Become Ocean : Ben Smith's "Doggerland"

Become Ocean

Ben Smith's "Doggerland"

Doggerland is the name given in the 1990s to an area of land, now submerged beneath the North Sea, which connected Great Britain to Continental Europe.  Doggerland once extended to modern-day Denmark and far north to the Faroe Islands.  It was a grassland roamed by mammoth, lion, red deer – and their human hunters – but melting ice turned it into an area of marshes and wetlands before it was finally and definitively claimed by the waves around 8,000 years ago. (Incidentally, Doggerland was recently in the news following exciting archaeological discoveries).

The idea of a submerged world resonates with mythical and poetic associations and, as a result, “Doggerland” lends itself well as the title of Ben Smith’s debut novel.   The work, in fact, portrays an unspecified but seemingly not-so-distant future, where global warming and rising sea levels (possibly exacerbated by some other cataclysm) have eroded the coastline and brought to an end civilisation as we know it.  

This strange, new world is made stranger still by the purposely constrained stage against which the narrative plays out.  Smith focuses on two main characters, maintenance men on an enormous wind farm out in the North Sea, who lead a solitary existence on a decrepit rig amongst the rusting turbines.  Although we are given their names, they are generally referred to in the novel as “the Boy” and “the Old Man”.  Early on in the book, we are told that of course, the boy was not really a boy, any more than the old man was all that old; but the names are relative, and out of the grey, some kind of distinction was necessary. It’s a significant observation, because much of the novel’s undeniable power derives from a skilful use of a deliberately limited palette.  The men’s life is marked by a sense of claustrophobia, the burden of an inescapable fate.  The monotony of the routine is only broken by occasional visits of the Supply Boat and its talkative “Pilot”, who is the only link with what remains of the ‘mainland’.  The struggle to keep the turbines working with limited resources becomes an image of the losing battle against the rising oceans, at once awesome and terrible in their vastness.  The Romantic notion of the Sublime is given an environmentalist twist.  One can smell the rust and smell the sea-salt.

Whilst the reader is made to share the ennui of the Boy and his mentor, Smith turns his story into a gripping one by making the most of the scant plot elements. For instance, we are told that the Boy was sent on the rig to replace his father, after the latter’s unsuccessful escape attempt.  What exactly happened remains unclear but, together with the Boy, we glean some disturbing details along the way – in this regard, Smith takes a page out of dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction, and suggests that society has been taken over by some sort of totalitarian regime of whom the Boy’s father was, presumably, a victim.     Part of the pleasure in reading this novel comes from trying to piece together an understanding of what exactly is happening on the mainland, considering that the perspective given to us is that of two people stranded in the middle of nowhere.

At times, Doggerland reminded me of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, which also describes a future marked by rising water levels. However, whereas Hunter’s vision, with its images of creation, birth and maternity, is ultimately a hopeful one, Smith’s is devoid of any feminine figure, suggesting a sterility in the human condition which can only lead to its annihilation.   Doggerland is haunting in its bleakness:  The wind blows, the branches creak and turn. Somewhere in the metal forest, a tree slumps, groans but does not quite fall.  The landscape holds fast, for a moment. For how long? It may be centuries. Barely worth mentioning in the lifetime of water...    

Kindle Edition, UK, 208 pages

Expected publication: April 4th 2019 by Fourth Estate

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As a counterpoint to Ben Smith’s novel, I have chosen three classical works which share a minimalist/post-minimalist aesthetic.

First on the (play)list is “Industry” for amplified cello and electronics (1992) by American composer Michael Gordon (b. 1956), here performed by Ashley Bathgate.  The screeching feedback effects remind me of Doggerland's giant, rusting turbines.

Italian singer-songwriter-composer-artist-director Franco Battiato (b. 1945), with his obsession with Middle Eastern myth and religious traditions, is possibly the last person one would associate with a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel.  However, his Stockhausen-Prize-winning electronic piece L’Egitto Prima dell Sabbie (Egypt before the Sands), with its obsessive repetition of one simple rising scale, reflects on the one hand the expanse of the sea and, on the other hand, the mind-numbing weariness of the protagonists of Doggerland.  

    

In 2014, American composer John Luther Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for his 40-minute orchestral piece Become Ocean.  Like Doggerland, his piece evokes “the depth of the waves and the spray of the sea.  But it also warns us that ‘as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean’.  You can listen to the piece here (performed by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra) and read about it on the brilliant Corymbus classical music blog.

Happy birthday, Arvo Pärt!

September 11th marks the birthday of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, born in Paide, Estonia in 1935.  To mark the occasion here's a small tribute to the composer, including a review of a study of his "Tabula Rasa" and my recollections of meeting him at the European premiere of  "Greater Antiphons".  But first, a happy birthday song in his style:

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Book review  "Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa"  

Each of the volumes in the Oxford Keynotes series is dedicated to a particular musical work or album from the fields of classical, jazz or popular music and is accompanied by a dedicated website which provides multimedia materials, including audio clips. In this particular book, Kevin C. Karnes explores Tabula Rasa, one of Arvo Pärt’s iconic works. A double concerto for two violins, prepared piano and strings, this was amongst the first compositions which Pärt wrote in his distinctive tintinnabuli style or ‘method’. Karnes’s explanation of how tintinnabuli works is admirably lucid, and I will not even attempt to put it into my own words. To get a feel of its sound (short of reading the book) I suggest listening to Für Alina (amongst the earliest of his tintinnabuli pieces) or to Tabula Rasa itself. Here's a live performance:

and here's a link to the cult 1984 ECM album which launched the label’s “New Series” and brought the piece (and its composer) to the attention of a wider public. 

