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December 03, 2008
Gunter Bialas, "Introitus - Exodus"
-- Liner Notes --Gunter Bialas was born in 1907 in the town of Bielschowitz in Upper Silesia. He studied music in Berlin, particularly with M. Trapp. In 1947 he was appointed director of the composition course at the Northwest German Academy of Music in Detmold, where he became a professor three years later. From 1959 until his retirement in 1972 Bialas taught composition at the Munich Musikhochschule.
A Profile
In 19th-century Germany the history of music was largely coloured by the debate over programme vs absolute music. Here it was the theorists who tried to make a hard-and-fast distinction rather than the composers, who doubtless realized that, in the final analysis, absolute music also has its programmatic traits and programme music does not stand outside the norms of the absolute. As a result, this debate has left our century, and German composers in particular, with a somewath consorted relation to any form of illustrative music. Significantly, Gunter Bialas has noted this fact with regret. This is significant first of all because in large parts of his oeuvre he has attempted to reconcile these two admittedly never fully disparate ideals, instilling into his works a characteristic tension between the absolute and the illustrative. Bialas's music uses suggestive images to put pressure on the listener and express (its meaning intelligibly in sound. His musical language reveals with exemplary clarity the truism that music is a priori always more than something with a one-dimensional meaning. His works take illustration beyond the realm of banal tone-painting and are fully capable of standing on their own.
A good example of this point is provided by his "Haiku" series, ideally matched settings of concise Japanese lyric poetry, even though they only represent a small if characteristic segment of his work as a whole. "I intended to grow no older/But the temple (bells . . ." Bialas captures a musical image of the relentless tolling of the bells in a melodic ostinato. Yet he goes beyond this to attain a purely musical evocation of perseverance: the osoinato "stands" for a manner of musical expression that neither shuns concrete images nor falls foul of the strictures of absolute music. In this way, subjective vision and the objective shaping of time coincide for one brief instant, both image and music uniting in the "primary sound-form" of the bell strokes.
This aesthetic of reconciliation between image and music accounts not only for the strong influence of literature in Bialas's work - even in his untexted instrumental pieces - as the composer himself has emphasized. It also explains his unmistakable fondness for the miniature, or rather for musical distillation. After abandoning the driving, extrovert, dangerously mechanical music of the 1950s Bialas was able, by discovering and cultivating archaic techniques such as "primitive" heterophony in the 1960s, to attain an art of deliberate omission, choosing as his goal the greatest possible simplicity. This goal manifested itself in a judicious and calculated renunciation of plenitude and abundance: he regards technical manipulation and musical constructivism as an inescapable transitional stage which every progressive composer must pass through and leave behind. In the back of his mind is the realization that only by passing through musical technique does a form of musical compression become possible in which omission itself Is discernible. In Hegelian terms, the omissions are "sublated" in the music.
Discernibility (perhaps lucidity is a better term) is a key notion in Bialas's view of music. It doubtless accounts for his almost violent rejection of the mindless application of serial techniques which, in his opinion, leads to indiscernibility and hence to the imperceptible and meaningless. Musical meaning is the keystone of Bialas's work as a composer, though this is not to equate meaning with one-dimensional signification. Particularly in his later works Bialas's musical language becomes increasingly multi-faceted with a clear tendency toward shades of mood, always trenchantly formulated. His Heine cycle of 1983 provides a clear instance of his search for shimmering, disparate realms of expression. This, as the composer himself remarks, is fully in keeping with Heine's own personality as a poet, hovering precariously between lyricism and irony. Even Bialas's operas likewise strike a precarious balance between tragedy and comedy. Here the balance is expressed in varied devices of psychological and emotional alienation fully in accord with the aristocratic irony which marks the personality of this highly cultured composer.
Bialas sees himself as part of a sorely tried transitional generation which, though violently bereft of valuable years of creative work, nevertheless was given the opportunity of a radical and rewarding fresh start. At all events his music represents an important aspect of German post-war culture, and his art of musical illustration and expression, his abstract conaiseness and sublime shades of mood will probably be more greatly appreciated in the near future than is presently allowed by the current death-throes of hyperstructuralist music.
Introitus - Exodus
When traditional labels for musical forms and genres are applied to 20th-century compositions they most often summon up a broad panoply of meanings. Much can be learned of the work in question by examining these meanings. Was the composer seeking reassurance from the past for his novel idioms? Did he feel compelled by his neo-classical leanings to take recourse in history? Or, as in the present work, did he wish to conjure up an aura of archaism and ritual? Bialas himself addressed this matter in a brief introduction: "First of all, 'Introitus' and 'Exodus' mean exactly what the words imply when translated hiterally: entrance and exit. We are familiar with the introit as the beginning of the mass. In Greek tragedy, exodus refers to the departure of the chorus. Both of these are rituals, and it is this idea of ritual which I wish to kindle in the listener" (from "Meilensteine eines
componistenlebens - Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag" p. 66).
