Review: Material Issues

Author(s): Arnold Whittall

Reviewed work(s): De Materie by Louis Andriessen; Schönberg ;Asko Ensembles;Reinbert de
Leeuw
Zilver; Disco; Overture to Orpheus; Worker's Union by Louis Andriessen;California Ear Unit
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 138, No. 1852 (Jun., 1997), pp. 38-39
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1003671
Accessed: 03/09/2008 17:25

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Louis Andriessen(photo ElektraNonesuch)
Materialissues
ARNOLD WHITTALL
Louis Andriessen: De Materie
Schonberg and Asko Ensembles/Reinbertde Leeuw
nonesuch7559 79367 2
Louis Andriessen: Zilver; Disco; Overture to Orpheus; Worker'sunion
CaliforniaEar Unit
New AlbionRecordsNA 094 CD
In an MT interview (March 1994), Louis
Andriessen declared that he considered
Stravinskyto be 'the composer for the
future', a 'midtown' composer supreme.
Specifically,The rite of spring is 'the most
important historical and revolutionary
piece for the next two hundred years'
because of the ways it combines 'pulsed
rhythms and diatonic melodies, which
are elements from folk music, with highly
chromatic harmony,and in a way that's
an example for me of how to deal with
material.... I think that for getting further
38 THE MUSICAL
in the next fifty years, dealing with
chromatic and diatonic material could be
a very interesting way out.'
Andriessen'stheatre-piece De materieis
certainly a 'very interesting' composition,
not least for the way it seems to act out
the obsession with Stravinsky'sbell-music
that resonates through the pages of the
book which Andriessen wrote with Elmer
Schonberger,TheApollonianclockwork,
published in Dutch in 1983 and in English
in 1988. Appropriately,then, De materie,
composed between 1984 and 1988, has
TIMES /JUNE 1997
less to do with Le sacre than with Les noces
and the Requiemcanticles.A ritual is being
enacted, part-sacredbut predominantly
secular, and transferredfrom the level of
an archetypalsocial event (a marriage,a
funeral) to that of a pressing cultural topic.
This work is about nothing less than the
confrontation between, and limitations of,
the scientific (the rational) and the human
(the emotional). It ends with Marie Curie
confessing that even the greatest success
in her scientific work is unlikely to
compensate for the loss of her husband:
yet for this personal epiphany,Marie Curie
does not sing. She speaks: music is reduced
to a few oddly irascible punctuating (bell-
like) chords. It is indeed a strange way to
end the work.
The basic structure is clarity itself. Each
of the four parts has a separate topic, and a
separate formal function within this quasi-
symphonic design. The pugnacious first
part celebrates the establishment of the
Dutch republic, and progresses to the
joyous shipbuilding practicalities of tool-
naming. The didacticism of these texts
promotes an appropriatelyrepetitive,
insistent style with stretched similarities
underlining Andriessen'saffinity with
'downtown', minimalist composers, even
though there is a no-less perceptible
evolutionary quality,not least to the
rhythms, and a particularlystriking
contrast between the vibratoless small
chorus and the vibrating tenor soloist.
The text for Part 2 is sacred, a 13th-
century nun's account of aspiring to
union with God, but it is the inescapable
worldliness of erotic spirituality which the
music seizes on and makes its own. It is
very well sung by Susan Narucki, and this
makes the rather uneventful early stages
acceptable as preparationfor the more
urgent flights which eventually emerge.
Andriessen'slyricism finds its release
in a radiantly gentle, ostinato-dominated
ending. Here, undoubtedly, the kind of
supple modality suggested to Andriessen
by that Stravinskiandiatonic/chromatic
conjunction has been put to good use.
Part 3 ('De stijl') is in one sense the
inverse of Part 2, since here we encounter
the thoughts of an old man, the painter
Mondrian, about young girls, and learn
of his love of dancing, which inspires
Andriessen's'boogie-woogie'. Here the
bleached-out choral style over-stays its
welcome, but the generic mix, a chorale
prelude in the dance hall, has great appeal,
and the harmony moves exuberantly in a
forward direction, refusing to confine itself
to more minimal kinds of circulation. After
this, the way in which Part 4 homes in on
the solitary human figure of Marie Curie
might seem to suggest an allusion to the
solo bridegroom who ends Les noces.
Before Curie'sspeech begins, however,
Andriessen establishes a lamenting tone by
means of the slowly intensifying repetition
of two sonorous chords. This goes on for
rather too long, so that the ritual risks
degenerating into something merely
mechanical. Nor do I warm to the choral
music that precedes the spoken narration,
which uses what appears to be fulsomely
lyrical Dutch poetry in a totally unironic
manner. Even if Andriessen intends us to
respond wryly to the two very different
ways in which love is expressed - the
uninhibitedly romantic choral hymn, the
reticent speech of Curie - the combination
