Nash Ensemble: Atmospherics and Encores

O  ur piano quintet is looking for new ideas for encore pieces. Any suggestions?”
  —  Anonymous.

The usual objective is a sparkling, novel, jewel-like ‘character piece’ that is shorter than 3 minutes in length and that is ‘approachable’ and does not make heavy demands of the listener. It should read like pungent microfiction. Additionally, you want something that conveys an intense presence—show-stopping emotionality.

One serious option is to treat the encore as a ‘tag’ or a synoptic ‘capstone’ for your program—melding with the other pieces. You choose for an encore a character piece that is light and simple, something composed about the same time as other pieces on the program and preferrably by someone whose style and compositional methods and worldview are coherent with the rest of the program. If it has those features, it can serve as a ‘tag’, and its tagness/epilogiality will be immediately evident to the listeners.

A whimsical option that aims at surprise is to choose something wholly unexpected (a polka or mazurka, if the rest of your program has been heavy going) or something that embodies a counterintuitive, dramatic contrast against the other pieces (much slower or faster tempo; different articulation or timbre)—possibly composed in a different period or by someone of disparate worldview and methods, yet arriving at a similar result or addressing a similar compositional challenge as the other pieces had done.

You can go for drop-dead flash virtuosity. You can tug on the audience members’ nostalgia. You can ‘plug’ your most recent recording or an up-coming performance with a short selection. You can capsulize your ensemble’s namesake [composer] if you’re one of those eponymously-named ensembles, provided your eponymic was thoughtful enough to write a short, sweet piece. And so on.

In any case, a good encore piece should be the musical equivalent of a bespoke chocolate truffle. [The foregoing was just a brain-dump for the anonymous question-asker (and for others who struggle with similar challenges), on ‘How We Search for Suitable Encore Pieces’.]

For sheer bon-bon-ness, you might try Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘The Aquarium’.

S  aint-Saëns] invents various kinds of musical masquerade and cross dressing. Furthermore, many aspects of the work suggest that it is a musical farce to be put on by the very people who are supposed to get [the jokes], evoking the spirit of carnival as described by Bakhtin... [The] musical depictions demand that the instrumentalists performing the piece impersonate themselves as ‘characters’ in the salon, just as the instruments they play represent particular animals. Essential to the work is this kind of performing ‘about’ performance, a notion that in effect literally materializes immaterial aspects of music such as melody and timbre and allows Saint-Saëns to subvert the Romantic surface-depth paradigm by taking up instrumental materiality as one possible ‘substance’ to be revealed within the context of late nineteenth century chamber music.”
  —  Erica Scheinberg.

Carnival of the Animals’ nominally is a set of orchestral character pieces, each of which is meant to describe a particular animal, usually by mimicking the sounds it makes or characterizing the way it moves or carries itself. But, as musicologist Erica Scheinberg has written, it contains many ‘inside jokes’ about composers and music. There are passages mocking Offenbach’s ‘Can-Can’, wry liberties taken with Berlioz’s ‘Dance of the Sylphs’, poking fun at Mendelssohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, mocking the turgidness of several Rossini arias, parodying then-current dance-hall tunes, and mocking Saint-Saens’s ‘Danse Macabre’.

It is extremely ‘meta’—today, just as it was during Saint-Saëns’s lifetime—and so is just waiting, ready to serve your own meta-purposes!

What’s more, ‘Carnival of the Animals’ has for many years been a prime vehicle for music outreach and education programs for kids (see, for example, this, from a kids’ program at Music Institute of Chicago). Consequently, performance of the piece triggers for many adults today intense and instantaneous memories of their musical childhood—of everything that has led them now to be sitting in their concert hall seats listening to you. This is a bonus that you cannot get with just any old encore selection—instant [Freudian] flashback and epiphany. To be honest, my own response to these pieces is like this—primitive and immediate, as though I were five years old once more. That alone is enough to make these Saint-Saëns movements good encore material—and it exemplifies some of the qualities that you might look for in other suitable material.

