Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 - DVD

The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the coast of South Carolina next to a fishing harbor. They are fishermen and they till some land for cotton. They live in some kind of a fort that is closed by a metal and monumental gate and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The only outside people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and that is only to make a token arrest since they never get any testimony about who committed the crime. There will be two murders in the “fort”. The other visitors are peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do not represent a danger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sporting Life is another can of worms. He is dangerous and his role will be dramatic in the story.

The story is simple. A woman who is more or less an easy woman is the unmarried woman of a violent man. They are Bess and Crown. She provides her man with the money he needs to buy alcohol and drugs and to gamble. She is entirely mesmerized and dominated by the drug, Happy Dust, and her man. The drama starts with Crown killing another man, Robbins. He runs. The cops want to arrest some bystander, Peter, but he will be eventually released after some time in prison. The main witness that testifies no one has seen anything is a cripple and beggar, Porgy. He appears as being the one who defends the waterproof character of the community. Do not deal with the white police. He is also the one who is going to take care of Bess, left behind by Crown who is on the run.

The rest is the story of the fight of this woman between two men, Porgy and Crown, a battle that is lost from the very start but not by the fault of anyone in the community but because of the outside “invaders” the police and the drug peddler are.

The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman always end up with one man dead and the other in prison, and the woman having no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with no testimony against him but under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown’s dead body, which he refuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for contempt of court. Hence Bess ends up alone, an easy prey to Sportin’ Life who manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes away with him to New York. When Porgy comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prison and made a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell him where Bess is. He finally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his two crutches and go to New York after Bess.

That kind of rivalry between the protector of an easy woman and someone who falls in love with her is not so uncommon, even in the opera world. The new element is the fact that the man ho falls in love with the woman is a cripple and the protector turns criminal. The rivalry between two men for one woman is not uncommon in all spheres of literature and music and the fact that one kills the other is banal, except that here it is the cripple who kills the super strong and powerful protector. The end is purely opportunistic. The woman is totally unable to live without the authority of a man: she is helpless without a man and she finds herself alone. She cannot choose the community as a substitute or at least she cannot resist the suggestion from a third man, the drug peddler who proposes her to go back to easy life in the big city up north.

But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair and this surprisingly effective love quartet, one woman and three men. As long as the black community lives closed up on itself it can survive more or less decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the white society outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers: fishermen are killed by hurricanes when they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves to anyone, into drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man out of their community. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to bring into the community what may destroy that community. And yet this community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whisky and moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them is their solidarity in front of the outside white society. They even have a fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, the divorce dealer, the drug peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostly illegal reason.

Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.

The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself. The action concerned a black community that was depicted as containing normal human feelings and passions and that was under the perversion imposed onto them by the white society outside that both victimized the community with systematic suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic functioning that made them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and accept the violence of some of their members even when it became criminal. In other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from an outside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them. In 1935 there was yet no way out of this colonized situation except hard work to make a better living in that system but that did not change it, no matter whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or sharecroppers. We were at the time still a long way from the education and then civil rights transformation, the main two ways for these communities to open up on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up in society by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in the surrounding white society. But this opera showed that the situation was becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with the outside world. It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new hats were wanted and there would come a time when these people would say: we want them and they will finally do what they can to get them without selling their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.

And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in 1935, though they are some of the greatest musicians in America already at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long time before the Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of “Guess who’s coming to dinner” that was only to come out in 1967, thirty two years and one World War later.

But the music is surprisingly modern and avant-garde for its time and even today. It is both melodious with some sentences coming back both with words and notes, but also disruptive of standard harmony and melody, working on slight variations from major to minor tones, and working tremendously on half tones and other intervals that are often taken downward when we expect upward movements or vice versa. It is not jazz but it integrates some of the innovations of jazz in the music and particularly the polyrhythmic aspect of African and African-American music by playing on the chorus as opposed to the leading voice, or on some more distant rhythm that has its autonomy behind the voice, on on gospel technique of a chorus calling for attention every so often in the rhetoric of some songs and introducing a different tempo articulated on the main tempo. Hallelujah! We are like entering a musical forest in which each tree is revealing the whole forest and all the other trees of it.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

SHORTER VERSION

The story is entirely enclosed in a black community that lives on the coast of South Carolina next to a fishing harbour. They are fishermen and they till some land for cotton. They live in some kind of a fort that is closed by a metal and monumental gate and that is entirely turned inward onto its own courtyard. The only outside people are the police that comes when a crime is discovered and that is only to make a token arrest since they never get any testimony about who committed the crime. There will be two murders in the “fort”. The other visitors are peddlers. The strawberry lady, the honey man or the crab man do not represent a danger in any way. But the drug peddler known as Sportin’ Life is another can of worms. He is dangerous and his role will be dramatic in the story.

The drug peddler has it right when he says that two men for one woman always end up with one man dead and the other in prison, and the woman having no one at all. Porgy kills Crown, is arrested with no testimony against him but under the pretext that he is supposed to identify Crown’s dead body, which he refuses to do, even when in front of the body. He is sent to prison for contempt of court. Hence Bess ends up alone, an easy prey to Sportin’ Life who manages her so that she goes back to drugs and then goes away with him to New York. When Porgy comes back with presents for everyone, since he played dice in prison and made a little fortune, the community is friendly with him but does not want to tell him where Bess is. He finally gets it out of them and he decides to drop his two crutches and go to New York after Bess.

