Inviting Worlds

This Full Bowl of Roses, Part I is a representation in music of the image described so beautifully in Die Rosenschalle by Rainer Maria Rilke. Created by William Copper, the music is written in a rigorous form of just intonation called Intonalism. Every interval, melodic or harmonic, is perfectly tuneable, and easily hearable by the musicians who play the piece. The music begins as all art must begin with a reference to the first moments of creation, the moment of “brooding over the face of the waters.” Out from this primordial liquid comes Rilke’s words, arriving at the Bowl of Roses through a circuitous path of wide ranging images of humanity and nature.

In a paper about Phenomenology, the scholar Rochelle Tobias said “the mind’s orientation toward objects enables it to project a unity out of the various and sundry impressions that run through it.” (Rilke, Phenomenology, and the Sensuality of Thought, 2015). In the same way, the poem is a representation of a thing. The bowl of roses, through a collection of verbal images, and the music is a representation of the poem of the thing through another collection of musical images, beginning with a rich, complicated melody in the cellos rising out of the rich, complicated waters of consciousness.

Die Rosenschale (excerpt)

Und sind nicht alle so, nur sich enthaltend,
wenn Sich-enthalten heißt: die Welt da draußen
und Wind und Regen und Geduld des Frühlings
und Schuld und Unruh und vermummtes Schicksal
und Dunkelheit der abendlichen Erde
bis auf der Wolken Wandel, Flucht und Anflug,
bis auf den vagen Einfluß ferner Sterne
in eine Hand voll Innres zu verwandeln.

The Rose Bowl: (translation Edward Snow)

Aren’t they all that way: simply self-containing
if self-containing means: to transform the world outside
and wind and rain and the patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and muffled fate
and darkness of the evening earth
out to the roaming and flying and fleeing of the clouds
and the vague influence of distant stars
into a handful of inwardness.

This Full Bowl of Roses is in three parts. Part III was released in April 2021 on PRISMA VOL. 5 from Navona Records.