The 7^th movement, ‘The Aquarium’, is wonderfully atmospheric. For the image of water splashing (brighter, compared to deep rumbling of the sea in the cello part and the flutey undulations) we have the glass harmonica’s and two pianos’ (or glockenspiel, xylophone, celesta, or small cymbals) movements. A realistic evocation of moving water involves varying and controlling the dynamics on a short time-scale and the contrary-direction voice-leading in the different parts. Irregular intervals represent the erratic swimming of fish. Saint-Saëns creates florid kinesthetic/synaesthetic ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels.

Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) likewise convey ‘visual-acoustic’ parallels, and likewise mostly via short time-scale timbre changes. The Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16. No.3 (Faben) is sometimes translated to English as ‘Color Music’, ‘Morning on the Traunsee’ and ‘Summer Morning at a Lake’ by authors like Boretz and Cone. The musical progressions move in a slow and undulating manner throughout, which is similar to the ‘quivering reflection of the sun on a sheet of water’ (Dahlhaus, 1989). Schoenberg acoustically mimics the changing light on the waves by the changing timbre of instruments; the colors of the changing brightness lie in the differing timbres of the instruments. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Aquarium’ is like this, although the voice-leading in the Saint-Saëns’s string parts represents, I think, rays of light filtering down to the depths, from the point of view of the fish. The flute and pianos and glass harmonica manifest most of the surface watery features, including the sparkly play of light up top.

Insofar as ‘Aquarium’ has been used in many film soundtracks, it has the added advantage of being especially familiar to general audience members (compared with other of the ‘Carnival of the Animals’ movements). The Nash Ensemble has a particularly nice rendering of ‘Aquarium’.


    [50-sec clip, Nash Ensemble, Saint-Saëns, Carnival of the Animals VII, Aquarium, 1.5MB MP3]

The Nash’s octet version does include the flute and glass harmonica and two pianos as-scored by Saint-Saëns. But the glass harmonica is out of practical reach for most ensembles and, in any event, the instrument does not travel easily—delicate; risky. Most of the time, the orchestral incarnations of the piece have a celesta or glockenspiel or xylophone substituting for the exotic glass harmonica. And, anyhow, the anonymous emailer in the blockquote above said her/his ensemble are a piano quintet; you are not going to bring out a flute or other players to participate in an encore when the rest of your program was straight piano quintet. Right. So is there a published arrangement of this Saint-Saëns piece for piano quintet? No. So improvise one!

Here’s one way: take the string parts from the original octet score, and take the Lucien Garban reduction of ‘Aquarium’ for solo piano and put them together. Fine-sounding instant piano quintet!

Yes, some of the spectral qualities that the glass harmonica or celesta add go by the boards. If that disappoints you, then improvise some flourishes in the upper register of the piano. The Garban transcription is tough enough by itself, so your efforts to accessorize it into something even more virtuosic will be all the more dazzling. (N.B.—Whether you improvise or leave it as-is—the string parts and the solo piano reduction—the piano’s doubling of the strings does risk trampling on the string parts, so you’ll need to rehearse with care, to make sure you’re achieving a good balance.)

Yes, the first-piano part descending ‘ten-on-one’ and ‘eight-on-one’ ostinato, while the second-piano plays ‘six-on-one’, is lost in the Garban transduction to solo piano. (After all, not many human beings can totally decouple the right-hand rhythmically from the left-hand.) So some of you purists reading this blog post may object strongly to my idea of a piano quintet adaptation of ‘Aquarium’. That’s fine. If the sacrilege is too great, don’t do it. But if you try it and it ‘works’ for you, more power to you!

Tempi of various ensembles’ performances of ‘Aquarium’ vary widely, with performance times ranging from 1:50 to 2:40. In other words, your effect can be ethereal/dreamy or near-demonic, depending on your taste. You can be over-the-top lyrical; or conjuring and fantastical; or subdued and meditative; or ironical; or elegantly benign and charming—you choose! The insider jokeness and transgressiveness that were intended by Saint-Saëns provide you a very long interpretive ‘leash’ with this piece.

