Existing, no matter what…

To date, the most explicit example of ecological engagement in Furrer's work is found in Violetter Schnee. Its libretto, written by the composer's long-time collaborator Händl Klaus, is loosely based on the work of the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. In Sorokin's dystopic, satirical and highly repetitive novels, snow is a frequently recurring trope. As a substance that sits in-between being liquid and being frozen, snow is used by Sorokin as a metaphor for liminal spaces and phases of transition.Footnote ⁸ Similarly, the five protagonists of Violetter Schnee seem to be caught in limbo. They are stuck in a house together during what appears to be a never-ending blizzard. The situation they find themselves in is dire, to say the least: the sun has disappeared completely and it is snowing incessantly in the middle of summer. Nevertheless, they desperately try to maintain certain routines: they burn furniture for heat and brew tea from molten snow. Slowly, but certainly, the relationships between them start to dissipate. As time progresses, the scenic actions become more and more repetitive, while the conversations between the protagonists start to circle around the same set of topics over and over again (the house, the snow, the cold). Eventually, dialogues turn into simultaneous monologues and stuttering, indicating that the communication between the protagonists is breaking down. Language fails, and there is nothing left to talk about.

Throughout, Klaus’ libretto emphasises fragmentation and association, strictly evading clarity as if mirroring the relentless snowfall. Musically, this transition from naïve hope to utter despair is apparent in the orchestral score, which shifts from a highly fragmented multitude of individual and generally high-pitched sound events in the opening ‘Prolog’ to a much broader, more bass-oriented and highly resonant soundscape in the closing act (Vierte Episode, Act IV, Scene 34). This could also be read as a sonic mirror to the plot's incessant snowfall, which eventually forms thick layers blanketing the stage. A similar transition into apathy and despair is marked in the vocal soloist parts, which feature highly dramatic melodic lines with expressive dynamic and intervallic leaps at the beginning of the work and conjunct, quasi-monotonous melodies, the use of Sprechgesang and an overarching p dynamic in its final scenes.Footnote ⁹

This intense feeling of isolation experienced by the five protagonists – of losing hope and, as a result, withdrawing into oneself and one's routines – is an example of what Timothy Morton describes as an ‘existence no matter what’: a mode of being stripped entirely of its human joys and qualities, a feeling of ‘numbness or shock’.Footnote ¹⁰ Morton argues that this type of existence is common nowadays, and more particularly, that it is a sign of ‘impending doom’, signalling the moment that ‘[e]verything starts to go haywire’.Footnote ¹¹ They argue:

The sentiment of ‘things going haywire’ signals a moment of crisis which, according to Morton, is central to the ‘transitional phase’ the planet is in now. A central claim in their project of dark ecology is that the planet is currently entering a new geological epoch: the so-called ‘Anthropocene’, in which human influence significantly shapes the earth's geology and ecosystems. The transition towards this new era is marked by rapid, anthropogenic environmental change and is accompanied by what Morton refers to as ‘ecological awareness, dark-depressing… [and] dark-uncanny’Footnote ¹³: the haunting and deeply existential realisation that the world as we know it is not ending but has already come to an end, an idea also echoed musically in Violetter Schnee at the end of Peter's ‘Angstarie’ (Fear Aria, Act I, Scene 14), where Peter sings: ‘schon bin ich gestorben’ (‘I have already died’; see Example 1).

Example 1: End of Peter's ‘Angstarie’, Violetter Schnee (Act I, Scene 14), bars 749–57. © Bärenreiter Verlag; used with permission.

