Earlier this year I used this same image in an article about a piece that the pictured composer, Pierre Boulez, had withdrawn from his catalog, the infuriatingly enticing Trois Psalmodies for piano. It's the most happy, inviting one I could find of him, and while I've been making an effort to get flattering, sunny photos of the people I've talked about for these In Memoriam articles there's an added pressure with Boulez, partially because that for a lot of people, including a part of me, Boulez was the troll under modern music's bridge. For decades there was no way to experience the cutting edge of Avant-Garde classical music without running across his name or his works, and the latter's reputation was primarily painted with the brush of his Piano Sonata no. 2, an especially brutal work that has gained quite a status since its authorship in the 1950's. While I personally favor that work over Jean Barraqué's Piano Sonata, as forbidding an "opus one" work as there ever was, I'll probably never see eye to eye with Boulez's oeuvre or ideals. Sticking to music that doesn't kowtow to popular tastes or Classical music's "relaxing" market niche does make him quite admirable, but it's mostly just not music I can use - and I say that as a man who has spent this entire blog championing works by artists whom the general public found no use for. For this memorial article, however, I'll talk about a work that is the most appropriate musical eulogy for Boulez, and some of you may have heard a different version of it without even realizing it.
The Memoriale is one of the several versions of ...explosante-fixe..., originally written for flute, clarinet and trumpet in the early 1970's as a eulogy for Igor Stravinsky*. I may have mentioned in my last Boulez article that he kept revising and recycling this piece for decades, culminating in a work for flute, midi and orchestra, and that I personally heard Gunther Schuller express disdain at the fact that Boulez was allowed to publish all the revisions as separate pieces and collect royalties for all of them. I'd argue that they're all fairly different from one another (and Stravinsky himself constantly revised and rearranged his own works and nobody complains about that, now do they?!), and my favorite one is the one here, scored for flute, two horns and string sextet. Another composer I personally met, Daron Hagen, claimed that he preferred Boulez works where he "was trying to be Debussy, and not playing mind games with himself (*motions with hands*)", and I can't think of a more Debussy-esque piece of his than this. The Memoriale is lush, a bit capricious and enchanting to a "t", several spins of a kaleidoscope with core material diced up in the lens. The younger Stravinsky would certainly have approved, as the softly jutting flute line and cushioning, sympathetic strings would be right at home in the Firebird, itself heavily indebted to the harmonic doors that Debussy opened for the world. There's also an indebtedness Memoriale has to Debussy directly, as his Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune, allowing a flute solo to dictate rises and falls and cycle back to the same phrases over and over. It's a lovely rest-stop for Boulez's career of making works to stand one's skin on end. And luckily for you guys somebody uploaded a score/recording combo video so you can see Boulez's subtly ingenious orchestrations at work.
Rest in peace, Pierre.
~PNK
*Fun fact: the premiere of The Rite of Spring is closer to Beethoven's time than ours.
OK, the bright side of life first. I'll take a selfish attitude to start so I can insist that, yes, some good things happened this year (though if I were a Cubs fan like certain best friends of mine I'd count the ultimate "Hell Freezing Over" sports event of the year as a good thing). I was able to get a full-time job through a 20-minute interview, the shortest I'll probably ever get in my life, and it's worked out for nearly 3 months now. I still have both my spleens, and...wait... My chamber group Cursive played two excellent, challenging programs this year and are in preparations for a third, the cherry on top being that the musicians involved actually appreciate being in the group and the work that we're doing. I secured future housing with an amazing deal, I don't have any terminal illnesses, and I'm not in crippling debt due to student loans, loansharks or my own multitudinous sins. However, all of us, and I mean everybody who can stand to speak to me without projectile vomiting, can agree that this year sucked supreme shit of every type, shape and species of origin imaginable. Full-stop, cheek-bulging shit-sucking. Let me sum it up with much funnier writing than my own:
Let me say this as clearly as I can: there's nothing America did worse this year (that I know of) than electing Trump president. Nothing. I just heard about how bird flu is ripping through South Korea without proper government acknowledgement or action and every chicken in a meat/egg plant has been ordered to be killed, and Trump's 99.99999% potential presidency is still worse. What the fuck. I'd break my legs in protest but that would only prevent me from sprinting to Canada until my lungs explode. Fuck Trump, fuck this country, fuck the media and fuck humans in general. Fuckity fucker fuckfuckfuckeatmyanuswithshitsauceandbastardinteriorfuckfuckfuckfuckdonkeyanus. And while there have been big wallops of despair like that we've had to endure an obscene number of small wallops (smallops?) of despair in the form of celebrity deaths, including the one-two punch of pop-music legends David Bowie and Prince. I mean, for fuck's sake. The big'un's, of course, dominated social media and the news when their deaths were announced, but dozens of little guys went largely or totally unnoticed, leaving people like me with the sad responsibility of checking Wikipedia's deaths page every day to make sure I don't miss anything. I didn't get into this habit until late this year and most likely wouldn't have bothered if it weren't for the sheer volume of these kinds of deaths, and in doing so I found that a number of classical composers near and dear to my heart left us this year, some of them too young to go and a lot of them well-established and even legendary figures. Normally I'd spend December covering Christmas music (and I might squeeze in a few nods before the month is out) but