In my 2022 Advent Calendar, i included Milton Babbitt‘s An Encore, a work i likened to a nut that i kept returning to in order to try new ways to crack it. It’s a similar situation with the work of his i’m featuring today, Autobiography of the Eye for soprano and cello, which i’ve similarly orbited around for several years, pondering it from various angles.
What i’ve always found very immediate is the text (see below), Paul Auster‘s powerful reflection on permanence and impermanence. i love its progression from abstract (invisible, cold, things) to concrete (summer, warmth, objects and colours), and its existential challenge to the notion of “nothing”. In this respect, its assertions that “Nothing ends”, reinforced a moment later following a possible moment of doubt – “As if I could see / nothing / that is not what it is” – make for a strong tension with the later account of impermanence, houses built of air, the flux of the air itself, stones (whether real or also built of air) crumbling. At first i found the poem melancholic; now i find it somewhere between stoic and zen (i know that’s a wide continuum), not merely accepting but embracing impermanence as part of an infinite natural cycle, as well as, in its final lines, suggesting an implied celebration of profound intimacy, now also gone except for its potent memory, a lingering trace similar to the light “that vanishes / into each thing” from earlier.
One could read Babbitt’s setting as speaking quite directly, yet it’s typically enigmatic. When exploring An Encore two years ago i pondered the question “is it a duet?”, and that same question applies to Autobiography of the Eye. Whether the soprano and cello are connected at all is not a trivial question – the fact they start and end at the same time doesn’t signify anything. The soprano rises at the prospect and reality of light, grows lyrical, holds to a single note to assert “that is not what it is”, becomes lighter (happier?) with the tactile tangibility of the text. The cello dances around the soprano like the unwitting partner in an accidental two-part invention, sometimes seeming to go in a deliberately opposite direction, more often appearing to be following its own narrative trajectory. Every time i listen to the song i hear new possible connections while others feel disproven. Perhaps the cello is an echo of the impermanent other mentioned in the final line; a second voice, now silent, its traces twirling around the voice that remains, and remembers. The distance that survives.
This performance of Autobiography of the Eye, its European première, was given by Sarah Gabriel and Rohan de Saram in February 2016.
Text
Invisible things, rooted in cold,
and growing toward this light
that vanishes
into each thing
it illumines. Nothing ends. The hour
returns to the beginning
of the hour in which we breathed: as if
there were nothing. As if I could see
nothing
that is not what it is.
At the limit of summer
and its warmth: blue sky, purple hill.
The distance that survives.
A house, built of air, and the flux
of the air in the air.
Like these stones
that crumble back into earth.
Like the sound of my voice
in your mouth.
—Paul Auster
