Maya Verlaak’s New Album Vanishing Point

Liner notes for the album Maya Verlaak – Vanishing Point, by music philosopher Tomas Serrien

In The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), philosopher Mikel Dufrenne describes music as an aural atmospheric phenomenon, behaving either as a difficult-to-fathom conversational partner or as an enigmatic alien being that does not speak your language. That tension makes it uncomfortable to talk about music as something that we can truly understand. But still, there’s a compelling sense of a search to find words for what you have experienced.

For Frank Zappa, speaking about music is like dancing about architecture. When you try to encapsulate music in words, you somehow pierce its magic. The apparent open-mindedness you have while listening to a piece of music for the first time is difficult to relive once you have thought, spoken, or read about it. But at the same time, words about music also create new meanings: associations with all kinds of events and feelings, insight into the sonic material or a questioning of your musical taste. Even if the sounds that make up the music always seem the same, you are left with something new in your perception after each listen.

Unique vanishing points

This interplay between listening and reflection is characteristic of Maya Verlaak’s Vanishing Point. In the three new works on this album, the Flemish composer distances herself from her own compositions by presenting the musicians of Ensemble Klang with three musical puzzles, the solution to which is not fixed. She leaves free space for the performer to influence, understand and ultimately finalise the composition in these recordings. Maya provides the puzzle pieces for the music, but she does not supply its final content.

Both performing and listening to Vanishing Point leads to unique sonic encounters. The thoughts and words on her music are both creations and also vanishing points of meanings. It is this fragile paradox that intrigues me so much. By listening to her music uninhibitedly, I had a very different experience than when I first met her and reflected extensively on the process of creating the work. The same may be true for the performers, who try to understand her musical puzzles with a different ear each time.

As a composer, Maya positions herself as an outsider, watching from a distance as the performer embarks on the musical adventure. That outsider perspective makes me reflect in this text on two encounters with Maya’s work, my own attempt towards a vanishing point. For Maya, this is the point at which the resonance of a sound disappears and merges unrecognizably into the ambient sound. This is the grey zone where the musical meaning settles into the perception like a memory, further impacting the listening process.

The words you read about music have a similar effect. They resonate with your thoughts and feelings and their presence gradually disappears, further impacting the way you listen. This creates an interplay of meanings, a unique search for a relationship with the music that touches you.

1/ Musical images

Ping. An email. Pete Harden, artistic director of Ensemble Klang asks for liner notes to Maya Verlaak’s new album Vanishing Point. Maya is not unfamiliar to me, but I am certainly not an expert on her work. I know her from 2012’s Tape Piece, a work she made with Andy Ingamells. Two performers must simultaneously wrap each other with rolls of tape and are then tasked with escaping from that sticky situation. It is a tussling duet that with the sound of gaffer tape creates a new association in my perception. I have the realisation that I’m never left indifferent when faced with a focused sonic experience.

The sound world appears always in relation to new thoughts and feelings. I play Tape Piece during lectures I give on the philosophy of music. A standard reaction I get is: “what a noise!”, “that’s not music, is it?” or “I don’t understand any of it”. It shows that active and open listening to new music is not straightforward. In 2022, I summarised this in my book Hoor as follows: ‘We like to listen to music that sounds familiar. A music listener is not a blank page, but a flesh-and-blood human being, with a specific listening history, a certain functioning of brain and body and a personality of their own. We also listen in a complex context with all kinds of cultural influences. Values, norms, traditions, and forms of living together are just some of the factors that can influence how we approach sounds. This can lead to all kinds of situations in which listening is difficult.’

Those factors combine to create a listener’s expectation-pattern toward sounds. When you listen to music, you expect it to sound a certain way. If that expectation is not met, most listeners drop out. Exploratory listening simply feels more threatening than listening through familiarity. Much new music, therefore, often meets with incomprehension and is primarily perceived as noisy, as the author Alex Ross summarises so beautifully in his well-known book The Rest Is Noise (2007). Our listening behaviour is conditioned into musical patterns in which tonality, melody and harmony take precedence. For many, this makes listening to new unusual music unpredictable and therefore not immediately enjoyable.

Maya Verlaak’s album consists of three pieces of music: Roulette, the title track Vanishing Point and Conditions. I immediately apply some listening exercises. I lie down on my sofa, close my eyes and let the three pieces come to me without any visual input. As I listen to the music, I hear no noise. I do have certain expectations that immediately put my body into a state of readiness. When I hear new music for the first time, my eyes automatically blur because my ears need to focus more. I focus my full attention on the auditory phenomenon. From passive hearing to an active listening mode.

