Stopping the Wheel: Music, Time and Spiritual Experience in Sofia Gubaidulina’s

Hommage à T. S. Eliot.

Greetings from Valladolid, from Spain. We are Valentín and Carlos…

First of all, we would like to thank the Montreal Nouvelles Musiques Festival
organization for accepting our proposal. We would have loved to be there in person, but
at this time it could not be.

In an event that tries to rethink the relationship between music and transcendence
in the post-human era, it was clear to us that the presence of the Tartar composer Sofia
Gubaidulina would be inescapable. But what aspect should we focus on? The richness of
her proposal, both musical and spiritual, provided us with so many options that it was
difficult to specify. However, we decided to base ourselves on the composer’s own words,
according to which: “the main objective of a work of art is, in my opinion, the
transformation of time”.

Gubaidulina manifests here a dream that actually begins in Romanticism, which

consists of the ability of sounds to manipulate the specters of a past that is not even past,
freeing them from their apparent vanishing and providing them with a dimension of future
that is as certain as it is irrepressible. The arrow of time is shattered by the action of music,
where the past has not gone and the future is already here. It is a conviction that, in the
composer’s music, sets in motion a promise of resurrection inextricably linked to the
substratum. It is not by chance that the look at the redemptive power of music over time
developed during the nineteenth century. The French Revolution had created a new
perception of change, and time began to be experienced with greater intensity. This
transformation becomes an unknown vertigo, which has become a daily experience.
Furthermore, capitalism extends the domain of an abstract linear time, converted into the
measure of all things; so it spreads with it a new sensation of loneliness and vulnerability.
Music helps to react sensitively to this alienation, since it provides another experience of
time able to calm the new anxiety: it seems to stop it. Music is, in this way, the art of the
spirit par excellence.

However, in her Hommage à T. S. Eliot, Gubaidulina seems to offer us an even more

complex vision of music’s own time: not only does music stop it, but it transforms time
in unexpected ways. It seems to offer us a non-empirical experience of time as hyper-
chaos, as defined by the current French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. It is a time that

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precedes the subject, and therefore any consciousness, and that works between, below,
through and within minds and bodies. According to him, the absolute that time is, is
defined by

a contingency so radical that even becoming, disorder, or randomness can be

destroyed by it, and replaced by order, determinism, and fixity. Things are so
contingent in Hyper-chaos, that time is able to destroy even the becoming of things.
Time is not governed by physical laws because it is the laws themselves which are
governed by a mad time.

It is therefore not surprising that the composer was fascinated by the Four Quartets
composed by the British-American poet Thomas Stearns Eliot. In her own words,

He [Eliot] made time the hero of his work… Four variations in time and four
variations in non-time. I found this quite captivating. Past, present, future and non-
time are linked to the four elements, to the four ages. The non-time has four
variations. This is very beautiful. A point of immobility within a moving circle. A
point on a moving circle, and so it moves. The point that is in the center on the
Cross. And finally, a point that is irrational, completely crazy, outside the Cross,
outside the circle. That point that is the nucleus of Time, where everything dies,
burns in flames, is reduced to nothing. The Fire and the Rose are united in the
essence of Time. This is not just beautiful, it is a profound truth, especially in the
twentieth century, as we stand too close to our end to perceive this end as a state of
bliss, as a purifying flame after which true truth takes place, transfiguration,
resurrection of the spirit.

Indeed, Eliot composes his fundamental poetic reflection on time in these Four Quartets
and, for this, he builds a literary work that alludes to and imitates the form of the string
quartet. For her part, Gubaidulina builds her work based on Eliot’s poems, borrowing
instrumentation from Schubert’s Octet. But the inherent paradox of Gubaidulina’s music
is that much of Eliot’s verses are inaudible. We could say that, to a large extent, both the
string quartet in Eliot’s poem, and Eliot’s verses in Gubaidulina’s work are present in
absentia. However, the tactics that both follow seem radically different to us: while Eliot
constructs his poems as if it were a quartet, Gubaidulina’s recourse to Eliot in his work is
strategic, since what she is trying to do is really repeat the poet. This fact provides us with
a key to the complex relationship that the composer has not only with Eliot’s verses, but

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also with temporality and spirituality in general. Let us explain it with an example from
the Hommage.

