Recently heard

•Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question. •Darius Milhaud: La création du monde, op. 81. •Jean Sibelius: Luonnotar, op. 70. •Thomas Adès: In Seven Days.      Thomas Adès, San Francisco Symphony; Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Kirill Gerstein, piano; Tal Rosner, video artist      Heard March 6, 2015, in Davies Hall, San Francisco

Eastside Road, March 8, 2015—

ON PAPER, as the cliché goes, the concert program was very attractive, attractive enough to suggest a couple of hours driving to hear it. And in retrospect I'm glad we did: but in the event the evening could have profited from more expressive conducting. The conducting composer is one of the problems (by far not the biggest!) attending contemporary orchestral music. I can see why composers contribute to the problem: it's a living; undoubtedly a better one than composing. It's a sad fact that the creators of music are rarely rewarded as well as their interpreters. But a couple of recent experiences have led me to believe really fine conductors deserve their rewards; they bring something to the concert hall their part-time colleagues rarely seem able to supply.

The program in question was thematic: all four compositions address the concept spelled out in Milhaud's title, and suggested in Adès's: the creation of the world. That was an intriguing idea, particularly when expressed by two of my favorite pieces from the previous century and two more that I'm unfamiliar with. Ives;s The Unanswered Question is of course well known. It calls for a string ensemble, preferably unseen, which drones quietly away on slowly changing chords suggesting some kind of ethereal process. A solo trumpet plays a slow five-note call whose pitch contour and rhythm suggests

What - is the An-swer?

, repeating the call without variation a number of times; each time the call is answered by a quartet of flutes playing increasingly more discordant, strident responses. Ives had a program in mind: the strings represent "the silences of the Druids, who know, see, and hear nothing"; the trumpet repeats "the perennial question of existence"; the flutes are the "fighting answerers" who, as Jan Swafford writes in the useful book Charles Ives: a Life with Music,"for all their sound and fury, get nowhere." (The Ives quotes are from Swafford's book, where they are unattributed.)

In this performance the strings were backstage, conducted by Christian Baldini, and barely audible. The solo trumpet (uncredited in the program!) stood downstage center in the traditional soloist's position and played, commendably, from memory; Adès stood nearby to direct the flute ensemble, standing (good! not sitting!) upstage left. The performance was, I think, the most satisfying of the evening: Ives does nearly all the work with his score.

I would have thought La création du monde nearly as foolproof, but in spite of fine instrumental and ensemble playing this performance seemed dull. I don't think this is the necessary result of playing the piece in a big concert hall, though of course that doesn't help. Milhaud scored his haunting, poignant ballet score, commissioned by the Paris-based Ballets suédois, for an unusual combination: according to the useful article on Wikipedia, reduced winds including an alto saxophone, one French horn, two trumpets and one trombone, and four strings: two violins, a cello and a double-bass; with a large percussion section including tambourine, four drums, five timpani, piano, cymbal, anvil and wood block.

Milhaud's twenty-minute score is in six sections, with prominent solo roles for saxophone, clarinet, and double-bass. The music is heavily influenced by Milhaud's enthusiasm for the (mostly black) American jazz he'd heard in New York in 1920, and the instrumentation probably suggests the pick-up theater orchestras prevailing in that milieu and vaudeville. (Ives was similarly influenced; there's an interesting affinity between Ives and Milhaud, who both excel at integrating vernacular and "high-art" musical styles.)

While La création du monde is narrative and suggestive, clearly written for choreography, it is also contrapuntal and even oddly austere, a parallel I think to the sober browns and muted colors, the arbitrary and abstraction-oriented geometry of Braque and Picasso at the peak of Cubism. Its effect depends on the sonorities of its instrumental writing and the energy of its rhythms, but also on the structural, architectural quality of its construction, which must not be neglected in favor of surface color and "expressivity." I was concerned before the piece began, listening to the saxophonist warming up and pracising his vibrato, and alas I was right to have worried: the performance was like fine dancers being sacrificed to the novelty of their costumes.

