Winter Journey

It is ten years since the untimely death of W. G. Sebald and earlier this month there was a special event to celebrate his work and launch Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001. There were contributions from Iain Sinclair, A. S. Byatt, Andrew Motion and others who knew him (like poet Will Stone, whose recollections of studying with Sebald were particularly poignant).  It was sad to reflect that the last time I had seen translator Anthea Bell on stage it was next to Sebald himself, reading from the recently-published Austerlitz.  The crumbling Victorian Wilton's Music Hall was a particularly resonant setting for the readings, and for the performance of songs from Schubert's Winterreise by Ian Bostridge.  Hearing the Winterreise in this context prompted thoughts of all the journeys and sadness in Sebald's writings.  

There are many clips online of Ian Bostridge performing the Winterreise - the one I've included above is the opening song in the sequence.  I thought it would be interesting to provide here short summaries of the cycle's twenty-four songs, to show how many of them start with some aspect of the winter landscape - the rustling sound of linden trees, ice on a frozen river, a tree's last few leaves trembling in the wind.  Many of these natural elements are evoked in Schubert's piano score (for example, in 'Der Lindenbaum', 'the piano’s fluttering triplet figuration in E major which opens the song evokes the gentle breezes and whispering leaves of summer: the figure returns later, altered with chromatic harmonies, to depict the cold wind and eerie rustling of the tree in winter, and the young man’s growing sense of delusion'.)  Rather than do a plain synopsis I've turned the Winterreise below into a set of tanka-style verses - I know this is a complete travesty (as Mrs Plinius was quick to point out when she saw what I was doing) but I just found it more fun than writing a set of bullet points... I've based this on the English translation at the Lied, Art Song and Choral Text Archive, using Arthur Rishi's titles; you can follow the link to read proper translations, or the original German poems by Wilhelm Müller. 

Good Night

I leave, a stranger -

Remembering the flowers

And the talk of love

As I walk this path in snow

And write “Good Night” on thegate.

The Weathervane

The weathervane blows

Whistling at this fugitive.

In that house, the wind

Plays quietly withpeople’s hearts.

What is my suffering tothem?

Frozen tears

Frozen teardrops fall

Like morning dew turned toice

But spring from a heart

That’s burning hot enoughto

Melt all the ice of winter.

Numbness

No trace of her now

Walking on this once greenfield.

Pale turf, dead flowers.

And if my dead heartshould thaw,

Her image would melt away.

The linden tree

By a fountain, near the gate:

A linden tree. Though it’s dark

I try not to see

The words of love we carvedthere.

Still, I hear the tree rustling.

Torrent

The snow drinks my tears,

But when the grass starts to grow

And the ice breaks up

A brook will carry them through

The town’s streets and past herhouse.

On the stream

Wild stream, with a hard

Solid crust of ice onwhich

I carve her name, and

A broken ring.  Underneath

There is a surgingtorrent.

Backward Glance

I’ll not pause until

The town is out of sightwhere

Once the windows shone,

The linden trees wereblooming

And a girl’s eyes wereglowing.

Will-o'-the-wisp

A will-o'-the-wisp

Led me astray. Now I walk

Down a stream’s drycourse.

Every stream will find the sea,

Every sorrow finds its grave.

Rest

Too cold to stand still

I’ve walked this desolateroad.

Sheltering now in

A coal burner’s narrow hut

I cannot rest, my woundsstill burn.

A Dream of Springtime

Dreaming of flowers

And the song of birds inMay,

I wake in the dark

With ravens shriekingabove.

When will all these leavesturn green?

Loneliness

A dark cloud passing

Through clear skies, I make myway

Through bright, joyful life.

When the tempests were raging

I was not so miserable.

The post

What makes my heart leap

At the sound of a posthorn

Coming from the street?

Why would I want to look there?

There is no letter for me.

The grey head

My frost coated hair

Soon thaws and leaves megrieving,

Sad to think that death

Is still far off.  This journey

Has still not turned my hair togrey.

The crow

A crow is circling.

It’s been with me since the town

And won’t leave until

The end.  Not much further now.

Fidelity to the grave.

Last hope

A few coloured leaves

Are visible on the trees.

