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Marin Marais “Tombeau
pour Mr. de S.te Colombe” was recorded in a small local
church in Hermance, Switzerland (the ceiling of which you can see
on the front and back covers of the digipak). The recording was
done on the Fostex DV-40 DVD RAM recorder, while the sampling rate
was 176.4 kHz. The recording cables for this session were made
by Kharma Audio in Holland.
www.kharma.com
Here are the liner
notes in English which Andre De Carlo prepared for the recording:
Rue
de L’Oursine, le 15 Août 1728
The elderly Marais kept his
eyes closed, and listened to the noises filtering through the blinds
he firmly shut against the light. Even the sounds seemed to melt
from the heat and, semi-evaporated, rose in fat bubbles to the window
of his bedroom, where they burst into drops of thick air, laughing,
rumbling of carriages, banging of hammers. The humidity made breathing
difficult, and relief only came in the form of occasional and brief
spurts of drowsiness which caught him by surprise like bursts of
fresh air, without warning, spreading through the house, freeing
it of stagnant smells and releasing the light trapped in the dark
corners.
As he hesitated, on the edges
of perception, undecided whether to give in to this new breeze or
not, something caught his attention, leading him towards a new consciousness.
A different sound pierced through all the others, and escaping the
meteorological distortions, reached him as if brought by a wind he
had himself created. It was the sound of a Viol. Someone was playing
in the street, maybe even in his own house. He leapt up, sitting
in the bed for just a moment. Even in this position the notes seemed
to come from every part of the room, as though produced by the walls
themselves. He stood up, for the first time in many days, ignoring
how tired he felt. Without knowing why, he abandoned the idea that
the sound might be coming from outside, and moved towards the door
of the room. He opened it and took several steps, but still the music
seemed to come from everywhere, from the staircase, from the room
he had just left, from the floor, and from the ceiling. Thus he began
to concentrate on what he heard, and surprised himself because it
was a music unlike any he had ever heard, unlike anything he knew,
but that nevertheless spoke to him, touching and almost moving him.
He had an urge to know who made these sounds, these movements so
incomprehensible and fascinating, to understand these harmonies which
seemed so abstruse and yet so familiar, so he rushed down the stairs,
drawn more by curiosity than the source of the music, and began to
walk through the empty house, unsurprised that there was no-one there,
not bothered that the arrangement of the rooms seemed different
to what he remembered, that the furniture was either different or
absent and that, apart from a few weak candle flames, no light entered
through the windows. At the end of a corridor that there had never
been, but that he now remembered perfectly, was a green and gold
door, decorated with birds and plants, which told him that it was
there he would find what he sought. Opening the door, he found himself
in a large room with pale walls and without windows, but with a diffused
light of unknown origin, completely empty, except for a chair turned
towards the wall at the other end, on which, with back turned, someone,
unaware of his arrival, played the Viol. He left the door open behind
him and remained silent. At once he was charmed, disturbed, grateful,
and impatient. It seemed to him, even if it was improbable, that
the music had slightly changed since his arrival. It was the same
as before, but seemed to slowly become ever more simple, as though
the person playing sought to bring forth the essential elements of
those harmonies, to make them clearer and more understandable. What
confused him most was the use of strange dissonances, the way they
were arrived at, and how they were resolved. The movement of the
voices seemed to him nearly incomprehensible, and yet sounded pleasing
to his ear, without his knowing why. As though obeying his own desire,
the Viol player tightened the circle ever more, concentrating on
a series of dissonances and consonanceswhich repeated again and again.
And there, in that circular movement both infinite and unambiguous,
he made his first discovery. Something he had always known, or intimately
felt, but had never been able to realize clearly. The relation between
dissonances and consonances, the movement from one to the
other, and its irreversibility were the only things which gave the
music a temporal direction, which created a before and an after which
couldn’t be switched, a development from which we could not
return, similar to our emotions, our thoughts, and our lives.
He then began to follow one
sound at a time within the harmony, with the leaps, the exchanges
with the other sounds, beginning to distinguish the structures which
kept repeating themselves, recognising them even before having learned
them, so that each moment they spoke to him more, touching parts
of his soul, long forgotten or which he didn’t yet know,
and he slowly began to understand and to predict the direction of
the music, he could have played it himself, already being
used to it, and felt the need to change it, to add something different,
his new sensitivity required justice and sought attention, and already
he wanted to take the place of the mysterious violist who had shown
him this new world, when something distracted him, a sound, voices, there
was someone upstairs, hurried steps, and he had the sensation that
the magic of that moment was about to finish, so he moved towards
the chair, while the violist was still playing, whether to
discover who he was or just to thank him, he didn’t yet know,
but when he was next to the musician, he put a hand on his shoulder,
and while continuing to play, the violist turned his face, and Marais
saw, himself, as a young man, as he had been at the age of twenty,
a boy who smiled calmly, looking at himself aged and stupefied, and
felt the need to talk to the boy, to ask him some questions,
eventhough he was the old man and it should have been the other way
round, but he felt that the young man knew things he had ignored
and that he now craved to know, opened his mouth, but no voice came
out, he struggled, became agitated, while the young man remained
serene and continued to play and smile at him, as though to calm
him down, and at that moment he realized that the light, that
before had only filled the room, now filled the whole house, came
through the gaps under the doors, through the chinks and the window
frames, making the air once again heavy and un-breathable, so he
left the boy and ran upstairs, to open the windows, absent in the
room below, but already on the stairs he met lots of people going
up and down, talking in low voices, and he was afraid to hear what
they said, because he already knew, and when he arrived upstairs,
saw that his room was also full of people, some crying, others praying
or wandering aimlessly. He stopped at the doorway, because he didn’t
want to go in. He remained there for some moments, waiting. Then
he saw his wife, bent in tears on the bed, and felt for her. So he
thought he couldn’t leave her alone, and went to put his face
beneath her hands.
Translation
from the Italiano by Agnes Crawford
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