Ensemble intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher

Species of Spaces

The Ensemble intercontemporain Plays Blondeau, Lindberg, and Vivier

Paul Griffiths

Music, we know, exists in time, unfolds in time. But it also exists and unfolds in space—in the resonant spaces within and around an instrument, in the larger space of the concert hall, and then in another space, virtual, where we position it in our perception. The new work by Sasha J. Blondeau, and the one very nearly half a century old by Claude Vivier, both change the spacing of musicians within the hall. This will jolt our perceptions, but no more than they will be jolted by the ideas that have demanded departing from conventional placement—ideas coming from ritual spacing and movement in the Vivier, and in the Blondeau from the internalized geographies of our minds. And of course, as Magnus Lindberg will remind us, it is possible to propose a new space from within a normal concert layout.

Another Space, Another Time

Sasha J. Blondeau’s twelve-minute Contre-espace takes its title— “counter-space”—from Michel Foucault, two quotations from whom head the score. For Foucault a counter-space, which he also calls a “heterotopia,” a place of otherness, is somewhere off our regular mental maps of familiarity and unfamiliarity, safety and danger, habit and exception, rest and action. A counter-space may show up the illusoriness of all those other spaces, or it may create “another real space as perfect, meticulous and ably arranged as ours is disorganized, badly adapted and sketchy.”

From here the composer (who was born Julia Blondeau in 1986) takes up the theme in his preface to the score: “The year 2019 has been for me the beginning of a transition: from one gender to the other. While this has been absolutely liberating, it also implied passing into the sort of ‘counter-space’ Michel Foucault might have called a ‘gender heterotopia.’ I am now living in a new space—an elsewhere of gender—and am trying, somewhere, to find this space in my music. There is no question here of a literal transposition; it is rather that living in this middle ground—this infinite space between two points that mark the extreme ends of an endless field of possibilities—is leading me to rethink certain boundaries, to see the great cohorts of well-defined categories as ghosts in the making. I wanted to take advantage of the specific character of the Pierre Boulez Saal to try to sound out new spaces and see how an instrumental ensemble could coexist with musicians on the periphery, how the various combinations could make a melodic mass transform itself into a constellation of more or less indeterminate sounds. This is a kind of first trial, the start of a journey I am making, one on which sometimes you have to dare to advance blindly.”

Initiated by a signal that is ricocheted as it spawns a first, tight harmonic field, Contre-espace is music in which such fields, such spaces, whether of explicit pitches or fuzzier constituents, of flexible rhythms or pulses, steady or whirling, are always in a condition of suspense, no sooner formed than transforming themselves into other fields, other spaces, and doing so within the whole acoustic space around. The beginning comes from above, from the balcony, where four high, penetrating instruments are stationed: two oboes and two trumpets. Soon these are joined by four others from the back of the parterre—two horns, bassoon, and trombone—and then by the main ensemble below, by which point change is already in progress, set to continue. There are places where the three groups— and groups within the main group—may seem to be on independent paths, but there are also moments of startling unanimity. All the time the counter-space goes on revealing its intricate workmanship and its sound-discovery, achieved without this composer’s more customary use of electronics.

Magnus Lindberg also takes his title from a writer—in this case from Edith Södergran (1892–1923), a Finn, like himself, of Swedish family and language. Among the pioneers of modernist free verse in Swedish, Södergran wrote from an “I” that seems very immediate to herself. Her Shadow of the Future, from during or soon after the First World War, begins: “I sense death’s shadow.” After six lines speaking of fate and foreboding, however, the poem in its shorter second part turns to the light: “The future casts on me its holy shadow, which is nothing other than the flowing sun.” Her health declining, the poet foresees a time beyond her death, a time by which she is nevertheless illuminated.

It was this assurance of life amid death that drew Lindberg to Södergran for the first time last year in answering a commission for a work to mark the centenary of the armistice that ended the 1914–18 conflict: Triumph to Exist, also based on a wartime poem. “Her universe continues to inhabit me,” he has said. “When I think of the world as it is today, and of all the shadows that darken our future, this optimism seems to me something we have to hold on to.” Hence the glow and the bound of Shadow of the Future, which he began composing for the Ensemble intercontemporain right after the armistice piece.

