Eminent theorist Christopher Hasty once, in conversation, said something that I still find quite perceptive and relevant to Bartlett's music. He said (paraphrased as required by memory & time) that her music 'seems as if it shouldn't work, but does. It is almost not there.' Throughout her output, increasingly in recent works, and clearly in 'Spell,' witness is borne to moments of origination and moments of dissolution; In the compositional process, in performance , and in the experiencing of the audience there are again and again transitions from chaos to control and back again, between a sculpted world of maximal density and complexity and a smooth space of quietudinal repose. The severity and occasional violence of such rapid transitions is not (as a colorful wag once put it) a bold statement of anti-music, but rather an unveiling of the ontic character of music, esp. music in performance. Music-in-performance is always about to not be, and is also new to being; each sound is a new action and, in the case of Bartlett's pure distillations of sound, gesture, and action, it is new to the aspiration of being music. These are not vacillations but oscillations, as the domain of music (and in 'Spell,' the domain of music-for-strings) is orbited and approached and transected, but never inhabited for very long.
'Spell' operates on dual precipices of not-being: a divide between the striking and bowing, and between action and stasis. Each divide bring different elements to the fore, showing these domains to be orthogonal and entwined in equal measure. To provide a modicum of the diachronicism notes like this are expected to manifest, consider the progression of the work; an opening shadow-world of harmonics and whispers is interrupted by explosively percussive rhythmic unisons ending abruptly in a return to the opening stillness, but a stillness now threatened with a recapitulation of the interrupting violence. And yet it would be a mistake to say that the interruption of that first material is simply 'surprising.' By the delicacy of character and presentation, the opening is from its first moments in danger of dissolving into nothing, much as the base ferocity of the percussive material risks monomaniacal reduction to machinic 'bruit.' Such oppositions persist through out the piece, each blossoming in repetition, as do fragile bridges between the domains.
Such a hermeneusis places us adjacent to Lyotard's formulation of the Sublime, situated in art as the anticipation of not-being; this threat of extinction and the need for new action to bring art into the Now makes, for Lyotard, the Sublime the very core of the Modern.
'Hidden in the cynicism of innovation there is surely a despair that nothing further will happen. But to innovate is to behave as if any numbers of things could happen, and it means taking action to make them happen. In affirming itself, will affirms its hegemony over time.' (Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-garde')
Lyotard's move to situate his sublimity in time is right and proper, but he interrogates the Sublime in the domain of the visual arts, and so finds himself focusing on the Sublime as an isolated event, often the perception or representation of physical or spatial momumentality (either of nature, of the infinities of color fields, or stark projections of negative space). This vantage can result, if we are not careful, in teleological narratives in which the Sublime is a moment to be achieved. Such a misstep loses the great insight of Bartlett's music -- the ontic character of the Sublime in art is not occasional and momentary, but pervasive and continual. It can be discovered through delicacy or savagery, and peers out at us from corners at right-angles to the Real, enfolded in habit and history, and unfolding in each moment of music's obstinate, persistent capacity to be.
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