Hallock Hill

A Broken Consort, “A Sundering Path,” Box of Birch (Tompkins Square, 28 April 2009)

Writing about music forces such great reductions and constrictions on language. The written word, and most of the spoken word too, is not built for it. At least when one speaks, there is the inflective and gestural accompaniment that adumbrates musical motion and structure. Writing about a piece of music, though, really just scratches at a wall.

I’m faced with writing about something deeper than this equipment at hand. Richard Skelton, I hope, understands that anyone who writes about his music can, at best, only pass on bare and broken thoughts. He is, I think, in the best sense of the word a Modernist—one who expresses ideas over time and articulates them formally and with process (if that may serve as one definition). My late teacher, the novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, defined the high spots of Modernism as those which you have to experience in time, and then, when they are over, they are erased and the only way to revive the memory is to experience them again. He applied this to reading Ulysses, Gertrude Stein, Robert Creeley. It also fits Richard Skelton.

An interesting fixture of Skelton’s work though is its classicism. One hears snippets of motifs from historical antecedents. Perhaps one does. His music is an echo-chamber of history, save that the history is right now, expressed in the moment. His pieces feel composed and they feel improvised. There is an aural space— a depth of field where one hears things that are nearer and farther mingling together. This work feels like nothing else.

“Feel.” That’s the problem. In non-vocal(lyric)-based music, so much depends upon an evocation of mood, through the space and time of musical language. Skelton’s music feels like a music of process, outlining and subsequently defining emotion. It is a type of process that Steve Reich described in his “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), though used to different effect. This music has what might simply be called “power.”

Not the power wielded by goverments, not military power. Not mite. Not strength. But power—the power of some ineffable spirit, the energy of the earth and place. It has reverberance (as opposed reverberation). Anyone who has never felt the hand of history on their shoulder, the embrace of their five-year old self in the middle of the night in middle-life may never know this power.

What troubles me is that I am essentially a Formalist and all that I’ve written speaks of things without form that cannot be named. Listening to Skelton’s music, I can make my mind work as it usually does—identifying elements and structure, finding fundamental design, hearing specific movements that have structural definitions. But I lose interest in those with his music. It is that process, an almost overwhelming “thing.” For me it takes on solid form, that embodiment of some inexplicable forebear that in his hands takes shape.

Orpheus, the son of Apollo, was said to be able to charm birds, make rocks dance, divert the course of rivers with his poetry and his lyre. Invented by Hermes, the lyre was the poet’s accompaniment, and Orpheus perfected its design and use. He also practiced magic and inspired rituals throughout varying cultures. It was the ability to substantiate the insubstantial that made his myth. In Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, the young Orpheus listens to messages that are being transmitted on the radio of a limousine, being sent from the underworld by Cégeste, another young poet killed in an accident (it is a more complicated narrative, so forgive this condensation). Orpheus is so preoccupied with the messages that he tells his beloved wife Eurydice that if she were to die, he would not notice her. Orpheus catches a glimpse of the Princess, and runs after her, but he cannot find her. Eurydice runs out into the road, and is run over by one of the motorcyclists. The Princess and Heurtebise bring Eurydice’s body back to her bedroom and the Princess reveals that, though she is like a ghost, she is an eternal being. Heurtebise is in love with Eurydice, and the Princess is in love with Orpheus. Orpheus is listening to the radio messages in the limousine, and is still so preoccupied that he does not hear the warning of Heurtebise that Eurydice is dying. Upon learning of his wife’s death, Orpheus descends into the Underworld to pursue her. In the end, it turns out to have been a vision, we presume, and when Orpheus returns through the mirror into Eurydice’s bedroom, she awakes and the muse Heurtebise informs them they are to have a child.

As in many of the variations on the Orphic theme, it is this power of manifestation that comes to the fore. The messages Orpheus hears are nonsensical to all, but not to him. To the poet the messages have form. The American poet Jack Spicer addressed the Orphic, natural power of the poet in a different way:

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

Poetry need not be listened to attentively, as Orpheus does in Cocteau’s version, for it manages to change the structure of the world quietly, just as any wave crashing against the shore is not attended to but makes a constant adjustment to the world.

This all comes to mind because Skelton possesses this power—one which evokes things, not just sounds. A painter creates an object, a writer creates words on pages. A composer/musician though creates ephemeral notes that appear and then disappear. But Skelton’s ability to render something solid is for me what distinguishes him from the miasma of so much music now. In his work exists solidity, thing-ness. I of course cannot show it to you. You have to find it for yourself and keep it close. It is a small thing, but is there, and precious.



This is written on the occasion of Tompkins Square’s release of Skelton’s Box of Birch, under the name A Broken Consort. This record, to be released tomorrow, reveals all of Skelton’s gifts and is a rare thing. I have selected the opening track, “A Sundering Path,” since it serves as a superb beginning. I will have more to write about Richard Skelton and the various names under which he records (Heideka, Clauwbeck, Riftmusik, A Broken Consort, and even his own name). But for now, consider this an introduction.

Tompkins Square

Sustain-Release, Richard Skelton’s private press

Sustain-Release on MySpace

Landings on MySpace