Music review — Federal University of Bahia
In Memoriam of my sister, Silvia
Silvia died on May 31, 2015 after a long and courageous fight with an aggressive cancer that consumed the last thirteen years of her life. She faced this battle with determination, persistence, and grace. Her two adult children who lived with her and were very attached to her suffered a great loss. Silvia and I became very close during the last two years of her life. Her condition began to deteriorate in 2013 after she visited me in Riverside, California. After that, we spoke on the phone often — I called her almost daily. Sometimes we had very long conversations that gave us feelings of trust and openness. I was also able to spend time with her when I travelled to São Paulo and visited her many times in the hospital.
In April 2014, when I was in São Paulo for the premiere of my work The Refrigerator (A Geladeira), we celebrated Silvia’s birthday with a party full of relatives and friends. A couple of days later she was admitted to the hospital for treatment, which became a recurrence in her life. Our family celebrated that Christmas in the hospital with Silvia. My mother and I, Silvia’s children, and the cousins from Rio de Janeiro who travelled often to São Paulo to help take care of Silvia were all there. We exchanged gifts and had a meal at a restaurant. When Silvia was discharged by year’s end, it meant that we could all be together again for New Year’s Eve. From the balcony of Silvia’s apartment, we could see fireworks — their colorful lights popping above the buildings of Paulista Avenue. Silvia was being cared for at home, which included a cart full of infusion bottles that we helped her move from place to place.
I went to see her in her final days at the hospital and was at her bedside when she passed away. After her death, I was allowed to stay a while in the hospital room alone with her. I could feel her presence beyond death. It was a very intense and revealing experience. Mirror of Death aims to capture this experience of death and the very short moment when my sister left her body. The piece was written for the International Contemporary Ensemble and premiered at the Festival, “Música de Agora na Bahia”on July 24, 2015. It is dedicated to Silvia and especially meaningful to me that it premiered in the city of our birth, Salvador, Brazil.
The greatest source of inspiration for the composition Mirror of Death is the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on death. Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition believes that we can actually use our lives to prepare for death: “Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected” (2002, 11). From this perspective, death is the dissolution of the conscious into space. Dying is seen as a process of dissolving from the densest and heaviest form to the finest and most subtle levels of our being. First, there is the outer dissolution of the four elements that compose the physical body —earth, water, fire, and air — and then the inner dissolution of the states of mind. In the moment of death, the male and female essences return to the heart center and, at the same time, all the subtle states of mind related to aggression, passion, and delusion cease. The culmination of the dying process is the experience of luminosity; all vital energy is absorbed into the very subtle prana of life energy or original prana, which is the very subtle consciousness, the mind of luminosity. Death appears as a self-illuminating power or “clear light.” The moment is compared to “a perfectly clear autumn sky at dawn, free from any tinge of moonlight, sunlight or twilight; it is simply suffused with its own natural, self-illuminating power”(Frementale 2013). This state of luminosity can last a few seconds, several days, or even weeks for trained yogis.
Tibetan Buddhism teaches the deeper acceptance of death as an intermediate state of existence, or an in-between state between one life and the next. The concept of bardo is central for understanding death from a Buddhist perspective. The word bardo is used to denote this intermediate state, which literally means, “in-between,”but it can also be interpreted as any transitional experience or state that lies between two other states. In a broader sense, bardo denotes the experience of living, which is between birth and death. Sogyal Rinpoche sees bardo as a moment when we step toward the edge of a precipice. The present moment, the now, is a continual bardo, always suspended between the past and the future. In Transcending Madness (2004), Chögyam Trungpa describes the bardo states as periods of uncertainty between sanity and insanity, between confusion and the transformation of confusion into wisdom. He interprets the experience of luminosity that occurs in death as a moment of utter surrender, brought about by the abandonment of our lifelong struggle to maintain the ego.
Trungpa identifies six realms of being in the bardo experience. “They are the heightened qualities of different types of ego and the possibility of letting getting of ego. That’s where bardo starts —the peak experience in which there is the possibility of losing the grip of ego and the possibility of being swallowed up in it.” Bardo is seen as a sudden glimpse of experience that is constantly developing and which happens in everyday life. The moment we try to hold on to it, it leaves us; we try give birth to it, but we realize that we can’t give birth anymore. The bardo of dying is one of these six realms of being. As Frementale says, “death is a process of dissolution, described in terms of the elements of body and mind being progressively absorbed from coarse to subtle, one by one. It seems to be a unique and final event, yet this transformation is actually taking place all the time. All the elements that make up our existence are continuously arising and dissolving again: birth and death occur at every moment.” (2013)
Trunga associates the bardo of dying to the experience of hell, which comes from aggression, the opposite of patience. Patience is seeing the situation in its fullest extent; it is having a proper relationship or exchange with the situation as it is, realizing that we are part of the situation. The basic aggression of hell comes from wanting to destroy our projection. It is natural aggression — we want to destroy the mirror. More specifically, we want to destroy not only the projection in the mirror, but the perceiver of the mirror as well. There is the suicidal mentality of wanting to destroy the perceiver of the mirror as well as the mirror itself. The bardo of death, connected with the experience of hell, deals with the duality of pain and pleasure; we experience anger as a sudden peak, in which we do not know whether we are actually trying to destroy something, or trying to achieve something by destroying it. It is the ambiguous quality of destruction and creation. Death is the recreation of birth that we experience in everyday life. Changing is always taking place and it is the realization of impermanence, the opposite of aggression. Aggression tries to freeze the space and to sterilize it. When we begin to see impermanence, we cannot solidify space anymore, and we are able to transcend aggression.
Mirror of Death develops a structure inspired by Chögyam Trungpa’s description of the bardo of dying in four parts, corresponding to the rehearsal letters A, B, C, D of the score:
A – Part I, Hell: Aggression x Patience
Patience is seeing the situation, exchanging with it, and realizing that we are part of it.
B – Part II, Mirror: Projection x Mirror
The mirror is the projection. We try to destroy the perceiver and the mirror.
C – Part III, Destruction: Destruction x Creation
Here there is an ambiguous quality. Pain versus pleasure; going versus coming.
We try to achieve something by destroying it.
D – Part IV, Aggression : Aggression x Impermanence
We attempt to freeze the space and realize that we cannot solidify space anymore.
We begin to see impermanence and transcend aggression.
At the beginning of the piece, we hear the piercing sound of the claves playing a regular pulse, upon which the musicians shout the words “Hell”, “Hölle” (German), “Naraka”(Sanskrit) and “Inferno”(Portuguese). We are immediately immersed in a powerful state of aggression. Then the space opens up to the bardo of death. The music unfolds the dissolution process and the luminosity of death until the end of the piece through constant flow of intermediate states charged with intense passion and acceptance. There is a constant flux of that oscillates between the constant demand for something —the ego that wants to be — and the willingness to perceive the situation and submit to it. The composition engages with the desire for continued existence, the fear of annihilation, and the total transformation of one’s consciousness that occurs the moment just before death. I would like to express my profound gratitude to the Festival “Música de Agora na Bahia”, and especially to Guilherme Bertissolo, for providing me with the unique opportunity to accomplish this homage to my sister. My thanks also to the musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) who perform the demanding score with high sensibility and precision.
Frementale, Francesca. 2013. Luminous Emptiness: Understanding The Tibetan Book of Dead. Boston: Shambhala Publications.
Rinpoche, Sogyal. 2002. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. New York: HarperCollins.
Trungpa, Chögyam. 2004. Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos. In The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa, Vol. VI. Edited by Carolyn Gimian. Boston: Shambhala Publications.