Claude Debussy – { feuilleton }

Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century

In which orchestral conductor Simon Rattle explores a century of music in much the same way that Robert Hughes explored a century of art in The Shock of the New. Or almost… It’s unfair to compare this more modest TV series to a landmark which was shot on film and with a budget large enough to allow Hughes to present his art history from locations all around the world.

If you’ve ever felt in need of an intelligent introduction to the challenges of orchestral music then Leaving Home is the ideal guide. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1996, a time when the channel still was still devoting a considerable portion of its programming to the arts. Simon Rattle was a wise choice as a presenter, being a conductor with a less intimidating demeanour than some, as well as a proselytising nature. His intention here was to dispel the difficulty which many people still feel when faced with atonal compositions (twelve-tone music, aleatory music, serialism) by explaining how these musical forms evolved and why they’re not so difficult at all once you appreciate the reasoning behind them and the context out of which they emerged. Music is a curious medium in this respect. Where other art forms can start to feel distinctly old-fashioned and even thoroughly antiquated once a few decades have elapsed, there’s a lot of European music which is well over a hundred years old yet can still challenge and disturb an audience today if that audience is unprepared. Rattle’s explanations parallel The Shock of the New by dividing a century of artistic evolution into distinct modes or themes. The structure of the series and the music under discussion is as follows:

Programme 1: Dancing on a Volcano
Wagner, Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
Schoenberg, Transfigured Night
Mahler, Symphony no. 7
Strauss, Elektra
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, nos. 1 and 2
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, nos. 3, 4 and 5
Berg, Violin Concerto

Programme 2: Rhythm
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
Varèse, Ionisation
Mahler, “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Reich, Music for Pieces of Wood
Nancarrow, Piano Roll no. 21
Boulez, Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna
Messiaen, Turangalîla Symphony

Programme 3: Colour
Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky, The Firebird
Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé
Debussy, Jeux
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, no. 3 “Farben”
Boulez, Notations
Messiaen, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Takemitsu, Dream/Window

Programme 4: Three Journeys through Dark Landscapes
Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 4
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 14
Lutosławski, Concerto for Orchestra
Lutosławski, Venetian Games
Lutosławski, Symphony no. 3

Programme 5: The American Way
Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Ives, Decoration Day
Carter, A Celebration of Some 100 x 150 Notes
Copland, Appalachian Spring
Weill, “Lonely House” from Street Scene
Bernstein, “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story
Cage, Sonatas and Interludes
Cage, First Construction in Metal
Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at 90
Riley, In C
Adams, Harmonium

Programme 6: After the Wake
Strauss, “Im Abendrot” from Four Last Songs
Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw
Boulez, Le marteau sans maître
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, no. 4
Stockhausen, Gruppen
Britten, Serenade for tenor, horn and strings
Stravinsky, Agon

Programme 7: Threads
Berio, Laborintus II
Henze, Symphony no. 8
Gubaidulina, Zeitgestalten
Kurtág, Grabstein für Stefan
Birtwistle, Ritual Fragment
Turnage, Drowned Out
Knussen, Flourish with Fireworks

“Leaving home” in Rattle’s explanation is a phrase that refers to music leaving behind the rules and harmonic bases of the previous centuries. It also refers to various forms of exile and social change, departures from earlier orthodoxies. Much of the music explored here was created in years and nations beset by wars and revolutions, and, as Rattle notes, art created under such conditions can’t help but reflect its time. I have the book of the series by Michael Hall which is very good in its own way, filled with a more detailed history and musicology, as well as many photographs and paintings relevant to the compositions. What the book lacks is the music itself, and this is the real strength of the TV series. Rattle spends each programme either sitting at a piano or conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra who play extracts of all the pieces under discussion. Rattle is a proficient pianist which that means in the first couple of programmes he’s able to physically emphasise some of his talking points, in particular those instances when a composer deliberately deviates from expectation. Watching an orchestra perform a composition you’ve just heard described is much more effective than listening to a recording, especially when we reach the 1950s with extracts from a performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

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Cornell, 1965

It’s the magus of Utopia Parkway again. As the title suggests, Cornell, 1965 was shot in the 1960s, although the footage wasn’t assembled as a film until 1978 when director Lawrence Jordan added his narration and a Debussy soundtrack. Jordan had been Joseph Cornell’s assistant in the 1960s, and his footage was meant to document details in the workroom where Cornell made so many of his boxes. The details are mostly of the boxes that didn’t get sent to the galleries, half-finished or damaged works which the camera explores in close-up. Jordan also managed to capture a few surreptitious shots of the camera-shy artist from an upstairs window. Cornell didn’t like to see himself on a screen but he loved the medium of cinema, using it to fuel his imagination—an early issue of View includes his star-struck paean to Hedy Lamarr—while also making short films of his own. Many of the latter, including the celebrated Rose Hobart, may be seen at Ubuweb.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cosmic Alchemy, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Hamfat Asar, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Cornell’s Constellations
• Carabosse, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box
• Joseph Cornell, 1967
• Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell

Engulfed Cathedrals

La cathédrale engloutie by Claude Debussy. From Préludes pour Piano (1910).

