We must at all costs bar the door of the Institut [de France] against a man capable of such atrocities; they should be put next to the cubist pictures.
Camille Saint-Saëns
Nectoux, Jean-Michel (1991). Gabriel Fauré, A Musical Life, Cambridge University Express, p. 108
We conclude BCMS Season 41 with three works that still seem new in our time—in message, means, and how they broadened the very definition of music, of chamber music, and from where, for whom, and by whom our music is performed.
One of the biggest challenges facing anyone introducing classical music to new audiences is how to explain the concept and power of keys, as in, say, the keys of G, or C. One soon learns that these concepts are only really internalized first through the physical sensation of playing an instrument, which is foundational to any study of music. Equating the concept of key to the color spectrum of light or the use of color in painting is perhaps the best analogy as in Gershwin’s title Rhapsody in Blue. Yet, there remains a physical, sensory, and inner emotional connection to be made.
Hence the outrage, one French musician decrying the creation of another, because the concept of being in a key in music is abandoned for the sensation of soundscape informed by color! And besides, Debussy’s naming of colors—white and black—in the title, Caprices en blanc et noir, which at first may seem to refer to the color of the piano keys, is more likely a poetic reference to the extreme polarization between France and Germany, again at war in 1915. Could Debussy’s quote of the Lutheran hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is our God) in the second movement be an attempt to mock, understand, or sympathize with the other side? Debussy’s reference to the choice of colors in the paintings of Velazquez—blacks, whites, and grays—offers some insight into the quest to explore and exploit the materials of music, whether they be from Balinese Gamelan or Spanish painting, to create musical art and sounds beyond the dominant Germanic models. Others have used the designation of Impressionism, taken from the contemporaneous visual art movement, to describe his technique.
Paul Schoenfield’s depiction of the inspiration and source material for his Café Music for Piano Trio tells of his exploration of the boundary between Classical and popular genre:
The idea to compose Café Music first came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Murray’s employs a house trio that plays entertaining dinner music in a wide variety of styles. My intention was to write a kind of high-class dinner music—music which could be played at a restaurant, but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall. The work draws on many of the types of music played by the trio at Murray’s. For example, early 20th-century American, Viennese, light classical, gypsy, and Broadway styles are all represented. A paraphrase of a beautiful Chassidic melody is incorporated in the second movement.”
Hidden behind his designation ‘early 20th-century American’ (my underlining) is the debt owed to styles such as Ragtime, cakewalk, and Jazz invented and introduced by African American players such as Scott Joplin and James Scott, later imported back to use in Classical works by Debussy, Ravel, Gershwin, Milhaud, Bernstein, among others, even as he is quick to name the marginalized communities from whom he derives other styles. (Omission noted!)
After a little more than one hundred years since its American premiere in 1923, Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire continues to fascinate audiences, composers, and players alike.
The work, based on settings of three groups of seven poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire (aka Moonstruck Pierrot), is an original melodrama scored for a reciter/singer voice, piano, cello; and for flute, clarinet, and violin who are required to extend their tonal ranges by doubling on piccolo, bass clarinet, and viola, respectively. His composition of cabaret songs and use of spoken singing (Sprechstimme) predate this work but come together to open with a powerful image of a hapless character being driven mad by the moon. Schoenberg intended for Sprechstimme to have characteristics and inflection of both singing and speaking, but made few indications which notes are to be sung on actual pitches. Although known later for inventing a composition technique based on twelve equal tones, Pierrot is atonal, that is, not in a key, but also not systematically dodecaphonic. Around the same time, and in a different place, he too was experimenting with creating musical sounds in a completely different way from Debussy, perhaps to the same end.
The accompanying ensemble—two winds and three strings polarized around the piano—has been considered one of Schoenberg’s most iconic inventions leading to the founding of mixed chamber ensembles such as BCMS, and the creation of new music ever since! Even for Schoenberg the focus was to be on the sounds, not the meaning of the words.
The performer’s task here is at no time to derive the mood and character or the individual pieces from the meaning of the words, but always solely from the music. To the extent that the tonepainterly representation [tonmalerische Darstellung] of the events and feelings in the text were of importance to the composer, it will be found in the music anyway. Wherever the performer fails to find it, he must resist adding something that the composer did not intend. If he did so, he would not be adding, but subtracting.
Arnold Schoenberg [English translation by Stanley Appelbaum]
And, speaking of outrage, one witness described the scene at the premiere:
When she appeared in a Pierrot costume, her painted, frightened face framed by a ruff, her aging ankles in white stockings, she was greeted by an ominous murmur from the audience. One could not help admiring her courage, as she went on from poem to poem, disregarding the hissing, booing and insulting invective shouted at her and Schoenberg. There were also fanatical ovations from the young generation, but the majority were outraged. A well-known virtuoso, his face purple with rage, shouted: “Shoot him. Shoot him,” meaning Schoenberg, not the poor, undaunted Pierrot.
Viertel, Salka (January 22, 2019). The Kindness of Strangers. New York: New York Review Books. p. 58.
Our performance is to be the fourth in BCMS’s history, and our third with Lucy Shelton, one of its most accomplished protagonists.
Enjoy!
MT