seems more determined to embrace the
sentimental than to resist it.
It is surely a truism that no amount of
intellectual achievement can render the
achiever emotionally immune to suffering
and sorrow.But the work's final statement
about the limitations of atitionalityand of
the material could have been much more
powerfully presented, either by means of
an unsparingly realistic pessimism, or by
a musical atmosphere suggesting that it is
possible to find some consolation in
accepting the inevitable. Examples of
both types of denouement are not hard to
find in recent music, and it is because one
is aware of them that, for all its earlier
attractions, De materieseems to end with
something at once too downbeat and too
naive.
Reinbert de Leeuw, his performers,and
the recording producers and engineers
have done the work proud, but in the end
the result seems to fall some way short of
those Stravinskianideals. Perhaps there's
still a bit too much of 'downtown' in
the mix, or maybe the ending was a late
compromise agreed when the composer
wanted to move on to other things - the
Curie text was suggested by the work's first
producer, RobertWilson. As it is, a version
which abandoned chronology and ended
with the wickedly sensuous part 2 might
achieve a more memorable effect, and a
more appropriateambiguity.
The four Andriessen items on the
New Albion disc don't set much store
by ambiguity either - or do they? The
earliest, longest and loudest, Worker'sunion
(1975) is a virtuoso display of muscular
uniformity which might be taken as a
bitterly ironic comment on the soullessness
of conveyor-belt industrialism, were it not
for a note from the composer requiring
each player to perform in the belief
'that his part is an essential one', the
moral being that such commitment
(to uniformity?) is the key to artistic
and political success alike. Retreating
gratefully to a purely musical stance, I
can report that Worker'sunion has sufficient
variety (of pitch, register and rhythm)
to balance the uniformity apparent
in nineteen minutes of almost totally
uninflected homophony. It may be very
noisy, but it is also infectiously energetic,
and it is this basic motoric exuberance that
Andriessen seems determined to shun in
the three later pieces included. Overture
to Orpheus(1982) is the thinnest, a
protractedmodal doodle for harpsichord
whose reliance on consonance and smooth
rhythmic patterns seems too desultory to
be either a challenge or a capitulation to
tradition. Disco for violin and piano (1982)
promises an unbuttoned encounter with
modern dance in its first few seconds
but soon subsides into quasi-meditative
musings around the resonances of isolated
sonorities, and never fully recovers the
kind of uninhibited propulsiveness which
is Andriessen'smost appealing trademark.
THE MUSICAL TIMES
Zilver has more intellectual substance,
unfolding a sequence of canonic dialogues
between sustained and staccato sounds,
but progress through the cycles concerned
is too slow to obviate a strong sense of
monotony; it's as if, having set the machine
in motion, the composer has left it to
run on unattended. There is little here to
nourish ears opened up by the excitements
of De materie, and that'swhere the best of
recent Andriessen is to be found.
Songs of the earth
RICHARD DRAKEFORD
Michael Finnissy: Red earth
BBC Symphony Orchestra/MartynBrabbins
NMC D040S
Anthony Payne: Time's arrow
BBC Symphony Orchestra/AndrewDavis
NMC D037S
NMC has brought out two useful CD
singles of recent British orchestral
pieces (tone-poems in that each, though it
tells no story, is characterisedby a strong
extra-musical idea). The BBCSOplay
intelligently under, respectively,Martyn
Brabbinsand Andrew Davis and the
recordings are mostly excellent, though
each piece ends very abruptly,almost as
if the sound source has been suddenly cut
off. Otherwise they are very different.
Michael Finnissy'sRed earth, with its
slow pulse and only gradually shifting
harmonic movement, could almost be
thought a grandchild of Schoenberg'sthird
orchestralpiece op.16, adding half way
through and at the end a disturbing
incursion of the drum beats from the finale
of Mahler'sTenth Symphony.But to write
thus is not to say that its atmosphere is in
the least Viennese. On the contrary,the
sense of what Finnissy calls 'the flayed, raw
landscape of central Australia'is powerfully
evoked, even if he goes on to warn us that
'these aren'tthe sounds of the Australian
desert, but sounds inside the head'. It starts
with pungent semitonal clashes made
the more vivid by the sound of oboes;
inflections are microtonal both here and
later where again an oboe is given a long
eloquent line of melody. Eventually these
lines are taken into a bass register,while all
the orchestralcolourings suggest, as well as
a landscape, a strong lament for what is
lost in our modern industrial world.
Anthony Payne begins his vivid piece
with an idea of the Big Bang, after which
Time'sarrowjourneys forth at first rapidly,
later slowing down to reach a 'still
centre'. Then in the returnjourney all the
/JUNE 1997 39