CardiovasCular Chopin
Ending at the Beginning with
Guido Van der Werve
Michael Maizels and Jenny Johnson
“Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Light of the Stars”
A s the camera slowly pans down the richly engraved walls, the rising, eupho-
nious sounds of the Warsaw Chamber Opera Choir and Orchestra fill the
baroque space of the seventeenth-century Church of the Holy Cross. IL
plaintive, modal piano lullaby that initially accompanies this purview gently gives
way first to the muted sounds of strings, and then the reverent, echoing voices of
a small choir resonating from the organ loft above. While the chamber orchestra is
impressively arrayed in the church’s imposing central apse, the camera fixates on the
figure of the pianist (also the composer) hunched over an impressive grand piano
shoehorned into the transept. The pianist himself also cuts an incongruous figure.
Though the oneiric logic that led the pianist to perform clad in a hooded wetsuit is
far from clear, the unusual attire appears not to hinder his performance.
Following his elegant opening solo, the pianist appears to wait, with hands folded,
for a clausula vera, a moment of tonal rest. Anticipating such a pause — which elides
deceptively with the introduction of a new theme in the choir — he silently stands up
from the piano, walks stiffly out of the church, and runs through the city center onto
the banks of the nearby Wisla river. (In music-theory parlance, this is an example of
enjambment, or the ending of one musical idea overlapping with the introduction of
another.) He dons goggles, zips his wetsuit, then leaps into the placid water, embark-
ing on the first leg of a triathlon that will cover 1703.85 kilometers, the equivalent
of seven-and-a-half consecutive Ironman distances.
So opens Nummer veertien, casa ( “Number fourteen, home” ), the most recent and
ambitious production from artist, filmmaker, composer, and endurance enthusiast
Guido van der Werve. Following the artist in elegantly shot panoramas as he swims,
pedals, and runs along the historic route between Warsaw and Paris, home was con-
ceived as van der Werve’s homage to the Romantic composer and virtuoso pianist
Frédéric Chopin (1810 –1849). Chopin — born Fryderykowi Chopinowi — died in Paris,
where he had spent the majority of his life in exile from his native Warsaw. Though
© 2015 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
PAJ 111 (2015), pag. 111–123. 111
doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00280
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he was buried in the renowned Père Lachaise cemetery, he requested that his heart
be returned to his native Poland. His sister Ludwika ferried the organ, preserved in
a jar filled with alcohol, back to Warsaw. The heart now rests immured in a pillar in
the Church of the Holy Cross in which home opens. The film is animated by van der
Werve’s attempt at a reciprocal gesture: carrying a cup full of Polish soil on his journey,
which he eventually places, at the film’s conclusion, on the composer’s tomb in Paris.
Although home elegantly builds upon many of the themes that are most significant
within the artist’s oeuvre — physical and emotional endurance, virtuosic performance,
and a sense of smallness within the natural world — our interest in this film lies
less in the window it provides into van der Werve’s work than in way it seems to
encapsulate an important thread of contemporary investigation that has received
insufficient scholarly attention. While our own moment is experiencing a resurgence
of explorations that cut across the traditional art/music divide, the more highly vis-
ible concerns of “sound art” — with an emphasis on sculptural installation and the
sonification of space — provide just one example of the kind of work being done in
the artistic and musical borderlands. Another, less well-analyzed thread of exploration
can be found in the productions of artists such as van der Werve, Ragnar Kjartansson,
and Luke Fowler, who produce long-form film, video, and performance works that
are underpinned by both themes and structures integral to the history of music. As
come, interpretation and historicization of these works require an analytic lens that
bridges gaps between art history, musicology, and musical analysis.
Nowhere is this need more apparent than in van der Werve’s productions, particolarmente
casa. While the central concern of this piece — the unfulfillable desire to return to
one’s origins — is legible in the film’s imagery, it is only through a joint consideration
of the aesthetic and musical devices at play that the artist’s nuanced meditation on
the impossibility of such returns comes into focus. This search for origins is at the
heart of the film’s music, which is framed within what the artist identifies as a “clas-
sical Requiem: three movements and twelve acts.” A requiem suggests mourning;
a mourning for Chopin, perhaps, but also a mourning for the idea of “home” as an
extant place to which one can in fact return. Mourning for the loss of one’s home
is further reflected in the harmonic language of van der Werve’s score. The twelve
acts comprising the requiem are each composed in a different key, a choice that
alludes to the dodecaphonic or twelve-tone methods of pioneering twentieth-century
composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez. With their new system
that utilized all chromatic pitches equally, these composers sought to destabilize
centuries-old musical ideologies that placed a stable tonic “home” pitch at the
center of compositional praxis.
