In my mind I’ve worked up Antoine Beuger as my personal nemesis. Never met him, but his music has always aroused a vehement antipathy, sufficient for me to have resolved to avoid further encounters wherever possible. (The only other composer I’ve singled out for this treatment, more or less arbitrarily, is Wolfgang Rihm.) Whatever I’ve heard has always struck me as being imprisoned in theoretical purity, beholden to presenting an idea at the expense of any musical considerations; a dry, academic routine left to run its course. I found it devoid of aesthetic interest, but never in a way that challenged or provoked, and so felt no need to pursue it further.
So, when Another Timbre sent me their new recording of Beuger’s jankélévitch sextets, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to demonstrate my impartiality by getting really stuck in. I’m happy to report that those hopes have been dashed. This is quietly intriguing music. Maybe I needed to hear more Beuger after all, but what seems to set this piece apart from previous works I’ve heard is that the idea here focuses on musical considerations.
Then basically, the players, they do the same thing. They play long, very quiet tones. There’s nothing to practice, because individually everybody is engaging in the same activity. And they’re going to find themselves in different kinds of constellations, if you like. And there’s a whole set of pages in the score which you play separately, so you have a whole number of instances of this situation, and you move from one to the other, and it’s basically very amorphous. But it takes on some kind of form each time, and the form comes very logically and genetically from the setup, from the deep structure, if you like.
There seems to be a simple scheme in play here, not unlike some of my preferred music by Eva-Maria Houben. From this simplicity, a pleasing subtlety is allowed to emerge. As the title suggests, the piece is an homage to the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, who said that music has no itinerary, it’s not going from here to there to there, and who explored the philosophical concept of the event, the grey area where the appearance of a new state is dependent on perceiving the disappearance of an older state. The structure of the piece – musicians independently playing shared material within loosely-defined time-frames – bears a clear similarity to Cage’s late ‘number’ pieces. Indeed, the sound-world of soft, overlapping pitches strongly resemble many of those works.
There are distinct differences, however; borne out of differences in musical thinking. Where Cage allows some interpretive freedom, Beuger stipulates long and modestly soft notes throughout. With potential for harmonic and textural complexity thus reduced still further, other qualities come to the fore. The instruments (double bass, accordion, bass clarinet, violin, bassoon, viola) pair off and produce strangely sophisticated tone-colours. The mix of instruments used here by members of the ensemble Apartment House includes an accordion, which brings out unexpected beating frequencies and other acoustic phenomena. It’s a work that lovingly exemplifies the beauty of instrumental sounds, all through simple play that removes any faint traces of didacticism that linger even in Cage’s most beguiling works. Apartment House play with a steadfast simplicity that seems to suit Beuger’s style, although after a while it starts to sound a little too tender, which perhaps helps to sweeten the sound for the ear.
It figures that I must have been missing something all this time. Still wary of diving into Beuger’s back catalogue, but now because I’m worried I’ll spoil the mood.
