CONTEMPORARY MUSIC R EVIEW
Editors Peter Nelson and Nigel Osborne
Music and Mysticism (II) Issue Editor Maxwell Steer Volume 14 Parts 3–4
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” CONTEMPORARY MUSIC R EVIEW Editors Peter Nelson (UK) Nigel Osborne (UK) Regional Editors Stephen McAdams (France) Fred Lerdahl (USA) Jonathan Kramer Kond J (Japan) Editorial Boards UK: Paul Driver Alexander Goehr Oliver Knussen Bayan Northcott Anthony Payne USA: John Adams John Harbison Tod Machover JAPAN: Joaquim M.Benitez, S.J. Sh no Susumu Tokumaru Yoshihiko RUSSIA: Edward Artemyev Edison Denisov Yury Kholopov Alfred Schnittke
Aims and Scope: Contemporary Music Review is a contemporary musicians’ journal. It provides a forum where new tendencies in composition can be discussed in both breadth and depth. Each issue will focus on a specific topic. The main concern of the journal will be composition today in all its aspects—its techniques, aesthetics and technology and its relationship with other disciplines and currents of thought. The publication may also serve as a vehicle to communicate actual musical materials. Notes for contributors can be found at the back of the journal. © 1996 by OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH, a member of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under national laws or under the Photocopy License described below, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the advance written permission of the Publisher. © 1996 by Gordon and Breach Publishing Group Reprinted 2003 By Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” ISBN 0-203-40153-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-40179-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
Contents
Preface Maxwell STEER
1
Introduction Jonathan HARVEY
4
Music and Inner Meaning Jonathan HARVEYMichael TUCKERMaxwell STEER
7
Signifying the Spiritual in the Music of Yes Allan MOORE
19
Laya in Indian Music: Monody and the Shapes of Time Philip RAWSON
27
Taste, Snobbery and Spiritual Discernment Joscelyn GODWIN
37
Symphonic Mind: States of Consciousness in Orchestral Performance Richard GONSKI
43
The mind and the heart: Mysticism and Music in the Experience of Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Composers Ivan MOODY
51
Trompette d’un Ange Secret: Olivier Messiæn and the Culture of Ecstasy Robin FREEMAN
65
Notes on Contributors
109
Index
114
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Philip Rawson (1924–1995)
a man wise in the meaning of Art
Philip Rawson (left) and David Lumsdaine at Chard Festival of Women in Music. Photograph Piers Rawson
Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, p. iii Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
A Personal Memoir of Phil ip Rawson
I first met Philip in the early 70s, when he was director of the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art at Durham University and I was a newly arrived lecturer at the Music Department. I had taken a couple of my students to the museum for a silent tutorial—sitting with a Zen painting of a fly whisk. (It is usually very quiet there first thing in the morning.) He had come into the room at some point and must have watched us for some while. As we left (still silent) he gave us a beautiful smile —gentle, benign, eyes twinkling with humour and a hint of conspiracy. A few days later we met formally when I returned to the Museum with a query. This was the first of many conversations in which Philip gave me the benefit of his wide learning. It was more than a sharing of his erudition: his quick imagination, his empathy, enabled him to lead me to areas which, as composer and person, I needed to explore; art, literature, music, Oriental, European, medieval, modern. He was able to make enlightening connections between different traditions, periods, schools of thought with the rigor of a scholar and the insight of an artist. It was some years after our friendship began, and long after we had talked exhaustively about my music, that he took me into his studio and brought out the folios of his own work to share with me. Here was the crucible of his own development. His work as scholar, teacher, writer, curator was given authority, energy and originality by his own creative exploration. Like so many other people, I’m bound to acknowledge my debt to Philip for his enthusiasm and patience. There are a number of my works with which he helped me directly or indirectly; most obviously, Hagoromo, Tides, and Raindrums. But above all I’ll remember him for his warm and generous friendship, and that first smile, which, I soon discovered, was a characteristic expression of his essential nature. David Lumsdaine York University Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 1–3 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
Preface Maxwell Steer
In assembling this issue I have had in mind a distinction between religious experience and mysticism. Naturally the two are aspects of a similar phenomenon, but while the former occurs in connection with a revealed tradition of systematic wisdom, the latter is a perception of the unity of multi-dimensional worlds of experience that transcends tradition. Even allowing for semantic distinctions it’s significant that religious experience comes with an evolved vocabulary (implying involvement of the left hemisphere of the brain) whereas mysticism doesn’t (implying the right hemisphere). Nevertheless both are semi-volitional, involving the subject’s active participation or mental assent. Beyond either lie the altered states of trance, varieties of automatism and ultimately ecstatic frenzy—whether induced by psycho-physiology or drugs. Mystical experience may be defined as being an ‘infinite intimacy’, a sense of fulfilment in which the subject is simultaneously aware of the limitless nature of the Universe and yet of hir intimate relationship to a force sensible as an identifiable personality. It is simultaneously the experience of everything and nothing, of knowing all yet being empty, of hearing within silence all sound. Different religious traditions identify this state individually—nirvana, mushín, Shambhala, Buddhahood, mystical union, alchemical marriage, shekinah—yet it can be seen as a common goal of all esoteric teaching, an experience of oneness beyond the world of duality. It need not even occur in a religious context. To me those very rare moments of total understanding that can arise in connection with works of art are clearly in the same category—that clarity of vision and sense of contact with some archetypal personality. Only those withdrawn from the world are likely to sustain such visions on anything more than an occasional basis, yet however rarely it occurs the mystic is quite clear that s/he is in contact with some archetypal source of consciousness that transcends rational knowledge. Eurocentric culture is normally only willing to allow significance to thoughts or actions proceeding from an exercise of will, volition, and accordingly has tended to ignore whatever proceeds from involuntary states except where it eventually assumes a coherent form. Indeed it might be said that the most highly charged cultural ‘fault line’ in humankind divides those who believe ultimate significance lies within the volitional and those who believe the exact reverse—the distinction in practice defines the Eurocentric view of ‘civilisation’. However if one believes there is a holistic, or multi-dimensional, logic to all experience then a distinction between the volitional and the non-volitional seems artificial. The so-called Freudian slip is symptomatic of the way in which the non-rational governs apparent rationality. European consciousness has subjugated and wherever possible annihilated those ‘lesser breeds beyond the law’ who fail to acknowledge the supremacy of a supposedly—rational Cartesian world. One byproduct of this has been a history of the systematic rape of our physical and psychological environment. By a process of reductionist logic we have deprived ourselves of any coherent belief system or myth whose overview might assist us to acknowledge our common humanity, let alone our common eco-system. Nowadays
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MAXWELL STEER
swathes of the arts, which for ‘advanced’ cultures have replaced religion, are similarly visionless, while other areas—mass market music—have been surrendered to Dionysiac ephemerality But as the juggernaut of Eurocentric rationality rolls onward, undaunted by the murderous record of its ‘scientific’ beliefs, the mystical insights of those lesser breeds’ have begun to assume an immense importance—like the genetic root stock of an overbred species. I hope these articles may open a way for musicians to rediscover a tradition of wisdom and imagination which has always existed and will always exist because it is an archetypal element of the psyche. The great mistake, actively promoted by Governments and academics at present, is to confuse information with knowledge—yet ironically thanks to modern communications, at no time have the insights offered by mystical awareness been so readily available. In the last 40 years Eurocentric culture has been radically reinvigorated by the discovery of the wisdom traditions and holistic thought-forms of the East and of indigenous peoples. In these quasi-mystical traditions the Cartesian distinction between subject and object falls away, and there is a corresponding diminution of differentiation between creator and recreator, composer and performer. Any contemporary discussion of Music and Mysticism ought to be trans-cultural. I should very much like to have secured an article explaining the mystical function of aboriginal music-making and its relevance to twentieth century musical practice such as the impasse of the concert hall, or an article on populist mysticism of gospel revivalism, but could not locate potential contributors with an overview of the subject. I am particularly sorry that we have no female subjects or writers. I assure you I sought them. Two were slated to contribute but for separate reasons withdrew, a third wished to contribute but was unwilling to write for the rates offered. Those who wonder at the omission of articles on or by John Tavener and Arvo Pärt are directed to the recent Contemporary Music Review Music and Religion issue. Other notable absentees may have felt what Alfred Schnittke expressed, that ‘while the subject has always fascinated me I really don’t know enough to write on it.’ And if you sing like angels but love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and voices of the night. The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran Healing, making whole, is much more than the therapeutic restoration of ‘normalcy’, it is a profound drawing into vibrant Unity of every aspect of our life so that we function in a loving reciprocal awareness with all life from the microbial to the cosmic. Active engagement in this process, alone distinguishes the numinous life from other paths. That this ‘wholing’ was conceived to be an integral part of musical experience from Pythagoras onwards is a truth which we are now ignoring to our detriment. Industrialised Education can no more make musicians than industrialised medicine can make healers. The practice of regarding someone as ‘qualified’ because s/he holds a piece of paper and of treating this ‘qualification’ as a negotiable career currency is so inimical to the profoundest character of musicianship that if we don’t abandon the idea of training musicians as if they were pin-headed lawyers, the moral bankruptcy of technocratic society can only accelerate the already-manifest social disintegration and violence which vitiates Western ‘civilisation’. By failing to understand the psycho-physical nature of sound vibrations and how these modulate humans’ perception of ontological reality those who have it in their power to ‘whole’ and to promote well-being are acting as the very jailers of young minds who should be being shown the open door. In the kingdom of the deaf, the one-eared person hears in stereo!
PREFACE
3
The adoption of the Arts as a state culture has (in Britain at least) multiplied a leaden footed government +academic bureaucracy whose exoteric myopia never sees beyond the political realities of ‘post-modern’ capitalist culture. Such a reductionist environment no longer even possesses the vocabulary to discuss nonmaterial values or esoteric spiritual meaning in the Arts. (See the article Music and Inner Meaning.) Having recently visited India and encountered at first-hand the living traditions of Sanskrit scholarship, I am convinced that the only way for Education to recover its role as a vehicle for the transmission of profound ideas lies in the Ashramic principle—people drawn to the energies of specific person(s). —with that ‘academy’ existing only while those energies, that magic, lasts. Western Education has, quite literally, been corrupted by money—by the bourgeois financial expectations of its political administrators—by the procrustean thuggery of political control—by the pursuit of quantity at the expense of quality. Whilst I wouldn’t wish to see education returned exclusively to the sectarianism of organised religion I certainly do think that, for all their failings, religious institutions were better guardians of the idea of education for the preceding centuries than state control has been during the twentieth. But this too will pass. The age of scientific materialism is drawing to a close. It’s own success in explaining the phenomenal world has exposed the algorithmic substructure of matter for which a new vocabulary is emerging. For this new world, a new vision is required. The vision must necessarily be inclusive where the old one was exclusive. The numinous view of life seeks meaning in the inexplicable, and by continuously redefining its awareness begins ultimately to penetrate the timeless mysteries of existence that remain a source of perplexity to the materialist. To those on that inner journey this issue is dedicated. Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 5–7 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
Introduction Jonathan Harvey
Mysticism is a big word. What’s more it occurs in an area where meaning, the relationship between signifier and signified, is particularly strained. Because it’s big and because it’s problematic in terms of what it means, it is commonly dismissed as pretentious and over-inflated. Even the Church at times has taken the view that it begins in mist and ends in schism. I shall not give a verbal definition (see Ivan Moody’s article for a dictionary’s attempt). The problem, it seems to me, lies in language. Much of our post-structuralist, deconstructionist culture is about the constitution of the subject through language. We are in a prison compound, they say (using language), which we must honestly acknowledge. We must entertain ourselves as best we can, inventing games and other pastimes. We are only what language we have. Language, moreover, is an abstract thing; the object signified, for instance, is not present in the word signifying it. We are dealing with rather empty, ever rejuggled patterns. From such circularity and enclosure there are various ways out. One is mysticism, let’s call it the apprehension of what is beyond time and space for the moment; another is Buddhistic apprehension of suchness, quidditas, the immediacy of things, of which language is the dualistic distorting expression; and a third is music. George Steiner, in his important book, Real Presence, insists on music having a vital duty to represent the awkward weakness in the arguments of contemporary critical theory; it is a pointer to a transcendence that one ignores at one’s folly. If, then, words are limited and limiting, to speak about mysticism is doomed to failure, as the word refers to something that transcends words. It depends for existence on the fact that it is possible to overcome dualism, that subject-object thinking can be unified, that mind and matter, knowing and being are not (only) two, but one. This sort of overcoming is experienced in mystical experience, or unitive experience as it is also called. The overcoming is also, I suggest, the subject of music. Music perpetually plays between the physical sound and our subjectivisation of it. We also veer between observing it and participating in it (outside/inside). It is always, as Stravinsky claimed, a matter of the Many and the One. Contrast and Unity. Two things (at least) simultaneously If we follow music with a degree of identification, we see now idea ‘a’ at the centre, now idea ‘a’ at the periphery, whereas idea ‘b’ has replaced it at the centre, and so on to an amazing degree of complexity. We see entities going on transformation journeys, being destroyed and rebuilt. Many writers have portrayed music’s play as a mirror of the self (or soul, or whatever). It seems to me truer to think there is no such thing as ‘the self’, at least as a static experiencer. The self is always changing, and while the music lasts we are being reconstituted in different forms at every moment; both the music and ourselves are moving. Music is not just a mirror of the self, it is an interactive system.
INTRODUCTION
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Music’s mysterious play with the ambiguity which lies deep in unity, its close symbiotic connection with the most private levels of our feeling of ourselves; these are factors which bring music in to the domain of the transcendent and the mystical. That Harmony (in the broader sense) which composers and writers attribute to great music transcends the profound ambiguity of music. The Zen swordsman is trained to prohibit even a “hair’s breadth” of thought to come between the impulse to strike and the blow itself. They must be one, without duality. The union of contrasts, subjective/objective, self/other, centre/periphery, knowing/being and all the other mutually excluding but equally plausible opposites, is achieved in music in just this wise, without the hair’s breadth of discursive thought or words intervening, as gracefully as if the problem never existed. (It could be said that it is our only problem, the root of human suffering, the root of competition, power struggles, envy, desire, anger and fear.) Yet, for all the difficulties, one must write about mysticism. There will always be readers who have experienced the thing, yet suppressed it with doubt or laziness, who need moral support. The trivialisation of the consumer society, where Van Goghs adorn biscuit packets and plastic bags (the man who wanted his vibrating colours to capture “something of the eternal which the halo used to have”), where music is piped in non-stop streams to otherwise-occupied ears; this trivialisation can ultimately deaden our innate faith that there is something remarkable, deeply extraordinary to be had from life and in particular, from art. There is an urgency. The spiritual is suppressed with embarrassment, the sensual liberated. We have reversed the past exactly. Unless we release spiritual activity we will become arid as a society. If we are arid we will concentrate on material pleasures. These we can only have if another person does not have them, which matters very much when there is not enough for everybody. Dualism becomes aggressive at that point. But those who write on mysticism and music do so not from an ethical sense so much as from a sense of warmth, of love of the subject. That is of the essence. Mystical experience is one of extreme joy and love (unity). To share that is to ‘sing’ and to write on the subject is to some extent to ‘sing’ —because only the alliance with the musical spirit can bring about the communication of mysticism’s flavour. The words in this volume probably say the most when they struggle to match the spirit of music. What music, then, is mystical? Music can be joined to mystical texts or labelled with references on the composer’s part. Clearly one might think some such music unmystical, despite its text. But, music has a mysterious ability to unite itself undualistically to ‘external’ events, objects, concepts; hence the very great power of some liturgical music, as well as opera (and even film music). Music as music, though, without the aid of a text or ‘label’: can that be mystical? Some will say, certain music can for certain reasons. The reason may be to do with hieratic qualities, with stasis, with ‘Harmony’ and above all with subjective taste (what you experienced when). There is a third possibility, though, and this has less to do with subjective taste. However, it merges at the edges with the previous possibility, paradoxically enough. It is that music by its very nature is mystical. Perhaps we have to go back long before the age of canned music to view the art in such a ‘special’ light. Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Religio Medici (1642) ‘there is a musick wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion…even that vulgar and tavern Musick, which makes one man merry another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers, it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God… In brief, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.’
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All three categories can be argued for. The third is the most difficult as, from Plato on, listeners have cast much music in the role of the anti-mystical—the banal, the humorous, the sentimental, the furious, the violent, the coarse, the vulgar… the categories are endless. Yet, perhaps the art of combining tones itself is innocent —we have projected on to that white screen our fantasies and our failings. But could the same argument be applied to mysticism? Have we imputed to music profound spiritual experiences which belong in ourselves? We have, perhaps, plastered them on to suitable musical surfaces, cosmetically. I think such arguments, though tempting, are ultimately shallow. The more we concentrate on the music itself, the more we become the music in participation mystique, with full consciousness the more we sense its true nature to be the play of ambiguity and unity: ‘one knowing’. It ceases to be ‘one who knows’ (that is dualistic) but ‘one knowing’ is all there is and that, phenomenologically, is all that can really be fully known where music is concerned. Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 9–23 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
Music and Inner Meaning Jonathan Harvey, Michael Tucker and Maxwell Steer
A conversation between JONATHAN HARVEY, MICHAEL TUCKER and MAXWELL STEER. The discussion centres on psychological depth in the arts, and takes as its starting point Michael Tucker’s book Dreaming With Open Eyes (HarperCollins 1992) which explores the role of the twentieth century artist as shaman. The participants compare the many attitudes to the numinous in the contemporary arts. KEY WORDS Jung, magic, masks, perennial wisdom, spontaneity, tenderness The three of us arranged to meet as the crisp November [1993] air was tangling the old man’s beard with the first frosts. None of us knew each other. But Maxwell had come to admire the work of Jonathan and Michæl separately, and seeing that they were neighbours both by domicile and profession, he had a hunch they’d have enough in common to merit a meeting. It could have been a civilised academic fencing match, but in the event a genuine enthusiasm Jonathan and Michæl felt towards each other’s work became the spark from which this current issue of Contemporary Music Review was ignited. MS In ‘alternative’ culture the shamanic, the mystical are acknowledged and practised by many people: yet the academic establishment seems completely closed to these ideas. JH I hear a lot about friends setting up healing groups and all manner of things, and yet at the University people speak of it all as having happened before, not being of any importance. But is the sacred becoming more necessary to the ordinary person? Are the pressures of ecological catastrophe going to accelerate such a tendency? These things are very important. Without a spiritual or artistic view of life man will just become arid and decline rather dramatically—in health, psychology, crime and social fabric. Our culture suffers from a deep suspicion of spiritual thought as anti-intelalectual. Such thinkers aren’t particularly encouraged in universities, but we need more acknowledgement of the state of receptor in the Arts—the wide-open consciousness Buddhists call ‘suchness’ where everything that happens is vivid and important. So far as music’s concerned the ideal is to encourage people to sit and listen to half an hour’s span of music without doing the washing up or reading, just sitting in a chair— but many people are too impatient for that these days. So either we’re looking for the disciplined, conscientious and hard working sort of person who is determined, or perhaps a New Age sort of person who believes that meditation or long periods of silence are where the answer can be found.
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JONATHAN HARVEY, MICHAEL TUCKER AND MAXWELL STEER
Figure 1 Maxwell Steer, Jonathan Harvey and Michael Tucker
MT You have said that dealing with the spiritual is not necessarily comforting: it can be very challenging to live the faith, to create in that spirit. JH Yes, it’s the opposite of escapism—you have to face what’s suppressed. Many people like the arts because they’re semi-consciously perceived to have some magical quality, but it’s pushed away and rationalised or not really acknowledged. However once that dimension is acknowledged it becomes bigger, more mysterious, not less. Whereas the other way, when the arts are deconstructed or socially explained, everything is reduced in scale. MS If the inner meaning of Art were better understood it could provide a source of inner motivation—but most people’s lives are lived on an exterior basis and they find it hard to make any such connections. JH What do we do about raising consciousness for the subtler voices of magic? MT Nietzsche said ‘the only fish you can catch are those your nets are capable of handling’. Sometimes your sense of your nets changes, and the act of hauling in larger fish can demand construction of a larger net. The sense of growth you can receive through art is essentially that of traveling beyond your current position. But often it only occurs after a lot of hard work. I feel quite strongly that in relation to spiritual experience there’s nothing wrong with hard work! Yet there are so many conflicting pressures which drown out the silence or clearing space in which these things can come alive. MS Surely we’re dealing here with something like perennial wisdom—that as a person’s perceptions deepen s/he becomes aware of new dimensions and wonders why others aren’t because they seem so obvious. When our eyes are opened to the older, or esoteric, traditions of spiritual knowledge we see a wisdom that has always been there—in the Vedas, the Bible, the Sufi literature and so on. There’s a helpful remark ‘we can only see what we’re karmically ready for.’ In other words, just as a young child
MUSIC AND INNER MEANING
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is ‘protected’ from mental overload by simply not being aware of the range of options available to an adult, so people whose awareness is limited tend to see and be governed by the externals. MT Ultimately one hopes it can be a matter of something very deep within coming alive. The perspective I don’t like is Milton Babbitt’s lecture Who Cares If You Listen?, written in the late 50s, where he’s saying the modern artist is like the modern physicist. Of course nowadays physicists talk about themselves as poets, or Taoists! Re-visioning the arts What I’m circling around is intuition, how a complex piece may be comprehended by an untutored ear, whereas some very highly tutored ears can no longer appreciate the magic, the essence that the notes are about. One of the many problems in writing about these things is describing the relationship between ‘body and mind’, ‘soul and spirit’, or whatever terminology our inheritance gives us. The purpose of my book was to expound the archetypal idea of the shaman which I find both very moving in itself and useful as a ‘re-visioning’ of what the past 250 years of western art might offer us—for s/he revitalises the ‘wounded healer’ of prehistoric and tribal cultures ‘flying outside’ everyday notions of time and space to the cosmic wisdom needed to heal either individual or tribe. In pointing to the shaman as the archetype of artistic endeavour, and in linking that archetype with the Jungian notion of the balanced, or individuated psyche, the last thing I wanted to suggest was that we should suddenly reject Western culture and ‘go prehistoric’ as it were—anymore than I wished to suggest that so-called non-Western cultures today should somehow cling to the artistic forms of their archetypal past. There are some enormously complicated issues involved here—issues of personal, ‘lived’ time and history, of images of development as linear or spiral, for example. It touches on the eternal problem: the relation between the individual’s (or society’s) sense of history and cosmos, between questions of ‘internal’ reality and development; between spirituality and politics. These sort of questions came up time and again when I gave a talk at a conference at Schumacher College, Dartington called Ecology and the Art: Nourishing the Soul through Aesthetics. JH You’ve hit a significant new theme in your book, which is everywhere to be found. When one sees to the deeper level—that all these art forms are inter-disciplinary manifestations of the same basic depth— then it becomes much easier to understand. You offer people a key. I think if you had taken medieval Christian musicians to see an exhibition of Christian art they would immediately understand because of the similarity of imagery. MT Matisse said something similar about the Arena chapel in Padua: he didn’t need to know details of the Biblical stories Giotto had illustrated because he could intuit Giotto’s spiritual intention simply from his marvellous sense of design and colour harmony. But Matisse was a genius of what Jungians call integration or individuation, and felt the resonance of Giotto’s work at a very deep level. A less developed psyche would perhaps interpret Matisse’s words—and Giotto’s work—from a simply decorative standpoint. JH A lot of students today don’t even know who the Virgin Mary is. They simply haven’t the first idea of Christian iconography any more. Western Art must be impossibly difficult for them to decipher, they’ve lost the keys. Tho if those ones are no good any more we must find other keys—some other way in to the deeper symbolic levels. MS You have said that you had never had a difficulty about identifying yourself as a Christian, and I thought that a remarkable statement to come from a serious experimental composer at this juncture in the twentieth century.
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JONATHAN HARVEY, MICHAEL TUCKER AND MAXWELL STEER
Figure 2 Detail from Arena Chapel, Padua
JH I feel we have such a short time here we must lay our cards on the table. Everything’s over so quickly. And what is there to hide? I see music as very close to death, that is the life that follows death, the mystery of not dying; I have done for a long time. And I think my music might often be about the interaction between the dead and the living, or the journey to the other world. Music can do that very well. MS There is supposed to be a special power in hearing the Tibetan Bardos chanted to ease the passage of the soul at the point of death. Altered States MT I am chiefly interested in improvisatory routes to certain ‘ecstatic states’— which may help us to unite body and soul, heart and mind. Therefore I have chosen to focus mainly on Jazz, blues and the renaissance of indigenous shamanic music, as in Saami (or Lapp) culture—I’m thinking here of the Norwegian saxophonist and composer Jan Garbarek, with his integration of folk music and chromaticism, dance rhythms and poetic reverie, but also of musicians such as Lester Young, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Keith Jarrett, Don Cherry, Marilyn Crispell and Mari Boine. Tho I like a lot of twentieth century art music, and discuss Stravinsky and Stockhausen in some detail in the book, after half an hour my body wants to move! Do you feel contemporary art music has had much less sense of the dance than Beethoven, Mozart and others? JH I have a lot of sympathy with what you say, and as a result my current works are increasingly connected with dance, which I love, and therefore tend to feature a light beat. I’m particularly fascinated by Indian drumming and the sense of lightness, not the big heavy drums, but lightfootedness that involves a sense of the body, of gracefulness. Of course you can go back to the Rite of Spring and find a tradition that continues through to Dutch minimalism. Or the hard beat of popular music, the tough music that comes out of many parts of the world nowadays.
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Ours is sometimes called the age of prose. Rhythms and metres are often far too irregular to give a sense of body rhythm. Stockhausen viewed this as positive, a release from the body, floating rhythm. Regularity makes him feel imprisoned and limited—like marching with the Nazis. He was very much against regularity and yet now he’s writing very rhythmic music. Die Jahreslauf, from his latest opera, Dienstag, is all about parallel rhythms, very complex. I suppose he might compare that to mathematical proportions and particularly to stars—orbits at regular but different speeds—a Keplerian or even Pythagorean regularity. MS Isn’t one of the most fruitful cross-fertilisations in the ‘globalisation of culture’ that art music has been revitalised by ethnic musics? JH Yes, ethnic music has been a wonderful opening. Ligeti’s music, for instance, changed radically when he discovered African drumming. It’s quite body music now. Right down to earth, but it retains the complexity of African rhythm, which he has profound respect for. MT We have access to so much information and imagery, through books and records, that the potentiality for transformative spiritual—and hence political—experience in our culture is enormous. The ‘journey to the self’ is unlike that available within any previous culture. But we have to beware of a magpie— like attitude. We have to work hard to find what the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf called ‘the wide and inner way’; and by ‘working hard’ I mean developing our capacity for intuition by much more than devouring books and records. Everything depends on the spirit with which one undertakes such a journey, a journey nourished by both oral and written traditions of the past. MS That brings up another issue: how can performance art be transmitted apart from literacy? How can one create a framework which combines space for performers’ instinctive musical responses, as in popular music traditions, with the ability to transmit and receive complex concepts that fundamentally depend on strophic form or conventions of musical literacy I went to see Geoffrey Poole’s Concerto for African Drums at the ICA last year, which was a sincere attempt to combine the two worlds. But basically the classical musicians kept their eyes glued to their parts and played like merry hell, and the drummer kept his eyes glued on the conductor drummed like merry hell whenever he was cued—but there was no emotional unity, the best bits were where the drummer improvised alone. We pay lip-service to the art of other cultures, but in our literacy-dominated environment there is a Main Event—and no matter what anyone says it’s the ‘text’ that gets the attention every time. JH It’s certainly something that’s been dangerously buried in the classical music culture. Beethoven must have been one of the great improvisers of all time from what people say, some of the nineteenth century composers too. The dominance of literacy began shortly after Beethoven, increasingly little was left to chance, and it’s got worse and worse. Even in the 70s most young musicians improvised, now it’s not very common, but if I had my way all music students would have to improvise. MT You enjoy improvising yourself? JH Yes: cello, keyboards or percussion. MT And do you find a certain tonal area or rhythmic idea comes through or do you improvise in different ways at different times? JH Different modes I think. I have the instinct to keep things unified. My training does contribute something at those intuitive moments, but intuition itself brings something different. The cellist Frances-Marie Uitti and I have made a CD1 of some improvisations which was released recently. We went into it without thinking too much, latterly I’ve reflected that we may be risking our reputations by doing it! The music’s not sophisticated in the way that many critics would expect but it has a magical quality. I’m very pleased with what we achieved.
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JONATHAN HARVEY, MICHAEL TUCKER AND MAXWELL STEER
MS In Philia’s Dream2, which arose out of your opera Inquest of Love, the sound-world you create by the sound processing on the cello harmonics has a trance-like quality nearly identical in both sound and feel to didgeridoo playing. Were you aware of this? JH Is it? No. I didn’t know that. MS That subtle variation in harmonic content is used for evoking a meditative state in many religious cultures, Tibetan overtone chanting for instance. JH Buddhist teaching is that suffering is the conflict between different ‘centres’ in different spheres, each one thinking itself the most important, which I find a very profound analysis of human suffering. It’s certainly time to reestablish the Gamelan view of music, where everyone contributes equally, but I’m too much the product of western industrial civilisation to approach that, and after all here we are talking about the shaman—an individual channelling something from another plane. It’s good to work communally but if you’re an artist nowadays you have to go into a quiet, private state and come up with something to help society along. Music has many aspects, not just the magical strangeness: it has ability to resolve conflicts. I believe it is perfectly possible for several ‘centres’ to coexist in music without causing ‘suffering’, especially if they’re brought to a resolution. We call Mozart magical. He has this marvellous quality of harmony which is healing in itself, bringing opposing things into a glorious dance which is a higher consciousness, altho his music is not necessarily about God or any text, just patterns of sound. In an ideal world there’s no Art, everything is art. MT And of course a few years after him you have Novalis saying that all illness is ultimately a musical problem. I’d like to connect Mozart to Paul Klee whose fascination with the world of Mozart and Haydn is expressed by his attempt to weave melody and voicings into painting. I sense Klee as a shaman because of certain ways of constructing cosmic imagery, and I want to extend the idea that music is sound vibration, entering the temple of the ear, to say that art is colour vibration entering the body and soul via the eye. Language Transcending Culture JH I’m very attracted to Buddhism which is an extraordinary internal system of religion, a thinking philosophy. I’ve practised meditation for many years, transcendental meditation and Buddhist meditation, and I’ve kept at it, which has given me a kind of sense of optimism towards the future. Not going backwards but of somehow transcending to a purer simpler vision of things. That’s probably one end of your book. At the other end are the primitive, magical figures in Miró and elsewhere who reach their way into Freud. So they’re interesting but I find myself looking to something much more diffuse, let’s say ‘light’: enlightenment rather than something magical. In the middle comes Christianity with this wonderful figure of Jesus, but it is a historical figure and cannot escape something of that. MT Have you looked into Taoism? JH Well I’ve read the texts but not more deeply than that. MT The Dao De Xhing is a kind of bible to me. MS Michael, do you follow a spiritual practice yourself?
1 2
Imaginings, Chill Out Records CHILLCD007 1996. Cello Music of Jonathan Harvey, Etcetera ETC1148, 1993.
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MT Oh I’m a real late twentieth century individual! Joseph Campbell was once asked if he meditated, and he replied “I meditate by underlining in books.” That and looking at paintings. Tho I’ve begun to become interested in Christianity I think my main interests are in figurative art rather than religious texts themselves. When I finished my book after three years I wrote ‘thank you God.’ If you’d asked me why, my rational self would’ve said that of course I don’t believe in God; but I’m quite happy to look at it from a Jungian perspective. JH I think not having a defined religious perspective can make you open to more things and probably a better teacher in many ways. That’s the question I’m trying to refine, like so many people. What I like is the idea that the shaman isn’t just a primitive stereotype. MT There are some crucial images that illuminate the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical which underlies this whole debate. Mircea Eliade believed that, the more a consciousness becomes spiritually awakened, the more it transcends its own sense of historicity. How does one escape what Joyce called ‘the nightmare of history’? Joseph Campbell said something like ‘it’s by living myth as metaphor—not historicising it, not becoming locked into fundamentalism—and thus remaining open to fluidity and metamorphosis, which keeps one open to transcendence, and develops a sense of the luminous, trans-historical core which lies at the heart of being.’ If one lived that core for too long, however, one would soon be ‘burned out’ or burnt up in love, but metaphor is a way of containing, of ‘pausing’ it—hence Campbell’s other great study of the mythic imagination: The Masks of God. We need masks, as Nietzsche knew, but we need to know that we need more than one mask. Harrison Birtwistle JH Do you know Harrison Birtwistle’s music? He’s very much involved in myth and roots. His work dreams back time, the fearful dreaming back, of somehow remembering the horrors of existence under Greek mythology with all those terrifying gods coming to life; also, the fear of the primitive green man is very real, very alive, very strong. When he teaches music theatre, he makes everyone put on masks, and he wont tolerate the slightest triviality or slacking of attention. It’s extremely intense. You become possessed by the mask. I admire his music so much, and yet I recognise myself going a different way. I find it important and in a Jungian sense very healing but I don’t project backwards into a mythological past, for me it’s important to go forward. MS Surely, Jonathan, what you and Harry have in common is the release of self into something greater, from which you draw inspiration. Like all dealings with the world of imagination and numinosity, it doesn’t matter what labels you put on the experience, because we’re talking here of a language of symbols, unique yet consistent—whose character is clearly identifiable to the alerted eye, regardless of the label on the packaging. MT Is it important for you that your music is experienced as a real time event with people there listening? JH I know a lot can be achieved by listening carefully to a record privately, but best of all is the sense of ceremony in the concert hall where people have made a special effort all to be present. It’s a bit shamanic; we have a charismatic musician or two, and then something special can happen. It’s very ancient tradition, the linking of energies: the performers’ and the audience’s … MT …in a circle, or spiral of energy. MS I’ve thought deeply about this, particularly having been involved with electronic music. Part of my reason for wanting to enter that area was that I wanted to experience sound in a certain way and I couldn’t find musicians willing to do it, and so my only way of hearing the sounds was to make them myself. But having been very deeply into electronic procedures I now feel strongly that the chance
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JONATHAN HARVEY, MICHAEL TUCKER AND MAXWELL STEER
Figure 3 Frans Widerberg (b. 1934) “Bird” 1986, colour woodcut. Reprinted by permission of the artist.
element of live performance creates a psychic interaction between everyone present which is, if possible, more important than the ‘music’ itself. And this in part derives from the ‘dangers’ of public performance—that combat with the unknown. People think of music as if it were an absolute, a product, but in reality it’s only a set of meanings encoded onto sound, just as radio is a signal modulating a ‘carrier frequency’—and the meanings have to be constantly rediscovered by collective experience. MT A large part of the shamanic relationship couldn’t exist without an audience channelling its energy into the performance and enabling the performer, giving—as it were—the legitimacy to the event. JH I have almost always tried to see electronic music as a live experience and one which is an extension of live players. MT If shamanism is about transcending the familiar plane of daily life in order to recharge that life with healing, inspiring energy, then there can surely be nothing wrong with exploiting the possibilities of technology today, provided it be done in a shamanic spirit: the first shamans were great technologists, after all. I’m sympathetic to the strong focus on Goddess qualities in creativity today; but that doesn’t just mean dancing the Earth Goddess back into being at Glastonbury. The spirit of shamanism is also in film (Bergman and Tarkovsky) and print-making; in novels and poems, in electronic music (aspects of Stockhausen as well as some recent Saami music, such as Nils-Aslak Valkeapää). It’s all to do with technology and the soul, or spirit, being in a fructifying relation. Personally, I’m very suspicious of claims about the shamanic implications of so-called Rave, or House music: repetitive electrorhythms may have more to do with an unreflective, hedonistic neo-tribalism than the sort of solitary—and suffering—exploration of life’s deeper mysteries highlighted in so much classic shamanic literature. Perhaps Beethoven was a shamanic figure? I was in Frans Widerberg’s studio recently. He listens to late Beethoven a lot, loving the extraordinary range of focused emotion so evident in the work. Isn’t the unfocused sentimentality of much so-called culture today one of the things art can perhaps save us from? JH It’s often necessary, or best, to be rather focused as an artist: you only work in wood, you only work in stone, you only work in electronics. That way you can create a universe within the limitations.
