Conversations with Elliott Carter

If the Aldeburgh Festival began (almost) with a bang (see ‘Beside the Seaside’ below) it ended (almost) with the sound of a tiny cymbal - the final note of Elliott Carter’s Conversations which received its world premiere in Snape Maltings last Sunday. Performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard on piano, Colin Currie on percussion and conductor Oliver Knussen on a rather precarious-looking chair, the seven-minute piece packs in a great deal within its short span. Luckily Knussen and his musicians played it twice on the night.

With two other recent pieces on the bill, Helen Grimes’ exuberant Everyone Sang (2010) and Charlotte Bray’s haunting violin concerto, Caught in Treetops (2010), it was an evening (indeed a weekend) for new music at the Festival. One hopes that Carter would have felt in good company. In 1994, in a piece reprinted in his Substance of Things Heard, Paul Griffiths wrote:

You do not have to be eighty-five years old to feel marooned in the past while time races on, but you probably have to be that age - and specifically to be Elliott Carter - to have the reverse feeling of desertion by time’s skidding hurriedly backwards from a point you thought was not only yours but everyone’s. At a public interview before the world premiere in Chicago of his newest orchestral work, Partita, Carter reacted passionately to a question about the future. How could he have any certain hope for his music, he said, when the last decade had seen a rush of young composers - by whom he probably meant anyone under seventy or so - ‘writing like Brahms, and doing it badly’? His tone was regretful, bewildered, but not bitter: he has too much gaiety of mind ever to turn sour - or indeed, ever to write like Brahms. We therefore have the paradox of an aged composer producing some of the most exhilarating music around, and doing so with majestic accomplishment (if that does not seem too settled a term for this athlete of the mind) in his new piece.

But perhaps the youthfulness is not so paradoxical; maybe only the old, in these jaded times, have their innocence intact, and stay able to be surprised by immediate sensory impressions, as Carter is evidently surprised and delighted by sounds. Simplicity and directness have always been as much his blessings as the vaunted ‘complexity’. (Why should this always be introduced as a problem? Who complains of the complexity of a forest?) Indeed, the abundance, to give it an apter name, comes out of a simple certainty about the nature of a composer’s task… [p.22]

Listening to Conversation on Sunday evening - how the piano often seemed primarily percussive and the percussion instruments, especially the vibraphone, took on the more melodic role expected of the piano - we were reminded of a paragraph in Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler’s ‘centennial portrait’ of Carter:

Carter has drawn on existing traditions for key points of his creative process and his artistic philosophy, preferring to prolong and rejuvenate them rather than call them into question. This applies to his preservation of the idea of a self-contained work of art, set down in writing with maximum precision, and to his focus on working with conventional tonal material (for example, precluding electronic sounds and largely avoiding experimental performance techniques on conventional instruments). It applies equally to his understanding of the role of the performer, whom he employs primarily as an interpreter of his ideas and not, as in aleatoric music, as a ‘co-author.’ And finally it is no less applicable, at least in intention, to his understanding of listeners: although Carter has often said that he never thinks of the audience while composing, but only of the performers, his efforts to make the musical events audible, and his penchant for casting his musical discourse in quasi dramatic roles, doubtless spring from a desire to make statements of maximum concision and urgency and to communicate them to his listeners. [Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, pp.16-17]

Let’s hear finally from Elliott Carter himself, as quoted in Bálint Varga’s essential new book, Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers:

Each of my works is an adventure into a new conceptual, expressive, and musical domain which I have not yet explored. Their style is not something consciously thought about, but is a reflection of the expressive and musical intention. To work out a series of stylistic devices and then use them as formulae bores me as a prospect and it bores me in others who do it. Self-repetition is to me a sign of fatigue. [p.43]

In a 1985 postscript to Varga, Carter wrote: ‘The plan of your proposed book seems interesting and I hope you have the best of luck with it. It is courageous of you to include something about an American composer—for all of us have had a very hard time penetrating European indifference to our work.’ There was certainly no indifference on Sunday evening, as rapturous applause followed that delicate cymbal note in the closing minutes of the 64th Aldeburgh Festival.

