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Jakob van Domselaer: Proeven van Stijlkunst, IV (1915)

From the album Jakob van Domselaer: Piano Music

Jakob van Domselaer (1890-1960), fairly or not, is best known for his association with the Dutch modernist painter Piet Mondrian.  The two met in Paris in 1912 and briefly lived together in 1915 in the Dutch town of Laren.  Around this time (from 1913 to 1917), Van Domselaer wrote his Proeven van Stijlkunst (Experiments in Style), a nine-part cycle of piano works that is his best-known and most forward-looking composition.  

The Proeven van Stijlkunst were directly influenced by van Domselaer’s encounter with Mondrian, who at the time was developing his rigorously abstract aesthetic program that would eventually be called “Neoplasticism.”  In turn, Domselaer influenced Mondrian’s thinking on music, which was eventually expressed in a series of articles on “neoplastic music” published in the early 1920s.  Among the diverse sources Mondrian mentions are J. S. Bach, American jazz-band music, the noisemakers of the Italian futurists, and the work of the otherwise unknown Domselaer.

In the early 1920s, Domselaer’s Proeven van Stijlkunst were performed by Nelly van Moorsel to accompany lectures by her partner, the painter Theo van Doesburg, as well as slide shows of works by artists belonging to the Dutch modernist movement known as De Stijl (The Style), of which Mondrian and van Doesburg were the most prominent members.

Piet Mondrian: Composition No. II: Composition in Line and Color (1913)

January 28, 2011, 9:36am

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Rued Langgaard: Sfaernes Musik (excerpt; 1916-1918)

From the album Music of the Spheres / Four Tone Pictures

Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) was a Danish composer in the grand tradition: prolific, eccentric, and obscure.  His most ambitious and best known composition is the opera Antikrist, which was inspired by his mystical-eschatological religious beliefs. The rejection of this work by the Royal Theater in Copenhagen in 1925 played a part in Langgaard’s withdrawal from public musical life, which corresponded with a shift in his music from hyper-expressionist modernism to a more neo-Romantic style.  He would be an outsider for the rest of his life, composing a vast body of more than 400 works in embittered isolation.

Sfaernes Musik (Music of the Spheres), composed from 1916 to 1918, was performed only once in Langgaard’s lifetime, in Germany in 1921. Made up of a series of distinct tableaux characterized less by thematic development than by the exploration of particular sonic moods and textures, this composition is vaguely reminiscent of a piece such as Debussy’s Jeux of 1913.  But in its intensely quiet and static nature, its exploration of timbre and texture, Sfaernes Musik has few parallels before 1950.  When it was rediscovered in the late 1960s, it was seen as a predecessor to the contemporary tendency toward Klangkomposition exemplified in the music of Ligeti, Penderecki, and others. Upon looking through the score, Ligeti supposedly exclaimed, “I didn’t know I was a Langgaard imitator!”

This roughly five-minute excerpt from Music of the Spheres comprises three distinct sections, labelled by Langgaard as follows: ”How dewdrops shimmer in the sun on a lovely summer morning,” ”Longing—Despair—Ecstasy,” ”World-soul—Abyss-All-souls.”

“Collage-like features, expressive of desperation and fragmentation, and a preoccupation with visions of destruction make Langgaard’s music distinctive, despite the often late Romantic and at times demonstratively retrospective nature of his musical language. He often went to extremes to achieve expressiveness, and his works frequently transcend traditional perceptions of musical form and temporal progression.” (Bendt Viinholt Nielson)

December 07, 2010, 5:45pm

Paul Klee: Instrument for New Music (1914)

“On the basis of abstractly stylized, fragmented representation…the musical symbols are reinterpreted as purely graphic material of a meta-musical nature.  The title corresponds to the strange and unconventional manipulation of the traditional notational symbols and instrumental components, which generates a new relational context: the represented ‘instrument’ bears as little resemblance to the familiar instruments as the ‘new music’ does to the traditional music of the 19th century…” (Christoph von Blumröder, The Concept of “New Music” in the 20th Century)

November 28, 2010, 1:13pm

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Maurice Ravel: “Soupir”

From Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913)

The early 20th-century French composer Maurice Ravel, best known for powerfully rhythmic pieces such as the toe-tapping Bolero and the wickedly parodic La valse, was also capable of creating music of the utmost expressive refinement, as shown by this piece from a setting of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

“Soupir” is written for an unconventional chamber ensemble of soprano, two flutes, two clarinets, string quartet, and piano.  The piece begins with a striking passage played by the strings: a repeating loop of cascading arpeggio patterns in which the combination of natural and artificial string harmonics and six-against-eight hemiola obscures the already ambiguous harmony. More remarkable than this texture itself is the function it serves in the composition, extending over the first 16 of the song’s 37 measures, and lasting a full two minutes—half of the total duration—in performance.  

This music, with its shimmering sense of motion-in-stasis, evokes perfectly the conjunction of timeless repose and breathless anticipation in Mallarmé’s text.  The singer’s melody unfolds in gentle pentatonic turns while the piano, flutes, and clarinets enter and gradually fill out the texture.  The climax on the word fidele (“faithfully”) and the ensuing descent of the vocal line is a thing of rare and delicate beauty.

In the second half of the song, corresponding to the second stanza of Mallarmé’s poem, the shimmering string texture falls away, replaced by a wistful and languorous chordal accompaniment.  Toward the very end, with the dying word rayon (“ray”), a fragment of the original texture reappears, an echo or afterimage of unmistakable melancholy.

October 13, 2010, 11:49am

“The Realm of Music,” by Ferruccio Busoni (1910)

Come, follow me into the realm of music.  Here is the iron fence which separates the earthly from the eternal.  Have you undone the fetters and thrown them away?  Now come.  It is not as it was before when we stepped into a strange country; we soon learnt to know everything there and nothing surprised us any longer.  Here there is no end to the astonishment, and yet from the beginning we feel it is homelike.

You still hear nothing, because everything sounds.  Now already you begin to differentiate.  Listen, every star has its rhythm and every world its measure.  And on each of the stars and each of the worlds, the heart of every separate living being is beating in its own individual way.  All all the beats agree and are separate and yet are a whole.

Your inner ear is sharper.  Do you hear the depths and the heights?  They are as immeasurable as space and endless as numbers.

Unthought-of scales extend like bands from one world to another, stationary and yet eternally in motion.  Every tone is the center of immeasurable circles.  And now sound is revealed to you!

Innumerable are its voices; compared with them the murmuring of a harp is a din; the blare of a thousand trombones a chirrup.  All, all melodies heard before or never heard, resound completely and simultaneously, carry you, hang over you, or skim lightly past you— of love and passion, of spring and of winter, of melancholy and of hilarity, they are themselves the souls of millions of beings in millions of epochs.  If you focus your attention on one of them you perceive how it is connected with all the others, how it is combined with all the rhythms, colored by all kinds of sounds, accompanied by all harmonies, down to the unfathomable depths and up to the vaulted roof of heaven.

Now you realize how planets and hearts are one, that nowhere can there be an end or an obstacle, that infinity lives in the spirit of all beings; that each being is illimitably great and illimitably small: the greatest expansion is like a point; and that light, sound, movement and power are identical, and each separate and all united, they are life.

December 23, 2009, 2:48pm