Towards a Receptive Music:
Cavellian Reflections on André Forget’s “The Composer of Space”
By Gerald Ens
The issue is one of inhabitation, placing yourself. But placing a lost self in a land that is gone is an exercise of mourning.
– Stanley Cavell[1]
André Forget’s “The Composer of Space” presents us with Philip Lefebvre (hereafter the CoS for the Composer of Space): failed musician, failed composer, failed architect. His tone and antics are manifestly not those of a well-adjusted person. The narrator of Forget’s story further describes the CoS’s grand vision – which is to “compose a shape-shifting concert hall…whose infinite mutations would provide a space for music to reach the infinite” – as “somewhat inhuman.” On first reading, he appears as a portrait of how not to do music (or life), an extreme example of the way art and artists can fail.
In this essay I want to show how the text[2] of the story hints at there being much more than this to the CoS and his musical vision; indeed, I will go further than this and suggest that there is something to the CoS that points in the direction of a more truthful, more hopeful, and more beautiful way of participating in music. I will do so by exploring two questions that the narrator asks, but which never receive any sort of explicit answer. First, why is the CoS’s musical dream (or obsession) “so inextricably linked to a single and in some ways rather silly event,” namely, his encounter with that elusive musical sound in the Scottish fog? My exploration in response to this question suggests that the CoS’s musical vision, at its best, gestures towards a music that is receptive to the world around it and solicits our ongoing participation. The second question is “what happened to Lucy?” – the woman who appears to play such a key role in the genesis of the CoS’s musical epiphany and who may have been his lover. Here I hone in on the ongoing and vulnerable work such receptive music requires of us.
Before I address these questions in earnest, I’ll say a few more words about the textual basis for even attempting to provide a more positive take on the CoS and his musical vision. First, and most obviously, even Aleksandr Otkazov, the narrator of the story, writes of catching a glimpse of the beauty of the CoS’s vision while looking out upon the remarkable musical medley of his street.
Even at three o’clock in the morning, someone would be out walking their Doberman pinscher in a bowler hat and spats, singing “Tangled Up in Blue.” There were street festivals, of course, and the occasional busker, and everyone in the apartment across the street seemed to play a banjo, a guitar, or a Theremin. Some of the most remarkable combinations of sound I’d ever heard, I had heard sitting right there in front of my window.
This brief description is a breath of fresh air in the midst of a story that is otherwise rather grimly told, something that makes you want to dust off your guitar and call your neighbour over instead of drinking a glass of Scotch by yourself while reflecting on the pitiable state of the world. You can hear the street come to life in a vivid array of colourful sound.
Second, our narrator, while a good observer with a journalist’s eye for detail, is far from perfect, either as a character or analyst. He is a little too keen to casually expose his failings and exhibit his substance abuse. His world-weariness appears a little bit too much like a show (and a good thing too – it would be somewhat tired if there were not more to it). Finally, the way Otkazov encounters the CoS, as a specimen that may be of some use to his own purposes, right from the moment he gets the CoS’s letter, is also rather “inhuman,” to use his own term. We should surely be wary of Otkazov’s perception and judgement, including his critiques of the CoS.
Receptive Music and Its Comic Tragedies
Why is the CoS’s obsession “so inextricably linked to a single and in some ways rather silly event?” Otkazov articulates this question to himself while pondering over the CoS the evening after he receives the CoS’s letter. He never returns to the question, either in his thoughts or in conversation with the CoS. This is surprising, given the emphasis the CoS puts upon his encounter in the Scottish fog. In this section of the essay, I argue that Otkazov’s lack of attention to the significance of the Scottish fog exhibits a misreading of CoS’s letter, one that locates his musical vision in randomness rather than in receptivity and participation. These latter emphases and their evocation of a deeply human music emerge, I suggest, if we stick with the question of the “inextricable link” to the Scottish fog and thereby stick with the CoS and his telling of his story.
