Have you noticed how, the deeper into the supposed
mire the leviathans of the recording industry sink, the more prolifically
the "little fish" breed. If your fingers are inclined towards
the green, you might say that as the big plants in your garden thin
out, the faster the little weeds spring up. If perhaps I sound a touch
sardonic, it’s down to my choice of metaphors - I’ve absolutely nothing
against the "little weeds" of the record industry: just so
long as I can get my sticky mitts on decent, or at the very least passable,
recordings of the music I love, I don’t really care tuppence from whence
they come. Well, maybe not quite - the "tuppence" that I do
care about is the price, or more precisely "value for money".
The other side of the coin is that the "little
weeds", in order to compete with the leviathans (who remain a force
to be reckoned with, even when half-immersed in nasty, sticky mire),
have to rummage the cul-de-sacs that line the musical B-roads, winkling
out the juicy morsels overlooked by their bigger brothers. This approach
was pioneered, more or less, by Vox, who gave many of us the old "Vox
Box" principle: the only constraint on a punter, tempted to chance
his arm on something unknown, is price. If I’m looking to further
my voyage of musical discovery, I for one will tolerate even poor playing
and sound, so long as it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg - the "value
for money" factor must be high enough to ensure that any possible
musical disappointment won’t be exacerbated by an agonising lance of
pain in the region of my back-pocket.
Right then, time for a little application. These CDs
are of solo piano pieces by Gurdjieff and Hartmann. I’ve never heard
of them. Have you? That makes it arm-chancing time, so let’s check the
price. I had a little peek on Amazon.com, and they were quoted at £13
each. Now I reckon that’s a bit on the "ouch!" side for the
average arm-chancer. Ah, but then they each contain over 70 minutes
of music. Is that "value for money"? Well, let’s say that
if I had been in a shop, turning this Unknown Quantity over in my hand
from flat cold, I’d have been seriously pondering why, when all the
pieces are only a few minutes long, they couldn’t have made it a straight
80 minutes a disc! The alternative is a "warm start". Having
had my initial curiosity sparked by some erudite wordsmith, I might
be looking at rather shorter odds, and moreover if it turned out that
I didn’t like it, there would be someone else to blame for it. I start
to feel this Burden of Responsibility, so perhaps I’d better get on
to the nitty-gritty!
Neither Georges Gurdjieff nor Thomas de Hartmann is
listed in my trusty old Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (which
is that well thumbed that it’s been reduced from one volume to four!).
In the case of the former, this is hardly surprising - he is not a musician
but a philosopher. According to the liner note, "During his life
[Gurdjieff] had considerable magnetism and influence among many artists
and intellectuals". Influential, eh? I grabbed my copy of Russell’s
History of Western Philosophy, first published only a year or
so before Gurdjieff’s death. I found not even a mention. Perhaps, even
though Gurdjieff had lived in France since 1922, Russell considered
his philosophy insufficiently "western"?
This is pretty likely. Gurdjieff had trekked over more
territory than even Marco Polo, boldly going where no man had gone before,
seeking out old "truths" and "teachings" in the
remotest corners of the Orient, fulfilling his conviction that "a
true knowledge of man and nature had existed in the past, and that it
was still possible to find it again". In passing, I wondered why
he thought that any such "true knowledge" didn’t exist in
the present. Anyway, from all this emerged "The Work", a philosophy
otherwise called "The Fourth Way", though from what I have
read I can’t easily enlighten you as to what that is, hampered as I
am by uncertainty as to what the first three "Ways" might
be!
Now, it seems that a happy by-product of Gurdjieff’s
travels was that he collected a substantial number of tunes along the
way. This, though, was no research on the lines of Bartok and Kodaly.
Gurdjieff simply happened to have a good - and capacious! - memory for
tunes. These he could play on his "little instrument" (which,
I hasten to add, was a kind of portable harmonium), or pick out on a
piano, or even just whistle. It so happened that one of Gurdjieff’s
disciples was Thomas de Hartmann, a "musician of repute" (though
insufficiently reputable to make the Concise Oxford take note!)
and "of classical training". Over a period of years Hartmann
notated these themes and "[made] them compatible with the musical
instruments available to us", bequeathing to us the piano pieces
enshrined in these CDs.
