Filed under: Commentary
This is a continuation of Lili Boulanger, Part 2.
In her song cycle, Clearings In The Sky, Lili Boulanger selected 13 poems by the French symbolist poet, Francis Jammes. The title of Jammes’ cycle is Tristesses, and in this cycle he expresses his sadness in losing and remembering the lost love of a girl to whom he was forbidden to marry by his mother. She set only 13 of the poems to music. 13 was Lili’s favorite number and she would occasionally write the number 13 as a signature because there were 13 letters in the form of her name that she used. She also chose a monogram of L. B. which closely resembled the number 13. Indeed, Lili seems to be using quite a bit of metaphor herself, thus, the song cycle is identified not only by her name but by metaphor as well.
Discussing her music and the poems by Jammes is very difficult in a blog article such as this because there is simply no room for musical examples, nor is there room to show the text of each poem. The most that I can hope for is that you readers go to a music library and check out the score, and, keeping in mind the items that have been discussed here, trace for yourself the examples of Impressionism contained in the text and in the music. For example, in the second song, “She is serious but mirthful“, the last word of the text is ‘pensees.’ (I would also like to apologize for the lack of appearance of diacritical marks in the French names and words. Most blog sites, including mine, automatically erase them.)’Pensees’ can be translated as pansies or thoughts, setting up a symbolic reference to flowers as memories and memories as flowers. This continues throughout the cycle. In the fifth song, “At the foot of my bed“, the poet describes a Russian icon that his mother gave him and the comfort it provides in his times of stress. Lili Boulanger’s mother had given her a Russian icon to place at the foot of her bed also, to help relieve her stress from the constant pain she suffered as a result of Crohn’s disease. As the poet Jammes contemplates his never ending pain, it is unavoidable to consider that Lili Boulanger must have been aware of her own impending death and its relief from the pain that she suffered. In the 13th song of this cycle, “Tomorrow will mark a year“, Jammes recalls his pain of the last year and in so doing, brings back fragments of previous poems. Boulanger follows his lead and also recalls fragments of previous songs, making this song more complex formally than the others.
Lili Boulanger certainly understood the concepts of Impressionism and symbolism very well. She demonstrates a valid and personal sense of metaphorical expression in her use of the number 13. In addition, she used that expression again in her setting up 13 poems of Jammes’ cycle, emphasizing her connection with the sentiments of the text. In several instances in the song cycle, Boulanger emphasizes the symbolism in the text by descriptive writing in the score and, thus, emphasizes a subject outside the boundaries of tonality and form. The musical definition of Impressionism in this particular work is fulfilled as well, through her use of all the characteristics: parallelisms, added note chords, modes, and multiple tonalities. Though Clearings in The Sky is a “middle” work, she, at least in one song, number 12, approaches the limits of tonality until one is reminded of Stravinsky. There is no question that she was not following blindly in the footsteps of Debussy, but that she was developing her own musical personality by the strength of her gifts and artistic ability. If that statement has often been applied to other composers, let us remember that in this instance we are dealing with a composer who won the most coveted prize in composition, the Prix de Rome (comparable to the Nobel Prize), when she was nineteen and died when she was only twenty-four. In addition, there is no sense of experimentation for its own sake. Her music is as sincere as is Jammes’ text.
Comparing Lili Boulanger on a personal level with Franz Schubert seems unavoidable. Boulanger suffered constant pain from Crohn’s disease for a good portion of her life, and Franz Schubert suffered from a terrible combination of typhus and syphilis. Both composed constantly until the day they died. At least, Lili had a supporter, friend, and advisor in her devoted sister, Nadia. There are photographs of Lili in the garden of their family home where she is sitting in the chair with family members and friends surrounding her. If one looks closely, in some of the photographs, she is tied to her chair because she did not have the strength to sit upright unaided. Even when Lili won her prize, she could not stay long in Rome at the Villa Medici. World War I had broken out. She had to return to Paris where she and her sister donated time and money to the Franco-American Committee. As her vitality ebbed, she had only the strength to lie in bed and compose. She died on March 15, 1918.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Baudelaire, Debussy, Edgar Allen Poe, Jammes, Mallarme, symbolism, Valery
This is a continuation of Lili Boulanger, Part 1.
The Impressionist painters soften the shapes with small blobs of color until, at close range, shapes dissolved into one another. Thus, they made vague or obscured the outlines consciously. The object was never exposed in its photographic form, thus imbuing the impression with a sense of mystery because so much is left to the imagination. The artists refused to expose the concreteness or basic concept of the subject.