You may want to consider how such an atmospheric piece would ‘fit’ with other program elements from the piano quintet literature:

• Elfrida Andrée: Piano Quintet in E minor (1865)
  
• Anton Arensky: Piano Quintet in D major, Op. 51 (1900)
  
• Béla Bartók: Piano Quintet (1904)
  
• Arnold Bax: Piano Quintet in G minor (1915)
  
• Amy Beach: Piano Quintet
  
• Franz Berwald: Piano Quintets No. 1 in C minor and No. 2 in A major (1857)
  
• Ernest Bloch: Piano Quintets No. 1 (1923) and No. 2 (1957)
  
• Alexander Borodin: Piano Quintet in C minor (1862)
  
• Johannes Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 (1864)
  
• Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet in D minor (1905, revised 1912)
  
• Ernő Dohnányi: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 1 (1895) and No. 2, Op. 26 (1914)
  
• Antonín Dvořák: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 5 (1872) and No. 2, Op. 81 (1887)
  
• Edward Elgar: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84 (1918)
  
• George Enescu: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 29 (1940)
  
• Louise Farrenc: Piano Quintets No. 1, Op. 30, and No. 2, Op. 31 (both with double bass)
  
• Gabriel Fauré: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 89 (1905) and No. 2, Op. 115 (1921)
  
• Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet (1985)
  
• César Franck: Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7 (1879)
  
• Wilhelm Furtwängler: Piano Quintet in C major (1935)
  
• Hermann Goetz: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 16 (with double bass; 1874)
  
• Otar Gordeli: Piano Quintet (1950)
  
• Sofia Gubaidulina: Piano Quintet (1957)
  
• Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor (1921)
  
• Heinrich von Herzogenberg: Piano Quintet in C major, Op. 17 (1876)
  
• Johann Nepomuk Hummel: Piano Quintet in E-flat minor, Op. 87 (with double bass)
  
• Vincent d’Indy: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 81 (1924)
  
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15 (1921)
  
• Bohuslav Martinů: Piano Quintets, H. 35 (1911), H. 229 (1933), H. 298 (1944)
  
• Nikolai Medtner: Piano Quintet in C major (1949)
  
• Krzysztof Meyer: Piano Quintet Op. 76 (1991)
  
• Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet (1927)
  
• Joachim Raff: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 107 (1862)
  
• Alan Rawsthorne: Piano Quintet
  
• Max Reger: Piano Quintet Nos. 1 and 2 in C minor
  
• Carl Reinecke: Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 83 (1865)
  
• Anton Rubinstein: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 99 (1876)
  
• Camille Saint-Saëns: Piano Quintet in A minor, op. 14 (1855)
  
• Franz Schmidt: Piano Quintet in G major (1926)
  
• Florent Schmitt: Piano Quintet in B minor (1908)
  
• Alfred Schnittke: Piano Quintet (1976)
  
• Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 (Trout Quintet with double bass; 1819)
  
• Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44 (1842)
  
• Giovanni Sgambati: Piano Quintets Nos. 1 and 2
  
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940)
  
• Jean Sibelius: Piano Quintet in G minor (1890)
  
• Sergei Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 30 (1911)
  
• Louis Vierne: Piano Quintet in C minor, Op. 42 (1917)
  
• Anton Webern: Piano Quintet (1907)
  
• Charles-Marie Widor: Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 7 (1881)
  
• Yitzhak Yedid: Piano Quintet ‘Since My Soul Loved’ (2006)
  
• Ludwig Thuille: Two Piano Quintets (1885)

The Hinson and Roberts book (pp. 545-68) is the premier source of ideas as you explore your options.

It’s ideal for your encore piece to be familiar to the audience—this is a correlate of the requirement that an encore piece sparkle and divert the audience without placing large demands on them. But the competing requirement that the piece be ‘novel’ and ‘exciting’ means that your selection had best not be a familiar piece that receives excessive or clichéd airplay. I think this 7^th movement of the Saint-Saëns piece is nearly perfect from these perspectives.

Incidentally, only the movement ‘The Swan’ was published before Saint-Saëns’s death. (He was supposedly anxious that the pastiche qualities of these pieces would undermine his reputation. For 35 years (between 1886 and 1921), ‘Carnival’ was hardly even a ‘salon’ item, so cautious was Saint-Saëns about restricting its performance—obsessive, almost to the point of being paranoid about it.) After Saint-Saëns’s death ‘The Swan’ quickly became popular among cellists, and is one of Saint-Saëns’s most frequently-performed pieces. ‘The Aquarium’ is far less commonly performed live, despite its popularity as film-score material. Therefore it has an aspect of novelty that makes it a good choice for live encore presentations.

