Thursday, March 12, 2020

Underrated Classical Musicians: 3/11/20

What makes the contemporary music of Northeastern Europe so particularly special is its ability to show that content and accessibility needn't be mutually exclusive. My musical friend Jens Laurson writes of Erkki Sven-Tüür that he's 'one of those composers whose music is both uncompromisingly modern and above-average accessible.' In America, in Western Europe, we talk as though one must choose a side and make concessions to it. But Tüür's music is fully modernist and fully tonal, as informed by Schoenberg as by Sibelius. 
Perhaps it's generational, he's roughly thirty years younger than Tormis and roughly twenty-five younger than Pärt. Pärt, like so many of his generation, started as a serialist. In an time and place that demanded social realism of its artists, the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern was a way for composers to embrace a profundity that was also subversive. But everything that once was subversive becomes establishmentarian and for most composers born in 1959, regardless of place, atonality was a millstone about their necks. Nobody in Europe was forcing social realism on artists after 1990, so if they wanted to develop their voice, what point is there in not letting oneself evolve away from a style of 1925 to declare one's independence from the dogmas of 1948? 
Tüür reconciled influences that were particular to his musical generation, on the one hand the American minimalism of Glass and Reich, on the other, the European complexity of Xenakis and Ligeti, to arrive at a Schnittke-like poly-stylistic eclecticism. Like a particular favorite of mine of the previous generation, Alfred Schnittke, Tüür reconciles the bifurcations that existed in classical music all throughout the twentieth century. But whereas MacMillan lets all the influences stand out without blending, perhaps like Mahler, Tüür seems to integrate them like Sibelius at a more elemental level - simple rhythmic patterns alternating with complex ones, or coloristic elements of Schoenberg blending with elements of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. 
Túúr had the added distinction of being leader of one of the pre-eminent rock bands in Estonia in the years around Communism's fall. The band, called 'In Spe' is clearly extremely influenced by prog-rock, the fascinating and often controversial genre of rock which takes marrying classical complexity to the adaptive accessibility of Rock as its bible. 
Jens Laurson also calls Tüür the preeminent symphonist our time. I'm not expert enough to make anything like that definitive declaration, but what makes Tuur interesting is his ability to blend so many different strands of musical material, and the the fact that he can let so many different sources seep into his music makes a musical mind like his ideal for creating large forms. 
But for today, we'll just talk about a couple of his ingenious works for string orchestra. Listen to Lighthouse, a work for string orchestra. In spite of its title, this is no pastoral string orchestra work like those (glorious ones) by Vaughan Williams or Holst. This is an encyclopedia of ways to write for string orchestra, nothing necessarily too 'out there,' but just out there enough to make every musical gesture have maximum impact - that, not using all your material at once, is the sign of a great compositional artist. Every time you think the attention might wander, Tüür has a new trick. It's this grey area where styles and worldviews are married that true individuality has the best chance of happening, individuality can certainly happen at the extremes, but the stronger the movement, the more easily the movement can subsume one's voice. 
Or these ingenious marriages of harmony and color in Insula Deserta - from back in 1989, it was Tüür's first classical hit. I honestly have no idea what the title means, but the work is a tornado of activity that goes back and forth between dissonance and consonance, using strings both for traditional melody and harmony and also for weird and creepy textures and asymmetric rhythms, and doing it all with such deft virtuosity that in 1989 it must have seemed to announce to its audiences a whole new way of composing. 
But best of all is Flamma, a work that takes all these string techniques to a whole new level, incorporating natural harmonics, complex polyphony, very brief snippets of Beethoven and Bach and Schoenberg and maybe even Led Zeppelin that seem to be quoted like a musical hyperlink (though I'm probably just hearing things...). It is perhaps an admirable successor piece to Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, that smears the ink of previous music all over the page.

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