I've decided that for this year-end I'll talk about my favorite composers that passed away this year, because, sadly, hardly anybody else has bothered to. When I was in Middle School I went to my first classical guitar recitals, perhaps not so surprising as classical guitar recitals aren't something that parents think to take children to as primary cultural education. It was at a Unitarian Universalist church in Kirkland, WA, and the soloist was Michael Partington, arguably the Pacific Northwest's best-kept classical music secret. Partington is a wonderful guitarist whose talent and heart seem larger than this area, making many of us wonder how he hasn't been snatched up by a label or lured to the Northeast or LA by all those that "success" and "money" nonsense we all claim to be above but secretly all want. We'll treasure him while he's still around, and his recital made a fine impression on me at the time, so much so that I bought one of his CD's. The woman selling the discs claimed the one I ended up buying had "fireworks" on it, and though I can't tell if I heard the same fireworks it succeeded in shaping my impressions of what good classical guitar music should be, featuring classics like Lennox Berkeley's Sonatina and Richard Rodney Bennett's Impromptus as well as lesser-known stuff like a pair of etudes by Seattle native Tom Baker. You can get the CD here and it's worth the money, and among the better pieces on the disc is a work by Roland Dyens, a Tunisian-born French guitarist-composer who passed away this year two days before Halloween.
I'll admit that I haven't heard much of Dyens's music, not just because of the dumb luck that I never got around to it but also that classical guitar rep doesn't get much discussion music world, aside from with guitarists, of course. The instrument's modest volume and the overwhelming influence of Spanish national music on the rep has kept most "serious" composers away, even though a number of big-time composers, including the likes of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, have written major works in the field, and I consider at least one pair of works, Maurice Ohana's two large cycles for the 10-string guitar, to be considerable contributions to modern music in general. Much like the Cuban giant Leo Brouwer, Dyens promoted his compositions through his own performance, such as here with his best known piece, Tango en Skai:
Songe Capricorne ("Dream of Capricorn") doesn't have the same crowd-pleasing flair that the Tango does but it's a work very near and dear to my heart - not only did I hear it at the right place and the right time but it further proves that composers can be technically inventive and still hushed and soulful. Dyens's music largely had an air of improvisation and Songe is no exception, shifting moods with emotive grace and allowing for much wiggle room for the performer. The piece shows the truly comprehensive knowledge of the instrument that Dyens had, utilizing chordal counterpoint as well as rushing 16ths, the rich tenor of the guitar's main voice as well as advanced harmonics. While the whole piece is excellent a particularly striking section is the opening to the "bridge" of the piece, with hard harmonics cutting into a string of 16th's at uneven rhythms. All of the fine details, such as the final chords which are explicitly marked to be unstrummed, are in service of a great dramatic sensibility, helping the piece create a portrait of enormous yearning in a vast landscape. It's a piece that has the ability to outlast its creator, and hopefully we can help it last longer than we can even dream of. Rest in peace, Roland.
There's a saying in Hollywood: "you're only as good as your last picture". It's an unsympathetic reminder of the fact that most people only value others in so much as what they can do for others and the quality of those actions, and the only way to stay relevant is by a continuous string of quality. The goal is to create a legacy, a good reputation that ensures that you won't have to keep proving yourself, but nobody knows where legacy's goal line is - which brings us to the ultimate obstacle to creating a legacy, death. It's always easy to look back fondly on someone's works, especially artists, right after their deaths (such as how this year there'll be a Bowie-shaped hole in every record store), and how rose-colored our lenses become is due to a complicated tangle of factors including the artist's reputation just before their death combined with what it was in the previous years as well as which works entered the popular consciousness most recently. However, few incidents incite this kind of backward praise than an untimely death or incapacitation, such as how Death to Smoochynever got respectable viewership until after the suicide of lead actor Robin Williams. This effect is no stranger to Classical composers, though admittedly the niche nature of those who actually follow composers' careers, even back when that was a thing, means that not many of the Short-Shrifted, subjects of my new series on Re-Composing, have gotten the same attention as those in more popular genres. The most consistently remembered of these are composers whose work or lives were snuffed by Totalitarian regimes and the Nazis, their resurrection part of a large-scale movement in the later decades of the 20th century - the most successful of these were concentration camp composers like Erwin Schulhoff and early Soviet modernists like Roslavets, Mosolov and Lourié. A scant handful of composers are actually better known for dying young than for any one piece that they wrote, such as the Belgian-born Guillaume Lekeu, dead at 24 from contaminated sorbet and author of the pseudo-famous Adagio pour quatuor d'orchestre, and the thoroughly disappointing William Hurlstone who was at least able to contribute to the distressingly small bassoon sonata rep before his death at 30 from bronchial asthma. The most dramatic of these has to be Heikki Suolahti, a Finnish composer who died at age 16 after writing the Sinfonia Piccola, a work that fascinated Sibelius (though not myself). Short-Shrifted aims to praise composers who died well enough before their time that their works quickly fell out of view, possibly never to be appropriately revived, and I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better opener to the series than Pierre-Octave Ferroud (1900-36).
