Correspondence No. 7: “The Dog,” a microstory by Lydia Davis // “Six Pieces for Orchestra,” a composition by Anton Webern
“The Dog”: eight sentences, one paragraph. Her dog is laid out on a gurney, in a place with “a large flower garden and a fountain” (presumably a pet cemetery). He’s in front of “a sort of shed.” There are flowers laid on his neck, which suggests that a ceremony has just taken place. “I look away and then back – I want to see him one last time.” But he’s gone, wheeled away. The end.
Micromusic: as far as I know it’s not a genre, but if it were, Anton Webern would be known as one of the founders. He said: “we don’t want repetition, everything should always be new!” The Six Pieces for Orchestra take about 12-13 minutes to play in their entirety. But if we don’t count the funeral march (which is about five minutes long), the pieces average out to a little over a minute each – brief sketches in sound.
Webern was mourning his recently deceased mother, not his dog. He doesn’t take one last look at her. Instead, he writes the funeral march (marcia funebre, starting at 3:18), but it sounds less like a dignified march to the grave and more like a prelude to an avalanche or mudslide, with the deep growling of the earth erupting in violence at the end.
Each of the six pieces is complete in itself. It’s like six Lydia Davis-style stories, one after the other. Since “we don’t want repetition,” the pieces are made up of series of gestures, the basis for these brief episodes. You remember them as you remember events in a story. The outburst at the end of the second piece (1:36): is this a sudden crisis, or some kind of accident? How about this odd little music box popping up in the fifth piece (10:03)? I hear this as something like a merry-go-round at a fairground, filmed in glorious black and white. I can’t tell you why. A childhood memory perhaps, but your guess is as good as mine.
Your guess helps fill in the blanks, both in the music and in the story.
Pierre Boulez developed his own kind of correspondence in this essay, connecting the music of the Second Viennese School with the work of contemporaneous painters, such as Kandinsky and Mondrian.