The Nash Ensemble next present a concert on 25-SEP, at Malvern Concert Club in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, with a program that includes the Mahler Piano Quartet; Mozart Piano Quartet in G minor K. 478; Dvořák Piano Quintet in A minor Op. 81. Then on 11-OCT their next concert is at Wigmore Hall in London.

A  fter 40 years and over 250 premières (140 commissions) the Nash Ensemble is still the best champion that any composer could hope to have. Its concerts are always meticulously polished, but what impressed about this heroically well-stuffed programme—two premières and four other chamber pieces, none more than four years old—was the illusion conjured by the players that they lived with this music for years, even if the ink was barely dry on the page. Perhaps it is precisely because the ensemble is not entirely dedicated to doing contemporary work, that it can radiate so persuasive a feeling of new pieces being assimilated into chamber-music heritage, stretching back two centuries or more.”
  —  The London Times.

• Scheinberg E. Performing Instrumental Transgression: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals in the fin-de-siècle salon. Columbia Univ Music Scholarship Conference, 2004. (parody and inside jokes)
  
• Nash Ensemble London website
  
• Nash Ensemble Friends
  
• Nash Ensemble concert calendar
  
• Nash Ensemble. Dvorak/Saint-Saens. (Virgin, 1998.)
  
• Visions of Light (film that uses Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals as sountrack score)
  
• Glass harmonica page on Wikipedia
  
• G. Finkenbeiner, artisanal glass harmonicas
  
• Bloch T, et al. Glass Harmonica. (Naxos, 2001.)
  
• Dahlhaus C. Schoenberg and the New Music. Cambridge Univ, 1989.
  
• Hinson M, Roberts W. The Piano in Chamber Ensemble. 2e. Indiana Univ, 2006. (Pp. 545-68)
  
• Hoffman B, et al. Music for Glass Harmonica. (Vox, 1994.)
  
• James D. Cristal: Glass Music Through the Ages. (Sony, 2002.)
  
• Lyle W. Camille Saint-Saens: His Life and Art. Reprint Svc, 1990.
  
• Nichols R, ed. Saint-Saens: On Music and Musicians. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Reed E. Ovations & Encores: The Musician's Guide to Getting the Best Response from Your Audience. Aspen Grove, 2000.
  
• Rees B. Camille Saint-Saens. Faber, 2008.
  
• Smallman B. The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Teller-Ratner S. Camille Saint-Saens 1835-1921: A Thematic Catalogue of his Complete Works Volume I: The Instrumental Works. Oxford Univ, 2002.

Four Hands On-Deck: Peloquin-Hidalgo Duo at Bargemusic

The pianists, Marc Peloquin and Roberto Hidalgo (a.k.a. ‘Split-Second Piano Ensemble), gave an imaginative and exciting recital last night at Bargemusic at Fulton’s Landing in Brooklyn, to an enthusiastic audience of about 120 people.

• Thomson—Synthetic Waltzes (1925)
  
• Lavista—Simurg (1980)
  
• Burke—Alchemy (2007)
  
• Crumb—Makrokosmos IV (1979)
  
• Barber—Souvenirs (1952)

Bargemusic is a vintage-1900 boat moored just south of the Brooklyn Bridge that is the venue for an extensive program of chamber music that runs year-round. Violinist-violist Olga Bloom and her supporters present more than 200 chamber music performances on the boat each year in the main salon, which has a seating area about 15 x 9 meters in size and a 5 meters-deep stage on the outboard/stern side.


The Virgil Thomson duet is a character piece, with abundant evocations of Americana; post-World War I moods; descriptive specificity of a self-prepossessed nationalism; and the supremacy of ‘idea’, in a way that seems sweet and untenable these days.

