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new insights into our classical catalogs, contemporary composers and the music scene. umpc: giving music a universal perspective

Table of conTenTs

Foreword.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

site-speciFic music-making ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Focus on mankind Klaus Huber Celebrates his 90th Birthday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

martin grubinger on xenakis .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

péter eötvös Interviewed by László Gyori. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

digitized but not entirely: I taly’s Composers Under-40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

getting to the core oF things Q&A with Graham Fitkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

Fabien lévy A Portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

contemporary music For education ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

composer/pianist Baptiste Trotignon and Jean-Frédéric Neuburger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

Fausto romitelli: six keywords Drawn from Romitel l i ’s own Descriptions of his Music . . . . . . . .42

sirenen, a new opera Rolf Riehm in Frankfurt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

machine poetry The Music of László Vidovszky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50

alexandre desplat & François meïmoun New Signings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56

the new puccini critical edition .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58

world premieres in 2014 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64

A successful Verdi-anniversary year is behind us, and in 2014 we are

ready to celebrate the next milestone anniversaries, those of Eötvös

(70), Globokar (90), Huber (90), and Nono (90).

In this, the third edition of our yearbook, we will keep you up to date

on important anniversaries, as usual, but also on our new composers

and projects, such as the launch of our Puccini Critical Edition series.

Our lead article, “Site-Specific Music-Making,” explores new trends in

composing for unusual venues and sites.

2014 is also the first full year our German office will be operating

from Berlin, instead of Munich, where a (mostly) new team is now

working alongside the other Universal Music Group publishing and

recording colleagues.

Our newly-designed web portal www.umpgclassical.com will soon

be followed by new websites for our individual offices. A blog and

other social media presence have been added to a redesigned On The

Dial e-newsletter to help you keep up with our composers and publish-

ing activities. We cordially invite you to join the conversation on both

Facebook and Twitter.

We hope you “follow” and “like” us and, most importantly, that you

like the great works we have the privilege of publishing!

Antal Boronkay, Managing Director, Editio Musica Budapest

Silke Hilger, General Manager, Ricordi Berlin

Cristiano Ostinelli, General Manager, Casa Ricordi, Milan

Nelly Quérol, General Manager, Durand–Salabert–Eschig, Paris

James M. Kendrick, Consultant, Head of Classical Publishing, New York and London

The home for composers from across The globe

2

Site-

Specif

ic MuSic-

Dusapin: Opéra de Feu - Deauville

2010

operas in car parks. symphonies in airfields. concerTs in barns, beaches, caves, and underground sTaTions.

3

Gr

ou

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hie

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av

a

MuSic- MakingWhere we might come across contemporary classical music has

become increasingly difficult to predict. It’s premature to talk of

us entering a post-concert hall world. But the scene is certainly

getting restless.

A rising number of new music festivals have taken up residency

in resolutely un-classical venues. The London Contemporary Music

Festival (LCMF) took over a car park in summer of 2013. The festival

Sonica, now in its second year, explores the urban wilds of Glasgow

each November. Heiner Goebbels’s Ruhrtrienniale, meanwhile, contin-

ues its annual take-over of the post-industrial wastes of west Germany.

Not all this site-specific bed-hopping is without precedent. Pascal

Dusapin’s Opéra de Feu (2010), for example, deals with a familiar ritual:

that of writing music for firework displays. It’s a reminder that every

musical event, before the concert hall explosion of the late 1700s, was

once site-specific. The current trend, then, for classical music tailoring

itself to specific structures, which has gathered such momentum over

- by igor toronyi-lalic

4

Dusapin: Opéra de Feu - Deauville

2010

5

Gr

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pe F - Thier

ry

Na

va

the past few years, is simply a return to

an older norm.

Some of this has been driven by the

chase for new audiences. Most, how-

ever, has been about using non-stan-

dard space to free music, performer,

and listener from the constraints and

conventions of the concert hall and to

reconfigure the musical experience.

This was the aim of the London

Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF)

2013, which teamed up with the

summer arts festival Bold Tendencies

to put on concerts on the sixth floor of a little used multi-storey car

park in South London. The decision was part practical (it was a large,

free space), part acoustic (famously good), part aesthetic, and part

musical. Few spaces could have chimed as well with the early avant-

garde timbre works by Ennio Morricone or the thunderous piano

recital given by Mark Knoop on the final night, which included Iannis

Xenakis’s brutal Evryali.

What suits spatial adventurism best, however, is opera. Intrinsically

unstable as an art form, opera has always rewarded experimentation.

The immersive movement of the past decade, for example, has found

an enthusiastic partner in it. When LCMF 2013 embedded itself in

the nooks and crannies of the car park space for Gesamtkunstwerk

by Gyorgy Kurtag, Laurie Anderson, Gerald Barry, and Jennifer Walshe,

it was a natural fit.

One of the most notable historic models for this interaction between

architecture and opera is Luigi Nono’s Prometeo. Needing a space that

would radically redefine the relationship between listener and per-

former, Nono asked Renzo Piano to create a specially designed “musi-

cal space” for the opera. The result was a space that worked like “a

gigantic lute,” the music causing the wooden structure in which the

audience sat to vibrate like a sound board.

A redefinition of what opera could be and do by composers like

Giorgio Battistelli—whose 1981 Experimentum Mundi, for example, sees

16 artisans lay bricks, shape stones, forge, grind knives, cobble shoes,

build barrels, and make pasta over the course of the evening—also has

helped the art form escape the opera house.

Spatial awareness has been a central part of a composer’s job since

at least Edgar Varèse’s Poème Électronique (1958), which was created

for the futuristic curves of Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the Belgian

Expo and was recently resurrected (along with the rest of the Varèse

oeuvre) at the Holland Festival and put on in a disused gas works

building in west Amsterdam.

Post-Varèse, space began to be addressed and played with as much as

timbre and pitch. Alongside several acoustic experiments with orches-

tral set up (Musivus was composed for a four-voice polyphonic space),

Emmanuel Nunes explored the spatial phenomena of music in works

such as Wandlungen, which sees each pitch triggering a spatial response.

what suits spatial adventurism best is opera. opera has always rewarded experimentation.

6

Complete breaks with the concert hall were rarer. One of the first

to do so was the Scratch Orchestra, a politically minded collective

set up by the maverick Marxist composer Cornelius Cardew, whose

“environmental events” in the early 1970s included “an ambulatory

concert” around south-west London and “a concert in the forecourt

of Euston railway station.” The gallery space and art scene has often

been the site of classical music’s most radical ideas. Many works that

have attempted to think spatially—like Salvatore Sciarrino’s work for

massed amateurs, Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni, which sees a hundred

flautist schoolchildren perform while circling the audience—have

found themselves seeking out gallery partners. The Guggenheim

Museum, for example, hosted the U.S. premiere of the Sciarrino.

One of the oldest drivers behind the exodus from civic concert halls has

been about flight from city life. “Only the chirp of crickets can be heard

in this semi-open, semi-closed and in the summer relatively cool place,”

explains Gábor Csalog, artistic director of the barn concerts in Vértesacsa,

Hungary, which celebrate the work of Kurtág. “Neither the noise of the city,

nor the artificial silence of concert halls or studios can disturb absorption.”

But many have left the concert hall to get closer to the sonic cor-

ruptions of urban life. LCMF 2013 rejoiced in the leakage of city sound

into the concert environment. The trains, traffic, and sounds of social

life were appreciated by many of the composers in the Cage tradi-

tion who performed in the car park, especially experimentalists like

Charlemagne Palestine, who had performed in five car parks before.

Site specificity can be political. It can be aesthetic. It can be nostal-

gic. It can be practical. It can be cynical. It can also be monumental.

Dusapin’s Opéra de Feu, in which he teamed up with France’s foremost

pyrotechnicians, Groupe F, for a beach-side extravaganza, is one kind

of epic. Luca Francesconi’s FRESCO (2008) is another. The work sees

300 city-scattered musicians (made up of five wind and brass marching

7

aN

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ea F

elv

éGi

bands) perform while slowly and separately winding their way through

the streets of town to a central plaza, the music fashioned by the town

plan. This is civic thinking taken to an extreme, where the city itself has

become a kind of score.

This may all seem a long way from the focused concert experience of

the 19th and 20th century. Yet every one of these experiments is about

creating artworks that respond to the new ways in which we, today,

organize ourselves, our stories, and our thoughts. Twenty-first-century

society and narrative is a scattered thing; it’s no surprise that, increas-

ingly, concerts are too.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic is a critic and curator. He writes regularly on music

for, among others, The Times and Sunday Telegraph. He is the author

of Benjamin Britten (2013) for Penguin, co-founder of theartdesk.com,

and co-director of the London Contemporary Music Festival.

using non-standard space to Free music, perFormer, and listener From the constraints and conventions oF the concert hall and to reconFigure the musical experience...

Facing page:

Péter Kiss and

Péter Szűcs on the

stage of a barn in

Vértesacsa.

This page:

Salvatore Sciarrino:

Il Cerchio tagliato dei suoni for 4

flutes and 100

migrant flutists -

Leghorn, April 2013

8

Klaus Huber, born November 30, 1924, in Switzerland, is one of the

last living representatives of the so-called post-war generation. He

was a late starter, as he says himself. Since the end of the Fifties his

works have been performed successfully by excellent musicians. But

he was no opinion-shaper like Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, or Cage,

even though Huber’s writings are extensive, stimulating and, not rarely,

polemical. As professor of composition in Freiburg, he became one

of the most influential teachers of his generation. His pupils include

diverse composers such as Febel, Ferneyhough, Hosokawa, Jarrell,

Lauck, Pagh-Paan, Platz, Rihm, Saariaho, and Wüthrich.

Reflecting on Social Conditions

When starting the composition of his full-length oratorio Erniedrigt…

geknechtet…verlassen…verachtet… (1975, 1978-83), he found a fitting

home in Ricordi, the publisher of Italy’s left-wing composers like Nono

and Maderna. Coming after a long period of composition, its premiere

in Donaueschingen in 1983 marked a climax in his public impact. The

music put its finger right on the pulse of the peace movement: aestheti-

cally overwhelming, with orchestra and choir, paired up with Huber’s own

expression of sharp criticism of the political circumstances, degrading of

mankind, in Nicaragua. Up until then, many people had underestimated

Huber. The works’ Latin titles, his frequent reference to spiritual, bibli-

cal themes, the emphatic interest in Early Music with its contrapuntal

focuS on Mankind

by till knipper

klaus huber celebraTes his 90Th birThday

9

STeFaN

For

STer

and isorhythmic techniques struck many as antiquated and unworldly

– unjustly so. Looking back, it seems more accurate to say that he has

consistently kept his music well apart from compositional fashions, but

not from historical and intellectual currents, which are reflected in his

music both artistically and in terms of aesthetic content.

Nono’s Death and the Second Gulf War

The aesthetic change that leads to Huber’s late period is remarkably

novel and was first revealed to the public by the Witten premiere of

the string trio Des Dichters Pflug (1989) in third-tone tuning. Shortly

afterwards, Huber was made professor emeritus, and his friend Luigi

Nono (b. 1924) died on May 8, 1990. At their last meeting Huber had

lent him a book on Sufism. The Second Gulf War began and lead to

huge anti-war demonstrations, and not just in Germany. This provided

the aesthetically fertile ground for his late period. In memory of Nono,

Huber wrote his …Plainte… for viola d’amore (1990). Numerous refer-

ences and re-workings have made this piece a sort of seed for his late

period, as well as a kind of self-portrait with Nono, and also with Ossip

Mandelstam, the poet who died in a Russian gulag in 1938; the rhythm

of …Plainte… is based on the spoken rhythms of one of his poems.

Variants and Interlockings

Beneath the surface, Huber’s late works are intricately intercon-

nected. The solo piece …Plainte… was also intended as one of the

focuS on Mankind Klaus Huber

10

17 soloist layers in the monumental spatial composition Die umgep-

flügte Zeit (1990) which, alongside a choir as well as a third-tone and

a quarter-tone ensemble, move through the space, following Nono’s

precedent with compositions like “Hay que caminar” soñando (1989)

or Prometeo – Tragedia dell’ascolto (1981-84, 1985). As so often, there

are also reductions of Huber’s big pieces. Time and time again, his

pieces have undergone these kinds of variant versions, so that they can

reach performance by means of various instrumentations, and in varied

forms. Superimposed, autonomous layers had already occurred, as in

the orchestral piece Protuberanzen, which contains three movements

that, purely “to save time,” can also be played simultaneously – a caustic

side-swipe at the ‘snippet-culture’ preferred by concert promoters.

Mozart – Mandelstam – Nono

An important stage in Huber’s recomposition of …Plainte… lies at the

centre of the string quintet Ecce homines (1998), where it is overlaid

with fragments from Mozart’s G minor String Quintet – idealistically

performed in a mean-tone intonation – which are re-instrumented,

and completed by a canon in inversion. The quintet is a sort of model

for his major Mandelstam opera Schwarzerde, which sums up the late

period. At a central point in that work there are seven instrumental-

ists who wander through the audience playing …Plainte… as a canon.

Mozart, Mandelstam, Nono: for Huber these are the mountains stand-

ing firm against the surge of time, artists in the sense of an aesthetic of

resistance, people who pursue their ideals.

20.2.1985

Jury for “Junge

Generation in

Europa”

in Cologne;

from left:

H. Lachenmann,

M. Lichtenfeld,

L. Nono,

I. Xenakis,

K. Huber

11

reN

aTe

lieS

ma

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-Ba

um

Pitch Spaces – Human

Spaces

What links Huber to

Nono is not just his interest

in the performance space,

but also in the pitch space.

From his very first compo-

sitions, Huber set these in

contrast to one another: dia-

tonic chorales and twelve-

tone chromaticism, semitones

against quarter-tones since

the 1960s, and in the late

period third-tones come up

especially often against Arabian quarter-tone pitch spaces. His music

reveals astonishment at such different but extensive musical traditions

with hundreds of pitch scales and assemblages of additive rhythms

which are longer than one could imagine in traditional Western music.

