Part II

3. The End

The final minutes of Verblendungen once again return to a solo for tape, the orchestral high strings fading out much as they did before the start of the earlier solo. Before this point, despite a great deal of change which has occurred since the start of the piece, it is possible to observe a return to many of the ideas which can be found at the work’s opening, albeit it in modified form.

The sparse attack-decay sequence in the orchestral ‘percussion’ (guiro, piano, vibraphone, harp, and crotales) which takes place during the closing stages of the work in many ways clearly looks back to the very start of Verblendungen.  For instance, the small rhythmic cells for guiro, which appear after bar 162, obviously take over from material type 5a at the opening, with its short rhythmic noise impulses, a swapping of electroacoustic and orchestral roles. As with the earlier material, the giuro’s short phrases are associated with attack-decay gestures, as before these are marked by the percussion instruments. The difference here, at the end of the piece is that there is no lead up  to the attack itself, the guiro’s short phrases coincide and lead away from the gestural attack point (in vibraphone, piano and harp). The weakness of the attacks themselves and their lack of gestural energy gives some sense of the nearness of the work’s completion. Figure 21 shows this guiro material and its connected chordal attacks. The  pitch process here is reminiscent of the work’s opening sections albeit much simpler, with the basically static chord accumulating increasingly higher pitches as well as recalling the harmonically static areas identified within the earlier part of the piece.  The chord which is built up by the fifth attack point (bar 173) is a repeat of the upper part of the chord which first appears at bar 92. More importantly it is a vertical presentation of the pitches contained within the tape solo’s melodic material, which continue to be present throughout this orchestral material, providing an obvious connection between the tape and orchestra.

The time between these attack points is also of interest as they recall the underlying three second ‘pulse’ identified towards the start of the piece (with a one second discrepancy between the sixth and seventh attack timings) giving further credence to the idea that the piece is at times working with this three second unit as some kind of meta-pulse:

A further example of the swapping of previous roles can be seen in the orchestra’s move away from pitched towards noise-based sounds. This is most noticeable after bar 178 where woodwind and brass gradually switch to unpitched but rhythmically profiled air sounds, a clear echo of the opening’s material type 5b. The strings also move away from the strong harmonic and melodic role they had at the work’s opening and adopt tremolo sul pont and sul pont ext  bowing methods, both of which emphasise the noise content of their sound, finally moving to heavy (premuto) bowing (bar 185 onwards). As well as often having continuous glissandi, at the very end of their material (bar 199) they even play in quarter tones, further weakening the sense of the equal-tempered scale, which was so important at the work’s opening. The orchestra’s role in the closing part of the piece in fact belongs much more to an electroacoustic rather than note-based world, with the only clearly linear, melodic material to be found in the iterative ascents on tape, which occur several times towards the very end of the work.
Another change which has occurred to the instrumental writing after the tape solo is its instrumentally stratified nature. Unlike the opening where all instruments are treated equally and where material is shared between all instrumental families, this part of the work is characterised by a layered orchestration where the strings, woodwind and brass (which act as a single group), and ‘percussion’ sections have different musical materials. The connections between these instrumental groupings is much weaker than previously and although some connections can be identified there are no unifying events or gestures which affect all the orchestral layers simultaneously. Connections can be seen between the percussion attacks and the woodwind and brass materials where the air-sounds of the wind instruments group around and after the attack points. This becomes particularly clear at figures BB and CC. However this pattern is broken by the attack at figure FF where the wind instruments continue as if unaffected, although the crotales entry at HH does seem to signal their stopping a few seconds later. Similarly the percussion attack at DD does seem to mark the changeover of material in the strings, although not one which is immediately audible, as one block of material (tremolando glissandi) gives way to another (double stopped glissandi), the strings still utilising the overlapping waves of material previously identified. However in the whole of this closing section of the piece the strings have only five different types of material and the overlaps between the sections is much greater than was previously the case at the start of the work. This helps to contribute to the sense of slowness and lack of forward momentum through this closing part of the work, which when coupled with the lack of obvious sectional divisions and gestural weakness of the percussion attacks helps create a somewhat timeless quality, with the end of the piece ‘planing’ off into the distance, with no real sense of forward momentum or definite temporal point of conclusion. However, the termination phase of the work has been so clearly signalled through the audible structure, particularly in changes of gestural shape, that a sense of closure is arrived at in a more general sense and a specific end point not necessary. The structural clarity of the piece on a large-scale formal level is perhaps one of its greatest strengths, successfully teaching us how to listen to it as it progresses, despite its often gradual, slowly changing nature.

Many of the instrumental features identified above particularly the changes in orchestral writing and the connections between material type are only really observable on paper (in the orchestral score) or through extremely close listening. The closing stages of the piece are characterised much more by  a consistent, tape-dominated sound world in which the orchestra plays an increasingly supportive role and in which it is difficult to easily identify sound sources, be they instrumental or electroacoustic. Unlike the opening of the work where a number of sound materials are easily identified, the end of the work presents a sound world which is unified and closely fused, giving the impression of a single complex sound with complex unpredictable behaviour.

If an overview in taken of the piece after the main attack of the tape solo until its ending  using the three descriptive continua previously used, it will be seen that despite the very gradual nature of the change, that there is a clear move from the gestural, pitched  (or at least chordal) attack at the start of this termination phase towards a texture which is generally effluvial:

The move to the left-hand side in all three continua is striking, particularly as the opening materials of the piece (see figure 7) are almost all focussed on, or move towards the right (attack, gesture, pitch) and gives an reminder of how different the closing of the piece is from its opening.
A summary of the major changes which take place between the beginning and end of the work is given below and gives some sense of the changes which the piece undergoes: