Late styles
On display at the Museum of Modern Art right now is a device called the Isophone. It’s part of an exhibit called “Design and the Elastic Mind.” You should visit - never mind the lines.
The Isophone is a telecommunications device that creates “a telephonic space of heightened purity and focus,” in opposition to the current ubiquity of mobile phones and conversations, the designers say. Immersed in a flotation tank, the user wears a helmet that “blocks out all unnecessary sensory input whilst maintaining the head above the surface of the water,” which is heated to body temperature, blurring the physical boundaries between the user’s body and its surroundings. This floating state frees up to ninety percent of the brain workload normally engaged with calculating the law of gravity. The resulting space is an ideal, distraction-free environment for a telephone call. “The only sensory stimulus is the voice connection to the person using the same apparatus in another location,” the designers say.
Isophone. Prototype. 2003; James Auger (British, b. 1970) ; Jimmy Loizeau (British, b. 1968) ; Media Lab Europe (Ireland, 2000–05).
I find myself thinking about the Isophone. It’s not necessarily real; who wants to clamber into a flotation tank every time there’s a phone call to be made? Changing communication patterns isn’t the point of the Isophone. It’s designed instead to make us think about our minds and our focus, both positively (”wouldn’t it be nice to pay attention?”) and negatively (”ugh, I don’t want to live as a disembodied mind”). (Some people I talked to about the Isophone today said they’d be too worried about electrocution to try it.)
I thought particularly of the Isophone tonight when I had a chance to hear one of my all-time-favorite pieces, the Brahms clarinet quintet. I dearly love this piece. I remember the first time I heard it, when I was a college freshman. It is so familiar to me now that I can’t imagine not knowing it. Brahms wrote it after he had announced that he had stopped composing; he planned to relax. But he heard a wonderful clarinetist play, and was inspired to take up his pen again. So it’s a late work, a beyond-retirement work, and it’s both profoundly melancholy and energetic.
I so wanted to pay complete attention to this piece tonight. I was partially successful, but my mind wandered a bit; back to the first time I tried to perform this piece, back to the people I have played it with over the years, over to the contortions of the man sitting four rows in front of me, back to the explosion of inappropriate individual applause after the end of the prior piece on the program (I think the applauder was just trying to show that he knew when the earlier piece was over), over to the daily things on my mind. I tried to mimic the notion of an Isophone, staying still and not working on my placement in the gravitational plane. It worked, but not throughout the piece.
The “late style” pieces on tonight’s program were accompanied by brief essays that the group had commissioned. There was a particularly lovely one by novelist Richard Powers. Here’s an excerpt:
We age, yes. Grow, certainly. We stumble forward toward some obscure destination. We rewrite always, given more time. But maybe it’s just that provisional, interrupted, etermal revision that we’re left with. Perhaps when we listen to an artist’s last word, we might give it space to mean something even more than consummation. Maybe we should hear in arrival just the draft of a draft of something else that might have come along, given more time.
The Brahms quintet’s last movement comes full circle, with a haunting reprise of the first movement. I managed to pay attention to that, at least, even without an Isophone involved. I wish you could hear it, right now. Imagine if it was a draft of a draft.