A CD on which a narrator reads a late text by Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) for 65 minutes, alternating with new music for string quartet: that is obviously not a conventional combination. Yet Stirrings Still, Beckett's last prose text, combined with the music of Trevor Bača (b. 1976), is much more than a literary text with a musical frame. Above all, this release asks the listener for a willingness not to constantly seek a reconciliation between language and music.
At the edge of consciousness
Beckett completed Stirrings Still in 1987, when he was eighty-one; the text appeared the following year. It is an extremely concentrated work in which there is hardly any traditional action. A man sits at a table, observes, remembers, hears sounds, and at a certain point even seems to perceive himself from the outside. What actually happens remains persistently uncertain. The text moves somewhere between memory, imagination and consciousness, while death is not staged as a dramatic event but as a boundary that becomes increasingly palpable.
That Beckett comes close to music in this is not hard to understand. His sentences have a strongly rhythmic character: words return, formulations are taken up again, and a small shift can change the meaning of what preceded it. The text must therefore be not only read but also heard. ECM took precisely this auditory dimension as the starting point for this production, in which Trevor Bača placed an independent composition alongside the words.
Sound alongside the word
The word alongside is important here. Whoever writes music for Beckett runs the risk of illustrating the text: a dark passage receives dark music, a memory becomes lyrical. Bača chooses a less obvious path. His music appears between the spoken passages and thereby repeatedly creates a new listening experience of what has just been said, without any sound precisely confirming what the words mean at that moment.
When Griffiths speaks, the listener gets a concrete foothold: words, images, sentences. When the voice falls silent, the string quartet takes over. The instrumental sections are generally brief, rarely more than a few minutes, and are heard more as separate moments than as a continuous development. The concrete points of reference of the text then disappear, and the music does not make the meaning clearer but once again elusive. When Griffiths begins again, we do not hear the words quite as before.
Resistance beneath the surface
Bača's music is remarkably uninterested in immediate effect, but it is by no means constantly soft. The cello regularly provides a deep, sometimes almost bodily undertone, while the other strings also seek tension in sound, register and the relationship between ensemble playing and individual movement. Sometimes the quartet seems to follow the words, sometimes it offers a counterweight, as if what is told is not confirmed but remains standing alongside. That makes the relationship between the two layers less predictable.
At the same time, Bača avoids grand dramatic gestures. A single tone, a short movement, a grinding harmony or a chord that lingers longer than expected can be enough to change the space. The music calls for attention to the smallest shifts, but then also puts that attention under pressure by deliberately making the sound uncomfortable.
This makes the first encounter not self-evident. Whoever in contemporary music mainly seeks development, contrast or a clear arc of tension will not immediately find a foothold here; the quartet's sparseness may at first even give the impression that the music takes little risk. However, whoever listens attentively discovers, beneath the controlled surface, sounds that bring unrest, deepen, and sometimes emphatically resist the voice. It is precisely because of this that the silence between the musical events also gains weight. The music does not simply follow the mood of the text, but can contradict it, open it up or keep it briefly at a distance.
A voice as ritual
Paul Griffiths is more than a neutral reader. His delivery is sober and precise, without theatrical emphasis – fitting for one of Beckett's most austere late texts, in which the familiar ironic and absurd-comic verbal acrobatics are largely absent and the register becomes more restrained, almost liturgical. Griffiths recites the text almost as a priest would, now incantatory, then again withdrawn and quiet, letting it speak without psychologically coloring it. A sentence can be uttered almost casually and then, through the silence that follows, suddenly weigh much more heavily.
Yet there is also something to be said for a less restrained reading, with more emphasis on the repetitions and small shifts in the text. Griffiths deliberately does not choose that path. His approach makes Stirrings Still not a dramatic monologue but rather a restrained stream of memories, observations and thoughts that slowly unfolds.
One sound body
The JACK Quartet proves particularly suited to this project. The American ensemble's experience with contemporary and experimental chamber music is audible here not as virtuosic display but in the naturalness with which the four musicians realize extremely subtle differences in sound and timing.
Nor do the cello playing of Jay Campbell and the contributions of Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman and John Pickford Richards function as separate solo voices. The quartet sounds like a constantly shifting sonic body in which individual instruments sometimes stand out sharply and then again recede into the background. The cello in particular regularly lends the whole a dark depth, while the other strings can thin out, sharpen or tilt the sound.
The Disappearance of Sound
One of the strongest aspects of the recording is its transparency. Manfred Eicher, who produced the recording for ECM, allows voice and strings to retain their own acoustic space. The result is not always easy. There are moments when the music's restraint may cause attention to flag – the composition demands a concentration that not every listener will spontaneously muster, certainly since the text itself offers no conventional narrative line. But precisely the moments when the quartet develops more tension prevent the music from lingering in an overly uniform, contemplative mood.
The ending is also telling. Beckett does not conclude with a dramatic resolution; the text rather withdraws slowly. Bača follows those final words, after which the music too withdraws ever further, until the disappearance of the sound itself almost becomes a final event, in the direction of Beckett's closing words: 'to all to end'.
In this way, this CD touches on something essential in the late Beckett: the refusal to neatly round off an experience. The recording offers no key with which Stirrings Still can be unlocked, but renders the text strange once more. It is not a CD that surrenders itself completely after a single listening, and perhaps that is precisely its strength. Griffiths, Bača and the JACK Quartet do not try to explain Beckett, but make him audible anew: the voice gives us words, the quartet lets us hear how much can lie between those words.
