Love Songs without Subjects

Love Songs without Subjects

‘Love is to give what you do not have to someone who does not want it’
(orig.: ‘L’amour, c’est donner ce qu’on n’a pas à quelqu’un qui n’en veut pas’).

Love Songs without Subjects is a musical mediation which uses a short text taken from the seminars of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Much ink has been spilled on the meaning of this text, in keeping with the unresolvable trauma of desire and love embodied in psychoanalysis. Far from academic though, by turning Lacan into song, Thomas Meadowcroft has seized an opportunity to sing one’s way out of the mess of love.

Over forty-plus minutes, Love Songs without Subjects, which was written for the Norwegian singer, Ditte Marie Bræin and the Oslo-based experimental ensemble, asamisimasa, Lacan’s aphorism is set across a four measure chord sequence based on the famous descending, chromatic bass lament, a compositional device often found in love songs. The vocal line is delicately supported by a musical accompaniment consisting of bass clarinet, violoncello, guitar, vibraphone, Rhodes, piano and synthesisers. The overall effect is akin to a slow descending Shepard-tone effect, whereby one senses a falling, but never lands, as in love.

During the piece, these chords sequences happen to fall into other love songs which make use of the same lament sequence. Given the wealth of examples in popular culture that employ the sequence, they are played in parallel, for example, ‘Dido’s Lament’ alongside The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, Michelle alongside My Funny Valentine. These fleeting citations, which are embedded in the studio clutter of analogue tape outtakes, allude to love songs as ‘partial-objects’, things desired that are not in their full form. And yet, the question remains: why set a psychoanalytic text to music, and why mix it up with tunes by Purcell, Sherrill or McCartney? Perhaps this question is best deferred to the composer: “I wanted to set the text to music because I loved it from the moment I first read it, and, if I knew the reasons to explain why I loved the text, then I may as well not have loved it at all.”