But this opera is a lot more interesting than this dramatic love affair and this surprisingly effective love quartet, one woman and three men. As long as the black community lives closed up on itself it can survive more or less decently though poor but proud of what they can make on the very edge of the white society outside, the society of the buckras. When you get out of this cocoon, you run all kinds of dangers: fishermen are killed by hurricanes when they go fishing. Women are exploited into selling themselves to anyone, into drug addiction and even slavery of some kind when they get out and follow a man out of their community. And it is from outside that the drug peddler comes to bring into the community what may destroy that community. And yet this community is totally pervaded by gambling with dice, alcoholism with whisky and moonshine alcohol, and even common brutality among the members. What saves them is their solidarity in front of the outside white society. They even have a fringe of black exploiters like the undertaker, the divorce dealer, the drug peddler and some others that ransom their own black community for any mostly illegal reason.

Solidarity cannot do anything against that kind of easy exploitation.

The opera was composed in 1935 and represented a revolution in itself. The action concerned a black community that was depicted as containing normal human feelings and passions and that was under the perversion imposed onto them by the white society outside that both victimized the community with systematic suspicion and made that community close up onto itself into some autarchic functioning that made them accept to be exploited by some black crooks and accept the violence of some of their members even when it became criminal. In other words their minds are totally colonized, under the domination from an outside, surrounding and seen and felt as superior group that dominates them. In 1935 there was yet no way out of this colonized situation except hard work to make a better living in that system but that did not change it, no matter whether they were fishing or growing cotton. Their lot was to be fishermen or sharecroppers. We were at the time still a long way from the education and then civil rights transformation, the main two ways for these communities to open up on the world, for the individuals in these communities to find their way up in society by conquering an equal, or at least as equal as possible position in the surrounding white society. But this opera showed that the situation was becoming highly explosive inside and in the relations with the outside world. It could not last very long indeed because presents, beautiful dresses, new hats were wanted and there would come a time when these people would say: we want them and they will finally do what they can to get them without selling their bodies, drugs or fake divorces, not to speak of coffins and funerals.

And yet the composer is not black which means the Blacks are not in 1935, though they are some of the greatest musicians in America already at the time, accepted on Broadway yet. It will take a long time before the Blacks are accepted as equal in showbiz as composers, authors and artists. But this quasi-all-black opera is a very important precursor of “Guess who’s coming to dinner” that was only to come out in 1967, thirty two years and one World War later.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 – SIMON RATTLE – CD

The first act of this opera sets up the drama in a fully self-contained Black community working as fishermen for some and cotton sharecroppers for the rest. We are inside their living quarters that are devised as a fort with all rooms opening only onto the inside yard where everything happens. The community is shown as pretty idle though we understand we are on Saturday night and the activities are alcohol, a crap game, drugs (happy dust) and women. The drug dealer is Sporting Life. This situational composition leads to Robbins playing against Crown. Robbins is a plain member of the community, married to Serena, whereas Crown is more or less the local pimp who is dragging Bess around as his woman. Robbins wins and Crown refuses to lose and starts a fight and he kills Robbins, and runs with the money that had been given to him by Bess. Bess refuses the proposition from Sporting Life to go to New York with him and he goes away too.  The scene turns into a dirge dedicated to the dead man.

Then the people are confronted to the police who want to arrest one man, no matter who and order the body to be buried by tomorrow or it will be taken to the medical school to be dissected by the students there. The community has to collect fifteen dollars to pay for the funeral. The undertaker is there to collect.

This act shows how this community is poor, cut off from the rest of society, form the whites, a sort of shared exclusion: the Blacks don’t want to share anything with the whites and the whites don’t want to have anything to do with the Blacks. But life is cruel in many ways. The Blacks have anyway directly or indirectly to work for the whites and every single event in the Black community may bring the white police in and that means trouble, though and since the Blacks refuse to tell anything to the police who are obliged to be blind and arrest the first man they want. And this one is Peter who accuses Crown, hence breaks the silence law of the Blacks toward the white police. Porgy, the crippled beggar of the community, refuses to confirm. Peter has doomed himself for the Blacks: they will not help. He is arrested as a material witness.

Then the act can proceed to the funeral, led by Bess.

The act so far shows how blocked in their alienation the Blacks are. Locked up in a closed community that depends on the whites outside for work and for all types of regulations, the rare businesses they can control are selling alcohol, selling drugs, providing women, and women are in a dependent state be they married or not, and undertaker (we will see later various peddlers: strawberries, crabs, etc.). But they suffer from their alienation to themselves as a community. Within their community there is a strict order and that order has to be respected and all Blacks have to be protected against the whites. So Crown has to be protected since he is Black though the murderer of a  Black man, and he is considered as the top or strong man of the community and as such he has the right to kill if someone dares to win a crap game against him. The only positive point this opera shows is that the Blacks are able to sing their fate and dramas in swinging music. They are born “entertainers,” musicians. They can transform any event into a musical evocation that is generally collective. They all take part in it, be it a religious occasion, or a plain everyday life occasion.

This situation is what will be called sixty-five years later or so Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome by the Blacks themselves who are trying to get over this alienated situation that has obviously pushed roots into the Blacks so deep that these roots have to be pulled out before ever even thinking of solving other problems. The Gershwins as well as the Heywards could not know the concept but they definitely are the pioneers of this concept on Broadway. Note Black authors at the very same time are starting to write about such situation, Richard Wright for example, but in the same way they are not able yet to identify the problem. They stay at the level of behaviorism: the environment of the Blacks produces the behaviors of the Blacks, and this approach is a progress on the social Darwinism of the end of the 19^th century that considered such behaviors were hereditary: Blacks were born like that. In the 1920s-1930s they were made like by their social and cultural environment.

This opera is trying to show that the negative sides are not the only sides to be considered, but so far we have only been shown the negative sides, except the solidarity that appears during the funeral since the community collects the money for the undertaker: the widow cannot pay.

The second act starts with an essential dimension of the Blacks that gives them some freedom from this behaviorism of theirs. They believe in God, which is banal, but they project onto themselves the story of Moses taking the people of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. They believe in this Promised Land. The theme had appeared during the funeral but it could have been seen then as life after death. Now it is quite different because Jake is hitting the road to go to the Promised Land, meaning two things. It has to be undertaken by every single individuals. It is a land that has been promised to any one of them but it is not necessarily the same land. Each one has to go to his or her promised land. Jake in other words is going to discover the promised land he is looking for. This gives hope to the Blacks, but once again this hope is shared by all but has to be reached by every single individual among them on their own individual initiative, and within America. We can think the Gerschwins and the Heywards are answering the idea that was common in these years under the name of African Nationalism or Black Nationalism that wanted Black communities to be made entirely autonomous, some along with Marcus Garvey going as far as asking for a Black state in the USA. One of the hypothesis was for the USA to give the Blacks (or for the Blacks to take) what is called the Dust Bowl (The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km²), centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.)

The first business exchange is the buying of a divorce for Bess for one dollar fifty cents from a divorce peddler who pretends to be a lawyer, and later when a white man from the court comes to get the bail money for Peter from Porgy, Porgy sends him away telling him things have changed and calling these “peddlers” nothing but buzzards. Porgy’s consciousness is changing: he becomes able to step back and look at himself and the situation he is inn though it confirms the fact that Peter cannot count on support from the Blacks.

But then it is picnic day, a big day of celebration for this Black community. They go spend the day on an island. Bess does not want to go and wants to stay with Porgy since Porgy cannot go, I guess because he is a cripple, but he more or less send Bess to the boat and she goes; The picnic is a day of liberation and it starts with Sporting Life and some other men making fun of religion by showing how things are not always what they seem to be or should be according to the Bible. But the day is to take a bad turn when Bess discovers Crown is here and the latter forces her to stay with him and to promise she will go with him when cotton is in. Note the other Black people went on the boat not even caring for what was happening to Bess and why she was missing.

The shift back to the community’s base finds Bess, one week later, sick and having been absent two days. She is brought back to consciousness by some women singing Gospels. She tells Porgy she has been forced to say yes to Crown but she does not want to go. Porgy then takes over the responsibility and tells her he will deal with Crown when he comes.

This change in Porgy is extremely interesting. He is the one who is totally alienated in his social position, since he is a beggar; in his physical condition since he is a cripple; and in his ethnic position since he is Black. And it is this threefold-alienated man who only has three things in his life, “Got my gal, got my Lawd, got my song!” who saves Bess and welcomes and shelters her when Crown runs away after his crime. He is the one who refuses to say what happens after the fatal crap game because that’s the rule when dealing with the whites. And now, little by little he is the one who stands by a woman, her free will, her right to choose her life and her partner in life. He is the one who is developing a new sense of responsibility by caring for others and for their freedom. He is reconstructing a human mind in himself.

It is at this moment the woman, whose husband has got out to sea to fish comes up with the bad news of a hurricane that hits the community. The rendering of this storm and the tremendous anxiety for those out at sea is rendered musically by the second soprano, the tenor, the first soprano, the alto, the first bass and the second bass singing different solos one on top of the other, plus some more shorter interventions from other characters. This is not the best musical idea since then we cannot follow the words of any one of them. And yet the six solo pieces contain interesting elements to describe the situation and to define the various references to god. In order these references are “Doctor Jesus,” “Lawd above,” “Hev’nly Father,” “Professor Jesus,” “Captain Jesus,” “Father.” It is impossible to enter the richness of these six visions and the result is nothing but linguistic havoc. That is supposed to render the violence of the hurricane, but it crushes down the meaning of the solo parts.

It is in the heart of this hurricane that some knocking is heard at the door. Crown comes in to take Bess. She refuses, and Porgy tells him to keep off. At this moment Clara who is fearing for Jake who has gone fishing in the hurricane asks for some man to help her check if Jake’s boat is back. Only Crown responds and rushes out. And then the six soloists of the beginning of the scene sing again their six solos one on top of the other. It is still impossible to differentiate the words and meanings.

This ending of the second act is very dramatic but extremely ambiguous. Bess and Porgy are slowly capturing their independence in front of their community and Crown. But in the danger of this hurricane only Crown was out and came in and he is also the only one who responded to a call for help. He does not lack courage and yet he is a murderer who killed for the innings of a crap game and he is a male chauvinist who refuses to give his woman any freedom: she is his possession. On the other hand it is quite obvious Porgy cannot compete since he is a cripple. Maybe he would be courageous if he had the necessary body.

The third act starts after the storm with a chorus in honor of the absent men, Jake and Crown. Maria and Sporting Life are considering what was lost in the hurricane and Bess is taking care of Selena’s baby. Crown comes in to claim his woman but he is killed by Porgy with a knife in his back twice while he was trying to crawl on all fours under Porgy’s window. In a way this end is not very heroic.

