THIRTEEN CARTESIAN DUALISMS
for Two Violas

Movements:

1. The Cogito (in D)

2. Malicious Daemon (in D#)

3. The Mark of the Maker on His Work (in E)

4. Method of Doubt (in F)

5. The Lump of Wax (in F#)

6. Waltz-Fragment of Queen Kristina of Sweden (in G)

7. Natural Light (The Cogito II) (in G#)

8. Truth vs. Certainty (in A)

9. The Mind-Body Problem (in A#)

10. Coördinate Geometries (in B)

11. The Nightgown (The Dream of Reason) (in C)

12. Animal Spirits (in C#)

13. L’Apothéose raisonnée (in D [redux])

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Date:
2011

Duration:
14'

Notes:

Composed in 2011, this work is a highly characteristic example of Wingate’s almost-tonal atonalism—teeming with labyrinthine counterpoint, rife with delirious transmutations of mood and character, and rich with supra-musical references to the humanities (in this case, philosophy’s early modern period). Wingate’s 13 Cartesian Dualisms is a panegyric to the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes, in the form of a jewel box of character pieces for two violas, which disguise their true nature as a series of movements in ascending ‘keys’, dubiously built from musical materials that have no ostensible ‘keys’ through which to ascend.

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These thirteen pithy viola duets taken together form a petite surrealistic pageant of homages to Descartes’ life and work. His famous assertion Cogito ergo sum (often rendered into English as ‘I think, therefore I am’—and sometimes referred to simply as ‘The Cogito’), begins the Dualisms in the form of a stately yet breathless and rhythmically confusing prelude movement, perhaps mirroring Descartes’ first principle and fundamental point, which, as Kenneth Clark memorably puts it, “was that he could doubt everything—except that he was doubting.” * The piece’s second movement summons the philosopher’s ‘Malicious Daemon’ thought experiment (from his venerable book, the Meditations of 1641) via darkly flashing spiccato figures amongst cross-examining tremolos. But then the gossamer artificial harmonics of the third movement intervene to evoke the divine signature stamped on the mind of humanity from Descartes’ so-called ‘Trademark Argument’. Then the fourth movement reiterates the philosopher’s ‘Method of Doubt’ with uncertain figurations and flourishes that retreat from making any musical conclusions, while the ‘Lump of Wax‘ in the fifth movement (from Descartes’ famous ‘Wax Argument’, also from the Meditations) takes on a musically viscous character in the melting viola lines. The ‘Waltz-Fragment of Queen Kristina of Sweden’ occupying the sixth movement is a reference to the woman who had whisked Descartes off to Stockholm in 1649 to be her philosophy tutor, thereby inadvertently bringing about his untimely death by pneumonia. This brief and prickly waltz leads to a reappearance of the first movement’s material in the seventh movement, whose ‘Natural Light’ refers to the philosopher’s term for the rational mind’s ability to understand the highest kind of truth. This is followed by a discombobulated scherzo movement called ‘Truth vs. Certainty’, underlining Descartes‘ important distinction between the two concepts with opposing, yet ultimately identical musical materials. The ninth movement sets the philosopher’s signature ‘Mind-Body Problem’ as a kind of transcendent dialog between these two problematic entities, with one viola ascending to the æther of its violin-esque upper register, and the other staying in the corporeal tones of its low register, both delicately revealing the pitches of shared tone rows. The ‘Coördinate Geometries’ of the tenth movement refers to Descartes’ most famous contribution to mathematics, and features brief musical gestures arrayed as if on a grid, eventually crossing the axes of the pitch field and falling off the graph entirely. By the following movement (‘The Nightgown’, or ‘The Dream of Reason’), we finally find ourselves ‘in C’, and this is the viola’s lowest note of its lowest string, here used as an inescapable drone as the philosopher stays in bed, enjoying his favorite occupation: thinking. The ‘Animal Spirits’ (from his 1649 book Passions of the Soul) featured in the twelfth movement take the form of nervous pizzicato figures in a kind of grotesque dance of the animating principle, but these seem to die away in preparation for the thirteenth and final movement, ‘L’Apothéose raisonnée’ or ‘Reasoned Apotheosis’ (the title referring to a pair of famous trio sonatas by François Couperin from the 1720s). The Dualisms have now journeyed through all twelve pitches and are come again to D, but this time, the 90 ordered pitches of the piece’s first movement are heard in the exact reverse order, and with a much more meditative complexion. Yet the plucked notes of the penultimate movement intermittently reappear to interrupt the flow of reason, until the last two bowed tones come to abide in the certainty of the interval of the perfect fifth in the piece’s last two (now deified) pitches.