First, however, I will acknowledge that there is some excuse for Otkazov’s misreading of the CoS’s letter. Quite simply, the CoS’s explicit formulations at times appear to be somewhat misleading about his own revelatory experience in the Scottish fog. If Otkazov wrongly focusses on the notion that “it was this very randomness (which seemed impossible to reproduced [sic] through any mathematical model) that made the music come alive,” it is also true that those are words from the CoS’s letter.
But this statement by the CoS should alert us to an oddity in the idea that randomness and endless variation in itself is what the CoS is truly after: namely, that a mathematical model can produce infinite randomness and variability. We should therefore ask: what is missing, what experience is it that such a model is unable to produce?
What an algorithm cannot supply is the world as a subject, or, better put, the world as an endless array of interrelated subjects that address me and to whom I address myself in an ongoing song, the song of the universe. The CoS does not describe a concert hall that will deliver sheer randomness or the primal order of the universe in its generality, but a concert hall that will be “completely pervious to its environment.” This is the driving emphasis of the CoS’s letter and his dream: a music that accepts and indeed sees its call and genesis in a radical interference from and belonging to the world. Such music would beckon to us, inviting us to join with it rather than merely observe it from a distance. This is because true perviousness is not passive but requires something from us, an offering of something that is solid enough for something else to impact it. We might say that it is a matter of the ongoing work of infinite attunement to the world’s song, a song that irresistibly compels us and that we create insofar as we humans are also a part of the world. Here we glimpse the deep humanity and embodiedness of the CoS’s musical vision.
One important distinction between randomness or chaos per se and the perviousness or participatory receptivity of the CoS’s vision becomes clear in the fact that, in order to be pervious, the concert hall must be in an environment. There are indeed an infinite variety of sounds (and other sensations) one may experience in a Scottish countryside in spring; but there are also limits, and quite restrictive limits at that, within which this infinity takes place. That is, one does not experience just any weather during a Scottish spring: you will not catch your breath in the way you do amid the dry cold of a winter on the Canadian prairies; nor will you hear the whirring of a cicada that drives in the reality of a hot and humid Ontario summer. In a Scottish spring, the infinite variations will be those of the predictable wind, rain, fog, damp, and the other characteristics of that time and place (characteristics that were crucial to the possibility of the CoS’s musical encounter in the fog).
Likewise, Otkazov’s most profound reflections in the story, those about the beauty of his street and its sounds (quoted in the opening paragraphs of this essay) do not direct us towards sheer chaos and randomness but towards a truer seeing and hearing of a familiar and particular place. In Otkazov’s brief reflections on his street, the music the CoS dreams of begins to appear as the never completed work of intimate knowledge, of allowing the infinite depth of another to appear before you. This is not the task of objective knowledge, of accumulating (musical or aesthetic) data, but, in Cavell’s words, of cultivating the ability to “yield to what [we] know, [to be] commanded by it.”
The CoS’s dream is so promising because it attacks a notion of pure music. Our notions of musical performance and musical experience tend to be hostile to interference; they are thereby also hostile to life (witness here the hostility of many formal music spaces and performances to children, especially young children, and to people with intellectual disabilities[3]). In contrast, it is not difficult to see how the CoS’s concert hall might be made to celebrate the noisy sounds of life within its music: a permeability that offers itself to the permeability that is life.
It would be a much simpler matter if Otkazov could simply spell this out for us. Instead we get tensional glimpse of the CoS’s vision, with both Otkazov and the CoS stumbling in and out of inarticulacy. Every time that Otkazov turns to the CoS he seems also to turn away. This tension extends to the end of the story when, despite dismissing the CoS and his dream, Otkazov continues to find something “unbelievably sad” about it all (and presumably also continued to find his experience with the CoS significant enough to write it all down in detail for us).
I’m not sure whether or not Otkazov’s ultimate inability to give a full account of the great promise and deep humanity of the CoS’s concert hall does a disservice to the great promise within the CoS’s vision, obscuring it for us readers; perhaps it does. But there’s something I like about the way Otkazov both does and does not “get” the CoS.
I like that this story about a wholly receptive music is marked by failure and misreading and what this reveals, or at least suggests, about such music. To be a human music, the CoS’s composition must also fail. For we humans offer ourselves to another and at the same time look to receive another and we fail; by this I simply mean that our relationships with others and with ourselves are marked by everyday violence, deception, abandonment, misunderstanding, blindness, inappropriate care, and so forth. The world outside and inside of us spurns us; even the best and most “musical” relationships fill up with “misses.”
Let me flesh this out in terms of what we might expect if something like the CoS’s concert hall were to come into being. Only the most ideological and crassly optimistic view of humanity would expect each performance to be filled with beautiful and deeply moving music. Such a concert hall would of necessity risk elements in a performance and even whole performances that would be banal, tedious, boring, or obnoxious, if not downright ugly and horrifying. And to attempt to insure against this risk would mark a retreat from the great vision of the concert hall (but more on this last point in the next section).
In failing to “go with” the CoS and offer some trust in the CoS’s experience, electing instead for the guise of professional distance, Otkazov exhibits a posture (cynicism) that enacts precisely this (attempted) impermeability in the face of the world’s rejections. His casual dismissal of the world seeks to make music impotent. Otkazov is, in other words, in mourning – mourning over the unbelievable horror and sadness of this world, and perhaps mourning in particular the way we consistently turn something as astounding as music and our participation in it into a domesticated commodity. Otkazov’s “wise to the world” embrace of the “realities” of his music journalism profession is his attempt to shield himself from his grief. For this reason, he is unable to say why, at the end of the story, he finds something “unbelievably sad” about the fold line in the CoS’s letter.
The failure of Otkazov’s encounter with the CoS thus further reveals that the truth in the CoS’s musical vision can never be realized as a smooth movement of rapturous joy. The story would not work if it simply told of a music journalist coming across a musical revelation that makes everything easy and perfect and wonderful for the world and for him. It would, in form and content, constitute a denial of our finitude by claiming that we can banish failure from human life if only we acquire the right knowledge and procedures.[4] Its utopianism would be too unreal, an attempt to fix the world’s great suffering (and joy) with an abstract (and therefore inhuman) theory about the world rather than an attempt to bear (with) the world.
In the epigraph to this essay Cavell suggests that the work of inhabiting the world is a work of mourning. In this vein, I suggest that the CoS’s vision, to be true to itself, must enact the difficult work of mourning: the work of offering oneself to, soliciting, and seeking to live within a world that is lost and astray, not only because it is violent, but also because its beauty often disorients us in a way that reveals that the world’s violence partially lies within each of us.
Embodied Love: The Vulnerable Work of Musical Acknowledgement
“What Happened to Lucy?” This is the final question that Otkazov asks the CoS during their phone interview. It does not yield fruitful results. The CoS initially declares Lucy to be a marginal character, virtually insignificant. Upon further prodding by Otkazov – “were you lovers?” – the CoS explodes, accusing Otkazov of “cheap psychologizing,” of reducing human motivation and desire to “psychosexual malady.” This ends the conversation, and presumably also Otkazov’s relationship with the CoS. And yet, by leading us in a particular and personal direction (the direction of a broken relationship with a friend/lover), I want to suggest that this question opens up the way that the CoS’s concert hall points us towards the embodied and therefore vulnerable work of acknowledging the world.
I have already stated that I have limited trust in Otkazov’s judgement, and one could indeed see here a rather crass attempt to introduce some tabloid-like drama to the story, to provide some superficial titillation to a story that would otherwise only be about the “uninteresting” matters of music and architecture. Why then do I take up Otkazov’s question about Lucy? What makes it a good question? First, I’d suggest that in the context of their conversation, the CoS’s critique is rather thin. Otkazov does not appear to be slyly searching for ulterior motivations. He’s trying to understand how the CoS was initiated into his encounter in the fog, and as such the CoS appears to attack little more than a caricature. Add to this the vehemence and closure of the CoS’s response, and one gets the sense that Otkazov may be striking quite close to home.
