Text of a lecture presented by Liza LIM at IRCAM, Paris, on 7 June 2002 as part of that year's Agora Festival

Ecstatic Architecture

The title of my talk is `Ecstatic Architecture´ which is a term that I find useful for describing the formation of a compositional approach as well as the kinds of structures and structural thinking that interest me whether in music, literature, philosophy or the visual arts. I don't mean architecture from the viewpoint of historical monuments and famous tourist sites. Rather, the term for me is about an emotional architecture in which the seemingly inconsequential thing, the hidden modest detail, can trigger a whole world of feeling, opening out into a cascade of heightened experience.

It seems entirely appropriate for me to be talking about `ecstatic architecture´ in Paris. Sure, Paris has enough museums and grand buildings to fill countless structured itineraries but above all, this is the city par excellence for the randomly wandering observer, for the privately ecstatic art of the flâneur. Edmund White in his book, The Flâneur says: "Paris, land of novelty and distraction, is the great city of the flâneur  . . .  that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps." (p.16)

Walter Benjamin writing about the flâneur's sensuous engagement with the city said, "The great reminiscences, the historical frissons  . . .  these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade all his knowledge of artists' quarters, birthplaces and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile  . . .  that which any old dog carries away." (Edmund White, The Flâneur p.46) The nature of the flâneur's ecstasy is the sudden revelation arising from the fugitive detail  . . .  the Proustian moment in which the madeleine, the shifting flagstone, the play of light on a gateway unleashes a shiver of memory or amorous shock. The city becomes a landscape full of portents and fragmentary signs lying in wait to be deciphered. It is the potential that lies in the `fugitive detail´ that I want to talk about in relation to my own work. Looking through the pieces I've written, I notice that there is often some intimate moment embedded in the music that provides the key or acts as a fulcrum, a turning point, giving the work its direction. Like the flâneur, some tiny fragment in the whole world of possible sonic architectures catches my attention, begins expanding its meaning value and ultimately shapes the compositional process. Perhaps flânerie is something that I've learnt from working with improvising musicians -- that is, to keep alert to the unintended moment, the fortuitous conjunction or even a mistake. These things have the potential to act as portals for transmutation  . . .  often it is the seemingly unimportant or discarded element that can energise one's creativity and suggest another world of experience.

I'd like to examine aspects of this way of thinking in three of my works  . . .  a chamberwork called Koto (1993); a work for 27 musicians called Machine for Contacting the Dead (2000) written for the Ensemble InterContemporain and premiered in Paris last year and finally Chang-O Flies to the Moon which forms Scene 6 of my opera Moon Spirit Feasting. This last piece will be performed by ELISION later this evening. I'd like to say in advance that my approach to this discussion will be to magnify some facets of the thinking that shape these pieces in a broadly metaphorical way rather than provide an analysis in a classical musicological sense.

Machine for Contacting the Dead (2000)

The 13-string Japanese zither, the koto, is an instrument that I've used in quite a number of projects including a video-installation piece called Sonorous Bodies, in my recent opera and in the piece entitled Koto. There are so many things that attract me back to this instrument time and time again. Firstly, there is the central importance of silence in the koto's aesthetic tradition [In Japanese music there is a term `ma´ which describes the `heart´ of silence that exists both within and between the notes]. This aesthetic dimension also exists for other zither instruments like the Chinese qin and Korean kaegum. For these instruments the sound of the plucked string fades in a way so that there is an ambiguous zone where one is not sure if the string is still sounding or not  . . .  there is an elongated area between actual sound and actual silence which invites the listener's heightened attention.

Thus silence is not just a point of repose but can also have very intense and dramatic qualities and I find that koto performance combines the qualities of both violence and meditation. I speak about koto performance rather than koto music because for me, it is the choreographic element of the koto that is so strong. Watching a performance one is very aware of the placement of the player's body as it moves across the horizontal grid of the strings. The musician's fingers, hands, arms and so on articulate a whole vocabulary of calligraphic gestures as they approach and draw back from the strings.

So -- choreography, violence, meditation, silence -- In the Koto I wanted to explore how these aspects of the Japanese instrument could colour and shape what I call the `erotics´ of performance for a mixed ensemble of flute/piccolo, oboe d'amore, flügelhorn, percussion, viola and two `celli and the koto itself. I thought of the ensemble as a kind of `meta-instrument´, a `meta-koto´. Two characteristics of the koto give clues as to how I deal with this ensemble of rather diverse instruments. Firstly, there is the percussive playing action of plucking or striking the string (the element of violence) and then the subsequent resonance of the string which the musician inflects by depressing and releasing the string as the sound moves towards silence (the element of meditation). For example, at the beginning of the piece, the koto is paired with the viola where the viola acts to amplify the resonances of the plucked string sound. This idea of elongating a shimmering, inflected resonance is then taken up by two `cellos making these gliding calligraphic movements in harmonics  . . .  an amplification of the koto player's gestures.

