The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Voices like bells by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich 

 

This music is rooted in silence and the sublimity of the intelligible cosmos. Valentin Silvestrov’s sacred a cappella choral works studiously avoid using the first-person pronoun, adopting a subjective outlook or trotting out expressive attitudes. No, the human being and his artistic intentions — or, as the German composer Wolfgang Rihm would put it, his urge to expression — are left by the wayside and elevated to a vision of the supra-individual and the supra-sensual. This is music borne of and conjoined with mystical experience. To us adherents of western Culture, it seems to be a legacy of the Orient. Yet it is not only the Far East and especially India that convey values of this sort, but also the religious sensibilities of Eastern Europe, pervaded by Byzantine Christianity. lcon painting, to choose an example, clings to a pictorial reality long abandoned in western Europe after Giotto — the golden ground from which the depicted figures stand out as if set against an imaginary landscape, a mental space of pure beauty and divinity inaccessible to the painter's palette and merely symbolised by gold. In Silvestrov's choral music, the golden ground can be described in the devout aura of the voices. They function as a sort of halo above individualised musical figures, seemingly transfixing the perceived sound in reverberation and restoring it imperceptibly to the silence from which it emerged. 

 

“Music is the world singing of itself.” This pronouncement from Siivestrov likewise reflects his concern not to attach undue importance to his ego, and instead to turn himself into the medium of what he calls “the world. This should not be construed as what we normally mean by “world spirit” or Zeitgeist — terms from historical or even currently fashionable frames of reference far removed from Silvestrov’s religiously grounded cast of mind. This Ukrainian composer (born in 1937), who has spent almost his entire life in Kiev, initially turned to the experimental style of the western avant-garde — an effective antidote to the mandatory artistic doctrine of socialist realism. Yet in the 1970s he evolved in a completely different direction, namely, toward a religiously inspired ‘art of ideas’ no longer primarily beholden to the debates on musical progress still zealously pursued in the West. Silvestrov s more recent paths were at least as provocative to the Soviet Union's artistic officialdom as his former advocacy of the avant-garde. But they detached him from the mainstream of western composition and placed him in the position of a ‘typical’ eastern European individualist and maverick along the lines of Arvo Part, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Giya Kancheli and Galina Ustvolskaya. Silvestrov is well aware of his position and states it with more than a modicum of self-assurance: "I have to write what I like, not what other people like or, as the phrase goes, what the times dictate. Otherwise I will succumb to an economic activity that mutilates the mind.” Then he adds:  "I have to search for beauty"

 

‘Beauty was strictly taboo throughout the whole of modernist art, and even post-modernism still has a hard time with it. The philosopher and music theorist Theodor W. Adorno, a social critic especially fond of pillorying a certain kind of penchant for beauty (namely the quest of the large audience for ‘beautiful passages’ in famous masterpieces), tolerated beauty only as what might be called an accidental by-product in a larger compositional discourse grounded in the axioms of truth and coherence. In terms of actual music this was, to put it bluntly, tantamount to saying that the more acrid and hair-raising the dissonances, the more ‘beautiful’ the music. Now, this is not Silvestrov's aesthetic. He connects a search for beauty with a dimension equally off-limits to the modernists: the sacred. Only a few western musicians of note, among them Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, were still occupied with sacred music in the late 20th century. 

 

It is not far-fetched to claim that Valentin Silvestrov, like Arvo Part or Glya Kancnell, is concerned with nothing but sacred music. In other words, no matter what type or genre of music he happens to write, it is (as with Olivier Messiaen) filled with or at least touched by transcendence. A significant musical symbol of this is Silvestrov’s deliberate way of handling the notes of the overtone series (we need only think of the golden ground mentioned above). Normally overtones make up the distinctive timbre of a sounding pitch, forming what might be called a bridge between the audible and the inaudible. Silvestrov lends the overtones a helping hand, one might say, by spreading them out into a precisely composed tonal space. The ‘natural’ reverberation (which in any case has a considerable impact on our recording from the Cathedral of the Ascension in the High Monastery of Kiev) thereby receives a pendant in the precisely calculated nimbus of vocal sound added as an echo or reverberation chamber. At the same time it serves to paraphrase the principle of antiphonal singing, t.e. between a lead singer and collective response. Practically all of Silvestrov’s sacred pieces have more or less lively, at times even dramatically ‘propulsive’ voices emerging from the golden ground of the gently changing or fluctuating sound-space. There are also many subtleties in the harmonic movement: rather than appearing as a pensive and immobile mass, Silvestrov’s cosmology turns out to be a wholly surprising and ever-changing flux of colours and modulations. (He is fond of using a term coined in the early 20th century by the Russian natural philosopher Viadimir Vernadsky: “noosphere”, meaning an idealised ether imbued with human thought.) 

 

Silvestrov admits that, being an individualist, he found it difficult at first to write choral music. He was only goaded In this direction by the impassioned and authoritative performances of Mykola Hobdych and his excellent Kiev Chamber Choir. In short order he produced the roughly fourty-minute Liturgical Songs (2005). As with his two sacred chants, hymns, and psalms as well as the Alleluia, all dating from 2006, the work hinges entirely on traditional subjects taken from the Eastern liturgy. Its apparent simplicity notwithstanding, the music !s thoroughly sensitive in its rendering of the words. (In this respect it may well have been modelled on his own Si/ent Songs and Requiem for Larissa.) Diptychon, composed roughly ten years later, forms what we might call the nucleus of Silvestrov’s later a cappella music. It is here, despite the frequently dramatic diction, that this music finds its defining feature: a tranquillity and spaciousness all the more striking in view of the short-breathed, compressed form. These qualities magiCally transform the resultant chant, with its written-out overtones, into the mystical peal of bells those cosmic sounds and reverberations that blur into the inchoate, causing human longing to merge with the grace of the observed, animate universe. 

 

translation: J. Bradford Robinson