VOTD 1/6/2024

 Jean Barraqué: Séquence/Chants Après Chant (Musical Heritage Society)

Purchased used at Jerry's Records

First vinyl purchase of the year, and it's an old record of old-style post-War avant garde.

We're moving out of that season in which many people have been posting their year-end lists to social media: top Spotify playlists, top ten-to-fifty releases of the year, and other top of the tops. Regarding the former: I don't largely engage with Spotify. I understand its convenience, but I don't own a smart speaker and don't have my laptop setup for general listening; that's what I have two stereo systems for. I also consider Spotify to be a parasite on musical artists, with only the likes of multi-million selling artists being able to make even a small amount of money from it while the Spotify owners rake in billions. To hell that. I did engage with Spotify a single time, when Jenny from Homewood Cemetery asked me to assemble a playlist for walking through the ground. I put together a list of jazz pieces that I thought were meditative without largely being very slow. What I really wanted to do was put together a list of horror movie cues, but I was told a hard "no" on that. (It would have been great: pieces from City of the Living Dead, Suspiria, Phantasm, just off the top of my head.)

As for my list of top releases of 2023, I'm trying to think if I actually bought anything newly issued. I bought a 4-CD collection of The Pyramids, but it's music from the 70s, and released in 2022. 

And here I am, sitting on two CDs of Thoth Trio recordings, soon to be asking others to buy my new recordings, not doing the same myself.

In my early adulthood, I followed independently released music with a passion. Admittedly there was generally much less to follow, but OP and later Sound Choice and Option magazines helped keep one on top of things. As I've previous written, I could look  at more album covers and know if it was of some interest. Now I often struggle to so much as locate the artist's name on the cover. 

Which brings me back to this old record, recorded in 1970 for the Valois label but reissued on two others. The composer's year of death (1975) is not listed on the cover. 

Barraqué's total compositional output, the works he chose not to destroy, takes up a 3 CD set. Varèse's complete output I think was released on two CDs. It didn't help that he died at age 45, and was beset by difficulties such as an apartment fire, car accident, and poor health in general. Then of course was the drug-fueled S&M relationship he apparently had with philosopher Michel Foucalt. I hear in my head the voice of Homer from an old Simpsons episode saying, "Now that's interesting!" 

So what do we have in this release? Two works, one just under and one a little over twenty minutes in length. (Morton Feldman had something to say about this in general, that the marker of then current works was to create something twenty minutes long. I must speculate that the influence of the long playing record album was a factor.) Both are examples of post-War atonal vocal composition, a single voice with instrumental ensemble. Emphasis in the latter is on percussion and piano.

I've already stated my general lack of enthusiasm for modernist vocal writing. I'll admit it has to do with my general lack of enthusiasm for vocalists in general, though that's putting it a little broadly. I've previously admitted that I've already preferred the instruments over the voices, going back as far as when I really started listening to music intensely in my youth. 

If you have to have a voice in this setting though, the delivery here is how it should be. That is, what I especially don't like is Romantic opera voice delivery on atonal music. I know some of that is practical, that the projection of the voice pre-amplification was critical for the success of grand opera. Broad vocal vibrato though? No thank you. It works especially poorly for modernist opera. Thankfully here, the delivery on voice is more direct, without Romantic heaviness or inclination to be too expressive.

Music such as this is long on texture, short on memorability. It doesn't help that the vinyl record experience is several steps removed from that of live performance; I'm sure seeing this in the room real time would be more potent. 

My own take is, I'm sympathetic to post-War atonalism and like it from time to time. But even as a casual fan so to speak, I can't really recall much of what happened now that the record is over. Should music stick in your ear more? 

Nonetheless, maybe these composers effectively created works in this respect: they seem timeless, or at least not grounded in current realities. While this music might have been political at one time, that element seems distant now. It's sounds, sounds passing through time, no connection to modern politics, no connection to problems in the world. Escapism or retreat from troubles? Or something else?