ON THE WAY AND IN BETWEEN

“Even without detecting in the figure of the refugee or exile the emblematic figure of our time, the loosening of the bonds with a place of origin is no longer rewarded by a search for a promised land. The loss of a deep-rootedness that would provide an identity is no longer perceived as a lack that needs to be filled. We are strangers in our own land, and conversely we feel at home everywhere.”

Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking (tr. Massimo Verdicchio)

The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola goes deeply into what it means to be on the move, to be somewhere in between, in his volume of essays Ritual Thinking (2001). Transience becomes tangible. Old assumptions fade away without making way for new habits. Perniola’s words run like a common thread through A Basement Suite, the longest work on this album by Tim Mariën, but they also resonate throughout his entire sound world. It is in Perniola’s liminal world, between borders, that Mariën’s music finds its place. Here too, musical habits that seem to be self-evident are called into question; here too, one can make the sonic landscape one's own through a wandering listening.

On one level, Mariën “uproots” our listening experience through his use of unconventional musical tuning systems; these deviate from the normal division of the octave into 12 equal parts (equal temperament), yielding a greater diversity of (microtonal) intervals. Mariën’s use of tunings was formed during his study of the musical theories of Harry Partch, one of the figures of the 20th century who, in Partch’s own words, ended “the western world’s three hundred years of 12-tone paralysis”. In a different way than Partch, Mariën initially distills tunings from notes that are naturally present in the harmonic overtone series, using an open method of his own invention. Tunings are not set in stone in this liberating approach; they are changeable and can even be mixed as in A Basement Suite, expanding to provide a range of possibilities for the composer. Mariën’s technique is flexible and is closely linked to his rebuilding and retuning of instruments so that they can play his microtonal scales. He seldom works with perfect Steinways, but rather with antique and played-out pianos, a discarded harpsichord, or a much-travelled mandolin, all of which Mariën has retuned and given new life. The fragile state of these instruments can sometimes prevent them from being tuned with pinpoint accuracy, although it is precisely this unruly materiality of sound as it runs counter to the theoretical perfection of tuning systems that Mariën so cherishes in his works.

Given their unique timbres and microtonal scales, Mariën often lets his instruments develop various transformation processes simultaneously in his compositions. He himself envisages a sea, with various undercurrents and the “audible” waves on the surface. He creates the “inaudible” processes that lie behind this layered structure by treating the intervals in the scales he works with as time intervals: as tonal distances shrink or increase, so do their duration. Although Mariën’s music takes shape through this self-referential process, it never becomes abstract: instruments are in constant alternation, taking over intervals, gestures and even playing techniques from each other. These sometimes theatrical gestures act as signposts for our ears as we wander through Mariën’s turbulent soundscapes. Images and choreographies of movements emerge while the polyphonic mass of his music shrinks, swells and boils over into climaxes. Even if Mariën challenges our familiar musical experience with his tunings and abstract procedures, communication nonetheless remains present in his music. We may feel that we are “strangers” to it, but we can still feel at home.

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Mariën’s idiom is still in an early stage in Melissa (2001). He composed the piece for keyboard, retuned timpani, and a 16-string guitar that he himself had modified and renamed a “chordotrope”. This experimental instrument is played with a slide like a lap steel guitar; its strings are tuned in an extended overtone tuning that also supports the microtonal note clusters of the other instruments. Two polar forces drive the course of the composition: the keyboard and the chordotrope weave an almost childishly naive duet out of the quasi-tonal opening motif, which is violently disrupted when the timpani erupt in fortissimo and take the lead.

Such emphatic narratives become fainter in Toeënwâs (2010), written for the Ictus ensemble. Here Mariën unleashes his layered working method on his reconstructed and microtonally retuned instruments, amongst which are an antique piano, a 12-string guitar, and a reed organ; these are heard alongside percussion (with a retuned marimba), flute, and trombone. The outlandish title is a transcription of toonwijs, a dialect word from the composer’s home town: someone who is “tone wise” has mastered the principles of a certain activity. Mariën indeed experimented with his characteristic formal procedure for the first time in Toeënwâs, establishing the length and structure of the sections of the piece through his treatment of pitch intervals as time intervals. The sound surface is kept in constant motion throughout these sections, propelled by trill figurations that are passed back and forth between the instruments, until the piece finally culminates in an alluring loop of sounds. Here, the marimba and the piano repeat the same motif, creating a pleasantly disordered conclusion with their gratingly different tunings.

