‘Groping for the ungraspable is the most satisfying of modern pastimes, where the satisfaction lies in the fact that satisfaction is impossible.’ – Cornelius Cardew ^[1]

Robert Adlington argues that there is a type of musical movement which creates the possibility for path-like metaphors to arise, leading listeners to perceive music as an event of motion in linear time, with forward direction.^[2] As a listener to a music performance, even if I can decide to engage in non-linear listening,^[3] my experience of the moment of the act of performance will undoubtedly be influenced by the common linear perception of time, that everyday perception of time, the ‘single time: the time of our experience: uniform, universal and ordered’.^[4] As a performer, I cannot give in to that common perception of time but must question every aspect of the time and temporality of performance. These questions of time and temporality became pressing in connection with the pieces from my focus repertoire.^[5] These are pieces that in their design have an extreme superposition of material that is unlikely to be performed in entirety without some level of hierarchical order put in place for each of its performances. Pieces which are extremely precise and determinate in their design yet in which sonic and timbral characteristics are blurred, unexpected, and unrepeatable to the point they do not have a fixed sounding result, and thus become unconceivable in the mind based on anything previously “heard”.^[6] In this context, when I think about the piece and its sound, movement, and music in relation to all of my own movement to produce the sounding of that piece, I must question the relation between temporality and the piece’s existence, and I do so by thinking about concepts and asking myself questions in the following ways:

• Sound exists as an object in physical space only in one split moment of time.
• A sound percept appears only in relation with one exact moment of time.
• The consciousness of the moment signifies that it is already in the past.
• For how long does a sound exist within me as a performer?
• Recorded sound is the history of an event.
• Our memory of sound is a subjective record of the past.
• In my body as a performer the sound is recorded in the mind, the muscles, the soul, all – separately or collectively?
• How long does embodied sound exist within me as a performer?
• The sound is a measure of time. The time is a measure of space. The time and the space are the measure of temporality. The temporality is existence.
• What is the meaning of temporality in playing music?

When I speak about temporality in the context of these “impossible” pieces, I am taking a cue from Carlo Rovelli’s argument that the growth of our knowledge has subsequently led to disintegration of the previous notions of the structure of time. ‘What we call “time”’, he writes, ‘is a complex collection of structures, of layers.’^[7] I consider each layer of time a space occupied by a temporality, and each temporality as one existence.

A piece has its existence, independent of a linearly passing perception of time. A performer is a second existence, another temporality. When these two layers of existences enter into a conversation, there is a superposition of temporalities in play.^[8] It is the interaction of these two existences relative to each other that interests me in the “impossible” pieces of this study. The difficulties of these pieces are characterised as being on the verge of possibility, which in turn made them less accessible to performers, hindered opportunity to be performed and in some cases even stalled their completion. Yet in each case, after a certain time this impeded state has passed. If the piece has its temporality and so does the performer, what appears as “impossible” is rather a situation where the performer’s current perspective has not enabled a proper relationship to the piece. If a performer is able to change their viewpoint, a ‘light cone’^[9] of thinking, feeling, and doing may appear.^[10] In the context of these extremely difficult pieces, the ‘practicality of the impossible’ is located in sustained self-encouraged dedication,^[11] looking for solutions and remedies to overcome the challenges. In this sense, temporality is not simply a question of duration of the piece, its existence in everyday time. It is an existence in time-space which envelops all agents of the piece, and includes the preparation whereby the performer creates a relationship in order to translate a written score into a sounding event in one moment in physical time and space.

In each performance, by interpreting the score, I find I ‘bear witness to its precarious possibility of existence in an “open” space of collisions, of momentary fusions between word and referent’.^[12] My title Temporality of the Impossible recognises that while these pieces can seem impossible for a while, through adjustments in my performance practice and ‘musicking’^[13] the “impossible” state of existence becomes one surmountable layer of these superposed temporalities, this ‘legion of times’.^[14] Sharing possible practical trajectories for rendering the “impossible” possible, my aim is for any other violinist either to use some of the approaches described, or to find in them inspiration to create their own.

• ^[1]Cornelius Cardew, ‘Notation: Interpretation, etc.’, Tempo, 58 (1961), p.22.
• ^[2]Robert Adlington, ‘Moving beyond Motion: Metaphors for Changing Sound’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128/2 (2003), 297-318.
• ^[3]Sciarrino speaks about la forma a finestre [‘shapes with windows’], whose premise is that each work is created by a layering process and is dependent on memory. It implies that, to discover every layer of the piece, the listener must not only listen in the “now” but also rely on memory. Memory acts as a canvas on which all the layers of music are laid out and while initially the listener is passing through the piece in forward motion, he has the capacity to move back and forth in this “memory space”. It is in this way that all the layers and meanings of the work are discovered. See Salvatore Sciarrino, Le figure della musica da Beethoven a oggi (Milano: Ricordi, 1998), pp. 97-148. For more on ways of listening see Richard Glover, Bryn Harrison, and Jennie Gottschalk, Being Time: Case Studies in Musical Temporality (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).
• ^[4]Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (UK: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 171.
• ^[5]The choice of pieces for the focus repertoire is discussed in Chapter 1.1, and a list of these pieces is provided in Appendix A; a list of supplementary pieces can be found in Appendix B. [Full Thesis available here, via University of Huddersfield's repository]
• ^[6]Levels of difficulty, material and hierarchy, and “impossible” demands are discussed in depth in Chapter 1.1 and Chapter 2; sonic identities are discussed in Chapter 4. [Full Thesis available here, via University of Huddersfield's repository]
• ^[7]Rovelli, The Order of Time, p.3.
• ^[8]Rovelli, p.15.
• ^[9]Rovelli, pp.45-50.
• ^[10]In case of some pieces the change in perspective comes from searching for technique, in some cases it is related to the instrument, in others to the notation, and in some it is about time as duration. All these aspects will be discussed at length within the research, with examples.
• ^[11]Cage, ‘John Cage in conversation with Thomas Moore and Laura Fletcher’.
• ^[12]George Steiner, ‘On Difficulty’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36.3 (1978), p. 275.
• ^[13]Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
• ^[14]Rovelli, The Order of Time, p.15.

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