Stirrings Still

Memory doesn't retrieve the past: memory makes the present.

When does memory move from something a work of art represents to something from which the work of art is made? That question haunted me for the better part of 2016–18, during which I wrote the music for Stirrings Still, an hourlong work for speaking voice and string quartet built around Samuel Beckett's final work in prose. Finished in 1987 and first published the following year, Beckett's “Stirrings Still” traces the thought of one nearing the end of life. The words flicker between waiting and wondering, between recollection and anticipation, slowly outlining a sense of self that seems somehow to disappear before us as we read. Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM Records, had long cherished the text, recognizing in it an extraordinary musicality and imagining how that musicality might unfold as a recorded work for the label. Conversations between Eicher and the British critic, novelist and librettist Paul Griffiths led Eicher to ask Griffiths to find a composer who could create music alongside Beckett’s words, with Griffiths reading the text on the resulting ECM recording.

When Griffiths introduced me to the text in 2016, I was struck by the astringent beauty of the words, and even more by the truly strange way Beckett's writing activates the reader's own memory during the act of reading. Words and images recur; sentences double back on themselves; something that seemed incidental returns later carrying unexpected weight. Small words such as ‘again’ and ‘then’ continually force us to reconsider where, exactly, we are in time. These were my first intimations that the music I would write alongside the words might work with memory as a primary material of composition.

Throughout Stirrings Still, musical events return from elsewhere in the piece. Something heard much earlier suddenly enters the present. Elsewhere, something belonging to the future appears before we know what it is. A recollection opens inside another recollection, and then closes again. My hope was that, whether following music or words, listeners would not only recognize ideas as they return but feel those returns changing the present itself.

This matters because I think ordinary experience works this way, too. The present is real but it is rarely dimensionless. Our sense of now is enlarged, compressed, darkened or illuminated by the past it carries and by the future it anticipates. What happened yesterday changes the possibilities we feel in the present; what we hope for tomorrow changes the boundaries of today. Often these effects happen without us noticing, and we feel the weight of past or future times before we name them.

I came to think of memory in Stirrings Still in this sense, not as a source from which old things are retrieved but as an active force that changes the size and meaning of what is happening now. Beckett’s words and the quartet do this independently. The words remember something the music has left behind; the music reopens a past from which the words have moved away. At other moments both streams arrive at the same moment of return, but by different routes.

The result taught me something I didn't know before composing the music: memory doesn't take us out of the present into the past; memory is one of the things from which the present is continuously re-made.

Ongoing thread. More from Trevor Bača to follow.