‘Que la musique sonne’

There are few composers - at least among those who lived beyond their three score years and ten - whose musical output can be contained on two CDs. Edgard Varèse, whose work is celebrated over three evenings at the Southbank Centre this weekend, completed and published a relatively modest amount of music, but his influence on the work of a wide range of musicians continues - 45 years after his death.

Anyone captivated by the range of Varèse’s music - whether through the Southbank or Sage, Gateshead, celebrations or Riccardo Chailly’s award-winning recordings - should investigate Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary edited by the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann. ‘No-one interested in this composer, or indeed the 20th century modernist adventure as a whole, should be without [this book],’ wrote Bayan Northcott in BBC Music Magazine in 2006.

Exquisitely illustrated with material from the Varèse archive, the book contains essays by a range of contributors. There are, of course, pieces on the major compositions, alongside others on the lost early works - destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire; the influence of jazz on his work (it is said that Charlie Parker begged Varèse to teach him composition); the truth about that mythical phone call from a teenage Frank Zappa; his influence on American music; the Whitney connection and his New York patrons; even the art collection of Varèse and his wife, Louise.

One of the most thrilling pieces is ‘Converging Lives: Sixteen Years with Varèse’ by his pupil, assistant and music executor, Chou Wen-Chung. In 1937, Chou was a refugee at 14,

Somehow, despite the chaos and the smell of death around me, I learned of Ravel’s passing, and it dawned upon me that not all composers were dead historical figures. Transfixed by the idea that there were actually ‘living’ composers, I resolved to be one myself.

Some years later, having studied music at the New England Conservatory, Chou found himself in New York, searching for a teacher. He met Colin McPhee who told him, ‘Varèse is your choice,’ but warned him ‘Varèse is a volcano. His music consists of explosion after explosion…you must resist him or you will be buried.’

Varèse telephoned and invited me for a visit. When he asked to see my music, I was embarrassed to show him the first movement of Landscapes (1949)…In this piece I had tried to let fragments of ancient Chinese melodies drift across the sonic space of a western orchestra without conforming to western concepts of musical structure. So I could hardly believe it when I heard him say, ‘Come next week at the same time.’ Wondering how I could afford his tuition, I hesitated. He exploded, offended that I thought he was offering to teach me for money. He then explained how he had benefited from Debussy, Busoni and Romain Rolland without paying ‘a sou’. All he wanted was for me to ‘pass on the heritage’. Then he added with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘but perhaps you will find me a big old Chinese gong someday?’ He did not have to wait for long. In his later years, he was often shown in photos playing the enormous tam-tam I gave him. After his death, Louise gave me his favourite Chinese gong which he had bought on the street in Paris at about the time he finished Ionisation. This exchange of a tam-tam for a gong must have some symbolic meaning.

Chou goes on to describe how he came to edit Varèse’s work after his death, including a definitive version of Amériques for Chailly. ‘His art rests on a delicate balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, or logical construct and metaphorical suffering,’ he claims. ‘While I would spare no effort collecting information regarding Varèse’s intentions, planning and sketches, I would also attempt to examine every issue from his viewpoint emotionally as well as rationally.’

The book ends with a series of statements from other composers, including Pierre Boulez (‘Was he ever tempted to imagine that he was born too late in a world too young?’), Elliott Carter (‘After his death he was played much more frequently and with greater care. How he would have been cheered by this!’), Dieter Schnebel (‘I can still picture him, fifty-five years [after encountering him at Darmstadt] as if he were standing before me.’), Peter Eötvös - who collaborated with Frank Zappa, shortly before the latter’s death, on some as yet unreleased recordings, and others.

Anyone within reach of London or Gateshead this weekend should treat themselves to the music of Varèse, a pioneer who remains unique, and this superb book. How many other composers have influenced jazz musicians, composers such as Birtwistle and Schnittke, and rock musicians from OMD to Can to jazz-rock combo Chicago?