My thoughts begin to rattle. What am I hearing? How should I place this music versus sounds I’ve heard before? Our brain has a natural tendency to position a piece of music. You always listen from a frame of reference, and it brings peace of mind to determine whether the music can be understood within that frame. I unknowingly place Maya’s music in the category of ‘aleatoric music,’ in line with composers like John Cage. There seem to be elements of chance at play in this music. It is an intuition that I do not explore further. I leave the stylistic analysis for what it is and focus on the sounds themselves. I think of Pierre Schaeffer who, with his écoute reduite, made a plea to learn to listen to the sound itself, rather than focus on its origin or what its meaning is in a particular context. That disconnect between sound and its external references creates a certain depth of listening. It leads to a musical meditation where you consciously and fully focus on what you hear. Something composer Pauline Oliveros later refers to as ‘sonic awareness.’

In Roulette, I hear a dialogue between a piano and a guitar with a series of electronic intrusive sounds in the foreground with a high, short texture and a rhythmic pattern that is hard to count. Indeed, the meditative process feels like roulette: the electronic sounds are propelled like balls by the instruments, searching for an opening in a spinning mechanical sound device. In the hard-to-count breaks between pianos and guitars I wallow in a dreamy atmosphere that reminds me of Morton Feldman’s expressive music. I imagine myself an aural painter splattering sounds like paint against a white canvas only to look dubiously at one’s own creation, searching for structural lines that reveal a figurative shape in the artwork.

Vanishing Point appears with a resonating cymbal. What follows is a series of clicking sounds, beeps and more cymbals that feel like a random sequence of sounds. The structure seems lost, but there is clearly a process going on that suggests some calculation. I envision a typist overwriting invoices like a bureaucrat in a dystopian environment. The process accelerates. There is something futuristic, robotic about the atmosphere. My perception anticipates what is to come, but I get little grasp of the musical patterns. Toward the end, a bright bell sound grabs my attention. Like an hourglass, it gives a sense of time pressure, as if something urgently needs to be finished. I prepare myself for a climax until suddenly the piece ends in the same abrupt way it began.

From the start, Conditions is bathed in an alienating hypnotic atmosphere. Repetitive and minimalist, it breathes in my ear. At about half an hour long, the piece feels like a long musical sigh. There is a slow build-up in which a melee of transparent horns, subtle guitar lines and sudden piano, percussion and electronic sounds guide me to an indeterminate endpoint. The electronic glitches intrigue me. It seems as if my perception is reset again and again. It creates an aural bubble that completely surrounds me like a moving object in another space. That musical space within which the sounds move seems fluid and could fall apart at any moment.

Random images arise in my mind. Balloons rising slowly in the air, a child patiently waiting for a marble to roll down a step, a black cat wandering down a dark alley, and an old man raising his left thumb for no reason. These kinds of sounds do strange things to my mind. Associative images naturally pop up in my imagination and lead to all sorts of illogical connections. Toward the end, I imagine myself in a scene from a David Lynch film, at once absurd and logical. I get feelings similar when listening to Bohren & der Club of Gore, a darkjazz band that always puts me in Twin Peaks-like moods. Peace descends upon my consciousness as, unannounced, the final sound makes itself known.

The end of the album leaves me with a succession of feelings. A calmness descends upon me, with a sense of alienation that comes across as both confusing and pleasant. The game of meaning has done its job. It made me a different listener.

2/ Maya’s musical habitat

Maya and I drink coffee in the sun. We talk about her past. A student at The Hague Conservatoire, she grows up in the spirit of Louis Andriessen. She looks at music history with a hypercritical yet humorous eye. She is attracted to an anarchist ideal that rethinks classical music in a radical and uncompromising way. Reflection on the role of the composer, the performer, the audience in the musical process becomes prominent in her thinking. She befriends a group of fellow students who question everything, approve of almost nothing and take radical positions on every musical norm in society. It reminds me of the philosophy that prevails in DIY punk circles where radical genres like crust and grindcore with aggressive, loud and energetic, crunching guitars offer an answer to anything that still reeks of musical norms. Rebelliousness and resistance as the ultimate starting point.

Maya says her love for experimental music is great, but taboos prevail. This is evident, for example, in her work Darmstadt Hugging Music (2016), where at the Darmstadt Summer Course – an important gathering in the contemporary classical music world – she gives everyone a hug and presents that movement as a piece of music. It is her way of depicting the paradox between freedom and limitation that prevails in these musical middens. All standards about good or bad music blur, but at the same time everyone has a clear boundary for what can be defined as music, and the music world strives for quality, status and prestige.

Thus Maya is named by some music critics as a prominent figure in the so-called Second Hague School, which is to serve as a successor to the Hague School of composers such as Louis Andriessen, Dick Raaijmakers and Diderik Wagenaar. In a critical manner, Maya reflects on this event in Hexenhaus. She and several friends who critics say do not belong in the Second Hague School lock themselves in a room, and she challenges the audience to find a musical way to enter it. The play revolves around a doorbell where the audience must ring a major third before being welcomed, after which they are confronted in the room with a musical version of their previous attempts to open the door. The work reflects how aligning to a musical norm leads one to enter among a group of ‘serious’ composers. The audience assumes the role of the excluded one who is not welcome until the right ‘norm’ is created.

