Music never quite reveals its secret. That’s why the most loved pieces can belistened to endlessly. Viewing a beloved painting over and over again in amuseum or re-reading a favorite novel thirty or forty times still remainsquite an exceptional activity. But listening to a Mozart piano concerto or aBruckner symphony is never-ending for admirers. The music is never ‘off’ or’on.
That is both a blessing and a curse. As a result, classical music fans aregenerally slightly more conservative in nature than audiences for other artforms. Every art form has a canon: artists and artists from the past who areregarded as normative and directional. But the canon of classical music isvery narrow. Only a small number of composers attract all the attention, oftenwith the same works.
Few musicians have done more to break through such beaten musical paths thanconductor and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw (1938-2020). His concerts andrecordings with the greats of contemporary music such as György Ligeti, LouisAndriessen, Sofia Goebaidoelina, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág and GalinaUstvolskaja are of great importance if only because he worked closely with thecomposers. De Leeuw contributed to the music history of his own time.
His passion and perfectionism have been extensively documented over the years– including in the biography Thea Derks wrote about him and the musicaldocumentaries Cherry Duyns made about and with De Leeuw (including the famousseries ‘Toonmeesters’). Is there anything else to add? Anyway.
Passionate storyteller
In Across the border. Classical music after 1900 De Leeuw will speak onemore time about the composers who have determined his musical life. Althoughauthor Dap Hartmann is an avid music lover, he is not a professional himself.He therefore set the condition for the conversations on which his book isbased that De Leeuw should avoid musical jargon as much as possible.
This resulted in a book that offers an incomplete, but very catchyintroduction to the music of the twentieth century, which assumes little priorknowledge. De Leeuw is a passionate storyteller, who is never shy about anopinion, which he often stretches to an absolute standard. There is oftensomething to be said about this, but De Leeuw’s surrender certainlycontributes enormously to the liveliness of the book.
Ironically enough, the music of the twentieth century, which wanted to befreed from as many precepts and rules as possible, soon found itself trappedin all kinds of new dogmas, which the musical revolutionaries imposed onthemselves. Anyone who wanted to count in the first decades after the SecondWorld War had to compose in the manner of Karlheinz Stockhausen and PierreBoulez. In retrospect, De Leeuw considered this effort to arrive at a newgenerally applicable musical language as a mistake. De Leeuw’s discovery ofthe music of the American composer Charles Ives, a loner who imperturbablywent his own way, freed him from that straitjacket in the mid-1960s.
Yet De Leeuw has never completely abandoned the idea that musical history hasan inherent logic, which must inevitably lead to a certain way of composing.He was fascinated by this – especially by the musical life in Vienna around1900 in which Arnold Schönberg crossed the heavily charged border intoatonality.
In this way, certain musical developments remain central and absorb most ofthe attention – music that does not fit well into the grand story of theorigin of modern music is inevitably dropped.
Canon exclusive
It is also possible to look less linearly (and less hierarchically) at themusic history of the twentieth century. British music journalist Kate Mollesonshows this beautifully in her innovative book Sound Within Sound. Opening OurEars to the Twentieth Century.
Molleson decided not to repeat the sharp polemics about the exclusivecharacter of the classical music canon (white, male, European). Her agenda ispositive: she went in search of important ‘innovative figures’ that aremissing from most history books, regardless of country of origin, gender orcolor.
In this way she wants to remove the ‘false contradiction’ that she believesexists between an emphasis on diversity and quality as a guiding criterion.That contradiction does not have to be there at all. She also abandons thesharp hierarchical distinction between center and periphery: in thetraditional way of thinking, the (Western) music of the center is alwaysleading; music from other parts of the world can only have the followingcharacter.
Her approach resulted in ten portraits of very different composers, such asthe Mexican composer Julián Carillo, who mastered European traditions as amusic student in Leipzig, but went his own way in the 1920s with a musicsystem he developed himself that he called the ‘ Revolución del Sonido 13’.
A somewhat similar development went through the Filipino composer José Maceda,who was classically trained in Paris, gave up his career as a concert pianist,retrained as an ethnomusicologist and started composing from his country’sindigenous musical traditions. His career peaked with the work Ugnayan , acomposition for 37 radio stations, which was played for an hour on New Year’sDay 1974 in the Philippine capital Manila. Only the support of Imelda Marcos,the wife of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, gave him the opportunity to realizesuch a grand and ambitious project.
Countless cross connections
Closer to the European mainstream is the work of the Danish composer ElseMarie Pade. Molleson writes intriguingly about her sound collage compositions,which reflected her traumatic wartime experiences. The French Éliane Radiquewas involved in the famous Studio d’Essai of composer Pierre Schaeffer, apioneer of composing with sounds (‘musique concrete’.)
Radique mainly made a name for herself with her electronic music for earlysynthesizers. She is still musically active at an advanced age – Mollesonvisits Radigue in her Paris apartment and beautifully describes the momentwhen Radique turns the tables and the composer begins to ask her questions.
Between the famous music that has made it into the history books and thecomposers Sound Within Sound there are numerous cross-links. None of thecomposers in Molleson’s book developed in isolation. The question is whetherit is really possible to uncover completely new types of music by composerswho are as yet far too little known. But such pure innovation need not be theultimate criterion. In any case, what is certain is that there is much moregood music to be found than in the narrow canon of Western classical music.