Così, van der Werve’s musical language, while seemingly reliant upon the syntax
of tonality and its inherent pitch hierarchies, is formally assembled in ways that call
the idea of “home” into discomfiting question. Van der Werve structures his musical
language less around solid, conventional establishments of each section’s key than
around a series of circular peregrinations — episodic and repetitious minor-mode
chord progressions — that reflect his own physical, reciprocal journey in the film: UN
112 PAJ 111
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journey that returns from, rather than to, Chopin’s native Warsaw.1 No one pitch or key
determines the identity of this requiem — there is, tonally speaking, no real “home”
to which one could return.
NUMMER VEERTIEN: HOME:
REQUIEM IN THREE MOVEMENTS AND TWELVE ACTS
Van der Werve’s home is cast in three overarching movements, each of which corre-
sponds to the component distances he runs, bikes, and swims on his über-triathlon.2
These three movements are subdivided into four component acts that interweave
lush, hypnotic shots of the artist on his journey with other poetic reflections on
exile and return. These other acts — which read very much as the artist’s daydreams
during his prolonged, arduous exertion — cut from van der Werve’s own native city
of Papendrecht in the Netherlands to the sites of episodes in the peripatetic life of
Alexander the Great, another wanderer whose importance to the film seems largely
to rest in his role as a boyhood hero of van der Werve’s. The film is both accompa-
nied and framed by its soundtrack, whose twelve sections adhere to the liturgy of
the Christian Requiem Mass.
The first movement, “26.6 km,” illustrates the multi-part structure of home. After the
first act, “I Found Sadness,” which contains the opening of the piece in the Church
of the Holy Cross, the audience is transported in the second act (titled “Home” )
to Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great in what is today northern Greece.
Over the patient, almost languid sounds of strings and voiced harmony, subtitled
text introduces viewers to the origins of Alexander’s first campaign. We learn at
the conclusion of the act that, like Chopin, “he is never to return home.” The third
act, “1988,” takes viewers back to the Netherlands, where the local chamber groups
Promenade Orkest and Vocoza perform in front of the artist’s alma mater, the Prins
Constanijn school. This act includes one of the most striking moments in the film.
After the musicians have been have relocated to the banks of a small river, van der
Werve enters the scene from the right. His casual stroll belies the urgency of the
enormous flames shooting from his jacket and pants, E, in a gesture that reprises
his initial plunge into the Wisla, he submerges himself beneath the dark grey waters.
This plunge takes us to the fourth act, “Mother of Pearl,” the first filmic chapter that
focuses on the film’s main subject: the triathlon. Accompanied by luxurious choral
suspensions, delicate string sustains, and stratospheric vocal arches in the score, van
der Werve seems to glide effortlessly down the path of the Wisla. The tiny figure of
the artist, clad all in black, is dwarfed by the expansive landscape of fog-shrouded
forests, endless rolling hills, E, of course, the ceaselessly rushing river. The title
of the act refers to van der Werve’s mother, Louise, who, at the end of the 26.6 km
swim, is patiently waiting for the artist. She stands at the banks of the river, holding
van der Werve’s matte-black bicycle and sweeping racing helmet, which she word-
lessly exchanges for his dripping wetsuit. After receiving the bicycle, van der Werve
awkwardly jogs up the embankment to begin the second movement, “1388.12 km,"
on his bicycle.