The "entrance", a plastic sound introduced by an initial unison figure in the strings, brass and bassoons, is fully in keeping with Bialas's distinctive approach to music:
It is no accident that this figure, an ascending whole-step with an upbeat flavour, is a prototypical incipit formula in liturgical psalmody. Hence it forms a clear link with plainsong (the "introit" as a genre never left the confines of Gregorian chant) and points to the semantic background of the work. In a sense, it announces the opening of a secular mass, a ritual pertaining to human life and death generally. However, as Bialas himself explains, the entrance is not without its difficulties: "Entrance means overcoming resistance: each advance provokes a reaction" (Festschrift). There are two ways in which resistance and reaction are at work in the "Introitus": first of all. the initial impulse is followed by an opposing process of stagnation centred from the very outset around the portentous not "a". Secondlv, onomatopoetic noise figures alternate in various groups of instruments, clustering around the stagnant central pitch "a" and frustrating the implied progress of the work:
The opening 12 bars outlined above lead to renewed effort to begin (some using the initial figure in inversion) which in turn are confronted by stagnation and frustration as resisting forces. These form the constitutive factors of the first large division of the piece. The factors are superimposed in many ways, generating a dialectical tension as dynamic entrance figures confront inhibiting layers of sound with no style emerging as predominant. By the final third of the "Introitus" only the pivotal note "a" has been firmly established. From bar 157 it serves as a starting point for a wide-ranging pendulum movement to the pitch "b" a 9th above. This expressive gesture signifies life, and serves the additional function of linking the Introitus with the adjoining "Interludium", which likewise ends in this pendulum motion. Thus the first formal division is inconclusive, and leads directly to the second large-scale section, the "Interludium" for unaccompanied organ.
The "Interludium" is a rhapsody, its free form and improvisatory manner conforming to the traditional genre of this name. The composer has described its musical function as "to extend the development of the material, to prepare new material, to separate the movements, and to give the soloist an opportunity for self-expression" (Introduction, Third "musica viva" Concert, Munich, 1977). Unexpectedly, the primary turns into the intermediate: life is revealed as an "interlude" between birth and death.
The difficult entrance is followed by an im~lacable descend: "Even where the word 'Exodus bears no relation to its familiar meaning in the like-named book or film - namely explosion - every exit involves the application of force" (Festschrift). This forced exit is immediately evident in the figures which open the third section. Now the progress of the piece is dominated by constantly descending figures driven by timpani rolls and mark-like drumbeats, distantly reminiscent of the Baroque rhetorical figure "katabasis":
The downward force overwhelms and eventually absorbs the sustained tones and sonorities in the other instrumental groups. These tones now have an almost stabilizing function, and seem to pit all their strength in an effort not to slip away entirely.
In bar 19 there begins a large-scale crescendo of apocalyptic proportions over a march rhythms. New material and figures are added layer by layer, creating an impression of wild lamentation. Following a climax and consequent collapse, a gradual process of disintegration sets in. Here too the technical analysis of the music coincides with its meaning: disintegration ("Auflosung") is also a solution ("Loesung"), and for many it means redemption ("Erloesung") - or as Bialas put it, "the music does not recognize distinctions". All that remains are the ostinato elements, which were always present as a permanent background and which ultimately, from bar 1f6, draw all of the figures into the maelstrom of a "marche funebre" leading to the original starting pitch "a". In a manner of speaking, this pitch forms the soul of the work. As Bialas wrote: "The piece also concludes with this pitch, and we hear it reverberating in the small timpani in a long after the other instruments have fallen silent" (Festschrift).
"Introitus - Exodus" provides a notable instance of a synthesis which is characteristic of Bialas's work as a whole: a semantically meaningful process is articulated within a piece of music which at the same time meets all our expectations and notions of absolute music. Clarity of form and an inborn power of musical conviction do not stand opposed in this work but are mutually conditioned. Referring to the difference between his work and Richard Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration", Bialas shed revealing light on his own intentions: whereas Strauss seeks to depict an individual destiny, however transcendant at the end, Bialas's aim in "Introitus - Exodus" is to show Life itself in its primordial, archaic conditions: entrance, consummation and exit (whatever that exit may mean) can clearly be traced in the piece, even if it "has no programme which one must know and follow" (programme notes to "musica vivau concert). Hence the progress of the music in absolute terms has an unprogrammatic exterior meaning, and turns Bialas's musical language into a vital and profound expemience. -- Siegfried Mauser
(Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)
Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Dec 3, 2008 at 02:11 AM