The above set of pieces for flute is not only one of Ferroud's earliest pieces but also the only piece of his to remain performed in this day and age, a slightly unfortunate case as they're his least challenging and, more importantly, representative works in his oeuvre. Their universal claim to public domain status, something the rest of his music lacks, has a hand in this as well, and the effect is as if the only piece by Beethoven that got performed was that blasted Minuet in G major. For a more impressive introduction we have to get both later and a bit goofy:
A disciple of Florent Schmitt, the most outlandish of the Impressionists, Ferroud broke on the Paris scene in the 20's, one of the most exciting places and times to be a composer, and the above piece, Types (1922-24, originally for piano), is as good as any for an unofficial breakout piece. The piece is a trio of satiric character sketches - an old lothario, a self-important society woman and a frantic businessman - and shows Ferroud's budding language with clarity and flair. Ferroud was unique among French composers in his ability to synthesize Impressionist harmonies and colors with Neoclassical rigor and acidity, creating works both enchanting and forceful, a difficult feat and a singular achievement in his scene. These qualities didn't go unnoticed by his peers, among them Maurice Ravel, one of his chief influences. There's a double-fisted irony in this: a.) Ferroud parodied Ravel's more precious works in the second Type, and b.) they have a common cause of death, effects from car accidents. However, while Ravel's death was a drawn-out exacerbation of a possibly pre-existing brain condition brought on by a car accident, Ferroud's was the much more immediate effect of decapitation. While that doesn't quite scale the dramatic death heights of Albéric Magnard (burned along with his house by German invaders in WWI) or Enrique Granados (drowned trying to save his wife from drowning) it's still one for the books and, if I may suggest comical conspiracy, makes a case for him being a victim of necessary peacekeeping between the warring camps of Impressionism and Neoclassicism, as naturally ne'er the two shall meet.
(This recording is too slow; listen to this (if you're in the U.S.) to hear the true potential of the opening movement)
His Symphony in A major (1930) is arguably his masterpiece, a dense blast of extraordinary Neoclassical writing and one of the best symphonies written by a French composer in any time. Any Neoclassical work walks the rickety tightrope of tasteful irony, trying to acknowledge that the newer old ways are dead and irreverently call back to the older old ways while still maintaining objective beauty and craftsmanship, and Ferroud's Symphony has aged better in this respect than most pieces from this time, keeping the quality high without seeming too stiff or too silly (I'm looking at you, Poulenc). Among the Symphony's admirers was Prokofiev, who suggested a listening of it to his friend Boris Asafiev (whose sole claim to fame is writing a trumpet sonata nobody wants to play). Prokofiev was less impressed with Ferroud's 1927 comic opera Chirurgie ("Surgery", of all things) but any comedy about grim subject matter has some intrinsic value and the music, snipped out here for an orchestral suite, has more than enough fine qualities to pique my interest:
The influence of Stravinsky is so obviously apparent in these works as to need little comment but Ferroud's music never feels cheapened by its allegiance to the cream of the crop (unlike some Poulenc pieces which are blatant Stravinsky ripoffs (start at 3:50)...son of a bitch...). Likewise there is a great variety of moods in his works, such as the lovely opening to his concentrated, subtly orchestrated Serenade (1929), at times a dead ringer for Ned Rorem's early symphonies -
- or his charming-yet-impressive Trio d'anches (1933):
(Sorry if this doesn't work outside the U.S.)
But if there's one medium Ferroud got the most variety out of, and one that seems the most obviously resurrectable on the concert scene, it's his piano works. I mentioned that Types was originally for piano -
- and as unplayable as it sounds, looks, and is it's clear that Ferroud had high hopes for the instrument's potential. His piano works encompass the whole of his career and style, sometimes laying his techniques bare for the world to see, such as how the haunting Prelude and Forlane (1922) reveals his ingenuity at blending incongruous scales together to create liquid, novel lines:
Two piano works in particular beg for repeat performances. The first is Fables, a collection of miniatures that span the whole of Ferroud's emotional range and are able to contain his unique language in a compact, playable style, and the fact that these highly likable quickies haven't been played regularly since their conception in 1931 infuriates me.
