William Basinski: Passing the Cup of Sorrows

After a sound has faded, it can take a moment for quietude to regain its force. The ear stays where the sound has left it, as though something might still be communicated. That is how I find my way into William Basinski’s Passing the Cup of Sorrows. He spaces his piano phrases with something of Morton Feldman’s patience, allowing a note to arrive late enough to change what one might easily mistake for an ending. Over the course of this single, nearly forty-minute piece, I grow attentive to those small revisions. A pitch I could have sworn was alone acquires a neighbor as it decays, a faint vibration the electronics seem to have picked up through the skin of the note. Sometimes a figure returns so subtly that I wonder whether it has sounded again or whether I’ve been carrying it all along. Basinski took the title from a video about Life Between Lives, a form of regression hypnosis in which souls are said to meet between incarnations. In the exchange the video describes, a person comes…

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