Sound 1 (Koto)

The piece proceeds as a series of different magnifications of a gestural language derived from observing the koto as an instrument. The structure of the work could be desribed as a series of petals opening until at the end of the work, there is a kind of implosion. Right at the end of the piece, I introduce a text, a Japanese poem by Bokukei, 1869. The poem comes from the tradition of `death poems´ which were written as a kind of `last will and testament´ by monks, samurai and women of the samurai class. This particular one is written as a farewell in battle and echoes the Japanese folk saying that `when the cuckoo sings, its blood flows´ which is a reference to the bird's red beak.

`Cuckoo, I too
sing, spitting blood
my welling thoughts´

The poem is enunciated by the flautist singing through the flute, with vocal and bass drum interjections from the percussionist. The text rather than being an element that generates and shapes the music marks the point at which it implodes, the point at which the music can no longer sustain a continuous opening out. From a beginning that concerns itself with the gesture of striking and inflecting a resonating koto string I travel to a poem that is a kind of translation of these elements: the violent gesture -- `Cuckoo, I too sing, spitting blood´ and then the meditative resonance -- `my welling thoughts´.

A gesture is rhymed again and again through different instrumental configurations and finally transposed into text. Perhaps you could call this a kind of flâneur's logic  . . .  a series of correspondences are made which lead from an Asian performance tradition to an examination of physical relationships between body and instrument; a way of listening at a very intimate level to sound and silence leads finally to a poetic farewell.

Sound 2 (Koto)

Machine for Contacting the Dead (2000)

Machine for contacting the dead is a much more recent work but in a lot of ways follows the line of exploration begun in Koto. There is an expansion of the concept of meta-instruments  . . .  the twenty-seven musicians of the ensemble are grouped in constellations to suggest imaginary ancient Chinese instruments.

Slide 1 Opening page of score of Machine for contacting the dead Larger Version

And again, I tried to find a link between larger structural concerns and the physical qualities of instruments. The work was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain on the occasion of an exhibition of Chinese archaeological treasures from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng, dating from 433 B.C.E. The tomb is one of the most famous Chinese excavations of the late 1970s containing over a hundred musical instruments including an extraordinary set of 65 bronze bells.

Slide 2 Excavation of the 65 bronze bells from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng

The tomb was laid out like an underground palace with four chambers filled with musical instruments, with ritual vessels, bronze animal figures, chariots, weapons and the coffins of the Marquis and his 21 concubines, women musicians and dancers. The richness of the artefacts and their antiquity certainly convey an overwhelming sense of dynastic power and wealth. The big question for me when I first began this project was `how do I deal with all these objects?´  . . .  there was something almost horrific about this proliferation of elaborate, highly ornamented and magnificent remains.

Looking through the exhibition catalogue I found that the image that spoke most strongly to me was one of the simplest  . . .  an aerial photograph of the tomb.

Slide 3 Aerial view of excavation of tomb

I find this image incredibly powerful  . . .  the strong lines of the assymmetrical shape are stamped like a Chinese calligraphic character on the landscape. [One gets a sense of the scale of the excavation from the people ringed around the tomb.] What I found most affecting I think was that here was something resonating very deeply in the landscape but almost like an alien object or sign, a character so ancient that it can't be deciphered.

One of the things this picture suggested to me was a giant `Chinese puzzle box´  . . .  one of those boxes with many secret compartments which you open up without ever seeming to reach the final central core.

Slide 4 Further aerial view showing the four chambers of the tomb. Central chamber: bells/instruments/ritual vessels; West: 13 coffins of women musicians/dancers; East: double coffin of the Marquis and coffins of his eight concubines; North: Armoury, chariots and weapons

The tomb is like a Chinese-box structure with its components set one inside the other: coffins inside coffins, inside chambers within an underground palace that is itself wrapped in inner and outer layers. I decided to work with an idea of an architecture of boundaries, of enclosures, of entries and exits, and also on a notion of the barrier through which one forces a breach. This image of boundaries however, is not necessarily solid but can also be fluid, translucent  . . .  for instance, the boundary can be a veil that both hides and reveals, providing fleeting glimpses of something.

I was interested in articulating the temporal space of the work to create a sense of the opening and closing of `gateways´. Another way of describing this might be to say that the music is made up of shifting worlds in which things are alternately illuminated or thrust into shadow, or are glimpsed through gaps in the architecture.