Huber’s reference to the traditional Arabic music draws attention to

an admirable culture whose people have been viewed with hostility

in the Western world, who were bombarded, and whose museums

were opened up for looting.

The Unfulfilled Potentials of the Past

Huber’s late period is basically microtonal, but Huber dislikes this

nomenclature since he relates his music to traditional, historical sys-

tems. Traditional chromaticism – for Huber now an embodiment of

imperialist violence – is either excluded, or else very sparingly used, as

in the “Märschlein der Dienstbefliessenen” (“March of the Submissive”)

in Schwarzerde. Huber’s father was a musicologist, so it is not surpris-

ing that he cultivates a special interest in early music, the “unfulfilled

potentials of the past.” It is precisely in the late period that Huber com-

poses for “forgotten” instruments such as the viola d’amore (a kind

of seven-string viola) and the baryton (similar to the cello), and also

for countertenor. Even though it is not directly visible in the scores,

the 16th century’s expansion to 19 pitches by means of mean-tone

tuning with pure thirds informs many of his compositions, such as

his Lamentationes Sacrae et Profanae ad Responsoria Iesualdi (1993,

1996-97). During rehearsals he travelled with the musicians to a key-

board museum to investigate the unfamiliar intervals by consulting a

Vicentino harpsichord.

Continuing the Inheritance, but Differently

Though it stresses traditional references, Huber’s music is by no

means derivative or nostalgic. There are symbolic points of reference

and aural-sensual insights that he develops further. He seems to be in

search of a meta-harmonic pitch space, an aura lying beyond the con-

crete musical grammar of the historical models. What results from this

is new ideas with allusions, such as occur in his Lamentationes de fine

vicesimi saeculi (1991-94, 1995, 2007) wherein he divides the typi-

cal European orchestra, as a supposedly de-individualized mass, into

four chamber orchestras which, following his role model Stravinsky,

make music in maqam pitch spaces, polytonally transposed to dif-

ferent degrees. This gives rise to a supra-chamber music with very

varied instrumental colors.

We congratulate Luigi Nono and Klaus Huber on the occasion of

their 90th birthdays!

Translated by Richard Toop

huber’s Father was a musicologist, so it’s not surprising that he cultivates a special interest in early music, the “unFulFilled potentials oF the past.”

12

Martin grubinger

Felix B

ro

ede

Do you remember your first encounter with Xenakis’s music?

I remember I was 6 years old, and I heard Peter Sadlo perform-

ing Xenakis’s Rebonds B, and this was so fascinating to me. He was

playing it at Munich Gasteig, the Munich Philharmonic Hall, and I

was captivated: the wood-blocks, the combination with the drums,

the change between the rhythmic structure and this kind of impro-

visation on the wood-blocks and then the roll back to the rhyth-

mic structure again with the sixteenth note on the bongo and the

kind of melody on the left hand…. From this day on I was in love

with Xenakis. After that I started to work on his pieces. It took me

a long time, but I started with Xenakis very early, and I played all

the pieces: Kassandra, Rebonds A & B, Persephassa, and Pléïades,

plus Psappha. For percussionists, Xenakis is what we call in German

a “Schutzheiliger” (guardian angel). As a student I performed all

these pieces in concerts, Rebonds B of course, Rebonds A. Once we

performed a whole Xenakis program with Okho, Persephassa, and

Pléïades in one night. And people came—two thousand people—

just to listen to Xenakis’s music, and you know this was so intense,

interview by eric denut

on

xe

na

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13

Martin

Grubinger

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so special, it had such a power, such an impact—a musical impact—

but also, his music goes deep into your heart, so I would say that

without Xenakis, percussion would be in another situation entirely.

Is there any model, any master, any interpreter, or any colleague

who has influenced you in the way of performing?

Two performers did: Sylvio Gualda and Peter Sadlo, and both these

performers really had such a strong impact on me. I listened to all the

recordings, and of course I went to ARD competition and listened to

the different interpretations of Psappha. But at the end, it’s pure fun,

and that’s the fantastic thing. There’s a high, very high intellectual level

in this music and, on the other hand deep emotion, and that’s the fan-

tastic combination in the music of Xenakis. We did Pléïades in Salzburg

Festival, and at the end there was a standing ovation. People who had

never been in contact with Xenakis’s music before were fascinated. We

loved to play it, and we tried to express our emotion about this music

to the people.

Also the form is great, and the rhythm of the work.

That’s Pléïades with its four movements and its ending: Claviers,

Métaux, Mélanges, and Peaux. In the ending you know the movement

with the rolls. Then yes, this is simply something special.

15

Are you still preparing it? Is the music so difficult that you need to keep

working on it, or is it now really standing in the repertoire for you?

We have it in the repertoire; we deeply believe that for each concert it

has to be prepared very strictly and very carefully. According to the acous-

tics, but also according to the tightness of playing that is really perfect.

Do you have any plans to do it in the open air in Bregenz?

I would love to. I hope we can do it next year or in two years at the

Salzburg Festival in front of the festival halls or at the Domplatz, with

the special acoustics, because I think you can express this music to

a very large audience as Xenakis is for everybody. It is contemporary

music with high intellectual character, but it is for everybody, and it

should be expressed not just to a small group of people. This sounds a

little bit strange maybe but we believe that our Pléïades interpretation

and our Persephassa interpretation are right now at the level where we

really can say: “this is what we want to express to people.”

You’re talking about the Percussive Planet Ensemble; tell us a little

bit more as the web is quite silent about it.

The Percussive Planet Ensemble was founded at the Bonn Beethoven

Festival in 2006. The members are all student colleagues and teachers

of mine. They are so focused on music by Xenakis, Rihm, Cerha, and

we just played a new piece by Cerha entitled Étoile at the Salzburg

Festival and commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. These people are

so dedicated to music by Xenakis because all of them also played the

solo pieces, the Rebonds, Psappha, and Okho. They are perfect.

What about the name of the ensemble?

We have a project that is called The Percussive Planet, and it is a kind

of music, a percussive journey through all five continents in one eve-

ning; so we do samba, salsa, tango, African drumming, contemporary

music, funk, fusion, rock, pop, jazz, just in one evening, minimal music

and so on; that’s why we called the project “The Percussive Planet.”

You have spoken about Xenakis’s composition, the form that is very

structured, the emotions. What is the most difficult thing when you

concentrate, when you go on stage and you perform Xenakis? You said

on Bavarian TV, that after Pléïades you were all going to bed, even you.

I told my colleagues in the Percussive Planet Ensemble that at the

end of Xenakis’s Pléïades, when we do the last drumming movement,

on the congas, after this no one should have any power left to play

again. And that is because I want my musicians just to give everything

they have until the last Peaux part.

That’s a kind of meditation in some way.

Yes, and it must be really tight, and then you know it must be played

with such an impact. The ending must be played really with the last

you can give as a performer. After that, there is just nothing because

you cannot play anything as an encore after Xenakis’s Pléïades. It has

such a deep impact. I so much look forward to doing it soon because

it’s THE perfect piece.

Did you have talks with conductors explaining to you the same thing

about some symphony works? Is that really only for percussionists,

this kind of feeling? You have to manage an economy of … I don’t

know, it was the first time I heard from a musician this kind of thing;

it was really close to Eastern meditation. You know exactly how to

manage your time economically and energetically.

Yes, that’s interesting. I would say it’s our philosophy of playing

because we deeply feel and think that it’s our duty just to give every-

thing we can give into this piece. And for instance, Métaux in Pléïades,

it’s not so easy for people to listen to it. I mean it’s complicated. There

are high frequencies, and sometimes it’s really loud, but on the other

hand it’s so important for us to play all these different colors you know

with the wooden sticks, with the soft mallets, the medium mallets, the

hard mallets, in real pianissimo. I want them to play real pianissimo,

and then you can hear six players in pianissimo on the Sixxen, so on

the metal parts.

Can Xenakis’s music be part of the regular repertoire?

You know, Xenakis’s percussion works are so popular in Austria;

every student plays Rebonds, Psappha, and all these works. I think

this is maybe the biggest challenge, to ask our contemporary musi-

cians to bring this to the “normal” repertoire. I think this is so impor-

tant, that our conductors and large orchestras start just to do it as a

repertoire piece.

Have you performed Xenakis’s music in Paris?

My biggest wish would be to perform Pléïades and others Xenakis

pieces in Paris once, and this because it is the center of his music.

Pléïades by

Xenakis at the

Lucerne Festival,

played by The

Percussive Planet

16

péter eötvöS inTerviewed by lászló gyori

17

péter eötvöS inTerviewed by lászló gyori

Almost all your compositions since the beginning of your career have

been published, and you are involved with four European music pub-

lishers. How did your cooperation with them begin and continue?

My contact with publishers began with Editio Musica Budapest at

the end of the 1970s. They published Windsequences and Steine. Since

I worked as a conductor in Paris from 1979, Edition Salabert Paris was

most advantageous for publishing my compositions. They published

Cosmos, 3 Madrigalkomödien, and Intervalles-Intérieurs. After my con-

tract in Paris expired, I started working with Ricordi Verlag in 1992,

which previously had its headquarters in Munich. A large part of my

significant compositions were published by them. Korrespondenz for

string quartet was the first, followed by Atlantis, Replica, and Shadows,

and among my operas Three Sisters and As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams,

as well as Lady Sarashina written to a similar text. Since 2000 I have

worked with Harrison/Parrott Management, London. They represent

me, as a composer and a conductor. Since at the time serious legal

problems arose concerning the libretti of my new operas, in this respect

Schott Music Verlag in Mainz proved to be a good partner. It was very

complicated to get the rights of Le Balcon from Jean Genet’s inheritors,

just as it was not easy either to get the rights of Love and Other Demons

from the representatives of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Up to the present

day I still write every score in pencil, so I need a permanent copyist.

Today the younger generation write their scores by computer. For them

the publication of scores and the function of publishing mean some-

thing entirely different than for the older generations. Only a large

publisher can settle legal problems which a lonely composer could

never resolve. The opportunity to distribute the works is also greater

with a publisher than if a composer were to do everything on his or

her own. At the same time, a significant publishing house presents a

guarantee for the quality of the works. Since I have not concluded an

exclusive contract with Schott, I have the opportunity from time to time

to work with Ricordi Berlin and Editio Musica Budapest.

You are celebrating your 70th birthday this year. This signifies a

career of more than 55 years as a composer, since you wrote a mul-

titude of music for film and theatre at a very young age, as a student

of composition.

At the Academy of Music in Budapest I was known as someone

Kla

uS r

ud

olph

Harakiri (1973)

18

able to improvise well and was invited to the film studios to impro-

vise music for a student’s graduation film. I watched the film and

improvised something for it on a Hammond organ. Then a week later

I was again asked to go to the film studio. I first composed music for

Büchner’s play Leonce and Lena, performed at the Academy of Drama

and Film. I was 17. The directors and I were of the same generation,

so that also connected us to one another. It’s a fact that this work got

hold of me very much at the time. That was where I sensed the diver-

sity it demanded, since each play required a completely different style

and each work began with different conditions. I have maintained that

practical-oriented thinking I learnt there up to the present.

Another generation link: you took part in the work of the New Music

Studio from its founding in 1970. It was a generation group. What

did you, who already lived in Cologne around the time it was formed,

represent in it?

The New Music Studio led by Albert Simon came about due to com-

posers of my generation getting together. We were allowed to organize

concerts in one of the community centres of KISZ (the Hungarian Young

Communist League), where pieces of music could be performed which

could not be included in the programmes of “official” concerts, yet they

demonstrated the aesthetics of our generation. Besides our own com-

positions, we had pieces played that provided some information about

contemporary music of the time. I played the role of a travelling ambas-

sador, since I was living in Cologne and came home to Budapest from

there. Besides the performances of my own compositions, I also con-

ducted. We performed Kontrapunkte by Stockhausen—Zoltán Kocsis

played the piano—and we also had compositions by Webern on the

programme. In addition, I brought technical equipment from Cologne

to Hungary, which at the time was unknown here.

Which of your compositions were performed at the concerts of the

New Music Studio?

My work Now, Miss! That was not its world premiere, but it was my

most important piece in that period which bore my then stylistic

marks. The other work I remember had the title Passepied, but since

I later withdrew it, it is not included in any catalogues. It was per-

formed together with Péter Halász’s company. A man and a woman

using five shoes each walked a certain distance on the parquet

flooring accompanied by five musicians. Each had only one shoe

on, while the other foot was bare. There was a boot with spurs, a

roller skate, a clown’s shoe, a Dutch wooden clog, and a high-heeled

shoe. The rhythm and tempo were dictated by the character of the

shoes. This piece has lost its ‘up-to-dateness’ since then, but the

significance of the New Music Studio meant that such compositions

could be tested.

You studied conducting in Cologne. Did you stay there after graduating?

No, I returned to Budapest. I lived at home for one-and-a-half years.

At the time I played in Stockhausen’s Ensemble. The 1970 World Expo

in Osaka was a decisive experience of that period. I spent half a year in

Japan. The fact that I could have a taste of another culture had a huge

impact on me.

What affected you so much? Theatre? This impact is clearly present

in some of your compositions.

All three forms of theatre—noh, bunraku, and kabuki. But the

Japanese gardens, the stone, rain, nature, and the silence of temples

made an impression on me. Perhaps the philosophy of Zen was the most

important. It helped me find myself and become connected with the

cosmic world from the position of myself. I became a part of the Earth.

19

So you wrote music for the

stage and film as a young

man, then took part in the

work of the New Music Studio.

Then you lived and worked in

Cologne. You did not compose

much during that time.

