Rough Ideas by Stephen Hough

Author:Stephen Hough [Stephen Hough]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571350490
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Mompou and the music of evaporation: a note for a CD

yet in sooth

I cannot of that music rightly say

Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones.

John Henry Newman: The Dream of Gerontius

Hush!

if we

make but a sound

time

will begin again

Paul Claudel: Cent phrases pour eventail

The music of Federico Mompou is the music of evaporation. The printed page seems to have faded, as if the bar lines, time signatures, key signatures, and even the notes themselves have disappeared over a timeless number of years. There is no development of material, little counterpoint, no drama nor climaxes to speak of; and this simplicity of expression – elusive, evasive and shy – is strangely disarming. There is nowhere for the sophisticate to hide with Mompou. We are in a glasshouse, and the resulting transparency is unnerving, for it creates a reflection in which our face and soul can be seen.

When asked once how to play his music, the composer replied, ‘It’s all so free.’ Indeed it is, but not just free from rhythmic constraints and structural rules; it is free from affectation, posing, fashions and fads, and has the ecstatic liberty of childhood. ‘Unless you become like children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 18:3); and without a spirit of childhood in the listener Mompou’s ‘kingdom’ is closed and some of his music can seem almost infantile. Such is the innocence of Mompou’s world that Wilfrid Mellers (in his book on the composer, Le Jardin retrouvé) has compared it to a return to Paradise before the Fall. The composer himself called his style ‘primitivista’, referring to its lack of bar lines and key signatures, yet it entirely lacks the pulsating passion we tend to associate with the label ‘primitive’ – the leering masks, the gyrating dances and indeed the mesmeric music of primeval cultures. Where these have tended to see life beginning after some initiation ceremony – a coming of age – in Mompou we see rather a wisdom in childhood itself that should be cherished and protected. The composer’s muse begins and ends with innocence as a search for air beyond the smoke of experience.

There are numerous influences discernible in Mompou’s music – Chopin, Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin, plainsong, folk music and jazz (its harmonies rather than its rhythms) – and he was accepted by his contemporaries in Paris, Les Six, as a sort of honorary member (making an unofficial baker’s half-dozen). But his principal and fundamental stylistic ancestor, along with a whole generation of French composers, was the eccentric iconoclast Erik Satie. However, in spite of Mompou’s enormous debt to Satie in so many formal and musical ways, the two composers are poles apart in their personalities and spiritual vision. Where Satie used naïveté or childishness to mock the pretensions and pomposity of adulthood, Mompou rather took the insights of maturity to rediscover the magic of childhood. Satie’s smile has a knowing look, his eyes narrowing into cynicism; Mompou’s eyes are wide open, sparkling like a child’s, and his smile has all the surprise and enthralment of Creation itself.

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