Sound Bodies: Aufgang and Outscape by Pascal Dusapin
Poetry sings whilst music speaks. A community of voices underlies both spoken and musical language, originating in this echolalia where words and notes assemble according more to prosody than to grammar and solfege related rules. The resulting “intonations” lead to what Heidegger called Stimmung, ie. the affective tonality, characteristic of a given time, of a “choral or orchestral life”—which Rimbaud calls the foundational element of our humanity. Pascal Dusapin’s Aufgang and Outscape rest on this vocal community, where one ears the “Beyond” (Auf) and the “Outside” (Out) of this posthistory in which we now live: the subtle interlacing of solo and orchestral instruments invoke new tonalities, where other forms of temporality can be found—musical and poetic, of course, but also historical and political.