Postcards from Oblivion

Eternity is not something most people learn to live with until they’re dead – or serving an extremely long prison sentence.

That latter group – not one that the public likes to hear from – is given voice by French composer Thierry Machuel (b. 1962). Even a Francophile such as myself had never previously heard of him. But a new, lavishly packaged box set that includes two CDs and a DVD pulled me in – partly because performers include the fine chorus, Les Cris de Paris. The title: Clairvaux: Beyond the Wall, after the still-active medieval abbey and the notorious prison nearby.

Musically, the piece consists of several chamber works and, most significantly, a cycle of 13 choral pieces based on words written and spoken by long-term prison inmates as well as the monks next door who are praying for them.

It has been the highlight of my listening year.

The distinctive place that Clairvaux prison occupies in French consciousness comes from its history of housing criminals as infamous as Carlos the Jackal, a radical terrorist so wily and vicious that he dismisses Al-Qaeda as “amateurs.” More relevant to Machuel, the Clairvaux prisoners issued a manifesto in 2006 declaring that they were suffering a living death penalty, suggesting that there’s nothing humanitarian about having your life spared only to live in confinement.

In a 2009 workshop conducted by Machuel at the prison, inmates were asked to discuss and write about the subject of oblivion. What came out are searing descriptions of a life in which time and identity have become meaningless – a state incomprehensible to those of us whose lives are ruled by time and whose careers are held in balance by the force of personal identity.

Machuel is taking no stands on capital punishment, guilt, innocence or justice in his choice of the prisoner’s words. Examples:  

“Everything is broken; the gaze gets lost in it.”

“I…have forgotten who I was.”

“I sense my thoughts retreating without feeling them.”

Many such thoughts are heard on the DVD, which contains several of the original interviews that were the basis of the piece. In no way are they less interesting because, for the sake of anonymity, we only see the back of the prisoner’s heads.

The choral sections are mostly unaccompanied, sometimes frankly beautiful, often dreamy and with a conspicuous lack of rhythm, suggesting the sameness of the days there. Stylistically, the music feels familiar, though not like anything I’ve previously known but like something I should’ve known or would like to have.

What makes the music hard to describe is its selflessness. The composer so singlemindedly devotes himself to elucidating this singular human condition that he leaves few identifiable fingerprints of his own. Some passages have a chant-like simplicity – the composer grew up singing in his father’s chant choir – with many voices singing winding monophonic lines too long and too-constantly morphing to be called a traditional melody. Soon into the piece, those voices take their own paths, sometimes languidly overlapping each other, sometimes arriving at harmonic clusters.

Many passages present their musical events against a background of murmuring. Perhaps echoes of a more populated pre-imprisonment life? Or silence giving birth to aural hallucinations? Or the chatter inside their heads becoming audible? Anger is heard in short-lived outbursts, but even that seems more a remembered emotion than one currently felt.

Tragedy (in the torturous sense of the word) is absent, at least in the music. One feels a certain dazed late-Shostakovich irony in the instrumental pieces. As one of the texts puts it, there’s nothing particularly nasty about oblivion: “It relaxes just as it annoys.”

Some of the music is quite beautiful. One of the less cogent more stream-of-consciousness texts isn’t sung at all but simultaneously whispered and spoken in a welter of words. One particularly compelling passage has the music fanning out into more and more divided parts in ever tighter harmonies to convey the feeling of the prison walls closing in.

Descriptive elements are occasional at most, such as quiet undulating glissandi suggesting distant alert sirens that perhaps recall the arrest that put them there or anticipate the attempted escape that might get them out. Percussion suggests cocked rifles. Not all the texts have a nothing-to-lose directness, but are a bit spacy and free-floating, and with a less-vital message to impart. It’s there that Machuel shows what he can do as a composer, creating long spans of music with a maximum of musical and technical diversity – even if there’s a lack of a through line.

The nearby monks invited to participate in the project – though from their own, rather different cells – are less original and personal in their manner of expression. The monks lead similarly circumscribed lives, but by choice and with a strong sense of purpose: Clairvaux is their long-established staked-out corner of the universe – and they’re sticking to it.

The final chorus rather amazingly attempts to meld the two worlds. On the prison side, one inmate seems to answer a command to repent by saying that his life is damned no matter what he does. The internal quarter-tone harmonies never lose that vague throb of pain but achieve a collage-like coexistence with the chant-like monk music.

The album notes say the music proves that “art and culture can restore to everyone that human dignity.” Well, I don’t hear it. The music tells me there is no resolution. That’s honest. You can trust a composer like that.