But then Sibelius's Luonnotar ! What a marvelous piece! Composed in 1913 (halfway between The Unanswered Question and La création du monde ) and scored for full orchestra (winds in pairs, normal brass, but two sets of timpani and two harps), it is a demanding scène dramatique or concert aria for solo soprano, to a text from the Finnish epic the Kalevala, again addressing the creation of the world. Luonnotar is — again I rely on Wikipedia — "the Spirit of Nature and Mother of the Seas," a virgin daughter of Air who after seven centuries' ceaseless swimming in Ocean gives birth, by charitably offering rest to a similarly restlessly flying teal, to heaven, moon, and stars.

Sibelius "portrays" all this through his characteristically restless rhythms containing hard-edged, brittle themes, with the surging power of lower strings and winds and the bright icy sparkle of high winds and percussion. And against this, always, the soprano, whose very difficult role involves every corner of a two-octave tessitura, a command of Finnish consonants (and vowels, of course), and the ability to maintain presence within a full orchestra even while singing quietly.

This was the best performance of the evening, completely persuasive, largely because of Dawn Upshaw's glowing power and unflappable presence. The orchestra played well, with contained strength and focus, and Adès shaped and controlled the flow of the music carefully and expressively.

After the intermission we heard Adès's piano concerto, In Seven Days, composed in 2008, a century after the Ives. In seven connected sections the piece addresses the traditional Judeo-Christian seven-day Creation myth, less persuasively, I think, than Milhaud's "primitive" version or Sibelius's exotic pagan one. On the one hearing, in the back of the balcony seating, I had a hard time hearing either sonic details or structural units. The piano clattered away; the orchestra played smoothly and without much articulation; at the back of the orchestra, cartoonlike images played with a nine-section grid, suggesting Walt Disney collaborating with Pong. Sea and Sky emerged from Chaos, I read din the program; Land, Grass and Trees appeared, likewise Stars, Sun, and Moon; a couple of fugues accompanied the appearance of animal life; and the piece ended in Contemplation, as the concert had begun. Like Ives's flutes, Adès's forces seemed to me to get nowhere.

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•Charles Amirkhanian: Dumbok Bookache; Ka Himeni Hehena; Marathon. •Errollyn Wallen: The Errollyn Wallen Songbook. •Pauline Oliveros: Twins Peeking at Koto. •Don Byron: pieces for his ensemble.      The composers, with the Del Sol String Quartet; Frode Haltli, accordion; Miya Masaoka, koto; and the Don Byron ensemble      Heard March 7, 2015, at the Other Minds Festival; San Francisco Jazz Center

THAT WAS A RICH night in the vicinity of Davies Hall: Sarah Cahill was, unknown to us, playing music by Terry Riley on the same block; Other Minds was opening its 20th annual festival down the street. We returned the next evening to hear the second Other Minds concert. Other Minds is an annual assembly of internationally prominent (or in some cases not so prominent) composers who gather for a few days of conversation and show-and-tell, then attend a series of concerts in which each presents music to a generally young and attentive audience (including, of course, the composers themselves). (I should mention here that I was one of the group in 1996, in the third annual OM festival.)

Other Minds is directed by the Bay Area composer and factotum Charles Amirkhanian, who, because he turns 70 this year, chose this year to include his own music on each of the festival's three evenings. This is not as arrogant an act as it may seem: his work is modest, humorous, and unpretentious, and serves well as an opening act. The three selections last night were "text-sound" pieces for speaking voice (Amirkhanian), spoken live over a pre-recorded background of other spoken lines (still Amirkhanian) and percussion.

The source is Ernst Toch's Dada Fuge aus der Geographie, composed for speaking chorus in 1930 or so, and the source is not far except in years. I think Amirkhanian's sound-text pieces would gain from greater diversity of voice: the composer's baritone is clear and pleasant, but grows wooly when redoubled and -tripled electronically.

