slacken tired shrouds

Forces: String Quartet

Slacken tired shrouds plays on the themes of forgetting and memory, unclosable distances, and ritual acts. Underlying the musical material is a constantly-present palimpsest of a bittersweet rondeau by Machaut in which he expresses his fear of being forgotten by his former lover. The title is based on a line from a Petrarch sonnet that draws on themes from Homer’s Odyssey to describe the inner turmoil of continuously thwarted satisfaction: the impossibility of safe harbour. In this poem we also find the idea of oblivion or forgetting: ‘My ship, full of oblivion, sails on a bitter sea.’ For me, this is the abjection at the heart of a terminally incomplete journey; an always and forever incomplete memory. In Greek mythology, Lethe (the river of oblivion) has been ascribed to extant rivers from time to time in history for the purposes of realpolitik: to forget one’s differences as one crosses a border. Circling back to the final theme, the Machaut palimpsest is analogous to a half-forgotten song: it constitutes in this piece a ritual of remembering and an attempt at reproduction. To turn Benjamin’s famous analysis on its head, art neither as ritual nor as reproduction, but art as ritual reproducing: the act of anxiously gathering up some semblance of a fading possibility to project into the world.