Sarah Gait
Heroes: the shadows of a tragic mind
Created for ISA Digital 2020.
Cello improvisation: Sarah Gait
Audio and video footage and editing: Sarah Gait
Beethoven’s Egmont, Leonore, Coriolan: we see the exploits of youthful, active and valiant heroes and heroines, whether destined for a happy ‘ending’ or a tragic sacrifice. But what about the tragedy of the hero who grows old, facing a different foe – struggling to retain his grasp on life in a different sense, perhaps through the loss of physical faculties, such as hearing?
As for his warlike heroes, despite the battle with the physical, Beethoven surely grasped mentally a, perhaps increasingly intense, conviction of the artistic creation he aspired to bring into being – into a form of musical life which he himself could never again experience. Who can say what went on within the struggles and shadows of this aging hero’s own mind: struggles which we glimpse predominantly only through his music?
This improvisation, for the tragically aging hero, does not seek to replicate or to transcribe the state of mind of Beethoven – a task both impossible and futile. It seeks rather to express the eternal struggle and emotions that certainly must have crossed and battled within the ‘shadows of his mind’, as for so many other artists and humans – and to express this current of emotions within a present-day musical language.
Perhaps within the time of Covid – where we as musicians experience a battle between our artistic desire to create and share, and the restrictions of current human existence – it is not inopportune to aspire to create an artistic concept, that sees not only the tragedy, but also the hopeful possibility for rejuvenation: through the strength of human will, courage, belief and aspirations… just as Beethoven’s immortal last works live on, despite the adversities he faced.
With that motivation, to make opportunity from adversity, I sought in creating this digital work to utilise the very things that, through Covid, have changed most in my life during the last 6 months. Finding myself unexpectedly in the deep countryside for 6 months, I spent time in the studio where this video was filmed. This workshop, backing onto fields and woodland, is filled with old furniture, tools and assorted collections from the past years and centuries – most significant among these, the frame of the old grand piano that features in the later shots of the video. (This piano has been broken and unplayable as a keyboard instrument, since many years.)
Unnecessary to dwell on the comparisons that could be made: between this instrument which no longer fulfils its original function, and a composer whose physicalities also struggled to function as intended. Suffice only to show the chance for an unexpected redemption: for this instrument to have a new lease of life, though far from its original function.
The hammer blows: can they be reflected upon as part of the mental trauma of this shadowed mind? Or, in more direct reference, as an extreme extrapolation of how Beethoven would have assaulted his own piano? And is the greatest tragedy how the singing voice of his mind comes together with the silent piano…
The video material was recorded around midnight in several hours of unbroken improvisation in this studio. All the audio and video editing to create, from these raw materials, a finished digital concept, is my own – using only opensource software, again through a determination to create opportunity from adversity.
