Programme Notes

The Theatre of Memory

There were two distinct sources for The Theatre of Memory. The first was the classical art of memory, developed by and from the Greeks (and described so brilliantly by Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory). This was a technique for remembering, which depended largely on the placing of images in imaginary buildings or rooms in the memory and ‘reading’ these in a particular order. It became popular again in the Middle Ages, but in the Renaissance it took on a new significance. An Italian, Giulio Camillo, built for the French king a memory theatre which became famous, described by writers like Erasmus, Giodano Bruno and Ariosto. The memory theatre followed Vitruvius’ plan for a romanized Greek Theatre, with an amphitheatre rising in seven tiers, divided by seven gang-ways. At the foot of each of the seven ‘wedges’ radiating from the Greek orchestra stood seven pillars – the seven pillars of Solomon’s House of Wisdom, which Camillo saw as having Cabalistic significance. ‘The seven measures of the fabric of the celestial and inferior worlds’, he wrote, ‘in which are contained the Ideas of all things.’ The first row beyond the pillars represented the seven planets, and the images and characteristics of each planet went up through the six tiers above.

Camillo’s theatre reflected the proportions of the world in the imagery of its architecture, which was given extra significance by the secrets of the Cabala, the signs of the zodiac, and Greek mythology. Through a mixture of these elements, the theatre was supposed to act as a vast memory bank or Renaissance computer, which would place man and his functions within the universe – the Renaissance microcosm/macrocosm duality. The ‘spectator’, standing where the stage would be and looking up at the auditorium, would have his memory activated by the images he saw, and be led to understand the ‘prime causes’ of the universe. We may no longer feel ready to accept the occult influences, but we are just as ready to see the imaginative roots of memory, and not only as the mother of the Muses: ‘the imagination is nothing but extended or compounded memory’, wrote Vico a century and a half after Camillo; Giodano Bruno wrote of ‘how to organise the psyche through the imagination’; and Frances Yates has pointed out the relevance of ‘activated’ memory images to post-Jungian archetypes.

But Camillo’s theatre was modelled on a Greek theatre and informed by Greek mythology, and it was this Greek-ness that became the other source of the piece. The Theatre of Memory became permeated, for me, by Greek tragedy, its nature, its forms. There is no ‘plot’, of course, but the intention was for the orchestra to become the theatre, to provide the imaginative means by which our memories help us to recognise drama or tragedy in music; and to use specific forms within Greek tragedy to aid this process. Thus the piece is constructed of episodes which are basically dramatic – single- or several-voiced – and by ‘chorus’ sections which are multi-voiced. This structure is used more freely later in the piece, as in a Euripidean tragedy.

In the front row of the seven orchestral tiers sit seven players [flute, cor anglais, contra-bass clarinet, trumpet, harp, celesta and cello] who form a basic chorus; they are led onto the stage by the cor anglais player – probably the nearest we can get to the Greek ‘flute’ (aulos) player who used to lead the chorus. But each of these seven also features as a protagonist in the episodes, as Trumpet I has already done at the beginning of the piece and in the first episode, before the rest of the chorus have entered. Behind these seven, the orchestra is re-ordered in families, so that the memory process spreads naturally according to function, as in Camillo’s theatre. Sometimes these wedges are used in stichomythia, or fast line-by-line talk; sometimes the cross-rows are used (particularly in the fourth episode, where they form chords).

The form of Greek tragedy has been described as ‘seemingly full of action but built out of narrative and argument’, and ‘not characterization but organization of the various forms of speech and song’. I have used some of the lyric metres of Greek tragedy: the chorus material uses the metres of the ‘sleep’ chorus from Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and much use is made of some of the Bacchic metres from Euripides’ Bacchae. Of the seven blocks of intervallic material used, the first is derived from the first Delphic hymn, transcribed from the wall of the Athenian Treasury and dating from the second century B.C.

The word ‘drama’ probably comes from the Greek word drân, and could be paraphrased as ‘what is going on’. The opening of the piece derives from this concept and from the trumpet-call which began the day’s plays in Athens. Trumpet I and brass are joined by a second block of material on the flutes; the first episode is largely a duet between the trumpet and three flutes. Of the seven episodes, the second (with harp) is dialectical, with a tutti section of stichomythia; the third, with celesta, becomes a sort of Bacchic hunt; the fourth, with flute, a dramatic monolgue. At the end of this episode the whole orchestra becomes the chorus. The fifth episode is connected with the ekkyklema - the ‘thing rolled out’ – when a tableau of the violence reported was pushed out on a wheeled platform from the central doors: ‘Look, then, and see, nothing is hidden now’. The short overlapping sixth and seventh episodes, led by Cello I, merge at the end of the piece with the instruments of the chorus intoning some of their figures in a kind of kommos, or dirge.

Memory is invoked by place, by instruments, by the musical material itself, by the forms used, by the chorus and by the overall formal pattern, by our memories of musico-dramatic lines and meanings (i.e. of ‘archetypes’), by the ‘local’ forms of, say, Baroque ritornello, and by the parallel Greek/Camillo orchestra seating plans. Little attempt is made at invoking specific musical works of the past but to set up, by making the orchestra itself a theatre, a framework to aid the imagination in ordering the musical images in memory.

I should like to acknowledge the help given to me by Theo Zinn, on the Greek lyric metres. Shortly after the first performance in the 1981 Proms, Dame Frances Yates died. The piece is dedicated now to her memory and, as before, to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the year of their Golden Jubilee.

© John Buller,
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press