MAIZELS and JOHNSON / Cardiovascular Chopin 113
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Guido van der Werve, Nummer Veertien, casa, 2013. Photo: © Guido van der Werve. Courtesy the
artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
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114 PAJ 111
The second and third movements follow the artist on the remainder of his journey
to Paris. One of the most striking developments is the increasing rapidity with
which the landscape shifts beneath van der Werve’s pedals. While the foggy banks
of the Wisla provide a captivating but nonetheless fairly consistent backdrop, IL
road along which van der Werve travels is soon slicing through open, sunny vistas
and then plunging into verdant, shaded forests. These roads speak of historical as
well as ecological transformations; the artist’s passage in front of a sign demarcating
the Franco-German border subtly recalls the legions that have passed through the
same cartographic corridor. These evocative changes in landscape provide a charged
visual counterpoint to the relative uniformity of the musical score. Despite the subtle
changes afforded by the chromatic shifts in key between each act, the score remains
otherwise rooted in cyclical, medium-tempo consonances in the strings and choir
that episodically drift between moments of plaintive, semi-cadential rest. Infatti,
the musical conclusions of most of the acts are elided with the wistful continuation
of the ambient environmental soundscape — the whirr of bike gears, the licking of
the water against the banks, or the whispered roar of faraway vehicle traffic. These
elisions contribute to an overall sense of sonic inconclusiveness, as though the music
could never itself have the last word.
Act three, “289.13 km,” a staggering run of well over one hundred miles, carries the
artist to his final destination in the heart of Paris. Upon his arrival in the metropo-
lis, a distinctively Parisian siren slices dramatically through the otherwise seamless
musical accompaniment. For the final act, “I Don’t Feel the Pain Anymore” — a title
that refers to Chopin’s final words — the visibly exhausted artist enters the church
of La Madeline, the site of Chopin’s funeral, and sits to listen to the conclusion of
his mass. It is a conclusion that, much like the rest of the score, seems inconclusive;
it does not definitively close so much as it simply ceases to exist. In the wake of
his music’s diegetic disappearance, van der Werve walks back out of the cathedral
and over to the nearby Père Lachaise cemetery. Accompanied by what now seems
like palpable silence, the artist removes his silver cup of soil from its zipped pocket,
bestows it on Chopin’s gravestone amidst the welter of flowers left by other admir-
ers, and walks away without a word.
THE ART OF GUIDO VAN DER WERVE
The epic home represents an apotheosis in the direction that van der Werve’s oeuvre
has taken up to this point. Building on his training in music as well as topics ranging
from archaeology and industrial design to Russian literature and chess strategy, van
der Werve began the present series of films — all titled with numbers, based on the
traditional naming convention for musical opuses — in the year 2000. Film — or, at
first, video — presented itself as an ideal means not only to condense a heterogeneous
set of influences into a single production, but also to overcome his fear of perform-
ing his compositions in front of an audience.4 Notably, the numbered compositions
start with “Number Two (Nummer twee),” a small sketch of a film in which van der
Werve, after staring morosely into the camera for nearly a full minute, is struck by a
car. When the ambulance arrives on the scene, its doors open to the delicate strains
MAIZELS and JOHNSON / Cardiovascular Chopin 115
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of Arcangelo Corelli’s 1714 Christmas Concerto. In place of uniformed paramedics, UN
quintet of young ballerinas in full regalia slides elegantly from the ambulance vehicle,
aligns in formation, and performs a symmetrical dance to the music, while the artist
lies inert on the pavement in the background.