The detective and coroner come for some investigation and take Porgy along as a witness to certify the identity of the victim, Crown. They suspect Serena, the wife of Crown’s victim, Robbins but can’t prove anything and they go with Porgy. Then Sporting Life is alone with Bess and he tries to convince her to come with him to New York by tempting her with his drugs. It does not seem to work and he leaves. But Bess comes back for the dope and goes.

The last scene is the return of Porgy after his stint in prison for contempt of court because he refused to identify Crown. He has presents for a few people, including a red dress for Bess. But Bess is not there and no one dares tell him where she is. Finally Maria and Serena tell him the truth. He is told Bess has left for New York. So he gets his cart and his goat and leaves. He is on his way to a Heavenly Land.

This ending is surprising since it amplifies the love story between two people who had nothing in common, but at the same time it makes that love story impossible. We all know that finding Bess in New York, or even only Harlem;, will be like finding a pin in a haystack, if not even worse. This ending is definitely liberating Porgy from his alienation. He can cut off his mooring and go. He is on his way to the Promised Land. He has jumped over the obstacle and he is moving again away from his unbearable situation; All that is the name of love and symbolical of a real liberation of that Black man.

But Bess is the bad one in that tale. She goes away from the man who had bought her a divorce, who had killed her ex-husband, who had liberated her from all enslavement, and yet she falls for some dope, the promise of being a “woman” in New York, hence a prostitute in the hands of a pimp and drug dealer.

It is of course, once again a rewriting of Romeo and Juliet, but a tremendous number of obstacles are piled up in front of them: an age difference, a social difference, a physical handicap on one side, the fact that the woman was attached to an authoritarian man, the use of dope and the practice of prostitution. The worst obstacle is that she cannot live alone one single minute. And after Porgy’s being taken away and detained by the police she had to stay alone for a few days. She did not even wait five minutes. And yet Porgy abandons everything and goes after her. His love is so strong that he can take the road to New York, no matter how physically challenged he may be, with no resources, no income, no money, nothing at all, except a goat which is not going to be very helpful on the road.

The opera sure tells something about the persistence of a Black man when he is in love: he can fight, kill, serve, find full freedom in this new dependence. But it also says a lot about the Black woman who is dependent by “nature,” weak and in great need of protection which is close to possession. She is not able to see her real interest in love and prefers the evanescent pleasure and thrill of dope and street walking under the proprietary control of one man.

This is a beautiful story but how does it help the Blacks to step into their future? It did in 1936 by producing a musical on Broadway that had a tremendous success and that was showing a nearly entirely Black cast. It also showed the real triple alienation of a black man like Porgy, the double alienation of all Black people, the similar double alienation of all Black women and an alienation that cannot be numbered at all for the Black woman Bess: she is nothing but a possession and she is the property of the man who has the strongest and last word. That’s no longer alienation. This is self-fetishization: Bess transforms herself into a toy in the hands of the latest man who takes control of her: she is both a sex toy, an economic toy, a social toy, but she will also be a boxing toy of some type sooner or later, and she will accept it . . . of course.

This picture of the Black woman is amazing in 1936, not because Black prostitutes did not exist. They did. But because she is made the central character of the opera. That’s pathetic and tragic at the same time. She really sounds like a Black Lulu (composed though not completed in 1935 on the model written by Frank Wedekind in 1895 and 1904).

Dr Jacques COIULARDEAU

PIERRE BOULEZ – FRANK ZAPPA – BOULEZ CONDUCTS ZAPPA – ENSEMBLE INTERCONTEMPORAIN – BARKING PUMPKIN DIGITAL GRATIFICATION CONSORT – 1984

You must not believe what Frank Zappa tells you what the music signifies, expresses or even means. It might be what he had in mind at the time of his starting the composition, but notes do not work like words and music like language. So it cannot mean all the gibberish English he uses to manipulate us into believing music is an articulated language like English Arabic or Chinese. It is of course not.

So what meaning can we find in this music?

A tremendous amount.

First there is the project of Pierre Boulez, a composer of symphonic music considered as classical, though he is contemporary; Pierre Boulez a conductor that has conducted operas by Wagner, Alban Berg, and many others, concerts of the best classical music, some of the most famous orchestras and musicians, soloists or not; Pierre Boulez whose music is performed in the best and most elegant if not most fashionable concert halls all over the world; Pierre Boulez who conducts here Frank Zappa, that Californian pop music composer and performer who is generally best served in amplified music concert halls in front of audiences that would probably most of them never go to an opera by Mozart or Richard Strauss, or a symphony by Schoenberg or Haydn. This then is incongruous, surprising, astonishing. These two people are so far apart and here they meet.

What is then interesting in this adventure is the music which is typically American in many ways. First of all it is expressive in such a way that you can recognize this or that sound from real life, this or that situation in real life. It is impressionistic too and it tries to impress you with emotions, sentiments. In many ways it is music for a film but you only have the music and not the film, so that you have to invent the pictures, imagine them. But Zappa is taking us for fools if he believes we are going to accept his own stories. Each one of us is going to imagine their own stories and there won’t be two that would be the same. And the vacuum-cleaner peddler is definitely out, for a very simple reason: we do not have peddlers of that type any more and people under 40 may never have seen one.

In fact this expressivity is going to make us project into the music all kinds of situations and scenes directly borrowed from all the series and films we are watching all the time on TV. This music is turning us into exhibitionistic voyeurs. We project our phantasms and we peep at them as if we were invisible, well hidden, as if we were peeping toms looking at our own private crimes or sexual capers. This music is turning us inside out because of this double dimension.

