Crossroads

"The Katabasis, or journey to the underworld, was a staple of the ancient epic poem. The hero descends to an ancestral realm of shadows, passing beneath the surface of the earth to a mirrored realm. Going-Under is an undergoing, and to return is to Go Over. Arseniy Gusev's Crossroads, in nine movements, is a mythic piece. Ancient modes abound, whose tones change from ascent to descent. Soon after I met Arseniy some years ago, he dedicated a piece to me inspired by the plants contained within the Voynich manuscript, a famously indecipherable herbarium of untranslatable script and drawings of exotic, non-existent flora. I see many of the same preoccupations at work within Crossroads. The piece is highly organic; phrases bare their sinews. Yet this organic generative impulse comes not from this world. Just as we recognize the Voynich's script as language, yet find no analogues in human tongue, within Crossroads many phrases feel like old music, yet they betray no genealogy. Crossroads is a mythic piece, and myths spring up whole and unbidden, needing no ancestors.

The imagery that Crossroads calls to mind is often epic in scale. At times the sky splits open, rifts in the very heavens appear, and light shines so brightly that illumination turns us blind. Crossroads is structured as a kind of descent and return, the outer eight movements inexorably attracted to the fifth movement's gravitational focus. Each movement is mirrored around this fifth movement: motives, rhythms, and characters reflect the underworld nexus, coming out the other side both superficially similar and deeply, irrevocably changed. The symmetric structure of the piece allows us to hear both diachronically and palindromically. Yet, narratively, the sense of agential action remains strong. We, the listeners and the performers, descend, and we return, the same, yet changed forever.

Ovid writes of katabasis that "as ocean absorbs the whole of the earth's rivers/so this place receives all spirits, never too small/for its population, never a shade more crowded/as the bloodless shadows stray without bodies or bones." The central movement absorbs endlessly, it infuses sound with the silence of mute ghosts.

The mountains of Crossroads' outer movements rise up from the black sea of the fifth, the center of the work. Their stones are etched with the waves of that central movement. From the trapping, oily darkness of the fifth, colors begin to emerge. The adjacent pair, the fourth and sixth movements, are a kind of alien dance, fragile beat patterns that teeter on the edge of instability creating a furiously active yet never fully openhearted dance. Moving one layer outward, we have a pair of lyrical, rhapsodic movements. Here too, we are in an unfamiliar world, where heat waves and smoke distort the edges of familiar structures. Within the sotto voce of these foreign songs, intense expression longs to be freed. The second and eighths movements are a study in instability. Regular beats become infused with entropic rhythmic chaos. The ensemble rattles, screws on the verge of coming loose. The bookending movements, the first and last, bring introspective, plaintive themes. Something remains unresolved, however—next to the most beautiful chords we find boundless, muted sorrow."

Alex Goldberg, one of the performers of the piece

First recording (published below): Shannon Lee (violin) and Arseniy Gusev (piano) Recorded at Muziekhaven, Zaandam, Netherlands, January 5, 2024