Errolyn Wallen was a new personality to me, but is apparently well enough known; born in Belize, she was moved to London at the age of two, and has developed a considerable career in the UK. She has a strong clear focussed soprano voice and considerable chops as a pianist — at one point, in one of the seven songs she presented, her piano technique suggested she'd be at home in Ives's Concord Sonata. Her songs occasionally brought his to mind, too, with their constant references to a vernacular, even commercial style, and the directness (not to say naïvety) of their verbal and musical content. When they're light-hearted, as in "What's Up Doc?," they're engaging; when they reach toward emotional seriousness they grow too sentimental for my taste. All of them were with only her own piano accompaniment except the last, "Daedalus," accompanied by piano and string quartet — here, the Del Sol Quartet, with a substitute for first violinist Kate Stenberg.

The concert shifted gears after intermission. Pauline Oliveros brought a new work, for two accordions and koto, perhaps twenty minutes long, full of surprising beauty, with silences, a great dynamic range, an enormous range of instrumental color, and the composer's characteristic good humor — a piece full of heart and invention, occasionally hearkening back to the avant-garde of the 1960s: I thought I heard Robert Erickson's sunny straightforward "experimentalism" channeled in a sudden upwelling near the center of the piece), and the totally accepting state of mind, eager to explore any kind of sound and allow it its place, confirmed Oliveros's place alongside that of John Cage.

Then the clarinetist Don Byron came on, with his ensemble: John Betsch, drums; Cameron Brown, bass; Aruán Ortiz, piano. Their improvisations, over charts, were supple, witty, resourceful, and engaging — a throwback in spirit, though stylistically more advanced I think, to the "third stream" music that tried to negotiate between chamber jazz and avant-garde concert music fifty years ago. (When Byron played his clarinet into the sounding-board of the open Steinway it was impossible not to think of Mort Subotnick back at Mills College in the 1960s.)

Where the first half of the concert had shown awareness, intelligence, and skill, this second half was all artfulness and vision. It closed a pair of musical evenings on a note of pure pleasure.

Dave Brubeck

I SUPPOSE I FIRST heard Dave Brubeck on a recording, undoubtedly an LP, in the fall of 1952, when I was beginning college. I think by then he'd played his epochal date in Eagle Rock, not far away, where (I think) his first big recording Jazz Goes to College was made. Already the big tune was "Take Five," the famous 5/4 piece.

The music is insinuating, clever, lyrical. Later it became significant to me intellectually, when I learned he'd studied with Milhaud at Mills College, and that his music was informed by his study of — gasp — serious music, Bach and so forth. (He loved Milhaud; he named his son Darius.)

Well, Dave Brubeck died this morning, as you must already know, a day short of his 92d birthday, having created, then lived, then survived a Legend. He was the cool intelligent supple patient well-adjusted avatar of West Coast Jazz, that indispensable alternative to Bop — a category that would have saved jazz for the next generation, would have made Rock a silly sidetrack, if only Bossa Nova had not intervened, and convinced the next generation that jazz, all jazz, anything referred to as jazz, was irrelevant, intellectual, over thirty.

The radio stations and the Internet today have made a lot of "Take Five" and, in some instances, of "Blue Rondo alla Turk." The latter especially, at least in the version I heard in the car this afternoon, said a lot about what Brubeck must have learned from Milhaud. Toward the end it almost sounds like Milhaud. There's a curious non-Parisian Frenchness here: wit and pleasure in intelligence without irony, and substance, substance, like something Schumann might envy.

I met Brubeck once, at the Cabrillo Festival, when a Mass of his was performed there — a piece that didn't do a lot for me, but so what. That was thirty-two years ago, August 1980; I don't recall a lot about it. We hardly exchanged three words, I think; though perhaps I interviewed him; I don't know.

I better recall going to the old Black Hawk in San Francisco in the late 1950s — once only; we couldn't afford such things often in those days — to hear him and his Quartet. I remember Paul Desmond put down his alto and took up a clarinet for a couple of tunes. I remember Brubeck was cool, very cool. It was a wonderful night.

There's one Brubeck recording that always sends me into another — what? another plane? It's the last track on an old jazz sampler LP that I got free from the Columbia Record Club in the late 1950s: I Like Jazz. It's true enough that Paul Desmond's alto is a compelling reason the recording's so memorable, has so completely taken over a corner of my synapses; but Brubeck's steady, subtle, modest, generous, knowing, authentic musicianship grounds and enables it. You can hear it here, and I hope you do: it's one of the most beautiful recordings I know..

