Yannis Kyriakides - The Thing Like Us


Photo: Ingvar Loco Nordin

Yannis Kyriakides – The Thing Like Us
Electronic music theatre piece based on Spinoza, performed by the Veenfabriek.
Baruch Spinoza [texts] - Yannis Kyriakides [composition, electroacoustics] -
Ayelet Harpaz [voice] - Anne Falbourn [harpsichord] - Tatiana Koleva [percussion] -
Carola Arons [actor] - Bert Luppes [actor] - Paul Koek [dir]
Unsounds 09U. Duration: 75:29


I write my first words about the music of Yannis Kyriakides in a personally vulnerable and very, very fragile frame of mind – and perhaps this is the best way to approach this music, emotionally naked, shivering, stumbling into unknown spiritual territory, where all is at stake, where life and death have become the main concerns…

I have nothing to hide, and I’m not a music critic. I am a traveler of lives, and in this life I have come across a love which from the very beginning has a sharp and definite NO inside a wide and warm YES, because of traveling plans that were pondered and made steadfast and strong long before we met in the Lapland wilderness – and fate has it that this wondrous femininity is moving as far away as she possibly can from my habitat, without actually leaving the planet; the hills of New Zealand.

It is in my lack of coming to terms with this no in this yes that I move into the music of Yannis Kyriakides in a sense of total nakedness and formidable vulnerability, in which each sound, each shifting timbre, take on colossal proportions and stark, hidden meanings.

Yannis Kyriakides is a wondrous discovery for me as a music connoisseur, even without regard to the present mental traits of mine. I may have listened to more modern music, not least electronic and electroacoustic, than most contemporaries, which is why I am even more surprised at how I receive this music. To me there is no doubt that Kyriakides’ sound art is comparable to the most delicate, refined, most transparently sophisticated of all the music I have ever heard, counting even the giants of modernism that I have come to know also personally, like Stockhausen or Riley, or like others that I haven’t known personally but have come to regard most highly, like, for example, Jean Schwarz and Bernard Parmegiani.
Kyriakides lets his auditory brushes sweep gently across his canvas, leaving light traces of tone colors and dust particles and mineral grains of static and noises, but as you step back a little and lay your listening bare of the residue of today, or of life, you experience an aura of sound so brittle, so fragile and yet so convincing and persuasive that it is as if the composer has raised a magic wand across your existence.


Photo: Ingvar Loco Nordin

This is nowhere more evident than in The Thing Like Us; Kyriakides’ Spinoza venture, i.e. his music written for the 2002 VeenFabriek production SPINOZA: I am not where I think myself to be. The work is presented in its duality; Affectio & Epistola, based on, firstly, the definitions of emotions in part III of Spinoza’s Ethics, secondly on a Spinoza letter on the subject of the free will.

Kyriakides explains that the title of the work emanates from Spinoza’s phrase “Res nobis similis”, dealing with the concept of an imaginary ego and its influence on our self-conception. Kyriakides found an analogy in how music affects our emotions, how we’re reflecting ourselves in music, identifying with certain aspects of it that we think express our own feelings.

However, Kyriakides gives most of the credit of the composition to Spinoza and “the compositional beauty of Spinoza’s Ethics itself”, which he finds, in structure and form, almost reaches the state of music. He says that “the clarity of his thought, and the level of abstraction of his language function like music”.

The project began when singer Ayelet Harpaz requested a piece for voice and harpsichord for herself and harpsichordist Zohar Shefi from Kyriakides. They happened to live near Spinoza’s house in The Hague. Kyriakides had admired Spinoza, but had never really considered his texts for his music. When this request came, though, he found it too much of a coincidence that the instrument(s), the people and the place all fit so well into the Spinoza concept, so he wrote the first half of Affectio in 2000 for voice and harpsichord.

