Grant Covell
La Folia, November 2002
www.lafolia.com
 
 
This is a recording of a man reading philosophy. But the speaker says only
single-syllable words and spaces them about eight seconds apart. The text is
in German, and after every dozen or so words there are long stretches of
quiet. The jewel box provides a warning: "Die Aufname fängt mit 9 Minuten
Stille an" (the recording begins with 9 minutes of silence). I don¹t have a
precise count, but the entire CD, which lasts 70:15, has around 100 to 200
words.
No, this is not for everybody. I was at first skeptically amused, then
entranced. Beuger¹s relaxed voice gradually erodes any resistance to the
unfathomable stream of words (actually, it¹s more like a trickle). It does
help that even if one knows German, the text is difficult to understand.
Beuger took Baruch Spinoza¹s Ethics and meticulously copied out all the
single-syllable words. This required close reading, but more importantly,
Beuger soaked himself in the text¹s "art" and its "life-affirming attitude."
Of course Spinoza¹s concrete meaning is lost to us, but Beuger has distilled
an essence of Spinoza that he conveys very earnestly. Weighty words like
"selbst" (self) and "Gott" (God) figure rather frequently, as do trivial
words like "die" (the) and "und" (and).
Remarkably, the silences are very silent. I don¹t hear someone turning the
volume down on the microphone, there is no throat-clearing, and maybe the
faintest sound of shuffling paper. Releasing a CD that starts with nearly
nine minutes of nothing takes a bit of chutzpah. It¹s easy to forget there¹s
a CD on, and suddenly a gentle tenor voice comes out of nowhere with selbst.
A complete performance of calme étendue (spinoza) takes 180 hours. Beuger
actually performed the entire work over 26 consecutive days in August 1997,
speaking six to 10 hours per day at the Museum Schloss Morsbroich (in
Leverkusen, Germany) while the museum was open. I can imagine him sleeping
there after hours, using a tattered copy of Ethics for a pillow.
Would this work be as effective if Beuger were reading a shopping list, or
an inventory of Goethe¹s collections? That we¹re dealing with thorny Spinoza
makes this work bearable, and Beuger¹s reverence and apparent comprehension
of Ethics helps, too. As I¹ve said elsewhere, the text contributes more to a
setting than does anything the composer might do. With the many stretches of
silence, it becomes easy to forget that there¹s a CD playing, and when the
words do pass by it¹s more like Spinoza wallpaper than a concert work.