Alphabeticon: Concerning Composers
DEDICATION: for Harry Freedman
composer of masterpieces
master of the art of friendship
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
The twenty-six composers portrayed in this book were variously active in serious music, as distinct from folk music or pop music, during most periods of western culture from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, but not in the nineteenth. I make no apology for that omission: choices of listening are limited by taste; and I have little relish for the music of the nineteen-hundreds — indeed, the Romantic Revolution, as a whole, repels me, with its puerile fixation on the journey of the self. Before that obsession took hold, artists gazed outward in response to life, and the results could fully engage the attention of an adult mind.
The difference was neatly captured, recently, by the historian who said, “Beethoven tells us what it was like to be Beethoven; Mozart tells us what it is like to be human; Bach tells us what it is like to be the universe.”
To begin with, before ever the artist spelt himself with a capital A, composers were craftsmen serving the Church’s need for a liturgical music that spoke a contemporary language, that addressed the faith as a living reality, not as a fixed and obsolescent heritage. Their polyphonic craft was wonderfully appropriate to the task; for its contrapuntal mustering of several voices, each with its own identity, reflected musically the congregation of individual souls on their pilgrimage to God.
Thus Josquin and the early polyphonists, who opened the door for Palestrina and his heirs, for Byrd, Lassus, and Victoria; who paved the way, in turn, for the crowning genius of Bach. And still, in the next more secular time, there were composers earning a living like artisans in the workyards of supply and demand.
In the age that followed, when artists became Artists, instrumental music was saved from the morass of sentimentality that literature sank into. Composers wrote instrumental pieces that had no narrative content: the notes simply said themselves. But it was altogether another story when they set words to music: at worst, they composed hymns of insipid piety or drawing-room ballads of excruciating banality; and on a more ambitious plane, they composed operas that were either preposterously melodramatic or, in Wagner’s case, sheer mythologizing bunkum. There were, of course, exceptions: Bizet set “Carmen” realistically in a cigarette factory, long before Puccini attempted verismo; and Smetana, the ardently nationalist foe of Austrian overlordship, set “The Bartered Bride”, with earthy naturalism, in a peasant village. But such exceptions aside, nineteenth-century vocal music, by serious composers, dwelt mostly in the escapist world of romantic fantasy. It was a proclivity that slopped over into the twentieth century; and it may be said to have reached its peak in Mahler’s neurasthenic effusions, in his quasi-operatic symphonies.
Modernists turned their backs on all that, especially after the first world war flung so many complacencies on the garbage-heap of history. Experiments in atonalism and twelve-tone serialism replaced the wornout formulae of diatonic cliché — which an old mentor of mine characterized as “composing from memory”. In a harsh new world, marred by recent carnage and riven by economic injustices that could no longer be swept under the rug, composers could no more ignore the stark facts on their doorstep than anyone else could. Instrumental music, of course, continued to merely say itself, as it always had, though even then, in its new vocabulary, it did somehow echo the rigour of the time. But when it came to music with text, composers responded far more explicitly to a world gone sadly awry: sometimes with derision, sometimes with sorrow or wrath. Already in the nineteen-twenties, Weill and Brecht had pilloried the corrupt Berlin around them. A decade later, in that same city, there was hatched a monstrous genocide: and one of its victims afterwards was nobly mourned by Morawetz in his “From the Diary of Anne Frank”’ for soprano and orchestra.
In a 1995 composition of my own, I too touched on that tragedy. My late friend, Primo Levi, had survived Auschwitz; and among his eloquent writings about it was a fine poem. I set it to music, in the original Italian, for mezzo-soprano and string orchestra, entitling it “In Memoriam Primo Levi”. I am proud, as a composer, that my music, in this instance, should do more than merely say itself, that rather it should serve a cause of obligatory conscience in the world at large. And I should add, on a personal note, how very touched I was that sitting next to me, in the premiere performance, was an elderly man who had also survived Auschwitz and who, before emigrating to Canada after the war, had actually been a friend of Primo’s in the camp. It is at such moments that one can go on believing in the indestructability of the human spirit.
EDITOR’S FOOTNOTE
John Reeves was elected Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre in 2012, in recognition of his many and widely performed works for various ensembles. Some of them are dedicated to composers and other musicians whom he particularly admires; thus, in a way, they form a musical counterpart to “Alphabeticon”. An article about him can be found in the “Encyclopaedia of Music in Canada”.
