Remake the Thesholds

Think of Berlioz composing, tears running down his face. Why does he weep? At the terrible strength of the music. And perhaps because he is the custodian of this beauty; he feels thankful. This is a scene of inspiration. The music reaches you – and let’s say you weep, too. You are inspired – the music has brought you inspiration. What does this mean? Berlioz’s ‘gift’: he makes music out of rhythms and sonorities. Music is born from his fingertips. It is a kind of matter, a materiality that is shaped by him. Shaped, but in such a way that it is not wholly determined. Was he not the first composer who foregrounded nuances, tones, sonorities – the texture of sound for its own sake? Nude and barely adorned? Bare sound: it is a kind of matter that is affirmed.

– And what do you receive from the work? The gift that gives you giving – for are you, now, the locus of creation? – As though you had grown newer, finer organs in order to receive what you have heard. For it is a question of growth, of alteration, of a becoming which does not leave a ‘limit’ intact. There was never a limit. The self was never the form of the same. Inspiration: the self increases its powers. If it is a question of superabundance, of excess, this is not a transgression of a fixed prohibition. The thresholds are remade as you move across them. If it is matter that would bind you to Berlioz, it is matter as it unbinds you from yourself.

A whole line of composers lend themselves to be treated in this way. But what of those who do not? What I would like to think: a lugubrious ecstasy, a mournful rapture. More: a rapture that is suspicious of itself, its excesses. I will come to this one day or another. It is Shostakovich I want to write about – the composer of the 15th Symphony and the 15th String Quartet.