It was a period of collecting

and orientation. I didn’t know

what direction I was going to

take. Composition interested me,

but I couldn’t make use of the

knowledge I brought with me from

Hungary. By then in Cologne they

were already ahead and thought in a different way. To use a compari-

son, at the Academy of Music in Budapest we were involved only in

the part of the flower that is above ground. But there was no men-

tion of the flower having a part under the ground. The point was that

the flower should be beautiful, sweet-smelling, and bring joy. With

Stockhausen we were mostly involved in the root and knew that if

everything was alright there then it would become a flower. You could

learn much from Stockhausen. When I began my studies in Cologne,

I presented myself to him, and he asked me to prepare the score of

his electronic composition Telemusik for publication. I copied it by

hand, in pencil and with a ruler. We worked together for about six to

eight months. That was the time when I began being interested in live

electronic music.

Did you only play in Stockhausen’s Ensemble?

Not only. From 1971 to 1978 I was part of the technical-music

staff of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. I realized the

works with the composers, for example with Stockhausen, Pousseur,

and York Höller.

I had little time to compose in that period. In 1972 I wrote my first

chamber opera Harakiri, which already represented a new way of

thinking, and the effect of Japan was well audible.

Up to 1986 I composed all-in-all three to four works that are

still performed. I wrote the Chinese Opera for the Ensemble Inter-

contemporain in 1986. Kent Nagano, who was appointed the music

director of the Lyon Opera at that time, heard about the Chinese Opera

and thought that it was a “real” opera. When it turned out it was not, he

asked me if I wanted to compose a “proper” opera. I received a com-

mission and composed Three Sisters. Thanks to a fateful chance, I began

composing operas.

Your compositions speak in different languages. In the case of operas

it is obviously due to the thinking of a playwright; the story tells you in

what language the music should be. Is it possible to talk about changes

in styles in your oeuvre?

Not really about stylistic shifts, but about periods, yes. My composi-

tions written in the ’70s and ’80s were fundamentally connected to elec-

tronic music. The synthetic construction of the sound and the structure

were due to the fact that I had to think synthetically in the electronic

music studio. The instrumentation of Chinese Opera, for example, betrays

a kind of synthetic orchestrational thinking. My thinking later changed,

which was due to the fact that I conducted more. I am basically a com-

poser who works with sound, timbre, and the density of the sound—like

an architect who not only deals with form, but has a feeling where con-

crete, bricks, wood, or glass are required. These days I mostly compose

operas and concertos. I tailor the concertos for the soloist’s character.

in budapest we were involved only in the part oF the Flower that is above ground. but there was no mention oF the Flower having a part under the ground.

20

To what extent do you look after your works? When is it necessary to

let a composition go and take its own course?

I take care of my compositions very much. I am pleased for each

performance, since every time I listen to one there is the opportunity

for modification. With orchestral pieces a work begins to take a final

shape after five or six performances. Until then I take something out or

may add something. I change mostly the dynamics and the density of

the sound. This is needed because I’d like them to do well, to maintain

their place for centuries.

You graduated from conducting in Cologne and began conducting

while you were in that city and working in the electronic studio. As a

conductor you are one of the most prominent interpreters of modern

music across the world. How did your conducting career start?

The venue for my diploma concert was at the Cologne radio station. The

musicians in the orchestra and I knew each other and they asked where

I conducted. I told them “nowhere”. So they organized a radio recording

for me. Then another one. On the third occasion I conducted a concert at

the RIAS in Berlin. That was followed by one in Stuttgart and all the radio

orchestras in succession. I had no problem with the modern repertoire

because I could communicate that to the musicians without any difficulty.

Do you have an inborn talent with your hands for conducting or have

you acquired this precision in practice?

It is a natural endowment with me, but for a long time I didn’t know

because I didn’t use it. Yet it is not the hands that are the most important

in conducting but communication: the imparting of information by which

you are letting the musicians know what you expect of them. So thanks

to the German radio orchestras I began conducting, which was due to

the fact that in Germany at that time there were few conductors who

would have conducted modern music, with the exceptions of Michael

Gielen and Hans Zender. And—again it was ordained by destiny—one

day the radio orchestra of Stuttgart gave a concert in Paris. They played

Stockhausen’s Hymnen, which he composed for audio tape and orches-

tra. I often played it as a pianist. I knew it well, therefore Maestro Gielen

passed the coaching to me, and I also conducted the concert. It was a

success, and that was how I became the music director of the Ensemble

Intercontemporain. I filled that post for 13 years.

Teaching takes up a significant part of your life. You teach compos-

ers and conductors, hold courses, mentor young people, and you vis-

ibly regard it your mission to pass on your knowledge. Moreover, you

have set up two foundations specifically with a teaching purpose.

The principal idea was for me to help those young conductors who

didn’t really know which way to go after finishing their studies. My

career as a conductor began thanks

to chance. My first foundation in 1991

helped musicians and conductors

at the beginning of their careers find

their way. In 2004 I set up the second

foundation for conductors and compos-

ers. As a professor of the Cologne and

Karlsruhe academies I had many stu-

dents, and since my retirement I have

continued educational work at home in

the Eötvös Institute, which in my own

career I consider as important as compos-

ing and conducting.

Translated by Katalin Rácz and Bob Dent

i am basically a composer who works with sound, timbre, and the density oF the sound—Form, but has a Feeling where concrete, bricks, wood, or glass are required.

priSK

a K

eTTerer

21

Pierre Boulez

and Péter Eötvös

in Lucerne

22

iTaly’s composersunder-40

by marilena laterza

digitized but not entirely

Francesco Antonioni

(left), Emanuele

Casale (center),

Matteo Franceschini

(right)

23

Gia

Nlu

ca

mo

ro

(a

NTo

Nio

Ni)

, ma

riN

e d

ro

ua

rd

(Fr

aN

ceS

ch

iNi)

The digital revolution is an anthropological one that for some years

now has been introducing a stream of unheard-of resources into musi-

cal thought and practice. These are resources that all composers under

40 have had to come to grips with as they reflect on their artistic activ-

ity and reconsider the overall creative tradition. This process has led to

outcomes that, although extremely varied, are nonetheless anchored,

surprisingly, in a series of shared premises, ranging from research into

form to the conception of timbre as a fundamental prerequisite, from

composition understood as an ars combinatoria of pre-existing musical

elements to attention for the perceptive result that that combination

produces. But perhaps, more than anything else, it is the renewed rela-

tionship with history, strongly encouraged by the digital resources and

the possibilities they afford, that astounds the observer: a relationship

that is no longer traumatic or morbid, but instead, serene and construc-

tive, which allows us to sense exciting new points of arrival for the

music of the future.

Albeit without making concessions to the past, Francesco Antonioni

(b. 1971) remains tied to his pre-digital artistic roots and bears witness

to a presence different to the mainstream. Music, for him, is still an

occasion to invite performers and listeners to reflect together in the

place. And this is true both when that music makes exclusive use of

acoustic instruments, conducting a dialogue with the history that those

instruments bring with them, and when it uses electronics, provided

that they are able to bring together different worlds and, in the face of

the virtuality of the digital, safeguard the truth of the work. A neces-

sary truth that, in the music of Antonioni, entails the constant expres-

sion of an emotive content: art, for him, “has the task of directing one

towards a path to embark upon,” and the challenge of new music is “to

place people before an enigma—even furnishing them with the keys to

access it—ineffable but full of sense and gratification for anyone who

wishes to question it.”

Born, both actually and musically, before the digital age, Emanuele

Casale (b. 1974) experiences digital technology as a resource that is

never taken for granted and that influences in equal measure both

his “esoteric” music, with electronics, and his “exoteric” music, prin-

cipally for solo acoustic instruments. In the former, characterized by

24

JeaN

ra

del (v

eru

Nelli)

a certain compositional complexity, the electronics act as a sort of

receptacle of time in which to collocate the acoustic instrumental

sounds, conferring on them a greater temporal precision. But even

when, in his “exoteric” pieces, Casale operates from the point of

view of a listener who knows very little about the contemporary,

the digital, albeit in a different way, returns. In fact, the possibility

of making use of an immediately accessible and repeated quantity

of musical information, passing with extreme rapidity from John

Lennon to Debussy, translates, in the course of his writing, into

a greater freedom of expression. Released from the prohibition

against transgressing certain clichés, reference to traditional music

in Casale’s works remains nonetheless an affinity of a non-citation-

ist nature, something “personal” and involuntary, as in the case of

his affinity with certain Italian instrumental music of the early 18th

century that is recognizable in his more ironic pieces.

Silvia Colasanti (b. 1975) does not make use of electronics in her

compositional production. Music, for her, is a combination—with the

mentality of today—of pre-existing elements that have made the

history of Western music. Timbric elements—because Colasanti still

believes in the possibilities of traditional instruments, and for her the

challenge lies in making use of already patently connotated instru-

mental make-ups still arousing marvel—and also harmonic elements:

“today a cluster is just as historicized as a C-major interval.” The impor-

tant thing, then, is not the material, but the manner and the context in

which it is used. Once a tradition has been assimilated, for Colasanti,

it is necessary to interact with it, setting up a dialogue in which the

past resounds through the chords of modernity. “What is art,” she asks

“if not to continually give a new name to the same meanings, with a

language characteristic of the epoch in which one works, represent-

ing oneself and communicating with the people of one’s own time? If

we observe the same object under a new light, we seem to see a new

object; it is new, but only in part.”

For Matteo Franceschini (b. 1979) the correct approach to the devel-

opment of a musical idea is still that of an artisan, with pen and paper.

This approach does not, however, exclude recourse to digital technolo-

gies, which, for Franceschini—currently interested in multi-perceptivity

and multi-sensoriness—are fundamental. Digital technology, in fact,

permits him to integrate with the same rigor different forms of artis-

tic expression (music, literature, video art) and to render his creativity

synaesthetic, involving not just hearing and sight but also other chan-

nels of perception, for example, taste. All of this is based on solid tech-

nique and deep historical awareness, but free from dogma and from

the “weight” of the masters, whose legacy, in Franceschini, is renewed

in those fundamental, almost physiological, archetypes that he col-

lects and reinterprets, one above all, form, handed down by the “noble

fathers” but managed with the instruments and thought of today.

For Daniel Ghisi (b.1984), his first approach to writing music was

digital. Influenced by the processes of computer-aided composition,

Silvia Colasanti

(left), Daniele

Ghisi (right)

25

he makes use of the computer, on the one hand, to allow himself to

“be surprised” in his dialogue with the machine as as a creative par-

ticipant other than himself and to discover unexpected evolutions of

an idea through the modification of certain parameters. On the other,

he uses the digital technology to manage the meta-musical process

that lies at the basis of his work. In fact, for Ghisi, writing a piece con-

sists of re-elaborating a database of musical elements and citations,

almost never recognisable when heard, in such a way as to obtain a

form one degree removed from the original. The digital techniques,

then, become a means for interfacing with tradition, within a perspec-

tive of “open music” in which the work of the fathers takes the form of

live material, and not just at an unconscious level. Nonetheless, when

Ghisi writes for acoustic instruments, there is no computer-aided

orchestration software equal to the job. The translation of a sonic idea

into acoustic content remains for him an “analog” craft.

From the moment he set foot inside IRCAM, where he has become

a teacher, Mauro Lanza (b. 1975) has not written a piece of music

without a computer, making use of it to organize a coherent form as

much as to manage the harmonic dimension. He especially appreci-

ates the clarity and impersonal character of formalized processes of

composition. These allow him to get past his own ego and his own

cultural background so as to create an “unhuman” music, which stirs

up a profound and sacred fascination. Within this logic, Lanza has in

recent times interacted with the history of music as a blind listener

who takes bits from it and puts them back together without heeding

hierarchies of value. The musical material that he uses is impure, full of

connotations of an objet trouvé. There is no direct tie with history, and

so no recognition of any debt to the masters, but rather an uninhibited

attitude which, often by means of “corpus-based synthesis,” raids the

repertory, breaks it up into pieces and recomposes the rubble, recreat-

ing what might be termed “sonic Frankensteins”.

Much more than for the continuously evolving outillage that digi-

tal technologies offer to composition, Francesca Verunelli (b. 1979)

considers the digital techniques fundamental to the extent that they

constitute an epistemological principle with which it is necessary

to come to grips, in particular in respect of time. In fact, according

to Verunelli, the alternative temporality which, thanks to the digital

technology, accompanies the biological one, influences and rein-

forces the perception of what she considers to be the most power-

ful aspect of musical composition: the writing of tempo, or, in other

words, the possibility of listening to it, but also of “seeing” it under

one’s very own eyes, and also of “awakening” the listener. Thanks to

a formal elaboration that challenges the expectations of the listener,

Verunelli provokes in him or her a feeling of surprise that only music

can generate. And if it is true that the rhetorical codes of percep-

tion are the result of a long sedimentation in time, Verunelli’s music

reveals itself as a game that cannot avoid taking account of history.

Translated by Nicholas Crotty

Mauro Lanza (left),

Francesca Verunelli

(right)

26

27

STev

e Ta

NN

er

getting totHe core of tHingS

a Q&a wiTh graham fiTkinby elaine mitchener

1. Your latest work is linked to Umea, Sweden, which in 2014 will be

the European City of Culture. Have you been associated with the city

and its orchestra before now?

No, I hadn’t worked with Norrlands Operan Symphony Orchestra, and

in fact never visited Umea either. They have a fantastic building there

with two good halls—one specifically a concert hall, the other a full

opera house—and they also have conductor Rumon Gamba who I have

worked with before, and it will be great to work with him again. I had

done a concert tour in that part of Sweden before and remember deep

snow in April, and specifically driving a 15-seater minibus with spiked

tyres to an airport in the middle of nowhere, for a 4am flight, without

a map, when all the road signs were covered with snow. I visited Umea

last September and it was all beautiful warm sunshine, lakes, forests,

28

29

and not a hint of winter. I met with

the orchestra, conductor, lots of local

people and had a wonderful time.

