Introduction
   Martin Arnold

 
    In his study, The Medieval Imagination, French historian Jacques Le Goff distinguishes between the "miraculous" and the "marvelous" (or mirabilis) as conceived in the Middle Ages. The "miraculous" involved supernatural intercessions from God. Miracles came from outside of the phenomenal world, issuing from the spiritual beyond, from an eminent, transcendent realm. The "marvelous" was left over from an earlier era, from a pre-Christian, pagan/Celtic imagination. Marvels were unexplainable wonders. Marvels were not merely strange, for strangeness can give way to explanation through reflection. Marvels remained amazing. However, they were not technically "super-natural" for they stemmed from a world view that did not fracture existence into the physical and the spiritual. Marvels were real, objective, and immanent within phenomenal experience-they just did their wonderful thing apart from and unconcerned with human understanding. If the world is a collection of things, there are the things that you recognize and know, and marvels are not above and beyond these, they are the things in between.

    Eve Egoyan goes out to play in the marvelous. She is drawn to composers who wonder at music and put together works that can take part in this wonder. The composers gathered here seem to approach musical material as something that they discover outside of themselves and are amazed by; that they experiment with, not to come to conclusions about it and ascribe to it a coherent significance, but rather to keep opening up potentials for amazement. All of this music seems effortlessly resistant to and unconcerned with epiphany. A piece becomes a locus for activity where any listener can come upon personal marvels. And the musical material that is discovered can come from anywhere. It is not just an issue of physical sounds and gestures-musical material involves all the stuff of musical experience: history and culture and politics, all open for consideration from the most personalized to the most generalized points of view. All of the composers here search through their musical worlds and find stuff to transpose and play with, from a beloved Strauss waltz to years of hacking around on an electric guitar, scraping the strings with a pick.

    All of these pieces could be discussed in terms of exploring deconstructed margins or the productive subversion of culturalized conventions of apprehension. However, what strikes me most about the composers' own approaches is the modesty and straight-forward affection they bring to the act of composing. Not that there is anything modest about the potentials of these pieces-each, from the densest to the sparsest, offers an unfettered array of marvelous events and spilling associations for the listener's ear (equally unfettered) to meander through amazed. Yet each composer, again regardless of the surface complexity of the resulting piece, seems, nonetheless, to have found a way to do just enough to share their own wonder with others. Finnissy and Longton adhere to speculative procedures and bloody-minded discipline to maintain enough distance so that they avoid tampering with unexplainable possibilities. Curran observes what happens when he brings together two musics that do not strive to reach anywhere-the psychedelic simplicity of a song and chorale, reminiscent of Satie, with relentless repetition music-co-existing in fond tribute to his late friend's desire to bring down to earth and evaporate the elevated ("miraculous"), "elite" aura that pervades much new music practice. Smith respects the marvel she's discovered and won't fight her material to make it stay; she won't grasp it for herself or for the listener. Parkinson is not involved with reduction; he's not stripping anything away; his work does not come out of argument or opposition. Parkinson is just keenly attentive to small mirabilia that too often stay obscured by being in between.

    Eve Egoyan goes out to play in the marvelous but we are not relegated to passive admiration. This music invites us to go out and play in the marvelous as well.