I seldom read dance criticism, mostly because critics nearly never mention the music, much less how the music is used. Yet without the music the dance would be without its spine. A good choreographer goes against the sound in a manner that only the sound could provoke, finding in the music's potential more than even the composer is aware of. No critic has yet written an essay on the interaction — on how music, because it has no specific meaning, can make or break a given "meaningful" scene. Music's power lies in an absence of human significance and this power dominates all mediums it contacts. When Georges Auric composed the score for Blood of a Poet he produced what is commonly known as love music for love scenes, game music for game scenes, funeral music for funeral scenes. Cocteau had the bright idea of replacing the love music with the funeral, game music with the love, funeral with game, which gives the film its surreal correctness.

The sea reminds me of Debussy's La mer; La mer never reminds me of the sea. But if a picture recalls the sea, the sea conjures up no picture of anything beyond itself. In this sense, water is as abstract as music, but a picture of water represents an abstraction. Whatever title Debussy might have chosen, his work is finally enjoyed as sheer music. If a novice were told that the three movements of this piece illustrated three times of day, not on the sea but in a city, he wouldn't know the difference. Paintings also present different impressions to different people: as many interpretations exist as spectators. Etcetera.

Maybe I'm wrong. Reexamining La mer tonight it occurs to me for the first time that all three movements are essentially fast, yet one's memory of this sensuous experience is — as with all sensuousness — slowness. And the harmonies, which constantly revolve but never resolve, do imply the hopelessness of the sea, at least for a human lost in it. The hopeless chords.

Arthur Miller ends his autobiography with a beautiful three-word verbless sentence: "Even the trees." He tells us that all living entities on earth are interrelated, are continually looking at each other, are looking at us, even the trees. Couldn't the reverse be as true? I cannot know you. No Arab of yore can know us, nor Noah, or Lana Turner. Even our mothers. We are each alone in the hopeless chords of the sea.

Ned Rorem, Knowing When to Stop
Copyright © 1994 by Ned Rorem. All rights reserved.

Posted 31 March 1997

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