WINGATE: SYMPHONY NO. 5
“Trivium Cixousien”

(THIS PROJECT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS)

Movements:
I. The School of the Dead
II. The School of Dreams
III. The School of Roots
 
Notes:
Wingate’s Fifth Symphony (‘Trivium Cixousien’) is a musical homage to the great French experimental writer, dramatist, and theorist Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), whose work has been a perennial source of inspiration and delight for the composer since his discovery of her book Beethoven à jamais ou l'existence de Dieu [‘Beethoven Forever; or the Existence of God’] in 1993. The symphony’s movements take their titles from the three sections of Cixous’ other 1993 book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, and this trivium of ‘Schools’ underwrites this whole symphonic project. For Cixous, the steps on this ladder are in a downwards direction, ‘because the ascent . . . is towards the bottom.’ * The Fourth Symphony attempts to bring about this paradox of great beauty, so that we may perhaps momentarily hear with the ears of those ‘explorers of the lowest and deepest’.
 
To that end, the Symphony’s first movement (The School of the Dead) calls forth the powers of the orchestra’s low instruments in a funerary march which doubles as a kind of wordless chorus of ghosts, while the second movement (The School of Dreams) is a deliriously dour scherzo, rather like a dream-logic dance of the hours, leading itself both everywhere and nowhere. The Symphony’s final movement (The School of Roots) calls upon the services of a cathedral organ with 32-foot ranks, so that it may better explore the limits of the human auditory apparatus (attaining a frequency of just 16 Hertz), sending its melodic tendrils into the symphonic root beds. Although these literal sonic ‘depths’ might threaten to collapse into a facile programmaticism, the wider symphonic entity nevertheless struggles in Cixousien fashion (à la mode cixousienne) ever deeper against the limits of all human language—musical and/or otherwise, gravely invoking the oneiric powers of our most profound musical energies.

* Cixous, H. (1993) Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press.