Claude Ballif : Un coup de dés [1/6]

Ballif's 1981 work for five choirs, two double basses, two percussionists, two kettledrums, and electronic tape. Part 1 of 6.

With "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard". Mallarmé had already opened the way for music. Using different typographical characters for each "deal" or "throw" - one cannot speak of verses or sentences, and hardly even of clauses -, the poet had acknowledged his intention of "orchestrating" the blank page. And even in availing himself of double pages as distinct units, from the point of view of both the sense and the figure designed on each page (and thus of the visual, pictorial doubling, analogous to the meaning in the writing or the topography of the poem), Mallarme's concept of his work was that of an album of abstract imagery in which various tempi succeeded one another and linked together like in a musical score, It is not surprising that the composer, Claude Ballif, should have declared himself "fascinated" by this "Mallarmeenne" music that "uses our techniques: recurrence, backtracking, augmentation, syllables carried over to the next line, parentheses, appositions, anticipations, etc.". Resolved on setting the poem to music, he quite naturally sub-titled his composition a "musical countersubject". This does not refer to the "countersubject" of a fugue (which is of necessity linear since it is the answer to a melodic subject), but designates, in relation to the whole poem considered as a given musical subject, "another facet of the same idea, which, guided by the ear, traces a complementary idea which was born in me like a necessity out of Mallarme's Subject with its dynamics, its entries, its reliefs". A "countersubject", therefore, but amplified, allargando, in relation to its "subject", Ballif's score repeats in spirit, not only to the letter, Mallarme's precept of chance that never abolishes chance.

Reading the text in the large format edition of 1974, Ballif decided to assign a particular "sound property" to each of the eleven double pages, according to the singularity of each of the graphic configurations imagined by Mallarme. And the duration of this reading of each double page must be "exactly four minutes, in which the words are precipitated, or more calmly rendered or deposited", depending on how densely the page is filled. The voices will be arranged "not in bass-treble corresponding to the top and the bottom of the page, but in relief of shade and light, matness and resonance". Between the "low voice, without larynx, for matness" and the "singing voice for resonance", there is provision for intermediary degrees. Finally there are five different choirs corresponding to the typefaces used by Mallarme: a "rhetorical choir" ("small Roman type"), of low, whispering voices; a "poetic choir" ("very large Romar type"), singing, still in the bass, the neumes drawn in "English" script. of the letters of the poetic text; a "tragic choir" for the italics; an "ode choir" humming almost without breath for the small Roman type; finally a "symphonic choir", pianissimo, mouths closed singing simultaneously in two different harmonic "colours" (chords resulting from a three part and a fourpart division of the octave) and adding the "rustling, soughing sound necessary to every symphony", the murmuring of a psalmody with half-open mouths without any exact reference to the pitch of the sounds (only the registers count). Ballif rejects the notion of a cappella singing and demands two double basses, two percussionists and two kettledrum players to punctuate the change from one page to another. A "ribbon of sound" elaborated in the studio for electronic music at McGill University in Montreal where Ballif taught for a year in 1978-79, (clinks groups of pages, or creates an "echo", widening the atmosphere of this state of a half-open spaces.

Essentially grave, still music - helped by the contemplation of the calm vastness of the St. Lawrence Estuary - Un coup de des, looked at, freely broken up phoneme by phoneme, read, heard, savoured - in brief, lived by Ballif, presents us with a secret Mallarme, in love with swirling tenuities, like at the double page 6 where the static whirling, as in the eye of the storm, allows the song to emerge gradually, without, however, letting it become really detached from the whispers and incantations at the bottom of the abyss, In a slow ascending movement the music causes the glossographic sifting of complex euphonic timbres to sound more and more clearly. In this respect it is remarkable that Ballif should have preferred a womb-like quietness to brightness and fanfares. Rather than "Mallarme-izing", like the Moderns, by a refinement of preciosity in the treble, Ballif elaborates, in the bass and pianissimo, the intermissions of the singing by means of a seemingly unchanging drone which indefatigably ties up with its own difference and majestically, like a river, unfolds ...

Category:

Music

Tags:

• claude
• ballif

[stanchinsky]

Wonderful upload!

[mickyj300x]

I love your descriptions for each of the pieces you upload. Keep up the good work!

[pelodelperro]

Thanks for sharing!!