2. The commission calls for the

work to be performed twice with

different instrumentation (the

orchestra and your band). Has

this presented any particular

challenges and how have you

structured this new work Birch?

The idea behind the com-

mission is to create two com-

pletely different perspectives

on the same musical material.

Often when I’m composing

this is something which natu-

rally crops up without much

conscious planning, but I generally get rid of it as deviating from the

driver of the piece. So I have never done this before with conscious

planning. The concert will be a standard two-half event; in the first half

they will perform the new orchestral work (which is about 40 minutes

long), and in the second half, the audience will move to the other hall

in the same building, and my own ensemble will perform there, gradu-

ally joined by members of the orchestra. This part of the commission

will take the same material but rework it with an entirely different vibe.

3. What sources of inspiration have you drawn from the experience

of working in Umea?

It’s quite a long story. For me it was important that this work was

imbued with something specific to the area and the culture there.

However I wasn’t born and bred there; I don’t have a great deal of

experience of the area, and so I can’t just assume knowledge of what is

important or unimportant. In essence I’m an outsider.

This has both disadvantages and advantages, and I have to

approach it from this standpoint. I have learned a lot about the area

and of course its traditional links with Sami culture. When I was last

there I had good meetings with Marco Feklistoff, Artistic Director

at the Noorlandsoperan, and Michael Lindblad, Chair of the Umea

Sami Association. We talked about the history of Umea, the issues

surrounding integration of Sami culture in Sweden and the present

climate. I travelled out into the larger Vasterbotten County area, and

as I’d taken my trainers [running shoes], I also ran around the city and

countryside which also helped me put things into place.

Bit by bit I started to make decisions about what I might and might

not use in the piece, and I became more and more keen to use data in

this work, specific objective information which could serve in some

background way as a ‘map’ for the music. In the end it seemed to come

together in the shape of a tree, the birch tree.

It [the birch tree] is a real omnipresent feature of both the city and

the surrounding landscape. It has been central to the Sami, used very

specifically in construction, used for firewood, and it plays a big part in

the reindeer herding culture. And then in Umea itself, following a huge

fire in 1888 which decimated a huge part of the city, the reconstruction

involved planting thousands of birch trees through the city to prevent

the spread of fire from building to building. So the city has all these

birch trees spread through it. Okay, that was intriguing, and beautiful as

they are, I really wanted some hard data about birches, their life cycle,

growth patterns and so on.

And of course it so happens that Umea’s University has a Department

of Forest Ecology headed up by one Lars Östlund. Lars and I have been

in contact many times and he has been the most incredible help. He has

supplied me with all sorts of data, images, graphs, and he has cored a par-

ticular birch tree for me which shows the width of the growth rings so that

we can establish a life cycle over 100 years. This has become my map.

The World Premiere of Birch by Graham Fitkin will take place 29 August

2014, NorrlandsOperan Symphony Orchestra, the Fitkin Band conducted

by Rumon Gamba NorrlandsOperan, Umea, Sweden.

www.norrlandsoperan.se/eng

i became more and more keen to use data in this work...which could serve in some background way as a ‘map’ For the music. in the end it seemed to come together in the shape oF a tree, the birch tree.

30

© m

uTe

Sou

veN

ir i

Bie

Ner

TS

In our current globalized world, with music effortlessly available

from almost every country, the most compelling musical identities

transcend national borders. Fabien Lévy represents a model of today’s

international composer both in his life and his compositional œuvre.

Born in Paris in 1968, he has lived in France, England, Italy, Germany,

and the United States and has been engaged in the different local

music scenes. His delicate music unites influences ranging from spec-

tralism, musique concrète instrumentale, and minimalism to the poly-

rhythmic music of Central Africa and Gagaku of Japan.

Lévy first studied mathematics and economics before finding mentors

in Gérard Grisey, Jean-Claude Risset and Hugues Dufourt. His œuvre,

comprising works for orchestra, vocal and instrumental ensemble, solo

instruments, and electronics shows post-spectral traits in several ways:

it features the composer’s fascination for sound as a sensual experi-

ence with all its complexity, ambiguity, and finally ineffability. Lévy is a

master of surprise, establishing listening expectations only to subvert

them and shift the listener’s attention into another direction. The ear,

Lévy seems to suggest, is as susceptible to illusion as the other senses.

He was led to this attitude not only by research on perception by Risset

but also by his experience with non-Western music. Lévy passionately

explores the diversity of musical cultures of the world. While study-

ing ethnomusicology—in addition to composition, music analysis,

harmony, and orchestration at the Conservatoire National Supérieur

in Paris—he investigated pygmy music in Cameroon. This engagement

taught him that listening is culturally conditioned and hence relative,

an awareness that constantly flows through his own music.

Extra-musical inspirations and sources play a crucial role for Lévy,

and he does not hesitate to share them with the listener, as in À propos

(2008) written for the German ensemble recherche. Each of the four

movements is dedicated to a visual artist: Jeff Wall, Giuseppe Penone,

Alberto Burri, and Tim Hawkinson. Together they form Lévy’s “little

imaginary museum,” as he puts it. The piece also shows his interest

in musical form, representing, for Lévy, the influence of the German

tradition on his musical thinking. In 2001 he first went to Berlin and

remained there until he became Professor of Composition at Columbia

University in New York in 2006. Six years later he moved back to Berlin

as Senior Professor of Composition in Detmold, a historic town with a

well renown conservatory.

As in many other works like durch (1998) and towards the door we

never opened (2013), both for saxophone quartet, rhythm is a dominant

fabien lévyby lydia rilling

porTraiT

31

feature of À propos. The steady regular pulse and the concern with

meter give Lévy’s music the character of flow, of always moving for-

ward. One might hear this as an influence of first generation minimal

music, or as a shadow of Lévy’s earlier engagement with jazz. He

delights in building complex poly-rhythmical structures and uses a

variety of techniques and mathematic models, like cross rhythms and

rhythmic canons. Thanks to this strong, rhythmic dimension his music

is highly accessible to a broad variety of listeners.

With Après tout (2012) for vocal and instrumental ensemble and

live electronics, Lévy composed a 50-minute musical meditation on

the possibilities of forgiving. It was inspired by a debate between the

philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch and a German high school teacher,

Wiard Raveling, about whether it would ever be possible to forgive

after the Third Reich. The topic touches upon the coordinates of Lévy’s

own life as a secular French composer with Jewish roots who lives in

Berlin. At the end of his “grand theater of forgiveness,” he refuses a

moral judgment but leaves it open to the audience to decide whether

forgiving is possible—a powerful statement with a strong impact on

the listener as the first performances in Berlin and Stuttgart showed.

The experience was equally moving for the audience and for the com-

poser himself, as the fine and subtle music succeeded to reach and

deeply affect many listeners who had never been in touch with con-

temporary music before.

One of Lévy’s favorite lessons from Grisey is that composing is

not about producing but about creating. This summarizes his own

musical credo. In a musical world that prioritizes premieres and

always demands more new pieces, Lévy allows himself to focus on

writing very few pieces per year and to develop a new approach for

each one of them. As a result, none follows the same strategy or

method as any others. In Pour Orchestre, written for the orchestra

of Komische Oper Berlin, he deconstructs the traditional symphony

orchestra as a mirror of the Western world with its implied hier-

archies and mechanisms of power. This begins with a “geography

of the ensemble” when the harp and woodwind sections take the

place of the strings, which must instead move to the background.

It continues with the musicians enacting the utopian ideal of a dif-

ferent society, in which 67 individuals interact as equals in a poly-

rhythmic structure.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Fabien Lévy’s music stands out for its

rhythmical delicacy and deep sonic sensitivity, multi-dimensionality

and perceptual richness. No matter how intellectually charged and

philosophically reflected, the music remains playful and joyous, invit-

ing the listener to follow Lévy through his musical world.

32

conteMpor ary MuSicfor educatio on

One of the gems of Editio Musica Budapest (EMB) is its constantly

expanding series of piano pieces by György Kurtág entitled Games. Now

the EMB catalogue is being enriched with two new related publications:

János Bali’s exciting and inspiring work Introduction to the Avant-garde

for Recorder Players and György Orbán’s two-volume, completely indi-

vidual Aulos: Advance-level Piano Pieces for Practising Polyphony.

Beyond their basic differences (range, instruments, and target audi-

ence), the three works share common features, for example, an inten-

sive connection with the music of the past and the stress on impro-

vised elements, but most of all, going far beyond any educational aim,

they enrich the repertoire of contemporary music with significant,

exciting, unmistakably unique-sounding compositions. Furthermore,

they continue a valuable Hungarian tradition, namely: composers of

instrumental tutorials commissioning prominent composers to enrich

their works with new concert pieces. For example, Sándor Reschofszky

approached Béla Bartók to be the co-composer of his Piano Method

(1913). The traditionally strong connection between music composi-

tion and music education can of course be realized in other forms,

as exemplified by the choral works for children of Kodály and Bartók,

those par excellence artistic manifestations which became part of the

music teaching curriculum of Hungarian children and at the same time

entered the international concert repertoire. György Kurtág

by János malina

33

aN

dr

ea Felv

éGi

conteMpor ary MuSicfor educatio on

Kurtág’s Games series bears striking similarities to Bartók’s

Mikrokosmos. Both familiarize the pupils or the musicians playing the

pieces with the music and with the basic experiences and movements

connected with the arts; and at the very beginning both take the child

music student by the hand, but after numerous volumes reach valuable

and even brilliant concert pieces. In the case of Games, these two faces

of the series outwardly and fittingly separate from each other; the first

four volumes, completed in 1979—in the creation of which a legend-

ary piano teacher, Mariann Teöke, participated—primarily serves a

directly educational aim. Over the course of the years further volumes

have been published in succession (four up to today) representing an

even more personal Kurtág genre, as indicated by the sub-title Diary

Entries, Personal Messages. Just as the first volumes contained concert

pieces of full poetic value, which have even become popular in recent

decades, so the second series of Games is not devoid of technically

quite simple, brief compositions, thus making it possible that through

them those who are not professional pianists can enter the shrine of

distinguished art. The second four volumes are simultaneously a per-

sonal portrait gallery of Kurtág. You can hardly find in them a work

which is not a homage to his models, a deceased or still living com-

poser, friend or colleague, or which is not dedicated to such a person.

“Homage” is the key word of these four volumes. Great artists (not

only musicians but also, for example, poets and artists) and figures

quite unknown to the public appear with either their full names or ini-

tials, underlining that ability of György Kurtág to find in everyone that

personal characteristic and unrepeatable quality which gives rise to

a unique and indispensable element of the universe. Connected with

his well-known passion is that he has always worked with and ardently

involved himself with amateurs and musicians whose talent is modest.

The eight volumes of Games now before us show a striking symme-

try and closed format in that both parts end with a volume for four

hands and two pianos (Volumes 4 and 8), though such pieces also

appear sporadically in the other volumes. Meanwhile, Volumes 9 and

10 of the series are already in preparation. However, the greatness of

the series is embedded not only in the structure or the proportions,

but also in the inner richness of the pieces, which in the case of the

first part of the series is primarily manifested in the elucidation of the

piano’s traditional and novel possibilities of resonance, while in the

second part it lies in the limitless diversity of artistic expression, sen-

sitivity, passion, movement, and content which cannot be expressed in

words—precisely as in the case of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.

While György Kurtág is acknowledged primarily as one of the

world’s greatest living composers, János Bali, the author of Introduction

to the Avant-garde, has become noted mainly as a performer (a flute

a connecTion wiTh The pasT, improvisaTion and uniQue sounds for boTh sTudenTs and professional musicians

34

aN

dr

ea F

elv

éGi

player and choirmaster) and as a teacher and outstanding researcher

of the history of the recorder. The particular and perfectly individ-

ual musical conception of Bali, who originally qualified as a math-

ematician, has always been defined by early music, primarily by

Renaissance choral polyphony and Baroque instrumental music, as

well as his intense interest in contemporary music and the avant-

garde. It is worth mentioning that in addition to working with younger,

distinctly avant-garde contemporary composers, as an editor-composer

he has had an intensive working relationship directly with Kurtág and

his works for a long time.

Although the concept of Introduction to the Avant-garde belongs

to János Bali, the work is emphatically a collective creation, since a

significant proportion of the pieces are by other composers: Ádám

Kondor, Gábor Kósa, György Kurtág Jr., Csaba Laurán, Dóra Pétery, Vera

Rönkös, László Sáry, András Soós, Máté Szigeti, and Péter Tornyai. In

one section (Photo and Sound) there is not one single piece, rather

only ideas, instructions for use, and suggestions for transforming the

manifestations of everyday life—from the sound of a concrete mixer

to the chirping of a bird—into a composition. One of the important

characteristics of making music from the small details of reality is Bali’s

way of looking at things, as shown by the enlarged photograph details,

which cause you to reflect, in the first section entitled Drawing and

Sound. This follows in the footsteps of such eminent predecessors as

John Cage and Zoltán Jeney. Besides photographs taken by Olga Kocsi,

Hanna Tillmann’s graphics—sometimes witty, occasionally thought-

provoking or constituting an organic part of the composition—also

form an important part of the volume’s instructions.

Before the Instructions attached to the first volumes of Games,

Kurtág expresses a few words concerning what he would like to

encourage: “Pleasure in playing, the joy of movement—daring and

if need be fast movement over the entire keyboard right from the

first lessons, instead of clumsy groping for keys and the counting of

rhythms …. On no account should the written images be taken seri-

ously, but the written images must be taken extremely seriously

as regards the musical process, the quality of sound and silence.”

Overcoming the music student’s inhibitions and encouraging his/her

creativity are the most important aims of János Bali’s Introduction.

