furious artisans

Paris-X: Musica Obscura of Dane Rudhyar and Erik Satie

Page 3 of 4 But the first half of the disc also suggests a different pairing: that of the youthful Daniel Chennevière with his later American alter ego Dane Rudhyar, as works from both phases of his career are represented here. The first two works, Lamento and Cortège Funèbre, were composed in Paris in 1913 and 1914 respectively and published there by Durand et Cie. (as the work of Daniel Chennevière). They offer a tantalizing glimpse of the music Rudhyar composed in his Parisian years, very little of which survived his leaving for America a few years later. As the work of an eighteen-year-old with no formal training in composition, this music is highly assured, showing a technical command and a sureness of idiom that belie its composer’s youthfulness.     Both are majestic and solemn in mood, and quite exploratory harmonically: but whereas Lamento resolves its tensions on a conventional tonal ending, Cortège Funèbre maintains them through its biting harmonies and comes to a troubled, unsettled close. It is this funeral music that points most clearly toward the future.     Tetragram no.8, “Primavera”, and Tetragram no.3, “Rebirth”, allow us to hear the very different musical world of the “ultramodern” Rudhyar of the later 1920s. The Tetragrams (of which there are nine in all, in three “series” of three) are a musical form quite personal to him. Each piece is a sequence of four short related sections, often intense and psychologically complex. Rudhyar explained that, in common with much of his mature music, these works are intended to evoke various phases of a deep process of human transformation, sometimes of a cathartic and tragic character (as can be seen in the titles of the three Tetragrams of the first series: “The Quest”, “Crucifixion”, and “Rebirth”). Rudhyar himself performed “Primavera” and “Rebirth”, as a pair, in an evening concert of his music given at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York on November 13, 1950, billed as a “Recital of Compositions by Dane Rudhyar”. (The concert came in the midst of a brief period of renewed musical activity—1948-51—during Rudhyar’s “silent” years: unluckily for us it did not lead to a sustained return to composition at that time.) Richard Cameron-Wolfe played “Primavera” for Rudhyar in New York in the late 1970s, and recalls the composer explaining that the music “isn’t the spring of “Rebirth”; it is the gentle rebirth of the plants.” At an earlier meeting in La Jolla, California, Cameron-Wolfe had played “Rebirth” for the composer: “Rudhyar then played it for me as well,” the pianist recalls, “and his volcanic, intensely resonant playing informed my own interpretation.” “The hearer should concentrate on the tones themselves as they flow and merge into each other,” Rudhyar wrote in a statement on his music: “the holistic resonance of the piano tones especially should be allowed to vibrate within one’s consciousness and to stimulate a deeper experience of inner living and psychic transformation.”     << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 Next > End >>