Simurg is Mario Lavista’s solo piano work that is a meditation on ideas in author Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings. In the book, the simurg is the ‘king’ of all birds. (From Lavista’s composition, we must conclude that the simurg is a raptor of unusual size. The simurg spends much of its pianistic time waiting, 13 minutes of atonal, percussive lurking-for-something-to-kill. It is obvious Hidalgo inhabits this creature with gusto; the piece provides an opportunity for aggression, indulging in acting-out that must ordinarily be kept in-check in normal civil society. I suspect the simurg may be the urbane Hidalgo’s alter-ego… ) The indolence of this piece accurately replicates the milieu in the Borges chapter on the simurg. Some imaginary beings are sentient, perhaps more so than many humans. But, by contrast, the imaginary simurg seems to have difficulty imagining its own purpose, other than doing what it does—lurking and killing, manifesting and preserving its malevolent power. It is anti-sentient: unfeeling, uncaring, destructive. (In Iranian legend, the simurg is so old that it has seen the destruction of the world three times already. The frightening timeliness and cautionary political relevance of this nihilistic image in today’s world could not have been clearer.)


Peloquin’s world-premiere performance of Stephen Burke’s Alchemy revealed this post-atonal piece to be a sculptural essay in chromatics—ethereal, with no clear time-signature. The sustained pedal caused some of the passages to be pretty muddy, although the geometry/acoustics of the barge performance salon did Peloquin no favors in this regard. Alchemists notoriously search and search and fail to ‘find’ [the method to transmute lead into gold], a failure for which Burke takes them to task. The succession of Burke’s sculptural ‘mass-of-sound’ gestures reveals the quixotic nature of alchemical self-deceptions—truthy assertions of dubious trajectory, hermetical inquiries without a discernable rationale or story, abstruse but diverting exercises that, in the end, disserve humankind. (Stephen is a 1984 graduate of The Juilliard School, not the Steve Burke who is a prodigious video-game composer, including the score for Kameo: Elements of Power (Xbox-360).)



The Crumb piece was superb. Makrokosmos IV is a 28-minute tour-de-force in 4 movements, for 4 hands playing a miked-amplified prepared piano (3 stainless steel rulers inside, laying on the tuning pins). Prolific sonic textures involving both pianists repeatedly up and off the bench and reaching inside the piano to pluck, damp, de-tune, thump upon, and otherwise tamper with the inner workings of the instrument to create myriad effects.


At one point, even the page-turner was engaged to knock on the cast-iron armature of the Steinway and assist in evoking imagery of super-nova celestial processes. The emulation of stellar coronal flares was particularly impressive. It’s a violent-but-beautiful universe according to Crumb, and Peloquin and Hidalgo gave a faithful rendering of that naturalistic/pantheistic viewpoint, assisted with a single cardioid dynamic mike running into a 60-watt Roland guitar amp with a little bit of added reverb. (In a way, the Crumb piece was a continuation of the anti-anthropocentric political re-calibration that was introduced in the Lavista piece, Simurg. It is a universe in which humankind does not have a pre-designed, God-given place; indeed, in which humankind has no cosmic friend at all; beauty in the here and now, with difficulty and no possibility of redemption. )


The Samuel Barber piece, Souvenirs, is an amusing 4-handed character piece that is seldom performed in public settings—receiving here on the barge a convincing reincarnation in the hands of Hidalgo and Peloquin. (Barber evidently had a sardonic fit at the age of 42 when he composed this duet, a critical comment on the esoteric/illogical quality of what is collected: the very nature of what it is to be a ‘souvenir’ and what it means to ‘collect’ such things are lampooned. The ‘Hesitation Tango’ is itself worth the price of admission.)


Peloquin and Hidalgo performed a wry, over-the-top Brahms Hungarian folkmusic send-up as a dazzling-humorous encore, as the barge swayed gently in the East River chop. One of the nicest chamber music outings ever for a delighted crowd ranging from 8 to 80 years old, in a charming, unusual venue. The illustrious and extroverted Olga Bloom gave warm, personal thank-yous to each of us as we departed via the gang-plank. Bravo!

• Bargemusic website
  
• Marc Peloquin website
  
• Roberto Hidalgo website
  
• Steve Burke page on MySpace
  
• Free scores for Brahms piano works for 4 hands
  
• Virgil Thomson page at ArtOfTheStates
  
• Brooklyn-London telectroscope videos

Cryptography: Dissidence and Forbidden Music

In the midst of chaos, Messiaen wrote about the apocalypse in a completely unapocalyptic manner. And not too long after Messiaen’s quartet was completed, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten, and Penderecki would write pieces expressive of the horrors of the Nazis and their war, music full of screams, howls, and cries for righteous justice against the oppressor. But Messiaen has no place for such neo-pagan hysterics. In the middle of his prison camp, as a prisoner unsure if he would ever again see his family or home again, Messiaen composed a vision of Heaven where anger, violence, vengeance, and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant.”
  —  Michael Linton

DSM: The Indian Ambassador, Ronen Sen, speaking at the International Relations Council banquet Thursday night almost got to finish his remarks without controversy, didn’t he?

