From the New York Times, Wednesday, 09/18/2012
A Sound, Then Silence (Try Not to Breathe)
By
RANDY KENNEDY
The sound, a D major chord produced by an orchestra and a chorus, begins
abruptly, full force, and fills the air for 20 minutes, like a sonorous
foghorn with a stuck switch. It ends as suddenly as it begins, but
there is no applause because the orchestra is only half finished — its
members sit without playing or even moving, “performing” silence for
just as long.
This highly eccentric symphony, receiving its first New York performance
on Wednesday, was created by the artist Yves Klein, who is best known
for his monochrome paintings.
He harbored no small ambitions when he began thinking in the late 1940s
about a kind of musical complement to his visual ideas: a symphony of
monotony and silence, a much harder thing to do well than he or anyone
imagined.
“You can’t really do a full rehearsal of something like this,” said Roland Dahinden,
a Swiss composer and performer who has conducted the piece four times
in Europe and will take the baton (and stopwatch) in New York. “It’s too
hard. Everyone would just die.” Klein was one of the leading heirs of
Marcel Duchamp’s Modernist wit, but he was not joking around. “The
Monotone-Silence” Symphony, he wrote, expressed no less than “what I
wished my life to be.” But Klein, who died of a heart attack at the age
of 34 in 1962, never had the chance to hear his symphony realized as he
imagined it. For the only documented performance during his lifetime, in
1960, at an art gallery in Paris, with Klein himself in white tie as
conductor, only 10 musicians participated.
On Wednesday evening, the fulsome orchestra he dreamed of — 70 musicians
and singers — will gather to perform the work at Madison Avenue
Presbyterian Church, at East 73rd Street. The hope among those involved
is that the sold-out performance, the product of months of intense
planning, will hew closer to Klein’s ethereal intentions than many other
versions attempted since his death.
With that goal in mind, the performers and Mr. Dahinden have been
preparing themselves mentally over the last few weeks for an unusual
test of stamina, patience and repose: to play one note in an “intense
and continuous” way, as Klein instructed, for an unreasonable amount of
time and then to remain quiet and motionless for longer than most people
ever do.
Mr. Dahinden, who is being flown in for the one-night event by the Dominique Lévy Gallery,
which is producing it, added: “When it’s right, you have this huge
block of sound. There is such a beauty within the piece. You sit in the
audience and you start to hear some melodies and some fragments of
melodies, and yet nobody is playing them.” Klein said he saw the work as
“having neither a beginning nor an end,” a creation “freed from the
phenomenology of time.”
To pull off the first half of the symphony, the singers and musicians —
10 cellists, 10 violinists, 3 bassists, 3 flutists, 3 oboists and 3
French horn players — need to produce the chord with no vibrato or
variation, breathing and bowing in such a way as to create a sound with
no audible breaks. (Early on, Klein compared the sound to a human scream
and played recordings of screams — one quite harrowing example was the
voice of the French playwright Antonin Artaud — to demonstrate.)
Sahra Motalebi,
a New York singer and performance artist who has helped to assemble the
musicians and the choir — which will be made up of both professional
singers and experimental musicians — said: “The reality is that it’s
like a kind of bizarre primordial universe chorus. It’s not like a note
you’ve ever heard.”
Klein conceived of the idea for the symphony around 1947-48, the same
years that John Cage, in New York, was formulating “4’33”,” a landmark
work that involves a pianist not playing the piano but instead attuning
an audience to the complexities of silence. Though there seems to be no
evidence that Cage and Klein were aware of each other at the time or
influenced each other later, Klein also came to view silence as the most
important part of the musical work.
“This is really my symphony,” he wrote, “and not the sounds during its performance.”
Daniel Moquay, who oversees the Klein archive and estate in Paris, said
the silence is sometimes more difficult than the sound for audiences to
take in. “You get into the deepness of a silence and you realize that
silence is not a nothing,” he said. “Silence is something that is very,
very powerful.”
The work anticipated some of the interests that Fluxus artists would
soon begin exploring in New York and Europe in the 1960s, and it feels
very much in tune with works by young contemporary artists like Ragnar Kjartansson, who in 2011
staged a critically acclaimed 12-hour performance of the denouement of
Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” by opera singers.
Klein’s symphony has been performed both with the permission of the
estate, and without, over the last four decades — once by a chorus of as
many as a hundred singers, and at least once by a single musician with a laptop.
During the original 1960 performance, Klein included a companion piece
in which three naked women — he called them “living brushes” — covered
themselves in his signature deep blue paint and pressed their bodies on
paper during the sound half of the symphony, freezing during the
silence; that part will not be recreated in New York.
Dominique Lévy, who is opening her new gallery at 909 Madison Avenue,
next door to the church, became determined to produce the symphony to
accompany her inaugural exhibition, “Audible Presence: Lucio Fontana,
Yves Klein, Cy Twombly,” an examination of ideas about time and music in
works by those three artists. (Tickets for the free performance were all claimed almost immediately after it was announced.)
Ms. Lévy first heard the symphony in 2007 and said that after the abrupt
cut between the sound and the silence, “I had all these conflicting
feelings of wanting to laugh and then confusion and then finally deep
emotion.”
Early this year, she secured permission from the Klein archive to
produce the work and dispatched Jennifer G. Buonocore, the gallery’s
associate director, to Paris to delve into the archive, to try to ensure
that the work would be realized with the best understanding of what
Klein wanted.
But even with the best efforts and intentions, Mr. Moquay said, the
symphony doesn’t always work. Of four performances held in a Paris
church during a Klein exhibition at the Pompidou Center in 2007, he said
he felt that only one was wholly successful. But it worked so well, he
added, that a lovely kind of St. Francis moment occurred.
“The door of the church was open, and a pigeon came in and sat where
everyone could see him,” he said. “During the 20-minute silence, he did
not move at all. It was kind of incredible. And then when the silence
was over, he left.”
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