But this music is also extremely modern in the fact that it gives every single sound, every single note, every single interval a clarity and a distinctiveness so that we are like bombarded by thousands of musical objects, many too fast to be identifiable and we are assembling them live in our ears and eyes, because we see them as much as we hear them. And there we reconstruct meaningful elements like a plodding heavy and fat person going down a metal bridge with some kind of a band in the distance and maybe a funfair on the left ands some merry-go-rounds. Joyland in one word and an amusement park. We suddenly see a strange character coming down the street and going directly at us, pulling a gun out and a brandishing a saber and we feel the bullets going through our skulls and the saber cutting our legs in one vast swerving movement.

But all that is in our head and not in the music.

At another moment I feel the cold air coming out of a dark tunnel whose door has just been opened behind me. I turn around and I see a whole set of monsters with all kinds of scissors, shears, cutters, chisels in their hands and they are coming toward me slowly at first, each one with their menacing airs, each one with their lightness and particular sounds, and I can really not see beyond their faces, if these are faces, because beyond it is pitch black dark night and I can’t run because I am frozen and behind me there is nothing except an enormous and uncrossable wall of night and fear.

That’s what I feel, but I am aware that anyone else will feel something completely different, except that everyone should feel disturbed because the music has no continuous melody, no continuous musical sentences, but many sentences that are intermittent and crisscross one another into some kind of patchwork, coverlet or whatever you may use at night in the winter to cover yourself. At every single corner of the most winding road I have ever seen, a road that has many bumps and potholes, you know these holes that look like the pots of some witches assembled for a great Sabbath or Walpurgis night, you come across something unexpected, sound, instrument, or rhythm or twist or twirl, and you have thus to let yourself be transported down the chute into the municipal music collecting truck that is taking you and the music to the municipal music dump or landfill. And you get acquainted, and even addicted, to that feeling and you let yourself be taken anywhere the two men want to take you. Submit, wait and see. You might even learn how to swim in such a perilous sea. We should have more of these strange meetings of artists from different planets. The result is generally fascinating. Tonight the Pope meets Prophet Muhammad under a bodhi tree in front of a Buddhist temple contiguous to a synagogue.

Imagine Philippe Jaroussky and Bob Dylan being respectively Bess and Porgy in “Porgy and Bess” under the direction of Steven Spielberg on a script written by Stephen King and Joe Hill. And imagine this performance in the ruins of Crystal Palace in London. Queen Victoria might even decide to take part in the event.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JORDI SAVALL – ARMENIAN SPIRIT – HESPERION XXI – 2012

Armenian music is using three traditional instruments. The duduk and the zurna, two wind instruments of the vast family of the pipe, and the kamancha, a string instrument using a bow. These give Armenian music a very special sonority both extremely cosmic with the duduk, shrill with the zurna and bitter or sour with the kamancha. They add other instruments more in the European line, a violin of course, an organ, various violas da gamba and tambourines. As such many pieces, especially those using a duduk that can be amplified by the organ or other instruments, sound at times psychedelic, a music that can take you high into heaven and this remark brings the next point. But many of the sounds and compositions could be compared to the music produced in mountainous regions isolated in a way or another, like for example Corsica or Sardinia.

The music of Armenia is deeply articulated onto its national culture which is built on the language that has resisted more than twenty centuries thanks to an original alphabet invented in 405-406 by Mesrop Mashtots that devised 36 letters for his language. The first task was to translate the Bible and the Fathers of the Church, an objective which was quite common in those days. They did the same thing in Ireland or in England. But this language that was able to resist any attempt to destroy it found another inspiration: their religion. Armenia was the first state to convert to Christianity asq a state even before the Roman Empire and that story was long, and very conflict-loaded, especially with the surrounding countries who were all “pagan” at first, and then turned Muslim in a few centuries. During the crusade period they managed to be integrated in the Christian states in the Middle East, but that was only a short period of positive relations with the outside world and it explains their impact in medieval Europe especially with one Troubadour, Jaufré Rudel from Blaye, Aquitainia, France, who dedicated one of his eight surviving song to the story of a Queen of Armenia.

During May, when the days are long,
I admire the song of the birds from far away
and when I have gone away from there
I remember a love far away.
I go scowling, with my head down
so much that songs and hawthorn flowers
aren't better, to me, than the frozen Winter.

[…]

He is true who calls me grasping
and longing for a faraway love
since no other merriment pleases me as much
as enjoying a faraway love.
But that which I want is denied to me
since my godfather made it so
that I love and am not loved.

Then up to the Soviet Revolution, they were divided, integrated in various empires and negated in their independence and culture, both language and religion. The Soviet Revolution actually created an Armenian Republic within the USSR that could teach and use their language and enjoy some religious freedom. This period of slightly more than 70 years came after the tragic genocide performed by the Turks in 1915 when the whole world was fighting in France against the Germans. This genocide is still not solved in Turkey nor the world. Recognized by most it is far from being off the table and thus repaired and forgiven.

But after the fall of the USSR Armenia had to relearn its national fight especially against the surrounding Muslim countries and particularly Azerbaijan with the tragic fate of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that is constantly under pressure from surrounding Azerbaijan. Armenia nowadays is still isolated though the international support it enjoys enables it to reconstruct itself and live in peace. Turkey is slowly evolving towards acknowledging their responsibility in the 1915 genocide and Azerbaijan, Syria and Iraq should evolved positively, especially the Kurds who are also speaking an Indo-European language, though they are Muslims but they also have a problem of national and cultural recognition and independence.

