LES BONNES CHANSONS

Saturday, march 16, 2024 — all saints parish, brookline

= program notes =

by Michael Barrett

For centuries, French music has been central to the history of European art music. It was composers of France and Burgundy, adopting and adapting techniques from the English, who were the chief innovators of the musical Renaissance in Europe. During the “grand siècle” of the 17th century, the musical tastes of the Sun King Louis XIV both held sway over his own court and were imperfectly imitated by many a lesser prince and by many composers outside of France. (See, among many examples, JS Bach’s suites inspired by French dance music.)

Like its most powerful European counterparts, France was an imperial and colonial power: there were French colonies throughout the African continent, and “Nouvelle-France” once included a swath of North America from the north Atlantic to the Mississippi delta, with further French presence in the Caribbean and other points south. The complex and often horrific stories of how cultures were imported – either willingly or by force – whether they survived, and how they interacted with indigenous populations, gave birth to many of the blended cultures we find in the “New World” and Africa today, from Québec to Louisiana to Haiti and beyond.

By the 19th century, Paris was the cultural nexus of much of Europe, drawing thinkers and dreamers from around the world. In some respects (notwithstanding the cultural cachet of that new kid on the block, the United States) the city has never fully relinquished that role. The musical dialects of late 19th century French art music were, in some respects, conscious efforts to break away from the Austro-German flavor of musical Romanticism that, since the time of Beethoven and before, had come to dominate European art music. Through this lens we might understand, for example, how modality and other scalar and chordal concepts favored by many French composers are a means of both adding fresh musical colors and subverting that sense of narrative drive and structure that were hallmarks of the Austro-German musical language of the 19th century. This general desire for a distinct French style was given a fresh nationalistic jolt by the unprecedented bloodshed of the “Great” War of 1914-1918, and of course by its even bloodier successor.

The stereotyped quintessence of anti-Germanness was Claude Debussy. He was given the label of Impressionist composer par excellence, though the composer himself rejected the moniker, in part because the term was first applied to another artistic medium (the visual arts) which expressed its ideas with fundamentally different means. Nevertheless, one often senses in Debussy’s work a kind of studied lack of specificity, at least with respect to tonal grounding or directionality, that could be seen to have its visual analog in the works of Claude Monet and his orbit.

Claude Debussy, best known as a composer for the piano and for larger orchestral forces, seems equally in his element with his setting of three poems by the Medieval poet Charles of Orléans. In keeping with the era of his chosen texts, Debussy indulges in certain musical anachronisms, such as modality and passages of fugue-like imitation. In his setting of the refrain-form poem Dieu! Qui la fait bon regarder, the composer makes the interesting choice to set the refrain lines of poetry in a varied, more-or-less ternary (ABA) pattern. His setting of the poet’s diatribe against winter, Hiver, vous n'estes qu’un villain, is a rather humorous take on the complaint, including a short passage for tenors in falsetto.

Maurice Ravel also rejected the term Impressionist that has often been applied to him, and lamented that his Bolero, quite a stylistic outlier for him, came to be his best known work. Ravel’s only foray into a capella choral writing were his Trois chansons, with texts by the composer but in the style of older poetry. So like Debussy, there is a sense of the archaic in the musical setting. Ravel wrote these pieces, and dedicated them to a series of influential men, as part of his effort to be accepted into the army during the First World War, and the selection we perform tonight, Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis, tells the story of one whose beloved has gone off to fight. Meanwhile, three birds of paradise, in the colors of the French tricolore, visit the speaker and offer allegorical gifts.

Lili Boulanger was a rising star of the French musical scene, the first female winner of the Prix de Rome and an all-too-rare example of a woman in this largely male-dominated field. But she died at age 24 from tuberculosis, survived by her older sister Nadia. Nadia went on to compose but mostly teach, and came to be regarded as perhaps the greatest music teacher in the European tradition of the 20th century. Lili’s setting of Delavigne’s paean to the sun, Hymne au Soleil, with its mythical imagery, is one of great vigor, framed by triumphant choral declamations, and setting the description of the horses that drive the sun chariot with intricate and inventive counterpoint.

