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Maurice Ohana: Satyres for two flutes (1976)

From the album Complete Chamber Music

Born in Morocco, raised in Spain, and active most his life in France, Maurice Ohana (1913-1992) was a cosmopolitan composer whose vast and heterogeneous body of work defies easy stylistic categorization. Ohana belongs to what musicologist Harry Halbreich calls the “alternative avant-garde”—those modernist composers who plied their trade in relative isolation, outside the primary institutional channels of support. He was a self-conscious musical outsider, stating proudly that his education “owes more to Andalusian folk music, African, and Berber music, than to Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms.”

In 1947, Ohana founded with three other like-minded composers the group Zodiaque, opposed to both serialist and neo-romantic tendencies and based on the organic development of folksong melodies into a modern compositional idiom. During this time, Ohana’s work was heavily influences by the Spanish traditional music with which he grew up. But by the mid-1960s, he had developed a mature and highly syncretic style that encompassed contemporary avant-garde elements such as extended instrumental technique and microtonality as well as various world music influences, including Afro-Cuban rhythmic structures and aspects of east Asian theater music. He also invented two instruments used frequently in his later music: a ten-string guitar and a zither tuned in third-tones.

The composer with whom Ohana felt the closest affinity was likely Claude Debussy, another great innovator who was hostile to all schools and dogmas. Ohana composed a Tombeau (a musical tribute to a dead composer) for Debussy in 1962, and his later work Sacrale d’Ilx was written for oboe, horn, and harpsichord, the ensemble of Debussy’s planned fourth sonata, which the French composer did not live to write. Satyres evokes inevitably Debussy’s use of the flute in pieces such as Syrinx and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

April 27, 2011, 6:25pm