Writing on the Wind

Writing on the Wind

Music for Solo Flute

Thomas May

In the Swabian Alps in Baden-Württemberg, paleolithic instruments with hand-holed bores have been found dating back more than 40,000 years—making the ancestral flute the oldest known musical instrument. Moving ahead a considerable stretch to one of the earliest surviving works of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh (dating from c. 1800 BCE) makes reference to a “flute” of the semiprecious stone carnelian, and the Biblical figure Jubal is sometimes described as the inventor of the flute.

Claude Debussy drew on the flute’s associations with a timeless and pastoral antiquity at the beginning of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune—which, at the same time, announced for Pierre Boulez the beginning of Modernism in music. For his recital program, Emmanuel Pahud explores the dramatic transformations in the image of the instrument from the Baroque to the present. But the revolution imagined by Modernist and contemporary composers involves not just abstract concepts but their realization by embodied performers playing physical instruments. Thus, another theme threaded through Pahud’s selection of works is the contribution made by masters of the instrument and their role as mentors. The entire program is framed by pieces inspired by the artistry of Aurèle Nicolet, a legendary modern flutist and Pahud’s own mentor.

When Aurèle Nicolet died a week after his 90th birthday in January 2016, Emmanuel Pahud organized a memorial concert to pay tribute to his former teacher, who had been an enormously influential inspiration—a figure once described by the novelist Günter Grass as a “spitfire, his curly hair ablaze.” As part of the program of indispensable works for his instrument by such composers as Boulez, Debussy, Bach, and Varèse, Pahud asked his contemporary Jörg Widmann to contribute a piece. Petite Suite, dedicated to Nicolet’s memory, condenses the solo flute part from Widmann’s earlier work for flute and orchestra, Flûte en Suite. Pahud was impressed by the latter’s “numerous references to Bach, but also to Mozart, Mahler, Puccini, Strauss, and Berio, ultimately in a very Ligeti-style approach.”

Written in 2011 during a residency with the Cleveland Orchestra, Flûte en Suite veers away from Widmann’s larger-scaled concertos and instead takes the form of a quasi-Baroque suite with its array of reworked dance forms plus chorales and a cadenza. The composer notes that he was inspired by the “exciting dark timbre” of Joshua Smith, the ensemble’s principal flutist. “Sunken worlds suddenly emerge here, only to reach the surface, hover in dangerously distorted fashion, and then sink back to the bottom,” says Widmann, adding that the instrument in Flûte en Suite appears in varied lights as “acerbic, pale, and radiant.” Petite Suite is structured as three brief movements—Allemande, Lamento, and Sarabande—that span a vast range, from the dark, brooding opening low in the range to ecstatic heights. The score includes parts for obliggato bass flute and gong, though this evening, as on his recording, Pahud performs the solo part unaccompanied. He calls Widmann’s music “expressive, pure, and intense, but with a wonderful sense of mischief as well—a mix of intensity and vivacity that reminded me of Nicolet.”

Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita for Solo Flute in A minor

Essential to the flute repertoire, this Partita survived in an 18th-century manuscript—not the autograph—with the heading “Solo p[our une] flûte traversière par J.S. Bach.” It shares with many of Bach’s other chamber compositions the fact that little is known of its origins and purpose—including the essential question as to whether the surviving manuscript even represents the original instrumentation the composer had in mind. (Might it have been taken from a piece intended for keyboard?) Like the Cello Suites and Partitas for Solo Violin, the Flute Partita comprises a series of Baroque dance-based movements. But the claim that it was composed during the same period in Köthen (from 1717 to 1723), when Bach focused on secular instrumental genres, is disputed by the expert Christoph Wolff. He does so on the grounds that “the playing technique is much more advanced than, for example, the writing for flute in Brandenburg Concerto No. 5,” and thus posits a later date. In any case, the Partita contains four movements that test the limits of a flutist’s artistry.

For example, the opening Allemande, in binary form, demands the utmost in artful breath control as the soloist shapes its ceaseless flow of 16th notes while at the same time negotiating wide register leaps. These are part of Bach’s illusionistic technique of “suggesting” harmony for a solo instrument—or the broken chords may indicate an origin from the keyboard. Bach uses the Italian-style Corrente (as opposed to Courante) for an even more rapid essay in flowing 16th notes, whose apex is a high D sharp. A contrastingly slow and inward-looking Sarabande opens up a different emotional perspective, while the concluding Bourrée angloise reconfigures the more familiar Gigue prototype with a short-short-long rhythmic impulse (associated with the British Isles) in duple meter.

