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FRANCE
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Introduction
Although Paris remained one of the paramount
musical centres of Europe, French classical music during the
19th century was eclipsed by German and Austrian music, and
by Italian opera. Throughout the century, France produced composers
of interest and sometimes passing fame, but lacking the individuality
and spark of lasting genius. The exception was Hector Berlioz
(1803-1869), arch-Romantic but musical visionary, whose example
continues to resonate through French music. The French composers
of the later 19th century fall into distinct groups. Camille
Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) was the major French Romantic composer,
often under the spell of Liszt; his sense of technical craftsmanship
provided an important example to the next generation of composers.
Other Romantics included Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894), an admirer
of Wagner. French opera, mostly on a grand scale, provided a
second thread, including those of Georges Gounod (1818-1893),
Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and Jules Massenet (1842-1912), all
of whom included an element of realistic intimacy in the relationships
between characters (often of more ordinary people) in their
major works, in contrast to the mythological scale of Wagner
or the characters of power and position in Italian opera before
Puccini. More notorious than any of these composers
was Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), whose small-scale musical
comedies stormed Europe, and whose qualities of grace, sparkle,
and sheer fun helped established an important strand in later
French music.
The third main group provided the foundations
for a renaissance of French music, and were centred around the
figure of César Franck (1822-1890). The basis of Franck's
aesthetic - a preoccupation with musical form and architecture
that is largely abstract, and an awareness of and admiration
for Classical forms and examples - were very different from
German and Austrian concerns. The importance of this aesthetic
to later French music has been overshadowed by his best-known
technique, the use of germ themes that return in different movements
in a cyclical principle; the significance of the organ in his
output ensured a tradition in French music that continues to
this day. Two of his pupils developed and promoted this aesthetic
in both their music and their teaching. Vincent d'Indy
(1851-1931) was the more conservative, and fused the inheritance
with an admiration for Wagner while maintaining a French clarity.
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) refined the aesthetic,
especially in his chamber works, taking it towards Impressionism,
and in the final years of his life anticipating neo-classicism.
Of Franck's other pupils, Henri Duparc (1848-1933), whose output
was curtailed by mental illness, produced in his fourteen songs
perhaps the most perfect collection of songs ever written.
Meanwhile, two composers emerged at the end of
the 19th century who were to cement the renaissance of French
music initiated by Franck, and place it on an equal footing
with German and Austrian composition. Claude Debussy
(1862-1918) revolutionized the way composers have thought of
music, initially through what has become known as Impressionism;
for a fuller discussion of this revolution, of Impressionism,
and of Debussy's legacy, readers are referred to the entry on
Debussy below. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was both
less revolutionary and less influential, but the immense popularity
of his music established a vital and colourful aesthetic alternative
to the Germanic tradition. Of their contemporaries, Paul Dukas
(1865-1935), an important teacher, refined the late-Romantic
tone poem with incisive orchestration and formal construction.
The eccentric Erik Satie (1866-1925) developed
the miniature form, often with dissonant harmonies, and including
unusual sound sources later in his career; his particular brand
of the absurd, his quirky sense of humour, and his drive towards
simplicity were widely influential. Albert Roussel
(1869-1937) became the classicist of the period in his own individual
style, traceable back to Franck and with oriental influences
from his own travels.
The potency of French music was then confirmed
after the First World War by the magnet that Paris became for
writers, visual artists and composers from all over the world.
Here were to be found such diverse artists as Picasso and Joyce,
Hemingway and Le Corbusier, and among the foreign composers
who lived in Paris in this period were Stravinsky,
Martinů, and Prokofiev, to
name but three. French composition again followed clearly defined
general lines, all of which remained committed to the traditions
of tonal music, or their development by Debussy,
rather than following the harmonic revolution of Schoenberg
and his followers. Yet the well-known composers of the generation
that followed Debussy and Ravel had echoes
of their mid-19th-century precursors in producing many secondary
figures but none of outstanding genius. The period between the
World Wars was dominated by a group known as `Les Six', a name
given to them by the critic Henri Collet. The six composers
were Georges Auric (1899-1983), Louis Durey (1888-1979), Darius
Milhaud (1892-1974), Francis Poulenc
(1899-1963), Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) and perhaps the
most outstanding, the Swiss Arthur Honegger. Although
they together produced a group of piano pieces (Album des
Six, 1920), and a joint ballet (Les Mariés de
la Tour Eiffel, 1921), their common denominator was extra-musical,
the influence and leadership of the writer Jean Cocteau (1891-1963).
His ideas of modernity, simplicity and directness were themselves
influenced by Satie, but the six composers quickly
went their different ways, and had little in common musically.
Auric wrote ballets for Diaghilev, but remained close to Cocteau,
writing music for his films (1930-1949); late in his life he
was influenced by the developments in French music after the
Second World War. Milhaud also followed Cocteau's
aesthetic in some of his huge output, especially in his collaborations
with the writer Paul Claudel, but otherwise pursued neo-classicism
and developed polytonality. His idiom became very wide-ranging,
and the best of his works show what a prodigious talent he had,
and the rest what little self-criticism. Durey became politically
involved, eventually writing settings of communist writers,
including Mao and Ho-Chi-Minh. Poulenc is the most interesting
of the French composers of this group, shedding his early reputation
for an almost flippant gaiety and elegance for a thoughtful
and personal idiom characterized by grace and craftsmanship,
including many superb songs. Tailleferre remained the most conservative
of the group, and is now most often encountered in her harp
music. Outside `Les Six', Florent Schmitt (1870-1958)
represented a last flowering of late-Romanticism in France.
A reaction to what was perceived as the shallowness
of this period of French composition, and especially the neo-classicism
that became prevalent in Paris in the 1930s, was inevitable,
and future historians may see the revolution that followed (partially
delayed by the Second World War) as crucial to the development
of classical music as that of Debussy and Schoenberg.
There was already a French composer that had started this revolution,
but since his ideas were so far in advance of `Les Six', and
because many of his premieres had taken place in the unsympathetic
milieu of New York, he had not been as noticed. Edgard Varèse
(1883-1965) was experimenting with completely new concepts of
sound and its organization, including the use of new instruments
(for fuller details, see the entry below), and with Debussy,
Schoenberg, Webern and Cage was one of
the innovatory musical geniuses of the century. One significant
French composer, André Jolivet, had studied
with Varèse (1930-1933); with Olivier Messiaen
(1908-1992), the figure who was to become central to this revolution,
he co-founded `La Jeune France' in 1936. The other members were
Yves Baudier (born 1906), whose output was restricted by ill-health,
and Daniel-Lesur (born 1908), who, beside his own compositions,
did much to promote contemporary music on French radio after
the Second World War. Jolivet developed an idiom tinged with
exoticism, often with an incantatory or mythical impulse, dissonant
effects and sometimes complex rhythms, and stood largely apart
from developments after 1945. Messiaen, however, became the
major French teacher of the period, while writing music, often
for the organ, of astonishing power and spirituality, his mysticism
paralleling that of Jolivet but firmly rooted in Christian theology.
Messiaen's innovations included the development of modes, the
extension of rhythmic patterns including the development of
rhythmic modes, sometimes influenced by Eastern musics, and
the exploration of a wide range of new tone colours, often drawing
on bird-song.
These innovations paved the way for developments
immediately after the Second World War; in particular, the systematization
of rhythm pointed to the possibility of `total serialism', the
extension of 12-tone principles into areas of musical construction
other than harmony. This major step was led by one of Messiaen's
French pupils, Pierre Boulez, who consolidated
the principles of total serialism in 1951-1952. The importance
of this step cannot be overestimated. Quite apart from the widespread
emulation and development of serialism all over the world (including
such French composers as Jean Barraqué,
1928-1973, and Gilbert Amy, born 1936), led by the promotional
powers of Boulez in his writing and in his conducting, it reconciled
two divergent strands of musical continuity that had been temperamentally
at odds for 150 years and beyond, the French and the German
traditions. On the one hand total serialism can be traced back
through Webern and Schoenberg to
Wagner and ultimately to Beethoven; on the other, through Messiaen
to the twin progenitors of Varèse and Debussy,
and beyond them to Franck and his precursors (it is perhaps
no coincidence that Boulez is also celebrated as a conductor
of both Wagner and Debussy). To cement this conjunction, one
of Messiaen's other pupils, Stockhausen, took
serialism back to Germany. This reconciliation (which paralleled
the social reconciliation of the foundation of the European
Economic Community) is partly responsible for the international
embrace of serialism; from the 1950s the major divide in classical
music has been not between France and Germany but between Europe
and North America, however strong the cross-fertilization.
At the same time, another musical revolution
was taking place in France which may prove even more far-reaching.
Varèse and Messiaen had already used electronic
instruments (the ondes martenot), and Varèse completed
the first work for orchestra with tape in 1954, but the development
of new technology (particularly the tape-recorder) gave birth
to a completely new media: electronic music. The pioneers were
Pierre Schaeffer (born 1910) and Pierre Henry
(born 1927), who had studied with Messiaen. Schaeffer's first
electronic works were composed in 1948, using the technique
of `musique-concrète', in which naturally occurring sounds,
including those of musical instruments, are electronically manipulated
to create completely different sounds. Electronic composition
using purely electronic sound sources soon followed. The `Groupe
de Musique Concrète' was established in 1951, and an
advanced interest in electronic and then computer technology
has informed French music ever since, notably in the Service
de la Recherche de O.R.T.F. (French Radio), and then in 1977
with the opening of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination
Acoustique/Musique in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, directed
by Boulez, which has become a magnet for composers
from all over the world interested in advanced technology. Among
later French composers of electronic music have been François
Bayle (born 1932), François-Bernard Mâche
(born 1935), and Luc Ferrari (born 1929), who increasingly left
the sound sources as natural as possible, eventually arriving
at `anecdotal music': Presque rien no.1 (Nearly Nothing
No.1, 1970) is the skilfully edited sounds of a busy beach,
anticipating the environmental soundscapes of the `New Age'
movement.
Marius Constant (born 1925) has drawn on an eclectic
range of styles within conventional means, from the conventional
to the experimental; further details will be found in the introduction
to Rumania, his country of origin. Meanwhile, other French composers
have pursued a less radical path. Jean Françaix
(born 1912) has continued the French tradition of grace and
charm, while the most interesting of the mainstream composers
have been Marcel Landowski (born 1915), absorbing
some of the new sounds into a more traditional idiom, and Henri
Dutilleux (born 1916), who has forged a powerful
individual idiom emerging from the influence of Roussel.
Henry Barraud (born 1900) is best-known for the suite Un
saison en enfer (A season in hell, 1969, after Rimbaud,
for orchestra), large in intent and orchestral forces, a very
sure handling of varied orchestral colour, and a harmonic language
that will interest those who have accepted modern developments
without putting off those who haven't. His impulse is often
religious (Mystère des Saints Innocents for soloists,
chorus and orchestra, 1942-1944, Te Deum for chorus and
winds, 1955) or humanitarian; works less intense in emotional
scale, such as the Piano Concerto (1939) or the
Concerto for Flute and String Orchestra (1963),
are characterized by grace and style. Alain Bancquart (born
1934) has been one of the few composers to use quarter-tones
extensively in large-scale orchestral works while keeping relatively
traditional structures, including the symphony. His use of quarter-tone
writing dates from 1967; works or movements for strings predominate,
and where instruments are unsuitable because they cannot play
quarter-tones, Bancquart has found alternatives: bassoons, for
example, are replaced in the Symphony No.1 by
electric bass guitars. In some cases an instrument can simply
be retuned to quarter-tones, as in the effective Ma Maniére
de Chat, (1978) for solo harp, where 12 different notes
can be produced in 2 octaves without pedal changes. The dark
Symphony No.1 itself uses opposed orchestral blocks,
setting up sonorities not dissimilar (especially with the quartet-tones)
to the effects of some electronic music. The slow movement is
for strings alone, while the final movement introduces the deep
sounds of the electric bass guitar. The music of Henri Tomasi
(1901-1971), once extremely successful in France but less well
known outside, is dominated by his operas and by many concertos,
and is noted for its orchestration and use of exotic and Impressionistic
colours within a conventional, occasionally dissonant harmonic
framework. The exotic sense partly reflects his time with colonial
radio services in French Indochina from 1930 to 1935 (e.g. Chants
laotiens, 1934), but extends to scenes as far apart as the
Sahara (Impressions sahariennes, 1938, for orchestra)
and the South Pacific. Of his concertos, the Trumpet Concerto
(1949) is probably the best known. It is very direct and undemanding,
with a mysterious, nocturne slow movement and transparent orchestration,
but is an attractive addition to the repertoire. A number of
his operas were conspicuously successful in their time, including
Atlantide (1954), Miguel de Mañara
(1956) and Sampiero Corso (1956). His later works
reflected social issues, and included the Symphonie du tiers
monde (Third-World Symphony, 1969) and the Chant
pour le Vietnam (Song for Vietnam, 1969) for wind
ensemble and percussion.
Throughout the century there has been a vigorous
French musical tradition that has often been overlooked, but
which unexpectedly met the latest developments in the figure
of Messiaen: that of French organ music. Again
with its origins in the figure of Franck (a major organist),
it has produced a number of organist-composers who have kept
the art of improvisation at the keyboard alive. Charles Widor
(1844-1937) wrote ten symphonies for organ in a grand late-Romantic
style, more suites than symphonies; the thunderous and mercurial
toccata from the Symphony No.5 (1880) is often
heard. Louis Vierne (1870-1936) wrote genuine symphonies
for the organ that range from a thoughtful sensitivity to the
full power available from the large cathedral organ. Charles
Tournemire (1870-1939) produced influential organ works with
a mystical cast of deep religious faith; his major accomplishments
were the 51 organ masses for the liturgical year, L'orgue
mystique (1927-1932). Jean Langlais (born 1929), like Vierne
blind from birth, followed Tournemire in the influence of old
church modes and melodic lines founded on Gregorian chant, but
often with a more dramatic content. Besides his organ music,
his bold Salve Regina Mass (1949) for three choirs, two
organs and two brass ensembles, designed for the large spaces
of Notre Dame, and the colourful and dramatic Messe solennelle
(1952) are worthy of note. He also produced a number of works
for chamber groups and organ. Maurice Duruflé
(1916-1986) also followed the style established by Tournemire
in his own delicate fashion. One of the finest of these organist-composers
was Jehan Alain (1911-1940), whose output of smaller-scale
works had less of a strictly liturgical intent, and explored
possibilities of the development of the sounds available for
the organ, a process taken further by Messiaen
himself.
Among the most remarkable musical figures working
in Paris in the century was the composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger
(1887-1979), whose very long teaching career encompassed many
famous pupils, and was noted for its principles of craftsmanship
and clarity. In particular, her encouragement of American composers
in the 1920s and 1930s was instrumental in forging a distinctively
American tradition of composition.
One of the reasons for the liveliness of French
composition in the 20th century has been the advocacy of modern
music by performers and performing groups working especially
in Paris, and far too numerous to be detailed here. Another
has been the support and enlightened encouragement of French
Radio, and the importance that French governments since 1945
have attached to a healthy, vigorous, and contemporary cultural
life.
French Music Information
Centre:
centre de Documentation
de la Musique Contemporaine
225, Avenue Charles
de Gaulle
F-92521 Neuilly-sur-Seine
Cedex
France
tel: +33 1 47 47
5650
fax: +33 1 47 45
1294
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ALAIN
AMY
BARRAQUÉ
BAYLE
BOULEZ
CANTELOUBE
CHARPENTIER
D'INDY
DEBUSSY
DUKAS
DURUFLÉ
DUTILLEUX
FAURÉ
FRANÇAIX
HENRY
IBERT
JOLIVET
KOECHLIN
LANDOWSKI
MÂCHE
MESSIAEN
MILHAUD
POULENC
RAVEL
ROUSSEL
SATIE
SAUGUET
SCHAEFFER
SCHMITT
VARÈSE
VIERNE
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ALAIN Jehan
Ariste
born 3rd February
1911 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye
died 20th June 1940
at Saumur
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Alain, who was killed in action in the Second
World War at the age of 29, is chiefly known for his organ works.
Coming from a family of organists (his father was a celebrated
organist, and his famous sister, Marie-Claire Alain, has justly
championed his music) he himself became a church organist in
Paris in 1936, and experimented with his father on new registrations.
Almost all of his organ music is miniature in length but not
always in scale, and is largely divorced from liturgical or
programmatic connotations. Throughout there is an emphasis on
rhythm, sometimes of the most complex nature and often with
the presence of dissonant harmonies, and an acute awareness
of the possibilities of registration. He was influenced by exotic
and oriental colours, as in the sonorous and touching Deux
danses à Agni Yavishta (1934), or the Moroccan song
that comes through the exotic underplay and rhythmic complexities
of the atmospheric Deuxième Fantaisie (1936),
one of his finest pieces. An ethereal mystical quality imbues
such works as the famous Le jardin suspendu (1934), evoking
the artist's ideal that is perpetually sought but always out
of reach. A wistfulness haunts Aria (1938), his
last composition that almost ignores the use of pedals, and
Lamento (1930), dissonance typically adding an edge,
while there is a dreamy evening reflectiveness in the marvellous
Postlude pour l'office de Complines (1930), with its
sense of plainsong drifting high into the nave. His two major
works are on a grander scale. The short Litanies
(1937), his most regularly heard work, was written after the
death of another sister. An ardent but powerful supplication,
it repeats the same dance-like pattern in changing colours and
settings, a `tornado' (as Alain described it) of faith. The
thematically linked Trois danses (1937-1939) were
designed as a symphonic poem for orchestra, but the manuscript
blew out of his sidecar in Flanders during the war, and it exists
perfectly successfully as a work for organ. Rhythm dominates,
often in complex fashions, especially in the jazz-influenced
first dance, where the shifting patterns are laid over a regular
beat. The long second dance (mourning) has an atmosphere of
despair or resignation, again with extraordinary shifting rhythmic
effects, while the final movement adds grandeur to the rhythmic
energy. Alain stands between the French organist-composers of
the previous generation and his contemporary Messiaen,
and if his life was short and the works few, he continued, with
his sense of humour and dance as well as devout mysticism, the
finest traditions of French organ music.
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works include:
- Andante, Aria,
Ballad en mode phrygien, Berceuse sur deux notes qui cornet,
Choral cistercien, Choral dorien, Choral Phrygien, Climat, Deux
danses à Agni Yavishta, Trois danses, 2 Fantaisies, Grave,
Intermezzo, Le jardin suspendu, Lamento, Litanies, Monodie,
Petit pièce, Postlude pour l'office de Complines, Prélude
et fugue, Préludes profances, Suite, Variations chorales
sur Sacris solemnis, Variations sur `Lucis Creator' and
Variations sur un thème de Clément Jannequin for
organ
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recommended works:
The complete organ
works, especially:
Trois danses
op.81 (1937-1939) for organ
Litanies
op.79 (1937) for organ
Postlude pour
l'Office de Complines op. 21 (1930)
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AMY Gilbert
born 29th August,
1936 at Paris
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Amy has achieved prominence both as a conductor
and as a composer. Early in his career (1956) he came under
the influence of Boulez, whom he succeeded as director
of the Domaine Musical concerts (1967-1973). From his early
works (e.g. the Piano Sonata, 1960) his music
has employed an increasingly broad and Expressionistic canvas,
while retaining serial forms. A favourite device has been to
use divided forces: Antiphonies (1960-1963), for
example, uses two main orchestras, each with their own conductor,
with a concertino group as mediator. This has led to exploration
of the timbral and expressive interactions of such forces, exemplified
by the contrast of percussion instruments of different character
(e.g. pitched versus unpitched) and different sonorities (e.g.
wood versus skins) in Cycles for six percussionists
(1964-1966), or the wandering violin opposed to the orchestra
(broken into blocks of instruments) in Trajectoires
(1966) for violin and orchestra, which uses quarter-tones. This
exploration has been extended into vocal works: in Strophe
for soprano and divided orchestra (1964-1966, reorchestrated
1977) a short text is broken into enunciation, then vocalization,
and then a reduction to phonemes (i.e. individual constituents
of sound). There is a similar process in Récitatif,
air et variation (1970) for twelve voices, admirably clear
in its interaction of the linear opposition of voices and the
vertical opposition of the structure of words broken up. In
D'un espace déployé (1972-1973), there
is a concertante effect of two instrumental groups, the smaller
virtuosic against the blocks of the larger group, with a solo
soprano part using more extreme writing. The Sonata
pian'e forte (1974) for two female voices and instrumental
group, with antiphonal effects and the soloists singing into
a prepared piano, went further along these lines.
Amy is representative of the post-Webern
group of composers who extended Webern's ideas into serialism.
Like that of so many of these composers, his music is not always
comfortable listening, its complex structures extending over
considerable periods rather than on the miniature scale of Webern
himself. This very inflation seems destined to condemn his music
to a limited audience. In 1973 Amy was appointed Musical Advisor
to ORTF; he co-founded and directed the New Philharmonic Orchestra
of French Radio (1976-1981), and has been director of the Lyons
Conservatoire since 1984.
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works include:
- Antiphonies
for 2 orchestras; Chant and Triade for orch.;
Trajectoires for violin and orch.
- Diaphonies
for 2 ensembles of 12 players each; Mouvements for 17
instruments; 7 Sites for 14 players; Inventions I
& II for four instruments; Alpha-beth for wind
sextet; Relais for 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and horn;
Cycles for 6 percussionists; Cahiers d'epigrammes (Epigram
notebooks), Jeux and Jeux et formes for piano
- song cycle Oeil
de fumée; Cette étoile enseigne à
s'incliner (This star teaches us how to bow) for men's voices,
10 instruments and tape; Strophe for soprano and orch.;
D'un désastre obscur for mezzo and clarinet; D'un
espace déployé for two instrumental groups
and soprano; Sonata pian'e forte for 2 female voices
and 12 instruments
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BARRAQUÉ
Jean
born 17th January
1928 at Puteaux
died 17th April
1973 at Paris
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Jean Barraqué is a figure virtually unknown
to all but a few specialists, but in the six acknowledged works
that he completed before his early death, he established himself
as one of the most imaginative and far-sighted of those composers
developing post-Webern serialism. In particular, he sought
to use serialism to express almost late-Romantic Expressionist
concepts, seeing music as `the complete game, quaking on the
edge of suicide'. Consequently he attempted to marry serialism
with large-scale works, meticulously arranged and with an astute
sense of instrumental colours and their combinations.
He came to notice with the Piano Sonata
(1950-1952), a 40-minute work pitting ideas arising out of rhythmic
cells against freer movement, with silences that become longer
and longer until denuding the work, and with the related Séquance
(1950-1955) for soprano and instrumental ensemble, both works
of turbulence and cold despair. Barraqué then embarked
on what was intended as a large series of musical commentaries
on the novel The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. The
first to be written, Le temps restitué (1957),
was revised for soprano or contralto, chorus and instrumental
ensemble in 1968, and its texts, in five sections, explore cosmic
philosophical questions of the interrelations of the human soul
with time, death, and chance. The vocal writing includes extended
vocal ranges and techniques, variously allowing the words to
emerge and to be subdued in almost hallucinatory textures, and
the choir sometimes support, sometimes oppose the soloist. It
is an intensely dramatic work of considerable scope, sometimes
including a thread of the lyrical, with the instrumentation
in constant metamorphosis, from the grand scale to the pointillistic
detail. The second commentary, ...au delà du hasard
(...beyond chance, 1958-1959) for soprano, women's chorus
and four instrumental ensembles, pits the vocal forces against
sharply differentiated instrumental groups: brass and vibraphone,
tuned percussion with piano, non-pitched percussion, and four
clarinets. The third, Chant après chant
(Song after song, 1966) reduces the forces to soprano,
piano and a large variety of percussion. The textures of Barraqué's
final completed work, the Concerto (1968) for clarinet,
vibraphone and six instrumental trios, are a collage of sharply
differentiated colours, notably the harpsichord, emphasized
by the placement into six groups, with the clarinet intervening
only after an introduction by strings, and the vibraphone not
appearing until considerably later. It is an exceptionally difficult
work to assimilate, but nonetheless a rewarding one, its façade
a ferris wheel of different events and colours, silence occupying
the spaces between the chairs; but on further acquaintance it
has the underlying logic that informs Barraqué's work,
weaving a large web in which at any one moment a particular
strand may be sounding, starting another in its train.
Barraqué's
music is not for the faint-hearted, but for an example of the
expressive powers of serialism, what one commentator correctly
called the `combination of Logic and Passion', it is of great
fascination.
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works:
- Concerto
for clarinet, vibraphone and 6 instrumental trios
- piano sonata
- Au delà
hasard for soprano, women's chorus and 4 instrumental ensembles;
Chant après chant for soprano, piano and percussion
sextet; Séquence for soprano and ensemble; Le
temps restitué for soprano, chorus and orch.
- electronic Étude
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recommended works:
Piano Sonata (1950-1952)
Le temps restitué
(1957, revised 1968) for soprano or contralto, chorus and instrumental
ensemble
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BAYLE
François
born 27th April,
1932 at Tamatabe (Madagascar)
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Bayle studied with Stockhausen,
and in 1960 joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (founded
in 1950 by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry),
a major French experimental electronic studio, and became its
director in 1964. Using almost entirely electronic means (both
electronically generated and musique concrète),
he has been one of the more successful at creating a suitable
indigenous electronic sound, rather than adapting an instrumental
language to an electronic palette. Thus, although his earlier
works use conventional instruments (L'oiseau, le chanteur
[The Bird, the Singer, 1963, from a film score], Trois
portraits pour l'oiseau qui n'existe pas, (Three portraits
of the-bird-which-does-not-exist) for horn, oboe, clavichord
and electronic sounds, or Archipelago, 1963-1967,
for string quartet and recorded sounds), these are inclined
to provide support for the electronic effects rather than the
other way around. Some of his explorations (such as Solitude,
1969, mixing rock sounds with street and other noises) were
a sonic disaster, but an important and still effective work
(especially the sonorous third section, Hommage à
Robur), which achieved some prominence at the time of its
composition, was Espaces inhabitable (Uninhabitable
spaces, 1967) with a formal five-movement structure, a conscious
use of the descriptive powers of electronic sounds, and rhythm
created by the changes of timbre and colour.
Bayle has continued to develop these concerns
(exemplified in textures of Les couleurs de la nuit,
1983), especially in the area of what he has called `the poetics
of timbre', in a large series of eight works titled Propositions
(1972-1989). Designed to be heard singly or as a group, they
cover a wide range of sound sources: the first four are for
strings, wind, percussion and voices respectively, while the
last four are for unusual sound sources, without any of the
sonorities heard in the first four. The dream-like and sonorously
impressive Proposition I (1972-1973) contrasts a held
note with clusters in a mobile form; the strings sounds benefit
from Bayle's experience with electronic textures. The foundation
of a long held note recurs in Proposition II (1979-1980),
where the wind conduct a lively dialogue (using mirror forms)
before the held-note takes over evolving into a haunting landscape
of homogeneous sonorities before ending with a curious, accelerating
clicking passage created by unusual usage of the instruments.
Propositions III (1982-1983) for six groups of percussion,
is divided into four sections each reflecting different groups
of percussion sound, from the primitive, unpitched and strident
to the delicacy of tuned metal instruments. Proposition IV
(1986) for twelve solo voices uses phonemes and a multitude
of vocal sounds in a luxuriant and compelling display of vocal
sonorities, again with delicate and clicking passages, sometimes
recalling Stockhausen's Stimmung, and with
something of the atmosphere of the animals' nocturnal sounds
in Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges.
The second set of four move to sound worlds more distant from
traditional experience. Proposition V (1986) is for 28
non-European instruments from five continents, Propositions
VI (1987) was written for older European instruments (e.g.
`original instruments'), Proposition VII (1987-1988)
uses computer sound synthesis, and Propositions VIII
(1988-1989) moves away from humanly created sound by utilizing
recordings of birds and of the elements. Thus the first four
of this set can be seen as representing the development of a
Western tradition, the second four representing new sources
to enliven that tradition, and if none of these pieces is individually
remarkable, they are consistently interesting, presenting an
unusual overview of the development of post avant-garde music
and an enormous range of sonorities.
Bayle has taught
at the University of Paris VIII, and among his writings is a
large study, Schönberg à Cage (1981).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Pluriel
for orchestra and tape; Archipelago for string quartet
and tape
- series of 8 Propositions
for various forces and electronics
- electronic Les
couleurs de la nuit, Espaces inhabitables, Lines and Points,
Nadir, Trois portraits pour l'oiseau qui n'existe pas and
Solitude, some as film scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Uninhabitable
Spaces for tape (1967)
Propositions
I-VIII (1972-1989) (see text)
───────────────────────────────────────
BOULEZ
Pierre
born 26th March,
1925 at Montbrison
───────────────────────────────────────
Pierre Boulez has been among the most influential
of all composers since the Second World War. However, the considerable
effect of his work, his ideas, and his incisive intellect is
more observable on two generations of composers than in a widespread
appreciation (or knowledge) of his music by general audiences,
to whom he is far better known as a conductor of international
renown. This situation has been exacerbated by Boulez's habit
of leaving works unfinished, albeit with sections ready for
performance, by his reworkings of earlier material, and by the
relative paucity of works in recent years.
Following Boulez's discovery of the music of
Schoenberg in 1945, his studies with René Leibowitz
led first to a period fusing 12-tone techniques with the ideas
of his earlier teacher Messiaen, and then, crucially,
to his adoption of what has come to be known as `total serialism'
(and which Milton Babbit had independently already formulated).
Extending the ideas of the Second Viennese School, and particularly
those of Webern, the rules of the 12-tone system
were developed by equivalents to cover not just pitch but all
aspects of music - rhythm, dynamics and instrumentation. Messiaen
had already applied such ideas to rhythm (by adding or removing
fractional values) but not in a serial context, while Varèse
and his follower Jolivet had added irrational smaller
units of rhythm. Having already abandoned time-signatures in
the Piano Sonata No.1 (1946), which is typically built
on motivic cells of ideas, Boulez started to apply 12-tone ideas
to rhythmic concepts in a serial frame in the Piano Sonata
No.2 (1948) and then in the rhythmically very unsettled
Livre pour quatuor (Quartet-Book, 1948-1949),
now withdrawn and revised as the haunting, distant and dense
Livre pour cordes (Strings-Book, 1968). But it
was with Polyphonie X (1951) for eighteen instruments,
with its extreme leaps of register, its inexorable logic and
its clarity of texture, and with Structures Ia
(1951-1952) for two pianos, that he applied analogous principles
to dynamics and timbre as well as rhythm, thus achieving a total
system control over the material. Among those immediately influenced
by these works were Berio, Cage, Pousseur
and Stockhausen - all of whom soon found the strict
application of total serialism too restricting, and adapted
some of the techniques thus learned to the development of the
avant-garde, or combined them with other concepts, particularly,
in the case of Cage and Stockhausen, chance happening (the antithesis
of total serialism).
Boulez himself relented from such absolute strictures
in what has become his best known work, considered by many to
be his masterpiece. Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer
Unmastered) (1953-1955) for contralto, alto flute, viola,
guitar, vibraphone, xylorimba and percussion, sets three poems
by René Char, and intersperses them with musical commentaries
on those poems using associated material (preceding and succeeding
the actual songs). The resultant sense of strong structure,
together with the clarity of the instrumental writing, pointillistic
in feel (developing the lead of Varèse
and Webern), is arresting and compelling. Its
effect is heightened by a basic opposition between the sensuality
of the surrealist poetry, supported by a rich and sometimes
exotic feel to the instrumental timbre, and the intellectual
incisiveness of the technique and structure. Boulez had already
set René Char in two works using chorus, both of which
have complicated histories in which their current versions reflect
the additions and changes in Boulez's style since their original
inception. Le soleil des eaux (The Sun of the
Waters, originally incidental music, 1948, versions 1950
and 1958, final version 1965) for soprano, chorus and orchestra
sets two allusive poems that use two of the images of the stage-play:
a lizard in love, complaining of man's destruction, and the
river as a metaphor for nature and life, the soloist predominant
in the first, the chorus in the second. The cantata Le visage
nuptial (The Nuptual Countance for chamber ensemble,
1946, version 1951, current version 1988-1989) for soprano,
contralto, women's chorus and orchestra is Boulez's choral masterpiece.
The poem, in five sections, deals with the erotic experience
in dense language and imagery, and the antecedents of both text
and music are to be found in the rich, allusive, luxuriant styles
of Expressionist Vienna. It is a heady work, ceaselessly shifting,
effusive were it not for the sense of order weaving through
the intensity; Boulez produces restless but sometimes lyrical
layers requiring extraordinary virtuosity from all the performers.
This fantastically rich web almost becomes too much - the moments
of respite are brief, but sometimes magical, as in the end of
the third song - though just as a surfeit seems to have arrived
a change of pulse underlies the penultimate section, giving
respite. Throughout, one feels that every strand of this dense
and complex work has purpose and integrity, doubtless the result
of over four decades of work. Both text and music are not easy
to absorb, but this cantata is a culmination of a line that
looks back through the vocal works of Berg to the earlier,
sensuous Schoenberg, but has arrived at the late 20th
century.
After Le marteau sans maître, Boulez
next started to apply some of the freedoms he found in the poems
of Mallarmé to his music in the effort to develop and
broaden the intellectual techniques which power his music (a
continuous feature of his output). Notable among these was the
concept of interchangeability of sections (otherwise known as
`open form'), and the concept of continual transformation within
self-contained forms (for Mallarmé notably the sonnet)
- all of which presumably contributes to the officially unfinished
character of so many of Boulez's works. Boulez initially tried
a musical equivalent in the Piano Sonata No.3
(1957, discussed below), but it is in Pli selon pli (Fold
upon Fold, 1957-1962, but with some sections now existing
in different versions and revisions) for soprano and orchestra
that the tribute to Mallarmé is overt. Centred on three
Improvisations sur Mallarmé (which transcribe
elements of sonnet form, with indeterminacy in the third), the
potential aridity of serialism is countered by the allusive
writing, with constantly changing timbres and colours, some
of which are intended to be symbolic. The opposition here is
between those inner sections with complete settings of Mallarmé
texts to chamber forces, and the outer sections where only fragments
are set with complete orchestra, the music contributing the
rest of the whole. The transference of poetic structures into
music was further explored in cumming is der dichter
(unfinished, 1970-) a setting of birds (here invented)
for sixteen voices and twenty-four instruments.
The importance of
timbre in Boulez's work, the extension of controlled but durationally
undetermined events, as well as the synthesis of different works,
was further demonstrated in Éclat (meaning both
`burst' and `glitter', 1964-1965) for two keyboards, three strings,
four winds and percussion, which exists as an independent piece
or as the opening of the unfinished Éclat-Multiples.
With a polarity between those instruments that have a quick
decay of sound (playing in the foreground as soloists), and
those that are more sonorous (providing the background), its
colours do shimmer in changing textures of light, enhanced by
bursts where the conductor, at moments of his or her own choosing,
requires the orchestra to respond with a burst of sound. The
unfinished (but playable) Multiples (1974-) exists only
in conjunction with the earlier score, adds nine violas and
a basset horn, and provides a further opposition, its more continuous
lines and sonorous textures retrospectively highlighting what
has already been heard.
But his most immediate
work of the 1960s and 1970s was Rituel, (1974-1975, in
memoriam Bruno Maderna), for eight groups of instrumentalists
and nine percussionists. As the title would suggest, the sense
of ritual, with insistent percussion and an atmosphere of the
blocks of sound suggesting the Far-Eastern processional, is
paramount, enhanced both by the sometimes exotic spotlighting
of colour and the extremely effective structure. It is divided
into fifteen parts, which alternate between very slow (controlled
by the conductor over freer percussion) and moderately slow
(more improvisatory, with the conductor setting events in motion).
At each section (until section 13) the duration gets longer
and more forces are added; after section 15, the entire process
is reversed (in retrogression). Rituel has affinities
with the ritualistic insistency of the music of Varèse,
and in its vivid sense of colour and its instrumental transparency
is probably the most approachable work for those unfamiliar
with the music of Boulez. Manipulation of short sections is
also found in Domaines (1968) for clarinet and twenty-one
instruments, where the order in which the twelve sections are
to be played is first chosen by the conductor, and then by the
soloist. Messagesquisse (1976) for seven cellos
(with one in a solo role) emerged as a more conventional if
till compelling work, unfolding with beautiful formal logic
from an opening statement of six notes (based on the surname
of Paul Sacher, the dedicatee), moving through very fast, eliding
variations, to a solo cadenza and a final coda. There is even
a suggestion of an underlying key (E flat), though the work
is in no way tonal. The equally effective Notations
(1978) for orchestra is a reworking of four pieces from an early
piano work, Twelve Notations (1945); short but densely
packed, they are almost raunchy in feel.
Following the foundation
of IRCAM (see below), Boulez has further extended the parameters
of his technique. The major work to emerge has been Répons
(1980-, again incomplete, and currently in three sections).
The expansion in means has been the addition of transforming
electronics and the importance of spatial effect, and again
there is a basic opposition of textural concept. Six soloists
(piano, organ, harp, cimbalom and tuned percussion) are spaced
around the hall, and they are electronically modified, by pre-set
programmes, both timbrally and spatially into shimmering sounds.
Against them are an ensemble of twenty-four players, their unmodified
writing particular and detailed.
The three piano
sonatas are regularly encountered (at least in reference if
not in performance). The short two-movement Piano
Sonata No.1 (1946) shows the influence of Webern,
but the Piano Sonata No.2 (1947-1948) - which at one
point quotes from Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata
- is one of the seminal works of the period. Extremely virtuosic,
its material is again developed from melodic cells, its rhythmic
complexities regularly preclude a sense of metre, and it also
takes advantage of the sounds of the release and decay (rather
than just the playing) of notes, while the third movement shows
another characteristic of Boulez - the continual presence of
a particular interval, here major 2nds. The structure of the
Piano Sonata No.3 (1956-57) of which two movements of
the projected five have been released (it is rumoured that the
other three were complete by 1959) derives from a Mallarmé
poem designed to look like a constellation. In the poem the
reader can move from place to place in the constellation; so
in the sonata, whose Constellation-Mirror is in two forms
(forward and retrograde), while the whole extant piece can also
be played in retrograde.
Boulez's particular
genius has not just been to emerge as the most prominent and
most influential innovator of total serialism and its subsequent
(less purist) evolution and development, but also to produce
music of striking power and effect that goes considerably beyond
the intellectual rigour of the theoretical conception. A number
of characteristics seem to be responsible. The parameters are
almost always controlled, and when aleatory elements start to
appear in his work, they are within a basis of pre-setting in
the overall structure. Crucial to many works is a central contrast,
often between instrumental forces, which adds another dimension
to the serial structures. Above all, there is an instinct for
and preoccupation with timbre and colour. This is a fundamentally
sensuous instinct, in opposition to the formidable intellectualism
of the form and technique. The idiom is extremely difficult
for those unused to serial music; but that clash between content
and form, that containment of the sensuous by the intellect,
is a late twentieth-century version of a basic duality that
has imbued all great music. Its absence or imbalance in so many
of Boulez's followers is partly responsible for the aridity
of so much serial and post-serial music. Its presence in the
work of Boulez is partly responsible for the regard in which
it is held by other composers, and is why the difficulty of
the idiom should not deter anyone who has the least interest
in the music of our time.
Amongst Boulez's
many conducting activities have been his appointments as chief
conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-1974) and the
New York Philharmonic (1971-1978). Between 1974 and 1977 he
set up with government backing the Institut de Récherche
et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) at the Pompidou
Centre in Paris. IRCAM has become one of the world centres for
new music, and through it Boulez has again influenced or promoted
the music of composers of his own generation, including Berio,
Birtwistle and Kurtág, as well as a
whole new generation.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include (some
incomplete but performable):
- Domaines
for clarinet and 21 instruments; Doubles (revised as
Figures, doubles, prismes) for orch.; Rituel for
orch.
- Répons
for six soloists, chamber group, computer tape and live electronics;
Dérive for chamber group; Eclat for chamber
forces, with additions in Éclat-multiples;...explosante
fixe... for various forces; Messagesquisse for solo
cello and six other cellos; Polyphonie X for 18 instruments;
Livre pour cordes for strings; Sonatine for flute
and piano
- 3 piano sonatas;
Structures I & II for 2 pianos
- Le marteau
sans maître for soprano and ensemble or orch.; Pli
selon pli for soprano and various forces; Le soleil des
eaux for various voices and orchestra (in 4 different versions);
Le visage nuptial for soprano, contralto, female voices
and orch. (originally 2 soloists, 2 ondes martenot, piano and
percussion); cummings is der dichter for chamber chorus
and orch.; Étude sur sept sons for tape
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Éclats-Multiples
(1965-)
Le marteau sans
maître (1955)
Piano Sonata No.2
(1947-1948)
Pli selon pli
(19570)
Répons
(1981-1982)
Rituel (1974-1975)
Le visage
nuptial (1946-1989) for soprano, contralto, women's chorus
and orchestra
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
P. Boulez Boulez
on music today trans. S. Bradshaw & R.R. Bennett, 1971
Conversations
with Célestin Deliège trans. E. Wangermée,
1976
Orientations:
collected writings trans. J.-J. Nattier, 1986
ed. W. Glock Pierre
Boulez - A Symposium, 1986
P. Griffiths Boulez,
1978
Joan Peyser Composer,
Conductor, Enigma, 1976
P.F. Stacey Boulez
and the Modern Concept, 1987
───────────────────────────────────────
CANTELOUBE
de Malaret, (Marie) Joseph
born 21st October
1879 at Annonay (Ardèche)
died 4th November
1957 at Grigny
───────────────────────────────────────
Canteloube is almost
entirely known for one set of works, which have become world
famous and a staple of the vocal repertoire. They are the
Chants d'Auvergne (Songs of the Auvergne) published in five
sets (1924,1924,1927,1930,1955), which are arrangements of folk-songs
collected from 1900 onwards in the region between the Dordogne
and the Rhône. The involved and very beautiful orchestration
(started, so it is said, after he arranged a song he had heard
in 1900 while travelling in a train 23 years later!) is so extensive
that, apart from the melodies and the words, these are essentially
original works. He uses a large Romantic orchestra, often pulling
out solo or groups of instruments against a general background,
favouring the upper woodwind to give a country feel and as a
colour device to point up the expressiveness or the humour of
the songs, which are in the original dialect. The results are
sometimes delicate, sometimes Impressionistically languid, usually
rich in changing colours, careful to echo the modal nature of
the original songs, though sometimes, where appropriate, chromatic
in harmony. As much as anyone, Canteloube succeeded in reflecting
the varying moods of a rural countryside, using the songs as
his medium, and his orchestration as his means. He also collected
songs from other parts of France (the collection Chants de
France is sometimes heard), and edited French-Canadian songs.
His two operas (one on a rural theme, the other a patriotic
portrait of the Gaul leader Vercingetorix), were performed at
the Paris Opera, but failed to enter the repertoire.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Lauriers and
Vers la princesse lointaine for orch.; Piéces
Françaises for piano and orch.; Poème
for violin and orch.
- Dans la montagne
for violin and piano; Rustiques for oboe, clarinet and
bassoon
- folksong arrangements
Chants d'Augoumois, Chants d'Auvergne and Chants de
France; Au printemps (To spring), Eglogue d'automne (Autumn
elegy) and Triptyque for voice and orch.; Colloque
sentimentale for voices and string quartet; song cycle L'Arade
- operas Le Mas
(The Farmhouse), Vercingétorix
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Songs of the
Auvergne (1924-1955)
───────────────────────────────────────
CHARPENTIER
Gustave
born 25 June 1860
at Dieuze (nr. Nancy)
died 18th February
1956 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Although he lived
until the age of 95, Gustave Charpentier (not to be confused
either with the famous opera composer of the 17th century, Marc-Antoine
Charpentier, or Jacques Charpentier, born 1933) is chiefly known
for one work completed in 1900. The opera Louise,
regularly revived and with one very famous aria (Depuis le
jour) deserves a place in any survey of 20th-century music,
for if its musical idiom has shades of Massenet, Wagner, and
Italian verismo, its plot (which shocked early audiences),
its philosophical attitude, and its essentially ordinary story
were distinctly modern, making it a transitional work. The autobiographical
story (very rare in opera) is set among the proletariat of Paris
(vividly portrayed), and revolves around the generation-gap
between the seamstress Louise and her parents, and her leaving
home to live with (not marry) the poet Julien. The resulting
conflicts and morals are those that have preoccupied the century
ever since; the almost incestuous love of the father for the
daughter is also a contemporary theme. The opera moves from
realism to a symbolic fantasy in its central two acts (Alma
Mahler called Charpentier "the first surrealist")
and back to naturalism again, and is more effective on stage
than in broadcast or recording. If an autobiographical opera
was rare, life reflecting opera was even rarer, for in 1902
Charpentier founded the Conservatoire Populaire Mimi Pinson,
which for 35 years gave Paris seamstresses the opportunity for
(free) musical training. In 1913 the successor to Louise,
Julien, ou La vie du poète was staged at the
Opéra-Comique with some success, but has been neglected
ever since. Charpentier produced little else, and eventually
became a recluse; his picturesque orchestral suite Impressions
of Italy (1889-1890) was once popular, but has long disappeared
from the repertoire.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Impressions
d'Italie for orch.
- cantata La
vie du poète; Impressions fausses, Poèmes
chantées and Sérénade à Watteau
for voices and orchestra
- operas Julien
and Louise
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
opera Louise
(1900)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
F. Andrieux (ed.)
Gustave Charpentier: lettres inédites à ses
parents, 1984
───────────────────────────────────────
D'INDY
(Paul-Marie-Theodore-) Vincent
born 27th March
1851 at Paris
died 2nd December
1931 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Outside France,
Vincent d'Indy's music is more honoured in the breach than in
the observance, his influence and importance to French music
universally recognised, his works surprisingly neglected.
Part of the reason
is that his compositional career (1870-1931) spans a period
of great change in European music; the achievements of the Impressionists
in the middle of this period, and of the Parisian circle of
younger composers at the end, have overshadowed his personal
style, rooted in Romanticism. He was initially influenced by
his teacher César Franck, whose ideas were German-orientated
rather than French, with emphasis on counterpoint and fugue
(and on Franck's instrument, the organ), with the innovation
of Franck's own development of the cyclic principle (a recurring
motif or idea that appears throughout a piece, linking it structurally),
and with an emotional emphasis on the mystical and the luxuriant.
Following visits
to Bayreuth, d'Indy became interested in Wagner, the immediate
outcome of which was the tone-poem La forêt
enchantée (The Enchanted Forest, 1878), a happy and
dramatically effective musical painting that is occasionally
revived, and whose French aspect is clear from the orchestration,
far brighter and clearer than d'Indy's German models - despite
the eight harps. Other Wagnerian works included the opera Fervaal
(conceived 1878, completed 1897), and if d'Indy's style had
been exclusively on these lines, his music would probably be
forgotten, especially in the anti-Wagnerian reaction exemplified
by the Impressionists.
However, an abiding
love of the countryside infected his music, particularly the
Vivarais and Cévennes regions (whose folk-songs he collected),
tempering the Wagnerian leanings with a light freshness. This
is the major element in d'Indy's two most popular works. The
lovely and lyrical Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français
(Symphony on a French Mountain Song, also known as the Symphonie
Cévenole, 1887) has a major role for the piano
(integrated into the orchestra, and creating a new departure
for French piano concertos). Its individuality, in spite of
the echoes of Liszt and Franck, is created both by the folk
theme (which links all three movements, perhaps recurring a
little too often) and the pastoral atmosphere. Its comparative
neglect seems entirely due to the absence of virtuosity in the
solo piano part. The large-scale orchestral counterpart is the
Jour d'été à la montagne (A Summer's
Day on the Mountain, 1905), incorporating Gregorian chant
as well as folk themes. The fine Diptyque méditerranéen
for orchestra continues this idiom, but is less well-known,
perhaps because of its late date (1926).
Of his other works,
three in particular stand out. The symphonic variations Istar
(1887, later successfully used as a ballet score) are, on a
purely emotional level, a marvellous evocation of the Assyrian
legend - Romantic in feel, but with some passages almost Impressionistic
in the shimmering delicacy of orchestration. On an intellectual
level, the variation form is unusual and used with complete
command - the variations are in reverse, with the statement
of the theme occurring only at the end. The Piano
Sonata (1907) is a summation of the Romantic inheritance
- a work on the grand scale, the influence of Liszt and Franck
evident in the germinal (small cells of material gradually expanded)
and cyclical (the third movement rewords material from the other
two) structure, with a set of variations as the first movement.
The Symphony No.2 (1902-1903) uses similar structural
principles, moving in its course from charm to nobility but
with an intellectual energy and orchestral clarity that leave
Romanticism behind.
The works written
after the First World War show a continuance of the move away
from the Wagnerian influence, culminating orchestrally in the
Concerto for piano, flute, cello and string orchestra
(1927), his last orchestral work, with neo-classical elements;
there was also much chamber music, notably the String Sextet
of 1928. Of his choral works, the dramatic legend Le chant
de la cloche (The Song of the Bell, 1883, for soloists,
chorus and orchestra) established him as a composer. Once popular,
its prologue and seven tableaux hark back to the example of
Berlioz as well as Wagner (it is often referred to as an opera;
it was produced as such only long after its composition). Of
his four actual operas, L'étranger (1903) is based
on a story that is a French parallel to Britten's Peter
Grimes, while his last opera, La légende de Saint
Christophe (1908-1913), although reportedly containing fine
music, was damned for its anti-semitism at its first production
in 1920.
It is symptomatic
of this paradoxical man that while remaining a fervent champion
of his master Franck, his editing of the then little-known operas
of Monteverdi and Rameau, and of some of Bach's works, wittingly
or unwittingly helped to lay the foundation for neo-classicism.
Such older music sometimes influences his own (e.g. Chansons
et danses for seven wind instruments, 1899 or the Suite
dans le style ancien for two flutes, trumpet and string
quartet, 1886). His teaching was hugely influential, especially
his co-foundation of the Schola Cantorum (1894), the first modern
conservatory whose methods were widely copied elsewhere, aided
by his many foreign tours. Among his many accomplishments, he
was decorated for bravery in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870,
and was the prompter at the premiere of Bizet's Carmen
(1875). He died of a heart attack at the age of 80, at the end
of a day working on a book on Wagner's Parsifal.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 3 numbered symphonies
(No.1 Italienne never published, No.3 Sinfonia brève
de bello Gallico [Of the War in Gaul]); Symphonie
sur un chant montagnard français (Symphony on
a French Mountain Song, also known as the Symphonie Cévenole)
for piano and orch.
- concerto for piano,
flute and strings
- Diptyque méditerranéen,
La forêt enchantée (The Enchanted Forest),
Istar, Jour d'été sur la montagne (A Summer's
Day on the Mountain), La poème des rivages, Saugefleure,
Souvenirs and Wallenstein Trilogy for orch.
- Suite dans
le style ancien for 2 flutes, trumpet and string quartet;
cello sonata; violin sonata; trio for clarinet, cello and piano;
piano trio; piano quartet; 3 string quartets; piano quintet;
string sextet and other chamber music
- piano sonata;
Helvetica for piano and other piano music
- Le chant de
la cloche (The Song of the Bell) for soloists, chorus
and orch.; choral works; songs; folk-song arrangements; comic
opera Attendez-moi sous l'orme (Wait for Me Under
the Elm-Tree)
- operas L'étranger
(The Stranger), Fervaal, La lègende
de Saint Christophe, La rêve de Cinyras (The
Dream of Cinyras)
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Concerto for Piano,
Flute and Strings op.89 (1926)
La forêt
enchanté op.8 for orchestra (1878)
symphonic variations
Istar op.42 (1896)
Jour d'été
à la montagne op.61 for orchestra (1905)
Piano Sonata op.63
(1907)
Symphony No.2 (1902-1903)
Symphony on a
French Mountain Song op.26 (1886) for piano and orchestra
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
L. Vallas Vincent
D'Indy Paris, vol.1 1946, vol.2 1950 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
DEBUSSY (Achille-)
Claude
born 22nd August
1862 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye
died 25th March
1918 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Debussy is perhaps
the seminal composer of the 20th century, whose influence has
pervaded much of the rest of the century's serious music. That
influence has been more insidious and less spectacular than
that of Schoenberg, less clearly traceable than
that of Webern, more self-effacing than that of Stravinsky.
But his aesthetic was a more complete break with Romanticism
than that of the Second Viennese school, and his harmonic solutions
have proved as durable and as relevant as those of the Serialists;
the style known as Impressionism has continued to recur as a
stylistic element; the concept of the movement in stasis obliquely
led to the work of such composers as Cage, and,
eventually, to the Minimalists; the ballet Jeux
is a distant herald of Boulez and Stockhausen;
and the suggestions of neo-classicism that appeared in his later
works, although he was not the only composer of the time to
utilize them, helped pave the way for the neo-classical movement.
Moreover, and to a greater extent than any of the other major
composers of the 20th century, his music appealed to a very
wide general audience, and continues to do so.
His compositions
can be roughly divided into three periods. In the first he developed
his aesthetic and formulated the characteristic colours and
idioms, culminating in the opera Pelléas et Mélisande
(1893-1902). With La mer (1903-1905) for orchestra, that
development reached maturity, and the works of the decade 1894-1905
are both the best-known and the ones most associated with Impressionism.
With the stage mystery Le martyre de Saint Sébastien
(1911) and Jeux (1912-1913) he initiated a final, more
rarefied phase. His revolutionary reaction to Romanticism was
to absolve music of the necessity of thematic development to
create forward motion and form. Thematic development had been
the basis of all 19th-century music, had impelled the works
of such contemporary composers as Mahler, and was, in
altered form, to continue to underlie the practices of the 12-tone
composers, surviving, of course, as a major musical element
to this day. In its place Debussy evolved more improvisatory
forms, often of short duration, in which there is an underlying
static quality overlaid by metamorphosis of detail and colour.
These are less suited to the traditional genres of the symphony
or the concerto, which is why neither of these appear in Debussy's
canon, apart from a youthful symphony. It is this reconception
of the way music may have motion that led eventually to Cage,
and by another path, to the Minimalists; a variant of this way
of thinking was also adopted in 1911 by Schoenberg in
his concept of Klangfarbenmelodie.
At the same time,
the traditional notions of harmony (which during the 19th century
had been inseparable from thematic development, even when the
rules of harmony had been stretched to the breaking point by
ever-increasing chromaticism) were both unsuited to this conception
and (from a very early age) outside Debussy's aesthetic. His
solution was less radical than that of atonalism or 12-tone
techniques, but no less influential: to turn to the old Gregorian
church modes, and to the whole-tone scale, both of which avoid
traditional harmonic implications, and which give much of Debussy's
music its individual cast. In particular, he adapted from early
music the notion of organum, two identical lines of music
moving together a given interval apart (often thirds or fifths)
creating a parallel motion that emphasises the horizontal rather
than the vertical; this particular effect has found widespread
use in later 20th-century music, perhaps aurally most obvious
in the work of Vaughan Williams. Part of the popular
appeal of Debussy's music is that this did not lead to dissonance;
rather he preferred a juxtaposition of consonant ideas and this
method of construction - introducing a new consonant layer over
another already in progress - adds to the static qualities.
This evolution of
ideas also placed more emphasis on orchestral or instrumental
colour. In the absence of traditional harmonic development,
the interplay of texture and timbre, the details of the entire
orchestral palette, the subtle changing shades and inflections,
themselves create an element of momentum and change. Consequently
Debussy developed the minutiae of orchestration, using the orchestra
in a manner comparable to brush-strokes in painting, from a
broad wash, through the sharpness of a dab of brass, the points
of light from the woodwind, a fluttering figuration for the
flutes, to the characteristic brightness of edging from a harp
or tuned percussion. These details, individually often of short
duration, are combined and juxtaposed to create the larger orchestral
canvas. Similarly, in his piano music he emphasized the subtleties
of colour, pedalling, expression and touch.
All these solutions
had been influenced by two experiences. The first was his stay
in Russia (1890) as pianist to Madame von Meck (Tchaikovsky's
patron), where he discovered in the music of Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
an earlier attempt to break away from traditional forms, and
a close musical correspondence with the context of texts in
word-setting, as well as the influence of Russian Orthodox music.
The second was his encounter with oriental culture at the Paris
World Fair of 1889, and especially with Balinese gamelan music,
which is built on movement through stasis (and was to reappear
as an important influence in Western music after 1945), and
which showed the possibilities of new textural colours.
The term `Impressionist'
has usually been applied to Debussy, and has been the subject
of academic (if not popular) controversy, usually from commentators
unable or unwilling to place Debussy's music in a wider cultural
and artistic context. The term is less appropriate in his earlier
works, as he was developing his idiom; the expression `Symbolist'
(which has also been applied to Debussy) is here more applicable,
and works such as Prélude à `L'aprés-midi
d'un faune' (1894) or Pelléas et Mélisande
have affinities with such artists as Beardsley. But in the central
period of the best-known works, the techniques do parallel those
of the Impressionist painters. Points of light and colour, individually
insubstantial and without sharp delineation except in the larger
context, combine to create light and shade, momentum, the subtleties
of impressions, and, together, that larger context. Similarly,
the overview of a Debussy work or an Impressionist painting
is often static; the momentum is created internally and thus
self-contained by the interplay of the details.
But much more important
than these technical similarities is the perception of the world
that Impressionism represents. In place of dramatic, programmatic
or symbolic content, or a view of nature that sought to mirror
the nature of man, the Impressionists sought to show how a single
still view, often of something perfectly ordinary (be it of
a landscape or a portrait) could contain a multitude of impressions
that affect the viewer and contain their own momentum. The result
is not only contemplative and essentially passive, but acknowledges
an affinity with all the natural elements of the still view,
rather than using them as a mirror to man; it is also an attempt
to reconnect with the natural world from a largely urban base
that seemed to have lost such contemplation. This is precisely
the perspective that Debussy, friend of painters and poets as
much as musicians, himself adopted (and with a similar desire
for the natural in one who, living almost entirely in the city,
had to create it internally: Debussy, composer of La mer,
had never experienced the sea beyond the beach and a cross-Channel
ferry-ride). It is profoundly different from the main thrust
of music at the time, which was increasingly expressing heightened
and more complex conflicts of internal psychology, a trend that
was continued in the work of the atonal and 12-tone composers.
Thus through this very different response to, and view of, the
world around, Debussy achieved a break with late Romanticism.
The later Debussy works move on to embrace other, new angles
of perspective; but so then do the visual works that evolved
out of Impressionism.
Although Debussy's
maturity as a composer is often dated from the Prélude
à `L-après-midi d'un faune' (1892-1894) for
orchestra, the impulse to express the ingenuous pictorial essence
(rather than any Romantic internal state) is already observable
in the charming and unpretentious Petite suite
(1889) for two pianos, most familiar in its orchestral version,
and which has something in common with the pictorial reveries
of the Spaniard Albéniz. A Wagnerian element pervades
some of the earlier songs (discussed below), but it was the
String Quartet (1893) that first brought Debussy to the
attention of the musical world of Paris. The form still follows
the models of the French tradition of César Franck (with
a cyclical structure, a germinal theme appearing in different
guises in each of the four movements), but there is a fluidity
of movement, with constant changes of shades of mood, an oriental
influence in the scherzo (recalling the contemporary
French literary Orientalism) and a stillness in the slow movement
of this alluring, sometimes yearning, sometimes nervously energetic,
often sinuous work. Prélude à 'L-après-midi
d'un faune', perhaps Debussy's best known work, is based
on a poem about the nature of dreams and reality by Mallarmé,
though it is more an expression of the moods of the poem - languor,
sensuousness, dreamy longing - than of its content. The limpid
flute, cascades from the harp, a solo violin, are typical Debussy
colours, the dreamy stillness of the mood - even the central
dance turns back on itself - a typical Debussy atmosphere, though
the melodic elements are not as fragmentary as his middle works,
and there are both French and Wagnerian influences. Apart from
its atmospheric allure, its appeal lies in its completeness;
it seems exactly to contain what it should, no more, no less.
The three Nocturnes (1897-1899, but reworking
material conceived earlier) for orchestra hover between Symbolist
and Impressionist palettes, with a central dance, sometimes
of vivid realism (including the echo of a drum and bugle band),
being flanked by first an Impressionist orchestral evocation
of clouds and the interplay of light, and second the shifting
swells and arabesques of the final Sirènes,
with its wordless female chorus based on but two notes a tone
apart.
With La mer
(1903-1905) for orchestra the development of Nocturnes
is fulfilled (it actually quotes a phrase from the earlier work).
One of Debussy's best-loved works, and one of the most successful
translations of the ocean into music, it has an element of symphonic
construction in its three movements, but this evocation of the
sea and its moods (rather than a pictorial description) is built
on wisps of harmony and fleeting rhythmic ideas. The main emphasis
falls on the vivid detailed orchestration, with constant shades
of nuance, and on a rhythmic heave and flow; momentum without
going in any direction, the satisfaction of arriving in much
the same place while having experienced the essence of that
place. Of the three pieces that form Images (1908-1912,
not to be confused with the piano sets of the same name) for
orchestra, the most popular is the central Iberia,
with its Spanish atmosphere again an imaginary evocation of
received impressions (for Debussy visited Spain for the total
time of but a couple of hours). Itself in three parts, it is
most often heard alone rather than in the context of the suite,
and ranges from vivid poster paint colours and Spanish rhythms
and melodic ideas to a more nocturnal mood. But in Images
Debussy is already moving away from the `Impressionist' style,
when layering an independent foreground of lithe woodwind against
an underbelly of slow orchestral swell behind (a technique brought
to fruition by Britten); in the sometimes almost mechanistic
ostinati of Iberia; in the unusual rhythmic dance effects
of Rondes de printemps (with prominent timpani), and
especially in the more open, lean orchestral sound and the use
of a Scottish folk-song in the Gigue which starts the
set, but which was written last.
The thinning out
of Debussy's idiom was heralded by the incidental music to Le
martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911), now most likely
to be encountered in the suite of symphonic fragments (arranged,
it is believed, by André Caplet) or in a concert oratorio
version retaining the choruses and songs and linked by a connecting
text. The influence of church modes is immediately evident,
with the use of parallel fifths, but it is combined with a restrained
languor, a Mediterranean sensuousness, and thinner orchestral
palette that aims for long melodic lines of single colours rather
than the detail of earlier works, and adds a darker drama. Debussy
had stripped down his aesthetic, and in doing so, made it more
direct. In the ballet Jeux (Game, 1912
- the original ballet was set on a tennis court), the earlier
Symbolism seems almost to return, using a construction of contrasting
short sections or blocks, whose juxtaposition creates the momentum
but which are linked by harmony or common intervals. Its extraordinary
opening, with ostinato fragments and bare percussion, seems
to leap two or more decades; if the subsequent music is not
so startling, it nonetheless has a new sense of poise and motion
(still with a sinuous touch) through the use of fragmentary
motifs whose logic avoids all traditional progressions. Jeux
has always rightly been a seminal work for the Debussy connoisseur,
if less encountered on the popular platform.
Late in his life
Debussy returned to chamber music, planning a set of six sonatas,
of which only three were completed, in intended imitation of
18th-century French music. The return to traditional structures
brings with it not only an element of formality, as in the very
opening of the Cello Sonata (1915), which is tinged
with the tragedy of the First World War, but also a concentration
on the purely abstract qualities of the music, and in particular
- and this is the strength of these late works - a leanness
in which every note carries weight. In the central slow section
of the Cello Sonata there is a suggestion of the rhythmic
irregularity, the deconstruction and juxtaposition of material
that was to be pursued later in the century. The Violin
Sonata (1916-1917), better known because of its brighter
and more flowing lyricism, explores the shades of colour of
the string instrument. The most appealing of these sonatas is,
though, the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915),
in which some of the Mediterranean nuance of colour achieves
a richness of texture through the barest of means. The earlier
Syrinx (1913) for solo flute has a haunting mixture of
Celtic mysticism and Dionysian sensuousness; much 20th-century
flute music has been under its shadow.
Although the piano
pieces are often heard individually in recital, their full effect
is only appreciated when they are played in the sets to which
they belong - apart, of course, from such self-contained works
as L'isle joyeuse (1904), the first of Debussy's piano
works to embrace the virtuoso expression of light and water,
probably influenced by Ravel's Jeux d'eau. While
individual pieces conjure up some particular atmosphere or scene
usually in an almost improvisatory way, the careful architecture,
created by the juxtaposition and order of small pieces, is only
revealed over the longer span of the sets, even if Debussy himself
disapproved of playing the Préludes complete.
The Suite bergamasque (1890, revised 1905) anticipates
neo-classicism in some of its echoes of the age of Couperin,
but the third of its four pieces, Clair de lune,
dreamy, nebulous, eventually rippling with a nocturnal sparkle,
has become one of his most famous works. The title is from a
poem by Verlaine, set the following year in the first set of
Fête galantes (discussed below). The two
sets of Images totalling six pieces (1905 and 1907) should
not be confused with the orchestral suite of the same name,
and there is also an originally unpublished 1894 set of three
similarly-titled pieces. Images are perhaps the most
obviously Impressionistic of the piano works, with the typical
evocation of light and shade on water and its eddying motion
(Reflets dans l'eau [Reflections on the Water]
or Poisson d'or [Goldfish]), or the light
of the moon.
The two books of
Préludes (1909-1910, 1912-1913, each of
twelve preludes) vary from the mysterious atmosphere-painting
of La Cathédral engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral)
to more abstract evocations such as Les tierces alternées
(Alternating Thirds). Showing Debussy's wide range
of affinities and pianistic moods, they embrace visual scenes
(mists, dead leaves, winds), places (with the Spanish element
of the Alhambra, Egypt, the hills of Anacapri), or people and
dances (Delphic and Shakespearean), ending with fireworks. But
even in the more obviously extrovert works, there is a feeling
of the music being garnered from the wind, spun out on the keyboard,
and released to the wind again, a triumph of instinct, judgement
and technique. There are structural connections between the
pieces (for example, the basic tonality of C and the thirds
connecting the first and the eleventh pieces of Book II). Their
sense of the wash of impressions is reinforced by Debussy putting
the titles at the end of each piece, rather than the beginning,
as if saying: gain your own impressions, your own undercurrent
of reaction, and then see the source of inspiration. The Études
(1915) are the summit of Debussy's pianistic art. Evocative
titles are now dropped; instead the twelve pieces divided into
two books have titles reflecting technical musical aspects (for
example Pour les sonorités opposées [On
opposed sonorities]). The intention is by no means solely
to provide some practical pianistic manual; rather it is Debussy's
own exploration in a series of miniatures of the possibilities
he has reached on his favourite instrument. The first book has
an almost spartan quality, the studies concentrating on sureness
of technique, except for the last flowing fantasy Pour les
huit doigts (For the eight fingers), while the second
set more explores shades of touch and colour, all from the minimum
of basic material. Mention should also be made of the ever-popular
Children's Corner (1906-1908), a suite of six innocent
and delightful pieces written for his daughter, including the
Golliwog's Cake-Walk, its rollicking jazz rhythm delighting
children, the satire on Wagner (it quotes Tristan)
entertaining adults. One of his finest late compositions is
also little known, mainly because it is written for two pianos,
four hands: the three movement suite En blanc et noir (In
White and Black, 1915). There is enough characteristic phrasing
to be instantly recognizable as Debussy, but it is combined
with a simplification of colour, a rarification of idiom (the
two pianos provide a spatial atmosphere rather than being used
to double the potential), a formality of overall outline, and
a willingness to veer into unexpected directions, be they jaunty
or tumultuous. At times it sounds like music written entirely
to satisfy an interior whim, without notion of audience.
Debussy's contribution
to the revival of French song, as a genre in its own right rather
than following German models, is considerable. All are for voice
and piano, although the Trois ballades de Villon
(1910) were also arranged for voice and orchestra. Besides the
many early songs, some of which are only now coming to light
and which show the shadow of Massenet, the song cycle Cinq
poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (1885-1888) still has
touches of Wagner in the melodic lines and in the emotions,
but also a restraint and close integration between singing line
and piano that was to become characteristic. Ariettes
oubliées (1887-1889), to words by Verlaine, one of
Debussy's favourite poets, has a similar influence in the through
composition, rather than an internal division in the songs into
the traditional three parts. But the next Verlaine settings,
Trois mélodies (1891), are far more lithe, with
loose flowing vocal lines, rippling piano arpeggios, and shifting
consonant harmonies. Conventional song structures, based on
verse forms, are now almost completely dissolved in favour of
following the essence of the words. Verlaine was also the poet
for the two sets of Fêtes galantes (1891 and 1904),
which follow similar lines, though the first are more delicate
and direct (especially in the piano writing), the second more
divergent and confident in its effects, especially in the swell
and nebulous piano fragmentation of La faune. The Trois
ballades de Villon (1910) throw the emphasis on the free
vocal lines, with restrained and clear-cut piano writing, capturing
something of the dichotomy between the outward naïveté
and the hidden complexity of Villon's verse, and with a peasant
loveliness in the final song extolling the superiority of the
Paris women, or rather their nagging tongues. Debussy's last
song-cycle, Trois poèmes de Mallarmé
(1915) is lyrical and restrained, almost pessimistic in
tone.
The opera Pelléas
et Mélisande (1893-1902), a virtual word for word
setting of the symbolist play by Maeterlinck, is spellbinding.
It treats what might be described as an episode from some heroic
and legendary story with resonances of Arthurian legend, not
in the grand manner, but as an interior and intimate drama,
centred not so much on the inevitability of fate but more on
the appropriateness of synchronous actions. There is an ethereal
quality throughout the score (which discreetly uses recurring
motifs), but also an astonishingly close correspondence between
the vocal line and the words (a correspondence also found in
Debussy's songs), and in particular between the music and the
emotional content of the words, blurring any distinction between
recitative and aria. This creates vocal lines that sound spontaneous
and natural, and aids the very strong portrayal of the characters.
The story itself (and such was its symbolist intent) operates
in short scenes on the level of subconscious empathy rather
than surface action, in spite of the vivid naturalness of some
of its dialogue, and is open to Jungian interpretation. It is
this layer, without a wide range of orchestral colour but with
a richness and consistency of subdued texture, as well as his
compassion for the characters, that Debussy's allusive and elusive
score so amplifies in slowly evolving detail. The aura of innocence
removes it far from Expressionist angst (the anguish
and anger of the betrayed husband Golaud is all too directly
expressed), and all these qualities made the opera both remarkable
and widely influential when it appeared, but almost impossible
to imitate, and its tone has since perhaps only been matched
by Bártok's Bluebeard's Castle. Debussy
also worked for many years on a second opera, based on Poe's
The Fall of the House of Usher; he never completed it,
but enough has remained for others to put what remains in performable
order, suggesting a dark oppressive drama.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Images; March
écossaise, La mer; Nocturnes, Printemps, Prélude
a `L'après-midi d'un faune' for orch.; Dances
sacrée et danse profane for harp and strings; Fantaisie
for piano and orch.; Rhapsodie for alto saxophone and
orch. (or piano); Première rhapsodie for clarinet
and orch. (or piano)
- Syrinx
for solo flute; cello sonata; Petit pièce for
clarinet and piano; violin sonata; sonata for flute, viola and
harp; string quartet
- Berceuse héroique,
suite Children's Corner, D'un cahier d'esquisses, Estampes,
Études, Hommage à Haydn; Images (two sets),
L'isle joyeuse, The little Nigar, Masques, La plus que lent,
suite Pour le piano, Préludes (two books), Six
épigraphes antiques, and Suite bergamasque
for piano; Marche écossaise, Petite suite
and Six épigraphes antiques for piano, four hands;
En blanc et noir and Lindaraja for two pianos
- song cycles with
piano Ariettes oubliées, Chansons de Bilitis, Cinq
poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, Fêtes galantes (two
sets); Le promenoir des deux amants, Proses lyriques, Trois
ballades de Villon (also orchestrated version), Trois
chansons de France, Trois mélodies and Trois poèmes
de Mallarmé
- La demoiselle
élue for soprano, women's voices and orch.; L'enfant
prodigue for 3 soloists and orch.; Invocation for
men's voices and orch.; Salut printemps for women's voices
and orch.; Trois chansons de Charles d'Orléans
for chorus
- ballets La
boîte à joujou, Khamma and Jeux; incidental
music to Le martyre de Saint Sébastien; operas
The Fall of the House of Usher (incomplete) and Pelléas
et Mélisande
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
All of Debussy's
works are recommended. A sensible introduction to Debussy is
through Prélude à `L'après-midi d'un
faune' (1892-1894) for orchestra, La mer (1903-1905)
and some of the earlier piano music, such as L'isle joyeuse
(1904) or the Images for piano (1095 and 1907). Those
familiar with the popular works of Debussy might consider turning
to the more rigorous late works, and the opera Pelléas
et Mélisande (1893-1902)..
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
C.Debussy Debussy
on Music, 1976
M. Dietschy A
Portrait of Debussy, 1990
E.Lockspeiser Debussy,
1962-1965
───────────────────────────────────────
DUKAS Paul
Abraham
born 1st October
1865 at Paris
died 17th May 1935
at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
For many years Dukas has been known by a single
work, albeit one of the most popular in the orchestral repertoire.
But recently the real value of his very limited output (the
complete list is given below) has begun to reach wider audiences.
One of the most fastidious and private of composers, he is known
to have destroyed much of his unpublished and unperformed work
before his death, including three incomplete operas and a symphony
- a great loss.
His first success
(after being a fellow pupil of Debussy), was Polyeucte
- Ouverture pour la tragédie de Corneille (Overture
to the Tragedy by Corneille, 1891) whose successful and
seamless five-part structure, allied to a general Wagnerian
wash with a lovely and nostalgic slow ending, reflects his lengthy
studies of Classical composers - pleasant, if unstartling music.
The Symphony in C major (1896) is more individual, equally
skilfully crafted, and indebted to Beethoven.
In 1897 appeared
Dukas' most famous work, L'apprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer's
Apprentice). This brilliant scherzo, one of the most graphic
tone-poems ever written, conjuring up both the actions of the
story and the feelings of the unfortunate apprentice, is based
on a monologue by Goethe, describing the apprentice attempting
- disastrously - to use magic to do his chores for him. Particularly
brilliant is the sharp, rich and yet crystal clear orchestration,
with the enchanted broom splitting into two on clarinet and
bassoon, and the gripping depiction of movement through rhythm.
It was equally brilliantly set to cartoon (with Mickey Mouse
as the apprentice) in Walt Disney's Fantasia, ensuring
its world-wide popularity. It also caught the attention of younger
composers at the time of its composition, for its absence of
Wagnerian influence (it is much more akin to contemporary Russian
tone-poems), for its orchestration, and for the harmonic devices.
But L'apprenti
sorcier is not entirely characteristic of Dukas' concerns,
which were more with the problems of large-scale musical architecture,
as in his best-known piano work, the wide-ranging Variations,
interlude et final sur un thème de Rameau (c.1899-1902).
His other major surviving work, the opera Ariane et
Barbe-Bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard, 1899-1906), seems
to be regaining some of the attention it deserves. It also uses
variation technique, usually associated with operas later in
the century. Maeterlinck's reworking of the traditional story
was unusual for the time, though it now has a contemporary ring.
The subject is Ariane herself, who not only rescues Bluebeard,
but asserts herself and eventually subdues him, emerging as
a modern and undominated woman; the traditional submissive role
of women is represented by the other wives, who are not dead,
merely imprisoned, but who are too fearful to take the opportunity
they are offered at the end to leave. The opera provides not
only social comment, but also an allegory of the forces of progression
and traditionalism. For this Dukas provided music that sometimes
has a Wagnerian grandeur, but also something of the line and
atmosphere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande
(also to a Maeterlinck text), with whole-tone harmonies - at
the name of Mélisande (one of the former wives) Dukas
quotes Debussy. It is a compelling score and drama, with a massed
chorus of villagers outside the castle walls, and a major and
difficult role for the mezzo-soprano heroine.
Dukas' last work,
apart from one song and La plainte, au loin, du faune...
(1920) for piano, a tribute to Debussy, was the ballet or `poème-dansé'
La péri (1911-1912) to which he later added
an imposing brass fanfare in a ceremonial style Walton
was to emulate. In contrast to the fanfare, the actual ballet,
an eastern fairy-tale telling how La péri, guardian of
the Lotus of Immortality, wins it back through her dancing when
it is taken by King Iskender, is hauntingly atmospheric. Again
the orchestration is brilliant and lucid: sections of the orchestra
are layered (the flutes and high woodwind sometimes running
at a different pace) giving great depth to the rich overall
sound. The rhythm and dynamics are extraordinarily fluid. It
is perhaps a finer, if not so immediate, achievement than L'apprenti
sorcier.
Dukas was active
as a critic, and one of the editors of the complete editions
of Rameau and François Couperin, and taught at the Paris
Conservatoire, Messiaen being the most notable
of his pupils. Privately, Dukas was also known for his extensive
collection of pornographic pictures.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include: (complete
list of known works):
- symphony
- early overtures
Götz von Berlichingen and King Lear; L'apprenti
sorcier (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) and overture
Polyeucte for orch.
- Villanelle
for horn and piano (also orchestrated)
- piano sonata;
La plainte, au loin, du faune..., Prélude élégiaque
and Variations, interlude et final sur un thème de
Rameau for piano
- Sonnet de Ronsard
and Vocalise for voice and piano; unpublished cantatas
Hymne au soleil, Sémélé and
Velléda
- ballet La péri;
opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard)
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
opera Ariane
et Barbe-Bleue (1899-1906)
The Sorcerer's
Apprentice (L'apprenti sorcier) (1897) for orchestra
La péri
(1912) for orchestra
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
P. Dukas Écrits
sur la musique, 1948 (in French)
G. Favre L'oeuvre
de Paul Dukas, 1969 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
DURUFLÉ
Maurice
born 11 January
1902 at Louviers
died 16th June 1986
at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Duruflé,
an organist-composer in the French tradition, only published
a handful of works, reflecting his fastidiousness. He is justly
known for one work in particular, the Requiem
op.9 (completed 1947, for mezzo, bass, organ and orchestra,
also version for organ alone). This lovely work takes up the
spirit of Fauré's Requiem (both
were written in memory of the composer's father), and cloaks
it in a late Impressionist hue. It shows the main features of
his style - largely gentle, but with more dramatic moments well
integrated into the whole. Melodically his idiom is based on
Gregorian chants, while employing an orchestral wash of subdued
colour, with only limited use of other instrumental touches.
The deep sonorities are aided by the use of the organ. The Impressionist
harmony uses modal ideas, and aims at a gentle and intimate
evocation (the ostinati of the `Sanctus' seem to stand between
Impressionism and the Minimalists). A similar combination of
Impressionist harmonies and liturgical influence had already
surfaced in the Trois danses (Three Dances, 1936)
for orchestra. His organ music shows the influence of Tournemire,
and is distinguished by its meticulous craftsmanship and by
the sense of the self-sufficiency of individual pieces. His
style, which first attracted notice in the Prélude,
Adagio et Choral varié op.4 (1929), has distinct
layers of simultaneous action, usually employing different but
related rhythms. In the Scherzo op.2 (1926) the
counterpoint leads to a gentle but lively mood, in the chorale
variations section of Veni Creator Spiritus, op.4
(1930) to multiple strands of idea. The rhythmic emphasis is
even more marked in the elliptical opening of the Prélude
et fugue sur le nom Alain op.7 (Prelude and Fugue
on the name Alain, 1943), commemorating the organist-composer
Alain, and quoting his Litanies - the use
of plainsong is also overt. This small body of organ works,
so finely crafted, is particularly pleasing.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Andante et
scherzo and Trois dances for orch.
- Prelude, Recitative
and Variations for flute, viola and piano
- Tryptique
for piano
- Fugue sur le
carillon des heures de la cathédral de Soissons for
organ; Prélude, Adagio et Choral varié
for organ; Prélude sur l'Introit de l'Epiphanie,
Prélude et fugue sur le nom de Alain, Scherzo,
Suite (also orchestral version), and Veni, Creator
Spiritus for organ
- mass Cum jubilo;
Requiem; 4 Motets for unaccompanied choir
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
complete organ works
Requiem op.9
(1947)
───────────────────────────────────────
DUTILLEUX
Henri
born 22nd January
1916 at Angers
───────────────────────────────────────
That the music of Henri Dutilleux, so highly
regarded by many who have encountered it, has still to reach
a wider musical public outside France seems due more to its
circumstances than its intrinsic worth or its potential appeal.
His style has a more traditional base than that of many of the
better known modern French composers, and has therefore attracted
less attention, less of the excitement of the new. He has not
subscribed to any `school', and like another French composer
who has been a major influence on his own work, Roussel,
he has been something of an isolated figure. In addition, his
output has been limited to a handful of works (nine major scores
in 40 years), less a reflection of his numerous other activities
as teacher and administrator than of his extreme fastidiousness,
which has included the suppression of his earlier scores.
Orchestral writing
(non-programmatic, but usually with a poetic subtitle) has dominated
his output. The most obvious characteristic is the mastery and
brilliance of the orchestration, from the glowing textures of
the Symphony No.1 (1949-1951) onwards. Typically
he subdivides the orchestra into small units that are either
briefly highlighted or act autonomously to generate polyrhythmic
and polytonal effects, so that, for example, the strings of
Métaboles (Metabolism, 1962-1965)
for orchestra are subdivided repeatedly in one of its sections,
while the Symphony No.2 `Le double' (The Double,
1956-1959) pits, in concerto grosso fashion, twelve solo players
against, and sometimes with, the rest of the orchestra. In non-orchestral
works there is a similar preoccupation with expressive colour,
so that the String Quartet `Ainsi la nuit' (Thus
the Night, 1975-1976) explores every permutation of string
colour in seven movements with four `parentheses'. His harmonic
language, which has ranged from the obviously tonal (the Piano
Sonata, 1947, a well-known piece in France) to a 12-tone
idea in one of the sections of Métaboles,
always has the feel of a tonal base and, thanks to the clarity
of orchestral texture, rarely feels dissonant in spite of the
polytonal effects.
As a result, much
of the emotional and structural preoccupation is with sonority,
and in particular a sense of the opposition of two basic concepts,
what one might describe as the still point and the turning world.
At times this might be between massed sound and silence, at
others between low, held chords and fluttering ideas. His preferred
method of musical structure emphasizes these features. In place
of the traditional methods of statement and development, he
has developed structures that rely on internal metamorphosis,
in which individual ideas almost imperceptibly evolve, and the
overall pattern is eventually seen to have slowly undergone
consistent change. Shorter linked sections that devolve into
each other therefore predominate over traditional movements.
The origins of this lie in variation technique (used in the
Piano Sonata) and allow for a sense of plastic freedom,
most clearly seen (as its title would suggest) in Métaboles.
Of the individual
works, the rather ineffectual extended melodic lines of the
opening of the passacaglia that starts the Symphony
No.1, initially tinged with an almost jazzy feel, should
not deter listeners from the rest of the work, which is in one
continuous flow. For it opens out in tight argument into magical
gossamer moments of colour and effect, evolving into more aggressive
brass and darker strings with great rhythmic energy reminiscent
of Roussel or Walton. The scherzo has a compelling
fleetness and vitality, and the whole work impressive power.
The Symphony No.2 `Le double' (The Double),
with its division of forces and its quasi-variations construction,
is less assertive until the finale, but equally effective. Métaboles
is perhaps Dutilleux's most characteristic score, the five sections
playing continuously, with the third part (`Obsessional') in
the cast of a passacaglia, the emotions ranging from a dark
mystery to nobility. The orchestral diptych Timbres, espaces,
mouvement (1977), subtitled La nuit étoilée
(Tone colours, space, movement or The starry night)
has brilliant instrumental writing, and is built around the
metamorphosis of a single note (G#).
These works show
Dutilleux's idiom to be essentially poetic, a musical expression
of the deep colours and landscapes of our subconscious, in which
changing timbre is always more important than melodic line.
Both, however, come to the fore in the two concertos which many
may find an appealing approach to the composer. However, even
in the Cello Concerto (as it seems to be universally
known, though correctly titled Tout un monde lontain
[A whole distant world, 1968-1970, after Baudelaire])
often it is the interaction of the colours of the orchestra
and the highly rhapsodic and flowing solo line that is responsible
for the effect. It was the cellist Rostropovich's advocacy of
this work that introduced Dutilleux to a larger audience, and
Isaac Stern has repeated this with the Violin Concerto
(1985, subtitled L'arbre des songes), a less lyrical,
more brittle work with a close dialogue between orchestra and
soloist (whose virtuoso material at times seems almost discursive),
leaping melodic phrases, sharp instrumental colours (including
a piano), and nervous intensity.
Dutilleux was director
of singing at the Paris Opéra in 1942, joined French
Radio in 1943, becoming director of music productions 1945-1963,
and professor of composition, first at the École Normale
de Musique in 1961, then at the Paris Conservatoire from 1970.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 2 symphonies;
cello concerto (Tout un monde lointain); violin concerto
(L'arbre des songes)
- Métaboles,
Serenade and Timbres, espace, mouvement for orch.
- Chorale, cadence
et fugato for trombone and piano; Sarabande et cortège
for bassoon and piano; Sonatine for flute and piano;
string quartet Ainsi la Nuit (Thus the Night)
- piano sonata,
2 preludes, Résonances and early works for piano;
Deux figures de résonances for two pianos
- San Francisco
Night, Trois sonnets de Jean Cassou and other songs
- ballet Le loup
(The Wolf); incidental music
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Cello Concerto (Tout
un monde lointain) (1968-1970)
Métaboles
(1962-1965) for orchestra
Piano Sonata (1947)
Symphony No.1 (1949-1951)
Symphony No.2 (Le
double) (1956-1959)
Timbres, espace,
mouvement (1977) for orchestra
Violin Concerto
(L'arbre des songes) (1985)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
P.Mari Henri
Dutilleux, Paris, 1973 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
FAURÉ
Gabriel (-Urbain)
born 12th May 1845
at Pamiers (Ariège)
died 4th November
1924 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Although Fauré
was 54 when the 19th century turned into the 20th, he was a
composer who strode both centuries not only temporally, but
also musically, being a traditionalist who nonetheless introduced
into his style many elements that were to come to fruition in
the following generation of composers. That his music (with
the exception of the very popular Requiem) is
not more widely known, or his stature more determined, is almost
entirely due to his concentration on small-scale forms, the
song, of which he is one of the great French masters, piano
music and above all chamber music. In addition his relatively
small output was constrained by financial obligations to his
family - throughout his life he could devote time to composition
only in the summer. His art is also one of understatement, the
antithesis of display, and appeals more to those who are prepared
to explore and share its intimacy. It is no coincidence that
Fauré was one of the few composers of his generation
who was immune to the spell of Wagner (apart, perhaps, from
the Ballade for piano and orchestra, 1881).
His earliest music
reflects the Romanticism of his teacher Saint-Saëns, and
the Violin Sonata No.1 (1876) has remained popular for
its lyricism and the flowing ideas that were to remain a major
characteristic. During the last two decades of the 19th century
his style matured, adding an assertiveness to the underlying
lyricism and introverted grace. The Requiem is
the outstanding work of this period. But Fauré's summit
of achievement did not come until the 20th century, and especially
the last two decades of his life (for he continued to compose
masterpieces until his death at the age of 79). Notably in a
series of chamber works his expression becomes more refined,
more ethereal, tauter and more radiant. His characteristic traits
remain: the preference for long melodies that are created from
harmonic or rhythmic germ-cells to any sense of variety or vividness
of colour, for which Fauré seems to have had less feel
than almost any other major composer (one reason why there is
so little orchestral music and none for wind); a rhythmic sense
that is rarely central to his music and which has sometimes
been criticised for monotony; three- or four-movement structures
that often include scherzos of Gallic impishness and humour;
an essentially diatonic harmonic palette that includes modes
inherited from the church music Fauré was accustomed
to as a professional organist; and a harmonic freedom created
by the naturalness of his technique of very rapid modulations,
usually by movement through notes shared by the initial and
final key.
The bulk of his
output puts the piano in a central position, in the songs (where,
in French art song, Fauré gave it a new importance in
relationship to the voice), in the solo piano music, and in
the chamber music (where the only work not to use piano is the
String Quartet, 1923-1924), again helping detail of tone
and timbre to offset lack of colour. However, these last works
extend the harmony to include elements of dissonance, chromaticism,
and whole-tone passages, and the kind of introverted serenity
that is the province of only a handful of composers in their
old age. Fauré, like Beethoven, had the additional handicap
of deafness, which had become serious by 1910.
Of his orchestral
music, the masterpiece is the lucid suite op.80 from his incidental
music to Pelléas et Mélisande (1898),
the first musical work based on Maeterlinck's influential play.
The suite was formed by Fauré's own orchestration for
a large orchestra of his pupil Koechlin's chamber
orchestration of the original theatre scoring. Unlike Schoenberg's
tone-poem or Debussy's opera on the same subject,
it looks back to classical models, and thus forward to the neo-classical
movement. The now little-heard Prométhée
(1900), originally for three wind bands, 100 strings and twelve
harps, together with soloist and choirs, secured Fauré
considerable public success. Fauré, always preferring
the intimate to the public face of music, destroyed other large-scale
works before they were publicly heard or published. However,
the suite Masques et bergamasques op.112 (1918-1919)
for orchestra and based on incidental music and material from
as far back as 1869, again has a strong feel of neo-classicism
in its series of entertaining dances and in its light scoring.
However, it is his
chamber music, which spanned his entire compositional life and
reflects the evolution of his style, where the most rewards
are found. The Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor op.15
(1879), probably his best known chamber work, is classical in
form, essentially lyrical and graceful, as is the quite often
heard Élégie for cello and piano, op.24
(1883). But the beautiful Piano Quartet No.2 in G minor
op.45 (1886) is wider ranging in its ideas, more powerful in
its impact, with a greater freedom and delight in the manipulation
of the material, especially in the sometimes ravishing harmonic
changes. There is a similar contrast in the two piano quintets.
The Piano Quintet No.1 in D minor op.89 (1887-1905)
is more conventional than its successor, the Piano
Quintet No.2 in C minor, op.115 (1919-1921). Sustained by
its extended formal arguments, this latter quintet has a beautifully
carefree and graceful atmosphere, the warmth of a mellow and
well-aged wine, as well as breathless and dissonant moments
in the scherzo. The two Cello Sonatas (1917 and 1922)
and the Piano Trio in D minor (1923) op.120 continue
the rarefied and yet lyrical aesthetic. Fauré left writing
a string quartet until the very last, at the age of 79. The
String Quartet in E minor op.121 (1923-1924) is strong
in melodic line, transparent in construction, and has an ethereal
quality, as if already lost in some other world. But it seems
slightly rough-hewn for Fauré, and indeed he did not
live to revise it as he wished.
Much of Fauré's
distinctive piano music is grouped into forms (though not content)
that evoke the titles of Chopin - the Impromptus, the
Barcarolles and the Nocturnes. The attractive
Theme and Variations in C sharp minor, op.73 (1897)
is quite often encountered, while the later works (the last
three Nocturnes, or the later Barcarolles)
again show the compression of concept. Many commentators have
traced some of the ideas of Impressionism back to Fauré's
piano music.
His songs were gathered
into three collections published in 1879, 1897 and 1908. With
the exception of the settings of Verlaine, for whose poetry
Fauré had a particular affinity (e.g. the song cycle
Cinq mélodies de Verlaine op.58, 1890), he often
chose poetry devoid of obvious musical content or clear description,
allowing the piano a greater (sometimes contrasting) role than
had been customary. In his earlier song cycles (e.g. La bonne
chanson op.61, 1891-1892, also in version for piano, string
quartet and double bass) he arranged the chosen poetry into
a dramatic progression, emphasising this musically by the use
of recurrent themes. His last song cycles (Le jardin clos,
op.106, Mirages op.113, and L'horizon chimérique
op.118) omit this technique, but show the rarification, and
the subtlety of thought and detail, that mark his other later
works. His opera Pénélope (1913)
is derived from the techniques of song, the drama introverted,
theatricality absent. But his best loved work is the Requiem
op.48 (1877-c.1890, version for small ensemble 1888-1892, with
soprano and baritone, soloists and chorus, full orchestration
1900), written in memory of his father. Its simplicity and purity
of beauty, untroubled by any sense of banality or self-consciousness,
have exceptional appeal. Of the three versions (with organ,
with small instrumental ensemble, with orchestra), that for
a small instrumental ensemble (without violins and with divided
violas and cellos) perhaps most happily matches the scale, intimacy
and lucidity of the writing, from the initial echoes of old
church music, the lovely rocking of the Sanctus set against
divided strings, some in lilting ostinato, some soaring through
the chorus, to its famous close, with the atmosphere of a gentle
carol, the organ weaving its own song above, in Paridisum. There
is also a version for the smaller orchestral ensemble with two
extra movements and two horns added by Fauré in 1893.
Undoubtedly, one
of Fauré's greatest legacies was the influence he had
through his teaching, and the very French example of his own
music, effortless, intimate and yet full of the clarity of light,
of grace, of charm, that so contrasted with German models. Among
his pupils were Enescu, Koechlin,
Ravel, Florent Schmitt, and the most notable teacher
of the succeeding generation, Nadia Boulanger. In addition to
his posts as organist, he started teaching at the Conservatoire
in 1896, and was its director (introducing major reforms) until
1920. Until his death he was a champion of new music, co-founding
the Société Nationale de Musique with d'Indy,
Lalo, Duparc and Chabrier in 1871, and becoming president of
the new Société musicale indépendante in
1909. He was music critic for Le Figaro (1903-1921), fought
in the action that raised the siege of Paris in 1870, and was
awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur in 1920.
He edited the complete piano works of Schumann and the organ
works of Bach.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Ballade
and Fantaisie for piano and orch.; (for orchestrations
of works for instrument and piano see below); suite Masques
et bergamasques; suite from incidental music Pelléas
et Mélisande for orch.
