The eMusic Dozen: European Mavericks

Only 12 of Edgard Varese's compositions still survive, but his name is among the most venerated of modernist composers. Much of that can be attributed to Frank Zappa's tireless and frequent championing of the French composer. That and premiering a work in Paris and having it jeered off the stage. (Hey, it worked for Stravinsky.) Varese's "Deserts" did just that in 1954. He'd composed the piece after nearly 20 years of silence, dejected by the reaction to his challenging orchestral work of the 1920's and '30s, and frustrated by his inability to properly capture on paper the sounds in his head. Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrete studio offered help in the form of a two-track tape that was played as interludes between the ensemble's atonal compositions. A cynical soul would point out that the two don't sound all that different -- a listener interested in the simultaneous birth of electronic music and avant-garde classical would probably make the same point.

It's almost fitting that Norwegian composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's most famous work is composed partly of birdsong -- his career could easily be described as "flighty." He's moved from neo-classicism to serialism to neo-romanticism and beyond. Rautavaara is at the height of his romantic powers on "Cantus Arcticus," scoring an orchestra that triumphantly swells its long, languorous melodies into heart-bursting crescendos. The focus of the listener, however, can't help but be drawn to the featured soloists: arctic birds that Rautavaara taped in Northern Finland. As the flock gets louder and louder, so does the orchestra, making for a climax worthy of none other than Finland's other great composer, Jean Sibelius.

"'Philosophy'? He has none," Nora Part once told a Spike Magazine interviewer. "He learns everything from the old Church Fathers." Arvo Part's wife just might be right, as his music seems to be some of the simplest -- and most spiritually affecting -- you'll ever come across. It's no wonder that filmmakers often use his compositions in their work to further their emotional ends ("Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten," included here, has been in no less than eight films). Sure, there may be a niggling voice in your head that screams about the cloying aspects of his stirring and epic compositions. But when isolated from its context as a way to evoke solemnity during the opening moments of Fahrenheit 9/11, I think you'll agree with Steve Reich, who points out that "[Parts] music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion."

Coming after the dissonant tone clusters of "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," Krzysztof Penderecki's 1966 composition, the St. Luke Passion, must have come as a shock. Even leaving aside its overtly religious subject matter (a form that had been all but abandoned in post-WWII Communist Poland), St. Luke Passion is positively Baroque in its structure. Of course, as Poland's leading avant-garde composer, Penderecki couldn't help but tweak the format. In Penderecki's vision of the Passion, he asks the chorus to make all sorts of noises (whistles, groans, shouts), while the orchestra builds indistinct clouds of sound around them. Bach composed the most famous St. Luke Passion and Penderecki duly pays tribute to the master by using the BACH motif in the opening theme.

Aside from teaching composition to noted European mavericks like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis as a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, Olivier Messiaen did double duty throughout his career as both composer and ornithologist. For many years, he traveled all over the world to perform music, but also to transcribe the calls of exotic and rare birds. In these solo piano compositions, he combined the two interests, basing each piece on the call (and the surrounding environment) of one bird. The results are hugely complex works, which is why Carl-Axel Dominique, the pianist here, is so important. Luckily, Dominique is a noted interpreter of Messiaen's bird compositions and he does an excellent job of presenting the notoriously difficult tone poems, imbuing them with feeling and empathy.

Iannis Xenakis was already a well-known architect before he began to study music. While he worked in the '40s and '50s with Le Corbusier, he composed in his spare time. That's probably why his scores are pretty much inscrutable and his music is pretty much unmistakable. Pleiades is that rare beast: a piece composed solely for percussion. Here, the Kroumata Percussion Ensemble builds impenetrable clouds of sound; the patterns click into focus moments before you want to give up. But much like Stockhausen's Stimmung once the percussionists settle into a groove, it immediately begins to unravel, giving Pleiades a sense of continuity and mutability. It's somehow unsettling and comforting -- all at once.