Van der Werve’s further explorations of classical composition and absurdist perfor-
mance include his fourth numbered composition, I don’t want to get involved in this. IO
don’t want to be part of this. Talk me out of it. The film opens with a blank screen and
the solipsistic phrase “I woke up early and watched the sun rise. I felt it came up just
for me,” then cuts to the artist walking, solitary and somber, on a mist-shrouded pier
extending into the North Sea. From there, I don’t want makes several moves that will
be reprised in the subsequent home. First among these is van der Werve’s invocation
of Chopin. The diegetic score for I don’t want is Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 1 In
B-flat minor, which we see van der Werve performing on a wooden raft that floats
languidly down the fog-laden Twente canal. The artist’s dreamlike, reflective solitude
is soon interrupted by the imposition of a much larger craft. The multi-decked boat
is lined with a full orchestra performing Mozart’s Requiem in D minor — a piece
Quello, not coincidentally, Chopin selected for his own funeral at La Madeline — which
steadily grows louder as the orchestra approaches van der Werve and his small raft. As
the camera begins to focus on the orchestra and its soundscape begins to dominate,
we momentarily lose track of van der Werve, who reappears in dramatic fashion by
plunging from the sky into the river just as the piece ends.5
While van der Werve’s trope of epic endurance is broached by a pair of works he
executed near the North Pole — including a time-lapse piece in which the artist
slowly turns against the rotation of the earth for a full twenty-four hours — the most
significant predecessor to home is Nummer Twaalf: Variations on a theme: The King’s
Gambit accepted, the number of stars in the sky and why a piano can’t be tuned or wait-
ing for an earthquake. The film meditates on the infinite mathematics of chess games,
astronomy, earthquakes, and resonant frequencies, revealing analogous forms of
sublimity within each. Van der Werve composed his own music for The King’s Gambit,
Quale, while orchestrated for nineteenth-century classical instruments, more directly
refers to contemporary cinematic tropes: long, modal-minor swaths of repetitious,
medium-tempo lyricism whose affect is largely melancholic and contemplative. In a
subtle blend of the sublime and the absurd, this gravely serious music is performed
in the first section of the film by musicians that are squeezed next to chess players
crouching over games inside the cramped Marshall Chess Club of New York. IL
small string orchestra provides a humorously austere soundtrack to the otherwise
silent drama of chess-playing, and is also accompanied by one of the chess boards
itself, which has been fashioned into a slightly detuned piano that plays a muted
tone each time a player moves a piece. The harmonic language of The King’s Gambit
is similar to the one that van der Werve eventually revisits in home with less humor.
The repetitious, circular nature of this music is transformed from surreal hyperbole
and repurposed in home to assume the much weightier valence of one’s inability to
find a way back home.
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THE FIGURE OF THE ROMANTIC: THE ART HISTORY
In both home and The King’s Gambit, van der Werve draws heavily on the lyri-
cism, grandiosity, and melancholy that characterize the art, music, and literature of
nineteenth-century Romanticism. Infatti, the “character” that van der Werve plays
in his films — the solitary figure, clad all in black, suffering in isolation to give birth
to a direct expression of raw, sublime experience — seems a directly appropriated
archetype of the Romantic creator. A visual comparison between van der Werve’s self-
presentation in his films — with his black clothing, slim build, and blustering, unkempt
hair — and Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above the Mists (1817–18), an icon
of High Romantic painting, demonstrates the importance of this visual language
in van der Werve’s work. Allo stesso modo, van der Werve’s most prominent themes — the
yearning for a lost homeland, the journey to the extremes of nature, the meditation
on the infinite sublime — find similar corollaries in the writings of Goethe, Fichte,
Schiller and Novalis. But as numerous critics have noted, the Romantic sweep in
van der Werve’s work is nearly always complicated by a nagging sense of futility or
absurdity. In turning against the rotation of the earth, or completing seven consecutive
Ironmans, van der Werve metastasizes the Romantic gesture into something beyond
itself, something that seems unable to hold as its own justifiable end.6
While this ambivalent, even ironic cast comes partly from the reticent personality
of the composer, it must also be understood as the product of translating these
Romantic motifs into the space of contemporary artistic practice. In this vein, one
of the most significant predecessors for van der Werve’s films can be found in the
explorations of early performance artists, particularly those of Chris Burden and van
der Werve’s fellow Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. These figures both sought to reinterpret
the image of artistic creation forged by suffering; their work centered on performing
and documenting arduous trials or acts of extreme danger.7
Many of their performances have marked similarities to van der Werve’s subsequent
productions. Van der Werve’s first filmed performance — a somewhat clumsy staging
of an artistic suicide by gunshot — bears more than a passing resemblance to Burden’s
famed Shoot — in which the artist instructed a friend to shoot him at a distance of
fifteen feet with a .22 caliber rifle. Tuttavia, the most striking parallel is with Ader’s
lavoro, particularly his final, baroque production In Search of the Miraculous, che è
perhaps the grandest example of a piece like home: a seemingly impossible voyage
resituated as an aesthetic act. As the second part of an imagined three-part epic, Ader
commissioned a choir to sing traditional sailing songs while he set off on a small
craft, which he planned to sail from Cape Cod across the Atlantic. Ader himself was
subsequently lost at sea; his craft was discovered six months later off of the coast of
Ireland, but the artist’s body was never recovered.