CMT: Yes. Almost. And then the final question, the one from the fellow in the back of the room who asked whether the distinguished Ambassador would please comment on India’s feelings about the U.S. position in Iraq. Two genteel hours in that pleasant banquet room and here was the giant elephant finally! It had been lurking all the while the several hundred of us ate our elegant dinners and talked about U.S.-India trade relations and business development and globalization, politely ignoring the big ugly rogue elephant. But here was the question that acknowledged its presence, acknowledged the war and the U.S.’s bellicosity!

DSM: I thought that Ambassador Sen responded in impeccable, characteristicaly diplomatic style. In fact, while several of his extended remarks glinted at actual signification, he concluded by saying, “I suppose I have said quite enough for now, without saying really anything.” His humility and gracefulness were superb. This exchange between the Ambassador and the audience was classic!

CMT: There are moments that are congenial for conclusory, pithy directness. And there are moments for being dilatory and oblique. The acrimony in U.S. politics in recent years; the degree to which open discussion is suppressed, in many, many ways; the difficulty that the person asking Ronen Sen about the war had in asking that question in a room of several hundred people; the fact that such a question had to be calculatedly held and held until it could be the very last question of the evening . . . It reminds me of the suppression that Shostakovich experienced—the obliquity of Shostakovich’s stance under the Soviet regime and during the Cold War. Or Messiaen in World War II and after. Or Stravinsky in World War I. Or other composers who have labored under tremendous political constraints but who have nonetheless managed to create art of enduring value and honesty—works that were morally decisive but not so aggressively so that the regime silenced their voices. They lived to fight another day.

DSM: Do you think Madama Butterfly is an accurate representation of the U.S. military? Or, regarding Messiaen's imprisonment by the Nazis, do you think Messiaen was commending the respect accorded Allied prisoners of war by the Nazis?

CMT: Well, yes, paradoxically maybe. Or maybe with a bit of the so-called Stockholm syndrome. You know, Antares Quartet has commissioned or premiered works by composers such as Ezra Laderman, Stefan Freund, John Mackey, Carter Pann and members of the Minimum Security Composers Collective. A number of these are highly political commentaries rendered in musical form.

DSM: Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat Trio; Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 and String Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp major, Op. 142; Britten’s War Requiem; many other things. Hans Gál, Peter Gellhorn, Berthold Goldschmid, Pavel Haas, Ernst Krenek, Karl Rankl, Franz Reizenstein, Mátyás Seiber, Leopold Spinner, Vilém Tausky, Victor Ullmann, Egon Wellesz. Suppressed composers, suppressed music!

CMT: And Messiaen’s answer to incarceration as a prisoner of war, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), uses a clarinet in place of a viola because that’s all Messiaen had available to him in the prison camp. Would we perceive this as the epitome of disenfranchisement and oppression if we did not know the circumstances under which Messiaen composed this, in Stalag 8A at Gorlitz?

DSM: Well, it’s impossible to now turn back the clock to a time before we knew those circumstances. But can tell you I first heard the Quatuor pour la fin du temps when I was 7 years old—at Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota. I’m certain I had no idea at that time, about Messiaen’s circumstances or views. And the things that this piece signified to me then are, I think, not very different from what it imparts to me now. The forsakenness of the clarinet is penetrating.

CMT: I am, as you know, not a religious person. So what is astonishing to me is Messiaen’s outpouring of love toward his captors and his display of religious devotion in the circumstances of his imprisonment. The Stockholm syndrome and the psychology of coping in untenable situations, these I understand. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others whose religious devotion was as profound as Messiaen’s chose different paths during the times of their imprisonment.

DSM: Pungent dissonances rub shoulders with pure, gorgeous, open chords. Rhythms that at first careen here and there coalesce into something that makes perfect sense. And throughout all of it, birdsong!