The repetitive structure of the loop is a recurring image in Morton's work. In their 2016 book Dark Ecology, for instance, this manifests in the shape of interchangeable opening and concluding chapters, repetitive wordplay (such as ‘weird weirdness’ and ‘the strange stranger’) and several artistic renderings of ouroboroi scattered throughout the pages. Morton argues that ‘[e]cological awareness is weird: it has a twisted, looping form’. They continue: ‘[a] strange loop is weirdly weird: a turn of events that has an uncanny appearance. And this defines emerging ecological awareness occurring to ‘civilized’ people at this moment.’Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, dark ecology, which Morton describes as a ‘bardo-like transition space’, is an experience in which the familiar suddenly feels unsettlingly unfamiliar.Footnote ¹⁵

Repetition is also a central feature of Furrer's music. In Violetter Schnee, this translates to the composer's signature use of what I call ‘microvariations’: incessant near-exact repetitions of cells and motifs, which aid in the creation of a constantly shifting musical landscape. The effect of these microvariations, in which the difference between repeating cells sits just below the threshold of perception, is one of ‘spinning out and away, of losing one's way and eventually getting lost in a strange and complex landscape’.Footnote ¹⁶ Morton Feldman describes the highly destabilising effect of musical repetition in his work as ‘a disorientation of memory’, whereby ‘there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize that this is an illusion; a bit like walking the streets of Berlin – where all the buildings look alike, even if they're not’.Footnote ¹⁷ Through its emphasis on musical repetition, Furrer's work explicitly foregrounds sentiments of slippage and loss, of memory and the loss thereof, of far-reaching melancholia and an unrepairable detachment from reality. As such, a parallel can be drawn between Furrer's use of repetition and the ‘weird weirdness’ Morton associates with the repetitive structure of loops: ‘[t]he loop form of beings means we live in a universe of finitude and fragility, a world in which objects are suffused with and surrounded by mysterious hermeneutical clouds of unknowing’.Footnote ¹⁸

Much like Morton's writing, Furrer's work explores repetition on several different levels. Beyond the musical, repetition is often found on the level of the textual, taking the shape of repetitive language and even the repetition of pre-existing literary works. One could argue that the practice of subsequently de- and re-contextualising a pre-existing artwork is by definition an act of estrangement: a defamiliarisation and decentring. As mentioned earlier, the plot of Violetter Schnee is itself repetitive, its five protagonists seemingly stuck in repetitive acts and utterances. The opera also features intertextuality, both in its libretto and its stage design. The opening ‘Prolog’ starts with a heavily microtonal orchestral overture, after which the mixed choir introduces a slightly adapted quote from the didactic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things, first century BC). The poem, by the Roman writer-philosopher Lucretius, describes several apocalyptic scenarios in which the world transforms into an unfathomable void of timeless nothingness. The poem is referenced often by Furrer, with fragments of it appearing in works such as Wüstenbuch and the Spazio Immergente triptych, signalling the composer's tacit engagement with issues of climate change and ecology. The quote used in Violetter Schnee is taken from the first book (lines 1102–10) and describes a scenario in which the world comes to a catastrophic end:

Lucretius’ apocalyptic imagery is not to be misunderstood: the world is coming to a fast, devastating and inevitable end. Fragments of the text reappear in each of Violetter Schnee's four acts, or ‘episodes’, both in the original choral setting and scattered in the solo parts, the image of a world-shattering catastrophe lingering throughout the work as an ominous foreboding.

The 2019 scenography for Violetter Schnee by Claus Guth also refers back to an older source. Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting Jagers in de sneeuw (The Hunters in the Snow, 1565) is a recurring visual motif in both the work's stage design and its scenic actions (see Figure 1). The painting, which is part of a series of works depicting the seasons of the year, shows a village scene in the dead of winter. The overall atmosphere of the work is dark and gloomy, with its colour palette largely limited to muted greys, whites and browns. Interestingly, Brueghel's landscape constructs a fictitious geographical location that combines typical Dutch architectural elements with ragged, alpine mountain peaks and a traditional German castle. The bottom left of the painting shows three hunters returning from an unsuccessful outing: the men and their dogs appear weary and defeated, with one of the men carrying the meagre carcass of a fox. The diagonal movement of the composition leads the gaze towards a snow-packed watermill with its wheel frozen shut.Footnote ²⁰ Down in the valley, the townspeople are shown carelessly ice-skating and playing early forms of ice hockey and curling on a large frozen lake, as if unaware of the hunger that awaits them. In the far background, just behind the lake, disaster has struck, as heavy smoke rising from a chimney suggests a fire in a remote farmhouse. In the central foreground, a magpie is circling the scene while crows are looking down from the arid trees in which they rest. Arguing that ‘[m]agpies and crows are generally birds of ill omen in Bruegel's paintings’, Michel Weemans claims that much of the imagery used in Jagers in de sneeuw points towards ‘[t]he idea of a threatening and insidious evil presence’.Footnote ²¹

