“indolentiae ars,” a medium to be kept [2015]

for 9-key basset clarinet in A

duration :: 23’

Commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik and the Ministry for Families, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the NRW for Carl Rosman

First performance :: Carl Rosman — Montags in der Musikfabrik (Cologne, Germany), 15 February 2016

‘twas Germanicus’ advice of old, that we should not dwell too long upon our passions, to be desperately sad, immoderate grievers, to let them tyrannize, there ‘s indolentiae ars [an art in suppressing grief], a medium to be kept: we do not (saith Austin) forbid men to grieve, but to grieve overmuch.

-- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 2, Sec. 3, Mem. 5: Cure of Melancholy – Remedies against Discontents

Not grief so much as duration, which can amount to the same thing: the challenge of an old, obsolete instrument, limited in some respects, impossibly flexible in others, and possessing ghosts of a specific musical rhetoric, confronted with a large space to fill, a number of strategies attempted, circled back upon, rejected, various stubbornnesses indulged, digressions pursued, durations confronted and deferred.

One of those stubbornnesses is that of Robert Grosseteste, whose treatise De luce is also about the filling of spaces physical and rhetorical, with its imagined spheres and its hysterically repetitive phraseology:

 Ex his patet, quod denarius sit numerus universitatis perfectus, quia omne totum et perfectum aliquid habet in se sicut formam et unitatem, et aliquid sicut materiam et binarium, et aliquid sicut compositionem et ternarium, et aliquid sicut compositum et quaternarium. Nec contingit ultra haec quattuor quintum addere. Quapropter omne totum et perfectum est decem. His autem manifestum est, quod solae quinque proportiones repertae in his quattuor numeris unum, duo, tria, quattuor aptantur compositioni et concordiae stabilienti omne compositum. Quapropter istae solae quinque proportiones concordes sunt in musicis modulationibus, gesticulationibus et rythmicis temporibus.

Explicit tractatus de luce Lincolniensis.