Post on 27-Mar-2016
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editio Musica
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new insights into our classical catalogs, contemporary composers and the music scene. umpc: giving music a universal perspective
Table of conTenTs
Foreword.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
site-speciFic music-making ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Focus on mankind Klaus Huber Celebrates his 90th Birthday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
martin grubinger on xenakis .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
péter eötvös Interviewed by László Gyori. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
digitized but not entirely: I taly’s Composers Under-40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
getting to the core oF things Q&A with Graham Fitkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
Fabien lévy A Portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
contemporary music For education ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
composer/pianist Baptiste Trotignon and Jean-Frédéric Neuburger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Fausto romitelli: six keywords Drawn from Romitel l i ’s own Descriptions of his Music . . . . . . . .42
sirenen, a new opera Rolf Riehm in Frankfurt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
machine poetry The Music of László Vidovszky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
alexandre desplat & François meïmoun New Signings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56
the new puccini critical edition .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
world premieres in 2014 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
A successful Verdi-anniversary year is behind us, and in 2014 we are
ready to celebrate the next milestone anniversaries, those of Eötvös
(70), Globokar (90), Huber (90), and Nono (90).
In this, the third edition of our yearbook, we will keep you up to date
on important anniversaries, as usual, but also on our new composers
and projects, such as the launch of our Puccini Critical Edition series.
Our lead article, “Site-Specific Music-Making,” explores new trends in
composing for unusual venues and sites.
2014 is also the first full year our German office will be operating
from Berlin, instead of Munich, where a (mostly) new team is now
working alongside the other Universal Music Group publishing and
recording colleagues.
Our newly-designed web portal www.umpgclassical.com will soon
be followed by new websites for our individual offices. A blog and
other social media presence have been added to a redesigned On The
Dial e-newsletter to help you keep up with our composers and publish-
ing activities. We cordially invite you to join the conversation on both
Facebook and Twitter.
We hope you “follow” and “like” us and, most importantly, that you
like the great works we have the privilege of publishing!
Antal Boronkay, Managing Director, Editio Musica Budapest
Silke Hilger, General Manager, Ricordi Berlin
Cristiano Ostinelli, General Manager, Casa Ricordi, Milan
Nelly Quérol, General Manager, Durand–Salabert–Eschig, Paris
James M. Kendrick, Consultant, Head of Classical Publishing, New York and London
The home for composers from across The globe
2
Site-
Specif
ic MuSic-
Dusapin: Opéra de Feu - Deauville
2010
operas in car parks. symphonies in airfields. concerTs in barns, beaches, caves, and underground sTaTions.
3
Gr
ou
pe F
- T
hie
rr
y N
av
a
MuSic- MakingWhere we might come across contemporary classical music has
become increasingly difficult to predict. It’s premature to talk of
us entering a post-concert hall world. But the scene is certainly
getting restless.
A rising number of new music festivals have taken up residency
in resolutely un-classical venues. The London Contemporary Music
Festival (LCMF) took over a car park in summer of 2013. The festival
Sonica, now in its second year, explores the urban wilds of Glasgow
each November. Heiner Goebbels’s Ruhrtrienniale, meanwhile, contin-
ues its annual take-over of the post-industrial wastes of west Germany.
Not all this site-specific bed-hopping is without precedent. Pascal
Dusapin’s Opéra de Feu (2010), for example, deals with a familiar ritual:
that of writing music for firework displays. It’s a reminder that every
musical event, before the concert hall explosion of the late 1700s, was
once site-specific. The current trend, then, for classical music tailoring
itself to specific structures, which has gathered such momentum over
- by igor toronyi-lalic
4
Dusapin: Opéra de Feu - Deauville
2010
5
Gr
ou
pe F - Thier
ry
Na
va
the past few years, is simply a return to
an older norm.
Some of this has been driven by the
chase for new audiences. Most, how-
ever, has been about using non-stan-
dard space to free music, performer,
and listener from the constraints and
conventions of the concert hall and to
reconfigure the musical experience.
This was the aim of the London
Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF)
2013, which teamed up with the
summer arts festival Bold Tendencies
to put on concerts on the sixth floor of a little used multi-storey car
park in South London. The decision was part practical (it was a large,
free space), part acoustic (famously good), part aesthetic, and part
musical. Few spaces could have chimed as well with the early avant-
garde timbre works by Ennio Morricone or the thunderous piano
recital given by Mark Knoop on the final night, which included Iannis
Xenakis’s brutal Evryali.
What suits spatial adventurism best, however, is opera. Intrinsically
unstable as an art form, opera has always rewarded experimentation.
The immersive movement of the past decade, for example, has found
an enthusiastic partner in it. When LCMF 2013 embedded itself in
the nooks and crannies of the car park space for Gesamtkunstwerk
by Gyorgy Kurtag, Laurie Anderson, Gerald Barry, and Jennifer Walshe,
it was a natural fit.
One of the most notable historic models for this interaction between
architecture and opera is Luigi Nono’s Prometeo. Needing a space that
would radically redefine the relationship between listener and per-
former, Nono asked Renzo Piano to create a specially designed “musi-
cal space” for the opera. The result was a space that worked like “a
gigantic lute,” the music causing the wooden structure in which the
audience sat to vibrate like a sound board.
A redefinition of what opera could be and do by composers like
Giorgio Battistelli—whose 1981 Experimentum Mundi, for example, sees
16 artisans lay bricks, shape stones, forge, grind knives, cobble shoes,
build barrels, and make pasta over the course of the evening—also has
helped the art form escape the opera house.
Spatial awareness has been a central part of a composer’s job since
at least Edgar Varèse’s Poème Électronique (1958), which was created
for the futuristic curves of Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the Belgian
Expo and was recently resurrected (along with the rest of the Varèse
oeuvre) at the Holland Festival and put on in a disused gas works
building in west Amsterdam.
Post-Varèse, space began to be addressed and played with as much as
timbre and pitch. Alongside several acoustic experiments with orches-
tral set up (Musivus was composed for a four-voice polyphonic space),
Emmanuel Nunes explored the spatial phenomena of music in works
such as Wandlungen, which sees each pitch triggering a spatial response.
what suits spatial adventurism best is opera. opera has always rewarded experimentation.
6
Complete breaks with the concert hall were rarer. One of the first
to do so was the Scratch Orchestra, a politically minded collective
set up by the maverick Marxist composer Cornelius Cardew, whose
“environmental events” in the early 1970s included “an ambulatory
concert” around south-west London and “a concert in the forecourt
of Euston railway station.” The gallery space and art scene has often
been the site of classical music’s most radical ideas. Many works that
have attempted to think spatially—like Salvatore Sciarrino’s work for
massed amateurs, Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni, which sees a hundred
flautist schoolchildren perform while circling the audience—have
found themselves seeking out gallery partners. The Guggenheim
Museum, for example, hosted the U.S. premiere of the Sciarrino.
One of the oldest drivers behind the exodus from civic concert halls has
been about flight from city life. “Only the chirp of crickets can be heard
in this semi-open, semi-closed and in the summer relatively cool place,”
explains Gábor Csalog, artistic director of the barn concerts in Vértesacsa,
Hungary, which celebrate the work of Kurtág. “Neither the noise of the city,
nor the artificial silence of concert halls or studios can disturb absorption.”
But many have left the concert hall to get closer to the sonic cor-
ruptions of urban life. LCMF 2013 rejoiced in the leakage of city sound
into the concert environment. The trains, traffic, and sounds of social
life were appreciated by many of the composers in the Cage tradi-
tion who performed in the car park, especially experimentalists like
Charlemagne Palestine, who had performed in five car parks before.
Site specificity can be political. It can be aesthetic. It can be nostal-
gic. It can be practical. It can be cynical. It can also be monumental.
Dusapin’s Opéra de Feu, in which he teamed up with France’s foremost
pyrotechnicians, Groupe F, for a beach-side extravaganza, is one kind
of epic. Luca Francesconi’s FRESCO (2008) is another. The work sees
300 city-scattered musicians (made up of five wind and brass marching
7
aN
dr
ea F
elv
éGi
bands) perform while slowly and separately winding their way through
the streets of town to a central plaza, the music fashioned by the town
plan. This is civic thinking taken to an extreme, where the city itself has
become a kind of score.
This may all seem a long way from the focused concert experience of
the 19th and 20th century. Yet every one of these experiments is about
creating artworks that respond to the new ways in which we, today,
organize ourselves, our stories, and our thoughts. Twenty-first-century
society and narrative is a scattered thing; it’s no surprise that, increas-
ingly, concerts are too.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic is a critic and curator. He writes regularly on music
for, among others, The Times and Sunday Telegraph. He is the author
of Benjamin Britten (2013) for Penguin, co-founder of theartdesk.com,
and co-director of the London Contemporary Music Festival.
using non-standard space to Free music, perFormer, and listener From the constraints and conventions oF the concert hall and to reconFigure the musical experience...
Facing page:
Péter Kiss and
Péter Szűcs on the
stage of a barn in
Vértesacsa.
This page:
Salvatore Sciarrino:
Il Cerchio tagliato dei suoni for 4
flutes and 100
migrant flutists -
Leghorn, April 2013
8
Klaus Huber, born November 30, 1924, in Switzerland, is one of the
last living representatives of the so-called post-war generation. He
was a late starter, as he says himself. Since the end of the Fifties his
works have been performed successfully by excellent musicians. But
he was no opinion-shaper like Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, or Cage,
even though Huber’s writings are extensive, stimulating and, not rarely,
polemical. As professor of composition in Freiburg, he became one
of the most influential teachers of his generation. His pupils include
diverse composers such as Febel, Ferneyhough, Hosokawa, Jarrell,
Lauck, Pagh-Paan, Platz, Rihm, Saariaho, and Wüthrich.
Reflecting on Social Conditions
When starting the composition of his full-length oratorio Erniedrigt…
geknechtet…verlassen…verachtet… (1975, 1978-83), he found a fitting
home in Ricordi, the publisher of Italy’s left-wing composers like Nono
and Maderna. Coming after a long period of composition, its premiere
in Donaueschingen in 1983 marked a climax in his public impact. The
music put its finger right on the pulse of the peace movement: aestheti-
cally overwhelming, with orchestra and choir, paired up with Huber’s own
expression of sharp criticism of the political circumstances, degrading of
mankind, in Nicaragua. Up until then, many people had underestimated
Huber. The works’ Latin titles, his frequent reference to spiritual, bibli-
cal themes, the emphatic interest in Early Music with its contrapuntal
focuS on Mankind
by till knipper
klaus huber celebraTes his 90Th birThday
9
STeFaN
For
STer
and isorhythmic techniques struck many as antiquated and unworldly
– unjustly so. Looking back, it seems more accurate to say that he has
consistently kept his music well apart from compositional fashions, but
not from historical and intellectual currents, which are reflected in his
music both artistically and in terms of aesthetic content.
Nono’s Death and the Second Gulf War
The aesthetic change that leads to Huber’s late period is remarkably
novel and was first revealed to the public by the Witten premiere of
the string trio Des Dichters Pflug (1989) in third-tone tuning. Shortly
afterwards, Huber was made professor emeritus, and his friend Luigi
Nono (b. 1924) died on May 8, 1990. At their last meeting Huber had
lent him a book on Sufism. The Second Gulf War began and lead to
huge anti-war demonstrations, and not just in Germany. This provided
the aesthetically fertile ground for his late period. In memory of Nono,
Huber wrote his …Plainte… for viola d’amore (1990). Numerous refer-
ences and re-workings have made this piece a sort of seed for his late
period, as well as a kind of self-portrait with Nono, and also with Ossip
Mandelstam, the poet who died in a Russian gulag in 1938; the rhythm
of …Plainte… is based on the spoken rhythms of one of his poems.
Variants and Interlockings
Beneath the surface, Huber’s late works are intricately intercon-
nected. The solo piece …Plainte… was also intended as one of the
focuS on Mankind Klaus Huber
10
17 soloist layers in the monumental spatial composition Die umgep-
flügte Zeit (1990) which, alongside a choir as well as a third-tone and
a quarter-tone ensemble, move through the space, following Nono’s
precedent with compositions like “Hay que caminar” soñando (1989)
or Prometeo – Tragedia dell’ascolto (1981-84, 1985). As so often, there
are also reductions of Huber’s big pieces. Time and time again, his
pieces have undergone these kinds of variant versions, so that they can
reach performance by means of various instrumentations, and in varied
forms. Superimposed, autonomous layers had already occurred, as in
the orchestral piece Protuberanzen, which contains three movements
that, purely “to save time,” can also be played simultaneously – a caustic
side-swipe at the ‘snippet-culture’ preferred by concert promoters.
Mozart – Mandelstam – Nono
An important stage in Huber’s recomposition of …Plainte… lies at the
centre of the string quintet Ecce homines (1998), where it is overlaid
with fragments from Mozart’s G minor String Quintet – idealistically
performed in a mean-tone intonation – which are re-instrumented,
and completed by a canon in inversion. The quintet is a sort of model
for his major Mandelstam opera Schwarzerde, which sums up the late
period. At a central point in that work there are seven instrumental-
ists who wander through the audience playing …Plainte… as a canon.
Mozart, Mandelstam, Nono: for Huber these are the mountains stand-
ing firm against the surge of time, artists in the sense of an aesthetic of
resistance, people who pursue their ideals.
20.2.1985
Jury for “Junge
Generation in
Europa”
in Cologne;
from left:
H. Lachenmann,
M. Lichtenfeld,
L. Nono,
I. Xenakis,
K. Huber
11
reN
aTe
lieS
ma
NN
-Ba
um
Pitch Spaces – Human
Spaces
What links Huber to
Nono is not just his interest
in the performance space,
but also in the pitch space.
