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Barraqué and the Serial Idea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1978

Bill Hopkins
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Extract

It was through Schubert and Beethoven that Jean Barraqué came to his vocation as a composer. He himself indicated 1940 as the date when his ‘conversion’ began; he was twelve years old, and his practical experience of playing the piano and the violin as well as daily singing classes at school had done nothing to deflect him from his childhood ambition to enter the priesthood. Then one of his teachers played him records of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, and he was immediately fired with an obsessive enthusiasm for music. He refers to three other works which he went on to discover for himself: the Arpeggione Sonata, the Pastoral Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. He had at that time a burning desire to emulate the great masters, and he would copy out major orchestral scores and compose his own imitations of them. At fifteen, he says, his idea of a composer was of someone who wrote the Missa Solemnis. The work was to remain his constant touchstone, just as Schubert was always, for him, ‘that purest of musicians’. No doubt, too, there was something about the nature of the particular works to which he was first drawn that determined the scale on which he later customarily worked. He could not conceivably have composed Bagatelles or Moments Musicaux; these would have seemed to him too self-contained, too ‘finished’. In fact, he was deeply committed to what he called ‘l'inachèvement sans cesse’; if creative thought was a continuum, then no creative act could properly be regarded as ‘finished’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 105 , 1978 , pp. 13 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

NOTES

1 Jean Barraqué, ‘Propos impromptu’, Le courrier musical de France, xxvi (1969), 75–80, from which the following details of the composer's early development are drawn.Google Scholar

2 Radio interview with Florence Mothe (ORTF recording, 30 April 1969). Except where stated, all translations are the author's.Google Scholar

3 Jean Barraqué, op. cit., 79; see also Le temps restitué, section iv.Google Scholar

4 Jean Barraqué, ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’ (six broadcast talks, 1953; MS (no. V missing) in the possession of Mme Germaine Barraqué), I.Google Scholar

5 MS and various notes (undated) in the possession of Mme Germaine Barraqué. The material on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (214 pp. + notes) will hereafter be referred to as ‘Beethoven’; that on Debussy's La Mer (37 pp., apparently based on lecture transcripts made by André Riotte (31 pp.), + various notes) as ‘La Mer’.Google Scholar

6 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar

7 Revue musicale, xxv (1952), 117–48; reprinted in Relevés d'apprenti (Paris, 1966), 147–82.Google Scholar

8 Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud Jean-Louis Barrault, iii (1954), 32–45.Google Scholar

9 Cf. ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar

10 Polyphonie, ix-x (1954), 47–73.Google Scholar

11 ‘Rythme et développement’, 73.Google Scholar

12 ‘Beethoven’, 84.Google Scholar

13 Igor Stravinsky, ‘Geleitwort’, Die Reihe, ii (1955), 7.Google Scholar

14 ‘Beethoven’, 205.Google Scholar

15 Walther Kolneder (in Anton Webern: Genesis und Metamorphose eines Stils, Vienna, 1974, p. 187) makes a spurious bibliographical reference to a published article entitled ‘Essays fiber Weberns Klaviervariationen’ in Melos (1961).Google Scholar

16 See, for example, ‘Demarches musicales du demi-siècle’, I and III.Google Scholar

17 ‘La Mer’, 8–9.Google Scholar

18 By Barraqué himself in ‘Beethoven’, 83.Google Scholar

19 ‘Beethoven’, 83–4.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.Google Scholar

21 Jean Barraqué, ‘Debussy, ou l'approche d'une organisation autogène de la composition’, Debussy et l'évolution de la musique au XXe siècle, ed. E. Weber (Paris, 1965), 83–95.Google Scholar

22 ‘Beethoven’, 84.Google Scholar

23 Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris, 1962), 150.Google Scholar

24 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar

25 ‘Beethoven’, 84.Google Scholar

26 See bars 8–9, etc., of the work's second movement, and cf. Boulez's strictures in Penser la musique aujourd'hui (Paris, 1963), 52.Google Scholar

27 ‘Rythme et développement’, 47–8.Google Scholar

28 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, I.Google Scholar

29 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar

30 MS notes and diagrams in the possession of Mme Germaine Barraqué.Google Scholar

31 ‘Beethoven’, 178–9.Google Scholar

32 ‘Rythme et développement’, 70.Google Scholar

33 Composition plans and sketches for … au delà du hasard, in the possession of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (uncatalogued); for an explanation of the mathematical basis of this procedure, see André Riotte, ‘Jean Barraqué ou le dépassement du combinatoire’, in Dossier Jean Barraqué (Paris, 1974).Google Scholar

34 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar

35 Cited in G. W. Hopkins, ‘Jean Barraqué’, Musical Times, cvii (1966), 952: ‘une musique parfaitement incompréhensible’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar

37 Ibid.Google Scholar

38 Cf. G. W. Hopkins, op. cit.Google Scholar

39 See, for example, the series of musical analyses Barraqué published between 1952 and 1957 in Le guide du concert et du disque.Google Scholar

40 ‘Beethoven’, 303–4.Google Scholar

41 Apart from the unpublished Webern analysis already referred to and some partial analyses, I have traced only two other examples – the analytical notes on Berg's Violin Concerto appearing in Le guide du concert et du disque (7 January 1955, p. 495), and the Encyclopédie Larousse de la musique (Paris, 1957), i, 604.Google Scholar

42 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar

43 Cf. ‘Beethoven’, 203–4; also ‘Rythme et développement’, 63–4.Google Scholar

44 Author's notes from the composer's dictation (1965).Google Scholar

45 Composition plans and sketches for Sonate, in the possession of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (uncatalogued).Google Scholar

46 From the final bar on p. 25 to the first bar on p. 28 in the Bruzzichelli edition (Florence, 1965).Google Scholar

47 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar

48 Composition plans and sketches for Sonate.Google Scholar

49 Ibid.Google Scholar

50 Ibid.Google Scholar

51 Ibid.Google Scholar

52 Ibid.Google Scholar

53 By Yvonne Loriod on Vega C 30 A 180.Google Scholar

54 In the possession of Aldo Bruzzichelli – Editore, Florence.Google Scholar

55 Jean Barraqué, Sonate (Florence, 1965).Google Scholar

56 By Claude Helffer on Valois MB 952 and by Roger Woodward on EMI EMD 5511, the latter now available separately on Unicorn UNS 263.Google Scholar

57 In the possession of Mr Roger Woodward.Google Scholar