The other is the Sonatina in C-sharp minor, his "big piece" for the instrument. Full-blown sonatas, while never all that popular among the French (despite some excellent piano entries by the likes of Paul Dukas and Vincent d'Indy), had fallen out of fashion during the latter half of la belle époque and sonatinas, once a shallow teaching medium, were totally revitalized as a dynamic platform for invention and charm. While many countries, notably the Netherlands and Sweden experienced Sonatina Fever (with composers as disparate as Sibelius and Bartók trying their hand at them) the French were particularly deft at them and Ravel, Roussel, Milhaud and Hahn all wrote excellent works in the genre, though the champion was the sadly neglected Maurice Emmanuel at six varied, luscious pieces (now there's an article I need to write). Ferroud's Sonatina isn't quite as dense as the Symphony but takes a great crack at it and all the Ferroudian hallmarks are here - primitive melodies juxtaposed on illusory arpeggios, earnestness on top of foreboding, and remarkably tasteful virtuosity.
Many of Ferroud's score can be downloaded at his IMSLP page, further proof that we are living in the best world we've ever had right now (except for Trump's existence, of course). There's such greatness for new players to explore that there's no way to go into it here, but I can leave you with a contrasting pair of works: the Central Park in the Dark-style Foules (Crowds) (1924) and the teenage-conceived Andante Cordial (1919/1926). Here's to meager vindication of the untimely deceased and hopefully more articles to come.
There's a trend among French composers that one could see as a blessing in disguise - many French composers end up writing few works but take great care in writing them, sacrificing prolificness for craftsmanship. This obviously doesn't afflict too many French composers that it's a big problem - just look at Darius Milhaud and his 400+ opus'd pieces - but I can't help but find it a bit troubling. The French "tradition" of self-suppression and -destruction has many cases, from Ernest Chausson to Henri Dutilleux, and most famously Paul Dukas with only 13 pieces published in his lifetime, leaving everything written before 1891 unpublished and abandoning or destroying many later works. Another notable case is Maurice Duruflé, whose completed opus'd compositions only reach op. 14. The most extreme case, however, is that of Jean Barraqué (1928-73), one of the most enigmatic and difficult figures of French Classical music.
Barraqué was a highly meticulous, self-critical artist, so much so that when he completed his large, unwieldy Piano Sonata (1950-52) -
- he decided to really, really declare it his de facto OPUS ONE and suppressed/destroyed all his earlier works. He was a devout serialist and took the Boulez-Piano Sonata no. 2 approach to composition in his Sonata, that being the mood of running through a spanking machine. A stir was caused the year of its publication when the critic André Hodeir, in his book Since Debussy, declared the then-unperformed Sonata the greatest piano sonata since Beethoven, a pretty absurd claim for a piece by a composer with only two premiered works under his belt and the most insane sonata since Boulez waiting for someone to mistakenly stick their hand in looking for a candy bar. This of course caused laughter and skepticism, but his later accomplishments have gained some serious praise from critics and adventurous concertgoers. His use of multiple, unrelated tone rows in a piece, what he called "proliferating series", makes his brand of serialism not only somewhat unique but doubly difficult to analyze, as new rows are gradually insinuated into pieces rather than clearly announced, though I've often found that composers who are terribly worried about an audience of theorists crying foul if they can't easily pick apart every formal detail of their works are often composers with little to no musical personality. That being said Barraque's music is highly combative and thorny, though at times highly compelling in its drama and overwhelming sense of doom, such as in the pieces from his unfinished Death of Virgil cycle like Les Temps Restitué (1956-68):
His biography doesn't lessen the doom much, as he was involved in a car accident in '64 and his apartment caught fire in '68, not to mention his frequent health problems and sudden death at age 45. Altogether only 10 completed Barraqué works survive to this day, and it would have only been presumed to be 9 if today's piece hadn't been found among Barraqué's papers less than a decade ago.