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, edited by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, is published by the Boydell Press in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation. There is a limited quantity of this lavishly-produced volume left, and further reprints are unlikely. More information about the Southbank concerts may be found here.

Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!

To celebrate Elliott Carter’s 100th birthday, we have published – in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation - Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait by Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler. Here Professor Shreffler relates how the book took shape:

No one who has ever visited the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel will ever forget the stunning view of the Rhine from the reading room windows. Nestled away in a corner of one of Basel's most picturesque town squares, across from the 900-year old cathedral, the building houses not medieval manuscripts, as the surroundings suggest, but rather the largest private collection of documents relating to 20th and 21st-century music in the world: Stravinsky, Webern, Bartok, and Boulez are only a few of the more than 100 collections.

I remember very well how one day in 1988, my attention was diverted from that seriously distracting view of the river and the Webern manuscripts I was studying by the sight of the enormous table in the adjoining room covered with boxes. "That's Elliott Carter," Felix Meyer, then a curator and now Director of the Paul Sacher Foundation, explained. Since then material has continued to flow from New York City to Basel, as works are completed and closets cleaned out. While there is still Carter material in the Library of Congress and other libraries, the bulk of his music manuscripts and correspondence is in the Paul Sacher Foundation, where in the twenty years since the collection arrived it has been carefully catalogued and preserved in the Foundation's vast, climate controlled, three-story deep underground safe.

The decision to publish some of this material with extensive commentary in honor of the composer's centennial was an easy one. We both love Carter's music and relished the chance to steep ourselves in it. The hard part was choosing from roughly 10,000 letters, thousands of pages of sketches, and dozens of lecture texts, articles and photographs in the archives, almost all of it previously unpublished. It was also difficult to select which works we wanted to include, especially since Carter has become quite prolific in his later years (his works list is at 128 and counting…). The logistics of a transatlantic collaboration between Boston and Basel were easily overcome with the help of email, phone calls, and a few international flights. We ultimately decided to present a portrait of the composer within the musical life of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, and hope in particular to have chosen texts that illuminate his situation as an American composer in the world.

To accompany Carter throughout his almost century-long existence is to experience vicariously the ups and downs of American music in the twentieth century. We trace his tentative beginnings in the 1920s and '30s, his steady rise to fame, his efforts to establish institutions of new music in the US, and his artistic friendships with some of the leading musicians of the last hundred years. Carter generously shared his memories and his time during our visits to his Greenwich Village apartment; the weeklong Carter festival at Tanglewood this past summer brought us all together again.

Carter, hale, hearty, and as productive as ever, will turn 100 on December 11. When Felix and I started working on this book, our ages taken together added up to that number exactly. Now, about a year and a half later – relieved that we will in fact meet this very hard deadline! – we have surpassed him with a collective age of 102, and look forward to celebrating his 101st, 102nd and many subsequent birthdays after that - but with glasses of champagne, not new books.

Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents is available now from all good booksellers. In the Financial Times, Andrew Clark, has already called it “lavishly illustrated, handsomely documented and superbly annotated” and “for committed Carterites, the only acceptable Christmas present”. Congratulations, Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler, and congratulations too, Elliott Carter.

Music Scholars come to Music City

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - At 3am on November 7^th, a woman in Nashville, having learned that her husband was in Fuel Bar and Nightclub with another woman, came by and called him out into the parking lot, writes Ralph Locke. A quarrel erupted, she cut him in the back with a broken bottle, and he took out a gun and fired a warning shot in the air. I heard about the incident the next morning on the local TV news, and could not help but thinking that it sounded like a country-and-western song.

I was one of some two thousand musicologists and music theorists who were in Nashville that week, attending the joint annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory. Our hotel was a short walk from Second Street, and many of us walked by Fuel at one point or another. After I heard the news about the violent episode, I asked around but was relieved not to find anybody who had been within shooting distance of Fuel (or, I really mean, being-shot distance) during the wee hours of the 7^th.

