FÉNELON: Épilogue. Halley. Les Combats nocturnes* / Florent Boffard, pno; *add Florent Jodelet, perc / Deux Epigrammes / Joëlle Léandre, bs; Sylvie Beltrando, harp; Jodelet, perc / Omaggio (a Tiepolo) / Maryvonne Le Dizès, vln / Notti / Joëlle Léandre, voc/bs / Zabak / Jodelet, perc / Paléomusique for 22 Lithophones & Percussion / Didier Benetti, Emmanuel Curt, Florent Jodelet, Gilles Rancitelli, perc/lith / Still Dreams for Steel Drums & String Quartet / Jodelet, steel dm; Quatour Diotima / Signature 2658693X, also available for free streaming on YouTube in small bits.
Extra pieces available on YouTube by clicking links: Diagonals: Part 1, Part 2 / Ensemble Contemporain; Peter Eötvös, cond / Onze Inventions pour quatuor à cordes: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 / Quatuor Rosamonde
This two-CD set represents the music of a French composer, now in his 72nd year, who has been writing music since he was in his late teens, yet although some of his works have already been issued on CD, they don’t stay in print for very long because they are odd to the point of eccentricity.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow to present: Philippe Fénelon!
Fenelon & wall of rocks
I want to make it clear that I am not ridiculing Mr. Fénelon or his music, only that when the scores are this far-out, you need a neck four feet long to wrap your head around them. Please understand: every so often a composer comes along whose work is too outré even for the avant-garde of his or her time, yet it has value because the composer is sincere, thus the music is overbrimming with a weird sort of energy that makes it fascinating and even delightful to listen to without always being coherent to every listener. This was true of such composers as young George Antheil, Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch (at any age), and Leif Segerstam in the 1970s and early ‘80s. In fact, if anything much of Segerstam’s early output was even further out than Fénelon’s, but as I pointed out in my profile of the composer-conductor in his younger years, I didn’t have to sit and analyze his music in order to enjoy it. As long as YOU know what you’re doing, and Fénelon definitely seems to know even if I don’t, and as long as it sounds through-composed and complete even if it’s bizarre to listen to, I’m with you. If nothing else, music such as this has a unique place in our lives in that it is simultaneously very complex yet, oddly, very entertaining…like watching a two-legged cat walk a tightrope and do back flips on it without losing its balance. It’s something outside your normal frame of reference, but I, for one, wouldn’t live without some music like this. If nothing else, it’s a poke in the eye of academia, and I’m always for that!
Paléomusique, for instance, is played by 22 lithophones. And what, pray tell, is a lithophone? Why, you should know that! It’s an instrument consisting of pieces of rock which are struck to produce musical notes. If you know what a glass harmonica is, just think of the lithophone as a rock harmonica. I’m surprised that “rock” bands don’t use it! The origin of the instrument was the sound some people could produce tapping natural rock formations in caves with spoons or small mallets. Perhaps you can think of it as a stoned-out version of vibes. Except that the rocks don’t have a sustain pedal. After all…they’re just rocks.
Despite his having been around since the early 1970s as a composer, only a few albums have been issued with his music on it. The earliest I could find was a 1986 album by the Ensemble Contemporain conducted by fellow-composer Peter Eötvös on a French Harmonia Mundi LP. HMC 5180, which contained his piece Diagonals. Next up was his piece Onze Inventions pour quatuor à cordes, on an album by Quatuor Rosamonde on an MFA Radio France CD from 1991, 581280, which was paired with Henri Dutilleux’s Quatuor À Cordes “Ainsi La Nuit.” Both of these Fénelon pieces are uploaded on YouTube, thus I listed them above as “extra pieces” which you can click on and listen to. Also available on YouTube is a complete recording of his 1988-89 opera Le Rois (The Kings), but I don’t necessarily recommend it because there is no plot synopsis available online. All I could find was an interview with Fénelon around the time of its 2005 revival by the Bordeaux National Opera, in which he mentioned that the short story by Julio Cortázar on which it is based. In an interview with Bertrans Bolognesi published online, Fénelon only gives us this brief and enigmatic idea of what the opera is about:
I had the idea of writing an opera about Telemachus, about the story of Theseus, which is at its center. Cortázar’s wife gave me this text about twenty years ago. These are philosophical dialogues that spoke to me right away. I found the theme of the labyrinth in them, which is dear to me: I had obviously come out of aleatory music, but its character of quasi improvisation based on elements that are proposed to the performers has something labyrinthine about it; we can also admit that life in general is a labyrinth. Perhaps we are always looking for a Minotaur pursued by a Theseus that we do not know. I saw that we could not use the text as it is. I had partly integrated it into this Telemachus which never saw the light of day, then I quickly realized that by making it the center of the work, I had to add a beginning and an end: but it must remain autonomous, its entity absolutely must not be touched. I began to adapt, from the French version, reworking the text which is nevertheless, in places, quite abstract, which required pruning, or adding characters to get as close as possible to an effective dramaturgy.
