Epilogue: Disordered, and Flatulent is a film sequel to Moses and Griffiths (2012) and WYE (2016), the work of South African artist Mikhael Subotzky. It is a thirty-minute single-channel projection film which follows various strands of narration between three central points in time; the mid 17th century, the mid 20th century, and the present. Composer Jonathan Blair was commissioned to provide the original score for the film which began its life as a singular impulse: The deconstruction of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung.

Early in the process, Subtozky presented a pamphlet to the composer in which the artist had provided an original narrative to accompany the technical details of the project. Blair found the writing to be poignantly painful, poetic and evocative. Despite its highly stylized prose and the problems it conceals as a musical text, the composer was determined to commit to it as the source text for the vocalization of the piece. As the composer began to sketch the formal outlines for the sketch he determined than an oratorio as in the style of Haydn was too periodic as a form. He turned to the cantata’s of Bach with its scriptural angularity and culturally didactic prose as a style that could convincingly fit Epilogue. The sketch work consisted of taking the content of Haydn and the formal expectations of Bach’s cantatas through a process of fragmentation and disconnection. With an abstract concept of ‘pieces’ constituting the contours, interval classes and classifications of geometric chordal divisions, the composer went about processing those materials under transformations such as inversion, stacking, and stratification until a harmonic language began to emerge for the project. While particular moments in the movement ‘Chaos’ from Die Schöpfung are quoted recognizably, the array presented in the opening sequence places the ordering of that ‘chaos’ into ‘disorder.’ The content itself is again then rotated, inverted, and juxtaposed in such a way as to create increasingly complex relationships of development, most often interacting in polyphonic ways to create a web of harmonic fog. As such, one attempts to latch on to systems of coherence throughout the opening sequence as they modulate and evade themselves. Harmonies contend for foreground exposure as quickly as they evaporate into one of several layers of musical texture.

As well as the various techniques Blair utilized to create a uniting harmonic language, he introduced linguistic multipliers from within Subtozky’s text to infect the musical transformations as well. For instance, the year 1652, which is central to the visual as well textual experience, is translated into a series of intervalic distances creating a pentachord. Those notes are placed under vertical stracking to to create the two pillar chords that begin the piece. The pentachord also supplies a horizontal configuration that is sounded by a slave bell that develops its linear motive throughout the opening section. The ‘Epilogue’ chords, as they came to be known to Blair throughout the process can be distilled into constituent bi-tonal structures with implications of resolution pointing into several directions at once. This is analogous to the dimensional time-frame of the film that goes both backwards and forwards. As a motivic element, the chords themselves always appear at places where resolutions of chordal tension would conclude a declamatory punctuation in the music. At the center of the piece, a transition between scenes is written out as a palindrome to signify the mirroring of the sections.

Another visual aspect of the work that became integral to musical design was the concept of the form of the ocean. An early discussion between Subotzky and Blair revolved around Da Vinci’s troubled sketches of fountain water and the historical difficulty that artists found with representing the stratified layers of various undulating movements seen from the top of the water’s surface. In the Da Vinci sketch, these movements appear more floral than anything.

This lead the composer to attempt various states of representing stylized motions of water through canonical procedures representing the oceanic themes surrounding the Cape. Bowed and scraped percussion as well as ‘sticky mallets’ that engage the sounding body of percussion instruments were used to mimic the sounds of ocean life(whale calls, crashing tides, etc) to give a distinctive ‘ocean’ sound to these textures.

As the piece moves forward from the 17th century to the 21st, the music evolves in reverse, with stratified sections of synthetic material moving closer to common practice tonality culminating in a Bach style chorale. Several electronic instruments were commissioned by Blair from New York electronic artist, Sam Irwin, as well as instruments created by Blair’s mentor, Michael Norris, are utilized to create texturalized meta-orchestrations of the voice and instruments. Meta-orchestration, as described by Blair is a process in which a single source is analyzed by the instrument and then is partitioned and grouped, where it is presented to the composer to undergo different orderings. At the discretion of the composer, then, these orderings can be manipulated to transform the natural acoustic and aural properties of the instrument or voice so that they ‘orchestrate’ themselves within a singular reference; essentially creating new timbres and textures from the same sound source. Finally, physical sounds curated from the city of Cape Town are integrated and transformed to blend with the orchestration as musical devices that are not immediately recognizable as the sounds originally captured in recording. Again, as the piece represents musical idioms consistent with nostalgia for the 17th century, it introduces perturbations brought on my technological disruption. Such surface ‘tears’ in the musical fabric are an attempt to replicate Subotzky’s techniques of Sticky Tape Transfer.

Similarly, the orchestration writes string parts in such a way that create a transparent sheen that audibly ‘drips’ around teleologically moving structures. The effect is the composers attempt to mirror the aesthetic nuance of Subotzky’s ‘moving paintings.’

Utilizing a cast of singers from Cape Town Opera, the vocalization was conceived as fragmented aria-esque solos, choral sections, and dialogues between singers. A demand placed on the singers that was attempted in the vocal writing was to allow the inflection of the multifarious backgrounds of South African singers to be heard while still retaining the musicality of the singing voice. Voices are brought to their declamation range for moments that lend these voices transparency and verisimilitude. The encompassing democracy of the vocal parts acts as a disinterested yet codified voice that weaves itself together without being consciously aware of the voices that surround it. The melodic contours given to the singers in solo approach the musical canvas from nowhere, imitating the scratches, slashes, swipes, and swirls of Subotzky’s animated transformations. These later begin to amalgamate into a unified blend of intertextual dependence as the piece moves to a contextual togetherness, while the text elucidates the isolation of the narrator.

While the narration and vocalization tell separate, yet interweaving plot points, other unspoken, musical dramaturgy represents a third and embedded level of biographical information in relation to the discussions that Blair and Subotzky had in regards to the events that inspire the film. For example, Klezmer tunes that burst into argument at the emphatic inclusion of ‘God’ in the text, or the reference of the traditional Pesach song ‘Chad Gadya’ are directly representative of events that Subotzky shared with the composer; a type of musical Polaroid riddled throughout the film.

The work is scheduled to premier at Goodman Gallery London in June 2022.