"Les Objets Obscurs"

Mesdames et Messieurs, ecoutez ? les objets obscurs! / Ladies and gentlemen, listen: to the hidden things!

When the female voice states these words, we are already inside. Inside the music, in front of the speakers. We are inside of Åke Parmerud’s latest work, a work that I will use as a map in this article in order to “read” the topography within which Parmerud works. Les Objets Obscurs will serve as a catalyst, as a witness to the rational mystique of the hidden things. I will write of riddles, the quintessence of Parmerud’s aural thoughts. Le premier est le point d'oų surgit une énigme. ... The first is the point where a riddle begins. The riddle is mystical and mythical, present in all cultures, through all times. It ties together, or mixes, reality with fiction. The unknown, the hidden things, have a primary place above the known, the concealing things. That which we feel but do not yet know is much more interesting than that which we know, a fact that spring from nature itself, if we are to believe Herakleitos words: fysis kryptesthai filei, “nature loves to hide itself.” The riddle is the bearer of a great power, tangible enough that Aristotle was not able to overlook it when he wrote “On Poetry.” In the fantasy world of Tolkien, it has a mighty, almost liturgical position. When the main character, Bilbo, meets the evil creature Smeagol deep within the damp caves of the mountains, the riddle serves as weapon and judge. It was a life and death matter. Because Bilbo “knew, of course, that riddling was holy and ancient; and even evil creatures were frightened of being fooled when they guessed the answers.”

Metaphor
One can also read a deeper philosophical meaning in the riddle. That is what separates those who possess the unique knowledge, who have the key, the means with which to see the contours of the hidden things, from the rest. The riddle functions as a metaphor for that which creates differences in the sense of the primary basis of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, in which the concept of différence is spelled with an “a” in order to accent the double meaning of creating differences and delaying. I will return to the inherent problems of delay (the answer to the riddle). To follow the thought process another step, the riddle can also be seen as a metaphor for the rite of initiation, the knowledge necessary to be a part of a brotherhood. Its function can be likened to that of a password; it allows entry and access. This aspect is developed by Derrida in the essay Shiboleth, the title of which refers to the diacritical password, the line of demarcation that creates through dividing, that unveils through concealing. The latter is only one of many facets of the prism of the riddle. Parmerud will, however, be inspected from another side, with the help of our French philosopher along with an Italian writer with close ties to Parmerud. Before this, though, we should draw a quick outline of the work that is the basis for this article. Fyra gåtor: Les Objets Obscurs (Four Riddles: The Hidden Objects) consists of four movements, all of which are riddles. The riddles are presented by a short text, after which the music follows. Each answer reveals details about both the sounding object—an everyday item—used for each movement, as well as an aspect of the musical development. So the music in each movement becomes question, clue, and answer simultaneously. Close to the end of the piece, we are given the four answers. After this, Parmerud takes a trump card from his sleeve by putting the four answers together and forming a new question. There is however no answer to this eternal riddle; or, perhaps, an infinite number of answers.


Le deuxičme: Un paysage ambulent.
Un déplacement perpétuel. Quelque chose qui frôle sans toucher. Un
movement sans but. Un objet sans repos. / The second: a landscape on legs. A constant moving. Something that touches without touching. A movement without goal. An object to rest in.

The well-known semiotician Umberto Eco has in his two novels constructed masterful enigmas, cryptic texts, and traitorous secret passages and dead ends. The similarities with Parmerud’s music are several, and stretch far beyond the randomly associative. Both are fascinated by, and capture in their work, intricate riddles to solve, locks to unlock, codes to decipher, signs to interpret, puzzle pieces to put together. Their enthusiasm before the hidden things appears to mirror an attitude towards the fundamental aspects of their own role as artists.

Alter ego
In an unpublished commentary to the piece Alias, Parmerud admits: "Is it not true that many artists find that that which they create becomes such an important part of their personal manifestation that it can be described as a sort of alter ego, a mask behind which their original personality can live an obscure and perhaps also rudimentary life?” In Eco’s second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, the main characters (Eco himself?) says, “our world is a benign enigma that becomes terrible thanks to our madness, because the madness wants to interpret it according to its own truths.” The world as a riddle, creation as disguise: against the background of these personal, artistic credos, the thoughts and artifacts are shown throguh the proximity of the hidden things, or rather, of the proximity of their irresistible allure.

