Spurious

Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer:

N.P.: The last chord in Cantus seems not to want to come to an end. It stands still, without growing or diminishing. Something has been achieved and now one doesn't want to let it go. The content of the entire work strives toward this point. When the plateau of this cadence has been reached the chord does not want to stop. The same thing happens at the end of the first part of Tabula Rasa: always this final chord that appears to want to go on forever.

[...] A.P.: I believe the sacred texts are still 'contemporary'. Seen in this light there are no significant differences between yesterday, today and tomorrow because there are truths that maintain their validity. Mankind feels much the same today as he did then and has the same need to free himself from his faults. The texts exist independently of us and are waiting for us: each of us has a time when he will find a way to them.

[...] A.P.: It is possible that the people who follow my music with interest hope to find something in it. Or perhaps there are people who, like me, are in search of something and when listening to my music, feel that it is moving in the same direction as they are.

Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer:

A.P.: At the time I was convinced that I just could not go on with the compositional means at my disposal. There simply wasn't enough material to go on with, so I just stopped composing altogether. I wanted to find something that was alive and simple and not destructive.

[...] my experience with the third symphony left me dissatisfied. It became clear to me that I was caught within my relationship to musical history, which was too much one of debt. And that my work somehow lacked a style of its own. But I had succeeded in building a bridge within myself between yesterday and today - a yesterday that was several centuries old - and this encouraged me to go on exploring. During those years I filled thousands of pages with exercises in which I wrote out single voiced melodies. At home there is a cupboard full of exercises like this. [...]

N.B.: Arvo wanted to develop his spontaneity, and not just through this experiment with the psalms - I can remember that he observed flocks of birds, sketched them in a book, and wrote a melody next to the drawing. In other cases he used photos of mountains as inspiration to find a musical phrase. He had the feeling that the observation of cold, dead roles from years gone by had extinguished his own free, creative impulse.

[...] You can't imagine how important this period was, with all its pages of exercises and psalms. He didn't know if he had found anything at all, and if he had, what it was. But he would certainly have given up composition if he had found nothing. I knew that he would not have been able to go on living without that music, which was the real content of his life.

If there's one dream that never left me, whatever I've written, it's the dream of writing something that has the form of a diary. Deep down, my desire to write is the desire for an exhaustive chronicle. What's going through my head? How can I write fast enough to preserve everything that's going through my head? I've sometimes started keeping notebooks, diaries again, but each time I abandoned them [...]. But it's the biggest regret of my life, since the thing I'd like to have written is just that: a 'total' diary.

Derrida, interviewed

 

Arvo Pärt: As you can see, we are dealing once more with the concept of spirituality. By spirituality I do not mean something mystic, but something in fact quite ordinary. There are different attitudes - a very negative way of thinking, and another attitude that sees everything in a positive light. Old music and art teach us to see things from the second of these two perspectives. This is the way Fra Angelico painted, for example, in representing the Day of Judgement. Naturally hell is shown, but even this seems to be imbued with sanctity, and here hell is simply some 'added colour'. For other painters that came later, hell was a real place, but heaven was not so pure as that of Fra Angelico.

In this context the words of Peter Brook occur to me: I am thinking of his comments on the legendary Aix-en-Provence production of Don Giovanni. He said that the miracle of Mozart consists in the way he never condemns anyone, how in his work he accompanies his protagonists lovingly and with equal generosity and empathy.

HTMLGiant shine the 'Author Spotlight' on me for a review/ interview. Grant Maierhofer asked the questions.

'Stupid Men in Moldy Flats: On Lars Iyer's trilogy'. David Morris on Exodus, Dogma and Spurious.

Today sees the publication of Exodus in the USA. 

 

Cover of the Spanish translation of Spurious, forthcoming from Palido Fuego. They've given Levinas the walking stick! 

Spurious, in Croatian, as Mudrovanje, from Edicije Božičević (Zagreb, 2012). Translated by Marijana Bender Vranković and Nikolina Fuštar. The novel has been given the subtitle, Što je zabavnije od intelektualnog mudrovanja?, What's more fun than intellectual arguments? The title can be translated as Weaseling.

New interview at Full Stop on the topic of pathos.

Olga Silver writes a profile of me (in Russian)