Meanwhile, Yannis Kyriakides had met up with Paul Koek, one of the founders of the ZTHollandia theatre group and VeenFabriek. Kyriakides had already worked with Koek together with legendary composer and conceptualist Dick Raaijmakers, and those experiences had all been inspiring and highly rewarding.
Through some tossing of creative ideas they got deeper into the Spinoza project, now to involve a staging in a kind of music theatre setting.
The Theatre aan het Spui teamed up, and was able to provide a very good location for performing; the old ABN bank headquarters in The Hague, which was temporarily abandoned for a later refurbishment. It took Kyriakides, Koek and a set of collaborators, including artist Isaac Carlos, actors Bert Luppes and Carola Arons, dramaturge Paul Slangen and assistant director Andrea Astbury, six weeks to develop the Spinoza project.

Paul Koek adds that this is “a very musical performance piece, which certainly translates very well to CD, unlike many other theater performances where the music is more functional and thus temporary”.

I might also add that when I first played through this piece on the CD I had no idea that it was drawn from a theatre piece of sorts, because there is nothing in the music, in the wonderful sound art of this work, that suggests that anything is missing when you hear it. Instead it strikes you as a very original, fully developed work of sound art, with a stunning combination of the acoustic properties (the voice, the harp) and the electroacoustic ones (Yannis Kyriakides’ masterly utilization of electronic means).


Photo: Ben van Duin

In his Affectio – the 48 Emotions (the third part of Ethics) - Spinoza lays down a theory on the properties of emotion. His opinion was that emotions were as bound by the laws of nature as, for instance, motion. Spinoza also maintains: “The essence of all things is conatus (desire): Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.”
So, an affect is any change in this power.
The rich booklet text – written by Yannis Kyriakides - goes on to state: “This structural theory model of emotion, which was very much anathema in his days, bears close resemblance to how emotion is understood in cognitive psychology nowadays, and even hints at neurological theories of brain activity.”

Kyriakides explains quite vividly how he worked with sounds to create this highly suggestive music that carries the Latin texts:


The sound world is made up of the voice and harpsichord, paper sounds, wax falling on paper, glass-sine tones and live manipulated samples of fragments of the piece. The intention is that the electronics create a sense of a living organism; an image of the physical – a body of slowly transforming states, that constantly move between the mental and the material world (idea and extension). From the high-pitched sine tones of the cerebral cortex to the image of a lung, a heart, breathing paper, blood coursing through the veins; the connection between the rational world of the Latin definitions and the visceral experience of emotion as a physical phenomena. The physicality of the electronic sounds plays an important function in the music, as it highlights the gray area between the corporeal, sensual presence of sound in space, and its abstraction into a codified musical language. This is fertile territory for music-theatre and is one of the more direct influences from Spinoza’s philosophy on my music. The changes in tempo and velocity are used to connect polyphonic layers of different states of activity and non-activity.


I here provide the Definition of the Emotions of Affectio from the Ethics of Spinoza, part III. The numbers correspond to the track numbers on the CD:

