Chapter Text
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
PART I: VALINOR
PREFACE
The evolution of musical form may at first appear a strange means of telling the story of how the first and only performance of Cuiviélin set in motion certain events leading to the abdication of the Crown Prince and all that followed. The two events, however, are not unrelated. All music reflects the spirit of its time. All great art reflects the greatest questions of its time. And so too must musical form evolve, expand, until its shape is vast enough to bear the responsibility of answering the questions with which it is burdened.
For years, great scholars have debated the virtues of the Music of the Airs and the Music of the Waters. Scandals mire this debate now. In Valinórë, the past is inescapable. This too haunts us. Should we surrender to passion? Should we channel passion through form? And so we return full circle to the premise of our debate: form versus resonance; abstraction versus dramatic realism; technique over emotions. This attempts no answer to that debate. Instead it poses a very different question: can unity in form, technique, symbol and resonance, drama, emotion ever be perfectly achieved?
Neither is this a history of popular works. Some might marvel at the exclusion of certain pieces. The popular, however, needs no further elevation. It speaks for itself and when it does not, it has plenty of interlocutors on its behalf. The most popular works rarely innovate in form: they merely adopt it, becoming part of the spirit of the age. Those who change forms come before the spirit raises its head and breathes the first winds of change. Rarely, if ever, do their achievements remain well-known.
Does it contradict itself? Very well, it contradicts itself.
All great art is quite contradictory.
KANAFINWË MAKALAURË FËANÁRION
Tirion
Fi.A.32
**
I. Fog On Water, Smoke On The Wind
Comp. Ehtelion of Ondolindë
First performed in F.A. 7, on the occasion of the Coronation of the High King Ñolofinwë.
Played on the long zither, this piece is very likely the last Noldor composition to have been written solely in the Sú tradition. Very few long zithers survived the journey to hither shores and those that did were rarely played. It is a difficult instrument, requiring patience and full mastery before it can be used in a performance. Its notation is famously complex; its playing techniques nuanced and precise, requiring the full attention and commitment of body and spirit to successfully command all three modes and all two thousand one hundred and nine forms. The manuscript for this single piece is as long as the manuscript for a symphony, though it plays for half the time.
The difficulty of its composition is essential to its understanding and appreciation. Composed over a period of forty years, from the departure from Araman to the arrival of the Ñolofinwëan host in Mistarimbë, the vast majority of its creation took place in the harsh and inimical conditions of the Ice. Nevertheless, despite the peculiar challenges of that crossing, its composer fashioned a perfect arithmetic and musical problem in 42 sequences designed across a 7x6 grid, which makes it one of the most intricately patterned pieces in existence. Undoubtedly, such diversions were necessary to hold spirit, mind and body together in the hostile landscape of a seemingly unending and frozen desert, filled with untold, sublime perils. And no doubt, the memory of that battle against Unlight, cold and even the very despair of the soul seeped into the piece itself: it was performed only once by its composer at the Coronation of the High King Ñolofinwë and Ehtelion gave up the long zither for the flute afterwards.
The long zither is not an instrument designed to express rage or despair. It is a meditative instrument, to be played in the silence of an airy small room to a gathering of high-minded souls on a fine summer’s Mingling. Or perhaps you may play it by a fresh spring on a summer day and use it to reflect and amplify the pure beauty of water, life, light. Nevertheless, rage and despair both simmer across this piece. It begins with a classically meditative slow phrase that invites the listener to consider the gravity of what is about to come. It sets the stage: the total and blinding darkness, with only a flicker of light held in a rare two or three high notes. The playing grows harsh. The strings are plucked harshly, rendering each note with a steely undertone. The harsh storms that batter the terrified, huddled masses of Noldor grow deeper and darker in the mind’s eye.
It stills into an ominous rippling of fog across water and then dark, harsh notes that hang suspended in the air like the swift strike of the sword. The Doomsman speaks and the Noldor are condemned to an eternal exile of treason, death and misery on distant shores. Still the music continues, dark and forbidding and nearly silent. The effect is achieved by a light tapping of the finger against the silk strings instead of plucking, creating a sound that ranges in tenor from demure and restrained, to hushed and menacing. The playing grows slowly louder and more frenetic. In the long zither, the movement of finger against string often overpowers the sound of the note, lending an illusion of rhythm and becoming part of the playing itself. So to here, until finally we reach the zenith: fire and boats ablaze on the horizon, the first Doom to make itself true.
And then a declaration. They will not turn back, they will proceed. The notes slow and grow triumphant, yet with a rippling ominous undertone to it. It grows louder and louder till it distorts horribly and grows nearly heretically discordant. But a skilled player will bring it back from pure discord, to the severe harshness which its composer intended. We are left with a single, distorted, deep note that fades away into nothing. A promise of vengeance? A declaration? Or simply a question? The audience enters into the piece and carry on its philosophical debate once it is finished. The result is a highly effective and entirely original subversion of the traditional Sú school of composition and playing.
Its first performance sparked a rigorous debate amongst those of the Noldor inclined towards the musical arts. Could such a use of the long zither be treated as legitimate? True, the composition demonstrated a technical perfection that could only be achieved by someone who had mastered the art of the long zither. To all extents and purposes, the piece is an abstract philosophical meditation as is the nature of the Music of the Airs. Neither was it unheard of masters of the instrument to invent their own modes of playing, enriching the canon of the long zither. The question was reduced, therefore, to whether the deliberate introduction of discord was a deliberate heresy — discord being the province of the Moringotto and the Music of the Airs being the province of Manwë.
No definitive answer was reached in those days. The philosophical debates of Valinórë had no room in Valariandë; where a trivial matter of style might have been debated for weeks, now matters of life and death weighed more heavily on the minds of all, even the bards. In this, matters were hastened by Ehtelion’s own dramatic demonstration of artistic commitment in a vow to never touch the long zither, after having been accused of being a heretic in the Fëanárian vein. This did little to repair relationships between the two warring factions at the time and the debate was foreclosed by a direct intervention from the High King who, as it turned out, had little taste for the abstraction of the long zither.
No definitive answer has been reached today either and the composer still languishes in the Halls of Mandos — though the matter might, no doubt, prove a sore subject given the circumstances. Taking pure theory as our guide alone, however, one discerns in this piece the first attempt to fashion a union between the technical nature of the Music of the Airs and the emotional resonances of the Music of the Waters. Was this intended by the composer? Perhaps not intentionally. Nevertheless, it holds the seeds of the first true union and may be treated as the origin of all debates concerning whether these two schools of composition might be married. Whether the long zither was the best medium for this attempt is irrelevant; certainly its controversial performance suggests it held a certain symbolic value for the Exiled Noldor, in its symbolic power as an instrument of Valinórë and the perception of its corruption with an emotional quality that simply was not seen at “home”.
Despite the controversy, it has become one of the most famous pieces of music in the history of the Amanyar, though rarely performed and only by the truly daring amongst those with mastery of the long zither.