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MT There’s a paradox that twentieth century artists and musicians want to reach out to an audience—have wanted their work to be morally, politically, spiritually transformative—yet there’s the tragic dimension that, as Paul Klee said, ‘the people are not with us’. JH Yes I think the frustrating thing for an artist is that the ‘message’ doesn’t get through to that many people very quickly. If you take the perspective of a Beethoven or a Wagner, then the good those men have done is extraordinary, immeasurable; and presumably there are artists living today who will resonate on over the centuries in the same way. So art has this immense power over people. Even if they only listen to Beethoven in their bed sitting rooms when they get depressed. I’ve been seeing a lot of continented Europe lately and I’m struck by the contrast between us and them in their sense of wanting the extraordinary, wanting the magical. I feel more alienation here than I do abroad altho this country has other merits. But in general I’m happy wherever people respond to spiritual ideas. Even the simplest people who have scarcely heard of contemporary music will often respond in a way which is genuine and deep when they organise the ‘sacred’. MT Unfortunately when the arts do ‘get through’ to the general public, it’s often on the level of a journalistic exercise in cheap disparagement—like the notorious case of the Carl André bricks bought by the Tate Gallery a few years ago. What sort of popular newspaper would have been interested in discussing the political implications of the relation of André’s horizontal, earth-oriented sense of space and material to the contrasting transcendental, vertical emphasis of Brancusi? But the problem doesn’t end there. A lot of good artists in the middle like Frans Widerberg get completely overlooked. He’s not seen as radical enough, he’s not ‘pushing the boundaries’. So on the one hand you have the deconstructionist academic orthodoxy while on the other you have the entertainment or commercial world. And the so-called international avant garde world pushes itself forward (in areas like the Turner Prize, for example) at the expense of ‘irrelevant’ traditional forms. The psychic dimensions of art get lost; Journalism and fashion combine to project an image of the arts as superficial as their own. Yet somewhere between all this the task of education is to lead out what is within us. MS It’s important we don’t set ourselves in opposition to mass media culture. Having worked on the journalistic side of the fence I have to say one of my great heroes is the writer and Fortune journalist James Agee, whose genius in something like Knoxville, Summer of 1915 or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is to take some utterly, utterly banal circumstance and bring out the poetry, the universal, within it —not that the editorial power exercised over electronic news gathering really permits that today. News production is one area where ‘imagination’ is ruthlessly excluded. And if you’re suspected of it, you’re out! The problem is that people’s focus and memories are so myopic that if you put something more exalted in front of them they’ll walk right past without ever even noticing: while Mr Blobby gets to number one. People today are suffering from information overload. And many respond by switching off about anything except their appetites—hence The Sun’s success. I discussed all this with Noam Chomsky. His case is that people are capable of making informed, intelligent decisions if the facts are set before them. I don’t dissent from this—how could one?—but my reply, based on practical experience, is that altho TV managers may be venal they aren’t fools. If a significant minority of the public really did want (ie, would pay for) serious alternative programming some entrepreneur would step forward to provide it. Regrettably history shows there’s no market in consciousness-raising. Channel 4 TV would never have survived de-regulation in this country without ring-fencing. Look at the record of left wing papers in this country. You see the ‘culture market’ most nakedly in pop album sales: it’s a market driven activity, almost completely impervious to ideology. If a group happens to express a certain psycho-social archetype
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which is current, then the ‘attitude’ they’re expressing becomes a radar beam, onto which the nonliterate emotional responses of ‘their’ public lock, but if the group evolves, or seeks to change wavelength it’s a pound to a penny they’ll lose their original audience. The point is that for the general public ‘meaning’ has to be held within very narrow bandwidths if it’s to be understood at all. MT This is the terrible irony of our culture. We have massive touring shows, like American Show at the RA last year, that enable us to plug into whole periods of time and creativity, but they’re showbiz—they’re self-defeating in terms of an authentic experience of a work of art. Having said that my own way into Art has been manifold—I don’t think there is any one way to get to what we’re talking about. JH Well they’re better than nothing. You do at least get to see them even if it’s in a mass of noise. It’s a bit like records, I’m very very glad they exist, but they’re not the real thing—altho they help towards the real thing, and hopefully do encourage you to experience music acoustically sooner or later. One of the possibilities offered by the big exhibitions we’re getting these days is talks and music. I saw Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou Centre and there was music to go with it. MT Do you know Peter-Michæl Hamel’s book Through Music to the Self? That seems very relevant to what we’re discussing. Now why didn’t that book sell in millions? MS The simple answer is because it’s esoteric. It’s simply not a level of perception that most people get to. For godsake, it’s almost entirely absent from the most colleges of music, so why should we expect armies of people elsewhere hiding copies under bushels? JH Are there many courses like yours at Brighton? MT No, only a handful. I teach alongside specialists in a variety of visual disciplines. The only other comparable course is one at your university run by Dr Brian Bates. Brian has an art history background but is very good at bridging disciplines, between that and psychology, the novel form and drama. He is interested in re-visioning drama. In The Fraying of America Robert Hughes goes into detailed analysis of art, arguing a link between extreme left and extreme right—which I happen to disagree with—but then says “but this is all pointless, because when did art ever change anybody? Is it really that powerful?” I find this sad because he so obviously wishes it did. Ironically the power of art shows up best in unpleasant cultures: the Nazis certainly recognised the power of art by banning it. The USSR saw the artist as shamen— put up enough posters of healthy Russian workers around you’ll get healthy Russian workers—a crude vision of the power of the artist. Surely there has to be some continuing focus that expresses the need for vision? One idea of using the Shaman as an archetype of the artist is embodied in some the texts I projected onto hir, s/he combines in one activity all that subsequently becomes extraordinary, professionalised and diverse. Rather than suggest the emergence of some Shamanic Gesamtkunstwerk I sense people making links across the arts in their own imaginations as we have by the serendipity of Max’s reading my book, setting up this meeting— elective affinities, chains starting to form. One of my fears in opening this area is that people will use it as a way of getting rid of all western culture. “Isn’t our culture terrible— we should be like the third world, just making magical connections.” Tenderness We had an assessor once who was of the left. When things got a bit tetchy I took him out for a drink, and asked why he and his ilk always talked about Freud and why indeed many of them had never even read Jung. And he replied directly “I think it’s because we’re afraid of the sacred.” It’s not just off limits, they’ve lost the vocabulary, and even to some extent the will to engage with this area.
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MS Now surely, here we come to it. The whole of academic analysis is intimately related to male perceptions, keeping the subject at a distance, objectifying it, and that is classically Freudian—rather than Jung’s integrative approach which says ‘no you can’t understand it from outside, you must first enter the experience.’ Even we ourselves are White European Males sorting out everyonelse’s perceptions from our male perspective. Men defined the agenda during the middle ages and have jealously clung onto a world view based on an image of the divided self—which they have projected into learning, religion, sexuality, and almost every arena of awareness. It creates a reductionist climate where meaning is always pursued in ‘otherness’ rather than being accepted as a cultural construct. Instead of people accepting their god-given wholeness they are comprehensively taught that (a) they’re inadequate and (b) can only be ‘redeemed’ by acquisition of something that lies outside them: knowledge, possessions, money, power or, for heaven’s sake, Jesus Christ. This projection of a divided self is nowhere more evident than within academe where a pattern of duality is reinforced by people being actively rewarded for the use of their intellects, but never for the use of their emotions. That’s at the basis of my fight for a recognition of non-academic viewpoints. For me the exciting thing is the feminisation of culture, not in a political sense, but in terms of the inclusiveness of the female awareness. Because these are games that women don’t play, by and large, unless they’ve been systematically indoctrinated by men! MT When you talk of male-female I wonder if there aren’t better ways of conceptualising it: yin-yang, for instance. One word I like very much is tenderness. We all need to be more conscious of how we use language so that we keep it as a vehicle for traveling to the ‘beyond’ point, which lies deep within us. JH If we can. Do you think the language of analysis is doomed? Can we only reach higher ideals through art? MT My dream is that analysis and intuition can feed each other. That’s my idea of greatness: exceptional art has the kind of lucidity which, by its clarity, opens up the realm of mystery: mystification, on the other hand, results in second-rate art. I retain faith in analysis, but want it balanced by other qualities— by an intuitive longing for wholeness, above all. I certainly hope the present dominance of so-called deconstructive analysis is doomed! JH I hope so too. In teaching music we teach students to imitate other composers, and endeavour to get them to think creatively, so that it’s not just an imitative technical exercise but involves some inner commitment. I wish that were true of all subjects. Rudolf Steiner recognised the educational power of creativity, and I think it would be an easy step for all education to take. To go back to feminisation, or that lovely word tenderness. I did a Christian opera called Passion and Resurrection. And I saw it in terms of masculine-feminine. The passion was dominated by men, Caiaphas, the soldiers and the disciples—St Peter was the pawn of all the dark masculine forces. But for a long time I couldn’t write the resurrection music. It was obviously going to be dominated by the three Marys and the scene in the garden. I realised that all the instrumental music would have to change. Instead of the dark lower brass, I brought in the trumpet. The violins suddenly began to play important melodies. Everything began to be radiant. I found a new sort of music that was inversional, around a middle axis. It wasn’t bass conscious: it floated. In Jesus I tried to unite the two genders so that he was the only character who had both. He was complete, the healer. A lady composer friend said “you should write more music like that, tender music” and just that chance remark set me off on quite a new development thinking how important it was and how I’d neglected this sense of softness, melting rather than the assertive, the argumentative.
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Music and Auras MS That raises the question of using sound as a healing medium. I’d like to mention Jonathan Goldman’s book Healing Sounds. I’ve interviewed him and been to a couple of his workshops, where I’ve experienced both giving and receiving gentle vocal tone, which can almost cause the recipient to believe s/he’s levitating. It works by one person ‘scanning’ downwards with hir voice until s/he hits a resonant frequency, and then everyone joins in producing very gentle tone on that note. JH When you say resonant frequency, do you mean resonant frequency of the room? MS No of the recipient’s aura. JH And this is different for each individual? MS Even for the same individual on different occasions. It’s almost like homeopathy, it doesn’t treat the symptoms of illness but works on balancing the wholeness of the individual. JH I definitely believe in chakras being stimulated by different sounds. I met a medium who said she could observe different chakras gaining energy according to the character of the music being performed. I wish I could see that sort of thing: it would give a great insight into music. MS In any art what matters is the latent energy, and that can be feminine just as much as masculine. It’s even true of the most anti-transcendental works of art—as Braque said “the true materialist is a spiritualist.” If you truly encounter the nature of the materials you’re working with you see there’s something immanent in them. JH There’s no dualism between light and darkness really. MS In The Unknown Craftsman Sóetsu Yanagi speaks of this better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Ideas either of imperfection as a stage on the way to perfection, or the rejection of perfection have to be seen in terms of musó, the Buddhist idea of unchanging formlessness behind all phenomena. In this state, mushín, there is neither acceptance nor rejection. Ideas come out of a world that existed before Dualism—or rather, not before or after, but in a world where dualism Is Irrelevant. A true artist is not one who chooses beauty in order to eliminate ugliness, he is not one who dwells in a world that distinguishes between the beautiful and the ugly, but rather he has entered the realm where strife between the two cannot exist. This is a state of mind characterised by the words buji (‘no event’) and bunan (‘no trouble’). What is implied is an absence of storm, of conflict, of dis-ease. Worshipping the beautiful and hating the ugly are immature: in the work of one who seeks enlightenment there is no room for encroachment of duality.3
Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 25–33 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
3
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
S.Yanagi The Unknown Craftsman © 1953, Kodanshalut OK 1972. These ideas are developed further in Maxwell Steer’s See Through Music in part one of this edition.
Signifying the Spiritual in the Music of Yes Allan Moore
The music of Yes doesn’t portray a specific, coherent spiritual philosophy; but particular musical features common to an output extending through twenty years can be interpreted as signifying “the spiritual’. These are largely tied to explicit references in the lyrics, and operate across different domains: texture, timbre, production techniques, harmony and rhythm. KEY WORDS Anderson, dualism, material, spiritual, texture, timbre. In his study Hungry For Heaven, Steve Turner argues that ‘the conviction that we are made for a more transcendent world’ is ‘essential’ to the spirit of rock music, that ‘musician after musician propos[es] a spiritual solution’.1 Turner then proceeds to illustrate his argument through discussing the work of artists from Little Richard and Bob Dylan through to Bob Marley, Yes, U2 and many others. Turner’s argument proceeds on the basis of analysing the semantic content of lyrics, while other features of songs are allowed to pass almost totally ignored. This is not an unusual situation, of course, for most attempts at conjuring ‘meaning’ out of popular music assume that the ‘music’ acts as little more than a backdrop to the lyrics. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the ‘spiritual solution’ which may be divined in the music of the band Yes is frequently reinforced, in a number of interesting ways, by the sounds that they make. Yes formed in 1968 around a nucleus of Jon Anderson (vocals) and Chris Squire (bass). Through the next ten years they released nine albums (all but the first being hits), plus live compilations, and were for some (especially post-punk critics) the quintessential ‘progressive’ band (what the trade these days labels ‘dinosaurs’). Original keyboardist Tony Kaye was soon replaced by the more flamboyant Rick Wakeman, ‘advanced’ drummer Bill Bruford left after five albums to be replaced by the more stolid Alan White, while Anderson, Squire and guitarist Steve Howe remained throughout. Re-formed after a break-up in 1978, Squire and guitarist Trevor Rabin have since continued to record with Anderson, Kaye and White under the name ‘Yes’, while Anderson has also worked separately with Howe, Bruford, Wakeman and bassist Tony Levin (colleague with Bruford in the last manifestation of King Crimson). The path of these post-1978 ‘parallel’ bands has had interesting consequences on the development of the music, some of which will surface below.2 Throughout all these incarnations, guiding force Anderson has felt ‘there was and is an
1
Steve Turner Hungry For Heaven Virgin Books, 1988, p8–Z9. Details from Paul Gambaccini, Jonathan Rice and Tim Rice: British Hit Albums; 6th ed, Guinness, 1994 and Dafydd Rees and Luke Crampton: Guinness Book of Rock Stars; 3rd ed, Guinness, 1994. Howe actually joined after the first album Yes; released on Atlantic, 1969. 2
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infinite spiritual tone throughout the whole’.3 For the listener, such a tone can literally be felt in a live situation in the way the performers interact, and can often be guessed at with respect to a recording. Explaining, or even discussing that aspect of it, is beyond almost all but the most analogic prose. Fortunately, such a tone frequently leaves its mark on the music itself, and so my approach will take a different course. I shall focus purely on the recordings, those musical traces to which we all have access, to try to pin down the musical techniques which might enable listeners to assure themselves that the ‘spiritual tone’ is not simply a matter of self-publicity. Spirituality and Music Defining ‘spiritual’, without tying it down to any particular ‘spirit’, is fraught with difficulty, not the least being that of total relativism. The revised Collins English Dictionary offers a number of uses, which circle around words like ‘intangibility’, ‘sacredness’, ‘soul or mind’, and ‘refined’. These notions share a general opposition to the ‘material’, which accords with the colloquial use of ‘spiritual’ as being that realm which exists in opposition to the world of ‘everyday reality’. There may be suggestions of dualism here, worrying not least because many recent expressions of spirituality begin from the equation of mind/matter dualism with the (cultural/political/ecological) decline of the West. This is a paradox which cannot be addressed here (to my mind, the pronouncements against dualism are honoured more in word than in deed), but the dualism is less blatant than it might seem, for it counters the ‘material’ world to the ‘natural’, which latter incorporates the ‘spiritual’. In other words, it is not simply a mind/matter dualism, but more one of ecology/ technology. Taking a non-specific sense of ‘spiritual’, we might ask whether there is any way of generalizing about how it might be signified in sounds of specific pitch and duration. In an influential book, Wilfrid Mellers once proposed that the music of the ‘primitives’ adopted two totally opposed rhythmic strategies for achieving spiritual ecstasy through music. The first was what he termed ‘corporeal’, wherein a regularity of stresses tends to produce feelings ‘incantatory and hypnotic’. The second was what he termed ‘spiritual’, wherein regular stresses are counter-acted, yielding an effect ‘liberative and, therefore, ecstasy-inducing’.4 While the ‘damaging’ effects of the first of these have frequently been laid at rock’s door, the second was a little more common in Yes’ music of the 1970s (irregular timesignatures were a frequent point of criticism of progressive rock). More recently, Yes’ music has returned to using regular accentual patterns, although not at the sorts of speeds which produce hypnotic effects. There is, yet, a third strategy which seems worth separating from these two, wherein the absence of any explicit beat creates a ‘floating’ quality, in which Time’s passage, far from our being set free from it, seems to be totally ignored (this is the movement of the chant, which Mellers prefers not to separate from his ‘spiritual’ rhythm). Although rock is not a music of primitives, the strategies remain, and both the latter are made use of by Yes, although not in any systematic way Whether they can be said to induce a spiritual ecstasy, rather than simply to evoke a sense of the spiritual, is an altogether different matter. Accordingly, rather than approach from the level of generalization of Yes’ music, I shall proceed in a more ad hoc fashion, focusing in turn on specific areas of technique: texture; production; timbre; and musical material (those more mundane matters of harmonic and rhythmic patterning), and asking how these techniques act as metaphors for spiritual qualities.
3 4
Private communication, September 1994. My thanks to Teresa de Santos and Maxwell Steer for making this available. Wilfrid Mellers: Caliban reborn; Gollancz, 1968, p3.
SIGNIFYING THE SPIRITUAL IN THE MUSIC OF YES
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In terms of texture, rock has frequently relied on an excess of bass frequencies. It is these which have from time to time given it a bad name (the licentiousness associated with the urge to sexual cavortings on the dance floor, for instance) such that bass-empty textures might be associated with escape from this erotic materiality towards a ‘refined’ plain. Although the very presence of a bass textural layer is supremely normative in rock,5 Yes manage to override this norm sufficiently often for it to become noticeable. For ‘I get up I get down’, for instance,6 Jon Anderson’s perennially high vocals are supported by equally high parallel vocal backing and high, repeated, mellow keyboard chords (alternating E9 and C#m7) for what might be termed a lament for the earth mother. As the voice asks whether we will ‘ever learn’, it traces an upward scale to high B, at which point a full pipe organ cuts in, repeating a semitone motif whose precision is blurred in the resonance of the building. A more powerful metaphor for an unfilled ‘spiritual’ space could hardly be imagined. The referents of ‘Angkor Wat’7 are a little less obscure, due in no small part to general dissatisfactions with the pretensions of the earlier era. Here, an echoladen yet sparse treble texture seems to have in its heritage Isao Tomita’s evocation of Holst’s ‘Neptune’ and that myriad of ‘rainforest’ relaxation tapes.8 The song clearly recalls Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’,9 where the turning is Western, and we ‘return to the centre— Angkor Wat’. The stillness is emphasised by the song’s unmitigating, unfocused Dorian context and its use of what I presume is a native Mongolian speaker to add the final exoticism. She is allowed to continue beyond the confines of the ‘song’, perhaps in a gesture of acceptance that we (the Western audience) have not yet ‘returned’. Yes in the '80s The work of Yes through the 1980s was marked by a less esoteric style—more conventional rhythmic patterns, somewhat shorter lengths of song, more comprehensible formal structures and less oblique lyrics. ‘Holy lamb’ exemplifies this style, simply being a succession of five sung verses and a fade-out on an Ionian I–VI–V– IV–I sequence. Subtitled ‘song for harmonic convergence’, it traverses a simple path from sorrow at ecological mismanagement towards an expression of hope in the future.10 This path is reinforced by that of its textures. It begins with an uncluttered full strumming of an acoustic guitar, which itself stands out within the work of a band known for their generally complex layering of instrumental strands. This builds, verse by verse, to a rich texture of the sort which is frequently labelled ‘anthemic’. Such powerful
5
This is developed in Allan Moore: Rock: the Primary Text; Open University Press, 1993, p.31ff. Yes: Close to the edge; Atlantic, 1972. Throughout, I have refrained from offering transcriptions of any material for the simple reason that notation is totally inadequate to convey the sound of Yes’ music (and most rock music, for that matter). Not only is listening to the material the only adequate answer, but notation will give a false impression in its unwarranted emphasis on pitch and rhythm. 7 Yes: Union; Arista, 1991. This album was a collaboration between Yes and Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, in which Anderson and Squire supplied vocals to the product of both parties. For a short while thereafter, the entire conglomeration toured under the name Yes. 8 Tomita/Holst: The Planets; RCA, 1977. This entirely synthesized album takes enormous liberties with Holst’s original text, and yet at moments is able to match Holst’s evocation of other worlds. Indeed, ‘Turner makes the obvious link between such ‘New Age’ atmospherics and belief: “[Anderson] was able to mingle his gleanings from Hinduism with beliefs about UFOs as bearers of arcane knowledge and the coming New Age in lyrics for sprawling concept albums with pompous music”. Turner, op. cit. p117. 9 TS Eliot: ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets; Faber, 1959. 6
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textures are a part of any worthwhile live band’s armoury, used as they are to send an audience out on a high, with the sense of being enveloped in sound—‘Holy lamb’ is used to close the album. The full richness of Yes’ textural intimations of spirituality can be found at the beginning of the fifteenminute ‘Awaken’.11 Opening with a treble-dominated, sparse texture beneath lyrics which invoke ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’, even calling on the sun to stand still, it gives way to a complex texture which underpins a passage of ‘multivocality’. Here, the same voice (Anderson’s with backing) sings related streams of words (for instance ‘suns high streams thru’ and ‘awaken gentle mass touch’) from opposing points in the stereo image, with neither stream taking precedence. The effect here is of the listener being enveloped within not only the sound, but also the ‘meaning’, since that meaning is clearly not semantic. It appears that the only way to ‘understand’ is literally to get inside, a process facilitated by the actual texture. This ‘multivocality’ is a frequent feature (first notably appearing on ‘We have heaven’),12 and it seems important that it is audibly the same voice, in the same register and with the same articulation, which sings both streams. On ‘Without hope you cannot start the day’,13 for instance, the path to the climax to this encouragement to belief is marked by a multivocal passage of initially three (and subsequently more) lines. These are barely separated in the stereo image, and grow out of the use of echo from the extremes of the stereo space. At the climax itself, these multiple lines coalesce on the words ‘must be love’. This is one of the richest uses of this technique in Yes’ output, nearing the complexity of fellow ‘progressives’ Gentle Giant.14 On ‘Hearts’,15 the song’s message of spiritual union is emphasised by a multivocal refrain. Here, however, the use of two different voices seems to dilute the effect, a dilution compounded by a switch from D Dorian (in the verse) to a D Mixolydian I– IV–VII sequence in the refrain. This latter is more in keeping with the highly polished ‘pop’ surface of the album as a whole.16 With discussion of ‘multivocality’, matters of texture shade into matters of production. Exploring Space I have written elsewhere about the preponderance of fantasy, particularly space fantasy, among ‘progressive’ bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s.17 Explorations of both outer and inner space tended to become elided, especially under the effect of hallucinogens, which means that notions of ‘spirituality’ could become tied to lyrics about interstellar travel and UFOs, especially where the latter were hypothesised as bearers of ‘arcane knowledge’. In the early work of Pink Floyd, the ‘space’ metaphor is texturally marked both by the omission for long stretches of the bass end of the texture, and also through the use of ‘phasing’ in the mixing process. This latter appears in Yes’ work on the early song ‘Astral Traveller’,18 where the voice’s ‘whirring’ nature results from its manipulation through what sounds like a heavily gated Lesley speaker.19 The location of the astral planes (whether in inner or outer space) remains ambiguous, an ambiguity
10
‘Holy Lamb’ is on Yes: Big Generator; Atlantic, 1987. Rock’s harmonic patterns are theorised in Allan Moore: ‘Patterns of harmony’; Popular Music 11/1, 1992, pp.73–106. Links between the green movement and a general ‘New Age’ spirituality are, of course, widely accepted. See, for example, Peter Russell: The awakening earth; Ark, 1984. 11 Yes: Going for the one; Atlantic, 1977. 12 Yes: Fragile; Atlantic, 1971. 13 Yes: Union, op. cit. 14 Probably the clearest example of this technique, although put to a markedly different use, is ‘Knots’ on Octopus; Vertigo, 1972.
SIGNIFYING THE SPIRITUAL IN THE MUSIC OF YES
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reinforced by the oscillations between Gm6 and Gm7 with which the song (essentially in E minor) opens and closes. A more subtle use of a related technique is made throughout the first half of The remembering; high the memory’.20 This effect sounds like heavily panned flanging, where the sound’s timbral alteration is associated with motion, while the sound’s location actually remains stationary. The album on which this track appears is widely accepted to have its lyrics ‘based on Shastric scriptures’.21 The shastras are enlargements of a series of sacred Hindu texts concerning Vedic ritual, divided into matters of pleasure (kama), economic gain (artha), virtue (dharma) and liberation (moksha). This is clearly more a case of inspiration than translation, but the attribution does point to the spiritual exploration behind the lyrics. Throughout the first half (some ten minutes) of the song, the guitar is subtly flanged, while in the song’s first two instrumental interpolations, the technique is applied to the entire texture of tremolo guitar chords and rich keyboard wash. The effect of this is of a slight surging of the whole, whose subtle disorientation is particularly appropriate. The third set of techniques relate more clearly to matters of timbre although, again, production techniques cannot be ignored. Some uses are overt, and work in a very simple way. On ‘Arriving UFO’,22 for example, the bringers of arcane knowledge of all things are characterised throughout by an evocation of short wave frequencies captured from interstellar space. The ancient; giants under the sun’23 opens with high bells and clashing cymbals in a distinctive rhythm reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhist processions, while the use of an anachronistic harpsichord on ‘Madrigal’24 evokes a quasi-Elizabethan world where ‘sacred ships’ (later identified as ‘celestial’) sail the ‘seventh age’. Mid way through ‘Ritual; nous sommes du soleil’,25 during a 5/4 bass guitar break, the percussion takes on an elemental quality deriving from the use of very short decay on cymbals and assorted shakers, whose sense of menace approaches the similar playing by percussionist Jamie Muir on ‘Lark’s tongues in aspic (part 1)’.26 These examples are merely the most immediate, and could be multiplied. Other uses, however, have to be understood as more metaphorical and here, again, an opposition of ‘spiritual’ to ‘material’ is useful. One aspect of rock’s inheritance from the blues is its normative reliance on ‘dirty’ timbres. These are achieved not only through distorting devices whose very names (fuzz, wahwah, overdrive) clarify their intention, but also through such simple guitar techniques as note-bending and playing unvoiced ‘clicks’ (known as ‘hacking’ or ‘playing chics’). These timbres are particularly prevalent in styles such as hard rock and heavy metal, whose inheritance of the earthbound lyrics of the blues is a matter of convention. Against such norms, the appearance of ‘clean’ timbres is notable. The opening to ‘Long distance runaround’27 exemplifies this, where the clean tone of guitar and piano is reinforced by their doubling by the ‘clean’ interval of a sixth, rather than the overdriven bare fifth.28 The use of a sitar at the beginning of ‘It can happen’29 seems overt in its reference to ‘Hindu’, but its speedy replacement by a conventional rock line-up betokens a dualism which underlies the lyrics’ call to an individual spiritual awakening (‘it can
15
Yes: 90125; Atlantic, 1983. This surface is largely due to the production by noted pop producer Trevor Horn, briefly a previous member of Yes. 17 Moore (1993), p.98 et seq. 18 Yes: Time and a word; Atlantic, 1970. 19 My thanks to Iain Hodge for suggestions as to the source of this and other effects. 20 Yes: Tales from topographic oceans; Atlantic, 1974. 21 See eg Donald Clarke (ed.): The Penguin encyclopedia of popular music; Penguin, 1990, p.1269. The following explanations come from Margaret Stutley: Hinduism: the eternal law; Aquarian, 1985. 16
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happen to you/it can happen to me’) which remains unfulfilled in the song. The sitar’s later return within the rock texture can be read as a timbral reconciliation or, perhaps more crucially bearing in mind the album’s stylistic eschewing of the more ‘progressive’ elements of Yes’ earlier phase, incorporation. The sense of conflict inherent in this dualism is more apparent on ‘Heart of the sunrise’,30 where it is underpinned by differences in musical material. This song, motivically very rich, begins by opposing two ideas distinguished through changes in tempo and density of rhythmic space (the Mellotron chords of the slower will, at the last, come to symbolise ‘the heart of the sunrise’). These ideas come to coalescence before the entry of the voice beneath a clean guitar, emphasising the title. As the song proceeds, it becomes clear that the opening material is to symbolise ‘the city’, in which the singer complains of feeling ‘lost’, emphasising again the simple duality discussed above. This city encroaches to the end, ultimately smothering the ‘sunrise’. Other uses of specifically musical material can be more straightforward. On ‘Where will you be’,31 the declaration that ‘we are…everlasting life’ is succeeded by a long (c.1’40”) instrumental section of totally unvarying texture and range, over a single drone bass. A more difficult instance is the aforementioned ‘Heart’, which sets off at a pace of about 67 bpm. This is far slower than a ‘normal’ up tempo rock speed, but is yet noticeably faster than a slow ‘ballad’ speed. Together with the extreme precision of the keyboards and the enunciation of the voice, its tempo seems remarkably focused, which perhaps can be seen as a metaphor for the focused meditation of the mystic. There seems, so far, to be little sense of history in my account, other than a rough 1970s/1980s stylistic distinction. I have intentionally taken examples of techniques from throughout Yes’ output in order to demonstrate that their connotations are not just peripheral to the music, but central to the band’s concerns. This is made even more clear by a comparison of what I have said so far with particularly two tracks on the early The Yes Album.32 Here, ‘The Clap’ is a piece of ragtime guitar playing, a style which was coincident with other blues styles in the southern USA during the 1930s, and which is largely purged from Yes’ output after this point. The same goes for the shuffle rhythm of ‘All good people’, a rhythm whose origins (as far as rock is concerned) lie in rock’n’roll, jump and, ultimately, pre-war jazz. Again, its earthbound orientation seems inappropriate for Yes’ mature work. Hitherto, all these significations have a more-or-less iconic quality That is not the case with the next two. The long, central ‘Talk’ section from ‘Endless dream’33 culminates in an anthemic passage whose ‘power’ is not only a factor of its masterly use of rock clichés in terms of vocal, guitar and drum articulation. The harmonic patterns hinge on the judicious use of first inversion harmonies, particularly in the sequence Ib–
22
Yes: Tormato; Atlantic, 1978. Yes: Tales from topographic oceans, op. cit. 24 Yes: Tormato, op. cit. 25 Yes: Tales from topographic oceans, op. cit. 26 King Crimson: Larks’ tongues in aspic; Island, 1973. 27 Yes: Fragile, op. cit. 28 Indeed, Steve Howe’s guitar work was for many years marked by its refusal of the conventional rock player’s licks and pose. 29 Yes: 90125, op. cit. A slightly distorted ‘electric’ sitar timbre is also prominent on ‘Ritual; nous sommes du soleil’ (Tales from topographic oceans), where it seems to evoke the magical psychedelia of Traffic’s ‘Hole in my shoe’, originally released in 1967. 23
SIGNIFYING THE SPIRITUAL IN THE MUSIC OF YES
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IV–Vb–I.34 In order to understand why this is so crucial, we need to remember that root position harmonies are almost ubiquitous in rock—any deviation always has a notable effect. Perhaps of greatest interest is the closing section of ‘Awaken’.35 Here, a closing set of invocations to the ‘Master of images…of soul…of light…of time’ is intoned above an endlessly fifth-circling revolution of all twelve major triads (from E), of almost randomly patterned lengths (anything from one to six beats) and in varying harmonic positions. This can be read as a metaphor for the unity which spirituality discovers beneath surface diversity, and the key word here is surely ‘read’. This metaphor depends on a structural congruence, for the cycle of fifths of its nature conceals lack of (harmonic) motion beneath the illusion of (harmonic) movement. Moreover, because of the lack of familiarity which most listeners have for matters of musical structure in theory, this explicit congruence cannot be taken for granted, but must be read. Yes Now If we focus on Yes’ more recent output from 90125 onwards, there is a general sense that the earlier, slightly unfocused content of lyrics (at its simplest, whether ‘you’ denotes another person or some vague Godhead) has bifurcated into those songs with no apparent ‘spiritual’ content and those where the content has become far more overt, and also to songs whose accompaniments are supportive of, or are transparent to, this meaning. ‘The calling’36 exemplifies this—the lyrics address the entire world in terms of taking the opportunity for our own spiritual re-awakening, and yet the groove (in this case both the guitar and kit patterns) struts straight out of classic 1960s Rolling Stones. The intention is not overtly ironic, and this appears to me to be something of a miscalculation. ‘The big dream’ is equally forthright in its expression of intense brotherly and sisterly love, and yet the music seems to be unable to reinforce this—we are here in the ordinary rock world of transparency between lyrics and their harmonic, melodic and rhythmic expression. ‘Birth-right’37 is more particular—the song is an expression of solidarity with Australian aborigines. It opens with clapping sticks, leading into an ever-present drone which, symbolising the Didgeridoo, creates an appropriate atmosphere. The song ends again with clapping sticks, and an actual Didgeridoo, beneath what is clearly Jon Anderson’s chant. Herein lies a problem, in that a song which appears to agitate on behalf of a voiceless people too easily shades into speaking for them, maintaining their silence. In this respect, the solution on ‘Angkor Wat’, where the voice is more obviously oriental and clearly exceeds the boundaries of the song proper is, I think, to be preferred. This brief survey does not support the notion that there is a coherent spiritual philosophy found in the music of Yes, at least as portrayed in that music, unless one allows a rather unspecific ecological pantheism with touches of universal siblinghood. To provide such support, however, has not been my aim, Rather, I have endeavoured to show that they make, and have made, use of a wide variety of specific techniques,
30
Yes: Fragile, op. cit. Yes: Talk; Victory, 1994. 32 Yes: The Yes album; Atlantic, 1971. 33 Yes: Talk, op. cit. 34 Personally, I trace the power of such usage back to the work of Edward Elgar, and in particular to the ‘Nimrod’ movement from the Enigma Variations, although I would be unwilling to have to identify a clear chain of stylistic awareness back to this. 31
35 36
Yes: Going for the one, op. cit. Yes: Talk, op. cit.
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textural, timbral, harmonic and rhythmic, which can be viewed as having a metaphorical relationship to some of the ideas most commonly expressed in the lyrics. This is, of course, just an interpretation, but it is an interpretation which goes to suggest that the music is functioning as more than just a ‘backdrop to the lyrics’. Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 35–46 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
37
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
‘The Big Dream’ and ‘Birthright’ are on Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe: Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe; Arista, 1989.
