A Languedoc Tantum Ergo

Perhaps it's due to the glut of brilliant talents that French classical music produced at the fin de siècle, but even a cursory glance at the compositional scene of the day shows that France had no shortage of regional heroes.  Paris has always been the center of culture in France, and a combination of a healthy reaction to that kind of artistic exclusivity and increasingly prominent efforts to collect European folk music saw a number of composers celebrate their regional heritage through their works, such as Guy Ropartz with Brittany and quite notably Joseph Canteloube with Auvergne, whose Chants d'Auvergne are sung quite frequently.  Heck, I would've covered Joseph-Ermend Bonnal on one of these blogs earlier if recordings of his stuff weren't so hard to find, and his heritage included the Basque region that stretches across both Southwestern France and Northeastern Spain.  Likewise, Déodat de Séverac's most written-of attribute is his celebration of his Languedoc heritage.  Séverac (1872-1921) is one of those outer Impressionists that I've always known about but never really explored, partially due to his music never really taking flight with Impressionist technique and as such getting lost in the shuffle.  That isn't to say that his music isn't worth investigating - he's just a slightly awkward 'tweener, clearly enamored with the musical elite around him but unsure of how to make their art his own.  He is mostly remembered for his piano works, including the ambitious pictorial suites En Languedoc and Cerdaña, and there are plenty of recordings of his piano works (including an exquisite oeuvres complètes series by Satie champion Aldo Ciccolini.  The other piece of his that still gets played is much shorter than those - in fact so short it can be written on a leaf.

I'll freely admit that Séverac's setting of the Tantum Ergo isn't recognizably Languedocian, but nobody said that a hometown hero can't talk about anything but his native soil.  Written in 1920, the year before his untimely death, the Tantum Ergo has some of the most novel synthesis between all that stepwise-motion voice-leading your theory teachers kept talking about and the kind of French post-Romanticism that Franck and Chausson pioneered.  The lines wax and wane with an intense yearning, kneading into each syllable in that gorgeous way that only a capella choirs can bring to life.  While the harmonies are entirely tonal he'll find perfect spots to phase between junction chords à la Franck.  His dissonances are held on to only long enough to press against the temples, quickly sliding to the next poignant moment, and it's this continual liquid passion that makes the piece so precious.  There are dozens of performances to choose from but the performance below by Schola Cantorum Oxford has the most clarity and simple mastery of any of them, accentuating each supple curve and fully aware that the piece thrives on not wasting anyone's time - hugging the listener's heart and carefully releasing it back into the world.

~PNK

A question or few on Ruggles's Exaltation

One of America's great composing legends, Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was a man of deep concentration.  That is, while he only wrote some 15-20 pieces in his whole life, he worked incredibly hard on them and they exhibit a concentrated dramatic power unlike anything else.  Working mostly within a dissonant counterpoint system (developed contemporaneously with Charles Seeger's method), his mature works sound like the War in Heaven - intensely dramatic, vaulting and anguished - and sport apocalyptic titles such as Men and Mountains, Angels and Sun-Treader.  And I love them so - in fact, Angels is one of my favorite pieces for brass, possibly one of my favorite pieces ever.  I haven't gotten around to featuring him on one of my blogs yet because, well, at this point he's well-known in America and I normally don't cover well-known people.  Oh, sure, I linked to his song Toys in my Cos Cob Song Volume article, but that was small potatoes and a bit before his style was developed (but it's still dang fine, and a blast to perform).  He was much more productive as a painter, and you can see some of his wonderful work here.  His only leaf (that I know of) is also the last piece he completed and his only piece of outright sacred music, an odd fact considering how cosmologically themed his pieces were.  It's incidental that I'm doing a piece of Christian sacred music today, because I've got a confession to make.  Specifically, I'm not sure I get this piece.

At first glance, Exaltation doesn't look that different from a normal chorale, but then the odd notes creep in.  Ruggles was notably free from the constraints of formal compositional training, having never learned tonal theory or studied other composers' works - he composed largely through trial and error, contributing to his glacial pace - but despite this he keeps to the chorale guidelines of stepwise motion and tight voicing.  That doesn't mean he can't have jarring dissonances every third or fifth beat, and at first these clashes are off-putting in the context of this otherwise conventional, and quite American, hymn.  However, many of them obtain a bittersweet luster after multiple hearings, and these become more important once you find out the piece was written in memory of Ruggles's wife Charlotte, who died the year before.  A trumpet colleague of mine was fortunate enough to have visited Ruggles at his house, and noted that near the end of his life Ruggles's eyesight was so bad that he had enormous staff paper made for him and he composed with it on the floor, so his usual sluggish pace became even more strained, and a more heartless critic would be tempted to wonder if the "wrong notes" were as unintentional as the critic wanted them to be.  I got the chance to perform Angels some years ago with Judson Scott at the University of Puget Sound, and after the performance he quoted Rilke ("Every angel is terrifying.") and we played it again, a move I thought was unnecessary at the time but still sparks a few synapses when I hear this piece.

Or maybe I'm thinking way too hard about it.

Anyways, Exaltation only grows in value the more you hear it, and the recording by Gerard Schwarz (yes, that Gerard Schwarz), a brass ensemble and the Gregg Smith singers repeats it about six times with instrumental variation.  Presser's published version is just the bare chorale with no words, as Ruggles intended the chorus to hum, perhaps to heighten the sense of nostalgia and loss, but the recording finds words for it (and I'm sure it's a hymn I'd recognize if I was of the churchin' folk), and they could have been working from an alternate version Ruggles kept in his desk drawer.  It's a lovely solution to a semi-problematic piece, and is a nice eulogy to Ruggles as well.  You can listen to everything Ruggles wrote in a couple of hours, so have at and take in, lest the angels terrify you too much.

~PNK

Ives leafs a Christmas Carol for the Eve

I've highlighted Ives's sentimentalism before on this blog, and nothing wells the tears of nostalgia in the American populace more than Christmas.  He had a real talent for weaving old popular tunes into crazy tapestries of sound and emotion, but his one Christmas song is surprisingly traditional, so traditional in fact that it could pass for a classic Christmas carol if tossed into a collection or on the radio.  And, unsurprisingly, it's called A Christmas Carol.

Even though the song appears to be Ripped from the Hymnbook, Ives includes a few small inventive elements to bring out an arrested, fragile pang in the heart.  The little rhythmic figure in the first beat of measure 3 turns into a leitmotif, stuttering the phrasing in measure 6.  Measure 8 is a Grand Pause, an achingly long time in the slow tempo and an illumination of Winter's enveloping silence.  The top of the phrase arc in measure 12 switches the time from a compound meter to a simple duple, giving the words an emphatic weight that works both with "hearts" and "die", awfully clever prosody considering Ives probably wrote the words.  Once measure 15 comes by the rhythmic leitmotif comes back, stuttering the phrases on expansive repeated pitches, allowing the Christmas sentiment to unspool across time and space.  Everything is piano or quieter, and the hushed quality brings the song's poignancy to the fore.  It's one of those rare songs that fits perfectly into a genre while commenting on the genre at the same time, as the piece is a normal hymn that's creative moments spark deep psychological notes.  It's title A Christmas Carol confirms that fact, as the listener is forced to admire it from the outside, treating it as a disconnected object rather than just another carol.  Either way you slice it the song is gorgeous, and best sung in the dead of night as a lone star pierces the heavens.  Even better if you're a countertenor like this singer.

Merry Christmas, and don't forget this lovely choral performance:

~PNK