Things Fall Apart
Emma Fielding and Robert Glenister with readings on decay and decadence from John Donne to Derek Walcott. Music from Schreker to Elgar, Basinski to Bowie.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
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Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes
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00:00Stephen Jenks
Decay (聯My days are as the grass聰)
Performer: His Majestie聮s Clerkes.- HARMONIA MUNDI HMU907128.
- Tr22.
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John Donne
An Anatomy of the World, read by Robert Glenister
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00:02Xavier Montsalvatge
Desintegraci贸 Morfol貌gica de la Xacona de J.S. Bach
Performer: Orquestra Simf貌nica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya, Edmon Colomer (Conductor).- VALOIS V4732.
- Tr6.
William Drummond of Hawthornden
I know that all beneath the moon decays, read by Emma Fielding
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00:10Franz Schreker
Die Gezeichneten - Prelude
Performer: Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Lothar Zagrosek (Conductor).- DECCA 4444422.
- CD1 Tr1.
Oscar Wilde
The Portrait of Dorian Gray, read by Robert Glenister
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00:21Benjamin Britten
Death In Venice 聳 Scene 9 聳 Do I detect a scent? Aschenbach
Performer: Peter Pears (Gustav von Aschenbach), English Chamber Orchestra, Steuart Bedford (conductor).- LONDON 4256692.
- CD2 Tr5.
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land, read by Emma Fielding
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00:27Maurice Ravel
La Valse
Performer: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink (Conductor).- PHILIPS 4387452.
- Tr7.
Charles Baudelaire (trans. Roy Campbell)
To The Reader, read by Robert Glenister
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00:42David Bowie
Station To Station (2010 Mix) (2016 Remaster)
Performer: David Bowie.- Parlophone 聳 0190295989842.
- CD9 Tr1.
Rudyard Kipling
Cities and Thrones and Powers, read by Emma Fielding
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00:47William Basinski
Disintegration Loop, Pt. 4
Performer: William Basinski.- TEMPORARY RESIDENCE TRR194CD.
- CD3 Tr1.
Derek Walcott
Ruins of a Great House, read by Robert Glenister
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00:51William Basinski
Disintegration Loop, Pt. 4
Performer: William Basinski.- TEMPORARY RESIDENCE TRR194CD.
- CD3 Tr1.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias, read by Emma Fielding
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00:53Edward Elgar
Like to the Damask Rose (1892) Orchestrated by G Williams
Performer: Susan Gritton (soprano), 蜜芽传媒 Concert Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins (Conductor).- DUTTON EPOCH CDLX7228.
- Tr4.
R. S. Thomas
Reservoirs, read by Robert Glenister
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00:57Trent Reznor
Ripe With Decay
Performer: Nine Inch Nails.- Island Records 聳 CIDD 8091.
- CD2 Tr11.
Philip Gross
The small phrases are easy, read by Emma Fielding
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01:03Bob Dylan
Everything Is Broken
Performer: Bob Dylan.- CBS 聳 465800 2.
- Tr3.
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01:06Michael Nyman
Bell Set No.1
Performer: Michael Nyman (percussion), Nigel Shipway (percussion).- EMI CDVE964.
- Tr2.
Walt Whitman
You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me, read by Robert Glenister
Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. Anne Hyde Greet)
Sickly Autumn, read by Emma Fielding
Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay, read by Robert Glenister
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01:09Ian William Craig
Drifting to Void on All Sides
Performer: Ian William Craig.- 130701 - CD13-22.
- Tr3.
Producer Notes: Things Fall Apart
Everything is impermanent.听 The inevitability of decay is what all of these pieces reflect, in one way or another.听 Not simply physical transience, but moral decline too.听 Decay and decadence.听
鈥楳y days are as the grass鈥� is a setting of Isaac Watts鈥� words by the American composer Stephen Jenks.听 Our sense of the finite nature of things is informed by our own mortality and vice versa.听
John Donne鈥檚 An Anatomy of the World traces the corruption and decay that can be perceived all around us right back to the creation of the world, the uprising of the rebel angels and the expulsion from Eden.听
As we shall see, decay and intentional destruction can also be used as creative tools.听 The Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge begins with the original chords and harmony of the Ciaccona from Bach鈥檚 second Partita in D minor and then progressively takes them apart over the course of his Desintegraci贸 Morfol貌gica de la Xacona de J.S. Bach.听
In 鈥業 know that all beneath the moon decays鈥� the 17th century Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden lays out a very human conundrum.听 Even though he knows that nothing lasts, everyone dies and all that he creates is doomed to oblivion, he is nonetheless compelled to love and to write.听
As mentioned earlier, we鈥檙e also looking at moral decay. Franz Schreker鈥檚 1918 opera Die Gezeichneten is partially set on an island paradise that has been created by a young nobleman, Aviano.听 Concerned about his hunchbacked appearance, he avoids the island, but in his absence his decadent peers use it as a setting for their depraved orgies.听 In 1938, four years after Schreker鈥檚 death, the Nazi regime included the opera in the group of works that they labelled as Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music).听
Oscar Wilde was associated with the decadent movement of the late 19th century and his most decadent creation was surely Dorian Gray.听 Influenced by an unnamed morally poisonous French novel (actually Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans) Gray embarks on an eighteen year spree of indulging in every conceivable vice.听 While he remains beautiful (because beauty and sensual fulfilment are all the matter to him), his portrait becomes increasingly hideous and distorted.听听