From his very first compo-
sitions, Huber set these in
contrast to one another: dia-
tonic chorales and twelve-
tone chromaticism, semitones
against quarter-tones since
the 1960s, and in the late
period third-tones come up
especially often against Arabian quarter-tone pitch spaces. His music
reveals astonishment at such different but extensive musical traditions
with hundreds of pitch scales and assemblages of additive rhythms
which are longer than one could imagine in traditional Western music.
Huber’s reference to the traditional Arabic music draws attention to
an admirable culture whose people have been viewed with hostility
in the Western world, who were bombarded, and whose museums
were opened up for looting.
The Unfulfilled Potentials of the Past
Huber’s late period is basically microtonal, but Huber dislikes this
nomenclature since he relates his music to traditional, historical sys-
tems. Traditional chromaticism – for Huber now an embodiment of
imperialist violence – is either excluded, or else very sparingly used, as
in the “Märschlein der Dienstbefliessenen” (“March of the Submissive”)
in Schwarzerde. Huber’s father was a musicologist, so it is not surpris-
ing that he cultivates a special interest in early music, the “unfulfilled
potentials of the past.” It is precisely in the late period that Huber com-
poses for “forgotten” instruments such as the viola d’amore (a kind
of seven-string viola) and the baryton (similar to the cello), and also
for countertenor. Even though it is not directly visible in the scores,
the 16th century’s expansion to 19 pitches by means of mean-tone
tuning with pure thirds informs many of his compositions, such as
his Lamentationes Sacrae et Profanae ad Responsoria Iesualdi (1993,
1996-97). During rehearsals he travelled with the musicians to a key-
board museum to investigate the unfamiliar intervals by consulting a
Vicentino harpsichord.
Continuing the Inheritance, but Differently
Though it stresses traditional references, Huber’s music is by no
means derivative or nostalgic. There are symbolic points of reference
and aural-sensual insights that he develops further. He seems to be in
search of a meta-harmonic pitch space, an aura lying beyond the con-
crete musical grammar of the historical models. What results from this
is new ideas with allusions, such as occur in his Lamentationes de fine
vicesimi saeculi (1991-94, 1995, 2007) wherein he divides the typi-
cal European orchestra, as a supposedly de-individualized mass, into
four chamber orchestras which, following his role model Stravinsky,
make music in maqam pitch spaces, polytonally transposed to dif-
ferent degrees. This gives rise to a supra-chamber music with very
varied instrumental colors.
We congratulate Luigi Nono and Klaus Huber on the occasion of
their 90th birthdays!
Translated by Richard Toop
huber’s Father was a musicologist, so it’s not surprising that he cultivates a special interest in early music, the “unFulFilled potentials oF the past.”
12
Martin grubinger
Felix B
ro
ede
Do you remember your first encounter with Xenakis’s music?
I remember I was 6 years old, and I heard Peter Sadlo perform-
ing Xenakis’s Rebonds B, and this was so fascinating to me. He was
playing it at Munich Gasteig, the Munich Philharmonic Hall, and I
was captivated: the wood-blocks, the combination with the drums,
the change between the rhythmic structure and this kind of impro-
visation on the wood-blocks and then the roll back to the rhyth-
mic structure again with the sixteenth note on the bongo and the
kind of melody on the left hand…. From this day on I was in love
with Xenakis. After that I started to work on his pieces. It took me
a long time, but I started with Xenakis very early, and I played all
the pieces: Kassandra, Rebonds A & B, Persephassa, and Pléïades,
plus Psappha. For percussionists, Xenakis is what we call in German
a “Schutzheiliger” (guardian angel). As a student I performed all
these pieces in concerts, Rebonds B of course, Rebonds A. Once we
performed a whole Xenakis program with Okho, Persephassa, and
Pléïades in one night. And people came—two thousand people—
just to listen to Xenakis’s music, and you know this was so intense,
interview by eric denut
on
xe
na
kis
13
Martin
Grubinger
14
peTe
r F
iSc
hli
so special, it had such a power, such an impact—a musical impact—
but also, his music goes deep into your heart, so I would say that
without Xenakis, percussion would be in another situation entirely.
Is there any model, any master, any interpreter, or any colleague
who has influenced you in the way of performing?
Two performers did: Sylvio Gualda and Peter Sadlo, and both these
performers really had such a strong impact on me. I listened to all the
recordings, and of course I went to ARD competition and listened to
the different interpretations of Psappha. But at the end, it’s pure fun,
and that’s the fantastic thing. There’s a high, very high intellectual level
in this music and, on the other hand deep emotion, and that’s the fan-
tastic combination in the music of Xenakis. We did Pléïades in Salzburg
Festival, and at the end there was a standing ovation. People who had
never been in contact with Xenakis’s music before were fascinated. We
loved to play it, and we tried to express our emotion about this music
to the people.
Also the form is great, and the rhythm of the work.
That’s Pléïades with its four movements and its ending: Claviers,
Métaux, Mélanges, and Peaux. In the ending you know the movement
with the rolls. Then yes, this is simply something special.
15
Are you still preparing it? Is the music so difficult that you need to keep
working on it, or is it now really standing in the repertoire for you?
We have it in the repertoire; we deeply believe that for each concert it
has to be prepared very strictly and very carefully. According to the acous-
tics, but also according to the tightness of playing that is really perfect.
Do you have any plans to do it in the open air in Bregenz?
I would love to. I hope we can do it next year or in two years at the
Salzburg Festival in front of the festival halls or at the Domplatz, with
the special acoustics, because I think you can express this music to
a very large audience as Xenakis is for everybody. It is contemporary
music with high intellectual character, but it is for everybody, and it
should be expressed not just to a small group of people. This sounds a
little bit strange maybe but we believe that our Pléïades interpretation
and our Persephassa interpretation are right now at the level where we
really can say: “this is what we want to express to people.”
You’re talking about the Percussive Planet Ensemble; tell us a little
bit more as the web is quite silent about it.
The Percussive Planet Ensemble was founded at the Bonn Beethoven
Festival in 2006. The members are all student colleagues and teachers
of mine. They are so focused on music by Xenakis, Rihm, Cerha, and
we just played a new piece by Cerha entitled Étoile at the Salzburg
Festival and commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. These people are
so dedicated to music by Xenakis because all of them also played the
solo pieces, the Rebonds, Psappha, and Okho. They are perfect.
What about the name of the ensemble?
We have a project that is called The Percussive Planet, and it is a kind
of music, a percussive journey through all five continents in one eve-
ning; so we do samba, salsa, tango, African drumming, contemporary
music, funk, fusion, rock, pop, jazz, just in one evening, minimal music
and so on; that’s why we called the project “The Percussive Planet.”
You have spoken about Xenakis’s composition, the form that is very
structured, the emotions. What is the most difficult thing when you
concentrate, when you go on stage and you perform Xenakis? You said
on Bavarian TV, that after Pléïades you were all going to bed, even you.
I told my colleagues in the Percussive Planet Ensemble that at the
end of Xenakis’s Pléïades, when we do the last drumming movement,
on the congas, after this no one should have any power left to play
again. And that is because I want my musicians just to give everything
they have until the last Peaux part.
That’s a kind of meditation in some way.
Yes, and it must be really tight, and then you know it must be played
with such an impact. The ending must be played really with the last
you can give as a performer. After that, there is just nothing because
you cannot play anything as an encore after Xenakis’s Pléïades. It has
such a deep impact. I so much look forward to doing it soon because
it’s THE perfect piece.
Did you have talks with conductors explaining to you the same thing
about some symphony works? Is that really only for percussionists,
this kind of feeling? You have to manage an economy of … I don’t
know, it was the first time I heard from a musician this kind of thing;
it was really close to Eastern meditation. You know exactly how to
manage your time economically and energetically.
Yes, that’s interesting. I would say it’s our philosophy of playing
because we deeply feel and think that it’s our duty just to give every-
thing we can give into this piece. And for instance, Métaux in Pléïades,
it’s not so easy for people to listen to it. I mean it’s complicated. There
are high frequencies, and sometimes it’s really loud, but on the other
hand it’s so important for us to play all these different colors you know
with the wooden sticks, with the soft mallets, the medium mallets, the
hard mallets, in real pianissimo. I want them to play real pianissimo,
and then you can hear six players in pianissimo on the Sixxen, so on
the metal parts.
Can Xenakis’s music be part of the regular repertoire?
You know, Xenakis’s percussion works are so popular in Austria;
every student plays Rebonds, Psappha, and all these works. I think
this is maybe the biggest challenge, to ask our contemporary musi-
cians to bring this to the “normal” repertoire. I think this is so impor-
tant, that our conductors and large orchestras start just to do it as a
repertoire piece.
Have you performed Xenakis’s music in Paris?
My biggest wish would be to perform Pléïades and others Xenakis
pieces in Paris once, and this because it is the center of his music.
Pléïades by
Xenakis at the
Lucerne Festival,
played by The
Percussive Planet
16
péter eötvöS inTerviewed by lászló gyori
17
péter eötvöS inTerviewed by lászló gyori
Almost all your compositions since the beginning of your career have
been published, and you are involved with four European music pub-
lishers. How did your cooperation with them begin and continue?
My contact with publishers began with Editio Musica Budapest at
the end of the 1970s. They published Windsequences and Steine. Since
I worked as a conductor in Paris from 1979, Edition Salabert Paris was
most advantageous for publishing my compositions. They published
Cosmos, 3 Madrigalkomödien, and Intervalles-Intérieurs. After my con-
tract in Paris expired, I started working with Ricordi Verlag in 1992,
which previously had its headquarters in Munich. A large part of my
significant compositions were published by them. Korrespondenz for
string quartet was the first, followed by Atlantis, Replica, and Shadows,
and among my operas Three Sisters and As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams,
as well as Lady Sarashina written to a similar text. Since 2000 I have
worked with Harrison/Parrott Management, London. They represent
me, as a composer and a conductor. Since at the time serious legal
problems arose concerning the libretti of my new operas, in this respect
Schott Music Verlag in Mainz proved to be a good partner. It was very
complicated to get the rights of Le Balcon from Jean Genet’s inheritors,
just as it was not easy either to get the rights of Love and Other Demons
from the representatives of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Up to the present
day I still write every score in pencil, so I need a permanent copyist.
Today the younger generation write their scores by computer. For them
the publication of scores and the function of publishing mean some-
thing entirely different than for the older generations. Only a large
publisher can settle legal problems which a lonely composer could
never resolve. The opportunity to distribute the works is also greater
with a publisher than if a composer were to do everything on his or
her own. At the same time, a significant publishing house presents a
guarantee for the quality of the works. Since I have not concluded an
exclusive contract with Schott, I have the opportunity from time to time
to work with Ricordi Berlin and Editio Musica Budapest.
You are celebrating your 70th birthday this year. This signifies a
career of more than 55 years as a composer, since you wrote a mul-
titude of music for film and theatre at a very young age, as a student
of composition.
At the Academy of Music in Budapest I was known as someone
Kla
uS r
ud
olph
Harakiri (1973)
18
able to improvise well and was invited to the film studios to impro-
vise music for a student’s graduation film. I watched the film and
improvised something for it on a Hammond organ. Then a week later
I was again asked to go to the film studio. I first composed music for
Büchner’s play Leonce and Lena, performed at the Academy of Drama
and Film. I was 17. The directors and I were of the same generation,
so that also connected us to one another. It’s a fact that this work got
hold of me very much at the time. That was where I sensed the diver-
sity it demanded, since each play required a completely different style
and each work began with different conditions. I have maintained that
practical-oriented thinking I learnt there up to the present.
Another generation link: you took part in the work of the New Music
Studio from its founding in 1970. It was a generation group. What
did you, who already lived in Cologne around the time it was formed,
represent in it?
The New Music Studio led by Albert Simon came about due to com-
posers of my generation getting together. We were allowed to organize
concerts in one of the community centres of KISZ (the Hungarian Young
Communist League), where pieces of music could be performed which
could not be included in the programmes of “official” concerts, yet they
demonstrated the aesthetics of our generation. Besides our own com-
positions, we had pieces played that provided some information about
contemporary music of the time. I played the role of a travelling ambas-
sador, since I was living in Cologne and came home to Budapest from
there. Besides the performances of my own compositions, I also con-
ducted. We performed Kontrapunkte by Stockhausen—Zoltán Kocsis
played the piano—and we also had compositions by Webern on the
programme. In addition, I brought technical equipment from Cologne
to Hungary, which at the time was unknown here.
Which of your compositions were performed at the concerts of the
New Music Studio?
My work Now, Miss! That was not its world premiere, but it was my
most important piece in that period which bore my then stylistic
marks. The other work I remember had the title Passepied, but since
I later withdrew it, it is not included in any catalogues. It was per-
formed together with Péter Halász’s company. A man and a woman
using five shoes each walked a certain distance on the parquet
flooring accompanied by five musicians. Each had only one shoe
on, while the other foot was bare. There was a boot with spurs, a
roller skate, a clown’s shoe, a Dutch wooden clog, and a high-heeled
shoe. The rhythm and tempo were dictated by the character of the
shoes. This piece has lost its ‘up-to-dateness’ since then, but the
significance of the New Music Studio meant that such compositions
could be tested.
You studied conducting in Cologne. Did you stay there after graduating?
No, I returned to Budapest. I lived at home for one-and-a-half years.
At the time I played in Stockhausen’s Ensemble. The 1970 World Expo
in Osaka was a decisive experience of that period. I spent half a year in
Japan. The fact that I could have a taste of another culture had a huge
impact on me.
What affected you so much? Theatre? This impact is clearly present
in some of your compositions.
All three forms of theatre—noh, bunraku, and kabuki. But the
Japanese gardens, the stone, rain, nature, and the silence of temples
made an impression on me. Perhaps the philosophy of Zen was the most
important. It helped me find myself and become connected with the
cosmic world from the position of myself. I became a part of the Earth.