I wonder if Fénelon ever wrote any pieces for the late Cathy Berberian. Those two were meant for each other; both were (are) a bit cracked, but nuts in a fun way.
The only all-Fénelon CDs before this one were his one-act opera, Le Chevaliere Imaginaire, issued in 1992 on Erato 4509-96394-2 (CD), a 1993 an album on Thesis THC 82057 that presented his works based on Greek legends, La colère Achille, Orion, Hélios and Ulysse, and a 1997 MFA Radio France CD, MFA 216015. The latter disc consisted of all the pieces and recordings which are now on CD 1 of this new set, by the same performers, which to me indicates a reissue; thus, the only new recordings made for this specific album were Paléomusique and Still Dreams, which total about 37 minutes of playing time. But at least all of these other bizarre compositions of his are available once again…as an American advertiser would say, “for a limited time only!”
So, as they used to say in the old days, “Hold onto your hats!” Here we go down the rabbit-hole of Philippe Fenélon’s music! I will, of course, be leaning on the liner notes, written by Fénelon himself, to guide me (and you) through his musical labyrinths, and hope that the words convey something to you of the character of the music.
Épilogue for piano solo. The liner notes: “Inspired by certain musical ideas from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstucke, Épilogue, as its title implies, aspires to offer a conclusion to that illustrious earlier suite. Using serial language without bowing to its strict canons, the work unfolds in three parts separated by two silences. The first part, obsessive, is marked by an absence of melody, a distortion of the registers and a nimble, intense, irrational rhythmic spark. Only one note, an ever present D disturbs the serialistic logic, that order and coherence which every “series” strives to establish.” Me: This music is scattered and abstract in the extreme, but by constantly repeating the D above middle C over and over again, Fénelon actually establishes this as a sort of “ground note” which somehow gives a feeling of order to this otherwise chaotic piece. The second (middle) section represents ecstasy; here, things calm down both in terms of atonality and forward momentum; the music has atonal moments but does not always linger in them, and the music seems to float without a forward pulse. Towards the end of this section, however, Fénelon’s natural restlessness and orneriness brings the atonality back; a series of feverish trills in the right hand also emphasize the mood of this last section, marked “evocative,” although what it is meant to be evocative of is left up to your imagination Good luck! Sorry, no prizes if you guess right, because even I don’t know!
Deux Epigrammes (for string bass, harp & percussion). The notes: “Deux épigrammes are written improvisations in a tempo quite relative in its strictness. Without any predetermining factors, without any presuppositions. The solo instrument, a double bass, is escorted by two witnesses: a harp, purely accompanimental, and percussion which punctuates and rounds off each section, coloring each phrase it penetrates with a certain pungency. The work takes the form of a critical dialogue, almost satirical, between the three performers.” Me: This some really wacky shit, let me tell you. Yes, it has humorous undertones, but with an overriding feeling of sarcasm within the humor. Fénelon apparently wants to make you laugh, but not too loudly and with more of a grimace than a smile. My cat: “Wow, this is some crazy stuff! Can’t you play some Mozart?”
Halley is meant as a tip of the Fénelon beret to Halley’s Comet, which made its reappearance in 1986. It sounds much like Épilogue, but without the repeated middle Ds. If you could tell me just by listening, without knowing the title, that this piece was supposed to suggest Halley’s Comet, you’re several steps beyond me. The liner notes suggest that one can tell because the piece is “a cluster of brief, connected episodes.” Your mama.
Les Combats nocturnes translates as Nocturnal Battles. We are told that their two movements are titled “Dedalus improvising the dance of the labyrinth” (I wasn’t aware that labyrinths had dances) and “The sacrifice of Icarus.” In this piece, the notes tell us, “The percussion is an acoustic prolongation of the piano, even if some of its timbres (bells and crotales) give it a certain instrumental autonomy. Me: It sound a HELL of a lot different from the piano, but adds to the music’s over-the-top wildness and energy. Yes, there is a small resemblance in Fénelon’s music to his teacher Messiaen’s, but he’s more like Messiaen on LSD. And a bottle of Bordeaux. The bizarre thing about Fénelon’s music is that it almost always goes in two or more directions at the same time, and none of these directions is any more important than the other one (or two). It’s up to you which direction you want to follow in any particular listening session. In the second part, Fénelon plays with rhythm in an amusing manner, at one point somewhat suggesting Charles Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette.
Next up is the violin piece Omaggio (a Tiepolo), his tribute to an immense fresco bombarded during World War II but never restored. As Vagn Holmboe and others have said, you cannot depict a physical object through music; all you can do is to suggest the emotional effect the physical object has on you, the composer. As usual, Fénelon sounds agitated, off the wall, and somewhat scattered in his thoughts. Very few of the passages the violin plays have any relationship to each other, but when you put it all together it’s interesting if entirely unrelated to a WW2 mural.