But the most important element is the fact that their cultural emergence was finally acknowledged in the world because of the great efforts of the French linguist Arthur Meillet who published his first grammar of the Armenian Language in 1903. This grammar remains a milestone on the road to the description and understanding of the language. It classified it in the Indo-European family and gave it the nobility it needed to find a new life. Armenian is very close to Greek and we can think the Greek migration to the Balkans, through Anatolia started there after the moving down west from the Iranian plateau and separation from the other branch of that family of languages, the Indo-Aryan subfamily that went down east.

It is in that region that the mystery of the Indo-European migrations to Europe can find its solution. Another migration probably based on a slightly differentiated group (the presence of the Kurdish linguistic area shows the Indo-Europeans were probably not unified in only one “dialect” and the second, or more, “dialect” moved across the Caucasus into the Russian plains and the n northern and western Europe. Armenia is thus central in the history of Europe, just as much as the Kurds and the Turks. The Kurds because they are our linguistic family moving down from the Iranian plateau, and the Turks because they are the modern descendants of the Turkic people who were the first Homo Sapiens in Europe under the appellation of Cro-Magnon and Gravettians.

The music itself is always sad, always mysterious, always feeling as if in danger, under some menace. And yet the mythology of Armenia is rich with dragons, a dragon killer, and that is so Indo-European since this dragon killer is a distant ancestor of Germanic Siegfried. But since Armenia was the first Christian State we may hope to get one day from some archaeological cache some old documents from the early Christians that could widen the Nag Hammadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls, not to speak of the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew and that could cast some light on how Christianity built its dogma in the third and fourth centuries. At least Armenia should be considered closely by Christian archaeologists.

But do not fall in any romanticism about the suffering of the Armenian people. History is cruel and there is no exception. But I regret that Armenian Christian music has not yet reached some essential sacred music festivals in France, for example La Chaise-Dieu that seems be very reluctant at integrating other Christian approaches that are not Catholic or Protestant, with a recent evolution towards Russian Orthodox music, but African, Latin American, Armenian, Asian Christian approaches are not at all considered, be they Catholic, Protestant, Anglican or whatever.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JORDI SAVALL – BALKAN SPIRIT – HESPERION XXI – 2013

This collection of music from the Balkans, from the Mediterranean to the Danube is extremely important because it is one of the cribs from which European culture emerged. But we have to be clear here. It was not the only crib. This is how far the Greek migration from Anatolia reached at the very most. Romania was also the limit of the Roman Empire, or Roman presence, hence their language surrounded by Slavonic languages.

There was another Indo-European migration along another route, through the Caucasus and then in the vast plains of Russia, Ukraine and then the Germanic northern half of Western Europe and the Celt second half of Western Europe that the Romans tried to conquer but did not really colonized, apart from the Iberian peninsula in depth and Gaul rather deeply in the Occitan area of today’s France and superficially in the Oil section of today’s France and in Walloon Belgium. We must also understand that the Magyars arrived later from another migration from north-eastern Europe and the Finno-Ugric linguistic tradition. And we have to keep in mind that the Indo-European penetration was not demographic since only 25% of present day European DNA is from that origin several thousand years after the ice-age, whereas 75% of the DNA of present day European population (of European origin) is from the older stock that arrived in Europe some 45,000 years ago and 25,000 years before the peak of the ice-age. These older populations, Cro-Magnon, Gravettians, etc., were of Turkic descent and language.

The Balkans were not different. The Greeks were first to arrive and settle in the peninsula with the great advantage they had over the local population since they were arriving with the military organization of the Indo-Europeans, their agriculture and cattle husbandry, their commercial practices and their metal work that gave them an edge in weaponry and war. But they were a minority and they had to integrate in their own culture the culture of the locals not to completely alienate them, and eventually to bring them over to their life style, economic model and language-culture. The basic and symbolical episode is that of the Golden Fleece, Jason and Medea and how the Turkic culture of Georgia was integrated, and at the same time brought down, demonized into the Greek religious culture. I regret that Jordi Savall does not go that far in the history of this region. It is tentative to start the history of this region in 330 and the founding of Constantinople, founded on the site of the old Greek city of Byzantion, better known as Byzantium, founded by the Greeks in 657 BCE, hence practically one thousand years before Constantinople and the Greeks probably recuperated a site that was already occupied by the Turkic population that were there before them.

Note too the presence of Islam in Turkey and beyond did not start with the Ottoman Empire. Islam arrived in Anatolia, hence today’s Turkey in the second half of the 11^th century, that is to say before the FIRST crusade was decided in 1095 and called for by Pope Urban II in Clermont Ferrand, Auvergne, France. Or so is the legend going on around this event, and that could only be then because it is then that the Peace of God movement started in Aurillac, Auvergne, France in 972 and then to be widened in the Charroux Abbey’s Synod in 989, was finally endorsed as the Peace of the King in France and other kingdoms in Europe. The Crusade was the only way to keep the military class fighting but out of the Christian territories.

One of the leaders of the fourth Crusade that was to reconquer Constantinople for a while was a certain Conon de Béthune, a poet from Béthune, Pas de Calais, France, and he is buried in Anatolia. He became the leader of this re-conquered Constantinople after the death of Yolande of Hainaut, the Empress of Constantinople, in 1219, but he died soon after.