Written sometime in the late '40's, the Sonata for Solo Violin was long considered one of the approximately 30 works Barraqué wrote and destroyed prior to the Piano Sonata, excluding a short piano piece titled Retour that escaped into a 2009 anthology by Bärenreiter. The violin Sonata was discovered around the same time and is available on special order from Bärenreiter, though you apparently have to leap through some asking-nicely hoops to get a copy. This is a way of saying I couldn't find the score for this review, though from this excellent performance we can suss out a good feeling for the piece without the physical notes. In contrast to the slamming despair of the Piano Sonata and some other Barraqué works, the Sonata for Solo Violin is a playful, charming piece, still serial and jagged but far more manageable and sly, kind of like Giselher Klebe's Sonata for Solo Violin no. 2(now there's a composer I need to talk about). These kinds of pieces are all about turning on a long series of dimes with the skill of a mountain goat, the drama largely drawn from snippets of ideas colliding with one another, forcing the performer on as many toes as they can muster. If done well the playfulness shines through and the performer here, Rachel Field, clears all the hurdles with style and passion. I'm not sure what the opposite of not letting a clown be serious would be, but it seems that this fine-'n'-fun Sonata was repressed because, or at least I'd like to think so, it wasn't a serious enough a statement for Barraqué to let it out of the box. Whatever the true reason it's no outrageous claim to say that there's a lot about Barraqué that we may never understand, but at least we don't have to let him stomp on any piece of his that may garner a smile. Especially since he's dead now. ~PNK
A while ago I did an article on a CD by pianist Patricia Goodson that featured a bunch of great pieces by known-and-unknown American composers, and one of my favorite pieces on the disc was Augusta Read Thomas's Whites, a diffusely compelling sonic exploration of the color white. My liking for the piece came up against a factoid I discovered in researching that article - Whites, as well as Thomas's deserving-of-performance Sonata for solo trumpet, had been withdrawn by Thomas herself and has been out of print for decades. Some composers feel the need to discourage performance of, or outright destroy, pieces of theirs that they think aren't up to snuff, and in cases such as Paul Dukas what they deemed snuff-full enough is so little their whole oeuvre can be performed in a marathon without much discomfort. The thing of it is...sometimes artists are wrong. Really wrong, and in a way that is needlessly destructive. Hell, most of Kafka's work would have been lost to the ages if his will's executors had followed his instructions to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death. I've done some searching and found a number of quality works that their authors tried to bury, in some cases successfully, and we'll examine them this January as Withdrawn Month, apt as everybody is trapped indoors cursing and letting their social lives wither for the sake of blankets and fresh coffee. Originally I was going to wait on these articles to finish the Marco Polo Awards but a staggering coincidence occurred and forced my hand. We are now living in an age where Pierre Boulez is no more.
Boulez is a figure so ubiquitous in the minds of the classical music community that one cannot throw a conversational stick and not hit several conflicting opinions, especially among composers. I've met a number of name composers in my day and all of them had something to say about Boulez even if they were never asked about him. When Daron Hagen visited UPS to do a masterclass he listed Boulez's Éclat among his six favorite works, claiming that Boulez was at his best emulating Debussy and not "playing mind games with himself". Gunther Schuller, a longtime conducting champion of some crushingly difficult composers, wanted to write Boulez an angry letter for publishing 13 different revisions of his piece ...explosante-fixe... and collecting royalty checks for each one. I knew about Boulez long before I heard any of his works because I had his Varèse album in high school, holding on to it before discovering how much better Riccardo Chailley's complete Varèse CD set is. However you personally feel about Boulez is merely one internal voice against the universal truth of his enormous presence in international music, and even a voice as iconoclastic as his feels the pressure to regulate his public image, such as the case with a handful of early pieces of his that were discarded before seeing print. Luckily for me, one of them is preserved in an archival recording, and considering that, as of this writing, Boulez has been dead for only a day there's no time like the present to reveal a supposed skeleton in his closet.
Boulez's first acknowledged work is the 12 Notationsfor piano from 1945, one of my two favorite works of his; the other is memoriale (...explosante-fixe...originel)for solo flute, two horns and string sextet from 1985. The work we're looking at today, 3 Psalmodies for piano, was written earlier in the same year as Notations but never saw the light of printed day. At this time in his life Boulez was under the wings of Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz, the biggest proponents of serialism in France at the time, and as such the Notations are Webern-brief and overtly experimental, each one highly focused studies in color and technique. They also exist at a time when he was still open to a bit of natural expression, and that openness is more apparent in the Psalmodies. The major difference between the Psalmodies and the rest of Boulez's work is immediately apparent - the former has actual drama. Many of the same compositional tricks are present from the Notations, such as percussive basement rumblings, explosive and disjointed arpeggios, duets that are unsure of who is leading who, etc., but rather than concentrate these techniques into terse blocks Boulez has arranged them into what we believe in our hearts to be full pieces with beginnings, middles and ends. The writer Peter O'Hagan wrote about the Psalmodies in his essay "Pierre Boulez and the Founding of IRCAM" (collected in the book French Music Since Berlioz) and was able to track down a manuscript of the piece in order to show the first few bars as an example::
O'Hagan saw a great deal of Messiaen's influence in these pieces and I can't help but acknowledge treble figurations reminiscent of birdsong, references to Catholicism, violently irregular rhythms and more Messiaenisms. Heck, the recording here is made by another Messiaen disciple, the highly obscure Yvette Grimaud, who apparently was an ethnomusicologist and premiered the Psalmodies, Notations and famously impossible-to-play Piano Sonata no. 2 from what little I was able to gather on her. She also composed some music, including microtonal works, so there's another detective case for me. The harmonic language certainly isn't Messiaen, though, and fits more with accepted atonal chord structures of the time, and the mood is less "mystical awe" and more "chased by a goblin". The most interesting thing to me, though, is that this score example is nowhere in the recording, and I say that having listened to it multiple times. There are chords that sound like the ones in the example and times where the example could have occurred but it just never shows up. Now, I know that O'Hagan probably had access to the manuscript, as one is housed in the Bibliothèque Musicale Gustav Mahler in Paris, and it's unlikely he would pull an example out of his explosante-derrière to make a point. The question now arises as to whether this is a different version of the pieces or if this recording is of a different piece altogether. I'm erring to the former, partially so this article isn't a complete waste of everybody's time, and also because I can't find a listing for a suitable alternative in Boulez's catalog, even among the withdrawn works. Either way I'd be very interested to see the full score of the Psalmodies, perhaps just so there can be a work by Boulez that I'm able and inclined to play aside from the Notations. In the meantime if anybody out there has more information on this piece I'd love to hear it, and in the meanertime let's admire how a 20-year-old composer under the influence of a powerful teacher can't help but write an original and cohesive piece and then decide it's not original enough. Rest in Peace, you magnificent solipsist.