01. DESIRE (Cupiditas) is the actual essence of man, in so far as it is conceived, as determined to a particular activity by some given modification of itself.
02. PLEASURE (Laetitia) is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.
03. PAIN (Tristitia) is the transition of a man from a greater to a less perfection.
04. WONDER (Admiratio) is the conception of anything, wherein the mind comes to a stand, because the particular concept in question has no connection with other concepts.
05. CONTEMPT (Contemptus) is the conception of anything which touches the mind so little, that its presence leads the mind to imagine those qualities which are not in it rather than such as are in it.
06. LOVE (Amor) is pleasure, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
07. HATRED (Odium) is pain, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
08. INCLINATION (Propensio) is pleasure, accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally a cause of pleasure.
09. AVERSION (Aversio) is pain, accompanied by the idea of something which is accidentally the cause of pain.
10. DEVOTION (Devotio) is love towards one whom we admire.
11. DERISION (Irisio) is pleasure arising from our conceiving the presence of a quality, which we despise, in an object which we hate.
12. HOPE (Spes) is an inconstant pleasure, arising from the idea of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue.
13. FEAR (Metus) is an inconstant pain arising from the idea of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue.
14. CONFIDENCE (Securitas) is pleasure arising from the idea of something past or future, wherefrom all cause of doubt has been removed.
15. DESPAIR (Desperatio) is pain arising from the idea of something past or future, wherefrom all cause of doubt has been removed.
16. JOY (Gaudium) is pleasure accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue beyond our hope.
17. DISAPPOINTMENT (Conscientiae morsus) is pain accompanied by the idea of something past, which has had an issue contrary to our hope.
18. PITY (Commiseratio) is pain accompanied by the idea of evil, which ha befallen someone else whom we conceive to be like ourselves.
19. APPROVAL (Favor) is love towards one who has done good to another.
20. INDIGNATION (Indignatio) is hatred towards one who has done evil to another.
21. PARTIALITY (Existimatio) is thinking too highly of anyone because of the love we bear him.
22. DISPARAGEMENT (Despectus) is thinking too meanly of anyone, because we hate him.
23. ENVY (Invidia) is hatred, in so far as it induces a man to be pained by another's good fortune, and to rejoice in another's evil fortune.
24. SYMPATHY (Misericordia) is is love, in so far as it induces a man to feel pleasure at another's good fortune, and pain at another's evil fortune.
25. SELF-APPROVAL (Aquiescentia) is pleasure arising from a man's contemplation of himself and his own power of action.
26. HUMILITY (Humulitas) is pain arising from a man's contemplation of his own weakness of body or mind.
27. REPENTANCE (Poenitentia) is pain accompanied by the idea of some action, which we believe we have peformed by the free decision of mind.
28. PRIDE (Superbia) is thinking too highly of one's self from self-love.
29. SELF-ABASEMENT (Abiectio) is thinking too meanly of one's self by reason of pain.
30. HONOUR (Gloria) is pleasure accompanied by idea of some action of our own, which we believe to be praised by others.
31. SHAME (Pudor) is pain accompanied by the idea of some action of our own, which we believe to be blamed by others.
32. REGRET (Desiderium) is the desire or appetite to possess something, kept alive by the remembrance of the said thing, and at the same time constrained by the remembrance of other things which exclude the existence of it.
33. EMULATION (Aemulatio) is the desire of something, engendered in us by our conception that others have the same desire.
34. GRATITUDE (Gratia) is the desire or zeal springing from love, whereby we endeavour to benefit him, who with similar feelings of love has conferred a benefit on us.
35. BENEVOLENCE (Benevolentia) is the desire of benefiting one whom we pity.
36. ANGER (Ira) is the desire, whereby through hatredwe are induced to injure one whom we hate.
37. REVENGE (Vindicta) is the desire whereby we are induced, through mutual hatred, to injure one who, with similar feelings, has injured us.
38. CRUELTY or SAVAGENESS (Crudelitas) is the desire, whereby a man is impelled to injure one whom we love or pity.
39. TIMIDITY (Timor) is the desire to avoid a greater evil, which we dread, by undergoing a lesser evil.
40. DARING (Audacia) is the desire, whereby a man is set on to do something dangerous which his equals fear to attempt.
41. COWARDICE (Pulcila) isattributed to one, whose desire is checked by the fear of some danger which his equals dare to encounter.
42. CONSTERNATION (Consternatio) is attributed to one, whose desire of avoiding evil is checked by amazement at the evil which he fears.
43. COURTESY or DEFERENCE (Humanitas) is the desire of acting in a way that should please men, and refraining from that which should displease them.
44. AMBITION (Ambitio) is the immoderate desire of power.
45. LUXURY (Luxuria) is excessive desire, or even the love of living sumptuously.
46. INTEMPERANCE (Ebrietas) is the excessive desire and love of drinking.
47. AVARICE (Avaritia) is the excessive desire and love of riches.
48. LUST (Libido) is desire and love in the matter of sexual intercourse.

The sound commences inconspicuously enough with just a hint of a breath, as the narrator/singer inhales to start her withheld kind of reciting, and the harpsichord utters sparse, one-letter metal pitches. A long, thinned-out but persistent and finally piercing – by virtue of duration – electronically achieved tone, almost without overtones, accompanies the now almost declamatory, spoken-sung words of Spinoza, in an incredibly glassy, brittle, Medieval kind of atmosphere, where everything seems to be happening like condensation on a wine glass, so transparent, translucent, like a bleak ray of light shining through stained-glass windows high up in a sacral space, life itself a soaring, suspended quality in the air, under the lofty dome of existence.


