ABSTRACT
I would like to think that some pieces work in quite mysterious ways – but I am drawn to things, both in life and art, which seem to define themselves quite clearly at some level or other. The paradox, however, is that oĞen something which appears straightforward will turn out to be quite complicated, and vice versa. It might even be worth risking a generalization and saying that things which have a consistent degree of simplicity or complexity will usually turn out be less interesting than those which work in different ways at different levels. I’m thinking for instance of the role of mountains in landscapes: the ones we can immediately recognize and name have very strong profiles but the detail of that landscape will include many forms which one does not see at first glance. The best pieces of Xenakis, or Feldman, or Beuys work like that. Equally there is that delight when one works through the initial complexity of a work to discover it is full of quite straightforwardly comprehensible individual elements. I’m just reading Joyce’s Ulysses properly for the first time and finding enormous pleasure in changing the focus of my aĴention – here the vocabulary, here the syntax, here the stylistic play – from section to section.