This apparently simple act of dedication and preservation
opens a real can of worms. The crux is that phrase, "making them
compatible", which is an implicit admission that in their original
forms the tunes were not compatible. Down the ages, and across
civilisations, musical intonation has developed following the proclivities
(and the physics) of the human ear. Ask two singers, without any artefactual
assistance, to sing a "fifth" and you will find that they
sing two notes whose pitches are in the ratio 3:2. To the best of my
knowledge, there is only one exception to the use of the hierarchical
system of just intonation - the introduction of equal temperament to
further the practical convenience of keyboard instruments. On a piano,
the notes of a "fifth" are in the ratio 1.4983070768766814987992807320298
. . . and so on ad infinitum (because that’s 27/12,
which is an irrational number). OK, but isn’t 1.498 (ish) near
enough to 1.5 for all practical purposes? It would seem so, seeing as
we have around 300 years’ worth of Western European "classical"
music as living proof. Hum. We also have upwards of 600 years’ worth
of a capella vocal music as living proof that it isn’t.
The unavoidable tendency of the ears of an unaccompanied chorus to return
to what is natural to them is, I would suggest, the reason why such
ensembles can resonate with a purity that is so extraordinarily
beautiful.
I’ve laboured this point, but with good reason: Alain
Kremski is at pains to point out that "a feeling of great purity
emanates from this music", while elsewhere the importance of "celestial"
or "natural" harmoniousness is repeatedly underlined. With
all due respect, you simply cannot take such purity and harmoniousness
and "make it compatible" with a piano - that’s tantamount
to making the Mona Lisa compatible with a toilet window for a frame.
The piano inevitably renders such pieces "through a glass, darkly",
giving us merely a rough idea of the import, a coarse outline with the
crucial details of the "purity" scrambled in the morass of
irrational intervals. Certainly, a good number of these pieces inadvertently
sound like those ersatz orientalisms you find in certain old
black-and-white films, where some blacked-up bloke wearing a fez and
a stripy nightgown does the old Egyptian "sand-shuffle", usually
(and with a degree of geographic licence) to the tune of "It was
in Baghdad". In any case, we’ve no idea to what extent Hartmann
has "dressed them up" for western consumption.
For these reasons I suspect, strongly but regretfully,
that these arrangements for piano do these ancient tunes no favours
whatsoever. However, before somebody mounts his high horse and charges
me down, I’d better add at once that this is not the same as
saying that they have no value at all. Enter my next serious misgiving:
the booklet note. Of the nine pages in English (the other language is
French), two concern the pianist (one in relation to the music, and
one to biographical background), one gives a potted resumé of
Gurdjieff and Hartmann, one contains some acknowledgements, and four
discuss Gurdjieff’s philosophy. In Volume 7 the ninth displays the "eneagram",
a "secret symbol in certain early esoteric schools". Basically,
this is a circle whose circumference is divided into nine equal parts,
seven of which are labelled with the notes of the equal temperament
key of C major, and two of which are, well, not. The circumferential
points are cross-connected by a symmetrical tracery of straight lines,
a close study of which reveals absolutely nothing whatsoever of any
musical significance, and neither do the notes deign to enlighten us
otherwise. Perhaps the real significance is buried in the observation
that in the Volume 9 booklet this page is blank, the "eneagram"
having mysteriously translated to a space that was vacant in the French
section of the Volume 7 booklet?
I should also mention that, apart from the minutiae
of track listings, titles, and a couple of quotes inside a front cover,
the booklets are identical in content - even to the extent that both
volumes claim to be "the last of a series", and to "complete
the anthology of works", and this in spite of there being ten
volumes! From this, you may deduce that there is no commentary on the
pieces of music themselves. Should you so deduce, you would be spot
on. This is a pity, because whilst we can make a fair stab at what titles
like Dervish Dance, Adam and Eve, Women’s Dance,
Tibetan Masks, and Kurd Shepherd Melody are "about",
we don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of guessing several others, such
as Fontainebleu 1 October 1925, Big Seven, and Multiplication
of 9 October.
