Latest news with #ParisConservatoire
Telegraph
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I was once oblivious to the beauty of birdsong – now I'm hooked
If you want to be a composer, you should spend a bit less time in gigs and concert halls and more time in the woods learning from birds, since they are the greatest musicians. This advice, from French composer Paul Dukas, to his students at the Paris Conservatoire in the late 1920s, has passed into musical legend because of one student in particular – Olivier Messiaen. There's no evidence of a whole generation of French composers citing Parisian forests and parks as forcing houses for their work, but young Olivier certainly did. Dukas' advice was credited by Messiaen as part of his own creative genesis, but in truth, his obsession with birds was always there. As a young child staying at his aunts' farm in the Aube, Olivier would go out with a notebook and try to capture the songs of birds nesting in the trees and fields around his house. His lifelong attempt to 'capture' their songs resulted in a vast body of published music based on birdsong, and a unique archive of more than 200 handwritten notebooks titled Cahiers de notation des chants d'oiseaux. The latter are the most remarkable artists' notebooks I've ever seen, but before I get into that, a confession is in order. I've spent most of my life oblivious to birdsong. In so far as I listened to birdsong at all, I liked it. But it was just one component in the backing track to whatever was happening in the human world. The drama of human voices, our passion and compassion, a sense that being alive in the world meant being attentive to people, reduced birdsong to a generic soundscape at best, certainly not a choir of individual birds with distinctive voices. As a poet, I was aware of its profound influence on poets like John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Hopkins, Keats. The English poetic tradition is impossible to imagine without the presence of birds and their songs. Its impact on musicians is even clearer, from Vivaldi's Four Seasons to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony to the Beatles (Blackbird, Across the Universe) and Kate Bush on her Aerial album. The composer Béla Bartók took notebooks into the field to inform his use of birdsong in his Piano Concerto no 3. The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, in his Cantus Arcticus, employed birds not just as teachers but performers, interweaving tape recordings of Arctic birds with the orchestra. But the spark for me to listen, properly listen, to birds came in the last year, as I've been digging deeper in the work of birdsong-obsessed composer Olivier Messiaen. I've always loved his music, since I picked up a copy of his Quatuor pour la fin du temps by chance in a record shop as a student, knowing next to nothing about classical music at the time (much more into indie bands on the 4AD label, but that's another story) but the title had me at first sight. I mean, why would I not want to listen to a piece called Quartet for the End of Time? That piece has been in my life ever since, turning and deepening with the decades as only a great work of art can do. The Quartet comes complete with its own genesis story. It was written in a German labour camp where Messiaen was imprisoned in 1940, premiered in a washroom barrack with the composer on piano and three fellow prisoner-musicians on violin, cello and clarinet, to an audience of prisoners-of-war from across Europe. This famous story has elements of myth to it, notably about the battered and makeshift quality of the instruments, but there's no doubt about the presence of birds in Quartet. This was the first time Messiaen directly incorporated transcribed birdsong into a composition, in this case a blackbird and a nightingale. From my first listen on the record deck in my student room, those avian voices were clear and strange and utterly entrancing. From this early composition, Messiaen went on to become one of the 20th Century's most influential composers, a mystic modernist innovator with a particular – and peculiar – obsession with birdsong. He went on to place the birds centre stage in pieces like Catalogue d'oiseaux, written for his wife the pianist Yvonne Loriod, conjuring from the keyboard 13 birdscapes evoking different French locations. Later, as his fame grew and his music was performed across the world, Olivier and Yvonne would schedule their travels to allow time in forests or mountains or deserts to track down new birdsongs. This included a trek in New Caledonia to fulfil the composer's wish to include the song of a gerygone (a kind of warbler) in his opera on the life of St Francis of Assisi. Of all the composers who drew on birdsong in their work, it's fair to say Messiaen stands out for his lifelong fascination with it, the efforts he made to incorporate and explore it in his music, and his diligence in making personal pilgrimages to capture birds' songs in the wild, however hard to reach. Last October, working on a book about my lifelong love of his Quatuor pour la fin du temps, I made a pilgrimage to the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to look at the famous cahiers. These notebooks are a record of Messiaen's encounters with birdsong in situ. They are plain school-style exercise books with printed staves, but Messiaen set out to record far more than just the notes being sung. To understand these notebooks, it helps to know that Messiaen didn't just listen to birdsong. He saw it too. His synaesthesia meant that he saw sounds as colours. This makes some of his notes on his own music both enticing and (to this listener) baffling, as he talks about chords as 'yellow topaz, red stained with blue, mauve, amethyst…' In the cahiers, he captures not just the songs, but an entire sensory experience. He'll note down time of day, colour of rocks or leaves, quality of light, character of the weather. As for capturing the song itself, this was a challenge, even for him. Birdsong is often rapid, complex, riffing across shifting microtones. Not only is it difficult to write down as a score, it would be close to unplayable if you did. Even if you could produce an accurate birdsong score, no human player could play it at full speed. He records the notes as accurately