It's an understatement that Baroque music rarely gets featured on these blogs, as in point of fact Baroque music has never been featured on this particular blog - the closest I've gotten to that is Unico Wilhelm von Wassenaer's Concerti Armonici and those were Late Baroque at best. Luckily for this series I found a Baroque piece that fits the bill, and because of my lack of experience with Baroque music I hadn't heard of the piece or its composer until only yesterday. Sébastien de Brossard (1655-1730) was a composer, theorist and collector of manuscripts and books on music, and much of his surviving music appears to be sacred and secular vocal music, a genre we're not touching on today in the least. Instead of his usual fare today we're looking at a seeming contradiction in terms - a Symphonie de Noël that's only three minutes long and is written for only three voices.
Back in the quite olden days a "symphony" was usually a short instrumental piece that was part of a larger work, and there was so much variance in what a symphony could be that the term was largely interchangeable with other formal terms. This Symphonie de Noël carries a subtitle: "Joseph est bien marie", or "Joseph is married", though I'd be hard pressed to tell you where exactly in the music I can find anything Christmassy. Like many instrumental pieces of the time the Symphonie is scored for two equal treble voices and a basso continuo, and in an original score bass line might carry figured bass markings (I'm pretty sure this isn't an original manuscript from the time). While there is an obvious hierarchy with the treble voices the lines overlap and intertwine, the second voice often mirroring the first in such a way as to get higher than it, a common feature in music of this era and one that lends the piece a bit of charm. The likability of the piece, while perhaps not apparent from looking at the score, is evident when performed by people who value zest in life, as do these performers (Ernst Stolz, recorder 1; Ernst Stolz, recorder 2; Ernst Stolz, viola da gamba; Ernst Stolz, organ).
As the organ and religious music go hand in pedal you'd think there'd be piles of great Christmas-themed music, though I wasn't able to find as much (in the formal classical sphere) as I'd like. One piece I'd love to show you guys but couldn't find a recording of on YouTube is Gardner Read's Chorale-Fantasia, op. 50, based on "Good King Wenceslas" and morphing that old chestnut with wicked modern harmonies and dense organ sonorities. I found a good replacement piece in the Variations sur un Noël, op. 20 by Marcel Dupré, one of the most famous members of the great French organ tradition.
Dupré was a disciple of Cesar Franck through and through, stretching tonality as far as it will go through intertwining, highly chromatic counterpoint and gnarly contrasts. The theme might have a different name in France but I know it as "Now the Green Blade Riseth" and it gets a very sophisticated treatment here:
The chromaticism kicks in with the first variation, rolling and rambling and painting the town red. It's a good example of harmonic shifts that wouldn't sound nearly as good played at a slower tempo but sound great whipped past at ear-massage speed. When the piece does slow down we get to hear the haunting third variation, a canon at the octave:
This smashes right into planing dissonances:
It's not often that organ music aims to shock, so moments like this certainly stand out in the rep. Other moments of inspiration come in the form of a triple canon at the fourth and fifth:
The rest is best left for you to discover, like extra presents hidden behind other presents, and the onus remains on me to find a way to show you the Gardner Read Chorale-Fantasia in recording form. We're halfway there, aren't we? Better make the green blade speedeth to the next article! (sorry) ~PNK
One of the most hazardous variables in the life of a musician, one that is rarely considered in a full appraisal of an artist's life, is the role of the artist's family. The question is not only how much they supported the artist's development, but also applies to how their work is treated after their death. A particularly sad case I came across is Thomas Peterson, an absolutely obscure Seattle composer who went unannounced through his whole life and quietly passed away in 2006. I found a few works of his on Dartmouth professor Larry Polansky's website, and Polansky led me to Peterson's old friend David Mahler. Mahler told me that the only kin who came in contact with Peterson's works after his death was his sister, who didn't understand the value of the work, and threw the majority of it out with the trash. Part of this included his unique quarter-tone counterpoint system, developed by detuning a chintzy Casio keyboard and playing it alongside a normally tuned one. I can't begin to tell you how heartbreaking that is, especially because of how rare successfully self-taught composers are - Meyer Kupferman's career consistency is doubly inspiring in light of this statistic. This brings us to Lucien Durosoir (1878-1955), a virtuoso violinist who taught himself composition, making little to no effort to show his work to the world. If it wasn't for the discovery of his manuscripts by his son, Durosoir's work may have been stuffed into the dustbin of history, and France would have been deprived of one of its most fascinating auto-didactic Classical oeuvres.
