After Territoires de l’oubli, Murail wrote two shorter works, sibling-like in their notational and gestural language: Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire… (1992), a tribute to Messiaen, and La mandragore (1993), which in part takes inspiration from Ravel’s “Le gibet” (Gaspard de la nuit). Following these compositions, after a decade away from the instrument, Murail composed the elegiac nine-part cycle Les travaux et les jours (2002). This thirty-minute odyssey is connected in many ways to Territoires de l’oubli, most notably in its revolution around a B–C tremolo, supported by a low F, which plays an important role in defining the harmonic environment of
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both compositions. Les travaux et les jours’s individual movements examine elemental components of the pianist’s gestural vocabulary – single tones, arpeggios of different velocities, grace notes, chords, rhythmic patterns, and filigree – from different perspectives: a view glimpsed through a win- dow at different times of day. The movements constitute a series not unlike Claude Monet’s “Haystack” paintings (c. 1890) or the “Helga Pictures” by the American realist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). Although it was written just after the turn of the twenty-first century, Les travaux et les jours should still be considered a high spectral work. In it, we see a composer uncom- promising in his commitment to the evolution of harmonic-timbral color in time and the exploration of liminal states.
Each movement in Les travaux et les jours explores a sonorous envir- onment, an ambience evoked using a limited repository of acoustic mate- rials and performance techniques. There is sure neutrality to the opening material (Example 4.3). The first movement begins with a barely audible, glacially ascending harmonic spectrum. The initial harmonic arch, restated and extended, becomes a rainbow that rises and falls slowly, which in turn becomes a series of rainbows rising and falling in sequence. Their reso- nances, caught in a single depressed pedal, overlap, and initially amorph- ous, ethereal arpeggiations presented in isolation become interwoven simultaneities. Intervals and notated rhythms begin to emerge, and the environment is soon characterized by ever-increasing horizontal and ver- tical densities. In the movement’s climactic passage, chords and rhythms cascade vertiginously, after which, from their combined resonances, quieter streams of harmonies are heard to re-emerge. The movement ends in decay, with a fading tremolo of the signature minor ninth, heard within the resi- due of the initial harmonic spectrum.
Other movements explore these same “simple” components and the “complex” transformations by which one musical element becomes another. In the third movement (Example 4.4) these transformations are effected in slow motion; there is a sense of languorous stasis and placidity, a Messiaen- like timelessness. The movement begins with rich mezzo piano harmonies in the piano’s upper registers ringing like chimes, echoed by pianissimo sonorities distinguished by tessitura (occurring in a higher register, emu- lating harmonics) and separated temporally by deep chasms of resonance. At a crucial moment of rupture, an indistinct gesture falling harp-like in the piano’s lowest octaves heralds a kind of chaos: rhythmic erraticism and chromatic saturation. Just after the gesture speaks, brilliant yet unpredict- able figurations are unleashed in the highest treble register, like a flock of seagulls whose flight is triggered by a wave crashing upon the shore. Gradually, as if assailed by gravity, these figurations lose their momentum and begin to discolor. Weightless and fluid passagework becomes a series of
jagged grace-note figures, which are transformed into dotted rhythms and, finally, into the chordal simultaneities of the movement’s opening.
Les travaux et les jours abounds with unprecedented techniques of
harmonic-timbral manipulation, requiring a highly controlled approach to both keyboard and pedals, in performance revealing a virtuoso performer Example 4.3 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, I.
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as well as composer. The fifth movement juxtaposes fortissimo high-treble chords played just before pianissimo chords in the lower register; instantly, with a change of pedal, the latter are revealed like a shadow resonance, pro- duced seemingly without attack (Example 4.5). In the sixth movement (the shortest, yet in some ways the most difficult in terms of performance real- ization), descending arpeggiations overlap at different rates and intensities, contributing over time to a polyphony of attacks and resonances: a virtual canon in which polyphonic lines are articulated from the keyboard in deli- cate counterpoint to the resonances held in the damper pedals. It is a play of voices and their shadows.
In a manner almost reminiscent of the études of Liszt and Scriabin, the seventh movement (Example 4.6) seems to defy the reality of the piano’s decay. Unlike its predecessor, it is animated by a variety of agile figures and techniques: trills and tremolandi, intensifying figurations involving sin- gle notes, hocketing dyads, and arpeggios, broadly characterized by loud dynamics (fff) and near secco textures. As a culmination of the work, the two final movements offer the listener memories of all that has gone before. The eighth movement is a thematic (if the adjective can be applied loosely) retrospective, revisiting the distinctive materials of the previous move- ments, albeit in fragmented form; in contrast, the ninth is an elegiac sonic Example 4.5 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, V.
essay on the bare elements, stripped of thematic significance. Elemental, the B–C oscillating ninth and slowly ascending spectral return. The final movement offers an environment for meditation, with quiet, lushly pedaled events separated by increasingly large rests – resonant spaces of up to seven seconds in duration. In the penultimate movement, material is fragmented and compressed. In the ensuing coda, all materials are neutralized, returned to the repository of purest harmonic sound.
The movements are without titles, and Les travaux et les jours features no text-based instructions or performance indications. Murail’s sole extra- musical reference is the work’s enigmatic title – a nod to Works and Days, an 800-verse compendium by the Greek poet Hesiod (active c. 700 BC). At first, this seems an odd reference. Hesiod’s text is an instructional work, offering assorted moral and practical advice for the living of an honest life. “Best of all is the man who perceives everything himself, taking account Example 4.6 Murail, Les travaux et les jours, VII.
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of what will be better in the long run and in the end,” is, in its content and stilted manner, a typical statement. “Good is he, too, who follows good advice”; “Point out to your labourers while it is still midsummer: ‘It will not always be summer. Build your huts’” (Hesiod, 1988: 45, 52). Detailed explications of cosmology and cosmogony are interspersed with practical, seemingly hard-earned insights.
Marry a virgin so that you may teach her good ways; and for preference marry her who lives near you, with all circumspection, in case your marriage is a joke to your neighbors. For a man acquires nothing better than the good wife, and nothing worse than the bad one … who singes a man without a brand, strong though he be, and consigns him to premature old age.
(Hesiod, 1988: 58)
Works and Days touches upon topics such as politics, agriculture, religion,
the merits of labor, and the intrigues of the gods as well as practical aspects of seafaring (although Hesiod admitted that he was no sailor). It is a disorderly text, something of a hodgepodge, intentionally didactic yet indisputably poetic. It is not considered a “masterpiece” so much as an “important work.” Yet in his own day, Hesiod was critically acclaimed. A breed apart from his contemporary Homer, he was recognized as a poet who celebrated peace, not war, and whose poems, while rambling and erratic, were among the first literary works to convey the personality of their author. It is a curious work, very different in nature than the writings of Max Weber (Die ration-
alen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, 1921), which were influen-
tial on the first-generation spectralists and would reflect something of the thought processes behind Murail’s concerto Le désenchantement du monde. In conversation, Murail attested that it was the spirit, and not the content or structure, of Works and Days that informed his compositional act: the daily work of sitting with the material, alone at his desk, viewing it honestly and attempting to craft it with industry. One senses a similar melding of the sacred and the profane, in an essayistic musical composition that considers both the inspired and the practical aspects of artistic creation.
Murail wrote Les travaux et les jours in somewhat reclusive fashion, reflective of both his professional circumstance and personal deport- ment. At the time, he had moved to the United States and was teaching at Columbia University, appointed to the post left vacant by Varèse’s former assistant, Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934). He chose to live upstate from the city, remaining geographically separated from the ideological battles that continued to rage across Manhattan. Some of his students sensed a desire to remove himself from the rhetorical and political quagmires of the musical arena. (Whether or not his own personal attitude can be traced to
the death of his close friend Grisey a few years earlier cannot be said with certainty.) As an interpreter who worked with him at this time, I sensed a sincere wish on his part not to do battle with his work but instead to grap- ple with his chosen materials, in a creative process more akin to that of an artisan than an artiste; he had written, just a few years earlier, “I imagine myself as a sculptor in front of a stone block, which conceals a hidden form …” (Murail, 1989: 154). “It seems to me,” he commented in his program notes to Les travaux, “that it is best to adopt a completely naïve attitude, to make believe as though this were the first piece that I wrote for the piano.” For all the complexities of its realization and conception, Les travaux et les
jours is boldly direct in its goals and processes – reflecting the mindset of a
composer not oblivious to past and present but seeking to hear the musical elements at hand anew, with fresh ears. It reveals a composer at the height of his powers. Everything necessary for the realization of his music is inher- ent in the notation itself. Each articulation, dynamic marking, and graphic indication is fully functional in a score that, unlike the heavily annotated
Territoires de l’oubli, is devoid of written text.
Hesiod’s Works and Days is regarded as one of the earliest works in which a poet asserts his identity as an artist and, more so, his authority as a teller of truth. In the text itself, he directly attributes this authority to his masterful handling and understanding of poetic material and form. Hesiod acknow- ledges his debt to the muses who, he famously states, “have taught me to make sound without limit,” and crucially asserts the power of the poetic forms with which he has chosen to communicate (Hunter, 2008: 167). It is in this same sense, playing Les travaux et les jours, that one senses a mature composer, inspired and in full command of his chosen tools. The written page and its sonic counterpart reveal a disciplined approach to the material and the identity, and authority, of a composer reconciled with his craft.