The collection provides varied opportunities for that, from hint-like

instructions for ‘piece generation’ or graphic scores to the most tra-

ditionally recorded, set compositions. The ensembles performing the

pieces also can be varied, from a solo recorder and very different

accessories (a jug of water or mobile phone) all the way to a recorder

sextet. At the same time, similarly to Kurtág, the collection develops

the technical skill of playing the instrument and also teaches a

responsible attitude toward the performed sounds. Although in some

compositions greater emphasis is placed on enthusiastic creativity

than on a secure mastery of the instrument, other pieces require a

high-level of skill in playing the recorder. Thus a good teacher can use

the publication when teaching music students who have the most

diverse grounding. Furthermore, we can

say that for lower-grade recorder teach-

ing, Bali is primarily addressing music

teachers, introducing them to the avant-

garde, giving them advice for the jour-

ney, inspiration, ideas, an open attitude

towards everything new, exciting, and

challenging, which gives support and

help right at the start of the journey.

The versatile and prolific composer

György Orbán is known internation-

ally primarily for his choral works. His

music is always witty and at the same

time it often profoundly touches his

listeners with a cathartic power. For

more than a quarter of a century he

taught composition at the Budapest

Academy of Music, for a decade as

a departmental head. With all cer-

tainty, rigour characterizes him.

György Orbán’s compositions

thoroughly put performers to the

test, be they an amateur choir,

an instrumental soloist, or a solo

singer. However, those who know him personally know that he has an

exceptionally open personality and is blessed with a wonderful sense

of humor, someone who temperamentally cannot compose or teach in

any other way than in the most personal manner on the basis of the

most personal experiences and associations.

Orbán’s Aulos: Piano Pieces for Advanced Players to Practise Polyphony

is an all-embracing personal composition, which was created in the

spirit whereby the manifestation of polyphony and the polyphonic

view of and approach to music present for him a fundamental per-

sonal experience, which has to be shared with others; and part of it is

thanks to his colleague, the devoted piano teacher Ágnes Lakos, whose

talented pupils inspired him to give them more didactic piano works

to help them better understand the wonders of music. The title of the

György Orbán

35

györgy orbán is known...primarily For his choral works. his music is always witty... and at the same time it oFten proFoundly touches his listeners with a cathartic power.

Orbán: Aulos -

Fughetta in A major

36

Recorder

(Tenor-)Recorder-Head

quasi Siciliano

Fújj a leszerelt furulya-fejbe, közben a kezeddel változtasd a másik végén lev nyílás nagyságát!(Ha teljesen nyitva van, magas hangot ad, ha teljesen befogod , mélyet.)Próbáld minél pontosabban utánozni a másik furulyás által játszott hangmagasságokat, dallamokat!

improvizáljmotívumokat!

gyors, rövid hangokdühösen

glissandopossibile

utánozd!

amikormegelégelted

sub

gyors glissandóknagyon lassúglissando

32

Speech therapistfor two recorders

Péter Tornyai

Blow into the removed head, and at the same time alter the size of the aperture at the other end with your hand.(If it is fully open, it gives a high-pitched sound, and if fully covered, a low one. See the picture on p. 29.)Try to imitate as accurately as possible the pitches and tunes played by the other recorder player.

Alto recorder

The head of a tenor recorder

improvise motifs

imitate

fast, short notes, angrily

rapid glissandi

Z. 14 734

glissando

very slow glissando

when you have had enough

14734_Bali_ENG_beliv.indd 32 2013.04.08. 14:14:47

two-volume work refers to the Greek double-reed pipe, known as the

biaulos, which for him in European culture symbolizes the first, uncer-

tain steps on the road of polyphony. The collection of 31 pieces and

two variations also offers short explanations at the start of each vol-

ume and introductions and commentaries for each piece. As he writes:

“The first part of Aulos outlines the main features of the basic genres

of polyphony and their technical procedures. … The second part …

starts off with an inward direction, towards the details. Those technical

approaches are considered in turn, without which polyphonic music

making cannot exist.”

The structure of this collection is more confined than the other two;

it deals with specific musical phenomena, and in its main part con-

structions for the alternate preludes and fugues of Bach’s The Well-

Tempered Clavier can be felt. Confined, yet in every respect irregular.

37

Ba

lázS a

rN

óTh

The alternate pairs of pieces become

greatly imbalanced and are replaced

by three-piece sub-cycles; the number

of pieces is arbitrary; the alignment of

lightly-touched tonality is incomplete;

and in terms of the basic characteris-

tics of polyphony, the canon is missing;

namely the composer “doesn’t like it.”

Perhaps with this point we can quite

understand why the entire series is

primarily about games, a love child, the

creation of which was a pleasure for the composer, such that both the

composer and the pianist could feel absolutely liberated and exempt

from school rules. This motif of playfulness permeates everything

and is present in the most serious moments of the pieces--preludes,

fugues and fughettas, capriccios, fantasias, studies, choral works,

psalms and hymns—as well as in the written commentaries.

Among the three works, Orbán’s work most recalls a type of

textbook, since it demonstrates concepts such as double counter-

point, mirror conversion, the double and triple fugue, cantus firmus,

and complementary rhythm. However, by means of the facilitating

and uniquely sounding commentaries about the demanding pieces,

students mainly feel that someone is speaking personally and is

explaining precisely why polyphony can become an issue of per-

sonal feeling for people.

Behind the three educational undertakings there stand several

decades of teaching experience and three decidedly different person-

alities. At the same time, all three enterprises are uniquely clear and

based on shared convictions. That is to say: music making is an intel-

lectual discovery and adventure, and is an extremely important and

serious matter that bears upon our entire lives, choices, and actions,

and from which we can gain experiences and encouragement which

cannot be compared to anything else. However, all this demands of us

serious-mindedness, concentration, and responsibility.

Translated by Katalin Rácz and Bob Dent

the particular and perFectly individual musical conception oF bali, who originally qualiFied as a mathematician, has always been deFined by early music.

János Bali

38

Baptiste

Trotignon

coMpoSer / pianiSt

39

Jim

my

KaT

z

bapTisTe TroTignon and Jean-frédéric neuburger

Baptiste, when did you begin to compose?

Baptiste: As far as jazz idioms are concerned, I was around 16, when

I started to play with my first jazz groups. I started writing ‘fixed’ piec-

es—that is, things defined by being written down—even if in jazz, ef-

fectively, the notion of being ‘fixed’ is more liberal than in a classical

piece, where in general everything is more controlled.

What was your first classical opus, then?

B: The first piece has to be my piano concerto, called Different

Spaces, because what I was able to write for musicians before, for in-

strumentalists or strings for example, who played something and didn’t

improvise, was still more or less in a jazz context, a suite for orchestra

or rather for jazz quintet and small orchestra.

Jean-Frédéric, your first pieces date from when?

Jean-Frédéric: I started to write around about 10 or 11 years old.

They were in fact pastiches of repertoire pieces: ‘faux’ Mozart or ‘faux’

Chopin, things like that, things that I was working on at the time. My

first proper works which could be played in public—which however I

completely reject now because they were not mature from a technical,

structural or, obviously, stylistic point of view—date from when I was

17 years old at the end of my conservatory studies.

Did the passage towards writing seem to you a natural continuation

of your activity as a musician?

B: Yes, even more so since, even if we do not play the same kind of

music, Jean-Frédéric is like me; we have continued to play a great deal.

It was just something that seemed to be part of the natural flow of

music-making, in fact.

Baptiste, it is therefore about three years that you have been both

composer and performer. How has that impacted on your life as a

performer?

B: There are times when I have few concerts when I take advantage

of this to spend time just writing and when I only touch the piano with

an eraser, a pencil, and paper. In any case, I do not work at the piano

coMpoSer / pianiSt

a conversation led by eric denut

40

in this period, because I know I can allow myself that time. I have no

concerts for three weeks, a month, for example, which is rare, but I try

to use these times to devote myself to writing.

Jean-Frédéric, your timetable is like Baptiste’s, so I imagine that

when you have the time you make use of it?

J-F: For me it is rather like Baptiste. However, I manage to arrange

free periods quite often in fact, at the expense of refusing lots of

things. For example, I try now to have a whole month off at least twice a

year. Just now, I shall have August and December, for example, which is

already very good. And then the rest of the time, I often have ten days,

a fortnight …. Then what often happens in my case is that a composing

project starts to take shape a long time before I get down to writing the

piece itself. And often that happens after a long period of improvisa-

tion. That could equally be at home or in a concert hall, and I improvise

very regularly, obviously, like all composer-pianists. And then it is not

necessarily the object to have ideas but sometimes they arrive none-

theless and so suddenly one day a composing project is born, and then

effectively at that moment I find it is always good to have some paper

not far away, paper in my rucksack, at the hotel, no matter where, and

to write down half a page of music or a sketch; you think about it again

ten days or a fortnight later, even six months later. Having done the

piece that had to be done because it was a little bit late, well, then you

go back to it, and in a month or so it becomes a piece for piano, a piano

quintet, a piece for orchestra ….

B: When they decide to come, these ideas, you jot them down. And

then, for me, for a while now I have sometimes used mini gadgets like

the dictaphone that you have on your mobile …. sometimes for exam-

ple you are doing the sound-check at a concert and something comes

into your fingers—“Ah, that’s not bad, that works”—and you know that

you will never remember it the following day, so you record it, and then

afterwards you take the time, to see if you can write it down, if it is

worth the trouble to make something of it. Sometimes nothing comes

of it, and sometimes it can be the source of …

J-F: … Sometimes it can be very good.

Is the act of composing in some way a means of getting into plurality?

B: As far as I am concerned, for the moment in the domain of jazz-

performer as I am, I have worked on many other different styles pre-

cisely in order to find my own, perhaps. In so far as being a classical

composer, I have not had time to do that much with regard to the 500

years of musical history. I took classes in compositional techniques but

I have not really had the leisure and the time to study deeply many

fields other than jazz. I believe I still have many subtleties to learn

about in the stylistic domain, a little more than in jazz where I have had

the time to cover different types of writing a bit more.

I do not remember having read any reviews that said that since Jean-

Frédéric started spending an average of two months of every year

composing, that had radically changed his view of the Années de

pèlerinage, but have you yourself felt a difference, maybe in your

relationship with the composers whose works you premiere, notably

concertos? Have you noticed any changes?

J-F: It is perhaps more true in the way in which I approach the works

of my colleagues, for example Philippe Manoury or recently Christian

Lauba, different composers; and it is a pleasure precisely because I am

sensitive to trying to

understand all the dif-

ferent aesthetics, that

is to say almost one

aesthetic per composer.

In this context, therefore,

I think that my work has

improved in terms of ef-

ficiency, maybe not for

the classical and romantic

repertoire, but because

the fact that I have studied

for five years particularly

lots of modern and con-

temporary works means

that I appreciate better and

more quickly the structure

of the piece that I am going

to premiere—what are the

main points that have to be

emphasised, what is impor-

tant from an aesthetic point of

view in this piece—and therefore I get closer to the heart of the score. I

think that this is a benefit for giving the premiere of pieces.

A question about your instrument. One notices that some composer-

pianists and keyboard players become “real” composers, but that

this is rather less common for other instrumentalists. Is the key-

board therefore a real advantage?

B: The fact of knowing how to play the piano at least quite well,

knowing how to play the piano ... helps with writing ... even iF it is occasionally Flagrant that .. . certain things are unplayable on the piano, whereas they work brilliantly For the quartet

41

riK

ima

ru

ho

TTa

that helps with writing and with being effec-

tive, even if it is occasionally obvious that with

a string quartet certain things are unplayable

on the piano whereas they work brilliantly

for the quartet. In the world of jazz, often the

great arrangers are wind players, on the one

hand because they often play in big bands,

so they are trumpeters, trombonists, and on

the other hand because they, unlike us, have

the experience of being part of an orchestra

and of seeing how their part sounds with

the others. It is something that one can

only imagine or dream of as a pianist. Even

when one writes something running, fast,

you do not need to play fast when you

write at the piano.

J-F: But it is not a bad thing to listen to

it at the tempo it will really be. We can

do that too.

And is there also a disadvantage?

B: When I began work on the con-

certo, I saw a harpist, and other spe-

cific instrumentalists, a violinist I have

often worked with, a flautist, a horn

player …. As far as experienced in-

strumentalists like Jean-Frédéric or

I are concerned, who stay in their

own world, and who move into the

world of composing one way or

another, the problem is that when

you write, you have all the preoc-

cupations of a performer because

we know what playing music is

all about. Now, amongst contem-

porary composers, all styles considered, even if they are all more or

less instrumentalists at the outset, are there not some composers who

have lost the physical relationship with an instrument and who do not

put themselves in the place of the musician who will play the piece,

whether it is the first violin or the third horn? Whereas we, because

of our activity as performers, are constantly confronted with what it is

to play an instrument, with its joys and pains, its thrills and struggles

too. Perhaps that makes a difference in the writing, without necessarily

having to think about it, because one is confronted with that regularly

and that is part of what one puts into the score.

J-F: It is a kind of second nature when you write—I am talking here

about writing for the piano, not for the first violin or the third horn,

which one manages as well, obviously, or a passage without piano solo.

I often go to the piano; I try things out, and I notice that what I have

worked out at the table or during several days of writing is nonetheless

a bit difficult, and I prune it. I cut back—let’s say—9% of the difficulty.

B: I often do that. You start with the idea, and then when you realize

that it is a bit overloaded.

J-F: Therefore, if you feel that 80% of pianists will be caught out at

a particular place which is precisely a beautiful moment, it is better to

take the line of simplifying a little, even if it is a bit of a shame, and to

tell yourself that 85% of pianists will play the right notes.

B: It may not be a shame at all if you know that it will sound better,

because there will not be a ‘smudge’. In that case, it is not just a ques-

tion of better realization but also of better sound.

J-F: That’s to say that one knows where the danger spots are where

the pianist could slip up, even if it is already good.

