When I began work on my interpretation of Bogusław Schaeffer’s  Symphony: Electronic Music, I recalled a curious anecdote concerning the various translations of a short, exceptionally beautiful  poem by Goethe. The poem, Wanderer’s Nightsong II, has been  rendered into Polish many times. In English, Leopold Staff’s version would read more or less like this:

The hilltops high
In silence bound;
No breezes sigh
In trees around;
The forest sleeps
And birds lie hushed on every bough—
For you, too, now,
It’s time to sleep.

The poem dates from 1780. In 1902, it was translated into Japanese. In 1911, the story goes, that Japanese version came to  the attention of a French devotee of East Asian art. Finding no  mention of the original, he took it for a little gem of Japanese literature and rendered it into French, putting his heart and soul into  capturing the poem’s Japanese spirit. That same year, the French  translation was rendered into German and published in a literary  journal in the following form (reproduced here in English):

All is quiet in the jade pavilion.
Crows fly soundlessly
towards snow-covered cherry trees in the moonlight.
I sit
and weep.

Music is born of music. Creative reinterpretations, translations, and even mistranslations—as with Goethe’s poem—serve  it extraordinarily well; they come naturally to it. Since 1966,  Schaeffer’s pioneering ideas have reverberated through even  the remotest reaches of sound art. Avant-garde ideas have been  reinterpreted, updated, repudiated, condemned, rediscovered,  modernised, and so on. They have been translated into every  conceivable style, language, and technology.

In today’s hypermedia world, the bizarre translation loop through  which Goethe’s poem passed has become a cornerstone of creative practice. Looking at the score of Schaeffer’s Symphony  today, we can find all manner of things there: jade pavilions, birds  in the undergrowth, and a wealth of other intriguing things its  graphic notation might bring to mind.

From graphic symbols plotted along a time axis, Schaeffer  fashioned a score that specifies their durations and textural  relationships with precision, while describing—more or less  exactly—the character of the sound events they represent. Yet  the sonic outcome of such a score will always be wholly subjective. The work’s entire conception was grounded in possibilities of  the emerging medium of electronic music that, at the time, could  barely be imagined. In keeping with the composer’s intention,  the concept—combining graphic sketches with a body of directions for realisation and performance—can be translated into  a different medium or carried into a different age. As Schaeffer  used to say, “Every age has its own symphony.”

Sławomir Wojciechowski