PROGRAM NOTES

'Music,' says the Chinese sage Seu-ma-tsen in his memoirs, 'is what unifies'... the unity of the work has a resonance all its own. Its echo, caught by our soul, sounds nearer and nearer. Thus the consummated work spreads abroad to be communicated and finally flows back toward its source. The cycle, then, is closed. And that is how music comes to reveal itself as a form of communion with our fellow man–and with the Supreme Being.

Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

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Recently, a wonderful friend, a devoted singer with the Cantata Singers, and lover of Russian music, teasingly chastised me for making Igor Stravinsky’s Svadebka the focus of a French program, and for thus implying that this work so deeply steeped in Russian folklore and folk music somehow deserved the French title by which it is ordinarily known. After all, Svadebka is the perfect evocation of the preparations, sacrament, and increasingly inebriated celebration of a Russian peasant wedding, constructed from authentic Russian words, traceable Russian tunes, and a stunningly realistic capture of the rhythmic, rough singing from a much earlier Russia. Svadebka speaks from an ancient world. Stravinsky said, “When I first played Les noces to Diaghilev... he wept and said it was the most beautiful and the most purely Russian creation of our Ballet.” And, as Stravinsky’s disciple Robert Craft wrote, “Stravinsky was a great artist because he knew that depth of allusion can be attained only by using the past, and that creation depends as much on the old as on the new.”

However, although Svadebka was conceived in Stravinsky’s homeland, it was born, after a nine-year gestation, in France as Les noces. As stunning as its profoundly Russian heritage was its explosion into a new world–the urbane, crisp and sophisticated world of Paris. A radically fresh way of thinking about how music could breathe (even more radical than the 1913 Le sacre du printemps) had arrived, and quickly it was everywhere, except in Russia, where composers, forced or not, rather ignored their country’s most inventive musical voice. Prokofiev, Kabalevsky, Gliere, Khachaturian and Shostakovich all proceeded very cautiously, largely turning away from Stravinsky’s revolutionary ideas and seeking safety and identity in their deep nationalistic and Revolutionary roots. Few Russian composers comprehended what Stravinsky was doing. Myaskovsky wrote to Prokofiev, “Someday when you have the time, explain Stravinsky to me. I hardly understand a thing; although here and there some feeling comes through, it’s all very dim . . .”

Meanwhile, the rest of the musical world, dazzled and infuriated by Stravinsky’s inventions, responded, French composers first and most enthusiastically. Ravel, Debussy (who, though distressed by Stravinsky’s music, immediately displayed its influence in his ballet Jeux), Milhaud, Honegger and Satie all quickly bore Stravinsky’s impact. Even today, his impact on the musical world has hardly faded–without Les noces and Petrushka, minimalism might never have taken hold or even been conceived.

Francis Poulenc, seventeen years Stravinsky’s junior, easily fell under the spell. The way Poulenc’s music unfolds in very short breaths, pungent harmonies, ritualistic repetitions, abrupt discontinuities, and quivering stasis all suggest Petrushka, Le sacre du printemps, and most of all, Les noces. Poulenc unabashedly accepted the influence: “I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy, but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords. Wasn’t that the case with Mozart-Schubert?”

His earliest music seems born of the salon, but eventually Poulenc found a penetrating voice, especially in his music for the voice, whether song, opera or choral. Among his most searching works are ones for chorus, including the Mass in G (1937), Lenten Motets (1939), Figure humaine (1943) and the Stabat Mater (1950). Wedged among these is the icily intense Un soir de neige (1944), a cycle for six-part unaccompanied vocal ensemble. Bittersweet, unpredictable and occasionally hallucinatory harmonies in harsh vertical spacing hang from sharply etched, unsentimental melodies. The halted pace and the gasping phrases perfectly evoke the text by the Surrealist poet and French Resistance fighter Paul Éluard about a French Resistance fighter who, in trying to avoid capture, freezes to death in the snow. Un soir de neige carries an impact in utter contrast to its extraordinary brevity.

