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TIME, MYTH AND NARRATIVE IN BEAT FURRER'S NUUN
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2024
Abstract
The title of Beat Furrer's nuun, for two pianos and chamber orchestra (1996), invites two principal readings. As a pun on the German ‘nun’, meaning ‘now’, it invokes a presentist mode of musical thinking, whereby each moment is heard to exist in a continuous state of development. It also invokes myth, as suggested by Wolfgang Fuhrmann, in its palindromic reflection of the name of the Breton goddess Nu, who, in medieval mysticism, ‘had the power to let time stand still’. In this article, I use Byron Almén's 2017 theory of musical narrative as the basis for a narrative analysis of nuun, aiming to reconcile these allusions with the aesthetics and formal processes of the piece, as well as Furrer's documented preoccupation with notions of storytelling in music. In doing so, I expand upon the hermeneutic readings of the piece proposed thus far, establish connections with textural archetypes in Furrer's oeuvre, both pioneered by and preceding nuun, and consider lines of dialogue with broader discourse on time in contemporary music.
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References
1 ‘Tatsächlich ereignet sich mit nuun… eine tiefgreifende Veränderung in der kompositorischen Faktur, mit dem in mehrfacher Hinsicht neue Wege innerhalb von Furrers Oeuvre beschritten werden’. Ender, Daniel, Metamorphosen des Klanges: Studien zum kompositorischen Werk von Beat Furrer (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2014), p. 117Google Scholar. Ender's monograph delineates four compositional phases in Furrer's career, characterised by issues of form and aleatoric composition (1982–86), dynamic restraint and the shaping of sound (1987–94), compression and expansion of textures – heralded by nuun (1995–2001) and interest in the timbral spectra of voices and instruments (2002–10).
2 See ibid., pp. 24–26 for more on Furrer's early reception.
3 Ibid., p. 119.
4 For discussions of myth in relation to the stage works see Kogler, Susanne, ‘Klingender Mythos: Zur Antike-Rezeption in der Neuen Musik’, in Beat Furrer, ed. Tadday, Ulrich (Munich: R. Boorberg, 2016), pp. 58–76Google Scholar.
5 Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Beat Furrer: Nuun; Presto con fuoco; Still; Poemas liner notes. 2000, Kairos, 0012062KAI, p. 15.
6 Ender, Metamorphosen des Klanges, p. 119.
7 ‘Immer wird erzählt. Aber wie? Diese Frage stellt sich mir von Stück zu Stück immer aufs Neue’. Furrer, Beat, ‘Nacktheit der Stimme. Fama. Theater der Stimmen. Wüstenbuch. Die Text-Maschine. La Bianca Notte’, in Beat Furrer, ed. Tadday, Ulrich (Munich: R. Boorberg, 2016), p. 80Google Scholar.
8 Almén, Byron, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Ibid., pp. 11–36. Almén is particularly critical of writers such as Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Carolyn Abbate and Lawrence Kramer, who have questioned the applicability of narrative to music, citing misguided conflations with the semiotics of literature. The breadth of this discourse is illustrated by the number of unique sources cited in Vincent Meelberg's 2006 theory of narrative in contemporary music. Vincent Meelberg, New Sounds, New Stories: Narrativity in Contemporary Music (Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2006). Meelberg's theory is valuable in the music it considers, including serial and minimalist works by Stockhausen and Reich, but it lacks the technical precision necessary for application to the narrative trajectory of nuun.
10 Almén, p. 13.
11 McClary, Susan, ‘The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during a Bach Year’, in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, eds McClary, Susan and Leppart, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 13–62Google Scholar.
12 Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative, pp. 3–10.
13 Ibid., pp. 23–27.
14 Ibid., p. 38.
15 See in particular Tarasti, Eero, A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Hatten, Robert, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Liszka, James Jakób, The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
16 Bouissac, Paul, ‘Isotopy’, in Encyclopaedia of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195120905.001.0001/acref-9780195120905-e-54 (accessed 26 June 2023).
17 Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative, p. 57.