Figure 1: Jagers in de sneeuw, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1565), oil on wood, 117 × 162 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

Although Weemans’ analysis largely suggests a religious interpretation of the painting, in which it offers an ominous allegory for the Christian motifs of hell and the devil, an ecological reading is also possible, the painting anticipating the grim but inevitable reality of climate change. It is noteworthy that the work was created during the so-called Grindelwald Fluctuation, from 1560 to 1628. This is generally believed to have been the coldest stretch of an era described as the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–c. 1850), a ‘chilly climatic regime’ which ‘[u]ntil the recent onset of global warming… may have been the most significant climatic anomaly to affect the Northern Hemisphere in at least 6,000 years’.Footnote ²² These ecological changes caused severe harvest failure, economic recession, socio-political unrest and death throughout the North Atlantic region, a situation not too different from the one the global community is faced with today.Footnote ²³

In Guth's stage design, Violetter Schnee opens with a mise-en-abyme. Behind a projection of Brueghel's painting, one of the five protagonists, Tanja, is shown looking at the painting in a museum (‘Prolog’, see Figure 2). Tanja faints and wakes up in a house with the four others (Act I, Scene 1). As the five protagonists emerge from the house by repeatedly climbing the stairs to the roof, other people appear in the distance. They are Brueghel's subjects: the hunters with their long arrows, elderly women with hunched-over postures collecting wood for a fire, and groups of townspeople, all dressed in thick layers of clothing. Linda Hutcheon refers to the mise-en-abyme as ‘an internal self-reflecting mirror’, which signals the work's ‘dual ontological status’, existing both within its own (fictional) reality – the world of the narrative, idea or emotion depicted by the artwork – and outside it, situated in a distinct historical, geographical and socio-cultural reality, the world in which we live.Footnote ²⁴ In other words, the mise-en-abyme provides a site for socio-cultural self-reflection and self-analysis. The message is clear: the five protagonists are caught in Brueghel's painting, living its grim reality of irreparable climate change, Morton's ‘super wicked problem… for which time is running out, for which there is no central authority; those seeking the solution are also creating it, and policies discount the future irrationally’.Footnote ²⁵

Figure 2: Brueghel as a central image in Claus Guth's stage design for Beat Furrer's Violetter Schnee (2019). Photo © Monika Rittershaus; used with permission.

… in barren landscapes…

Throughout Violetter Schnee, the omnipresence of snow as both a narrative and a visual trope serves as a metaphor for climate change and ecological catastrophe. Are we headed towards a new ice age? Or will we never see snow again? The relentless blizzard at the heart of the plot also reads as an allegory for isolation, bleakness and death. It represents stillness and, by extension, deafness or apathy towards the ecological realities of climate change. In her autobiographic novel The Faraway Nearby (2013), Rebecca Solnit describes the deep uncanniness of an arctic landscape:

