bradley leonard
syrinx (2026)
Shown as part of Dichotic Streams at the Sardenhaus in Munich
syrinx is a composition in three movements, built entirely from a single source: Marcel Moyse’s 1928 recording of Claude Debussy’s Syrinx for solo flute. In Ovid, the nymph Syrinx is turned into reeds to escape Pan, who cuts them and binds them into the pipes he plays. Debussy wrote his piece as Pan’s lament: it mourns the god’s loss, while the body that became his instrument goes unspoken. The composition takes up that silence. It subjects Moyse’s recording to the same treatment Pan gave the reeds: the performance is cut apart, stretched and reassembled into an instrument for music that is no longer its own.
Read through the labor that recorded sound conceals, the recording is itself such a body. A flautist’s breath, a living act of work, was fixed onto shellac and has circulated for nearly a century as a commodity, detached from the one who produced it. syrinx puts that breath to work again, three times over. The first movement, close to the Wandelweiser tradition, holds single tones for impossible durations between long silences, until one breath outlasts any body that could have produced it. The second sets the same chords in a fast footwork pattern, labor accelerated into machine rhythm. The third dissolves them into slow, pitched-down harmony, the work of one player turned into atmosphere.
In doing so, syrinx returns the recording to what it was made of, and asks what is owed to the performance on which every later transformation depends.
Documentation: Diogo Frazão