B: I realized with Nicholas Angelich, who played my concerto and

who is an accomplished pianist whether it is from the point of view

of technique or sonority, that I knew how far I could go. Nonetheless,

after the premiere I made a few corrections, not much to add to the

piano, apart from one or two places where, great virtuoso though he is,

I wondered if I ought to make a change given that just afterwards there

is a pianissimo, so I removed three grace notes that no one was going

to hear, just to make the pianissimo easier. On paper it might seem a

shame, but in the end it will sound better because the pianissimo will

work better. It is therefore extremely interesting when one is writing to

ask oneself these questions, the relation with effectiveness, not in the

marketing sense of the term, but from the point of view of the result,

so that the latter becomes more poetic.

And there you have a certain competitive advantage over your col-

leagues who do nothing other than compose?

J-F: Not necessarily.

B: I wonder about that, and it is almost more an answer than a ques-

tion, which is not to say that it is exclusive to us.

… the monopoly of the anticipation of realization …

B: Yes, finally, is it not more interesting when one has a physical rap-

port with an instrument to put that into the writing? That’s rather what

I was trying to say. Translated by Patricia Alia

Jean-Frédéric

Neuburger

42

Permeated by a desire to explore the trajectories of the degradation

of material sound, impregnated with the atmosphere of psychedelic

rock and the obsessive gestures of techno, direct, visionary, yet at the

same time calculated right down to the last detail, admirably written, the

music of Fausto Romitelli strikes one right from the start for the qualities

of its style and the energy of its expression. To present it here we’ll make

use of some key concepts or key terms, taken for the most part from the

lexicon with which Romitelli himself represented it: sound, modernity,

high and low, degeneration, paroxysm, and profundity.

Sound

Anyone who had the good fortune to meet Romitelli probably still

has the impression of hearing him pronounce this word, suono, with

that highly characteristic intonation of his, drawing out the “o” with

a satisfied resonance. When he used to listen to the music of oth-

ers, the sound was the first thing (and sometimes the last) that his

attention fell upon. He conceived a substantial part of his job as a

composer as an attempt to put its energy to work. He drew inspiration

from the about-turn effected by the composers of the Itinéraire, in

fauSto roMitelli :

Six keywordS

drawn from romiTelli’s own descripTions of his music

by alessandro arbo

43

the music oF Fausto romitelli strikes one right From the start with the qualities oF its style and the energy oF its expression.

the wake of other important 20th-century composers. Much

more than “compose with sounds,” what was at issue, for

him, was to “compose sound,” a formula which should not,

however, draw us into error. In fact, on listening to Romitelli’s

music, one quickly appreciates that “composing the sound”

was not an end, but rather a means—without doubt the most

important—to open a window on the world. He himself said

this on numerous occasions. Composition was for him a vision-

ary practice and at the same time an instrument for taking cog-

nizance of reality, almost a kind of probe, capable of registering

the reactions and mutations in our sensibility. However suspect

the word “expression” might have appeared to him (in fact, it

used to horrify him, perhaps because he immediately associated

it with what appeared to him like the cheap pathos of New Age

or Neo-impressionism), it is perhaps the most suitable to illus-

trate this intent. Because the sound of Fausto Romitelli—a sound

that does not hide but, on the contrary, flaunts its artificial, syn-

thetic nature, that presents itself right from the start as filtered,

degraded and even dirty, but that is also able to be magnetic and

extraordinarily seductive—is one of the most sincere and refined

expressions of a manner we have of feeling and reacting in a world

ever more crammed with technology, crisscrossed by the flows of

planetary communication, and the violent homogenizing forces of

the global market.

44

Modernity

It would be nice to be able to avoid such an old and compromising

term as modernity. But I think that this would be, if not impossible,

then inopportune, not just because this was a term to which, in spite of

everything, Romitelli used to often make recourse, but because, accom-

panied by a necessary clarification, it continues to fulfil an important

function. On listening to Romitelli’s works one cannot not be struck by

the innumerable musical influences that are incorporated within them,

from Strauss to Grisey, from Hendrix to Pink Floyd, to David Bowie, to

Sonic Youth, Aphex Twin, Pan Sonic. How can one not suspect, behind

such a heterogeneous network of references, that typically post-mod-

ern trait: the carefree pleasure of interweaving, reshuffling the cards on

the table, hybridizing, contaminating or parodying the works and tradi-

tions from the immense global musical library? Instead, such thoughts

could not be further from the intentions of a composer who never

abandoned the idea of reflecting on language, aware of the impossibil-

ity of saying new things with old formulas and of the fact that, at the

end of the day, “the composer is the language that he creates.” It’s true

that in the work of Romitelli this principle does not transmute into the

rigid, unilateral vision of progress that had characterized the historic

avant-gardes; but it nonetheless constitutes an essential chromosome

of its DNA. Looking around, absorbing the influences that serve to

strengthen its persuasiveness, Romitelli’s music never holds back from

creating its own language and, with this, its own world.

High and Low

For better or worse, this dual concept has marked the evolution

of the entire history of Western music. Although the nature of the

encounter between the traditions of serious music (from stile antico

to the musiques savantes) and those of popular music, whether rural

or urban, has not been straightforward, we can perhaps represent it,

at least in terms of the framework of references in which Romitelli

positioned himself, as a field of forces in which each pole causes the

other to gravitate towards it, continually relaunching two major atti-

tudes. In the first, what is recognized as “low” remains external, and it

manifests itself in its specific difference. One could define this as the

strategy of exoticism and immediately call to mind some well-known

examples, from the tziganeries of Haydn or Brahms to the Spanish

rhythms of Debussy. In the second, what is “low” is a humus from

which a vital lifeblood is drawn. This is the strategy of assimilation and

of Durchkomponieren, and here too there immediately come to mind

many important examples: from the manner in which Corelli or Vivaldi

allowed their writing to be populated by dance rhythms, to the sonic

invention of Beethoven, who drew his inspiration from the streets of

Vienna’s quarters, to Mahler’s sinfonismo, impregnated with Ländler

and fanfares. Romitelli’s music can immediately be recognized as an

expression of this latter strategy. From the sonorities of psychedelic

rock, ambient electronics, or techno, it draws an energy, an emotive

impact, a gestuality, and a visionary force in stark contrast with the

anemia of academic sound. This absorption goes hand in hand with a

desire to elaborate a distinctive harmonic vocabulary capable of hold-

ing in check the clichés of consumer music. But what happens later is

that, once they are assimilated, the “low” materials vivify the musical

body proper and definitively modify its physiognomy. In this way it

comes about that a viola expresses itself like an electric guitar, or that

the sound of a bass instrument comes to form part of a complex and

inharmonious sonic monad, or that a loop constrains an entire orches-

tra to derail. High and low are not only placed one next to the other,

but they merge together in a musical result that is no longer either

high or low, and is certainly not a middle way between the two either.

In the end, the image that best represents the matter is that of an alloy

forged from two or more metals: an original material that contains a

number of properties that cannot be reduced to the elements of which

it is composed.

in a state oF trance, in hallucination, in the arrangement oF the senses oF a light show, the conFines between the real and the imaginary become blurred, and it is precisely in these territories that this music intends to dwell.

45

Profundity

As if constituting a lesson in spectralism, Romitelli’s music works

on thresholds, transforming harmony into an instrument that gener-

ates sound and unheard-of temporal processes, exploring its borders

with inharmoniousness and noise. Its originality consists in bringing

this démarche to paroxysm, pursuing the excesses and shifts of feel-

ing. The psychedelic nature of progressive rock to which it so read-

ily makes recourse is one of the means that permits it to draw atten-

tion to its border zones, as one sees clearly in the major works. In a

state of trance, in hallucination, in the arrangement of the senses of a

light show, the confines between the real and the imaginary become

blurred, and it is precisely in these territories that this music intends to

dwell. In a certain way one could say that, without the will to explore

these border zones, there would be no Romitelli style, a style in which

there is a precise balance between a candid pleasure in discovery and

a fundamental critical intent. The intention to dirty the bel suono, to

bend the real with the prospect of producing an altered perception,

can in fact be related back to an anti-rhetorical will and, at the same

time, to a need to touch on one of the crucial features of the current

consumer civilization. “Today,” Romitelli observed in an interview, “the

world seems to be a metaphor of the vanity and smallness of each

one of us. Individual existential problems are amplified by those of an

epoch that does not offer any point of reference, but, instead, only an

extreme dehumanization and denaturalization.” The broad design of

Professor Bad Trip (1998–2000) can be interpreted not just as a les-

son imparted by the underground to contemporary art music but as

the allegory of an existential situation in which it is often difficult to

distinguish the difference between simulation and reality and where

the synthetic product ends up appearing to us more true than the natu-

ral. The abandonment of sonic naturalism reaches its apex in Trash TV

Trance (2002), a piece for electric guitar which recalls the gestuality

of Hendrix and the noise of Sonic Youth. Everything here is noise and

saturation, almost as if it were the unseemly symbol of the immense

mass of media rubbish that surrounds us, with visionary effects deriv-

ing from the action produced on strings by objects of every kind—bow,

coin, sponge, razor—capable of rendering the final result even more

saturated and unseemly. In Romitelli’s music this paroxysm expresses

a utopia of feeling that unsentimentally denounces the consequences

of the communication society.

Degeneration

In many of Romitelli’s compositions, what seem to assume the con-

tours of simple linear processes undergo corrosions or torsions that

completely deform their appearance. Behind the most simple material,

like the three-note motif that opens Amok koma (2001), or the Strauss-

like motif in Audiodrome (2002-2003), there lurk uncontrolled shifts.

Repetition, inharmoniousness, saturation, distortion, loops all become

instruments to bring about this metamorphosis of discursive elements

that suddenly seem to derail, to jam, unveiling an unexpected violence.

As has been said, precisely where the music of others generally devel-

ops, Romitelli’s degenerates. This is a trait that he was very proud of, and

rightly so, because this feature constitutes one of the major gambles of

his music. To make degeneration a positive value is risky. The danger of

finding oneself having struck a pose, in the presence of a superficial-

ity of a generically alternative (“dark”) attitude is always lying in wait.

Perhaps not everything that Romitelli wrote escapes this trap, but his

great works demonstrate clearly the extent to which his music has been

able to assume the negative contours of disintegration, of degenera-

tion, drawing from these paradoxical and extreme situations a sincere

emotion. Mercifully, we don’t need to read Adorno to remain enthralled

when listening to Professor Bad Trip. In the energy of its overexposed

sound, in the dilation of its hallucinated landscapes, one is aware of a

stupor still intact: an authentic poetry that pulses in the midst of ruin.

Paroxysm

There is one feature that today more than any other seems to

me to mark the music of Fausto Romitelli: its profundity. His writ-

ing, in putting to work the disintegration of sonic material, renders

visible a desire to transcend every preoccupation with virtuosity or

instrumental technique, in order to express something essential. In

his works, behind those so often ironic or cryptic titles there lies an

obstinate will to work in earnest. This music exudes a need to not be

satisfied, to go right to the bottom of things. On listening to it one has

the impression that the false icons of the media-dominated world are

breaking to pieces, undermined by an awareness of the vanity of all

things. The result, all things considered, is music of great profundity, a

quality by no means common in the musical production of the initial

part of this millennium.

Translated by Nicholas Crotty

46

STeF

aN

Fo

rST

er

Sirenen – Bilder des Begehrens und des Vernichtens (Sirens—Images

of desire and destruction) is the title of a new opera by Rolf Riehm.

Nothing can be presented accurately in one format alone, the com-

poser argues, so he has written an opera that tends toward installa-

tion, a plot in solitary images, a music with sampling technique. The

premiere will take place at the Oper Frankfurt on September 14, 2014.

Rolf Riehm, how did you get into music?

My parents were musicians as well. One of my liveliest childhood

memories is me sitting next to my father who used to play Liszt, Chopin,

and Brahms for hours and hours. I grew up on virtuoso piano music.

That was my first musical Eldorado. It was much later when Mozart,

Bach, or Beethoven got through to me.

What is your inspiration?

I like to think of myself as a composer stimulated by political events

and conditions. But right now while saying this, on the internet I’m

witnessing the protest on the Taksim Square in Istanbul. That’s not a

heated up poster holding and slogan shouting mass. Instead it’s just a

fragmented gathering of people standing there in silence like figures

by Stephan Balkenhol.

Statements or appeals are not as important anymore. Today the

political attitude has become part of the artifact itself. As a composer

I’m imbedded in a historic context, whether I like that or not. I want to

use that as an inspiration for my compositions.

Who are your role models among directors in the theatre world?

There are some movie directors that had a strong impact on

me, directors like Godard (Passion), Passolini (Teorema, Accatone,

Il vangelo secondo Matteo), Bertolucci, Billy Wilder (my favorite!).

Speaking of theatres, the early works of Robert Wilson really do

impress me; and also Christoph Nel (Salome ) through his staging

of Tristan and Isolde I finally realized what a phenomenal lyricist

Wagner actually was, Achim Freyer (Handel’s Ariodante), Jürgen

Sirenena new opera

rolf riehm in frankfurTby till knipper

Rolf Riehm

Sirenen

47

Sirenena new opera

48

Sketch by Rolf

Riehm for Sirenen

49

Gosch (Le Nozze di Figaro) and Heiner Goebbels with his theatrical

shift towards visuals.

How would you describe your own aesthetic in music theater?

At the moment I’m working on my opera Sirens, which will be pre-

miered in Frankfurt. The narrative focal point is the saga The Odyssey,

with Odysseus trying to impress the Phaeacian aristocracy with his

adventures. Above all, the encounter with the goddess Circe and the

beautifully singing but deadly Sirens resonate with audiences. Circe is

fascinating because she madly adores Odysseus although he left her

and her island with a flimsy excuse; and the Sirens because they lure

the passing seamen with deadly force only to kill them in a masquer-

ade of beauty and passion.