The Work
Parmerud describes Out of Sight as “a streamlined play of surfaces, stylizations, or if you will simplifications, meant to obstruct the view of what lies behind, the complex and unpredictable, the real.” The string quartet is imbued with (hidden) numeric symbolism. The piece Maze bears witness through its title that its theme is the riddle of all riddles: the labyrinth. The labyrinth is as you know also one of the (many) foundations of Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose.

Game for the Learned
The affinities between Parmerud and Eco do not restrict themselves to the thematic; they share also a stylistic and ideological impetus. Both set learned games in motion for the learned, both enjoy excesses in excesses of gestural precision and minute polishing of the finest details. Like Hermann Hesse’s glass pearl player: l'art pour l'art, play for the sake of playing, no ambition to comment or relate to the “outside world,” neither politically, ethically, nor in any other way. In the preface to The Name of the Rose, the writer makes the following clear: “Since this is a story about books, not about everyday suffering.” And Parmerud does not play chess with Death.

Le troisičme: Des corps convexes lancés dans une série de collisions. Des mouvements hasardeux sur des surfaces irréguličres. Quelque chose qui est aimé sans aimer.
Quelque chose qui s'assemble pour s'éparpiller aussitôt. . . . / The third: Convex bodies cast out in a series of collisions. Random movements over uneven surfaces. Something that is loved without loving. Something that is collected only to be dispersed.

To say that Parmerud’s music has its own personal style sounds almost like flatus vocis, like empty rhetoric. But still, it must be said: there is a special Parmerudish aural atmosphere, an atmosphere with its own personal characteristics. It is dramatic, rich in events, hardly meditative, activating more than deactivating. A finely tuned rawness, beautiful pain, and painful beauty. Economical.
Parmerud lets the sharp edges of the contours cut with a brutal power into the caressing SFUMATO formed figures, as if, to continue speaking in pictures, as if Rembrandt and Picasso were melded mercilessly onto the same canvas. The timbral spectrum is rich in illustrative colors and delicate nuances, but still extremely economically utilized, reduced to a few lowest common denominators (in Les Objets Obscurs, each movement uses sounds taken from one item only). It would be tempting to look for parallels between electroacoustic music and Parmerud’s “hobbies”—photography, rock music, film music—in orer to find a common foundation. But I would posit that in his case, these are wholly different aesthetic categories, and that the sound is handled differently when it is part of a multimedia project, for example, than when it is part of an independent piece for tape. The room is also a meaningful part of Parmerud’s music. Or rather, the rooms, in plural. We have on the one hand the use of the actual room: elaborate use of panning, sound cast between speakers, often while it goes through radical transformations. Then we have on the other hand the illusory room: illusions of the depth of the effects, illusions of great elastic spaces as opposed to limited, extremely small, compact aural bodies. Then we have the complementary play with these rooms: counterpoint, dialogue, metamorphoses, etc. The music sometimes gives one the impression that Parmerud does not have emptiness as a starting point when he builds a musical architecture, but starts rather with “fullness,” a coexistence of all where he erases, etches in pauses, and sculpts proportions through elimination in order to tame and structure the chaotic, overfilled material; as if he carved out the stamp whose impression is the soundscape, stretched in time. Parmerud’s signature.

Causality
Another characteristic of Parmerud’s music is its driven causality. Few events or elements appear in isolation, as ornaments. Instead, the processes are dependent on one another, where one sets another in motion, which then sets a third in motion, and so on, like the gears in a clockwork. The course of the music can be likened to a teleological net that is unfurled, a net in which each effect is the cause of the next. Note the difference between a net and the one-dimensional linking of a chain; in Parmerud’s music, entities can appear as indications of the later completion of latent events, or as confirmation of the appearance of earlier, seemingly isolated events. Les Objets Obscurs is sculpted with the stringency and outstanding technical control that marks of all of Parmerud’s works. But the virtuosically etched sonorities allow for a feeling that there is a disarming smile in the corner of his mouth. It is the playfulness of the game that is perceived, as well as a touch of irony. The latter must not be misinterpreted; it is not a question of satire or simple irony. It is much subtler than that, which can be shown etymologically: the word “irony” goes back to the Greek eironoia, a word with several meanings. It can mean to twist, alter, or-- to hide! And we listen to the hidden things.

