The Performance and the Artist

Ysaÿe’s tone and his charisma brought a humanism to the mathematical algorithms of even serious music like Bach, as cairns suggest human forms in the fog to Inuit people in Alaska.

This film is a tribute to those cairns, to the immanence buried in meadows, to the spirits in scales, to the Thunderers of clouds and keybeds, to the deeper shadows buried in the highly rational and cerebral virtuosity of Ysaÿe’s rustic dance.

The video technique pays homage to the pathetic fallacy, as Bobby Darin’s song “Listen to the Rhythm of the Rain” suggests that rain and Bobby’s tears are entwined.

The pathetic fallacy was coined by the great art critic John Ruskin in 1856 in the third volume of his work Modern Painters, to criticize the tendency among the Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley to attribute human qualities to nature.

At Tippet Rise, though, Symbolist conceits assume a more realistic identity, and nature plays a visible role in the emotions of both audience and musicians. The pianist Lucas Debargue asked us to tour the ranch before his concert so he could evoke it later in his playing.

In the deeper structures of the sky, quantum physics today proposes a wormhole which links disparate timelines in universes which are traveling at different speeds. ESP and premonitions are thus scientific breaches in a wall which separates us from other, equally valid realities.

4 Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No.5 for Violin, Op. 27

Our video team, in collaboration with the brilliant Utah virtuoso William Hagen, have thus devised a program where music transmutes into nature, and vice versa. Using the linguistic technique hypallage, Horace speaks of the angry crowns of kings, meaning the kings are angry, not the crowns. He misplaces his modifiers, transporting feelings from people to things. Virgil and Proust also use this transference to change dimensions linguistically. Musical grammar transfers an angry sky to harsh violin chords. Sky and violin are transposed: a preamble of rolling thunder under roiling skies anticipates the musical fireworks to follow. Dark clouds themselves transition through the darkness of the theme to the backdrop of the Beartooths from inside the Olivier Music Barn as the rustic dance begins.

Such correspondences aren’t only scientific and cinematic; they exist throughout history in animism and immanence, where society, as the Duke says in As You Like It: Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Indian and African cultures believe there are spirits in trees, as Francis Kéré’s pavilion, Xylem, is a tree taken apart. Aside from animism, Francis celebrates also the practical aspect of trees: in Burkina Faso people meet their girlfriends under trees, community elders confer under trees; trees provide shade against the sun; they hold water in the soil with their roots. They are also symbols of the forests we are losing every year.

In Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, the Inuit and other peoples of the Arctic understand that rocks can be mistaken for people in the mist, as John Luther Adams’ piece, Inuksuit, is a conduit where sounds and emotions originate in cairns, which mark the threshold of the spiritual landscape of the Inummariit — the Inuit who know how to survive on the land. Inuksuit, or cairns, indicate a place where life is renewed, where spirits radiate from stones, where decisions are made, and where festivals are held.

In the 20th Century, the Ojibwe communities of Canada conceive of weather as personal. Storms are people, ‘Thunderers,’ sounds that talk between the clouds. Wind isn’t just a sound, though, but a person. In the same way, musical notes create entire worlds in the space of a short piece, as in

Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 5.

Ysaÿe played in a beer hall band so renowned that Liszt, Joachim, Anton Rubinstein, Clara Schumann all came to hear it. It eventually outgrew the bierstube and became the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ysaÿe was a great virtuoso and composer of brilliant showpieces, his sonatas being an homage to the Etudes of Paganini, the encore showpieces of Sarasate and Saint-Saëns; but he was more than that; as a teacher, Ysaÿe taught the great string players (Primrose, Milstein, Gingold ) who in the 1950s and 60s passed on to us his goal of summoning up intangible feelings with tangible notes.

Like Fauré and Debussy, his composition was influenced by Baudelaire. He was a Symbolist, where notes stood in for the essences of, for instance, night and snow. At his death he was working on a piece called “the virgin of the stones,” hinting at sermons in stones, spirits in trees.

8 Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No.5 for Violin, Op. 27

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This film, then, evokes chords deeper than its surface. In our video, William begins the second movement of the sonata, the Dance rustique, surrounded by the Ojibwe Thunderers. When the music calms at 00:45, William finds himself transported to the lush aspen grove around Francis Kéré’s Xylem, his deconstructed tree.

When atoms change orbits, they release energy. William switches levels as a new energy courses into the music. As the theme develops at 1:04, William progresses up the hill to the fields past the Huffman cabin, built by early 1900s settlers on the Johnson Ranch quadrant of Tippet Rise.

At 1:21, William is back in the barn, the lawns and snowcapped Beartooths behind him out the window, although this time they are almost painted on the glass by the brushstrokes of condensation.

At 1:37, cumulus clouds roll in rapidly and thunder is heard as the first theme subsides.

At 1:45, the violin begins complex variations in thirds which question and take apart the structure of the original theme. For this very intellectual moment, William plays in the dark, so that sight doesn’t distract from the music.

Scales lead back to the outdoor storm at 2:43, as the music becomes expansive, sounding more like a concerto than a sonata: clouds scud, break up, and darken. This is an orchestral moment. The violinist and the sky begin to merge as night grows.

At 3:29, a dreamlike passage moves the piece into an ethereal realm, removed from issues of technique and virtuosity. At 3:37, the dark of the barn returns as the music turns meditative and fugal, falling down the keybed in plucked strings (one of Ysaÿe’s innovations) to the reprise, at 4:14, of the original Roma theme, emerging from the dark of the barn into the broad light of the groves around Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams.

At 4:34, a sliding chromatic scale plunges us into the coda and, again, as the pace increases, William’s site moves into the higher fields, flashing between dark and light, and then revisiting each of the sites of the short video in a visual fireworks matching the dizzying fingerwork on the violin. The last 45 seconds are a tour de force, the expected brillantine finish to this happy dance of the sky and land.

After the last flourish of the bow, for 10 seconds we hear running water, wind, thunder, and then the deluge: nature’s applause.

The synergistic cinematic style of the film offers a working parallel between music, land, and film, three objective correlatives working together.

The film changes sites as the music changes levels, grounding the Symbolism of Ysaÿe’s dreaming, Romantic age to the austere modern architecture of his Rustic Dance. The film’s style would resonate, I think, with Debussy and with Baudelaire, and we want to thank William and our audio-video team, Monte, James, Kevin, and Jim, for weaving together an imaginative accompaniment to Ysaÿe’s gorgeous showpiece. Their visual dance is more than rustic: it evokes the cycles of the earth itself.

—Tippet Rise co-founder, Peter Halstead 12 Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No.5 for Violin, Op.