Laya in Indian Music: Monody and the Shapes of Time Philip Rawson
The essay begins by negating a common fallacy that heavy beat is the prime vehicle of feeling in music; then continues by describing the role of essentially linear laya as the prime vehicle of feeling in Indian music. It goes on to describe the nature and properties of the basic structures of Indian music, including râga and tala, along with the distinctive role of laya in developing extempore monodic composition based on these structures. This involves considering the nature of time itself, and how in performance laya works by generating a specific order of shapes through and of time, Finally it discusses how laya as time-process can evoke in the audience well defined inner states (rasas), each based on setting into resonance (dhvani) traces of particular feeling-filled experiences, eventually combining the particular states into an ultimate rasa, which is a mode of mystical insight. KEY WORDS Âlâpa, Harsha, Râga, Râsa, Sanskrit, Tala. Nearly 50 years of listening to live performances of Indian music in India itself as well as in Britain and conversing with musicians have convinced me that there are certain Indian performance traditions which could revitalise aspects of Western musicianship if they were assimilated into the concordat that exists between performer and composer. Traditional Indian music is in effect extempore composition, apparently monodic, executed by a lead performer accompanied by one or two supporting instruments. There is an aspect of the traditional performance of such music, known by the Sanskrit term laya (Sanskrit is the language in which most classical Indian musicology is written) which is vastly important not only for Indian music as it was once played, but also for most other Oriental musics. Some recent Indian performers have lost touch with laya, probably under the influence of post-Cubist Western ideas. Though not overtly recognized, and hence not named in the West, it is nevertheless an aspect of artistic practice that is no less important here, especially but not exclusively for recent Western composers who are interested in both monody and the spiritual purposes of music. In fact, once it is explicitly identified, it can turn out to be no less vital to the interpretation of polyphonic Western music. The presence of laya in Indian music probably lay behind the once-common Indian question “why is all Western music march-music?” A letter to a newspaper1 even responded to the query “why must music for non-thinkers usually have every beat emphasised by drums?” by asserting that only drumming is truly expressive, and that ‘thinkers’ cannot ‘feel’ music because ‘thinking gets in the way’. This is a fallacy; and laya, for reasons I shall be explaining, gives it the lie. As a time-linear phenomenon having nothing to do with heavy beat, laya is entirely about feeling expressed with fluent melody as well as rhythmic subtlety. A
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major part of the letter-writer’s problem may be a dumb idea that feelings are crude, only to be aroused by crude methods. Universality of Laya Genuine laya belongs primarily to music as extempore composition, and can not be transcribed into Western notation. But in fact even the most sophisticated Western notated architecture of polyphonic chords, keys, tone-row derivatives and resonances, does need in performance a sense of time-shaping for which laya is an excellent term. What it refers to is closest to the sustained phrasing of fine string playing, eg Pablo Casals and Josef Szigeti, to good plainsong or Bel Canto singers such as Caruso or Callas (as distinct from the lineless syllable-pumping that now too often passes for singing), in that each of these may be able to generate timeshapes which are individually far longer than any tie-marking can notate, and can only be arrived at intuitively. The essence of monody is that its structural developments have to be achieved within a single ‘voiceline’. All its expressive shapes follow each other in time, and rely for their effectiveness upon the memory of the audience retaining a sense of the coherence underlying shape-transitions and the modulations of feeling which they evoke. This is not a matter of mere ‘thinking’. In books about Indian music laya has often been roughly and misleadingly translated as ‘rhythm’ or ‘rhythmic structure’; sometimes more appropriately as ‘rubato’, ‘phrasing’, ‘melodic subtlety’ or ‘expression’. But none of these alone is adequate, for it is far, far more than any of these, as the Indian musician and musicologist S.K. Saxena has pointed out.2 “By rhythm we understand musical duration as measured by beats. Laya is not necessarily subject to such measurement… Laya permeates good âlâpa…” The key terms here are ‘duration’ and ‘âlâpa’. The second refers to those freely moving passages, unpunctuated by marked beats, which introduce the note-pattern on which the following performance is to be based, and prepare the minds of performer and audience jointly for its subtle tone-structure and symbolisms. The first refers to the aspect of time in music which is rarely recognised explicitly, and which I shall be discussing later. An Indian musical performance is structured around a single basic note-pattern, called a râga (Modern Indian languages often omit the final a, and speak of râg.) There are many different râgas, some played more frequently than others, each constituted by an idiosyncratic arrangement of intervals between notefrequencies. Because each is built from a ‘tonic’ within an octave (the octave being the first natural harmonic of any note) they are often thought of in the West broadly as scales, though they may contain less or more than eight tones. Since they are addressed to the trained Indian ear capable both of hearing and distinguishing frequencies in terms of minute minimum intervals called srutis, and organised according to frequencies that can actually be heard, even though the series of intervals between the notes may be quite irregular, each note of the series is consonant with a frequency within the audible range of the true harmonics of the tonic. Râga scale-intervals are thus unrelated to those of Western tempered scales adopted to meet the needs of the keyboard and concerted orchestra of diverse instruments. The use of Western tempered-scale instruments such as the harmonium and concertina was already damaging the subtle Indian ear during the 19th century; and anyone whose ear becomes attuned to true harmonic rather than temperedscale frequencies may find the latter’s incongruities actively painful. Incidentally, five-note râgas
1Guardian 2 Indian
June 25th, 1993.
Philosophical Quarterly, New Series, vol.1 no 2. Laya in Hindustani Music.
LAYA IN INDIAN MUSIC
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are usually thought of as male; the associated râginîs containing the basic five plus additional tones as female. In performance, the notes are sounded predominantly in conjunct motion, emphasising linear continuity; though disjunct leaps are, of course, employed as well. Furthermore, each râga may include specifically required ‘graces’ around and between certain notes, differing according as the line is ascending or descending in pitch. The intervals of the râga provide the basic note-material to which the instrument, either blown, bowed or plucked, has to be tuned. Wind players of the double-reed shahnai or the flute modulate their pitches by blowing and fingering. On the larger stringed instruments—for instance the struck sîtâr with movable frets or bowed sârângî with flat fingerboard—the monodic/melodic line of the râga is normally carried on two upper strings, while auxiliary strings are tuned to the drones, and struck occasionally according to a rhythmic measure called tala. Tala is usually amplified and vastly varied when the hand-beaten tablas join in, the pair of small tuned drums with eccentrically positioned discs of resin that allow the player to produce a variety of sonic qualities of beat. Individual talas may be far longer, more complex and asymmetrical than Western timesignatures, and not every unit underlying the counting out of the whole measure is sounded. The first is the one on which all the musicians in a group come together. Each tala thus incorporates an underlying timeshape composed of a series of measures of varying numbers of numerical count that define their lengths, and has nothing to do with regular emphatic beat. To remember and sustain the shape of a tala musicians may inwardly, not outwardly, repeat a set of words giving the varied count-length: eg. (each ‘-’ signifies a unit of count; each word a punctuation of the whole measure) ‘Dhîn —
dhâ —
dhit —
kede --
tâg —
gade --
ghina’ --
Each tala ends on the next first syllable, ‘Dhîn’. Inventive use of tala can be a source of subtle rhythmic variety, and as such is a vital element in laya, incorporating variant lengths and stresses within the râga phrasing, Talas bear little relation to Western time-signatures, especially those of Jazz; and they have no connection with the thumping beats referred to in the letter above. They resemble far more closely the complex scansion of Sanskritic poetry. Indian Instruments The stopping-frets on stringed instruments are usually raised well above the fingerboard so that the performer can change substantially the tension and frequency of a playing ‘string’ (usually wire) by finger pressure behind the fret during the sounding of any note, so varying its pitch. To do the same the sârangî player slides finger-stopping positions along the smooth finger-board; while the wind-instrument player alters pitch by lip blowing and stopping-techniques over the open holes. All such continuous note-variation naturally produces a strong sense of linear continuity through time, reducing the sense of a succession of distinct notesteps: though successions can certainly play an important role in râga. Some of the larger-stringed lead instruments also have sets of shorter auxiliary strings strung diagonally beneath the finger-board over which the main playing strings are stopped. These auxiliaries are tuned, not touched, to resonate sympathetically and continuously with the râga-notes and their harmonics as they are sounded on the playing strings. After the âlâpa ends, the lower ‘tonic’ begins to be sounded continuously as a drone, often on a stringed tambura, perhaps along with the second harmonic, the fifth. The note-sequences executed by the lead-performer are designed to produce a ‘resonant harmonic space’, continuous and subtly
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shifting, enclosed between their own frequency-modulations and the frequencies of the drones. The skill of the supporting musicians is not merely to produce their individual sounds, but to hear and sustain this resonant (metaphorical) space as a rhythmically punctuated continuum. This is the life of laya, the be-all and end-all of performance, generating its own coherent and distinctive performance-time. Each performance of Indian music for a musically sensitive audience consists of revealing the vast wealth of melodic and sonic possibilities implicit within the structure of a single chosen râga combined with a particular tala. Each râga does contain certain motivic shapes in a sense ‘natural’ to it from which melodic developments are evolved. The râga thus has—or used once to have—an identity and function quite different from the Western mode or scale. The essence of râga-performance is to awaken and deploy, extended through time, the wealth of possible shapes of varied note-sequence and qualities of transition that lie implicit in the râga. Musicians and audience can only perform and listen for them when their ears and minds have become attuned to recognizing them (the function of âlâpa). A famous story makes the point beautifully. A renowned but self-centred and grossly exhibitionist musician was visited one night by a Deity, who said “I am going to take you up to heaven.” The musician was highly gratified at such an honour. But when they reached heaven, the musician was horrified to see the ground littered with the smashed limbs, dismembered and bloody bodies of divinely beautiful people, male and female. Filled with anger and dismay the musician turned to the Deity and demanded “Who could possibly have carried out this terrible butchery?” The Deity answered “You did. These are the râgas and râginîs you have spent your life mangling out of sheer pride and ignorance!” This reflects the Indian conception of the nature of all the arts, as it is recorded even in the ancient classics.3 Each work is thought of as giving rise to ‘realisation’ in the minds of the audience of a divine original which the artist has first inwardly intuited. Such intuiting and realization resemble yoga in that they entail a stilling of the monkey mind chasing after its thoughts and outer phenomena (what Patañjalî’s Yoga Sùtras call Cittavritti); and so, at least partially, integrating the self and reaching an insight into the unity of being behind all things, the Brâhman from which all moving and stationary inner and outer existents originate. With the visual arts this intuition may appear as static; but with the poetic, dramatic and musical arts it appears as a complex pattern of movement shaped as time. Each râga thus represents a relatively accessible sub-phase of the whole, a being beautiful in itself, as in the story. The good musician is one who can evoke a matching intuition and self-integration in an audience. The audience, however, does need to have ready within themselves both the resources to match and the capacity to respond by stilling their hopping minds, and turning inward to reach for that basic intuition. What this implies I shall discuss in a moment. But it does explain why to listen to any good performance demands that one be able to cut oneself off from all pragmatic irritations and attractions in the environment and ‘dwell’ in a separated from and somehow ‘out of’ the actual passing-time present. Total Awareness Proper laya ensures that neither monodic lead-performance nor accompaniment consists merely of uttering a series of distinct beat-notes of single, hard and fast frequencies (as, for example, in widespread modern ‘mechanical-popular’ electronic music). Rather, it is meant to sustain a ‘haloed’ linear flow of rhythmically varied interval-transition between the frequencies of its basic râga notes, using the elaborate graces, abundant portamento, detailed lengthening and shortening of time of and between elements of the tala. It is
3
eg. the Aitareya Bràhmana.
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therefore the longer and more complex talas that contain the richest possibilities for melodic variation. Being more difficult, they are less frequently used, especially for Western audiences. Westerners might think of laya as a varied but continuous ‘ductus’ of vertical and horizontal relations. In the West only a few of our ‘greatest’ performers take such a time-continuum for granted, and feel their way into it. All too often workaday performances provide rows of strictly tempered and timed note-steps and successions of chords, whose harmonics are out of kilter rather than flow-shapes through and of time. This musical loss is connected with a wider and more serious cultural-scientistic loss for us: our loss of a true sense of lived time as distinct from time measured as a succession of abstract units, discrete and individually timefree. To grasp laya properly we need to be prepared to take time far more seriously than people nowadays usually do. In our predominantly calculative era (at bottom calculus means ‘a little pebble’) our notion of time tends to overlook—or even banish as incomprehensible—the notion of time’s ‘duration’.4 Duration, however, is the first of four modes or aspects essential to time-as-experience. The other three are continuity, succession and change. Only the last two are generally recognized today: distinct unit-succession and integral change. Laya, however, emphatically involves the first two, duration and continuity, and so naturally includes the various kinds and functions of expectation towards the future as well as live memory. It naturally depends on creating, experiencing and grasping expressive shapes formulated not only in time, but through and of time-as-integral-continuum. What these shapes are, and how they are formulated and gain expression in music, has rarely been properly discussed save in terms of arousing and relaxation of tensions, together with some sense of anticipation. More usually time is interpreted, both in thought and art, in terms of static ‘abstract structure’. Part of our problem lies in our usage of words. Everyone knows that our presentday languages, especially those of politics, business and administration, and the thoughts to which they relate, are overwhelmingly based on the abstract noun (including ‘time’) plus a few qualifying adjectives. They are averse to naming not only concrete objects and facts save in generalities, but also especially definite actions and processes. You can read pages of text which contain hardly any other verbs than a few overworked generals like ‘are’, ‘have’, ‘meet’, ‘expect’. Writers prefer to say ‘are indicative of’ rather than ‘point to’. Even when verbs are used they may be highly abstract, such as: ‘take’, ‘evaluate’, ‘participate’, ‘control’, to the extent that one can read or listen to quite long stretches of prose without realising what they are actually about. All of this tends to obscure the basic fact that names and nouns are being used to refer to abstract categories as if they are single and static entities, counters which have no content of process through time. Everyone forgets that, as the scientific philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, “There can be no universe at an instant”, and that Heidegger showed existence to be inseparable from time. If you think about it you realise that the names and nouns one normally uses must imply time in many ways. We just ignore the fact for the convenience of seeming calculative and ‘scientific’. For any phenomenon to exist at all means that it has to endure in some recognisable form for a period, however brief. Simply to be recognised and named, it must have presented itself as a continuity through some phase of duration. Even to record or utter a sonic or visual ‘sign’ for any phenomenon constitutes an act through time. No phenomenon reveals any level and pattern of succession and change (the second pair of the four modes of time mentioned above) without also enduring continuously (the first pair). This is what abstract categorical thought, and language, prefer to omit. 4
The philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of time as durée, is widely discounted nowadays because it can not be measured but only ‘intuited’. Writers on music in the earlier twentieth century did sometimes use Bergson’s ideas to good effect.
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The truth, however, is that most of the things we recognise, name and think and feel about in our human lives endure and change together, act and grow following particular time-forms; and when we call them to mind, though we may not realise it, the forms of change and activity they follow through time are vital parts in our whole memory and idea of them. It is certainly true that when one analyses musical form via notation away from immediate live performance, however good one’s ‘inner ear’ may be, one is bound to deal with it in abstract terms. But it is the nature of abstraction (which at bottom means taking out from) that it considers only one selected and tightly defined aspect of what it handles: that is what analysis means. But the reality it may claim to handle is far wider than what can be abstracted from it, which by being abstracted is turned into fixed units. For these to be analysed demands that they be considered only in terms of the second two modes of time, succession and change-as-difference, rather than as duration and continuity We still have no terminology for timeshapes within the first two modes, which we are nevertheless perfectly capable of grasping as they ‘enact’, albeit by what we can only call ‘intuition’. Where laya is concerned the duration-continuity flow-aspects of that wider reality are precisely those which are essential to its realization and expression. Anticipation,5 in terms of scale-sequence modulated by tala intervals between notes and chords, certainly does come into such expression; also tensions induced by delay and acceleration. But the important unifying factor, corresponding to what Aristotle6 called entelechy, only appears through a râga as a product of occasion and particular of performance at and through specific times. Roughly speaking, entelechy means that a form contains, and its nature is determined by, its end; and no form— musical or otherwise—can ‘be’ merely as a static, spatial, and hence ‘timeless’ abstract shape. Aristotle also explicitly recognised forms as patterns of energy—which imply time-content, since without time ‘energy’ is meaningless. One good metaphor for entelechy was given by the Persian poet Jalal ad’din Rùmi: “Had there been no hope of the fruit, would the gardener have planted the tree? Therefore in reality the tree is born of the fruit, though it appears to be produced by the tree.” The Essence The centuries-long tradition of Indian aesthetic theory developed a splendid image for the entelechy of art, especially the end and goal of all musical performance: it is called rasa. This is an inner condition of mind and emotion induced in the audience which I mentioned earlier in the guise of a divine insight. The earliest term the founder of the Indian theory, Bharata (4thC AD?), used for the highest aesthetic experience was harsha, meaning ecstatic joy. But later theorists felt the need to recognise that harsha was not a simplex phenomenon, to be approached directly by the performing arts, but a complex reflecting and unifying a variety of emotional conditions. They therefore adopted the term rasa. Fundamentally the word rasa means ‘juice’ or ‘flavour’; and since we distinguish many actual rasa-flavours, the term rasa is capable of reflecting the variety of human emotions that underly the effects of art. So rasa was finally authenticated by Abhinavagupta (ca. 1000 AD) to embrace the whole spectrum of emotion and feeling contributing to what Bharata called harsha. Rasas are not emotions themselves; each of our actual emotions in everyday life possesses our minds singly, and we tend to act upon it. However, all of them leave their traces, along with traces of their various causes and effects, in our deep, usually unconscious, memories. The whole nature of rasa is that, in experiencing it, we do not undergo and attempt to act upon an individual emotion behind it; by, say,
5
cf. V.Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 1956.
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attempting to ravish a beautiful singer under the influence of the erotic rasa, or actually vomiting under the influence of the disgusting. Instead we sit still while performance-art presents forms and images analogous to the scalar and rhythmic shapes of the associated causes and effects of each emotion, so as to awaken and reconcile inner resonances (called dhvani) of that emotion among our mental experience-traces. The progress of an inspired musical performance gradually arouses by its performance-shapes in time the fields of resonance of each rasa in turn, as the audience follows and grasps its passage through shifting emotional regions. The performer, having evoked in succession traces in all the specific emotion-fields, and preserved them in the mind of the audience by introducing every now and then formal echoes of the shapes that evoked them, keeps them resonating together. By so awakening resonances of the lesser ‘flavour rasas’ the performer leads the audience to experience the single overarching compound of all lesser rasas: the indefinable Harsha-Rasa. This super-rasa therefore arises as a compound of all the lesser rasas awake at once: the profoundly erotic and infinitely sad, the jovial and tormented, the high-spirited and passionate, and so on, no one overwhelming the others.7 Since the lesser rasas are intense inner conditions, and each unifies resonances and rhythms belonging to a specific reach of emotion and mind within the listener, the theory accepts that no audience can possibly be expected to move through the lesser states and reach the final state quickly, by jumping from one to the next. All performance is thus progressive, leading from the tala-free âlâpa through to the intensely rhythmic finale. The speed of the latter is not intended to be merely ‘exciting’ in any banal, directly emotional sense, but to represent the culmination, the entelechy, the ripening of the fruit of the tree of music that has gone before. It is surely identical to that complex, nonspecific state we Westerners can all recognize in ourselves at the conclusion of any genuinely ‘moving’ performance of any music. Specifically musical shapes realised in all four of the modes of time alone generate progressions through lesser rasas to super-rasa. These shapes are not ‘built’ from blocks or fragments of sound; they are developed as a flow of subtly varying thematic elements, along with graduated pitch and numerical timeintervals between notes, unrepeatable qualities of stress and slide, of frequency-inflections within note-sets. This ties in with the Indian conception of the nature of monodic musical expression as rooted in the human voice singing extempore. Instruments sing; but they are capable of doing things, reaching ranges of shape and expression far beyond what actual human vocal organs can attain. They are super-voices, nevertheless appealing to the same human fund of feeling-resonances and unacted responses as the voice itself; hence the expressive instrumental performer may tap an even wider range of stronger and subtler gradations of aesthetic meaning than the singer. But the instrument, if its appeal is to be direct, always remains in some sense a voice, as in the playing of Charlie Parker and Art Tatum. Indian aesthetic theory recognises that, like words, the heard physical sounds of musical expression never ‘contain’ what they refer to or mean. Since the latter is a feeling-coherence perceived inwardly, which the heard sounds and their coherence can only symbolize, the mind of the audience needs to be trained both to be aware of and open to responding to these fields of feeling and coherence within themselves. The great advantage of music in this respect over the other arts is that all types of sound are somehow already ‘internal’ and, of all sense-experiences, most fully involve responses throughout the somatic system.8 This becomes highly significant later on. Since Indian theory recognises that each divine râga is progressively awoken by means of a wealth of phrases which, with the aid of tala, open out its inner nature, a true performance of a râga leads through a series of rasa-regions. The final state of Harsha-Rasa is that
6
Metaphysics book theta, chap 8.
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sustained condition during which a whole panorama of time-forms usually dormant within the mind is linked and set into resonance by the forms realised in the interwoven fluid and rhythmic shapes of sound. Forming Formlessness The term ‘form’ is so often misunderstood in art-writing that it is as well to clarify its meaning. The long European philosophical tradition dealing with form runs right through Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Plotinus, the Scholastics such as St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan, down to E.I.Watkin, and today’s Roman Catholic Thomists. All these treat and reinforce the understanding of ‘form’ as implicitly static, hence spatial, time-free, and susceptible to abstraction from the continuum of duration. There are levels and overlaps of form in this sense: the human body-form consists of ‘spatial arrangements’ and interactions between the lesser forms of its component organs and chemical structures. (The very word ‘Structure’ implies form in this sense.) All these writers recognise form as the medium of divine Creation; and this justifies the modern use of ‘form’, ‘formal expression’ etc, in the realm of the static visual arts. Aristotle was alone in emphasising entelechy, activity and energy as implicit in ‘form’,9 though D’Arcy Went worth Thompson, in his great book Growth and Form, treated organic forms as the result of patterns of development through time. But if one considers ‘form’ as meaning a graspable totality which links a whole set of discrete phenomena by close analogy, and differentiates them from other sets, there is no reason why ‘form’ should not be applied to phenomena and shapes of process through time, in the absence of any other generally recognised English term. The Sanskrit term âbhâsa as used in aesthetic theory comes close to what is meant. Most traditions, including the Indian, have recognized form as a mode of spirit no more or less sensuously tangible than ‘arrangement’. To the Western mind accustomed to dealing in static spatialized abstractions which consist of single aspects of groups of phenomena that exclude all other aspects of those phenomena than that abstracted, it may seem that since events in actual passing time never repeat exactly, they can not be said to show externally any other than a statistical formal pattern. But to the Indian consciousness, ‘abstraction’, understood as ‘withdrawal’, by stilling of the monkey-like mind hopping about to focus on an unending succession of thoughts and events, allows for the notion of form as a comprehensive image, resembling a concrete universal, which ‘contains’ all its instances, without having to exclude large areas of its content. In our present context the fluid time-entities which Indian music presents may legitimately be called forms. As shapes of sound signifying forms in and of time, the forms of individual phrases and passages may have no need to be symmetrical, and beginnings may be differently shaped from ends. We should have no difficulty in accepting that what they signify are recognisable forms, and so share the genuinely divine creative status of form as traditionally accepted. This provides the answer to the question as to what constitutes the match between the vocal/instrumental sequences the musician executes through time and the sequences of inner resonance these evoke to generate rasas: formal analogy. This may be both close and more distant, linking the fluid sounds with our memory traces of fluid human experience, somatic as well as vocal. They include expression in our communications with other people through active body-language of posturing and gesturing as well as voice-inflection. All of these are in reality shaped in and through time, never merely abstract in the static sense. Initially we absorb 7 The full canonical spectrum of named emotional Modes with their rasas is: Delight, the Erotic; Laughter, the Comic; Sorrow, the Pathetic; Anger, the Furious; Heroism, the Heroic; Fear, the Terrible; Disgust, the Loathsome; Astonishment, the Sublime; Peace, the Peaceful. 8 See H.Reinold ‘On the Problem of Musical Hearing’ in Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft vol.11, no.2, 1954.
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them (as Gregory Bateson has pointed out) by a kind of inner mimesis or mimicry—a time-active procedure. They include memory-traces of both uttering one’s own vocal inflections accompanied by bodily gestures and attitudes, and witnessing the causes and effects of such inflections and gestures in the utterances and attitudes of others. These get structured into our memory, along with their accompanying stimulus-shapes, feeling-responses and emotional consequences. Good music first modulates the feelings of the audience by ‘enacting’ through time sonic combinations analogous to those mimicked and empathised in each individual’s memory-fund. The process of musical composition then coordinates these fluid forms, with other, higher time-forms (as in the human body above) to attain the fluid—rather than the static— identity of the divine râga. A simple example in words can illustrate the basic material that the monodic line enhances, and how particular inflections of expressive sound and stress can convey delicate shades of trans-verbal feeling, and hence aesthetic meaning. Change of stress, pitch and slide can alter the feeling, and hence signified by the common phrase “I love you:” “I love you:” “I love you:” “I love you:” accompanied by kinetic shapes of bodily acts and gestures. Singers, of course, regularly produce much subtler inflections of the same simple phrase. Our minds thus contain, usually without our realising it, along with vocal traces, a fund of unconscious memory-traces and structures replete with many kinds of movement and process-imagery imbued with various feelings. As part of the mind’s ceaseless live analogising activity among its own contents, these get cross-linked, bridged and accumulated as forms-of-forms of sequence. The elements may originate in diverse regions of experience and knowledge which have no connection in the purely objective world. For example, a poet may write “I feel a wind from other planets” (musicians will recognise “leh fühl’ ein Duft von anderen Planeten”) talking factual nonsense but poetic sense. This, incidentally, is why it is important to have some idea of the emotional meaning of the tone and stress-forms in any spoken language whose music one wishes to feel one’s way into. Laya, of course, goes far beyond enacting straightforward imitations of common time-based soundphenomena of the everyday world; though it is formally developed from a continuous series of length and stress forms based on them, usually divorced from words. (A fine Western example of such development is in Beethoven’s 6th Symphony.) As formulated aesthetic utterance, all musics involve the reconciliation into coherence of contrasting thematic material along with its fields of reference. Because in monodic music such forms have to appear lined out through performance-time, all the variations, repetitions and homologues essential to resolutions into higher time-formal coherences have to be clearly differentiated and connected within the time-flow of the music. This is why it needs to involve that wide range of individual note-length, highly varied rubato, stresses, graces, glissando and minute shifts in pitch between notes and over clusters of intervals. In extempore monody, laya consists of the performer following through that reconciliation, reaching for râga along a developing insight of mind and feeling. Formal order within laya is not timelessly ‘structural’, but organic, growing through time towards its entelechy in rasa—like Rumi’s fruiting tree. The effect is to eliminate the mind’s hopping pursuit of individual things and events. The resolutions and laddered structure of sequential time-forms executed through the performance-time necessarily lift all the material unified by the formal ana logues out of and above common passing time, into another region. Achieving this generates the sense of transcendent time so familiar to musical people in India. It is felt to be a reflection of the True Self witnessing its Creative identity gathered within the temporal forms of Being. On special occasions the condition may reach further even than the musician’s original intuition of the wealth of the râga; because performing extempore may itself have led the musician
9
Metaphysics, book theta, chap 3.
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to attain fresh coherences, and carried him or her—along with the audience—further that the initial yoga-like intuition. Philip Rawson Select Bibilography 1991 Sacred Tibet Thames and Hudson, London. 1987 Design Macdonald, London and Sydney; Prentice-Hall Int USA. 1984 Reissue 2nd edition Ceramics U Pennsylvania Press 1983 Art of Drawing Macdonald, London and Sydney; Prentice-Hall Int USA. 1981 Oriental Erotic Art Quartet, London, Melbourne, New York. 1978 Seeing Through Drawing BBC London. 1977 Art of Indian Asia Elsevier-Phaidon, Oxford. 1976 Erotic Art of India Thames and Hudson, London. 1974 Tao, the Chinese philosophy of Change (w. L Legeza) Thames and Hudson; New York Graphic Soc. 1974 Yoga Art (w. A Mookerjee) Thames and Hudson, London. 1973 Art of Tantra Thames and Hudson, London; New York Graphic Soc. 1973 Introducing Oriental Art Hamlyn, London. 1972 Primitive Erotic Art (edited and part written) Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London. 1972 Indian Art Studio Vista, London. 1972 Tantra. Exhibition and catalogue planned, designed and curated. ACGB 1971 Ceramics OUP, London and Toronto. 1969 Drawing OUP, London and Toronto (Reissue 1987) 1968 Erotic Art of the East Putnam, New York; Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1967 The Arts of Southeast Asia Thames and Hudson, London; Præger, US (Reissue 1989) 1966 Indian Sword Royal Danish Arms Soc, C’hagen; Herbert Jenkins, London. 1965 Indian Sculpture Studio Vista, London. 1963 Early Buddhist Paintings of Japan UNESCO-Fontana, Paris. 1962 Indian music, Art and Dance. Catalogue of exhibition designed and installed by Rawson. Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh Festival. 1960 Indian Painting Tisné, Paris; Zwemmer, London; Electa, Rome.
Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts © 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) 3–4, pp. 47–53 Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Reprints available directly from the publisher Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Photocopying permitted by license only Printed in India
Taste, Snobbery and Spiritual Style in Music Joscelyn Godwin
The writer uses his own autobiography as a professional musician in order to illustrate how musical tastes and prejudices are formed and discarded. He describes his life as a choirboy, a composer, an adherent and a rejecter of the avant-garde, and a seeker after the spiritual aspects of music. He questions the Platonic doctrine that music has an effect on morality, admits his own lack of authentic inspiration, and suspects that it is generally shared by modern composers. But the classics of the Western tradition continue to serve him as a source of quasi-religious wisdom. He realises that this ‘spiritual style’ at which he has arrived is an individual affair, and urges the reader to make a similar self-analysis. KEYWORDS Autobiography, Avant-garde, Creative process, Meditation, Plato, Spirituality Since I have compiled, translated, and written so many pages about the speculative and spiritual aspects of music, people sometimes ask me about my views on the practical aspects as well, and especially on the connections between the three. They want to know, for instance, whether I regard any particular type of music as superior, when judged from the principles of the Pythagorean tradition? Is there a spiritual hierarchy in music? Was Plato right in wanting to control the music of his Republic, and if so, what are the implications for today’s music? As I brood on these questions, I feel a profound scepticism about any general claims or dogmatic statements. I realise the degree to which one’s musical preference is affected by one’s personal history, and especially by the trio of influences: taste, snobbery, and spiritual style. Taking my own case as a specimen, I invite the reader to make an analogous review. However different his or her history may be, the exercise of selfknowledge is bound to be revealing and rewarding. My first musical life was as a choirboy at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and the Anglican choral tradition my first repertory. As I recall it to memory, my immediate instinct is to classify it. I want to put at the top the Bach motets and Renaissance masses, and far beneath them those early twentieth-century anthems, constructed, as I now know, from purloined hunks of Mendelssohn and Brahms. Yet if I am to be honest, I must admit that Stanford in G, Balfour-Gardiner’s Te lucis ante terminum, or Vaughan Williams’ Rise, heart, thy Lord is risen meant far more to me than the then featureless plains of Lassus or Byrd. Those specimens of Edwardian sublimity gave me the peak experiences of my childhood, and they would still uncork a flood of emotion if I were to wallow in them again. What lessons do I draw from this? First, that I must beware of the snobbery of music historians, for whom Romantic English cathedral music is so insular and derivative as to be negligible. Second, I must allow that other repertories which I hear as tawdry and provincial may be vehicles for somebody’s peak experience.
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Edwardian music may be of minor value, but the Anglican cathedral tradition to which it belongs is among the world’s great Gesamtkunstwerke. Blessed with one of the most benign forms of Christianity and with a wealth of history, architecture, ritual, hierarchy, curious customs, and music, it could have been a haven for the rest of my life. But in time I deliberately cut my emotional ties with that world, renouncing the pleasures of nostalgia. Immensely grateful as I was for having been raised in a sort of musical Arcadia, I had to become free from it if I was to become true to myself. At thirteen I went to Radley, where my musical life found a new focus. For the next ten years (approximately the 1960s), most of my spare time and creative energy went into composing and getting my compositions performed. The way I learned composition was through writing pastiches in various musical styles. My undergraduate course at Cambridge covered the styles from 16thC counterpoint to about the level of modernism found in easy Bartók. At that point, the borderline between pastiche and original composition became very hazy. On the strength of my own experience, I doubt that there is really a borderline at all. Unlike their ancestors, contemporary composers have to start just as I did in my student exercises: by drawing the boundaries of the style that is to be used, and working within its boundaries. The implication, which did not exist in the past, in that there are other styles, equally valid, which might have been chosen. Moreover, it is commoner today than in the 1960s to recreate deliberately a style of the past. One is tempted to wonder whether most modern composition is little more than pastiche? Creative Education What is the creative process involved in writing musical pastiche? I believe that it is indistinguishable from most composition, in that one forms a conception of the piece as a whole, then works through it, listening inwardly for ideas or else discovering them at the keyboard, evaluating each idea in the light of the style and the rules of its discourse. The excitement and creative intensity I brought to the writing of a four-part fugue in Bachian style was genuine composition. So was the tribute of imitation I paid to whatever composer was my hero of the moment. Only the ground rules might differ. In the case of Benjamin Britten, whose successive works amazed me in each being so different in conception from the last, the key to pastiche was to think up an idea as novel as one of his. I would lie awake juggling poems and instruments, in search of a totally original idea for a song-cycle. Once the idea was there, the notes would follow with more or less coaxing, as one knew what would fit and what would not. In the case of avant-garde music, the conception was everything: one had to make a kind of piece that had never been heard before, mindful of Stockhausen’s requirement for a young composer: Invention— and that he astonish me.’ That, too, was pastiche, in that I was choosing a style and channeling my invention into it. The experience gave me some insight into the question of originality in music. It was not very difficult, and not at all praiseworthy, to be original when that was one of the main features of the style. However, it would not have been so easy a couple of hundred years ago, when originality was not the general rule, while in the era of plainsong, it would have been downright silly. As I have implied, my course as a composer led me on an evolutionary course through twentieth century music. While I was a choirboy, the last word in modernity was Herbert Howells, whose service-settings provoked predictable puns from the Dean and Chapter. On a trip to Paris, I insisted on going (twice!) to Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites, sensing that here was something beyond my limited musical world. Wanting to hear more sounds of that sort was my motive for beginning to compose as I entered my teens. Ten years later, after writing heaps of music in many different styles, I was making pastiches of Lutoslawski, Carter, and Cage. How do you make a pastiche of Cage? The answer at the time seemed to be that you did the most outrageous thing you could think of. But after that, there was nowhere left to go.