19
So you wrote music for the
stage and film as a young
man, then took part in the
work of the New Music Studio.
Then you lived and worked in
Cologne. You did not compose
much during that time.
It was a period of collecting
and orientation. I didn’t know
what direction I was going to
take. Composition interested me,
but I couldn’t make use of the
knowledge I brought with me from
Hungary. By then in Cologne they
were already ahead and thought in a different way. To use a compari-
son, at the Academy of Music in Budapest we were involved only in
the part of the flower that is above ground. But there was no men-
tion of the flower having a part under the ground. The point was that
the flower should be beautiful, sweet-smelling, and bring joy. With
Stockhausen we were mostly involved in the root and knew that if
everything was alright there then it would become a flower. You could
learn much from Stockhausen. When I began my studies in Cologne,
I presented myself to him, and he asked me to prepare the score of
his electronic composition Telemusik for publication. I copied it by
hand, in pencil and with a ruler. We worked together for about six to
eight months. That was the time when I began being interested in live
electronic music.
Did you only play in Stockhausen’s Ensemble?
Not only. From 1971 to 1978 I was part of the technical-music
staff of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. I realized the
works with the composers, for example with Stockhausen, Pousseur,
and York Höller.
I had little time to compose in that period. In 1972 I wrote my first
chamber opera Harakiri, which already represented a new way of
thinking, and the effect of Japan was well audible.
Up to 1986 I composed all-in-all three to four works that are
still performed. I wrote the Chinese Opera for the Ensemble Inter-
contemporain in 1986. Kent Nagano, who was appointed the music
director of the Lyon Opera at that time, heard about the Chinese Opera
and thought that it was a “real” opera. When it turned out it was not, he
asked me if I wanted to compose a “proper” opera. I received a com-
mission and composed Three Sisters. Thanks to a fateful chance, I began
composing operas.
Your compositions speak in different languages. In the case of operas
it is obviously due to the thinking of a playwright; the story tells you in
what language the music should be. Is it possible to talk about changes
in styles in your oeuvre?
Not really about stylistic shifts, but about periods, yes. My composi-
tions written in the ’70s and ’80s were fundamentally connected to elec-
tronic music. The synthetic construction of the sound and the structure
were due to the fact that I had to think synthetically in the electronic
music studio. The instrumentation of Chinese Opera, for example, betrays
a kind of synthetic orchestrational thinking. My thinking later changed,
which was due to the fact that I conducted more. I am basically a com-
poser who works with sound, timbre, and the density of the sound—like
an architect who not only deals with form, but has a feeling where con-
crete, bricks, wood, or glass are required. These days I mostly compose
operas and concertos. I tailor the concertos for the soloist’s character.
in budapest we were involved only in the part oF the Flower that is above ground. but there was no mention oF the Flower having a part under the ground.
20
To what extent do you look after your works? When is it necessary to
let a composition go and take its own course?
I take care of my compositions very much. I am pleased for each
performance, since every time I listen to one there is the opportunity
for modification. With orchestral pieces a work begins to take a final
shape after five or six performances. Until then I take something out or
may add something. I change mostly the dynamics and the density of
the sound. This is needed because I’d like them to do well, to maintain
their place for centuries.
You graduated from conducting in Cologne and began conducting
while you were in that city and working in the electronic studio. As a
conductor you are one of the most prominent interpreters of modern
music across the world. How did your conducting career start?
The venue for my diploma concert was at the Cologne radio station. The
musicians in the orchestra and I knew each other and they asked where
I conducted. I told them “nowhere”. So they organized a radio recording
for me. Then another one. On the third occasion I conducted a concert at
the RIAS in Berlin. That was followed by one in Stuttgart and all the radio
orchestras in succession. I had no problem with the modern repertoire
because I could communicate that to the musicians without any difficulty.
Do you have an inborn talent with your hands for conducting or have
you acquired this precision in practice?
It is a natural endowment with me, but for a long time I didn’t know
because I didn’t use it. Yet it is not the hands that are the most important
in conducting but communication: the imparting of information by which
you are letting the musicians know what you expect of them. So thanks
to the German radio orchestras I began conducting, which was due to
the fact that in Germany at that time there were few conductors who
would have conducted modern music, with the exceptions of Michael
Gielen and Hans Zender. And—again it was ordained by destiny—one
day the radio orchestra of Stuttgart gave a concert in Paris. They played
Stockhausen’s Hymnen, which he composed for audio tape and orches-
tra. I often played it as a pianist. I knew it well, therefore Maestro Gielen
passed the coaching to me, and I also conducted the concert. It was a
success, and that was how I became the music director of the Ensemble
Intercontemporain. I filled that post for 13 years.
Teaching takes up a significant part of your life. You teach compos-
ers and conductors, hold courses, mentor young people, and you vis-
ibly regard it your mission to pass on your knowledge. Moreover, you
have set up two foundations specifically with a teaching purpose.
The principal idea was for me to help those young conductors who
didn’t really know which way to go after finishing their studies. My
career as a conductor began thanks
to chance. My first foundation in 1991
helped musicians and conductors
at the beginning of their careers find
their way. In 2004 I set up the second
foundation for conductors and compos-
ers. As a professor of the Cologne and
Karlsruhe academies I had many stu-
dents, and since my retirement I have
continued educational work at home in
the Eötvös Institute, which in my own
career I consider as important as compos-
ing and conducting.
Translated by Katalin Rácz and Bob Dent
i am basically a composer who works with sound, timbre, and the density oF the sound—Form, but has a Feeling where concrete, bricks, wood, or glass are required.
priSK
a K
eTTerer
21
Pierre Boulez
and Péter Eötvös
in Lucerne
22
iTaly’s composersunder-40
by marilena laterza
digitized but not entirely
Francesco Antonioni
(left), Emanuele
Casale (center),
Matteo Franceschini
(right)
23
Gia
Nlu
ca
mo
ro
(a
NTo
Nio
Ni)
, ma
riN
e d
ro
ua
rd
(Fr
aN
ceS
ch
iNi)
The digital revolution is an anthropological one that for some years
now has been introducing a stream of unheard-of resources into musi-
cal thought and practice. These are resources that all composers under
40 have had to come to grips with as they reflect on their artistic activ-
ity and reconsider the overall creative tradition. This process has led to
outcomes that, although extremely varied, are nonetheless anchored,
surprisingly, in a series of shared premises, ranging from research into
form to the conception of timbre as a fundamental prerequisite, from
composition understood as an ars combinatoria of pre-existing musical
elements to attention for the perceptive result that that combination
produces. But perhaps, more than anything else, it is the renewed rela-
tionship with history, strongly encouraged by the digital resources and
the possibilities they afford, that astounds the observer: a relationship
that is no longer traumatic or morbid, but instead, serene and construc-
tive, which allows us to sense exciting new points of arrival for the
music of the future.
Albeit without making concessions to the past, Francesco Antonioni
(b. 1971) remains tied to his pre-digital artistic roots and bears witness
to a presence different to the mainstream. Music, for him, is still an
occasion to invite performers and listeners to reflect together in the
place. And this is true both when that music makes exclusive use of
acoustic instruments, conducting a dialogue with the history that those
instruments bring with them, and when it uses electronics, provided
that they are able to bring together different worlds and, in the face of
the virtuality of the digital, safeguard the truth of the work. A neces-
sary truth that, in the music of Antonioni, entails the constant expres-
sion of an emotive content: art, for him, “has the task of directing one
towards a path to embark upon,” and the challenge of new music is “to
place people before an enigma—even furnishing them with the keys to
access it—ineffable but full of sense and gratification for anyone who
wishes to question it.”
Born, both actually and musically, before the digital age, Emanuele
Casale (b. 1974) experiences digital technology as a resource that is
never taken for granted and that influences in equal measure both
his “esoteric” music, with electronics, and his “exoteric” music, prin-
cipally for solo acoustic instruments. In the former, characterized by
24
JeaN
ra
del (v
eru
Nelli)
a certain compositional complexity, the electronics act as a sort of
receptacle of time in which to collocate the acoustic instrumental
sounds, conferring on them a greater temporal precision. But even
when, in his “exoteric” pieces, Casale operates from the point of
view of a listener who knows very little about the contemporary,
the digital, albeit in a different way, returns. In fact, the possibility
of making use of an immediately accessible and repeated quantity
of musical information, passing with extreme rapidity from John
Lennon to Debussy, translates, in the course of his writing, into
a greater freedom of expression. Released from the prohibition
against transgressing certain clichés, reference to traditional music
in Casale’s works remains nonetheless an affinity of a non-citation-
ist nature, something “personal” and involuntary, as in the case of
his affinity with certain Italian instrumental music of the early 18th
century that is recognizable in his more ironic pieces.
Silvia Colasanti (b. 1975) does not make use of electronics in her
compositional production. Music, for her, is a combination—with the
mentality of today—of pre-existing elements that have made the
history of Western music. Timbric elements—because Colasanti still
believes in the possibilities of traditional instruments, and for her the
challenge lies in making use of already patently connotated instru-
mental make-ups still arousing marvel—and also harmonic elements:
“today a cluster is just as historicized as a C-major interval.” The impor-
tant thing, then, is not the material, but the manner and the context in
which it is used. Once a tradition has been assimilated, for Colasanti,
it is necessary to interact with it, setting up a dialogue in which the
past resounds through the chords of modernity. “What is art,” she asks
“if not to continually give a new name to the same meanings, with a
language characteristic of the epoch in which one works, represent-
ing oneself and communicating with the people of one’s own time? If
we observe the same object under a new light, we seem to see a new
object; it is new, but only in part.”
For Matteo Franceschini (b. 1979) the correct approach to the devel-
opment of a musical idea is still that of an artisan, with pen and paper.
This approach does not, however, exclude recourse to digital technolo-
gies, which, for Franceschini—currently interested in multi-perceptivity
and multi-sensoriness—are fundamental. Digital technology, in fact,
permits him to integrate with the same rigor different forms of artis-
tic expression (music, literature, video art) and to render his creativity
synaesthetic, involving not just hearing and sight but also other chan-
nels of perception, for example, taste. All of this is based on solid tech-
nique and deep historical awareness, but free from dogma and from
the “weight” of the masters, whose legacy, in Franceschini, is renewed
in those fundamental, almost physiological, archetypes that he col-
lects and reinterprets, one above all, form, handed down by the “noble
fathers” but managed with the instruments and thought of today.
For Daniel Ghisi (b.1984), his first approach to writing music was
digital. Influenced by the processes of computer-aided composition,
Silvia Colasanti
(left), Daniele
Ghisi (right)
25
he makes use of the computer, on the one hand, to allow himself to
“be surprised” in his dialogue with the machine as as a creative par-
ticipant other than himself and to discover unexpected evolutions of
an idea through the modification of certain parameters. On the other,
he uses the digital technology to manage the meta-musical process
that lies at the basis of his work. In fact, for Ghisi, writing a piece con-
sists of re-elaborating a database of musical elements and citations,
almost never recognisable when heard, in such a way as to obtain a
form one degree removed from the original. The digital techniques,
then, become a means for interfacing with tradition, within a perspec-
tive of “open music” in which the work of the fathers takes the form of
live material, and not just at an unconscious level. Nonetheless, when
Ghisi writes for acoustic instruments, there is no computer-aided
orchestration software equal to the job. The translation of a sonic idea
into acoustic content remains for him an “analog” craft.
From the moment he set foot inside IRCAM, where he has become
a teacher, Mauro Lanza (b. 1975) has not written a piece of music
without a computer, making use of it to organize a coherent form as
much as to manage the harmonic dimension. He especially appreci-
ates the clarity and impersonal character of formalized processes of
composition. These allow him to get past his own ego and his own
cultural background so as to create an “unhuman” music, which stirs
up a profound and sacred fascination. Within this logic, Lanza has in
recent times interacted with the history of music as a blind listener
who takes bits from it and puts them back together without heeding
hierarchies of value. The musical material that he uses is impure, full of
connotations of an objet trouvé. There is no direct tie with history, and
so no recognition of any debt to the masters, but rather an uninhibited
attitude which, often by means of “corpus-based synthesis,” raids the
repertory, breaks it up into pieces and recomposes the rubble, recreat-
ing what might be termed “sonic Frankensteins”.
Much more than for the continuously evolving outillage that digi-
tal technologies offer to composition, Francesca Verunelli (b. 1979)
considers the digital techniques fundamental to the extent that they
constitute an epistemological principle with which it is necessary
to come to grips, in particular in respect of time. In fact, according
to Verunelli, the alternative temporality which, thanks to the digital
technology, accompanies the biological one, influences and rein-
forces the perception of what she considers to be the most power-
ful aspect of musical composition: the writing of tempo, or, in other
words, the possibility of listening to it, but also of “seeing” it under
one’s very own eyes, and also of “awakening” the listener. Thanks to
a formal elaboration that challenges the expectations of the listener,
Verunelli provokes in him or her a feeling of surprise that only music
can generate. And if it is true that the rhetorical codes of percep-
tion are the result of a long sedimentation in time, Verunelli’s music
reveals itself as a game that cannot avoid taking account of history.
Translated by Nicholas Crotty
Mauro Lanza (left),
Francesca Verunelli
(right)
26
27
STev
e Ta
NN
er
getting totHe core of tHingS
a Q&a wiTh graham fiTkinby elaine mitchener
1. Your latest work is linked to Umea, Sweden, which in 2014 will be
the European City of Culture. Have you been associated with the city
and its orchestra before now?