If that one I choose

Is caught and blown to the ground

I too will sink down and weep.

In the village

The hounds are barking

Whilst men sleep and dream ofthings

They do not have. Bark

Me away, you waking dogs.

I am finished with all dreams.

The stormy morning

Weary shreds of cloud

Flit across a storm-torn sky,

Red flames among them.

This morning is to my taste -

It is nothing but winter.

Deception

Before me a light…

I follow it eagerly

Through the ice and night

Imagining a warm house…

But it is all delusion.

The signpost

I search hidden paths

Over cliff tops and wastelands -

One sign before me,

My eyes fixed upon the road

From which no one returns

The inn

I reach a graveyard,

Its death wreaths tempting to

The weary traveller.

But all the rooms are taken

And I must go further on.

Courage

Snow flies in my face.

I shake it off.  My heart cries,

But I sing brightly.

I have no ears for laments

And stride on against thewind.

The phantom suns

Three suns in the sky –

They seem to stare down atme.

Gone, the best two suns,

And I do not need thethird:

I’m better left indarkness.

The hurdy-gurdy man

Barefoot on the ice,

An old hurdy-gurdy man.

Nobody listens.

Shall I go with him and let

Him play along to my songs?

Iceberg in Mist

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse.  One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here.  At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.
 

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abtsracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies.  They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment.  Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes.  Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape.  Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich.  Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire.  Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'.  However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views').  This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982).  I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas -  Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice.   Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up.  In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.'  Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

Frost's Bitter Grip

About this time last year, influenced by all those end of year lists, I posted ten examples of landscape musicreleased in 2010, along with accompanying YouTube clips (nine of which still work).  Here isa similar list for 2011 and once again it is not supposed to be definitive; I'd certainly be interested in any additional comments and suggestions.  I did a post earlier this year on Toshio Hosokawa's Landscapes so am not including that. And, as I have discussed it before, I'm excluding RichardSkelton's Landings, another version of which appeared this year (the expansionof this project reminds me of the way Robert Burton kept adding material to TheAnatomy of Melancholy). 

(1) The obvious place tobegin is with Chris Watson, whose El Tren Fantasma, based on recordings ofthe old Mexican ghost train, has been widely praised.  Thesoundscape is not restricted to the railway tracks, as you can hear from theSoundCloud extracts below (sections 3 and 5, 'Sierra Tarahumara' and 'Crucero LaJoya').  A BBC review describes the wild countryside throughwhich the train passes: 'brushwood and tall grass sway beneath the breezecrossing canyon slopes, while constant cicada chatter is punctuated by thedistinctive calls of woodpecker and crow.'  This was not the only ChrisWatson release this year - Cross-Pollination, also on Touch, includes 'TheBee Symphony', created with Marcus Davidson, and 'Midnight at the Oasis' - recorded out in the Kalahari desert and nothing to do with the 1974 Maria Muldaurhit.


Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma album preview


(2) WaterBeetles of Pollardstown Fen, was released by Gruenrekordershortly before they announced the premature death of its creator, soundartist Tom Lawrence.  This is a very specific take on a landscape; as onereviewer says, 'Pollardstown Fen is an ancient, 500-acre,spring-fed alkali marsh in County Kildare, 30 miles west of Dublin, but tolisten to these hydrophone recordings by Irish musicologist Tom Lawrence, you’dthink it was a well-stocked video arcade circa 1985.' Whilst Chris Watson's ElTren Fantasma was directly inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète,the sense in which a record like this qualifies as 'music' is quite debatable.  Richard Pinnell has writtenthat 'aside from some tastefully simple crossfades there isn’t any editing,enhancements or attempts to sculpt these recordings into anything more than theremarkable audio photographs that they are.'

(3) On adifferent scale entirely, I think it is relevant here to mention Björk's Biophilia,a multi-media project of cosmic ambition based on elements ofnature and the landscape, like the sound of thunder and the cycles of the moon.(I think it would be too much of a stretch to include in this list KateBush and her fifty words for snow...)  Björk's live shows have featured new instruments devised for the project - the track 'Solstice' for exampleevokes the rotation of the Earth through the rather beautiful sound of a pendulumharp. The accompanying iPad apps makes me wonderhow far these could be used to develop new genres of landscape art.  But despite the involvement of SirDavid Attenborough, no less, these still sound limited: the app for'Crystalline' for example comes with 'a game, in which youcollect crystals in a tunnel as the song plays.' We just stuck to buying theactual album.