Darius Milhaud

Eastside Road, October 1, 2012—

FOUR AND A HALF years ago I abandoned a project here, a little survey of the eighteen string quartets composed by the 20th-century French composer Darius Milhaud. Just one of a number of half-finished — or, more often, let's be frank, half-begun — projects around here. The Drafts folder in this blogging application (MarsEdit, if you want to know) contains a couple of dozen abandoned posts, and perhaps ten times that many never even make it to the Drafts category. Oh well.

Milhaud was French, Provençal, Aixois, and Jewish, strong of mind and temperament, brisk and alert — deceptively so, for he was confined to a wheelchair for nearly his last thirty years, the victim of brutal arthritis.

Born in 1892, his life coincided with Modernism; but he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he received solid grounding in conventional harmony and counterpoint. He was greatly influenced by exotic materials, though: from 1917 to 1919 he was in Rio de Janeiro, where he served as secretary to the French Ambassador; in Harlem in 1922, he was overwhelmed by the jazz he heard there.

Milhaud is famous for his polytonal counterpoint. His 14th and 15th string quartets, which though of equal lengths are otherwise quite different from one another, can be played simultaneously as an octet, whose effect is again very different from either of the quartets.

In 1940 he emigrated to the United States, fleeing Nazi-occupied France. He found refuge at Mills College in Oakland, where he joined the music faculty, remaining until 1971, teaching alternate years after his 1947 return to France.

I met Milhaud once or twice, though I can't say we ever had a proper conversation. I participated in a television interview with him on the occasion of his retirement from Mills College — that was in 1970, I think. I recall very little of the interview, conducted principally by Bill Triest, recorded on film, and probably now lost.

In 1995 the Class of 1945 of Mills College established the Darius Milhaud Performance Endowment to mark its fiftieth Class Reunion, and the college continues to produce annual concerts of Milhaud's music. Milhaud was nothing if not fecund: his opus list comprises 443 titles. Further, he composed for every medium, including a number of interestingly configured chamber ensembles. Further than that, his œuvre is remarkably consistent. You get the feeling, listening to his music, that his hand slid effortlessly across the paper, his pen leaving quantities of notes in its wake, each in the right place, though none in a place you'd have predicted.

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Last Friday we heard the most recent of these concerts, with faculty, alumnae and alumni, and students of Mills College performing four compositions and excerpts from four others. I was particularly impressed with the relatively early Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, and Piano, op. 47, composed in Brazil in 1918.

What an interesting piece! It opens with a typical Milhaud pastorale: marked "Tranquil," it begins with a foursquare tune over a droning accompaniment; but in a couple of minutes the three wind instruments begin each to go his own way, staking out aural personalities that will become more sharply individuated as the piece proceeds.

I've read somewhere that Milhaud did not care for the music of Maurice Ravel, preferring that of Debussy: but this opening movement occasionally brings the Ravel of L'Enfant et les sortilèges to mind; clearly each composer processes the influence of Debussy, Ravel perhaps in a more urbane manner, Milhaud — here, at least — in a more pastoral vein.

The second movement, "Joyeux," is busier, full of trills and roulades; even the middle section, with longer note-values in the theme, seems driven, until at the end a quieter, darker element seems to wander past, sucking the energy away. Then comes an amazing two minutes, the third movement, "Emporté," a dense exercise in discord. (Milhaud's "tempo" markings are often interestingly idiomatic: this one is best translated "Carried away."

Polytonal in the extreme, each instrument takes the texture of the movement into his own key in a joyous cacophony that suggests not Ravel but the Rova Saxophone Quartet.

If the opening movement was a pastorale, the finale, "Douloureux," is a nocturne, the steady piano's rhythms occasionally suggesting a funeral march, though the sinuous chromatic voice-leading also pays tribute, I think, to the close dark Brazilian night. (And to Milhaud's best-known piece, La Création du monde.)

Looking back over the eighteen minutes of so of the piece you have the feeling you've been somewhere, a meaningful event of some kind has taken place; you're not sure what it was, what it means, but it has substance and purpose, and things are not what they were before you heard it.