Notti, music based on three original poems by Fénelon for string bass and vocal (by the same performer), is, according to the notes, “Free, playful music…The poems, the product of nocturnal walks in a Northern Italian town, tell of waiting, absence and loss of a sense of place.” Oddly, this was written in 1990, not during the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic. The bass opens up playing typically wild Fénelon musical lines in its middle register, sounding much like a cello. The words are mostly whispered, a few sung out. The performer definitely sounds lost and frustrated. The bass then begins grumbling in its lower register. If you thought the previous pieces sounded rather strange, wait ‘til you hear this one. Only the third song has a definable form, set in C minor, and it is here that all of the vocal lines are sung, not spoken/whispered. This is, believe it or not, a pretty normal-sounding piece.
Zabak (1994) is described as a percussion piece “Set to a background of nature, drama and poetry…zabak means ‘land’ in the Nuba language, spoken in the central mountains of the Sudan… the work, through its choice of highly characteristic instruments, is a challenge addressed to ethnic world music, particularly with its contemporary reference to the music of Mali and to certain elements of the Nuba world: masks, dances, bloodthirsty rituals.” Yeah, I can see where bloodthirsty rituals would appeal to Fénelon. The piece opens slowly, almost gingerly, with a few pots-and-pans sounds spaced apart from one another, then a soft rattling sound, like pebbles shaken in a metal pan. Other various percussion effects follow. Honestly, I couldn’t care less about percussion pieces. Men like them. Women normally don’t. But when we get to the explosive snare drum sounds which resemble an exploding string of firecrackers, we know we’re on Fénelon’s home turf. And yes, it does get even crazier from that point on. At one point, he actually creates a definite rhythmic pattern. Satisfaction guaranteed or you get your bongos back. There are three loud “dings” in this piece, indicating to me that percussionist Florent Jodelet hit the bell at the top of the wooden tower and thus won a prize or two (perhaps a box of cigars).
Whacking those rocks in Paléomusique
And now, on we go to CD 2 and the new music presented here for the first time. First up is Fénelon’s “box o’ rocks” piece, Paléomusique, for which he got the idea when he and performer Jodelet ran across “some oblong polished stones from the Neolithic period” in the Paris Natural History Museum. I would think that most people would just be interested in them for their historic value. Leave it to Fénelon to think of them as prehistoric versions of fire bells, to be struck in order to “communicate, exchange and send messages” but also “to play.” All I could think of was that guy who banged two rocks together in a rhythmic pattern at the beginning of each Spike Jones TV show back in the early 1950s. Well, at least the performers here (there are four of them) are virtuoso rock-bangers, and there are, of course, some tinkly percussion effects thrown in to alternate with the rock-hitting. In fact, quite a bit of this sounds like an out-of-synch music box from the old days, interspersed with the sounds of rocks rattling down what sounds like a giant washboard. Either way, it’s really out there, man! Dig it!! This piece gets really intricate rhythmically, but it doesn’t really “communicate” anything to me other than its sounds. And happily, as it progresses, there is much more of the high percussion and less of the rocks.
But to quote the late Al Jolson, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” After this comes the seven-part Still Dreams, and believe me, “stillness” is not what this music is all about. Here, Fénelon had the brilliant idea to combine a string quartet with steel drums., which is almost like having Gene Krupa bang out the bass drum intro to Sing, Sing, Sing in front of a flute trio. Fénelon tries to equalize the sound by having the string quartet play together much of the time and at full, volume, but they’re fighting a losing battle. Completely free srythm is the order of the day in this piece, Fénelon obviously tried to equalize their sounds to some degree, but at least in the first movement, it is the steel drum that leads the charge. The string quartet is just a tag-along partner.
In the second movement, the quartet also plays a lot of chords but since the steel drum sits out this section of the music, their volume is softer and thus they sound less abrasive. When the steel drum enters, it, too is playing at a softer volume. Part III is especially soft, and almost lyrical, but in Part IV both the quartet and the steel drum erupt like an explosion at a musical instrument factory. You just can’t predict Fénelon; he’s harder to pin down than a rabbit’s shadow. The suite, in fact, ends on an unresolved chord.
Because the second CD is so short, if you buy this recording as a download I recommend that you also add the two “bonus” works on the second CD from YouTube. The wind quintet Diagonals is no more decipherable than his other pieces, which is good; in one section of the piece, a couple of minutes in, the quintet sways on their notes as if inebriated. But make no mistake in any of this music: for all its eccentricity, it is all fascinating and most of it, like Diagonals, is damned difficult to play. No wonder they needed a conductor; much of it sounds like Swiss clockwork exploding. The Onze Inventions pour quatuor à cordes are also highly virtuosic pieces, and again they often sound as if they are running backwards. (How he does this I can’t quite put my finger on, but he does it anyway!)
I’m sure that, for many listeners, this much of Fénelon’s music would be enough to last them a lifetime, but as I said, I actually like it even when I can’t always follow it, so I’m going to keep digging until I unearth a plot synopsis for Le Rois and download that, too. Philippe Fénelon, for better or worse, is truly a one-of-a-kind composer.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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