No, I hadn’t worked with Norrlands Operan Symphony Orchestra, and
in fact never visited Umea either. They have a fantastic building there
with two good halls—one specifically a concert hall, the other a full
opera house—and they also have conductor Rumon Gamba who I have
worked with before, and it will be great to work with him again. I had
done a concert tour in that part of Sweden before and remember deep
snow in April, and specifically driving a 15-seater minibus with spiked
tyres to an airport in the middle of nowhere, for a 4am flight, without
a map, when all the road signs were covered with snow. I visited Umea
last September and it was all beautiful warm sunshine, lakes, forests,
28
29
and not a hint of winter. I met with
the orchestra, conductor, lots of local
people and had a wonderful time.
2. The commission calls for the
work to be performed twice with
different instrumentation (the
orchestra and your band). Has
this presented any particular
challenges and how have you
structured this new work Birch?
The idea behind the com-
mission is to create two com-
pletely different perspectives
on the same musical material.
Often when I’m composing
this is something which natu-
rally crops up without much
conscious planning, but I generally get rid of it as deviating from the
driver of the piece. So I have never done this before with conscious
planning. The concert will be a standard two-half event; in the first half
they will perform the new orchestral work (which is about 40 minutes
long), and in the second half, the audience will move to the other hall
in the same building, and my own ensemble will perform there, gradu-
ally joined by members of the orchestra. This part of the commission
will take the same material but rework it with an entirely different vibe.
3. What sources of inspiration have you drawn from the experience
of working in Umea?
It’s quite a long story. For me it was important that this work was
imbued with something specific to the area and the culture there.
However I wasn’t born and bred there; I don’t have a great deal of
experience of the area, and so I can’t just assume knowledge of what is
important or unimportant. In essence I’m an outsider.
This has both disadvantages and advantages, and I have to
approach it from this standpoint. I have learned a lot about the area
and of course its traditional links with Sami culture. When I was last
there I had good meetings with Marco Feklistoff, Artistic Director
at the Noorlandsoperan, and Michael Lindblad, Chair of the Umea
Sami Association. We talked about the history of Umea, the issues
surrounding integration of Sami culture in Sweden and the present
climate. I travelled out into the larger Vasterbotten County area, and
as I’d taken my trainers [running shoes], I also ran around the city and
countryside which also helped me put things into place.
Bit by bit I started to make decisions about what I might and might
not use in the piece, and I became more and more keen to use data in
this work, specific objective information which could serve in some
background way as a ‘map’ for the music. In the end it seemed to come
together in the shape of a tree, the birch tree.
It [the birch tree] is a real omnipresent feature of both the city and
the surrounding landscape. It has been central to the Sami, used very
specifically in construction, used for firewood, and it plays a big part in
the reindeer herding culture. And then in Umea itself, following a huge
fire in 1888 which decimated a huge part of the city, the reconstruction
involved planting thousands of birch trees through the city to prevent
the spread of fire from building to building. So the city has all these
birch trees spread through it. Okay, that was intriguing, and beautiful as
they are, I really wanted some hard data about birches, their life cycle,
growth patterns and so on.
And of course it so happens that Umea’s University has a Department
of Forest Ecology headed up by one Lars Östlund. Lars and I have been
in contact many times and he has been the most incredible help. He has
supplied me with all sorts of data, images, graphs, and he has cored a par-
ticular birch tree for me which shows the width of the growth rings so that
we can establish a life cycle over 100 years. This has become my map.
The World Premiere of Birch by Graham Fitkin will take place 29 August
2014, NorrlandsOperan Symphony Orchestra, the Fitkin Band conducted
by Rumon Gamba NorrlandsOperan, Umea, Sweden.
www.norrlandsoperan.se/eng
i became more and more keen to use data in this work...which could serve in some background way as a ‘map’ For the music. in the end it seemed to come together in the shape oF a tree, the birch tree.
30
© m
uTe
Sou
veN
ir i
Bie
Ner
TS
In our current globalized world, with music effortlessly available
from almost every country, the most compelling musical identities
transcend national borders. Fabien Lévy represents a model of today’s
international composer both in his life and his compositional œuvre.
Born in Paris in 1968, he has lived in France, England, Italy, Germany,
and the United States and has been engaged in the different local
music scenes. His delicate music unites influences ranging from spec-
tralism, musique concrète instrumentale, and minimalism to the poly-
rhythmic music of Central Africa and Gagaku of Japan.
Lévy first studied mathematics and economics before finding mentors
in Gérard Grisey, Jean-Claude Risset and Hugues Dufourt. His œuvre,
comprising works for orchestra, vocal and instrumental ensemble, solo
instruments, and electronics shows post-spectral traits in several ways:
it features the composer’s fascination for sound as a sensual experi-
ence with all its complexity, ambiguity, and finally ineffability. Lévy is a
master of surprise, establishing listening expectations only to subvert
them and shift the listener’s attention into another direction. The ear,
Lévy seems to suggest, is as susceptible to illusion as the other senses.
He was led to this attitude not only by research on perception by Risset
but also by his experience with non-Western music. Lévy passionately
explores the diversity of musical cultures of the world. While study-
ing ethnomusicology—in addition to composition, music analysis,
harmony, and orchestration at the Conservatoire National Supérieur
in Paris—he investigated pygmy music in Cameroon. This engagement
taught him that listening is culturally conditioned and hence relative,
an awareness that constantly flows through his own music.
Extra-musical inspirations and sources play a crucial role for Lévy,
and he does not hesitate to share them with the listener, as in À propos
(2008) written for the German ensemble recherche. Each of the four
movements is dedicated to a visual artist: Jeff Wall, Giuseppe Penone,
Alberto Burri, and Tim Hawkinson. Together they form Lévy’s “little
imaginary museum,” as he puts it. The piece also shows his interest
in musical form, representing, for Lévy, the influence of the German
tradition on his musical thinking. In 2001 he first went to Berlin and
remained there until he became Professor of Composition at Columbia
University in New York in 2006. Six years later he moved back to Berlin
as Senior Professor of Composition in Detmold, a historic town with a
well renown conservatory.
As in many other works like durch (1998) and towards the door we
never opened (2013), both for saxophone quartet, rhythm is a dominant
fabien lévyby lydia rilling
porTraiT
31
feature of À propos. The steady regular pulse and the concern with
meter give Lévy’s music the character of flow, of always moving for-
ward. One might hear this as an influence of first generation minimal
music, or as a shadow of Lévy’s earlier engagement with jazz. He
delights in building complex poly-rhythmical structures and uses a
variety of techniques and mathematic models, like cross rhythms and
rhythmic canons. Thanks to this strong, rhythmic dimension his music
is highly accessible to a broad variety of listeners.
With Après tout (2012) for vocal and instrumental ensemble and
live electronics, Lévy composed a 50-minute musical meditation on
the possibilities of forgiving. It was inspired by a debate between the
philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch and a German high school teacher,
Wiard Raveling, about whether it would ever be possible to forgive
after the Third Reich. The topic touches upon the coordinates of Lévy’s
own life as a secular French composer with Jewish roots who lives in
Berlin. At the end of his “grand theater of forgiveness,” he refuses a
moral judgment but leaves it open to the audience to decide whether
forgiving is possible—a powerful statement with a strong impact on
the listener as the first performances in Berlin and Stuttgart showed.
The experience was equally moving for the audience and for the com-
poser himself, as the fine and subtle music succeeded to reach and
deeply affect many listeners who had never been in touch with con-
temporary music before.
One of Lévy’s favorite lessons from Grisey is that composing is
not about producing but about creating. This summarizes his own
musical credo. In a musical world that prioritizes premieres and
always demands more new pieces, Lévy allows himself to focus on
writing very few pieces per year and to develop a new approach for
each one of them. As a result, none follows the same strategy or
method as any others. In Pour Orchestre, written for the orchestra
of Komische Oper Berlin, he deconstructs the traditional symphony
orchestra as a mirror of the Western world with its implied hier-
archies and mechanisms of power. This begins with a “geography
of the ensemble” when the harp and woodwind sections take the
place of the strings, which must instead move to the background.
It continues with the musicians enacting the utopian ideal of a dif-
ferent society, in which 67 individuals interact as equals in a poly-
rhythmic structure.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Fabien Lévy’s music stands out for its
rhythmical delicacy and deep sonic sensitivity, multi-dimensionality
and perceptual richness. No matter how intellectually charged and
philosophically reflected, the music remains playful and joyous, invit-
ing the listener to follow Lévy through his musical world.
32
conteMpor ary MuSicfor educatio on
One of the gems of Editio Musica Budapest (EMB) is its constantly
expanding series of piano pieces by György Kurtág entitled Games. Now
the EMB catalogue is being enriched with two new related publications:
János Bali’s exciting and inspiring work Introduction to the Avant-garde
for Recorder Players and György Orbán’s two-volume, completely indi-
vidual Aulos: Advance-level Piano Pieces for Practising Polyphony.
Beyond their basic differences (range, instruments, and target audi-
ence), the three works share common features, for example, an inten-
sive connection with the music of the past and the stress on impro-
vised elements, but most of all, going far beyond any educational aim,
they enrich the repertoire of contemporary music with significant,
exciting, unmistakably unique-sounding compositions. Furthermore,
they continue a valuable Hungarian tradition, namely: composers of
instrumental tutorials commissioning prominent composers to enrich
their works with new concert pieces. For example, Sándor Reschofszky
approached Béla Bartók to be the co-composer of his Piano Method
(1913). The traditionally strong connection between music composi-
tion and music education can of course be realized in other forms,
as exemplified by the choral works for children of Kodály and Bartók,
those par excellence artistic manifestations which became part of the
music teaching curriculum of Hungarian children and at the same time
entered the international concert repertoire. György Kurtág
by János malina
33
aN
dr
ea Felv
éGi
conteMpor ary MuSicfor educatio on
Kurtág’s Games series bears striking similarities to Bartók’s
Mikrokosmos. Both familiarize the pupils or the musicians playing the
pieces with the music and with the basic experiences and movements
connected with the arts; and at the very beginning both take the child
music student by the hand, but after numerous volumes reach valuable
and even brilliant concert pieces. In the case of Games, these two faces
of the series outwardly and fittingly separate from each other; the first
four volumes, completed in 1979—in the creation of which a legend-
ary piano teacher, Mariann Teöke, participated—primarily serves a
directly educational aim. Over the course of the years further volumes
have been published in succession (four up to today) representing an
even more personal Kurtág genre, as indicated by the sub-title Diary
Entries, Personal Messages. Just as the first volumes contained concert
pieces of full poetic value, which have even become popular in recent
decades, so the second series of Games is not devoid of technically
quite simple, brief compositions, thus making it possible that through
them those who are not professional pianists can enter the shrine of
distinguished art. The second four volumes are simultaneously a per-
sonal portrait gallery of Kurtág. You can hardly find in them a work
which is not a homage to his models, a deceased or still living com-
poser, friend or colleague, or which is not dedicated to such a person.
“Homage” is the key word of these four volumes. Great artists (not
only musicians but also, for example, poets and artists) and figures
quite unknown to the public appear with either their full names or ini-
tials, underlining that ability of György Kurtág to find in everyone that
personal characteristic and unrepeatable quality which gives rise to
a unique and indispensable element of the universe. Connected with
his well-known passion is that he has always worked with and ardently
involved himself with amateurs and musicians whose talent is modest.
The eight volumes of Games now before us show a striking symme-
try and closed format in that both parts end with a volume for four
hands and two pianos (Volumes 4 and 8), though such pieces also
appear sporadically in the other volumes. Meanwhile, Volumes 9 and
10 of the series are already in preparation. However, the greatness of
the series is embedded not only in the structure or the proportions,
but also in the inner richness of the pieces, which in the case of the
first part of the series is primarily manifested in the elucidation of the
piano’s traditional and novel possibilities of resonance, while in the
second part it lies in the limitless diversity of artistic expression, sen-
sitivity, passion, movement, and content which cannot be expressed in
words—precisely as in the case of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.
While György Kurtág is acknowledged primarily as one of the
world’s greatest living composers, János Bali, the author of Introduction
to the Avant-garde, has become noted mainly as a performer (a flute
a connecTion wiTh The pasT, improvisaTion and uniQue sounds for boTh sTudenTs and professional musicians
34
aN
dr
ea F
elv
éGi
player and choirmaster) and as a teacher and outstanding researcher
of the history of the recorder. The particular and perfectly individ-
ual musical conception of Bali, who originally qualified as a math-
ematician, has always been defined by early music, primarily by
Renaissance choral polyphony and Baroque instrumental music, as
well as his intense interest in contemporary music and the avant-
garde. It is worth mentioning that in addition to working with younger,
distinctly avant-garde contemporary composers, as an editor-composer
he has had an intensive working relationship directly with Kurtág and
his works for a long time.
Although the concept of Introduction to the Avant-garde belongs
to János Bali, the work is emphatically a collective creation, since a
significant proportion of the pieces are by other composers: Ádám
Kondor, Gábor Kósa, György Kurtág Jr., Csaba Laurán, Dóra Pétery, Vera
Rönkös, László Sáry, András Soós, Máté Szigeti, and Péter Tornyai. In
one section (Photo and Sound) there is not one single piece, rather
only ideas, instructions for use, and suggestions for transforming the
manifestations of everyday life—from the sound of a concrete mixer
to the chirping of a bird—into a composition. One of the important
characteristics of making music from the small details of reality is Bali’s
way of looking at things, as shown by the enlarged photograph details,
which cause you to reflect, in the first section entitled Drawing and
Sound. This follows in the footsteps of such eminent predecessors as
John Cage and Zoltán Jeney. Besides photographs taken by Olga Kocsi,
Hanna Tillmann’s graphics—sometimes witty, occasionally thought-
provoking or constituting an organic part of the composition—also
form an important part of the volume’s instructions.
Before the Instructions attached to the first volumes of Games,
Kurtág expresses a few words concerning what he would like to
encourage: “Pleasure in playing, the joy of movement—daring and
if need be fast movement over the entire keyboard right from the
first lessons, instead of clumsy groping for keys and the counting of
rhythms …. On no account should the written images be taken seri-
ously, but the written images must be taken extremely seriously
as regards the musical process, the quality of sound and silence.”