I've typed the preceding six paragraphs while listening to the recording of the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, and Piano by the Ensemble Polytonaal (Channel Classics CCS 13998, available at iTunes); and it's a pleasant recording, a useful reminder of the effect of the piece. But what we heard at Mills on Friday was more intense, stronger, edgier. It was driven, you might say, by the piano work of Lois Brandwynne, who never held back, even when touching the softest of notes (those at the ends of the outside movements, for example).

There was more than power in this performance: there was also a great deal of intelligence, of the sort that can only come from performers who know a wide repertory, and somehow let its sounds, probably subconsciously rather than intentionally, speak through the piece at hand. So I heard Stravinsky, Ives, and Messaien in this performance, not only (or not so much) because Milhaud's instrumentation, rhythms, and aural imagination suggests similar qualities in those other composers, but because their sounds are in these instruments, the instruments being played by these musicians.

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There were other fine moments on the program. Cheryl Seltzer plunged into the marvelous Trois Rag-Caprices, op. 78, of 1922, with the dry muscle, the romance, and the nervous precision Milhaud asks for directly in the indications at the head of the three movements. The Wong sisters, Betty and Shirley, found and transmitted the simple pleasure contained in piano transcriptions of occasional pieces: a scherzo and waltz from Les Songes, arranged from workaday ballet accompaniments, and the "Modéré" from Scaramouche, characteristically saucy and Gallic.

Lesser moments, because of weaker performances, I suppose, in the Élégie for cello and piano; seven movements from the piano suite La muse ménagère; and three songs from Rêves. But how nice to hear songs by Darius Milhaud! I've been too much bent toward instrumental chamber music; studying the French chanson, say from Debussy through Milhaud, would be as rewarding as concentrating on the stupendous 20th-century cordillera of string-quartet masterworks.

The Milhaud concert ended with the Suite for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano, op. 157b, from 1936. Again, a suite arranged from occasional pieces, incidental music for the play Le Voyageur sans bagages, by Jean Anouilh. The Suite was composed almost twenty years later than the Sonata that had opened the concert program, and perhaps for that reason too, and not only because of its occasional nature, it seems less impactful, less historic. I don't know the nature of Anouilh's play; its title suggests something blithe*. The four movements — Vif et gai; Animé; Vif; Modéré, Vif — often sound, especially the quicker ones, like music for a travelogue, one taking us to America as seen by the French. (It's a reminder that Milhaud was commissioned at some point to write an orchestral A Frenchman in New York, to respond to Gershwin's An American in Paris.)

The Suite was played, beautifully, by Tom Rose (clarinet), Christina Stanley (violin), and Betty Woo (piano); and the nature of the occasion was underlined by the observation, in Tom Rose's intelligent program note, that the Suite was played at a dinner tribute to the composer, forty years ago or so, by Rose, Woo, and the late (and lamented) Nathan Rubin. Christina Stanley was a worthy successor to Rubin: the entire evening was a testament to the endurance of music, which overcomes the mortality of its makers.


The Milhaud quartet survey, as far as it got:

Part 1: Introduction, and Quartet No. 1, Op. 5

Part 2: Quartet No. 2, op. 18

Part 3: Quartets No. 3, op. 32; no. 4, op. 48

Part 4: Quartets No. 5, op. 64; no. 6, op. 77; no. 7, op. 87

*Since writing that, I've looked it up. Boy was I wrong. What was Milhaud thinking of?

Milhaud: Quartets, part two

SINCE BEGINNING THIS SURVEY of Darius Milhaud's string quartets a few days ago, I ran across the full text of his memoir Notes Without Music online — but where, I can't say; I copied the text to my computer but clipped the online reference. Before, I was relying on liner notes to the Cybelle LP recordings and my ears; now I'll be adding things found in the memoir. To begin with, in 1904, when Milhaud was twelve years old and already a good violinist, he was asked to join his violin teacher, a professional cellist who taught at the conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, and a local carpenter who played viola, to read through quartets. The next year, 1905, they studied the Debussy Quartet, which resounds throughout Milhaud's first, composed seven years later in 1912.