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In 1961, Poulenc wrote, “I’m truly sorry to miss [Boulez’s] Pli selon Pli, because I’m sure it’s well worth hearing [plus que valable].” Even this 62-year-old composer was aware of the fresh, magical world of the young Pierre Boulez. Four decades later, the 80-year-old Boulez is now the emerged master, the eminent musical voice of iconoclasm and equilibrium.

Though still known to the public more as conductor than composer, Boulez continues to compose steadily, often reworking and expanding his earlier compositions until he believes the material has been exhausted. Sur incises, a 35-minute spellbinding adventure for nine virtuoso instrumentalists, grew out of just such an eruption–the seeds of the music lay in Incises, a six-minute work for one piano that Boulez had composed to be played as part of a piano competition. “My recent music is much like a family tree–one tree spawns many other trees, and so on. Derive I is from Repons, Derive III is also like that. Repons itself was my response to Poesies pour pouvoir, which I had written over twenty years earlier... they are all works-in-progress.”

Sur incises, completed–at least to this stage–in 1998, explores and exploits virtually every sonority possible within its delicious ensemble of three pianists, three harpists, and three percussionists (who play two vibraphones and marimba, and, less frequently, glockenspiel, chimes, crotales, timpani, and steel drums), a sonic combinationthat the composer acknowledges was inspired by the piano-percussion ensemble of Les noces. Even without his admitting to this connection, however, we could not miss it, for the gleaming, glittering surface of Sur incises, its clangorous bells that haunt the work throughout, and its meteoric energy would not have been possible without Stravinsky’s revolutionizing creation.

Boulez’s own creation, perhaps his greatest work to date, captivates, hypnotizes, overwhelms, and thrills us with a wild roller coaster ride. Our inability to predict the journey of the music is, of course, part of the excitement, so letting the music sail over and around us may be one of the best ways to take it in. Its glittering sensuality, at times ethereal and, at others, breathless and almost violent, offers an inviting surface. And the largest gestures are remarkably lucid even on first hearing. But, for those who are interested, the following is a very simplified impression of what one might expect during Sur incises, whose title suggests both the intercutting of the musical lines and something more geological, as when a river slices through a seemingly impenetrable material.

Sur incises arises from dark rumblings, as if in search of purpose; crystalline and fleeting fanfares grow increasingly agitated and plummet headlong into the first large section, an electrifying (and exhausting to play!) perpetual motion toccata propelled by rapid-fire repeated chords. It is music that inevitably must collapse under its own weight. But when it finally does, the subterranean rumination that follows offers only brief respite before a playful interchange among the pianists interrupts. That, in turn, collapses back into the earlier muttering; again, agitated music (reminiscent of the toccata) cuts in, though it is yet again supplanted by foggy stasis. This rapid succession of stasis and vivacity–ABABA–marks the close of the first half of Sur incises.

Then, with neither pause nor articulation, the music thrusts into the most fractured music thus far; again sailing with a rapid, steady motor (an idea largely shunned by Boulez before this Les noces-inspired work), its arpeggiated lines and oscillating chords suggesting a gamelan ensemble at full tilt. At the pulsating climax, the entire ensemble freezes while the second pianist launches into the first of a series of cadenzas. The oscillations (now in the pianos) and interlocking waves (in the percussion) resume. Quickly, however, all crashes to a halt, and the second pianist again loosens the fabric with a solo. Into his world, the third pianist is slowly drawn until they dance together in arabesques. When the third pianist begins to dominate the duet, the second pianist yanks everyone back into the recently displaced quick music, but it is short-lived, for the first pianist forcefully interrupts with his own ostentatious solo that gradually sinks into a harp-like cadenza. Suddenly, however, the second and third pianist rejoin to force an end to the first pianist’s solo, and all are off on one last, brief surge of agitation.

