Diario 87 for reciter and tape (1987)

Towards the end of his life Tomasz Sikorski was particularly fascinated with the work of Jorge Louis Borges, to whose words he composed Diario 87 less than a year before he died. Written for tape (electronic sounds) and reciter, the piece is one of the last in the composer’s oeuvre.

The musical layer is reduced in it to the minimum. It consists of a synthesizer-generated and constantly transformed “patch of sound” against the background of which there appear irregular sounds of the gongs and the chimes as well as the recited text.

Electronic generation of sounds enabled the composer to shape their colours at will. Various hues are produced by the gongs and the chimes; what also changes is the nature of static sound: from dark, rough, opaque and muted to decidedly brighter, limpid and smooth. The transitions from a broad, dense, heavy and quavering to narrower, lighter and quieter sound, and from pianissimo to mezzoforte are seamless, with no rapid changes.

The verbal layer in Diario 87 is made up of fragments – selected and arranged by Sikorski – of the poems The thread, Doomsday and The long search from Jorge Luis Borges’ last collection of poetry, The Conspirators, published in 1985:

		He met the Nightmare and her name he told.

		The pen that traced the strange line.
		The weight of a rose in Persepolis.
		The weight of a rose in Bengal.
		The name of Hengist’s sword.
		Shakespeare’s last dream.
		The dusk whose red still exists in some Cretan cup.
		The waters that do not know they are the Ganges.
		Among all the objects lost there is not a single one
		that does not cast a long shadow now,
		that does not decide what you do today or will do tomorrow.

		There is not a single instant that cannot be the crater of Hell.
		There is not a single instant that cannot be the water of Paradise.
		There is not a single instant that is not loaded like a gun.
		In each instant you can be Cain or Siddhartha,
		the mask or the face.
		In each instant Helen of Troy can reveal her love to you.
		In each instant the cock may have crowed the third time.
		In each instant the water clock lets the last drop fall.

		It lurks in Turner’s crepuscules, in the look of a woman,
		In the ancient sound of the hexameter,
		In the ignorant dawn,
		In the moon shining over the horizon or in a metaphor.
		It eludes us from one second to the next.
		The sentence of the Roman is becoming erased.
		The nights gnaw at the marble.

With their expression, they fit it with the overwhelmingly pessimistic and dejected mood of texts used by Sikorski so far.