Belvedere

I have long been fascinated by the work of the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, and have used several of his lithographic images as inspiration for my compositions. Their paradoxes, mathematical structures and understated but often deeply moving poetic content are endlessly fascinating, and Escher's obsession with craft and technique has also been an exemplary model.

A particular favourite of mine is "Belvedere", which depicts a beautiful scene of the Italian countryside and mountains with a viewing platform (the "belvedere" of the title) in the foreground. One of Escher's "impossible buildings", the belvedere is based on a visual paradox, its two levels being placed at an impossible right angle to each other. The bemused chap at its base in fact holds in his hands a structural replica of the paradox, while the poor prisoner bemoans his fate though no one listens.

For years I tried to imagine ways of translating this visual paradox into music. Though I was never able to find a workable solution, for some reason I formed a strong association with the impossible cube and chains of perfect fifth arpeggios, rising and falling in lattice-work combinations to represent the skewed cuboid structure that underlies Escher's print. These arpeggios seem to me like planar surfaces, and I thought of the different arpeggios presented at varying speeds as representing different perspectives on the same structure, just as in the print the belvedere's structure is seen differently depending on the particular view one takes at any given moment.

Though I never could attain an aural equivalent of Escher's print, my repeated failures in this endeavour had an odd side-effect: I began to associate particular rhythmic groupings of the fifths-based material (and melodic ideas that arise from the lattice-work) with different characters in the print. The same basic pitch material thus viewed from different rhythmic and textural perspectives essentially became leitmotifs for the prisoner, the man and woman preparing to climb the stairs (whom I call "the lovers"), the guys on the ladder etc... The piece that resulted is in effect the soundtrack for a non-existent film featuring these characters, or rather a mini instrumental opera. As I went on with the composition, it struck me how uncannily similar the motifs in the print are to characters and locations in the Hitchcock film Vertigo, and equally how similar the musical material I was dealing with is to some of the music that Herrmann composed for the great soundtrack to that film--hence the homage to one of my favourite film composers, Bernard Herrmann.

Commenting on the print, Escher said "Is it any wonder that nobody in this company can be bothered about the fate of the prisoner in the dungeon who sticks his head through the bars and bemoans his fate?" In my piece that situation is reversed, with the prisoner's leitmotiv (a descending scalar motif, often associated in music with sighing and lament) gradually assuming more importance throughout the course of the work until it takes over entirely in the final section.