Twenty-first-century advances in physics and astrophysics have taken us to the very limits of our understandings of the universe. Institutions, laboratories and experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, LIGO (the Laser Gravitational-Wave Observatory, based in Louisiana and Washington state) and the global telescope array known as the Event Horizon Telescope have discovered new fundamental particles, observed gravitational waves and captured direct images of black holes. These are, by some measures, the most advanced fields of scientific knowledge, as well as some of the most exciting and imaginatively adventurous. Given music's long and illustrious relationship to the physical sciences, it is a little surprising that more composers haven't engaged in detail with these developments in their music.
One who has done so, and for more than a decade and a half, is the Catalan composer Héctor Parra. His opera Hypermusic Prologue of 2008–09 was set to a libretto by the theoretical physicist Lisa Randall (author of a model for five-dimensional space); Caressant l'Horizon for chamber orchestra (2011) considers the warping of spacetime at the event horizon of a black hole. … limite les rêves au-delà, composed in collaboration with the cellist Arne Deforce and sound designer Thomas Goepfer, as well as the French physicist Jean-Pierre Luminet (with whom Parra also worked on the orchestral Inscape, 2018), extends such imagery across a still larger canvas. Over an unbroken 70 minutes, cello and live electronics take us on ‘a psycho-acoustic journey’ (quoting the composer's liner notes) from the origins of life on Earth, through hypernovae, the merger of two black holes (a phenomenon first observed by LIGO in February 2016), the crossing of the event horizon into a different universe and, finally, a perception of ourselves as ‘3D holograms of an encoded reality in 2D on the surface of the far reaches of the Universe’. A lot of the imagery, much of it speculative, of course, derives from a poem by Luminet that imagines a journey through a black hole, ‘L'astre qui fut lumière’.
I confess that Parra's 2001-like cosmological narrative – with its references to spaghettification and Poincaré dodecahedral space – had me reaching frequently for Wikipedia (with only limited enhancements to my understanding). More seriously, it also threatened to block my appreciation of the music itself. I do not object to metaphorical or programmatic superstructures around a musical work; indeed, many of my favourite composers are very fond of them. But the intricacy and apparent precision of Parra's programme (‘Gravitational shock and merger of the two black holes, followed by an immediate burst of gravitational waves of the LIGO type’ is a typical example) threatens to limit the listener's own imagination. An unfortunate and ironic outcome, given the context.
Yet the music itself is of such sumptuous and extraordinary immediacy that I was encouraged to persist, past the event horizon of the work's own supporting discourse, as it were. And here it becomes apparent that despite the specificity of the composer's descriptions, limite les rêves isn't intended as descriptive music. The opening section, ‘Life on Earth’, follows a broadly expansive trajectory, from protozoa to human language, but after this the precise correspondences are left to the listener. What we get instead are lines of force and interaction – of attraction and destruction, of approach and transgression. Thresholds, horizons, fields, tides. Forces that underpin the cosmological drama but that can equally apply to the interaction of a bow and a cello string, and to a cello and its live electronic expansion. In this respect, the three musicians create a complex system of intersecting orbits. Deforce, as one of new music's leading and most versatile cellists, brings a wealth of playing techniques and sounds to the table, but it is the role of Goepfer's electronics, which flip and roll like a particle spinning through space, that I particularly enjoyed. In the work's most surprising section – ‘Approaching Black Hole and Galactic Collision’ – the juxtaposition of Goepfer's soft, sinewave loops and Deforce's increasingly agitated playing captures, with genuinely affective power, the passivity of interstellar space and the collapse of fundamental particles. In the final section, ‘Return to Earth in Holography’, warped electronic reverberations serve as the holographic projections referred to above, a reality somehow more real than the cello physically in front of us.
Ultimately, while speculative astrophysics is Parra's chosen terrain, his subject is humanity – both its limits and its possibilities. In Hypermusic Prologue this took the form of a love story across different dimensions of the universe; in Caressant l'Horizon it was the heroic encounter with the unimaginable forces of the event horizon. In … limite les rêves au-delà, however, the story is extended into a kind of transcendence, a state of cosmological enlightenment. If you can find a way not to dwell too much on the details or specifics of that journey, you will find much to appreciate here.