- Élégie
(also orch.) and Sérénade for cello and
piano ; 2 cello sonatas; Fantaisie for flute and piano;
Andante for violin and piano (possibly from destroyed
violin concerto); Berceuse and Romance for violin
and piano (both also orchestrated); 2 violin sonatas; piano
trio; 2 piano quartets; string quartet; 2 piano quintets
- piano works including
Barcarolles, Impromptus, Nocturnes and
Préludes
- song cycles La
bonne chanson, La chanson d'Eve, Cinq mélodies
`de Venise', L'horizon chimérique, Le jardin
clos, Mirages and 60 other songs; Requiem
and numerous other choral and vocal works
- lyric tragedy
Prométhée; opera Pénélope;
`musical comedy' Masques et bergamasques
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Barcarolles
Nos 1-13 (1880s-1931) for piano
Cello Sonata No.1
in D minor op.109 (1917)
Cello Sonata No.2
in G minor op.117 (1922)
suite Pelléas
and Mélisande op.80 (1898) for orchestra
Piano Quartet No.1
in C minor op.15 (1879)
Piano Quartet No.2
in G minor op.45 (1886)
Piano Quintet No.2
in C minor op.115 (1919-1921)
Piano Trio in D
minor op.120 (1922-1923)
Requiem op.48
(1887)
Requiem op.48
(1893 version with two extra movements and small orchestra)
Quartet in E minor
op.121 (1923-1924)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
ed. J.M.Nectoux
Gabriel Fauré: his Life through his Letters, 1984
R.Orledge Gabriel
Fauré London, 1979
───────────────────────────────────────
FRANÇAIX
Jean
born 23rd May 1912
at Le Mans
died 25th
September 1997 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Jean Françaix is an epitome of a particular
French brand of musical expression: an amiable, delicate palette
in which emotion is played down in favour of wit and elegance
tinged with an amused irony. That his works rarely address deeper
understandings (coming closest in the oratorio L'Apocalypse
de Saint Jean, 1942) makes him an intrinsically less interesting
composer than, for example, his contemporary Poulenc,
who was equally capable of creating such Gallic pleasures. Some
listeners may therefore find Françaix's music too trite;
others may enjoy exactly such an idiom. The Piano Concerto
(1936) confirmed the promise of the sparkling Piano Concertino
(1932). The concerto is typical of his style, delicate, chamber
in feel (in spite of the large orchestra, its size used for
shades of colour), and with more of an amiable dialogue between
soloist and orchestra than a confrontation. A similar feel -
clarity of line and texture, a gentle lyricism, sometimes light-hearted
rhythms - are found in other concertante works: the Suite
(1934) for violin and orchestra with piquant Stravinskian elements,
the Rhapsody (1946) for viola and small wind orchestra
with episodes of more sardonic humour, the admired Fantasy
(1955, from earlier material) for cello and orchestra, or the
Concerto for two pianos and orchestra (1965).
In his large and wide-ranging output, ballet music formed a
large proportion of his earlier music, including Scuola
di ballo (Ballet School, 1933) which is based on
themes by Boccherini (1743-1805) and a story by Goldini. His
chamber music includes the happy Wind Quintet (1948),
full of lively and expertly crafted writing, especially for
the horn, and the very attractive `musical game' Sérénade
BEA (1952) for string sextet, commissioned for a beautiful
woman named Beatrice.
Françaix
was a brilliant pianist, and toured extensively.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- symphony
- Concerto Grosso;
clarinet concerto; double bass concerto; flute concerto; concerto
for harpsichord, flute and strings; piano concerto; double piano
concerto; Quadruple Concerto for flute, oboe, clarinet
and bassoon and orch.; viola concerto; violin concerto; piano
concertino; Divertissement for bassoon and strings; Fantaisie
for cello and orch.; Variations de concert for cello
and strings; Musique de cour for flute, violin and orch.;
Jeu poétique for harp and orch.; Divertimento
for horn and orch.; L'horloge de Flore for oboe and strings
- Les bosquets
de Cythre, Le Dialogue des Carmélites, La
douce France, L'heure du Berger, Hymne Solennel,
Thème et variations, La ville mystérieuse
and other works for orch.; Cassazione for three orchestras;
Quasi Improvisando and Six Préludes for
strings
- Suite for
solo flute; Mouvement perpetuel for cello and piano;
Rhapsodie for viola and wind; Divertissement for
oboe, clarinet and bassoon; trio for flute, cello and harp;
quartet for cor anglais and strings; saxophone quartet; string
quartet; clarinet quintet; wind quintet; Sérénade
BEA for string sextet; Nuit for clarinet, bassoon,
horn and string quartet; Hommage l'ami Papageno for piano
and 10 wind instruments; Danses exotiques for 11 wind
instruments and percussion; Quasi Improvvisando for wind
ensemble and other chamber music
- piano sonata;
Danse de trois Arlequins, Eloge de la danse for
piano; Danses exotiques for two pianos and other piano
music
- oratorio L'Apocalypse
de Saint Jean; songs and choral works
- ballets Les
camalais, La dame dans la lune, Les damoiselles
de la nuit, Le jeu sentimental, Le jugement d'un
fou, La Lutherie enchantée, Les malheures
de Sophie, Le Roi Midas, Le Roi nu, Scuola
di ballo, Verrières de Venise and Les zigues
de Mars
- operas L'apostrophe,
La main de gloire, Paris nous deux, La princesse
de Clèves; chamber opera Le diable boiteux;
film scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Concertino (1932)
for piano and orchestra
Piano Concerto (1936)
`musical game' Sérénade
BEA (1952) for string sextet
Wind Quintet (1948)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
D. Ewen Françaix
───────────────────────────────────────
HENRY Pierre
born 9th December
1927 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Pierre Henry was a pioneer and leading exponent
of the musique-concrète movement, exploring electronic
composition through the manipulation of acoustic, non-electronic
sounds. After studying with Messiaen and Nadia
Boulanger, he collaborated in 1949 with Pierre Schaeffer
in the first musique-concrète experiments at the Experimental
Division of the French Broadcasting Network, becoming the head
of the Research Group (1950). He left in 1958 to set up his
own studio, the Studio Apsome. In his earliest pieces (for example
the Concerto des ambiguïtés, 1950)
atonal techniques were modified by electronic distortions to
tempo, pitch, and timbre. With Bidule en nuit
(1950) and Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony
for a man alone, 1950), both developed with Schaeffer,
this developed into a purely electronic language, in which the
material is based either on sounds electronically generated
or non-musical sound sources electronically manipulated. The
intention was to liberate music from conventional, inherited
notions, and to evolve a musical language more in keeping with
the realities of contemporary existence. The results were almost
totally divorced from the accepted musical sounds or forms (other
than the necessity of organising material within time limits),
and favoured low-pitched electronic sonorities. With a series
of ballet works for the choreographer Maurice Béjart,
following their meeting in 1955, Henry's abstract vocabulary
was modified into an almost pictorial expression of clear programmatic
content. Some of these ballets use purely electronically-generated
sounds (Le voyage, 1962, concert version 1963),
some concrète sounds (the creaking door in Variations
pour une porte et un soupir [Variations for a door and
a sigh, 1963], others more recognizable musical elements
(pop music in the Messe pour le temps présent
[Mass for the present time], 1967). Le voyage,
based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is perhaps the most remarkable
of these, following the journey of the soul on the death of
a man; the wind that comes with death, the extra-worldly light
and darkness, and the fear and the final dissolution described
in the text are highly suited to electronic realisation, and
Henry's score is vivid, descriptive, and sometimes genuinely
frightening. Its construction and metaphysics are perhaps influenced
by Messiaen. The slow immobility of La noire à
soixante (1961), later combined with the extreme quasi-speaking
techniques of a manipulated voice of Granulométrie
(1968), admirably illustrate concrète techniques and
include a humorous element, but are of limited aural interest
when divorced from a visual context. Henry's later music has
extended the scale of these programmatic stage-orientated works
into larger spectacles, with extensive lighting and stage effects,
and includes a re-exploration of the `noise-makers' invented
by the Futurists in the 1920s in Futuristie I
(1975), and the ballet Nijinsky, clown de Dieu
(Nijinsky, Clown of God, 1971). But it is the earliest
works, pioneering electronic music, that are of the most interest
and of historical importance, while Le voyage
remains one of the most cogent electronic scores based on an
extra-musical programme.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- electronic Symphonie
pour un homme seul (with P.Schaeffer); electronic Concerto
des ambiguïtés (1950)
- Bidule en nuit
(with P.Schaeffer), Coexistence, Granulométrie
and other electronic works
- electronic ballet
scores including Haut voltage, Messe pour le temps
présent, Nijinsky, clown de Dieu, La noire
à soixante, Orphée, La raine vert,
Variations pour une porte et un soupir, Le voyage;
L'apocalypse de Jean; La messe de Liverpool
- incidental music;
many film scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Concerto des
ambiguïtés (1950)
Symphonie pour
un homme seul (1950) (with Pierre Schaeffer)
electronic ballet
Le voyage (1962)
───────────────────────────────────────
IBERT Jacques
François Antoine
born 15th August
1890 at Paris
died 5th February
1962 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Although for much of his life Jacques Ibert was
mainly involved with opera and incidental music, he is best
known for a handful of orchestral and chamber works that have
endured in the repertoire. Otherwise his music, full of charm
and sparkle and utilizing both Impressionism and neo-classicism,
has been largely too shallow in substance to survive. His works
usually combine classical forms with bright colours, a poster-paint
vivacity, sometimes unexpected harmonies, and a piquant imagination
(as in the juxtaposition of the sonorous string tone of the
cello against wind instruments in the Concerto for Cello
and Wind Instruments, 1925). In the Suite Élizabéthaine
(1944) for solo voice, chorus and orchestra, he utilized music
from the English Elizabethan composers, while the ballet Diane
de Poitiers (1933-1934) expands Renaissance dances
into primary colours and a lively joie-de-vivre. His best-known
work is probably the Divertissement (1930) for
chamber orchestra, witty, fun and colourful, and originally
written to accompany Labiche's celebrated farce, The Italian
Straw Hat. It includes musical jokes, from a policeman's
whistle and jazz to a parody of Mendelssohn's Wedding March.
There is an element here of the French tradition stemming from
the delightful humour of Offenbach, as there is in Angélique
(1926), the best known of his seven operas, including two written
in collaboration with Honegger. The symphonic
suite Escales (Ports of Call, 1922), evoking the
atmosphere of three Mediterranean ports, was once very popular,
while the entertaining Trois pièces brèves
(1930) are often encountered in wind quintet recitals. The lively
Concertino de camera (1935) for alto saxophone and eleven
instruments makes full use of the potential of the instrument,
but his most successful concerto is the Flute Concerto
(1934). It typifies much of Ibert's idiom: a classical three-movement
structure, a strong lyrical sense made to feel elliptical by
the harmonies, a sense of pleasure and of fun, and sometimes
a feeling at the end of a passage that for all the facility
nothing memorable has been said. Nonetheless, this is a warm
and charming work, an important contribution to a limited repertoire.
Ibert was director of the French Academy in Rome (1937-1955,
except for the war years), and director of the Paris Opéra
and the Opéra Comique from 1955 to 1957.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Sinfonia concertante
for oboe and orch.; concerto for cello and wind instruments;
flute concerto; piano concerto
- La Ballade
de la geôle de Reading (The Ballad of Reading Jail),
Donogoo, Escales, Jeux, Paris and
Suite Élizabéthaine for orch.; Divertissement
for chamber orch.
- trio for violin,
cello and harp; string quartet; Trois pièces brèves
for wind quintet; Capriccio for ten instruments
- song cycle Chansons
de Don Quichotte ad other vocal works
- ballets Diane
de Poitiers; operas Angélique, Gonzague,
On ne seurait penser tout, Persée et Andromède
and Le Roi d'Yvetot; radio opera Barbe-Bleu; operas
in collaboration with Honegger L'Aiglon and Les Petits
Cardinal
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
La Ballade de
la geôle de Reading (1922) for orchestra
Flute Concerto (1934)
Divertissement
(1930)
Trois pièces
brèves (1930) for wind quintet
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
G. Michael Jacques
Ibert 1967 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
JOLIVET André
born 8th August
1905 at Paris
died 20th December
1974 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
In the last few years Jolivet's music has made
something of a comeback outside his native France, where he
has always been highly regarded. In 1936, in reaction to the
intellectual experimentation - especially neo-classicism - of
contemporary French composers and of Stravinsky,
he formed La Jeune France with the composers Baudrier, Lesur,
and Messiaen, to promote their own ideas and compositions.
Subsequently his idiom consistently attempted to return music
to its antecedents as a reflection of the spirituality of humankind,
as ritual and sacrament, through a language that gradually moved
further and further away from a tonal base but without strict
serial techniques. He achieved this through primitive ritual,
incantation, an interest in exotic and ancient musics, and the
use of Pythagorean number ratios and the `golden section'. Prominent
in his idiom is the use of percussion (which he learnt from
studies with Varèse, 1930-1933) and a strong
melodic interest.
However, ritual
was not apparent in his earliest works. In the uncompromising
String Quartet (1934), written under the influence of
Varèse, dissonances and harmonic conjunctions
destroy traditional tonality, and it was followed by the earnest
but lovely Andante for strings (1934). But with Mana
(1935 - Mana refers to the spirit of fetishes), six piano
pieces based on objects given to him by Varèse,
Cinq incantations for flute (1936) and the Dance
rituelles (1939, orchestrated 1940-1941) the ritual
element was established. The effective Dances rituelles
perhaps inevitably have echoes of the ritualistic works of the
Impressionists and of the Stravinsky of the Rite
of Spring, but clothed in thick orchestral textures, an
uneasy harmonic sense (mitigated by the melodiousness), primitive
dance rhythms, and with the tone of the flute, so appropriate
to a sense of ancient music and ritual and prominent in many
of Jolivet's works. The heady atmosphere of ancient religious
ceremony and music from other cultures is most overt in the
Suite delphique (1943), whose twelve instruments
include the ondes martenot and percussion instruments (to make
such sounds as that of baying dogs). Its exoticism, created
by unusual rhythms, eastern harmonic effects and melodies, is
blended with a sense of traditional tonality and a feel of the
convocation of traditions.
But with the exhilarating
and dissonant Piano Sonata No.1 (1945, dedicated to the
memory of Bartók), and the Ondes martenot Concerto
(1947), the first of the fourteen concertos that form the core
of his music, usually with technically difficult solo parts,
he submerged the more overt aspects of ritualism and exoticism
into a broader language. Those aspects are retained in a sense
of the dance, and especially in a feeling that the music reflects
a spontaneous expression of the human spirit; one of the results
is that the shifting harmonies and dissonances, and the increasing
use of percussion and unusual percussive/rhythmic effects are
more obvious, as they are no longer so clearly connected to
exotic borrowings or ancient ritualism. Gradually they become
more violent.
This new direction
was signalled in the Concertino for trumpet, piano and strings
(1948, numbered as the Trumpet Concerto No.1),
in which Jolivet tries to merge a spontaneous flowing feel (with
jazz influences and some dizzy dissonant sections) to a neo-classical
base - with its echoes of the first piano concerto of Shostakovich
- in an entertaining if light-weight piece. The Flute
Concerto No.1 (1949, for flute and strings), is also an
attractive neo-classical work, with a florid solo part. A third
concerto in a popular idiom was the Trumpet Concerto No.2
(1954), with echoes of jazz and Stravinsky.
Of more substance,
and the work that brought Jolivet international prominence,
was the large Piano Concerto (1950). It opens
with an ostinato piano against African-style drumming and Arabic
woodwind, progressing to shades of Bartók
and hints of Ravel. Heavily orchestrated sections, emphasising
woodwind and percussion in snatched phrases, contrast with passages
for piano and single instruments or exposed percussion. The
first movement is supposed to evoke Africa, the second the Far
East, the third Polynesia. It caused quite a furore when it
appeared. It is well worth hearing, though its constantly shifting
elements, including three separate batteries of percussion,
crowd out an overall sense of unity. The eclectic abandon of
this work (more commonly associated with young composers than
one of 45) is present in the much more effective Symphony
No.1 (1953), whose four movements develop by the opposition
of ideas rather than classical development. Again a fusion of
the Occidental and the Oriental, it has a steamy and sensual
slow movement followed by an other-worldly allegro full of ostinati.
With the raucous
Symphony No.2 (1959) Jolivet attempted a synthesis
of serial and modal music, and of melodic continuity and restless
rhythm, although interrupted by characteristic violent outbreaks.
The most difficult of the symphonies, Symphony No.3,
(1964) is also the finest. There is a battery of twenty-four
percussion instruments, and the predominant language is violent
and dissonant, with massed timbres. The sense of a tonal base
is almost, though not quite, extinguished, but underlying it
is the pounding of an elemental ritual. In the sombre Cello
Concerto No.1 (1962), the lyric flow and harmonic insecurity
are predominant, with a restrained orchestra (that nonetheless
employs twenty-two percussion instruments), and a striking second
movement of cello against revolving percussion. The similarly
rhapsodic Cello Concerto No.2 (1966), with a very difficult
solo part written for Rostropovich, uses only strings (with
a solo quintet).
Of his chamber music,
a special place is given to the flute, and his music is often
encountered in flute recitals, especially the Cinq incantations
(1936) and Ascèses I (1967, for various flute
types played solo). Among his vocal music is the large-scale
oratorio La vérité de Jeanne (The
Truth of Joan, 1956), written to commemorate the 500th anniversary
of Joan of Arc's death, and the appealing Epithalame
(1953), a `vocal symphony' for twelve voices with an incantatory
feel.
Jolivet's place
in the music of the 20th century is difficult to establish,
as is his appeal. Most readers should find merit in the earlier
ritual works, and entertainment in the two trumpet and second
flute concertos, and a rugged interest in the first cello concerto.
Those prepared to accept the violence of the language - and
the easiest way to do this is to accept some primordial miasma
as the spiritual source of the music - will find the later works
of interest, but lacking that complete individuality which was
always threatening to emerge. His techniques of blending other
types of music with an essentially tonal base is of interest
to an age that is searching for new ways to extend traditional
patterns of harmony while rejecting 12-tone techniques and the
avant-garde experiments that followed.
Jolivet was director
of music at the Comédie Français (1943-1959 -
his only opera, Dolorès ou Le miracle de la femme
laide [Dolores or The miracle of the ugly woman,
1942] is an opera bouffe), was the founder of the Centre Français
d'Humanisme Musical at Aix-en-Provence (1959), and taught at
the Paris Conservatoire (1966-1970).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 3 numbered symphonies;
Symphonie des danses; vocal symphony Epithalame
- concerto for bassoon,
harp, piano and strings; 2 cello concertos; ; concerto for flute
and strings (Flute Concerto No.1); concerto for flute
and percussion (Flute Concerto No.2); concerto for harp
and chamber orch.; ondes martenon concerto; piano concerto;
concerto for soprano and orchestra (Songe à nouveau
rêvé, The Dream once more dreamt); trumpet
concerto (Trumpet Concerto No.2); 2 violin concertos;
concertino for trumpet, piano and strings (Trumpet Concerto
No.1)
- Cinq danses
rituelles (Five Ritual Dances, also piano version),
Cosmogonie (also piano version) and other works for orch.
- Andante
and Adagio for strings; Twelve Inventions for
wind quintet, trumpet, trombone, and string quintet; Suite
Delphique for 12 instruments
- Cinq incantations
for solo flute; flute sonata; flute and cello sonatina; oboe
and bassoon sonatina; Suite en concert for flute and
4 percussion; Cérémonial, Homage à
Varèse for 6 percussion and other chamber works;
Rhapsodie à 7 for wind and string septet
- Cinq danses
rituelles (Five Ritual Dances, also orchestra version),
Cosmogonie (also orchestra version), Mana, 2 sonatas,
and other works for piano
- Hymne à
l'univers (Hymn to the Universe) and Mandala
for organ
- oratorio La
vérité de Jean (The Truth of Joan)
and other vocal works; song cycles
- ballets Ariadne,
Guignol et Pandore, L'inconnue (The Unknown
Woman), Marines and Les quatres vérités
- operas Bogomil
(unfinished) and Dolorès ou Le miracle de la femme
laide (Dolores or the ugly woman's miracle); 2 marionette
plays
- large output of
incidental and music for educational use
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:-
Andante for String
Orchestra (1934)
Ascèses
for solo flute (1967)
Cello Concerto No.1
(1962)
Cello Concerto No.2
(1966)
Dances rituelles
(1939, orch.1940-1941) for orchestra
vocal symphony Ephithalame
(1953)
Flute concerto (1949
Cinq incantations
for solo flute (1936)
Piano Sonata No.1
(1945)
Suite delphique
(1942) for chamber ensemble
Symphony No.3 (1964)
Trumpet Concerto
No.2 (1954)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
H.Jolivet Avec
André Jolivet, 1978
───────────────────────────────────────
KOECHLIN
Charles
born 27th November
1867 at Paris
died 31st December
1950 at Le Canadel
───────────────────────────────────────
The music of Charles Koechlin is currently something
of an enigma. His very large output (some 350 works, and over
225 opus numbers) includes almost every idiom except stage works
(with one exception), but he has been chiefly remembered as
a famous teacher (his pupils included Milhaud
and Poulenc), and as a considerable theorist and writer
on music. Part of the neglect of his music was due to his reluctance
to publish or perform his compositions. However, there are signs
that his work is currently undergoing a general re-evaluation,
and readers may expect to encounter relatively more of his works
than has been the case.
Like his teacher
and mentor Fauré, his early reputation
was based on his songs and his choral music, and of all Koechlin's
output it is the songs that are currently the most likely to
be heard. The earliest songs belong to Romanticism, but the
precise clarity of the first two sets of Rondels
(op.1 and op.8, 1890-1895) herald later developments in French
music. These settings, of poems by Théodore de Banville
that anthropomorphize nature, are very attractive and very direct,
from the metronomic regularity of the accompaniment to L'hiver
op.8 No.2 (Winter) that is merely an icicle phrase running
up and down, to the lyric freedom of Le thé op.1
No.3 with its delicate rippling accompaniments. By 1905 he had
started to use a subdued polytonality in his songs (influencing
such French composers as Milhaud).
Koechlin's harmonic
idioms are as eclectic as the inspiration for his works, which
are almost invariably extra-musical. They range from elements
of Impressionism to polytonality, moments of atonality and the
use of modes or polymodality that, in conjunction with a pleasure
in counterpoint, give an archaic feel to a modern idiom. Often
there is a tint of exoticism to the melodic line. Similarly
his aesthetic ranges from the subdued Germanic Romanticism and
modal scales of the rather attractive Ballade op.50 (1919)
for piano and orchestra, whose overall effect does not match
the interest of some of the details, to the neo-classicism of
the Partita (1945) for chamber orchestra, echoing the
stately dances of the time of Louis XIV, pleasant but unremarkable.
Koechlin had a reputation for mastery of orchestration. Of the
orchestral works, the most widely known is the cycle of symphonic
poems on Kipling's Jungle Book (1899-1940; the first
is for soloists, chorus and orchestra). Of these, Les Bandar-Log
parodies the techniques of Debussy, Schoenberg
and Stravinsky, but transforms each parody into
personal music.
Koechlin was also
noted in France for his choral music, which left behind the
choral conventions of the 19th century; here his use of modal
ideas and chant-like melodies is most marked. Among these is
the large-scale L'Abbaye (The Abbey, 1899-1908),
a `religious suite' in two parts. The chamber music most often
encountered includes an attractive but lugubrious six-movement
Wind Quintet op.165 (1943), and cello, violin and viola
sonatas. Apart from his own film music, Koechlin was also fascinated
by film stars, reflected in another work occasionally encountered,
the Seven Stars Symphony op.132 (1933) - less
a symphony than seven unrelated tone portraits of seven film
stars, in a contemplative style rather than brash Hollywood
pictures, and using a wide range of harmonic devices as well
as the ondes martenot, of which Koechlin was one of the early
exponents. It is a strange work, from the Impressionistic and
oriental sinuousness of `Douglas Fairbanks' to the lengthy final
portrait of Chaplin, integrating jerky ideas reminiscent of
piano accompaniments to silent films. But again, if there are
some pleasant touches (such as the appearance of the ondes martenot
in `Greta Garbo') and the portraits are clear enough, the Seven
Stars Symphony seems uninspired and uninspiring, its gestures
conventional and unmemorable.
Even more curious
is the final song cycle Sept chansons pour Gladys
op.151 (1935), which celebrates the film star Lilian Harvey
(he also wrote 113 short piano pieces in her honour). A strange
juxtaposition of contemplative music and semi-serious words
(undifferentiating between real and screen presence), its long
vocal lines have an archaic quality that recall sad southern
troubadour's songs, perhaps unwittingly expressing that confusion
of object-worship of the heroine that was one of the essences
of the cinema. Quite apart from the curiosity of the subject-matter
and the words, this is a tender, gentle and very French song-cycle,
rhythmically almost improvisatory, its tone that of contemplative
love songs, even if in idiom they could have been written two
decades earlier. Indeed, much of Koechlin's music seems to have
had a luminous and contemplative feel, combined with what a
number of commentators have suggested are moments of brilliant
academicism. There have recently been strong claims for the
quality of Koechlin's works; perhaps as more of them emerge
from obscurity those claims will be justified. Currently, the
songs apart, such claims seem exaggerated, as so often happens
when the works of an eccentric composer are re-examined. Koechlin
was co-founder of the Société Musicale Indépendante
in 1909, and, as a supporter of communism, president of the
Fédération Musicale Populaire from 1937.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include (over
225 opus numbers: those marked are based on Kipling's Jungle
Book):
- 2 numbered symphonies;
Symphony of Hymns; Seven Stars Symphony
- En mer la nuit,
Les bandar-Log, Le buisson ardent, La course
de printemps, Études antiques, Le forêt,
Les heures persanes, La loi de la jungle, La
méditation de Purun, Nuit de Walpurgis classique,
Rhapsodie sur des chansons françaises and Les
Saisons for orch.; Partita for chamber orch.
- Ballade
for piano and orch.; sonatas for bassoon; cello; clarinet; flute;
horn; oboe; violin; and viola and other works for solo instrument
and piano; sonata for two flutes; trio for flute, clarinet and
bassoon; 3 string quartets; piano quintet; wind septet Ancienne
maison de campagne, Douze petites pièces,
Paysages et marines, Portrait of Daisy Hamilton
and other works for piano; Sonatines françaises
for piano duet
- Trois poèmes
for soloists, chorus and orch.; Night Song of the Jungle
for contralto, bass and women's chorus; The Seal's Lullaby
for mezzo and woman's chorus; Song of Kala Nag for tenor
solo and tenor chorus
- ballet La Divine
Vesprée; `biblical pastoral' Jacob chez Laban
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
song cycle Chansons
pour Gladys op.151 (1935)
song cycles Rondels
opp.1 & 8 (1890/1895)
symphonic cycle
Jungle Book (1926-1940)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
R.Orledge Charles
Koechlin (1867-1950): His Life and Works, London, 1990
───────────────────────────────────────
LANDOWSKI
Marcel
born 18th February
1915 at Pont L'Abbé (Finistère)
died 23rd December
1999
───────────────────────────────────────
The grandson of
the French violinist-composer Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881),
and the son of the sculptor Paul Landowski, Marcel Landowski
has been an important figure in French administrative musical
circles, but his own work, essentially conservative in idiom,
has suffered from the French vogue for the avant-garde and for
serialism. He himself was involved for many years in academic
arguments over the merits of respective schools, although he
later supported all forms of contemporary music when appointed
music director at the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs in
1966. He once tongue-in-cheek described his music as "Centre-Right".
Within conventional
forms, his music is characterised by a strict, sometimes over-meticulous
sense of logic supported by powerful rhythmic momentum. In the
symphonies and concertos the intention is the disciplined depiction
of powerful human emotions; there is little improvisatory feel,
the harmonic language is rarely dissonant, and slow movements
are lyrical. His orchestration creates dense soundscapes with
broad changes of sometimes unusual colour; a favourite device
is a strong contrast between themes that involve brighter, fast-moving
material against slower, grander ideas. His symphonies display
a powerful sense of purpose, with philosophical inspirations.
The most immediate is perhaps the Symphony No.1 `Jean
de la peur' (1949), with an atmospheric opening where bright,
twittering and insistent ostinati are pitted against broader
ideas that gradually become more noble, with a rugged momentum.
It ends with a solo bassoon, answered by the woodwind that open
a dance movement that turns grand, almost sinister. The final
movement is dominated by a dark chorale, and eventually the
opening ostinati return at a slower pace to close a most effective
work. The Symphony No.3 `Des espaces' (1965) is
in two movements, less arresting than it predecessor, somewhat
turbulent, but the progression equally vital as it works towards
a joyous close. The Symphony No.4 (1988) in five
movements emerges as a deliberate return to the large post-Romantic
symphony (there are moments reminiscent of the Vaughan
Williams of the early 1950s, and a feeling of the continuation
of the heritage of Honegger), and the elements
of more modern sound world (such as the percussion in the furious
second movement) are integrated into this general cast. It has
another magical opening, contrasting the hushed and the grand,
the former picked up and elaborated in the third movement. The
fourth movement is full of bell sounds (it is titled `Les cloches
de Bruges'); the broad final movement is the weakest part of
the symphony until a turbulent passage evolves into calm and
then triumph and calm again. Such attempts using an out-moded
idiom usually fail (they lack the immediacy of their models),
but the urgent vitality of this symphony, its beautifully layered
orchestration, and its ability to change focus or open out into
broad melody, make it much more effective than similar works
from such composers as Tubin or Lloyd.
These orchestral
works have a strong sense of atmosphere, but it is as a vocal
composer that Landowski has shown a particularly powerful voice.
His masterpiece is the three-act opera Le fou (The
Madman, 1955-1956), which as music-drama was ahead of its
time, and today probably seems more apposite than when it was
written. The libretto by the composer combines the kind of half-mythical,
half-imaginary setting at which opera excels: a state at war,
in ruins, and about to be defeated. The time is not specified;
indeed, it could be any time. The central character, the scientist
Peter Bel, has invented a nuclear device. He knows that it can
save his country. He also knows what it will do to humankind,
and the opera is the story of his internal struggle between
these two pulls. He refuses to divulge his secrets, and dies
in his refusal. This intentionally abstract background is divided
into a number of layers, including Paul's internal torment reflected
in voices and distant chorus, the wasteland and depravity of
the ruined town and its despairing people, and between them
the archetypal figures of those who organize and rule: the Prince,
Paul's wife, and the Prince's hard-line official. The musical
idiom is founded on a spartan tonal lyricism, dark in its colours,
but heavily attenuated by colouristic and expressive effects:
percussion, vocal techniques from Sprechgesang to high,
flowing anguished lines, and especially electronic effects (one
of the first operas to use them). The ondes martenot is included
in the orchestra, and the chilling opening to the second scene
in the ruined city is set against tape. All these musical devices,
from the conventional to the more unusual, are used to underline
and expand the actual text, to considerable effect. With its
central moral messages and its exploration of loyalty and betrayal
and the responsibility of the scientist, it seems surprising
that this powerful piece of music-theatre is not better known.
The Messe de
l'aurore (Dawn Mass, 1977) for tenor, soprano, bass,
chorus and orchestra, was written for the tenth anniversary
of the founding of the Orchestre de Paris, for which Landowski
was responsible. It sets poems by Pierre Emmanuel that parallel
the movements of the Catholic Mass with more universal spiritual
ideas, packed with imagery. Landowski's settings are equally
dense, making the work seem over-heavy (in part from the lack
of strong contrasts between sections in both music and words),
but it has an insistent fervour, with the ondes martenot adding
other-worldly effects at important moments, and is worth hearing.
