What does it mean to be unfaithful in music? Listening to a conversation with composer Ahmed Essyad, our author reflects on why breaking loyalties may be a necessary condition for musical truth.

In her 2008 cello solo Invisibility, the Australian composer Liza Lim engages with systems of spiritual and ancestral knowledge practised by the Yolngu people of Northern Australia, in which knowledge is layered, concealed, and unevenly accessible. As a non-Yolngu composer, Lim is granted access only to a certain depth – knowledge that, in accordance with Yolngu law, she is not able to share.

I found myself thinking about this while listening to the conversation between Ahmed Essyad and Katia Truijen at the recent Ultima Festival. Essyad spoke of the treason that was inevitable when trying to reconcile two different musical cultures, of being «unfaithful» to oneself and one’s convictions.

Invisibility works through these ideas on several levels. On its surface, the music’s striated sound echoes the cross-hatching «shimmer» of Yolngu paintings. This is intensified by the use of a modified bow whose twisted hairs produce a rough, irregular tone, adding crackle and depth to the cello’s sound. For the cellist this creates an unstable, resistant surface that defamiliarizes the instrument. With repeated listening, further layers emerge.

Much of Lim’s work appears, on Essyad’s terms at least, to be treasonous. Born in Brunei to Chinese parents, but raised in Australia within a European-style education system, Lim is already a participant in several different cultures. But her artistic practice deliberately reaches out to many more: Japanese calligraphers, Norwegian fiddlers, even coral reef fish. It is as if she cannot embark on an artistic project unless she first destabilizes herself and her sense of identity.

To be clear, Essyad does not see «treason» in wholly negative terms. He seems to consider it a necessary and even productive evil. Nevertheless, I was struck by his use of the word. Because treason implies that cultures are defined by sets of rules and accepted usages; that they are a kind of bureaucracy of meaning that one can be treasonous against. But Lim’s music suggests a different kind of exchange. With Invisibility, for example, she was able to participate in the gift-giving, trust-making and knowledge-sharing economy of another culture, and then bring those experiences to bear on a work of Western classical concert music.

What I find particularly interesting is that Lim’s music is highly literary, often notated with extreme precision. On paper, it belongs to the same Western tradition as the total serialism Essyad rejects for its insistence on fidelity to the written sign. And yet, it is from that insistence – the demand that the performer work, as best she can, within highly specific notational constraints – that the flexibility Essyad seeks emerges. It is like squeezing a stress ball: the places where it pops out from the gaps between your fingers are the places where it is most like itself. The ball needs the restrictions and the pressure of your hand squeezing it to truly become what it is; the music needs an over-abundance of signs.

Towards the end of his conversation with Truijen, Essyad mentions Franz Schubert: the economy of his music providing a potential space for orality, and therefore truth. I note this because Schubert’s music is also some of the most widely transcribed, quoted, and reworked in history. From the transcriptions Liszt began to make only a few years after the composer’s death in 1828, to countless quotations in the music of present-day composers (including Lim), dozens, perhaps hundreds of composers have been «unfaithful» with Schubert’s music.

And those references have all been made within a literate musical economy, on the basis of the written signs of Schubert’s original scores. Yet each of these acts of unfaithfulness is a creation: something positive and new. Perhaps that was just Schubert’s gift – to create perfectly fungible units of transparency and ambiguity – but perhaps treason is also necessary, and inevitable. Both here and in Lim’s culturally delicate exchanges, listening becomes a question less of loyalty than of responsibility.