Dehiscence, flottements [2003]

for piano

duration :: 13’

Written for Ian Pace

First performance :: Ian Pace — Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik (Bludenz, Austria), 22 November 2007

I think of [Beethoven’s] earlier compositions where into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces, the continuity bitched to hell because the units of continuity have abdicated their unity, they have gone multiple...

— Samuel Beckett , “Dream of Fair to Middling Women”

Writing program notes for this work in the summer of 2007, five years after I began working on it, is an unusual experience. In the aesthetic chronology of a young composer five years can be a very long time indeed, and I see Dehiscence, flottements purely in retrospect: as a strong, almost desperately flailing thrust towards a vaguely sensed constellation of compositional concerns that have guided all the work I have since produced. It is a zero point. The ostentatiously off-kilter movement lengths, which swing wildly between a handful of seconds and seven minutes, imposing a destabilizing unpredictability on the repetitive, static material; the ebb and flow of physicality and the choreography of the pianist’s gestures, which at the end of the piece wind up totally dominating the musical argument; the sheer stubbornness and extremity of the notational situations (the fifth movement, for example, is written on nine staves): reflected in this long-unperformed piece I see a 22-year-old composer staking out a variety of almost untenable claims, and almost inadvertently mapping out a musical territory that I am still exploring. This is not the earliest of my works whose performance I encourage, but it is the first that I do not yet fully understand.

Dehiscence, flottements has nothing at all to do with Beethoven, and nothing in particular to do with Beckett. But the idea of “dehiscence” (the biological process wherein a sac ruptures along a natural seam and spills its contents) captures the organic yet destructive relation of the dominant second movement with the first, third and fourth, which surround it with its own disgorged detritus, as well as that between the first five movements and the final one, wherein the fact of the pianist’s arms outlasts the intricate structural concerns of the first eleven minutes of the piece. As for “flottements” (French for, approximately, “undulations”)—the static yet intransigently slippery material is continually slipping away from the pianist’s fingers, from the temporal boundaries of the various movements, and finally from the inherent mechanics of the keyboard itself, in an unstoppable but resolutely calm series of lapping waves.

Dehiscence, flottements is dedicated to Ian Pace, whose initial plans to premiere the piece in 2003 were stymied by American border policy. As a result, I have to supplement the initial words of dedication from four and a half years ago. This work, then, is dedicated to Ian “with sincerest respect and equal parts astonishment and admiration”—and with gratitude for his persistence as well.