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This episode of being a composer was highly educational and a great deal of fun. But the real lesson came at the end. While writing my doctoral dissertation at Cornell University I discovered oriental and esoteric philosophy, and in the spiritual turmoil caused by this encounter, I saw my heap of compositions for what they were: the exercises of a clever imitator, a semi-original inventor, and an egoist whose biggest thrill came from having people perform his own music. I realised that composition could and should be something more than the process I have described. The concept of inspiration returned from its long banishment as a sentimental relic of Romanticism. I realised with the force of a thunderclap that I had never known inspiration. Not once had my inner ear been visited with sounds that clamoured to be given out to the world. The source of my music was obviously not the world of spiritual realities, but merely my ego. Along with that revelation came the certainty that my fellow modernists, even famous ones, were no different in kind. The whole movement now appeared phony to me. There seemed no further reason either to compose or to listen to the effusions of anyone else’s ego. So I turned back the clock and cultivated ‘early music’, devoting myself to recorders and viols. I also stopped doing the abstract and surrealist painting that had been my hobby, and, rejecting the whole concept of originality, started copying religious icons while repeating mantras. Seeking Looking back, that attempt to return to a ‘sacred art’ seems to me the phoniest thing of all. I did it because I thought I ought to, which was a far worse motive than the youthful egotism that, now I have students of my own, no longer seems so reprehensible. However, my born-again lifestyle did lead me to explore the third mode of musical activity, after composing and performing: that of the listener. Listening to music blended with the practice of meditation, as I discovered states of absorption that my naturally active and analytical mind had hitherto concealed from me. I began to listen for spiritual qualities in music, rather than for intellectual and emotional ones. Not surprisingly, I found them at their peak in Renaissance polyphony, in the late works of Beethoven, and in the music of India. This level of musical experience opened up further after a traumatic accident, from which the only place I could find solace was in Mozart. Quite spontaneously, I discovered a hierarchy of states of listening that I associated with certain locations in the body. I explained these in my book Harmonies of Heaven and Earth and in several workshops during the 1980s. They had to do with states of self-identity with the music, free from associations, words, and visual imagery. Now at last I felt that I was giving music its due, by raising it to the status of a meditative or yogic technique. These exercises worked best with instrumental music, or with non-rhetorical vocal music such as Renaissance masses. They did not work well with music that was never intended to be listened to in that way, thus excluding madrigals, Lieder, all opera but Wagner, and all popular music whatever. Consequently I classed these other musics as ‘lower’ or merely aimed at pleasure. At the same time, I rejected atonal music as denying the harmonic nature of reality, while pop music and jazz were too vulgar to merit any consideration from the spiritual mountain top. I see now that in my zeal I was confounding the three elements of my title. My taste had narrowed to a musical world bounded by Monteverdi at one end, Debussy at the other, and heavily weighted towards keyboard music from Bach to Chopin. This was the music I most enjoyed to play and listen to. My spiritual practice had come to focus on abstract concentration, for which this music was a useful prelude. And an elitist musical training had imbued me with a snobbery that was all too readily transferred to the spiritual domain.
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Taste is a horizontal distinction, circumscribing an area of preference like a garden fence, which (in England if not in the USA) does not imply hostility to the neighbours. Snobbery, on the other hand, is a vertical distinction, in which one regards one’s own natural or acquired tastes as superior. It was an awareness of history, gained by teaching the entire Western repertory, that kept my mind open and prevented me from confusing subjective tastes with objective standards. Historians of former times did just that, in blissful unconsciousness. Applying the theory of evolution, they regarded Medieval music as a kind of Neanderthal stage, striving for a ‘perfection’ that would only be attained with the music they themselves could enjoy. At the other end of history, some pontiffs and pundits today condemn atonal music as a symptom of hyper-intellectuality, decadence, or contempt for the natural order. Usually they have heard very little, and know even less about it: they are rationalising their own distaste. The lesson they need to learn is one that barely anyone was in a position to learn before the twentieth century: that of self-awareness, in which the self and its prejudices are no longer the subject, but the object of knowledge. Inner Development As soon as one moves from the academic study and the everyday enjoyment of music into the realm of conscious work on oneself (which I prefer to the laden term ‘spiritual’), one has to uncover mercilessly one’s bondage to family, class, race, and circumstance, in order to approach one’s inner reality as a human being independently of all these. It does not mean that one will ever escape one’s background, any more than one escapes the body one is born with or the character delineated by one’s genes or horoscope. But one can begin to objectify them, instead of identifying with them unthinkingly. That is one small service one can do for a world crammed with people whose misplaced loyalty to tribe, nation, race, or class serves to cleave the human family apart. One consequence of entering on the path of conscious work is that one’s tastes and preferences have to be re-evaluated, whether these concern one’s friendships, religion, diet, or aesthetics. The ordinary person reads and listens to whatever pleases them. The conscious person may do the same, but it is in full knowledge of why he or she is doing so. Does one listen habitually to a certain type of music only because one wants certain prejudices, certain loyalties, reinforced? The answer may be that one needs a type of psychic nourishment that only a certain music can provide. Some people need the Dionysiac experience of rock and roll in order to achieve balance in their psyches. But if they are consciously working on themselves, this will be a deliberate decision, like taking the Dionysian initiation in ancient times, and not a mere following of the crowd and its commercial exploiters. Others have every reason to prefer New Age music for its calming effect and the devotional atmosphere that it can create, at its best. For some, ‘sacred art’ is the byword, as they make a stand against the secularism of modern art and life. Then again, there is the whole world of non-Western music, whose various traditions go naturally with the adoption of nonWestern spiritual paths. I have had memorable experiences from practically every type of music, sufficient to persuade me that everything is good for those for whom it is good. I keep this phrase at hand, like a talisman, for the occasions on which I am too ready to censure. This puts me at variance with wiser men such as Pythagoras, Plato, and the sages of ancient China, who believed that musical taste was too serious a matter to be left uncontrolled. They were certain that as a people’s music is, so their society will be. Healthy music, they said, is both the symptom and the cause of a healthy community, while ugliness and depravity in the arts betray a like state in the collective soul. They applied the same axiom on the individual level: a person will supposedly come to resemble the kind of music that attracts him or her. Music, in short, was believed to
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have a moulding influence on mind, soul, and body, and it was consequently not a matter of indifference what sort one chose to expose oneself and others to. The theory that a nation resembles its music was a seductive one, but it will never recover from the events of this century. No nations were richer in their musical heritage, nor more devoted to it, than the German-speaking ones, and among their citizens none were more expert musicians than the Jews. The Platonist would have thought it a perfect set-up for good government and harmonious relations. A second example: after World War II, it was the rulers of the Communist bloc who were most careful to shield their people from the influences of jazz and Western pop music. Wholesome folk music and romantic realism was what they liked, and what they thought best for the masses. But it was rock and roll that played as the Berlin Wall came down. Universal Characteristics I cannot take musical Platonism seriously any longer. Music, like religion, is a neutral source of energy that can be either used or abused. Neither one guarantees the enlightenment of humanity or the happiness of all beings. They only contain that potential when coupled with the basic good will that is humanity’s greatest, if not its only need. If I am under no illusions as to the moral value of classical music, I still feel a professional obligation to it. As a survivor of what is increasingly a minority culture, I have a responsibility to stand for and speak for the Western tradition, from Magister Leoninus to Pierre Boulez, and in a broader sense from Homer to Umberto Eco. I may not like all of it, and I certainly do not think that it is the only or the best way of being. But having been born and bred into it, I feel that I must pay my dues by teaching the appreciation of ‘high’ rather than ‘low’ art—if only because the latter and its votaries can look after themselves without being taught. For similar reasons, I feel no responsibility toward the spectrum of tonal and meditative music favoured by the spiritual schools of today: I mean the music that ranges from Arvo Pärt through Gurdjieff’s piano pieces to New Age improvisations. This music is intended as a vehicle for experience: for transporting the listener to various meditative, devotional, and even mystical states. Much of it recreates a mood not unknown in classical Western music. I welcome a return of these moods, though I do not think that it takes a genius to create them. Given an audience hungry for this kind of experience, a pastiche of the style will suffice, and very minor talents will rise to the top in a ‘name-brand’ society that likes to recognise the labels on its products. The use of music as a vehicle to take one somewhere else is perfectly valid. History and the study of other cultures show that it is quite rare for music to be anything else. But it is precisely those rarities that I value. I am not personally interested in those devotional and mystical states to which I know music can lead, because my spiritual style is now otherwise. Above all, I want to know what I am, what sort of world I am in, and why we are all here. Religious people and mystics find answers to these questions in their own way, but their answers rarely satisfy me. I have come to the conclusion that there are answers to be found not only through music but in music. The more elaborate classical musics, especially that of the West with its unique harmonic language, contain what I can only describe as a teaching, at once human and cosmological. From the composers to whom none would deny the gift of inspiration I receive the distinct conviction that I am learning truths that cannot be expressed in words or images. Their music tells me something absolutely essential about the human condition and about the structure of the universe: something that all scripture and philosophy has failed to convey to me.
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The best definition I can give of it is that music is an idealised mirror of human life. It offers a spectrum of rich emotions—not all of them pleasant—contained within elegant structures, just like the soul inhabiting the body. Foremost among these emotions are the many shades of love, from eroticism to compassion (the latter especially in Beethoven). But none of it is absolutely serious: it is all presented within the context of a game or play. Moreover, the listener of performer, however enraptured, may remain as an untouched witness of all the emotions, or structures, and dreams, like the higher self or spirit from whose point of view they are all maya, or illusion. Conversely, there are many worse ways to interpret life than in musical terms, as one traverses its concords and discords, its polyphonies, surprises and inevitable final cadence. I am not so certain of the cosmological secrets latent in music, but I believe that there is a link with physics and mathematics that future ages will discover. The plain fact of number, at the basis both of music and of the physical world, is obvious enough. But the particular combinations that lead to a satisfying composition in one, and to living matter in the other, remain unexplained. All must be present in the more highly developed non-Western musics, particularly those of North and South India. If my training had made me familiar with those musical languages, I don’t doubt that I would derive as much illumination from them. But this is not the case. Indian music for me is more of a vehicle than an object of intelligent contemplation. Yet I always feel envious of that tradition for its unity, so different from the shattered situation in the West. In India all musics, popular and classical, vocal and instrumental, determined and extemporised, are based on a common fund of melody and share in a single, yet hierarchical vision of what music should be. It is the image of what we have sacrificed in order to have our multiplicity of musical worlds that can include hymns and rock songs, fugues and blues. Lastly, I have to ask myself why I do not seek for this wisdom in that atonal music to which I once lent all my energies, and which is the natural conclusion of the Western adventure in musical evolution. My answer has to be the same as in the case of non-Western music: for all that I once spoke it, I do not know the language well enough. I have never reached the stage of easy recognition of serial structure that would make a Webern song as accessible as one by Schubert. I could demonstrate on paper the inevitability of every note, but I cannot perceive it without visualising a keyboard, notation, or some visual aid. I strongly suspect that many professional musicians are no better at this than I am. I also think that many atonal composers are doing no more than I was when I aspired to their company: they are just better at it. This leaves me listening to their music purely as sounds, whose choice, groupings, and contrasts I can enjoy in an aesthetic way. These sounds, especially in live performance, can be captivating and extremely beautiful. Even when they are ugly, I am enough of a Cagean to appreciate the value of taking each moment on its own unjudged merits. But it will always be a relief to turn from that razor-balanced state to question again the mysteries of Couperin’s Ordres, Debussy’s Préludes or the Art of Fugue. Here my musical wanderings have brought me to at least a temporary home, suitable to a spiritual style that turns from authority and mere belief to immediate and tangible experience. Here I willingly sit at the feet of masters who reveal the most authentic reality I know. Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts © 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) 3–4, pp. 55–64 Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Reprints available directly from the publisher Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Photocopying permitted by license only Printed in India
Symphonic Mind: States of Consciousness in Orchestral Performance Richard Gonski
Most musicians and music-lovers would agree that music is a phenomenon that affects the spirit and nourishes the soul. Yet this aspect of music-making is rarely, if ever, discussed in the world of classical music. In his article Richard Gonski identifies some of the conditions that can give rise to a higher states of consciousness during orchestral concerts and rehearsals, and suggests some priorities for the modern day Symphony Orchestra. KEY WORDS Audience, Concerts, Orchestra, Classical, Symphony, Rhythm “It’s all in the mind” is a truth that we ignore at our peril. The implications of this (by now) clichéd statement are far reaching—responsibility for our own state of mind can no longer be laid at the feet of the outside world, and we are forced, (if we want to escape the unhappiness of an unfocused mental state) to put a stop to the endless stream of thoughts and desires that hinder an awareness of our true selves. The above is never truer than when we are performing or listening to music. On a number of levels, participation in a musical event can be viewed as a short cut to our innermost being, with the music itself acting as a concentrated dose of medicine—bitter to those who resist its potency, life-giving to those who can open themselves to it. A musician filled with self-doubt or weighed down by the demands of an unrelenting ego may undergo extreme states of mental anguish before, during and after a performance, whereas one who is no longer troubled by these negative manifestations of self immerses himself in the music and can reach ecstatic heights. Most performers fit somewhere in between these two extremes. Less well documented are the mental states of a concert audience. If we are at all to accept the validity of the concept of an audience (ie: a group of people about whom we can make generalisations), we should be brave and recognise that in terms of audience participation, concerts of classical music (compared to rock concerts, for example) are near the bottom of the scale. One reason for this discrepancy is the high level of amplification that the rock genre demands—you cannot fall asleep, you simply have to be there. The resulting physical and aural sensations that are unavoidably experienced serve as a focusing point for the mind, whereas the more subtle energies of a chamber concert will only be consciously perceived and appreciated by individuals with above average sensitivity and powers of concentration. The sheer volume and timbral variety of a symphony orchestra in turn attracts a wider audience than a string quartet. The Orchestra If we begin to make judgments about musical performances based on spiritual rather than materialistic criteria, it would appear that the format of the symphony orchestra is from the start an impossible concept.
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We have all, as individuals, seen how long it takes to make even the smallest steps in the direction of a healthier spirit. The expectation that 70–100 people can sit down for a few hours and develop this aspect of themselves seems a Utopian one which is bound to bring disappointment and frustration in its wake. Even small ensembles like string quartets and rock groups have great difficulty staying together for any length of time because egos gradually become more important than the music. This is not to say that it is impossible— with intent, anything can be achieved. Group meditations are one example where it does work, but only because members of the group are there for that specific purpose. In the case of an orchestra, the primary motivation for being there is to play music and development of the spirit is not normally on the agenda. Despite this inherent disability, the symphony orchestra has survived for over 200 years and is viewed in Western society as one of its great cultural assets. The 19thC orchestra was fuelled by new instruments, an expanding repertoire and the effect of increasingly larger (and louder) groups. The twentieth century orchestra has built on these foundations by relying on a constant improvement in technical ability and the birth of affordable recording and playback devices. There has not however been any significant change this century to the basic format of the symphony orchestra and this has resulted in stagnation which has inevitably led to decay. The real dilemma facing orchestras and orchestral musicians in the 1990s is defining their role for the 21stC. The way forward lies not in improved marketing techniques, but in the openly declared pursuit of a single and simple goal—the musicians and the audience should leave the hall feeling better than they did when they entered it. Thus motivated, the musician becomes a spiritual healer, the audience the patient, with both parties benefiting from the experience. The very act of consciously giving and of genuinely being concerned about the well being of others has its own effects, one of which is to calm the mind. A quiet and tranquil mind in turn allows awareness to arise, and as we shall see, awareness is the first step on the path to a musical performance that is free of mental filters. Bio Feedback There are a number of a-priori factors which can help make this idea a reality First and foremost among them is the fact that whatever the receptiveness of a given audience, music works—it is just a question of degree. (Undoubtedly, ‘right motivation’ on the part of the musicians and ultimately, the intention behind the sound, will contribute greatly to the power of the music being played.) The generation of sound has innumerable effects on all the elements of the universe—this fact has been noted throughout the ages, and it is surprising that so many people still regard such a view as new-age nonsense. As a teacher, I have tried to impress upon my students the importance of understanding that our aural abilities encompass only a small part of the frequency spectrum to which we are continually exposed, and that to ignore the vibratory effects of frequencies outside this range will limit their ability to have complete musical experiences. Moreover, a complete description of the effects (whether physical, emotional or spiritual) of those sounds that are audible is a task that has yet to be satisfactorily accomplished by anyone, despite attempts by some of the greatest philosophers and mystics.1 We do however know that music has an immense power to arouse the whole gamut of human emotions and in some cases can open a door to higher states of consciousness. Secondly, there is the power of collective consciousness and group dynamics. If a majority of the members of a given group agree upon a common goal and are ready to make the effort to realise it, they are likely to pull the rest with them. A highly motivated and committed minority can be equally powerful in persuading the whole group to embark on a specific path. In terms of symphony orchestras, it is often a core of players who give the whole group its ‘personality’ and sense of identity.
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Thirdly, there is sympathetic resonance. This effect relies on a system that has ‘snapped into place’ or is ‘in tune with itself’—ie: a condition is created whereby vibrations that are being generated by one part of the system, cause other parts to vibrate sympathetically. If the sympathetic part of the system is very reflective, (ie: non-absorbent) a feedback loop is created; if the amplitude of the feedback passes a certain threshold, the whole system may enter a state of self-oscillation. In a symphony concert, the system components include the musicians, their instruments, the acoustic properties of the hall, the music that they are performing, the sum of the mental states of everyone present— in short, a complete description of the system demands that all factors be taken into account. At the present time we are not even able to define the exact causes of individual events, let alone attempt to follow the infinite permutations which result when we try to analyse the result of inter-acting ones. For example, we know that a violinist, by drawing the bow across a string, causes the string to vibrate, which in turn sets in motion a series of events whose end result is the aural perception of a sound. We are almost completely ignorant of what is happening on a momentary basis muscularly, or indeed how the player converts an emotion like love or sadness into a physical movement that alters the sound that expresses the emotion. (I am not referring to obvious ‘techniques’ such as vibrato or bow position). Proof of the above can be found in the world of electronics—all attempts so far to simulate acoustic instruments with long sustain portions have failed for the simple reason that an electronic oscillator is too regular. Attempting to randomise parameters (in an effort to alleviate this problem) doesn’t work either as the sum total of causes which result eventually in a violin sound is definitely not a random event—we are simply unable to identify all the elements in the chain, and are even unaware of the existence of many of them. Fortunately, we do not cease to be affected by an event just because we are ignorant of its exact cause. In practice How does all this relate to orchestral concerts? In the role of a conductor, I am always acutely aware of the different levels of energy that come and go in every rehearsal and concert. On occasion, while we are playing, everything will suddenly click into place, and everyone slips into a different space—at these times the performance becomes a resonant one. Flowery words these, but words end where these experiences start. I have nonetheless attempted to identify the elements that cause this state of resonance to arise and this article is an attempt to list and discuss some of those that I have noticed. Over the years I have been fascinated and intensely curious to establish whether orchestra members had noted those moments when all hindrances disappeared and the music came to life. I was at first both disconcerted and disappointed to discover that very few had, but consequently realised that they simply had not made a conscious note—on pressing them further they would say “Oh yes, that was a good bit” or something to that effect. By encouraging the musicians to pay attention to what was really happening around them and within themselves, they were able to note the shifts in energy levels, and to be aware of the factors that brought resonant moments into being. Here again group dynamics played its part—bringing the subject into the open made it an accepted and clearly understood goal of the orchestra. One of the most important and indeed essential ingredients in the ‘recipe’ is a consistent rhythmic pulse and a tempo which is appropriate to the place and time. The former generates a resurgence of sound at
1
Joscelyn Godwin—Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook Arkana, New York and London 1987.
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periodic time intervals, and providing the tempo is suited to the acoustic environment, a sympathetic system can suddenly spring into life. (This also leads to the conclusion that strict adherence to metronome markings is inappropriate, and one should regard them as guidelines only.) During the early eighties, when I first started using computers for music applications, I began to notice that the rhythmic accuracy of classical orchestras was not very good in comparison. I decided therefore, in preparation for a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K491, to sequence the concerto and give the orchestra (and myself) the opportunity to hear what an absolutely accurate rhythmic performance would sound like. This was a truly revelatory experience which brought many illuminations, among them the understanding of the fundamental importance of timing in vertically layered textures, especially in music which uses large ensembles. The clarity of a slow movement in a Beethoven symphony where the quarter, 8th, 16th and often 32nd notes all take their rightful place on the time continuum explained at least in part how periods of resonance arise during a performance—at these moments the tempo and the rhythm find their correct space for that moment in time, and instead of a lot of phased sonic impulses, a synchronised pulse arises creating a self-generating and sustaining energy which vibrates everything and everyone within its sphere of influence. Under such conditions, the high amplitude levels associated with the attack portions of acoustic instruments give added impetus to a system which is in effect perfectly balanced—only a small amount of energy is required in order to keep the whole thing going. An important by-product of such a state is that it allows the musicians to devote more of their mental energies to the music as less effort is needed for the actual production of the sound. In at least one sense, all musicians are aware of this—playing in a reverberant acoustic is a lot easier than playing in a dead one. The astonishing part is that when a resonant state is created, time seems to stand still, as if one could photograph the music in its entirety. A friend of mine recently drew my attention to the ability we have of instantaneously ‘visualising’ a piece of music which we know intimately, without having to go through the process of playing it in real-time. A resonant performance, or moment in a performance, has that self-same quality. Alternatives In many non-Western cultures rhythm is used to induce ecstatic and transcendental states and is often the most important part of the music. Tibetan music, which appears to lack any discernible pulse is actually perfectly timed and reflects a deep understanding of sound and its effects, and an ability to allow intuition rather than intellect to be the master. In twentieth century Western culture, it is rock music which has grasped this specific truth—that’s what the drummer is there for. During the eighties, when drum machines first emerged, many live drummers found themselves out of work. After a few years, when the pop/rock audience tired of listening to computer-accurate drum loops, live drummers were back in business. Their playing however, had undergone a real transformation in that they were forced to satisfy a much more (rhythmically) demanding and aware listening public. It seems absolutely clear to me that until we refine our rhythmic consciousness and sensitivity to the time dimension, resonant states in classical performances will continue to be both a matter of chance and rather rare. Another essential building block in our resonant system is the music itself. Undoubtedly, an orchestra will perform great music better than mediocre or bad music. We are left with the thorny problem of categorising different works. It might be helpful to examine whether great works are those that are structurally (rhythmically, harmonically and melodically) in tune with themselves—ie: they contain the potential to create a state of resonance when they are brought to life. One could view the great composers as
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beings who can intuitively feel how each note and sound in a piece of music evolves as a consequence of what went before, and causes the (inevitable) arising of the subsequent ones. We can see an example of this in the chorales by Bach—his choice of the note to be ‘doubled’ in a four voice texture is often governed by the harmonic tension at that point, and more importantly, hints at the direction of its resolution. (Doubling of the major third is only one instance where he ‘breaks the rules’ for a higher truth.) The recapitulation in a sonata form first movement provides another example of musical integrity in a composition. In the hands of a great master like Beethoven, the recapitulation is the pinnacle of a great edifice. It is the maturity of the youthful exposition, and comes after a development section in which all elements are rigorously exposed and subjected to the light of day The differences between the exposition and the recapitulation are a result of the transforming experiences of the development, and not because ‘the movement needed to end in the home key’. In the first movement of the Eroica, Beethoven has composed a coda of immense proportions, as the recapitulation was not able by itself to resolve the consequences of such a large musical edifice. In the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies where movements are joined and thematic material reappears in subsequent movements, a process of unification and continuity began that was to culminate in the operas of Wagner. Unfortunately, these consideration are not usually taken into account when the music is played rather than talked about. For example, in my experience, the energy level of an orchestra during the recapitulation is on the low side. The musicians have played through the exposition twice, (the first time is usually more energetic than the repeat) emerged from the more technically difficult development section and are now on the home stretch. Consciously or not, the musicians are pacing themselves, using the relatively crude yardstick of physical and mental stamina. In a resonant performance, these obstacles fall away—immersed in the music, concentrated minds, guided by the inherent truth of that point in time, become the master and bodies the willing servant. It is of significance that most of the orchestral music we play was composed a long time ago, and that all of our music whether old or contemporary is written down, not transferred orally and aurally, as it is in most other traditions. There are perhaps superficial advantages to this in that we do not have to devote mental energy to decision making in regard to pitch choice and the time intervals between them, although we do have to devote energy to reading the notes. Yet it is the very ability to allow intuition and our inner selves to ‘decide’ that separates the artist from the craftsman. In non-classical traditions, improvisation is an integral part in any musical performance. In the case of pre-composed music, we actually have to overcome the barrier that notation creates between ourselves and the music we are performing. We can only reveal the inner truth of the music and give it its life by treating it as an object that transcends time and is infinitely adaptable, despite the rigidity of its pitch and rhythmic framework—any lack of flexibility on the part of the performers will prevent this occurring. Timbral Quality We need to examine the instruments that produce the sound as well. With the advent of modern orchestral instruments we lost one of the more potent effects of symphonic music—ie: the richness of its harmonic spectrum. The race for louder, brighter and more mechanically versatile instruments resulted in the loss of clearly audible low and mid-order harmonics that are a feature of ‘authentic’ instruments which use lower tension gut strings or tubes without a multitude of keys (which can only interfere with the instrument’s vibratory pattern). Consequently, an unmodified 18th century violin sound is full of resonant harmonics which touch the heart in a very overt way—this is, I think, one of the main reason for the astounding rise in popularity of authentic instrument performances and recordings.
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There is one other issue relating to the development of instruments that is pertinent to our subject, and that is the gradual slowing down of the attack time of an orchestra (and other classical instruments) over the last 200 years. An obvious example is the harpsichord compared to the modern grand piano. While the harpsichord is not regarded today as an orchestral instrument, it certainly was a part of orchestral performances until the 19thC. A very clear aural definition of the beat and its sub-divisions was therefore a feature of music in this period. Likewise, we could compare old and modern string instruments. The advent of brass as melodic instruments in the 19thC slowed down the attack time of the orchestral ensemble even further. It is interesting to note that the principal percussion instrument in the symphony orchestra, the timpani, has a very slow attack characteristic compared to other percussion instruments, and this has been exacer bated by the switch to synthetic drum skins. Stravinsky felt the need for fast attack characteristics in order to bring out his ground breaking rhythms, and brought in a variety of different percussion instruments in order to achieve this, as well as being very specific about articulation and accents. The attack portion of a sound is therefore a critical factor in any musical event— we can view the attack as the cause and the decay/sustain part of the sound as the result. Attempts by synthesizer manufacturers to create ‘realistic’ simulations of acoustic instruments by tagging an oscillator generated sustain onto a sampled attack (Sample and Synthesis) failed because these two elements were treated as separate entities. Seen from this angle, it follows that the very ‘being’ of the sound is dependent on the nature of the attack (which itself is dependent on the intention of the musician), and that timing and rhythm are part of a much larger and more intricate network. Among musicians and public alike, a great deal of emphasis has always been placed on the technique and technical ability of the performer. Although the words are used frequently, their definition is not all that clear. On the assumption that technique is not a purely physical entity, but rather a result of mental intention, it follows that if we rid ourselves of unnecessary mental activity, our inner self can take over and generate the necessary physical movements, Under such conditions, we have no need to automate our movements and suffer the consequences of being separated from our bodies. The physical state of the performer is therefore as much a part of our potentially resonant system as any other component. Unfortunately, most musicians only pay attention to their bodies when a problem arises—a strained muscle, a technical difficulty or an aching back are common examples. Many then seek help through Alexander technique or other similar methods in an attempt to solve the problem. Hopefully, one consequence of such drug-free and non-invasive treatments is a greater awareness of the body in general. This is not only beneficial in that simply focusing the attention on the body, (or specific parts of it) will in many cases be sufficient for a process of self-healing to take place, but is also an essential requirement in the attainment of higher states of consciousness. In orchestral situations, lack of body awareness and consequently non-appreciation of the state of physical balance (ie: not tense and not relaxed) results in an inability to perform seemingly simple musical tasks adequately. For example, in many classical symphonies the strings (especially the lower ones) are often asked to play many bars of repeating eighth notes—most musicians find it impossible to play all of them with an equal attack and amplitude. (This is highlighted even further when non-specialist classical ensembles tackle minimalist repertoire.) From our point of view as musicians, it is important to note how a balanced physical state which allows us to perform unhindered by ‘technical’ difficulties is dependent on our mental state being itself free from the obstacles which were described earlier on. Clearly then, the mental state of the musicians and the audience is critical. If, as I suggested earlier, we regard music as an alchemy of spirit and material, we will also be able to accept that true creativity springs naturally from a mind unburdened by ego and mental aberrations. Nevertheless, despite the varying degrees of spiritual development which are to be found in any group of
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people, including orchestras, the power of music is such that it can overcome this obstacle and indeed remove it completely, depending on the resistance of the musicians and the audience. I keep grouping the musicians and the audience together as they are both part of the feedback loop, as any musician who has faced an indifferent or insensitive public will confirm. Setting A New Standard We do however have to generate a conscious awareness that such states exist, if we want states of resonance to become the norm—for this reason, the importance of bringing spiritual criteria out into the open cannot be over emphasised, especially in the context of modern Western society. When an amateur plays with love, the hardened professional is shamed into silence. One can hear it in the sound. My experience is that many orchestral musicians, especially of the younger generation, are not only open to these ideas, but have secretly harboured them inside for a very long time. The ‘realities’ of life and the fear of being unprofessional in front of their peers has been the main reason for their silence. It would however be unwise and irresponsible to ignore the dangers of bringing spiritual matters to the fore, as the eruption of suppressed feelings and emotions on the one hand, and unqualified messengers who have jumped on the new age bandwagon on the other, could cause more harm than good. I have in the past suggested to an orchestra (The Electric Symphony Orchestra) that we have a group meditation session before rehearsals and concerts. At first, there was a polite silence, but a few people turned up to the first session, and by the time we got to the concert, most of the orchestra was participating. The concerts themselves were both excellent and memorable, but we did not continue the practice on a regular basis as I did not feel competent enough in my own meditation to take on the responsibility for a whole group. A less intimidating method is to start off rehearsals with a few minutes of silence, thus enabling the musicians to clear their minds so that they can focus their attention on the musical experience that awaits them. In general, making everyone aware of the continually changing energy levels is a healthy and unthreatening first step which in itself can lead to significant changes in attitude, intention and execution. It’s also glaringly evident when the audience are moved and when they are not. It always amazes me how a sudden and palpable rise in audience attention occurs when ‘something begins to happen’. It is obviously a lot harder to develop new attitudes with an audience than it is with a regular group like an orchestra. Our only means of communication is through the music we play, and we have to rely on the power (in the most positive sense) of the performance to produce the effect. We can however help our audiences be more open and receptive by providing an environment which is conducive to the state of mind we are attempting to engender. The comfortable familiarity of contemporary orchestral concerts is sleep inducing, and the argument that the music should be sufficient is a denial of the effect that our surroundings, through our senses, have on our mental state. Furthermore, behavioural patterns that are at least a hundred years old are an added hindrance to overcome when we are trying to breathe life into an ailing body that will not adapt to its time and place. We should also bear in mind that an 18thC audience was capable of actually listening to a piece of music and appreciating the subtleties of modulations and other compositional devices, whereas the average audience of today has been totally desensitised, mainly through over saturation. Last, but perhaps not least, there is the conductor. Last because in an ideal world there would be no need for one. Modern orchestras are capable of executing the most complex scores simply by watching the leader, and there are even a few chamber orchestras that pride themselves on not having one. In the absence of a conductor, each musician becomes responsible not only for his own contribution, but for that of the group as a whole. This in turn necessitates an increased awareness and concentration on the part of the individual
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and can only be a good thing. Assuming that all (or most) of the musicians are capable of letting go and entering a state of ‘immersion in the music’, the music itself is the conductor, the need for a human intermediary disappears, and the performance becomes a resonant one. Not least, because most orchestras do perform with conductors. Inevitably the question arises of what they are actually doing up there. Despite the fact that this question is a common one, giving a coherent answer is a lot more difficult. I am fairly certain that the label ‘interpretation’ is too vague and encompassing to be of any real use. As a student, I had the opportunity to hear many different young conductors working on the same bars of music with the same orchestra, yet each individual still produced his own ‘sound’. Many orchestral musicians swear that they know if a conductor is any good before he raises his hands, and all of them are free of doubt after the first beat. Furthermore, it appears that clarity of beat is not a crucial factor when orchestral musicians make judgments, although on the occasions when they are uninspired, they feel that a clear beat is the least they can expect. Furtwängler and Klemperer (when he was already an old man) both had seemingly erratic and indecipherable hand movements, yet orchestras all over the world responded with ease. The only reasonable explanation is that orchestral musicians respond almost involuntarily to the ‘intent’ of the conductor. He serves as a focus of energy for the whole musical event, and it is his intent that starts the whole cycle of cause and effect and keeps it going. This intent is transferred to the musicians who produce the sound, and then to the audience, whose response to the music completes the feedback loop. The more a conductor is able to let go and give himself to the music. the more focused the energy and the purer the intent. In the event that the conductor does not manage to galvanise the orchestra, he has failed in his task. This point is easily missed, as we forget that given a downbeat, an orchestra will produce the notes and an acceptable performance of the music. Looking Ahead I am optimistic that in the coming years we will begin to see changes In behaviour and attitude that will allow the kind of ideas I have been suggesting to become more acceptable and widespread. While writing this article, I have been nagged by the thought that I don’t have any real evidence or research to back-up my arguments, only my experiences and my intuition. I do however feel that the general direction and orientation is correct and that the matters I have been discussing should rise to the top of our list of priorities rather than remain shrouded in silence as they are currently. Frequent conversations with orchestral musicians bear witness to the desire on their part to do this, and if our motivation is honest, we should not shy away from the responsibility of allowing it to happen. I have found it difficult to adequately describe the feelings that arise and the states that one enters into when participating in a resonant performance, and I have therefore limited myself to pointing out the criteria and conditions that I believe are essential to their manifestation as well as putting forward some ideas on how we might create these conditions communally True knowledge and wisdom comes from personal experience and not by word of mouth—our priority should therefore be the creation of the circumstances and environment that will allow others to have these experiences as often as possible. Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts © 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) 3–4, pp. 65–79 Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Reprints available directly from the publisher Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Photocopying permitted by license only Printed in India
The Mind and the Heart: Mysticism and Music in the Experience of Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Composers Ivan Moody
Is it possible to arrive at a definition of mystical music? Taking the OED definition of the word mystic as a basis, the premise behind several works which could be described as mystical by contemporary Orthodox Composers (Pärt, Tavener, Adamis, Moody) is examined. The idea of initiation (the attaining of a hidden body of knowledge, or gnosis) emerges as being of great importance, and the geometric, two-dimensional style of ikon painting is refered to as a point of comparison. The role of repetition and the use of symbols (in Stravinsky and Adamis) are discussed. While no objective conclusion as to the nature of mystical music is thought possible, a subjective one, employing the words of Fr Matta el-Maskeen from another context, is suggested. KEYWORDS Ikons, Initiation, Mysticism, Orthodoxy, Prayer, Repetition The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions of the word mystic, as a. & n. 1. Spiritually allegorical; occult, esoteric; of hidden meaning, mysterious; mysterious and aweinspiring. 2. n. One who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain union with or absorption into the Deity, or who believes in spiritual apprehension of truths beyond the understanding. The Greek root of the word is mistikós, cognate with mistírion (mio being closed lips or eyes). It is perhaps surprising that there are so many shades of meaning of the word, but then mysticism is one of those concepts likely to arouse only the most vaguely defined of ideas in most people. The word is in fact, as the dictionary proceeds to point out, often used derogatively; one may therefore conclude that the popular perception of mysticism is subject to the same mingling of terms as the original Greek, and that it is to do with mystery, whether or not also inspiring awe. At any rate it is not immediately comprehensible. Here we begin to touch upon the idea of gnosis: a hidden knowledge, a meaning obscure except to initiates. It is not without reason that the word ‘mysteries’ has been used of Greek religion from Eleusis to presentday Orthodox Christianity, and is a word which may be used to characterize much of Eastern religion in a more general way. An ikon, for an Orthodox Christian, is a holy presence to be venerated. It is not a religious picture, and it cannot be truly apprehended in terms of art history only: in that sense it is mystical. St John of Damascus, who wrote three treatises Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images in response to the iconoclast heresy of the 8thC, wrote that
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We use all our senses to produce worthy images of Him, and we sanctify the noblest of the senses, which is that of sight. For just as words edify the ear, so also the image stimulates the eye.1 It is obvious from these words that an ikon is not something vaguely or sentimentally ‘religious’, but, quite the contrary, very definitely incarnate. One of the problems in speaking of religion and the arts at all, but especially of religious mysticism and the arts, is that one is constantly subjected to a confusion between a genuine aspiration towards the sacred and mere romantic sentimentality: the word ‘spiritual’ is often used misleadingly and quite wrongly in this context. It is for this reason that I quote the words of St John of Damascus, and bearing this incarnate conception of religious mysticism in mind, pose the question: can music also be a vehicle for mysticism in a similarly incarnate way? As a composer, I can answer in the affirmative, though there are inevitably perils in such an enterprise and one is not always successful. Orthodoxy speaks of the mind entering the heart—this is the condition for real prayer—and this must be, at least partially, what is required for the composition of sacred music. John Tavener touched on this subject in conversation with Andrew Ford, who asked “I read in a copy of the journal Temenos from a couple of years ago an article by you in which you quoted Stravinsky on the late music of Beethoven. He said ‘Je ne pense pas, j’écoute.’2 Is this your own attitude to art?” Tavener replied: “I think there’s a line in Dante which says ‘You who have sound intellects, seek out that gnosis and apply it to your arts’—I’m paraphrasing, of course—It’s a very Orthodox concept, the idea of the mind going into the heart, so that you pray no longer with the mind—Orthodox monks incline their heads towards their hearts when they pray. That interests me. The heart on its own doesn’t interest me; the mind on its own doesn’t interest me. It’s something the ancients understood and which I think we’ve lost—Plato certainly understood it…. Art’s become so disconnected with divine realities, whereas in Plato’s day—or in any great civilization—it was the norm that it was connected with divine realities.”3 It is certainly possible to point to works in Tavener’s output in which the chief component is prayer, and very much a prayer of the mind in the heart. The most outstanding example is Prayer for the World, a remarkable thirty minute meditation using as its text the Jesus Prayer.4 The work was not well received at its première in 1981 and has not been widely taken up since. Nevertheless, its austerity, its uncompromising concentration on the text make it a truly remarkable work of sacred art. It is a genuinely mystical work, in that is requires a certain level of initiation, remaining otherwise an impenetrable mystery, and this is of course precisely why it failed as a concert piece. Much shorter and less harmonically acerbic, and therefore far more successful as a concert work, is Ikon of the Trinity, dating from 1990. This is also a setting of a much-used Orthodox prayer, the Trisagion —“Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy upon us.” It is similarly concentrated upon the text, each of its three sections corresponding to one Person of the Trinity, and could therefore similarly be described as genuinely mystical music. Between these two works chronologically comes Ikon of Light (1984), setting the highly abstruse, but at the same time extraordinarily direct, Mystic Prayer to the Holy Spirit by the 10thC St Ex. 1 (Continued) Symeon the New Theologian, and having outer movements setting the Trisagion and, in shining pillars of sound, the Greek words Phos (light), Dhoxa (glory), and
1
St John of Damascus: On the Divine Images, English translation by David Anderson, Crestwood, New York 1980. For the original Greek text see J.P.Migne: Patrologia Graeca, vol 94.