I regret this important shortcoming of the presentation of this region of Europe and its present day musical culture. This region became at the end of the 15^th century a crossroads of many cultural traditions. First of all the old traditions from before Christianization, then the Christian, both Orthodox and Catholic traditions, and we must not forget that the orthodox tradition itself is divided between the Slavonic tradition and the Greek tradition. We must also speak of the presence of the Magyars who finally settled in present day Hungary in the 9^th century over a period starting in the 5^th century, coming from the Urals and part of the Finno-Ugric linguistic and cultural family. We must not forget that they are connected to the Hunnic Empire, and the famous or infamous Attila the Hun, and older versions of the Siegfried mythology marries Siegfried’s widow to that famous Hun. But apparently they were pushed back and they settled in a small European territory.

Then at the end of the 15^th century they welcomed the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, and we must not forget that the Gypsies had been present in this area for a very long period and we aren’t even sure about their origin. Many connects them with India, but there seems to be no real evidence of this connection, except of course that their language or languages are connected to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. But the terms are false. In fact the Indo-European and the Indo-Aryan branches of this family of languages come from the same source, the languages on the Iranian Plateau in older times even before Zarathustra and the Zoroastrians and the two branches moved respectively west and east. They thus are cousins and in no way father-son or mother-daughter. The linguistic characterization of the Romani Gypsy languages seems to imply a later migration back west of an Indo-Aryan group of people. But we have no evidence beyond that, except legends and mythologies.

The final element we must keep in mind is that the Ottoman Empire with Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors was extremely open to European cultures and music and his court counted a lot of artists end composers from Europe.

The presentation seems thus more romantic about the people in this region than accurate enough about the tremendous crisscrossed heritages there. Romanticism about the tremendous and frightening wars of the last thirty years, the role of Europe and NATO in these wars and their end and now the European integration of these countries into Europe. A particular point has to be taken into account. These zones came down faster than expected, in spite of the horrors perpetrated on BOTH sides because the USSR had been dismantled and the Russian president at the time was a weakling at the international level because he was a highly incompetent president in Russia itself that was more or less trying not to sink in spite of the looting some oligarchic social climbers were carrying out on the whole territory not to speak of the Chechen terroristic problem. In other words Europe took advantage of this weakness of Russia to take over ex-Yugoslavia that was crisscrossed by innumerable and absolutely hateful ethnic conflicts based on ethnic and religious cleansing.

This being said, this CD is a marvelous compilation of various styles and traditions and this music is fascinating. Jordi Savall is of course equal to himself and brings together the best and most representative musicians from these traditions and his work and rendition is absolutely convincing and trustworthy. This compilation might be considered later on as a milestone in the rebirth of this vast area, but there are still a lot of potential conflicts and hatred there. It will be a long process to bring everyone to the proper understanding that respecting the others is the basis of the future.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MADOU DJEMBÉ – PERCUSSIONS D’AFRIQUE

Les percussions africaines sont une planète sonore à part et un monde en soi. Ce que la musique africaine a inventé et est presque la seule à avoir inventé, c’est la polyrythmie. La musique africaine est fondée sur les percussions comme aucune autre musique au monde et la seule diversité que cette musique pouvait développer c’était la diversité des percussions à deux niveaux : les sonorités de chaque instrument et les rythmiques que chaque instrument ou chaque main sur chaque instrument ou chaque main ou paire de mains des divers instrumentistes sur les divers instruments qu’ils utilisent simultanément. Cela donne la polyrythmie africaine. Aujourd’hui cette polyrythmie s’est développée du fait de la traite des noirs et de l’esclavage. Les esclaves noirs ont conservés contre vents et marées, contre toute persécution cette polyrythmie qui faisait partie de leur chair, de leur fibre plus que toute autre chose.

Cela a donné deux grands types de musique aujourd’hui devenus universels. D’une part la musique noire et depuis cinquante ans au moins blanche de l’Amérique du Nord. Certains de ces genres musicaux ont parcouru le monde entier et se sont installés pour toujours dans la planète musicale mondiale. Le gospel, le jazz, le blues, la soul en général, le rock and roll et tout ce qui s’en est suivi. D’autre part dans les Antilles et en Amérique du sud, particulièrement le Brésil où l’influence noire à été plus profonde qu’ailleurs, la musique latino américaine dont certains styles sont eux aussi devenus universels : rumba, particulièrement et quelques autres, mais pas le tango qui lui a une origine espagnole. La forme la plus novatrice et toujours novatrice est bien sûr la musique jamaïcaine, et en particulier le reggae et les autres formes de cette musique avant, autour et après le reggae, qui d’ailleurs n’est pas fini.

Ceci étant dit il est nécessaire de revenir aux sources africaines pour voir toute la richesse que ces percussions peuvent avoir dans le continent et dans les cultures qui les ont produites. Et ce disque est une véritable académie, une vitrine sans égale, presqu’une master classe. Bienvenue dans la planète des percussions africaines. Demandez-vous comment vous pourriez danser, comme le font les Africains, sur ces musiques. Vous pouvez choisir un des rythmes modérés et danser une danse calme et qui ne prend ni vitesse ni excès. Mais vous pouvez aussi suivre un des rythmes plus rapides et alors vous allez pouvoir monter progressivement vers des rythmes de plus en plus rapides et qui vous mèneront à la transe de ce que l’on appelle le vaudou, et que l’on devrait appeler le vodun, musique, danse et religion d’origine traditionnelle africaine et qui se fonde sur ces rythmiques. Le prêtre, l’officiant, voir les participants en général se laissent aller à ces rythmes rapides et passent de l’autre côté du miroir, avec ou sans l’aide de rhum ou d’alcool de palme.

L’alcool n’est en rien une obligation puisqu’il suffit de suivre une rythmique rapide pour arriver à ce niveau de la transe où le corps tout entier se fond dans cette rythmique et tous les rythmes vitaux du corps s’alignent sur cette rythmique rapide, des pieds à la tête en passant par le cœur, le cerveau et les autres organes à rythmique interne..

Ce disque est un excellent exemple de cette culture originale qui est devenu une norme universelle dans toute la musique amplifiée et même au-delà.

Bonne écoute

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

LA HUASTECA – DANSES ET HUANPANGOS – Mexique

Cette musique qui concerne un territoire et une population couvrant ou occupant l’ancien domaine Maya n’est en rien une musique qui remonte aux formes les plus anciennes de culture maya, pas le moins du monde. Il s’agit d’une musique qui s’est construite sur plusieurs siècles après la conquête espagnole mais on doit comprendre qu’un siècle après, à la fin du seizième siècle quatre-vingt-dix à quatre-vingt-quinze pour cent de la population originelle indienne avait disparu par massacre, par torture, par maladies ou simplement de faim.

Cette culture est dont typiquement mexicaine, le Mexique ayant conquis son indépendance de l’Espagne en 1810, déclaration d’indépendance, et effective en 1821. La culture mexicaine est une création originale qui mêle les traditions chrétiennes, les traditions espagnoles ou ibériques, et quelques formes qui se développent dans les Antilles, bien que l’influence noire sera très réduite puisque le Mexique ne compte pas de vaste héritage démographique africain, les esclaves noirs ayant été exclus très vite..

Vous reconnaîtrez des instruments typiquement européens, d’autres qui sont d’origine locales ou bien des instruments qui ont été modifiés localement, mais à la différence de la musique sous influence noire en Amérique du Nord il n’y a pratiquement pas de polyrythmie, même si la ligne mélodique semble plus rapide, en fait ce n’est qu’une illusion la rythmique de base en arrière et la rythmique de la mélodie en avant sont strictement réglées sur les même temps forts et donc sont équivalentes, au point devenu plutôt mécanique et lassant comme dans les pistes cinq à huit, Danza de Moctezuma.

Le nom peut faire penser à l’empereur aztèque auquel il réfère, mais nous n’avons aucun véritable élément pour dire que c’est un héritage direct et fidèle de la musique des Aztèques d’avant la conquête. Il est sûr que c’est une musique très répétitive. On notera la mention de Malintzin, plus connue comme La Malinche, présentée dans la notice comme l’interprète indienne de Moctuzema alors qu’elle était la concubine et interprète de Cortès lui-même, et mère de son fils. On touche ici à un phénomène typique du Mexique, l’expulsion des références à la conquête espagnole alors même que la source principale de la culture mexicaine est la culture espagnole importée au Mexique du temps de la conquête.

L’association du violon, de la guitare quinta huanpanguera et de la guitare jaruna, qui ne sont que des guitares propres à la région, est typique des pistes neuf et dix par exemple. On voit bien là que nous n’avons que des instruments européens ou simplement modifiés localement. L’association du violon et des guitares est fort intéressante, mais en quelque sorte fortement espagnole de tradition. On reste donc dans les instruments à corde, frottées ou pincées. Cette formation est la base du trio traditionnel utilisé dans de nombreux morceaux de cette musique. Trio instrumental auquel s’ajoute des assemblages de voix variant d’une voix de femme (assez rare) et d’une ou plusieurs voix d’homme et de chœurs plus ou moins étoffés maos ne dépassant pas trois voix.. On notera que ces voix ne se définissent pas selon les registres européens. D’ailleurs quand Philippe Jaroussky a enregistré avec des chanteurs traditionnels d’Amérique latine, ceux-ci n’ont jamais fait un duo avec lui car les définitions de leurs voix n’étaient pas en accord avec celle de Jaroussky, alors même qu’une des voix était de toute évidence une voix d’alto masculin.

On notera aussi au niveau des voix que les voix de femmes sont très basses pour des voix de femme, au moins dans le registre des mezzo sopranos, sinon même un peu plus bas. Les voix d’hommes ici sont aussi assez basses plutôt dans le registre des barytons-ténors très proches en quelque sorte des voix de femme, avec utilisation assez fréquente de la voix de tête des hommes, que certains appellent voix de fausset, terme désagréablement péjoratif.  La marque la plus indienne de ces musiques sont certains titres qui sont en langues indiennes, par exempl la piste quinze en Nahuatl et pourtant dédiée à la Santa Maria de Guadalupe, cette Vierge locale qui a permis d’imposer la religion catholique et d’expulser toute survivance des religions indiennes.

Les pistes seize à dix-neuf ont une autre formation musicale avec un ensemble tamborcillo et akapitsali, donc instrument à vent local et tambourin lui aussi original. On revient ensuite au trio traditionnel, le Trio Tamazunchale, qui a trois voix d’homme qui jouent l’une comme l’autre sur un registre un peu plus élevé de quelques notes de fausset

Le trio suivant, Los Vaqueros de Temporal emprunte des pratiques instrumentales à une autre tradition, celle des xochisoneros qui donne une musique beaucoup plus répétitive de phrases musicales courtes.

Le style tamaulipeco classique donne une musique sensiblement différente mais à nouveau répétitive, bien que moins que le trio précédent, avec une utilisation systématique de la voix de fausset de l’homme en fin de chaque phrase musicale.

Et pour finir un trio plus traditionnel, Herencia Huasteca. Le voyage vaut le déplacement.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU