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.