Charmes.

Posted by Ahmed Anzaldúa on May 13, 2010. one comment

Charmes, by Federico Mompou is a work comprised of six short pieces that, as the title implies, are short little spells intended to conjure different effects: …to alleviate suffering …to inspire love … to penetrate the soul …to effect a cure …to evoke an image of the past …to inspire joy. This approach towards composition is a great example of what Mompou’s music is about. Traditional analysis brings nothing to the table, most of his works from after the 20’s are wisps of fog; scraps of melody, ostinato figures and refined harmonies which, while owing a lot to the music of Satie and his contemporaries, have an entirely different approach towards musical discourse.

Development and rigid construction are the furthest thing from Mompou’s mind –in fact, in an interview he admitted to adoring all music except for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, precisely because of those qualities. What Mompou fully appreciated, decades before John Cage talked about everything around us being music, is that every chord, every motif, every note has an intrinsic beauty and meaning that is completely independent of what a composer does with it. What results of this aesthetic is music with long ostinati, frequent repetition and in which harmony has no functional meaning, but is profoundly connected with timbre. Much like bells –which play a very important role in Mompou’s music and life– the notes in each chord and the harmonics they produce result in different qualities of tone, ranging from the tinny, metallic sound typical of minor seconds and tritones, to the full, resonant, harmonic-rich superimposed fifths and fourths.

Magic is the word that best describes Mompou’s music, a meaning to be taken literally in his 1920-21 work Charmes. But perhaps this concept isn’t so unique to Mompou. After all, the use of music for its magical properties is something that has been a part of every culture since we started walking upright. The first spell in this cycle, …pour endormir la souffrance (…to alleviate suffering) conjures up an effect that everyone has felt at some time. Music as a refuge, as a way of dulling our pain.

Contrary to what happens with the majority of serialist music, which is more interesting to analyze than it is to play or listen to, Mompou suffers from analysis. The first piece in Charmes is  just a short Debussyian fragment of a melody repeated exactly the same four times over an ostinato pattern in the left hand, with very slight coloring shifts in the harmony. While not to everyone’s liking, I find that repetition to be an essential part of Mompou’s language; here it softly nudges you over and over, subtly shifting from darkness to light. It’s like taking a beautiful gemstone in your hands and turning it, watching the light play on its surface.

Does this music do what Mompou intends it to do, that is, “alleviate suffering”? I think it does. But that’s entirely up to the listener. While one may just hear the same thing over and over, someone else will allow himself to be swept away.