Among his more recent works are a pair of effective song-cycles
written for the singer, Galina Vishnievskaya, and her husband,
the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Un enfant appelle
(A Child is Calling, 1979) for soprano, cello and orchestra,
is actually subtitled a `concerto-cantata', and in it the cello
solo parts, though infrequent, do comment and add another emotional
layer. Landowski had attempted such a fusion of genres earlier,
in Le rire de Nils Halerius (1944-1948), whose
first act is an opera, the second a ballet, and the third an
oratorio; the combination can be performed in sequence, or each
Act performed separately. In Un enfant appelle the sense
of orchestral layers, observable in Landowski's earlier music,
is extended: tense string clusters and double layers of the
rhythmic ostinati (moving at different speeds) are added to
the approachable but dark idiom, matching the expression of
anguish and experience, innocence and its renewal, in the texts.
La prison (1981), subtitled an `opera-concerto',
is a music theatre piece for soprano, cello and orchestra to
a text by the composer. The protagonists are the singer, representing
the victim of political oppression and moving from waiting for
arrest to interrogation to the prison; the cello, lyrically
associated with her happier memories and hopes; and the percussive
small orchestra representing Force. It is starkly naturalistic,
a portrait of internal aloneness, and most effective, suggesting
that his idiom has responded to some of the mainstream developments
in European symphonic music.
Landowski was director
of the conservatory at Boulogne-sur-Seine (1959-1962), music
director at the Comédie Française (1962-1965),
and was appointed inspector-general for music education in 1965.
His own writings include a book on Honegger (1957).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 4 symphonies (No.1
Jean de la peur, No.3 Des espaces)
- bassoon concerto;
flute concerto; ondes martenot concerto; 2 piano concertos (No.1
Poème); trumpet concerto
- Edina,
L'horloge, L'orage, La passant, Le petit
poucet, Trois histoires de la prairie and other orchestral
works
- Quatre préludes
for percussion and piano; trio for horn, trumpet and piano and
other chamber works
- Sonatine
and other piano music
- oratorios La
quête sans fin and Rhymes du monde; Messe
de l'aurore for tenor, soprano, bass, chorus and orch.;
cantatas, song cycles and songs; Notes de nuit for children's
speaking voices and chamber orch.; `cantata-concerto' Un
enfant appelle for soprano, cello and orchestra
- ballet Die
Tiefe; opera-ballet-oratorio Le rire de Nils Halerius
- `opera-concerto'
La prison for soprano, cello and orchestra
- operas Le Fou
and Le ventriloque; `drames lyriques' Les adieux
and L'opéra de poussire; incidental music and
film scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
opera Le Fou
(1955-1956)
`opera-concerto'
La prison (1981)
Symphony No.1 (Jean
de la Peur) (1949)
Symphony No.4 (1988)
(see text)
`cantata-concerto'
L'enfant appelle (1978) for soprano, cello and orchestra
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
A. Gola Marcel
Landowski, Paris, 1969 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
MÂCHE
François-Bernard
born 4th April 1935
at Clermont-Ferrand
───────────────────────────────────────
François-Bernard
Mâche has concentrated on the mixing of natural sounds
from a wide variety of sources, but often including speech,
with electronic sounds. From his earliest works, such as Volumes
(1960) for chamber orchestra and 12-track tape, he has used
electronic means.
A series of works
in the 1960s (La peau du silence, 1962-1966, for orchestra,
Le son d'une voix, 1964, and Nuit blanche,
1966, for speaker and 2-track tape) used written text by breaking
it down into phonemes, and using them as the base material.
In the late 1960s he was involved with the Groupe de Researches
Musicales of French radio, producing the effective Synergies
(1968) for orchestra with tape for the `concert collectif',
with low shifting waves of electronic sonorities, that turn
to percussive effects, the piece drawing on initial themes and
ideas provided by the collective of composers.
Then in 1972 he
started a cycle of works entitled Melanesia, reflecting
the rituals and myths of Melanesia. The first of these was a
tape composition, Agiba (1972), made up entirely of natural
sounds, from the elements to animals, and including the sounds
of the Southern African Xhosa language, which is full of rhythmic
clicking. The second, Kowar (1972) for harpsichord
and tape, starts with the Xhosa language, overlaid with electronic
sounds and joined by the harpsichord, the rhythms of the accompanying
sounds matching and emphasizing the natural lie of the speech.
Gradually the voice falls away, to be replaced by other natural
sounds, bird calls and the noises of pigs, manipulated to maintain
the same basic rhythmic feel, eventually leading to a dramatic
climax. A Kowar is a New-Guinean container for a skull covered
in clay; subsequent works in the cycle referred to other cult
skull-objects, including Rambaramb (1972-1973) for piano,
orchestra and tape, and Temes Nevinbür (1973)
for two pianos, two percussionists and tape. The atmospheric
Temes Nevinbür utilizes the deeper sonorities of
the two pianos and delicate percussive touches and piano cluster
swirls, and the natural sounds are allowed to stand alone, the
pianos and percussion providing a contrasting layer rather than
pointing up the natural rhythms. In all these works the basis
of the tape was drawn from Agiba, and thus they become
a kind of variation on a sound-source. Of the further works
in the cycle, Le jonc à trois glumes (1974) is
for orchestra alone, while Naluan (1974) for piano,
chamber ensemble and tape and Maraé (1974) for
six percussionists and tape used new taped material.
Of his works without
electronics, Canzone II (1963) for brass quintet
is Mâche's only serial work, a virtuoso piece of very
short contrasting sections that explores various acoustical
and mute effects, including the first use of the percussive
effect of striking the mouthpiece of the brass instrument. Kemit
(1970) for darbouka or zarb solo is a virtuoso percussion transcription
of material recorded in Nubia. Of his more recent works, Styx
(1984) for two pianos, eight hands, is especially effective
in its initial tone-painting, the addition of sonorities to
a rippling climax (material then being thrown around between
the pianists), its tone-clusters, the suggestions of Minimalist
influence, pedal effects and its return to the opening mood.
Mâche graduated
in classical literature and Greek archaeology, and has taught
contemporary poetry and Greek as well as musical theory.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Le jonc à
trois glumes and La peau du silence for orch.; Synergies
and Volumes for orch. and tape
- Armargos
for sea waves and 12 instruments; Maraé (1974)
for six percussionists and tape; Naluan (1974) for piano,
chamber ensemble and tape; Rambaramb for piano, orch.
and tape; Rituel d'Oubli for winds, percussion and tape;
Temes Nevinbür for two pianos, two percussionists
and tape
- Eridan
for string quartet; Canzone II for brass quintet
- Styx for
two pianos, eight hands
- Danaé
for 12 voices and percussion
- tape Agiba;
Nuit blanche for speaker and 2-track tape
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Canzone II
(1963) for brass quintet
Temes Nevinbür
(1973) for two pianos, two percussionists and tape
Styx (1984)
for two pianos, eight hands
───────────────────────────────────────
MESSIAEN
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles
born 10th December
1908 at Avignon
died 28th April
1992 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
When the 20th century
is long gone, it may well be that Mahler and Olivier
Messiaen will be seen as the colossi of the century, in the
same way as Beethoven and Wagner are now viewed. Often vilified,
and to this day often misunderstood, Messiaen's music occupies
a different plane from every other major 20th-century composer.
Its purpose is the glory of creation, and through the creation
the glory of God; its theme is the cosmos, and the mysteries
of the cosmos, life and death, creation and destruction, the
wonder of nature. For Messiaen the theological foundation and
the mode of thought for the expression of the cosmos was that
of the Catholic Church, not the church of social rules and behaviour,
but that closer to the theological and especially the Christian
mystic. In the interrelation of man, the cosmos, and God he
comes close to Eastern religions, particularly Hindu and Buddhist
(as do the Christian mystics), and the language to express his
contemplation of these vast philosophical questions was music.
Using this language,
Messiaen is one of the most profound spiritual contemplators
of any age. His roots in the Catholic church reflect his own
geographical sources, and are in one sense incidental to appreciating
his work, for the subjects of his spiritual contemplation are
universal, and merely given through the particular symbolism
of those roots. Necessarily, many of his works are vast in duration
and often in scale, the more so because a major component of
that cosmic contemplation is the realization that time as we
experience it is an illusion of the material (again, in common
with much Eastern philosophy), and consequently Messiaen's music
increasingly operates on different time-scales than those normally
associated with music. This is most obvious in the sense of
the static (though it is an inadequate word), without development,
for in such a time-scale the ending is contained in the beginning
and vice versa.
At the same time,
Messiaen was one of the major technical innovators of the 20th
century, in part to find the means of expression for this meditation
on the cosmos. In this, following Varèse
and initially in common with Jolivet (who was
associated with Messiaen and others in founding the group `La
Jeune France' in 1936), Messiaen was the chief figure in turning
French music radically away from the neo-classicism and tradition
of charm and often flippancy that had dominated French music
between the World Wars. The first innovation was harmonic, in
what he termed `modes of limited transposition'. This refers
to a mode, or a scale of notes, in which the intervals between
the notes are so designed that there are only a limited number
of times that the scale can be transposed, maintaining those
intervals, before the pitches of the notes are repeated. The
obvious example of this is the whole-tone scale, utilized by
Debussy but not overtly by Messiaen, of a scale
of seven notes, which has an interval of a major second between
each note. This Messiaen designated as the `first mode'.
Messiaen designated seven of these modes (the `second mode'
could be transposed twice, the third three times, and so on),
and they each have the characteristic that they divide the octave
symmetrically, but in different places.
Harmonic progression using these limited transpositions and
symmetrical shapes creates a very static feel, often moving
in block-like fashion; Messiaen used these modes vertically
as well as horizontally (i.e. in chord construction as well
as melodic series) and they influence Messiaen's distinctive
melodic shapes, which may utilize the notes of a particular
mode with its intervals. Chords derived from the modes create
`added resonance' (Messiaen's `chord of resonance', taken from
mode 3, creates a fundamental note and a tower of natural harmonics).
When used quietly over another chord or note, or emphatically
below, this creates the sense of depth and resonance endemic
to Messiaen's style. The soundscapes that such harmonic devices
created have been become a normal currency of subsequent 20th-century
composition for composers of a wide range of styles and procedures,
even though they are rarely arrived at with the systematic technical
means used by Messiaen. The second innovation was rhythmic.
Messiaen introduced the widespread use of rhythmic patterns
based on Eastern musical traditions, particularly those of Indian
classical music, where rhythmic events unfold on two simultaneous
time-scales, that of a pattern or phrase of beats which is itself
repeated in a larger pattern, and those of Balinese gamelan
music, with its regular repetitive patterns of irregular rhythms.
To this he added the influence of ancient Greek and medieval
metres. He also utilized two important rhythmic concepts drawn
from the Western tradition. The first was `additive rhythms',
in which a rhythmic note or pattern is lengthened by the addition
of half its value, and the second `non-retrogradable rhythms'
in which a rhythmic idea is symmetrical, and therefore its retrograde
is identical. The effect of these techniques is to create continuity
of patterns, within which the additive rhythms allow proportional
irregularities. Rhythms thus become a systematic element, and
Messiaen used them much as he used his harmonic modes; this
was of crucial import to the development of music, for it showed
such composers as Boulez that the other elements
of music could be systematized in the same fashion as harmony,
and when this principle was applied using analogies to the 12-tone
inheritance of Webern it produced `total serialism'.
Similarly, Messiaen
treated colours with the same kind of systematic approach, for
of all the musical elements colour was perhaps the most important
to Messiaen, and changes of colour take on added significance
in musical progression when the harmonic structures are largely
static; in this Messiaen had the example of Varèse.
Messiaen `saw' colours when he was composing, and timbre and
tone-colour, and their combinations, were as crucial as pitch
or duration to his idiom.
A major characteristic
of Messiaen's music, one so thoroughly explored that it has
become virtually impossible for any other composer to emulate
it, was the influence and inspiration of bird-song. It fascinated
Messiaen from an early age, and provides the basis for much
of his melodic ideas throughout his career, and especially in
the early 1950s. On a philosophical level, bird-song represents
the aspect of the natural in the cosmos, the musical representation
of Nature around us. He remains generally true to the originals,
transposing them into the range of the instrument sounding them,
and mixing their rhythmic patterns with his own rhythmic idiom.
Equally important to his overall aesthetic, the organ occupies
a central place in Messiaen's output, and he elevated writing
for the organ to a position it had not held since the 18th century;
before Messiaen organ composers had been peripheral, and organ
works in the output of major composers had been equally peripheral.
It is impossible to divorce the experience of the organ from
Messiaen's entire oeuvre, as they mutually interact. In the
organ the spiritual, the religious and the earthly combine on
a symbolic as well as musical level. The huge, glorious instruments
which Messiaen played have an enormous range of colour and timbral
effect, partly explaining his preoccupation with colour. The
huge acoustic of the buildings that housed them tends towards
the large-scale expression of the vastness of the cosmos, and
the tradition of improvisation (continued by Messiaen) influences
the element of spontaneity within strict technical parameters
that is part of Messiaen's idiom.
All the technical
devices, fascinating and influential though they are, are strictly
means to the affective end, and knowledge of Messiaen's technique
is not necessary to feel the impact of his music. Indeed, there
is a completely different way of considering Messiaen's idiom.
Messiaen himself said that all his music was influenced by the
landscape of the French Alps, and there is a sense that his
music is an invocation of the feelings of vastness, impersonal
power, unadulterated nature, and an awareness of the spiritual
and the scale of the cosmos that many experience when entering
mountains. For Messiaen music itself was a means to a non-musical
end, the metaphysical, the spiritual and the theological, arrived
at through the spiritual and the aural impact.
His output can be
divided into fairly distinct periods, though there is a strong
continuity of voice throughout. In his works to around 1935
Messiaen forged his idiom, and this period shows lingering traces
of his early influences. From 1935 to 1950 he developed the
spiritual and religious content, the rhythmic aspects of his
music, and the use of large-scale cycles. This period includes
a trilogy of works (the song-cycle Harawi, Cinq rechants
for chorus, and the Turangalîla-Symphonie;
Messiaen called them his `Tristan' triptych, though they were
not planned as a trilogy) where the subject is love within the
theological cosmos. From 1950 to 1960 he developed the technical
aspects of his music (in the early 1950s coming closest to serialism),
and this period includes a foray into electronic music, a collaboration
with Pierre Henry (Timbres-durées,
1952). Here are also to be found the three works that thoroughly
explore the possibilities of bird-song (Réveil
des oiseaux and Oiseaux exotiques, both for
piano and orchestral forces, and Catalogue d'oiseaux
for piano). The works of the 1960s consolidated these technical
advances (culminating in La Transfiguration de notre
Seigneur Jésus-Christ for chorus and orchestra, that
heralds his last works). Then from 1970 to his death he wrote
four huge works (Des canyons aux étoiles
for piano, horn and orchestra, the opera Saint François
d'Assise, and the two organ cycles Méditations
sur le mystère de la Sainte-Trinité and Livre
du Saint Sacrement) in which he utilized all his previous
experience in a language often more luminous and simplified,
though this apparent simplicity is often achieved by elongation
of the time-scale of events, stretching out the textures and
the rhythmic flow as if in a new dimension. Combined with this
is a spiritual understanding that is both more rarefied and
more profound in its unity.
Messiaen became
organist of St.Trinité in Paris in 1930, and remained
there for over 40 years, but already he had written the set
of eight Préludes (1928-1929) for piano.
These lovely, sometimes mysterious pieces owe something to the
piano music of Debussy (and surely the opening
two have the potential for an equal popularity, were they better
known), but also show unmistakable Messiaen mannerisms. Birdsong
is not used directly, but there is a definite suggestion of
it in the use of trills and answering calls, and much of the
impact of the pieces is achieved through the emphasis on changing
colours and sonorities. The hints of exoticism and typical melodic
casts of phrase are in part created by the use of modes, and
more particularly `modes of limited transposition', which Messiaen
here specifically associated with actual colours, and built
the juxtapositions of the pieces accordingly (the dominating
colours are, apparently, violet, orange and purple). The Préludes
make a suitable place for those new to Messiaen to ease into
his idiom.
Messiaen's development
is most easily followed in the organ works. The Le banquet
céleste (1928) occupies a similar place in
Messiaen's organ output to that of the Préludes
in his piano music, and is an equally good starting point for
new listeners, rather than the more conventional Diptyque
(1930) for organ. It is a meditation on the Holy Communion,
and the slow overall movement, the subtly unfolding swathes
of changing colours and timbres, the addition of a high voice
with a new layer of colour and short phrases, as if suspended
over the general sound, all these were retained throughout Messiaen's
organ music. Apparition de l'Eglise Éternelle
(Vision of the Church Eternal, 1932) initiates the strand
of the revelation of the glorious in Messiaen's organ music.
L'Ascension (1932-1933), in four movements, each
a meditation on Biblical quotations, was originally written
for orchestra, but is much better known in its organ version.
The slow, vast textures of its first movement show a typical
Messiaen trait, lifting moments of light (by the use of a major
chord) from the darkness, and the transcendental last movement
(sometimes played on its own, as is the third) has a lucid,
magical beauty. It is still a transitional work, the rhythms
relatively conventional; the mighty opening of the third movement
recalls an earlier French Romantic tradition. In La Nativité
du Seigneur (The Birth of Our Lord, 1935) these more
conventional elements are discarded. It is cast in nine sections
meditating not on the events of Christmas but on the Word of
God among humans and the maternity of the Blessed Virgin. Modes
of limited transposition and irregular additive rhythms are
used, and the rhythms are influenced by his study of classical
Indian rhythms. The effect is more ethereal, more haunted, and
more personal than L'Ascension, and this cycle
is one of Messiaen's best-known works, although it is not as
fine as some of his later organ music. Messiaen's third organ
cycle, Les corps glorieux (The Bodies in Glory,
1939), subtitled `seven short visions of the Life of the Resurrected',
is very wide-ranging in mood, from the delicate wraiths of `L'Ange
aux parfums' (`The Angel of the Perfumes') to the titanic `Combat
de la Mort et la Vie' (`The Combat between Life and Death'),
a section sometimes heard on its own, divided into two moods,
the first the gigantic struggle, the second densely meditative.
War interrupted
Messiaen's access to the organ from 1941 to 1943, and the next
organ work did not appear until 1950. The Messe de la Pentecôte
(1949-1950), divided into five sections, started a phase in
Messiaen's output where the technical developments were joined
with more exotic and programmatic elements. In it Messiaen uses
unusually proportioned rhythms (3:2, 5:4) and Hindu rhythms,
exotic modes and colours, and unusual, clear-textured colours.
The moods are restrained, exploratory, and throughout emulate
external, natural sounds: bird calls, drops of water, the fierce
wind and the songs of the lark in the closing `sortie'. In the
Livre d'Orgue (Organ Book, 1951), perhaps Messiaen's
most difficult organ work, he concentrated on the technical
aspects of his music rather than the spiritual goal which informs
the other organ works (hence the title). The largely abstract
sections are the closest Messiaen came to serialism, and only
the fourth piece, `Chant d'oiseaux' (`Bird-calls') is deliberately
evocative, and even that has an element of the exploration of
technique in the integration of this musical source. Then, apart
from the Verset pour la Fête de la Dédicace
(1960), written as a Conservatory piece, Messiaen wrote no organ
music until the huge Méditations sur le mystère
de la Sainte-Trinité (1969). The thematic basis of
this cycle is created by assigning a sound, a pitch, and a duration
to each letter of the alphabet, and then building themes from
the texts chosen, omitting minor words but using other themes
to indicate grammatical contexts. There is a different sense
of the overall progression of time to this work, as if working
in a different spiritual dimension (most obviously realized
in the long held sonorities and chords), and a refinement of
his language. The end of the second section has a distillation
of his customary delicacy, and the contrasts of the colour-associations,
rhythms and dynamics of the different bird-calls in the fourth
section represent a summation of this strand in Messiaen's work,
matched by the luminosity of the endings to the fifth and eighth
sections, a single bird song heard over deep held sonorities,
all the world hushed for the one songster. The liturgical and
the birdsong, and this new sense of time, were also joined in
Messiaen's last and perhaps finest organ work, the Livre
du Saint-Sacrement (1984). This huge set of eighteen pieces
for organ is divided into three groups - acts of adoration,
the Mysteries from Christ's life, and the Blessed Sacraments
- and is a major simplification of Messiaen's language, tonally
direct, mostly in slow tempi, stunning in its (musically) spare
unfolding of the spiritual landscape, from the delicacy of the
peace of the desert, through the extraordinary series of great
stepping-stone chords to Christ's Resurrection, to the gigantic
depiction of the walls of water in the crossing of the Red Sea,
mostly peopled with birdsong (of Middle-Eastern birds), but
without many of Messiaen's more detailed idiomatic characteristics.
As music to transport the listener into a different spiritual
realm it is overwhelming.
Messiaen's orchestral
works show the same development and stylistic traits as the
organ music, and many include the piano as a solo instrument
(his second wife was the celebrated pianist Yvonne Loriod).
The first orchestral work to achieve international recognition
(and controversy) was the massive Turangalîla-Symphonie
for piano, ondes martenot and orchestra (1946-1948). The title
is a compound Sanskrit word referring to motion - time, rhythm
- and action, in terms of all the actions of the cosmos from
creation to destruction. The symphony is divided into ten sections,
united by four themes that recur; the orchestration gives prominence
to the two instruments acting as soloists, the ethereal colours
and long lines of the ondes martenot contrasting with the more
brittle piano writing, revolving around clusters and bird-song.
A large percussion section emphasizes the varied rhythmic effects,
and the writing for tuned percussion was influenced by Balinese
gamelan music. It presents a sound world unlike any other large-scale
orchestral work (though its antecedents come from Varèse),
sometimes on a vast scale, more often with individual orchestral
components creating a chamber-like atmosphere, ranging in mood
from the mystical to the violent. Its rhythms are invariably
untraditional and dynamic, pointed by the instrumentation; the
ondes martenot weaves a thread of the ethereal, hauntingly beautiful,
qualities of love, the brass expresses its physical excitement,
and the piano weaves a web between both these extremes. It is
music that seems to have lifted away from the earth to occupy
some space in the heavens, and it is one of those works to which
it is very difficult to remain neutral: it usually provokes
either a transcendental experience or deep loathing in its audience.
Réveil
des oiseaux (Dawn-chorus, 1953) for piano and orchestra,
and Oiseaux exotiques (1955-1956) for piano, eleven wind
and six percussionists, turned to detailed exploration of the
musical possibilities of bird-song. Réveil
des oiseaux opens with lean textures, the different bird
calls given to the different instruments in almost pointillistic
fashion, the colours sharply contrasted. It then builds into
a climactic overlay of calls, a babble of bird-song where the
musical continuity is created by complex rhythms with an underlying
progression: this of course matches the progression of events
in the dawn chorus, and is highly evocative. The dawn having
arrived, solo birds take over again, initially in a long piano
cadenza, and then with less harsh colours from the orchestra.
Oiseaux exotiques includes the calls of 40 different
birds metamorphosed into Messiaen's idiom, overlapping and cross-calling
in brilliant dense textures of sparkling plumage, the complex
kaleidoscope of rhythms creating a jungle of patterns, almost
impossible to unravel unaided, but setting up a continuous momentum
of patterns that is felt rather than perceived. The title of
Chronochromie (1960) for large orchestra is drawn from
the Greek words for time and colour, indicating the preoccupations
of the work, and Messiaen used an ordered scale of 32 `durations'
from a demisemiquaver (32nd note) to a semibreve (whole note)
to systematize the rhythmic elements; bird song is again included,
as well as the sound of Alpine rivers. With Couleurs de la
Cité Céleste (1963) for piano, thirteen wind
and six percussionists, Messiaen placed the spiritual meditation
in an orchestral context, based on five quotations from Revelations.
The musical elements, notably bird-song and Indian and Greek
rhythms, are designed to evoke the colours of the title. Et
exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (And I await the raising
of the dead, 1964) for 34 wind and three percussionists,
was designed for large open-air spaces or churches, its five
sections headed by Biblical quotations. It is slow-moving (to
suit the acoustics of large spaces), but within these blocks
of movement, differentiated by texture and colour, ritualistically
dramatic; the gamelan influence, and that of temple gongs, is
to the fore. The huge Des canyons aux étoiles
(From the canyon to the stars, 1971-1975) for piano and
43 instruments was inspired by the Grand Canyon, and is in three
parts with a total of twelve sections. It subjects are both
the natural landscape and the religious associations, encompassing
the vastness of the Canyon landscape and that of the night sky;
bird-song, using birds of the American West, is extensively
used, and the wide range of colours is reinforced by the addition
of desert sounds created by the wind-machine and the sand-machine.
This enormous work has a transparency, a fluidity and a time-scale
that is characteristic of Messiaen's late works, and is the
summation of his orchestral writing.
Messiaen wrote very
little chamber music, but his major chamber work is one of the
masterpieces of the 20th century. Quatuor pour la fin du
temps (Quartet for the End of Time, 1940-1941) for
clarinet, violin, cello and piano was written for his fellow
inmates in a German prisoner-of-war camp; it was first played
complete to an audience of 5,000 prisoners. The inspiration
for the eight sections is from the Apocalypse in the Biblical
Revelations, and the different sections use different instrumental
combinations; the third, `Abyss of the birds', one of the earlier
extended appearances of bird-song in Messiaen's music, is for
clarinet alone. Much of the work is slow-moving and meditative,
the traditional progress of musical time dissolved by the lack
of any sense of bar-line, and by long periods of held colours.
It combines Messiaen's technically advanced language (as in
the sixth section) with echoes of a more conventional sound:
the fourth section, Interlude, is a little dance connecting
Messiaen to earlier French music, and the following `praise
to the eternity of Jesus' a beautifully limpid cello solo over
piano chorus, whose simplicity and harmonic cast has been echoed
in some of the chamber works of Pärt.
Of his piano music
after the Préludes, the major works are
Visions de l'amen for two pianos, Vingt regards
sur l'Enfant Jésus, Quatre études de rythme,
and Catalogue d'oiseaux. Visions de l'amen (1943)
is in seven sections, each contemplating an amen connected with
a religious theme (from creation through Jesus's agony to the
Saints and consummation). Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus
(Twenty watches over the infant Jesus, 1944) is an enormous
cycle of 20 works each descriptive of a contemplation (by the
concrete, such as the Virgin, the theological, such as the angels,
the symbolic, such as the cross, or the abstract, such as the
Spirit of Joy) of the holy child. Although one of his lesser-known
works, it is one of the finest, with its clearly focused but
visionary philosophical base and magical piano effects, often
expressing qualities of light, and best summed up by Messiaen
himself: "I have looked here for a language of mystical
love, to be varied, powerful and tender, sometimes brutal, responding
to multi-coloured commands." Quatre études de
rythme (Four Studies of Rhythm, 1949) includes the
Modes de valeurs et d'intensités, a seminal work
in the history of 20th-century music. Each aspect of the music
is governed by a `mode': one containing 36 pitches, one containing
24 durations, one containing 12 types of attack, and one with
7 types of intensity (volume); the independent use of these
modes, integrated into a larger structure, paved the way in
particular for serialism (`total serialism'), by showing the
possibilities of simultaneous structurings of parameters, although
here those structures are not derived from the principles of
12-tone music. In addition, its sound world, where these four
major elements become sharply differentiated, deeply influenced
Stockhausen, who quickly moved away from serialism, and
Xenakis, who was interested in the mathematical
permutations. Catalogue d'oiseaux (Bird Catalogue,
1956-1958) is exactly what its title implies: a large musical
catalogue in a cycle of thirteen pieces in seven books of the
songs of French birds, the musical background including an evocation
of the appropriate habitat and the sounds of other birds of
the area. Messiaen included detailed written introductions to
the sounds, the context, and the musical constructions; this
marvellous collection is best dipped into, as one would a visual
catalogue.
Messiaen wrote three
major song-cycles, all to his own texts, utilizing his idiomatic
techniques, but without bird-song. Poèmes pour
Mi (1936, orchestrated 1937) for soprano and piano or orchestra
and divided into two books, combines earthly love, in the sacrament
of marriage (`Mi' referring to his first wife, the composer
Claire Delbois), with its heavenly counterpart. Chants
de terre et de ciel (1938) for soprano and orchestra turn
to fatherhood (both earthly and heavenly) and to resurrection.
More unusual than either of these is Harawi (1945)
for soprano and piano, part of Messiaen's `Tristan triptych'.
Its title is a Peruvian Quechua word describing a lovers' song
that ends in death, and the cycle of twelve songs is subtitled
`song of love and death'. In it, using texts that include phonetic
word-patterns without literal sense, love becomes related to
the cosmos in the symbolic association of love and death and
the ecstatic ascent to heaven; it ends with the image of a sleeping
town unaware of the personal-cosmos drama that it has witnessed.
The piano writing, largely independent of the vocal line, is
especially vivid; the intense, almost surrealistic cycle abounds
in rhythmic and onomatopoeic effects. Messiaen's major work
for chorus is La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ
(1965-1969) for piano, flute, clarinet, cello, vibraphone, marimba,
xylorimba, large choir and large orchestra. It is divided into
two parts, each of seven movements with texts drawn from the
Bible, St. Thomas Aquinas, and from Catholic rites. The first
part of this vast work, over an hour-and-a-half long, is concerned
with the Transfiguration as light, the second the relationship
of humankind with God through the Transfiguration. In many respects
it is an equivalent of the Turangalîla-Symphonie
in verbal and religious form, with similar use of ritualistic
percussion and sudden vast vistas. The choral lines have the
gravity of Gregorian chant or expand into dense textures, and
to this are added chorales of the kind of luminosity and simplicity
found in the Livre du Saint-Sacrement.
Messiaen's only
opera was one of his last works, and characteristically it observes
little of the traditional theatrical or operatic parameters.
Saint François d'Assise (1975-1983) is
a huge meditation on the life of St.Francis of Assisi, in three
acts and eight scenes lasting some three hours, not including
intermissions. To approach it with any kind of conventional
theatrical expectation is doomed to failure; with only seven
characters (St.Francis, his fellow monks, and an Angel), each
of whom is assigned a theme and a bird-song, and a chorus which
is used to symbolize the voice of Christ, it is virtually devoid
of action other than the curing of the leper, the appearance
of the angel, and St.Francis's death, and is intentionally slow-moving.
Instead, it is a culmination of Messiaen's spiritual and musical
beliefs expressed in the gradual ascent of St.Francis to a state
of grace. The simplification of Messiaen's later style is evident,
but so is the fluidity of his idiom, often with haunting or
startling musical effects (such as the other-worldly sounds
accompanying the knocking of the Angel at the door and at the
receiving of the Stigmata) and an extraordinary luminosity and
spirituality that suspends the sense of time. Messiaen's life-long
love affair with bird-song is encapsulated in the sermon to
the birds that forms the sixth scene. It is a remarkable, transcendentally
beautiful work which has to be approached on its own terms.
The importance of
Messiaen as a teacher, and the very high calibre of his students,
has already been indicated. He taught at the École Normale
de Musique and at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, and widely outside
Europe in the late 1940s. He was appointed professor of harmony
at the Paris Conservatoire on his release from prisoner-of-war
camp in 1941, and a class for analysis was specially created
for him there.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Turangalîla-Symphonie
- Des canyons
aux étoiles (From the Canyon to the Stars)
for piano, horn and orch.; Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic
Birds) for piano ,11 wind and 7 percussion; Réveil
des Oiseaux (Dawn-Chorus) for piano and orch.
- L'Ascension
(orch. from organ with new third movement), Chronochromie,
Couleurs de la cité céleste (Colours
of the Celestial City), Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum
(And in expectation of the Resurrection of the Body),
Sept haïkaï (Seven Haikai) for orch.