Aside from newsworthy events of that sort, Nashville - the epicenter of the country-music industry, featuring dozens of high-level, if sometimes too well-fueled, clubs and bars at which an amazing array of hopeful performers strut their stuff - proved an inspired choice. We academics like to flatter ourselves as open-minded, and there are few things that can force open a music scholar’s mind with more drastic efficacy than encountering music of a sort that he or she normally can barely tolerate. True, there were some country-music aficionados among us - I know one, at least - but I imagine I was more typical.

Walking by what looked like a nineteenth-century red-brick church (because that’s what it originally was), and never having heard of this building - the Ryman Auditorium - I was surprised to hear loud chords and joyous applause coming from inside. The guard at the door gave me a ticket that I suppose had been given to her by somebody leaving early. The ticket listed the main performer as Ronnie Milsap, a name that sounded faintly familiar to me, though I wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a woman or a man.

I quickly discovered that Milsap is one of the most beloved male country-music artists and the first country superstar to have been born blind. (He has had, across his decades-long career, more number-one songs on the country chart than any performer except George Strait and Conway Twitty.) We all sat in wooden pews, and people were bringing food and drink from the concessions in the lobby into the hall, as if this were a big outdoor festival. The audience loved Milsap’s banter about his career, and they welcomed as old favorites such love-forever-lost songs as “That Girl Who Waits on Tables Used to Wait for Me at Home.”

Quite a contrast to the sessions at the scholarly conference two blocks up the hill: no shouts of love and appreciation from the floor, for one thing! To be fair, though, many of the attendees noted that there was less contentiousness during this year’s sessions than has sometimes occurred in the past. Perhaps the two societies’ program committees chose particularly well: the papers that I attended were on a very high level. But the people in the audience can take some credit, too. The discussion and debate - often plentiful - was generally carried out in a remarkably constructive spirit. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of methodological pluralism: scholars may be beginning to accept that no one approach or interpretive angle necessarily invalidates another.

A particular excitement at any scholarly meeting surrounds the exhibit of new books. The tables for the Boydell and Brewer/University of Rochester Press family of firms received many visitors and many book orders. I edit URP’s Eastman Studies in Music series, so I looked on with particular pleasure - while trying to be inconspicuous! - as visitors to the booth discovered such recent titles as Beethoven’s Century, by Hugh Macdonald, and Variations on the Canon, a book of new essays created in tribute to the great pianist and critic Charles Rosen. (I kept hearing remarks along the lines of “Look at these names: Treitler, Lockwood, Kerman, even Rosen himself…!”) The fact that the many important books published by Toccata Press are now distributed by Boydell further enriched the wares on display.

But the biggest “wows” were heard as people opened the covers of Boydell’s richly illustrated Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents. Carter turns 100 on 11 December 2008 and continues to compose actively. A wealth of previously unpublished documents, scores, letters and photographs in the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation (in Basel, Switzerland) enabled the authors - Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler - to include 90 illustrations of this material, 60 of them in color. The documents are connected by a flowing and thoughtful text: this is one picture book that can be read with pleasure and profit from beginning to end. Sometimes, at the book table, it seemed that people who picked up this inviting book could barely stop themselves from reading on and on.

And maybe that is the scholar’s equivalent of the whoops, cheers, and applause heard at country-music concerts!

Elliott Carter on Future Radio

Another interesting programme from our near-neighbour On an Overgrown Path on Future Radio, which will be broadcasting a (somewhat early) centenary tribute to Elliott Carter on Sunday February 24th. Once again those wanting to learn more about the 99 year old Mr Carter will be pleased to know that we have a paperback selection of his essays and lectures. Furthermore, in the Autumn we’ll be co-publishing an exciting new volume with the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Elliott Carter: A Tribute in Letters and Documents (exact title still to be announced) edited by Felix Meyer and Anne C Shreffler. More – including an early extract - on what promises to be a stunning volume in later posts. Available – as always – from a loyal band of specialist retailers.