as possible, but his cahiers – with their beautiful mark-making in fine pencil – are a record of an encounter, with this particular bird performing this particular music at this particular time and place. In fact, I've come to see them as a record of epiphanies. In poetry, the notion of an 'epiphany' denotes a moment of realisation or opening out, as in Edward Thomas' famous brief stop at Adlestrop's railway halt beginning with a blackbird's voice then 'Farther and farther, all the birds / of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.' But Messiaen's bird epiphanies were not secular 'openings'. A lifelong Catholic ('Je suis né croyant', he said, 'I was born believing') he was both devout and radical in his personal theology, in which birdsong played a key role. Birds, he believed, were somehow spared the Fall, which left the rest of creation wounded and broken. Only in birdsong can you hear the sound of that lost prelapsarian world. When you hear a bird sing in the tree on your street, you are listening to the music of the Garden of Eden, the sound of paradise. When I listen to his music, I can almost believe it. And for the last couple of years, under his influence, my life as a birdsong refusenik has changed. Birdsong has grown into bird songs, individual voices I can pick out and identify, calling me to stop and pay attention.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman review – the radical lord of light entertainent
Music is extremely difficult to write about. First, because it has no plot, no figures, no images, and second, because it is, as the critic Walter Pater pointed out, the one artform to which all the others aspire. Remember those earnest mini-essays on the backs of album covers, which told us everything and nothing about the piece or pieces we were about to listen to? Ian Penman writes: 'As with sex, we inherit a certain language to talk about music which only glancingly reflects how much of it really makes us feel.' Penman, a journalist, critic and biographer, has written not only for the London Review of Books but also the New Musical Express. To say that he is eclectic in his tastes is an understatement; he gives the same level of consideration to Burt Bacharach as he does to Bach, and along the way puts in a word for the genius of the likes of Les Dawson – that's right, Les Dawson. If Penman's cheery chappiness can at times seem studied, he is for the most part admirably accommodating and affirmative, and always enthusiastic. He has little time for the grand Germanic musical statements of the 19th century, which Erik Satie and Debussy gigglingly referred to as Sauerkraut. Satie is an ideal subject for him, and Three Piece Suite is, as you would expect, a glorious celebration of this most elusive and ambiguous of early 20th-century composers. Satie was born in 1866 to a French father and a British mother. He studied first at the Paris Conservatoire but left without a diploma; later, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum and was more successful. For a time he played the piano in a Montmartre cabaret. He had a five-month liaison with the trapeze artist and painter Suzanne Valadon, but lived for the latter part of his life alone in a small and extremely cluttered room in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, making frequent forays into the city, where he became a well-known figure in cultural circles that included Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Jean Cocteau. He was a true eccentric, instantly recognisable for his neat grey suits, bowler hat and inveterate umbrella. One Paris wag nicknamed him Esotérik Satie. He drank a great deal, and died of cirrhosis when he was 59. His last words were, so Penman reports, 'Ah! The cows …' He composed mostly miniatures, especially for the piano, his best-known pieces being the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes – 'They feel as old as sand,' Penman beautifully writes, 'but strangely contemporary' – but also wrote what he called a symphonic drama, Socrate, commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac, and two late ballets. Penman loves him for his light and humorous touch – 'What's the big problem with happiness?' – and for the depths he managed to plumb by way of seeming superficiality. Penman situates Satie among the proto-surrealists, along with René Clair and Francis Picabia – 'the three amigos' – but distances him from the likes of André Breton, he of the 'pursed lips and castigating impulse'. The amigos 'proved that it was possible to be radical and lighthearted at the same time'. However, Satie was at heart solitary – solitary, that is, in the midst of the social whirl. At Arcueil he organised public concerts, took groups of schoolchildren on Thursday afternoon outings, and was, Penman notes, 'made a superintendent of the Patronage laïque of Arceuil-Cachan and honoured with a decoration called the Palmes Académiques for services to the community'. Yet the music, despite its apparent simplicity and sunny surfaces, turns upon inwardness. All true art is enigmatic, but the art of Satie is an enigma hiding in plain sight. His 'furniture music', musique d'ameublement, the composer himself wrote, 'will be part of the noises of the environment… I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself'. Not to impose: it could be Satie's musical motto. Disconcertingly, the audiences refused to ignore the furniture. Milhaud reported after one performance: 'It was no use Satie shouting: 'Talk, for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen!' They kept quiet. They listened.' But was Satie displeased, really? Was there not here a joke within a joke, a blague within a blague? Penman associates Satie not only with later composers upon whom he could be said to have had an influence, such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, even Morton Feldman, but also with artists in other forms, the novelist Raymond Queneau, for instance, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and, of course, the painter René Magritte – in the 'Satie A-Z' section of the book there is a telling cross reference: 'See also: BOWLER HAT; MAGRITTE; UMBRELLA.' One remarkable aspect of Three Piece Suite is that in its more than 200 pages there is not a single word of adverse criticism of its subject. Ian Penman is of an unfailingly cheerful disposition, which makes his book a delight to read, but you cannot but wonder if he never finds himself even a teeny bit exasperated by Satie's relentless whimsy, by titles such as Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Dummy or Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and references in the scores to the likes of 'Turkish Yodelling (To be played with the tips of the eyes)'. All the same, who could resist a work of musical criticism that closes with the diary entry '10.8.24. Such a lovely blue sky today'? Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