Sound 3 (MFCTD opening bars)

I thought of the opening of the work as the breathing of a giant sheng (mouth organ) in which notes are squeezed out through broken reeds, with air escaping out of crevices in the instrument. For this, I orchestrated the unstable aspects of a number of oboe multiphonics (chords) across the ensemble. On another metaphorical level, this music of tortured breathing, wheezing and squealing conjured up an image of the inhalations and exhalations of the earth in the tomb.

Another analogy I have for the shape of Machine for contacting the dead is a series of inner and outer courtyards (a very Chinese way of thinking about space!!). On the largest level, the forty-minute span of the work is divided into five movements:

1. Memory Palace
2. Spirit Weapons, part 1
3. Memory Body
4. Spirit Weapons, part 2
5. Ritual Bells

with the central movement Memory Body being the most intimate and recessed space.

In this movement I set out to write a `subterranean, ruined harp music´. Here the qin, the Chinese zither, provided the poetic inspiration. In the Marquis' `bed-chamber´ located on the eastern side of the tomb, were a number of different kinds of zithers (se and early examples of qin), intact except for their strings. These zithers suggested the idea of listening for the furthest trace of a string last sounded around 2,400 years ago; listening, as an act of attention to silence where this silence points towards a now inaudible reverberation. These stringless zithers are referred to in quite an explicit way in the writing for the violins, violas and `cellos. The players are asked to dampen the strings completely so that one hears only the most tenuous murmur from the friction of bow-hair  . . .  a barely audible breathing sound articulated by the ritualistic sound of stones struck together. For me, these gestures seemed to be an appropriate way to mourn the twenty-one young women musicians and concubines interred alive with the Marquis.

Sound 4 (MFCTD opening of mvt 3)

Later, in the final movement, the `stringless zither´ is evoked by the solo `cellist caressing the `cello strings without sounding them with the bow. The virtuosity of the `cello part is completely veiled here. This is the `theme´ of the last movement, Ritual Bells which works with notions of the play of absence and presence. Materials found in the other sections return but are veiled in some way.

There are actually so many things that I can talk about in relation to this piece. It became such an all-encompassing (almost operatic) world for me when I was writing it and drew together ideas from archaeology and astronomy to geomancy and number symbolism. For now I'll just play the end of the piece to provide a contrast to the delicate sound world of the third movement and give you a sense of where things end up.

At the conclusion of the piece, piano strings are bowed and struck by six musicians creating a massive sonority that is picked up by the brass instruments and at the very end by a contrabass-clarinettist in a final calligraphic display. This is the outer edge of the piece  . . .  the frame or perhaps one could think of it like a standing back from all the detailed and fine ornamentation that has gone before to perceive the larger shape. To continue the analogy, perhaps it's like finally exiting the puzzle box after travelling through countless chambers, corridors and courtyards and rising up high into the air to gain a perspective on the gigantic buried structure resonating in the landscape.

Sound 5 (MFCTD ending)

Moon Spirit Feasting (1997-99)

`Memory´ and the idea of ritually evoking the spirit world are themes that recur in various ways throughout all my compositions. Many of my projects have been concerned with ways to somehow connect with a spirit realm or access thoughts, emotions and desires of the past. These are also the themes of my Chinese street opera  . . .  Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting). The opera uses the structure of ritual propitiations of the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival and various myths about Chang-O  . . .  the woman who stole the herb of immortality and flew to the moon, as prisms to explore notions of transgression, transmutation or translation and also transcendence.

I'll show a short (4 minute) video of the opera to give just to give you a brief sense of the opera's hybrid quality. The work is a collision of various South-East Asian theatre forms from Malaysian Chinese vaudeville and puppetry to Bangkok strip shows; from Hong Kong martial arts movies to street-side trance rituals.

Video 1 (excerpts from the 2000 Adelaide Festival production where opera was performed outdoors on a barge on the river, ELISION)

Again, the subject of the opera is huge so I'm just going to focus on one aspect of Scene 6 which will performed this evening in the Agora late-night series at the Centre Bruxelles-Wallonie.

When I was researching materials for the opera I became fascinated with the subject of Chinese pronouns and how grammar or grammatical structures manipulate one's understanding of identity. Chinese is a grammatically uninflected language in relation to person, that is, verbs are not conjugated as they are in Indo-European languages. Unlike French, verb forms don't change whether one is speaking from the viewpoint of `I´, `you´, `he´, `she´, `it´, `we´ or `they´ and in Chinese poetry for instance, these pronouns are usually completely omitted.

