Modern Energy I

If I have a bone to pick with much of the music composed in the latter half of the twentieth century, it's the lack of a sense of rhythm and motion.  What makes the great classics of the last ten centuries so compelling (to me at least) is that they are all going somewhere, and doing so at a speed and in a way that can clearly be followed by the listener.  So, to me, when I hear a piece of contemporary music that just juxtaposes sounds, and the sounds just lie there on your ear, I feel profoundly unsatisfied.

Fortunately, combining modern sound idioms with a more traditional sense of movement can still create gripping and eminently listenable music.  This is going to be a multi-part posting, as I chart several of my favourite twentieth-century works which share that characteristic of energetic movement.

Today, it's the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen.  This extraordinary piece was created in the late 1940s to a commission by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  It's first recording outside of Europe came in 1967 from the Toronto Symphony, conducted by Seiji Ozawa.  I recently had a chance to listen to the digital remastering of that early RCA version, and the sound came up very well indeed.  Good quality sound is a prerequisite for Turangalîla, with its massive orchestra and unique sound world.  The TSO has performed the piece at least twice (maybe three times?) since then.  There have also been at least a dozen fine recordings in recent years.  Yet it remains unknown to many people, scared off by its reputation, or by its sheer size.

This 10-movement symphony (that's right, ten movements) sprawls over about 75-80 minutes in a recorded performance, easily contained in a single compact disc.  The composer wrote very detailed descriptions of the relationships among the movements, but perhaps it's better at first encounter to just listen and absorb. 

Very quickly you will notice that the score includes a terrific amount of percussion, as well as a piano solo part of concerto proportions.  Just as quickly you will detect a weird electronic sound emanating from the orchestra.  That's the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument invented by Maurice Martenot in the 1920s.  Although a number of composers have written music for the ondes, Messiaen's Turangalîla remains its highest-profile appearance.  The ondes can produce uncanny, eerie glissando and vibrato effects unlike any other instrument of the pre-synthesizer era, and Messiaen exploits its capabilities to great effect.

Now, about that rhythmic component.  Messiaen explained very carefully that he was using different groups of time durations simultaneously, one group expanding and slowing, another contracting and accelerating, while "the third, immobile, observes."  Make what you will of this, but rhythm and the energy of movement is present right from Turangalîla's opening notes.  Sometimes it's fast and frenetic, sometimes slow and sensuous, but this piece never, ever lies down and dies on you.

The rhythmic element is most to the fore in the jazzy fifth-movement scherzo, Joie du sang des etoiles ("Joy of the blood of the stars").  Don't let the strange title put you off, just enjoy the music as a kind of wild rhythmic dance scarcely heard since the time of Beethoven.  I firmly believe that Beethoven, however much the harmonic idiom baffled him, would have admired the sheer energy of this music.

The succeeding Jardin du sommeil de l'amour ("Slumber Garden of Love") is a beautiful, seductive slow movement, with a prominent wide-ranging love melody given to the ondes Martenot.  For sheer lyricism there's almost nothing else in contemporary music to touch it.  These two movements together represent in some ways the most traditional part of the symphony.

The conflicting time elements are most notable in the ninth movement, Turangalîla III, in which a set of rhythmic percussion variations (set against a slow melodic line in the clarinets) grow steadily more complex and contorted until the music suddenly stops dead.

The final movement returns to the sound world of the fifth movement in another jazzy, jagged fast movement whose energetic ostinati surge onwards until they culminate in a final, full-orchestral statement of the love theme from movement six, and a short vigorous coda which amply confirms Messaien's description: "glory and joy are without end".

If you have an adventurous ear, you really have to give Turangalîla a whirl -- and be prepared to be taken for a whirling, joyful ride yourself.  My own favourite recordings were by Andre Previn on EMI in LP days, (1977) and by Riccardo Chailly with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on Decca CD (1992).