Louis Andriessen – Mausoleum (1979)

Turns out Mausoleum makes an even better companion piece to Renard than I realized.  Not only do they both feature a cimbalom, but they also both feature men singing, in Russian, in a style inspired by Russian folk music, and they both focus on the tetrachord formed by the first four notes of the minor scale, although Andriessen rearranges it so that the third and fourth notes are on the bottom (Ab-Bb-F-G), which brings out the open fifth in the middle and makes it less clear where the tonal center is.

Maybe I’m just impatient, but I tend to prefer Andriessen’s more active, varied pieces — De Staat (1976), De Stijl (1985), Writing to Vermeer (1998) — over his more stripped-down, high-concept, “monumental” pieces — Hoketus (1977), Te Tijd (1981), Zilver (1994).  This one sits somewhere in between.  Almost all of its material is very simple and repetitive, but Andriessen shifts between different textures and gestures pretty frequently — until the last third, when the piece becomes an extremely minimal chorale, written in 3/3 time for reasons I can’t quite fathom.  (The piece was written for the centennial of anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin’s death;  3/3, as mentioned in the CD liner notes, is the modern equivalent of the Medieval time signature known as “perfect time with perfect prolation.”  Is the association between the two supposed to suggest a sort of utopianism, a vision of a perfect future?  It would probably help to know more about Bakunin.  I do know that Andriessen was something of a radical in the 70s, but I thought he was a Marxist, and from what I gather Bakunin was an anti-Semite who hated Marx.  Oh, hell, I don’t know.)

I have to say, Andriessen is better than anyone else I can think of at writing music that sounds like enormous, monumental architecture.  The piece opens with a series of gestures in which cimbalom, metal plates, pianos, harps, violas and cellos all play a simple diatonic figure in unison, and then there’s a long pause in which we hear the ringing of the instruments dying out, as if in a cavernous hall.  Later the same material returns, but now it’s suspended over cello harmonics, as if the hall had been filled with a pale, thin liquid.  Elsewhere, quick diatonic canons in the pianos and horns buttress long, melancholy brass tones.  Throughout the piece, there are passages in which atonal chordal attacks are cut off to reveal solid, blocky harmonies based on major seconds underneath, like a layer of stone under a smear of paint.

The bizarre and very typically Andriessenish ensemble — brass, cimbalom, percussion, electric bass, two pianos, two harps, two baritones and low strings, with as many of those instruments amplified as is necessary to balance the group — works incredibly well, and at times almost sounds like a synthesizer, especially since the strings play without vibrato at all times.  Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the two baritones on the recording, Charles van Tassel and David Barick.  Admittedly, their style does make the connection to Stravinsky’s folky pieces obvious, but vibrato singing almost always sounds out of place in Andriessen’s music — the only exception I can think of being the unusually lush and Romantic Writing to Vermeer.  It’s particularly damaging to Mausoleum, since the piece is based almost entirely on major seconds, and in particular on simultaneously-sounded major seconds;  when two singers are belting out their parts like they’re in a 19th-century opera, the distinctive bite of that interval is completely lost.  I actually found the middle section of the piece almost unlistenable because of these guys.  I also have to admit that the chorale that makes up most of the piece’s last third, while quite striking and beautiful at first, winds up trying my patience in much the same way as a super-minimal piece like De Tijd.  So I guess the first eleven minutes of Mausoleum is where it’s at for me.

Igor Stravinsky – Renard (1916)

This project gets off to a bit of a random start with a couple of pieces I want to listen to before I have to return the CDs to the library.  First up is Stravinsky’s chamber opera Renard, based on a set of Russian folk tales involving a sly fox and his attempts to lure a hen to her death.  Since I checked it out in order to study Stravinsky’s cimbalom writing, I didn’t bother checking whether I had a translation of the text.  Turns out I don’t:  the score has it in Russian, French and German but not English, and the CD has the entire text of Walton’s Façade but nothing for Renard.  I could translate the French or German with a dictionary, but I’m not sure how much it matters, since the singers sit with the orchestra and don’t represent specific characters (the narrative is handled by costumed dancers on stage), and at this point in his career Stravinsky saw music as an objective, sonic-cerebral art incapable of containing emotional content.

Stylistically, the piece is very close to Les Noces (1923):  a chamber orchestra plays percussive, mechanistic music while a group of singers evoke Russian folk singing with leaps from grace notes.  The music is largely modal, with occasional chromatic intrusions;  like a lot of Stravinsky’s music in the 1910s, it places a lot of emphasis on the tetrachord formed by the first four notes of the minor scale.  It’s put together in big blocks of contrasting material, often with abrupt tempo and pitch-collection changes between them;  each of these blocks itself consists of repeated and juxtaposed melodic cells.  The meters tend to be regularly irregular:  the opening march, for example, alternates between 2/4 and 3/4.  The instruments generally work together as one enormous super-instrument rather than playing in counterpoint, although there is a passage in the middle of the piece where the winds and brass start doing little neoclassical canons over a motoric ostinato string part — a moment that’s particularly striking because the canonized figure features an eighth-note septuplet, which as far as I can remember is an exceptionally rare rhythmic gesture in Stravinsky’s music.

Most of what I just wrote could be applied to just about any Stravinsky piece from the period, and that’s partially because Renard doesn’t really stand out that much from his other pieces.  There are some great moments, to be sure — the canonic bit I mentioned above, a cadence on an unexpectedly sweet major third in the scene where the fox is dressed up as a nun and trying to lure the hen with promises of spiritual absolution (!), and a great melody toward the end of the piece that flips rapidly between major and minor.  But all in all it feels like a pale shadow of what was to come in Les Noces, a piece that, to my ears at least, is much more obviously the work of a visionary.  Maybe that’s just history talking — Stravinsky’s rhythmic and formal innovations must have still been pretty startling in 1916, especially since the piece lacks both the lush orchestration and violent dramatic intensity of The Rite of Spring (1913), and the quirky humor and stylistic quotations of Pétrouchka (1911) — that is, the elements that made those pieces accessible.  But if you know the history, it’s hard to un-hear it, and I’m not sure that it’s even desirable to.

As for the cimbalom, it’s a neat instrument — kind of perpetually out-of-tune-sounding — but it’s not featured that prominently in the piece after the first five minutes or so.  Next up is Andriessen’s Mausoleum (1979), so we’ll see if he takes better advantage of the instrument.