Emmanuelle and I met around Eddie Prévost’s weekly workshops a few years ago and we discussed this score soon after it had been written. The following summer, I witnessed and took part in the closing realisation of this piece at the Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum, in Düsseldorf, the weather humid, changeable and breaking outside. (I wrote a brief report on the festival for The Wire, but its impact on me goes beyond critical summary.) The format of the gathering involves pieces being performed—one might say ‘workshopped’—every day for an entire week. It takes quite something for a piece, however open the score, to sutain that amount of attention, but what is left if we aren’t the world more than does this.
Over the past few years, I’ve found the piece a way to think and feel about what it feels like now—it makes a cameo in a book of poems I’ve been working on for the past few years called On Musical Objects—and I was honoured to write the liner notes to this CD release (for which Ryan Dohoney also provides a typically astute take). As upcoming performances in the context, not of music, but of performance art, activism, and discursive practices, suggest, what is left continues to evolve, and I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing about future iterations.
Until we are done, until we feel or sound indistinguishable from what is there…
what is left if we aren’t the world?
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s piece is a placeholder, a holding place, holding space. A way to respond to the alarming and sudden cessation of social life during the pandemic—whether that was experienced as ending, as interlude, or as a kind of new beginning. The piece has its origin in a recording of Emmanuelle’s voice and the wind on a stormy night in lockdown: the voice alone, but not alone, the wind its own kind of breath, one that doesn’t need a body to breathe through, to keep going or to preserve. what is Left, the ensemble piece that emerged from this, is a way of collectivizing that aloneness. From I to We, always asking who “we” are; who is allowed to be “we”.
A year after the premiere in Amsterdam, the piece was performed five times at the Jazz-Schmiede, Düsseldorf, as part of the long-running Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum. Lines were blurred between rehearsal, performance, and composition. Whatever their role in a particular piece, everyone is a listener, with listening a shared activity orienting us to each other and towards the world. The piece was workshopped: not as a precursor to something finished, but as part of an ongoing process, in which the discussions that surrounded the piece—how to perform it, what it means—are just as much a part of the piece as its score or a performance of that score.
what is left if begins with “pandemonium”, an explosion of sound which can be alternately joyous, explosive, or wracked, gradually fading out into a silence in which musicians and environment merge. Composed during Covid, it indexes that desolate time, but also the ways in which chaos continues to form the underlying, unstable ground of our equally uncertain present. This kind of collective catharsis is a space for grief as well as rage, and for the networked, swarm intelligence of collective sound-making occurring within the framework of a social relation of mutual attention and care. To go beyond ourselves whilst also digging deep into those parts of ourselves that we’ve forced ourselves to suppress, in order to go on: those huge griefs that, during the pandemic, we lived with and then had to force ourselves to forget; the ongoing griefs of the catastrophes we’re living through now, five years on.
I’m struck by the instruction in the score: “pandemonium [...], but not an apocalypse”. Because the idea that everything has ended is perhaps too easy, even as the possibility of planetary extinction becomes more and more palpable. How do we cope with an end that is not an end? How do we go on? The score opens at the moment when one doesn’t quite believe what’s happened, and continues into the moment where we try to hold onto the beliefs that sustained us up to this point, and to integrate—or to refuse to integrate—the new knowledge that trauma brings. “finding ourselves inside of something.” Finding something inside of ourselves. Keeping moving.
Within these sounds we hear the reflection of the horrors of where we are, all the things that block us truly being together—the anxieties, the cruelties, the hierarchies, the pettiness, the violence, the mistrust, the fear. But we also hear the possibility of what it would mean to be together, truly, glimpsed, briefly: a fraction of a second, a sliver of a sound.
Both the self and the tutti fall apart. And this is where we have to start. For after we figure out what’s left, the question is, as Emmanuelle says, “what to do?”
July 2025
