N. Andrew Walsh's Labyrinthus: Hic Habitat Musica – Ergodic Scores of the Postwar Avant-Garde is devised as a puzzle for the reader to solve. In the ‘User's Guide’ of the book's foreword, the author provides a disclaimer, or more appropriately, a warning: ‘it is nevertheless desirable to state here, as a hazard for which the reader should be prepared, that traversal of the text necessarily will encounter sections requiring nontrivial effort to read, and that some of which nevertheless will remain inaccessible’ (p. xiv). Instead of providing a ‘text passively received by a reader’, this book requires the user to ‘make decisions in the traversal and production of the text that entail manifest consequences for the use of the text itself, one of which is its own accessibility’, which Walsh insists is ‘less-hierarchical’ (p. xv). The various minefields and puzzles of the text include but are not limited to:
1. A chapter titled ‘Pauline Oliveros – To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation’ that has been encrypted in numbers from 00 to 51 and requires a ‘keytext’ that ‘was printed in limited numbers in a separate volume, of which copies may be obtained from the author upon request’ (p. 348).
2. Footnotes written in the undeciphered text of the Voynich Manuscript, currently at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Central European manuscript, the Voynich Manuscript's origin, language and purpose ‘are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text’.Footnote 1
This presents a quagmire for a reviewer. Solving a puzzle is a private affair that bestows personal benefit through the act itself. How does one summarise a book that vehemently asks for active engagement from each individual and defies coherence in the ordinary sense of a review? In defining ‘ergodic’ for the reader, Walsh even acknowledges the difficulty for a critic or analyst of ergodic literature. One of the four characteristics of ergodic literature is ‘transiency’, which means that the reviewer or critic can't be sure that another reader has read precisely the same text. The other characteristics are aporia (inaccessibility), participation and the intrigant/intriguée relationship instead of author/reader, composer/musician. For Walsh, ‘if meaning is to be experienced in the negotiation of the intrigue, it lies in the adoption of previously unknown modes of thinking necessary to traverse the event, and thus in deliberately following a path that is unfamiliar’ (p. 21).
Thus, for this review, I will undertake a very unfamiliar path, but one that I hope will provide some insight into Labyrinthus and as well contribute to the collective knowledge of this book as ergodic score, as various musicians such as Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew and Ming Tsao have contributed to the history of Karlheinz Stockhausen's difficult-to-interpret Plus-Minus (pp. 114–21). Specifically, I will directly quote a selection of the passages in the book that cite (in footnotes, not included here) the Voynich Manuscript, meaning that these citations are simply written symbols whose meaning is unknown. There are 38 such citations (17 selected here), distributed pretty equally through the text, and I believe that the sentences that contain these citations give a sense of the content and tone of the book to the reader, who may then make a decision for themselves whether to embark on a Labyrinthus reading journey. Perhaps it will even be of benefit to Walsh to have a collection of sentences that he deemed worthy to cite the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.
I will say, however, that in preparing for this review, my travels in the land of ‘ergodic scores’ have been thought-provoking, confusing and absurd, and for those who have the time and patience, Labyrinthus is a kaleidoscopic, well-researched rebus possibly worth tackling: if one enjoys going down rabbit holes, this is the book for you, where the footnotes often overtake the main text in interesting tidbits. Labyrinthus is free to download on the Wolke Verlag website,Footnote 2 and the pdf version, contains hyperlinked text and citations, which are useful.
Translations undertaken by the reviewer are in brackets. German text was translated with the help of DeepL, and the decoding was done by hand through guesswork of common words to match the start of the ‘keytext’ with the ‘codetext’, followed by linear functions in Microsoft Excel.
‘The attenuated hierarchy between the participants – evoking the rhizomatic structures of postmodernist philosophy – and the dynamic exchange between them, remains a phenomenon lacking description in systematic terms.’ (p. 10)
‘This further invokes the second aspect of the Labyrinth as discussed in Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, namely the tension between the creator of the labyrinth – who is usually presumed to know its structure – and the one who must negotiate the maze – who does not – built or planted by the former.’ (p. 20)
‘Certain aspects of the analysis, particularly those addressing independent agents, evoke the narrative sense of biography, while others follow the ecological or taxonomic perspectives of the natural sciences.’ (p. 29)
‘The Cornish School's radio studio was built in 1935 ‘in the midst of the old cherry orchard back of the School’ with funds provided by Mrs. Eugene Fuller and her son, Dr. Richard Fuller (the latter of whom was president of the Seattle Art Museum, had patronized Mark Tobey with an annuity throughout the 1930s, and who ‘showed an enlightened interest in Seattle's art life’).’ (p. 43)