Entering the Paris Conservatoire at age 14, Durosoir enjoyed great success as a soloist, distinguishing himself with Parisian premieres of important late-Romantic violin concertos by Brahms, Strauss and Gade. He worked as a stretcher-carrier in the first World War, and during his duties became increasingly drawn to composition, collecting any and all scores that took his fancy. In 1921 he was offered the first violin chair of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but was involved in an accident before he could accept the post and was forced to give up playing the violin entirely. His retirement separated him from Parisian artistic circles, and his dormant compositional aspirations took flight. Receiving virtually no input from contemporary figures and trends, he developed a rich personal voice, aware of his time but pointing towards the internal timelessness of his own psyche.
His Trio avec piano, one of his most extended and representative works, shows off his penchant for unique harmonic textures and extreme drama right off the bat. A hypnotic piano motive anchors the listener as the strings swoon and melt into exotic outer harmonies, often employing harmonics and different bowing techniques to heighten the otherworldly air. There are times when Durosoir can't keep his imagination still, employing so many contrasting textural and harmonic ideas at once that the piece feels ready to collapse under its own weight (à la Jean Huré's Piano Quintet). He had that lovely ability to introduce recurring ideas in the middle of a seemingly rhapsodic section only to pull them out of his hat later on to create long-form cohesion, and even when the Trio seems to slip into noodling a familiar ornament or color surfaces. Despite this I wouldn't recommend Durosoir's music for those looking for a half-hour of incessant thematic poundingà la Franck's Symphony in D Minor*, as the arc trajectory of the Trio is more akin to a mountain range or the life cycle of a phoenix, a series of rhapsodic episodes linked by reiterations the mesmeric opening section - until the halfway point (13' 50''). Even the yearning adagio of the second movement can't fully control the tendril-like movements of the strings, and one can't help but think of the sight underneath a carpet of lily-pads, their vines tangling organically in the dark. One also can't help but read the video's description and see the uploader's description of the movement - "a piercing sadness from another time." I'll admit that Durosoir's harmonies occasionally seem a bit "I wrote this down but didn't actually listen to it", a tad sour for the rest of the piece, though I also get the feeling that the performers of the Trio didn't quite understand the piece as a whole. These attributes are entirely understandable when you consider that Durosoir had little-to-no performance opportunities for his work, composing merely for himself. The last "movement" is the most volatile of the bunch, ornaments and spare notes leaping from the fold without warning and harmonies at their most unpredictable. However, shades of the opening phase in under different cloaks, and the movement winds down for a bit before erupting in the final seconds. It may be a while before the music world fully understand's Durosoir's music, as is the case with isolated artistic passions. His works are certainly concert-worthy and don't require ludicrous instrumentation or degrees in parapsychology, but there are those moments which aren't entirely, shall we say, "provable". However, those quixotic wrinkles are not only valuable to his artistic M.O. but also in the spirit of Debussy's dream of a lush musical world unconstrained by traditional notions of organicism and apartment-complex top-to-bottom order. His pieces reflect a wild internal world that can't be pruned to fit a front lawn, one far more reminiscent of the winding roots of an ancient forest, paths down which only shadows can travel. That being said, there's always room for simplicity, and among his works his Berceuse for cello and piano makes a calm and gentle end to a program of dense abandon, featuring one of his most poignant melodies. Once again, real beauty has no need to explain itself, and Durosoir's sui generis oeuvre has enough mystery and sincerity to endure on its own energies. Here's to another rock overturned, revealing rich soils and the untrimmed growth they bear.
~PNK
*If pressed to describe the Franck Symphony in a word I can't imagine a better candidate than "gooey". A lot of orchestra subscriber headaches might be fixed by simply replacing all instances of Franck's over-insistent ode to textural opaqueness with Paul Dukas's much fresher (and far less performed) Symphony in C.
God bless the internet and its users' bottomless curiosity, for otherwise I would never have found this secret rosace. Though a much longer celebration of the Public Domain Renaissance is coming I can say in few words and free from hesitation that the internet's infinite storage space and inexhaustible generosity has allowed once-forgotten pieces to float to the surface and craft a new digital repertoire, free from petty economics and codified tastes. Most of the music I've covered on this blog wouldn't have made it to my computer so easily without the help of YouTube, IMSLP and many other extraordinary free resources that you have no business ignoring if you love classical music and its potential futures. That being said, today's work was discovered only very recently but its craftsmanship and emotional heft made singing its praises top priority, and it was found only by the luck of random experimentation.