2 3
I don’t think, I listen. Andrew Ford: Composer to Composer, London 1993.
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Ex.1 John Tavener: Prayer for the World
Epiphania (shining forth). Again very successful as a concert work (and it has now been commercially 4
The Jesus Prayer is a central part of Orthodox spirituality. The text is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner”. See Mother Maria: The Jesus Prayer, Normanby, 1972.
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recorded twice), one may likewise attribute this to its accessible harmonic language. The essential difference, I think, between these two later works and Prayer for the World, is that they are much more firmly grounded in chant, specifically Byzantine chant, Ikon of the Trinity even more so than Ikon of Light. This gives them a genuinely melodic character and a harmonic clarity which was not apparent in
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Prayer for the World, which is far more dissonant in its harmonic language, in spite of its astonishing austerity. Arvo Pärt, also Orthodox, has until recently concentrated very largely upon setting Latin texts from the Roman Catholic liturgy. This has proved interesting indeed in that he has brought an Orthodox perspective to bear on them. The results have been extraordinary, though not immune to failure. One of the most interesting, and certainly now the most famous of his works, is the Passio Domini nostri secundum Iohannem of 1982. This is a mystical composition of the highest order, but it is curious that at first sight its means are so different from those that Tavener uses. Pärt’s treatment of the text is deliberately ‘cold’, that is to say, his word setting is like that of the most syllabic kind of Gregorian chant, and therefore on the surface ‘inexpressive’. Such austerity leads to a different form of listening and, as one must suppose was the composer’s intention, to the contemplation of higher things. In this one may find a parallel with the deliberately flat, geometrical style of ikon painting, but it differs greatly from Tavener (even though the latter has called many of his pieces “ikons”) in that the melodic luxuriance deriving principally from Greek chant is entirely absent. This luxuriance in Tavener’s work at its best is, however, stylized; there is no feeling of wordpainting in the melismata of Ikon of the Trinity, for example. Pärt, stripping away even this and coming near to a composer like Heinrich Schütz, betrays a very northern European sensibility.5 There is nothing mediterranean, let alone from further east, in Pärt’s music: we cannot imagine him writing a work with the title Uncreated Eros, for example, as Tavener has. Leaving aside these differences of temperament, Passio, by treating its subject in this ‘black and white’ fashion, reveals its secrets only to those who are prepared to enter fully into its spirit; once again, it is a mystery, and therefore mystical. Much the same could be said of the far less ambitious De profundis (1989) or the Stabat Mater (1985). In both these works the text is set with absolutely no word painting, but with a stylized ritual solemnity: the tragedy is felt, but as with the Passion it is over a long time-span, an arch, as though one were waiting for a hammer to strike a gong. Time is suspended, and that is another important element of mysticism. In an ikon there is no perspective, that is to say, it is not situated in reality Similarly mystical music must suspend real time in order to create its own ‘two-dimensional’ level into whose metaphorical simplification the initiate may enter in order to understand the multi-dimensional mystery thus presented. Ex. 2 (Continued) Ex. 3 (Continued) In my own Passion and Resurrection (1992), I was faced with the problem, as Pärt had been in his Passion, of reconciling narrative with stasis. The difficulty was not whether the Passion should be seen largely in dramatic terms, something I wished to avoid, but precisely how to bring its ritual aspects to the fore. In the western tradition the first of these methods has usually been preferred, and is of course exemplified at its height in the Passions of Bach, but in the Orthodox Church there has never been such a tradition of dramatic presentation. During Holy Week, as the Passion unfolds, the intensity of the services is brought about by other means; that is to say, the use of the ritual structure of the services themselves, with their constant references backwards to the Old Testament and forwards to the Resurrection, so that one never loses sight of the whole. It was for that reason that I used the title Passion and Resurrection. Orthodoxy looks forward to Easter Sunday throughout Holy Week: “We worship Thy Passion, O Christ. Show us also Thy glorious Resurrection.” The text comes, with the exception of a short phrase from a hymn by St Ephrem of Syria, entirely from the Holy Week services. In compiling it, I drew chiefly upon the Twelve Gospels service of 5
See Wilfrid Mellers’s remarkable essay Arvo Pärt, God and Gospel in Contemporary Music and Religion, Contemporary Music Review, Volume 12, Part 2.
Avro Pärt: Passio
Ex.2
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Avro Pärt: Stabat Mater
Ex.3
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Great and Holy Thursday (which is in fact Matins of Great and Holy Friday sung the previous evening by anticipation), but also the Bridegroom services from earlier in the week, Vespers of Great and Holy Friday, and the service of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. I employed three languages, English, Greek, and Slavonic. The symbolism of the use of these three is important, as well as the fact that they represent for me the three elements (liturgical, musical, and linguistic) upon which I feel most able to draw in the tradition of Orthodoxy in England. Though the text follows the liturgical order I have already mentioned, the work is divided into further sections which I have called ikons. This is once again related to the idea that the Passion can be presented ‘non-dramatically’, or, better expressed, a a series of stylized ritual scenes in the manner of an ikonostasis (ikon screen) in a church—though I react rather strongly against the idea that music can actually be an ikon. The Gospel narratives themselves are sung by a solo tenor, using the tone to be heard in any Russian church (the Gospel is always sung in the Orthodox Church so that the priest may not, through the inflections of reading, interpose his own personality between the Word of God and the congregation), except that Christ’s words are given to a solo bass. In this way I have tried to attain a ‘black and white’ presentation of the Gospel, as Pärt did through other means. Commentary is left to the liturgical insertions sung by the choir, using both Russian and Byzantine chant as well as my own music written in the spirit of chant. So there is here too a mystery, since so much is kept back through the deliberate avoidance of drama (and the recurrence of the Alleluia throughout serves to emphasize this): in this way I have tried to present a narrative, as it were, mystically. A more recent work of mine, Hymn to the Light (1984), uses a similar ritually repeating structure to emphasize the idea of “holy light”, though the text is this time liturgical (Svete tikhi, from the Orthodox service of Vespers); as in the prayerful repetition of the Jesus Prayer, re-iteration is fundamental to music aspiring to the expression of a mystery. This is of course also the idea underlying Tavener’s oneword movements from Ikon of Light, Dhoxa and Phos, which also exist as independent works. The Roman Catholic composer Góre ki did something similar in his choral work Amen, written as long ago as 1975. For me the best example of ecstatic repetition (with subtle changes, as in Pärt’s tintinnabuli method) remains Ex. 4 (Continued) Ex. 4 (End) the end of the final movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms: this has remained an ideal for me since I first heard the piece as a student, though the mystical quality of this music is hard-won indeed. Mention of ecstatic repetition—a decidedly eastern concept—leads me to another kind of music which is often talked of when the names of Tavener, Pärt or Górecki are invoked; that which it was once fashionable to call Minimalism. The point may seem obvious, but it is worth emphasizing that repetition with the aim of inducing an almost trance-like state and thereby exaggerating the impact of a harmonic or melodic shift, is far from being mystical music. It could never be, for one thing, without a religious intention, and, secondly, and partly as a result of this, there is in any case no mystery ‘encoded’ within that would bring it within the range of mysticism. Repetitive and incantatory music with a religious mystical function does indeed exist, but it is within eastern religious traditions (India, Morocco, Japan, for example), not in western Minimalism, at least as a general rule. Repetition and a sense of hypnotic incantation certainly have a place in the music of both Tavener and Pärt, though they are far from being the technical ‘core’ of their work; this, I would argue,—is akin to the state of prayer, though of course in order actually to be completely effective in this way the music needs to be prayed and not merely sung. It is an element which very clearly derives from the liturgical rhythm of the Orthodox Church.
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Ex. 4 Ivan Moody: Passion and Resurrection
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In the same interview with Andrew Ford Tavener said of earlier pieces such as Ultimos Ritos, “I tend to think of those pieces as mystical works, and I now react a bit against mysticism, because it’s like sniffing around a restaurant without actually going in.” Ford’s subsequent question as to whether the ‘aroma from the restaurant’ could not ‘induce pangs of hunger’ provoked Tavener’s assent, but it is certainly the case that his more recent works have an “incarnate” element (Mary of Egypt is a good example, in its simple, graphic telling of the tale) in a way that the large scale works of the 1970s do not. One way of reconciling mysticism with more ‘concrete’ musical factors, is through symbolism, as the work of the Greek Orthodox composer Michael Adamis shows (in his case it is a symbolism related specifically to the Byzantine tradition).6 There is nothing ethereal at all about his Byzantine Passion (1967), with its earthy, harsh soundworld rooted directly in Greek liturgical chant, but it is most certainly mystical music, again with a strongly liturgical background. The mystery is preserved unless one is prepared to become an initiate. Stravinsky also understood symbolism (one might point to the geometry underlying Canticum Sacrum or the pyramid of fugues in the Symphony of Psalms), and that kind of structural symbolism is certainly to be found in Tavener’s Ultimos Ritos (in spite of the composer’s reaction against it), The Protecting Veil, and the very recent Apocalypse, as well as in Pärt’s Passio. Symbols are a way of mediating between the composer’s interior world and the public to which his music will be exposed, and they are a way of imposing some order upon something (mysticism) which it is extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with in music (because it is so imprecise), and correspondingly difficult to present. Nevertheless, I have tried to put forward some of the connections which, as an Orthodox Christian, I see between my understanding of mysticism and my understanding of music. In an article entitled Christ, the Beloved, the Coptic Orthodox monk, Father Matta el-Meskeen, says We have agreed, O writer, with what you have written, but how do we begin and where is the way? It is a beat of the heart which lovers recognize immediately as a sign that the Beloved has entered. That is the beginning of the way that leads where God wills.7 May not that ‘beat of the heart’, given that it leads to the ‘spiritual apprehension of truths beyond the understanding’, therefore also be a way to recognize mystical music? Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts © 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) 3–4, pp. 81–125 Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Reprints available directly from the publisher Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Photocopying permitted by license only Printed in India
6 See Michael Adamis: Within and Beyond Symbolism in Contemporary Music and Religion, Contemporary Music Review, Volume 12, Part 2. 7
Sourozh, #57, August 1994.
Trompette d’un Ange Secret: Olivier Messiæn and the Culture of Ecstasy Robin Freeman
Olivier Messiæn was perhaps the last great figure in that post revolutionary resurgence of Catholic art heralded by Chateaubriand and brought to its height in its aftermath of the France Prussian War. Aside from the revival of the liturgy carried out by Dom Guéranger and his followers at Solesmes the key roles in this movement were played by Catholic laymen for its most part with encyclopaedic interests and a surprising knowledge of the world and its problems. Thus Messiæn’s fascination with time, often attributed to a heterodox modernism has its roots in Maritain’s accomodation of Bergson’s concept of durée with his existentialist reading of St. Thomas. Using an essentially philological method to supplement the composer’s public statements Robin Freeman places Messiæn’s œuvre in a context of which those who have viewed it as a purely musical phenomenon may have been unaware. KEY WORDS Messiæn, birdsong, Catholic, Franciscan, plainchant, symbolism. Note: All titles of musical works are given in bold type to aid identification. Titles of other works of art or literature are italicised. Rossignol jusqu’au déluge jusqu’aux étoiles éteintes. Nightingale till the flood comes, Till the stars go out. 1. LEARNING CAUTION Olivier Messiæn told Antoine Goléa in no uncertain terms: ‘J’ai horreur de parler en publique et horreur de parler de mes œuvres’.1 It had not always been like that. Messiæn had read his own notes on stage between the pieces at the first performance of the Vingt regards and he had been scrupulously forthcoming in the debate that followed on the Trois petites liturgies. But when even a priest, the Révérend Père Florant, was able to say on that occasion ‘Chez Messiæn, il y a un grand musicien qui s’explique de travers dès qu’il cesse d’écrire des notes’2 the
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composer grew very cautious indeed about what he said, realising, as Patrick Heron puts it, that an unguarded remark can boomerang against you for the next forty years. Mysticism, Christian symbolism, the relation between sacred and romantic love became slippery topics for him and he preferred putting most of his interviewers off the track when they came up. This series of essays tries to get at the specific nature of Messiæn’s culture by examining the pœtry, the painting, the music, the philosophy and theology he knew and frequented as a supplement to what he himself chose to say in his public statements and, at times, when the philological evidence seems overwhelming, as a counter-balance to them. Thus in a sense the quotations are the heart of this exercise and therefore I make no apology for the quantity of them. Most of the books quoted are now difficult to find, some were never translated into English. If any of my readers sees fit to use either references or quotations in a different context I should feel more than justified in my choice of strategy. One thing I hope to reveal is the nature of Messiæn’s Catholicism. Dallapiccola, Poulenc, Berkeley were all Catholic composers, though their religious music is as different from one another’s as it all is from Messiæn’s. The disparities are not purely musical, but point up differences in the approach to faith. Another is the persistence of the world of make-believe created by Messiæn’s mother, Cécile Sauvage and nourished from the beginning by Mæterlinck, by Mme d’Aulnoy, by Marie Noël, by Shakespeare and Calderón, right through the composer’s creative life, even when, as with L’Ile de feu, we least suspect it. The uncompromisingly French character of Messiæn’s cultural profile, something he had in common with Saint-Saëns and d’Indy, cannot be over stressed. Thus, even though his love of Rilke is something he spoke of in public I thought it essential to find a further sanction for it in an essay by a militant French Catholic writer, Daniel-Rops, published in a book by another French catholic writer, Patrice de la Tour du Pin, and which ties Rilke in no uncertain terms to St. Francis. Messiæn’s vision of Wagner is filtered through the symbolist interpretation of Baudelaire, his interpretation of Wozzeck influenced by the remarkable book on the opera written by his own student, Michel Fano, and the para-mystical pœt Pierre-Jean Jouve who is equally fascinated by depth psychology and St. John of the Cross. Another of his students, Pierre Boulez, conditioned his approach to Webern and Schönberg.3 Even Messiæn’s late enthusiasm for the German Catholic theologian Urs von Balthasar can be explained by the fact that Balthasar was fascinated by French Catholic literature and wrote a monumental theological analysis of the novels of Georges Bernanos. I have written mostly of the early music to lay the foundations for a discussion of the later works elsewhere. As it is, an introductory chapter on Catholic culture in France after the Revolution which traces the emergence of an æsthetically oriented approach to theology, and two others, one on synæsthesia, the other on mediæval latin prosody and fin-de-siede vers libre, had to be omitted for considerations of space. Certain delicate topics have also been set aside for later treatment—the relation between Messiæn and the Satie of the Rosicrucian period for instance, or the impact that the liturgical policies of the Second Vatican Council must have had on this Catholic traditionalist brought up in the spirit of the Révérend Père Martin, for long years Maître de chapelle at St. Eustache in Paris, who would defend his use of plain chant together with sacred music largely from the Renaissance and Baroque with the words ‘là où il y a la beauté il y a Dieu’ —wherever there is beauty there is God.”
1
I am horrified at speaking in public and horrified at speaking of my works. Antoine Goléa Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen, p104. 2 In Messiæn, there is a great musician who gets everything wrong as soon as he stops writing notes. Claude Rostand Olivier Messiaen, p20.
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I would like to thank Mme Yvonne Messiæn, Paul Méfano, Harry Halbreich, Jean-Pierre Armengaud, Ulrich Mosch, the staffs of La Procure (the French book- shop in Rome), the British Library, the Senate House Library of the University of London and the Latin American Institute, London for help in preparing this study. Paris, January 1995 2. METHOD Messiæn’s first copy of the Fioretti di San Francesco—The Little Flowers of St. Francis—was in what we would call a pre-Raphælite edition, ‘en vieux français’, as the composer puts it (where vieux simply means old fashioned) and ‘decorated with engravings by Maurice Denis one of which showed an angel playing the viol before St. Francis ‘en totale ecstase’.’4 Now it happens that Maurice Denis, ‘jeune homme mystique et sensuel’, had a passion for Fra Angelico, writing of him in 1896: Ce sont des âmes que le peintre a dégagées de la matière, il a pénetré les mystères de la vie intérieure, il en a restitué toute la poèsie, il a revêtus des formes plus belles nos âmes devant Dieu.’5 Denis was a friend of the composer Ernest Chausson. He decorated his house at Fiesole and in all likelihood introduced him to Mæterlinck whose Serres Chaudes he was to set to music. Denis also knew the Sâr Péladan as of course did Satie who had been his Maître de chapelle. The triple portrait of a girl sitting on the grass in the open air at twilight which Denis chose to call Soir Trinitaire resembles nothing so much as the Trois gymnopédies, those successive attempts to recall a single music heard as it were in a dream, both interpreting the world in mystic threesomes. The painting Jacob and L’Ange takes up an essential theme for Messiæn as we shall see later on in connecton with Delacroix’s painting of the same subject in a chapel of St. Sulpice. Offrande Au Calvaire, all in yellows, reds and oranges, bears the inscription, ‘I have shed such drops of blood for you.’ In the catalogue of the 1993 Nabis Exhibition at the Grand Palais it is described as follows: L’accord de la couleur, de la forme et du sujet est puissant. Du noir, on monte à travers un rouge sang passionel, puis un vert-jaune lumineux et le plus calme orangé, pouratteindre le doux rose des anges. La croix éclate d’un rouge vif. L’exhaltation de la couleur traduit une progression lumineuse et spirituelle.6 These are terms in which Messiæn doubtless would have described the colour element in his music if he had not grown more cautious about such things after the hue and cry that surrounded his attempts to explain his Trois petites liturgies to an essentially hedonistic musical establishment. Denis went on to devote himself to mural painting, like Puvis de Chavannes. But unlike Puvis, with his typically republican culture, went in for ambitious theological programmes. The monumentality and scale of his work together with its avowed goal of restoring mediæval spirituality have considerable bearing on
3 4
Brigitte Massin, Olivier Messiœn, Un Poètique Du Merveilleux, 1989.
These are souls the painting has released from matter, he has penetrated the mystery of the inner life, he has made it all into poetry again, he has clothed our souls more radiantly before God.
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Messiæn’s work. More specifically the angel ‘en totale extase’ with his viol turns up in a tableau of his opera St François d’Assise. Messiæn’s idea of how his characters should move… L’invisible s’avance avec des pieds légers, qui ne touche pas les herbes, et n’inclinent pas les fleurs, comme ceux des réssuscités de Fra Angelico.7 …is in keeping with those ‘âmes…dégagées de la matière’ Denis speaks of in his book on Fra Angelico and was more than likely prompted by them. In fact in a letter to Denis written by Chausson in 1897 the composer speaks of ‘an abandoned project…of setting to music the Canticle of the Creatures by St Francis.’ Chausson had still not found an acceptable French version of the text at the time of his premature death, for a reason that could not be closer to Messiæn’s own requirements in such matters. ‘La fausse mysticité’ he notes in the same letter ‘m’est odieuse.’ The above excursus should help understand the largely philological method used in this study to reveal the specific nature of Messiæn’s culture, Catholic and otherwise, its structure and consistency, in such a way that however vague any single insight may seem, taken all together, the result cannot but have an impact on how we conceive the music and how we perform it. In fact, to test my method one might try to work up something similar using Renoir or Van Gogh instead of Maurice Denis. Very little will come of it. Or to contrast the effect of Fra Angelico on Messiæn with that of Mantegna on Poulenc— who said of his starkly coloured Quatre motets: In a flash I had the precise vision of my Quatre Motets and wrote four motets for Holy Week as realistic and as tragic as a painting by Mantegna. 8 Other sensibilities, other painters… The two Iles de feu are dedicated to Papuasia, and their themes for that reason have all the violence of the organisation of magic in that country.9 This is the ‘official’ account. No one seems to get beyond it to anything specific about Papua or related cultures. What Messiæn had in mind was the incantatory nature of certain works by Varèse and Jolivet, especially Mana with its musical portraits of objets-fétiches, some from primitive cultures, which Varèse and his wife left with Jolivet in the thirties when they left for New York. In this sense the title is wholly appropriate, the more so since neither Varèse nor Jolivet seem to have had a taste for ethnology. What interested them was the primitive as an expressive category. But what of the title itself? There are from time to time playful ambiguities in Messiæn’s non-theological works. The pig sanskrit for instance in Cantéyodjayâ where plops and croaks are hidden in the music of grénouditâ and, just possibly, yodelling in the music that corresponds to the title word. What we have in L’Isle de feu is just as playful but much more charming. Messiæn had a lifelong enthusiasm for Mæterlinck: 5
A potent concord of colour, form and subject. From black we are borne forwards—passionate blood red, then a gleaming green, yellow and then calmest orange to reach the gentle rose of the angels. The cross bursts out in a bright red. The heightening of colour corresponds to a luminous spiritual progress. Les Nabis 1888–1900, Munich, p142. 6 The invisible comes forward with light steps, that do not touch the grass nor bend the flowers, like those of the resurrection figures in Fra Angelico. Olivier Messiæn, Conférence de Nôtre-Dame, 1978. 7
Claude Rostand, Francis Poulenc.
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(l’œuvre de Mæterlinck)…dévoile jusqu’a la manie parfois un extraordinaire usage des symboles; ils sont si nombreux qu’il faut la musique pour les expliquer; Mæterlinck appelle la musique.10 Of Mæterlinck’s plays one, Ariane and Barbe-Bleu, was specifically written as an opera libretto though with no particular composer in mind. Messiæn’s teacher, Paul Dukas, was eventually to set it to music and the resultant masterwork was one of the young Olivier’s enthusiasms. In it there is a scene where Ariane helps dress the various wives of Bluebeard for their confrontation with him when he returns to his castle. Alladine, who is of far off exotic origin and doesn’t even sing because she has no French needs to be given an entirely new outfit: YGRAINE: Où donc a-t-elle pris ces flammes inconnues? ARIANE: Sans doute en son île de feu… Mais vois-tu Alladine, ici, sous nos nuages, les rayons sont moins vifs, les fleurs moins éclatants, et les oiseaux plus ternes… Or il faut que les femmes suivent toujours l’avis des oiseaux et des fleurs qui traduisent pour elles les conseils du soleil. Enlevons cette écharpe et ce voile trop ardent.11 It seems likely that the suite of six dresses dreamt up by Cécile Sauvage, Olivier’s mother, to wear according to the changing hours was also inspired by this passage. In such a case childhood memories were at play in the choice of title. Right at the end of his life Messiæn wrote a short orchestral piece to commemorate the death 200 years before of one of his favourite composers, Mozart—favourite in part because of what Messiæn took to be his essential innocence in the midst of a corrupt world (his dialogue with Massin on Mozart’s freemasonry is revealing on this point) and because of his amazing rhythmic invention, unique among composers of the classical period. He called it Un sourire, a suitably valedictory title and one in line, as we have seen, with his view of the subject. Still, it is a surprising title for Messiæn as if for a moment he had let himself go to accept the human for no more than what it was. Then one day I came across this passage in a writer Messiæn loved almost as much as Mozart himself, Patrice de la Tour du Pin. It is to be found in his confessional book, Une vie récluse en poèsie. Whether Messiæn actually recalled it when he named Un sourire is of little importance so much is it a part of his way of thinking: C’est la seule part d’enfance que je vous permette encore, puisque vous ne jouex pas aux innocents; si la sourire se fexe au loin, qu’il ne redescende pas sur votre conscience ou votre litterature; s’il croit répondre à un autre, qu’il ne le prenne pas pour son jugement; un sourire tel que les hommes attendent, un sourire, humain, puisque la Joie divine est descendue.12
8
Harry Halbreich, Olivier Messiæn, p238 Mæterlinck’s work often conceals the pain of obsession an extraordinary use of symbols, they are so plentiful that it takes music to explain them. M. calls out for music. Massin, p38. 9
10
And you, my Alladine, what are you doing so far from us?—Where did she get those outlandish flames?—No doubt on her Isle of Fire… But you see Alladine here, under our clouds, the sun’s rays are not so bright, the flowers not so garish and the birds are dowdier… Now women should always take their cue from the birds and flowers for they reveal to them the counsels of the sun. Let’s remove this scarf and veil, too ardent by half. MauriceÌterlinck Ariane et Barbebleu, Act III-i.
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For everything in Messiæn doubles as lyrical theology.13 3. OLIVIER MESSIÆN, Musicien François What follows is not an attempt to deny the importance of Wagner and Strauss, Strawinsky and Berg for Messiæn. Still less is it an attempt to see him as carrying on from Berlioz and Debussy with a nod to Ravel and Varèse. Messiæn was concerned with the identity and independence of French music from the very beginning. The configuration of influences and promptings is impressively dense and gœs far beyond a simple transition from impressionism to modernism. Such an exercise is not without exemplary value considering that one German writer scolds him for using too many French models in his teaching of harmony and sees fit to tell us that not only Lalo and Chabrier but Franck and Fauré as well lacked sufficient technical mastery to be used as models in a German conservatory.13 A glance at Dom Guéranger14 will help explain why Messiæn came to insist that the rhythmic aspect of his music took precedence over all the others. Writing in 1933, before Messiæn had proclaimed his change of emphasis, Dom Germain Cozier wrote ‘Dom Guéranger it was who felt the need to put musical and liturgical restoration on an equal footing, and above them both the restoration of the rhythmic contours of plainchant.’ This strategy would surely have been on Widor’s ideal agenda (qv) even if he was critical of the specific shape the Solesmes reform took. Messiæn’s use of the technical word neume to describe the basic units in his own melodic-rhythmic thought was already current at the Schola Cantorum.Tho it was in some ways a more sophisticated notion than ‘cell’, a word too suggestive of biology, it is one which implies a certain programme as well (his remarks on the opening of Alléluias sereins d’une âme qui désire le ciel from L’Ascension are a case in point). In the period when Satie studied at the Schola Cantorum, writes Jean-Joël Barbier, ‘ce sur quoi on insistait, autour de d’Indy, c’était le phrasé, les courbes intérieures, l’agogique, la dynamique, la musique saisie comme succession de neumes.15 One dœs not think of Messiæn as being involved with neo-classicism. That is largely because the mainstream of neo-classicism held closely to Bach as a model, to the chorales, to the preludes and fugues, to the part writing in works such as the Brandenburg Concertos. Dom Guéranger and his followers, sacred and secular, were trying to liberate plain chant from the influence of the chorale and its four square approach to rhythm. Now in part because of its relation to plain chant, in part because of its neume-like use of ornamentation (as opposed to the German and Italian schools) much French baroque music has a less rigid profile. No surprise then that in his great organ works, aside from contemporary examples provided
11
It is the only part of childhood I still allow you, now that you no longer play at being innocents; but see that the smile keeps its distance, not nestling down on your conscience or your writing, if it is meant in reply to another let him not take it as a judgement; a smile like those people wait for, a smile, human, since Divine Joy came down to earth. Patrice De La Tour Du Pin Ma Vie Recluse En Poèsie, 1936. 12 If we go a step further we can have even birds and rainbows. Here is the opening of the poem ‘Mozart’ by Pierre-Jean Jouve, a close friend of Messiæn’s student Michel Fano with whom he wrote a book length study of Berg’s Wozzeck: A Toi quand j’écoutais ton arc-en-ciel d’été…/ Les glaives de chagrin/Sont recoverts par mille effusions de nuages et d’oiseaux… [To Thee as I listened as to thy summer rainbow…the swords of anxiety are sheathed in a thousand outpourings of clouds and birds.]
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by, among others, Dupré and Tournemire, Messiæn would have gone to the masters of the French baroque: Daquin, Dandrieu, Lebègue and, more particularly, François Couperin le Grand and Nicolas de Grigny. When Messiæn was learning his craft the process was already complete for piano music. To name only works which openly avow their relation to the French baroque there was Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, significantly written in memory of friends killed on the front in World War I, Debussy’s Hommage à Rameau the Variations et fugue sur un thème de Rameau by Messiæn’s teacher, Dukas; Maurice Emmanuel’s Cinquième Sonatine which has the form of a French Suite, however advanced its language, and the delightful Rococo miniatures of Reynaldo Hahn, such as Les Noces du Duc de Joyeuse. Organ writing had not yet followed a similar course in spite of promising episodes like the brief career of Jehan Alain. To some extent the large scale fugue is against the grain of French organs. Their strength is in the strong character of the individual stops and hence the variety of colours available for mixing. However romantic the Cavaillé-Coll organs may be they nevertheless descend from the eightieth century tradition of French organ construction. Messiæn’s organ music is always ingeniously coloured. It is marked by an almost total absence of chorales and chorale-like passages, which dœs not exclude singing motifs in largely conjunct motion. It is rhythm we are dealing with and from what he told Claude Samuel, Messiæn seems to have felt that the regular phrases of the chorale were the equivalent of doggerel in music. It makes ample use of plain chant melodies either with the rhythmic scansion of the Solesmes editions or with a rhythmic profile devised by the composer himself. The percentage of imitative textures is close to that of, say, the Livre d’orgue of Nicolas de Grigny where fugues, however masterly, are both rare and brief. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Messiæn’s organ music bears a similar relationship to the French baroque as Rouault’s 1920s paintings do to mediæval stained glass where the proximate suggestion of Cézanne and Van Gogh would correspond to that of Dupré and Tournemire. The Préludes are a good place to begin the search for Messiæn’s more immediate roots. Almost all the commentators make do with formulas like “in the idiom of Debussy with occasional flashes of originality”. In fact by the time of Messiæn’s Préludes twenty five years had gone by during which a number of composers with strong personalities had taken up Debussy’s innovations and reworked them for their own expressive purposes. Thus the ending of Florent Schmitt’s Et Pan, au fond des blés lunaires, s’accouda in which impressionist harmonies supply the scansion of a large boned form with sonorous spacing of Lisztian stamp, seems more frankly congenial to the expansiveness of Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu than anything in Debussy.16
13 Theo Hirsbrunner Olivier Messiaen—Leben and Werk, 1988. Referring almost certainly to Boulez’ harmony exercises now kept in the archive of the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel. 14 Re-founder of Solesmes Abbey where the traditions of plainsong were revived in the middle years of the 19thC. See index entry for other references. 15 What it was all about, around D’Indy, was phrasing, internal curves, ‘agogic’, [accent by melodic position, most often on what would otherwise be a weak beat] the dynamic, music grasped as a succession of ‘neumes’. Jean-Joël Barbier, Au piano Avec Erik Satie, 1986, preface. 16 In fact Schmitt reacted very favourably to Messiaen’s music from the beginning. Quotations from his reviews of it may be found in the book of Pierrette Mari. Mari is still able to see Messiæn as a typical product of the French school which is one of the things that makes her book so interesting. With Couleurs de la cité céleste where the idea of fouillis sonore wins out over traditional structure and where the example of Varèse is particularly evident Mari is unable to follow and apparently gave up on Messiaen.
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Ex. 1 Florent Schmitt: Et Pan, au fond des blés lunaires, s’accouda from Mirages. Reproduced by permission of Editions Durand S.A., Paris/UMP Ltd.
Though perhaps the clearest influence on the Préludes among the French ‘post impressionists’ is Maurice Emmanuel. To give but a single instance, the passage in the Quatrième Sonatine (sur les modes hindous) where Emmanuel slips a little waltz idea into the finale recalls in more ways than one the kind of thing that happens in Reflets dans le vent, its pot pourri in sonata form: Emmanuel’s Sonatine bourguignonne from 189317 combines the bells of Dijon cathedral, which was by then the Abbey of St Bénigne, with the carillon of the Flemish-influenced Collégiale de Beaune. But the essential prompting for that percussive style Messiæn developed for the Vingt regards, with its insistent effects of bells and gongs, would seem to be the Charles Tournemire of the late piano pieces written after he had completed L’Orgue mystique. Les cloches de Châteauneuf du Faou is the ideal point of reference though Messiæn would have had to hear or see it at the composer’s home since, aside from the Poèmes-Préludes which were played by Tournemire himself in 1933 in the Salle Debussy (now Pleyel), none of these pieces were publicly performed, much less published in useful time for Messiæn’s period of searching. With his unerring sense of what was useful to him, Messiæn set aside the Franckian elements of chorale and canon in favour of Tournemire’s bracing jolt of harmonies and the generous impasto effects he built up with it. A way of going beyond the scale and scope of Debussy without falling back on academic forms—even if it is likely that yet another French baroque model lies behind both Tournemire and Messiæn, the extraordinary Les cloches of Nicolas Lebègue.
17
Emmanuel’s way of explaining what he does is also much closer to Messiæn’s own forthcomingness than the elegant reticence of Debussy:
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Ex. 2 Maurice Emmanuel: Sonatine Bourguinonne (Introduction) Reproduced by permission of Editions Heugel et Cie, Paris/UMP Ltd.