That year at L'Enclos I finished my first string quartet. When I played it over with the Bruguier Quartet, only my beloved teacher understood what I was trying to say. His wife could not help blurting out: "It sounds just like Arab music!" and Segalas, the carpenter violinist, declared with his heavy Marseille accent: "Good God! This is hot stuff!"

[Notes Without Music, p. 34]

The First Quartet was performed in 1913 in Paris, on a contemporary-music concert:

I played in it, with Robert Soetens, Robert Siohan, and Felix Delgrange. After the concert, at the Salle Pleyel, while I was putting my instrument away and gazing at the old programs adorning the walls of the foyer, bearing witness to so many glorious performances and famous visits one of them even referred to a concert given by Chopin and Mendelssohn I was jerked out of my reverie by a gentleman with a white mustache and goatee who said to me: "I am Jacques Durand, I should like to publish your quartet. Come to see me tomorrow." Next day I signed my first contract.

[Notes Without Music, p. 47. And yet this quartet is not Opus 1, but op. 5.]

And at this point I refer you back to my last post, about that First Quartet, and now get on with it.

Milhaud compose a string quartet every other year from his First, in 1912, to his Sixth, in 1922; and he delayed only three years before getting to the Seventh, in 1925. But the three quartets that followed the First were special. They were composed during the First World War, a terrible irruption into la vie quotidienne in France (and elsewhere); they were composed in the deceptive quiet days before the German march on Paris, during the bleakest days, and during the last months, when the composer himself was safely (and fascinatedly) away from the action in Rio de Janeiro. And they reveal, I think, an absorbing change, within Milhaud's approach to the composition of music, from the fairly derivative, surely influenced youthful work in the First, through a series of intensely and revealingly personal statements in music composed for this most perfect of musical media, the string quartet, poised between the completely soloistic and personal world of the solo sonata and the quite public and audience-oriented world of the Symphony.

In the Second Quartet, op. 18, Milhaud celebrates his friend Léo Latil, and their mutual friendship. There's a friendship here that's hardly understood these days, nearly a century later, when we look for sexual "coding" everywhere. Let Milhaud describe his friend:

Leo… attended the Catholic school [recall that Milhaud was a Jew] and also studied music under Bruguier. We became firm friends. He worshipped music and admired my early efforts with passionate conviction; he made me share his admiration for Maurice de Guerin, and we loved to discover contemporary poets together. I think Leo would probably have become a country priest. The infinite tenderness in his gaze betrayed a tendency to melancholy and a tormented sense of anxiety. He kept a diary that was one long lamenta tion in which spiritual weariness and painfully intense reli gious feeling, dominated ever by a deep spirit of sacrifice and absolute resignation, were interwoven with a passionate love of nature, of flowers, and of the exquisite blue lines of the horizon at Aix. He was a dreamer, in love with solitary brooding, but he accepted my presence. We often went for walks together; he would always take the same direction, toward the Étang de Berre, west of the town, where the softly curving hills merge into the immensity of the plain, on the edge of which stood Cezanne's property, Jas de Bouffan, with its famous row of poplars gently suffused with the colors of the setting sun. We never wearied of walking along between the fields of wheat, blue-green in spring, bordered with almond trees in bloom, dwarf oaks, and pines, through exquisite landscapes, some of which, like the Chateau de l'Horloge, evoked historical memories : according to Chateaubriand, it was in this solid, roomy farmhouse that Napoleon spent the night on his return from Elba. Sometimes we went as far as Malvalat, the Latils' estate near Granettes, a village that took its name from the painter Granet, who lived there; one of his pictures, representing the death of his wife, hangs on a wall of its little chapel…

I quote at length for more reasons than one. First, to display Milhaud's fine prose style. Second, to underline the significance of landscape to his sensibility: the awareness of humanity in its natural context, in the environment, has much to do with the effectiveness, the persuasiveness of his music. Third, of course, to attempt to convey the quality of the friendship between these two boys, alert to Nature, aware of their intelligence and sensitivity, open to their world.