There are no recycled instruments in Where the Silence Breaks Its Back (2016) for flute, clarinet, string trio and grand piano (with a few retuned notes). The sextet was a commission from the Norwegian Ensemble Temporum, who performed the work alongside Gérard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum. The relationship between sound and time that appears in Grisey’s iconic spectral work is also central to Where the Silence Breaks Its Back. Not only do different speeds develop simultaneously, but each instrument also progresses through its own scale from top to bottom. The speed decreases as scales descend and accelerates as they rise. The instruments continually overlap each other’s movements in a tightly interwoven polyphonic web, creating a wave-like movement which gradually ebbs with each of the three phrases of the piece; the waves becoming fewer and smaller. The instrumentation also thins out: the wind instruments have disappeared when the waves in the last sentence reach us. One by one, the strings also cease playing, leaving the piano alone to lead us into a space of complete stillness: the place where, evoking the work’s title, “silence breaks the waves”.

A Basement Suite (2020) takes us to the heart of Mariën’s liminal sound world. The initial quotation from Perniola permeates the entire piece. This suite for string ensemble was written for Tiptoe Company and unites Basement of Strings, Unresolved Streets and Tomorrow Started the Game I, three pieces that Mariën composed and reworked between 2012 and 2020. The musicians, “strangers in their own land”, here perform on a harp that has been retuned string by string and an old and weathered harpsichord that has been brought back to life. The microtonal piano of Toeënwâs reappears, alongside a “bass piano”; Mariën has tuned one of the strings for each key of this instrument an octave lower to create a muffled and bell-like timbre. The microtonal sound field that the stringed instruments create in the suite is perhaps the most surreal and yet the most fascinating on the entire album. Their use of a division of the octave into 72 narrow but equal intervals provokes a tension between the boundaries of pure interval intonation systems and equal temperament.

The liminal approach of A Basement Suite goes even further, as the boundaries of the pieces themselves are porous too: Mariën conceived the suite as a modular composition, in which the three pieces can be rearranged and stitched together in various ways. In the version recorded here, Unresolved Streets (2015) became a type of refrain. Mariën derived the title of this short quintet from a remark by oboist and conductor Werner Herbers about the American avant-garde jazz composer Robert Graettinger: “[...] in some parts of his work there is a shapelessness, some wandering off into ‘unresolved streets’.” This description indeed fits Mariën’s piece well. The instruments seem to be searching for a solution through their plucked and bowed sound textures, although none is forthcoming. Like Perniola’s traveller, the piece appears throughout A Basement Suite, assuming a new identity with each repetition: it emerges as a slightly over-enthusiastic countermelody even before Tomorrow Started the Game I (2018) has finished resonating, and as a moment of repose when, after the frenetic density of Basement of Strings (2012, new version 2020), it hesitantly brings the entire suite to a close.

Perniola’s traveller is presented in a more direct manner in Tomorrow Started the Game I. The work’s title is taken from a message from an Iranian musician who met Mariën’s girlfriend on a Greek island. The “game” refers to the journey to Western Europe that the musician would then undertake; Mariën represents this in his composition with a street musician’s well-travelled mandolin that at times seems to get lost among the other stringed instruments. The unintentionally meaningful grammar of the message is also echoed in the musical form: it is as if past and future are mixed together. Solo passages for the two pianos emerge which return with other instruments later in the suite, whilst earlier passages could attach themselves as an alternative ending to Basement of Strings. In this latter piece, Mariën’s layered approach seems to reach boiling point: layers of vibrating figures, motifs and sound effects are continuously piled up in an overflowing wonderland of sound ideas that is as alienating as it is attractive.

Anna Vermeulen
Translation: Peter Lockwood

From the liner notes to the CD ‘A Basement Suite’