VOTD 5/10/2023

 Jean Barraqué: Sonate pour Piano (Unicorn)

Purchased at Jerry's Records, from the Duquesne University collection

I've been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University for something like eighteen years. I teach music technology courses. When I tell that to someone and they sound impressed, I say, "It's not as impressive as it sounds." Most of what I teach is a fundamental music and audio technology: scoring, sequencing, recording; I also teach a technology in the music classroom to education majors, and an electronic music course.

There are some listening examples in the latter. Sometimes I've asked the student to find an historical example themselves and write about it.

I'm thinking of a student, last name possibly of Buide (or some variation, maybe it was his middle name). He chose for this assignment the single known work of electronic music by Jean Barraqué. This wasn't a name I knew. He told me that he chose Barraqué because they were both Spanish.

This LP turned up in the $3 Duquesne bins this week, so naturally I pounced on it. In looking up some basic, Wikipedia-level information on the composer, I read that he was French.

This leads me to this conclude these two possibilities: either he was wrong about Barraqué, or my memory is faulty. He was a good student, but how could I possibly remember all of these details correctly? And does that mean some of the "facts" I've written here are suspect due to the limitations and gaps in my memory banks?

There isn't much of Barraqué's work left. He destroyed his early works prior to this sonata, written in 1952 (but premiered years later). Compound that with dying at age 45, you have a composer with very few in-print works. His entire authorized compositional output is recorded on a three-CD set. One of the comments I've read is that this sonata is his one work to have real legs, to be performed occasionally and recorded several times.

Barraqué was a student of Messiaen, and the sonata is an example of post-war serialism. That could be one reason Boulez was a champion of the work. I always wonder, with these serialist works, where the hand of the composer becomes evident? If it involves creating a system you work through to compose the work, where are decisions made beyond creating the formula. Barraqué seems to bring a touch of the Romantic spirit, of lyricism, into what is rationalized music. 

The work seems to hang on pitch areas from time to time. I don't know of a better way to describe it. It's clearly not random (or serialized beyond all recognizable processes), the piece seems to have different compositional regions. There is a section in the middle of the first part (the work is defined as first and second parts) with pregnant pauses, one of the moments in the work that is naturally dramatic.

The pianist on this recording is Roger Woodward, who as I think I've written before was one of Morton Feldman's three pianists of choice. His name is larger than the composer's on the cover (due to length), but in grey lettering. It's a staggeringly difficult piece. Even the slower second part requires attention to the details of playing highly differentiated dynamics and attacks.

I might look up the score for this, it's available in both the public and university libraries. I'm uncertain what I'll gain from it, apart from looking at it and thinking, "Wow, Roger Woodward is really good."