In Maya’s work, we increasingly see the element of play and the urge to observe her own musical habitat from a distance. But Maya explains that through that process came a major break in her life. She gets a PhD and a teaching appointment, but some resent her for it. She is now part of the musical establishment she has always opposed. Yet she finds her position right now very enriching. An honest critique can only come about by questioning your own radical positions and those of like-minded people. As a result, she increasingly distanc- es herself from the anarchic and at times corrosive musical environment in which she grew up. In dialogue with new composers, she became interested in the musical process that puts the conversation with people at the centre, and demands a caring approach. Opposition to others gives way to dialogue.

The album Vanishing Point is also based on this philosophy. Maya presents performers with three musical puzzles that can be solved with care, attention and dialogue. Thus she stimulates the performer and the audience to consider the vulnerable position a musician occupies during the musical process and the need for dialogue to bring it to fruition. She makes an effort to explain these works to me step-by-step, using sketch-like scores, live videos of the performances, and a lot of patience.

An atmosphere of great concentration stands out in the recording of Roulette. Pianist Saskia Lankhoorn and guitarist Pete Harden look into each other’s eyes penetratingly as they take turns playing their instruments. Occasionally their gaze deviates to a screen where the score of each part is displayed like a circular roulette wheel, with notes spaced like labels. Two arrows rotate in the circles, symbolizing, on the one hand, what the guitar should play and, on the other, what the piano should play. The goal of both musicians is to perform all the intervals listed on their roulette wheel, but they can only do that by working together. The arrow of one stops when the other starts playing and vice versa. They continuously disrupt each other’s games, and they can unravel the workings of the roulette wheel if they interrupt the other at just the right time. Building a bond of trust is the method of ‘winning’ this musical game, like a fascinatingly devised game of chords.

In Vanishing Point, percussionist Joey Marijs is confronted with his own musical playing. A peep sounds at the moment the resonance of a cymbal ceases: the vanishing point. The harder you hit, the longer the resonance continues and the longer it takes for the vanishing point to occur. At the same time, he can use a computer to select from a list of rhythmic patterns that make audible a series of tapping sounds. The goal of the musical piece is to synchronize the various vanishing points and the selected rhythmic pattern. Thus, the performer must learn to anticipate the length of the resonance and find a way to play the cymbals in such a way that the vanishing points of the resonant sounds align with the rhythm. This musical struggle requires tremendous concentration that contrasts with the apparent randomness I experienced when, without an accompanying explanation, I first listened to the piece.

In Conditions, Maya tries to compose the space in which music sounds and not see it as fixed. She shapes that musical thought-experiment by spreading the entire sextet of Ensemble Klang across a physical space around the outside of the listeners. Each musician is, as it were, a wall of a certain length that, together with the other performers, forms a new hexagonal ‘virtual’ space. If a musician moves to the inside or outside as a wall, the shape of that virtual space changes as well. Maya is fascinated by the impact such a potential space has on the interplay between musicians. Therefore, she calcu- lated how such a hexagonal room might sound, what the impact on the music is when a musician moves and how the sound of the instruments would reflect against the other ‘walls’. Maya thus attempts to depict a musical game in which the performers seemingly compose the space themselves and must work together. This allows them to estimate which echoes and resonances would impact their joint project. The result is a complex mathematical score that provides a unique insight into the musical mind of a composer struggling with her own imperfections. After all, virtual space does not exist in the exact world, but the conversion to a score reveals endless possibilities for giving this musical imagination a concrete form. The beauty of this work is that Maya herself admits and embraces her fallibility. While listening, this fragility is striking, as if the walls of her musical architecture could fall apart at any moment.

The album Vanishing Point is a musical Rubik’s Cube with puzzle pieces that click together through attentive performances, but where an understanding of the sonic material is not necessary to enjoy the beauty of the musical colours. While an explanation of the creation process makes sense and confronts me with the works’ fascinating complexity, the music never feels elitist or overly reasoned while listening. Maya embraces technical ingenuity and complexity, but listening to her music is never disturbing, unfeeling or gratuitous. The play is not fixed; it allows free and refreshing choices. She consciously gives way to a form of fragile open-mindedness that exposes the humanity of the musical process holding control and chaos in a state of suspense. Vanishing Point is a unique sonic encounter. A play of meaning that leaves me full of wonder and awe. It made me a different listener.

Tomas Serrien (1992, Belgium) writes about music, society and philosophy. Winner in 2015 of the Geert Grote Pen prize, his published works include Klank (2017), Lost in Enlightenment (2019), and Hoor (2022). Tomas regularly gives lectures, works on various interdisciplinary projects related to music experience, is a drummer for a number of music groups and helps a number of bands perform in Belgium.