, indications, they’re all inherently associated with the play, but isn’t music already full of them, along with their respective interpretations, anyway? If Extended Play was already engaging on its own, “Radio Jodoform” provides the tools for a second, new listen, even deeper than the first, although it’s quite hard to discern a crystal-clear relation and at times it could seem vain to try and find one.
To continue, we could replace “listen” with “read”, and as we re-read each act, we could look at the twists, feel the moments of tension and stress, and hear all the monologues and dialogues imbued with the crackle of a vinyl turntable as they paint a landscape of wartime hopes and emotions. In this respect, this is music to be seen with our ears, to be heard with our eyes. And since we don’t have the real-life play at hand, the installation, I guess the script will have to do, limited only by our imaginations.
-David Murrieta