I want the musicians to be infected by the passion I put into my

work, and I’d like them to discover something new about themselves.

Concerning the audience, I’d like to see the audience being carried

away by the story and the music just as it happened to Circe, the Sirens,

and Odysseus. Last, but not least, I’d be delighted if the immediate

presence of my music made clear that: Circe, the Sirens, Odysseus—

these are all mythological characters, but in principle they are repre-

sentations of us being threatened with drowning in conflicts of love,

desire, treason, farewell, and death.

Which stage design do you prefer?

I neither demand a historically correct stage design nor any kind of

daily political update. But I wouldn’t consider a parallel layer of the story

evoked by the design of the stage problematic. Constellations are out-

lined by my musical compositions, but of course some kind of trans-

formation is inevitable in order to bring it on stage. The specific details

have to evolve during the production. Taking my recent opera Sirens as

an example, I imagine that the disruption that transcends my music, the

characters, as well as the whole story can be experienced in every little

aspect and layer. Therefore I encourage light, story, and lyrics to find their

own way into my composition and, if appropriate, become individual

parts of it. At the end of the day presentation shouldn’t be reduced to a

means of illustration, instead, it should tie a semantic network together.

statements or appeals are not as important anymore. today the political attitude has become part oF the artiFact itselF. as a composer i’m imbedded in a historic context whether i like that or not. i want to use that as an inspiration For my compositions.

50

it was in paris that he First came Face to Face

with the music and writings oF John cage.

on the basis oF this experience [he decided]

composition could only be valid iF it was

coupled with a radical separation From

the traditional notion oF music.

51

Hungarian Contemporary music, having broken free from the cap-

tivity of Stalinist ideology and having become approximately equal

with the more moderate elements of Western European develop-

ments, was given space in Hungary in the 1960s, reflecting the post-

1956 easing. To verify its own liberalism, Hungarian cultural policy

was shown off abroad with this official “contemporary music,” while

at the same time the younger generation had already appeared and

did not seem willing to fit into the music history constructed by the

state. These students of composition were not satisfied with courses

based mainly on classical and Hungarian traditions offered by the

Academy of Music and wanted to create their compositions follow-

ing the world’s most up-to-date practices of the time. From 1970

the group of composers and performers who became known as the

New Music Studio, with László Vidovszky (b. 1944) as its co-founder,

attributed a greater importance to American minimal music than to

European dodecaphony and serialism, which had been bypassed

in Hungary. It wasn’t only due to the origin of this music that the

Studio got into the “tolerated” zone in the eyes of the Communist

state, but also because American contemporary music did not display

the intention to be a continuation of music history; namely it denied

the modernist idea of historic continuity and the belief in progress,

which was the sine qua non of

Communist ideology.

The formation of the Studio

almost exactly coincided with the

end of László Vidovszky’s study

trip to Paris. Although in Paris the

young composer could attend

Messiaen’s lessons on composition,

he received more direct inspiration

from the courses of the Group de

Recherches Musicales led by Pierre

Schaeffer, primarily via the varied

supply of international avant-garde

art that was unknown in Hungary.

It can be attributed to these experi-

ences that from among the members

of the Studio, Vidovszky proved to be

the most open in terms of cooperation

with avant-garde groups representing

other branches of the arts. For one thing,

it was in Paris that he first came face to

face with the music and writings of John

Cage. On the basis of this experience Vidovszky concluded that by that

time, composition could only be valid if it was coupled with a radi-

cal separation from the conventional notion of music. From then on,

Vidovszky abandoned the traditional dramaturgy of European music

and its related musical architecture and treatment of time, and, when

he returned to them, he did so in the spirit of irony.

Vidovszky’s first published piece, Duo, composed for two pianos,

displays the characteristics of the traces of the rift caused by the new

realization. The first version has a traditional sound and notation, while

the second version (1972), composed after his experience in Paris, uses

the prepared piano, echoing Cage. And given that the bar lines indi-

cate seconds, the score transfers its reference point to concrete time

instead of musical time. His work using electronics entitled 405 (1972)

MacHine poetry

The music of lászló vidovszkyby miklós dolinszky

ilo

Na

KeS

erü

52

Schroeder’s Death :

A graphic table of

the sixty-one

six-octave scales

53

shows that, in terms of this new thinking, for him the composer’s

task is primarily to decide what he regards as music in a given case.

In this case the tonal system was provided by recoding a text writ-

ten by the contemporary Hungarian avant-garde writer Dezső Tandori

to sounds, which then the performers could handle with formerly

unknown liberty. So the resulting improvisation is not the result of

an different conception, but actually that of the structure’s objective

serenity. Improvisation became included in the Studio’s activity not

from European aleatory, but from American experimental music, and

in this quality it was given a key role which was partly included in their

own compositions, partly in the form of joint practices. In the 1970s

improvisation was politically by no means an innocent artistic practice

in Hungary. It was regarded as suspicious not only by the Communist

state, but also by proponents of the then prevailing Kodály music edu-

cation, either because it threatened the status quo with the uncon-

trollable nature of freedom or because it represented an instrumental

practice which was precisely the opposite of Kodály’s concept regard-

ing the primacy of music for singing.

Vidovszky’s emblematic Auto-concert (1972) was composed at the

same time. The piece is undoubtedly a concert piece since musical

instruments take part, and undoubtedly ‘automatic’ since no one

plays the instruments. They provide sounds

themselves by falling down at a given

time. Regarding its form of appearance,

it is close to American performances;

however, while the latter are mostly the

counter-effects of over-rationalised social

behavioral forms recalling Dadaism of

the early 20th century, Vidovszky’s work

is purely the instrumentation of fate.

Unlike those who detect black humour

or cultural pessimism in Auto-concert,

Vidovszky rejects all symbolic inter-

pretation. György Ligeti’s ceremonial

Poème symphonique (1962) lets the law of gravity gradually silence the

metronomes, while in Vidovszky’s work, assistants in the background

hasten the unavoidable. It seems that the variety of possible interpreta-

tions did not hinder, but rather generated international success. (There

were performances in London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, Lisbon, and

Warsaw.) Vidovszky’s oeuvre now and then includes audiovisual works

(Movie, 1993; Black Quartet, 1993-7). However, they do not represent the

main line of his work, and their visuality often cannot be distinguished

from the visual effects of “normal” concert pieces.

The piece for piano Schroeder’s Death, inspired by a cartoon charac-

ter of American pop culture, can be included in the latter. It was writ-

ten in the year of Auto-concert but completed in 1975, and it became

Vidovszky’s most often played composition internationally. In the work

Vidovszky employs the prepared piano in the service of the known

dramaturgy of degradation and deconstruction. The sheet music of the

work contains sixty-one six-octave scales, and the preparation, which

is done in line with a chronology fixed in advance, gradually distorts,

then silences the sound of the piano, while the pianist continues

playing. The monotony of the approximately 40 minutes of music—

somewhat similarly to Satie’s pioneering work Vexations, lasting 24

hours—completely destroys the century-old expectations of listeners

the sheet music oF the work contains sixty-one six-octave scales, and the preparation, which is done in line with a chronology Fixed in advance, gradually distorts, then silences the sound oF the piano, while the pianist continues playing.

54

of European music. Yet, among others, it is one of Satie’s adaptations

that returns to the principle idea of Schroeder; here the written notes

also remain silent in the absence of preparation, except for one (Autres

gymnopédies III, 1994). The idea is carried on in

other works, such as in the fictitious viola solo

in The Death in my Viola (1996-2005), which

the instrumentalist plays without sounds, or

in Soft Errors (1989). The latter is the result

of an accidental computer crash in a techni-

cal sense; its real message, however, is again

the degradation of the musical process up

to the point when the viola with its lonely

quartered movement leaves last.

The demand for automatically produced

music, a performer becoming a machine,

actually emerges by including outside con-

trol systems in the creative process. No

wonder that Vidovszky’s attention turned

to the mechanical piano as early as the

late 1970s when he heard Nancarrow’s

relevant works. Yet by the time he actu-

ally would have had the opportunity to

get involved with the late successor of the mechanical pianos of the

early 20th century, the instrument could be linked with computers via

MIDI programs, so Une semaine de beauté and the Duchamp-like enti-

tled work Mechanical Bride’s Dance were created with a piano-roll MIDI

editorial program. Here again Vidovszky is interested in eliminating

the performer, not only because in this way it is the instrument itself

which is present instead of the performer (similarly to Auto-concert),

but because he does not have to be concerned about the performer’s

physical limitations. Nor did Vidovszky hesitate to broaden his experi-

ence with the mechanical piano; the live pianist communicates with

the pre-programmed instrument in his chamber pieces Le piano et son

double (1992) and Loco-dances (1995).

The instrument playing without human intervention is a peculiar

spectacle when works for a mechanical piano are performed in concert

halls. They preserve something of the theatrical character that Auto-

concert or Schroeder’s Death represent in an increased manner. It is not

surprising that Vidovszky quickly found the connection with the world

of theatre. Of his numerous works composed for the stage, the music

created for Péter Nádas’s tragedy Encounter (presented in Vienna,

London, Paris, Avignon, and elsewhere) is in a special situation since

the places where the music sounded, and the number of instruments,

were determined by the playwright himself. The music was an organic

part of the dramatic concept. Thus the musicians, limited to a solo vio-

lin, harp, and percussion, became simultaneous and equal participants

of the prose dialogues and highlighted their long silences by their

minimized shifts of movement.

In this light it may be surprising that Vidovszky composed only a

single independent work for the stage. In the case of the chamber

opera Narcissus and Echo (1980-81), it is not the theatre but film which

is in the background. This one-act masterpiece is an extended version

of the music written for Gábor Bódy’s film Psyche. Vidovszky treated

the historic period of the film’s story span as a musical source. The

characteristic idioms of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s dance and

salon music appear in the parts of the accompanying ensemble, which

seems like a salon and jazz orchestra combination, in the form of con-

crete quotes or mainly of distant stylistic imitations. However, with the

finishing choir, minimal music in the strict structure of a mensuration

canon is included in the panoptic music history.

Narcissus and Echo opens the way for Vidovszky’s ‘inter-textual’

works. These compositions in some way contain quotations from

music history spanning from Machaut to Satie. Vidovszky says about

Romantic Readings, written for a chamber orchestra in 1983 then for a

the instrument playing without human intervention is a peculiar spectacle when works For a mechanical piano are perFormed in concert halls. they preserve something oF the theatrical character that AUTo-CoNCeRT or SCHRoeDeR’S DeATH represent in an increased manner.

55

symphonic orchestra (it was presented by the Ensemble Modern and

the Suisse Romande) in which orchestral parts by popular 19th-cen-

tury composers form a new polyphonic pattern: “To read is a peculiar

and great thing. You can connect to live thoughts while remaining iso-

lated, entirely maintaining your independence and personal attention.

It is not bound to space as a work of art or to time as a piece of music.”

This dual relationship is actually true for all of Vidovszky’s composi-

tions in which he uses borrowed material. The need to review tradition

and step back from it, revealing common roots, manifests itself at the

same time. The original composition is squeezed out by the comments

gained from it in such pieces as Following Machaut (1998) or Machaut-

comments (2000); elsewhere, however, because of their reshaping,

it remains easily recognizable (German Dances, 1989, or the already

mentioned Autres gymnopédies). At the same time, this group of works

that can be sharply separated from the others clearly marks a shift of

the entire New Music Studio, the response given to the shortness of

breath of the avant-garde movement, but in the same way a resolute

stand taken against new tonality and new romanticism.

At the turn of the millennium a certain move towards classicism

can be seen in Vidovszky’s compositions. Not only does the irony

of experimental works disappear, but a series of a comprehensive

nature is written entitled Zwölf Streichquartette (2001). Although the

language of the title consciously refers to the great German string

quartet tradition, calling up the past makes Vidovszky do some seri-

ous creative reckoning, interpreting the universality of the quartet

genre as a conscious inventory of his own compositional means in

such a way that he assesses compositional procedures or ways of

playing in an étude manner. The sound that is becoming on the whole

more consonant does not lead towards turning back to tonality, but

to a balance of consonance and dissonance. Yet not only the sound

but the avant-garde and traditional variations of notation and string

styles of playing also become balanced. However, his Violin-radio

Sonata (2001) does not turn absolutely in the direction of classicism.

Rather it recalls the experimental period. The title Souvenir d’ASch

(2006) for a string sextet simultaneously refers to Schönberg’s Die

verklärte Nacht and recalls one of Schumann’s cryptograms. The parts

often sounding independently from one another in Reverb (for string

quartet and piano), composed in response to a commission from

Klangforum Wien in 2011, echo each other via phase delay and thus

multiply the sounding space while looking for an answer to the com-

poser’s question: “Can lost time be returned with the help of space?”

Translated by Katalin Rácz and Bob Dent

56

Four-time Oscar nominee Alexandre Desplat (b. 1961) is one of the

most acclaimed composers of his generation. It was his joint passion for

music and cinema that led him firmly in the direction of composition

for film and to create a new and unique voice in film music. Alexandre

Desplat’s approach to film composition is not only based on his strong

musicality, but also on his understanding of cinema, which allows

him to communicate well with directors. He believes that a great film

score should find a balance between function and fiction. Function will

ensure that the music fits well into the mechanics of the film but the

fiction can tap into the invisible—the deep psychology and emotions

of the characters, creating a “vibration.”

Under the mixed cultural influence of a Greek mother and a French

father who met and studied in California, he was classically trained as a

flautist, but extended his musical interests much further into the worlds

of jazz, Brazilian and African music. As a teenager, Alexandre Desplat

spent hours in movie theatres studying the great films and directors of

the 20th century and, of course, listening intently to the scores. Delerue,

Jarre, Rota, Waxman, Herrmann, Mancini, Williams, and Goldsmith

became his idols. He began his career in Europe, and throughout the

1990s he wrote more than 50 scores to great critical acclaim.