Like his compatriot Strawinsky, Alexander Tcherepnin entered French musical life between the two World Wars. He offered a relevant model when Messiæn was defining his personal system of modes. Tcherepnin’s 1920s piano and chamber music is full of ingenious experimentation of this type. But there is one work by him, the little-known set of children’s pieces from 1926 with the title Histoire de la petite Ste. Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus which may have played an even more important role in Messiæn’s development. It ends
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Ex. 3 Maurice Emmanuel: Sonatine IV—sur les modes hindous Reproduced by permission of Editions Durand S.A., Paris/UMP Ltd.
with a piece called ‘Offrande de moi-même à l’amour: 9 juin 1895’. This is, in fact, the date of the death of Ste. Thérèse de Lisieux but the piece is meant to describe the ascension of the saint who said: “I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.” The piece uncannily anticipates the last movement of L’Ascension and its reworking in Le quatuor pour la fin du temps. The Catalogue d’oiseaux often seems to return to impressionism proper for its nature sequences which scan the nervous asymmetrical bird song structures as an emblem of the more ample structures of day and night, woods and sea. Such music, in spirit at least, has more in common with Déodat de Séverac’s Baigneuses au soleil than with Debussy’s nature painting in, for instance, Jardins sous la pluie. Déodat wrote Baigneuses with Banyuls in mind; Banyuls is also the site of Le merle bleu and Le traquet stapazin. Paul Le Flem, who taught Jolivet, also wrote ‘out of doors’ pieces in a radiant improvisatory manner. Par landes, for example, with its unhurried quality similar to Messiæn—robust poèmes en prose, not the savant prosody of Debussy Schmitt—Le palais hanté, Dukas—the big climax near the beginning of Act II of Ariane, Milhaud— Cinq petites symphonies, all are present in Turangalîla—in fact there is Milhaud all the way to Chronochromie. While the most radical works, chief among them Couleurs de la cité céleste, are marked by Varèse whom Messiæn rightly considered a French composer, and by Jolivet, his Mana above all (for which Messiæn wrote a splendid non-theological preface), together with the various incantatory pieces.
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Messiæn always insisted on the seminal importance of Joli vet’s art.18 No question that Jolivet led Messiæn in a more radical direction than he might otherwise have taken. Another radical suggestion was provided by musique concrète which Messiæn clearly preferred to the more abstract type of electronic music written across the Rhine. Zeller is right to consider its influence on the Catalogue d’oiseaux though I think not so much for choice, as for manipulation of materials. The relation of the early organ music to Tournemire’s L’orgue mystique and to the occasional adventurous passage in Louis Vierne (the opening of Cathédrales among others) is common knowledge. More problematical is Messiæn’s relation to Dynam Victor Fumet. Fumet was an eccentric pupil of d’Indy who never got beyond the post of organist at Ste. Anne de la Maison Blanche. He wrote a slow ecstatic Transubstantiation, a visionary attempt to live the doctrine from inside rather than to express wonder at it quite in keeping with the strategy of Le banquet céleste. Les chariots d’Israël is suitably implacable and sublime well beyond the toccata in perpetuum mobile that even Vierne would have written to express such a theme. More extraordinary still is Le conciliabule des arbres with its Messiænesque alternation of tritone and perfect fifth. None of this music has yet been published though Fumet’s improvisations were legendary among musicians who sought him out. One of Dynam Victor’s sons, Raphaël, also an organist, composed an organ fantasy after Rouault’s Miserere engravings. The other, Stanislas, wrote a major study of Ernest Hello (qv). Yvonne Loriod dœsn’t recall if her husband knew either of the Fumet brothers though it is difficult to believe that he did not. He clearly put Brigitte Massin onto Stanislas’ study of Ernest Hello which would seem to have been crucial for him. If and when he had a look at the non-conformist organ music of Dynam Victor, as in the case of some at least of Tournemire’s piano music, has yet to be determined, though the fact that Daniel-Lesur’s organ music from the 30s seems even closer to D.V.Fumet than that of Messiæn himself cannot but have a bearing on the matter. Vincent Lajoinie’s biography of Satie contains a tantalizing reference to traffic between Satie and Fumet. To have insisted at length on this aspect of Messiæn’s musical culture was necessary in light of the cosmopolitan image of Parisian musical life in the 20s and 30s, open not only to foreign composers, some of whom had settled in France, but also to Jazz, the Tango and the Brazilian Saudade. Even today the most frequently played music from that period is by Strawinsky, the neo-classicist, by Milhaud, Poulenc and Ibert. In the midst of all this Messiæn made common cause with André Jolivet, then a young radical convinced that the greatest living French composer was the almost unknown and even more radical Edgard Varèse. Suzanne Demarquez characterises the influence of Jolivet on Messiæn as ‘une dynamique de la sonorité par transmutations de la masse—à l’exemple de Varèse—soit, des modifications brusques de volume, donc d’intensite, de timbres’.19 With Jolivet, Messiæn founded La Jeune France which included at first Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier. Later on George Migot and Paul Le Flem, who had been Joli vet’s counterpoint teacher, participated in their concerts as did Jehan Alain who was to die prematurely in World War II and the under-rated woman composer, Claude Arrieu. To quote once again the admirable Suzanne Demarquez: ‘to make a banner of sensibility, of lyricism, of the human and to call oneself a French composer was in 1935 a positive and revolutionary stand.’
18
Suzanne Demarquez Jolivet, 1945.
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4. LA LENTEUR and The Mystical Eucharist Messiæn’s organ works before L’Ascension all refer to specifically Roman doctrine —Le banquet cèleste to transubstantiation, the Diptych to resurrection in the flesh and L’apparition de l’église éternelle to the transcendent origin and hence infallibility (in doctrinal matters at least) of the Church through the ages. All of them, except the first part of the Diptych raise the question of lenteur, of what can seem exaggeratedly slow tempi. They bring us face to face as well with the immobile, the unchanging, the static, chosen words that seem to haunt so much of the writing about Messiæn. In the case of Le banquet céleste there is the precedent of those pieces written in seventieth century Italy to accompany the elevation of the host. Frescobaldi’s Toccata all’Elevazione from the Fiori Musicali is today the best known of these. The piece is slow in tempo and highly chromatic in harmony. The reason for this gœs beyond the wish to mark the solemn and mysterious in a way that would be appropriate as well for the Et incarnatus est. The Council of Trent had put the case for frequent communion. This led to a fascination with the act itself. San Filippo Neri in Rome would go into a trance as he ingested the host leaving the congregation to wait silently until he had finished and could go on to the communion of the people. The act of communion could thus for exemplary reasons last ‘as long as possible’ but always within a ritual, which is to say a public, context. We are also dealing with an act that cannot by its nature be indefinitely prolonged, for the host will eventually melt in the celebrant’s mouth, nor dœs it come to an end because of anything remotely orgiastic. Most likely the baroque tempi of such pieces as the Frescobaldi Toccata would have been much slower than supposedly tasteful neo-classic practise. Though there is a precedent for extremely slow tempos in the organ school that Messiæn and Tournemire belonged to that would not have been lost on either of them. Widor’s preface to the 1905 French edition of Schweitzer’s J.S.Bach contains a reminiscence of CavailléColl who would recount—always with the same astonishment—the slowness of the D major fugue as played by old Hesse, when he came to the Paris church of St. Clothilde whose organ was then only just built. At the other end of his composing life, in the Prière avant la communion from the Livre du Saint Sacrement Messiæn adopts a similar solution as if to show that in this regard there was no room for evolution, only for an increase in scale: Jean-Yves Hameline stumbles remarkably close to Messiæn’s image of Time, taking as his point of departure an unacknowledged notion from Ernest Hello’s Paroles de Dieu: Non pas constat du temps interminable, ce serait une mauvaise analogie…mais sidération…révélation de connaissance et de l’affectus pietatis, du désir… …before succumbing to the folly of definition… La musique c’est la brûlure du désir. La musique est le jeu entre les deux dimensions; arrêter le temps, le vivre et le brûler. L’essence de la musique est dans ses mouvements contraires et réciproques; c’est la structure du psyché humain.20
19
A dynamic of sonority by transmutation of the mass [of sound]—following Varèse—that is, sudden modifications of volume, thus of intensity, of timbres.
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Ex. 4 Olivier Messiæn: Prière Avant La Communion Reproduced by permission of Editions Alphonse Leduc, Paris/UMP Ltd.
…which in logical terms applies as much to Gaieté parisienne as to the Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Moreover ‘arrêter le temps’ is as bad an analogy as ‘du temps interminable’. It is the Bergsonian idea of temps vécu we need, of psychological time, the only image of time that music can convey and which will vary from composer to composer, from piece to piece and even within a piece. That is precisely why it may take on symbolic value if the composer so chooses. Thus, the slow movements in Messiæn are an image of that
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yearning for the celestial paradise Hello says is the only true vector of the pious soul now that the earthly paradise is irremediably behind us. A yearning which has within it the dynamic of prayer, an attempt to win God over through overwhelming desire for what He has prepared for us, the Pauline ‘quæ præparavit Deus, his qui diligunt illum,’ where the etymology of diligere reveals structure and strategy better than any equivalent word in modern French or English. In his reception speech for the Erasmus Prize, the man that is supposed to have wanted to abolish time in his music says with disarming simplicity: J’aime d’abord le temps, parce qu’il est le départ de toute la création…21 Here, Messiæn clearly takes Meister Eckhard’s point that time only comes to be when God creates the universe. Since the creation of the universe is the first and providential step towards the divine sacrifice, time, its enabling act, is in itself adorable. This is the existential side of St. Thomas as well who stands over and against the penitential asceticism of the more extreme followers of St. Augustine who see in time a principle of imperfection. Almut Rössler writes of how Messiæn lived this penchant of his in her description of him as they were preparing together the first performance of the Méditations sur la très Sainte Trinité.22 Rössler was with him every moment to secure the changes of registration. She tells of the deliberate way he would climb up into the exceptionally high organ loft, complaining that one almost needed one’s corps glorieux to get there. Then the meticulous step by step with which he would arrange the stops before playing. At first it was all she could do to put up with it, this healthy, optimistic Lutheran girl, who put everything in order in a few moments with her quick hands. But Messiæn’s were quick as well when it came to actually performing his music and she soon saw that, though from temperament she could never adopt such a pace for herself by clock time, she should indeed strive for a similar spirit when actually playing his music, a spirit of festina lente, of deliberate haste, even in the quickest passages. Interpretation is not based on technique alone, nor even on technique and intelligence conjoined. It is based as well on courage, the courage to present what one knows to be right to a public that will not always accept it without complaint, when it feels itself jarred out of the comforts of passive listening. The slow movements and slow sections in Messiæn’s music are often poorly played even by outstanding performers. The reason is almost always that the slowness of the tempo, chosen in line with standard practice, falls short of that artful exaggeration which provokes a different way of listening. The so-called static harmonic situation in these pieces exists primarily to allow for these very slow tempos, tempos in which melodic rhythm is more salient than harmonic rhythm—chant versus chorale once more, the music of the future as Widor and Tournemire conceived it. All those who wish to perform Messiæn should put on the table in their dressing room, like a prayer read by the priest as he vests for Mass, this exchange between Xavier Darasse and Messiæn on the question of tempo:
20 Not testimony of unending time, that would be a poor analogy—but transformations, revelation of intimacy and of the affectus pietatis, of desire. Music is the burning of desire. Music is the play between these two dimensions, to halt time, to live it (fully), to burn it (slowly). The essence of music is in these opposed and complementary movements, it is the structure of the human psyche. Jean-Yves Hameline quoted in Massin, op. cit., p. 116. 21 I love time before all else since it is the starting point for all creation. Olivier Messiæn, Discours pour le prix Erasme. 22 Almut Rössler: Beiträge zur geistigen Welt Olivier Messiæns, Duisburg, 1988.
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Vous souhaitez donc qu’on joue lentement? Oui, très, très lentement.* 5. L’Ascension and The Theologia Gloriæ
It was Messiæn’s confessor who recommended he deepen his understanding of the liturgical year by reading Dom Columba Marmion’s Le Christ Dans Ses Mystères after the composer’s appointment as organist at La Trinité. Strange advice, perhaps, to a young man ‘né catholique’ but even here Messiæn came to qualify the remark in the sense of another: that his ‘Vraie patrie’ was Dauphiné even though he had been born in the Vaucluse. From the feigned miracles of Mme d’Aulnoy to the true miracles of the Church. ‘On peut dire que je suis passé insensiblement du surreal des contes de Fées au surnaturel de la foi.’23 And back again—at least so far as Tristan was concerned. However, it is of the utmost importance to know the doctrinal content of those words if we are to follow Messiæn’s creative and mystical itinerary. Karl Adam, in his 1954 Tübingen lectures, Der Christ des Glaubens, makes the essential point: ‘We receive the belief in Jesus from the Church and not from philological and textual criticism… She knows it through herself, out of her living communion with Christ which through the centuries is its own everrenewed testimony… If there were no living Church in which Christ’s influence perpetuated itself, the Gospels and Epistles would be for us but a dead letter, breathing no life. The hammer of criticism would always be able to quash their testimony and make a joyful, victorious faith impossible.’24 Now what Messiæn found in the writings of Dom Marmion was just such a joyous, victorious faith. He found in them as well a Benedictine in the tradition of Dom Guéranger, firmly committed to the splendour of the liturgy. L’Ascension was a crucial work in Messiæn’s production. It was the only score he felt the need to rework after publication and, despite his pride in the number of performances it received from major orchestras and prestigious conductors, he became critical of it, condemning now the third movement in the version for orchestra, now the whole of the version for organ in which that third movement had been replaced by another. For us today Messiæn’s remarks are above all symptomatic of the struggle which must have accompanied the writing of a piece that is as fresh and attractive to audiences as it was in the thirties and forties, when it was performed as far afield as Tangle wood. The resultant solution was to be decisive for the whole of the composer’s later development. Specifically, L’Ascension is the first of Messiæn’s pieces to do with a feast as such, rather than a mystery or doctrine. Ernest Hello, Messiæn’s maître à penser in so many respects, conceived of the feast as something inherently sublime and of supernatural origin: Le Rédempteur sème les fêtes dans l’humanité comme le Créateur à semé les fleurs sur la terre. Là où il n’y a pas de fête, le Christ est inconnu. La puissance de décrêter la fête et la puissance de décréter la gloire sont deux forces incommunicables qui appartiennent a l’église.25 The distinction is therefore an important one. Feasts are established by Christ himself and celebrated in heaven as well as on earth. Their celebration here below is a foretaste of heaven and a preparation for it—a
*
So you wish it to be played very slowly? Yes, very very slowly. Quoted in Massin, op. cit., p. 116. You could say that I passed insensibly from the surreal in fairy tales to the supernatural in faith.
23
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sort of dress rehearsal in fact. But why did Messiæn choose Ascension Day rather than a more familiar feast? In all likelihood the answer is to be found in this startling passage by Dom Marmion: Of all the feasts of Our Lord, I daresay that, in a certain sense, the Ascension is the greatest because it is the supreme glorification of Christ Jesus. The victory of the Resurrection, marked the dawn of this personal glorification of Jesus in the admirable Ascension, fixes its full noon… It is the divine glorification of the humanity of Christ, above all heavens… Father, the hour is come. Glorify thy son that thy son and may glorify thee:—you see, it is by Christ and through Christ that we enter into Heaven. 26 And this is indeed the sense of much of the music. The opening meditation Majesté du Christ demandant sa gloire à son Père takes as its theme the text Dom Marmion comments on in the passage quoted above. Hiératique if not pâle, it is one of the closest approaches to Satie in Messiæn’s music—in scansion and harmony it resembles above all the Messe des pauvres written during Satie’s Rose+Croix period. In the context of the thirties, its novelty justifies Jean-Joël Barbier’s remark that, ‘Satie est peut-être le seul musicien qui ait été en avance sur la poèsie de son temps’.27 So much so that works like Le fils des étoiles, la porte héroique du ciel, and Uspud had no successors until Debussy’s Le martyre de Saint Sébastien— the other chief influence on L’Ascension. In the Conférence de Nôtre-Dame Messiæn called Le martyre an extraordinary piece of religious music, especially for a non-croyant, which, be it added, owes its origins ultimately to the work of another non-croyant, supreme master of religious psychology, Gustave Flaubert. Messiæn was never ungenerous in his admiration of Le martyre. The presence of Debussy’s assistant André Caplet (1878–1925), a croyant in search of new paths for religious music must surely have helped shape Le martyre—whose closing chorus, be it said in passing, has been maligned by musicians as diverse as Michæl Tilson Thomas and Jean Barraqué yet looks forward to L’Ascension like nothing else in the score. When one thinks of the last movement, with its title Prière du Christ montant vers Son Père, Debussy’s remarks about his music for Le Paradis take on particular significance: ‘…quand, au dernier acte, le sainte monte au paradis, je pense avoir realisé tout ce que j’ai ressenti, éprouvé à cette pensée de l’Ascension …’28 Now what did Messiæn change in the later version for organ, and why? In the orchestral version the second movement, Alléluias sereins d’une âme qui désire le ciel begins with a limber cantilena marked by rhythmic gruppetti (nearly always overaccented in performance) meant to express confident but not complacent expectation. This is followed by a pastoral idea on woodwinds which has less to do with the bird song suggested by Sherlaw Johnson than with the open air gregorianising of Pierné and Respighi. From these two gently contrasting elements Messiæn builds an ABABA sequence in which the final A is a simple restatement ending on a diatonically harmonised upward moving tonic triad in fortissimo. This functions as anacrusis to the third movement Alléluia sur la trompette, Alléluia sur la cymbale as close to a Koussevitsky-commission Scherzo as anything Messiæn was to write, a jubilation 24
Karl Adam, Der Christ des Glaubens. English Ed. The Christ of Faith, 1957. The Redeemer sows feasts in human life as the Creator sows flowers on the earth. Where there are no feasts, Christ himself is unknown. The power to decree feats and the power to decree glory are two incommunicable (i.e. undelegable) forces that belong to the Church. Stanislas Fumet, Hello, et le drame de la lumière, 1947, pp206–7 26 Dom Columba Marmion, Le Christ dans ses mystères, 1919, p338. 27 Satie is perhaps the first composer to be ahead of the poetry (i.e. aesthetic) of his time. Jean-Joël Barbier, Au piano Avec Erik Satie, 1986, preface. 25
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like that towards the end of Le martyre de Saint Sébastien, Louez le Seigneur sur le sistre et la cymbale. In the organ version this movement is suppressed. To accommodate its replacement the final A section of the second movement is extended and elaborated before being brought to a tranquil close with an appropriate echo of ‘In Paradisum’ from the Fauré Requiem. The outcome of this is to anticipate the ecstatic last movement and to heighten the effectiveness of its climax. While, not so incidentally, the orchestral shimmer is removed from the opening idea thus revealing its nature as an essay in monody constructed from (neo-)neumes and as such a step on the way to the opening movement of Les corps glorieux. The third movement was removed partly because Messiæn must have felt that such a tone was better left to composers like Walton and Honegger who excelled at it and partly because it is not readily transcribable for organ. But there were formal and theological grounds for such a recasting as well. The new movement is called Transports de joie d’une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne. It is three minutes shorter than the symphonic Alléluia and in it Messiæn uses everything he had learned from Marcel Dupré about the Organ Toccata (a second go, if you like, at the first panel of the Diptych). This serves further to prepare for the last movement which, in the organ version, has become the centre of gravity of the entire work. The theme of the meditation brings into play the all-important observation of Dom Marmion that with the Ascension not only Christ but all Christian souls enter into glory. The result is thus nearer to the plan of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps where the final movement (reworked from the final movement of L’Ascension) is strategically designed as climax rather than epilogue. Theologically the presence of both dreamy and impassioned aspects of desire (for the transports of joy betray a pious impatience as well) looks forward to the Amen du désir from the Visions de l’Amen where the two states are juxtaposed in a single movement. 6. Messiæn and Pantheism The fourth Vision de l’Amen represents another crucial step in Messiæn’s construction of his musical and mystical world for in it he anticipates much of what is to come in the (for me unfortunately named) Tristan Cycle…‘Il y a deux thèmes du désir,’ the composer says in his notes, le premier lent, extatique, aspiration d’une profonde tendresse: déjà le parfum calme du Paradis. Le deuxième est beaucoup plus véhément: l’âme y est tirée par un amour terrible qui atteint le paroxysme de la soif.’29 The slow ecstatic ‘theme’ considered not just melodically but harmonically and texturally as well clearly relates to the penultimate movement of the Vingt regards: je dors mais mon âme veille.30 Paradise is a garden etymologically speaking, a referent it has always kept on the level of allegory. So it is when we get to the Jardin du sommeil d’amour in Turangalîla the three themes of Paradise, Sleep and Love all come together. It is interesting how little the burgeonings of le style oiseau do to imperil the consistency of these movements. The thing most worthy of note is that here in a sacred context a principal dimension of Messiæn’s ‘amorous’ works is already present. Which raises the question, dœs the Jardin du sommeil d’amour sketch out a purely earthly paradise? No, because, as Stanislas Fumet remarks in his study of Ernest Hello, le paradis terrestre est perdu et il s’agit de conquérir désormais le paradis céleste.’ Hello, the 28
When, in the last act, the saint rises to Paradise, I think I expressed all of what I felt, all of what moved me, in this idea of Ascension. Quoted in the sleeve notes to Le martyre de St Sébastien [cond. Tilson Thomas. Sony SK48–240].
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immediate literary source of the Visions de l’Amen—of whom Fumet observes elsewhere, ‘Il ‘n’a jamais voulu parler que d’une seule chose, une si magnifique dissémination du substantiel Amen.’31 Since this Loss is existential, whœver seeks for Paradise on earth seeks nolens volens for the heavenly paradise as well. A source Messiæn may not have known but which has an uncanny relevance to his own outlook is Gœthe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities], where, according to Gœthe himself, even the realms of insouciant joy are unceasingly permeated with the traces of dark passionate necessity which only a higher hand can fully resolve—and that not perhaps in this life.32 Though Messiæn might have said not ‘perhaps’ but ‘of necessity’… The other and vehement form of desire could seem an exaggeration without reference once again to Hello in one of those extravagant passages in Paroles de Dieu which proved such a stumbling block for Catholic officialdom: Mon désir! Entassement d’abîmes et de montagnes! Abîmes sous abîmes! Montagnes sur montagnes! Accumulation gigantesque, démesurée des gouffres creusés par le désir, des hauteurs grandies par lui … Multitude inouie de paroles, de silences, de supplications, de gémissements, de rugissements et d’obsécrations, où le memoire se perd dans le temps et dans l’espace. [And the on following page,] ‘C’est la victoire du cri sur lui-même et il meurt de ses excès. Seigneur, mon désir est devant vous’.33 Not at all the sort of devotional literature the unprepared music lover would expect to find in Messiæn’s library. The rude impatience of man’s desire is like a claim on God for that eternal bliss he has been promised. Such eloquent hectoring of God, an Augustinian outburst in the midst of a French fin-de-siècle that had long since identified itself, culturally at least, with the sad aftermath of the Roman Empire, is heavy with consequences for the interpretation of his music. 34 The fifth Amen introduces some of the birds that are to sing in Turangalîla V. And here the presence of ‘mes chers oiseaux’ is placed in an unmistakably theological context: ‘en y joignant aux quatre sens de ‘l’Amen’ la vie des créatures qui disent AMEN par le fait même qu’ils existent…’35 This idea, most often couched in the words ‘Praise the Lord’ or ‘Praise God’ is found all through traditional theology. Nicolas Cusanus uses it to justify the fact that since each animal is created to some degree in the image of God, it is natural that it should conceive of God as sublimely embodying its own form. Those familiar with Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb will know a particularly exuberant account of the Amen of creatures in Christopher Smart’s pœm on his cat, Geoffrey. Not only lovers, as we shall presently see, but artists as well say ‘amen’ by being themselves. Messiæn’s parents read the books of the Catholic naïf pœt, Marie Noël as Olivier was growing up. No wonder she became one of his favourite writers in later life, the more so since she preferred the quiet rhythms of the Burgundian countryside to Parisian café life. In her Notes intimes she writes of the conflict between being a
29
There are two themes of desire—the first slow, ecstatic, breathing out a deep tenderness—already the calm perfume of Paradise, the second is much more vehement, the soul is racked by a terrible love which reasons a paroxysm of thirst. Olivier Messiæn, Visions de l’Amen, composer’s note in the score. 30 Only here has Messiæn begun to deal with the problem of forme durée in the large scale work so that the repeated cadences in the bass will seem grotesque without the eighteen pieces which preceded them, much as a sculpture foreshortened to be seen high up on a cathedral facade will do when one looks at it head on. 31 the earthly paradise is lost; it is now a question of conquering the celestial paradise. only wished to speak one thing, a magnificent broadcasting of the substantial Amen. Fumet p. 215. 32
From a letter by Gœthe quoted in Walter Benjamin’s Gœthes Wahlverwandtschaften, Suhrkampf, 1955.
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proper Christian and a proper artist: ‘Conflict? For me there isn’t one, simply obedience, the deep obedience of the bee to honey.’ She gœs on to explain that ‘the artist, the writer who elaborates proportion, rhythm, image, creation in keeping with [his] inner model likewise obeys God who is beauty and observes unf ormulated disciplines which have nothing to do with the rules of religion or morality but which order and oblige just as much the commandment ‘thou shalt eat no meat on Friday’36 Fumet attributes a similar belief to Hello: ‘poet of God who knew that poetry and music are ruled by the sweetest and highest laws of the universe.’ But Marie Noël takes the point even further: ‘If the lilac to yield ‘all to God’, were to do away with its perfume because its [spiritual] director Bossuet told it that perfume was a first step to sin there would doubtless be great rejoicing in the cloisters and confessionals of flowers on account of the lilac’s abnegation: but possibly the Eternal Father would be offended at finding fault with his work. The director of the lilac is not Bossuet, nor any other moralist. The director of the lilac is the Father.’37 The immediate point is clear and there is no reason to believe that Messiæn had a quarrel with it. One needs to underline that these ideas do not conform to conventional ideas of pantheism. The beauty of earthly things is seen as flowing from their relation to their creator, something the English pœt Gerard Manley Hopkins saw very clearly: ‘He fathers forth whose beauty is past change—Praise Him.’ A relation that draws the Amen from things themselves, from the ‘abîme’ of their separateness, and the Alleluia as well, from their joy at having been created, each in its own special way. That is the key to the vision of nature in works like Des Canyons aux Étoiles and no other is needed. 7. A SYMBOLIST TRISTAN Thus Messiæn’s erotic vocables were largely in place before he set about composing the Tristan cycle. Harawi poses special problems because of its exotic source in the folklore of the Andes. No discussion of it could do without La musique Inca et ses survivances by Raoul d’Harcourt, from which Messiæn took the basic stuff he transformed into his own text, his own narrative. Though such a choice is more in line with his Catholic culture than anything from the Hebraic or Muslim traditions, traditions conceived independently from Christianity. For already in the sixtieth century Spanish theologians were scanning Incan religion for ‘natural revelation’ and adapting cults and ceremonies to the Catholic rite. Every year, even now, the celebration of Qoyllur Rit’i (The Star Of The Snow) takes place at the winter solstice on a mountain top near Cuzco. A cross flanks the altars but the Ch’unchos dance as before with their many coloured feather headdress that hangs down to their waist. Just as significantly most of the song texts collected by d’Harcourt and his wife are in Spanish with a sprinkling of Quechua words and phrases.
33
My desire! Heaping up of abysses and mountains. Abysses under abysses. Mountains on top of mountains. Gigantic outrageous accumulation of chasms burrowed by desire, of howlings and obsecrations where memory loses itself in time and space. The cry cries victory over itself and flies from its excess. Lord, my desire stands before you. Ernest Hello, Paroles de Dieu, re-edited 1992. 34 Curiously enough there is a precedent for this in Mozart’s Requiem at the words Quæ Promisisti which earlier composers treat as simple doctrine. Mozart dwells on them and pleads like a child. ‘you promised, you promised, you promised’—which helps us to see that the high-flown tantrums of Hello are an unexpected way of becoming ‘like unto little children’. 35 By joining to the four senses of AMEN the life of creatures who say AMEN by the very fact that they exist. Messiæn, Visions de l’Amen, note.
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Phenomenologically it is a mestizo culture we are dealing with and not relics of Pre-Columbian culture as such. The ethnologist in, d’Harcourt saw these changes negatively, but Messiæn would have had a different view of the matter. One thing Maître Olivier, the budding ornithologist, would have appreciated in d’Harcourt was his conception of field work: ‘Il faudrait, nanti d’une formation musicale que rien ne remplace—pas même le plus perfectionné des phonographes régistrateurs—parcourir les hautes vallées à petites journées, ne pas craindre de s’arrêter ici et là, même dans les hameaux, suivre les fêtes locales ou se mêlent des coûtumes anciennes à peine dissimulées, et, tout en notant les chants, chercher à fixer les légendes et les fables encore si vivantes aujourd’hui parmi les Indiens.’38 Messiæn has been criticised for getting d’Harcourt wrong but he never pretended to be doing ethnomusicology à la Falla or Bartók. As for the texts the use of Quechua and Quechua-like words in a French context not only runs parallel to the originals but exists already in the French translations of them provided by d’Harcourt himself. Much of the imagery is there as well though it is the branch that tends to be green while the dove is white. Pirucha is the Quechua word for a child’s top. Here is the song in which Messiæn found it, congenial image of whirling ecstasy, interesting musically as well since the melody seems to be one of the least tampered with we have. The sadness and resignation of these Quechuan love songs is confirmed by d’Harcourt at every turn, a fact that becomes all the more interesting when one thinks that both Ahrens and Mari, without referring, to Harawi, insist that the sense of ecstasy in Messiæn’s music springs precisely from a background of resignation— the amen as ainsi soit-t-il—or, as one of the preludes has it, Chant d’exstase dans un paysage triste. Especially important in the light of the place that Harawi would take in the Tristan Cycle is this remark about fatalism: ‘Si l’on aime, si l’on n’aime plus, un evènement, un acte, une coïncidence en garde la responsibilité. Les philtres, les pratiques de sorcellerie conservent, bien entendu, toute leur puissance encore aujourd’hui. “Pourquoi, colombe, m’avoir fait boire au vase de l’eau d’oubli?”39 Musically considered, Harawi is a rethinking of the two earlier cycles, Poèmes pour Mi and Chants de terre et de ciel with the techniques of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jésus where long term scansion cuts it way across even the foreground of the individual sections. Biographically, the earlier celebrations of wife, of
36
Marie Noël, ‘Notes intimes’ in Œuvre Poetique, 1965, pp213–14. Bossuet, Primate of France under Louis XIV, is one of the classic prose writers of the 17thC. His presence here can be explained as part of that rejection of Gallicism which marked the 19thC Catholic revival. Lamennais, for instance, repeatedly attacks Bossuet in De La Religion from the standpoint of an Ultramontane who looks beyond the classical period to prereformation times in search of a programme for the unity of Christendom. 37
38
You need, with an all-in musical training that nothing can replace, not even the most up-to-date recording equipment —to comb through the high valleys a few miles per day, not worried about stopping here and there, even in tiny villages, to attend local festivals where ancient customs are barely disguised and, while noting down the songs, to fix as well the legends and fables still so much alive (even) today, among the Indians. Raoul d’Harcourt, La Musique Inca et ses survivances, 1925, p.V
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Ex. 5 Raoul d’Harcourt: La Musique Inca et ses survivances. Paris 1925
wife and child, gave way to what at the time must have seemed a more dangerous, though equally providential, ardour. For that Messiæn needed a masque. Though be it said that the probing of human love in all its passion and frustration, its disorder and calamity runs through the work of one of Messiæn’s cherished authors, Paul Claudel. May Violante, who, in L’Annonce faite à Marie gives one kiss to the man who loves her, a cathedral builder off to another town whom she will never see again and from that kiss becomes a leper, suffering the calumnies of all those near her, till her death works miracles of conversion and reconciliation, be a sufficient example. It is only in Cinq rechants that Tristan comes into the picture by name but he is there as well in the Turangalîla Symphonie, he and Iseult around whom the composer had allowed his music to crystallise. When Claude Samuel asked him “Vos Tristans ne mettent pas en scène les personnages…” Messiæn replied “Non, cela n’a absolument aucun rapport avec la vieille legende celtique et même l’idée essentielle du philtre en est ecartée (sauf quelques allusions dans les Cinq rechants.)”40 These remarks, born of the caution that Messiæn learned after the ugly row that followed on the first performance of the Trois petites liturgies are so extreme as to raise a smile. The problem was, of course, that he wanted no programme which might be construed in terms of his private life and, above all, no King Mark, that emblem of pathetic cuckoldry. The Tristan closest to his musings was that of Joseph Bédier, a prose version based, with a scholar’s precision, on the mediæval sources but with a deliberately cultivated symbolist atmosphere that recalls Mæterlinck. In the following passage Tristan calls Iseult to him, imitating the song of the nightingale:
39 Whether one loves, or has ceased to love, some event, act or coincidence is responsible for it. Love potion and sorcery to be sure have lost nothing of their power. “Why, (O my) love, have you made me drink from the jar of forgetfulness? d’Harcourt p192.
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—Comme il se plaint! Tel le rossignol quand il prend congé en fin d’été à grande tristesse. Ami, jamais plus je n’entendrai ta voix. ‘La mélodie vibra plus ardente. —Ah, qu’exiges-tu? Que je vienne? Non, souviens-toi d’Ogrin l’ermite et des serments jurés. Taistoi, la mort nous guette… Qu’importe la mort! Tu m-appelles, tu me veux, je viens.’41 Here we have Iseult, creature of God, submitting with an amen to her nature in the hope that providence will put all things right in the end. And in truth, such an attitude belongs more to French mediæval romance than to old Celtic legend. Gaston Paris in his introduction to the first edition of Bédier’s ‘translation’ says of the lovers in an imagery of church windows Messiæn returned to again and again in describing his music, that they are ‘comme des personnages d’un vieux vitrail, aux gestes raides, aux physionomies énigmatiques. Mais derrière cette image, marquée de l’empreinte spéciale d’une époque, on voit, comme le soleil derrière le vitrail, resplendir la passion, toujours identique à elle-même, qui l’illumine et la fait flamboyer toute entière.’42 And when the lovers are forced to part Bédier gives them these simple words: …Amie, que le Dieu né en Bethléem t’en sache gré! …Ami, que Dieu te garde. Nothing of the sort in the libretto of Wagner. Here we have the pure atmosphere of the High Middle Ages as confirmed by these remarks of Emile Mâle about the feminine figures on the portail royale at Chartres: ‘Nous ne sommes plus ici dans le monde des déesses mais dans celui des fées. Il émane de ces reines au vague sourire une étrange poèsie, qui est celle des lais bretons et qui sera bientôt celle des romans de la Table ronde.’43 Another observation of Gaston Paris could serve as a summary of the Tristan cycle’ as a whole: l’idée de la fatalité dans deux etres d’exception, purifiée par la souffrance et comme consacrée par la mort.44 Turangalîla is, of course, dominated by joy—the daimonic element that will come to the fore in Cinq rechants though already present in it is closely contained. Though behind the ‘statue’ theme which Messiæn associated with Prosper Mérimée’s tale La Vénus d’Ille lurks an even more disconcerting emblem of the blind fatality of love. Mérimée weaves a tale of mediæval origin—retold by Geoffrey of Malmesbury and by Vincent de Beauvais—about an antiquary’s interest in an ancient statue brought to light in the 40
Your ‘Tristans’ don’t put the characters on stage…—No, there is no relation to the old Celtic legend and even the essential idea of the love potion is cast aside (except for some allusions in Cinq rechants). Claude Samuel, Entretiens avec Olivier Messiæn, 1967. 41 “How he complains! Like as the nightingale when he sadly takes his leave at summer’s ending. My friend, I shall never hear thy voice again!” The tune throbbed more ardently.—“Ah what wilt thou have of me? That I come? No, bethink thee of Ogrin the Hermit and the oaths we have sworn. Be silent, death espies us Ah, what matters death! Thou callest to me, thou wantest me, I come. Joseph Bédier Le Roman De Tristan Et Iseult Traduit Et Restauré Par J Bédier. Préface by Gaston Paris, 1900, p191. 42 …like characters in an old-stained glass window, with stiff gestures and enigmatic expressions. But behind that image, marked with a period stamp, one sees, like the sun light through that window, the flaring out of eternal passion, always the same, which lights it up and makes it flame through and through. Paris My friend, may the God born in Bethlehem be gracious unto you. /My friend, may God keep you. Bédier 43 We are no longer in the world of [classical] Goddesses but in the realm of faery. There wafts from these queens with their fleeting smiles a strange poetry which is that of the Breton lays and will soon be that of the Arthurian romances Emile Mãle, Nôtre-Dame de Chartres, 1948, p. 46.