Björk's Biophilia app introduced by David Attenborough

(4) Earlier this year I wrote here about J. A. Baker's book The Peregrine but had not then listened to the Lawrence English album inspired by it. Matt Poacher reviewed it for The Liminal and identified the way the music seeks to imitate the movement of the hawk: 'the roar of the surface drones do have the feel of the upper air, and the granular detail becomes like the murmarations of desperate starling or lapwing flocks, banking and swarming in the viciously cold winter wind. ‘Frost’s Bitter Grip’ and ‘Grey Lunar Sea’ also manage to portray, using a mixture of high thin metallic and broader cloud-like drones (not dissimilar in texture to some of the sounds Basinki captures in the warping tape recordings of the Disintegration Loops), the shattering cold of the winter of 1962/3, during which countless birds died and significant parts of Essex’s North Sea coast froze for months on end.'

'December 24 - Frost's Bitter Grip' by Lawrence English

(5) Canadian ambient composer Scott Morgan (who records as Loscil) has named allthe tracks on his new album after features of the Coast Arc Range.  Although he uses field recordings the music is mainly built up from slow waves of synthesiser.  Appropriately enough it was released by the GlacialMovements label, whose mission statement may sound better in theoriginal Italian but certainly makes clear what they are aiming for in their artists' 'glacial and isolationist ambient' music: "Places that man has forgotten...icy landscapes...fieldsof flowers covered eternally with ice... Icebergs colliding amongstthemselves..The boreal dawn that shines upon silent white valleys in the GreatNorthern lands...an explorer lost among the Antarctic glaciers looking for theway home..."

Loscil - Coast/ Range/ Arc album preview 

(6) Guitarist Jon Porras records drones with Evan Caminiti as Barn Owl and has put out solo recordings as Elm.  Undercurrent is the first release under his own name and is described as 'California Gothic set to the tidal rhythms of the Pacific and tuned into the metabolic pathways of the northwest coast ... a love poem to the mist, a prayer cast in ghostly reflected guitar and deep pools of distortion'. Opening with 'Grey Dunes' (clip below), the album moves on to tracks with titles like 'Seascape', 'Shore' and ends gently with 'Land's End' and 'Gaze'.

(7)Following last year's round-up, Matt Poacher (whose blog Mountain 7takes a particular interest in landscape and music) left a comment referring me to TheLowland Hundred.  I was therefore interested to read hiscomprehensive review this year of Diffaith, a project by The LowlandHundred's Tim Noble. 'East of Aberystwyth is a tract of wild country, windblown and empty.Colloquially it is known as the desert of Wales – not because of a lack ofrainfall but because of this character of emptiness...'  Diffaith (Welsh for 'wilderness') comprises sixtracks and three complimentary short films (you can explore it further on Tim Noble's website).According to Matt,the album's centrepiece 'is a vast, monstrous thing, named for the blastedvalley floor of ‘Llawr-y-cwm-bach’. The track is dominated by long periods ofnear-silence, punctuated with huge walls of Stephen O’Malley-like guitar thatthreaten to tear the fabric of the track apart. If Noble’s aim was to make itsound as if the very land were voicing some primeval shriek then he hassucceeded. Christ alone knows what went on down there, but this sounds like ahowl from the void.'


'Llawr-y-cwm-bach' by Tim Noble

(8) Tim Noble , The Lowland Hundred (whose new album Adit has just been released) and Hallock Hill (whose music Matt locates 'at the intersection between landscape and memory') release their records through Hundred Acre Recordings.  Another small label whose name would lead you to anticipate music with a landscape theme is Wayside and Woodland Recordings, run by epic45, who been recording pastoral indie pop for some years now and this year released an album called Weathering.  Tracks like 'With Our Backs to the City' (below) have reminded reviewers of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs - 'yet where Mercury Rev seemed to find what they were looking for in the Catskill Mountains, the best epic45 offer is a fleeting glimpse of salvation; the occasional burst of sunlight through a blackened sky.'