Beside the Seaside

The 64th Aldeburgh Festival opened last Friday with a bang. Several, actually - many from the gongs and tam tams in Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle. The second half of this thrilling concert was given over to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with an ailing Magdalena Kozena nevertheless giving a superb performance right down to the closings Ewigs. Such is the variety of the Festival programme, even after this big opening number there will be much more to enjoy over the coming weeks.

The New Aldeburgh Anthology is as essential an accompaniment as the highly-collectable Festival programme book. This remarkable collection of prose, poetry and images of Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast has, at its heart, the Aldeburgh Festival in Benjamin Britten’s time and beyond. We celebrate both the Festival and the Anthology with excerpts from Steven Isserlis’ contribution to the latter, appropriately titled ‘Aldeburgh: A Magical Festival’:

My first performance at Aldeburgh was as part of a short masterclass seminar given by the distinguished Danish cellist Erling Blondal Bengtsson. I remember playing the Prelude of Bach’s fifth suite at the end-of-course student concert; about ten minutes after I’d finished, Britten arrived. So alas, I just missed my only chance to play to him. I did, however, get to play Bach to Imogen Holst, who was a friend of my teacher, Jane Cowan. As a result of that, I became friends with ‘Imo’ (well, if a rather bumptious teenager and a distinguished eccentric in her late sixties can be called friends), and she invited me to play her lovely piece for solo cello, The Fall of the Leaf, at a concert that marked her seventieth birthday in 1977. (I received my first-ever national review for that, the Telegraph graciously describing me as ‘the talented Roger Isserlis’.) Later, she invited me back to the festival to give the first performance for many years of her father’s only work for cello, Invocation. So my early memories of Aldeburgh are very much bound up with her. I really don’t think that a character like Imo’s could exist now. I remember her speeches to audiences: bending from the waist down, she would inform them, in the sort of voice now heard only in nursery schools, that they were about to have a ‘lovely, lovely time’. They would sit there meekly, putty in her hands.

At the concert in which I played The Fall of the Leaf, Peter Pears sang songs by Quilter and his contemporaries, with Roger Vignoles at the piano. I listened backstage and was bowled over by the performance; when they came offstage, I was ready for them. ‘That’s the best performance I’ve ever heard of British music!’ I gushed. Peter Pears looked at me a little strangely, as well he might; to him, having introduced so many of the greatest works ever written by a British composer, it must have sounded very foolish. Well, it was a silly thing to say; but I was young…

Another striking memory is from 1974, when Rostropovich was finally allowed out of the Soviet Union and was able to give the premiere of Britten’s Third Suite for solo cello, which had been written for him some years earlier. Again, Britten was sitting in the box; I remember thinking how frail he looked – but he was still a strong presence. We knew that we were listening to history in the making. Since then, I have performed that same Suite (the only one of the three that I play) several times at the Maltings; on each occasion, I have glanced towards the darkened box and imagined that Britten’s ghost was sitting there. It is quite an eerie feeling!

As I think of Aldeburgh and Snape, other memories come tumbling into my brain: the sight of Joyce Grenfell striding into a concert, seemingly oblivious to the excitement she was stirring up among her fellow audience members; Peter Pears and Murray Perahia getting to the very heart of Schumann’s Dichterliebe; Olly Knussen’s torso heaving with enjoyment of a somewhat risqué joke, with his co-director Steuart Bedford sitting with cocked head and knitted eyebrows, doing his good-natured best to understand it; my friend the pianist Paul Coker watching with amused concern a temper tantrum of mine backstage including (I’m ashamed to admit) some kicking of a dressing-room wall, when I felt my cello hadn’t been speaking properly during the first half of a recital; my mother attending a Bach recital I gave in the beautiful Blythburgh church, shortly before she died; Stephen Hough being thrilled by the sound of Britten’s piano, kept at the Red House; and so on. Variety has always been a hallmark of the festival and its associated activities, every visit offering a new and different experience.

The New Aldeburgh Anthology, edited by Ariane Bankes and Jonathan Reekie, is available in paperback, hardback and a limited edition. More books on Benjamin Britten, music associated with Aldeburgh and the history of Suffolk may be found here.

Pronunciation note: Aldeburgh almost rhymes with Marlboro rather than Nuremberg.

Selling Serialism

Luigi Dallapiccola was the first Italian composer to work within the twelve-tone system, and is considered one of Italy's most important composers of the twentieth century. As Brian Alegant writes below and in his recent book, The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola, the emotion in Dallapiccola’s music makes his version of twelve tone an exciting place to start for anyone who thinks they won’t enjoy it.

