I'm just reading "Maigret und der geheimnisvolle Kapitän" (Les Portes des Brumes, 1931), the plot is set somewhere out on the Breton coast, Quistreham or so; a sluice, gloomy rusty steamers, and a sailor's pub almost steadily veiled by fog; the characters of the drama communicate and find their ways by sounds which become plastic by the steady dampness; the visibility is poor. Sometimes the beam of the lighthouse rotates shortly into the world of sounds, uncapable to bring light into the drama! Does Dorner's, Minton's and Lehn's TOOT perhaps mean the scarcely perceptible foghorn far out off the mole? They find their ways (almost) without help from any means of the repertoire of the "music's language", sometimes groping forward cautiously, but then - with knowledge of and familiarity with the other's soundsigns - again find a firmly closed common direction in the "dark". Great spaces are forming, expanses in the music, distances by means of various volumes, perceptible, firmly determinable smaller spaces by means of reverbaration! After a while of listening the picture of a small foggy seaport is appearing, a plastic space with corners and angles, heights and rotten dangerous gangplanks - a sharply drawn story, full of suspense.
-Sven-Åke Johansson |