Photo: Ben van Duin

The first time I heard this Kyriakides music I was overwhelmed by this lightness of touch, this almost incredible transparence, as if the sounds were in fact just gestures of silence in a soaring, vertiginous moment in endless time… and I still listen in a kind of awe; it doesn’t cease!
Such is the beauty of this acoustic/electroacoustic interpretation of Spinoza. Never could he have asked for a better exposure, had he ever imagined one in his distant future. If ever there was magic at work in music, it is to be experienced here, in The Thing Like Us by Yannis Kyriakides.

I’m amazed that I haven’t learned of this wizard of atmospheres and sound transparency – this juggler of silences! – before I came upon this recording by pure chance…

Minuscule static clicks wander in panning motions across the sound space, in and out of it, and the thin upper layer of sound, almost heard as in a whisper of gleaming threads, is counteracted or complemented by deep, sub-woofing rumbles that bore so deep that they get lost beyond hearing, ensuring magnificent dynamics to the sound, and an almost frightening depth.

Small details, a bit like the tiny shreds of sound interspersed in Björk’s songs on her album Vespertine by the New York duo Matmos, sink or rise or pan inside Kyriakides sound world, making every second of this timeless music exciting and enjoyable – and I enter further into the music in a state of hypnosis and a curious kind of secular sacredness, or like Dylan Thomas put it; into the Synagogue of the Ear of Corn.

One very important aspect of Kyriakides’ music is its fastidious and discriminating character, i.e., Kyriakides never overloads the sound picture, but applies just exactly what he needs, in an almost ascetic manner. This does not mean that there aren’t – at times – many things happening simultaneously, or that you’re left with a feeling of emptiness – no!; but he manages to keep sounds so pristine, fresh, clean, that you feel like you see the sounds clearly, just like I imagine a good conductor or composer gets a grip of a whole symphonic score just by glancing at the paper – and this is a feeling that the attentive listener can enjoy in experiencing The Thing Like Us, in a, yes, mathematical clarity of beauty!

I burn some good Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa Agarbatti incense from India, and a fragrance as beauteous as the musical atmosphere reaches my nostrils in winding, smoky serpentines, lighting centers of smell inside my brain, like cerebral wildfires in the deep forests of mind.
I can rest in this soaring musical beauty of sound indefinitely, sensing the weight of gravity slowly loosing its grip as my consciousness rises through incense and Kyriakides’ sound art, in a physical as well as metaphysical catharsis of wonderful sounding silence.

Epistola (The Letter of Free Will) is drawn from a letter that Spinoza wrote to G. H. Schaller, containing a metaphor for understanding the illusion of free will. Spinoza is a determinist, but in Ethics he talks about freedom as something we can attain through understanding, even if we’re not born with it.

Here is Spinoza's text with the index points of Kyriakides' CD:

51. Though I am, at present, much occupied with other matters, not to mention my delicate health, your singular courtesy, or, to name the chief motive, your love of truth, impels me to satisfy your inquiries, as far as my poor abilities will permit.
52. I say that a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature.
54. Thus also God understands Himself and all things freely, because it follows solely from the necessity of His own nature, that He should understand all things.
58. You see I do not place freedom in free decision, but in free necessity.
59. However, let us descend to created things, which are all determined by external causes to exist and operate in a given determinate manner.
60. In order that this may be clearly understood, let us conceive a very simple thing.
61. For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion,
62. by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased.
64. The permanence of the stone's motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsionn of an external cause.
66. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions,
68. inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.
69. Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move.
70. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent would believe itself to be completely free,
71. and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess,
72. and which consists solely in the fact, that men ar conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.
74. Thus an infant believes that it desires milk freely;
77. an angry child thinks he wishes freely for vengeance,
79. a timid child thinks he wishes freely to run away. Again, a drunken man thinks, that from the free decision of his mind he speaks words,
80. which afterwards, when sober, he would like to have left unsaid.
83. So the delirious, the garrulous, and others of the same sort think that they act from the free decision of their mind,
84. not that they are carried away by the impulse.
85. As this misconception is innate in all men, it is not easily conquered.
90. For, although experience abundantly shows, that men can do anything rather than check their desires,
92. and that very often, when a prey to conflicting emotions, they see the better course and follow the worse,
94. they yet believe themselves to be free; because in some cases their desire for a thing is slight,
96. and can easily be overruled by the recollection of something else, which is frequently present in the mind.
97. I have thus, if I mistake not, sufficiently explained my opinion regarding free and constrained necessity, and also regarding so-called human freedom:
98. from what I have said you will easily be able to reply to your friend's objections.