Overcoming the music student’s inhibitions and encouraging his/her
creativity are the most important aims of János Bali’s Introduction.
The collection provides varied opportunities for that, from hint-like
instructions for ‘piece generation’ or graphic scores to the most tra-
ditionally recorded, set compositions. The ensembles performing the
pieces also can be varied, from a solo recorder and very different
accessories (a jug of water or mobile phone) all the way to a recorder
sextet. At the same time, similarly to Kurtág, the collection develops
the technical skill of playing the instrument and also teaches a
responsible attitude toward the performed sounds. Although in some
compositions greater emphasis is placed on enthusiastic creativity
than on a secure mastery of the instrument, other pieces require a
high-level of skill in playing the recorder. Thus a good teacher can use
the publication when teaching music students who have the most
diverse grounding. Furthermore, we can
say that for lower-grade recorder teach-
ing, Bali is primarily addressing music
teachers, introducing them to the avant-
garde, giving them advice for the jour-
ney, inspiration, ideas, an open attitude
towards everything new, exciting, and
challenging, which gives support and
help right at the start of the journey.
The versatile and prolific composer
György Orbán is known internation-
ally primarily for his choral works. His
music is always witty and at the same
time it often profoundly touches his
listeners with a cathartic power. For
more than a quarter of a century he
taught composition at the Budapest
Academy of Music, for a decade as
a departmental head. With all cer-
tainty, rigour characterizes him.
György Orbán’s compositions
thoroughly put performers to the
test, be they an amateur choir,
an instrumental soloist, or a solo
singer. However, those who know him personally know that he has an
exceptionally open personality and is blessed with a wonderful sense
of humor, someone who temperamentally cannot compose or teach in
any other way than in the most personal manner on the basis of the
most personal experiences and associations.
Orbán’s Aulos: Piano Pieces for Advanced Players to Practise Polyphony
is an all-embracing personal composition, which was created in the
spirit whereby the manifestation of polyphony and the polyphonic
view of and approach to music present for him a fundamental per-
sonal experience, which has to be shared with others; and part of it is
thanks to his colleague, the devoted piano teacher Ágnes Lakos, whose
talented pupils inspired him to give them more didactic piano works
to help them better understand the wonders of music. The title of the
György Orbán
35
györgy orbán is known...primarily For his choral works. his music is always witty... and at the same time it oFten proFoundly touches his listeners with a cathartic power.
Orbán: Aulos -
Fughetta in A major
36
Recorder
(Tenor-)Recorder-Head
quasi Siciliano
Fújj a leszerelt furulya-fejbe, közben a kezeddel változtasd a másik végén lev nyílás nagyságát!(Ha teljesen nyitva van, magas hangot ad, ha teljesen befogod , mélyet.)Próbáld minél pontosabban utánozni a másik furulyás által játszott hangmagasságokat, dallamokat!
improvizáljmotívumokat!
gyors, rövid hangokdühösen
glissandopossibile
utánozd!
amikormegelégelted
sub
gyors glissandóknagyon lassúglissando
32
Speech therapistfor two recorders
Péter Tornyai
Blow into the removed head, and at the same time alter the size of the aperture at the other end with your hand.(If it is fully open, it gives a high-pitched sound, and if fully covered, a low one. See the picture on p. 29.)Try to imitate as accurately as possible the pitches and tunes played by the other recorder player.
Alto recorder
The head of a tenor recorder
improvise motifs
imitate
fast, short notes, angrily
rapid glissandi
Z. 14 734
glissando
very slow glissando
when you have had enough
14734_Bali_ENG_beliv.indd 32 2013.04.08. 14:14:47
two-volume work refers to the Greek double-reed pipe, known as the
biaulos, which for him in European culture symbolizes the first, uncer-
tain steps on the road of polyphony. The collection of 31 pieces and
two variations also offers short explanations at the start of each vol-
ume and introductions and commentaries for each piece. As he writes:
“The first part of Aulos outlines the main features of the basic genres
of polyphony and their technical procedures. … The second part …
starts off with an inward direction, towards the details. Those technical
approaches are considered in turn, without which polyphonic music
making cannot exist.”
The structure of this collection is more confined than the other two;
it deals with specific musical phenomena, and in its main part con-
structions for the alternate preludes and fugues of Bach’s The Well-
Tempered Clavier can be felt. Confined, yet in every respect irregular.
37
Ba
lázS a
rN
óTh
The alternate pairs of pieces become
greatly imbalanced and are replaced
by three-piece sub-cycles; the number
of pieces is arbitrary; the alignment of
lightly-touched tonality is incomplete;
and in terms of the basic characteris-
tics of polyphony, the canon is missing;
namely the composer “doesn’t like it.”
Perhaps with this point we can quite
understand why the entire series is
primarily about games, a love child, the
creation of which was a pleasure for the composer, such that both the
composer and the pianist could feel absolutely liberated and exempt
from school rules. This motif of playfulness permeates everything
and is present in the most serious moments of the pieces--preludes,
fugues and fughettas, capriccios, fantasias, studies, choral works,
psalms and hymns—as well as in the written commentaries.
Among the three works, Orbán’s work most recalls a type of
textbook, since it demonstrates concepts such as double counter-
point, mirror conversion, the double and triple fugue, cantus firmus,
and complementary rhythm. However, by means of the facilitating
and uniquely sounding commentaries about the demanding pieces,
students mainly feel that someone is speaking personally and is
explaining precisely why polyphony can become an issue of per-
sonal feeling for people.
Behind the three educational undertakings there stand several
decades of teaching experience and three decidedly different person-
alities. At the same time, all three enterprises are uniquely clear and
based on shared convictions. That is to say: music making is an intel-
lectual discovery and adventure, and is an extremely important and
serious matter that bears upon our entire lives, choices, and actions,
and from which we can gain experiences and encouragement which
cannot be compared to anything else. However, all this demands of us
serious-mindedness, concentration, and responsibility.
Translated by Katalin Rácz and Bob Dent
the particular and perFectly individual musical conception oF bali, who originally qualiFied as a mathematician, has always been deFined by early music.
János Bali
38
Baptiste
Trotignon
coMpoSer / pianiSt
39
Jim
my
KaT
z
bapTisTe TroTignon and Jean-frédéric neuburger
Baptiste, when did you begin to compose?
Baptiste: As far as jazz idioms are concerned, I was around 16, when
I started to play with my first jazz groups. I started writing ‘fixed’ piec-
es—that is, things defined by being written down—even if in jazz, ef-
fectively, the notion of being ‘fixed’ is more liberal than in a classical
piece, where in general everything is more controlled.
What was your first classical opus, then?
B: The first piece has to be my piano concerto, called Different
Spaces, because what I was able to write for musicians before, for in-
strumentalists or strings for example, who played something and didn’t
improvise, was still more or less in a jazz context, a suite for orchestra
or rather for jazz quintet and small orchestra.
Jean-Frédéric, your first pieces date from when?
Jean-Frédéric: I started to write around about 10 or 11 years old.
They were in fact pastiches of repertoire pieces: ‘faux’ Mozart or ‘faux’
Chopin, things like that, things that I was working on at the time. My
first proper works which could be played in public—which however I
completely reject now because they were not mature from a technical,
structural or, obviously, stylistic point of view—date from when I was
17 years old at the end of my conservatory studies.
Did the passage towards writing seem to you a natural continuation
of your activity as a musician?
B: Yes, even more so since, even if we do not play the same kind of
music, Jean-Frédéric is like me; we have continued to play a great deal.
It was just something that seemed to be part of the natural flow of
music-making, in fact.
Baptiste, it is therefore about three years that you have been both
composer and performer. How has that impacted on your life as a
performer?
B: There are times when I have few concerts when I take advantage
of this to spend time just writing and when I only touch the piano with
an eraser, a pencil, and paper. In any case, I do not work at the piano
coMpoSer / pianiSt
a conversation led by eric denut
40
in this period, because I know I can allow myself that time. I have no
concerts for three weeks, a month, for example, which is rare, but I try
to use these times to devote myself to writing.
Jean-Frédéric, your timetable is like Baptiste’s, so I imagine that
when you have the time you make use of it?
J-F: For me it is rather like Baptiste. However, I manage to arrange
free periods quite often in fact, at the expense of refusing lots of
things. For example, I try now to have a whole month off at least twice a
year. Just now, I shall have August and December, for example, which is
already very good. And then the rest of the time, I often have ten days,
a fortnight …. Then what often happens in my case is that a composing
project starts to take shape a long time before I get down to writing the
piece itself. And often that happens after a long period of improvisa-
tion. That could equally be at home or in a concert hall, and I improvise
very regularly, obviously, like all composer-pianists. And then it is not
necessarily the object to have ideas but sometimes they arrive none-
theless and so suddenly one day a composing project is born, and then
effectively at that moment I find it is always good to have some paper
not far away, paper in my rucksack, at the hotel, no matter where, and
to write down half a page of music or a sketch; you think about it again
ten days or a fortnight later, even six months later. Having done the
piece that had to be done because it was a little bit late, well, then you
go back to it, and in a month or so it becomes a piece for piano, a piano
quintet, a piece for orchestra ….
B: When they decide to come, these ideas, you jot them down. And
then, for me, for a while now I have sometimes used mini gadgets like
the dictaphone that you have on your mobile …. sometimes for exam-
ple you are doing the sound-check at a concert and something comes
into your fingers—“Ah, that’s not bad, that works”—and you know that
you will never remember it the following day, so you record it, and then
afterwards you take the time, to see if you can write it down, if it is
worth the trouble to make something of it. Sometimes nothing comes
of it, and sometimes it can be the source of …
J-F: … Sometimes it can be very good.
Is the act of composing in some way a means of getting into plurality?
B: As far as I am concerned, for the moment in the domain of jazz-
performer as I am, I have worked on many other different styles pre-
cisely in order to find my own, perhaps. In so far as being a classical
composer, I have not had time to do that much with regard to the 500
years of musical history. I took classes in compositional techniques but
I have not really had the leisure and the time to study deeply many
fields other than jazz. I believe I still have many subtleties to learn
about in the stylistic domain, a little more than in jazz where I have had
the time to cover different types of writing a bit more.
I do not remember having read any reviews that said that since Jean-
Frédéric started spending an average of two months of every year
composing, that had radically changed his view of the Années de
pèlerinage, but have you yourself felt a difference, maybe in your
relationship with the composers whose works you premiere, notably
concertos? Have you noticed any changes?
J-F: It is perhaps more true in the way in which I approach the works
of my colleagues, for example Philippe Manoury or recently Christian
Lauba, different composers; and it is a pleasure precisely because I am
sensitive to trying to
understand all the dif-
ferent aesthetics, that
is to say almost one
aesthetic per composer.
In this context, therefore,
I think that my work has
improved in terms of ef-
ficiency, maybe not for
the classical and romantic
repertoire, but because
the fact that I have studied
for five years particularly
lots of modern and con-
temporary works means
that I appreciate better and
more quickly the structure
of the piece that I am going
to premiere—what are the
main points that have to be
emphasised, what is impor-
tant from an aesthetic point of
view in this piece—and therefore I get closer to the heart of the score. I
think that this is a benefit for giving the premiere of pieces.
A question about your instrument. One notices that some composer-
pianists and keyboard players become “real” composers, but that
this is rather less common for other instrumentalists. Is the key-
board therefore a real advantage?
B: The fact of knowing how to play the piano at least quite well,
knowing how to play the piano ... helps with writing ... even iF it is occasionally Flagrant that .. . certain things are unplayable on the piano, whereas they work brilliantly For the quartet
41
riK
ima
ru
ho
TTa
that helps with writing and with being effec-
tive, even if it is occasionally obvious that with
a string quartet certain things are unplayable
on the piano whereas they work brilliantly
for the quartet. In the world of jazz, often the
great arrangers are wind players, on the one
hand because they often play in big bands,
so they are trumpeters, trombonists, and on
the other hand because they, unlike us, have
the experience of being part of an orchestra
and of seeing how their part sounds with
the others. It is something that one can
only imagine or dream of as a pianist. Even
when one writes something running, fast,
you do not need to play fast when you
write at the piano.
J-F: But it is not a bad thing to listen to
it at the tempo it will really be. We can
do that too.
And is there also a disadvantage?
B: When I began work on the con-
certo, I saw a harpist, and other spe-
cific instrumentalists, a violinist I have
often worked with, a flautist, a horn
player …. As far as experienced in-
strumentalists like Jean-Frédéric or
I are concerned, who stay in their
own world, and who move into the
world of composing one way or
another, the problem is that when
you write, you have all the preoc-
cupations of a performer because
we know what playing music is
all about. Now, amongst contem-
porary composers, all styles considered, even if they are all more or
less instrumentalists at the outset, are there not some composers who
have lost the physical relationship with an instrument and who do not
put themselves in the place of the musician who will play the piece,
whether it is the first violin or the third horn? Whereas we, because
of our activity as performers, are constantly confronted with what it is
to play an instrument, with its joys and pains, its thrills and struggles
too. Perhaps that makes a difference in the writing, without necessarily
having to think about it, because one is confronted with that regularly
and that is part of what one puts into the score.
J-F: It is a kind of second nature when you write—I am talking here
about writing for the piano, not for the first violin or the third horn,
which one manages as well, obviously, or a passage without piano solo.
I often go to the piano; I try things out, and I notice that what I have
worked out at the table or during several days of writing is nonetheless
a bit difficult, and I prune it. I cut back—let’s say—9% of the difficulty.
B: I often do that. You start with the idea, and then when you realize
that it is a bit overloaded.