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With its many virtuosic demands, the 13 Cartesian Dualisms gives its violists the opportunity for star-making turns, and the many double-stops in the two parts even create a rather string-quartet-like feel at times while using just the two players. The viola has often been the hapless target of Wingate’s compositional ambitions (beginning notably with the Rhapsodie gothique of 1987), despite being often generally regarded as a kind of Cinderella of the orchestral string family, and thus suffering from a relative dearth of repertoire choices. The world of unaccompanied viola duet literature had very few original compositions until the twentieth century, although the indefatigable Carl Stamitz (1745-1801) and J.S. Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784) did both produce some charming 18th century examples. But the incomparably melancholic disposition of the viola’s tone, when doubled as a duo, achieves a uniquely conspicuous pathos that is rarely enjoyed on the concert stage. Frank Bridge’s Lament for Two Violas (c. 1911-12) was an inspiration for the potentialities of this rarefied instrumentation for the young Wingate, who heard the piece by chance at a string masterclass in the 1980s. Composed many years later, his 13 Cartesian Dualisms are a continuation of the composer’s fascination with dense contrapuntal textures in string writing, while exploring the liminal boundaries surrounding dodecaphonic compositional procedures clothed in the raiment of the viola’s richly pensive tones.

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Unlike other chromatic sets which often begin their proceedings on C (like J. S. Bach‘s famous Well-Tempered Clavier), the 13 Cartesian Dualisms is arranged to begin and end on D (for ‘Descartes’). As the piece ascends chromatically (i.e. D, D#, E, F, etc.), each movement uses only the tone rows beginning or ending with that movement’s designated pitch. This theoretically should have no effect on the perception of a ‘key’, since all twelve pitches are used serially in every movement, but the composer has arranged for the main pitch of each movement to take a kind of contextual prominence, perhaps raising an almost Cartesian question: How much of the human experience of musical key and tonal center turn out to be a matter of, as it were, pure reason? Even Descartes’ own musical treatise (and also his first book, the Compendium Musicæ of 1619), was concerned with the acoustic phenomena of instruments and the mathematical properties of sound, but always with a mind (and an ear) to the question of how musical tones come to arouse the passions. Likewise, the title of Wingate’s piece plays with the shared inheritance of the musical terms ‘duo’ and ‘duet’ and the academic term ‘dualism’. Additionally, the word ‘duel’ (as in ‘dueling violas’) haunts this formulation, just as ‘Cartesian’ (being the somewhat confusing adjectival form of the name ‘Descartes’ in English**) etymologically flies away from its namesake, leaving us muddled in the conceptual legacy of the unavoidably compelling separation of mind and (musical) body.

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It should be noted that certain similarities of musical concern between the 13 Cartesian Dualisms and many of Wingate’s other works will readily be found. For example, the atonal chromatic set idea informs both the Metaphysical Monologue No. 1 (for flute), and the Wind Quintet No. 1 (‘Thirteen Self-Portraits’), the latter also conspicuously sharing a 13-movement structure, as well as what might be described as an overall personality. The ‘Malicious Daemon‘ movement of the Dualisms might recall the ‘Fuge der Dämonen‘ from the First Symphony, which in turn might prefigure the all-pizzicato setting of the ‘Animal Spirits’ movement from the Dualisms. And the piece’s last movement will remind some of the Metaphysical Monologue No. 2 (for viola) and its pizzicato interruptions of bowed phrases. Wingate’s penchant for apothegmatic character pieces resplendent in works like the Symphony No. 2 (‘Kleetüden’) is greatly in evidence here as well.

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​* Clark, K. (1969). Civilization: A Personal View.New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc. (page 209). Note: It was Clark’s charming introduction to Descartes in his BBC series Civilization (Episode 8. ‘The Light of Experience’) which first captivated the composer’s interest in the philosopher as a child.

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** Coming ultimately from ‘Cartesius’, the Latinized form of the philosopher’s name.