notes
The artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011) often included literary quotation and allusion--sometimes fragmentary, other times sprawling--among the scribbles and brilliant bursts of color on his surfaces. Placing these words--often in his barely legible freeform hand--on the canvas where asemantic figures nearly mimic letters and numbers, he creates a tension between seeing and reading.
By the time the viewer encounters the words included on the surface, they have passed through several filters: Twombly used translations of non-English texts, and he often altered texts (sometimes significantly) before using them in his work. The songs in the Grapheme series represent another such filter, as these words are removed one more level from their original source and set to music. Given Twombly's love for the ancient (the Pre-Christian Mediterranean, and its poets and philosophers), this kind of contextual and temporal dialogue seems appropriate.
Each Grapheme presents texts as Twombly used them--in their altered and translated form. The texts are taken from a number of different Twombly works and then assembled to form a kind of cento or collage poem. Grapheme III is organized around the theme of war, and uses texts from Twombly's epic paintings Fifty Days at Iliam, and Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, as well as from two sculptures--In Time the Wind Will Come and Destroy My Lemons, and Epitaph.
Several text fragments painted or drawn in the Iliad-inspired Fifty Days at Iliam are simply thematic ideas referencing the Trojan War, and not direct literary quotes. Among the list of names in the "House of Priam" panel, the name "Cassandra" stands out. Its stylized letters are larger and are placed over multiple instances of their own erasure. In Greek Mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophesy, but also the curse that nobody would believe her. As such, her predictions and warnings about the Trojan War were ignored. Her name is found throughout Grapheme III--repeated in florid lines at the opening, sung and whispered as interjections, and appearing at the end of the piece in a choked, erased utterance of only the "C" and "S" sounds.
The other prominent recurring text throughout Grapheme III is from the Greek poet Archilochus (7th century BC). In three separate moments, the soprano gradually reveals his fragment "In the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by". Across these three statements, the character of the vocal line and delivery shifts from sadness, to indifference, to arrogance. In the final section of the piece, the brutality of this text obliterates the delicate preceding passage of Rilke's text on the fragility and fleetingness of life.
Grapheme III was written for Jamie Jordan and Daniel Druckman.
By the time the viewer encounters the words included on the surface, they have passed through several filters: Twombly used translations of non-English texts, and he often altered texts (sometimes significantly) before using them in his work. The songs in the Grapheme series represent another such filter, as these words are removed one more level from their original source and set to music. Given Twombly's love for the ancient (the Pre-Christian Mediterranean, and its poets and philosophers), this kind of contextual and temporal dialogue seems appropriate.
Each Grapheme presents texts as Twombly used them--in their altered and translated form. The texts are taken from a number of different Twombly works and then assembled to form a kind of cento or collage poem. Grapheme III is organized around the theme of war, and uses texts from Twombly's epic paintings Fifty Days at Iliam, and Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, as well as from two sculptures--In Time the Wind Will Come and Destroy My Lemons, and Epitaph.
Several text fragments painted or drawn in the Iliad-inspired Fifty Days at Iliam are simply thematic ideas referencing the Trojan War, and not direct literary quotes. Among the list of names in the "House of Priam" panel, the name "Cassandra" stands out. Its stylized letters are larger and are placed over multiple instances of their own erasure. In Greek Mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophesy, but also the curse that nobody would believe her. As such, her predictions and warnings about the Trojan War were ignored. Her name is found throughout Grapheme III--repeated in florid lines at the opening, sung and whispered as interjections, and appearing at the end of the piece in a choked, erased utterance of only the "C" and "S" sounds.
The other prominent recurring text throughout Grapheme III is from the Greek poet Archilochus (7th century BC). In three separate moments, the soprano gradually reveals his fragment "In the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by". Across these three statements, the character of the vocal line and delivery shifts from sadness, to indifference, to arrogance. In the final section of the piece, the brutality of this text obliterates the delicate preceding passage of Rilke's text on the fragility and fleetingness of life.
Grapheme III was written for Jamie Jordan and Daniel Druckman.