Concise as it is, this monograph casts its web wide. Indeed, only one of the book’s five chapters is dedicated specifically to a “theoretical” analysis of Tabula Rasa. Before tackling the work head on, Karnes delves into the cultural context in which this concerto, and by extension, Pärt’s tintinnabuli approach, were first conceived. This involves an examination both of Pärt’s earlier compositions and of the Soviet musical world in which he worked. The volume ends with a chapter on the reception of Tabula Rasa outside the “Soviet” bloc and Pärt’s own emigration to the West. 

Along the way, Karnes provides several insights which will likely challenge lazy assumptions about Pärt and his music. Pärt’s development of tintinnabuli or, as he prefers to describe it, his ‘discovery’ of it, is often portrayed as a sort of Damascene conversion which led the composer to abandon his serialist, avant-garde past. Karnes however presents us with a “hermeneutic of continuity” (to borrow a theological term), teasing out several parallels between Pärt’s earlier and later pieces. Thus, whilst it might not be immediately evident to the listener, the composer’s tintinnabuli pieces often follow a strict mathematical process, making them not unlike the serialist works of his youth. Moreover, an interest in early music and forms, and a penchant for ‘polystylism’ could be felt even in pieces pre-dating Pärt’s tintinnabuli phase.

Karnes also convincingly shows that despite his distinctive mode of expression, Pärt is very much one of a piece with the post-war avant-garde: the mathematical formulae remind one of serialism, the “process” aspect of tintinnabuli is not far removed from the experiments of Steve Reich (although both composers were working independently) and the importance Pärt gives to silence is reminiscent of the musical philosophy of John Cage, whom Pärt often references in interviews.

There are other surprising discoveries in store. Influenced by the “marketing” people, many listeners tend to classify Pärt as a “holy minimalist”, lumping him with other (very different) composers such as John Tavener and Henryk Gorecki. So it might be surprising to discover that the earliest “Western” listeners, as yet lacking such preconceived references and easy categorizations, found in Tabula Rasa echoes of “Far Eastern music” and compared this strange, new, static music to “the effects of highly skilled pop groups such as Pink Floyd”.

Karnes does not eschew technical analysis and yet his style remains remarkably accessible throughout, making this an absorbing book for general readers as well. The text is enriched not only by the multimedia element, but also by illustrations and references (some of them difficult to find) and copious footnotes. In other words, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in Arvo Pärt and tintinnabuli.

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Postscript : The day I met Arvo Pärt

Pärt has been a musical idol for me ever since a hazy summer afternoon in the early nineties when I caught a recorded broadcast of “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” on Rai Radio 3 (played, incidentally, at half the speed and lower pitch because of a technical mishap). In July 2016, the composer was invited to Malta to attend a concert of his music presented by the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the Malta Arts Festival. The highlight was to be the European premiere of Greater Antiphons, the orchestral arrangement of his choral piece Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen. It had only been performed once before – by Gustavo Dudamel at the helm of the LA Phil. It was, to a Pärt fan, a historic occasion which I couldn’t let pass. I dragged along my good friend Nick. To be honest, he is more into jazz and rock but is, like me, an ECM groupie. And a good sport. Concealed in an inner pocket of my jacket was a Naxos recording of Pärt’s Passio, held close as a talisman, in the vague hope that I could get the composer to sign it.

Aesthetically, the golden Baroque splendour of a packed St John’s Co-Cathedral seemed miles away from Pärt’s pared-down style, just as the heat of the Mediterranean summer was hardly redolent of ‘Estonian cool’. Yet, when the descending scales and tolling bell of Cantus cascaded like a sigh over the audience, it seemed as if we were being propelled beyond time and space. I had listened to recordings of the piece tens of times, but hearing it live in those sacred surroundings felt like discovering it anew. The hushed atmosphere was temporarily torn asunder by the sound of a "festa" band marching outside, to the consternation of musicians and organisers. It was a facepalm moment. What must the composer be thinking? I later heard through the grapevine that Pärt was quite amused by it all. A touch of Ives?

When the concert ended, I lagged behind hopefully. Would Pärt be spirited away for after-concert canapés? Would I get a glimpse of him? Yes, as it turned out. There was the Great Composer, in the middle of the aisle, smilingly signing programme after proferred programme. I smugly pulled out my Passio CD, handed my camera-smartphone to my long-suffering concert buddy (who promptly placed himself in a strategic position), and joined the queue.

As I got nearer to Pärt, I couldn’t help feeling that the image of the benign man who stood before me seemed quite incongruous with that of the ‘prophet’ propagated by magazines and CD adverts. He was wearing a rather flamboyant, open-necked shirt with a surreal print (little blue birds, if my memory serves me right). “What’s your name?” Pärt asked a little boy who was being egged on by his mother. “Saviour”, the boy replied. “Ah, Saviour...”, the composer sagely nodded, “Saviour, like Our Lord Jesus Christ...” I couldn't tell whether he was in earnest or whether this was his idea of humour. Or both. 

It was my turn then. My recollection becomes hazy, but Nick’s photos show me grinning sheepishly as Pärt scrawls his signature on the CD cover. It’s on the shelf in front of me right now.

Arvo Pärt in bird-patterned shirt