Don?t Let Words Get In The Way

SOME people are too smart for their own good. On the way to listening to a CD of music by Marc-André Dalbavie, I was hijacked by a set of program notes. All I really wanted was to hear pieces like Color or the Ciaccona on my stereo, but Mr. Dalbavie and his spectral music colleagues have taken me to a dark place where I have been beaten mercilessly with brilliant ideas.

A CD of works by Marc-André Dalbavie (pictured in 2004) comes with puzzling program notes, translated from French.

To be fair, I read these program notes in an English translation, and to be perfectly idiomatic on a sophisticated topic in another language is near impossible. If the Pentagon and dissertation writers can get away with multisyllabic neologisms, then maybe I cant complain to Guy Lelong (the author) about defocalisation or acoustical redefinition of sonority.

So breathless were the revelations contained in this essay, called Space, Line, Color, it seemed for a moment the music could wait. Expounding on hearing, space and your stereo system, it reads: while right/left movement can be recreated, front/back movement is replaced by a sensation of sound advancing or receding. So its true that sound is softer when it is farther away than when it is in front of you. That will be useful the next time I come across a marching band going down the street.

Here is another verbal space walk: Hence some of Mr. Dalbavies works do not limit their musical space to the concert platform, but extend to the entire hall, he writes. The defocalisation thus achieved calls into question the spatial hierarchy resulting from any frontal presentation of the music.

I sure wish Gabrieli had thought about that 450 years ago; imagine the antiphonal music he could have written, with sound flying from every direction at people standing in the middle of his church.

On things that change as they move, Mr. Lelong writes, when the composer spatializes a sound object — whether it is a chord, a motif or a rhythm — the sound object that is set in motion evolves, or to put it another way, the motion stimulated by the compositional process transforms the object, whereas previously works of spatial music merely give an impression of the same object moving unchanged through space.

This makes a lot of sense when applied to My Old Kentucky Home, which goes on just the same verse after verse. But I am troubled when I think about Beethoven altering and squeezing his themes, or about Chopin taking the original tune of the D flat Nocturne and going every which way with it. And what about theme and variations? Ah well, the future beckons, and who am I to question?

Since about 1970 the spectral movement has caused a stir, especially in France. Mr. Lelong defines its three principles as 1. a redefinition of sound material, due to recent discoveries in acoustics; 2. a conception of form founded on techniques of continuous transformation or morphing; and 3. the attention paid to perception so that the music can once more become accessible to every listener. I have at least grazed the first two subjects in earlier paragraphs. As to the third principle I am offering a prize (of what I dont yet know) to any reader who can tell me what it means.

Music — whose glory is concreteness — is not going to stand for this kind of thing. Composers are not theorists but day laborers with a special set of skills. They make things, and scientists who sort out the vibrations that tickle our ears are just adding a tool to their musical tool box.

Im no Luddite. I dont think that geniuses huff and puff and great music squirts out. Science is everywhere. Counterpoint and traditional harmony give young composers muscle tone to act more freely. The grand pianos escapement mechanism is a work of mechanical genius; the varnish on great string instruments, chemistry at its best. But music is not science and is offended when so described. Science in music exists so that the person listening doesnt know its there.

Some cultures believe that a word exists for everything, and that language has the capacity to explain all. As someone who writes about music for a living, I know what folly this is. I am used to the clouds of obfuscation that float regularly out of program notes like this one, but I do think the implication that Mr. Dalbavies music stands at some cutting edge is bogus, like the auto dealer who has turned back the mileage on a used car so that it will appear as new.

Hearing Color, the Violin Concerto and the Ciaccona on this recording is more interesting than reading about them. The composer likes monotones in quiet spaces and sends out stabs and flurries of instrumental sound to attack them. The music — played here by Christoph Eschenbachs Orchestre de Paris and the violinist Eiichi Chijiiwa — sounds a lot less intellectual, and a lot more attractive, than Mr. Lelong would have us think: more Popular Mechanics than quantum mechanics; more cinematic soundtrack than epistemological beard stroking. Mr. Dalbavie writes music that wants to be liked right away but seems to yearn for the philosophers mantle as well. Good luck.

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