‘“hat ihre Wurzel”’ [‘has its root’] (p. 64)
‘Between engagements and, as [Stockhausen] described it, with little paper on hand to sketch out project ideas for the course, he and Mary drew diagrams in the sand on the beach of the various musical forms he considered elemental to his ‘meta-serial’ thinking of the time.’ (p. 109)
‘Titled the “Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun”, the exhibition featured beached industrial machinery, a fifty-foot-long painting suspended from trees, a store-bought ball set all alone on the pavement path titled Work B, among others.’ (p. 133)
‘The title derives from Ono's childhood memories of eating grapefruit, and her belief that the fruit was a hybrid of oranges and lemons: seeing herself as a ‘spiritual hybrid’ of Japanese and Western influences, the fruit thus had personal significance.’ (p. 149)
‘Dzimbo, a different species than the National Zoo's other elephants, was housed in an enclosure with Nancy, an older African Bush elephant.’ (p. 155)
‘31 30 00 10 40 24 25 47 07 23 16 32 06 03 16 08 06 48 17 20 47 33 10 02 27 48 36 35 08 00 30 13 12 27 49 26 02 51 23 44 18 09 20 11 36 10 39 43 25 35 36 27 24 00 28 24 19 10 00 19 01 31 04 48 16 34 22 22 47 32 28 24 16 23 38 14 29 41 04 18 17 44 00 38 47 38 14 03 48 15 27 44 27 25 43 09 03 38 35 33 09 25 51 29 20 37 21 36 15 48 30 17 11 42 32 37 39 24 05 49 06 41 48 46 04 46 12 10 06 41 11 09 04 24 49 15 13 17 23 30 18 23 04 19 22 04 16 51 22 44 08 13 50 22 45 42 26 32 45 32 02 19 18 45 13 08 48 48 37 31 46 42 37 07 45 03 14 09 05 42 36 48 18 48 38
25 28 25 33 09 09 27 19 41 40 40 01 08 20 50 48 09 07 44 06 00 34 25 48 01 13 48 23 20 02 00 47 42 49 37 17 15 42 20 29 29 38 25 37 48 44 23 23 44 06 23 07 41 19 30 44 13 04 40 38 43 39 36 44 05 13 32 29 51 22 47 03 50 21 23 16 17 04 42 40 34 09 43 34 09 04 15 13 02 09 13 15 05 21 28 08 00 25 17 15 41 32 23 27 43 28 47 15 21 11 09 23 00 32 00 35 35 12 45 27 46 43 18 24 21 06 03 20 32 24 10 34 08 49 39 04 46 45 49 04 06 10 40 50 26 01 41 10 34 36 28 42 16 01’ [Menroe's [sic] suicide became the allegory to the poetically inclined of the sinister underside of American (or, in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the broader western-capitalist) society; and in the subsequent murders of prominet [sic] political civil figures, in the ferocious upheavals of the civil rights era, the depredation of the flower of the natiom's [sic] youth in the killing fields of0[sic] Vietnam, the concealment of despair beneath the mask of a ‘blond bombshell’ was the poetic harbinger of the doubts and mistrust Americans began to harbor about all they had been schooled to venerate as the promise of the ‘American dream.’] (pp. 170–71)
‘08 41 03 10 40 37 13 02 25 28 44 18 24 33 34 09 32 31 43 09 02 13 15 25 20 33 45 41 19 05 46 49 25 26 39 47 15 16 50 41 48 45 39 15 38 29 14 02 11 01 27 50 25 24 02 38 15 51 04 22 07 16 30 10 10 43 41 49 36 49 33 38 17 23 05 18 22 30 25 51 29 48 13 50 35 03 38 45 15 40 08 31 06 03 34 46 49 02 12 18 45 34 15 28 34 01’ [Oliveros writes emphatically on the richness discovered by the attentive listener in everyday surroundings, and by extension the importance of reducing musical textures to their minimal constituents to reveal details of the individual sounds!] (p. 205)
‘Pro Musica Nova was followed by two other noteworthy festivals, in Berlin and Munich; and John Cage – the featured guest in Bremen, whose simultaneous performance of Mureau with David Tudor's Rainforest was a landmark of both composers’ work – would tour later that year with Merce Cunningham throughout Germany and Europe.’ (pp. 220–21)
‘See Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence”, citing László Moholy-Nagy in discussing van der Rohe's houses of glass and white planar surfaces for their ability to dematerialize and become part of their natural environment.’ (p. 276)
‘“Probably Siegfried Behrend was imposing it.”’ (p. 293)
‘Notable are two general æsthetic principles not explicitly prescribed in the score: first is the intromission of video recording equipment into the stage space, explicitly made a part of the performance event; and second, the references in the performance instructions and Einführungstext to the word-root ‘cross’ is translated into explicit cross imagery in costume and stage design.’ (p. 306)
‘“Die Aufzeichnung ist nur ein Kern, aus dem die Musik erwächst, in ihr sind alle wechselnden Aufführungsvarianten virtuell enthalten, während die jeweilige Aufführung nur eine einzige Variante zu Gehör bringt.”’ [‘The recording is only a nucleus from which the music grows: in it all changing performance variants are virtually contained, while the respective performance brings only a single variant to ear.’] (p. 311)
‘In contemplation of the revolutionary arts the philosopher of music is most adequately comparable to the humble gardener, who does not expect to live to see the seedling grow into the forest, but nevertheless abides in faith of the natural world and the nobility of labors for the benefit of the future: we submit here, for any who might stand at the threshold however far in the future from the present era, that this labyrinth is complete, that at its heart resides the promise of transcendence we have set forth, that the hazards of which we have warned may be overcome through courage and perseverance – but that although the steps taken to reach and surpass the challenge it represents have been yours alone, the summit attained is all of ours to share, together.’ (pp. 335–36)