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Roussillon. The son of the family on whose estate the statue was found is shortly to be married. As he plays a ball game in the garden with friends, he places his ring (Mélisande, Proserpina) on the finger of the bronze image for safe keeping. Unable to get it off when the game is over he is found dead on the morning after his wedding night by the narrator: J’écartais sa chemise et vis sur sa poitrine une empreinte livide qui se prolongeait sur les côtes et le dos. On eût dit qu’il avait été étreint dans un cercle de fer. Mon pied posa sur quelque chose de dur qui se trouvait sur le tapis; je me baissai et vis la bague de diamants.45 A gothic tale if ever there was one and, in fact, in Turangalîla (never mind the playful ‘Sanskrit’ name), Messiæn is discovering the secular side of the Middle Ages and not only in terms of literature. For he is experimenting with the refrain forms of mediæval and renaissance song giving rise to unexpected parallels with other works from the forties—the St. Vartan Symphony of Alan Hovhaness, B.A. Zimmermann’s Enchiridion and of course Orff’s Carmina Burana. In Chant d’amour II use of them has become insistent and with Turangalîla III (which David Drew rightly holds to be the most advanced of all) Messiæn passes beyond the stage where the usual ABC school analyses can be of any help in clarifying his forms. For Turangalîla is a work that reflects its composer’s development as fascinatingly as Gürrelieder does that of Schönberg. From passages in the early manner of Florent Schmitt, who wrote so glowingly of the first performance of Les Offrandes oubliées through typically Milhaud-like development strategies (développement par bordel) we are brought to the threshold of the modernist world of Chronochromie. At the end of Turangalîla there is a struggle between an abîme figure and a tendresse-paradis figure over which of them will secure the final cadence. In the Vingt regards it was the abîme figure which carried the day—back to earth for the time being. Here it is the paradis figure leaving us with an overall impression very close to André Breton’s description of a painting by Chagall in a book that was one of Messiæn’s favourite companions during the late forties: La Peinture et le Surréalisme: Il n’a rien de plus résolument magique que cette oeuvre, dont les admirables couleurs de prisme emportent et transfigurent le tourment moderne, tout en réservant l’ancienne ingénuité à l’expression de ce qui dans la nature proclame le principe du plaisir: les fleurs et les expressions de l’amour.46 The words ‘emportent et transfigurent le tourment moderne’ are the essential ones for Messiæn’s artistic programme which has something in it of Burne-Jones’s defiant stance—‘the uglier the world becomes, the more angels I shall paint’.
44 The idea of the fatality of love, which raises it above all laws, incarnate in two exceptional beings, purified by suffering and as if consecrated by death. Bédier (preface by Gaston Paris). 45 I drew back his shirt and saw on his chest a livid imprint that extended over his ribs and back. One would have said he had been crushed by an iron hoop. My foot came down on something hard that lay on the carpet. I bent down and saw the diamond [wedding] ring. Prosper Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille, Classiques Garnier. 46 There is nothing more resolutely magical than this work whose stunning prismatic colours carry off and transfigure the torment [of] modern [times], while cleaving with coy ingenuity to what in nature proclaims the pleasure principle, flowers and expressions of love. André Breton, La Peinture Et Le Surréalisme, 1945.
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9. BIRDS La chose merveilleuse du plain chant ce sont les neumes. On les trouve aussi dans le chant des oiseaux: la fauvette des jardins, la grive musicienne, l’alouette des champs, la rouge-gorge font des neumes.47 There are so many mediæval pœms by monks about birds in their cloisters that one suspects there was indeed some interpenetration between plain chant and bird song. Be that as it may, mediæval birds sing the hours, matins and vespers with special assiduity, and Guilhem de Poiteus says of them ‘e le aucel/chanton chascus en lor lati’.48 For indeed not even the subtlest Messiænologist could distinguish at the close of the Livre du Saint Sacrement whether those repeated staccato chords we are dealing with are a psalm tone or an expostulatory garrulax. The birds have a natural liturgy, prompted by the hours as they pass—in image of the actual liturgy We could say that Le réveil des oiseaux remains close to the earthly liturgy, matins of course as with Jannequin, while Oiseaux exotiques is bird song in adumbration of the heavenly liturgy which is one reason birds sing together there that never do here on earth. There is also a tradition, especially among Franciscans, of the nightingale singing the Hours of Christ’s Passion. John of Howden, an Anglo-French Franciscan of the thirteenth century, wrote a long pœm on this theme which he called Philomena: Et par ce enkores a il nom rossignos que il étoit fez et trouvé en un beau verger flori ou rossignol adés chauntoient et pur ce fu il faiz li quor celi qui le lira soit empris en l’amour nostre seigneur.49 Messiæn frequently spoke of birds as living symbols of freedom, though I don’t know if he ever cited this bird verset from the Feast of the Holy Innocents as a case in point: Anima nostra sicut passer erepta est de laqueo venantium—laqueus contritus est et nos liberati sumus. 50
But aside from their value as example, as symbol, what did Maître Olivier really think about them? Teasingly, Goléa asks him: what about those ‘osiaux’, those dicky birds?51 One ought not to show disrespect to such ‘masters’, Goléa is told by Maître Olivier with a touch of whimsy, for Messiæn knew perfectly well from his visits to La Branderaie de Gardépée, the estate of his ornithologist friend Jacques Delamain, that birds have all sorts of unholy reasons for singing as well, most of them to do with courtship and territorial rights. As Reverdy puts it: ‘Des merles en habit règlent discretement une querelle d’amour ou d’honneur dans le sous-bois.’52 But also he knew that they sang to 47
The wonderful thing about plain chant is the ‘neumes’. They are found also in bird songs: the garden warbler, the song thrush, the meadow lark, the robin, all have neumes. Messiæn: Conférence de NôtreDame, p4. 48 and the birds sing each in their latin (i.e. special language). Guilhem de Poiteus. 49 [the pœm is] called Nightingale (i.e. Philomena) because it was invented and written down in a fair flowering orchard where nightingales did sing the while and also for the fact that whosoever shall read this poem will be seized with love for Our Lord. John Of Hoveden/Howden, ‘Philomena’ in Hymnologie Beitrâge, Bd 4,1930. 50 Our souls like the sparrow have escaped from the hunters’ lime—the lime is dissolved and we have been set free. Liber usualis
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each other for company and in response to the changing hours and to the weather—or just for the sake of singing. One piece that was surely essential for Messiæn and ‘les osiaux’ was Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, settings of prose pœms from the book of the same name by Jules Renard. Renard had grown up in the country, finding time to serve as Mayor of his little town when his literary reputation was established in the Paris salons. The pœms engage in fond but shrewdly ironic personification with, behind it, a naturalist’s eye. Five of the six poems chosen by Ravel are about birds. As for the cricket, insect sounds do occur in the Catalogue d’oiseaux, notably the cicada in L’Alouette calandrelle. Renard’s pœtry uses speech rhythms with the economy of Haiku posing musical problems that even Debussy with his admirable souplesse would have thrown up his hands at. Ravel’s solution to these difficulties is a constantly renewed attention to detail against a metrical context as unpredictable as any he ever constructed. And indeed what happens as the cricket puts his little house in order—“a-t-il bien fini?”— and the moon shows itself above the poplars like so many fingers pointing it out, or as the kingfisher rests a moment on a fishing pole while the fisher holds his breath (“nous n’avons pas d’oiseau plus éclatant”) amply suggest the nature sounds in the Catalogue. Fascinating to think how another daring manœuvre in Ravel, almost the opposite to the one in the Histoires naturelles, the adaptation of a Malay verse form in the pantoum movement of the Piano Trio was equally important for Messiæn, fascinating as well the thought that it is Emmanuel who may be lurking in the background once again. When Messiæn construes his birds as oriental princes there is something of Renard in it, the bold colours if not the irony. His birds are never histrionic like the paon though they can be devilish like the ‘pintade qui se roule dans la poussière comme un bossu’ [the guinea hen who rolls in the dust like a hunchback]. One of the strangest appearances of birds in Messiæn is in the Chants d’oiseaux from the Livre d’orgue. There they seem to be perched high above a blasted landscape or heard chattering overhead from down a pit. But then the Livre d’orgue with its relentlessly grey colouring seems to be about horror: Et comme le soleil se couchait, le sommeil fondit sur Abraham, et l’horreur l’envahit, immense et ténébreuse.53 As for the overall shape of the Livre d’orgue (for as the title suggests it is not a proper sequence of pieces) Huysmans’ description of the De Profundis dœs well enough:
51
Goléa has been criticised for his ironic distance from his friend but, in fact, Messiæn was always ready to talk things over with him. Massin, in her dismissiveness can be more frustrating since she dœsn’t always give the composer a chance to reply, however brilliant the overall strategy of her interviews. Thus she gives us to believe, as it were behind Messiæn’s back, that the Imitatio Christi is an outmoded devotional tract with no relevance to modern times—an opinion she could scarcely have acquired from Bernanos’ friend Monseigneur Daniel Pérezil, whom she calls in when the references get beyond her memories of a Catholic girls’ school. However nothing could be more amusing than Hirsbrunner taking osiaux to be a printing error and correcting it to oiseaux! 52
Tuxedoed blackbirds in the thicket settle a point of love or honour. And as the sun went down, sleep fell on Abraham, and horror, vast and brooding flowed into him. Ernest Hello Paroles de Dieu. 53
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(II) s’incurve semblable a ces grands arcs qui forment l’ossature enfumée de voute; il est lent et nocturne comme eux; il ne se tend que dans l’obscurité, ne se meut que dans la pénombre marrie des cryptes.54 Huysmans gœs on to say that such an effect is meant to underline the ‘l’horreur des prophéties’, just the sort of thing described by Hello in the quotation above. Messiæn puts his concert of bird song into the midst of it like a far off hope of liberation. There may have been reasons why the composer chose to take up the theme when he did but before rushing on to biographical explanations it is well to recall the words of the child Messiæn as told to Goléa; ‘J’aime tout ce qui fait peur’. After all some of the langage communicable themes are a bit hair-raising as well. It should be clear by now that Messiæn’s music is symbolist rather than programmatic, in its general intention at least. What it conveys about doctrine or landscape is expected to be different for each listener. We are dealing with scenarios for meditation. The Catalogue d’oiseaux is no exception to this. Messiæn had shown what he could with ultrachromaticism and the serialising of modes. He now set out to give to France what Albeniz had given to Spain with his Ibèria only he chose birds to animate his regional landscapes rather than human singers, the more so because he felt there was no longer any equivalent in France of the vigorous traditional music Albeniz had learned to admire from Pedrell. No doubt that if one knows those landscapes one’s pleasure is enhanced: Quant on connâit l’oiseau et le paysage, que je veux peindre, on doit prendre un plaisir particulier à l’écoute de la pièce parce qu’on retrouve ces éléments comme on retrouve des amis, des souvenirs d’enfance ou certaines choses oubliées dans un coin de la mémoire.55 I myself know the sea at Banyuls and the woods along the Charente. I do not know the Cirque de Mourèze and so have forgotten nothing there that La merle de roche could bring to mind. One night I heard an owl, a moyen duc calling by the roadside, just below the Grand Ballon d’Alsace. I listened, stone still, as another owl called out from what seemed miles away across the snow. Little by little the distant cries drew closer until the two owls were perched on a single branch a few yards from me. All this in perhaps a quarter of an hour towards midnight and unnerving to the ear like the cry of strangled infants in færy tales. That is a memory which haunts me whenever I hear La Chouette hulotte despite the relative disparity of countryside and species. Messiæn loved the work of Jean Lurçat who had revived the tapestry as a major art form using for his ultimate point of reference a model that could not have left the composer of the Quatuor indifferent, the great mediæval tapestry of the apocalypse at Angers: Chez Lurçat ce sont ses chouettes et ses fleurs. Chez moi ce sont mes oiseaux.56 Lurçat wrote in 1942, from his wartime retreat in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon that…
54 [It] stoops like those great arches that form the smoky ribbing of a vault. It is slow and nocturnal like them, it only stretches out in darkness, only stirs in the squat penumbra of crypts. JR Huysmans’ La Cathédrale, quoted in Segalen. 55 when one knows the birds and the countryside I want to paint, one takes particular pleasure in listening to a piece, because one comes across these elements again, like rediscovering old friends, childhood recollections, or certain things hidden away in some corner of the memory.
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Y etant installés dans ces contrées aimables, sans contrainte, ces disponibilités et ces aisances conférèrent au cœur du Francais courtoisie devant les choses de la nature, c’est à dire esprit de réalité. 57
The réalité aspect of the Catalogue D’oiseaux is a highly complex one. It has led H.R.Zeller in an excellent article58 to stress the influence of musique concrète in its composition, in part one feels to save the piece for ‘modernism’. Zeller is quite right if one is willing to accept that musique concrète has a prehistory as well that is not irrelevant here. There are at least two reasons why the Catalogue has elements of artistic montage, both of them part of an overriding compositional strategy. For Messiæn was not trying to suggest bird song within the context of an existing style as for instance was Rameau in La Poule. He looked to actual birdsong to create a style that could also be used without reference to birds. One of these reasons is the foreshortening of time: J’ai mis longtemps a découvrir par exemple que le déroulement du jour et de la nuit, le déroulement des heures, pouvait fournir un cadre formel excellent. C’est celui que j’ai adopté pour mon Catalogue d’oiseaux.59 Nonetheless the examples were there in Debussy: De l’aube a midi sur la mer and in the transition from night to morning between Les parfums de la nuit and Le matin d’un jour de fête in Ibéria, but Messiæn had in mind filling the scheme with specific details, sonorous objects as it were and not just gradually changing tempos and textures. Though in fact he would seem not to have devised his tactic purely as a response to formal problems. Anyone who has Messiæn’s preliminary notes to his Catalogue pieces together with the running commentary that accompanies the actual score will find passages like the following from Les jours et les nuits des oiseaux published in 1932 by Jacques Delamain hauntingly familiar: Towards four o’clock a ray touches the trunk of a pine, raising the still-sleeping grass in the outer fringes of the wood. First, the Robin tunes his note, then the Redstart begins his short monotonous phrase, a Blackbird whistles, discreet songs hesitating on the brink of dawn, then growing bolder. Once or twice the tinkling of the Scops owl calls back the cries of the night. The Nightjar’s wheel thrums louder and, unexpected at this time of day, the cooing of a Turtle Dove evokes the high noon. All the Robins are now awake, their blended voices ringing crystal clear. A Tree-frog croaks… The choir of a thousand voices has no conductor, yet seems to obey some will; to be pulsed by a rhythm. Suddenly the Orioles make a triumphant entry drowning the Blackbirds with their fullthroated harmonious whistling, but leaving undimmed the Golden Crested Wrens’ sweet strain with its pure tone and pleasant swing. And this soft network of sound and the Orioles bright fluting is pierced by the ditties of the Finches and the Warblers’ melodies. 56
With Lurçat it’s his owls and flowers. With me, it’s my birds. Messiæn in Goléa. Having taken up residence in these amiable, easy-going part, their offerings and their amenities have confered on this Frenchman’s heart a courtesy before the things of nature, that is to say the spirit of reality. From Jean Lurçat; Notes pour un pétique, quoted in Jean Cassou’s Jean Lurçat, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, 1958 58 H.R.Zeller, Messiaen and Kritische Universalität, Musikkonzepte #28. 59 I took a long time discovering for example that the unrolling of day and night, the unrolling of the hours, could provide an excellent structural frame. It’s the one I chose for my Catalogue d’Oiseaux. 57
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On this musical background certain notes stand out insistently. The Cuckoo repeats his call impatiently, the Hoopoe plays his bassoon, a Magpie awakes and clacks his castanets. The Chiffchaff, a dwarf among birds, tries to assert himself and endlessly beats time, but it is the thrushes glad rhythm and tuneful voice which seems to direct the whole orchestra. Just before sunrise, the choir reaches its height, a unique moment, when at its full intensity it retains all its sweetness. Waves of sound come and go—borne on the breath of the breeze comes the hymn of the Larks who have taken flight from the ground nearby, but the Orioles whistling is no longer so loud and other sounds it drowned are now more clearly heard. Boldly the Chaffinch pours out his roundelay, the Blackcap’s strain is hearty, while the little wren, not easily humiliated, trills exultantly. On the horizon the gleam of day is stained a deeper rose.60 Even if musical considerations outweighed all others in the final elaboration of the style oiseau, its application in the Catalogue clearly owes something to Messiæn’s host and guide in the Branderaie de Gardépée. The other reason for montage-like effects has to do with Messiæn’s study of ornithology as a discipline, for, aside from field work, there is also how the findings are presented, the didactic side, if you like. Thus most of the birds that frequent, say, a marsh in the Sologne, will be put close together in a glass case or in a tableau vivant, even though they are seldom, if ever, found in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. The result is not empirical truth but a kind of scientific shorthand of considerable mnemonic value. Of course the ornithologist will read the whole as a figurative précis for he knows the actual situation in the field. The student will learn this bit by bit; the casual visitor to the natural history museum perhaps never. The result in Messiæn is an artistic tableau vivant animated by a foreshortened image of time. So that, in the end, Messiæn’s fieldwork was not so much like that of Pierre Henry recording snippets of the real for surreal assembly as like that of Janàcek jotting down speech rhythms, wood chopping and natural sounds (with some birdsong doubtless among them) to give his music the authenticity he chose for it, a national and rural one. The comparison is apt in another way. Neither composer was interested in inserting his discoveries into the context of academic form as were d’Indy and Dvorak before them. It is this aspect of collecting and transforming materials to create a new syntax that both composers, one before it and one after it, have in common with musique concrète. The scale and scope of the Catalogue brings us back to Messiæn’s pondered affinity with Jean Lurçat’s exhbition at the Trocadéro in 1958, which the composer would have visited while he was still at work on his vast project: L’effervescence et la somptuosité des formes de Lurçat entraînent tout naturellement celle-ci aux plus vastes dimensions. Son imagination, pour se satisfaire, éprouve un besoin organique de rencherir sur sa propre vigueur et sa propre audace. Il est peu de créateurs de notre temps à qui la puissance soit plus naturelle.61 This gives us the true key to analysing the various bird and nature gestures to see how they are capable of long-term scansion. In fact a monumental tapestry without conventional narration is not unlike a monumental piano cycle without the conventional structuring elements of development and punctual transition.
60
J Delamain trans. Marie Schlumberger, 1933.
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Bird song, which in the Reveil d’oiseaux with its amorous colloquies and shimmering ecstatic choirs against a background of French mediævalism62 had conspired to produce an unavowed fourth member of the Tristan cycle, came eventually to be used in contexts well removed from its native haunts. Such is the case with the Méditations sur le mystère de la tres Sainte Trinité where Messiæn wanted to create a French Catholic equivalent for the more complex symbolic works of Bach and with the sublime motley of La Transfiguration for which all the elements of Messiæn’s style are subjected as nowhere else to the exigencies of a relentless pace. As for the concert of birds from the opera St François it is the technical climax of the style oiseau as Messiæn himself well knew: J’ai cherché et obtenu un grand fouillis organisé dont je ne connais pas d’équivalent dans la musique contemporaine…63 In terms of mediæval Italy it is rightly meant to be fantastic even if the distant Isle of the Fioretti (it might have been in the domains of Prester John for all St. Francis knew) was conveniently chosen by Maître Olivier from the French DOM-TOMs.64 And so, appropriately, there are no sultry nature motifs with which to construct a tableau vivant from ‘down in the tropics’. With the Livre du Saint Sacrement however, Messiæn returns to a kind of naturalism that repercusses this time on the highest figurative and mystical level: J’ai voulu [retracer tous les episodes de la vie du Christ] de façon tellement précise et sérieuse que j’ai décidé d’aller en Israël, en ornithologue, pour y écouter les oiseaux que le Christ avait pu entendre luimême sur cette terre.65 This is the kind of remark that unprepared readers (and interviewers) generally take for naive. Yet it is precisely what Flaubert did for Salâmmbo, or for his biblical tale Hérodias. In the later nineteenth century there was a great excitement about the possibility of reconstructing classical and biblical antiquity from living folk tradition. Judith Gautier (daughter of Théo who had shown his interest in such things in his novel, Le Roman de la Momie) felt sure the Egyptian dancers she had seen at the Paris Great Exhibition were ‘just like’ those from Cadix as described by Pliny the Elder. An observation that was not lost on the author of Danseuses de Delphes. Artists began painting biblical scenes with camels putting the Holy Family in Beduin garments—Mariani is the painter who represents that movement in the churches of Rome. And of course herbs, flowers, birds and other animals were objects of curiosity as biblically minded travellers, some of them trained naturalists, gained access to the Holy Land—without needing to pack rifles, like Chateaubriand Ex. 6 (Continued)
61
The effervescence and sumptuosness of Lurçat’s forms led him on to vast dimensions. His imagination, to be satisfied, felt an organic need to push to the utmost its innate vigour and daring. There are few creators in our time to whom strength is more natural. Jean Cassou, op.cit. 62
The revival of renaissance music and poetry in France was really part of the gothic revival for literary and linguistic reasons beyond the scope of this study. 63 I strove for and achieved a great organised jangle of sound which has no equivalent, to my knowledge, in (the whole) of contemporary music. Messiæn in Claude Samuel, Musique and Couleurs, Nouveaux Rencontres Avec Olivier Messiæn, 1986. 64 Départements d’Outre-Mer—Territoires d’Outre-Mer. (French overseas territories)
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Ex. 6 Olivier Messiæn: Livre du Saint Sacrament Reproduced by permission of Editions Alphonse Leduc, Paris/UMP Ltd.
Olivier Messiæn: Livre du Saint Sacrament Ex. 6 (End) Olivier Messiæn: Livre du Saint Sacrament at the 65
I wished to retrace all the episodes of the life of Christ in such a precise and serious way that I decided to go to Israel as an ornithologist to listen to the birds that Christ Himself might have heard on this earth. Messiæn in Massin.
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beginning of the century as we know from his Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem. But there is another precedent in terms of expressive intention, the well-known fresco of the Baptism of Christ by Raphael. Here the sense of remoteness and awe is heightened by the solemn presence of exotic
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wading birds which suggest that if Raphael had lived he might well have joined Michælangelo in his taste for the sublime. Perhaps the most gripping single passage of bird song in all Messiæn is part of the portrayal of the last supper. As Christ tells of one who shall betray him and initiates the sacrament of communion—‘do this in
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remembrance of me’—outside the window a nightingale begins singing, the bird of the Passion who will sing though the night as Jesus suffers his torments on the Mount of Olives. The Petites esquisses d’oiseaux are the last pieces the birds will have to themselves. I was present at the reception for the tenth anniversary concert of the Ensemble Intercontemporain which had seen their first performance and, quite frankly, I would be ashamed to mention the names of certain musicians who remained totally unimpressed by them. But perhaps they are not meant to impress. In them Messiæn had chosen homely French birds that may be heard in every garden: ‘Lorsque le jardin embaume et que tous les oiseaux chantent en français,’ as Claudel has it in his Magnificat.66 These are Messiæn’s Kinderscenen or Children’s Corner and will be the first experience with his music for generations of young pianists. They are also that rarity in Messiæn’s music, a succession of perfect miniatures. He who masters not only their colourful parade of metres and rhythms but learns as well how to weigh each note in to get that halo of light passages like the following imply will be well on the way to grappling with Oiseaux Exotiques. 10. CINQ RECHANTS: Gothic Færy and Gothic Prosody Critics could place Turangalîla with the modern French school as it was thought of before the emergence of Boulez but Cinq rechants leave no doubt about their radical approach to musical form. Their connection with the French Renaissance is avowed in the very title, used as it is by Claude Lejeune in Le Printemps, a work analysed by Messiæn. But it is not to be excluded that he also knew the Livre des Meslanges from 1585 as well, even though there is still no modern edition. Lejeune was a Protestant who in the 1580s frequented moderate Catholics known as Les Politiques because they wanted to negotiate as it were a political settlement to the French religious wars. This allowed him to gain appointment as Maître de Musicque of the Duc d’Alençon for whom he wrote a number of highly original Latin motets. The most relevant to Cinq rechants is Adjuro Vos, an antiphonal setting of a text from the Song of Songs, probably written for the wedding of the Duc de Joyeuse. In it Lejeune makes striking use of the vers mesurés technique promoted by Théodore Baïf ’s academy, strikingly so at the words ‘equalis est dilectus tuus ex dilecto’ and again at ‘ad aureolum aromatum’. The idea of vers mesurés was part of a revival of classical Latin versification based on long and short syllables, deriving ultimately from ancient Greek poetry. It had been abandoned during the Middle Ages in favour of those rhyming verses and insistent rhythmic feet which characterised of the emerging vernacular pœtrys as well. By the sixteenth century neo-Latin poetry once more followed the schemes of the Roman ‘golden age’. A brief attempt was made to correct the prosodies of the modern languages neglecting the fact that they were phonetically of a different order. Nevertheless the most successful results have survived as a sort of experimental poetry from the Renascence. Thomas Campion, the leading poet to attempt such a reform in England, was reviled by his contemporaries every bit as much as were Baïf and Lejeune in France. But Campion was as fine a composer as he was a pœt and saw to his own settings. He was a doctor as well and firmly believed in the curative powers of music something that, as we shall shortly see, is not as removed from the Tristan question as one might think.
66
When the garden breathes out its perfumes and all the birds sing in French.
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As for the troubadours, they wrote in the ‘unreformed’ way with as complex a prosody as has ever been developed in the West. Messiæn also drew on this fund of material… Pour en revenir aux troubadours, je me rapproche aussi de leur grand rythme, en opposant des passages vocalisés libres à des durées mathématiquement travaillées, comme ils alternaient des neumes de plain-chant et des modes rythmiques mesurés…67 Thus, together with the vers mesurés of Baïf and Lejeune, the attentive analyst will find the more properly mediæval device of Jaufré Rudel, Foulquet de Marseilles and Guiraut de Bornelh. Though once again, not surprisingly, there is a symbolist connection. Jaufré Rudel is the hero of an early one act play by Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play widely known in France and which could not but have delighted the lad Messiæn. It is called La Princesse lointaine and in it Jaufré Rudel, who has vowed his love to the princess of Tripoli, sees her for the first time years later in the Holy Land where he has been wounded on a crusade, to die then in her arms content. The career of Foulquet de Marseille, one of the greatest of the Troubadours, gives the lie to the thesis that courtly love was bound in its very essence to the Albigensian heresy—a thesis put forth by the Swiss theologian Denis de Rougemont in his book L’Amour and l’occident. Foulquet was a friend of St. Dominic and as Bishop of Marseilles, did the utmost to uproot both Cathars and Albigensians yet felt no need to repudiate, much less to destroy his own poetry. Though whatever the precise ascendancy of its techniques, one could scarcely underestimate the seminal importance of Cinq rechants. In them Messiæn has divested himself of the last remnants of classical form developing in a direction that would have been unthinkable on the basis of plain-chant alone without the example of romance prosody. These techniques will pervade all the bird music of the fifties and make possible the dazzling rhetorical structures of Chronochromie and Couleurs de la cité céleste. They will have opened the way to the musico-pœtic symbiosis of Pli selon pli into the bargain, as revealed in the essay of Célestin Deliège on Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui. The relationship of such theological abstractions to Messiæn’s mystical view of his life’s work is explained in a sleeve note to the recording of Claude Lejeune’s latin motets by the musicologist Isabelle His: This type of metric construction in which musical invention put itself forward as an image of divine creation finds its roots in the most ancient ideas about composition.’68 Something however remains to be said about the literary aspect of the Cinq rechants. The presence of Orpheus side by side with Tristan—‘l’explorateur Orphêe trouve son cœur dans la mort’69—which adds yet another dimension of erotic pathos to the argument, surely has to do in part with a remark Messiæn would have read in Gaston Paris’s introduction to Bédier’s Tristan where he describes the Celtic hero as ‘the inventor of all barbarous arts—most able of all to make the harp and rota sound, knowing how to imitate to perfection the songs of all birds.’70 The words ‘Barbebleu, château de la septième porte’ refer to Mæterlinck’s libretto Ariane and Barbebleu used by Dukas for his opera of the same name. The seventh door was the one Barbebleu told his wives to leave closed. As Ariane presses on determined to open all doors at once she scolds her nurse who lingers over the jewels spilling out from the second door. In Mæterlinck’s original the passage runs: Va, nourrice, häte-toi, l’heure où on peut pécher et rare et fugace. Go nurse, make haste, for the time to sin is rare and fleeting.
67
To get back to the troubadours, I draw close to their great rhythm (i.e. sense), contrasting passages of free vocalise to mathematically calculated durations, as they alternated the names of plain-chant with measured rhythmic modes. Samuel, p22.
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Ex. 7 Olivier Messiæn: Petites esquisses d’oiseaux Reproduced by permission of Editions Alphonse Leduc, Paris/UMP Ltd.
Dukas changes pécher (sin) to agir (act). The idea of transgression remains nonetheless, calling to mind this ‘confession’ Messiæn made to Claude Rostand:
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Mon secret désir m’a poussé vers ces épées de feu, ces brusques étoiles, ces coulées de lave bleuorange, ces planètes de turquoise, ces violets, ces grenats d’arborescences chevelus, ces tournoisements de sons et de couleurs en fouillis d’arc-en-ciel.’71 And it is with this exposition of Hello’s concept of God’s glory by Stanislas Fumet, as uncompromising and extreme in his formulation as Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven but with a wholly Catholic spirit: Il a de la gloire une sublime notion qui consiste à donner le Vertige à la Divinité, et c’etait là le point culminant de sa doctrine, toute inspirée de l’Ecriture Sainte, de la lutte de Jacob et de l’Ange notamment, et de la maladie d’Ezechias. Si nous résistons à Dieu, Dieu peut-il résister à l’abîme de notre misère?… Parce que le secret de Dieu, c’est sa gloire et il n’y a pas de gloire possible pour Lui en dehors de celleci, faite d’amour, qui est de se laisser vaincre par les bras d’un petit enfant, de se laisser tomber vers ce qui n’est pas assez grand pour atteindre jamais à Lui. L’abîme invoque l’abîme et l’humanité suscite le vertige du Très-Haut.72 It is thus more than fitting that in one of his chats with Theo Hirsbrunner Messiæn suggests he go look at Delacroix’s painting of Jacob Wrestling With Angel in the church of St. Sulpice while waving his arms to imitate the struggle. Here we are very close to an essential component of Messiæn’s art, one which dœs much to account for his technical boldness when compared with most contemporary composers of a religious bent—a special though wholly orthodox version of the felix culpa, a human-all-too-human transgression that tempts heavenly grace. 11. Symbolism and the Spiritual Exercise—Wider, Schweitzer, Rilke In his interviews with Claude Samuel, Messiæn would occasionally reveal things about his early years that he had seen no reason to reveal before. In no other published source does he speak of the musical views of his parents, their influence on his career being elsewhere limited to the prophetic phrase lointain musical’ from a pœm written by his mother, Cécile Sauvage, when she was pregnant with Olivier. To Samuel he tells of the great admiration his parents felt for Widor.
68
Claude Lejeune; Motets Latins. [CD: ADDAMN7]. This passage is mistranslated by Sherlaw Johnson. The actual sense is ‘finds his heart in death’ which can be construed as ‘finds the meaning of love in the loss (=death) of Eurydice first of all and then perhaps in his own sacrificial death at the hands of the Bacchantes which transfigures his love into the spirit of poetry. 70 Le Roman De Tristan Et Iseult Traduit Et Restauré Par J Bédier. Préface by Gaston Paris, 71 My secret desire led me to these fiery swords these hurtling stars, these beams of blue-orange lava, these turquoise planets, these violets, these garnets that burst to comets, these whirlings of sounds and colours like the arching out of a rainbow. Messiæn in Rostand, p21. 72 He has a sublime notion of glory which consists in making the divinity dizzy and it was the high point of his teaching, inspired through and through by Holy Scripture, by the Struggle of Jacob and the Angel notably and by the illness of Ezekiel. If we resist God, can God resist the abyss of our misery? For God’s secret is his glory and for him no glory is possible aside from this, made from love, of letting himself be won by the arms of a little child, of letting himself fall towards what is not large enough ever to reach all the way up to him. Fumet, pp238–239. 69
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Chez nous Charles-Marie Widor était un des seuls compositeurs capable d’entrevoir et de concevoir le devenir de la musique, comme celui d’une autre musique, écrite autrement. In 1934 Widor had been organist at St. Sulpice for 64 years when he relinquished his post to Messiæn’s teacher, Marcel Dupré, the year of L’Ascension. Honegger and Milhaud had both been composition students of Widor’s, and Messiæn spoke well of both throughout his life. More important still, because of the impact he was to have not only on Messiæn’s organ music but on his piano music as well, was another Widor pupil, Charles Tournemire. Under circumstances such as these, Messiæn’s suggestion that he was induced to study organ at the Paris Conservatoire ‘because he was a good improviser’ needs some qualification. Widor’s ideas about the future of music included the re-establishment of the organ as a great instrument, in its age-old liturgical role to be sure, but with an important non-liturgical repertory as well, that, as with the fugues and fantasies of the North German baroque masters, implied as much the spiritualising of the concert recital, as the secularising of the organ literature. His will to define a creative relationship with the aesthetic of the Middle Ages is reflected in his last two organ symphonies, the Symphonie Romane and the Symphonie Gothique, where modal experiment is carried to impressive lengths for a composer born in 1844 who had studied with Fétis. But there is a further aspect of Widor’s neo-traditionalism which has largely escaped attention—his interest in musical symbolism, an interest which fits in with the grand programme of Emile Mâle—the recuperation for modern times of the symbolic language of the Middle Ages.73 In the preface to the 1905 French edition of Albert Schweitzer’s J.S.Bach, Widor describes Schweitzer’s first visit to him as a young organ-playing theologian from Strasbourg. He came to ask my advice on the interpretation of the masters, sat down at the organ (and played). I would listen to him then afterwards we would talk it over. As he had an excellent knowledge of the old Lutheran texts I confided to him my perplexity as to certain works, my inability to follow certain chorales that pass abruptly from one set of notions to another, from the chromatic to the diatonic, from the lowest register to the highest for no apparent reason and according to no logical procedure. What could the author be thinking of when he breaks the thread of his discourse that way? He must be looking beyond abstract music to some literary idea. But how to discover what idea?—Quite simply from the words of the hymn Schweitzer answered and then he recited the verses of the hymn in question which fully justified the musician and showed the flexibility of his genius as he came to grips with word-by-word progression of the text. I had come to see that it was impossible to understand a (chorale-based) work without knowing the text that underlies it. And so we began leafing through all three books of the collection to discover the exact meaning of each item. Everything was explained and illuminated, not only in its general outlines but in the finest detail. Music and poetry were closely intermingled. Each musical design corresponded to a literary design. And this collection admired up to then as a model of abstract counterpoint was vouchsafed to me as a sequence of pœms of matchless eloquence and intensity of feeling.74
73 Of course Widor wrote secular music as well. Jean Lorrain in a prose sketch Leurs Pénitentes, written on 18/3/1891 but not published until 1983, speaks of Widor’s ballet La Rorrigaine. It is music ‘de toutes sensualités, de chuchotements et d’attouchements’ he says disapprovingly —‘all made from sensuousness, whisperings and caresses’ where attouchements has almost the sense of petting. Interesting when one thinks that no less than Boulez called Turangalîlâ ‘une musique de bordel’.