In literature, the Symbolist movement was closely allied in its ideals with the Impressionists. The poet, Charles Baudelaire, was the chief progenitor of this movement and his works reflect an almost hallucinative imagery that obscures objectivity. Indeed, this movement was a reaction to the Parnassians whose main thrust was the creation of perfect, objective poems based on scientific, historic, and philosophic subject matter. The French poets Jean Moreas and Gustave Kahn founded a magazine called Le Symboliste that appeared in 1886. In that, Moreas, Kahn, and Paul Adam protested objective description and defended obscurity. But it was Anatole Bajou, in his publication Le Decadent, who called Stephane Mallarme the first man to formulate the Symbolist Doctorine. This was due to Mallarme’s expounding orally on his aesthetic, even though it is only sparingly mentioned in his writings (Michaud, Guy. Message poetique du Symbolisme, 3 vols. Paris: Nizet, 1947, II, 335.). Thus, Mallarme is included in the international coterie of Symbolist poets and writers made up of Verlaine, Tailhade, Vignier, Morice, Baudelaire, Valery, Jammes, Moreas, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Symbolism was a sensuous appearance of the idea, where “idea” remains unclear and a defense of obscurity made up their primary argument. It was the reign of free verse without rhyme and the usual French alexandrine (a line of verse having six iambic feet with cesura generally after the third). There is much evidence that Symbolist poets thought there was a close relationship between poetry and music. Care must be taken not to insinuate that a poem had been responsible for technical musical change or that a piece of music was responsible for technical poetic change. However, the abandonment of the alexandrine can be traced to the influence of Wagner on the symbolist poets. Wagner introduced infinite melody and its rhythmic irregularity. As this was a new step in technical and emotional (expressive) freedom, and since in music, it was a new way to express ill-defined emotion, poets began to use free verse. This was done with the aim of new poetic freedoms of expression that would compensate for the loss of structure based on syllabic count. The new poetic rhythms would be based on repetition, alliteration, assonance, and the Symbolists’ willingness to concentrate on pure sound values.
Symbolism was a language of metaphors. It was a language that spoke of something or somebody, but the subject, the person or thing, remains hidden and unidentified. In his article, Symbolist Music (Schneider, Marcel. ” Symbolist Music”, The Symbolist Movement In The Literature Of European Languages, ed. Anna Balakian, (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1982), 472., Marcel Schneider says that Mallarme dreamed of a poetic verse that would be just one word, yet never heard. Christine Brooke-Rose, in her book A Grammar Of Metaphor, states, and I quote, “… The proper term is replaced altogether by the metaphor, without being mentioned at all. The metaphor is assumed to be clear from the context or from the reader’s intelligence.” Thus, Symbolist writers used metaphor to hide the shape of their subject, giving their prose a dreamlike, mysterious quality. Impressionist painters created vague impressions and obscured outlines, revealing only the mood of the subject matter by using blobs of color that hid the definitive shapes.
How does this Impressionist aesthetic manifest itself in the music of Lili Boulanger?
The first characteristic the listener is drawn to is harmony. Impressionist music contains many examples of parallel triads, seventh, and ninth chords and obscured tonal centers either through decoration or through their use as modulatory chords. Tonal centers are often made ambiguous by the use of chords with added seconds or sixths. These chords are often given as examples of pentatonic sonorities, or the use of Eastern sonorities. It makes more sense, however, to de-mystify them by considering them as added note chords because there was no Impressionist composer who gave more than scant attention to Eastern or Oriental harmony.
Impressionist composers, Debussy and Faure in particular, also used modes extensively. In some compositions there are examples of two modes sounded simultaneously with the melodic line that is very clearly centered tonally. This use of multiple tonalities puts the Impressionist composers at the forefront of innovation. These characteristics would seem to destroy any concept of tonality that a given piece might contain were they not quite often used over a pedal point that maintains the sense of tonality.
Most musicians would agree that the combination of characteristics mentioned above define the Impressionist style. But, in order to be truly impressionistic, is it not necessary to make use of additional material in the manner of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, wherein Debussy was motivated by Mallarme’s poem? This would have several implications. First, it would mean that Debussy wrote precious few Impressionist compositions. Second, it would force a non-casual use of the word Impressionism to be used in the purist sense; to include only those musical compositions that were influenced by Symbolism as well as Impressionism. Third, it would make obvious that the word “impressionism” could be used to describe the general style of music at the turn of the century that contained all of the elements necessarily inherent in the purist definition. Fourth, it would simplify the classification of composers. Are they Impressionist in the purist’s sense, or only because they used the Impressionist style?