(9) It is now five years since I first discussed the Ghost Boxlabel on this blog and excellent new releases continue to appear - this year's highlight was As the Crow Flies, an album by Jon Brooks (The Advisory Circle). Also this year, Jim Musgrave, who works with Ghost Box's Belbury Poly, put out an album as Land Equivalents called Let's Go Orienteering which he describes as 'half-remembered educational films, imagined landscapes, foreboding woodland trails and a last minute dash towards a promised utopia'.  This combination sounds very familiar now but there are still more musicians wanting to follow these foreboding woodland trails.  The Ley Hunter's Companion by Sub Loam for example is packaged as another piece of aural psychogeography and described as 'two extended synthesiser and sequencer tripsover the summer countryside.'

Sub Loam - Ley Hunter's Companion album preview

(10) As I reach the end of this post I realise it's as much a list of record labels as artists, and the final label I want to mention is Another Timbre.  Their recent releases featuring field recording include Tierce, with Jez riley French, and a CDr from Anett Németh ('A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage' and 'Early Morning Melancholia Two') which Richard Pinnell praised highly on his excellent website. But the album I'm highlighting here is Droplets by the trio of Dominic Lash, Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes because it includes a performance of Maria Houben's 'Nachtstück' recorded out in the landscape (a wood near Hathersage in Derbyshire to be precise).  Dominic Lash says that they didn't anticipate in advance accompanying the sound of a rainstorm: 'The plan was simply to record the piece outdoors; we were hoping for a rain-free window. But when the rains came, some way into the piece, they weren't especially heavy so I decided to keep on playing, hoping it would just be a brief shower. It turned out to be a little bit more than that...'

Ice Music

Terje Isungset, the Norwegian percussionist renowned for his ice horns, is here in Britain again.  We went to see him last night at LSO St. Lukes in a concert that began with the solo percussion piece called Tribute to Nature.  This was played on his special drum kit, featuring sheepbells strung up with rope, a ride cymbal on a weathered stick, bundles of clave-like arctic birch sticks and pieces of granite. It started quietly with the tapping of sticks and the scraping of stones, grew louder and more expressive with horns and Jew's harp, and ended with a long sigh of breath. He then left the stage to be replaced by the LSO's Wind Ensemble, who performed Carl Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922).  A film collaboration between Isungset and Phil Slocombe, 'The Idea of North', was supposed to be played at the interval but never materialised - instead we waited expectantly for the appearance of the ice instruments.  Eventually they emerged - two white blocks carried onto stands and adjusted by a sculptor-roadie, wrapped up in a parka and woolly hat.  The ice had been driven here from Norway; the first clip below shows Terje Isungset carving his instruments directly from the frozen landscape.

Ice Music, the second part of last night's concert, featured Isungset's regular singing partner Lena Nymark (you can see them on stage together towards the end of the second clip above).  She is evidently pregnant, prompting my wife to speculate on the benign influence this music was having on the unborn child.  Isungset began by crunching and tapping one of the ice blocks before moving on to an ice xylophone which he played with ice sticks and bare hands (as he says in the clip below, ice has a surprisingly warm sound when tapped with the finger).  The ice horns only came out for a short time - but since they melt whilst being played this was not too surprising.  At the end of the concert I went up to the stage and held a shard of ice lying on the floor, wondering if this had come from the 600 year old Jostedalbreen glacier.  Terje Isungset has said that the instruments he makes are eventually returned 'back to nature where they belong.'

After the concert - ice remnants

High Arctic

I've talked here before about the ongoing Cape Farewell project which takes a group of artists and scientists each year to the Arctic.  Last year's trip sailed around Svalbard and among those on board were poet Nick Drake and artist Matt Clark of United Visual Artists.  They have now collaborated on an installation for the National Maritime Museum: High Arctic. It is described as 'an exhibition with no touchscreens, no static photographs, and no panels with text: instead High Arctic is a genuinely immersive, responsive environment. Ultraviolet torches unlock hidden elements, constantly shifting patterns of graphics and text that react to visitors approaching; an archipelago of thousands of columns fills the gallery space, each representing a real glacier in Svalbard; an artificial horizon borders the gallery as a seamless canvas of light, shifting in intensity and colour. A Max Eastley and Henrik Ekeus-designed generative soundscape flows through the gallery, weaving in the voices of arctic explorers across the centuries as well as the poetry of Nick Drake.'