Are the five protagonists desperately sticking to their routines because they are aware of the ultimate powerlessness and insignificance of their individual actions (as Morton notes, ‘[o]ne car ignition firing doesn't cause global warming’Footnote ²⁷)? Or are they blissfully ignorant of the situation, unknowingly accepting their apocalyptic fate, living life in what Morton poetically describes as ‘the gentle slope of the upwardly moving rollercoaster that you don't even suspect to be a rollercoaster’Footnote ²⁸)? Comparable metaphors of ecological hopelessness are found in Furrer's musical theatre work Wüstenbuch, for small orchestra, actors and vocal ensemble with solo parts. In several respects, Wüstenbuch is the polar opposite of Violetter Schnee, in that its plot revolves around a journey through the desert. As such, the work deals with imagery of the scorching heat versus Violetter Schnee's bitter cold, the dryness of aridity versus frozen precipitation. Nevertheless, their respective geographical landscapes have much in common as places of uninhabitable ecological excess. The composer refers to desert landscapes as ‘places of silence that make concentration possible’: in other words, places of loneliness and isolation in which one is faced with oneself and, ultimately, confronted with one's mortality.Footnote ²⁹ Just like the snow in Violetter Schnee, the desert in Wüstenbuch is a similarly desolate and barren landscape and, as such, also functions as a metaphor for death, loss, isolation and profound emptiness.

As a sonic metaphor, snow suggests softness and stillness.Footnote ³⁰ In the world of acoustics, snow is known for its naturally dampening qualities, with just a few inches of it capable of absorbing up to 60 per cent of sounds within the audible range.Footnote ³¹ Furrer had previously explored snow as a metaphor for silence and stillness in voicelessness – the snow has no voice, for piano solo. With dynamic markings ranging from mp to ppppp and a tempo indication that reads ‘sehr ruhig – gespannt – schimmernd’ (very quiet – tense – shimmering), the work is at the same time delicately fragile and eerily strained. In its soundworld, this earlier work of Furrer's is reminiscent of the late works of Morton Feldman, with slowly shifting repetitions that create a nervously drifting, quasi-static landscape. In Violetter Schnee, the deafening silence of excessive snowfall is referenced several times throughout the libretto, perhaps most explicitly in Act I, Scene 15, where four of the protagonists insist that they ‘cannot hear anything, nothing but the snow’ (‘ich höre – nichts – nichts – ist – zu hören – nichts – nichts – als – der Schnee’). Musically, this translates to a reduction in the orchestral score, which is largely stripped of its wind section. The remainder of the musicians are left with a score that prescribes an overall p to pppp dynamic and explores a multitude of extended techniques (see Example 2). The string writing features high overtones in the violin section and the bowing of the bridge in the lower strings. The piano is made resonant through a gentle stroking of the strings, both with the player's fingertips and a guitar plectrum. The recorder, trumpet, trombone and tuba players are asked to vocalise various shushing sounds into their instruments (‘chu’, ‘hu’, ‘cha’). These are then mirrored in the vocal parts, which are largely dominated by the use of Sprechstimme. Combined, these extended techniques render the score with an overall eerie and fragile atmosphere, a sort of barren soundscape. Guth's 2019 stage design for Violetter Schnee gives the idea of soundlessness or muted sound a visual counterpart with thick artificial snowfall and low-angled, deep blue and eventually ultraviolet stage lighting blurring both the audience's and the performers’ vision (see Figure 3). To a certain extent, this idea of blurring also raises questions about ecological change in the current socio-political climate of fake news misinformation: unable to see clearly, what is one to believe?

Example 2: Snow as a sonic metaphor in Violetter Schnee (Act I, Scene 15), bars 758–75. © Bärenreiter Verlag; used with permission.

Figure 3: Heavy snowfall blurs the vision in Claus Guth's stage design for Beat Furrer's Violetter Schnee (2019). Photo © Monika Rittershaus; used with permission.

… and, finally, into oblivion

The deep-purple stage lighting that gives the snow its titular violet hue in the final seconds of Violetter Schnee signals a total obliteration of sorts. During the fourth and final episode (Act IV, Scene 34), the blizzard finally seems to settle. As the snowfall starts to slow, the five protagonists and the silent Brueghelian bystanders come face to face with a giant ball of light that is falling down from the sky. Their vision is blurred and eventually, for just a brief few seconds, everything turns purple and, more importantly, silent. Straight after that, everything goes dark. Has the world as we know it come to an end? And if so, does that mean humankind will not survive?

