Ming Tsao: Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch

(2016/2017)

»Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch« is a book of 20 canons for six voices where each canon reverse-transcribes a puzzle canon (Rätselkanon) from the Medieval to Renaissance periods with reference to the poetry of Paul Celan. Each original puzzle canon is accompanied with a cipher that offers the key to their performance, i.e., when each voice should properly enter and under what conditions (diminution, augmentation, retrograde, transposition) in order to satisfy the rules of counterpoint of that period. Each title of a canon is properly named according to these ciphers. The exceptions are the five canons that are based upon five poems by Celan, that offer a different kind of cipher as something that does not require a solution but is rather a »letter in a bottle«:

»A poem … may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the–not always strong–hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are «en route” they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.“

Paul Celan, Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, 1958.)

If the ciphers of the puzzle canons require specific solutions, Celan’s poetry accomplishes the opposite by opening this book of canons to some other reality, one in which the numbers, proportions and relations of symmetry that are carefully woven into the music blend together with noise and materials that resist lyrical formation and cannot be easily grasped. This other reality searches for a listening where music no longer seems possible and lyrical expression is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in our world of possible sounds. Such a listening can occur when music’s expressive aspects are broken and damaged and there is leakage between the compositional work and the larger world order.

The rhythmic and metric structure for each canon was derived from Prynne’s poem Pearls That Were which references Shakespeare’s The Tempest (i.e., Full Fathom Five).

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Intosomethingrichandstrange.

Sea-nymphshourlyringhisknell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,–ding-dong, bell.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610–11

My first opera Die Geisterinsel (2010–11) was also based on the The Tempest. One can imagine Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch sung by the Geisterchor (choir of spirits) who are native to Prospero’s island as a postlude to my opera, once Prospero’s influence has disappeared and the spirits can again discovertheirmusic.

Caliban:

Diese Insel ist voll von Getöse,

Tönen und anmutigen Melodien,

die belustigen und keinen Schaden tun.

(The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.)

Ming Tsao, Die Geisterinsel, Libretto from William Shakespeare and Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter

Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch

Titles and Musical References

1. Noli me tangere (Josquin Desprez: Missa L’homme arme super voces musicales)

Touch me not

2. Die Zahlen (Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum Kyrie)

The numbers

3. Hunc discas morem, si vis cantare tenorem: ut iacet attente, cantetur subdiapenthe (Guillaume Dufay: Bien veignes vous, amoureuse liesse)

4. Weissgrau (Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum Gloria)

Whitegrey

5. Dum tria percurris quatuor valet. Tertius unum subque diapason sed facit alba moras (Johannes Ciconia: Le ray au soleyl)

6. Wo? (Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum Credo) Where?

7. Omnia per circuitum (Baude Cordier: Tout par compass suy compose)

Everything about

8. Tenor crescit in duplo (Guillaume Dufay: Missa Se la face ay pale)

Tenor augments in double

9. Canon in Diapente (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Rex Pacifica)

Canon at the fifth

10. Cancer eat plenus sed redeat medius (Guillaume Dufay: Missa L’homme arme)

Let the crab go full but return in half

11. Reverte citius (Josquin Desprez: 15. Pigmeus hic crescat, gigas

Missa L’homme arme super voces musicales)

Go back faster

12. In gradus undenos descendant multiplicantes, consimilique modo crescent antipodes uno (Josquin Deprez: Missa Fortuna desperate) They descend eleven steps multiplying, and in the same manner they increase in the opposite direction

13. Scinde vestimenta tua redeundo (Antoine Brumel: Missa Ut re mi fa sol la)

Rend your garments in returning

14. Fuga trium temporum in diapente remissum (Adrian Willaert: Salve Sancta Parens–Virgo Dei Genitrix)

Fugue after three measures at the fifth

16. Canon ad septimam (Orlando Lassus: Missa Du bon du cueur)

Canon at the seventh

17. Das Geschriebene (Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum Sanctus)

The written

18. Noctem verterunt in diem/Etrursum post tenbas spero lucem

(Anon:. Missa Du bon du cueur)

They have turned night into day, and after darkness I hope for light again/

19. Keine Sandkunst mehr (Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum Agnus Dei)

No sandart anymore

20. Finis est principium

(Guillaume de Machaut: Ma fin est mon commencement)

The end is the beginning

Canon #2

THE NUMBERS, in league

with the images‘ doom

and counter –

doom.

The clapped–on

skull, at whose

sleepless temple a will –

of–the–wisping hammer

celebrates all that in

worldbeat.

WHITEGRAY of

shafted, steep feeling.

Landinward, hither

drifted sea oats blow

sand patterns over

the smoke of wellchants.

An ear, severed, listens.

An eye, cut in strips,

does justice to all this.

Canon #6

WHERE?

In night’s friable matter.

In grief–debris and–drift

in slowest uproar,

In the wisdom–shaft Never.

Waterneedles

sew the burst

shadow together–it fights its way

deeper down,

free.

Canon #17

THE WRITTEN hollows itself, the

spoken, seagreen,

burns in the bays,

in the

liquified names

the dolphins dart,

in the eternalized Nowhere, here,

in the memory of the over –

loud bells in–where only?

who

pants

in this

shadow–quadrant, who

from beneath it

shimmers, shimmers, shimmers?

Canon #19

NO SANDART ANYMORE, no sandbook,

no masters.

Nothing in the dice. How

many mutes?

Seventen.

Your question–your answer.

Your chant, what does it know?

Deepinsnow,

Eepinno,

I–i–o.

Ming Tsao was born in Berkeley, California, in 1966. His father is from China, and his mother’s parents are from Austria. He learned to play the violin and viola before travelling to China to study the fretless Chinese zither, the guqin, with the renowned virtuoso Wu Zhao-ji in Suzhou.

He followed his studies in composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston and ethnomusicology at Columbia University in New York with studies in logic, philosophy and mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in composition at the University of California in San Diego as a student of Chaya Czernowin, and he studied privately with Brian Ferneyhough. He then taught as a professor of composition at the University of Gothenburg and as a visiting professor of composition at the University of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover. In 2021, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. In 2024, he was appointed Birge Cary Professor of Music at the University of Buffalo in New York, taking over the professorship originally created for Morton Feldman.

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Ming Tsao: Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch

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