Anyone who has had to teach twelve-tone music knows that it is a “hard sell.” Having taught music majors for nearly a generation, I can say without hesitation that no other genre of classical music inspires such a hostile reaction as serialism. I have seen and heard students, performers, and even critics denigrate it as abstract, tortured, inhuman, and more about numbers than music.

And yet, most scholars would agree that twelve-tone composition is among the most important musical developments of the twentieth century. Even a partial list of composers who experimented with—or fully embraced—serialism is staggering: Babbitt, Barber, Bartok, Berg, Boulez, Britten, Carter, Crawford, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Mamlock, Martino, Mead, Morris, Nono, Perle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sessions, Schnittke, Skalkattos, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern, and Wuorinen, among many others. And most scholars would also agree that Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75) is among the most accomplished and admired serial composers. His output includes ballets, choral music, concertos, film scores, piano pieces, song cycles, orchestral pieces, and operas. Dallapiccola enjoyed international fame as a lecturer, teacher, and author, and he was a member of the national academies of arts in the U.S., France, and England.

I have been entranced by Dallapiccola’s music ever since I heard David Burge play the Quaderno musicale di Annalibera. I have been listening to his music ever since with increasing appreciation and admiration, and I use his works to introduce twelve-tone to my students (with overwhelmingly positive results).

The scholarly literature on Dallapiccola is vast, and comprises a host of books and monographs, countless articles, and an ever-growing number of dissertations and theses. As a result, we know quite a bit about his oeuvre: namely, his predilection for self-quotation and symbolism, his fondness for intricate counterpoint and systematic designs; his penchant for languages and text setting; his stylistic eclecticism; and his appropriation of Anton Webern’s techniques. And yet many facets of Dallapiccola’s music await further explanation, chief among them a gradual but inexorable absorption of Arnold Schoenberg’s techniques.

In simplest terms, this book does not ask why Dallapiccola composed twelve-tone music, but, rather, how. It examines his repertory through a technical lens and traces the evolution of his praxis over a thirty-year period. In so doing, it highlights facets of his music that have not been previously disclosed, and sheds light on compositions that have been virtually ignored. Ultimately, it aims to complement the existing research in order to understand more fully his technique and his language.

This book attempts in several ways to fill in some of the lacunae in the state of Dallapiccola research: it sheds light on several twelve-tone works of high quality that have been virtually ignored; it discusses these works in depth, so as to help readers understand them analytically and engage with them aurally; it builds upon recent developments in the post-tonal theory by Allen Forte, David Lewin, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, Joseph Straus, and myself; it documents the composer’s seemingly limitless invention and his extraordinary skill and delight in text setting; and, most of all, it endeavors to continue the conversation on this important composer and his serial compositions, whose enchantments and challenges are so richly rewarding.

The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola by Brian Alegant is published by the University of Rochester Press. Anyone interested in the life and work of Dallapiccola should also seek out another Rochester publication, The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola by Raymond Fearn, which is available in paperback from your favourite bookseller.

Good Music for a Free People

During the revolutions of 1848 two dozen members of an orchestra left Berlin for America to bring their music to new audiences. With their repertory of symphonies, opera selections and social dances they helped shape an audience for orchestral music at a seminal time in the history of the public concert. In her new book, Good Music for a Free People, Nancy Newman looks at the history of the Germania Musical Society, as they called themselves, and their effect on their adopted land. In this piece, written specially for the Stave, the author describes how she came across the orchestra and their fascinating story.

My first encounter with the Germania Musical Society was through Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Lawrence Levine’s provocative book had ignited a debate across disciplines about the historical relationship between so-called classical and popular music, a subject that interested me deeply. The Germania Musical Society makes a brief appearance for having played a pivotal role in the emergence of the symphony orchestra as a regular feature of American musical life. Its members were a group of young Berlin musicians who immigrated to the United States in 1848 and presented nearly nine hundred concerts to approximately one million listeners over the next six years.

Although it’s widely acknowledged that German immigrants had a profound effect on American musical practices, what intrigued me was Levine’s characterization of this particular group’s motivations. The orchestra members wanted “to further in the hearts of this politically free people the love of the fine art of music through performance of masterpieces of the greatest German composers”? Why would their listeners’ freedom have mattered? What did political liberty have to do with appreciation of the foremost classical compositions during “the century of artistic autonomy,” as Carl Dahlhaus described it? The relationship between absolute music and political thought was also of on-going interest, and the Germania Musical Society offered a new perspective on this complicated topic.

Following Levine’s trail led me to Skizzen aus dem Leben der Musik-Gesellschaft Germania, a brief memoir by Henry Albrecht, viola and clarinet player for the orchestra. This little-known account raised more questions than it answered. For example, Albrecht describes the members’ departure during the 1848 Revolutions in terms of their adversarial relationship to patronage. The prevailing system in Europe did not produce ideal musical results because it encouraged currying favor. Although noble courts were musically sophisticated and employed “virtuosi of the first rank,” nearly all the musicians sought to exhibit themselves through “exceptional mannerisms.” Albrecht claims that as a result, “a performance rarely appears totally flawless.”

The Germanians, in contrast, were willing to sacrifice their egos for the sake of the ensemble. “In the performance of orchestral works, every member realized that it was his holiest duty never to exhibit an exceptional, individual artistic mannerism.” To me, this articulated a fascinating paradox: by coming to the cultural wilderness of the United States, the Germanians sought the freedom not to show off. Even more surprising, they gave their desire for an alternative to patronage a form that was explicitly political. Not only did they seek an environment that was democratic, but they organized themselves accordingly. They drafted a constitution and agreed to share equitably in rewards and obligations. Aware that in leaving Berlin the orchestra became their sole means of support, the members pledged to place the welfare of the group above self-interest. A social-utopian motto, “One for all and all for one,” was adopted.

Good Music for a Free People makes Albrecht’s fascinating memoir available in English in its entirety for the first time. It also chronicles the orchestra’s travels to the major cities and small towns of the Eastern seaboard, west to the Mississippi, and to southeastern Canada. The ensemble offered Americans first and repeat hearings of works by major composers—especially Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner. They familiarized listeners with current opera repertory by playing overtures and excerpts by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Auber, and Verdi. The Germanians performed with many of the era’s traveling virtuosi, including singers Jenny Lind, Henriette Sontag, and Teresa Parodi; violinists Ole Bull, Camilla Urso, and Miska Hauser; and pianists Alfred Jaëll and Otto Dresel.

At the same time that they helped forge a “classical” canon, the Germanians varied their programs with lighter genres such as polkas, waltzes, and potpourris. A good number of these works were original compositions by members, especially conductors Carl Bergmann (who later conducted the New York Philharmonic) and Carl Lenschow. The diversity and eclecticism of the Germania’s repertory had not been explored previously, however. I analyze how their programs changed over time in response to audiences in Baltimore, Boston, and other cities. During the orchestra’s final year, debates over whether they should segregate their repertory into lighter and more demanding concerts were aired in Dwight’s Journal. The controversy affords unique insights into contemporary attitudes toward the social significance of the public concert as a place where heterogeneous audiences gathered. Ultimately, the Germanians’ manipulation of their repertory reflects a struggle to define the semiotic arena of the arts and leisure by those who served it.

Much of Good Music for a Free People is concerned with events of the 1840s, a remarkable decade in transatlantic history. The Germanians were part of a great movement of Europeans, dislodged by economic and political upheaval, to the New World. German-speaking immigrants became known as “Forty-Eighters,” so named for the Revolutions of that year. The merging of their diverse and often innovative practices with the dominant culture would have a deep impact on many areas of American life.

The 1840s also saw experimental forms of music-making by “private orchestras,” modeled after the touring ensemble of Johann Strauss, and in “promenade concerts” in Paris and London. In these forums, audiences for orchestral music grew from a few hundred to several thousand enjoying “mixed repertory” concerts indoors and out. Such democratization of musical experience helped solidify the middle class’s consciousness of itself. These first truly “popular” musical events led to the realization that the same processes of commodification and mass mediation—sheet music production, instrument sales, and journalism—worked equally well for both serious and lighter genres. And the image of the United States as a place where musicians operated exclusively within a market economy increasingly tempted individuals and ensembles to make the dangerous Atlantic crossing. The Germanians’ origin as a private orchestra situates it within a formative stage of the “culture industry,” the Frankfurt School’s term for the institutions and practices that shape the commodification of art.

In The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay posits that the intellectual ferment of the 1840s make it “the most extraordinary decade” of the nineteenth century. For the first time, abstract German philosophical thought began to be applied to social and political matters. Social utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Étienne Cabet had embarked on a similar path, and their adherents pursued the implications of their systems in France and abroad. Music critic John Sullivan Dwight, for example, lived in the Fourierist community Brook Farm on the outskirts of Boston. Before he left Berlin, Albrecht read Cabet’s utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie. Shortly after the orchestra disbanded, he went to live in Cabet’s model community in Nauvoo, Illinois. The ideology of “Icarian communism” played an important role in shaping Albrecht’s idealized view—his utopian vision—of the Germanians’ attempt at self-determination.

In many ways, we are still living with the ramifications of musical, cultural, social, and political developments that occurred during the 1840s. It is my hope that the Germania Musical Society’s extraordinary story will shine new light on the possibilities unleashed during that eventful decade.

Good Music for a Free People by Nancy Newman is available now from your favourite bookseller. Excerpts will follow over the coming weeks in this blog.

Words and Music

Advance copies of Bálint Varga’s Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers have just arrived, and what a remarkable publication it is. Birtwistle, Boulez, Cage, Carter, Henze, Kurtág, Ligeti, Nono, Reich, Tippett and Xenakis are just a few of the artists who agreed to discuss their music and their influences. In this post we extract a few choice morsels but urge you to seek out a copy in your favourite bookshop, as we are unable to reproduce the compelling flow of conversation and ideas within the confines of a blog post.

Gunther Schuller

To get back to Darmstadt: in the early fifties there came about an alliance between the German radio stations, composers, publishers, modern music journals, and festivals. Radios, as you know, are subsidized by the state and can broadcast new music without any great risk. A political/business linkup developed: a festival premiered a new work, it was recorded or taped by a radio station, and then the tape was broadcast throughout Europe. And everybody became richer and more famous. As a result of a terrific publicity machinery, everything was made to sound bigger and better than it really was. That is how lesser composers, like Pousseur or Kagel, became touted as “great” composers. We were told in Darmstadt that they and Boulez and Stockhausen were the masters of our time, and we should all compose like them.

There were three composers in Darmstadt in those early years who thought this was all pretty silly: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and me. We were young and fairly cocky, and didn’t necessarily swallow Stockhausen’s line. I am proud of that. In the end—around 1957—I left Darmstadt, never to return.

Pierre Schaeffer

I am going to tell you why, at a particular moment in my life, I embarked on an adventure which I called concrete music.

I am not a composer. I have a degree in engineering but I have always regarded writing as my calling. As for my profession: I was one of the pioneers of broadcasting. I set up an experimental studio during the German occupation (today, they would call it an atelier) with the aim of developing the bases of radio art. Is it possible to create art devoid of the visual aspect? Is blind art viable?

Those were great years even though we had to work clandestinely during the occupation. We also participated in preparing the liberation of Paris. The first broadcasts went on the air a few days before the withdrawal of the Germans: it was rather a perilous undertaking.

It was after the war that the development of radio art really got under way. We wanted to find out all the possibilities inherent in this genre based only on text, background noise, and music—a genre that freed the imagination. Logically enough, I attempted on one occasion to create an experimental work in which I set out to explore at what point background sound, the condensing of noise turns into music. (In other words, musique concrete was the outcome of an accident, just as most other innovations. One stumbles on something one was not looking for.)

Toru Takemitsu

The pieces I wrote during the past several years have had a great deal to do with water. I love the sea. It has many faces. Numerous currents are whirling in it, each with a tempo, a color, and a temperature of its own. This phenomenon reminds me of the structure of music.

Twenty-five years ago when I started composing, I carried out concrete musical experiments with water. During a visit to France I was surprised to find that Pierre Schaeffer was working in the same direction. In my Water Music (1960) I use the sound of dripping water. I collected material from rivers, wells, and the sea and in the process of concentrating my attention on these sonorities, I grew fond of water.

Nature is important for my music in other ways as well. All four seasons are beautiful in Japan. I live on the shore of a lake and forty thousand cherry trees blossom in the neighborhood. Still, I prefer the autumn when trees, the grass—nature as a whole—change from day to day. One cannot catch the actual moment of change, only its result is tangible. It is a phenomenon that is of interest for me also as a composer.

Iannis Xenakis

Metastasis, that starting point of my life as a composer, was inspired not by music but rather by the impression gained during the Nazi occupation of Greece. The Germans tried to take Greek workers to the Third Reich — and we staged huge demonstrations against this and managed to prevent it. I listened to the sound of the masses marching toward the center of Athens, the shouting of slogans and then, when they came upon Nazi tanks, the intermittent shooting of the machine guns, the chaos. I shall never forget the transformation of the regular, rhythmic noise of a hundred thousand people into some fantastic disorder . . . I would never have thought that one day all that would surface again and become music: Metastasis.

I composed it in 1953–54 and called it a starting point because that was when I introduced into music the notion of mass . . . Almost everybody in the orchestra is a soloist, I used complete divisi in the strings which play large masses of pizzicati and glissandi. In other words, I do not use the term “mass” in a sociological sense.

Another experience of my youth dates from the time immediately preceding the war. I used to make outings to the countryside near Athens. I would take my bicycle, select a spot to erect my tent and listen to the sounds of nature. Crickets, for instance: their chirping was coming from every direction and was changing all the time. Those are also mass sounds, you see? But I also liked listening to the wind and the sea or the rain as it was lashing at the side of the tent.

Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers by Bálint András Varga is published by the University of Rochester Press and will be available soon from all good booksellers.

The image at the head of this post is taken from the book. The drawing, by Johannes Maria Staud, was made 'at the time of preparing the score of my opera Berenice in 2003/4.'

Who was that masked man?

Unmasking Ravel is the intriguing title of a new collection of essays on the French master, edited by Peter Kaminsky. It joins an already impressive list of books on French music in the Eastman Studies in Music series published by the University of Rochester Press, including Stephen Zank’s acclaimed Irony and Sound. Here Professor Kaminsky describes his “Eureka!” moment with Ravel’s music and gives us some idea of what to expect from this new publication.

Ravel’s music has had an irresistible hold on me since my first encounter with it in Professor Joel Sheveloff’s music history class at Boston University. It was there that I heard the combination of hilarious story and impossibly clever music that is Ravel’s first opera The Spanish Hour (L’Heure espagnole); and the shimmering and utterly original dance “Forlane” from Le tombeau de Couperin. Cut to 15 years later as I began my professional career as music theorist: imagine my surprise when my colleagues sneered at the mere mention of Ravel’s name — too lightweight, too effete, too popular. (The ubiquity of Bolero did not help.) Needless to say, this situation presented precisely the thing that all writers need: A PROBLEM TO SOLVE. That is, how could I square my conviction that Ravel’s music was Hall of Fame material (I am a hardcore baseball fan), while all but a handful of scholars regarded him as strictly bush league*?

After writing a number of journal articles and book chapters, I finally had a breakthrough, a “Eureka!” moment. I understood that the metaphor that everybody writing about Ravel seemed to employ — MASKS — was in reality a bunch of tropes that, beginning with his earliest reviews onward, gradually hardened into the public and critical reception history of his music. These tropes include what I term “Ravel as classicist,” as “artisan,” as “artificial,” as deliberately attempting the impossible (the so-called “aesthetic of imposture” made famous by his student and first biographer Roland-Manuel), as “cold,” as “virtuoso,” and as “ornamentalist.” Three realizations followed: his music presents all of these facets at once; I decided to assemble and edit a Ravel book rather than write a monograph to better reveal the panoply of musical, aesthetic and historical contexts; and I found a title for the book that captured all this: Unmasking Ravel.

The book divides into three parts: Orientations and Influences; Analytical Case Studies; and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. In Part I, authors Steven Huebner, Barbara Kelly and Michael Puri—three of the most incisive current writers on Ravel’s music—engage aspects of cultural and literary history, biography, influence, reception, branding (in the modern advertising sense), memory, and interpretive strategies. Ravel provocatively stated that his most important composition teacher was the American author Edgar Allen Poe, especially the essay The Philosophy of Composition in which Poe describes the step-by-step creation of his poem “The Raven.” Huebner, equally provocatively, places this statement in the broader context of Ravel’s literary circle and unravels (pun intended) its crucial role in his aesthetics and concept of classicism (e.g., why Ravel loved Mozart and equivocated over Debussy). Kelly reveals how Ravel’s student and first biographer Roland-Manuel deliberately and continually manipulated the composer’s image in relation to ongoing music-critical currents to enhance his standing with audiences and critics alike, and how this effort subsequently shaped our current views on Ravel. Puri manages to interpret Adorno’s writings on Ravel with a positive spin by addressing the composer’s melancholic nostalgia in the context of the demise of the Western music tradition. (Do I hear La valse?)

The five chapters comprising Part II provide close analyses of compositions representing the chronological boundaries of Ravel’s mature work (from the 1899 Pavane pour une Infante défunte to the 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major). My essay provides an introduction to the other analyses by comparing formal process in three pairs of like works (including Aloysius Bertrand’s poem “Le Gibet” and Ravel’s musical setting as the middle movement of Gaspard de la Nuit). As theorist/pianist and concert pianist, respectively, co-authors Daphne Leong and David Korevaar address Ravel’s virtuosity in “Scarbo” from Gaspard and other works in terms of “mechanical motion” and “dance-like motion” (and their merging), showing how musical structure, physical gesture, and expressivity come together in ingenious ways. Sigrun Heinzelmann addresses Ravel’s approach to sonata form in the pre-War String Quartet and Piano Trio, further demonstrating Ravel’s axiomatic and classicist economy of means. Volker Helbing deconstructs the waltzes of Johann Strauss into their sub-atomic particles to show their culmination in the “spiral form” and self-destruction of Ravel’s La valse. Elliott Antoloketz, better known for his work on Bartók and Debussy, shows the relevance of Bartók’s polymodal chromaticism in modeling Ravel’s modernist post-War music, in particular the elusive Sonate pour violon et violoncelle.

In Part III, Interdisciplinary Studies, authors Lauri Suurpää, Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, and the present writer offer novel perspectives through the combination of philosophical, art-critical, or psychoanalytic theories with music analysis. Suurpää draws on semiotician A. J. Greimas and Schenkerian theory in dealing with text-music relations in songs from the cycle Histoires naturelles. Bhogal synthesizes aspects of the nineteenth-century Art Nouveau movement, pianistic pyrotechnics, current metrical theory, representation, and Ravel biography in her analysis of selected virtuosic piano works including “Ondine” from Gaspard. In the concluding chapter, I begin with psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s well-known interpretation of Colette’s libretto, and go on to explore contrasting psychoanalytic theories (Freud’s and Piaget’s) of moral development in children as a backdrop for analyzing the 1925 opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges. Readers will discover what is meant by “his [the Child’s] chord is his sword.”

In conclusion, let us reconsider the notion of “Ravel as lightweight.” In a sense, the composer’s own irony and self-deprecation helps foster this impression. After all, any artist who heads a score with “the delicious and ever-novel pleasure of a useless occupation” (quoting de Régnier in Valses nobles et sentimentales) is not exactly asking to be taken seriously. But that is part of the seductive charm of Ravel’s irony. Indeed, Roland-Manuel cites Valses nobles as marking a seismic shift in his harmonic and compositional conception. (A glance at the voice leading of the opening two bars confirms this in spades.) Such a gap between the “face value” of a Ravel work and the depth of its technique, craft, and especially its expression manifests itself in virtually all of his major compositions. Perhaps more than any other factor, this argues for a re-examination of context, interpretation, perspective, style, and structure across his output. À mes lecteurs: amusez-vous!

Unmasking Ravel will be available soon. Why not order a copy from your local bookseller and help keep bookshops on the high street as well as in cyberspace?

* For those of us not steeped in the terminology of North American sports here is a definition of 'bush league'.

Talking to Morton Feldman (and 64 others)

Imagine being able to ask composers like John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich or Karlheinz Stockhausen detailed questions about their influences and their methods of composition. This is exactly what Bálint András Varga did for his new book, Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers. Here, as a taster for this fascinating book, are excerpts from three of his conversations. First György Ligeti:

Noises do not influence me directly, but neither do I cut myself off from them altogether. The outside world makes an indirect impact. Music works with acoustic material, no doubt, but I do not think that the sounds of live or dead nature would influence me in a decisive manner. Various types of movement do. In my view, you see, music mirrors the processes of motion through sound. Machines play an important role… I have, after all, also written a piece for one hundred metronomes.

Although Atmosphères and Apparitions are not programmatic in character—I did not set out to render the sensation of flying in either piece—flying did have an indirect influence on their floating, on the continuous transformation of their musical patterns.

Without asking for my permission, Stanley Kubrick used extracts from Atmosphères, Lux aeterna, and the Requiem in the music of his science fiction film 2001. I was angry with him but I did like his work (apart from the mystical beginning and ending). While composing, I did not think of anything “cosmic” (Atmosphères is meant to convey “atmosphere” rather than “air”), but the film made me aware of the possibility of associating infinity with my music.

As far as Lux aeterna is concerned, the words only served as a chance for me to compose music which is in fact musica aeterna: as if it has been sounding from time immemorial and would be going on forever—we only hear a part of it. It emerges from nowhere, it is here and slowly disappears.

Interviewing Morton Feldman, Varga writes: I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

[On whether Robert Rauschenberg’s white pictures influenced John Cage]
What influenced John Cage in Rauschenberg was an answer to a philosophical question about life and art. Robert Rauschenberg is exactly my age. And brilliant. He said something that was very influential to a lot of young artists at that time. I think this is the influence of Rauschenberg, with his white paintings, to Cage. He said that he does not want either life or art. He wants something in between. A very influential statement: neither life nor art but something in between. And Cage would see this beautiful white thing in the shadows of the environment. He lived in a very beautiful apartment, Cage, and he saw where art and the outside environment could collage.

John Cage is only involved with music forms….That there is nothing there behind the material. So in that sense, John Cage is not a mystic.

Don’t you think that his music exudes an atmosphere and in doing so, it communicates something beyond the music, it communicates a way of thinking?
I think it asks a lot of questions. I think it’s the atmosphere of asking questions.

Whereas yours?

The atmosphere of answering them (laughs).

In that case, one must envy you: you seem to have the answers. Few people can claim that.

Only for my music. Only. You see, that’s another problem: I don’t feel that it’s a community. I could never listen to a piece of Boulez and get some insight from the piece. I could listen to a piece of Boulez and could say to him what I said once to Ligeti, who I like very much, we are very good friends, and I said to him: “György, you are too gifted to write European music”.

II.
Sounds do not surround you.

There are sounds right now.

I don’t hear them.

You don’t hear them?

No.

What sounds do you hear?

Nothing. I hear them but they are indigenous. In a place that builds modern buildings—do you hear the drilling that’s going on? It is absolutely like having a lion in a jungle. I mean it is indigenous to the landscape. It would be interesting if you would hear an Islamic chant. What’s happening here? OPEC, OPEC! (Vienna - where the interview took place - is the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In other words: I hear it like everyone else but it is not a source of . . .

. . . inspiration.

It’s not a source of anything. Most of the time I think of it as pollution. Noise pollution.

How about the sounds of nature, such as the wind, birds, and so on?

I have no contact with them. They don’t interest me at all. I can live very well without them.

So in composing, the sounds always come from within.

Yes, only when I am composing. Otherwise, you are crazy. I don’t go around hearing sounds. Some people do! Stockhausen, I am sure, is one of them.

Let’s turn to Karlheinz Stockhausen for our final snippet. Here the Master describes what one might find in one of his best known pieces:

In Hymnen there appear national anthems, that is, completely banal material as well as numerous other situations (recordings made in a Chinese shop, at a student protest demonstration in Aachen, at a ship’s christening in Hamburg, at a soccer match with crowds of people shouting, the squawking of birds, and boys shouting in a school yard). Linked to the American national anthem, you hear odd short-wave sounds (Morse signals, whistling, shrill screeching), as if someone has turned on a radio station at night, with distorted broadcasts. In the context of the “International” the words of a croupier: “rien ne va plus Messieurs Dames,” “faites vos jeux Messieurs Dames,” etc., are heard. Out of the “Rouge” called by a croupier in a roulette hall emerges a four-part fugue in four different languages on the word rouge, with all the different variations of the color red as listed in the color catalogue of a London paint company.

Longer excerpts will follow over the coming weeks. Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers by Bálint András Varga will be published towards the end of this month by the University of Rochester Press.