It's hard to understand exactly how Jorgen Plaetner was forgotten so completely by devotees of early electronic music. His '60s and '70s compositions sound more contemporary than Stockhausen, Xenakis or Schaeffer. In fact, if you played "Beta" for any noise musician today, they'd probably have a hard time telling it apart from, say, Alec Empire's Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5. Whatever the reason, Plaetner's wide breadth of sound -- the one-two combo of the spasming tone sequences of "Modulations" and the hauntingly beautiful flute/electronic duo of "Nocturne" being a prime example -- almost seems like a joke. Can these two pieces be by the same composer? Did Denmark secretly produce the world's finest musique concrete? Listen and judge for yourself.

eMusic Classical columnist Justin Davidson summed it up perfectly when he called composer Sofia Gubaidulina's work full of "bleak apocalyptic beauty." There seems to be a constant battle of good vs. evil in Gubaidulina's flute concerto "...The Deceitful Face of Hope and Despair," with flautist Sharon Bezaly trying her best to overcome the alternately deafening and silent orchestra. Bezaly is called on to use all manner of tones throughout -- besides the standard flute, she uses both alto and bass flute in the fight -- and, in the process, proves her status as one of the world's most talented flautists. Also on this disc is 7 Words, which is equally as concerned with evoking pathos. This time, though, it's generated via Gubaidulina's favorite instrument, the bayan -- a sort of Russian accordion. Like "...The Deceitful...," the effect is intensely emotional, producing music that sounds like what one BBC critic called "Part meets Penderecki."

Along with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Anton Webern was part of the Second Viennese School, a group of composers exploring the idea of atonality and 12-tone composition. Webern, specifically, was known for his extreme brevity. His nearly forty years of compositions fit on only six CD's; lending each individual note heightened drama. (The fourth of his "Five Pieces" is just six bars long.) Collected here are works from the beginning of his career ("Passacaglia" was composed in 1908, just after Webern had completed his studies with Schoenberg) until the end ("Variations" was his penultimate piece, completed in 1940). Takuo Yuasa leads the Ulster Orchestra through each expertly, but it seems that the group gains more confidence as they go on: the Symphony helps belie the myth that Webern is more for the head than the heart. If you listen long enough, you'll begin to hear lyricism poking its head out of his trademark iciness.

"The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so." So said Alfred Schnittke, whose music was dubbed "polystylism" because of the way that it attempted to bring together genres of music that rarely had intermingled before. You won't hear much of that, however, in his Piano Quintet, which has come to be regarded as one of his finest pieces. Instead, spiky traces of Webern color the piano work, while the massive and depressed droning of the strings recalls nothing less than the stormy undercurrents of emotion found in Shostakovich. Violinist Mark Lubotsky gets the lion's share of credit here for helping make the quivering, atonal melodies cohere, but it's pianist Irina Schnittke, Alfred's widow, who makes the most striking impression -- adding alternately stark and lyrical counterpoint to the maelstrom that often threatens to overpower her completely.

In most of Gyorgy Ligeti's work, you can hear the sound of a grand comedian -- his opera Le Grand Macabre begins by poking fun at Monteverdi's "Orfeo," mocking its strident brass with an overture composed of 12 car horns -- but his piano pieces are often a different story. Few will forget the stark and haunting opening notes to "Musica Ricercata: II," which soundtracked the psychosexual odyssey of Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. Fewer still will forget the forlorn, chiming dissonance of his Arc-en-ciel etude once they hear it. You can hardly blame him. Not many composers can claim to have survived both Hitler and Stalin. (Ligeti's brother and father died at Auschwitz and Ligeti fled Budapest in 1956 after the Soviets crushed a nascent rebellion.) But Ligeti doesn't always leave his rubber chicken at home -- listen carefully to "3 Bagatelles for David Tudor" and tell us if you hear much more than a single piano note over its one-and-half minutes.

While Paris students were rioting, American troops were razing My Lai and the Beatles were busy crafting odes to blackbirds, piggies and raccoons, Stockhausen was trying to recreate a recent vacation during which he walked among the ruins of ancient temples in Mexico. With Stimmung, a piece for six voices and microphones, he very nearly did it. The German composer here only affords the piece's six singers a few notes, all overtones of B-flat, and simply asks them to move slowly between them. The piece is in 51 sections, each with a distinct phonetic pattern. Twenty-nine of these patterns are built from "magic names," which come from the gods of a variety of cultures (Greek, Aztec, etc.). If you can ignore the hippie-dippie nature of the piece and simply focus on the content, though, you'll soon find it's pretty much ambient music before the genre was (re)invented by Eno -- endlessly fascinating under close scrutiny and just as pleasing when you're doing the dishes.