Second, given the text of the CoS’s letter, Otkazov’s own explanation of his question – “she was fairly instrumental in preparing you for your breakthrough” – makes a good deal of sense. In his letter, the CoS describes his time with Lucy, which includes her suggestions on composition that are crucial to the development of the CoS’s musical ideas, with a vivid liveliness and detail that is matched perhaps only by his description of his musical encounter in the fog. The CoS’s description of Lucy slowly slipping her hand into his when they first arrive at her Scottish cottage alone more than invites Otkazov’s question (indeed, this is the one place where I find that the story strains credulity: it is not particularly believable that a man who would bother to write down this memory in a letter would so downplay Lucy’s significance to the recipient of that letter).
We should ask, together with Otkazov, about Lucy because such a question exposes how far indeed the CoS’s vision does have a shade of the inhuman about it. That the CoS writes Lucy out of his musical odyssey, both in his account to Otkazov on the phone and in his own forgetting of her after his experience in the Scottish fog, is suggestive of the temptation the CoS appears to face: to think that music – infinite music – might be a way to escape the task and burden of being human. And so, in his final words to Otkazov, the CoS erects a division between the true experience one receives from music and the pale experience one may get from “carnal love,” “domestic life,” “rotting bodies,” and human relationships; it is a division between (human) life and art, or, we might say, between the act of love and the love of art.
Otkazov’s point, as I take it, is that this division won’t hold, at least not if taken in an absolute way. Look at Lucy, he seems to say, and the way her presence and absence and relationship with you was so important to the emergence of your musical ideas; look at the tangible and the more intangible ways that her body brought you to and then shaped and marked the Scottish landscape which provided the (material!) context for your musical epiphany.
Music and art are so central to the human because the work of becoming human, of offering ourselves to and receiving ourselves from others in an ongoing and broken communication with the world, is itself a musical dance. Reflecting in part upon Inuit throat singing, Lisa Stevenson uses the term “song” to describe those “forms of recognition that [do] not depend on knowing the truth about – or fixing the identity of – another person.”[5] Stevenson emphasizes the fact that we owe our lives not only to others, but to their call to us, to the fact that they name us, tell our story, and allow us to tell their story with ours. We do not define ourselves. As Cavell writes, “there are debts in living, conditions of existence.” Being human is being born and living and learning to die as deeply indebted creatures who must respond to the call of those who place us in debt with our own calls that will (partially and musically) define and call forth the lives of others.
There is an important sense in which the question “what happened to Lucy?” calls us back to the core of the CoS’s vision. Indeed, the fact that the question can be posed at all in a meaningful rather than reductive way suggests that there is something that should grab us in the CoS’s musical quest. There is no way to pose the question of Lucy in the concert hall model of music. Lucy has no bearing when music is understood as an object separate from us that may or may not register with and “move” us according to our subjective proclivities. Neither does Lucy matter if art and aesthetics is something so preciously separate from human living that it must be kept behind glass or up on stage, safely held in the hands of professionals and machines.
But my argument is that Lucy does make sense as a question for the CoS. Indeed, the possibility must exist for Lucy, in the full hiddenness and revealedness of her flesh and blood, to appear, in ever surprising ways, both new and familiar, in the CoS’s music. The vision of his concert hall is in fact one in which the ongoing performance of one’s music/life is radically open to being woven together with and impacted by others, perhaps especially impacted by one who offers an address with the attentive force of a lover. If Lucy were to attend a performance in the CoS’s concert hall, or even be within its vicinity, she would become part of the performance. The irony of the inhumanity in the CoS’s vision and the tragedy of his refusal of Otkazov’s question is that in many respects the CoS’s inspiration and vision is a deeply humanizing one, one of bringing the human and embodied human experience back into music. Instead of bringing “to mind the idea of rain” with music, the CoS dreams of bringing to bear upon music and our experience of music an organic texture of sounds that would call forth “the visceral feeling of dampness and confusion, or [else] the comfort of hearing rain on the window.”