The new work is strongly, even emphatically thematic, based on a theme in two segments presented right away by the brass in the opening bars: first comes a march down a fourth in steps of a major second and a minor third, and then, from this, a rise that is more variable but will often go scale-wise and end with a fall back. Big music is already implied, and the promise is fulfilled. As the material is developed, so attention swings from one instrumental family to another, the percussive group—piano, harp and two percussionists at this point on vibraphone and marimba—adding an exotic touch.

After three minutes or so, the 17-minute piece moves into the second of its four parts, with airy woodwinds slowly pushing up through whole tones. Horns restore the main theme, and activity increases, to a point where the third part begins. This features majestic chords such as these musicians rarely get to play together, but ends with an oboe duet featuring a quick circling figure that was heard in the first part. Similar darting figures take over the whole ensemble to begin the final part, in the initial stages of which the brass players are silent. Returning, they are at first muted, but soon bring reminders of the theme. This comes to an apotheosis, amid fanfaring chords from the third part and more dancing figures. The re-arrival of the upward whole tones moves the work into its coda.

Toward the Sacred

“Having finished a work or part of a work,” Claude Vivier wrote in an article of 1978, “the question that comes to me is this: Do I feel the same as on Christmas Day?” Almost certainly he was referring here to his experience at a midnight mass, at which he suddenly realized music would be “the ideal instrument to express my search for purity.” We cannot be sure when this was, but Hiérophanie, which he wrote at the age of 22, was the first of his works to make this search very evidently its subject matter. It is a hierophany, a revelation of the sacred.

Vivier’s concept of the sacred had two main sources. One was Roman Catholicism, which remained a home and a lodestar for him long after he had been expelled from his seminary. The other was the eastward-looking spirituality that was in the air at the time, strengthened in his case by the contact he made at Darmstadt in the summer of 1970, right at the time he was writing Hiérophanie, with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Here was his hero, having recently returned via Ceylon from two months in Japan. Viewed within either perspective, the condition of sacredness—of redemption, enlightenment—was to be achieved at the end of a process, and it is such a process that Hiérophanie traces.

The work is scored for three instrumental groups, representing different principles. Two percussionists, with their instruments across the back of the stage, stand for “the transcendent.” The two other groups, of brass with a few woodwinds, are representatives of “loving humanity” and “egoism,” and musicians move between them. At the outset the “loving humanity” group, in a line with access to the tam-tam behind them, has six members (two flutes, clarinet, trumpet, and two trombones), with three for “egoism” at front right (two trumpets and a horn). There is also a soprano, whose interventions come relatively late in the piece.

Bob Gilmore, in his book on the composer, points out that the work’s instrumental setup reminds us Vivier had recently completed his dissertation on Varèse—specifically on Arcana, whose epigraph from Paracelsus may have given him a further impulse to understand music as metaphysical. The way Vivier works with his windpercussion formation, however, is his own, and closer to the instrumental theater of the period, with examples in the works of Boulez (Domaines), Stockhausen (Ylem), Birtwistle (Verses for Ensembles), and many more. Closer still are the connections Vivier makes yet again, in his use of procession (from the stage around the hall), signaling and versicle-response dialogue, with Catholic worship.

Engaging his musicians in what is not only a performance but also a ritual act, he disengages them from concert norms. They move about. They might have to make animal noises. They must cope with changed lighting. They are offered choices, whether in how to work with given material (pitches, rhythms, dynamic levels), how to respond to other players, or across a broader field. They will be invited to speak (words, invented names of gods, at the end something from one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which for Vivier were tantamount to Scripture) or sing (plainsong). They even have to bring in their personal histories by playing songs from their childhoods. In general, the percussion parts are more fully prescribed than those for the wind players, especially in the first half of the piece, after which the balance is reversed.

Certain moments may stand out as points of passage. After an introductory section leading to a duo for gongs and tom-toms over quiet, wide, discordant harmonies from the wind, the latter introduce sequences of “sacred chords,” “sacred sounds,” and “sacred dynamic nuances” together with a “sacred rhythm,” with which they start to improvise as they leave their regular stations. Toward the halfway mark, one of the trumpets has a long solo, while the other musicians are commenting or doing their own things. A little later, the singer, having made her presence felt, sings the First Delphic Hymn, a survival from the second century B.C. Soon after, the wind players exchange instruments while continuing their childhood memories. The piece moves into its final stages as the singer begins a plainsong Salve Regina, and it is with this that the action is completed.