L’initiation.

Posted by Ahmed Anzaldúa on April 29, 2010. 0 comments

One of my favorite twentieth century pieces is Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet. Playing it is grueling, mainly because it lasts almost two hours and requires a constant attention to the duration of the rests and the number of repetitions for each measure (all the durations are written out.) One little lapse of concentration in those two hours and it’s very easy to get lost and never catch the rest of the ensemble again, since it all sounds so similar –it’s also exhausting for the page turners, my wife turned the pages for me during a performance a few years ago and her back ached for a week! Feldman’s music tends to have rhythms that seem free and floating, with slow evolution and asymmetric patterns, his later music also tends to be very long.

I find that the Prelude to the second act of Le fils des étoiles, by Erik Satie has some elements that are very Feldmanesque, not a small feat considering that it was composed 100 years before Piano and String Quartet, while the rest of Europe was still playing to Wagner’s beat. The first similarity is in the character of the music; when I play the music of both composers, I feel it has a very slow, quiet evolution, as some sort of solemn ritual (which is very much in the context of Satie’s prelude.) All kinds of interesting things are happening in the music and we have time to enjoy and assimilate each and every one. The other element in common, which is much more technical, is the way they both use repeating asymmetric patterns in their music.

There is a special expression in the way asymmetric patterns and structures that are not quite perfect work. The imbalance in the music immediately calls attention from the listener and, in the hands of the right composer, it becomes fascinating.

Just as the first prelude, L’initiation is written without bar-lines or time signature and has all sorts of quirky, baffling performance indications. The first few notes of this short piece are groundbreaking:

A lot is happening here, all of it for the first time in musical history. We have a small unit which is formed by two minor chords, superimposed. The top voice then jumps up in a tritone –since the middle ages, the tritone has had strong satanic and mystical symbolism and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some sort of extra-musical significance to its use here by Satie (he did hang out with a Satanist sect for a while, after all.)  The remarkable thing about this tritone is that it does not resolve in any way, he just repeats the whole thing a minor third below and then he continues downward with the sequence at a major second. Then comes a beautiful, metallic chord moving in parallel harmony. Note his use of asymmetry, he could have built the chord using only perfect fourths but he adds an augmented fourth right in the middle of the chord. This gives the chord a kind of metallic quality, a distinctive dissonance that alters the way it rings.

Then comes the whole thing again, only transposed up by a major second. Here is another use of asymmetry; the beginning gives the impression that he will repeat the same sequence, but he departs from it in the third repetition, going down a fourth instead of a second and replacing the octave with a minor ninth. We end this section with another one of those planed quartal chords.

Satie was always credited by Ravel as being the mind behind the french impressionist movement. The role he played in the history of music was that of a great experimenter, every few works moving into new ground. Much of the best music by Ravel and Debussy –and most french composers that immediately followed– was directly inspired by Satie’s experiments. I believe that, besides the experimental nature of his music, there is great substance in what he wrote. The aesthetic of his writing is so far beyond romanticism or impressionism that it is no surprise that his music wasn’t fully appreciated until the second half of the twentieth century.