From his founding experience in an immersive and treacherous environment, one that made the familiar unfamiliar, what the CoS describes is a search for a way to weave the ongoing and eternal mystery of our material lives within a material world into a musical performance. Such a musical performance could never be less than the ongoing constitution and expression of our lives. This is the dream of a concert hall that would continuously “adapt to the music being played within it and incorporate the surrounding environment.” It is a vision of musical creation and collaboration that is not sundered from, but allows “the music of the world…to creep in” precisely as it endlessly responds to and solicits this music. To use Cavellian language, we might say that this is a vision of musical acknowledgement: a musical task that seeks to acknowledge the world in its simultaneous intimacy and otherness, its intimacy no less treacherous, revealing, unsettling, and compelling than its otherness.
The question about Lucy raises the point that there is no such music without the ongoing work of vulnerably revealing oneself, of composing oneself in an acknowledgement of oneself: acknowledging “the world” is always a matter of revealing myself to a particular other (and seeking out companionship with her) because acknowledging others always requires an acknowledgement of one’s own relations with those others. It further suggests, to complete the circle, that such self-acknowledgement is, from beginning to end, the work of acknowledging and receiving others, which is indeed an infinite task – for when can we be said to be finished in the task of knowing the mystery of another body?
The question of Lucy thus opens the door to music that looks like the perfectly imperfect sound of children singing in a rainstorm, of “fooling around” with a beloved instrument in the quietness of an intimate space, of the grueling repetition of musical practice as a musician enters into the world of a difficult piece, of finding a trusted and known or unexpected harmony of sound (whether it is formally music or not) with a neighbour that beautifully fits and expresses a moment with exquisite timing. You will be able to think of many more examples from your own life, of the ways you have found to live into the musical call that is “the structure of the cosmos,” as the CoS puts it in his final comment to Otkazov.
At its most compelling, the CoS’s concert hall seeks to render the reality of this musical experience, this musical account of our lives, into the reality of a concrete musical performance. At its least compelling, the CoS’s concert hall exhibits the human pretension of capturing and obtaining this music as an object, an unfortunate spatialization of music that misguidedly seeks to free us from our belongingness in time. Here the CoS resembles Cavell’s reading of Othello. For Cavell, rather than Othello exhibiting the paranoia of not being able to be certain that Desdomona loves him, Othello knows that Desdomona loves him and it is precisely this knowledge that is terrible and that he must deny. The problem, for Othello, is that love does not admit of conquest. Love instead reveals our partiality and dependency; love reveals that union comes through separateness rather than through its overcoming. And so we retreat.
Cavell says that “nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s humanity, or to assert it at the expense of others.” Here he’s not simply saying that we do this sort of thing all the time and should stop (though he is saying this). Cavell is also claiming that nothing is more human, that there is something deeply human that sets us upon this impulse. The (musical) emergence of the human self takes place in and as the context of the terror that is intimacy and/as separation, and this means that at the origin of humanity must lie also the desire to escape the difficulty of the task of being human.
At its worst, the CoS’s dream of a pervious concert hall exhibits the desire to find a site that is impervious to the world, its loves, its horrors, and its love as horror. The CoS falls into an “inhuman” trap to the extent that he tries to guarantee the encounter with music ahead of its happening. Unable to handle the vulnerable unpredictability of being loved, of being addressed as a beloved, the CoS attempts to insure the unpredictable, writing out the vulnerability of the encounter, which is what makes the encounter possible. But the CoS only does so because he first manages to see that music belongs to the world and the world to music. Instead of trying to take this music out of the world (as is so often implicit or explicit in dominant accounts of aesthetics), the CoS elects instead to separate both music and the world from the work of human living and human loving. The question of Lucy, however, shows how much his vision yearns for a reunion, and with this reunion a music that embraces the delights and tragedies of love.