J-F: Therefore, if you feel that 80% of pianists will be caught out at
a particular place which is precisely a beautiful moment, it is better to
take the line of simplifying a little, even if it is a bit of a shame, and to
tell yourself that 85% of pianists will play the right notes.
B: It may not be a shame at all if you know that it will sound better,
because there will not be a ‘smudge’. In that case, it is not just a ques-
tion of better realization but also of better sound.
J-F: That’s to say that one knows where the danger spots are where
the pianist could slip up, even if it is already good.
B: I realized with Nicholas Angelich, who played my concerto and
who is an accomplished pianist whether it is from the point of view
of technique or sonority, that I knew how far I could go. Nonetheless,
after the premiere I made a few corrections, not much to add to the
piano, apart from one or two places where, great virtuoso though he is,
I wondered if I ought to make a change given that just afterwards there
is a pianissimo, so I removed three grace notes that no one was going
to hear, just to make the pianissimo easier. On paper it might seem a
shame, but in the end it will sound better because the pianissimo will
work better. It is therefore extremely interesting when one is writing to
ask oneself these questions, the relation with effectiveness, not in the
marketing sense of the term, but from the point of view of the result,
so that the latter becomes more poetic.
And there you have a certain competitive advantage over your col-
leagues who do nothing other than compose?
J-F: Not necessarily.
B: I wonder about that, and it is almost more an answer than a ques-
tion, which is not to say that it is exclusive to us.
… the monopoly of the anticipation of realization …
B: Yes, finally, is it not more interesting when one has a physical rap-
port with an instrument to put that into the writing? That’s rather what
I was trying to say. Translated by Patricia Alia
Jean-Frédéric
Neuburger
42
Permeated by a desire to explore the trajectories of the degradation
of material sound, impregnated with the atmosphere of psychedelic
rock and the obsessive gestures of techno, direct, visionary, yet at the
same time calculated right down to the last detail, admirably written, the
music of Fausto Romitelli strikes one right from the start for the qualities
of its style and the energy of its expression. To present it here we’ll make
use of some key concepts or key terms, taken for the most part from the
lexicon with which Romitelli himself represented it: sound, modernity,
high and low, degeneration, paroxysm, and profundity.
Sound
Anyone who had the good fortune to meet Romitelli probably still
has the impression of hearing him pronounce this word, suono, with
that highly characteristic intonation of his, drawing out the “o” with
a satisfied resonance. When he used to listen to the music of oth-
ers, the sound was the first thing (and sometimes the last) that his
attention fell upon. He conceived a substantial part of his job as a
composer as an attempt to put its energy to work. He drew inspiration
from the about-turn effected by the composers of the Itinéraire, in
fauSto roMitelli :
Six keywordS
drawn from romiTelli’s own descripTions of his music
by alessandro arbo
43
the music oF Fausto romitelli strikes one right From the start with the qualities oF its style and the energy oF its expression.
the wake of other important 20th-century composers. Much
more than “compose with sounds,” what was at issue, for
him, was to “compose sound,” a formula which should not,
however, draw us into error. In fact, on listening to Romitelli’s
music, one quickly appreciates that “composing the sound”
was not an end, but rather a means—without doubt the most
important—to open a window on the world. He himself said
this on numerous occasions. Composition was for him a vision-
ary practice and at the same time an instrument for taking cog-
nizance of reality, almost a kind of probe, capable of registering
the reactions and mutations in our sensibility. However suspect
the word “expression” might have appeared to him (in fact, it
used to horrify him, perhaps because he immediately associated
it with what appeared to him like the cheap pathos of New Age
or Neo-impressionism), it is perhaps the most suitable to illus-
trate this intent. Because the sound of Fausto Romitelli—a sound
that does not hide but, on the contrary, flaunts its artificial, syn-
thetic nature, that presents itself right from the start as filtered,
degraded and even dirty, but that is also able to be magnetic and
extraordinarily seductive—is one of the most sincere and refined
expressions of a manner we have of feeling and reacting in a world
ever more crammed with technology, crisscrossed by the flows of
planetary communication, and the violent homogenizing forces of
the global market.
44
Modernity
It would be nice to be able to avoid such an old and compromising
term as modernity. But I think that this would be, if not impossible,
then inopportune, not just because this was a term to which, in spite of
everything, Romitelli used to often make recourse, but because, accom-
panied by a necessary clarification, it continues to fulfil an important
function. On listening to Romitelli’s works one cannot not be struck by
the innumerable musical influences that are incorporated within them,
from Strauss to Grisey, from Hendrix to Pink Floyd, to David Bowie, to
Sonic Youth, Aphex Twin, Pan Sonic. How can one not suspect, behind
such a heterogeneous network of references, that typically post-mod-
ern trait: the carefree pleasure of interweaving, reshuffling the cards on
the table, hybridizing, contaminating or parodying the works and tradi-
tions from the immense global musical library? Instead, such thoughts
could not be further from the intentions of a composer who never
abandoned the idea of reflecting on language, aware of the impossibil-
ity of saying new things with old formulas and of the fact that, at the
end of the day, “the composer is the language that he creates.” It’s true
that in the work of Romitelli this principle does not transmute into the
rigid, unilateral vision of progress that had characterized the historic
avant-gardes; but it nonetheless constitutes an essential chromosome
of its DNA. Looking around, absorbing the influences that serve to
strengthen its persuasiveness, Romitelli’s music never holds back from
creating its own language and, with this, its own world.
High and Low
For better or worse, this dual concept has marked the evolution
of the entire history of Western music. Although the nature of the
encounter between the traditions of serious music (from stile antico
to the musiques savantes) and those of popular music, whether rural
or urban, has not been straightforward, we can perhaps represent it,
at least in terms of the framework of references in which Romitelli
positioned himself, as a field of forces in which each pole causes the
other to gravitate towards it, continually relaunching two major atti-
tudes. In the first, what is recognized as “low” remains external, and it
manifests itself in its specific difference. One could define this as the
strategy of exoticism and immediately call to mind some well-known
examples, from the tziganeries of Haydn or Brahms to the Spanish
rhythms of Debussy. In the second, what is “low” is a humus from
which a vital lifeblood is drawn. This is the strategy of assimilation and
of Durchkomponieren, and here too there immediately come to mind
many important examples: from the manner in which Corelli or Vivaldi
allowed their writing to be populated by dance rhythms, to the sonic
invention of Beethoven, who drew his inspiration from the streets of
Vienna’s quarters, to Mahler’s sinfonismo, impregnated with Ländler
and fanfares. Romitelli’s music can immediately be recognized as an
expression of this latter strategy. From the sonorities of psychedelic
rock, ambient electronics, or techno, it draws an energy, an emotive
impact, a gestuality, and a visionary force in stark contrast with the
anemia of academic sound. This absorption goes hand in hand with a
desire to elaborate a distinctive harmonic vocabulary capable of hold-
ing in check the clichés of consumer music. But what happens later is
that, once they are assimilated, the “low” materials vivify the musical
body proper and definitively modify its physiognomy. In this way it
comes about that a viola expresses itself like an electric guitar, or that
the sound of a bass instrument comes to form part of a complex and
inharmonious sonic monad, or that a loop constrains an entire orches-
tra to derail. High and low are not only placed one next to the other,
but they merge together in a musical result that is no longer either
high or low, and is certainly not a middle way between the two either.
In the end, the image that best represents the matter is that of an alloy
forged from two or more metals: an original material that contains a
number of properties that cannot be reduced to the elements of which
it is composed.
in a state oF trance, in hallucination, in the arrangement oF the senses oF a light show, the conFines between the real and the imaginary become blurred, and it is precisely in these territories that this music intends to dwell.
45
Profundity
As if constituting a lesson in spectralism, Romitelli’s music works
on thresholds, transforming harmony into an instrument that gener-
ates sound and unheard-of temporal processes, exploring its borders
with inharmoniousness and noise. Its originality consists in bringing
this démarche to paroxysm, pursuing the excesses and shifts of feel-
ing. The psychedelic nature of progressive rock to which it so read-
ily makes recourse is one of the means that permits it to draw atten-
tion to its border zones, as one sees clearly in the major works. In a
state of trance, in hallucination, in the arrangement of the senses of a
light show, the confines between the real and the imaginary become
blurred, and it is precisely in these territories that this music intends to
dwell. In a certain way one could say that, without the will to explore
these border zones, there would be no Romitelli style, a style in which
there is a precise balance between a candid pleasure in discovery and
a fundamental critical intent. The intention to dirty the bel suono, to
bend the real with the prospect of producing an altered perception,
can in fact be related back to an anti-rhetorical will and, at the same
time, to a need to touch on one of the crucial features of the current
consumer civilization. “Today,” Romitelli observed in an interview, “the
world seems to be a metaphor of the vanity and smallness of each
one of us. Individual existential problems are amplified by those of an
epoch that does not offer any point of reference, but, instead, only an
extreme dehumanization and denaturalization.” The broad design of
Professor Bad Trip (1998–2000) can be interpreted not just as a les-
son imparted by the underground to contemporary art music but as
the allegory of an existential situation in which it is often difficult to
distinguish the difference between simulation and reality and where
the synthetic product ends up appearing to us more true than the natu-
ral. The abandonment of sonic naturalism reaches its apex in Trash TV
Trance (2002), a piece for electric guitar which recalls the gestuality
of Hendrix and the noise of Sonic Youth. Everything here is noise and
saturation, almost as if it were the unseemly symbol of the immense
mass of media rubbish that surrounds us, with visionary effects deriv-
ing from the action produced on strings by objects of every kind—bow,
coin, sponge, razor—capable of rendering the final result even more
saturated and unseemly. In Romitelli’s music this paroxysm expresses
a utopia of feeling that unsentimentally denounces the consequences
of the communication society.
Degeneration
In many of Romitelli’s compositions, what seem to assume the con-
tours of simple linear processes undergo corrosions or torsions that
completely deform their appearance. Behind the most simple material,
like the three-note motif that opens Amok koma (2001), or the Strauss-
like motif in Audiodrome (2002-2003), there lurk uncontrolled shifts.
Repetition, inharmoniousness, saturation, distortion, loops all become
instruments to bring about this metamorphosis of discursive elements
that suddenly seem to derail, to jam, unveiling an unexpected violence.
As has been said, precisely where the music of others generally devel-
ops, Romitelli’s degenerates. This is a trait that he was very proud of, and
rightly so, because this feature constitutes one of the major gambles of
his music. To make degeneration a positive value is risky. The danger of
finding oneself having struck a pose, in the presence of a superficial-
ity of a generically alternative (“dark”) attitude is always lying in wait.
Perhaps not everything that Romitelli wrote escapes this trap, but his
great works demonstrate clearly the extent to which his music has been
able to assume the negative contours of disintegration, of degenera-
tion, drawing from these paradoxical and extreme situations a sincere
emotion. Mercifully, we don’t need to read Adorno to remain enthralled
when listening to Professor Bad Trip. In the energy of its overexposed
sound, in the dilation of its hallucinated landscapes, one is aware of a
stupor still intact: an authentic poetry that pulses in the midst of ruin.
Paroxysm
There is one feature that today more than any other seems to
me to mark the music of Fausto Romitelli: its profundity. His writ-
ing, in putting to work the disintegration of sonic material, renders
visible a desire to transcend every preoccupation with virtuosity or
instrumental technique, in order to express something essential. In
his works, behind those so often ironic or cryptic titles there lies an
obstinate will to work in earnest. This music exudes a need to not be
satisfied, to go right to the bottom of things. On listening to it one has
the impression that the false icons of the media-dominated world are
breaking to pieces, undermined by an awareness of the vanity of all
things. The result, all things considered, is music of great profundity, a
quality by no means common in the musical production of the initial
part of this millennium.
Translated by Nicholas Crotty
46
STeF
aN
Fo
rST
er
Sirenen – Bilder des Begehrens und des Vernichtens (Sirens—Images
of desire and destruction) is the title of a new opera by Rolf Riehm.
Nothing can be presented accurately in one format alone, the com-
poser argues, so he has written an opera that tends toward installa-
tion, a plot in solitary images, a music with sampling technique. The
premiere will take place at the Oper Frankfurt on September 14, 2014.
Rolf Riehm, how did you get into music?
My parents were musicians as well. One of my liveliest childhood
memories is me sitting next to my father who used to play Liszt, Chopin,
and Brahms for hours and hours. I grew up on virtuoso piano music.
That was my first musical Eldorado. It was much later when Mozart,
Bach, or Beethoven got through to me.
What is your inspiration?
I like to think of myself as a composer stimulated by political events
and conditions. But right now while saying this, on the internet I’m
witnessing the protest on the Taksim Square in Istanbul. That’s not a
heated up poster holding and slogan shouting mass. Instead it’s just a
fragmented gathering of people standing there in silence like figures
by Stephan Balkenhol.
Statements or appeals are not as important anymore. Today the
political attitude has become part of the artifact itself. As a composer
I’m imbedded in a historic context, whether I like that or not. I want to
use that as an inspiration for my compositions.
Who are your role models among directors in the theatre world?
There are some movie directors that had a strong impact on
me, directors like Godard (Passion), Passolini (Teorema, Accatone,
Il vangelo secondo Matteo), Bertolucci, Billy Wilder (my favorite!).
Speaking of theatres, the early works of Robert Wilson really do
impress me; and also Christoph Nel (Salome ) through his staging
of Tristan and Isolde I finally realized what a phenomenal lyricist
Wagner actually was, Achim Freyer (Handel’s Ariodante), Jürgen
Sirenena new opera
rolf riehm in frankfurTby till knipper
Rolf Riehm
Sirenen
47
Sirenena new opera
48
Sketch by Rolf
Riehm for Sirenen
49
Gosch (Le Nozze di Figaro) and Heiner Goebbels with his theatrical
shift towards visuals.
How would you describe your own aesthetic in music theater?
