Machine for Contacting the Dead

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

Machine for Contacting the Dead (2001)

for twenty-seven instruments
Published by Ricordi, catalogue 138702

The composition Machine for Contacting the Dead was commissioned by the French Ensemble InterContemporain on the occasion of an exhibition of Chinese archaeological treasures and was premiered in February 2001. The exhibition, La Voix du Dragon, on display at the Musée de la Musique in Paris, was one of the `millennial´ projects of the Cité de la Musique in a season of activities that showcased Chinese culture. At the centre of the exhibition was a collection of ancient musical instruments excavated from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng, dating from 433 B.C.E.

The tomb of the Marquis Yi is one of the most famous and celebrated Chinese excavations of the late 1970s and the contents of its four chambers offer a picture of an extremely rich material and spiritual culture. In the central chamber of the tomb, archaeologists found over a hundred musical instruments. There were 65 bronze bells, chime stones, zithers, drums, mouth organs, panpipes and flutes as well as numerous bronze ritual vessels, suggesting a setting for a ceremonial banquet accompanied by an orchestra. The lacquered double-coffin of the Marquis Yi was situated in the eastern chamber together with the coffins of eight concubines surrounded by a `chamber-music´ set-up of zithers and panpipes. In the western chamber there were a further thirteen coffins containing the remains of the Marquis' women musicians/dancers, whilst in the northern chamber lay chariots, weapons and bamboo slips with texts. The tomb was constructed like an underground palace providing the deceased Marquis with ritual articles and companions as in life.

The tomb provided a wealth of provocative background material for my musical work and in an almost operatic sense, proposed an all-encompassing world. Archaeology; a subterranean architecture (the world in mirror form); the notion of an arrested `ritual court-music´; the ephemeral nature of sound in the face of the concreteness of the objects that have been preserved; the geomantic orientation of objects; the cultural-religious systems embedded in the instruments, vessels and writings, not to mention the horrific fate of the women buried alive with the Marquis -- all this was very suggestive ground. The architecture of the tomb and the placement of objects within also interested me as a cultural projection of the afterlife. The tomb is an elaborate marker for the boundary between life and death, providing a ritual focus by which the living can address an ancestor. It functions as an instrument or `machine of communication´ with the spirit world.

I found it most useful to consider the overall structure of the tomb complex in order to overcome my feelings of being overwhelmed by the wealth of archaeological artefacts. Also of importance was the relative position of the elements and their orientation according to a symbolic geomantic layout. The tomb suggested 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. In Machine for contacting the dead, I therefore concentrated on 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, was not necessarily solid but could also be fluid, translucent -- a sort of architecture of the veil that reveals fleeting glimpses of something. These structural principles gave me an ensemble of formal ideas that were very suggestive and could provide a framework by which I could also contemplate the tomb's contents.

The structure of Machine for contacting the dead could be described as an assymmetrical architecture of `outer´ and `inner´ courtyards. The proportions used to structure these different `spaces´ relate to segments of a `magic-square of three´, a matrix whose property is that every horizontal, vertical and diagonal reading of three numbers gives a sum of fifteen. This particular magic square is known in Chinese as the `luo diagram´ and it is used extensively in Chinese opera and ritual theatre to structure how performers move through space. The matrix represents the Daoist idea of `change in constancy´. The number `five´ lies at the centre of the matrix and is the `empty point´ through which one must always pass to move in any direction. The surrounding numbers are associated with elemental forces such as wind, fire, earth, water and so on. In this way, numbers not only govern duration but also indicate the qualitative structure of events in time.

Magic square matrix used in Machine for contacting the dead

This proportional matrix allowed me to articulate the temporal space of the work creating 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.

Machine for contacting the dead does not employ Chinese instruments to reflect a Chinese world. Reproductions of the tomb instruments are available but I decided not to include any of these in the ensemble and the work is scored for Western orchestral instruments. One reason for not using the instruments from the tomb comes from a reading of Confucius' comments in the Book of Rites concerning the correct manufacture of mortuary items known as ming qi (bright vessels). `Those who make (valueless) implements for the manes [deified souls] of the dead show that they are acquainted with the proper method of celebrating obsequies, for, though such implements be ready at hand, they are unfit for real use´  [1]. That is, respect is shown to the dead by creating objects that only seem life-like and should not be used by the living. I am reminded here of the paper models of mansions, cars and computers burnt as offerings for the dead in contemporary Chinese funerals. Since the tomb offerings, the bells and the other instruments have this role in relation to the spirit world, it seemed inappropriate to make literal use of them in my work.

