It is a very happy thing for me as a music lover, composer, etc. when a work that I admire on a technical, artistic and/or historical level is also one of those pieces that I enjoy coming back to again and again for the sheer pleasure of listening. Here's three that have been that way for me lately, coincidently spanning the decades from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Arthur Honegger - Cello Concerto in C Major, H. 72 (composed 1928, premiered 1930)
Honegger (1892-1955) is mostly remembered today as a member of the French neoclassical group Les Six, though he was actually Swiss and the appellation neoclassical is at times dubious in his case. The Cello Concerto is a delightfully cosmopolitan blend of musical elements, from that fantastically beautiful opening gesture (which blessedly makes a return towards the end of the final movement), to its harmonically authentic jazzy inflections and passages of Stravinskian quirk or Copland-esque joie de vivre. About 2.5 minutes into the middle movement, there's this mischievously orchestrated but exquisite theme that emerges, like something out of a Russian ballet. By referencing so many composers and styles, I don't mean to imply the work is unoriginal or derivative, rather I mean to say that for me Honegger rises to similar heights. The short runtime of the of the concerto is made up, in my opinion, by a tight thematic interweaving between movements.
I'm partial to the recent interpretation by Daniel Müller-Schott on the album Four Visions of France, which can be heard on Youtube at these three links:
Plenty of other nice performances are available, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qFqUUQx2Ls
Alan Hovhaness - Lousadzak 'The Dawn of the Light' (Concerto for Piano and Strings), Op. 48 (1944)
I have often heard Hovhaness (1911-2000) dismissed because he was so prolific and because a lot of his music sounds similar to his other music.
Does anybody dismiss Bach for the same reasons?
In any case, Lousadzak does contain a lot of the elements that would come to dominate his style, while doing it in a special and even revelatory way. The piano part, far from feeling like a muscular modernist or bravura romantic soloist, is more a whirling dervish, at once both obsessive with its ideas and endlessly inventive. The senza misura (free meter) and ad libitum 'humming effect' of multiple metrically independent parts presages Cage and Lutoslawski's use of similar musical freedom for the performers (in Lutoslawski's case, by over 15 years!)
The top comment on the score video on YouTube (an unfortunately inferior recording, IMO), shares the recollection of the works premier by composer Lou Lou Harrison:
"I remember the premiere of that work in Town Hall, and the enormous excitement that Alan's sudden appearance in New York produced. The intermission that followed [Lousadzak] was the closest I've ever been to one of those renowned artistic riots. In the lobby, the Chromaticists and the Americanists were carrying on at high decibels. What had touched it off of course, was that here came a man from Boston whose obviously beautiful and fine music had nothing to do with either camp, and was in fact its own very wonderful thing to begin with. My guest John Cage and I were very excited, and I dashed off to the lamented Herald Tribune and wrote a rave review while John went back to the Green Room to meet Alan."
The most arresting rendition I've heard is that by Keith Jarrett, whose talents seem particularly well matched the requirements of this piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GZCNMMGV7w
Giacinto Scelsi - Suite No. 9 "Ttai"(1953)
(I have been unable to locate a single photo of him that I can confirm is after the 1930s)
Some part of me feels like I failed to not complete this list with yet another concerto or another composer with the initials A.H., but the fact that the first two aligned that way was sheer chance. I'm only basing this list on works that really have hit home with me and that I keep returning to. This work by Scelsi is a recent discovery for me (as is Scelsi's music in general, I admit).
When I told my wife about discovering Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) and his music, and what I had learned of his music and biography, she laughed and asked me if I was sure that an AI bot hadn't made it all up just to create a new composer perfectly designed to suite my interests. The facts about the composer are few and often repeated - born an aristocrat (complete with being raised in a castle and having fencing lessons), left by his wife (precipitating a major personal and artistic crisis that transformed his earlier modernist style into something...different and unique), and his technique of composing (he saw it more as a spiritual process) by having his improvisations on the Ondioline (a rare early electronic instrument capable of vibrato, pitch bending and various timbral shifts) transcribed by others and then transformed into notated compositions. Certain of his ideas sound both completely off the wall and fascinatingly plausible, like the idea of sound being round instead of linear, leading him to write entire works focusing on developing single pitches–their overtones, timbral shifts, and microtonal fluctuations around them in a way that anticipates both drone minimalists and later spectral composers. Despite his obscurity and the abstraction of his ideas, the music itself has spoken to me and filled in a link I didn't know was missing from both my knowledge of contemporary music history and in my artistic pantheon of influences.
I first encountered and was blown away by 1963's Hymnos, and even more so to find out that that work isn't even really considered one of his major works (if such an obscure composer can be said to have major works). But that work, along with much of his mature work, is a hard sell. I would understand (as with many of my favorites) if I don't win any converts or goodwill by sharing it. So as I listened to more of his other music, it was this piano work, Suite No. 9, subtitled with the Italian transcription of the word Tai from the I Ching (meaning peace/harmony, if I recall), that struck me as being both fresh and innovative for its time while also remaining incredibly accessible despite postdating the crisis that led to his extreme stylistic shift. The work struck me as a prophecy of minimalism, by way of Satie.
Scelsi seems to have abandoned piano in most later works, probably because of its inability to capture long sustained tones and the precise microtonal inflections the composer could coax from strings, winds, or voices. But in "Ttai" Scelsi's harmonic language, obsessively coloring key focus notes with other pitches, manages to be neither entirely tonal, modal, atonal, nor dodecaphonic, but rather his own unique thing, which is quite something in the locked-in world of the equal temperament black and white keys.
I'm not sure of a favorite recording on this one yet, though the one I have listened to the most so far is this one by Rossella Spinoza (playlist includes other works on the album as well): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kSP1SzykZ0B2rsBamQ-wXd5ljoLG0D8uo&si=mDX6sqkIXOQhO0Eq
No comments:
Post a Comment