- Thème
et variations for violin and piano; Le merle noir
for flute and piano; Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet
for the End of Time) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano
- Catalogue d'oiseaux
(Catalogue of birds), Études de rythme,
Préludes pour Piano, Vingt regards sur l'Enfant
Jésus (Ten Meditations on the Infant Jesus)
for piano; Visions de l'Amen for two pianos
- Apparition
de l'Eglise éternelle (The Vision of the Eternal
Church), L'Ascension, Le banquet céleste
(The Heavenly Banquet), Le Corps Glorieux (The
Glorious Body), Diptych, Livre d'Orgue (Organ
Book), Livre du Saint Sacrement (Book of Saint
Sacrement), Méditations sur le mystère
de la Sainte Trinité, Messe de la Pentecôte,
La Nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of Our
Saviour) for organ
- song cycles Chants
de terre et de ciel (Songs of Earth and Sky), Harawi
and Poèmes pour Mi; Cinq rechants for a
cappella choir; La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ
and Trois petits Liturgies de la Présence Divine
for chorus and orch.
- opera St. François
d'Assise (St. Francis of Assisi)
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
All of Messiaen's
works are recommended. Those new to his music might consider
starting at the beginning and the end of his output, with the
Préludes pour piano (1928-1929) and the earlier
organ works, and sampling the Livre du Sainte Sacrement
(1984), especially the 8th, 9th and 10th sections; in addition,
the Quatuor pour le fin de temps is an excellent introduction
to Messiaen's mature sound-world and techniques. Otherwise,
it is suggested that the listeners moves inward chronologically
from these ends, leaving the works of the 1950s (the bird-song
works apart), which are technically the most difficult, until
last.
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
O.Messiaen Technique
of my Musical Language, 1944, English translation 1957
P.Griffiths Olivier
Messiaen and the Music of Time, 1985
R.S.Johnson Messiaen,
1975
R.Nichols Messiaen,
1975
───────────────────────────────────────
MILHAUD
Darius
born 4th September
1892 at Aix-en-Provence
died 22nd June 1974
at Geneva
───────────────────────────────────────
The works of Darius
Milhaud still remain one of the unassessed quantities of 20th-century
music. For as one of its most prolific composers (around 450
works), the quality of his music is so patently uneven that
the reputation for the banal and the shallow has masked what
is or might be (given the paucity of performances) both inspired
and fascinating. He was one of the members of the group, active
between 1917 and the early 1920s, that was dominated by the
aesthetic of Jean Cocteau, and which became known as `Les Six'
(the others were Auric, Durey, Honegger, Poulenc,
and Tailleferre), which added to his reputation as a modern,
although the group was more a conjunction of friends than musical
comrades.
His reputation was
secured by his early music, where he showed both a typically
French sense of wit and elegance, and a predilection for the
ultra-modern. His incidental music to Les choéphores
(The Libation Bearers, 1915) includes chorus whistling
and hissing, and shows an early fascination with percussion
and bitonality. A period in Brazil (1917-1918) with Paul Claudel,
diplomat, poet, and the composer's close collaborator, led to
the addition of South American colour and influences to his
innovative effects. The ballet L'homme et son désir
(Man and his Desire, 1917) for wordless voices and including
a large percussion section, was inspired in its evocative opening
by the Brazilian forest, and makes use of cross-metres. Saudades
de Brasil (1920, originally for piano, and then extended
and orchestrated) is a set of dances picturing Rio de Janeiro
and inspired by folk music. The ballet Le boeuf sur le toit,
(The Ox on the Roof, 1919, subtitled in English The
Nothing-Doing Bar), again uses Spanish-American dance rhythms,
combined with experimental dissonant effects, and is one of
Milhaud's most often-heard works. Most of these pieces caused
furores when they were first performed.
With the addition
of the influence of jazz (which Milhaud had heard in Harlem
in 1922) in the ballet La création du monde
(1923, discussed below) and the bitonality of Le carnaval
d'Aix (1926) for piano and orchestra (based on ballet music
Salade, 1924), the major features of Milhaud's
style had appeared, and if added to, were to remain largely
unchanged through the course of his life. Aside from his extraordinary
facility, chief among these was bitonality: the use of two keys
simultaneously. Although his teacher Koechlin
had already developed its use before Milhaud, it was the latter
who conspicuously developed and extended it to polytonality
(largely to the ends of the simultaneous sounding of melodies,
and already apparent in such works as the Sonata for flute,
oboe, clarinet and piano, 1918), with considerable influence
on his generation. His rhythms, emphasized by his extensive
use of percussion (of which he was an early large-scale exponent,
including such works as the Percussion Concerto,
1929), owe much to jazz and Spanish-American music, both novel
influences in the 1920s. The Six little symphonies (1917-1923)
for different chamber ensembles, added neo-classicism and a
mastery of counterpoint to this palette.
This period also
saw Milhaud toy with the cult of brevity, not only in the Six
little symphonies, but in such works as the three opéras-minutes
(L'abandon d'Ariane, L'enlèvement d'Europa
and La déliverance de Théséé,
1927), each lasting under ten minutes. The Suite provençale
(1936), based on themes from his own region, confirmed another
aspect of Milhaud's character, the lyrically pastoral, which
had appeared in the middle movements of such works as the Little
Symphony No.2 or, flanked by the influence of jazz, in the
neo-classical Viola Concerto (1929) for fifteen
instruments (originally full orchestra) written for Hindemith.
Similar moods recur throughout Milhaud's works, from the melodic
Clarinet Concerto (1941) to the Sonatine
pastorale (1960), the opening of the Symphony
No.6 (1955) or the Violin Sonata No.2. Similarly,
some of his vocal works show a charming simplicity (for example
the Quatre valaisans for unaccompanied choir).
The sense of the Mediterranean sun has been repeatedly noted
by both critics and admirers, and is evident in such works as
the baroque-inspired Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord
(1945), the twelve-minute Piano Concerto No.2 (1941),
with its brilliant colours, sometimes bouncy good-humour, and
languid slow movement, or the Suite française
(1944). This sunny quality became more evident after Milhaud's
move to the U.S.A. (1940), with the development of a more abstract
language in which the various disparate elements become more
integrated, and, generally, less inventive and interesting,
exemplified in the genial Suite Cisalpine sur des airs populaires
Piemontais (1954) for cello and orchestra.
His chamber music
includes eighteen string quartets (Milhaud was determined to
write one more than Beethoven), many of which are on a small
scale, and which show Milhaud's strengths (his great command
as a technician) and his weaknesses (a lack of distinctiveness).
They range from neo-classicism (including the tuneful No.6,
1922), through the lyricism of the opening of No.9 (1935),
the overt polytonality of No.10 (1940, subtitled
Birthday Quartet), the Mexican evocation of the finale
of No.13 (1946), to Nos.14 and 15
(1949) which can be played together to form a rather brutish
octet. They will be of interest to devotees of the 20th-century
string quartet, but are unlikely to find a regular place in
the repertoire. The rest of Milhaud's extensive chamber output
covers the range of his styles, including elements of controlled
chance in the late Septet for Strings (1964).
Among the considerable
amount of choral music are a number of liturgical works that
reflect Milhaud's Jewish faith and that generally show a more
diatonic harmonic language. Chief among these is the Sacred
Service, but the range of music inspired by his faith includes
such stylistic mishmashes as the large-scale orchestral Opus
Americanum No.2 `Moses', and culminated in the opera David
(1953). The intense Christophe Colomb (Christopher
Columbus, 1929), considered by some to be Milhaud's masterpiece,
is the most important of his six large-scale operas, and is
now receiving wider attention. In two parts with 27 tableaux,
it uses film projection and rhythmically spoken narration set
against percussion to mix reality, symbolism and dreams. The
libretto is by Paul Claudel, who collaborated on 29 different
works with Milhaud between 1912 and 1970; the religious is intertwined
with the history, with a play on Columbus' name (Christ, and
Colombe = dove). The story of Columbus discovering America serves
only as a backdrop to the psychological exploration of the character
of Columbus (especially as an old man) and those around him,
and the moral, social and political ramifications of his actions
and discoveries, including the destructive effects on native
Americans. In its final version, the two halves of the opera
were switched around, to end with the actual discovery, and
placing the later events first. With its short sections, and
extensive use of chorus, its sense of immediacy, dry orchestration
and lively rhythmical power, this highly effective work has
also been performed as an oratorio (with the composer's approval),
but its montage format is an antidote to the usual Romantic
structures of grand opera. In his lifetime, the most successful
of his operas, large or small, was the half-hour Le pauvre
matelot (The Poor Sailor, 1927, in version for both
full orchestra and a reduced instrumental ensemble), to a Cocteau
text, that mixes the music-hall with sea shanties (including
Blow the man down as the wife kills her sailor husband).
This very wide disparity
of quality and styles creates problems for those unfamiliar
with his music and who wish to explore it. The vacuousness of
which Milhaud was so all too easily capable is exemplified in
the appalling Kentuckiana for orchestra, where he tries
to add spurious spice to folk tunes by playing them simultaneously,
or in the even worse Globetrotter Suite - music
that never rises above the level of background music for outdoor
public occasions. His best works probably come from the 1920s,
when his invention was fresh, and the small scale of both instrumental
forces and musical forms most suited his imagination.
Among the most successful
works, and the most likely to be encountered, is the delightful
suite for two pianos, Scaramouche (1937, reworked
like a number of Milhaud scores from earlier material). Its
brilliant first movement has an infectious precociousness and
gentle polytonal colours, matched by the Latin American influences
of the boisterous `Brazileira' finale, while the middle movement
exemplifies Milhaud's lyricism and capacity for classical feel.
Les quatres saisons (The Four Seasons),
cast like those of Vivaldi as a series of four concertos, are
sometimes revived, especially the first (Printemps [Spring]).
The Suite for violin, clarinet and piano (1936, again,
drawn from earlier incidental music) exemplifies Milhaud's sense
of fantasy and his various influences, from Brazilian dance
rhythms to jazz. Among his later works the Second
Concerto for two pianos (1961), with its sparse orchestration
and a slow movement that combines a classical delicacy with
a stubborn harmonic restlessness, is an interesting example
of his later style, where the Gallic wit is sometimes made more
acid by the harmonies and the polytonality.
However, Milhaud's
masterpiece is the music for the ballet La création
du monde (The Creation of the World, 1923), the first
major score to use jazz (and still one of the most successful),
which entirely succeeds in the composer's stated intention to
combine a jazz style with a purely classical feel. It has the
brilliance and spontaneity of jazz, but the larger impression
is created by the clarity of the instrumentation, the simultaneous
use of major and minor keys, and the counterpoint to match the
enthusiasm of the score with a deeply satisfying sense of the
containment of form. There is a version for large orchestra;
that for the original ensemble is much more effective.
As important as
Milhaud's compositions was his influence as a teacher, at Mills
College, Oakland, California (from 1940) and then from 1947
to 1971 alternating his teaching there with his post as Professor
at the Paris Conservatoire. Among his pupils were Bolcom,
Reich, Subotnick and the jazz composer and player
Dave Brubeck. Milhaud himself was an accomplished violist who
took part in the first performance of Debussy's Sonata for
flute, viola and harp. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion
d'Honneur in 1933.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include: (from
over 450 works)
- 12 symphonies
(No.3 Hymnus Ambrosianus for chorus and orch., No.4 1898,
No.8 Rhodanienne); 6 chamber symphonies
- 2 cello concertos;
clarinet concerto; harp concerto; harpsichord concerto; oboe
concerto; marimba and vibraphone concerto; 5 piano concertos;
concerto for two pianos and orch.; 3 violin concertos; Suite
anglais for harmonica and orch.; Suite Cisalpine sur
des airs populaires Piemontais for cello and orchestra;
Music pour Boston for violin and orch.
- Globetrotter
Suite, Kentuckiana, Music for Ars Nova, Music
for Boston, Music for Graz, Music for Indiana,
Music for Lisbon, Music for New Orleans, Music
for Prague, Music for San Francisco, Musique pour
l'univers Claudélien, Ode pour Jerusalem,
Opus Americanum No.2 `Moses', Stanford Serenade,
Suite in G, 2 Suites symphoniques (No.2 Protée),
Suite français, Suite provençale,
dance suite Saudades de Brasil for orch.
- harp sonata; violin
sonata; Printemps for violin and piano; piano trio; Suite
for violin, clarinet and piano; 18 string quartets (No.10 Birthday
Quartet, No.12 In Memory of Fauré, No.14 and
No.15 designed to be also played as an octet); Sonata for flute,
oboe, clarinet and piano; King Rene's Chimney for wind
quartet; piano quintet; string septet; Elégie pour
Pierre for viola and percussion and other chamber music;
The Seven-branched Candelabra and other piano works;
Scaramouche for two pianos
- song cycle Chansons
de Ronsard; Cantata de la paix; Pacem in terris
for chorus and orch.; Cantata de Job for chorus and organ;
Les Momies d'Egypte and Promesse de Dieu for unaccompanied
chorus; many other vocal and choral works and songs
- ballets The
Bells, Le boeuf sur le toit, Le création
du monde, Madame Miroir, Le Train Bleu and
Saladez.
- operas Bolivar,
Christophe Colomb, David, Les Malheurs d'Orphée
(The Misfortunes of Orpheus), Maximilien, Médée,
Le pauvre matelot (The Poor Sailor); chamber operas
L'abandon d'Ariane, La déliverance de Théséé
and L'enlèvement d'Europa; incidental music; children's
music
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
ballet Le boeuf
sur le toit op.58 (1919)
opera Christophe
Colomb (1929)
ballet La création
du monde (1923)
Scaramouche
op.165 (1937) for two pianos
Saudades do Brasil
(1920-1921) for orchestra
Suite for
violin, clarinet and piano (1936)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
D.Milhaud Notes
without Music 1952
P.Collaer Darius
Milhaud, trans. J.H.Galante, 1988
───────────────────────────────────────
POULENC
Francis
born 7th January
1899 at Paris
died 30th January
1963 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
The French composer who above all others took
the tradition of French charm, wit, delicacy and colourful fun,
and sometimes imbued it with an underlying genius and restrained
passion that lifts it above the merely entertaining into music
of lasting power and effect, is Francis Poulenc. The style that
is usually associated with Poulenc is an elusive one, as it
uses the commonplace, the gauche, and the ingenuous as the basic
material for a deeper reflection of a certain aspect of the
human spirit. In addition, Poulenc subscribed to no systems
or theoretical models at all; his art is one of the usage of
whatever was suitable to the task in hand, including many stylistic
borrowings which could be integrated into his quite distinctive
and sometimes self-deprecating voice, that often seems to be
standing apart from its subject and commenting on it. But there
is also a more obviously serious and personal side to Poulenc's
musical character that gradually surfaced in the concertos and
some of the song-cycles and reached its clearest culmination
in the religious works. In the earlier works the style often
seems flippant, as if Poulenc was deliberately masking his own
character; that in itself can produce a very entertaining gloss.
In some of the song cycles, and especially in the later works
with orchestra and in the religious works, a meditative, simple
(but rarely simplistic) voice emerges from behind the mask,
looking at the world with a kind of celebratory innocence. These
works often include a very recognizable orchestral combination
of strings, dark underpinning, brass punctuation, and timpani
with a favourite figure of a rising major third. One of the
oddities of Poulenc's output is that inspirations and sometimes
styles often took decades to materialize in an actual work,
so that, for example, his major venture into the surrealist,
Le bal masqué, appeared some years after
surrealism had had its vogue.
He first came to
prominence with his songs, and the song remained a major factor
in his output, fostered by his deep love of poetry. His vocal
music is his especial achievement, including perhaps the finest
body of French songs since Fauré. He is particularly
associated with the poetry of Apollinaire and Max Jacob. His
first setting of Apollinaire was the cycle of six songs describing
animals with different human characteristics, Le bestiare
(1917) for baritone and chamber orchestra, typically light in
the orchestration, and with a deft and lyrical sense of humour.
But it was the Rhapsodie négre (1917) for
baritone, piano and chamber ensemble in five movements (only
one of which is sung) that brought Poulenc notoriety; the vocal
setting was of a nonsense hoax poet, purportedly a Liberian.
It has an undercurrent of primitivism and exoticism, especially
in the rhythms and in the artless baritone song, with shades
of Satie and Stravinsky. The same
year saw the establishment with Auric, Durey, Honegger,
Milhaud and Tailleferre, of the group (more a
collection of friends than like-minded composers), active between
1917 and the early 1920s, which became known as `Les Six'. The
aesthetic domination of Jean Cocteau on Les Six is reflected
in the Poulenc's setting of Cocteau texts, Cocardes
(1919), evoking Paris of the street musicians and recalling
Satie.
Much more personal
are the Chansons gaillardes (Bawdy songs,
1925-1926), to 17th-century texts, full of a piquant humour,
a combination of the delicate and the coarse, and with a modal
cast to the second song. The intentional artlessness that Poulenc
could sometimes employ surfaces in the 1930s settings of Apollinaire
and Max Jacob. The Trois poèmes de Louise Lalanne
(1931) are settings of three Apollinaire poems ostensibly by
the fictitious Louise Lalanne, the first sung very fast with
no change of tempo, and the second based on the rhythms of children's
patter. Artlessness of a different kind is incorporated into
the Quatre poèmes d'Apollinaire (1931):
the first is a rollicking drinking song celebrating one of Poulenc's
favourite subjects, Paris, here the seedier side of Montmartre.
The third makes fun of fashionable word-snobbery. The Cinq
poèmes de Max Jacob (1931), drawn from the
poetry collection Chants Bretons, reflect the artless
simplicity of the peasant girl who sings them, with a certain
amused but kindly comment in the piano accompaniment; in the
second song she has lost her lover, in the third she superstitiously
prays to ward off devils, the fourth is a cradle song, her mother
at church, her father in the bar, and the last is a nonsense
song.
Max Jacob was also
the inspiration behind the secular cantata Le bal masqué
(1932) for baritone or mezzo-soprano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon,
violin, cello, percussion and a prominent piano. The three poems,
divided by two instrumental interludes, evoke carnival time
in the Paris suburbs; they contain a kind of sophisticated naïveté,
with incongruous images and word play with surrealist overtones.
The musical setting is Poulenc in what might be described as
his `Mickey Mouse' mood, since the idiom was picked up by the
Hollywood short cartoon, and the humour is not dissimilar; `wrong'
notes, silly tunes and perky humour abound. The instrumental
contribution is as important as the vocal, and the cycle is
light, humorous, incisive and fun, sometimes with a jazzy feel,
sometimes with exotic touches. Le bal masqué,
though, does require a corresponding mood from the listener;
without such a mood, it can appear infuriatingly farcical.
Around 1935 there
is a discernable change in Poulenc's vocal output, though its
seeds are to be found in many earlier works. In place of the
overtly ironic or satirical there appears a subdued lyricism,
an increasing sense of the spiritual. The immediate catalysts
were the death of a close friend in 1935, Poulenc's discovery
of the poetry of Paul Éluard, celebrating love and liberty,
and his rediscovery of Monteverdi and the Renaissance polyphonists.
The change is reflected in the Sept chansons (1936)
for unaccompanied choir, setting five poems by Éluard,
and, for lighter relief, two by Apollinaire. Inspired by Monteverdi,
their effective polyphonic writing has something of the mystical.
In one of his finest song-cycle, Tel jour, telle nuit
(1936-1937) Poulenc found the combination of refined delicacy,
restrained lyricism, transparent textures, and easy flow that
exactly suited Éluard's poems of love, both between lovers
and between people in general; in addition, the moments of passion
that arise from this general cast are spontaneous and natural.
The Trois poèmes de Louise Valmorin (1937)
continues this idiom, but with a more forward liveliness. The
delicate writing of Fiançailles pour rire (1939),
another setting of Valmorin, covers a wide range of poetry subjects,
including the lament of one who has died for love, a self-portrait
of a statue, and flowers in winter.
During the Second
World War Poulenc expressed his political awareness both by
being a member of the French resistance and through a number
of musical works, including the moving Violin Sonata
(1943), dedicated to Lorca. The secular cantata La figure
humaine (The Human Face, 1943) for double unaccompanied
chorus, sets eight poems by Éluard expressing the horrors
of war and passionately extolling liberty, certain that the
human spirit will ultimately triumph; the poetry collection
had been circulated among the underground, and dropped by the
R.A.F.. The chamber cantata Un soir de neige (1944)
for unaccompanied choir sets four poems by Éluard describing
nature in the grip of winter, symbolic of the occupation of
the Nazis. The song cycle Calligrames (1948), based on
seven poems by Apollinaire, recounts the poet's experience in
the First World War, and includes the famous poem Rain,
written in vertical falling lines. There is a poignancy and
surface simplicity to this affecting cycle, a more flexible
rhythmic variety and change of mood, especially in the piano
writing, and more plastic vocal lines, that makes it one of
the most effective of Poulenc's song cycles. It might well appeal
to those who enjoy Britten's song cycles.
The strength of
feeling combined with a simplicity and sometimes luminosity
that emerged in La figure humaine came to fruition
in the late religious works, combining warm with joyous affection,
a sense of personal supplication, and dramatic elements, especially
in driving rhythms and the punctuation of brass. The Stabat
mater (1950) for soprano, chorus and orchestra is built
on slow evolving sonorities emphasized by the largely homophonic
choral writing, the flow often driven by plucked string basses,
its warm but limited meld of colours dominated by the strings.
The overall mood is of a restrained and joyful ecstasy. The
wonderful Gloria (1959) for soprano, chorus and
orchestra, continues this general framework, but in a less restrained
fashion, the fervour that is added to the luminosity exemplified
by the memorable opening.
Orchestral music
forms only a small portion of Poulenc's output. His first major
orchestral success (and one of his most familiar scores) was
the high-spirited ballet, set in a house-party, Les biches
(1924, later orchestral suite) which pits a gently lyrical innocence
against the sexual atmosphere of the music of Parisian nightlife.
The mood of the melodic line is infectious, and a Poulenc hallmark
makes its appearance in falling and rising brass fanfare phrases
answered by strings alone. The Suite française
(1935) for small orchestra, originally written as incidental
music, is an odd combination of the style of medieval dances
and a modern gloss: each section initially presented in quasi-authentic
fashion and then in both Poulenc's ironic, semi-farcical style
and his more lyrical, pastoral vein. The ballet Les animaux
modèles (1942) was designed to lift the French
spirit during the war, and is based on La Fontaine fables; its
suite is enjoyable music in a lighter vein. The Sinfonietta
(1947) is a work of charm and grace, and lightweight, leaning
more towards a divertissement than its four-movement
symphonic form would suggest.
Poulenc wrote three
important concertos. The Concerto champêtre
(1927-1928) for harpsichord and orchestra came from a period
of Poulenc's life when he was much better known for his more
daring and farcical idioms, and its considerable value has been
rather overlooked. Pastoral moments creep into all three movements,
the first being Poulenc in extrovert mood, but with the orchestral
colours muted to match the scale of the harpsichord, the second
having the grace of a slow dance, the third a largely neo-classical
cast. Few modern composers have dared to place the harpsichord
in such extrovert surroundings. Perhaps the most extraordinary
of the concertos is the Concerto for Two Pianos and
Orchestra (1932), combining a riot of themes and ideas,
a very French piquancy, a strong melodic element, and a classical
sense of proportion and grace. The middle movement is an exceptionally
delicate, beautiful and sometimes quirky pastiche of Mozart,
while the outer ones display sparkling brilliance, drama, gentle
lyricism and a humorous delight in the trite. The Concerto
for Organ, Timpani and Strings (1938) is one of Poulenc's
masterpieces, and on the face of it an unlikely one. It seems
composed of borrowings, the emphatic organ opening (the work
opens and closes with the same G major chord) from Bach and
much of the dancing sections from Mozart, although the rhythmic
exuberance is entirely Poulenc's. Part of the secret is the
scoring, which is anything but traditional: it shows three facets
of Poulenc's personality, the organ the bold and near-violent,
the timpani the rhythmically emphatic, almost brash, the strings
the more graceful and luminous. In addition, the atmosphere
of the work evokes the combination of the spiritual with the
secular that marks Poulenc's later works. On the surface the
work seems deceptively simple, its stylistic borrowings too
obvious, but underneath, the proportions between the sections,
between the moods of eruptive violence and graceful withdrawal,
are near perfectly balanced. The styles have become blended
into Poulenc's voice, and because the sense of uplifting joy
and praise is so memorable and so triumphant, it entirely succeeds.
Poulenc also wrote
three major operas, and they perhaps best demonstrate his abilities.
Les mamelles de Tirésias (1944) is based
on a surrealist play by Apollinaire whose premiere Poulenc had
attended in 1917. The semi-farcical subject brought out that
side of Poulenc that delighted in the satirically absurd. The
underlying theme is that the French must have more children:
in Zanzibar Thérèse and her husband change sex,
Thérèse becoming Tirésias. In the second
of two scenes their progeny are scattered around the stage:
gendarmes, a journalist, the people of Zanzibar, with various
minor characters providing the backdrop. Poulenc takes full
advantage of this slim plot, drawing on dance forms, creating
a tension between humour and lyricism that takes the comic opera
beyond mere farce. La voix humaine (1958) is a
more daring and more satisfying work. Its basis is a play by
Cocteau; there is only one character, a woman who has been jilted
by her lover, who is about to marry another. The entire action
takes place in her room, as a telephone conversation with that
lover. As a capsule of the kaleidoscope of emotions that the
woman traverses, from denial to acceptance, from pain to anger,
from hope to resignation, the text is brilliant; throughout
we understand the twin tugs of her love and her rejection. Poulenc
wisely decided to create a largely declamatory style for this
text, the music often subtly pointing up the emotions, and maintaining
its own layer of psychological progress. The result is unusual
for an opera (much of its effect is dependent on the skills
of the singer) but almost perfectly captures one aspect of the
human emotional experience. Poulenc's only full-scale opera
is also perhaps his finest work. Dialogues des carmélites
(1953-1956), based on a play (originally a screenplay) by Georges
Bernados, itself taken from a novel by Gertrud von Le Fort,
is set against the backdrop of the French revolution, but as
context rather than stage action. Its central character, Blanche,
becomes a Carmelite nun; her convent is disbanded, and eventually
the nuns chose martyrdom at the guillotine. The concentration
is on the psychology and spirituality of Blanche and the nuns;
its underlying theme is the study of fear (and the fear of death)
and its relationship with spirituality and faith. Consequently
it is a largely abstract opera, its focus on metaphysical questions
and their relationship to the psyche rather than on the plot;
contrast is provided by Blanch's aristocratic family. Poulenc's
score is restrained but luminous, the clarity of the vocal line
paramount. The style is arioso, with no doubling of voices unless
multiple voices would occur naturally; the opera has been criticized
for its lack of dramatic variety, but this suits its subject-matter,
and follows a French tradition of meditative opera. It is one
of those works whose thoughtful virtues increase in stature
with familiarity.
Poulenc's chamber
music is often encountered, in part because it is so enjoyable
to play, though he is more successful in writing for wind, where
he has a happy nonchalance, than for strings. His nine sonatas
for various instrumental ensembles range from the sinuous Sonata
for two clarinets (1918, revised 1945) to the jovial wit
of the Sonata for horn, trombone and trumpet (1922),
and include Poulenc's chamber masterpiece, the very lyrical
Flute Sonata (1956), with an unforgettable haunting
opening. The Sextet (1932-1939) for piano and
wind contrasts the more lyrical piano with boisterous winds,
dripping with a sorrowful charm in the slow movement, while
the attractive Trio (1926) for oboe, bassoon and piano
has a charming simplicity, music for relaxation, its models
Haydn, Mozart and Saint-Saëns in the three movements. The
best of his piano writing is to be found in the songs, but the
Mouvements perpétuels (1918) brought Poulenc
notoriety and has remained one of his most popular works, for
its acid opening harmonies, rhythms that keep unravelling like
a kitten playing with a ball of wool, and its lyrical humour.
Poulenc served in
the First World War in an anti-aircraft battery, returning to
similar duties in 1939, and after the fall of France he was
active in the French Resistance.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- sinfonietta
- Concerto champêtre
for harpsichord & orch.; concerto for organ, timpani and
strings; piano concerto; concerto for two pianos
- Suite française
for orch.
- cello sonata;
clarinet sonata; flute sonata; horn sonata; oboe sonata; violin
sonata; sonata for two clarinets; sonata for clarinet and bassoon;
sonata for horn, trombone and trumpet; trio for oboe, bassoon
and piano; string quartet; sextet for piano and wind
- song cycles Le
bestiaire for voice, flute, clarinet, bassoon and string
quartet (also piano version) and Chansons villageoises
for voice, and instrumental ensemble (also piano version); Rhapsodie
nègre for baritone, piano, string quartet and clarinet;
song cycles with piano Airs chantés, Banalités,
Calligrammes, Chansons gaillardes, Cinq poèmes
de Max Jacob, Deux poèmes de Apollinaire,
Fiançailles pour rire, La frâicheur et
le feu, Huit chansons polonaises, Métamorphoses,
Parisiana, Poèmes de Ronsard, Quatre
chansons pour enfants, Quatre poèmes d'Apollinaire,
Un soir de neige, Tel jour, telle nuit, Le
travail du peintre, Trois chansons de Lorca, Trois
poèmes de Louise de Valmorin; many songs
- cantatas Le
bal masqué, Figure humaine, Sécheresses,
Un soir de neige; Litanies à la Vierge Noire
for women's or children's voices and organ; Gloria for
soprano, chorus and orch.; Mass for choir; Stabat
Mater for soprano, chorus and orch.; Sept répons
de ténèbres for child soprano, chorus and
orch.; Chanson à boire, Laudes de St. Antoine
de Padoue and Quatre petites prières for male
choir; Chansons françaises, Exultate Deo,
Sept chansons for choir; other vocal works
- ballets Les
animaux modèles, Les biches
- operas Dialogues
des carmélites, Les mamelles de Tirésias
and La Voix Humaine
- melodrama L'histoire
de Babar
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Le bal masqué
(1932) for baritone or mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble
ballet suite Les
biches (1923)
song cycle Calligrames
(1948)
opera Dialogues
des carmélites (1953-1956)
song cycle Fiançailles
pour rire (1939)
Flute Sonata (1956)
Gloria (1959)
for soprano, chorus and orchestra
opera Les mamelles
de Tirésias (1944)
Mouvements Perpétuels
(1918) for piano
Rhapsodie négre
(1917) for baritone, piano and chamber ensemble
Stabat mater
(1950) for soprano, chorus and orchestra
Trio (1926)
for oboe, bassoon and piano
opera La voix
humaine (1958)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
P.Bernac Francis
Poulenc: the man and his songs, 1978
W. Mellers Francis
Poulenc, 1993
───────────────────────────────────────
RAVEL
(Joseph) Maurice
born 7th March 1875
at Ciboure (Basses-Pyrénées)
died 28th December
1937 at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Maurice Ravel, so
clearly a composer of the 20th century, nonetheless occupies
a personal no-man's land between the Romanticism that his age
was leaving behind, and the neo-classicism it was about to adopt.
As a pupil of Fauré he was trained in a
French school that was seen as an alternative to the Germanic
post-Wagnerian tradition. With Debussy, he was
one of the first composers whose rejection of a 19th-century
aesthetic met with approval beyond a limited audience of composers,
critics, or other musicians, to reach a wide public popularity
that it retains to this day. In parallel with Debussy, he also
initiated a musical style that was a counterpart to the Impressionism
that had taken the artistic world by storm at the end of the
19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
Unfortunately that
association with the name of Debussy, originally
perpetrated by critics antagonistic to the music of both composers
and who could not understand the work of either, has persisted.
