Spirit Weapons

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

Spirit Weapons (1999)

From Machine for Contacting the Dead (2001) 19850
violoncello, contrabass clarinet and three percussion
Published by Ricordi, catalogue 138579

Part 1 for solo 'cello
Part 2 for contrabass clarinet and three percussion

The two Spirit Weapons pieces form part of a much larger composition scored for 27 musicians entitled Machine for Contacting the Dead. These pieces were commisioned by the Ensemble InterContemporain on the occasion of an exhibition of ancient Chinese musical instruments excavated from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng buried some 2,400 years ago.

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: 65 bronze bells, chime stones, zithers, drums, panpipes and flutes as well as numerous bronze ritual vessels, suggesting a setting for a ceremonial banquet accompanied by an orchestra. Other chambers oriented north, east and west contained further musical instruments, weapons, bamboo slips with texts, laquerware, animal figures and coffins. The Marquis was interred with twenty-one young women, his concubines/musicians/dancers.

All this provides a wealth of provocative background material for my work and in an almost operatic sense, proposes 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 is very suggestive ground. The construction of the tomb and the placement of objects within also interested me as a cultural projection of the afterlife, an instrument or `machine´ of communication with the dead.

The work is scored completely for Western orchestral instruments. No Chinese instruments are included even though reproductions of the tomb instruments are available. One reason for this decision comes from a reading of Confucius' comments about mortuary items that are deliberately made imperfect. "Those who make (valueless) implements for the manes 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" (Book of Rites). Although these objects may seem to be the same as those used in everyday life, they are transformed through some process of destruction which signify their appropriateness as offerings for the spirits.

I have divided 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. There are also various kinds of musics that each meta-ensemble plays with each kind of music corresponding to collections of objects in the chambers of the tomb. The categories are called: `Ritual Bells´, `Spirit Weapons´, `Memory Palace´ (ritual vessels of the central court) and `Memory Body´ (the coffins of the young women).

The `Spirit Weapons´ part of the work comprise materials out of which I have also composed a `cello solo and a work for contrabass-clarinet and three percussion. These pieces refer to one particular object in the northern chamber of the tomb: a dramatic and powerful-looking triple-daggered halberd. The `cello solo takes its structural shape from the emblem of the State of Zeng incised on the top dagger, this emblem made up of two sets of double dragons revolving around a central cross shape. This shape suggested a compositional approach in which two mirrored zones of activity interact like a series of martial-arts gestures. Spirit Weapons (part 2) for contrabass-clarinet and three percussion is an example of a meta-instrument and plays a slowed down, submarine version of fragments of the `cello material: a `radiation of ancient wood and metal´. The spacious resonances of the contra-bass clarinet, for me, allude to the now disintegrated (invisible) wooden halberd-pole that had once held the three daggers in place.

These two pieces can be played as stand-alone works. In the context of the larger work however, they are fragmented and distributed at different points of the structure where I treat them as if they were objects in a space observed from the perspective of other chambers of the tomb. Thus the tomb can be `read´ as the convolutions or combinatorial alignments of a kind of Chinese puzzle-box. This `machine´ therefore suggests ways for codifying a kind of spatial grammar governing for instance how one moves from one location to another or the opening and closing of gateways. It is a world in which things are glimpsed through gaps in the architecture, in which spaces can be activated simultaneously (suggesting synchronistic relationships), a world calling forth a poetry of receding perspectives, illumination and shadow.

Spirit Weapons, part 1 is dedicated to Rosanne Hunt
Spirit Weapons, part 2 is dedicated to Robyn Archer

Spirit Weapons was premiered by soloists of the Ensemble InterContemporain at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in November 2000.

Programme note © 2000 Liza LIM