The exhibition looks into a future where we will have to imagine the Arctic as it once was.  As you walk on what seem to be pristine snowfields dark patches spread around you, and ice-floes break up as if melted by your torch.  When the voices are silent you can hear the bleak sound of wind whistling over the ice.  Each ice column has the name of one of Svalbard's disappearing glaciers on it, which appears and then vanishes when you move the light over it.  These minimal white blocks and their arrangement in the museum space reminded me of Rachel Whiteread's Embankment at Tate Modern, which was a response to her own Cape Farewell trip in 2005.  I took my sons along to High Arctic today and they really enjoyed interacting with the lights and exploring the labyrinth of ice blocks.  I see that, according to an article in Wired, the scale of these was 'based on Lego models because, as team member Ben Kreukniet explains, “Lego is awesome.”'

Before the melt-waters

My copy of The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales has a landscape by David Jones on the cover, painted in the twenties when he went to live with Eric Gill and others at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains.  The book describes Jones' long poem The Anathemata (1952) as 'at once devotional and commemorative, a celebration of Christian mysteries and a recalling of the making - both geological and cultural - of Britain ... The poem draws its material mainly from Celtic, Latin and Teutonic 'deposits' underlying London and Wales, and from English literature.'  Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair have followed a similar path in their recent writings (London Orbital quotes 'The Lady of the Pool' section of The Anathemata, in which Jones uncovers the mythic strata of the City).  But before the poem reaches London, before following the waves of ship-borne settlers whose culture has shaped Britain, there is a section called 'Rite and Fore-Time' which describes the formation of the land itself.  What I like about these lines is the way they too contain 'Celtic, Latin and Teutonic 'deposits'', projected back onto Ice Age Britain, 'before the melt-waters / had drumlin-dammed a high hill-water for the water-maid / to lave her maiden hair.'

He says for example, that it is long ages since these melt-waters 'troughed, in solid Ordovician / his Bala bed for Tacitus. / Long, long ago they'd turned the flow about. / But had they as yet morained / where holy Deva's entry is? / Or pebbled his mere, where / still the Parthenos / she makes her devious exit?' A footnote explains some of these etymological references: Bala is also called Pimblemere, and in Welsh, Llyn Tegid, the Lake of Tacitus.  Jones adds that 'it may be noted that Tacitus was the name of Cunedda's great grandfather' (the kind of fact that these days we can find instantly and then pursue as far as we like).  He also explains in the footnote that the lake 'is formed of solid rock but the S. W. end at least is thought to have been influenced by morainic deposits.  At some remote geological period the outflow was southward whereas now the Dee flows northward through the lake, but, says immemorial tradition, the two waters never mingle.'

Lake Bala

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The poem goes on to describe the movement south of glacial material, 'heaped amorphous / out of Caledonia / into Cambria.' It was from the Southern Uplands, Jones notes, that 'geological deposits of the Ice Age and certain legendary and historical deposits of the sub-Roman age came to Wales.'  At the same time ice sheets from Ireland, Scotland and the Lake District converged into the depression of the Irish Sea and moved south, 'part thrust against the land mass of North Wales' (here Jones' footnote quotes Brit. Reg. Geol. N. Wales pp77-8).  Microgranites and clay-bonded erratics were wrenched away and carried 'with what was harrowed-out in via, up, from the long drowned out-crops, under, coalesced and southed by the North Channel.'  And then the description of glacial action ends with the strange image of St Brendan on his sea horse.  A footnote explains that glaciation extended 'just beyond the waters between South Wales and Ireland, which very many millenia later became associated with the marvel-voyages of the Celtic ascetics; such as the navigation-saint, Brendan, who in the legend rides the narrow channel on a marine creature and hails Finbar, mounted on David's swimming horse, with the words 'God is marvellous in his saints.''