CBS News
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
"Morgiane," a forgotten opera written by Black composer in 1855, performed for the first time
"Morgiane" is believed to be the oldest existing opera written by a Black American -- but despite its historic significance, the show was only performed for audiences for the first time in 2025. "Morgiane" was the magnum opus of New Orleans-born composer Edmond Dede. The opera, based on themes from "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves," tells the story of a mother, Morgaine, and her daughter, Amine, who fight a tyrannical ruling sultan. Behind the curtain is Dede's remarkable story. Dede was born a free Black man in New Orleans in 1827. He was educated and moved to France in 1855, leaving just before the Civil War. In France, he studied music at the Paris Conservatoire and performed at Bordeaux's Grand Theatre. He also traveled to Algeria, then a French colony, and was inspired by the struggle of the people there. Dede returned to the U.S. once, during the height of the Jim Crow era. He was not permitted to perform in theaters, and went back to Europe, vowing that he would never return to his home country. Dede went on to write 250 songs, ballets and orchestral pieces. The 545-page "Morgaine" was his magnum opus, but it was never performed during his lifetime. In 2014, New Orleans Opera Creole founders Givonna Joseph and Aria Mason found a digital copy of "Morgaine." Opera Creole shares music by composers of African descent, and when they found the piece, they knew they needed to bring it to an audience. "I had, you know how you get, a gut feeling that this was important," Joseph said. "I didn't know exactly how." Patrick Quigley, the artistic director designate of Washington, D.C.'s Opera Lafayette, was eager to join the mission. He and Joseph connected in 2023, and they began working with musicians and historians from across the country to bring the never-performed opera to life. First, they transcribed almost 6,000 measures of music into modern notation. When the process was done, they heard music that hadn't been played in over a century. "It's this fabulous combination of so many different styles of music, both European and American all together in one place," Quigley said. Excerpts from "Morgaine" were played at New Orleans' St. Louis Cathedral on January 24. The church was likely the site of Dede's baptism. The entire opera was performed at Opera Lafayette for the first time on Feb. 3. "It was an incredible moment for Washington, D.C., and it was an incredible moment for American music," said Quigley, who conducted the performance. There were also two other performances, one in New York City and one in College Park, Maryland. The brief tour served as a kind of homecoming for Dede, said Joseph. "I think he's a New Orleans hero," she said.
CBS News
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
"Morgaine," a forgotten opera written by Black composer in 1855, performed for the first time
"Morgiane" is believed to be the oldest existing opera written by a Black American -- but despite its historic significance, the show was only performed for audiences for the first time in 2025. "Morgiane" was the magnum opus of New Orleans-born composer Edmond Dede. The opera, based on themes from "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves," tells the story of a mother, Morgaine, and her daughter, Amine, who fight a tyrannical ruling sultan. Behind the curtain is Dede's remarkable story. Dede was born a free Black man in New Orleans in 1827. He was educated and moved to France in 1855, leaving just before the Civil War. In France, he studied music at the Paris Conservatoire and performed at Bordeaux's Grand Theatre. He also traveled to Algeria, then a French colony, and was inspired by the struggle of the people there. Dede returned to the U.S. once, during the height of the Jim Crow era. He was not permitted to perform in theaters, and went back to Europe, vowing that he would never return to his home country. Dede went on to write 250 songs, ballets and orchestral pieces. The 545-page "Morgaine" was his magnum opus, but it was never performed during his lifetime. In 2014, New Orleans Opera Creole founders Givonna Joseph and Aria Mason found a digital copy of "Morgaine." Opera Creole shares music by composers of African descent, and when they found the piece, they knew they needed to bring it to an audience. "I had, you know how you get, a gut feeling that this was important," Joseph said. "I didn't know exactly how." Patrick Quigley, the artistic director designate of Washington, D.C.'s Opera Lafayette, was eager to join the mission. He and Joseph connected in 2023, and they began working with musicians and historians from across the country to bring the never-performed opera to life. First, they transcribed almost 6,000 measures of music into modern notation. When the process was done, they heard music that hadn't been played in over a century. "It's this fabulous combination of so many different styles of music, both European and American all together in one place," Quigley said. Excerpts from "Morgaine" were played at New Orleans' St. Louis Cathedral on January 24. The church was likely the site of Dede's baptism. The entire opera was performed at Opera Lafayette for the first time on Feb. 3. "It was an incredible moment for Washington, D.C., and it was an incredible moment for American music," said Quigley, who conducted the performance. There were also two other performances, one in New York City and one in College Park, Maryland. The brief tour served as a kind of homecoming for Dede, said Joseph. "I think he's a New Orleans hero," she said.