This grammatical fluidity strongly shaped Beth Yahp's libretto for the opera. In Scene 6, Chang-O Flies to the Moon, the stories of the moon goddess are passed through a series of grammatical translations  . . .  the singing subject `she´ transforms into `I´ through to `you until at the end `you´ (her shadow presence) comes into an embrace and unity with `I´.

In spoken Chinese, the pronouns `he´, `she´, `it´ are represented by the same syllable `ta´ but are distinguished in their written form. I was astonished to discover that these written forms and specifically the written form of the 3rd person feminine, `she´, was only invented at the beginning of the 20th century. Previously, the written form for `ta´ (meaning `he´, `she´, `it´) was written in an ungendered form denoting `human´ with specific gender indicated by the context.

To create the written character `she´, one component of the old word was lopped off and replaced with a feminine radical (sign). What this meant was that in creating the new written form `she´, the old ungendered word (`he´, `she´, `it´) was converted into a masculine pronoun whilst still maintaining its meaning as a `universal´ form  . . .  as is the case in a language like English.

This addition to the written language was made by Chinese writers wanting to translate texts from European languages and the changes have become part of the mainstream vocabulary of modern Chinese. In other words, the pronoun `ta´ cannot now be translated back into its previous state. Lydia Liu, a theorist in linguistics and gender studies has made a fascinating study of this. She talks about how the act of translation has hypothesized or `made up´ an equivalence in meaning across languages and how this is an interesting mirror of other kinds of exchanges that "reproduce the colonial relations of power". Liu points out rather provocatively, that "English and the metropolitan European languages have not experienced a similar need in modern times to adapt to the formal characteristics of the other languages by eliminating, for example, one of its gender categories in a reverse mode of operation." French scholars don't alter the grammatical structure of French verbs to translate T'ang dynasty poetry for instance!

The libretto for this scene comprises a poem entitled Transformation Song. The transformation it describes is one of `breaking through´ into oneself. Whereas in the previous scenes, other people tell Chang-O's story, this is the first time that she says `I´, that she uses the first person pronoun to take hold of and relate the story herself. In the libretto, this process of self-realisation is enacted in a series of grammatical transformations. In the first two verses, there is a transformation from the third to first person, `she´ to `I´, and at the close, an interchange between `you´ and `I´ which finally become synonymous. The text for this scene is as follows:

Transformation Song

Text by Beth YAHP

She is the moon-heart's furnace, brooding.
Her Fortune's flown, arrows pursuing.
Mouthless, throatless, she gorges sun and moon.

I take the Herb of Immortality.
I fly up to the moon.

I, Chang-O, turn myself
   into
      my
         self.

   Moon toad, moon shiver
unmanageable creature!


Celestial birds, I have your reason.
Your wishbone blazing.
   Alchemy of feathers
   Wind-heart tremors.

Earth falls away
   Miscarried weight
   Of ancestors.
Amorphous clouds, I am with you.
I unskin your scruples.
   Your airborne gravity
   propels me.

Earth falls
   A bride disrobing.


I seize your secret, Immortal Heavens,
while your jury's out hanging.
   Your quarrel
   quickens my slipstream.

Earth
   bound
      exile.


Before my blood and spirit fused,
I was already burning.
   Womb ice wanting
   Pregnant with fire.


Restless ghost, I recognise you.
Once we suckled like sisters.
   Your breath, my boldness.
   Your sting, my sinew.


I rise
I ripple
I reach

I resonate

I relinquish

I face

I embrace
   you.

In the opera production, Chang-O peels away layers of her costume as she climbs up a ladder and beyond the stage-space that had constricted her actions. She sees Earth falling away from her as she claims more and more her own story until she is able to say `restless ghost, I recognise you.´ This is a point of both self-recognition and release -- a release that comes in the form of acceptance rather than rejection of the complexities of freedom.

Finally, the voice is unaccompanied -- the ensemble dissolves into silence leaving Chang-O singing alone, in an ecstatic opening up to the self.

Sound 5 (YLJ Scene 6 ending)

Concluding remarks

The projects that I've discussed show the diversity of influences that feed into my music. They show that anything might potentially be the trigger for compositional ideas  . . .  a close up view of a musician's fingers on a string; a black and white photograph or the grammatical quirks of language as it evolves. These inspirations seem a rather random collection but what binds them together is a kind of flâneur's glance. This is a way of looking at the world with a sense of openness to the unforeseen, with a sense of alertness to the cracks in the architecture of ordinary life in search of moments of illumination, of mystery and above all, of ecstasy.

--Liza LIM
31 May 2002