Quiet Revolutions- Hölderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Rihm

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that music is 'the art of providing time with body, placing signs of sound and acoustic structures of movement in time',82 but also of how sparsely-textured such provision may be. In this case, time takes on the sound of a D; (the voice emphasizes it: the pitch D; appears only once in the vocal line, setting the crucial word 'Zeit'). Everything else, sparse as it may be, serves to add body to this single note. The pulse becomes denser with growing pitch material. In terms of dynamics, too, it comes to a climax while the voice emphatically renders the words 'um die' with glissando octaves on D.83 Having thereby reached the adjacent pitch above Dl, the voice finally completes its framework on C, the adjacent pitch below Db. The singer's short journey through time ends where it began and the D; fades out, pleasantly harmonized in esoteric heights with the pianist's faint final gesture which, although almost inaudible, is reminiscent of a typical closing formula of a piano sonata in the Classical style. One general characteristic of Rihm's idiom becomes evident from this brief fragment: 'tonal' chords and 'Classical' gestures may function as impulse, introducing or providing existing pitch material with a different colour or dimension (evoking the past like the opening, quasi-impressionist flourish, for example). They may initiate a change in direction, but they are usually not employed functionally.84 The thread which holds each piece together-Ariadne's thread, so to speak-is usually a rigorously restricted reservoir of central notes This is also evident in the first of Rihm's Holderlin-Fragmente (Ex. 5). The opening unison is broken with the piano's E in bar 3. This pitch is taken over an octave higher by the voice and sustained until it leads into the descending minor third E[-C in bar 5. These latter pitches are immediately taken up in the piano part, and the phrase comes to a logical conclusion with E;-Db in imitation. During the much denser last three bars of the piece the voice continues to dwell on previous pitch material until it too lands on B-Bk, the two pitches which have already formed a common denominator throughout the piano accompaniment of this second phrase (both in succession and simultaneously). The fragment thus ends on the pitch with which it began. Rihm's fourth fragment is in many ways exceptional (Ex. 6). It is the only piece of the set which completely separates the voice from the piano. Moreover, the first of the piano's chorale-like harmonizations of the voice's preamble is blatantly and conventionally tonal. It is the only passage within the work where one may discern a more or less logical tonal progression. As if to offer several possible readings of Holderlin's text, the fragment's melody is also the only one to appear more than once. Introduced by the voice alone, it is followed by two harmonizations for solo piano. The full melody occurs once more at the end of the final, ninth fragment, unharmonized and slightly modified in rhythm (Ex. 7). It is particularly effective here after the vivid rendering of the last of Rihm's Holderlin texts, the Lied des Schweden,where contrast is at its greatest (it fluctuates between ffff and ppp and between unaccompanied voice and violent piano chords). All the more hauntingly, the melody's pitches now fade away over the piano's still reverberating lower F. The importance of the melody of this fourth Holderlin fragment as a recurring segment demonstrates that even if conceived with no larger whole in mind, Rihm's individual event does indeed have an impact on the piece's overall form. Well awareRihm, 'Musik ist...', p. 92. Literally, Holderlin's text reads: 'Like clouds around time lie'; the word 'um' ('around') implies enclosure or captivity. 84 Rihm's of atmosphericuse of 'tonality'is greatlyenhanced in his Mahlerianorchestration the Hilderlin-Fragmente (1977).82 83

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of the dangers of endless accumulations of such individual events, Rihm himself warned: Macro-formalso has to be composed. Music which is strong at every moment, within every one of its micro-forms,but lacks as strongand imaginativea scheme for its overallprogressin time, this kind of music disintegratesand may, in an extreme case, become boring.85 However independent his individually carved units, Rihm consistently strives to relate that which follows to events past. Thematic recurrence is just one example of the kind of associative logic of progression which governs each of his works (sometimes even series of works). However, a sense of direction is deliberately undermined. The composer's ideal, after all, is to 'create something from chaos . . . which against chaos and with chaos again ends up being chaos'.86 However ordered this resulting 'chaos', it is mostly the self-enclosed autonomy of the aphorism which Rihm employs to guarantee the desired impression of musical anarchy. The structured juxtaposition of self-contained musical aphorisms as Rihm practises it in his Holderlin-Fragmente allows for the agglomeration of highly contrasted poetic images, maximum contrast85 Rihm, 'MusikalischeFreiheit',p. 76. 86 Rihm, 'Offene Stellen', pp. 95-6.

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Quiet Revolutions- Hölderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Rihm