Messiaen, Bartok and Britten
One of the best programmes on Radio Three is Composer of the Week with Donald Macleod.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cotw/
Macleod* is terrific on getting the balance between words and music right and he always himself sounds interested in what he’s saying and who he’s talking about. This week’s composer has been Olivier Messiaen–I’m listening to the final instalment as I write this: some half-weird half-meditative piano thing at the moment–and I’m so fascinated it’s bewildering. It’s bewildering because it dramatises just how wild and spectacular an effect this composing racket is having on me. I like stuff with tunes. Stephen Sondheim is about as far as I go into the thickets of modern music: I don’t do twelve-tone, I don’t do atonal, I don’t do Hindemith** or Schoenberg and I seriously don’t do Webern.*** One of the things I keep remembering now as I peck out my peculiar new noises at the piano is that when I (briefly) took piano lessons after I dropped out of college†, I was assigned Bartok’s Mikrokosmos (probably volume one, tiny simple not-very-threatening piece one) and I hated it. It was full of clanks and clashes as far as I was concerned. It was hard to find time to practise anyway–I was allowed to use the practise pianos at the school, but I still had to get there†† and find an empty room–and I didn’t last long.†††
I love the Mikrokosmos now. I even remember telling Oisin when I first began taking lessons from him about having been given Bartok all those years ago and it had taken me three decades to recover my nerve. But two or three months ago in response to the stuff I was writing or trying to write or fumbling toward writing‡ and feeling bemused, Oisin pulled out one of the middle books of Mikrokosmos and started playing bits of it in rather the way you might dangle a piece of string in front of a cat, or a pheasant in front of a hellhound. I subsequently borrowed it and declared that he’ll only get it back if he orders me my own copy and maybe I should have its brothers and sisters too.
But Messiaen . . . don’t make me laugh. No way I’m going to engage with him. He doesn’t give you a way in, like the early books of the Mikrokosmos. I like the idea of using birdsong–which used to be approximately the only thing I knew about Messiaen: that he used birdsong in his music–but listening to the stuff was all elbows in the ribs and fingernails on a chalkboard and stuff that might be musical instruments except they’ve been tuned really badly. Mikrokosmos only a whole lot worse.
I think my mini apotheosis probably started with Benjamin Britten. I’ve always liked some of Britten–the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, for example, where Britten said everything that needs to be said musically about Lyke Wake Dirge, but I’m not letting that stop me‡‡–but I actually remember the moment when I was dutifully listening to his Midsummer Night’s Dream (on Radio Three, of course) and without warning it . . . I don’t even know exactly how to describe it: ‘made sense’ comes nearest. One or two more musical possibilities not thought of by Mozart, Beethoven or Verdi went on my personal list. That was probably about ten years ago. And then I started liking Janacek. I even started liking Berg. Some of Berg.
Oisin also has more of a hand in my evolution as listener than merely thrusting Bartok–and Bach, who was quite extraordinarily a rebel and a pioneer: a cliché I know but I’m only just learning it for myself–under my nose, and encouraging me to look at Britten’s folk song arrangements. That evolution has been increasing speed recently, because composing makes you listen differently too–and I can use some extra grounding and/or leadership, flapping up here in the rafters with my music manuscript paper and wondering how the heck I got here. But what inspirational teacher ever didn’t have more of an effect on his (or her) pupils than merely inspiration and a few concrete examples? If Oisin likes it I tend to assume it’s good and slog (as necessary) in that direction. He says he can’t cope with all of Messiaen himself, but he does like some of the bigger, wilder organ music.
I couldn’t get my head around a lot of what I was listening to in Composer of the Week this week . . . but I could get my head around enough of it that several times I had to stop what I was doing to listen harder or more carefully ‡‡‡, and would find myself grinning with pleasure–both at the music itself and at the accomplishment of managing to listen to it. It’s an almost physical feeling of roused nerve endings–like a finger run down your spine–when your brain streeetches.§ I went in today planning to ask Oisin–who is also a sheet music source, I think I’ve told you–if he could find sheet music for the Woodlark from Messiaen’s catalogue d’oiseaux and Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jesus. The answer is yes . . . but at extreme cost.§§ Oh well. I’ll just have to struggle on as I am, clutching Oisin’s Mikrokosmos in a possessive manner. I wouldn’t say Finale and I are friends yet . . . and there was one after-midnight this week I was in literal tears of frustration . . . but I am definitely gaining ground, blood and bomb craters optional. And when Oisin played my Lyke Wake Dirge today he said ‘Congratulations’. I’m not even quite halfway through yet, but . . .
And in case you’d like to try a little thrilling Messiaen organ music for yourself, http://www.danielmoult.com/index.php Click on ‘Daniel plays Messiaen’ on the right, and . . . sit back. You may want to hang onto your chair.
* * *
* Or his writers. Of course I want to believe he writes his own scripts even if he has help with the research.
** Except a little of the early stuff that doesn’t sound like Hindemith yet. I think Schoenberg had an early, still-listenable-by-the-peons phase too, but I’m failing to call it to mind.
*** The 20th-21st century composer I don’t do most of all, however, is Harrison Birtwhistle. He would have to be British. So he keeps popping up. If he were Patagonian I bet Radio Three would leave him alone.
† I’ve told you I started at Dickinson College, haven’t I? Carlisle, PA. Hee hee hee hee. Peter still uses my ancient Dickinson College wastepaper bin.
†† On my trusty Kawasaki A7, if you’re trying to keep track. –Trusty? What am I saying?
††† I wonder about that teacher now. I can imagine (say) that she went home one evening and said to herself, If I have to listen to another Clementi sonatina I shall go mad, and started assigning everyone Bartok. All very well if you’re either musical or flexible or both, but it may be too great a shock to the system if you’re neither. It was too much for me. That was back in the days when I found Puccini avant garde.
‡ I know I’ve told you that I’m completely bemused at the fact that I’m not writing Mozart/Beethoven/Verdi pastiche. That I’m writing–music–at all is bizarre enough. Have I said this before–that it occurred to me that the sensation is not completely unlike my discovery that I could do public speaking? I could what? With this personality that was about as likely as the great lost Norman Mailer novel being about a nice, normal, sane, honest, kind-to-animals middle-aged woman. Hey, they found it in his bottom desk drawer but read the first twenty pages and thought, nah, that’s not Norman. Anyway. Being able to give speeches and talk in public makes me feel like a pod person–I have been taken over by an alien from outer space.^ Composing is a bit like that. How many of me^^ are there in here?
^ Fortunately it seems pretty friendly
^^ or aliens
‡‡ I’ve been determined that at least my singer should not be a tenor. Um . . .
‡‡‡ The programme plays twice: at noon and again at ten in the evening. So you have two chances. Plus the 7-day playback for the fatally earnest.
§ There may be a certain amount of owww involved, like undergoing a good massage
§§ Anybody know any good sites for used sheet music? eBay is pretty useless and amazon appears not to have sheet music at all.
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