For Ravel's is a very different musical temperament, attracted
on the one hand to music that works on the emotions rather than
the intellect, and on the other, through a paradoxical personal
reluctance to express feelings, to forms that would contain
such tendencies, mainly Classical in origin. It is the fusion
of these two opposing pulls that gives Ravel's music its impact,
and sets it aside from the main lines of development in modern
music, the abstraction of the emotionally persuasive powers
of music. He was of mixed Swiss and Basque parentage, and his
music is a rare example of cultural stereotypes (the one mechanical,
ordered, the other hot-blooded, expressive) having a metaphorical
validity.
The result is a
formidable mixture of technique and craftsmanship, expressed
in a relatively small number of works, made even fewer by the
virtual disappearance of such pieces as the three cantatas he
wrote in an attempt to win the Prix de Rome. Now most celebrated
as a supreme handler of the orchestra, he was first known for
his piano works: it is an indication of his craftsmanship that
there is little hint that many of his works started life at
the piano, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures
at an Exhibition (1922) was so brilliant that it virtually
created a separate work, and few new to it would ever guess
that the original is for piano. He preferred forms that aspire
to the miniature, favouring dance structures drawn from many
different traditions; longer works are usually the judicious
arrangement of a series of these shorter forms rather than being
based on an overall harmonic or thematic development. One of
the consequences is that individual items are often unfortunately
taken out of context and performed on their own. Within these
forms, Ravel drew inspiration from a wide variety of sources,
notably Spanish popular music and classical and pre-classical
styles; the twin shadows of Mozart and Liszt also stand behind
much of his music. Such anachronistic influences are not used
directly, but assimilated into a modern idiom and transformed
into Ravel's unique personal language. It is his conception
of the source rather that its substance that is utilized, and
Ravel anticipates the neo-Classicists rather than being counted
among them.
The oblique use
of influences is further tempered by the melodic and harmonic
language. Melody predominates, but often built on irregular
metrical schemes, and accompanied by ostinati or single repeated
notes. Ravel's harmonies are firmly rooted in the traditional
diatonic system, based on the use of Phrygian and Dorian modes
(the later a major element of Basque music), and delighting
in the use of 7ths, 9ths, and 11ths, and the movement in parallel
motion that was a signature of the Impressionists but anathema
to the Classicists. The ordinary classical major and minor scales
rarely appear. To further disguise the traditional foundation,
cadences often remain unresolved, and the frequent dissonances
are created by the calculated and momentary application of unsympathetic
notes to the underlying harmony.
Such is the craftsmanship
of Ravel. He saw the major purpose of his music as one of `divertissement',
and it rarely explores profound emotions and intentionally disguises
any manifestation of Ravel's inner personality. Instead its
characteristics are intellectual wit, clarity, the elegant evocation
of idea or place, humour - often ironic - and occasional fantasy
accompanied by tenderness. Yet from time to time a passion will
elude the emotional control, the Basque heritage seeking expression.
That Ravel's music
does not remain merely the art of the miniature is due to two
principal factors. The first is his orchestration, indulging
in large forces and exotic colours, exploring with great precision
the extreme potential of instruments, sometimes with mawkish
effects. It achieves individual clarity within complex densities,
and creates momentum by changes of timbre. Most of the longer
pieces were first written for piano, and most of the piano music
and songs have orchestral equivalents. The second factor is
the intrusion of sympathies that are less intellectual than
sentimental: not only the exotic, or the evocation of the 18th
century, but also affection for children and animals. It is
these that have appealed to a general public, while it is the
intellectual conceit and fastidiousness of craftsmanship that
have continued to fascinate musicians and the more musically
knowledgeable.
Although these characteristics
remained consistent throughout his work, there is a gradual
change of tone. The earliest works are dominated by Impressionism.
Ravel came into prominence with a piano piece that is the first
Impressionist work for the piano, preceding Debussy's
earliest Impressionistic piano works. Jeux d'eau
(Fountains, 1901), was inspired by the `sound of water
and the music of fountains, waterfalls and streams'. Those images
are conjured up by extended arpeggios pitted against dreamy
harmonies, opening very quietly, by a cascade of sixteenth and
thirty-second notes, and at the end a veritable waterfall of
sixty-fourths, all laid out in a loose sonata form. Of all musical
Impressionistic pieces, Jeux d'eau most echoes
the interplay of light and water so beloved of the Impressionist
painters, the keyboard transformed into a palette. It had been
preceded by Pavane pour une Infante défunte (1899),
best known in its 1910 orchestration, an evocation of old Spain
that has a lazy Debussian sensuous flow, with a timeless sense
imposed on the use of an old dance form. It was succeeded by
the famous String Quartet (1902-1903), in which Ravel,
in his own individual fashion, combined the colours and tone
of Debussy's quartet with the more formal structures derived
from his teacher Fauré. There is a hazy
tenderness, a nostalgia inherent in much of this string quartet,
combined with shimmering changes of colour and vista, as if
the characteristic colours of the viola were the impetus, handed
to the other instruments; this element is countered by a more
incisive precision in faster passages, often played pizzicato
to emphasize the contrast. The ravishingly beautiful song cycle
Shéhérazade (1903) for mezzo-soprano
and orchestra to verses by Tristan Klingsor (and not to be confused
with the celebrated Rimsky-Korsakov tone-poem on the same subject)
adds an exoticism to the Debussian sensuousness. The heady vocal
line has considerable independence from the orchestra, floating
over the luxuriant and warm orchestral hues; the flute of the
second piece exemplifies the sensuous legacy of Debussy. The
cycle of five piano pieces, Miroirs (1904-1905)
continues the Impressionistic pianism, its mirrors conjuring
up lazily moving waters, or the ripples, swells, and breaking
waves of `Un barque sur le océan'. However, into this
favourite imagery of the Impressionists is injected a new pictorial
imagery in the fourth piece. Still glittering but much more
direct, the brilliant Alborado del gracioso (`The
jester's morning'), best known in its orchestral version (1919),
launches into a bright, sharp, extrovert Spain, complete with
castanets and pinpoints of sharply etched colours from all over
the orchestra, with sudden emotive surges of climax. With this
piece, the shifting, the hazy, the mysterious inherent in the
Impressionistic style is brought into sharp focus, still using
the same techniques, but to a different, incisive end. The mysterious,
atmospheric opening of the celebrated Introduction
and Allegro (1905) for harp, flute, clarinet and string
quartet, with its pastoral shepherd flute moving into the rippling
waves of the harp, immediately announces an Impressionistic
piece, but this gentle and beautiful work, a kind of Arcadian
dialogue between the instruments, has a purposeful rather than
a hazy Impressionism created in part by the Classical organization
of the work. The little Sonatine (1903-1905) for piano
moves towards a different direction, for it harks back to the
world of Mozart and Couperin, light in the opening movement,
serene and reflective in the central minuet, bright-coloured,
pianistic and joyful in the finale.
That evocation of
Spanish colour, and the movement away from Impressionism, was
taken a stage further in Ravel's first piece originally (except
for one section) written for orchestra. The Rhapsody
espagnole (1907-1908) for orchestra is in four sections,
opening with a summoning of the murmurings of dusk, with motoric
elements and marvellous counter-movements in the `Malagueña',
and with the use of instrumental lines with vocal overtones
in the final `Feria'. At the same time, Ravel embraced the Spanish
trait more specifically in the short one-act opera L'heure
espagnol (The Spanish Hour, 1907-1909) which tells,
in farcical style, the adventures of a would-be adulterous clockmaker's
wife. Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose, 1908,
orchestrated 1911, expanded into full ballet 1912) was originally
a suite of pieces for piano duet written for children (rather
than to be played by children), but is much better known in
its orchestral, ballet form. The child-like aspect emerges in
the fantasy of the pieces, drawing together various well-known
fairy-tales, dressed in gorgeous orchestral colours, but the
organization is precise, fantasy meeting artifice. The pianistic
culmination of this period of Ravel's writing is the triptych
Gaspard de la nuit (1908), inspired by the fantasy prose-poems
of the 19th-century poet Aloysius Bertrand. The spirit behind
this work is the virtuosity and fantastical imagination of Liszt;
the first of the nocturnal visions is that of the water-nymph
Ondine, who unhappily falls in love with a mortal, the second
of a gibbet with a hanging skeleton, the third of the goblin
who is always present, unseen, darting and shifting in Ravel's
portrait. The writing has an uncanny ability to get behind these
visions, almost as if they were major archetypes of Ravel's
own psyche, so much so that they have a spontaneous, improvisatory
feel (whereas in fact they are meticulously calculated) that
adds a haunting and harrowing immediacy to the three pieces.
Gaspard de la nuit makes great expressive and technical
demands on the pianist, and has become one of the touchstones
of the great pianist's art. The orchestral culmination of this
period is very different. Ravel called the ballet Daphnis
et Chloé (1909-1912) a `choreographic symphony';
it is based on the Greek legend, and was the longest work he
wrote. The Greece he conjured up was that seen through the eyes
of the late 18th-century French artists, an arcadian and earthy
view. The result is electrifying, music steeped in pagan sensuousness.
For the magic of the orchestration and for sheer evocation,
nothing has yet rivalled the music for `lever du jour' (`Daybreak'),
with its rippling flutes over the tinkling of the harp, its
hush of a new dawn, the eddies of water, the calls of birds,
the great swell of the rising sun into the dawn. Ravel made
two suites (1911, 1913) from the ballet: the first suite uses
the first third of the ballet score, and the second suite, which
has become the form in which the music is most often heard,
the last third. For these suites he provided instrumental alternatives
to the wordless chorus of the original ballet, which is worth
hearing in its entirety.
The works immediately
following Daphnis et Chloé are smaller in scale,
and concentrate on clearer textures and a more idiomatic melodic
line. The shades of Schubert's Vienna stand at the shoulder
of the suite of waltzes, Valses nobles et sentimentales
(1911, orchestrated 1912); the suite is often heard in both
the original piano and later orchestral settings. The Piano
Trio (1914), with its suggestion of Spanish themes, hauntingly
explores the contrasts of sonorities between the piano and the
strings. The tendency to distil images of bygone eras reached
its fulfilment in Le tombeau de Couperin (1914-1917),
a set of six piano pieces, four of which were orchestrated and
reordered in 1919, each with a dedication to a friend who had
died in the war. In spite of the title, Ravel does not summon
up the style of Couperin, but rather that of French 18th-century
court dance music in a modern hue, creating what is to all intents
and purposes a neo-classical work, with restrained, clean orchestration.
Those expecting Ravel in a more sensuous, Impressionistic vein
will be disappointed, but it displays all Ravel's powers of
charm and grace and meticulous craftsmanship, a musical equivalent
to the robust delicacy of 18th-century French furniture. As
if to counter what he had initiated in Le tombeau de Couperin,
the short ballet La Valse (1919-1920), now a regular
orchestral piece in the concert hall, veers in a completely
different direction. In contrast to the Schubertian sensitivity
of the Valse nobles et sentimentales, this takes the
world of Richard Strauss' Viennese waltz head-on, outscoring
the German as it does so. The scale is huge - this is a waltz
in a gigantic, glittering palace ballroom - but there is a disturbed
ghostly undercurrent to the whole thing (partly caused by the
swooping middle-ground voices of the orchestra), as if Ravel
was looking back on pre-war Imperial Vienna through the horror
of the trenches. The Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920-1922),
dedicated to the memory of Debussy, is a strange
and under-appreciated work, one of the most intellectual Ravel
wrote. The dialogue between the unusual instrumental combination
is spartan and discursive, and may appeal to those who find
Ravel's major works too sumptuous. In the Violin Sonata
(1923-1927) - as it is known, though it was actually his second
- the rather uneasy juxtaposition of the sparse lines and textures
of the first movement and the bitter blues of the middle movement
have perhaps inhibited a wider popularity. But the highpoint
of this period of Ravel's output is the one-act opera L'enfant
et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments,
1920-1925). The brilliant, perfectly proportioned libretto by
Colette tells of a boy who ignores his mother's warnings, maltreats
a pet squirrel, is then tormented by the coming to life of all
his toys (and the furnishings of his room), is transported into
the nocturnal garden, and is then redeemed by all the animals
of the garden. It is one of those rare works which appeal to
both children and adults, and its episodic nature allows Ravel
a wide range of styles in individual numbers, from the jazz
spoof of the teapot and teacup to the glittering lyricism of
the Princess. The cat's duet has become as famous as that of
Rossini, and is atmospherically more effective. The range of
orchestration, from chamber proportions to larger ensembles,
is considerable and highly refined, and the moment when the
room dissolves and the garden appears, complete with owls hooting
and frogs croaking, is as magically evocative as anything in
Daphnis et Chloé. This opera deserves to be much
more widely known, as it is a masterpiece of its kind; stylistically,
it is a kind of summary of the different facets of Ravel's compositional
idioms.
Ravel's tendency
to find inspiration in, and solace from, other musics, and his
ability to transmute their idioms into his own, is exemplified
in the short but virtuoso Tzigane (1924), which
exists in versions for violin and piano and violin and orchestra,
though the latter is much more effective. In it he invokes the
spirit of Hungary, and especially of the Hungarian gypsy fiddlers.
It opens with a long quasi-improvisatory extended solo, countered
by an orchestral introduction that is a web of sounds dominated
by a prominent harp. Thereafter Ravel darts around his various
visions of the Hungarian spirit, including a spoof of the refined
Hungarian orchestral dances that is surely a tribute to Liszt.
There is humour in this work, as well as mystery in the high
orchestral and solo moments that employ harmonics - it is the
kind of unique piece that defies categorization. Ravel's best
known work started as a request for a short ballet. Boléro
(1928) for orchestra marries the Spanish influence, and a Spanish
3/4 dance rhythm, with the rigidity of modernity. It is a continuous
ostinato, a reiterated linear repetition, a progression of awesome
power and control. The propulsion is the menace of a sidedrum
remorselessly beating out the rhythm, echoed by brass, and the
progeny is the entry of the main theme no less than 18 times.
Transformation is achieved by subtle orchestral colours that
are piled up, iron-fisted, element by element. Yet the main
theme is sensuous, Moorish, sinuous, and when nothing else could
possibly seem to happen in this remorseless progression, the
whole orchestra shifts from C major to E major, and on towards
the blaze of triumph of the C major in which what Ravel called
an `exercise' ends.
Irony finally conflicts
with lyricism and virtuosity in the two piano concertos. Ravel
worked on them simultaneously, and there could scarcely be more
of a contrast between the two. The better-known Piano Concerto
in G (1929-1931) is the more traditional, cast in three
movements, and is of almost chamber proportions, looking back
to the example of Mozart. That is most prominent in the delicate
and beautiful little neo-classical slow movement, where the
piano opens solo, gradually to be joined by other instruments
until an almost bluesy tone is reached. The first movement opens
with a clapper, which, it has been pointed out, sounds like
the composer's ring-master whip as he is about to put the pianist
through his or her paces in the brilliant, darting movement.
The last movement has strong jazz influences, in the orchestration
(notably the trombone slides and the scrawling clarinet) and
in the rhythms. The dramatic Piano Concerto for the Left
Hand (1929-1930) is perhaps the finer work, for its explores
greater depths, and in it Ravel set himself a far harder task.
It was written for the one-handed pianist Wittgenstein (and
is the best of the many works written for him), and in it Ravel
returns to elements of the sensuous ecstasy of Daphnis et
Chloé, though tempered by a more direct and cogent
drive; something of the horror of the First World War (in which
Wittgenstein lost his arm) lies behind this work. Cast in one
movement, it is propelled inevitably and sometimes remorselessly
from its extraordinary opening, the bassoon rising out of hushed
lower strings, to its bitter-sweet end. Ravel employs a large
orchestra, and within this overall progression are a series
of almost episodic emotional surges, often propelled by the
orchestra and pianist alternately, including a sardonic march
as menacing as anything by Prokofiev. Not the least remarkable
aspect of this remarkable and unconventional concerto is the
piano writing: never once does it sound as if it is the left-hand
alone playing, and it is ironic that if this concerto had been
written for two hands (without a note being changed) it would
probably now be far better known than it is.
Ravel was also important
as a song writer, notable for the freedom of the vocal lines.
Among his works in this genre, the Trois poèmes de
Stéphane Mallarmé (1913) for soprano and nine
instruments are unusual in that Ravel intentionally used the
same instrumental forces as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire,
although at the time he had only heard of the work, not heard
it or seen a score. There are two sets of songs based on existing
material, the Cinq mélodies populaires grècques
and the Deux mélodies hébraïques (1914),
the former based on ancient and recent Greek folk-songs, the
latter on two Hebrew melodies. In both cases the importance
and independence of the piano writing takes them out of their
folk origins into the area of lieder, and the Greek set, with
its illustrative, often sharp-coloured piano writing and natural
vocal line, is especially effective. There is a combination
of melancholy, sensuousness and (in the central song), bitterness
in the three songs that make up Chansons Madécasses
(1925-1926) for high voice, flute, cello and piano, to poetry
by the 18th-century Creole poet Evarist Parny. There is little
of Impressionism left here; instead the three instruments and
the voice make a quartet, the writing is linear, the edges of
the textures clear-cut, the repetitions adding a touch of primitivism,
with a restrained eroticism in the interweaving of the four
lines: a musical equivalent to Gauguin. His last work, the three
songs of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (1932-1933)
for baritone and piano or orchestra, combines the Spanish influence
(with words by Paul Moran drawn from Cervantes) with a carefully
poised and perfectly calculated sense of the character who is
singing the songs. The first has piano writing that imitates
the guitar, the second (the Knight's epic prayer) a modal feel
recalling Spain's ancient noble past, that breaks out into a
climax of pure light, the third a drinking-song whose rollicking,
semi-flamenco nature hides an undercurrent of sadness appropriate
to the character.
Ravel's art was
too precise for easy emulation, though among his few pupils
was the unlikely figure of the older Vaughan Williams,
and the influence of the post-Impressionist Ravel is evident
in the latter's work (for a Ravel work that has similarities,
see the second song of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée).
Ravel's failure to receive the Prix de Rome at his fourth attempt
led to a scandal and extensive changes at the Conservatoire;
because of that snub, he also later refused the Legion d'Honneur
that was offered to him. He served in the First World War as
a driver, and was afflicted by a brain disease (Pick's disease)
in the last years of his life.
Ravel has sometimes
been criticized for being too shallow: those unsympathetic to
his aesthetic of intellectual and fastidious craftsmanship have
seen in his music not an original approach, but the aimless
manifestation of cultural decadence. He certainly created in
his music a filter between his own inner feelings and the outward
expression, refining them through his meticulous approach, but
such a criticism is difficult to apply to works such as Daphnis
et Chloé or the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
There is certainly a paradox in Ravel's musical personality,
between the sumptuous but refined sensuousness of some of the
scores, and the equally refined but much drier delight in technicality
of others, notably the later chamber works. It is perhaps ironic
that many unsympathetic to the former are unaware of the latter,
but the sheer orchestral pleasure that Ravel provides in so
many of the orchestral works is unlikely to be dimmed.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- piano concerto;
piano concerto for the left-hand; Tzigane for violin
and orchestra (or piano)
- Alborado del
gracioso (from piano work), Fanfare pour `L'eventail
de Jeanne', Menuet antique (from piano work), Pavane
pour une Infante défunte (from piano work), Rhapsodie
espagnole, Le tombeau de Couperin (from piano work),
and Valses nobles et sentimentales (from piano work)
for orch.
- Berceuse
for violin and piano; 2 violin sonatas; sonata for cello and
violin; piano trio; string quartet; Introduction and Allegro
for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet
- piano sonatina;
À la manière de Borodin, À la
manière de Chabrier, Jeux d'eau, Gaspard
de la nuit, Menuet antique, Menuet sur le nom
d'Haydn, Miroirs, Pavane pour une Infante défunte,
Prelude, le Tombeau de Couperin, and Valses
nobles et sentimentales for piano; Ma mère l'oye
four piano four hands; Frontispiece for two pianos, five
hands
- song cycles Cinq
mélodies populaires grècques, Deux épigrammes
de Clément Marot, Deux mélodies hébraïques,
Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, Histoires
naturelles, and Shéhérazade, most in
versions for piano or orchestra and other songs; Chansons
madécasses for high voice, flute, cello, and piano;
Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé
for high voice and nine instruments
- cantatas Alcyone,
Alyssa, and Myrrha
- ballets Bolero,
Daphnis et Chloé, Ma mère l'oye
(from piano work) and La valse
- operas L'enfant
et les sortilèges and L'heure espagnole
- orchestration
of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Alborada del
gracioso (1918 from 1904-1905) for orchestra
(ballet) Bolero
(1928) for orchestra
song cycle Chansons
madécasses (1925-1926)
ballet Daphnis
et Chloé (1909-1912)
song cycle Don
Quichotte à Dulcinée (1932-1933)
opera L'enfant
et les sortilèges (1920-1925)
Gaspard de la
nuit (1908) for piano
Introduction
and Allegro (1905) for harp, flute, clarinet and string
quartet
opera L'heure
espagnole (1907-1909)
Jeux d'eau
(1901) for piano
Miroirs (1904-1905)
for piano
Pavane pour un
Infante défunte (1899) for piano or for orchestra
Piano Concerto in
G (1929-1931)
Piano Concerto for
the Left Hand (1929-1930)
song cycle Shéhérazade
(1903)
String Quartet (1902-1903)
Le Tombeau de
Couperin for piano or for orchestra
Tzigane (1924)
for violin and piano or violin and orchestra
(ballet) La valse
(1919-1920) for orchestra
───────────────────────────────────────
Bibliography:
R.Manuel Maurice
Ravel (Eng. trans.), 1972
R.Nichols Ravel,
1977
- Ravel Remembered,
1987
A.Orenstein Ravel,
Man and Music, 1975
───────────────────────────────────────
ROUSSEL
Albert
born 5th April 1869
at Tourcoing
died 23rd August
1937 at Royan
───────────────────────────────────────
Roussel pursued
a career as a naval officer, until at the age of 25 he left
to devote himself to music, apart from a period during the First
World War when he joined the Red Cross and then served as a
naval engineering officer. He occupies an important, if tangential,
place in French music. Although his earlier works were influenced
by Debussy's Impressionism (the opening of the symphonic suite
from the ballet Le festin de l'araignée [The
Spider's Feast], 1913, is an obvious example), he developed
a very individual style of neo-classicism that was quite at
odds with the mainstream of French music of the 1920s and 1930s.
The classicism is
expressed in his adherence to the logic of traditional structures
and in the fastidious craftsmanship, both a legacy from his
teacher d'Indy, which give his mature works a
sense of rugged order. This is reinforced by his emphasis on
counterpoint, and by the occasional (and muted) use of a cyclical
structure (a motto or idea that recurs throughout a work) that
is a French tradition, from Berlioz via Franck and d'Indy. The
personal brand of modernism arises from his harmonies, which
are rooted in tonality, but branch out into unexpected directions
and dissonances - partly because their progressions are generated
by the counterpoint (harmony as a result rather than as a cause).
In addition, a modern element is injected by the influence of
eastern musics and their exotic colours, particularly Indian,
which Roussel had assimilated on his naval travels and on his
honeymoon tour in 1908. This also influenced his melodies, often
modal and often using the tritone. If these melodies are usually
not very striking (and sometimes downright weak), this is entirely
counterbalanced by the chief characteristic of his music: his
driving sense of rhythm, a motivating element that is similar
to that of Prokofiev, and which combines with the counterpoint
to produce a strong sense of impulse, energy, and sometimes
grandeur. His orchestration has sometimes been described as
thin, but although it is used sparingly and with great clarity,
the effect is often rich and with a suggestion of the sensuous.
Central to his output
are the four symphonies. The Symphony No.1, subtitled
Le poème de la forêt (The Poem of the
Forest, 1904-1906) is essentially a descriptive work, in
spite of its classical forms, but the Symphony No.2 (1919-1921)
established his classical style. The Symphony No.3
(1929-1930) and the Symphony No.4 (1934) are the most
commonly encountered. The former shows all Roussel's personal
style, from the vigour of the rhythms of the opening, the classical
logic, the use of a motif phrase, the sometimes acerbic harmonies
countered by the sensuousness of the violin solo part, the lilting
rhythms of the slow movement (with strong similarities to Prokofiev),
and a fugue, to the energetic scherzo and the echoes of Berlioz
in the finale. In the fourth symphony, with its complex and
impassioned slow movement, a mock-martial scherzo, and a very
fine and concise finale, the element of the melancholic that
is latent in Roussel's work is more obvious.
Of his other works,
the Suite in F (1926) for orchestra heralded the
move away from Impressionism, while the most overtly neo-classical
work is the fine Sinfonietta (1934) for strings, austere
in its discipline and rugged in its drive. The Piano
Concerto (1927) integrates the soloist with the orchestra,
while the little Concertino for Cello and Orchestra
(1936), his last orchestral work, is neo-classical in feel,
rather melancholy in sentiment. Of the chamber music, the finest
works are the String Quartet (1932) and the spare
String Trio (1937), though the Sérénade
(1925) for flute, violin, viola, cello and harp is delightful,
quickly moving away from any suggestion of Impressionism at
its opening to a laughing neo-classicism, with cello rhythmic
lines reminiscent of Stravinsky, happy dialogue between
the instruments, and a mellow slow movement. An unsympathetic
libretto (based on an Indian story) has probably prevented any
revival of his `opera-ballet', Padmâvatí,
(1914-1918), musically interesting for its rhythmic invention,
the formality of its design and its use of Indian raga and Near
East melody. The works which those unfamiliar with Roussel's
music will find most immediately appealing are the ballet scores
Le festin de l'araignée (1912), with its Impressionist
feel, happy tunes, rhythmic felicity, and marvellously pointed
small orchestra, and Bacchus et Ariane (1930). In the
latter (turned into two orchestral suites) the voluptuousness
is contained by the incisiveness of the writing and the surety
of the flow and change of rhythmic dance, its suggestion of
barbarity curbed by the sheer control of the musical thought
and the deft precision of its often vivid orchestration, occasionally
reminiscent of Prokofiev. A third ballet, Aenéas
(1935), sung as well as danced, is more sparse.
Although he taught
at the Schola Cantorum (1902-1914), Roussel has no obvious French
followers, even if there are echoes of his aesthetic in the
concertos and symphonies of Dutilleux and Jolivet.
On one major composer, however, he did leave his mark. The later
works of Martinů (Roussel's pupil from 1923-1924)
clearly have the imprint of the combination of neo-classical
form enlivened by a generating sense of rhythm exemplified in
Roussel's Sinfonietta, as well as some of Roussel's division
of orchestration, although all are further developed. Ironically,
Martinů was not to turn to his mature style until the very
last years of Roussel's life.
It is not difficult
to see why Roussel's music has been relatively unpopular. Apart
from its divergence from the general progression of French music,
the balance between expressive tendencies countered by intellectual
rigour, and craftsmanship and structure countered by the freer
elements, is a particularly personal one. His many admirers
attest to the success of that balance, and those readers unfamiliar
with his style should certainly hear his music to judge for
themselves.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 4 symphonies (No.1
Le poème de la forêt); Sinfonietta
for string orch.; piano concerto; concerto for small orchestra;
cello concertino; Evocations, Pour un Fête de
printemps, Resurrection and Rhapsodie flamande
for orch.
- Andante and
Scherzo and Joueurs de flûte for flute and
piano; 2 violin sonatas; piano trio; string trio; string quartet;
Sérénade for harp, flute, violin, viola
and cello; Divertissement for piano and wind quintet
and other chamber music Trois pièces, Prelude
and Fugue, Rustiques, Suite in f sharp minor,
and sonatina for piano; Ségovia for solo guitar
- songs and song
cycles including Deux idylles, Deux mélodies
de Ville, Deux poèmes chinois (3 sets), Deux
poèmes de Ronsard for soprano and flute, Odes
anacréontiques (2 sets), Quatre poèmes
de Regnier (2 sets); Evocations for soloists, chorus
and orch.; Psalm 80 for tenor, chorus and orch.
- ballets Bacchus
et Ariane, Le festin de l'araignée (The
Spider's Feast)
- opera Padmávatí
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
ballet Bacchus
et Ariane op.43 (1930)
ballet Le festin
de l'araignée op.17 (1913)
Sinfonietta for
string orchestra op.52 (1934)
String Quartet op.45
Symphony No.3 op.42
(1930)
Symphony No.4 op.53
(1934)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
B.Deane Albert
Roussel, 1961
───────────────────────────────────────
SATIE
Erik Alfred Leslie
born 17th May 1866
at Honfleur
died 1st July 1925
at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
The place of Erik
Satie's music has perhaps been exaggerated, in part because
it enjoyed a vogue during the hippie period of the late 1960s
and early 1970s, when Satie's unusual life-style and rebellious
brand of anti-establishment humour found a ready audience. His
ideas, though, have been of importance to later composers, and
he has been described, with some justification, as a minor composer
of major significance.
Satie's personal
reaction against Wagnerian late-Romanticism, and against the
studied symbolism often present in Impressionism, was to deride
and undermine the mantle of seriousness with which classical
music has so often cloaked itself. One part of that response
came from Satie's own eccentric sense of humour that mocked
pretentiousness - it was typical that he numbered his first
published pieces (Valse-Ballet and Fantaisie-Valse,
1885, both for piano) op.62. A second was to seek inspiration
and images, and, later in his career, sound sources, outside
those then associated with serious music. A third was to rebel
against accepted forms and harmonic progressions, and to evolve
his own plastic solutions to each piece. His major influences
were unusual, those of Gregorian chant and medieval music and
Gothic art, all of which he studied. To this was added from
1890 an interest in the mystical and the occult.
The problem for
all composers abandoning traditional forms is inventing new
ones, and these often initially emerge in small-scale works.
Satie was no exception, and all his earlier works were short
piano pieces; however, for Satie these small forms were temperamentally
conducive, for he had the instincts of the miniaturist, for
making precise, cogent and self-contained statements in small-scale
forms. Ogives (1886), a set of four piano pieces, was
imbued with the Gothic, and was followed by the three Sarabandes
(1887) for piano, but it was the Gymnopédies (1888),
a set of three slow dances for piano, that have become Satie's
best known works, especially after Debussy orchestrated
two of them. The title refers to ancient Greek ritual dances
by naked boys, but the music has a limpid simplicity and beauty
with haunting melodies which, together with the sense of progression
or time hung in suspension, influenced musical Impressionism.
The technique of a long melody over chord progressions has a
extraordinary sense of relaxation which has endeared these pieces
to later generations. The three Gnossiennes (1890)
have a similar limpid feel, but with more abrupt harmonic shifts
and right-hand melodies that wander in flights of delightful
fancy. In these sets Satie was exploring new ideas, and they
are in groups of three because each piece of a set essentially
explores the same melodic and harmonic ideas from a different
angle (hence the surface similarities of the three Gymnopédies).
Harmonically, there is a strong modal cast (a reflection of
Satie's medieval studies), and use of 7ths and 9ths that are
unresolved. In Gnossiennes Satie removed bar-lines,
emphasizing the free, plastic flow. There is often little sense
of closure - these pieces emerge and fade away rather than having
strong openings and endings. There is a conscious simplicity,
a paring away of unnecessary content, that is one of the hallmarks
of the miniaturist.