I let Yannis Kyriakides explain how the music for Epistola works:


The music in Epistola uses a cinematic type structure of many short scenes which constantly change the focus and perspective of the material. The piece develops on sudden shifts from layers of changing polyphony; sometimes there are six things happening at the same time, sometimes just one. The voice sings the Latin text of Spinoza’s letter from a distance, and this is stretched out through the whole part. The female actor’s voice is constantly moving around the acoustical space like a voice inside our head and highlighting themes about free will and her character’s desire to live in a world free of emotion, a dystopian future. The male actor’s voice is always right in front of us in the acoustic field, his texts have to do with the growing awareness of his character’s existential situation, the gradual realization of his mortality as he experiences it through his senses and memory. This was in part inspired by the mysterious circumstances of Spinoza’s death, and by his own writing about mortality.
The actors have a musical function in the work in the way their voices are used and the text is interpreted. Organisms within the music are created whereby the polyphony of voices have an interactive effect on each other through live computer processing using algorithms with feedback loops, whereby one voice influences the level of processing used on another.



Photo: Ingvar Loco Nordin, near Donaueschingen 2004

EPISTOLA begins with a metronome-like, rhythmically repeated high pitch beat, like the piano of Terry Riley’s In C, onto which a female, short cry and a growling, sound poetic deeper voice, distorted as through Stockhausenesque ring-modulators, is displayed, the rrrs spinning like a Mefisto whirlwind – and electronic, watery or sandy sounds pour down in a shower of fragments.
Soon a male voice enters, talking in Dutch right up your face – but softly, gently, with accentuated pauses that leave you in anticipation, and a singing male voice recreates a Renaissance or Medieval angle to the soundscape, which after a while comes at you in cut-up shreds, while the tempo picks up into faster progressions, penetrating high-pitch clicks and a shallow drum beat taking turns with a wildly hacking harpsichord – all in a brilliant mixture of modern and old, the feelings and atmospheres of Medieval Europe in electro-acoustic surroundings.
Sometimes when the text is spoken by the male voice in the middle of the sound, close to you, like he’s leaning towards you across the table, everything else stops dead in its tracks, leaving the voice very much focused in a anticipating silence that holds off all the sounds which were just recently there… until they come crashing in again; a witch-like laughter, rolling drums, meandering harpsichord... and then the female voice, clear and innocent as out of a late Arvo Pärt invocation.

This sublime mastery of electronics and the voice, electronics and the acoustic instruments, might be compared to the works of one other modern composer that I appreciate very much, the Frenchman Jean Schwarz. I’m thinking of, for example, and especially, his wondrous work Quatre Saisons, dealing with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s text. I recommend a good listen to that too. Apart from Schwarz and his Goethe piece, I find it hard to come up with anything, really, that would stand up to a comparison with Yannis Kyriakides’ Epistola. It has such beauty, such edge, such exciting transparency and such exact application of venomous details of sound.

There is a wave feeling in here too, on various levels; the slow rhythm of faster, more dense sections contrasted with almost silent, thin, restful passages. This also applies to the mixture of clean-sounding, unaltered Medieval-style voices with electronically manipulated, sound-poetically distorted and altered vocalisms. There is also a slow pulse of completely electronic passages that are relieved by purely acoustic sections.

All this makes the music dreamy, subconscious, bardo-like – timeless, beyondish, soaring, in a feeling of all times now, all places here.

I bow to the ingenious musicality and awesome artistic sensitivity of Yannis Kyriakides. His music has brought a totally new dimension to my listening.
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