Music notes
By Nick Stevens

People-watching, flânerie, voyeurism, surveillance: each describes the act of observing strangers, a one-way taking of pleasure in a glance or scan or stare at someone who may or may not feel a gaze raise their hairs. How quickly the connotations change from word to word, the chain above beginning in the innocent daylight of a park bench or sidewalk cafe and ending in shadow. Everyone enjoys watching a crowd go by, perhaps tracing an individual’s path now and again, but the flâneur attracts suspicion by making a lifestyle of it. In the everyday English of the post-9/11 digital age, surveil carries a grim implication of professionalism. Surveillance tends to follow nouns – corporate, online, satellite, state – that preclude neutral or benevolent meanings, such as caring for a child, that still exist in the original French. And then there’s voyeurism, the subject of Voyeuristic Images Op. 10 and of Julián De La Chica’s Agatha.

As of 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary has yet to acknowledge voyeurism in the form that pervades discussions of reality TV, news, live streaming, and social media in the twenty-first century, a usage in which the ease and mundanity of watching from afar have softened the word’s original focus on sexuality. In our time of images that stoke depthless desire at a thumb’s flick over glass, anything can be a form of “porn,” as the philosophers C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams point out. Whether it’s food, real estate, trauma, or torture that appears in an image, it can attract the label pornographic if the viewer derives pleasure from this mediated copy without having to do any of the work of producing the object itself. For comparison behold voyeurism, long defined as an improper ache, but lately relieved of its carnal burden as watching becomes the universal condition of the social realm. In putting our lives on screen, we have widened the window of acceptable pleasures to accommodate voyeuristic gazes, even welcomed surveillance, if passively. Agatha hails from an era when seeing into someone’s life directly and physically, without location-tracking, data-mining intermediaries, feels downright quaint.

Voyeurism requires only an opening into private space: a window. In prior decades any surface, whether the gloss of the Polaroid, the expanse of the movie screen, or the tubes of the television, did just fine as a simulator or replicator of looking into a window, the acids etching through or the projector switching on or the red, green, and blue phosphors becoming excited. Laura Mulvey made this much clear when she placed Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window at the heart of her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which gave the world the phrase “male gaze.” Hitchcock’s camera trains us to enjoy peeping. James Stewart’s character is merely the guide who blocks our guilt by looking first, a Virgil in the infernal Greenwich Village summer. Just as the Dante of The Divine Comedy revels in seeing his enemies aflame, his ancient heroes spared from torture, strangers in states ranging from boredom to agony, and his beloved Beatrice in paradise, we feel a certain comfort in watching the neighbors of Rear Window and making up little speculative tales about how they reached this point in life. Danger intrudes, literally, when a story that Stewart’s character conjures for a particular man turns out to be true.

It matters that Rear Window takes place in New York. Wrapped in glass, dwellings at a density unknown elsewhere in the United States, it virtually requires artists – already society’s observers by trade and disposition – to see strangers and envision their stories at every waking moment.

Even people without regular creative practices will find their imaginations about the lives of others fired in locations such as the High Line, at first a haven from the claustrophobia of street level but more recently “a real-world hookup app for voyeurs and exhibitionists,” as the critic Justin Davidson put it. Agatha brings this feeling down to the scale of a single relationship between watcher and watched, or perhaps even smaller: as in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, we cannot know for sure who’s done the intrusive filming, whether or not it was in fact the filmed.

The setting of New York matters for Julián De La Chica as well: “it is the city of love and hate, a city of magical energy that defies logic and rationality.” Bushwick becomes the backdrop for a series of magnetic attractions and repulsions between strangers, mysterious forces drawing eyes and lenses through windows and across lives. The sound of Voyeuristic Images op. 10, the music of Agatha, captures at once the intimacy and distance of the gaze. From the first image, “The Bar in the Corner,” we hear the distinction between the almost hedonistically sustained chords, reclining across silences, and the noises of the old upright piano beyond its strings. In “The Waiting,” a rhythmic squeak becomes a confession of pain, and bass-register notes – the only ones in the track, near the end – bloom like bombs exploding in slow motion, feet away.

These Voyeuristic Images may suggest, to some listeners, other times and places: the Romantic era perhaps, when artists wondered how to re-enchant a disillusioned world through sound, or a gallery full of objects that invite you to sit and keep them company for a while. “T Time” may recall Schubert’s songs at their most despondent, “My Name is Agatha” a sculpture by Alexander Calder that revolves slowly, catching the light just as you look away. “Dawn on a Tuesday” and “The Sister” find the baroque lament bassline, always gently cycling, more sadly spacious than in any example from that time.

Released into a world newly aware of how isolation feels, of how the sight of a stranger through a window can feel like a taunt from the world of dreams, the first ten Images can strike the listener like portraits of absent subjects: views into voids, empty rooms where people should be. Yet in “The Abyss” the piano, our weary protagonist, is suddenly no longer alone. Who is this? What are they doing here? Are you watching two parties come together in a distant window, unnoticed as you observe, or is the music staring also into you?

Nicholas David Stevens, PhD
Musicologist