Semblances The word ‘semblance’ connotes likeness, similarity, resemblance, reflection, appearance, illusion, deception and even delusion. A semblance can be unsettling in that things are not what they seem to be, but semblances can also be alluring and appeal to our desires, even though we suspect that our wishes will remain unfulfilled. A semblance can be like a promise, and sometimes the promise itself happens to be more engaging and pleasing than the thing being promised. Semblances can be beautiful beyond what they purport to be. One might think here of elegant clothes suggestive of social elevation or wealth, and friendly manners suggestive of a kind person. We can enjoy elegant attire and friendliness in their own right and thus a semblance might transcend the things it conjures up. The enjoyment of a semblance might even remedy a particular desire, a desire that quite possibly gave rise to the semblance in the first place. In short, semblances are not simply the opposite of truth, actuality and reality. So what does all of this have to do with music? A concrete example of a semblance in this recording is the folk-like material in Semblance of Innocence in a Ruptured Dwelling. This work prolongs an appearance of sentimentality until it can no longer be sustained, and yet even after the inevitable rupture there is a return to the simple tonal language that vacillates between a semblance of innocence and kitsch. Throughout this recording there are semblances of musical style. At its most basic level of signification, most music can of course point to its style: Jazz, Baroque, folk music, and so on. However, in contrast to stylistically uniform music, the works in this recording might briefly allude to a particular style without developing the musical material accordingly. Similarly, a section of a work might appear to be in a particular style, while certain musical features in the same section point into a different direction or even subvert the suggested style. Beyond issues of style and in line with Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between sense and presence, my work inhabits a field of tension (Spannfeld) between music’s representational qualities and music as a non-signifying occurrence. For example the fleeting instrumental gesture at the end of Geister represents on one level of meaning the theatrical exit of Mephistopheles’ spirits after putting Faust to sleep. However, a listener might respond to the same sound object in its own right, without any awareness of Goethe’s text. But even without specific reference to Faust, this particular sonic gesture creates at the very least a semblance of something scurrying past, and thus exceeds the Kantian thing-in-itself. The two literary texts set to music in Dust and Geister also relate to the idea of semblance. Richard Dauenhauer’s poem is about translation and any translation from one language into another can only ever be a semblance of the original. As for the excerpt from Faust, many have asked me about the meaning of this apparent stream of consciousness. Clearly, this strange string of images creates the semblance of a dream, which is not surprising since the spirits are trying to put Faust to sleep. This recording should also be placed in the vicinity of Susanne Langer’s idea that music can create semblances of human feelings. The flugelhorn solo Forlorn explores the well-documented analogous relation between musical characteristics and emotional states by creating musical gestures that correspond to feelings of being abandoned, lost, and without hope. This includes the anxious breathing sounds, the descending interval of the minor second that has long been associated with the sigh as a sign of grief (the pianto motive), the even smaller descend of the quarter-tone and other microtones, as well as a distorted appearance of the Lament of Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Returning to the dialectic of semblance and actuality, rather than being simple opposites, semblance and actuality can coexist in music and, in a sense, even reverse roles. That is, the immediacy of sound can create a semblance of music as a non-representational art form, and the many semblances created by music corroborate the actuality of music as a complex system of signs. Again, it is the tension between these two ontologies of music that I hope will energise this recording. Thomas Reiner, Melbourne, 2014