Gnossiennes
marked the end of this period in Satie's output, for from Première
pensée Rose + Croix (1891) until the Prélude
de la porte héroïque du ciel of 1894 Satie wrote
a series of piano pieces that reflected his involvement with
the mystical Christian Rosicrucian movement, all written for
imaginary ritual ceremonies. This period ended with the Messe
des pauvres (1895) for chorus with organ or piano, and was
followed by two years of silence, broken by the Pièces
froides (1897) for piano, where the sense of hung suspension
of the pre-Rosicrucian works has become a musing wandering,
regularly returning to the main melodic ideas. Then, developing
this idiom, his piano miniatures take on a new cast, still whimsical,
but with the influence of popular French music-hall tunes, outrageous
and sometimes misleading titles, such as Trois morceaux en
forme de poire, (Three pieces in the shape of a pear,
1890-1903) for two pianos - there are actually seven pieces
- and with equally quirky instructions in the score, such as
suggesting the sound should be `like a nightingale with toothache.'
Behind these eccentricities lay a serious intent. He continued
to experiment with unusual harmonies in these piano pieces,
his output reaching its zenith in 1913, after he had been championed
by the famous pianist Ricardo Viñes. Within the miniature
forms and the deliberate simplicity Satie was using humour to
cock a snook at the received wisdom of the establishment; at
the same time he was trying to forge an idiom that would find
a wider popularity (hence the music-hall influence; Satie supported
himself by playing popular piano). Satie called this `musique
de tous les jours' (`everyday music').
Meanwhile, recognizing
that his training and development had confined him to the miniature,
Satie enrolled in the Schola Cantorum in 1905, studying with
d'Indy and Roussel until 1908. Satie
then felt he had the training for larger works with orchestra
or instrumentation rather than piano, and these are of more
substance and of more lasting interest than his better-known
piano works. However, in them he lost none of his quirkiness
or his deliberately unconventional way of looking at the world:
the first, the satirical stage work Le piège de Méduse
(1913) for actors and eight instruments, has an absurdist text,
including a stuffed monkey that dances between the scenes. Then
in 1916 Satie produced for Diaghilev the ballet Parade,
with a scenario by Jean Cocteau, choreography by Massine, and
costumes by Picasso. It created a sensation (Satie so insulted
one of the critics that he was prosecuted for defamation of
character, and received a suspended jail sentence), for in many
ways it was a revolutionary work. In form it is a suite of small
pieces (the favourite technique of the miniaturist seeking a
larger form), it included such influences as ragtime, and it
used unusual sound sources in its instrumentation: sirens, typewriters,
revolvers, motors. The title refers to the excerpts that showmen
at the fair display outside the performance tent in an attempt
to attract an audience, and allowed Satie to parade such diverse
characters as a Chinese Conjurer and the Little American Girl
in brief appearances; ultimately the Manager fails, as the audience
are quite satisfied by the snippets they have seen outside the
tent. The vivid, down-to-earth, and completely unsentimental
score has been compared to Cubism in its juxtaposition of blocks
of ideas, themselves parodies of a multitude of sound sources
from the two-step, through an Oriental exoticism and the rhythms
of the typewriter, to the fugue that opens and closes the ballet.
Parade was
followed by Satie's masterpiece, the symphonic drama Socrate
(1918) for soprano or soprano, mezzo-soprano and orchestra.
Based on Plato's Dialogues, it is divided into three
parts: a portrait of Socrates by Alcibiades, the conversation
between Socrates and Phaedrus on the pleasant banks of the Ilissus,
and the death of Socrates related by Phaedo. Satie's idiom had
always tended to the simple, but in Socrate it becomes
deliberately spare, almost artless. The vocal lines follow the
inflections of the reported speech, and are without any sense
of bar-line; the subdued pulse is mostly provided by the orchestra,
drained of most colours except those that lie around a warm
middle register; the harmonies and melodic lines have the simplicity
and the modality of plainchant. The critics at the first performance
were baffled, thinking it another of Satie's jokes, but this
sparse setting is gently mesmerizing, creating an atmosphere
that presents an individual and convincing interpretation of
Socrates, a kind of deliberate conviction combined with a completely
unaggressive sense of pleasure (in the second part) and acceptance.
Socrate is the least immediate and the most serious of
Satie's works, but the courage to provide such a simplistic
setting for such potent words was justified; each of the three
sections uses the same harmonic and melodic idiom from a different
angle, as in his early piano works, and the whole piece has
the feel of the precise focus of the miniature expanded in a
longer time-duration.
In 1920 Satie extended
his concept of `everyday music' by creating `furniture music'
(Matisse's term) designed to accompany a gallery exhibition
and to be completely unobtrusive; Satie was annoyed when the
gallery viewers stopped to listen to the result, entitled Musique
d'ameublement for three clarinets, trombone and piano, and
written in collaboration with Milhaud. This was an experiment
of context, but then he wrote two further large-scale works
of importance. The ballet Mercure (1924), in thirteen
very compressed sections, caused another scandal, as the surrealists
in the audience supported the designer Picasso, but not the
composer; the choreography was again by Massine (at a later
performance the wife of the Count who commissioned the ballet
bought all of the seats to give her friends, but forgot to do
so, and the theatre was virtually empty). The plot is based
on Mercury's meeting with the Graces, but the idiom is drawn
from country-fair music, bright and sometimes brash, again with
a deliberately artless element, but constructed with Satie's
customary care for self-containment and detail. The ballet Relâche
(referring to a theatre that is `dark' or closed, 1924) was
both a return to the ingredient of the absurd in Satie's aesthetic
and experimentally daring, with elements of dadaism and surrealism:
it includes a strip tease, dances with objects (such as wheel-barrows),
and a film section with an unrelated musical accompaniment.
Satie's main accomplishment
was to broaden the parameters within which serious music could
take place, elevating parody and the absurd to a serious context,
and he was a pioneer of the aesthetic of the humorous, the quirky,
and the rebelliously surreal in music, idioms unthinkable in
the 19th century but now commonplace. His concepts of simplicity
and an assumed naïveté or direct artlessness that
would appeal to a wider audience greatly influenced Jean Cocteau,
both in his own writings and also in the aesthetic he transmitted
to such composers as Milhaud, Honegger,
and, briefly, Stravinsky. The modal shades of
his harmonies and the lack of traditional resolution, creating
a kind of blenched atmosphere, also had a subtle influence on
later composers, even, distantly, such composers as Britten
(audible in a comparison between the harmonic cast and decorative
piano line of the Gnossiennes and such songs as
Winter Words, No.6). Satie's concept of form having
the possibility of little opening or closure (and, in the ballet
Relâche, being partly predicated by duration),
though not unique to Satie, has become generally accepted.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- La belle excentrique,
Cinq grimaces and En habit de cheval for orch.
- Sonnerie pour
reveiller le bon gros Roi des Singes for 2 trumpets; Choses
vues à droite et à la gauche (sans lunettes)
for violin and piano; Musique d'ameublement for 3 clarinets,
trombone and piano (with Milhaud)
- Allegro,
Avant-dernières pensées, Chapitres tournés
en tous sens, Cinq nocturnes, Croquis et agaceries
d'un gros bonhomme en bois, Danses gothique, Descriptions
automatiques, Deux préludes du Nazaréen,
Embryons desséchés, Engantillages pittoresques,
Fantaisie-valse, Fêtes donnée par des
Chevaliers Normandes, Les filles des étoiles,
Heures séculaires et instantanées, Jack-in-the-box,
Menus propos enfantins, Modéré,
Nouvelles pièces froides, Passacaille,
les pantins dansent, Pecadilles importunes, Le
Picadilly, Pièces froides, Poudre d'or,
Le piège de méduse, Préludes
d'Eginhard, Prélude de la porte héroïque
du ciel, Prélude en tapisserie, Premier
menuet, Première pensée Rose + Croix,
Quatre ogives, Quatre préludes flasques,
Réverie de l'enfance de Pantagruel, Sonatine
bureaucratique, Sports et divertissements, Trois
gnossiennes, Trois gymnopédies, Trois préludes,
les trois valses du précieux dégoûté,
Trois véritables préludes flasques, Trois
sarabandes, Uspud, Valse-ballet, Vexations
and Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses for piano
- song cycles Quatre
petites mélodies, Trois mélodies, Trois
poèmes d'amour and other songs; Socrate for
four voices and orch.; Messe des pauvres for chorus and
organ or piano
- ballets Mercure,
Parade and Relâche
- stage work Le
piège de Méduse for actors and 8 instruments;
marionette opera Geneviève de Brabant for voices
and piano
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
In addition to the
works listed below, any sample of Satie's later piano music
will include works of interest.
ballet Mercure
(1924)
ballet Parade
(1917)
ballet Relâche
(1924)
symphonic drama
Socrate (1918) for four voices and orchestra
Trois gnossiennes
(1890) for piano
Trois gymnopédies
(1888) for piano
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
E.Satie The Writings
of Eric Satie (ed. N.Wilkins), 1976
A.M.Gillmor Erik
Satie, 1988
R.Myers Erik
Satie, 1948
───────────────────────────────────────
SAUGUET
Henri
born 18th May 1901
at Bordeaux
died June 22 1989
at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Much better known
inside France than outside, Sauguet's large output initially
came under the influence of Satie, and he was
a member of the group known as École d'Arceuil (1923-1925),
the name of the district where Satie lived. That influence is
(intentionally) obvious in Sauguet's best known score, the ballet
Les Forains (The Strolling Players, 1945), a watered-down
imitation of Satie's Parade, the idiosyncrasy if not
the vivacity smoothed out - colourful, but more appropriate
to the ballet stage than the concert platform. His earlier music
is characterized by an effortless free-flowing lyricism and
transparency of colour, the charm more marked than a strong
individual idiom. Wistfulness is apparent even in more public
works, such as the extended suite Tableau de Paris
(1950) for orchestra, describing different sections of the French
city from a dreamy mystical view to touches of jazz. Sauguet's
idiom then gradually evolved into the use of more complex harmonic
ideas, and by the 1960s became less tied to a tonal base. Of
his earlier works, the Piano Concerto No.1 (1933-1934)
with its clear-cut, if unremarkable outer movements, Romantic
in feel, is sometimes encountered and deserves hearing for its
beautiful and effective slow movement in which the echoes of
Debussy stimulate a more direct and precise utterance.
Of his later music, 12-note melodies (though not following any
system) are used in the attractive cantata L'oiseau a vu
tout cela (The Bird Saw All That, 1960) for baritone
and string orchestra, with a haunting slow-moving atmosphere
sometimes countered by busy textures in the instruments. His
typical wistful charm is retained in such works as the Mélodie
concertante (1964) for cello and orchestra. The Garden
Concerto (1969) for harmonica and orchestra (also version
for oboe and orchestra) has a lightness combined with Sauguet's
later harmonic style, and meanders on a pleasant ramble. Of
his chamber music, the String Quartet No.2 (1947-1948)
and the String Quartet No.3 (1978) exemplify his
preference for clothing a kind of lyrically sad serenity in
more direct, conversational utterance. A large part of his output
consists of works for the stage, and his first large success
was the ballet La chatte (The Cat, 1927)
for Diaghilev, based on an Aesop tale of a man who falls in
love with a cat, obligingly turned into a woman by the goddess
Aphrodite, until she sees a mouse, and reverts. The lively music
is entertaining, with a Parisian joie-de-vivre touched with
a dreamy lyricism. Among his operas, Les caprices de Marianne,
with Bizet a distant model, was much admired when it appeared
in 1954, and the most ambitious is La chartreuse de Parme
(The Charterhouse of Palma, 1927-1936, revised 1968).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 4 symphonies (No.1
Symphonie expiatoire, No.2 Symphonie des marches,
No.3 INR, No.4 Troisième âge); 3
piano concertos (No.3 Concert des mondes souterrains);
violin concerto (Concerto d'Orphée); Mélodie
concertante for cello and orch.; Garden Concerto
for harmonica and orch.; Sonata d'église for organ
and orch.
- Tableaux de
Paris and Les trois lys for orch.; Deux mouvements
à la memoire de Paul Gilson for string orch.
- Sonata crépusculaire
for violin and piano; 3 string quartets; trio for oboe, clarinet
and bassoon; Alentours saxophoniques for alto saxophone,
wind ensemble and piano and many other chamber works
- cantatas L'Oiseau
a vu tout cela and La Voyante; oratorio Chant
pour une ville meutrie; song cycles including Les animaux
et leurs hommes and Nièges and many other
songs and vocal works
- ballets including
L'as de coeur, La chatte (The Cat), Cordelia,
Les Forains (The Strolling Players), L'imposteur
ou Le Prince et le mendiant, Les mirages, Oedipus
et la Sphinx, Paris, Paul et Virginie and
Les roses
- operas Les
caprices de Marianne, La chartreuse de Parme (The
Charterhouse of Palma), Le Contrebasse, La gageure
imprévue, Le pain des autres and Le plumet
du colonel (The Colonel's Plume)
- incidental music,
film and television scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
ballet La chatte
(1927)
ballet Les Forains
(1945)
cantata L'Oiseau
a vu tout cela (1960)
Piano Concerto No.1
(1933-1934)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
F.Y.Bril Henri
Sauguet, Paris 1967 (in French)
M.Schneider Henri
Sauguet, Paris 1959 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
SCHAEFFER
Pierre
born August 14th
1910 at Nancy
died 19th
August 1995
───────────────────────────────────────
Pierre Schaeffer's name would probably be much
better known had he not given up composing at the very end of
the 1950s to concentrate on writing, on theory and as a novelist.
Nonetheless, in the history of 20th-century music he occupies
an important place, appreciation of which is likely to increase
as electronic means become more and more woven into the general
fabric of music-making. For after studying electrical engineering
and working as a radio technician (as well as becoming a novelist),
he founded `Jeune France' (`Young France', not to be confused
with the group `La Jeune France', founded in 1936 and whose
chief members were Jolivet and Messiaen)
devoted to inter-arts experiments. These were extended when
he co-founded the Studio d'Essai (Experimental Studio) in 1942,
as part of French radio; it was a centre for the Resistance
during the war. Then in 1948, taking up the theoretical ideas
of Varèse, he started experimenting with
the manipulation and editing of natural sounds, first on disc
and then on tape, thus arriving at the concept of musique-concrète.
This led to the formation of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique
Concrète (1951) with Jacques Poulin and Pierre Henry,
and then, with François-Bernard Mâche
and Luc Ferrari, to the creation of the Groupe de Recherches
Musicales (Group for Musical Research) with the RTF electronic
studio. His particular interest has been collecting sounds and
their classification, and it is in the distinguishing between
the qualities of different sounds and their subsequent manipulation
and juxtaposition that Schaeffer has been particularly influential.
Chief among his own works are the series of Études
(Studies, 1948-1959) for tape, noteworthy for their clean,
simple, sparse textures, and the clarity of sounds (based on
a wide variety of sources, including instruments and voices,
as in the Étude aux sons animés, 1958).
From 1953 to 1958 Schaeffer was active in the creation of the
overseas services of French radio, and from 1958 he concentrated
on theory, teaching electronic composition at the Paris Conservatoire
from 1968. His novels include Prelude, Chorale et Fugue
(1983)
───────────────────────────────────────
works include: (all
for tape alone):
Symphonie pour
un homme seul (with Pierre Henry); Concertino-Diapason
(with J.J.Grünewald); electronic Suite pour 14 instruments
- series of 9 Études
- Bidule en nuit
(with Pierre Henry); Continuo (with Luc Ferrari);
Exposition française à Londres (with Luc
Ferrari); L'oiseau RAI; Phèdre; Simultané
camerounais; Variations sur une flûte mexicaine
- electronic pantomime
Toute la lyre (with Pierre Henry); electronic
opera Orphée 53 (with Pierre Henry) incidental,
film and radio scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Symphonie pour
un homme seul (with Pierre Henry) (1950)
Étude
aux objets (1959)
Étude
de bruits (1958)
Études
aux allures (1958)
Études
aux sons animés (1958)
L'oiseau RAI
(1950)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
P.Schaeffer À
la recherche de la musique concrète, 1952
La musique concrète,
1967
S.Brunet Pierre
Schaeffer, 1970 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
SCHMITT
Florent
born 28th September
1870 at Blamont (Meuthe-et-Moselle)
died 17th August
1958 at Neuilly-sur-Seine
───────────────────────────────────────
In his lifetime, Florent Schmitt was as well
known as an influential and perceptive music critic (for Le
Temps from 1929 to 1939) as a composer, and is not to be
confused with other composers of a similar name, notably his
Austrian contemporary Franz Schmidt. His music
shows the formal inheritance of his teacher Fauré,
but against this is set a dreamy lyricism that has affinities
with the Impressionist music of Debussy, combined
with moments of powerful utterance, dynamic orchestration, and
rhythmic power that place his style in the 20th century rather
than in the period of Romanticism. Once he had established these
elements of his style, it changed little apart from a gradually
increasing use of chromaticism. Most of his later music is never
encountered, and he remains a composer who may well prove to
be worthy of greater exposure.
His idiom is well
represented by the three works from just after the turn of the
century that remain the best known of his large output (138
opus numbers). Psalm 47 op.38 (1904) for soprano,
chorus, organ and orchestra is a huge and passionate setting,
ranging from exultation and jubilation to a sensuous celebration
of the mystery of the passion for God. The ballet La tragédie
de Salomé op.50 (1907, revised as symphonic poem,
1910), with a symbolist version of the Salome story ending in
an engulfing cataclysm, combines the languorousness of Impressionism
(notably in the opening melodic lines, the central mysterious
seascape, and the wordless female chorus, all reminiscent of
Debussy) with grander, more powerful emotions in marvellous
orchestral colours and with an occasional exotic turn. At times,
its atmosphere of heady sensuousness, rich orchestration, and
powerful rhythms provides something of a foretaste of Stravinsky's
early ballets (Stravinsky himself greatly admired this work),
especially in the violence of the final dance. Those who enjoy
Debussy's La mer or the early Stravinsky ballets
will find this an interesting alternative. The long three-movement
Piano Quintet in B minor op.51 (1902-1908, revised
1919) is less immediately impressive than these two works, more
clearly under the inheritance of Fauré.
The writing is mostly dense and passionate, with the impression
of extended, seamless lyrical melodic flow in the strings, either
in consort with the piano or against a more decorated piano
backcloth.
Schmitt was director
of the Lyons Conservatory (1922-1924).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 2 symphonies
- Çançunik,
Kermesse, Musiques en plain air, Le palais
hanté, Rêves, Ronde burlesque,
Sélamik, Scènes de la vie moyenne
and other works for orch.; Enfants for small orch.; Janiana
for string orch.
- Symphonie concertante
for piano and orch.; Légende for viola or violin
or alto sax and orch.; Final, Introit, récit
et congé for cello and orch. and Scherzo vif
for violin and orch.
- Sonate libre
en deux parties enchaînées for violin and piano;
Sonatine en trio for flute, clarinet and piano or harpsichord
(also piano trio arrangement); string trio; quartet for four
flutes; Pour presque tous les temps for flute and piano
trio; string quartet; saxophone quartet; piano quintet and many
other chamber works, especially using wind
- large body of
piano music for solo piano, piano four hands, and two pianos,
much of it later orchestrated
- many songs and
song cycles; Mass for four voice and organ; Le chant
de nuit for soloists, chorus and orch.; Psalm 47
for soprano, chorus, organ and orch., and many other choral
works, with orch., smaller instrumental ensembles, or unaccompanied
- ballets Oriane
et le prince d'amour, La petit elfe ferme-l'oeil
and La tragédie de Salomé
- incidental
music to Antoine et Cléopatre; 2 film scores
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Psalm 47
op.38 (1904) for soprano, chorus, organ and orchestra
ballet La tragédie
de Salomé op.50 (1907)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
Y. Hucher Florent
Schmitt, 1953 (in French)
───────────────────────────────────────
VARÈSE
Edgard
born 22nd December
1883 at Paris
died 6th November
1965 at New York
───────────────────────────────────────
It has been said, with some justification, that
the only two truly revolutionary composers producing an entirely
new world of sound since the First World War have been Webern
and Edgard Varèse (by coincidence, both their fathers
were engineers). Certainly the most experimental composers since
1945 have been deeply indebted to the one or the other, and
Edgard Varèse is one of the innovative geniuses of the
modern age. His output consists of only fourteen complete surviving
works, and it is extraordinary that, in comparison to similar
figures in other artistic fields (e.e. cummings or Pollock,
for example), Varèse's name, let alone his music, is
still known only to relatively few.
Varèse was
constantly looking for new sounds, ones "that had not been
heard", that would of themselves be able to keep up with
and reflect new thought and a new age. For it was the qualities
of individual sounds that were central to his aesthetic: their
colour, depth, resonance, emotional effect, the register of
the instrument. His orchestration and instrumentation were a
reflection of the interaction and combinations of the sounds
he was using, hence his constant search for new instruments
or instrumental combinations. He preferred instruments that
could create distinct and harsh sounds, especially percussion,
wind and brass, and avoided those with vibrato, such as strings.
Harmony becomes secondary, the tone qualities producing harmonic
combinations; as Gilles Tremblay has pointed out,
this returns harmony to a primitive quality of resonance and
timbre, and is often aggressively dissonant.
This concentration
on the qualities of sounds throws two musical elements into
sharper relief. First rhythm becomes important as a structural
basis for the composition, and Varèse greatly developed
the use of rhythm in modern music, in particular irregular and
swiftly changing pulses and metres, and the interaction of different
rhythms. Second, dynamics take on new importance, because the
individual dynamics of an instrument change its sound, and the
interaction of different dynamics alters the overall sound.
This also becomes interrelated with rhythm, since the rhythm
of changing dynamics can help shape the overall progression
of a Varèse work. Varèse's plastic forms, as he
himself observed, are a consequence of these concerns rather
than following any traditional patterns; and the logic and seeming
inevitability with which his works unfold is one of their remarkable
features. The different sound-blocks or masses, often using
silence as a component and often associated with different rhythms,
overlap and interlink to create this flow.
Among his earliest
works, all subsequently destroyed or lost, was a Straussian
tone poem Bourgogne, which created a scandal when
first performed in 1910, and a Prélude à la
fin d'un jour for an orchestra of 120. He also worked on
an opera, Oedipus and the Sphinx, with Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
With his move to New York at the very end of 1915 he found a
society filled with the excitement of the new, largely untrammelled
by the weight of European tradition, that entirely suited his
aesthetic. That break with Europe was expressed in his earliest
surviving work, Amériques (1921, revised
1929). In its original version it was for a huge orchestra of
142 instruments, but he revised it for a still larger orchestra,
whose most remarkable feature for the time was a battery of
21 percussion instruments with ten players. This massive work,
generating excitement through its massed forces, the percussion
permeating the orchestral sound as a separate block, is prophetic
of Varèse's later work and of more recent orchestral
developments. Ranging through the ritualistic, the mechanical,
the primitive, it maintains a constant ferment of emotional
expression through changes of colour and dynamics, and the sound
of the siren, capturing the momentum he found in America, became
a feature of Varèse's style. More transitional is Offrandes
(1921) for soprano and small orchestra, setting poems by the
Chilean Vicente Huidobiro and the Mexican José Juan Tablada.
The orchestra provide the block effects, with rocking rhythms
and clockwork percussion, against the lyrical long lines of
the soloist.
But it was Hyperprism
(1922-1923) for flute, clarinet, three horns, two trumpets,
two trombones and sixteen percussion instruments that wrought
the revolution. Its colours and its construction by blocks and
rhythmic change were completely new, and it too caused a scandal
on its first performance. Much of the writing is for unpitched
percussion sounding and clashing against each other; in between,
the pitched instruments create blocks of sound, in contrasting
rhythms to the percussion, with the insistence on a repeated
note that is another feature of Varèse's style. It is
a short work, saying all it needs, no more and no less, and
it evokes the power and rhythm and aggressive sounds of the
urban jungle. Octandre (1923) for seven wind and
double bass, is actually in three linked movements, a different
wind instrument introducing each. It is a kind of nature equivalent
to the urban insistence of Hyperprism, a raw primitive
landscape or jungle, equally populated by blocks of sound, but
with the textures of wind rather than the raucousness of percussion.
Intégrales (1924-1925) for eleven wind
and four percussion completes what amounts to a trilogy. With
its different blocks moving at different speeds, its repetition
of single notes and individual incident, and the impulse of
the percussion, it has a primitive energy turning at its centre
into a more lyrical moment, and gave rise to the expression
`spatial music'.
Varèse then
turned back to a large scale work for orchestra, Arcana
(1925-1927), which has a quotation from Paracletus at the head
of the score, referring to the order of stars. Its raw expression
is based on a single idea of 11 notes, which provides the material
for returning in many different shapes and moods, sound-blocks
conflicting with each other, but with a quiet close added in
1960. He followed it with his most famous work, Ionisation
(1929-1931) for thirteen percussion, written during a period
in Paris (1928-1933). It took the earlier trilogy of short chamber
works to its logical conclusion: the complete absence of any
instruments other than percussion, and, until the use of tuned
percussion, the complete absence of any pitched sounds apart
from the variable wail of the siren, which opens the work and
regularly returns. It has an extraordinary sense of forward
motion, created by the rhythms and by the movement of percussive
sounds and colours, and a mesmerizing sound-world of hard, sharp,
incisive percussion. It is believed to be the first Western
piece for percussion alone, and its demonstration of how unpitched
material could create a musical piece has been extremely influential.
With Ecuatorial
(1932-1934) for bass soloist or bass chorus, eight brass, piano,
organ, two ondes martenots, and percussion, Varèse extended
his available sounds by using voice and the then new ondes martenot,
an early electronic instrument whose haunting sound has permeated
much French music since Ecuatorial. Influenced by pre-Columbian
art and setting a Mayan poem (in Spanish), it has an ethereal,
incantatory ritualistic quality. The incantatory also permeates
Density 21.5 (1936) for flute, commissioned for
a flute made of platinum (whose density is 21.5). Its precursor,
like so many 20th-century solo flute works, is Debussy's
Syrinx, and it opens with a plaintive, pastoral flute
unravelling a climbing melody, but it quickly moves into more
ecstatic regions with wide leaps, regularly touching base with
the pastoral source.
Apart from Étude
pour Espace (1947) for chorus, two percussion and tape,
Varèse remained silent until the gift of a tape recorder
(then recently invented) opened up new possibilities of sounds
and sound patterns. The result was his masterpiece Déserts
(?1950-1954) for fourteen wind, piano, five percussion and tape,
originally intended for a projected film showing the deserts
in the landscape and the deserts in the mind, and the first
work anywhere for orchestra and tape. The tape segments are
inserted at three points in the score, and are of musique-concrète
sounds, including modified instruments, lonely, isolated or
echoing, their colours quite unlike anything possible from an
orchestra. The piece progresses through opposing planes, and
its overall tone is of suffering and of desolation; the first
tape entry creates a moment of shock, its frightening, threatening
sounds like distorted screams or cries divorced from the instrumental
colours, but connected like a dark mirror or a shadow. It ends,
though, with the deserts in quiet repose.
Nocturnal
(1961) for soprano, bass chorus and orchestra is a bleak setting
of a few phrases from Anaïs Nin's The House of Incest,
the orchestra including two ondes martenots. Varèse started
two companion works, Nocturnal II and Nuit
for soprano and nine or ten instruments, both based on texts
from the same source, but neither were completed. His final
two completed works were both for tape, the short La procession
de Vergès (1955), and the major Poème electronique
(1957-1958). Commissioned for the Le Corbusier Philips pavilion
at the 1958 Brussels Exposition (in which Xenakis
was also involved), the latter used 400 loudspeakers sweeping
the sound through the building. It is based on a wide variety
of concrète and electronic sounds, including transformations
of percussion instruments, Étude pour Espace,
natural sounds, and a voice. Varèse said he wanted it
to express tragedy or an inquisition, and it has extraordinary
spatial effects, with elements of fury and loneliness, its ending
launching into a harsh new world. It remains one of the most
powerful of all electronic works, and at the Exposition it was
heard by more than two million people.
Varèse was
very active as a conductor and promoter of new music, especially
during the earlier part of his career.
───────────────────────────────────────
works surviving:
- Amériques
and Arcana for orch.
- Density 21.5
for solo flute; Déserts for wind, piano, percussion
and tape; Ecuatorial for bass, brass, piano, organ, ondes
martenot and percussion; Hyperprism for wind and percussion;
Intégrales for wind and percussion; Ionisation
for percussion; Octandre for wind and double bass
- Étude
pour Espace for chorus, pianos and percussion; Nocturnal
for soprano, bass, chorus and orchestra (completed by Chou Wen-chung);
song cycle Offrandes for soprano and ensemble
- Poème
électronique for tape; electronic film score La
procession de Vergès
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
All of Varèse's
surviving works are recommended. Ionisation (1929-1931)
makes a sensible place to start; for those new to his music,
it is worth immediately repeating in on a first listening, as
the impulse and the form then emerge over the shock of the new.
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
H.Jolivet Varèse,
1973 (in French)
F.Oulette Edgard
Varèse, 1966, English trans. 1968
L.Varèse
A Looking-glass Diary, York, 1972
O.Vivier Varèse,
1973
───────────────────────────────────────
VIERNE
Louis
born 8th October
1870 at Poitiers
died 2nd June 1937
at Paris
───────────────────────────────────────
Louis Vierne was one of the last major exponents
of highly chromatic late-Romanticism, expressed in a series
of symphonies for organ. The style of these works is partly
predicated by the huge, powerful and sonorous late 19th-century
organs for which he was writing, such as that at Notre-Dame,
where Vierne was organist from 1900 to his death, and by the
acoustics of the buildings in which they are housed. In these
symphonies Vierne followed the cyclic principles of his teacher
César Franck, where initial ideas permeate and unify
an entire work through transformation. They are more obviously
symphonically constructed than those of Widor, and most of them
are cast in five movements each representing a contrasting mood.
They are vivid works entirely married to the potential of the
instrument, sometimes with power and sonority, often with a
delicate playfulness. The Symphony No.3 op.28
(1912) is perhaps the most popular, the regal opening movement
balanced by the fiery finale; the second and fourth movements
are reflective, the former with a lyrical pastoral mood ending
in a gentle murmur, the latter more ruminative. At the centre
of this mirror structure is a lithe, angular little dance with
quirky harmonic colours. The Symphony No.1 op.14
(1899) includes a thunderous toccata as its finale. The Symphony
No.5 op.57 (1924) is the most introspective, and the most
chromatically extreme, the Symphony No.6 (1930)
the most difficult to play.
His other organ
works include the 24 pièces en style libre op.31
(1913), which follow Bach in using all 24 major and minor keys.
Of his choral music, the Messe Solennelle op.16 (1900)
for chorus and two organs is an antiphonal Mass with an organ
and divided choir at opposite ends of church.
Vierne was nearly
blind from birth, and was celebrated for his playing and in
particular for his improvisation. He died while actually playing
in Notre-Dame. Organ-lovers will need no introduction to his
work, but for others his symphonies are a major contribution
to a genre of music often overlooked, and opportunities to experience
one of these works in the large-scale settings for which they
were intended are rare but should not be missed.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- symphony; 6 symphonies
for organ
- Poème
for piano and orch.
- Les djinns
for orch.
- Marche triomphale
pour le centenaire de Napoleon for organ, brass and timpani
- violin sonatas,
string quartets, piano quintet and other chamber works
- Préludes,
Silhouettes d'enfants, Suite bourguignonne, Trois
nocturnes and other works for piano
- Messe basse
pour les défunts, Pièces de fantaisie
(4 vols.), Pièces en style libre (including Carillon
de Westminster) and other organ works
- song cycle Cinq
poèmes de Baudelaire and other songs; Messe Solennelle
for choir and organ; Ave maria, Ave verum and
other choral works
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Organ Symphony No.3
op.28 (1912)
Pièces
en style libre op.31 (1913) for organ
───────────────────────────────────────
