Pan
Density 2036: part v (2017-2018)
The goat-god Pan is one of only two Greek deities said to have been put to death. But how can an immortal figure die at all? Should we understand the death of a god not as a contradiction in terms, but rather as the end of an epoch, or a system of values? If so, then what is it that dies with a figure like Pan — and is such a death a cause for grief, celebration, or something else entirely?
PAN, a 90-minute piece for solo flute, live electronics and mass community participation, is a meditation on ambiguity and the discomfort it brings. Pan is himself the consummate in-betweener. He is half man and half beast; as a demigod, his realm lies somewhere between heaven and earth. He is the symbol of fecundity and the creative urge; he is the weaver of melodies and the guardian of the wilderness. But he is also a cunning predator, whose lust and rapacity drives him to unspeakable deeds.
Casa Circulo Cultural community member Fiorela Arias taking a bow with Claire Chase and composer Marcos Balter, Soundbox at the San Francisco Symphony, February 24th, 2023. Photo: Kristen Loken.
Pan with the San Francisco Symphony and community, February 24th, 2023. Photo: Kristen Loken.
Ritual wine glass chorus in “Pan’s Flute” with participants from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the broader community, February 24th, 2023. Photo: Kristen Loken.
Casa Circulo Cultural community member Fiorela Arias taking a bow with Claire Chase and composer Marcos Balter, Soundbox at the San Francisco Symphony, February 24th, 2023. Photo: Kristen Loken.
Pessoa for six bass flutes
Density 2036: part i (2013)
Pessoa for live and pre-recorded bass flutes explores sonic textures ranging from the mournful and languid to the dense and hyperactive, with “a nimbus of multi-tracked parts swarming the solo bass-flute lead” (Q2 Music). The piece draws inspiration from the poem “Solene passa sobre a fértil terra” by the Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher Fernando Pessoa, reprinted here with translation by the composer:
Solene passa sobre a fértil terra
A branca, inútil nuvem fugidia,
Que um negro instante de entre os campos ergue
Um sopro arrefecido.
Tal me alta na alma a lenta ideia voa
E me enegrece a mente, mas já torno,
Como a si mesmo o mesmo campo, ao dia
Da imperfeita vida.
Solemnly passes above the fertile land
The white, useless elusive cloud,
That a dark moment from the fields elevate
A shivery blow.
It flights high within my soul this slow idea
And it darkens my mind, but I quickly return,
Like the same field returning to itself, to a day
Of the imperfect life.
Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.
Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.
His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records.
He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.
PAN — BECOMING HUMAN
by Jenny Judge
For the ancients, the gods could do no wrong. But that didn’t mean the gods were seen as virtuous. The concepts of sin and wrongdoing simply didn’t apply to divinities: the gods were seen as beyond good and evil entirely, as Nietzsche puts it. And they were beyond mortality too, of course, because the gods could not die — by definition.
But things were less clear when it came to the demigods. Take a satyr: an in-between creature, neither god, nor man, nor beast. Could satyrs do wrong? Were they mortal, or not? And if satyrs could sin, and die, would it ever be justifiable to put them to death?
Pan, whose story unfolds over the nine tableaux of Marcos Balter’s Pan, is the satyr-lord of the woodlands, and the enchanter of all that hear his music. His musical talents are certainly godlike, as are the powers that those talents bring in their train. But Pan is not really a god — or at least, he is not acknowledged as such. When Pan invites Apollo to compete with him in a musical duel, Apollo sees this not as a challenge from an equal, but as an outrage. Condemned as an upstart, Pan is seized, tortured, and put to death. In dying, Pan gives his persecutors the satisfaction of knowing they were right: if he has died, he can’t have been a true god.
In many ways, Pan is more animal than anything. He has the hindquarters, legs and horns of a goat, and he can be as heedless and vicious as any wild creature. But Pan does not really belong among the animals, either — because Pan is on the cusp of becoming human.
Pan offers a musical portrait of this turbulent transformation. As we listen to the music that Pan plays, noticing how it alters, we are given an insight into what it would be like to be a creature taking the first hesitant steps toward fellowship, accountability, and love.
The transition from beast to man is not a linear one. Over the course of the work, we hear Pan’s subjectivity veering continually and unpredictably between the animal and the human. At times, we are given his white-hot, right-here-right-now animal consciousness: the searing rage, the overwhelming desire, the single-minded and unalloyed self-interest. But at other times, we sense the dawning of compassion, and a burgeoning need for companionship.
Pan begins with Pan’s violent death at the hands of Apollo, the horror of which is made viscerally apparent in the musical texture (‘Death of Pan’). As the agony becomes unbearable in his final moments, Pan begins to lose consciousness of the world around him. He turns inward. Pan dwells on his grief for what he has lost (‘Lament for Pan’s Death’), imagining his followers mourning him, and he begins to relive the course of events that has terminated in this most hideous of fates.
We are taken back to the very beginning of Pan’s transformation. This is the moment of his twofold discovery: of music on the one hand, and of power on the other (‘Pan’s Flute’). As Pan begins to play, we see his followers flock to him, enchanted by his music (‘Music of the Spheres’).
Pan initially sees the community as a tool to use for his own purposes, but this begins to change. Slowly, Pan realizes that his followers are fellow consciousnesses with minds and wills of their own: they are not creatures to dominate, but people from whom he needs recognition. As his conception of himself and his companions begins to alter, Pan begins to feel love. ‘Echo’, ‘Serenade to Selene’ and ‘Dance of the Nymphs’ are Pan’s hymns to his three lovers: Echo, Selene and Syrinx.
But love, for a creature like Pan, is not love as we know it. Pan has committed unspeakable acts of violence against all three of his lovers. In ‘Serenade to Selene’, we are given a window into what love feels like for Pan: for him, passion is shot through with aggression, hostility and bloodthirsty glee.
Pan’s misdeeds come home to roost in ‘Fray – The Unravelling’. Here, we see that Pan is not the only one whose understanding has been evolving. Pan’s followers have been growing, too, and they are realizing that they can no longer countenance his offenses. The musical charm breaks, and Pan’s community turns against him.
Pan sees condemnation, betrayal and disappointment in the faces of his friends. And this is the moment when Pan becomes human. In knowing others, he has come to know himself. Pan offers one last, thoroughly human plea for forgiveness (‘Soliloquy’), but it is too late.
Pan has spent his entire existence as an outcast, shunned by the worlds of god, man and beast alike. At the very end, he proves that he belongs in the human world. But the very moment at which he does so is the moment of his final, and irrevocable, banishment.
Many works of art explore what it is to be human. But Pan explores what it would be like to become human. Pan makes it clear that transformation of consciousness from animal to human carries with it not just the possibility of redemption, but the seeds of tragedy, too.