At two upcoming c)i concerts, my work The General Schemed will be performed– it is always a happy thing to return to past works, especially with players like these. The work was premiered by counter)induction on 13 June, 2008 in New York NY; it is always interesting to return to a piece after some time, in that interval between performances provides perspective on the successes and failures of a work and on the technical compositional devices employed, but more interestingly for me at least the shift in context of presentation will reveal new aspects and implications of the work, opening new dialogues with other works and practices.
The work was originally written as part of a collaborative project between c)i and the Beijing New Music ensemble. As part of the bridge between the New York and Beijing aspects of the project, I wrote a work based on a poem of Tang Dynasty poet Li Bao. The lament, ‘Fighting South of the Ramparts,’ was probably written in 751, a year of significant military defeats for the Tang Dynasty, which was approaching both its cultural and political peak and soon to face the rebellion of An Lushan. Li Bao, always iconoclastic, was sometimes more concerned with the fullness of his wine bottle rather than politics, but in poems like ‘Fighting South of the Ramparts’ his engagement with the concerns of the day come through clearly; the air of an empire at its zenith abounds, with the possibility of coming decline beginning to creep in at the corners of the rhetoric. One delight of reading a ‘classical’ literature (Greco-Roman, Chinese, Babylonian, what have you) is the delight in finding the shared interests and concerns of an individual remote to oneself in space and time; perhaps the sense of tragic is that much sharper when those shared concerns are of the futility of death and disaffection with a political and cultural regime. In the work, the spatial arrangement of the instruments is intended to amplify the shifting affiliations and alliances among the instruments partnerships and sharings which hold a promise of coordination and true friendship, but which cannot in the end be sustained. The title of the work is taken from the closing passage of the poem, translated here by Arthur Waley:
"Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and grass;
The general schemed in vain,
Know, therefore that
the sword is as accursed thing
which a wise man uses only if he must."
Though the cross-cultural framing of the poem in the context of its premiere trumps most other reading, the political overtones were still profoundly present. The work if marked in tempori belli, and was written and premiered as political and military crossroads where very much in the air.
In the context of this upcoming concert, the work feels more political, but also less overtly. Juxtaposed with Crumb's Eleven Echoes of Autumn, my work feels more elegiac and less immediately politically, but as I have been reworking parts and reengaging with the piece, the work remains political in at least one interesting way - in a work inspired by a poem about command and agency in a militarized political system, the score of the work carefully and systematically undermines its own authority, asking performers through aleatoric and quasi-improvisatory notations to take an active role in the foundations of that which makes this work this work - the notes, the rhythms, the durations, the very stuff of composing as it is typically understood. My hope in the use of these technics, in this work as well as in my other works, to both share the delight in that decision making, but also to remind audiences of the variety and density of choice-making that constitutes music making, the field of possible choices that we chose to let ourselves make. That simple fact is inescapably political, another fact that should not be forgotten, lest we forget the need to maintain the space for agency and free action.
Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, way of doing and ways of speaking). (Ranciere, "Dissensus," 152).
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