The work has a feeling of immediacy and freshness that places it on another plane compared with Parmerud’s earlier works, such as Alias, String Quartet, Repulse (this is said only as a comment on the character of the work, without qualitative judgements). The listener is not confronted with the turbulence and density of information of these works, but can rest in its wider brushstrokes and more transparent substance. The explanation the character of the work lies most probably in the 18 days Parmerud had to write it at GRM in Paris. This short period did not allow for careful calculations or time-consuming reworkings, forcing him to rely on his intuition. Therefore, Les Objets Obscurs allows us to see more of Parmerud’s musicianship, resting comfortably in the tradition to which he also pays tribute. The work’s subtitle says, “ Hommage ā Pierre Schaeffer.” The dedication was natural for Parmerud, since the composition was made possible by an invitation to the institute for electroacoustic music, GRM, which Schaeffer founded. But it is also a gesture of thanks to the entire tradition that was founded and nourished there, and Les Objets Obscurs is composed in a way that is wholly compatible with classical musique concrčte. The work is also an unvoiced dedication to some of the electroacoustic composers from his home country that Parmerud admires: Pär Lindgren, William Brunson, and Akos Rķzmann. Perhaps it is simply a universal, impersonal dedication to Tradition, the musical heritage in itself. It would not be unusual for Parmerud. Even in String Quartet, tradition is present in a pair of Webern quotes that appear as part of the thematic material. Les Objets Obscurs was premiered in connection with The Stockholm Electronic Music Festival XIII, in September, 1991. A couple of months later, the composer himself sat at the mixer board in Arras, France, to steer the work like a conductor through an orchestra of speakers. This time, it was not only a concert, but an international composition competition: Prix Noroit. As usual in these contexts, Parmerud was successful, and traveled home with a second prize.

Le quatričme: L'union entre le premier et le dernier. Le
premier étant l'origine de l'enigme. Le dernier, la décomposition du
premier . . . / The fourth is the union of the first and the last. The first is the source of the riddle. The last is the culmination of the first.

It is difficult to work with the human voice in electroacoustic music. It entails a charged confrontation between the most fundamental form of human identification and communication—the voice and the human language—and the highly technological, dehumanized machine, with its dark, Faustian undertones. In structural terms, it is a confrontation between the individual vocal fingerprint, la parole, and the abstract, independent system, la langue. A voice mediated through a speaker takes us towards a depersonalization of the most personal, towards a quantifying of the most unique. It is like seeing a nature film on a TV tube, or dreaming by an electric flame; it is an antilogy, or an oxymoron (a pairing of opposite words which gives them a new meaning, such as “telling silence.” It is also according to Aristotle through such an impossible combination of words that the riddle reveals truth; he also said that this paradoxical phenomenon was the soul of the joke.). There are plenty of examples of “concrete” electroacoustic onomatopoetic voice treatments that have stranded in a naīve belief that the connection to the human organism would supply the music with a connection to reality, make it concrete, human. But a great amount of emotional energy can be won through this confrontation, this fragile connection. The work’s ancestor, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, almost 30 years old, still stands as a superlative example.

Psychological shadow play
In several works, Parmerud has successfully utilized voice, usually the female voice (often with a light erotic touch). We can find his most effective treatment of voice in Alias, one of Parmerud’s best pieces. Through techniques such as "re-synthesising" (where the acoustical sound is broken down into its smallest parts only to be reconstructed synthetically into new formations, new sounds which still have a relationship with the old) and "time-stretching" (where sound is stretched in time without affecting the frequency), Alias creates a sophisticated agreement between material and psychological atmosphere. The ocher-colored fog of the Renaissance—hints of the morbid sides of Gesualdo da Venoza’s thoughts, bits of John Dowland’s Lamentations?—are mixed with the sharp edge of electroacoustics. The music becomes a psychological shadow play, a surrealistic smokescreen, where the obvious becomes hidden and the dimly perceived becomes clear. What is modern and what is archaic? What is human and what is machine? What is hidden and what hides? The clearly expressed words are sucked into the black hole of pure sound, where the many-faceted semantics of words are broken into a larger diversity of meaning. The effect is a deeper actualization of Derrida’s theory of the interpretive breadth of symbols, dissémination, a diffusion that in Alias and also Les Objets Obscurs (last movement) is accented by the sudden metamorphosis: from proximity of the personal, spoken word (parole), to the anonymous, abstract, unquantified sound (la langue). “One does not know any longer, stricto sensu, which gestalt should be recognized,” wrote the philosopher in Glas. The words could be applied to Derrida’s own book as well, this truly labyrinthine montage of texts, as sides of Parmerud’s music. The train of thought is further strengthened by a comment on the work, Yttringar, where Parmerud describes parts of the recorded song voice as “shadows.” Shadows that conceal. Shadows—these unavoidable companions formed by that which casts a shadow, that reveal that which casts the shadow, which are born of light and give birth to darkness. Once again, the hidden things!


