after Xin Qiji III is the last in a number of works (beginning with ancient lament, 2018), following the tradition of mathias spahlinger’s “Chilean” pieces (music impura, 1983; el sonido silencioso, 1980), which engage with the aesthetics of phonetic transcription and increasingly addressed the fraught liminal spaces between language and music. 

Three lines from the Song dynasty poet Xin Qiji (1140-1207) are transcribed vis-a-vis diverse codes. The quartet searches for speech sound analogues in the materiality of the instruments, prioritizing at various times timbral reproduction, rhythmic envelopes, or intonation (the ubiquitous contours of spoken Chinese). These codes present functional contradictions: the careful sound production called for in high-resolution timbral reproduction predicates a slow motion transcription, i.e. a loss in rhythmic or gestural clarity; codes reproducing the rhapsodic flow of Xin Qiji’s language lose, by necessity, timbral detail. These artifacts of transcription become vectors for expression. 

If music is the deterritorialization of language, it deterritorializes in two diverging directions: music in one sense emerges from the phonetic richness, the material surplus, of speech; in another from a desire to give to speech a pathos it fails to find in mere recitation, or indeed from the very breakdown of speech in the scream, the shout, the laughter, the wail... When the full materiality of the string quartet is summoned for expression, the resultant “vocalizations” utterly obscure the project of phonetic reproduction. Thus much of after Xin Qiji III operates on the edge of language’s sublimation and obliteration by music—or in other words as clandestine speech or song against seemingly impossible odds.

 

“I light the rhino horn and scan the depths

my hand upon the rail, I fear

the wind and lightning’s rage 

and water dragons’ wrath”