This discussion of Lili Boulanger and Impressionism will be continued in Lili Boulanger, Part 3.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Caussade, Gounod, Impressionism, Jammes, Lili Boulanger, Maeterlinck, Massenet, Nadia Boulanger, Prix de Rome, Vidal, Ysaye
I sat down the other evening, just to take some time for myself and listen to music. I chose a CD that I had not listened to for some time; an album by the French impressionist composer, Lili Boulanger. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the first name of this composer, be aware that she was the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, the famous organist and teacher of composition. Had she lived longer, I am sure that Lili would have eclipsed her sister as a composer, but that was not to be. She was born in 1893, and died in 1918, at the age of twenty-four.
Lili Boulanger is a composer who has been ignored by most historians, not only because she was a woman, but because she had such a tragically short life. Without a real examination of her work, many historians seem to consider it serendipitous that she won the Prix de Rome, considering that she was able to compose for only eight years. What is her place in literature? Most articles state that she was in the “mainstream of French music”, without defining what the mainstream was or how Lili Boulanger fit into it. Impressionist composers were the avant-garde during her life.
Marie-Juliette Olga Boulanger, known as Lili, was born August 21, 1893, into a musically well-known family that had a history of winning prizes and accomplishing notable feats in music. Her father was a teacher of voice at the Paris Conservatory and had won the Prix de Rome in composition in 1835. His father, Lili’s grandfather, was a professor and vocal coach at the same institution where he had won first prize in cello in 1797. On her mother’s side of the family, Marie-Julie Hallinger, Lili’s grandmother, won First Prize in voice at the Paris Conservatory and had premiered the role of Jenny in La Dame Blanche. Lili Boulanger’s mother was Raissa, the Princess Mychetsky, who studied voice with Ernest Boulanger when she went to Paris for her education. It was this woman who continued to surround the family with the most prominent musicians in Paris at the time. Some of the luminaries that frequented the Boulanger household were composers Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet, the French symbolist poet, Paul Valery, and the famed Belgian violinist, Eugene Ysaye. In such an environment, constantly surrounded by music, it would have been unusual for Lili not to have shown an interest in music. At the age of five, Lili attended her sister Nadia’s harmony lessons. She also learned how to play the violin, piano, cello, and harp. Her first public performance was on the violin at the age of seven, and at the age of 11 she performed the Beethoven sonata, Opus 27, at a piano recital. At nineteen, Lili won the most sought-after prize in composition: the Prix de Rome. She began to compose about 1907, writing for solo voice and orchestra, chorus and orchestra, and piano. However, these compositions were destroyed by her once she had completed formal music study.
About 1909, at the age of 16, Lili made her desire to be a composer known and began to work assiduously. It was at this time that she began lessons with Caussade and Vidal. From that time until her death, March 15, 1918 (she died of Crohn’s disease), she wrote about fifty compositions, many of them using religious texts from the Psalms or the texts of the symbolist poets Maeterlinck and Jammes. There are choral works, large works for chorus and orchestra, two cantatas, songs, a song cycle, several orchestral pieces, several works for piano, and at least six chamber works. She also wrote one opera that was not finished.
As I stated at the beginning of this article, it has been the norm for authors of articles to brush off this composer with comments that categorize her as being “in the mainstream of French music” without stating any specific way, why, or how. Much misinformation is also given. For example, it is often stated that she studied composition with her older sister Nadia, when in fact, she studied composition with Paul Vidal and harmony and counterpoint with Georges Caussade. In addition, it is often erroneously stated that she studied with Gabriel Faure, though she did audit Faure’s classes, attending them with her sister. Her only biographer, Leonie Rosenstiel, does not seem to be immune to the confusion that surrounds others concerning some aspects of Lili Boulanger’s life. In the preface of her book (The Life And Works Of Lili Boulanger, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), she states that Lili Boulanger was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome. Then, on page 231, she laments inaccurate information given in program notes when she says, “While avoiding the fairly common mistake of calling Lili Boulanger the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome…” [Lucienne Heuvelmanns was the first winner in the Sculpture category in 1911]. Nadia Boulanger had won Second Prize in the Prix de Rome Competition in 1908 but not the First Prize that Lili was to win. Many inaccuracies also show up in short biographical statements in the additions of her songs and in program notes.
In nearly all the books that mention Lili Boulanger, the authors state that she was an Impressionist composer. However, there are many different definitions of Impressionism, depending particularly, upon the casualness of its use. Indeed, the closer one arrives at an accurate definition, the more over-used the term seems to be. After the definition of Impressionism is reached, then it must be decided whether a given composer fits the definition precisely or whether the composer just borrowed Impressionist techniques.
It is generally agreed that Impressionism comes from the painters Monet, Manet, Courbet, Delacroix, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, and Degas to name a few. It was their opinion that observers of objects or nature could not absorb every facet, angle, contour, and dimension, of the object they were looking at, or of nature. All that was possible was to record an “impression.” These painters softened the shapes with small blobs of color until, at close range, the shapes dissolved into one another. Thus, they made vague or obscured the outlines consciously.
This will be continued in my next blog entry Lili Boulanger, Part 2.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Lang Lang
The love of music and music education all over the world is suffering. It could be that the only place where musical education is flourishing is in East Asia. I have discussed in previous blogs (see Arts Attendance and Culture and The Death of Michael Jackson) the impact on serious music brought about by packaging the performer and the state of musical education in this country. But aside from those two aspects, there is one other that needs attention and that is appearance. In the Denver Post on page 4B, of the Denver and The West section, Saturday, September 5, 2009, issue, there was a three-quarter page photograph of the young pianist Lang Lang. The photograph gives the appearance that he is acquiescing to being packaged rather than being a true musician (which he is) and being a member of that community which is concerned with the state of music appreciation as an art.
This photograph appeared as part of an advertisement for the general program of concerts, plays, and the Fall Arts Preview section that the Post published the next day. The photograph shows Lang Lang seated at the piano in a state of rapturous ecstasy. How can one concentrate while gyrating to that extent? It is hard to tell what he is ecstatic about, but as a pianist, I can tell you that if he moved around that much while he was actually performing, most of the notes that he hit would be wrong. I have seen him perform live and he does move more than any other pianist in modern history, but most of the time his movement is limited to strange rolling of the eyes and facial expressions. Now before any of you start sending nasty letters, I perfectly understand that Lang Lang is a formidable pianist and that he has done much good for the cause of music through his new International Music Foundation. As a matter of fact, the goal of the foundation is, and I quote, “to enrich the lives of children through a deeper understanding and enjoyment of classical music and to inspire and financially support the next generation of musicians through targeted outreach and educational programs.” But I am disappointed with the photograph because he has, perhaps unconsciously, created the appearance of being a rock star. He is wearing all black, has on a black leather jacket, which no one in his right mind would wear while performing, plus a black scarf around his neck. All black, of course, is fine for concerts, but I think you get the idea. So many young people are attracted to rock ‘n roll or hip-hop, because of the way the band members dress. They wish to look “cool.” It creates the impression that dressing that way will somehow allow one to reach stardom without doing the work. Now I know that Lang Lang has to do publicity photographs, but I fear such a photograph attracts youngsters for all the wrong reasons, and I think this photograph is a caricature.
In a world where it often seems that the love of serious music is waning, it seems a shame, that he may be inadvertently mis-directing young minds. I do not wish to foolishly blame Lang Lang for the demise of serious music. But, it brings to mind some piano teachers that I have met in my life that are afraid that six-year-old students cannot understand music notation. Instead of teaching them the value of quarter notes and eighth notes, they teach the students about walking notes and running notes. And I have seen some elementary school teachers try to make music “fun” because to teach students serious music is a little more difficult and time-consuming. But they do give the appearance of teaching music. Since the teachers approach music as if it is an activity, how will the students ever understand that it is an art? It seems impossible that students in our public schools can go all the way from first grade to twelfth grade and be horrified at the thought of improvising any music unless it is a harmony exercise. In English class we are taught to write English compositions. I never understood why this does not happen in music classes. If schoolchildren can tell the difference between Pink Floyd and Chicago, why can’t they be taught to tell the difference between Mozart and Prokofiev? As it is, only the most gifted students who flourish with really competent private music teachers are the ones who succeed. And, as it now is, musical activities are a substitute for music education. Many public school music teachers seem incapable of correlating the musical needs of a student with the preparation and future interests in music. In this way, they deny that one can make a living choosing a career in music as an art.