jwilzewske: etudes

W hat is left is a very simple, straight-forward and honest voice, a voice that is at the heart of the music and that listeners seem able to respond to instantly. When it comes down to it, what makes Alkan’s music so attractive to listeners is not the virtuosity of the piano writing, though that can be exciting, nor the cleverness of the construction, though that might be impressive. No, what grips listeners is the sheer passion of Alkan’s music and the strength of his musical personality.”
— Jack Gibbons, 2002.

I ’m becoming daily more and more misanthropic and misogynous: nothing worthwhile, good or useful to do; no one to devote myself to. My situation makes me horridly sad and wretched. Even musical production has lost its attraction for me for I can’t see any point or goal.”
— Charles-Valentin Alkan, letter to Ferdinand Hiller, 1861.

T he performance by Marc-André Hamelin in Kansas City last night as part of the Harriman-Jewell Series was animated and inspiring throughout. I particularly admired the Alkan ‘12 Études dans tous les tons mineurs Op. 39, Nos. 4-7’.

I n making sense of this challenging piece, I find it helpful to read Stephanie McCallum, Senior Lecturer in Keyboard at Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney, who gave a paper at the 2007 Australasian Piano Pedagogy Conference, entitled ‘Alkan: Enigma or Schizophrenia?’

A lkan withdrew from public life at age 24, and, according to McCallum, Alkan’s subsequent correspondence (200+ letters) provides clear indications of the onset of severe mental illness. McCallum considers evidence for schizophrenia, for Asperger Syndrome, and for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—with considerable support for the latter... compulsive washing, ritualized avoidance of touching surfaces, refusal to go out of his house, fear of contaminated food, etc.

D espite his private agonies, Alkan in his reclusive years was highly creative. He produced some of the most fantastical, large-scale and virtuosic music of all piano literature. He often displays a preference for long passages of rhythmic and textural patterns, including sequences which set up clashing dissonances. Although these things are frequent in music generally, Alkan takes them to extremes and often to unnerving [melo-]dramatic effect.

E xamples include extended passages of tremolando-like rapidly repeated notes in the left hand and wave-like rolling patterns where the pianist’s hands are like animals roaming the keyboard and the fingers are like animals’ legs—given to primal reflexive impulsions and unspeakable predatory aims.

H amelin captures the erratic, reiterative, relentless, bombastic qualities of these Etudes perfectly—reanimating the unusual personality who composed them. As an encore, Hamelin performed a jewel-like Nocturne of his own composition—a piece that itself embodies ambiguities and moment-to-moment alteration of mood, dissonances, and impromptu trajectory, not unlike the Alkan etudes.

[50-sec clip, Marc-André Hamelin, C-V Alkan, 12 Études dans tous les tons mineurs, Op. 39, No. 9, Adagio, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc-André Hamelin, C-V Alkan, 12 Études dans tous les tons mineurs, Op. 39, No. 10, Allegretto, 1.6MB MP3]

T hese are miniature worlds full of drama, excitement, color and terror!

C uriously, Alkan’s death involved a bookcase in his home, toppling over and crushing him as he was reaching for a book on a high shelf. Bad things happen, as it turns out, even to people who are delusional or paranoid.

Alkan in top hat, standing, superstitiously refusing to look at photographer

Luigi Dallapiccola was was 48 years old when Quaderno was composed, nominally as a gift for the eponymous Annalibera, his daughter, on the occasion of her eighth birthday. [Annalibera Dallapiccola was born on the day of the liberation of Italy, whence the ‘libera’. Prof. Annalibera Dallapiccola is now a scholar in Asian and Indian art and is an Honorary Professor of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Edinburgh. Formerly she was Professor of Art History, South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University.] The Quaderno is composed of eleven variations on a twelve-tone sequence based on the name B-A-C-H (the pitches B-flat, A, C, and B).

Surely we can wonder whether Luigi meant Quaderno as a veiled criticism of government: projecting children as analogous to the general public (under Mussolini, or under subsequent regimes). After all, other of Luigi’s compositions were famously political.

But there is plenty of evidence that we should take Quaderno at face value—as a collection of etudes addressed by father to daughter. For one thing, the title ‘Quaderno’ recalls Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Notebook’ for his daughter, Anna Magdalena. Other correspondences include Dallapiccola’s recapitulation of Bach’s contrapunctus subtitles for movements in strict canon, as in Art of the Fugue.

Quaderno’s movement titles are (in English) as follows:

Symbol;
Accents;
First Counterpoint;
Lines;
Second Counterpoint (Canon in contrary motion);
Friezes;
Andantino amoroso and Third Counterpoint (Canon cancrizans);
Rhythms;
Colors;
Shadows; and
Quatrain.

These movements are lovingly didactic in a fatherly way—their names and their playful, thematically-expansive musical content are difficult to construe as covert political polemic.

Some 15 years ago David Lewin published a detailed transformational analysis of the Simbolo movement. Simbolo is marked ‘Quasi lento, misterioso’ and fully lives up to the misterioso. Regarding Simbolo, Lewin said: “The group [of transformations] is not a list of immediate aural intuitions or intentions ... Rather than trying to make our transformations denote phenomenological presences in a blow-by-blow narrative, we can more comfortably regard them as ways of structuring an abstract space ... through which the piece moves” (Lewin, p. 34).

If Dallapiccola wrote that the tone row in Simbolo isn’t meant to be perceptible to the listener, then we should take him at his word. He was, at the ripe age of 48, in a period of rapid change and learning—we hear plenty of discovery and exploratory gestures in these ‘etudes’. We can also readily conceive of what the intense, inquisitive Annalibera may have been like at that age—and imagine the motives that may have been at work in the father, trying to create something beautiful and highly symbolic ‘for her’, to be hers. It is one hell of a birthday gift. And, as things go in the Age of Reason—late in childhood and before the onset of adolescence—it was the perfect time for Luigi to make such a gesture. Misterioso—one of the duties of a composer (of a musician; of any artist) is to trade on the novel and non-obvious. Il Luigi ci istruisce così!

There is no reason why music theorists should give undue emphasis to tone-row or other serial compositional methods—giving priority to the ‘system’ seriously mis-represents the compositional process. It does violence to the music and dishonor to the composer! Dallapiccola especially was no slave to the [twelve-tone, serialist] ‘system’.

Even in Quaderno where a tone-row is perceptible, it does not dominate. As the canon or other variations progress, the role of the tone-row becomes less and less clear. Or, more accurately, the force of the ‘system’—the thematic mechanics—begins to cope with the accretion of other equally-legitimate guiding principles, other thematic genera. How like a Bach fugue this is! Once a theme is developed, it is absorbed into layers upon layers, variation upon variation. Futile to analyze a fugue by exhaustively identifying subject, counter-subject, and so on! Dried insects preserved in an entomologist’s collection have more fidelity to nature than this!

Based on the evidence we see in Quaderno, I don’t believe Dallapiccola relied on twelve-tone rows compulsively. There are so many other factors, that present themselves to the ear, that should inform a faithful analysis true to Dallapiccola’s motives and intentions. Above all, analysis should enlighten the performer and the listener.

So my speculation is this: Luigi Dallapiccola created Quaderno not only as a special gift, but also as a way of memorializing his sentiment(ality) about childhood. He was concerned about children as well as other members of society, both before the war and in the post-War period. A highly private man, he maintained a traditional idea that what went on in the family was nobody’s business, least of all government’s. But he was not a traditionalist as concerns the rights and duties of children, from what we can tell in his writings. Poverty and social exclusion may be resistant to solution by public means, but that simply implies that individual families must redouble their efforts. Children, too, have moral standing and therefore have duties commensurate with their rights. The childhood privilege of engaging in fanciful, creative and artistic pursuits carries with it, for example, an obligation to exert effort in good faith, to pay attention—for the children to avail themselves of the opportunities that the parents set before them.

If there is a better way to talk about this than through the notions of ethics and children’s rights, perhaps Luigi Dallapiccola knew such a way. The embarrassingly prevalent and pernicious (U.S.?) ideology—which insists that parents should be like gods to their children and that children are basically property, in a status of utter subjection to the will of the parents; and which defers to some distant time in adolescence any accountability by children for their acts—surely had no place in Luigi’s world-view.

Of course under U.N. and E.U. resolutions, children are emphatically not property, but they are nonetheless ‘extensions’ of the parents’ identities. Emotionally and biologically, this is natural. And, legally, this is true as well. Children progressively acquire autonomy or sovereignty—increasing rights, commensurate with increasing responsibilities and abilities. They discover and progressively grow beyond the parents’ identities. Quaderno is a gentle exhortation, by Luigi to Annalibera, to have serious fun in this process—of finding her own identity, of finding her own voice, of finding the good in the world and in other individuals and other cultures.

In summary, children are by nature ‘becoming’, not yet arrived into the fullness of identity. Of course, all of us are all always still ‘becoming’ no matter how old we may be, but children are more so. To Luigi Dallapiccola, children were persons to be taken seriously, as subjects with moral standing who have complex and evolving interests that merit public concern and complex and evolving duties that require the attention of the children as well as the attention of their parents and of society. Etudes are at this boundary: they are emblems of the social duty to give (parents’ and society’s duty of care), and they are emblems of a complementary duty to receive (the child’s duty of care). In a way, Quaderno is a meditation on ‘children as children’ and ‘parents as parents’ instead of as proto-adults and gods, respectively.

jwilzewske

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Marc-André Hamelin: Alkan Unlocked

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Dallapiccola on Children’s Rights and Duties: Quaderno di Annalibera