Although Morton's project of dark ecology does suggest that the world as we know it has indeed ended, they maintain that this does not mean a definite end, but a mere transition-to. They argue that ‘[o]pposing anthropocentrism doesn't mean that we hate humans and that we want ourselves to go extinct. What it means is seeing how we humans are included in the biosphere as one being among others.’Footnote ³² In other words, Morton suggests a radical re-evaluation of our human entanglement with nature. Being ecological, they argue, is realising that we as humans do not hold any privilege over nature, but instead we are one with it; humankind is part of the natural world. Though the end of Violetter Schnee may seem to suggest a meteor impact, in which the earth is annihilated, this gesture of complete obliteration can also be read as the earth disintegrating into and thus being part of the cosmos. Individual existence makes way for shared co-existence, and the individual is lost into the mass. This idea is at the very core of OOO and is echoed musically in the closing scene of Violetter Schnee (Act IV, Scene 34), where the vocal solo parts dissolve entirely into the orchestral sound (see Example 3). The performance notes read: ‘wie man einen neuen Planeten betreten würde – die Worte bedeuten nichts mehr, sie sind ganz in den Orchesterklang integriert’ (like stepping on to a new planet – the words have lost all meaning; they are fully integrated into the orchestral sound). Whereas the orchestral score had initially served as a traditional backdrop for the vocal parts, voices and orchestra are now deeply interconnected, the boundaries between them blurred; metaphorically, there is no longer any distinction between the individual and the collective, the subject and the object, the human and the non-human.

Example 3: Loss of the individual into the collective: Violetter Schnee (Act IV, Scene 34), bars 1673–ff. © Bärenreiter Verlag; used with permission.

Similar individual-to-collective motions can also be found in mia vita da vuolp, for soprano and baritone saxophone, in Wüstenbuch (specifically in Scene XI) and in Lotófagos, for soprano and double bass. In the latter work, the voice and the double bass explore the extremities of their pitch registers while also sometimes reuniting on a curious common ground where the soprano's lowest range meets the double bass' highest, in microtonal explorations of repeated cells. Sonically, this unusual combination results in an uncanny timbral space that lingers between stasis and movement. The work highlights difference and individual identity but also emphasises notions of sameness, similarity or at the very least a deep entanglement between what at first glance appear to be two entirely isolated entities. In Spazio Immergente I, for soprano and trombone, the timbral qualities of the voice and the trombone start to merge together, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from one another and thus, again, exploring the idea of the loss of the individual within the group, Morton's notion of ecological awareness as an ‘inextricable coexistence with a host of entities that surround and penetrate us’.Footnote ³³

Reading Furrer's oeuvre through the lens of ecological awareness creates what Slavoj Žižek refers to as a ‘short circuit’: a critical reading that leads to ‘the inherent decentring of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought”, its disavowed presuppositions and consequences’.Footnote ³⁴ More specifically, it points towards a possible link between this oeuvre and Morton's eco-philosophical project of ‘dark ecology’. Interestingly, Morton understands dark ecology largely as an aesthetic mode of thinking. Art, they argue, is a means of accessing this ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’ ecological awareness:

Although the composer has never claimed any sort of socio-political agenda for his music, an ecological engagement shimmers through several of Furrer's works. The frequent allusions that the composer makes to nature imagery, in both the titles and the narrative plots of his works, hint at his deep affinity with the natural world. A ‘dark ecological’ reading of Furrer's work, however, reveals a multitude of more tacit ecological dimensions to his work, from the uncanny instabilities created by the composer's multi-layered use of repetition to the plea for a radical intraspecies coexistence suggested by his music's signature processes of fragmentation, disintegration and coalescence.