It is striking, Poi, that van der Werve claims to only have investigated the work
of Freidrich and Ader after peers and critics began making these comparisons.8
Undoubtedly, some awareness of the doomed In Search of the Miraculous must
have informed home, but any thematic similarities to Ader’s work belie important
MAIZELS and JOHNSON / Cardiovascular Chopin 117
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differences in the structure and meaning of the respective productions. Ader and
Burden were a part of a generation of performance artists that, as art historian
Howard Singerman has emphasized, are “working in the tradition of sculpture as
actual, painting as illusional.” 9 For these figures, the performed gesture became a
way to extend the Romantic tradition of the spatialized artwork as precisely not an
illusion. Just as the nineteenth-century critic and theorist Johann Herder explained
that “sculpture is truth, whereas painting is a dream,” Burden and Ader exposed
themselves to real danger as a means of producing fundamentally truthful art.10
This is not to suggest that van der Werve’s films are somehow dissembling, but rather
that the stakes of the real-ness of his arduous journey are fundamentally different.
The meaning of aesthetic literalness, especially for Burden, was inextricably linked to
a larger politics of authenticity, and by extension, to the cultural and social upheaval
of the late 1960s. For van der Werve, the genuinely grueling nature of his journey
becomes not a way of exposing his body to the natural (Ader) or industrial (Burden)
sublime, but rather functions as a more retrospective gesture. In van der Werve’s art,
the endurance of arduous trials is a performance of a kind of pre-scripted score, con
his extreme endurance taking the place of a more traditional demonstration of an
unusually refined artistic skill — a performance that showcases virtuosity.
THE MUSICOLOGICAL FIGURE OF THE ROMANTIC
Van der Werve’s imaginative engagement with notions of virtuosity, and his aware-
ness of a historical condition of afterward-ness, reveals how his most important
artistic interlocutors are not only Ader and Burden but also his imagined versions
of canonized musical performers and composers, such as Mozart, Beethoven, E
most of all, Chopin. Van der Werve’s aesthetic engagement with figures of classical
and especially Romantic music reveals his awareness of classical music’s profound
connections to the aforementioned themes that populate so much of his work: sub-
limity and the Sturm und Drang solipsism of the Romantic artist, to be sure, but also
absurdity, futility, and danger. His Friedrich-esque comportment has its own set of
(interrelated) references to the history of music. Van der Werve’s unkempt hair reprises
the wildly mussed tresses of the famously depressed and heartbroken Beethoven;
his slim, black-clad figure is resonant with the wiry, black-tailed body of Mahler,
who would die young from the cardiovascular stresses of conducting. His pianistic
presence on various physical precipices of danger (such as playing a piano atop a
raft floating precariously in water) brings to mind the physical fragilities of Chopin,
Mozart, and Schubert, all of whom died young after months of illness, languishing
over unfinished pieces at pianos.
Van der Werve’s use of music-historical tropes in the context of artwork that explores
physical danger and endurance also brings to mind aesthetic dangers that face the
contemporary classical composer, who assumes the perilous role of attempting to
compose music in the wake of musical figures whom we now consider, perhaps in
a continuation of Romantic hyperbole, to have been towering geniuses. By scoring
his own films with accessibly consonant, lyrical, and modal music, van der Werve
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Guido van der Werve, Nummer Veertien, casa, 2013. Photos: © Guido van der Werve. Courtesy the artist and
Luhring Augustine, New York.
MAIZELS and JOHNSON / Cardiovascular Chopin 119
arguably “endangers” himself by subjecting his score to the probability of intense
twenty-first-century criticism. One imagines this criticism to come especially from
academically trained composers, many of whom tend to avoid such language or
dismiss it as “movie music,” a bygone hybrid of sentimental Romanticism and
austere Renaissance piety that no longer seems relevant to today’s post-Industrial,
cosmopolitan milieu.
Yet the experience of van der Werve’s soundworld in the visual context of his works
suggests that the artist is distinctly aware of his own music’s connection to obso-
lescence, its misplacement in time, and its semiotic capability to evoke themes of
history and an imagined past. Van der Werve’s yearning lyricism, especially in home,
seems animated beyond the simplistic expression of sadness or melancholy, as might
characterize similar musical choices made in the soundtracks of commercial films
or television. The use of modal harmony in home seems bracingly indicative of the
dangers of nostalgia, of the circularity of memory, and of the simultaneous absurdity
and sublimity of looking back over one’s shoulder to the storied past of cultural his-
tory and our own inaccessible places of origin.
TONIC OR HOME KEY
While home ends with van der Werve depositing a cup of Polish soil on Chopin’s
Parisian grave, our first clue that the film is about the impossibility of accessing the
past lies in its complex, ambivalent engagement with the music of Chopin. For a
work that ostensibly pays homage to the Polish composer, the Requiem Mass decid-
edly avoids any Chopin-esque musical tropes, including virtuosic piano writing and
extensive chromaticism. Invece, van der Werve’s score (composed with guidance
from Benjamin C.S. Boyle) is written for string orchestra and choir, with only a spare
piano solo at the film’s opening, and is characterized by an almost eerie stillness,
an austere continuity that resonates with the visual immensity of the film’s natural
landscapes. Chopin’s own musical sensibilities are nowhere to be found. Despite
van der Werve’s exploration of instrumental timbres and emotive intensities that
are directly analogous to those of nineteenth century, his own harmonic language
almost seems to confirm Chopin’s death, both physically and sonically.
The harmonic language in question is cast in modal minor, a scale often understood
to denote a dark or melancholic affect. While Chopin’s language was no stranger
to similarly melancholic keys, the far more dynamic and volatile nature of Chopin’s
formal pacing is conspicuously absent in van der Werve’s much more static and
unchanging score. All twelve acts oscillate dreamily between lengthy moments of
haunting, straight-toned Renaissance vocal polyphony and undulating, elegiac strings.
Despite van der Werve’s musical reliance on key signatures and extensive tonic pro-
longations, his frequent refusal to make use of what is called a “leading tone,” or a
note that strongly establishes the tonic or “home key” of a piece, lends the music
a floating, non-urgent quality. In contrast to Chopin’s goal-oriented phrasing, van
der Werve’s music contains little sense of a vector or goal.
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Like the landscape it underscores, the music is itself an environment, a physical space
that van der Werve’s athletic efforts occupy. This music never seems to “cadence”
or rest fully; the harmonic memory of one movement is quickly recapitulated when
the next movement begins. This endlessness reflects the physical endurance of van
der Werve’s über-triathlon, the repetitious breathing and physiological gestures
required to complete it, and the ceaseless rhythms of the body: the heart, the lungs,
and the entire cardiovascular system. One does not listen to this music so much as
embody it, becoming immersed in its vastness, and matching one’s own breathing
to its continuous, meditative undulations. These cardiovascular dimensions of van
der Werve’s music also bring to mind Chopin’s heart, the organ that was removed
posthumously and returned, without its body, to the place where Chopin was born.