Edgard Varèse: Density 21.5

Edgard Varèse was a witness to the birth of Modernism in both Berlin and Paris. He attended the premieres of Pierrot lunaire in 1912 and The Rite of Spring in 1913 and introduced Debussy to Schoenberg’s atonal experiments. In 1915, he made his way to the United States and cofounded the International Composers’ Guild there. Placing his faith in a future of radically novel sonic possibilities, Varèse celebrated the discoveries of “new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men” with the orchestral Amériques, the first major work he composed after leaving Europe and his first published score. Back in Paris in the late 1920s through the early 1930s, Varèse worked with Léon Theremin and even anticipated aspects of the electronic medium, waiting for the technology to catch up with his imagination. He attempted to enlist the support of the Bell Telephone Company, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Hollywood, where he hoped to persuade decision-makers of cinematic potential of electronic music.

Varèse returned to the U.S. in search of these new alliances, but lack of interest led to a long fallow period. Density 21.5 dates from 1936 (revised in 1946), shortly after Varèse’s return to America, and is surrounded by long periods of compositional silence (though he was continually planning and sketching ambitious projects that failed to be realized). The meager number of works Varèse completed is a poor indication of his widely spanning influence, which encompasses such figures as Stockhausen, Boulez, Frank Zappa, and John Zorn, among many others. Amériques had given a prominent role to the flute, making idyllic allusions to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune throughout its radical course. Varèse composed Density 21.5 for Georges Barrère, the very flutist who had played the iconic solo that begins Debussy’s epochal work at its premiere in 1894. Barrère wanted a solo piece to inaugurate a newly constructed platinum flute at the New York World’s Fair. The title of the piece refers to the density or specific mass of this rare metal, which is 21.5. Density 21.5 concentrates a great deal of compositional and sonic invention within its brief span. Varèse wrote of the sense of tonality that can be established without relying on a traditional tonic hierarchy. What he called “shapes of sound” could accomplish something similar. In Density 21.5, these shapes coalesce in the form of pivotal intervals (such as tritones and minor thirds). The piece also makes use of altered timbre, extremes of register, and percussive clicking in such original ways that Varèse pointed the way toward future radical approaches to the instrument.

Elliott Carter: Scrivo in vento

As Elliott Carter’s remarkably long career progressed into the 1980s, he began producing a number of relatively short compositions. “At first many of these miniatures sounded like distillations of Carter’s large-scale forms,” writes his biographer David Schiff, “but as the list of short works grew they established aesthetic principles of their own, which in turn recast Carter’s approach to extended forms.” Scrivo in vento (“I Write in the Wind”) comes from this vintage of compositions that, according to Schiff, “present themselves more as jeux d’esprit than as cris de coeur.” Carter wrote this piece for his friend Robert Aitken, the Canadian flutist and composer, who premiered it on July 2, 1991 at the Festival of Avignon. The title comes from a poem by Petrarch, who spent a period of his life in and near Avignon, namely Sonnet 212 from Rime sparse (“Scattered Rhymes”), which is titled Beato in sogno (“Blessed in Sleep”): “I plow the waves and build my house on sand and write on the wind.” The flute is used here, the composer explains, “to present contrasting musical ideas and registers to suggest the paradoxical nature of the poem.” Fundamentally, this is the paradox of artistic creation itself: of striving for permanence, for immortality, from our fragile human condition. The musicologist Arnold Whittall argues that Carter reframes this paradox through his subtle calibration of highly contrasting elements (such as register and dynamics) to achieve “equilibrium in the absence of the anchoring force of tonality.” The art—poetry and music—lives on in the present human breath. It delighted Carter that Aitken premiered his piece on Petrarch’s 687th birthday.

Marin Marais: Les Folies d’Espagne

Les Folies d’Espagne by French viol virtuoso Marin Marais, in a transcription for solo flute, takes us back to the Baroque era. The fascinating phenomenon known as “la Folía,” “la Follia,” or “les Folies” refers to a folk dance, originating in Portugal in the late Renaissance, that became associated with an improvisatory process based on a given chord sequence. By the 18th century, the so-called “Follies of Spain” had taken shape as a specific eight-chord progression in D minor, moving in the stately triple meter of the sarabande. In this incarnation, it became a maddening obsession indeed, an ear worm that spread internationally. Arcangelo Corelli created a sensation with a violin sonata cast as a set of 25 variations on this sequence; closer to our own time, Rachmaninoff made use of it in one of his late works.