At the moment I’m working on my opera Sirens, which will be pre-
miered in Frankfurt. The narrative focal point is the saga The Odyssey,
with Odysseus trying to impress the Phaeacian aristocracy with his
adventures. Above all, the encounter with the goddess Circe and the
beautifully singing but deadly Sirens resonate with audiences. Circe is
fascinating because she madly adores Odysseus although he left her
and her island with a flimsy excuse; and the Sirens because they lure
the passing seamen with deadly force only to kill them in a masquer-
ade of beauty and passion.
I want the musicians to be infected by the passion I put into my
work, and I’d like them to discover something new about themselves.
Concerning the audience, I’d like to see the audience being carried
away by the story and the music just as it happened to Circe, the Sirens,
and Odysseus. Last, but not least, I’d be delighted if the immediate
presence of my music made clear that: Circe, the Sirens, Odysseus—
these are all mythological characters, but in principle they are repre-
sentations of us being threatened with drowning in conflicts of love,
desire, treason, farewell, and death.
Which stage design do you prefer?
I neither demand a historically correct stage design nor any kind of
daily political update. But I wouldn’t consider a parallel layer of the story
evoked by the design of the stage problematic. Constellations are out-
lined by my musical compositions, but of course some kind of trans-
formation is inevitable in order to bring it on stage. The specific details
have to evolve during the production. Taking my recent opera Sirens as
an example, I imagine that the disruption that transcends my music, the
characters, as well as the whole story can be experienced in every little
aspect and layer. Therefore I encourage light, story, and lyrics to find their
own way into my composition and, if appropriate, become individual
parts of it. At the end of the day presentation shouldn’t be reduced to a
means of illustration, instead, it should tie a semantic network together.
statements or appeals are not as important anymore. today the political attitude has become part oF the artiFact itselF. as a composer i’m imbedded in a historic context whether i like that or not. i want to use that as an inspiration For my compositions.
50
it was in paris that he First came Face to Face
with the music and writings oF John cage.
on the basis oF this experience [he decided]
composition could only be valid iF it was
coupled with a radical separation From
the traditional notion oF music.
51
Hungarian Contemporary music, having broken free from the cap-
tivity of Stalinist ideology and having become approximately equal
with the more moderate elements of Western European develop-
ments, was given space in Hungary in the 1960s, reflecting the post-
1956 easing. To verify its own liberalism, Hungarian cultural policy
was shown off abroad with this official “contemporary music,” while
at the same time the younger generation had already appeared and
did not seem willing to fit into the music history constructed by the
state. These students of composition were not satisfied with courses
based mainly on classical and Hungarian traditions offered by the
Academy of Music and wanted to create their compositions follow-
ing the world’s most up-to-date practices of the time. From 1970
the group of composers and performers who became known as the
New Music Studio, with László Vidovszky (b. 1944) as its co-founder,
attributed a greater importance to American minimal music than to
European dodecaphony and serialism, which had been bypassed
in Hungary. It wasn’t only due to the origin of this music that the
Studio got into the “tolerated” zone in the eyes of the Communist
state, but also because American contemporary music did not display
the intention to be a continuation of music history; namely it denied
the modernist idea of historic continuity and the belief in progress,
which was the sine qua non of
Communist ideology.
The formation of the Studio
almost exactly coincided with the
end of László Vidovszky’s study
trip to Paris. Although in Paris the
young composer could attend
Messiaen’s lessons on composition,
he received more direct inspiration
from the courses of the Group de
Recherches Musicales led by Pierre
Schaeffer, primarily via the varied
supply of international avant-garde
art that was unknown in Hungary.
It can be attributed to these experi-
ences that from among the members
of the Studio, Vidovszky proved to be
the most open in terms of cooperation
with avant-garde groups representing
other branches of the arts. For one thing,
it was in Paris that he first came face to
face with the music and writings of John
Cage. On the basis of this experience Vidovszky concluded that by that
time, composition could only be valid if it was coupled with a radi-
cal separation from the conventional notion of music. From then on,
Vidovszky abandoned the traditional dramaturgy of European music
and its related musical architecture and treatment of time, and, when
he returned to them, he did so in the spirit of irony.
Vidovszky’s first published piece, Duo, composed for two pianos,
displays the characteristics of the traces of the rift caused by the new
realization. The first version has a traditional sound and notation, while
the second version (1972), composed after his experience in Paris, uses
the prepared piano, echoing Cage. And given that the bar lines indi-
cate seconds, the score transfers its reference point to concrete time
instead of musical time. His work using electronics entitled 405 (1972)
MacHine poetry
The music of lászló vidovszkyby miklós dolinszky
ilo
Na
KeS
erü
52
Schroeder’s Death :
A graphic table of
the sixty-one
six-octave scales
53
shows that, in terms of this new thinking, for him the composer’s
task is primarily to decide what he regards as music in a given case.
In this case the tonal system was provided by recoding a text writ-
ten by the contemporary Hungarian avant-garde writer Dezső Tandori
to sounds, which then the performers could handle with formerly
unknown liberty. So the resulting improvisation is not the result of
an different conception, but actually that of the structure’s objective
serenity. Improvisation became included in the Studio’s activity not
from European aleatory, but from American experimental music, and
in this quality it was given a key role which was partly included in their
own compositions, partly in the form of joint practices. In the 1970s
improvisation was politically by no means an innocent artistic practice
in Hungary. It was regarded as suspicious not only by the Communist
state, but also by proponents of the then prevailing Kodály music edu-
cation, either because it threatened the status quo with the uncon-
trollable nature of freedom or because it represented an instrumental
practice which was precisely the opposite of Kodály’s concept regard-
ing the primacy of music for singing.
Vidovszky’s emblematic Auto-concert (1972) was composed at the
same time. The piece is undoubtedly a concert piece since musical
instruments take part, and undoubtedly ‘automatic’ since no one
plays the instruments. They provide sounds
themselves by falling down at a given
time. Regarding its form of appearance,
it is close to American performances;
however, while the latter are mostly the
counter-effects of over-rationalised social
behavioral forms recalling Dadaism of
the early 20th century, Vidovszky’s work
is purely the instrumentation of fate.
Unlike those who detect black humour
or cultural pessimism in Auto-concert,
Vidovszky rejects all symbolic inter-
pretation. György Ligeti’s ceremonial
Poème symphonique (1962) lets the law of gravity gradually silence the
metronomes, while in Vidovszky’s work, assistants in the background
hasten the unavoidable. It seems that the variety of possible interpreta-
tions did not hinder, but rather generated international success. (There
were performances in London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, Lisbon, and
Warsaw.) Vidovszky’s oeuvre now and then includes audiovisual works
(Movie, 1993; Black Quartet, 1993-7). However, they do not represent the
main line of his work, and their visuality often cannot be distinguished
from the visual effects of “normal” concert pieces.
The piece for piano Schroeder’s Death, inspired by a cartoon charac-
ter of American pop culture, can be included in the latter. It was writ-
ten in the year of Auto-concert but completed in 1975, and it became
Vidovszky’s most often played composition internationally. In the work
Vidovszky employs the prepared piano in the service of the known
dramaturgy of degradation and deconstruction. The sheet music of the
work contains sixty-one six-octave scales, and the preparation, which
is done in line with a chronology fixed in advance, gradually distorts,
then silences the sound of the piano, while the pianist continues
playing. The monotony of the approximately 40 minutes of music—
somewhat similarly to Satie’s pioneering work Vexations, lasting 24
hours—completely destroys the century-old expectations of listeners
the sheet music oF the work contains sixty-one six-octave scales, and the preparation, which is done in line with a chronology Fixed in advance, gradually distorts, then silences the sound oF the piano, while the pianist continues playing.
54
of European music. Yet, among others, it is one of Satie’s adaptations
that returns to the principle idea of Schroeder; here the written notes
also remain silent in the absence of preparation, except for one (Autres
gymnopédies III, 1994). The idea is carried on in
other works, such as in the fictitious viola solo
in The Death in my Viola (1996-2005), which
the instrumentalist plays without sounds, or
in Soft Errors (1989). The latter is the result
of an accidental computer crash in a techni-
cal sense; its real message, however, is again
the degradation of the musical process up
to the point when the viola with its lonely
quartered movement leaves last.
The demand for automatically produced
music, a performer becoming a machine,
actually emerges by including outside con-
trol systems in the creative process. No
wonder that Vidovszky’s attention turned
to the mechanical piano as early as the
late 1970s when he heard Nancarrow’s
relevant works. Yet by the time he actu-
ally would have had the opportunity to
get involved with the late successor of the mechanical pianos of the
early 20th century, the instrument could be linked with computers via
MIDI programs, so Une semaine de beauté and the Duchamp-like enti-
tled work Mechanical Bride’s Dance were created with a piano-roll MIDI
editorial program. Here again Vidovszky is interested in eliminating
the performer, not only because in this way it is the instrument itself
which is present instead of the performer (similarly to Auto-concert),
but because he does not have to be concerned about the performer’s
physical limitations. Nor did Vidovszky hesitate to broaden his experi-
ence with the mechanical piano; the live pianist communicates with
the pre-programmed instrument in his chamber pieces Le piano et son
double (1992) and Loco-dances (1995).
The instrument playing without human intervention is a peculiar
spectacle when works for a mechanical piano are performed in concert
halls. They preserve something of the theatrical character that Auto-
concert or Schroeder’s Death represent in an increased manner. It is not
surprising that Vidovszky quickly found the connection with the world
of theatre. Of his numerous works composed for the stage, the music
created for Péter Nádas’s tragedy Encounter (presented in Vienna,
London, Paris, Avignon, and elsewhere) is in a special situation since
the places where the music sounded, and the number of instruments,
were determined by the playwright himself. The music was an organic
part of the dramatic concept. Thus the musicians, limited to a solo vio-
lin, harp, and percussion, became simultaneous and equal participants
of the prose dialogues and highlighted their long silences by their
minimized shifts of movement.
In this light it may be surprising that Vidovszky composed only a
single independent work for the stage. In the case of the chamber
opera Narcissus and Echo (1980-81), it is not the theatre but film which
is in the background. This one-act masterpiece is an extended version
of the music written for Gábor Bódy’s film Psyche. Vidovszky treated
the historic period of the film’s story span as a musical source. The
characteristic idioms of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s dance and
salon music appear in the parts of the accompanying ensemble, which
seems like a salon and jazz orchestra combination, in the form of con-
crete quotes or mainly of distant stylistic imitations. However, with the
finishing choir, minimal music in the strict structure of a mensuration
canon is included in the panoptic music history.
Narcissus and Echo opens the way for Vidovszky’s ‘inter-textual’
works. These compositions in some way contain quotations from
music history spanning from Machaut to Satie. Vidovszky says about
Romantic Readings, written for a chamber orchestra in 1983 then for a
the instrument playing without human intervention is a peculiar spectacle when works For a mechanical piano are perFormed in concert halls. they preserve something oF the theatrical character that AUTo-CoNCeRT or SCHRoeDeR’S DeATH represent in an increased manner.
55
symphonic orchestra (it was presented by the Ensemble Modern and
the Suisse Romande) in which orchestral parts by popular 19th-cen-
tury composers form a new polyphonic pattern: “To read is a peculiar
and great thing. You can connect to live thoughts while remaining iso-
lated, entirely maintaining your independence and personal attention.
It is not bound to space as a work of art or to time as a piece of music.”
This dual relationship is actually true for all of Vidovszky’s composi-
tions in which he uses borrowed material. The need to review tradition
and step back from it, revealing common roots, manifests itself at the
same time. The original composition is squeezed out by the comments
gained from it in such pieces as Following Machaut (1998) or Machaut-
comments (2000); elsewhere, however, because of their reshaping,
it remains easily recognizable (German Dances, 1989, or the already
mentioned Autres gymnopédies). At the same time, this group of works
that can be sharply separated from the others clearly marks a shift of
the entire New Music Studio, the response given to the shortness of
breath of the avant-garde movement, but in the same way a resolute
stand taken against new tonality and new romanticism.
At the turn of the millennium a certain move towards classicism
can be seen in Vidovszky’s compositions. Not only does the irony
of experimental works disappear, but a series of a comprehensive
nature is written entitled Zwölf Streichquartette (2001). Although the
language of the title consciously refers to the great German string
quartet tradition, calling up the past makes Vidovszky do some seri-
ous creative reckoning, interpreting the universality of the quartet
genre as a conscious inventory of his own compositional means in
such a way that he assesses compositional procedures or ways of
playing in an étude manner. The sound that is becoming on the whole
more consonant does not lead towards turning back to tonality, but
to a balance of consonance and dissonance. Yet not only the sound
but the avant-garde and traditional variations of notation and string
styles of playing also become balanced. However, his Violin-radio
Sonata (2001) does not turn absolutely in the direction of classicism.
Rather it recalls the experimental period. The title Souvenir d’ASch
(2006) for a string sextet simultaneously refers to Schönberg’s Die
verklärte Nacht and recalls one of Schumann’s cryptograms. The parts
often sounding independently from one another in Reverb (for string
quartet and piano), composed in response to a commission from
Klangforum Wien in 2011, echo each other via phase delay and thus
multiply the sounding space while looking for an answer to the com-
poser’s question: “Can lost time be returned with the help of space?”
Translated by Katalin Rácz and Bob Dent
56
Four-time Oscar nominee Alexandre Desplat (b. 1961) is one of the
most acclaimed composers of his generation. It was his joint passion for
music and cinema that led him firmly in the direction of composition
for film and to create a new and unique voice in film music. Alexandre
Desplat’s approach to film composition is not only based on his strong
musicality, but also on his understanding of cinema, which allows
him to communicate well with directors. He believes that a great film
score should find a balance between function and fiction. Function will
ensure that the music fits well into the mechanics of the film but the
fiction can tap into the invisible—the deep psychology and emotions
of the characters, creating a “vibration.”