Conclusion: Absurd Inhabitations
Re-reading the words above after a brief hiatus from this piece, one thing that strikes me in my analysis is the absence, in tone or content, of a feature prominent in and of the utmost importance to both “The Composer of Space” and its companion short story “The Lower Registers”: their hilarious and playful absurdity and even goofiness. These stories abound with absurd content and the seriousness with which their characters present and interact with this content multiplies the absurdity.
The absurdity of these stories makes the world strange to us. And it does so in such a playfully gentle and entertaining way that this strange world beckons to us to befriend it again. Its strangeness calls us home. Such absurdity presents a call to us to re-familiarize ourselves with our worlds such that we might again stand in awe of them and their strange music. This mirrors the music of our lives, which is intimate because it is recalcitrant and absurdly strange because it knows us so well and speaks to our souls. The CoS makes me laugh in such a way that I feel my eyes widen. In such moments of hilarity I want to go and follow after him, at least for a few steps to see what he’s doing now (and this is to say nothing yet of underwater organs).
I like what this suggests for music, art, and life. I like that it makes me want to make music. I like how it holds together the paradox of music (and art and life) as at once incredibly serious work and something that we should never be too serious about.
In this respect the story of the CoS is characteristic of the kind of work Earth World has done in its short tenure. If I invest in the story of the CoS to the tune of 5000 hard-to-write words, it is because I trust what Earth World is trying to do with music. The earth, of which, as we are prone to forget, we are a part, is burning because of our abuse of it and we appear likely to burn with it in the uncomfortably near future. Such abuse stems, at least in part, from a failure to receive and acknowledge the bodies of others (in their uncomfortable absurdity of both their recalcitrance and intimacy), including the many particular places/bodies upon the earth that provide us with our homes; indeed, the failure is one of even conceiving of such acknowledgement as something that might be worth working for. I am of course not claiming Earth World’s artistic practice might save the world. But their collaborative drive to make music that is responsively in the world strikes me as part of the mournful and hilariously absurd inhabitation that is the work of human living.[6]
[1] Though I have elected to provide minimal exegesis of Cavell’s texts, his philosophical investigations are the guiding force of much of my own reflections here. For my reading of Cavell I am heavily indebted to Peter Dula’s excellent text, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology.
[2] I limit the explicit analysis in this essay to Forget’s story. I should acknowledge, however, that the “text” that has influenced my thinking on the character and vision of the CoS includes two videos by Earth World Collaborative featuring the CoS (both released before this short story), for which Forget was not the primary author and for which I played an editorial role. I have also written an essay (“Stradivarian Capture and the End of Music,” available as a video essay here: https://www.earthworldcollaborative.com/en/the-death-of-music) under the pseudonym of the CoS. While I saw one early draft of Forget’s story, I did not play any direct role in editing or writing “The Composer of Space.”
[3] Earth World Collaborative’s June 2019 concert based on Forget’s short story, “Concert in the Clouds,” included the artistic contributions and participation of members of L’Arche Hamilton. L’Arche is an international network of homes where people with and without intellectual disabilities live together and care for one another.
[4] The similarity between this description and what counts for much of contemporary left wing politics is not accidental.
[5] Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic
[6] Thanks to Joel Peters and Sarah Ens who provided helpful input on an earlier draft of this essay.
Essay by Gerald Ens
Gerald Ens is a PhD student in Religious Studies at McMaster University under the supervision of Dr. P. Travis Kroeker. His primary research interests include Christian ecclesiology, Christian ethics, philosophical theology, Mennonite theology, phenomenology, and political theology. His current work brings together theological, ethnographic, and sociological research to examine and constructively engage trends in Mennonite churches from lay to professional leadership models.
Ens’s publications include “Boundaries Thick and Permeable” (Zwickau Press), an examination and constructive proposal for ecclesial boundaries. Ens holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and a Harry Lyman Hooker Senior Fellowship.
Ens holds an MA from McMaster University and a BA (Hons) in Theology and Philosophy from Canadian Mennonite University. He has many years of ministry experience in Mennonite Church Manitoba’s camping ministries and will probably preach a sermon if you ask him to.