Then again, why is over half of the text given over
to what is, in the context, such a detailed philosophical discourse?
This philosophy is of the sort that you either find profoundly mystical,
or common sense dressed up in arcane jargon, or simply pretentious twaddle,
depending on your background, education, and prejudices. Personally,
I am deeply suspicious of philosophies that hint at knowing the Answer
to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, yet proceed to
merely sound revelatory: "The ray of creation develops,
covering the cosmic octave. In this scale man finds his place participating
more or less consciously, according to his ‘degree of objective reasoning’,
his comprehension [et cetera]", or aphoristic pronouncements
like "Judge a man not by what he says, but what he thinks",
which sounds impressive but at rock bottom is obvious and moreover misses
out on the all-important "how?". The other aspect that
bothers me is this prevalent tendency to try to demonstrate that the
ancient mystics had already "invented" things like Relativity
and Quantum Theory, and that modern science has simply rediscovered
them. I don’t deny that there are parallels of thought, largely
perceived through the concept of the Unity of Nature, but analogues
aren’t necessarily identities (and in this particular case you can strike
out that "necessarily").
Anyway, on to the Real Question: what has all this
got to do with the music? Unfortunately, the booklet is rather less
forthcoming on what I would have thought was the most important bit.
When I’d finished boiling down the fat, all that seemed to remain was
pretty much the same impression of the relationship between Man and
Art that I already possessed. So I had to smile when I got to the last
sentence of Alain Kremski’s exposition: "After all these commentaries,
I would add mischievously: why not forget everything and simply listen
to the music for its profound beauty, simplicity, purity and authenticity".
I would suggest that those who either read the booklet or listen to
the CDs on the morning of April the First do so at their peril. I couldn’t
believe that "authenticity"!
Let’s return to that proper practical philosophical
question of "value for money". Should you buy either of these
CDs? Well, are you already averse to the mild "orientalisms"
of such as Rimsky-Korsakov (and I know one or two who are)? If so, you
should steer well clear, because these pieces positively ooze perfumed
"orientalism" out of their every pore. If you’re still with
me, do you get bored by repetition? If so, then you should steer well
clear, because these pieces (or at least quite a lot of them) have a
distinct tendency to hypnotic repetition. Still here? Right: do you
insist on plenty of meat on the bone? If so, you should steer well clear,
because these pieces, in their professed simplicity, are often quite
sparsely fleshed. Still here? (I think you’d better start checking
your wallet!) If, on the other hand, you have a taste for the exotic
- even if viewed "through a glass, darkly"! - and you’re ready,
willing and able to sample something from off the beaten track (!),
then this is going to be right up your street.
Your wallet will be relieved to hear that the recording
beautifully captures the gorgeous tone of the Steinway piano. The instrument
is set forward, but not over-much, so that the livelier numbers have
a fresh immediacy and plenty of sparkle, while still allowing the pianist
to draw a thin muslin veil over the musing songs and religious chants.
It gets better, for I found Kremski’s playing technically exemplary
and otherwise thoroughly enchanting. If we disregard that "authenticity"
bit, his "mischievous" comment said it all - he plays these
pieces exactly as he asks us to listen to them. His right hand negotiates
the vocally-inflected twiddly bits as if born to the task, and he knows
just when to let his left hand off the leash in the more resonant accompaniments.
Moreover, he does just about all you could reasonably expect to coax
the most convincing equal temperament approximation to the implied just
intonation of the exotically undulating melodic contours.
Technique is one thing, but feeling is another entirely:
for me, Kremski succeeds partly because he’s always finding subtle little
touches to spice up the repetitions, but mostly because his playing
of these pieces draws me, as if on some magic carpet, from my armchair,
and in my mind’s ear transports me to "faraway places with strange-sounding
names". In other words, for £13 I get a package touring holiday
without leaving the comfort of my own front room. Now, that’s value
for money!
Paul Serotsky
Recorded at Opus Systeme
(Vanves, France) September 1998