Both physical and moral decay feature in Benjamin Britten鈥檚 opera Death In Venice, based on Thomas Mann鈥檚 novella.听 In this excerpt, the writer Aschenbach becomes aware of rumours of a cholera epidemic in the city, but he has become obsessed with a young Polish boy, Tadzio, and is determined that the boy鈥檚 family must remain ignorant of these rumours, fearing that otherwise they might leave immediately.听听听
In The Fire Sermon, the third section of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot evokes a barren city whose riverbanks are the litter-strewn site of debased sexual encounters.听 Overall, the poem is his response to what he saw as the moral and spiritual decay afflicting Western civilisation after the First World War.听
Two years before The Waste Land was published, Maurice Ravel finished writing La Valse.听 Despite Ravel鈥檚 insistence that the piece was not intended as an allusion to the situation in post-war Vienna, some listeners have found it difficult not to hear resonances of those events, including the British composer George Benjamin:听 鈥淲hether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz鈥�.听
Charles Baudelaire embraced the term 鈥榙ecadent鈥� as expressing a preference for the beautiful and the exotic and the pursuit of sensual expression.听 To The Reader is a disconcerting inventory of human vice, moral shortcomings and crime which is turned with full force on the reader in the two final, accusatory lines.听听听
Another decadent figure is The Thin White Duke 鈥� David Bowie鈥檚 louche persona that he unveiled on his 1976 album Station To Station and onstage during the subsequent tour.听 The album was recorded while Bowie was living a life of occult-tinged excess in Los Angeles, bedevilled by cocaine-fuelled paranoia.听 Not long afterwards he relocated to Berlin, a move foreshadowed by the motorik beat of the title track鈥檚 long introduction.听
People and their morals may decay, but so too do the things that we make.听 In Cities Thrones and Powers, Rudyard Kipling reflects on the fleeting nature of our works and the way that we comfort ourselves by clinging to the illusion that they will endure.听
Magnetic tape is particularly prone to decay, a fact exemplified by William Basinski鈥檚 work The Disintegration Loops.听 Basinski had been trying to save recordings of some of his earlier pieces in a digital format, but the ferric oxide layer of the tape started coming away from the backing as they played.听 He decided to exploit this setback by making tape loops from the original recordings and playing them to destruction while he recorded the process.听
Derek Walcott鈥檚 Ruins of a Great House is an ambiguous response to the experience of walking amongst the crumbling remains of a plantation house in the Caribbean. The narrator rages at the inhumanity that the place represents, but concludes by extending his compassion to all who were caught up in the history of an empire of which only ruins remain.听
The image of the ruined statue in Ozymandias is possibly the most famous poetic expression of the frailty of worldly power.听 In fourteen lines Shelley encapsulates with wonderful bathos the transitory nature of despots and empires.听听听听听
Like to the Damask Rose is Edward Elgar鈥檚 setting of a poem of uncertain authorship which unremittingly hammers home the transience of everything.听
In Reservoirs, R. S. Thomas delivers an angry lament for the Wales that has been erased by the picturesque surfaces of those artificial lakes and the conifer plantations that cover the hills.听 In assigning blame for the decay of his nation and its language, he points the finger not only at the English but also at the acquiescent Welsh themselves.听
Trent Reznor is a musician and composer whose career has included collaborations with David Bowie and, like Bowie, experienced a period when his life was spiralling out of control. 听Ripe With Decay was recorded with his band Nine Inch Nails in 1999 when his problems with substance abuse were at their most profound.听
Ageing is necessarily a process of decline, despite the compensations that it may offer.听 Hardest to bear is the falling away of those aspects which combine to create our sense of self.听 The small phrases are easy is taken from Philip Gross鈥檚 collection Deep Field in which he struggles to come to terms with his father鈥檚 loss of language, first due to deafness and then aphasia.听听听
The thrust of Bob Dylan鈥檚 1989 song Everything Is Broken is perfectly summed up by its title.听 It must be said that despite laying out a litany of disintegration, he sounds remarkably jaunty.听
Decay is not necessarily a bad thing.听 In musical terms it describes the attenuation of a note after it initially sounds 鈥� notes played on different instruments decay at different rates.听 Michael Nyman鈥檚 Bell Set No.1 explores the different decay lengths of various percussion instruments including bells, triangles, gongs, cymbals and tamtams.听
In You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me, Walt Whitman likens his aged self to a tree 鈥� those attributes that he still retains in his final years may lack the vigour and magnificence of what he had when he was younger, but they are hard-won and precious to him.听听
Cycles of decay are all around us and the passing of the year is a well-worn metaphor for our own mortality.听 Guillaume Apollinaire鈥檚 Sickly Autumn poignantly evokes the signs of the year鈥檚 decline into winter.听 Robert Frost also uses the inevitable passing of the green of spring and summer to underline the tendency of everything to fall away.听
Finally, demonstrating that something good can come from things falling apart, the Canadian composer and musician Ian William Craig uses broken tape machines to create his music.听 The appropriately titled Drifting to Void on All Sides is taken from his 2016 album Centres and manages to wrench beauty from mechanical and electronic malfunction.听
听
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Broadcast
- Sun 1 Oct 2017 17:30蜜芽传媒 Radio 3
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