The Power of Music Redux

Listening to Ligeti's Requiem for Soprano, mezzo-soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra recently, I was struck by the way that this music can unsettle me, physically, and - in the right circumstances - even evoke feelings of fear and paranoia. This is rare: I'm struggling to think of other pieces of music that I listen to regularly that can elicit similar feelings. In particular, it's the Kyrie that achieves this effect, for a number of reasons (beyond the sheer other-worldliness and strangeness of the music).

Firstly, there's the association with 2001: A Space Odyssey. When I first heard this music, in the context of the film (this was at the cinema, shortly after release, so I'm thinking 1969, probably), I would have had no conception of how music worked (let alone complex modern music like this) - i.e. what the instruments were, how the different parts and sounds were created and interacted, what the music was 'doing'. At that time, I would have just heard a kind of sonic landscape, a swirl of mood and impression, a mental space where some effects were created through sound, largely unmediated through any thought process, conscious interpretative act or embedding in any informed musical/cultural background: I was seven.

And, of course, my experience of the music would have been intimately coloured by the cinematic context in which it was being played: for starters, there was the (to my eyes) visual feast of 2001 itself - black, black space, a few stars showing faintly; the cool greys and whites of the space vehicles, and the clinical, glossy whiteness of the interiors; the ultra-modern computer technology and light displays; the eerier elements of the pre-human segment. Added to this would have been the relative novelty of being in the cinema, and seeing this kind of film (science fiction) on a big screen for the first time. I would have seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the cinema before this, I think, but 2001 would have been a different kind of sensation: it would have felt, I think, as if I was looking at something more adult, more secret, more strange. If my memories of this are true, I recall seeing at one of the Ealing (West London) cinemas, and I remember the vast blackness of the screen in the darkened cinema, and the bluish-white glow of the earth and the moon (hazy auras and ethereal feel) on the screen, and the dust motes floating in the light from the projector. (This is retrospective in part, amplified, suspect.) I seem to remember my mum and my brother being there, seated to my right, and I seem to have a memory of looking along the row of seating and seeing all of the watchers' faces bathed in that blue-white light, and I have a sense of now of my young self wondering if those people were feeling the same awe in the face of this beauty as I was.

I'm not sure precisely where the Requiem was used in the film, but my recollection is that it's either in the Dawn of Man sequence (at the end of that sequence, when the apes are all going - er - apeshit around the monolith) and/or when the astronauts are walking around the Tycho monolith on the moon.

The essence of the music for most of my life has been the split effect of the choir and the solo voices: the sense of a disturbed, gibbering dialogue that's taking place somewhere strange and alien: somewhere out of normal place and time, somewhere that's different from the familiar world of everyday perception and thought and sound and experience that we usually live in. This sense of the music has been pretty much wordless in my mind: felt and seen rather than articulated or understood consciously - a sense of the strange, the ethereal, the sublime and - perhaps - the spiritual suffused with an otherness, a barely understood beauty.

Last year, another layer of meaning was laid down over this established mental landscape; this new layer was partly a function of place, time and imagery, and partly the result of my burgeoning sense of mortality and - er - existential darkness. The place was a rented holiday cottage in Trallwm, in deepest mid-Wales, and the time was late on a dark September night, as I lay in bed listening to the Ligeti piece on my iPod. I was under the bedclothes, looking up through the uncurtained skylight at the night sky, which was deep blue-black (no street lights here) and generously sprinkled with so many stars that the usual familiar constellations were difficult to pick out. I knew that the sky would be rimmed by the deeper darkness of the forest trees, and that the moon would rise later, illuminating the wisps of cloud moving across the slower-moving face of the starscape.

And, looking up at this visible patch of the universe through the skylight, I was suddenly aware of the terror and hatred in the voices on the Kyrie: there's nothing 'merciful' here, it suddenly seemed to me - rather, the music and the tone and drive of the voices makes me think of fear, chattering teeth, ashes, bodily terror, bitterness and accusation. It's as if all the singers are lost souls, or ghouls and demons, flanking the edge of a great dark pit into which the lonely, terrified, tortured souls of the dead are cascading in a pitiless stream. The voices offer no comfort, only mockery; no kindness, only vituperation, sarcasm and vindictiveness. They are telling the fallen souls that there is no solace, no redemption and no happiness in the afterlife: only this death, this terror, this meaningless gibbering, wailing and gnashing of teeth. All is lost: abandon hope all ye who enter here.

That's what this music means to me now - an abyssal emptiness, overlaid with the short and tenuous cable of an individual life. And, on the sidelines, a chorus of mockers who undermine any meaning or purpose.