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Widor encouraged Schweitzer to incorporate his discoveries in a book, a book that was to have a tumultuous history, challenged as it was not only by the enemies of Straussian programme music but by those ready to condemn any trace of literary’ content in an art that was held to speak in terms of abstract form only. This view briefly triumphed in the thirties and forties when Messiæn was struggling against a neoclassicism shared for a time by both Strawinsky and Schönberg. Musicology has since vindicated Schweitzer’s overall approach however much it may have corrected his details, tracing Bach’s symbolism into regions little suspected by Schweitzer himself where the cue came not from sixtieth century choral texts but from speculative theology and exegetics as well. What then are we to make of Messiæn’s blunt denial of using ‘Bachian’ symbolism in his works in response to Massin’s questions about cruciform musical imagery (which she evidently supposes Bach invented)? Très peu, pratiquement jamais. C’est comme le Nombre d’Or. Bartók par exemple…mais aussi André Jolivet…en ont utilisé les proportions dans leurs œuvres. Mais moi, jamais.75 Messiæn may well have felt the question, however unwittingly, to be tendentious. He wanted nothing to do with accusations of an ‘esoteric’ meaning that had to be winkled out in order for his music to be understood. Also, Bach’s imagery, based on Protestant hymns and a theology that at best equivocates on the central mystery of transubstantiation, could not have served him as a model, yet Messiæn’s music is nonetheless permeated by rhetorical and symbolic devices with their roots in Catholic liturgy and exegesis. David Drew, who has the supreme critical gift of saying something essential even in those rare cases where his judgement can be called in question, says of L’Échange from Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jésus: It resembles the improvisation of a child precociously acquainted with Dr. Schweitzer’s views on Bachian symbolism.’76 The figuration of l’Échange uses what Messiæn called personnages rythmiques to represent the exchange of human and divine natures by the first and second persons of the Trinity which, in an affective context which is also that of Messiæn’s music, insists that not only is man bound thereby more firmly to God but God more firmly to man. Even the title has something of the baroque conceit about it, recalling the titles of George Herbert’s religious pœms. However there is one work in which there is reason to believe that Messiæn was in part consciously building a French Catholic equivalent of what Bach had done in a German Protestant context (as had Tournemire before him), a work that had as it were a North German original. ‘Messiæn’, writes Almut Rössler, ‘was so merry after his musical birthday [in Düsseldorf, 19681 that on the last evening at my request, he promised to go back to composing for the organ. The result was to be called Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité.’77
74
Albert Schweitzer JS Bach. Preface by C-M Widor, pp VII–VIII. Very little, practically never. It’s the same with the golden section. Bartók for example…but also André Jolivet… used those proportions in their works. But me, never. Massin, pp107–108. Author’s note: Bach was of course drawing on mystical traditions that going back at least to the Middle Ages in terms of surviving music and to late antiquity in terms of literature, some of it of course as in the case of Boethius, touching on music. In this there is an absolute continuity between Bach and his immediate predecessors, such as Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Walther. For Catholic examples one need look no further afield than the south German lands and Biber’s Rosary Sonatas. All this was abundantly known to Almut Rössler (qv) and her theologian father. 75
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Acquainted he was with Dr Schweitzer’s views as well as Widor’s esteem for them—so much so that Widor’s summing up at the end of his preface seems at least as prophetic as Cécile Sauvage’s phrase ‘lointain musicale’ in her pœm to her unborn son Olivier: At 30 years of age [Bach] felt sure enough of himself to decree his programmes and fix definitively his mystic gestures, joy, sadness, serene confidence, quietude, etc. Each of his inner states would henceforth have its formula, its aesthetic label. And with what exatcness, with what psychological depth was he able to bring out the different aspects of the same idea with what art did he use, over and over again those unchanging formulas, those leitmotiv to which he remained faithful his whole life long, bending them, kneading them at will, to translate with even more subtlety and precision what he had in his heart. Speaking organist to organist with Almut Rössler on the 23rd of April 1979 for the Neue Musikzeitung, Messiæn uses none of the caution he was to adopt with Brigitte Massin. They are talking about the symbolism in Bach’s B Minor Mass: OM: Well, there’s another fine example in the Credo where the text says that God the Sun springs from God the Father. This passage is written in canon—the same melody twice at the interval of a fifth sung by tenor and contralto, so as to say that both are God and the one springs from the other. There as well we find a theological and a symbolic aspect. AR: Could one say something similar of your music? Is there a correspondence between the chosen doctrinal theme and the choice of musical means? OM: Perhaps and I believe, since I’ve looked into theology, I’ve gone into contents that not everyone will understand. Even more explicit is a remark made on the 11th of June 1972 during a public discussion in the Bach Room of the Johanneskirche in Düsseldorf on the occasion of the first European performance of the Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité: I am like the first Christians who devised a secret language that could be read up and down and viceversa in all directions yet which always produced a cross with alpha and omega. They wrote these cryptograms on the walls of the vaults [eg. in the Roman catacombs] so as to be recognisable by each other while protecting themselves from their persecutors. 78 It was presumably the latter consideration which led Messiæn to play down at times this aspect of his work. But the story dœs not end here. Messiæn’s way of conceiving musical symbols was never merely neobaroque. It was too much affected by the symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century and its twentieth century prolongations for that. It is now we encounter another major influence on the young Messiæn—the 1923 version of Paul Hindemith’s Das Marienleben. How interesting it is to learn from Suzanne Demarquez’ evocation of musical life in Paris in the thirties that Hindemith’s new pieces were, if 76
David Drew, Olivier Messiæn, a provisional study in The Score, #13/14. Rössler. 78 Rössler. The text of Messiæn’s remarks on this occasion survives only in the German of Irmgard Villette, the wife of, the then, director of the Institut Français in Düseldorf, who served as translator and interpreter during the discussion. 77
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anything, better aired there than Strawinsky’s. Certainly there are traces of Hindemith to be found in the Hymne au Saint Sacrement—the ‘coup de vent’ idea (think of the opening of the Konzertmusik für Streichorchester and Blechbläser from 1930) together with its subsequent fugato working out, and further traces as well as right the way through the third movement of L’Ascension in the version for orchestra. Another favourite would have been the Engelkonzert from the Symphonie: Mathis der Mahler (1934) a precursor of the ‘concert des oiseaux’ in St. François. Messiæn, like Hindemith, loved Matthias Grünewald’s painting and speaks more than once of inspiration he took from the rainbow colours of the resurrection which (not surprisingly), forms part of the Eisenheim Altarpiece in the Musée unter den Linden in Colmar. To say nothing of Nobilissima Visione (1938), Hindemith’s ballet on the life of St. Francis. And, though one has no reason to doubt what instruments Messiæn had to hand in Görlitz in 1941, the fact remains that one of the Hindemith’s best chamber works is the 1938 Quartet for Violin, Clarinet, Cello and Piano. For in spite of the chasm that divides them, the sequence formed by the four movements of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps which use all four instruments is the closest thing in Messiæn to a proper chamber work. The result in proportions and consistency of texture is virtually a different piece, a piece Messiæn did not want to have written and so subverted to a type of scheme that would serve him later in Des canyons aux étoiles. All this is marginal, however, in comparison with the impact on Messiæn of Hindemith’s 1922–3 setting of Rainier Maria Rilke’s Das Marienleben. In it Hindemith uses a variety of symbolic device from the naive Augenmusik of sharps that represent stars to the sophisticated association of threes with heavenly order and twos with earthly unrest. Significantly, in the 1948 version Hindemith eliminates almost all these devices, something he did not think worth mentioning in the preface where he does discuss the search for a more natural vocal line and a more consequential harmonic design. The truth is that by 1948 Hindemith had abandoned his interest in ‘Dr Schweitzer’s views on Bach’s symbolism’ in favour of that misguided purism which engendered the tiresome neo-classical style of baroque performance typical of post-war music making. Das Marienleben appealed to Messiæn largely because of its text—the cycle of pœms on the life of the Virgin by Rilke. Rilke’s religious culture was vast. It included painting and pœtry in several languages as well as devotional writings. With it he was able to devise an æsthetic theology of his own in all points compatible with the teachings of the Church. The method he adopts for Das Marienleben is derived from that of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius which was used, as it happens, by painters of the sixteenth century Franciscan revival such as Francesco Barocci in inventing their compositions. The idea is to relive from within the events, the mysteries chosen for contemplation. This practice is foreshadowed in the Stabat Mater, usually attributed to another Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi: Eia Mater, fons amoris/me sentire vim doloris/Fac, ut tecum lugeam.79 Rilke extends this technique to every detail of the narrative—a kind of magic realism capable of daring formulas like the ‘Gott fühlt sich ein in einer Jungfrau Schoss’80 of his Annunciation to the Shepherds. While in ‘The Presentation in the Temple’, Rilke solicits the co-operation of the reader from the very beginning: ‘Um zu begreifen, wie sie damals war/musst du dich erst an eine Stelle rufen/wo Saülen in dir wirken…’81 The scheme of a little girl stepping forward in the midst of a terrifying and oppressive architecture towards a high priest of seemingly giant stature was used by Titian for his Presentation of the Virgin in the Venetian church of S.M. dell’Orto, a painting Rilke knew well. Hindemith renders it musically with a gloomy implacable passacaglia.
79
Ah mother, fount of love, I want to feel [your] sorrows, help me to mourn with you. Jacopone da Todi Stabat Mater
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Ex. 8 Hindemith: Darstellung Mariä im Tempel (Das Marienleben 1922–3)
It is this world that informs, though as always with Messiæn through the window of his own imaginings, La Nativité du Seigneur, his first great narrative cycle. The presence there of Jésus accepte la souffrance is wholly in keeping with Rilke’ s insistence long sanctioned by the Eastern Church and expressed in the familiar image of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour83—that Christ knew of his future sacrifice already as a babe in arms. The Musette in Les bergers is as close as Messiæn ever gets to neo-Baroque gesture. H.D.Möller rightly evokes the traditional Noel, ‘Il est né le divin enfant’ with its second line ‘jouez hautbois, resonnez musettes’ when writing of it. Here we come across another popular tradition dear to Hindemith and Rilke, that of the shepherd pifferari who play their shawms before the relics of the Holy Crib in the church of S.M.Maggiore in Rome on Christmas Eve—a tradition familiar from the Concerto pe la notte di Natale by Corelli and that had reached Northern Europe by 1743 thanks to the Pastorellen vor die Weynacht-zeit of Valentin Rathgeber, organist at St. Sebald’s in Nürnberg. Messiæn even follows up his rustic musette with a proper double. This approach is resumed in Les corps glorieux and in the Amen de l’agonie de Jésus when Hindemith, the composer, had already been left behind84 and, again, much later on in the narrative sections of the Livre
80
God felt his way into a virgin’s womb. Rilke Das Marienleben To grasp how it was with her then, you must first invoke a place where columns crowd within you. 82 In which one of the Christ Child’s sandals is falling off to show his fright as the angels hold out to him the instruments of the Passion. 81
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Ex. 9 Olivier Messiæn: Les Bergers Reproduced by permission of Editions Alphonse Leduc, Paris/UMP Ltd.
du Saint Sacrement. For to Rilke and his ‘æsthetic’ transfiguring of the spiritual exercise Messiæn remained true to the end, not least in his opera St. François. There is an essay by Daniel-Rops appended to the 1938 edition of La vie recluse en poèsie by one of Messiæn’s favourite writers, Patrice de la Tour du Pin, which bears the title Reconnaissance à Rilke. It concludes with an evocation of Rilke’s shade, dans les petits chemins qui mènent à la Léproserie et à la Portioncule, le long des pentes ensoleillés qui remonte vers Assise. [Il cherche] le Poverello, celui qui Rilke a tant aimé et qui anime de sa sainte présence Le livre de la pauvreté et de la mort.85
Postscript: Communicable Language Communicable in French has a nuance it does not seem to have acquired yet in English. When Jean-Marie Colombani, as newly appointed director of Le Monde was invited to talk about his job with Bernard Pivot86 he said that his newspaper would do the best it could to see that communication did not become the sole public function of language. What he meant was the imparting of a predetermined message with no debate or discussion. Thus the idea of langage communicable is not that it communicates in the English sense but that it conveys a message, in the event an encoded message. Messiæn didn’t expect his audience to decode the message as they listened. He knew perfectly well that that would be impossible. Listeners would have to know in advance. Why then did he incorporate such a code into the Quinze Méditations sur la très Sainte Trinité? The answer is that, in addition to birdsong,
83
Ahrens, S. and Möller, H.-D.Das Orgelwerk Olivier Messiaens, 1968. Though it is probable that the first version of Das Marienleben lies behind Messiæn’s conception of Harawi as a dramatic song cycle with virtuoso piano part long enough to exclude from the programme mélodies by other composers with which it is essentially incompatible. 85 In the narrow paths that lead to the lepers’ house and to the Portiuncola, along the sunny slopes that rise towards Assisi [He looks for] le Poverello, he whom Rilke loved so much and who enlivens with his holy presence The Book of Poverty and Death. Daniel-Rops Reconnaissance à Rilke in Ma Vie Recluse En Poèsie (P De La Tour Du Pin), Paris 1938. 84
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plainchant, non-retrogradable rhythms and the rest, Messiæn wanted some rugged melodic outlines to serve as emblems. To create them he devised a method for, as it were, spelling out chosen words in musical notes. Thus aside from the pure succession of pitches all compositional choices were left open. A quick way to find the unusual, the alea in fact harnessed to religious symbolism for Messiæn had read the I Ching as well. Or like Klee painting certain passages with his left hand, thus forcing an invention that might have been too facile otherwise: J’ai obtenu des thèmes absolument invraisemblablement extravagants que j’ai du ensuite contrepointer, harmoniser.87 This may seem ‘baroque’ enough in the current sense of extravagant, but it also involves an historical allusion: J’ai donc, moi aussi, entouré un nom par un cartouche, c’est le thème divin…88 for the actual Baroque had a penchant for emblems and monograms IHS BMV AMDG and others still, surrounded by cartouches in architecture, painting or even, as with CARITAS, on a religious habit. Bibliography Adam, Karl Der Christ des Glaubens Jübingen, 1954. English ed: The Christ of Faith, London 1957 Ahrens, S+ Möller, H.-D. Das Orgelwerk Olivier Messiæns, 1968 von Balthasar, Hans Urs Bernanos, Köln, 1954 Barbier, J.-J. Au piano Avec Erik Satie, Paris 1986 Baudelaire, Charles “Wagner et Tannhauser” in Curiosités esthétiques, ed Henri Lemaître, Paris, 1962 (Classiques Garnier) Bédier, Joseph Le Roman De Tristan Et Iseult Traduit Et Restauré Par J Bédier, Paris 1900 Breton, André La Peinture Et Le Surréalisme, New York 1945 Cassou, Jean Lurçat exhibition catalogue, Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris 1958 Cusanus, Nicolas De venatione sapientiae, ed. Paul Wilpert, Hamburg 1964 Daniel-Rops, F. “Reconnaissance à Rilke” in Patrice de La Tour Du Pin, ma vie récluse en poésie, Paris, 1938 De La Tour du Pin, Patrice Ma Vie Recluse En Poèsie, Paris 1938 Delamain, Jacques Les Jours Et Les Nuits Des Oiseaux (1932) trans. Marie Schlumberger (1933) Demarquez, Suzanne Jolivet, Paris 1945 Denis, Maurice Les Nabis in Exhibition Catalogue Grand Palais, 1993 d’Harcourt, Raoul La Musique Inca Et Ses Survivances, Paris 1925 Drew, David Olivier Messiæn, a provisional study in The Score, #10/1954, #13+14/ 1955, UK Fumet, Stanislas Ernest Hello, Et Le Drame De La Lumière, Paris 1947 Goléa, Antoine Rencontres avec Olivier Messiæn, Paris 1960. New ed Geneva 1980 Halbreich, Harry Olivier Messiæn, Paris 1980 Hello, Ernest Paroles de Dieu, new ed Paris 1992 Hirsbrunner, Theo Olivier Messiæn—Leben and Werk, 1988 Howden, John of ‘Philomena’ in Hymnologie Beiträge, Bd 4, 1930. Huysmans, Joris-Karl La Cathédrale (Ed: Pirot, St-Cyr-sur-Loire 1986) Jouve, Pierre-Jean and Fano, Michel Wozzeck, ou le nouvel opéra, Paris, 1953 Lurçat, Jean Notes pour un poètique introduction by Jean Cassou in Lurçat exhibition catalogue, Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris 1958
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Pivot: Bouillon de Culture, France 2/1994. I obtained themes of an impossible extravagance which I had then to counterpoint, to harmonise. Messiæn in Samuel, 1986 p133. 88 And so I as well—surrounded a name with a cartouche, it’s the divine theme. Messiæn in Samuel, 1986 p133. 87
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Mæterlinck, Maurice Ariane et Barbe-Bleu (Score by Dukas) Mari, Prerrette Olivier Messiæn, l’homme and son œuvre, Paris 1965 Massin, Brigitte Olivier Messiæn, Un Poètique Du Merveilleux, Paris 1989 Merimée, Prosper La Vénus d’Ille, Classiques Garnier Messiæn, Oliver Conférence de Nôtre-Dame, 4/12/77, pub 1978 Discours pour le prix Erasme Visions de l’Amen, 1943 Noël, Marie Notes intimes in Œuvre Poetique, 1965 Paris, Gaston Preface, Le Roman De Tristan Et Iseult Traduit Et Restauré Par J Bédier. 1900 Pivot, Bernard Bouillon de Culture, France 2/1994 Rössler, Almut Beiträge zur geistigen Welt Olivier Messiæns, Duisburg, 1988 Rostand, Claude Entretiens avec Francis Poulenc, Paris, 1952 Francis Poulenc, Paris Olivier Messiæn, Paris 1957 Samuel, Claude Entretiens Avec Olivier Messiæn, Paris 1967 Musique and Couleurs, Nouveaux Rencontres Avec Olivier Messiæn, Paris 1986 Schweitzer, Albert J.S.Bach, le musicien-poète. Preface by C.M.Widor, Leipzig 1905 Segalen, Victor Les Synæthesie, La Rochelle Widor, Charles-Marie Preface JS Bach, le musicien-poète. Paris, Leipzig 1905 Zeller, H.R. Messiæn and Kritische Universalit, Musikkonzepte #28/1982, Munich “Messiaen und musikalische Universalität” in Musik Konzepte No. 28, 1982
Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 127–129 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
Notes on Contributors
Robin Freeman is a poet and musicologist who lives in London and Rome. He found his double vocation at twelve through Les fleurs du mal of Baudelaire and Berg’s Wozzeck to which he was introduced by Stephen Balough, a Hungarian member of Schönberg’s circle. Subsequent studies took him to the University of Chicago, L’Université de Grenoble and the Warburg Institute of the University of London where his supervisor was E.H.Gombrich. He was a friend of the composer Giacinto Scelso, helping to arrange first performances of his chamber music. He spoke at the 1988 seminar on Scelsi et la voix at the Abbaye de Royaumont and published a monograph on his life works, Tanmatras in the March 1990 number of Tempo. He has also prepared a bilingual edition of Scelsi’s book of poems Le poids net under the title Summit of Fire. Robin Freeman is author of Birgitta, an ars recitandi for English voices. He is currently finishing an opera libretto Orpheus; or The Bees for the Roumanian composer Aurel Stroë. His L’Eau du Styx, a palindrome of poems, was published by Bran’s Head Press. Robin Freeman 126 Calabria Rd, London N5. (0)171 704 2343. Joscelyn Godwin is Professor of Music at Colgate University, NY, USA. His publications include: Harmonies of Heaven and Earth (Thames and Hudson, London 1987), The Mystery of the Seven Vowels in Theory and Practice (Phanes Press, Grand Rapids, 1991), Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750–1950 (U Rochester Press, NY, 1995). He has also edited Music, Magic and Mysticism (Routledge, London, 1986), Cosmic Music: Musical Keys to the Interpretation of Reality (Inner Traditions Int, Rochester Vt, 1989), Harmony of the Spheres: A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music (Inner Traditions Int, Rochester Vt, 1989). Prof Joscelyn Godwin, Music Department, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA. (315)824 7626. Fax (315)824 7787. Email
[email protected] Richard Gonski was born in South Africa and emigrated to Israel when he was 14. In 1982, upon completion of his degree in orchestral conducting and flute at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, he came to England where he has been resident since. In 1983 Richard created the Electric Symphony Orchestra which introduced coordinated lighting, amplification and music technology into the symphony orchestra as a matter of course. Since 1989 he has been lecturer in Electronic Music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Richard Gonski, 46b Gascony Avenue, London NW6 4NA. (0)171 624 8774. Jonathan Harvey has composed a number of works widely considered central to the last 20 years, notably Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, created at IRCAM, and his opera Inquest of Love performed both in the UK and on the continent. He is particularly interested in the effect of combining live and electronic sounds. Honorary Professor of Music at Sussex University for many years, Harvey is now Professor of
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Composition at Stanford University, California, and has been honoured with many awards. He is Composer in Association with the chamber orchestra Sinfonia 21 and is currently completing a Percussion Concerto for Evelyn Glennie to perform at the 1997 BBC Promenade Concerts. Professor Jonathan Harvey, Music Dept, Sussex University, Brighton, BN1 9GN. 0(044)1273 606755. Ivan Moody studied composition with Brian Dennis at London University (winning the Royal Holloway Prize in 1984 for his Three Poems of Anna Akhmatova) and privately with John Tavener. Eastern liturgical chant has had a profound influence on his work, as has the spirituality of the Orthodox Church, of which he is a member. In 1990 he won the ‘Arts for the Earth’ Festival Prize for Prayer for the Forests, which was subsequently premiered by the Tapiola Choir in Finland. His most important recent works include Passion and Resurrection, a large-scale oratorio on Orthodox liturgical texts premiered by Red Byrd and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in Tampere, Finland in 1993; Epitaphos, for solo ‘cello and strings, premiered by Raphael Wallfisch and La Camerata in Athens, May 1995; Canticum Canticorum II premiered by the Hilliard Ensemble in Frankfurt, March 1995; Lamentation of the Virgin, premiered by Singer Pur in Nuremburg, May 1995, and Revelation, premiered by the Taverner Consort conducted by Andrew Parrot in London, November 1995. Future plans include a string quartet for the Cuarteto Latinamericano, and new works for the Hilliard Ensemble and the Harpsichordist Sophie Yates. Allan Moore is a composer, musicologist and Christian, and is coordinator of the Centre for Research into Contemporary Music Practices at Thames Valley University. His chief interests lie in theorising avant garde and popular musics, and also in Anglo-Celtic song. Dr Allan Moore, London College of Music @ Thames Valley University, St Marys Rd, Ealing, London W5 3RU. (0)181 231 2558. Maxwell Steer A chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, Maxwell Steer ran away to Paris at 15. His professional life began as a silent film pianist at the National Film Theatre, London, from which he developed into drama music for theatre, tv and radio. As a harpsichordist he has broadcast on BBCr3 with leading baroque musicians, toured Europe and the US, taken part in the first UK performance of Stockhausen’s Die Jahreslauf and recorded Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto for Capital Radio. From 1983 he began to concentrate on original writing and scripted 25 major Drama and Feature programmes for the BBC featuring many artists including David Suchet, Sam Wanamaker, John Wells, and Elizabeth Spriggs. The Royal National Theatre commissioned A Tormented God for Robert Stephens based on Berlioz’s memoirs. Recently Maxwell visited India for BBC Radio to make a documentary pilgrimage In Search of Sai Baba. While there he also recorded a documentary for BBC World Service about Indian music. An archive of his published writing is available on the internet at
. Maxwell Steer, 125 Duck St, Tisbury, Wilts SP3 6LJ, UK. (0)1747 870070. Fax (0)1747 871451. Email: [email protected]. Michael Tucker is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton, England and regular reviewer for Jazz Journal International (JJI) London and Contemporary Art, London. His recent publications include Dreaming With Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit In Twentieth-Century Art and Culture (Aquarian/Harper San Francisco, London 1992), a re-visioning of all the arts this century, critically acclaimed in Britain, Europe and America; ‘Music Man’s Dream’ in Alan Davie (Lund Humphries, London 1992); (editor) Alan Davie: The Quest For The Miraculous (University of Brighton/ Lund Humphries, London 1993); The Heartbeat Remains: The Art of Patrick Kirby’ (The Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester 1993) and ‘Making The World: The Art of Frans Widerberg’ in Frans Widerberg: Bilder. En Reise77 (Labyrinth
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Press, Oslo 1994). He is a contributor to the MacMillan Dictionary of Art and has selected major touring exhibitions of Nordic art. An external assessor and examiner at the University of Sussex, England, Tucker contributes to a variety of international conferences on the theme of spirituality, shamanism and art. His publications on Garbarek include ‘Jan Garbarek: Beyond The Nordic Ethos’ (JJI, October 1977) and ‘Jan Garbarek: The Poetics of Space’ (The Wire, issue 7, London 1984) as well as programme notes for the Jan Garbarek Quartets Contemporary Music Network tour of Britain in 1987. He has published articles on Eberhard Weber (JJI, January 1987) and the post-Romantic relation(s) between music and the arts (‘Hearing The Colours, Dancing The Heartspace’ (Contemporary Art vol 2 #1 Autumn 1993). The January 1995 edition of Resurgence features an interview with Tucker about his perception of the modern artist as shaman. Michael Tucker, Principal Lecturer, School of Historical and Critical Studies, University of Brighton, 10 Pavillion Parade, Brighton, BN2 1RA. (0)1273 600900. Contemporary Music Review, 1996, Vol. 14, Parts 3–4, pp. 131–134 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only
© 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in India
NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS
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These, like the illustrations, must be of a high enough standard for direct reproduction. Musical examples should be prepared in black (india) ink on quality white card or white music manuscript paper, or on tracing paper, with any necessary lettering included. If staves are hand drawn, ensure that the lines are of uniform thickness. Unusable musical examples will not be redrawn or retouched by the printer, so it is essential that figures are well prepared. References and notes References and notes are indicated in the text by consecutive superior arabic numerals (without parentheses). The full list should be collected and typed at the end of the paper in numerical order. Listed references should be complete in all details, including article titles and journal titles in full. In multiauthor references, the first six authors’ names should be listed in full, then “et al” may be used. Examples: 1. Smith, F.J. (1976) Editor. In Search of Musical Method, pp. 70–81. New York and London: Gordon and Breach. 2. Cockrell, D. (1982) A study in French Romanticism. Journal of Musicological Research, 4(1/2), 85– 115. NB authors must check that reference details are correct and complete; otherwise the references are useless. As a final check, please make sure that references tally with citings in the text. Proofs Contributors will receive page proofs (including illustrations) by air mail for correction, which must be returned within 48 hours of receipt. Please ensure that a full postal address is given on the first page of the typescript, so that proofs arrive without delay. Authors’ alterations in excess of 10% of the original composition cost will be charged to authors. Page charges There are no page charges to individuals or institutions.
Index
Abhinavagupta, 41 Adam, K, 95 Adamis, M, 65, 78 Agee, J, 19 Alain, J, 92 Albeniz, 107 Anderson, J, 25, 27 André, C, 18 Aquinas, 43 Aristotle, 41, 43 Arrieu, C, 92
Bossuet, 100 Boulez, P, 51, 82, 118 Brancusi, C, 18 Braque, G, 22 Breton, A, 104 Britten, B, 48, 99 Browne, T, 7 Bruford, B, 23 Burne-Jones, 104 Byrd, W, 47 Cage, J, 48, 53 Cajetan, 43 Calderón, 82 Callas, 36 Campbell, J, 15, 16 Campion, 115 Caplet, A, 96 Carter, E, 49 Caruso, 36 Casals, P, 36 Cavaillé-Coll, 87, 92 Cézanne, 87 Chabrier, 86 Chagall, 104 Châteaubriand, 81, 110 Chausson, E, 83, 84 Cherry, D, 13 Chomsky, N, 18 Chopin, F, 50 Claudel, P, 102, 114 Colombani, 124 Coltrane, J, 13 Corelli, 123 Couperin, F, 53, 87
Babbitt, M, 11 Bach, 50, 59, 74, 86, 119 Baïf, 15 Balfour-Gardiner, E, 48 Barbier, J-J, 86, 96 Barraqué, 96 Bartók, B, 48, 101, 119 Bates, B, 20 Bateson, G, 44 Baudelaire, 82 Baudrier, 92 Bédier, J, 102, 117 Beethoven, 13, 14, 18, 44, 49, 66 Berg, A, 85 Bergman, I, 18 Bergson, H, 39, 81, 94 Berkeley, L, 82 Berlioz, 86 Bernanos, G, 82 Bharata, 41 Birtwistle, H, 16 Bloy, 13 Boine, M, 13
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INDEX
Cozier, 86 Crispell, M, 13 Cusanus, 99 d’Aulnoy, 82, 95 d’lndy, 82, 86, 91, 109 Dallapiccola, 82 Dandrieu, 87 Daniel-Lesur, 91, 92 Daniel-Rops, 82, 123 Dante, 66 Darasse, X, 95 Daquin, 87 de Grigny, 87 de la Tour du Pin, 82, 85, 123 Debussy, C, 50, 53, 86–90, 106, 108 Delacroix, 83, 118 Delamain, 106, 108 Demarquez, S, 92, 121 Denis, M, 83, 84 Déodat de Séverac, 90 d’Harcourt, 100, 101, 102 Dolphy, E, 13 Drew, D, 104, 119 Dukas, 85, 87, 91, 117 Dupré, 87, 96, 118 Dvo ak, 109 Dylan, B, 23 Eco, U, 51 Ekelöf, G, 13 Elgar, E, 31 Eliot, TS, 27 Emmanuel, M, 87–90 Euclid, 43 Falla, M, 101 Fano, M, 82, 85 Fauré, M, 86, 96 Fétis, 118 Flaubert, 97, 110 Florant, 81 Ford, A, 66, 78 Fra Angelico, 83, 84 Franck, 86 Frescobaldi, 92 Freud, S, 21 Fumer, DV, 91 Fumer, R, 91
Fumer, S, 91, 96, 98, 117 Furtwängler, 63 Garbarek, J, 13 Gautier, 110 Gentle Giant, Octopus, 28 Gibran, K, 2 Giotto, 12 Godwin, J, 57 Goldman, J, 22 Goléa, A, 81, 105, 106, 107 Goethe, 99 Górecki, 74, 78 Guéranger, 81, 86, 96 Gurdjieff, GI, 52 Hahn, R, 87 Halbreich, H, 82, 84 Hamel, P-M, 20 Hameline, J-Y, 94 Harvey, J Imaginings, 14 Inquest of Love, Philia’s Dream, 14 Passion and Resurrection, 22 Haydn, 15 Hello, E, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 106, 107 Herbert, G, 120 Heron, P, 81 Hesse, 92 Hindemith, 121, 122 Hirsbromer, T, 86, 105, 118 Holst, G, 27 Homer, 51 Honegger, 96, 118 Hopkins, GM, 100 Horn, T, 29 Houhannes, A, 104 Howe, S, 25, 30 Howells, H, 48 Hughes, R, 20 Huysmans, 107 Ibert, 91 Jalal ad’din Rùmi, 41 Jarrett, K, 13 Jolivet, 84, 90, 91, 92, 119 Jouve, 82, 85 Joyce, J, 16 Jung, CG, 21
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INDEX
Kaye, T, 23 Kierkegaard, 117 King Crimson, 23 Lark’s tongues in aspic, 30 Klee, P, 15, 124 Klemperer, 63 Lajoinie, V, 91 Lalo, 86 Lassus, O, 47 Le Flem, P, 90, 92 Lebègue, 87, 88 Lejeune, 114, 115 Leoninus, 51 Levin, T, 23 Ligeti, 13 Little Richard, 23 Loriod, 91 Lorrain, 10 Lurçat, J, 107, 108, 109 Lutoslawski, W, 49 Mæterlinck, 84, 85, 102, 117 Mâle, 103, 118 Mantegna, 84 Mariani, 110 Maritain, 81 Marley, B, 25 Marmion, 95, 96, 98 Martin, 82 Massin, B, 84, 85, 91, 94, 110, 119, 120 Matisse, 12 Matta el-Meskeen, 65, 79 Mellers, W, 26, 69 Mérimée, P, 103, 104 Migot, G, 92 Milhaud, 91, 104, 118 Monteverdi, C, 50 Moody, I, 5 Mozart, 13, 15, 49, 58, 85, 99 Nietzsche, 10, 16 Noël, 82, 99, 100 Novalis, 15 Orff, 104 Paris, G, 103, 117 Parker, C, 42
Pärt, A, 2, 52, 65, 69–74, 78 Patañjalî, 38 Péladan, Sâr, 83 Pierné, 96 Pivot, 124 Platonism, 43, 51, 66 Pliny the elder, 110 Plotinus, 43 Poole, G, 14 Poulenc, 1, 48, 82, 84, 91 Puvis de Chavannes, 83 Pythagoras, 2, 13, 51 Rabin, T, 23 Rameau, 108 Raphael, 114 Rathgeber, V, 123 Ravel, 86, 87, 106 Reinold, H, 42 Renard, 106 Renoir, 84 Respighi, 96 Reverdy, 106 Rilke, 82, 121, 122 Rolling Stones, 32 Rössler, A, 94, 119, 120 Rostand, C, 81, 84, 117 Rostand, E, 115 Rouault, 87 Saint-Saëns, 82 Samuel, C, 87, 102, 115, 118, 124 Satie, 82, 83, 86, 91, 96 Sauvage, C, 82, 85, 118 Saxena, SK, 36 Schmitt, F, 87, 88, 91, 104 Schnittke, A, 2 Schönberg, 82, 119 Schubert, 53 Schweitzer, 92, 118, 119, 120 Shakespeare, 82 Shenaw Johnson, R, 96 Smart, 99 Squire, C, 23 St Augustine, 43, 94 St Francis, 82, 83, 110, 121 St John of The Cross, 82 St John of Damascus, 65 St Philip Neri, 92
INDEX
St Symeon, 3 Stanford, CV, 47 Steiner, G, 5 Steiner, R, 21 Stockhausen, K, 13, 48 Strauss, 86 Stravinsky, I, 5, 13, 61, 65, 66, 78, 86, 90, 91, 119, 121 Szigeti, J, 36 Tarkovsky, A, 18 Tatum, A, 42 Tavener, J, 2, 65, 66–69, 78 Taylor, C, 13 Tcherepnin, A, 90 Thompson, D’A W, 43 Tomita, I, 27 Tournemire, 87, 88, 91, 118 Traffic, Hole in My Shoe, 30 Turner, S, 25 U2, 23 Uitti, F-M, 14 Union Without Hope… 27, 28 Valkeapää, N-A, 18 Van Gogh, 84, 87 Varèse, E, 84, 86, 91, 92 Vaughan Williams, R, 47 Vierne, 91 von Balthasar, 82 Wagner, R, 18, 82, 85 Wakeman, R, 23 Walton, 96 Watkin, E I, 43 Webern, A, 53, 82 White, A, 23 Whitehead, AN, 5 Widerberg, F, 17, 18 Widor, 86, 118 Yanagi, S, 23 YES Albums 90125, 32 Hearts, 29 It can happen, 30 The Calling, 32 Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe Birthright, 32
The Big Dream, 32 Big Generator Holy lamb, 28 Close to the edge Angkor Wat, 27, 32 I get up, I get down, 27 Fragile, 28 Heart of the sunrise, 31 Long distance run-around, 30 We have heaven, 28 Going For The One, 28 Awaken, 28, 32 Tales from Topographic Oceans Ritual; nous sommes du soleil, 30 The ancient; giants under the sun, 30 The remembering; high the memory, 29 Talk Endless Dream, 31 Where will you be, 31 The Yes Album, 25 All good people, 31 The Clap, 31 Time and A Word Astral Traveller, 29 Tormato Arriving UFO, 30 Madrigal, 30 Young, L, 13 Zeller, 91, 108 Zimmerman, BA, 104 Zuckerkandl, V, 40
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