From the Tripod (1981) for female choir and soundtracks

A group of women take part in a ritual round an oracle. A fortune-teller, who speaks for the oracle, is heard only on tape. The choir represents those who seek: at times the priestesses, the outcasts who obey no law, and the people. In a colourful and eclectic miscellany of texts (including philosophical texts from ancient Greece and medieval love poems, as well as the cries of fishmongers and cheerleaders) and musical styles (from Gregorian chant to a lullaby and a Western minimalist interpretation of a raga), the types of questions and answers that have preoccupied humanity from time immemorial are examined: what is the reason for our existence on earth, and why do we even ask ourselves this question?

Commissioned by the Baron de Vos van Steenwijk Fund.

(Text by John Paagiviströmn, from the Music Information Centre Donemus MuziekGroep Nederland)

“There is no such thing as taste or light or color in the world. These are just electro-magnetic vibrations, ordinary photons. They're just purely physical things, but in order to perceive them as light, color or sound or smell, taste or pain - all this is created out of brain events by some mysterious process that we don't understand.”
(Sir John Eccles in an International Herald Tribune Interview, 31-3 1981)

A large group of women is attending a séance around the Oracle, introduced by bell-Iike sounds. The women whisper “Phonanta”, a word taken from the second Olympian Ode of Pindarus: "Words are understood by the wise but the crowd needs interpreters".

The volume increases to hysterical screaming. Vocal drums and cymbals resound in classical hexameters (Tympana tenta tonant palmis et cymbala circum.) interrupted by the empty American social noise 'Hi!' (high) sung on a downward glissando.

The rhythm pulsates like a strong heartbeat. "Enjoy yourself, it is later than you think. Destroy yourself, it is later than you think." Twice the Pythoness utters from her tripod Ezechiel's question "Can these bones live?" followed by a big bang - the first warning.

An imperative “Hark!” is interrupted as an old memory takes possession of the mind of the Pythoness and it is not clear whether she is doped or speaks in a voice naturally slurred. "A bright light is among men and the gentle age comes."

Recalling a musical cliché, horn motives announce the arrival of a message: "The angels are blowing their ear-trumpets". The messengers use their hearing-aids to produce their sounds which are questioned and answered by echo: "What is, is." A second explosion of sound; a second warning.

The choir bursts into a rousing song of the Wobblies, an early American trade-union movement, "A pie in the sky". After an interlude of what sounds like stringed instruments, the Pythoness announces the pregnancy of time. A prophecy is born. "A gentle age comes to birth." As in a dream, the worshippers confuse and transpose the meaning of the French words “sage femme” and “femme sage’, altering the meaning from ‘midwife”, the personification of birth, to ‘sorceress”. A transfiguration.

The choir sings softly in the mechanical tones of a medieval town crier the words of an inscription found in a copy of Bach's Goldberg Variations: "What is taken from the dream is given to life." (Quod somno eripitur datur vitae.)

As an entr’acte follows a short lullaby in three-quarter time. Similar sounding words (danse heureuse, dangereuse) are sung, deliberately blurred. The themes of ‘Phonanta’ and ‘Pie in the sky” return in the chorus. From this point, the Pythoness simply repeats her prophetic message as if it were stored on tape and has become a dim and failing memory.

The women break into plain-chant, a Gregorian monody. Their question: "Somniantis dei subconscienta actuosa est?" (Is the subconscious of a sleeping god active?) The language they use is a dead one but the response comes, in a three-voice Gregorian harmony: "The mating cries of bats, cri-cri de coeur."

Then follows the climactic theme of decay as one of the women steps forward and identifies the other worshippers as excommunicates, female jugglers, women no longer subject to the laws of the church. Like a cheerleader at an American football game, she begins to spell out the theme of decay with an antiphonal response from the chorus of the notes D, E, C, A. The Pythoness finishes the word with "I give you the Y" which, in echolalic repetition forms itself audibly into the question “Why?” The imperative to decay is set to the minimal music of East-West raga-Iike sounds.

There is an interruption of a subjective statement about the smell of decay – “J’ai eu toujours horreur du parfum des roses" - and a wondering about the inadequacy of the human memory of erotic encounters - "Hast du mein' Lippen wund geküsst?" Fishmongers appear selling lobsters. "Sales bêtes, they have hair on their legs." The apparently irrelevant statement "Un crapaud enragé n'est pas joli à voir" reinforces the theme of disgust and decay. It is repeated five times. A half-forgotten quotation from Baudelaire is introduced, quoted wrongly but sung with the musical notatic 'grave'. "Donnez-moi la force et le courage de contempler ce monde sans dégout." A mechanical bird passes over while the bells toll to silence.

The Pythoness closes the séance: "You hear nothing but silence, not even the screech of a pheasant."

(from the score From the Tripod, Donemus 1981, text by John Paagiviströmn)