Death, Creativity, and Voice in Jean Barraqué's Le temps restitué

Abstract

DEATH, CREATIVITY, AND VOICE IN JEAN BARRAQUÉ’S LE TEMPS RESTITUÉ AARON HAYES OMPOSERS WHO ATTENDED Olivier Messiaen’s courses would no doubt have confronted the multi-faceted problem of time in music.1 It is tempting to speculate that these young composers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after leaving Messiaen’s class for the evening and congregating at Jean Barraqué’s Paris flat for wine and discussion, touched on another aspect of time, the temporality of human existence.2 Although Barraqué never attended Darmstadt, his close ties with many of those composers in Paris and his commitment to serial technique placed him in the central circles of the European avant-garde. Barraqué audited Messiaen’s course between 1948 and 1952, the same years as Karel Goeyvaerts, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Yvonne Loriod, and others. Along with Pierre Boulez, Barraqué also attended Pierre Schaeffer’s class on electronic music during that time, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was involved in the Domaine Musicale concerts with Boulez and Pierre Souvtchinsky.3 Barraqué’s participation in the developments of his avant-garde compatriots was coupled with his attention to wider trends in twentieth-century thought. Studies of Barraqué’s deeply intellectual background reveal that he was closely in touch with the philosophical C 6 Perspectives of New Music and literary forces of his Parisian world—not least of all Michel Foucault, his lover during the early 1950s.4 These two aspects of Barraqué are well known, but the deep connection between his serial aesthetics and his philosophical background has not been dealt with thoroughly. By coupling his serial aesthetics to the theme of death, Barraqué offered a strong link between the musical avant-garde and the question of temporality in European thought. Barraqué’s piece Le temps restitué for soprano, chorus, and large ensemble (1957) lies especially near to this question, since the source of his text, Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, itself focused on temporal-existential themes. Some of the most striking musical qualities of Le temps restitué are also those that most clearly illustrate the implications of Barraqué’s musical-philosophical suggestions. In this large-scale piece, the creative transformation of vocal texture, the sensitivity to timbre, the porous boundaries among each vocal and instrumental voice, and the expressive vocal gestures and their relationship to the ensemble all stem from aesthetic decisions that can be traced to particular philosophical ideas. My analysis below reveals the way in which Barraqué’s treatment of texture and vocal expressivity relates to human temporality as it is shaped by the anxiety of death, specifically by the sense of anxiety as it becomes articulated in Barraqué’s acknowledged philosophical inspirations. I argue that, with Le temps restitué, Barraqué brought his philosophical concern with temporality to bear on his compositional style by a musical manifestation of certain consequences of existential thought—especially of the critiques of the over-determined unity of the self and the forces of dissolution and dispersion at work on human existence. Contrary to the majority of scholarship on Barraqué, my approach to this musical-philosophical perspective is not primarily concerned with serialism. The most thoroughly discussed aspect of Barraqué’s style in Le temps restitué and in his other works is the innovative manner in which he deploys integral serial technique.5 Like other composers of the 1950s, Barraqué developed different ways of transforming a small initial set of serial rows in order to generate new possibilities beyond the basic permutations. As Hopkins most clearly explains, Barraqué’s “proliferating series” functioned by abstracting the ordinal placement of specific pitches from one of the rows and applying it to one of its permutations. By applying the ordinal patterns of specific pitches, and not intervals, of two different permutations to each other, it is possible to create new rows with different but related intervallic content. To be sure, Barraqué’s unique serial system, described extensively by Henrich as well as Griffiths, Feneyrou, and Hopkins, is a significant element of Death, Creativity, and Voice in Le temps restitué 7 the composer’s style and a notable contribution to the development of serialism in mid-century Europe. Yet accounting...