Although the format has deeply historical overtones, the actual musical structure of
van der Werve’s Requiem — twelve movements in twelve different keys — is connected
with the mid-twentieth-century development of dodecaphony. Music composed using
this system is based not upon the singular supremacy of a single pitch or key, Ma
instead upon a tone row, or an ordered set of all twelve chromatic pitch classes. Questo
tone row, in place of a single note or key, allows all twelve pitches to be equally vital
to a composition’s identity, and also permits other musical parameters to emerge as
central to the music’s formal design, such as instrumental timbre. Van der Werve’s
music sounds nothing like the harsh, cacophonous sonorities that populate many
twelve-tone pieces, yet his decision to structure his more traditional music accord-
ing to what effectively amounts to a massive tone row is a clear reference to the
bracing aesthetic philosophy that drove Arnold Schoenberg to devise this system
in the first place: a belief that music should be emancipated from the hegemony of
one singular “home” key or pitch.11
The impossibility of going home is thus reflected not only in the music’s covertly
dodecaphonic structure, but also in the way that this system scaffolds a series of
peregrinations within a delimited musical space. Such a system by definition cannot
begin or conclude, merely cycle back on itself. The cyclicality of the twelve musical
acts of van der Werve’s Requiem, which proceed through an ordered cycle of the
twelve chromatic keys, poetically mimics the circular yet circuitous journey of van
der Werve from Chopin’s birthplace to his grave. These journeys are ongoing and
incomplete, like the music itself; they bring us full circle, but only to reveal that a
search for home will simply bring you back to where you began, longing without
fulfillment. It cannot be accidental that this most musical, most arduous, of journeys
ends not with one of the twelve chromatic pitches, but with no pitch at all. Con
characteristically flat affect, van der Werve departs Chopin’s grave in silence.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
MAIZELS and JOHNSON / Cardiovascular Chopin 121
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NOTES
1. A more technical explanation of the music’s inherent circularity is as follows: by being
cast in twelve movements that are each in a different key, the piece necessarily ambulates
(albeit circuitously) around the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is a chart used in Western
musical theory to demonstrate how the twelve equal-tempered pitch classes are related by
fifths in terms of their key signatures. The circle always begins with the key of C major (or A
minor). G major (or E minor), a fifth up from C (or A), has one sharp; D major (or B minor), UN
fifth up from G (or E), has two sharps; and so forth. This is a useful chart for students of music
theory, as it illustrates why tonic-dominant, or fifth-based, relationships are so important for
tonal music: the key signatures are closely related, and the dominant chord of a given tonic
chord contains that tonic chord’s leading tone, or the pitch directly below the tonic, Quale
naturally wants to resolve up to the tonic and establish its supremacy.
2. Van der Werve numbers of all of his films in the tradition of opus numbers. Though the
artist customarily translates the non-numerical titles of his work (in this case, “home” ), he
typically leaves the number in the original Dutch. We have followed this convention, anche
as the Dutch standard to leave the subtitle capitalized, in this article.
3. In music-theory parlance, a “cadence” is a conclusive moment, or a place of resolved
tension. In classical music, cadences almost always occur at the end of a composition, E
are also found at the ends of phrases or sections. The word “cadential” can denote both a
specific musical cadence and a general feeling of musical conclusion.
4. Ciara Moloney, “Guido van der Werve: Minor Pieces, The Model, Sligo, 16 April–12 June,
2011,” Paper Visual Art Journal, May 1, 2011, http://papervisualart.com/?p=4964.
5. Raul Martinez, “Following Cortazar: Guido Van der Werve,” Art in America, Luglio
10, 2009, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/everything-is-going
-to-be-alright-/.
6. Ibid.
7. Howard Singerman, “Chris Burden’s Pragmatism,” in Chris Burden: A Twenty Year Survey
(Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988), 19–28; Alexander Dumbadze, Bas
Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 103–26.
8. Martinez, “Following Cortazar.”
9. Singerman, “Chris Burden’s Pragmatism," 19.
10. Johann Gottfried Herder, Scultura: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pyg-
malion’s Creative Dream, Jason Gaiger, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 45.
11. The order of the keys of the twelve movements creates a 12-note scale, or tone row:
D – E flat – E – F sharp – B – C sharp – G sharp – F – B flat – G – C – A).
MICHAEL MAIZELS is currently Mellon Curator of New Media Art at the
Davis Museum at Wellesley College, where he has presented exhibitions
of art and music, including audio works by La Monte Young, Terry Riley,
Marcel Duchamp, and Bruce Nauman. He is at work on his second book,
Radical Composition, which will address interrelationships among artists and
composers such as Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, La Monte Young,
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Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk. In addition to his work at the Davis, he
has also served as resident dramaturg for the experimental opera company
Opera Cabal.
JENNY OLIVIA JOHNSON is a composer and sound artist currently teach-
ing at Wellesley College. Her music is often concerned with abstract repre-
sentations of overwhelming emotional experiences. Her scholarly work on
synaesthesia, musical memory, and trauma has been published in Women
and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture and the Transcultural Music
Review. Her interactive sound installation “Glass Heart” is scheduled for
exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2017.
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MAIZELS and JOHNSON / Cardiovascular Chopin 123
