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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: “The Letter Killers Club”.
The meeting took place in the library at the Abbey of St. Gall, in Switzerland. It was, I believe, a rainy day; boredom had led my hero to the shelves of that rarely visited library, and there, amid the whorls of book dust, he found Notker the Stammerer: although Notker was no one's invention and had finished existing exactly one thousand years before; besides his name, which caught the immediate interest of our collector of plots, little of him remained; only a few semi-apocryphal bits had stood the test of the millennium; this then meant that one might remake him, might turn what had moldered into something radiant. Our hitherto luckless writer set about re-creating Notker. Abbey books and manuscripts told him of an ancient, half-forgotten school of St. Gall musicians. Long before the contrapuntists of the Netherlands, the monks in lonely, mountain-immured St. Gall were performing mysterious polyphonic experiments; one of those monks was Notker the Stammerer. Legend says that one day, while walking along a precipice, he heard the whine of a saw, the tap of a hammer, and the voices of men; turning toward the sound, he reached a crook in the path and saw workers shoring up the beams of a future bridge to be built across the chasm; without going closer and without being seen, he watched and listened as these men, suspended over the abyss, tapped with their hammers and sang merrily, and then when he returned to his cell he sat down to compose a chorale: Media vita in morte sumus
Our hero rummaged through the library's yellowed music books in search of the square neumes that told of death wedged into life; but the chorale was nowhere to be found. With the abbot's permission he took a whole pile of moldering music back to his hotel room where, having locked the door, he spent the whole night with the celeste pedal depressed, pounding out the ancient canticles of the St. Gall monks. When he had played all the sheets through, he strained his imagination in an effort to hear the unfound chorale. That night it came to him in a dream, lofty and mournful, slowly marching in the mixolydian mode. Next morning, while sitting at the piano trying to re-create the dreamed chorale, he noticed a surprising resemblance between Notker's Media vita and his own Commentary on Silence.
Continuing to ransack the St. Gall library, our sleuth learned that the old composer of music with the odd sobriquet of Stammerer (or Balbulus) had been a lifelong collector of words and syllables to fit music; it was curious that, while venerating sound combinations, he had utter contempt for articulate human speech. In one of his authentic writings, he said: “At times I have quietly considered how to secure my combinations of sounds so that they, even at the cost of words, might escape oblivion.” Words for him were so many motley signals, mnemonic symbols, for memorizing musical sequences; when he tired of choosing words and syllables, he would pause at an Alleluia and lead it through dozens of intervals, nonsensing the syllables for the sake of other abstruse meanings; these exercises in atekstalis were of particular interest to our sleuth. The hunt for the Great Stammerer's neumes led him first to the library at the British Museum, then to the Library of St. Ambrose in Milan.
Next in line is a triple hybrid, crossed by fragments of the past: - Weather Reports - Succour - Sunification
From the Weather Reports materials, we continue to work at the following: - a reprogramming of the weather field recordings program see below (same as for the Breakdown Sessions, MUBU?) - a reprogramming of the weather sky pictures, with recognition of the spectra and shapes, (see ML.Lib)
From the Succour materials, we continue to work at the following: - Future Unifold Langluage (FUL), a machine generated version - a realization of the Bosch-Butt score - a realization of Mitten Wir im Leben Sind by Luther and Notger the Stammerer - a realization of all poems and texts both in FUL and as Atekstalis
From the Sunification materials, we continue to work at the following: - small autonomous and networked boxes collecting data of the several types of Sunlight - principles for making sense of the huge data and useful for a relevant sonification and visualisation, or installation
From the Breakdown Sessions (live, Berlin and Hranice u Malce, elsewhere Gívan Belá & Geza Roman Bobb), we continue to work at the following: - a machine able to segment and compose with the field and performance recordings (presumably with Max-MSP: MUBU and ML.Lib objects) - a connected online version, generative in Javascript (?)
From the archives in the Banana boxes in the attic, we continue to work at the following: - snippets from texts 1975-2015 - pictures of pictures and objects - fragments of home recordings 1975-2015