LAB II: Mystery of Time
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by JASPER CROONEN
Giovanni Gabrieli Symphoniae Sacrae (1597)
Oscar Jockel paths in the sky (2023)
Arvo Pärt Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977)
Miloslav Kabeláč Mystery of Time (Mysterium času), Op. 31 (1957)
-----
14.11.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
Tick
Tock
Tick
Tock
Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week … At first glance, time seems a straightforward concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a long time, we humans believed that life progressed in a straight line. A timeline on which one point follows another.
Over the past century, that perspective has changed. Under the influence of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, time and space are now seen as inseparably linked. To locate an event in what is known as spacetime, you do not mark a point on a line, but plot coordinates in a four-dimensional field: you need three to locate something in space; time makes it four-dimensional.
A new relationship between time and space
The theory might seem particularly suited to science fiction writers – anyone who has seen the film Interstellar, for example, knows how flexible time and space can be. Yet as early as the sixteenth century, the composer Giovanni Gabrieli knew that the placement of musicians affects the echoes of their sound, and therefore the experience of a work and its unfolding in time. For his Symphoniae Sacrae, he positioned his performers in different corners of St Mark’s Basilica, using space and time as a compositional effect.
Five centuries later, in 2023 to be precise, composer and conductor Oscar Jockel distributes his musicians around the concert hall in a similar way. His paths in the sky is written as a massive, slowly evolving orchestral sound. It is a wave of sound that gradually engulfs you, without washing over you head-on. Jockel divides the ensemble into five groups that largely reflect the traditional sections of a symphony orchestra: groups 1 and 3 are the strings (without double basses), group 2 the brass, group 4 the woodwind, while group 5 consists of two percussionists, a harpist and the double basses.
Only this last group sits on the stage – assuming the architecture of the concert hall allows it. Ideally, the other groups play from the balconies, positioned around the audience. The two string groups are also placed as far apart as possible to bring out the music’s spatial effects. Paths in the sky disorients and unsettles listeners and performers alike, all the more so because the work is normally performed in complete darkness. As a listener, you do not know where the sound will come from; as a musician, this new position in the hall calls for a new understanding of time. It changes your relationship with your fellow players, and especially with the conductor, who tries to keep time throughout. Only in the final section do the musicians gradually walk through the audience towards the stage, still playing, towards a shared point in both time and space.
Timelessness
Arvo Pärt, meanwhile, has made timeless compositions something of a trademark. His particular form of minimalism, the bell-like tintinnabuli, seems lifted out of that four-dimensional grid mentioned earlier – perhaps this is why his music is so popular as a soundtrack to futuristic films such as Gravity and Navigaator Pirx.
His Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten takes this timelessness to its extreme. The entire work is built as a canon on a descending A minor scale. The tubular bell struck by the percussionist throughout the work serves as the tonal centre. Meanwhile, all the other instruments seem gradually to search for the right note, specifically one of the notes of the A minor triad. The constant small shifts give this relatively short piece, lasting around six minutes, a slightly hazy quality.
That feeling of being lifted out of time is a deliberate choice on Pärt’s part. His work is an elegy for Britten, who died the year before it was composed. Pärt reinforces the intention expressed in his title by beginning and ending the work with composed silence. He opens with three (notated) beats of rest. At the end, none of the instruments is still playing: only the resonance and overtones of the tubular bell remain. Pärt’s Cantus is, in other words, a reflection on an entire human life: the music emerges from the great void and fades back into infinity. In between lies that tiny span of a human life, over almost as soon as it begins.
A scientific or human question
Mysterium času by the Czech composer Miloslav Kabeláč (1908–1979) is not only the final work in our exploration of time; it also gives this LAB concert its name: Mystery of Time. As with Arvo Pärt, the composition seems boundless. Kabeláč begins his work with a chorale melody and uses a passacaglia bass as its foundation. Yet while these traditional forms often serve to create rigid structures, here the music seems to move with extraordinary freedom, almost without pulse, rhythm or tempo.
That organic feeling should come as no surprise. According to musicologist Jaroslav Mihule, who discusses the work in a CD booklet, Kabeláč drew inspiration for this piece from stargazing at night. With friends, he would often discuss the fixed order governing everything, and the emotional excitement stirred by cosmic events. It is this tension between structure and chaos that makes the work so affecting.
Especially when Mystery of Time is also considered in the context of the political history in which it was created. In the CD booklet mentioned earlier, Mihule also uses the term spacetime. Physics, then, is never far away. But locating Kabeláč’s music in four dimensions brings us above all to a turbulent point in the continuum. The composer lived through a period of upheaval, experiencing two world wars and, above all, the annexation of his homeland by the Soviet Union, with all its consequences for a self-declared democrat such as Kabeláč.
Seen in this light, the mystery of time in the title is not solely an attempt to answer questions of physics. The “mystery of time” is just as much, and perhaps above all, about our inability to understand the times we live in. Our Mystery of Time may have its origins in the exact sciences, but the mystery is above all a human one.
