In her talk at the 2013 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching conference, art historian Jennifer Roberts describes the unusual task she puts to her students as they embark on their research projects: visit the artwork in question and spend no less than three hours looking at it. It’s an exercise situated at the intersection of patience and perception, designed to provide students “the permission and the structures to slow down” and help teach them what Roberts calls the “deliberate engagement of delay.” Through it, doubts like “How can there possibly be three hours’ worth of incident and information on this small surface?” are gradually displaced by an astonishing proliferation of observations, questions, and analyses as time exerts its force.
It’s the kind of practice that might appeal to a composer like Catherine Lamb, whose long, subtle works reward persistent listeners with an unexpectedly rich (psycho)acoustic experience. In fact, Lamb describes the transformative effects of her own engagement with Agnes Martin’s multi-panel painting The Islands: “At first my eyes are overwhelmed by the luminosity of white. Over time, I begin to see whole spectrums of color emerging to the surface, which may later become variations of grey.” Next to the “incident and information” contained in Roberts’s example, John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, the relative “blandness” of Martin’s or Lamb’s aesthetic only stresses the role the audience must play in any encounter with their work. For Lamb, intentional blandness may represent a resistance to the notion that “a piece of music must ‘take one somewhere’ or overwhelm the senses to be felt, rather than the listener having any responsibility towards it.”
What is the nature of the responsibility the listener owes to this music? Patience should not imply passivity. In “The Form of the Spiral,” her own Harvard lecture, Lamb draws on Maryanne Amacher’s suggestion that “the active listener is the experimenter.” A key component of this active, experimental posture is the rejection of “habitual musical thinking and terminologies.” These frameworks aren’t just limited or inadequate; proceeding by habit, we unwittingly choose received conceptions over true attention. In a sense, then, engaging with Lamb’s music by turning to well-worn labels like “microtonal,” “drone” or even “just intonation” and “timbre” is like going to a museum to skim wall copy. Doing justice to the music requires something more, something as sui generis as the piece itself. “I don’t believe in virtuosity,” Lamb tells one interviewer. “I believe in working over a long period of time, consistently and with love and attention.”
If Lamb is describing a kind of generous, sympathetic patience, these passing references to belief hint that she’s also describing something like faith: trust that earnest application will lead one safely into, if not through, doubt. With its title’s suggestion of things forever out of reach, Lamb’s latest from Another Timbre is a fitting venue for all these ideas. Muto Infinitas is also music of considerable ambiguity, at least on first approach. Just 20 seconds into the hour-long composition, the performers — Rebecca Lane (quartertone bass flute) and Jon Heilbron (double bass) — fall silent. After 10 seconds of silence, they resume their sustained breathing and bowing, only to pause again not quite two minutes later. The music proceeds in this fashion, its “global” structure troubling the distinctions between continuity and discontinuity, repetition and progress, event and nonevent. Similar puzzles play out on the “local” level as well, with each of the piece’s 30+ episodes inviting the listener to ponder the complex harmonies, tensions and acoustic phenomena occasioned by the instruments’ interactions — a true test of language (especially for those of us taking notes) as we search for words that can keep up with the minute distinctions and developments introduced after each silence. “Microtonal” won’t get us very far. Close attention only heightens the effect of the surprise that arrives in the piece’s final passages, as Lane’s breath lengths contract and a simple but affecting melody slowly emerges from harmony. Without committing to a conventional narrative structure, Lamb manages, in a sense, to dramatize Roberts’s “deliberate engagement of delay” and the process of discovery that grows out of it.
Ultimately, of course, that process — and the responsibility that underpins it — extends in varying proportions not only to the listener but also to the performers and the composer herself. “I have been slowly working on Muto Infinitas for 5 years,” Lane writes, characterizing the present recording less as an absolute statement than as a document charting one point in an even longer, perhaps infinite, effort of exploration and refinement: “So the piece is a framework into which Jon and I hope to go deeper and deeper. We look forward to performing it again and again and seeing how our interpretation and listening evolve further.”
Perhaps paradoxically, it may be Lamb’s role in this network of shared responsibility that is most opaque. Commenting on an earlier work, her words apply well here: “Fluctuations of bow or breath or tone may become little bits of expression, and I find those portions the most compelling,” she says of 2012’s three bodies (moving), also on Another Timbre. “This is humbling, because I really have nothing to do with them other than allowing them to occur.” In the case of Muto Infinitas, it may be tempting to trace that guiding hand in the definitive, if elusive, melodic turn in the composition’s final moments. It’s there, of course, in the fertile interaction of tone carried out by the flute and bass as well. But it may actually be the piece’s periodic silences that best mark the composer’s presence. Modest but firm, they open a space for recovery and refocusing, always bringing the music back to the place of richest possibility.