Early in his career he met his wife, the violinist Dominique

Lemonnier, who became his favorite soloist and artistic collaborator.

They developed a close artistic partnership, which enabled Alexandre

to create a unique style of writing for strings. This led to the formation

franÇoiS MeÏMoun

alexandredeSplat &

57

of the Traffic Quintet (string ensemble), for which he has written and

transcribed some of his favorite film scores for concert performance

together with excerpts of Pascal Dusapin’s Medeamaterial.

In June 2013, Universal Music Publishing Classical, Editions Durand,

was proud to welcome Desplat to its prestigious French catalogues

with his first symphonic work for flute and orchestra, premiered by

Jean Ferrandis and the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire con-

ducted by John Axelrod.

Born in 1979, François Meïmoun studied at the Conser-vatoire

National Supérieur de Musique de Paris with Michael Levinas, at the

Sorbonne-Paris IV University, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.

His works are played by numerous soloists and ensembles—

Armand Angster, Quatuor Benaïm, Quatuor Ardeo, Alain Billard, Florian

Frère, Chen Halevi, Sébastien Vichard—and programmed in French

festivals such as Chaillol Festival, La Chaise-Dieu Festival, Cabaret

Contemporain, Rencontres de la Prée, Centre Beaubourg, Journées

Proquartet, and foreign festivals such as the Berlin Zeitkunst Festival.

He was in residence at the Abbaye de la Prée from 2011-12 and in resi-

dence at the Chaillol Festival for which he composed Tara after a text by

Antonin Artaud. This work is part of a musical monograph project around

Artaud, meant to illustrate the thought of the poet. He started his collabo-

ration with Editions Durand, one of Universal Music Publishing Classical’s

French catalogues, with his second quartet titled untitled – selon pollock,

which was premiered in July 2013 at the Aix Festival. François Meïmoun

is currently writing his third quartet for the ProQuartet association.

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Alexandre

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58

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Sad

aS)

/ c

iTe

de

la m

uSi

qu

e (p

ar

ra

)

Edgar , Act IV -

José Cura, Amarilli

Nizza (Fidelia),

Carlo Cigni

(Gualtiero),

Marco Vratogna

(Frank), Julia

Gertseva

59

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) is one of the most

popular of all opera composers. Yet Puccini’s enor-

mous success, combined with his tendency toward

experimentation, contributed in a unique way toward

creating a complicated legacy of musical sources.

Interest in the operas of this great composer has contin-

ued to increase in recent decades, but so has the realization

that the currently available scores are inadequate to allow

a new generation of performers and scholars to accurately

study and interpret these ground-breaking works of fin-de-

siècle musical language.

Puccini published his operas almost exclusively with Casa

Ricordi, whose large editorial staff and state-of-the-art print-

ing operations allowed it to rapidly issue different editions of

full scores and vocal scores. Yet Puccini’s ceaseless penchant

for revision (he revised each of his operas, with the inevitable

exception of the unfinished Turandot) led to a quantity of simul-

taneously available, sometimes overlapping versions of the texts.

In addition, performance materials hired

out to theatres were kept updated with

corrections that did not always make their

way into the published scores that were

The criTical ediTion of The operas of

by gabriele dotto

giacoMo puccini

Edgar , Act III - José

Cura (Edgar), Julia

Gertseva (Tigrana)

60

Edgar , Act II -

Julia Gertseva

(Tigrana), Marco

Vratogna (Frank)

offered to the general public. Over time, this produced

a confusing, sometimes conflicting array of docu-

ments. Furthermore, in an effort to make sense of some

of these conflicting readings, editors inserted numer-

ous changes into “new editions” published long after

the composer’s death. A critical edition of his operas

has been long overdue. Yet such an edition is a uniquely

complicated operation.

The Critical Edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini,

many years in the planning and with several works

already in preparation, published its first volume in

2013. This critical edition is a landmark initiative, not only

for the importance and familiarity of the repertory being

studied, but also because of the path-breaking approach

to textual criticism that is a necessary part of its editorial

philosophy. For instance, in some cases it is not possible

to establish a single master text as a primary source for an

entire opera; in some operas, two or perhaps several musi-

cal sources may occupy positions of a shifting status, now

primary, now secondary. Furthermore, the typical approach

toward standardization of layers of performance indications

in the scores, adopted in many editions as a way of resolv-

ing incomplete or conflicting readings, cannot always apply

to much of the music of Puccini’s time and milieu. Layered

dynamics, non-unified phrasing, differentiated articulation of

reprised passages, etc., were all part of the more sophisticated

orchestral palette of the composers of the 1890s and the early

20th century, but were obfuscated in later printed scores. The

critical edition must carefully consider the shades and nuances

reflected in the opera’s earliest sources.

Each opera published in the series will seek to identify a final

or, in some cases, an ideal version as the base text. Sections

of other versions, and/or suppressed passages, will appear in

appendices. Where entire, distinct versions can be reconstructed,

separate volumes will be published. Each volume will include

ra

mella

&G

iaN

NeSe / Fo

Nd

azio

Ne TeaTr

o r

eGio

61

Manon Lescaut,

first page of Act I -

critical edition by

Roger Parker

The CriTiCal ediTion of The operas of GiaComo puCCini promises to be a Fundamental resource For anyone approaching this magniFicent repertory For study or For perFormance.

an apparatus of commentary on the most perti-

nent issues, as well as a Historical Introduction

describing the genesis of the opera and the

development of the libretto, staging and casting

issues that directly involved the composer, the

process of revision that led to subsequent ver-

sions, as well as a summary discussion of the

choices the editor made in establishing the

base text that appears in the score.

With unparalleled access to the primary

autograph sources and annotated secondary

sources in the Ricordi Historical Archive, to

the publishing records, and to other contem-

porary documentation, The Critical Edition

of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini will offer

the student, the performer, and the aficio-

nado a range of information never before

available. As with other critical editions of

Italian opera published or co-published

by Casa Ricordi, each edition will have

Contrabbassi

139071

Violoncellipizz.

Violepizz.

II

pizz. arcoViolini

I

Allegro brillante = 132

Arpa

Celesta

Carillon

dietro la scenaSonagliera

dietro la scena

Cornettain La

Triangolo

Piatti

TimpaniLa-Mi

Tuba

3 TromboniI

3 Trombein Mi

Corni

III-IVin Mi

I-III

2 Fagottia 2

Clarinetto bassoin La

2 Clarinettiin La

a 2

Corno inglese

2 Oboia 2

2 Flautia 2

Ottavino

scaletta esterna conduce al primo piano dell’osteria.con porticato sotto al quale sono disposte varie tavole per gli avventori. UnaUn vasto piazzale presso la Porta di Parigi. Un viale a destra. A sinistra un’osteria

Allegro brillante = 132

ATTO PRIMOAd Amiens

62

the benefit of performances before the text is finalized

for publication. Indeed, recent productions based on

the initial volumes in the series have already made

an important contribution to our knowledge of early

Puccini. A performance of the critical edition of the

1893 version of Manon Lescaut met with great acclaim

in 2008 at the Leipzig Opera (where it will be revived

this season for four performances in from March until

May 2014), and the production of the 1889 four-act

version of Edgar (Turin, 2008), using the rediscov-

ered autograph of the final act four, was hailed as

one of the most significant musicological events

of recent years.The Critical Edition of the Operas

of Giacomo Puccini promises to be a fundamental

resource for anyone approaching this magnificent

repertory for study or for performance.

Plan of the critical editions:

I Le Villi (I.a one act, II.b two acts)

II Edgar (II.a four acts, II.b three acts)

III Manon Lescaut

IV La bohème

V Tosca

VI Madama Butterfly

(VI.a two acts, VI.b three acts)

VII La fanciulla del West

VIII La rondine

IX.1 Il tabarro

IX.2 Suor Angelica

IX.3 Gianni Schicchi

X Turandot (to be published as an

unfinished work)

Editorial Board

Gabriele Dotto (general editor), Francesco

Cesari, Linda B. Fairtile, Roger Parker,

Jürgen Selk, Claudio Toscani

Cb.

* Per una versione precedente di quest’aria, vedi App. 3.

139071139071

Vc.

Vle

II

Vni

I

Man

lan da de so la ta!… Or ror!… In tor no a

Ob.

I

Fl. II202

Cb.

Vc.arco

legato

Vlearco

legato

IIarco

legato

Vni

I*

Largo = 9210

Manon(l’orizzonte si oscura: l’ambascia vince Manon; è stravolta, impaurita, accasciata)

So

con la massima espress. e con angoscia

la… per du ta, ab ban do na ta… In

PttoPiatto battuto colla mazza

520

Ob.

196*

Largo = 9210

I

con molta espress.

(interno)scenasulla

From Manon Lescaut - incipit

of Manon’s aria

“Sola, perduta e

abbandonata!”

63

ra

mel

la &

Gia

NN

eSe

/ Fo

Nd

azi

oN

e Te

aTr

o r

eGio

Edgar, Act II -

Julia Gertseva

(Tigrana) Teatro

Regio / Turin -

Opera Season

2007/08

64

JANUARY

6

Francesca Verunelli

The Narrow Corner for

orchestra, Paris

8

Eric Tanguy Affettuoso

for orchestra, Paris

14

Philippe Hersant

Dreamtime, Flute

Concerto and

orchestra, Paris

19

Alberto Colla

Ouverture pour l’éveil

des peuples for

orchestra, Paris

21

Carlo Boccadoro

Box of paints for

ensemble, Milan

24

Emanuele Casale

Conversazioni con

Chomsky, talk-opera

(new version), Rome

26

Giacinto Scelsi

[Kamakala] for

orchestra, Berlin

28

Sergej Newski,

2013 for ensemble,

Moscow

FEBRUARY

7

Nikolaus Brass

fallacies of hope for

choir, Stuttgart

20

Luca Francesconi

Duende – The Dark

Notes, violin

concerto, Stockholm

25

Dai Fujikura, Minina

for ensemble, Tokyo

MARCH

4

Hèctor Parra

Te craindre en ton

absence, monodrama,

Paris

7

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler

De-crescendo for

orchestra, Frankfurt

Fabio Vacchi

Veronica Franco for

soprano, actor and

orchestra, Milan

8

Jean-Claude Petit

Colomba, opera,

Marseille

12

Francesca Verunelli

Graduale,

Disambiguation,

symphonic work,

Lucerne

Robert Wittinger

Symphony no. 8 op.

68 for orchestra,

Wiesbaden

16

Mela Meierhans

shiva for anne for

8 voices and 4

percussionists, Berlin

21

Daniele Ghisi

Nostre for 8 voices

and electronics,

Villefranche

26

Fabio Nieder

The Waters Flow

On Their Ways for

orchestra, Florence

Ian Wilson, Causeway

for orchestra, Belfast

27

Daniele Ghisi Próxima

for ensemble, Florence

Philippe Hersant

Chant de l’isolé for

piano, violin, cello

and string orchestra,

Pau

29

László Dubrovay

Cello Concerto and

orchestra, Budapest

APRIL

11

Philippe Hersant

Au temps du rêve for

small orchestra, Paris

17

Jan Jirásek

Guru (ballet), Prague

Fabio Vacchi

Il bordo vertiginoso

delle cose for recitant

voice and orchestra,

Bari

25

Eric Tanguy

Stabat mater for cello

and choir,

Aix-en-Provence

MAY

6

Peter Eötvös

Da capo for cimbalom

solo and ensemble,

Porto

Ian Wilson Shī Shì shí

shī sh  for soprano,

trombone, percussion,

piano and cello, Basel

7

Philippe Schoeller

Tiger, concerto for

orchestra, Avignon

8

Samy Moussa

Vastation, opera,

Munich

10

János Vajda

Requiem for mixed

choir and organ,

Debrecen

12

Nikolaus Brass

Sommertag music

theater, Munich

20

Hèctor Parra

Das geopferte Leben,

opera, Munich

23

Oscar Bianchi

new work for cello

and string orchestra,

Clermont-Ferrand

JUNE

14

Luca Francesconi

Dentro non ha tempo

for orchestra, Milan

20

Giorgio Battistelli

Il medico dei pazzi,

opera, Nancy

26

Gerhard Stäbler

Erlöst Albert E. for

music theater, Ulm

JULY

10

Dai Fujikura Rare

Gravity for orchestra,

Tokyo

AUGUST

21

Pascal Dusapin

Wenn du dem Wind

for soprano and

orchestra, Tokyo

29

Graham Fitkin Birch

for orchestra, Umea

(Sweden)

SEPTEMBER

3

Dai Fujikura

Wondrous Steps for

ensemble, Lucerne

16

Rolf Riehm

Sirenen, music

theatre, Frankfurt

NOVEMBER

10

Olga Neuwirth A Film

Music War Requiem

for ensemble, Paris

13

Frédéric Verrières

Mimi, opera, Paris

14

Fabio Nieder

Der Anfang. Die

Mitte. Das Ende aus

Thümmel…for Chorus,

3 accordions and

percussion, Köln

(selecTion)

world preMiereS 2014

Please contact our promotion team for any

questions, perusal scores or recordings:

Casa Ricordi, Milan

Annamaria Macchi

annamaria.macchi@umusic.com

Editions Durand–Salabert–Eschig, Paris

Caroline Maby

caroline.maby@umusic.com

Ricordi Berlin

Till Knipper

till.knipper@umusic.com

Ricordi London

Elaine Mitchener

elaine.mitchener@umusic.com

Editio Musica Budapest

Tünde Szitha

szitha@emb.hu

Universal Music Publishing Classical,

North America

Mary G. Madigan

mary.madigan@umusic.com

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© Universal Music Publishing Classical, 2014

Printed in France

Design: Anna Tunick (www.atunick.com)

Editors: Mary G. Madigan, Jens Wernscheid

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