MUSICAL PORTRAITURE

I haven't looked into it in any depth, but it strikes me there's a theme running through French music from Rameau and Couperin down to Satie (and, of course, through Satie to Virgil Thomson). Of course there were German baroque composers who depicted; and Schubert, I think, and Schumann and Alban Berg, certainly, took pleasure (and inspiration) from translating their impressions of friends and lovers into musical terms. But the durable tradition of musical portraiture is, I think, French; and Milhaud took to it readily: in 1914, after Léo had already been mobilized into the war, while Milhaud was waiting

to receive notice calling me up, I remained in Aix and … started on my Second String Quartet. Léo was stationed at Briançon in the Chasseurs Alpins. He looked on the war as a mission, a solution to his personal problems, and got himself sent to the front as soon as he could. Gradually the first bad news filtered through to us: Alberic Magnard shot by the Germans and his house burned down; my cousin Daniel Palm killed before Lunéville his parents were notified the very day their youngest daughter, Suzanne, was repatri ated from Germany, where she had been spending her vacation perfecting her German. When Etienne was called up with the 1915 class, Madeleine and I went with him in the streetcar as far as Pont de l'Arc, the first stop after Aix. We came back on foot along the little river, dark with shadows and lined with richly hued trees. It was the first autumn I had spent in Aix since 1908.

By the next year, 1915, Milhaud had completed the Second Quartet, whose five movements can be taken as a portrait of his friend Léo. It's an engaging piece, open and winning; you'd hardly suspect a war was on.

i: Modérément animé -Très animé : Lively, meaning full of life: animé , as so many of Milhaud's quartet movements would be marked; animated. And there's much busy-work here, expressive of the energy and constant outward-looking curiosity these boys must have had in common. Sweetness, too. Nothing terribly original, or worked-out: Milhaud depends on lyricism and symmetry; perhaps a record of the innocence of his boyhood — the movement ends in a slower, appreciative moment…

ii: Très lent Something prescient here? The rhythm, in the lower strings, is somewhat dirgelike. Très lent is a marking — stipulating not so much tempo as mentalité, state of mind — that will recur often among the quartets to come. I could speculate about the extent to which Milhaud, pastoral, Provençal, was prescient in a Surrealist way avant la lettre, sensitive, through his sensitivity to the present moment and locale, to what is to come. So many things I wish I'd had the wits to ask him!

iii: Très vif Complete innocence, again: a record of those rambles together through the "softly curving hills," the garrigue surrounding Aix-en-Provence. Busy and uncaring: but the four instruments divide cannily the business of this musical energy, even if there is a bit of repetitiveness…

iv: Souple et sans hâte, assez animé et graçieux Supple; without haste; rather animated, and graceful. Enough said.

v: Très rythmé: Pure energy and intentionality; direction always forward. But the close, suddenly, is slower, reflective. Again, there's a presentiment here: I'll continue with this in a day or two.

Be advised: Milhaud's Third Quartet is an amazing leap, looking forward to Morton Feldman.

Darius Milhaud: the string quartets (1)

A FEW WEEKS AGO I ran across a lucky find on Ebay: the complete Milhaud quartets, on six LPs, recorded by two French string quartets. (Of course what I'd really like to have is the integral edition performed by the Quatuor Parisii, released some time ago on CDs on the Naive label, but I can't find a copy for love nor money.)

Yesterday a package arrived, a foam-plastic slab with the LPs carefully packed inside. Curiously, the LPs were in their protective envelopes but outside their jackets; each jacket with its LPs was sealed in its own heavy plastic envelope. I think perhaps the LPs are new and were never repackaged for retail on their being received from the factory. The sound engineering is dated, to say the least, and some recordings appear to be monaural: but what a joy to hear this music — it reminds me that the true descending priorities of music-listening are

Composer

Composition

Performance

Sound (whether live acoustics or recorded engineering)

and it's interesting to think whether such scales apply to the reading of books, or the viewing of paintings or sculpture.