Instead, I decided to divide up the ensemble of 27 instruments into different groupings, each constellation being an imaginary `ancient instrument´. Each of these groupings synthesise sounds into a kind of meta-instrument which performs in an ensemble of such instruments. I also defined various musical `styles´ that each meta-instrument would play, with each kind of music corresponding to objects in the chambers of the tomb. The forty-minute span of the work is divided into five movements that correspond to the following aspects of the tomb complex:

Memory Palace:

central ritual space and western burial chamber; orchestra of women musicians playing sheng (mouth organs), pai-xiao (panpipes) and percussion

Spirit Weapons part 1:

northern chamber (armoury), dragon emblem incised on weapons

Memory Body:

eastern `bed´-chamber of Marquis and 8 concubines, ruined zithers, stone chimes

Spirit Weapons part 2:

northern chamber, triple-daggered halberd

Ritual Bells:

set of 64 bianzhong bells and Bo bell

I imagined the opening of the work as the breathing of a giant sheng 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. Later in the work, cascading microtonal scales suggest the disarray of the pai-xiao's bamboo pipes. 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 example of the ensemble as `meta-instrument´ occurs in the third movement, Memory Body, in which I set out to write a `subterranean, ruined harp music´. I took my poetic inspiration from the qin, the Chinese zither, whose performance practice emphasises the kinaesthetic, the musician´s caress on the instrument, and the value of silence. Surrounding the `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 as the index of a now inaudible reverberation. I referred in a rather explicit way to these stringless zithers 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. There is an intense silence, articulated by the movement of the bows and the ritualistic sound of a pair of stones struck against each other. These gestures also seemed to be an appropriate way to mourn the twenty-one young women musicians and concubines interred alive with the Marquis.

There is a small epigraph at the beginning of the 'cello solo of the second movement, Spirit Weapons part 1, which is a quotation from a poem by Michael Ondaatje: "There was always the `untaught hold´/ by which the master defeated/ the student who challenged him" [2]. Later, in the fifth movement, Ritual Weapons, there are the lines: "before her story became a song/ lost in imprecise reproductions" [3]. Both quotations, from Ondaatje's `Handwriting´ collection, are an attempt to find a way of pointing towards another world beneath the surface of the music, like the infinitely receding perspectives of Chinese calligraphy. For me, these lines also resonate with the erotic-tactile and meditative world of qin music which informs the innermost emotional level of the score. Again, the `stringless zither´ is interpreted in a virtually silent music where the 'cellist caresses the strings of the instrument, producing sounds which are almost inaudible.

The `theme´ of the final movement, Ritual Bells is the play of presence and absence. Materials found in the other sections return but are often veiled in some way. The `meta-instrument´ created in this movement refers to the tomb's chime bells, but the image here is of bells whose sounds are deformed as they are dug from mud and water. The structure of bell sounds -- a percussive attack followed by resonances in which different inharmonic partials emerge and then decay -- is taken as a model for the shape of the music.

At the end of the work, piano strings are `bowed´ with lengths of fishing line and struck with a timpani mallet by six musicians. These sonorous chords suggest a giant bell resounding, giving a sense of closure to the work. Yet the closing gestures actually come from a contrabass-clarinet which continues to play with the resonances from the piano in a fluid calligraphic display. There is a sense of something ending but the `frame´ is not clear-cut, the closure is merely provisional. The combinatorial possibilities of the `Chinese puzzle-box´ are not exhausted in the music for the `machine´ leaves an infinite number of other perspectives to be explored and illuminated.

Programme note © 2000 Liza LIM

References

1. Jo Riley. Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 146.
2. Michael Ondaatje. Handwriting. New York: Vintage Books, 2000, p. 3.
3. ibid, p. 74.

Select Bibliography

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• Jouffray, Alain. ed. La Voix du Dragon. Paris: Musée de la Musique, Cité de la Musique, 2000.
• Li, Ling. ed. The High Appreciation of the Cultural Relics of the Zeng Hou Yi Tomb. Hubei: Hubei Museum Press, 1995.
• Ondaatje, Michael. Handwriting. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
• Rawson, Jessica. Mysteries of Ancient China. London: British Museum Press, 1996.
• Riley, Jo. Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Stockwell, Foster. Tang, Bowen. ed. Zuo, Boyang. transl. Recent Discoveries of Chinese Archaeology. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984.
• Von Franz, Marie-Louise. On Divination and Synchronicity: the Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.