Recall the famous opening of “Burnt Norton”, the first of Eliot’s Quartets:

Time present and time past

are both perhaps present in time future,

and time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

all time is unredeemable.

We find ourselves, in these and the following verses, with a philosophical and speculative
presentation of the themes that permeate the Quartet: thoughts of what could have been
(regrets), lack of understanding (intellectual anguish), the memory of happiness (feeling
of loss and melancholy that accompanies it). Immediately afterwards, Eliot exposes the
same subject, but in a poetic instead of a philosophical way, thus changing the color, the
tonality of the poem.

Down the passage which we did not take

towards the door we never opened

into de rose garden. My words echo

thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

If we listen to the first movement of Gubaidulina’s Hommage, we can hear many of the
elements Eliot himself exposes, through an impressive amalgamation of compositional
resources. Let us look, for example, at the beginning, with the doubling of the violins that
perform the same ascending minor second, but at different speeds, as if it were a
proportional canon.

EJEMPLO 1

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 Thus, a floating sensation is produced, time seems to stop. The memory of that
interval, that past that is no longer, is amplified through the harmonics of the viola and
cello: this fact direct our attention to the sound itself, decontextualizing it until it becomes
a world of its own, creator of new associations. What is Eliot’s echo, if not the tangible
presence of an absence? The subtlety with which Gubaidulina transforms one particular
texture or color into another is impressive, and reminds us of that mysterious line by Eliot:
“disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves”. Once again, it is reminiscent of both the
past (dust accumulates over time) and the way matter decomposes. The “rose-leaves” in
the bowl are leaves that are therefore already dead. Both the dust and the rose leaves are
vestiges, traces. The different paths of Eliot’s rose garden are presented in an impressive
glissandi section, while trills herald the presence of birds. In short, we are immersed in
Eliot’s strange and autumnal rose garden.

EJEMPLO 2 4’45 – 5’20

However, the composition appears stripped of the poet’s voice, although it should
not be imperceptible. They must reach listeners stripped of all narrative residue,
transformed into sound and nothing more than sound. And all this tells us fundamentally
about the peculiar relationship with temporality that Gubaidulina proposes. Eliot’s
evocation (that is, of the past) is much less immediate than we might imagine, but much
more subtle and, paradoxically, much more intense. To get to hear Eliot’s voice we need
a kind of prophetic passion, because the clues cannot be easily recognized. On the horizon
of the past are not the great historical events, but rather a new component that dominates
everything: uncertainty. The ties that unite music with the past become fragile, brittle.
Faced with the existence of a historical subject, we find ourselves with the non-existence
of any subject; faced with the firmness of the historical imperative, the imprecise,
inaudible voice of the old poet rises, as if wrapped in mist. In this way, the concern for
time is connected to the problem of listening and silence, that is, to the difficulty of
attending and, therefore, of hearing the echo of other worlds, of other times, the
impossibility of capturing the other. Gubaidulina invites us to awaken a renewed
attention: she challenges us to listen to that silence, to listen to that absence surrounded
by sounds and, within that silence, the fragile voice of the poet. The absence of voice, the
intensification of silence should cause us to intensify listening and thus find the presence
of the strange in what is our own. Far from being a mere void inserted between sounds,
silence here means fullness, the non-sound condition of all sounds.

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 Let’s look at the example of the fourth movement of her Hommage, which also
lacks an explicit literary text. We know from Gubaidulina’s sketches that, at first, the work
was conceived with a structure of eight movements. However, Gubaidulina decided to
reduce it to seven, perhaps because of the symbolism related to the number that he had
already used in previous works. With this fact, the composer manages to correspond
structurally to one of Eliot’s metaphors most related to mysticism: “at the still point of
the turning world”. It is the central movement, like a kind of hinge between the past and
what is to come: “condensation of time in a focal point in which everything in
simultaneity exists”, as the composer says in the draft. The masterful use of pizzicati and
harmonics fabulously expresses that “non-time”, that time without time.

EJEMPLO 3

This leads us to explain our previous statement: while Eliot writes his poems as if
they were string quartets, Gubaidulina tries to repeat the poet. In what sense? The decision
to make the poet’s voice appear explicitly in a fragmentary way, finding its fullness only
in the instrumental movements, avoids the risk of turning Eliot – that is, the past – into a
static monument, carved in marble, deprived of the uncertainty of the present which is,
precisely, one of the fundamental ideas of Eliot’s own quartets. The purpose is not to
recover a lifeless past, but to discover in it the uncertainty of the old present that every
past was. It does not recover the security and solidity of Eliot’s texts, but the fragility of
his verses. The Hommage thus becomes not a mere memory, but a repetition in the sense
that Heidegger or Deleuze defines it. For these thinkers, the simple reappropriation of the
past as past cuts off an essential component: its future dimension. Only by assuming all
the vulnerability of the past can we truly make it ours, thus rescuing the possibilities for
the future it contains. And that full assumption must be its repetition. We think that a brief
example from Heidegger can be enlightening.

In our own interpretation of being, we do not attempt anything other than to repeat
the problems of ancient philosophy in order to radicalize them in repetition through
themselves.

As we can see, the philosopher’s work implies a dialogue with the thinkers of the past,
conceived directly as repetition. However, to be a true repetition, it cannot be identical.
The repetition itself produces the difference at the same time. It is in this strong sense of
repetition that Gubaidulina repeats Eliot: not as an evocation, nor as an imitation, but as

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an assumption of aesthetic, philosophical positions... Thus, in her composition, she
repeats what is open and indeterminate in Eliot’s work. It avoids crystallizing Eliot’s
vision and thus causes the reciprocal illumination of past and present.

This uncertainty is felt even when Eliot’s lines make their explicit appearance. After
the first two instrumental movements, which lead us to think of a time previous and
beyond any subject, the naked voice emerges, singing with great rhythmic freedom but,
above all, accentuating the paradoxes, the uncertainty: notice how she expresses
musically lines like “have buried the day” or “carries the sun away” with an ascending
line, when the poetic fragments point to a clearly descending movement.

EJEMPLO 4

The subject exists, yes, but appears dissociated from the world, decentered in his
loneliness and anguish. However, hasn’t this dissociation, this anguish, been a key
element to achieve a spiritual and transcendent experience? How can that which cannot
be known be known? Only in one way: by becoming to a certain extent that thing itself.
This disarticulation of the world and the subject is only the first and essential step to
achieve the dislocation of the subject from himself. Consistency vanishes with those black
clouds, making the becoming-other possible. That is to say, transfiguration.

It’s a shame not to be able to hear the fantastic last movement due to time, but we’ll
let Gubaidulina herself define it in an interview with Vera Lukomsky:

It’s climax (in the last movement) draws on a moment of Transfiguration: “And all
shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well when the tongues of flame are
in-folded and the fire and the rose are one.” This is death and the radiant arising of
something new: that is, the Transfiguration.

In conclusion, Sofia Gubaidulina’s Hommage à T. S. Eliot proposes an enormous

challenge for the listener: a work that calls for a higher listening intensity than usual, since
they must listen to the absence, the silence itself, of the poet’s voice. The explicit
appearance of Eliot’s texts does not seem to improve the tragic situation of the listener:
more than a synthesis of music and poetry, Gubaidulina’s profound reading of the symbols
and metaphors present in the poem makes her composition work as a series of paradoxes
about temporal experience. In this way, Gubaidulina repeats Eliot in a work where time
(or rather non-time, or a hyper-chaotic time), silence and the dissociation of the subject

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from the world and from himself, constitute the very essence of an intense spiritual
experience that leads, in its last movement, to the transfiguration.

Thank you very much for your attention.