18 Ibid., pp. 57–8.
19 Ibid., p. 41.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 43.
22 Topic theory was pioneered by Leonard G. Ratner in Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, London: Schirmer, 1980) as a means of cross-referencing styles and genres of eighteenth-century music.
23 Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative, p. 68.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 70. Mozart's Fantasia in D Minor, K. 397 is cited as a textbook example of this phenomenon.
27 Ibid., p. 74.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 66.
32 A full score can be accessed at www.universaledition.com/beat-furrer-241/works/nuun-3916?form=reprint (accessed 17 November 2023). ‘Scroll to the bottom of the page to view and enter ‘presentation mode' for optimal sizing’ or something similar as it is not immediately visible/obvious when the page loads and it is very important for the reader to have access to the score.
33 For more on Furrer's use of temporal layers, see Stefan Jena, ‘Hörend durch die Welt: Furrer und die Musik seiner Zeit – Berührungen und Anziehungskräfte’, in Beat Furrer, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: R. Boorberg, 2016).
34 For more on the history of pitch circularity in music and its association with notions of infinity and timelessness, see Braus, Ira, ‘Retracing One's Steps: An Overview of Pitch Circularity and Shepard Tones in European Music, 1550–1990’, Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12, no. 3 (1995), pp. 323–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative, p. 62.
36 Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), p. 117. The pagan and Christian adaptations of figures and narrative elements from Egyptian myths do not rule out a possible connection between the Egyptian and the Breton versions of Nu, who are notably related by their association with notions of time and eternity. Daniel R. McBride, ‘Nun’, in The Oxford Essential Guide to Egyptian Mythology, ed. Donald B. Redford (New York: Berkley, 2003), p. 277.
37 In this sense, the framing aesthetic of the first half may be heard as a primordial counterpart to the bucolic water topic identified by Almén's Chopin's G major Prelude analysis.
38 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians: Studies in Egyptian Mythology, Vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 291–306.
39 McBride, ‘Nun’, p. 277.
40 ‘Nun’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/Nun-Egyptian-god (accessed 26 June 2023). The myth is considerably more complicated, involving numerous complementary male gods and their female counterparts; Nu and Ra, however, remain the central symbolic protagonists.
41 Ender cites these contexts, unified by the influential themes and narrative qualities of Ovid's Metamorphoses, as central to Furrer's musical development. Ender, Metamorphosen des Klanges, pp. 10–20.
42 Stockhausen's description of moment types in his moment-form theory, for example, bears a striking resemblance to the description of isotopic units and their agential arrangement by Almén, as well as the aesthetic and formal characteristics of isotopies in nuun. Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Momentform’, in Texte I: Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik; Aufsätze 1952–1963 zur Theorie des Komponierens (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1963), pp. 189–210.
43 See, for example, Kristina Knowles recent framework for parsing musical conceptions of time and timelessness. ‘Music as Time, Music as Timeless’, in The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music, eds Mark Doffman, Emily Payne and Toby Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 57–76.
44 Klaas Coulembier's rhizomatic comparison of temporal processes in Carter and Mahnkopf, for example, could be fruitfully extended to Furrer's work by means of narrative analysis. Klaas Coulembier, ‘Multi-Temporality: An Analytical Approach to Contemporary Music, Embracing Concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’, Music Analysis, 35, no. 3 (2016), p. 351.
45 Christian Utz's ‘morphosyntactic’ analysis of spatial, processual and presentist temporal modalities in music by Lachenmann, Xenakis and Ferneyhough and their contingency on performance decisions, for example, highlights the need for deeper investigation of the relationship between performance decisions and narrative interpretation in contemporary music. Christian Utz, ‘Time–Space Experience in Works for Solo Cello by Lachenmann, Xenakis and Ferneyhough: A Performance-Sensitive Approach to Morphosyntactic Musical Analysis’, Music Analysis, 36 (2017), pp. 216–56. While the single recording of nuun does not allow for phonomusicological comparison of the kind undertaken by Utz, decisions taken by Péter Eötvös and Klangforum Wien – beyond the investigative scope of this article – particularly with respect to tempo and voicing, will undoubtedly affect listener perception of the micro- and macro-scale beats of the narrative.