Francis Poulenc is a member of the next generation of French composers, and as such was touched by both of the 20th century’s devastating European wars, in both of which he served for a time. Poulenc came to be seen as possessing something of a dual personality, one that could be at home equally in irreverent mischief or spiritual sobriety. He set a four-movement cycle (of which we will perform the first two movements) to the poetry of Paul Éluard, Un soir de neige, that contains symbolic references to the struggles of the French Resistance.

Paul Hindemith set the French language serendipitously, thanks to the two world wars. Hindemith fled Nazi Germany for Valais in Switzerland, where a Swiss choral director introduced him to a set of French-language poems on nature by Rainer Maria Rilke, who had himself fled to Switzerland during the First World War. Tonight we perform three of Hindemith’s resulting Six chansons. La biche (“The doe”) evokes, both in poetry and music, a dreamy, somewhat surreal encounter with, and understanding of, the animal. In En hiver (“In winter”), Death comes for the people in winter but is (partly) driven away by the advent of spring. Finally, Puisque tout passe (“Since all is passing”) is a short and humorous “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” bit of verse, set, appropriately by Hindemith, at full speed.

The first French Canadian on tonight’s program, our prélude, is Lionel Daunais. He composed and sang, winning a prize that enabled him to study in France in his 20s. His setting of the Apollinaire poem, Le pont Mirabeau, seems almost designed to be an exemplar of common French harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic tropes, and thus seemed a fitting amuse-bouche for our program.

The remaining Québecois composers on tonight’s program are representatives of the younger generations of French Canadian talent. Cecilia has had the good fortune to work with Québecois composer Louis Desjarlais. The composer joined us via Zoom to discuss his work and to offer feedback as we rehearsed. As the composer himself explained to us, his text emerged from the idea that those who die remain in some sense alive as long as they are remembered, and so they die a kind of second death after those who remember them are gone as well. His work describes “a dance of ghosts held like puppets by people that remember them… and when the people that remember them disappear, the puppets are not attached to any strings and are free to fly away.”

Rachel Laurin, who died just last year, was active as an organist and composer. Her set of three motets in honor of the Holy Family (of which we perform the first, Ave Verum) are written in an advanced tonal language, veering in unexpected directions and reminiscent of Arnold Schoenberg’s post-Romantic experiments such as Friede auf Erden. At the same time, the neo-late Romantic language seems well suited to a certain ardent Catholic mysticism, suggesting a love that almost tips from the sacred to the profane.

Marie-Claire Saindon is a versatile musician, equally at home in film scoring and Irish fiddle music. In her setting of a poem by Herménégilde Chiasson, Constellation, she asks for the extended techniques of whistling and aleatoric murmuring to create, as the composer describes in the score, an “effervescent texture.”

To complete our program, we turn from French to Haitian Creole, the language that emerged as a blending of French and other languages of Europe and Africa, just as Haitian culture blends cultures from at least two continents. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume is a leading composer and advocate of Haitian choral music. In his compositions we find a wealth of stylistic influences, but perhaps the first thing that may strike us, especially after what one will have heard so far tonight, is an energy and vitality that takes us far from the dreamiest of our Impressionistic examples. Guillaume takes advantage of the cumulative power of repetition, both varied and unvaried, and in those respects he might be seen as a kindred spirit with both the pop world and Stravinsky, or the minimalists of the post-World War II era. But the roots of this writing are his own roots, traditions existing largely apart from stylistic developments in Europe and those influenced by European art music.

Almost shockingly, Guillaume brings this rhythmic energy to a text, by his father, in which a mother laments the death of her three children during a conflict between university students and the Haitian government. We hear in the Guillaume father-and-son work a meditation on many expressions of grief: anger, resignation, and finally, even hope. The recurring exclamation Anmwe is hard to translate. According to the composer, “[‘Anmwe’] is a very powerful exclamation in the Creole language. To cry ‘Anmwe’ is to convey pain, emotional torment and heartache on the deepest level.” Sydney Guillaume’s setting may bring those of us who do not speak the language a bit closer to understanding its power.

Our second selection by Guillaume, Dominus vobiscum, is a setting of his father’s meditation on the divine. The poem both declares the presence of God and offers a litany of the kinds of light that God offers to the human condition. Sydney Guillaume’s setting subtly morphs from a gentle lyricism, supporting the soloist’s intonation of “The Lord is with you” to a rhythmically charged declaration of joy.