Marin Marais published his set of variations on “les Folies” in the Second Book of his Pièces de viole in 1701. The French composer was a student of Jean-Baptiste Lully and became a viol virtuoso at Louis XIV’s court in Versailles. In his preface to the publication, Marais—“one of the first French instrumentalists to make his mark as a soloist,” according to the New Grove Dictionary—noted that he “took pains while composing [these variations] to make sure they could be played on all kinds of instruments, including organ, harpsichord, theorbo, lute, violin, or German flute, and I dare flatter myself that I have succeeded in this aim, having tested them on the two latter instruments.” He included a line for basso continuo, yet, as in the Bach Partita, the solo flute is capable of working its illusionist magic to imply the harmonic contours—at least for the 25 variations that are transposed from the full set of 32 published by Marais.

Luciano Berio: Sequenza I

The term “omnivorous” is often applied to Luciano Berio and his larger-than-life hunger for experience and passion for all kinds of music. Berio was fascinated by the convergences between musical expression and the rest of human culture, high and low, elite and populist. He took inspiration from such sources as literature, theatricality, circus performances, linguistics, anthropology, and politics. His Sequenze, which go back to 1958, continued as a work-inprogress totaling 14 solo compositions by Berio’s death in 2003. Each Sequenza is for a different instrument (including one for female voice), with alternate versions for two of them and various companion pieces acting as satellites. These compositions crowd a density of ideas and experiments within their frames that belies their relative brevity. And there is something labyrinthine—to borrow a term of which Pierre Boulez was fond—about them. The title for the series refers to Berio’s process of constructing most of these pieces from “a sequence of harmonic fields from which the other, strongly characterized musical functions were derived,” according to the composer, with the intention of encouraging “a polyphonic mode of listening.” The earlier Sequenze in particular show Berio working out issues of compositional language, but he also came to explore each instrument as a phenomenon in itself, bringing its cultural history and even physical makeup into play in a sophisticated brand of performance art and self-referential commentary. Sequenza I was written for Severino Gazzeloni, principal flute of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Turin and a champion of avant-garde compositions for his instrument. “Writing for a singlevoice instrument today means that the composer must thoroughly re-establish the relationship between open and concealed, linear and melodic counterpoint from the ground up,” observed Berio. “This touches a central nerve-point of musical invention.” Much the same might be said of Bach—if his Partita was indeed conceived for solo flute—but the context by the late 1950s was so completely different that an utterly new picture of the flute emerges here from the pressures of ultra-virtuosity. To¯ru Takemitsu: Air

Aurèle Nicolet’s artistry again receives a nod at the conclusion of Emmanuel Pahud’s recital with this piece, which Tōru Takemitsu composed in 1995 to mark the flutist’s 70th birthday. Yasukazu Uemura gave the premiere, in Switzerland, on January 28, 1996. Takemitsu died only a month later. Air was his final published composition.

Born in Tokyo and coming of age in the devastation of postwar Japan, Takemitsu was eager to learn about Western musical culture, which until recently had been taboo. He eventually developed a musical language that subtly blended his early experiences of the Western avant-garde—John Cage made an enormous impact on this thinking—with a deepening knowledge of Japanese and other Asian musical traditions. “As a Japanese I want to develop in terms of tradition and as a Westerner in terms of innovation,” Takemitsu once said. Air meditates on an enigmatic motif of four notes, which are transformed through echoes, transpositions, shifting dynamics and register, pauses, and a relatively sparing use of the extended techniques of flutter-tongue and slow glissando. The music unfolds in a gentle rhapsody, or a moment of enlightenment, as organically as the very breath that produces it. Characteristically, the title is layered with suggestive possibility: the breath through which life is sustained is also the breath the flutist uses to make music. On another level, the melody that results, a self-contained song, an “air,” is the product. The note A even serves as an anchor at the beginning of the piece. In his book on the composer, Peter Burt notes that Takemitsu, despite his avant-garde credentials, once remarked: “I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody…” Elsewhere, Takemitsu observed that when “thinking of musical form, I think of liquid form. I wish for musical changes to be as gradual as the tides.”