• La cathédrale engloutie performed by Daniel Barenboim.

The Submerged Cathedral (1929) by MC Escher.

La cathédrale engloutie (1950) by Ithell Colquhoun.

La cathédrale engloutie III (1960) by Ceri Giraldus Richards.

La cathédrale engloutie (1968) by Luc Simon.

Snowflakes Are Dancing (aka Clair De Lune) (1974) by Tomita.

• Track 6: The Engulfed Cathedral (Preludes, Book 1, No. 10).

Escape From New York (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1981) by John Carpenter In Association With Alan Howarth.

• Track 4: Engulfed Cathedral.

Re:Sort (2003) by Sora.

• Track 4: La Cathédrale Engloutie.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• L’après-midi d’un faune
• Hokusai record covers
• Tomita album covers

L’après-midi d’un faune

Listening recently to a collection of Debussy’s music it occurred to me that I knew rather a lot about the creation and performance of the Nijinsky ballet based on Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune but couldn’t recall having seen a performance of the original dance. Not in full, anyway, although “full” here only means the entire 12 minutes, Debussy’s short piece being the only completed part of what would have been a much longer composition.

This filmed version of the ballet dates from 1980, and forms part of a tribute to Nijinsky staged by Rudolf Nureyev and Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, the other works being Petrouchka and Le Spectre de la Rose. L’après-midi d’un faune is the only one of the three ballets that was choreographed as well as danced by Nijinsky, and was famously radical at the time, with the dancers adopting the stylised postures of figures from the ceramics of Ancient Greece. The erotic tone of the piece also generated controversy.

The Nureyev/Joffrey film restages the original Ballets Russes performance from 1912, using the costumes and decor designed by Léon Bakst. The choreography departs so much from classical ballet it might serve as a different kind of prelude, to the even more radical and controversial dances that Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes staged the following year. The original performance of The Rite of Spring was subsequently resurrected by the Joffrey Ballet after a lengthy period of historical research by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. A 1989 BBC documentary about the process of research and reconstruction, The Search for Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, is essential viewing for anyone interested in Diaghilev’s company.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• George Barbier’s Nijinsky
• The Rite of Spring reconstructed
• Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe
• Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
• Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
• Images of Nijinsky

Hokusai record covers

Debussy: La Mer, Nocturnes (Nuages, Fêtes, Sirènes) (1959); Orchestra Of The Cento Soli And Choir Of The Paris Opera, Louis Fourestier.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. In the case of Katsushika Hokusai it’s all about the waves, or one wave in particular. The Great Wave off Kanegawa (1830) is not only the most well-known of all the prints in the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, but it occupies the unique position of representing to the rest of the world the nation from which it originates. Claude Debussy deserves much of the credit for elevating the popularity of the wave print after he used it in 1905 as an illustration on the cover of the sheet music for La Mer. Consequently, the print is an inevitable choice for art directors who require cover art for Debussy recordings. The example above is the first in a long line, many of which are omitted here in favour of other prints. The landscape format of this view, and that of many other Hokusai prints, means that the art is usually cropped to suit the square of the album cover. The results aren’t always successful.

Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Delibes, Adam: Ballet Favourites: Highlights From The Nutcracker/Carnaval/Coppélia/Giselle (1964); Orchestra Of The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Ernest Ansermet.

Switched On East (1971) by M. Sato. Art: Fine Wind, Clear Morning, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

A gatefold sleeve for one of the many “switched-on” Moog albums released to capitalise on the success of Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos. (Tomita recorded Switched On Hit & Rock a year later.) M. Sato gives a collection of Japanese folk tunes the synthesizer treatment.

Lyrical Melodies Of Japan (1980) by András Adorján & Ayako Shinozaki.

Sakura: Japanese Melodies For Flute And Harp (1990) by Jean-Pierre Rampal And Lily Laskine.

A reissue with collaged artwork by Paula Sher of an album first released in 1969.

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