CMT: Frankly, I hear irony in this—not the insuperable victory of Good over Evil; not the human spirit buoyed up by divine mercy. I hear the continuation of dumb nature despite the idiocies of humankind. I hear the brutal indifference of the Universe. It is, for me, not unlike one of Werner Herzog’s films. Frankly imitative at one turn, fleshed out with complex harmonies at another, Messiaen’s careful notation of what he heard in the trees and bushes in France and in his travels permeates his music, but localizes the music in the context of human oppression. On the surface, yes, the result is a raw naturalism that infuses our senses. But there’s a subtext. Messiaen’s implicature! The backstory is the one that we would most like to know. Was this music performed for Messiaen’s German captors? Is this Herzog-esque subtext that I perceive in it something that Messiaen had to put deep, deep undercover?

DSM: I think you’re wrong here. The eight movements’ titles refer to the biblical Revelation of St. John, and Messiaen was emphatic about this. Three of them are pure solos. Messiaen’s bird calls in the clarinet solo unfold like an improvisation—an inspired meditation on the human condition. Entrances of the other instruments come out of nowhere and die away like ghosts—pretty good evidence for your subtext argument. But rapid-fire articulation in all registers here is a hallmark of direct exposition, not of oblique implication. The long, slow, singing line in the fifth movement and the gorgeous, consonant violin solo in the finale, which closes with a phrase that rises gently into the stratosphere in both the piano and the violin—these convey the pathos of the resigned martyr’s acceptance of his fate, not a covert dissident’s commentary on silenced voices and forbidden points of view. This is not the cryptographic expression of someone who is agitating to change things! Nothing like a Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. Instead, in a way that is consistent with the Michael Linto blockquote above, there is a Zen-like quality to it, I believe. Vengeance and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant. Messiaen has entered the state of not-wanting, the absence of desire. A Zen-like or Eckhart Tolle-like state.

CMT: Well, what about Shostakovich? He is the antithesis of a Zen-like response. It’s now clear that Shostakovich loathed the Soviet system, but he saw compromise as the best way to continue to work, to live and fight another day. Yes, he signed articles criticizing dissidents and Western formalism. But he apparently thought that no thinking person in the Soviet Union or elsewhere would take the ludicrous articles seriously anyway. He also took refuge in irony—for example the Finale of his Fifth Symphony? Is this not an ironic commentary on the emptiness of the reality that communism presented? His music needs to be decoded to be able to tell. If he spoke up for the oppressed, it was as one of them, and he had to be careful doing this. He obfuscated what he was doing with layers of motivic reference and irony.


DSM: In the few photographs that show Shostakovich smiling, there’s a wariness about him. It’s not merely that he didn’t enjoy being photographed. Look, there is an edgy vulnerability and guardedness in his posture, certainly, but there’s also strength—not the vehemence of a Beethoven, but a quality of dogged determination to survive. Dogged, not beatific!

CMT: Even if we’re right in these speculations, we shouldn’t see Shostakovich as egotistical or self-obsessed; there’s nothing of the Also Sprach Zarathustra about him. If he’s survived it’s as a representative of common humanity; it’s through his ability to feel the sufferings of others, one of his most noticeable and attractive traits.

DSM: It’s in the famous Quartet No. 8 where we’re most aware of Shostakovich’s empathy with others’ suffering. It was written in 1959 following his visit to Dresden where he was appalled by the destruction. What are we to read into his DSCH motif in this work? The first movement is a profound and sombre fugue based on the four notes. Not so much ‘I was there’ but more ‘I went through it and so did (or so will—) you.’

CMT: And the Quartet No. 14, performed last night by Miró Quartet, composed in 1973, in the darkness of the Vietnam War! He began it in 1971-1972. Do you remember when we protested the war, you and I—on the campus of University of Minnesota in the spring of 1972? Do you remember the fires burning on Washington Avenue, at the foot of the Mall? Do you remember when the police with the shields and the night-sticks charged us and ran us off? When we returned after midnight to the fires, still burning, and had a sandwich under the stars? Lived to fight another day?

DSM: Seems like an eternity! But lately we at least see the public protests against war beginning again. Long, long overdue. But at least it’s beginning.

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