As I mentioned in my review of Bruce Simonds's Prelude on "Iam sol recedit igneus" organ composition is often a fly-by-night genre, its performers writing a handful of their own works and then moving on with their lives. As I bit my lips trying desperately not to call the compositional ambitions of these organists "pipe dreams" I remembered that a lack of prolificness is no guarantee of artistic failure ("Of course not!" huffed Abel Decaux.). Before I checked Worldcat I thought René Blin was one of these guys, but the case is not so much a lack of extant works as much of a lack of works people have bothered to put up on his IMSLP page. Blin's most notable accomplishment was his work as the organist and choirmaster at Église Sainte-Élisabeth-de-Hongrie for nearly 30 years, though he did publish a few dozen works for organ, piano and choir along the first half of the 20th century. However, only three of his organ pieces have made it to the loving embrace of the Petrucci Music Library, and while his Organ Symphony does look pretty impressive (or just long) I'd bet dollars to donuts that his Rosace en violet dans la pénombre du soir is his best bet for contemporary immortality.
I suspect that the New Digital Repertoire will include lots of eye-catching titles, and Rosace en violet dans la pénombre du soir (purple rose in the penumbra of the evening) is quite pleasing to the mind's eye as well as the ones in your face. When I was but a naive viewer of this work I took the title literally and imagined a purple rose bathed in the half-light of the setting sun. As wonderful as that image is to behold the excellent YouTube performance that I'm using today mentions stained glass, and I decided to do a bit of research. As you can imagine l'Église Sainte-Élisabeth-de-Hongrie has a lot of exquisite stained glass, and one window in particular got stuck in my eye for its obvious significance to my query:
Yep, those are purple roses, and my research into their meaning uncovered a lot more than I could have guessed. The miracle of the roses is a Catholic legend that has been attributed to many female Saints, including the Saint Elizabeth of Hungary that loomed large over Blin's work. I'm not exactly sure of the significance of purple roses in Catholic symbolism, though purple is the color of the Lenten Season and I found a Holy Cross church in Wisconsin that uses different colored roses in their Elizabeth Ministry program, wherein purple roses are reserved for special prayers for families. There's an air of pain and mourning surrounding the color in the Catholic faith, and while Blin's Rosace is similarly not an upper its inspiration may be much simpler than the baroque hullabaloo of Catholic symbology. Like the Simonds piece, Rosace is all about the Magic Hour, and soaking in the faint illumination of these flat-yet-deep roses could have been a profound experience for Blin, or at the very least melancholic. My research on flower symbolism revealed across the board that purple roses stand for enchantment and mystery, quite apt as they're a modern crossbreed and not naturally occurring, and Blin nails both those qualities on the head.
While written in a traditional-enough context of close-voiced liturgical composition Rosace finds its true colors in the brave new harmonic worlds opened up by the fin de siècle Catholic composition tradition helmed by Fauré and the French organ school (and even Satie's Messe des Pauvresin its own way). There was certainly room in French Catholic music for otherworldliness, as La Belle Époque was all about reviving Catholic mysticism in all its monolithic glory. Right away Blin drags and disjoints harmonic transitions to create modal dissonance and ambiguity. The intertwining lines snake through odd off-key notes, allowing the inverse motions to travel up and down the staff with gentle insistence and urgency. Once the first line of page 2 is near finished louder stops are pulled and a canon at the octave is deployed. The second line has one of my favorite details -
- as the bottom of the first phrase of the canon subject becomes the texture underneath the next phrase, a nearly invisible detail but a testament to Blin's organ writing. He also reverses the order of imitation, letting the left hand lead the way for a while, and any sense on paper that that's not as exciting as it sounds should be quelled by the fact that the canon subjects are intensely lyrical, and the slowly marching pedals only heighten the sense of voluptuous loss. These singing lines give way to glassy planing in a delicately exotic mode, the searching four-part chords intensifying and finally unwinding into a mysterious E sus-2 chord. Again, talking about the piece does little justice to its value to the soul, and thankfully the YouTubing organist Jonathan Orwig has a taste for unearthing fine French organ music from the turn of the 20th century. His performance also turns up on the piece's IMSLP page, meaning you can download it for free and keep Rosace on your mp3 player for those wee-hour bouts of introspection wherein all the best thinking is done.
While I may never turn to René Blin's other works his Rosace is a dark jewel of the French organ school, and as there's already more than one YouTube performance available we may be lucky enough to see it pop up in recitals and even commercial recordings. We need more pieces like it to surface for classical music to stay relevant and enchanting, and luckily the internet has assured that your new favorite piece may only be a few mouse clicks away.
