With music, we must learn what to listen for—or, indeed, what not to listen for. After a 1964 concert in Berlin of Xenakis’s music in the 1950s, the great Nadia Boulanger ... said to the composer in her usual forthright, no-nonsense manner: “Xenakis, you don’t know how to develop your themes!” “What themes?” he replied reasonably.
CHARLES ROSEN, Freedom and the Arts, Harvard U. Press, p.237
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I wonder if Nadia Boulanger's remark was simply a joke which somehow went over Charles Rosen's head. Surely by 1964 Boulanger must have been familiar with the decades-old music of composers who "did not know how to develop their themes", e.g., Schoenberg's Erwartung (1909) or Varèse's works from the 1920s (Ameriques, Arcana, Ionisation). Or perhaps she was too shocked by what she heard and blurted out the first thing that popped into her head (thematic development may have been a subject of criticism she frequently directed at her many composition students). Either possibility sounds more plausible to me than Rosen's (admittedly funny) portrayal of Boulanger as a musical dimwit.
Be that as it may, Xenakis' music may have been pretty shocking back then, but I doubt it has much of a shock value today. Not after half a century of exposure to Xenakis-influenced sonorities in concert halls (e.g., the fake-titled, frequently performed Penderecki's Threnody) and movie theaters (THX's audio trademark Deep Note). Yet if the shock of Xenakis' music has worn off, its ability to thrill remains undiminished, at least when heard in the ambience of a concert hall rather than on poisonously equalized and (as a rule) poorly edited studio recordings.
But why take my word for it when you can decide for yourself with these live recordings of Metastaseis (1954), Syrmos (1959), Aroura (1971), and Voile (1995). The first recording was made at a 2009 concert given by ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien under Bertrand de Billy, while the remaining three were recorded at a 2011 concert given by Amsterdan Sinfonietta under Johannes Kalitzky.
7 comments:
I know all of these pieces from recordings - but have never had the opportunity to hear the quite extraordinary and unique music of Xenakis in concert. I would agree with your comments and would expect it to be quite a spectacular experience, especially for the larger orchestral works.
I haven't had the time yet to give these pieces the listening to that they deserve, but just want to record my thanks for making them available :-)
- Rex
Interestingly, Rosen said of Xenakis’ music that he didn’t much care for it as although he had some good ideas, he didn’t do much with them - not very different from Boulanger’s comment. Of course, Xenakis was more concerned with texture and contrast rather than development, so I suppose both Boulanger and Rosen are right, but applying criteria that aren’t appropriate. Many don’t find Xenakis’ music terribly interesting because of its static nature.
Rex,
Sorry for a delayed response.
Always good to hear from a fellow aficionado of Modernist music.
I hope you were not be disappointed by these concert performances.
Colin,
I don't recall ever having read Rosen's direct (and negative) criticism of Xenakis' music.
I would appreciate if you let me know the source behind your comment.
During the course of the following lecture, at about 26 minutes:
https://youtu.be/geyRVsZqyyc
Colin,
I must have skipped that part of Rosen's lecture. (He seemed to be repeating all the points he had made earier in his books and essays, so I was doing a lot of jump-forwarding.)
In any case, Xenakis is obivously one of Rosen's musical blind spots. Every music lover has them (Chopin hated Beethoven, Tchaikovsky despised Brahms), and Rosen had been quite open about his - e.g., Debussy and Bartok in his youth, Satie and Messiaen to the end of his life.
Of course, to complain, as Rosen does, that Xenakis "does not do much" with his ideas invites the reply that he does exactly as much as needs to be done. This was the complaint often made in the past about Debussy (Richard Strauss barely survived Act 1 of Pelleas et Melisande), but today we know better than to judge Debussy's music by the Teutonic criteria of thematic development and harmonic motion. (I'm sure you've read about Debussy's quip made at a concert featuring a Beethoven symphony: "Ah, development! Now I can go outside and smoke a cigarette.")
Incidentally, Rosen is one man I would expect to know better than to dismiss a composer on such aesthetically shaky grounds. After all, in his writings Rosen repeatedly points out the dangers of the reverse complaint that a composer "does too much". This was Dittersdorf complaint about Mozart, Moscheles' complaint about Chopin, Spohr's complaint about Beethoven. And today we frequently hear this complaint made about the music of Carter (e.g., Taruskin's description of Carter's compositions as "absurdly overcomposed monstrosities").
With this in mind, I take it for granted that well-trained and highly experienced composers do exactly as much with their ideas as they think needs to be done. One may dislike some composers for doing "too little" to keep one's mind stimulated (e.g., Dvorak, Satie, Grisey, or Glass), others for doing "too much" by overloading one's neural circuitry (e.g., Carter, Babbitt, or Ferneyhough). While such likes and dislikes may say something about one's psychology, they certainly say nothing about artistic merits of music.
Oh well... At the time of that CUNY lecture Rosen was old and probably already very ill (I think he died only a few months later). I still miss his presence in the world of music.
We all have our musical blind spots. A person who claims to like everything is either lying, or not listening properly.
Music should ideally be judged according to its own criteria, which is Rosen’s point in the passage quoted. You don’t assess the merits of a symphony of Haydn and Mahler in the same way. Nevertheless, there’s no reason why one can’t reject the criteria as not producing music that’s very interesting, which is what he’s saying in the lecture. Some room has to be left for individual taste. Nevertheless, In this particular case, it does seem a little ironic.
Yes, a great loss to the world of arts and letters. My old professor of Art History, T. J. Clark, had met him at a reception for an honorary doctorate Rosen was receiving. “The only problem is” he said “is that he knows everything about everything”. At least we have Rosen’s writings, which are full of so many insights and endlessly stimulating. And his own recordings are splendid. I rate his Beethoven piano sonatas very highly. I saw him perform the last three sonatas late in life, and found it quite moving, even though the playing was not up to his previous standards - try his scintillating performance of Ravel’s Gaspard. It’s a pity Rosen wasn’t able to make more recordings, in particular the second volume of Boulez piano music, which was abandoned by CBS after volume 1. It seems the sheer range of Rosen’s repertoire was a problem - they couldn’t pigeon-hole him for the purposes of marketing.
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