Under the mixed cultural influence of a Greek mother and a French
father who met and studied in California, he was classically trained as a
flautist, but extended his musical interests much further into the worlds
of jazz, Brazilian and African music. As a teenager, Alexandre Desplat
spent hours in movie theatres studying the great films and directors of
the 20th century and, of course, listening intently to the scores. Delerue,
Jarre, Rota, Waxman, Herrmann, Mancini, Williams, and Goldsmith
became his idols. He began his career in Europe, and throughout the
1990s he wrote more than 50 scores to great critical acclaim.
Early in his career he met his wife, the violinist Dominique
Lemonnier, who became his favorite soloist and artistic collaborator.
They developed a close artistic partnership, which enabled Alexandre
to create a unique style of writing for strings. This led to the formation
franÇoiS MeÏMoun
alexandredeSplat &
57
of the Traffic Quintet (string ensemble), for which he has written and
transcribed some of his favorite film scores for concert performance
together with excerpts of Pascal Dusapin’s Medeamaterial.
In June 2013, Universal Music Publishing Classical, Editions Durand,
was proud to welcome Desplat to its prestigious French catalogues
with his first symphonic work for flute and orchestra, premiered by
Jean Ferrandis and the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire con-
ducted by John Axelrod.
Born in 1979, François Meïmoun studied at the Conser-vatoire
National Supérieur de Musique de Paris with Michael Levinas, at the
Sorbonne-Paris IV University, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.
His works are played by numerous soloists and ensembles—
Armand Angster, Quatuor Benaïm, Quatuor Ardeo, Alain Billard, Florian
Frère, Chen Halevi, Sébastien Vichard—and programmed in French
festivals such as Chaillol Festival, La Chaise-Dieu Festival, Cabaret
Contemporain, Rencontres de la Prée, Centre Beaubourg, Journées
Proquartet, and foreign festivals such as the Berlin Zeitkunst Festival.
He was in residence at the Abbaye de la Prée from 2011-12 and in resi-
dence at the Chaillol Festival for which he composed Tara after a text by
Antonin Artaud. This work is part of a musical monograph project around
Artaud, meant to illustrate the thought of the poet. He started his collabo-
ration with Editions Durand, one of Universal Music Publishing Classical’s
French catalogues, with his second quartet titled untitled – selon pollock,
which was premiered in July 2013 at the Aix Festival. François Meïmoun
is currently writing his third quartet for the ProQuartet association.
© d
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François
Meïmoun
Alexandre
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58
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Sad
aS)
/ c
iTe
de
la m
uSi
qu
e (p
ar
ra
)
Edgar , Act IV -
José Cura, Amarilli
Nizza (Fidelia),
Carlo Cigni
(Gualtiero),
Marco Vratogna
(Frank), Julia
Gertseva
59
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) is one of the most
popular of all opera composers. Yet Puccini’s enor-
mous success, combined with his tendency toward
experimentation, contributed in a unique way toward
creating a complicated legacy of musical sources.
Interest in the operas of this great composer has contin-
ued to increase in recent decades, but so has the realization
that the currently available scores are inadequate to allow
a new generation of performers and scholars to accurately
study and interpret these ground-breaking works of fin-de-
siècle musical language.
Puccini published his operas almost exclusively with Casa
Ricordi, whose large editorial staff and state-of-the-art print-
ing operations allowed it to rapidly issue different editions of
full scores and vocal scores. Yet Puccini’s ceaseless penchant
for revision (he revised each of his operas, with the inevitable
exception of the unfinished Turandot) led to a quantity of simul-
taneously available, sometimes overlapping versions of the texts.
In addition, performance materials hired
out to theatres were kept updated with
corrections that did not always make their
way into the published scores that were
The criTical ediTion of The operas of
by gabriele dotto
giacoMo puccini
Edgar , Act III - José
Cura (Edgar), Julia
Gertseva (Tigrana)
60
Edgar , Act II -
Julia Gertseva
(Tigrana), Marco
Vratogna (Frank)
offered to the general public. Over time, this produced
a confusing, sometimes conflicting array of docu-
ments. Furthermore, in an effort to make sense of some
of these conflicting readings, editors inserted numer-
ous changes into “new editions” published long after
the composer’s death. A critical edition of his operas
has been long overdue. Yet such an edition is a uniquely
complicated operation.
The Critical Edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini,
many years in the planning and with several works
already in preparation, published its first volume in
2013. This critical edition is a landmark initiative, not only
for the importance and familiarity of the repertory being
studied, but also because of the path-breaking approach
to textual criticism that is a necessary part of its editorial
philosophy. For instance, in some cases it is not possible
to establish a single master text as a primary source for an
entire opera; in some operas, two or perhaps several musi-
cal sources may occupy positions of a shifting status, now
primary, now secondary. Furthermore, the typical approach
toward standardization of layers of performance indications
in the scores, adopted in many editions as a way of resolv-
ing incomplete or conflicting readings, cannot always apply
to much of the music of Puccini’s time and milieu. Layered
dynamics, non-unified phrasing, differentiated articulation of
reprised passages, etc., were all part of the more sophisticated
orchestral palette of the composers of the 1890s and the early
20th century, but were obfuscated in later printed scores. The
critical edition must carefully consider the shades and nuances
reflected in the opera’s earliest sources.
Each opera published in the series will seek to identify a final
or, in some cases, an ideal version as the base text. Sections
of other versions, and/or suppressed passages, will appear in
appendices. Where entire, distinct versions can be reconstructed,
separate volumes will be published. Each volume will include
ra
mella
&G
iaN
NeSe / Fo
Nd
azio
Ne TeaTr
o r
eGio
61
Manon Lescaut,
first page of Act I -
critical edition by
Roger Parker
The CriTiCal ediTion of The operas of GiaComo puCCini promises to be a Fundamental resource For anyone approaching this magniFicent repertory For study or For perFormance.
an apparatus of commentary on the most perti-
nent issues, as well as a Historical Introduction
describing the genesis of the opera and the
development of the libretto, staging and casting
issues that directly involved the composer, the
process of revision that led to subsequent ver-
sions, as well as a summary discussion of the
choices the editor made in establishing the
base text that appears in the score.
With unparalleled access to the primary
autograph sources and annotated secondary
sources in the Ricordi Historical Archive, to
the publishing records, and to other contem-
porary documentation, The Critical Edition
of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini will offer
the student, the performer, and the aficio-
nado a range of information never before
available. As with other critical editions of
Italian opera published or co-published
by Casa Ricordi, each edition will have
Contrabbassi
139071
Violoncellipizz.
Violepizz.
II
pizz. arcoViolini
I
Allegro brillante = 132
Arpa
Celesta
Carillon
dietro la scenaSonagliera
dietro la scena
Cornettain La
Triangolo
Piatti
TimpaniLa-Mi
Tuba
3 TromboniI
3 Trombein Mi
Corni
III-IVin Mi
I-III
2 Fagottia 2
Clarinetto bassoin La
2 Clarinettiin La
a 2
Corno inglese
2 Oboia 2
2 Flautia 2
Ottavino
scaletta esterna conduce al primo piano dell’osteria.con porticato sotto al quale sono disposte varie tavole per gli avventori. UnaUn vasto piazzale presso la Porta di Parigi. Un viale a destra. A sinistra un’osteria
Allegro brillante = 132
ATTO PRIMOAd Amiens
62
the benefit of performances before the text is finalized
for publication. Indeed, recent productions based on
the initial volumes in the series have already made
an important contribution to our knowledge of early
Puccini. A performance of the critical edition of the
1893 version of Manon Lescaut met with great acclaim
in 2008 at the Leipzig Opera (where it will be revived
this season for four performances in from March until
May 2014), and the production of the 1889 four-act
version of Edgar (Turin, 2008), using the rediscov-
ered autograph of the final act four, was hailed as
one of the most significant musicological events
of recent years.The Critical Edition of the Operas
of Giacomo Puccini promises to be a fundamental
resource for anyone approaching this magnificent
repertory for study or for performance.
Plan of the critical editions:
I Le Villi (I.a one act, II.b two acts)
II Edgar (II.a four acts, II.b three acts)
III Manon Lescaut
IV La bohème
V Tosca
VI Madama Butterfly
(VI.a two acts, VI.b three acts)
VII La fanciulla del West
VIII La rondine
IX.1 Il tabarro
IX.2 Suor Angelica
IX.3 Gianni Schicchi
X Turandot (to be published as an
unfinished work)
Editorial Board
Gabriele Dotto (general editor), Francesco
Cesari, Linda B. Fairtile, Roger Parker,
Jürgen Selk, Claudio Toscani
Cb.
* Per una versione precedente di quest’aria, vedi App. 3.
139071139071
Vc.
Vle
II
Vni
I
Man
lan da de so la ta!… Or ror!… In tor no a
Ob.
I
Fl. II202
Cb.
Vc.arco
legato
Vlearco
legato
IIarco
legato
Vni
I*
Largo = 9210
Manon(l’orizzonte si oscura: l’ambascia vince Manon; è stravolta, impaurita, accasciata)
So
con la massima espress. e con angoscia
la… per du ta, ab ban do na ta… In
PttoPiatto battuto colla mazza
520
Ob.
196*
Largo = 9210
I
con molta espress.
(interno)scenasulla
From Manon Lescaut - incipit
of Manon’s aria
“Sola, perduta e
abbandonata!”
63
ra
mel
la &
Gia
NN
eSe
/ Fo
Nd
azi
oN
e Te
aTr
o r
eGio
Edgar, Act II -
Julia Gertseva
(Tigrana) Teatro
Regio / Turin -
Opera Season
2007/08
64
JANUARY
6
Francesca Verunelli
The Narrow Corner for
orchestra, Paris
8
Eric Tanguy Affettuoso
for orchestra, Paris
14
Philippe Hersant
Dreamtime, Flute
Concerto and
orchestra, Paris
19
Alberto Colla
Ouverture pour l’éveil
des peuples for
orchestra, Paris
21
Carlo Boccadoro
Box of paints for
ensemble, Milan
24
Emanuele Casale
Conversazioni con
Chomsky, talk-opera
(new version), Rome
26
Giacinto Scelsi
[Kamakala] for
orchestra, Berlin
28
Sergej Newski,
2013 for ensemble,
Moscow
FEBRUARY
7
Nikolaus Brass
fallacies of hope for
choir, Stuttgart
20
Luca Francesconi
Duende – The Dark
Notes, violin
concerto, Stockholm
25
Dai Fujikura, Minina
for ensemble, Tokyo
MARCH
4
Hèctor Parra
Te craindre en ton
absence, monodrama,
Paris
7
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler
De-crescendo for
orchestra, Frankfurt
Fabio Vacchi
Veronica Franco for
soprano, actor and
orchestra, Milan
8
Jean-Claude Petit
Colomba, opera,
Marseille
12
Francesca Verunelli
Graduale,
Disambiguation,
symphonic work,
Lucerne
Robert Wittinger
Symphony no. 8 op.
68 for orchestra,
Wiesbaden
16
Mela Meierhans
shiva for anne for
8 voices and 4
percussionists, Berlin
21
Daniele Ghisi
Nostre for 8 voices
and electronics,
Villefranche
26
Fabio Nieder
The Waters Flow
On Their Ways for
orchestra, Florence
Ian Wilson, Causeway
for orchestra, Belfast
27
Daniele Ghisi Próxima
for ensemble, Florence
Philippe Hersant
Chant de l’isolé for
piano, violin, cello
and string orchestra,
Pau
29
László Dubrovay
Cello Concerto and
orchestra, Budapest
APRIL
11
Philippe Hersant
Au temps du rêve for
small orchestra, Paris
17
Jan Jirásek
Guru (ballet), Prague
Fabio Vacchi
Il bordo vertiginoso
delle cose for recitant
voice and orchestra,
Bari
25
Eric Tanguy
Stabat mater for cello
and choir,
Aix-en-Provence
MAY
6
Peter Eötvös
Da capo for cimbalom
solo and ensemble,
Porto
Ian Wilson Shī Shì shí
shī sh for soprano,
trombone, percussion,
piano and cello, Basel
7
Philippe Schoeller
Tiger, concerto for
orchestra, Avignon
8
Samy Moussa
Vastation, opera,
Munich
10
János Vajda
Requiem for mixed
choir and organ,
Debrecen
12
Nikolaus Brass
Sommertag music
theater, Munich
20
Hèctor Parra
Das geopferte Leben,
opera, Munich
23
Oscar Bianchi
new work for cello
and string orchestra,
Clermont-Ferrand
JUNE
14
Luca Francesconi
Dentro non ha tempo
for orchestra, Milan
20
Giorgio Battistelli
Il medico dei pazzi,
opera, Nancy
26
Gerhard Stäbler
Erlöst Albert E. for
music theater, Ulm
JULY
10
Dai Fujikura Rare
Gravity for orchestra,
Tokyo
AUGUST
21
Pascal Dusapin
Wenn du dem Wind
for soprano and
orchestra, Tokyo
29
Graham Fitkin Birch
for orchestra, Umea
(Sweden)
SEPTEMBER
3
Dai Fujikura
Wondrous Steps for
ensemble, Lucerne
16
Rolf Riehm
Sirenen, music
theatre, Frankfurt
NOVEMBER
10
Olga Neuwirth A Film
Music War Requiem
for ensemble, Paris
13
Frédéric Verrières
Mimi, opera, Paris
14
Fabio Nieder
Der Anfang. Die
Mitte. Das Ende aus
Thümmel…for Chorus,
3 accordions and
percussion, Köln
(selecTion)
world preMiereS 2014
Please contact our promotion team for any
questions, perusal scores or recordings:
Casa Ricordi, Milan
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© Universal Music Publishing Classical, 2014
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Editors: Mary G. Madigan, Jens Wernscheid
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