In any case, to the matter at hand, the Milhaud quartets. Ever since the dawn of the string quartet we've been accustomed to think of them as cycles: within European concert music, the string quartet is one of the major cordilleras; within the oeuvre of every composer who has dealt with the form — and that includes most of the most significant — his own cycle of quartets is another major range. So through the history of post-Baroque European concert music we have Haydn, Mozart, B**th*v*n, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Milhaud, Schoenberg, Bartok, Shostakovich; apologies to those I've forgotten; this is blog, not book.

(There is of course a fascinating category of European composers with only one quartet to their credit: Puccini, SIbelius, Debussy, Ravel, Berg, Lutoslawski; apologies to those I've forgotten; this is blog, not book. And note I'm not considering extraEuropean composers at the moment: if I were, Carter's name would be prominent in the previous paragraph, and Cage's in this one.)

Of those great "cordilleras," I suppose the Milhaud is the most neglected, certainly the most unjustly neglected. In 1920, twenty-eight years old, when he had composed his fifth quartet, he told a journalist (for Le Coq Parisien) that he wanted to compose eighteen quartets (one more than Beethoven had managed); in 1951 he completed the eighteenth, quoting his first quartet in its closing measures, and noting on the manuscript "eighteen quartets, as promised." It's an impressive sequence of quartets, whatever you think of the implied competition with B**th*v*n. It was his very facility that led to Milhaud's neglect, I think; people forget that facility does not inevitably equate with the facile. Mozart, Picasso, and Henry James were blessed with facility, leading to impressive quantity which rarely slip when quality is considered, whatever the benchmark.

Milhaud's own a attitude to chamber music, as a medium:

C'est une forme, le quatuor surtout, qui porte à exprimer le plus profond de soi, et avec des moyens limités à quatre archets… C'est à la fois une discipline intellectuelle et le creuset de l'émotion la plus intense…

[It's a form, the quartet above all, that induces expression of the innermost of one's self, and with means limited to only four bows… it's at the same time an intellectual discipline and the crucible of the most intense emotion…]

But to the matter at hand. I've listened so far to three or four of these performances, in the course of digitizing them for my iPod, in the order in which they appear on the LPs — presumably an order determined by durations and, perhaps, a kind of logic that prefers to ignore chronological sequence. I prefer to consider them here, however, in the order in which they were composed: it's fascinating to hear the "development" (by no means logical or necessarily even linear) of Milhaud's interests in the forty-one years he spent on the medium.

The First Quartet, op. 5, was composed in 1912, at the age of twenty. It's dedicated "to the memory of Paul Cézanne," Milhaud's older concitoyen from Aix-en-Provence

The first movement, Rythmique, opens with a simple unison declaration, lively and forthright, brisk and open, occasionally letting up for more lyrical phrases. There's a reference to the opening of the Debussy quartet: the best way to confront influence is to face it openly. A central episode in a slower tempo transforms the declaration into a speculation, expanding on motifs from the basic themes; then a three-beat march heavily gives way to a waltzlike return to the opening theme.

The second movement, Intime, contenu, lyrical and graceful, on muted strings, continues the Debussy mood in a supple , plein-aire piece — so often French music, and Milhaud especially, seems to evoke the out-of-doors, where German music sings of the studio.

The original third movement, Grave, soutenu, is not recorded: in the revised corrected edition of his quartets Milhaud let it stand, but specified that it was there only "pour mémoire," as a memory.

The finale, Vif, très rythmé, is unfortunately perhaps the least persuasive movement of the quartet, a bit repetitive and, in the present performance, hectoring — but, again in a center section, giving way to a more reflective, graceful voice.

Not bad for a first quartet by a twenty-year-old from the provinces working in the shadow of such giants as Debussy and Ravel; and still a pleasant thing to hear today. To composers and string-players much of its effect lies in its skill: Milhaud played in a quartet himself in his youth, and clearly knew the conversational and contrapuntal nature of the medium as well as the fluencies of the instruments. But even more pleasurable in this First Quartet is its role of Janus to the seventeen that followed. I'll write next of the three remarkable quartets that came next, composed during the First World War, and beginning Milhaud's fascinating and complex development of a style that unites personal expression, response to friendships and poetry, and technical discovery.