At this point, about two-thirds of the way through Sur incises, the music fabric loosens considerably. The three pianists lead the ensemble in metrically free, minimally coordinated music, and the music becomes quite unpredictable. Flashes of light, quiet chords, scampering lines, witty interactions, returns of toccata-like music, hints of fanfares from the beginning, and finally an extended return to the somber music that marked the end of the first part can all seem somewhat like a traditional development section in which materials are jostled about to shake out their maximum meaning. However, it becomes increasingly clear that this mercurial music is less a working out of previous music than a series of memories of earlier ideas, like reflections either in sharply cut gems or in lapping waves of water.

Suddenly, the closing section of Sur incises, more manic than anything that preceded, launches. Several times the music seizes up, only to release into even more turmoil. Ultimately everything fractures, and the ensemble is caught between trying to restart its motor and trying to spend the energy of the unstoppable rush. Then, in one enormous clang, the entire ensemble gathers for a final time, and the pianists, liberated from each other, peal ever more quietly. As with the end of Les noces, the bells fade into infinity.

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The wealth of Igor Stravinsky’s Les noces reaches deeply into every corner of the musical experience–the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, and, ultimately, the spiritual. All great music, of course, does this, but Stravinsky’s passionate and radical homage to dying musical and social traditions, and his discovery of unprecedented means to marry words and music create a perfect jewel that has been dimmed by the shadow of no work since. This is arguably one of the two greatest compositions by the twentieth century’s greatest composer and, in this writer’s estimation, a perfect piece.

Stravinsky, characteristically, writes of his own music as if little deeper than construction was the idea or result. Standing rather at arms’ length from his own creation, he says:

As a collection of cliches and quotations of typical wedding sayings (Les noces) might be compared to one of those scenes in Ulysses in which the reader seems to be overhearing scraps of conversation without the connecting thread of discourse. But Les noces might also be compared to Ulysses in the larger sense that both works are trying to present rather than to describe.

Individual roles do not exist in Les noces, but only solo voices that impersonate now one type of character and now another. Thus the soprano in the first scene is not the bride, but merely a bride's voice; the same voice is associated with the goose in the last scene. Even the proper names in the text such as Palagai or Saveliushka belong to no one in particular. They were chosen for their sound, their syllables, and their Russian typicality.

Les noces is also—perhaps even primarily—a product of the Russian Church. Invocations to the Virgin and the saints are heard throughout the work. Among the latter, the names of Cosmos and Davian occur more often than any others. They were recognized as wedding saints in Russia, and they were popularly worshipped as deities of a fertility cult. The binding of the bride's tresses with red and blue ribbons was a religio-sexual custom, of course, and so was the tying of the tresses around her head to signify the married state. The bride weeps in the first scene not necessarily because of real sorrow at her prospective loss of virginity, but because, ritualistically, she must weep. (Even if she had already lost it and was looking forward... she still must weep.)

The non-Russian listener should understand... that, first of all, the swan and the goose are folk characters, and that the solo voices who impersonate and quote them are enacting a traditional folk game. Swans and geese both fly and swim and, therefore, they have fantastic stories to tell about the skies and the waters, stories that are mirrors of peasant superstitions. But 'swan' and 'goose' also refer to the bride and groom.

Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments

The listener’s and performer’s experiences, however, may be far richer than the composer’s description would suggest. The visceral energy of the musical ritual pulls us in–the insistent rhythm, at once static and volatile, rides on constantly shifting waves and patterns. We are thrown into a perfect imbalance. And the brazen combination of the human and the mechanical– voices, individual and in chorus, facing four pianos and a large array of percussion–thrills the ear and, in the case of live performance, the eye. Stravinsky could not have been more wrong when he claimed that music expressed only itself for, by the closing moments of Les noces, it is the inescapable sweep of emotion that wells up and consumes us. Loss and hope, silliness and profundity, yesterday and tomorrow merge in one stunning outpouring. The words cling to their meaning at the same time that they ascend into pure sound. The instruments become voices. Words and music become one and, suddenly, everyone is speechless in the face of eternity.

— David Hoose