André Boucourechliev – Anarchipel (1970)

Most of the pieces on the “Music of Our Time” CD set that I checked out in order to listen to Symphonie pour un homme seul are by the big names of European modernism:  Berio, Boulez, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen.  But my eye was caught by the names of two composers I’d never heard of.  One was Maurice Ohana’s Sybille (1968), and a quick listen to the opening made it clear that this was not a piece I would get along with.  (The way composers in that tradition write vocal music is almost always unbearable to me.  Pretty much only Berio gets a pass.)  But Anarchipel by Bulgarian composer André Boucourechliev sounded interesting, and I decided to give it a closer look.

The piece is the last in a series of five pieces called Archipel, all of which are experiments in guided improvisation, or in Boucourechliev’s words, “open or mobile forms.”  It’s scored for piano, organ, harp, harpsichord and one or two percussionists — but “scored” isn’t really the right word, because there is no score, only parts.  Each part is an enormous, beautiful, handwritten piece of graphic notation;  in the CD liner notes, the composer compares them to marine charts.  At first glance they look utterly impenetrable, but after I read the instructions I realized that they’re actually simpler than they look.  Basically, you’ve got a bunch of pitches in the middle of the page, and all around them are pitchless fragments of music, complete with rhythms, contours, tempos and dynamic ranges.  Each player spontaneously picks a fragment (Boucourechliev calls them “diagrams”) and plays it using the pitches in the middle of the page, starting anywhere in the pitch series and looping around as often as necessary.  You can play a diagram more than once or not at all, and you can even continue and freely develop them of your own accord.  But at the same time you’re instructed to listen to the other players and respond to them.

Obviously, performing a piece like this is phenomenally difficult.  You have to be an incredible sight-reader and an incredible improviser at the same time.  I could easily imagine the result being a complete mess if the performers weren’t up to the task.  But in this performance it actually works pretty well.  Sure, it’s noisy, abrasive and chaotic — the title is a pun on the word “anarchy,” after all! — but it’s also organic and fluid in the way the best improvisation often is, and also visceral and intense, sometimes even violent.  The musicians are clearly listening to each other:  there are sharp contrasts, loud passages and quiet ones, dense passages and spare ones, pointillistic gestures passed from instrument to instrument.  Pianist Christian Ivaldi is particularly good, pounding the hell out of his dissonant chords.  Although the material is clearly post-Darmstadt, the mood and textures almost remind me of the title track from Alice Coltrane’s album Universal Consciousness, released in 1972, only one year before this recording was made.  You can chalk the similarity up to zeitgeist, but I’m always happy to hear points of contact between the experimentalists in different genres of music, especially at a time when a lot of composers wanted nothing to do with anything even remotely identifiable as “pop culture.”

AND WITH THAT I AM FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH THIS BLOG YAAAAY