Tableaus
Les Objets Obscurs—short introduction, four riddles, coda (where the four answers are provided and a new riddle appears). In contrast to Parmerud’s other works, the forward drive here is not so pronounced. The four movements are like tableaus: states rather than metamorphoses, photographs rather than film sequences, poems rather than stories. Towards the end of the piece, the dramaturgy intensifies. A direction, a will, grows. But the music ends too quickly, without reaching the goal, without fulfilling this will. The coda, which is connected with the final movement, should have been a little longer (this would also have realized the Fibonacci proportions of 1-3-5-3-8). The unfulfilled, the engendered but unused energy, is absorbed by the fifth and final riddle, which goes unanswered. Which cannot be answered. The value of a riddle, in fact, its entire ontological status, resides in that it conceals instead of revealing. Therefore, Parmerud exhorts us in the first sentence to “listen to the hidden things.” The riddle above all also contains the promise of a possible answer; it delays. In this way, the riddle encapsulates a Freudian-Nietszchian friction between desire in itself (the continuing of the game) and the satisfaction of those desires (the end of the game)., which is at the same time the death of desire. The answer to the riddle is also the death of it, since the answer is eliminating; it causes the riddle existence as a riddle to end. We stand before the desire to retain and the impossibility of retention, at once constructive and destructive, like a candle the very life of which burns it up. Desire must have an object, just as each symbol must refer to something, or each musical gesture is decided by its surroundings, by its context. Without this intentional object, without an answer to the riddle, no desire can exist. But this object is at the same time the only thing that can satisfy the desire and that ends it. The answer to the riddle is only a synthetic pseudo-goal. I tis not the Grail that is interesting and enticing, but the search itself. Nor is it the end of the piece, where our expectations are finally either satisfied or disappointed, where we get our “answer,” that is the driving force here, but rather the listening itself. A dissonant relationship has its limited lifetime; it glides out of our grasp and we cannot stop it. We want nothing more than to better its affective substance, and what we wish is for its dissolution, its end, its answer. In contrast to the remembered music, the sounding music is still open to possibilities; like a sentence that is open until its final word and fatal punctuation. And what is music if not a process over time of possibilities and probabilities? The end of the music—the answer to the riddle—is therefore self-erasing: that which takes over is the white emptiness that the resolution of a promise involves. It is the shift where the dynamic present of the music still has not gone over to the resigned already. The shift is analogous to the negation of the riddle; the unlocking of the lock can only go back to a closure, a relocking. The music exists only in the memory, like a Derridian trail, only to be erased and become a scar.

Remains poetry
How shall the loss be avoided, how can the riddle both be answered and kept alive? The contradiction of contradiction—“how does the artisan work this paradox out?”—is asked by Derrida in Glas, and he immediately answers, “in an enigmatic fashion.” In The Name of the Rose, Eco conceals the true mystery by letting it pass as a side story, without focus. The monastic novice Adso must simply be enticed by the bittersweet scent of the rose in his nightly meeting with The Other, the Woman. The Other: a thing forever concealed (and perhaps the mother of all desire?). The secret is shown without being revealed, the rose is never given a name. The rose—the poetic object par excellence—remains unfathomable, remains a mystery, remains poetry. Parmerud lets the answers to the four riddles in Les Objets Obscurs form a new riddle. This is odd in that it is its own answer, like the snake biting its own tail. A phenomenon that is closed but without an end. To listen to the hidden things is, like the differance that delays its own end, a “game where he who loses, wins, and where one both loses and wins with each throw” (Derrida). The answer to the last, all-encompassing riddle, the form of existence of the hidden things, is: la musique!