Uploaded February 2010 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Madrigal III for clarinet, violin, cello, 2 percussion instruments and piano was composed in the spring of 1962 and dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Steinecke, since 1945 founder and daring promoter of the Darmstadt Festival.
This work comprises almost all of Madrigal I, written four years earlier for clarinet solo. For Pouseeur, the earlier work represented a first and almost unconscious attempt to reactivate the harmonic values that post-Webernian music had almost completely neutralized. Pousseur made a more resolute attempt in this direction in Votre Faust. In Madrigal III, this reactivation is still dependent on dodecaphonic material, and crystallizes around a process of frequent and variable repetition of the constituent notes of an harmonic field.
The work excludes all mobile forms, yet benefits from a supple and fluctuating performance. While notes are clearly set forth, other aspects of the music (duration of pauses, intensity and attacks) are relaxed and permit a certain amount of liberty. Synchronization, speed, silences or dynamic evolution thus result partly from the performers reactions, which can be individual and isolated or contrarily, dependent on the reactions of other musicians.
Above notes by Jean-Claude Eloy
In 1945 Pierre Boulez won a first prize in harmony. He was twenty then, and suddently made the discovery that was to affect the whold of his musical life: the [second] Vienna School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It was a revelation, he relates, I had a passionate urge to learn all about that music, to know how it was made. There were violent discussions then and the music of the [second] Vienna School was called mathematical recipes. But I realized that this was the music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities for evolution. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein. The tonal idea was based on a universe defined by gravity and attraction: the serial idea, on a universe in perpetual expansion.
[Please accept our profuse apologies for the chthonic sound quality of this 1960s LP.]
Madrigal III for clarinet, violin, cello, 2 percussion instruments and piano was composed in the spring of 1962 and dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Steinecke, since 1945 founder and daring promoter of the Darmstadt Festival.
This work comprises almost all of Madrigal I, written four years earlier for clarinet solo. For Pouseeur, the earlier work represented a first and almost unconscious attempt to reactivate the harmonic values that post-Webernian music had almost completely neutralized. Pousseur made a more resolute attempt in this direction in Votre Faust. In Madrigal III, this reactivation is still dependent on dodecaphonic material, and crystallizes around a process of frequent and variable repetition of the constituent notes of an harmonic field.
The work excludes all mobile forms, yet benefits from a supple and fluctuating performance. While notes are clearly set forth, other aspects of the music (duration of pauses, intensity and attacks) are relaxed and permit a certain amount of liberty. Synchronization, speed, silences or dynamic evolution thus result partly from the performers reactions, which can be individual and isolated or contrarily, dependent on the reactions of other musicians.
Above notes by Jean-Claude Eloy
In 1945 Pierre Boulez won a first prize in harmony. He was twenty then, and suddently made the discovery that was to affect the whold of his musical life: the [second] Vienna School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It was a revelation, he relates, I had a passionate urge to learn all about that music, to know how it was made. There were violent discussions then and the music of the [second] Vienna School was called mathematical recipes. But I realized that this was the music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities for evolution. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein. The tonal idea was based on a universe defined by gravity and attraction: the serial idea, on a universe in perpetual expansion.
[Please accept our profuse apologies for the chthonic sound quality of this 1960s LP.]
![Edison Denisov, Symphony [No.1], USSR Ministry of Culture Orchestra, Rozhdestvensky](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xiH4u8B_glg/mqdefault.jpg "Edison Denisov, Symphony [No.1], USSR Ministry of Culture Orchestra, Rozhdestvensky
It seems to me that one of the greatest values of music is its spiritual power, its ability to carry a great spiritual charge. Music carried this charge during pre-Bach and Bach epochs, as well as for some time afterwards (Mozart, Brahms). In the 20th century, this charge was, to a considerable degree, lost. During our lifetime, for a long while, the loss of spiritual values has progressed, - or their leveling, or even a negative attitude to them revealed by the growth of so-called atheism - a phenomenon very dangerous to mankind. I remember Shostakovich telling me a few times a year or two before his death: Earlier, there were ten commandments: thou shall not kill; thou shall not steal; thou shall not seduce your neighbors wife; etc. But now we have just one single commandment - do not violate the purity of the teaching of Marx and Lenin. A lot of artists perceived the leveling of spiritual values and their replacement by false values. In music - both in academic and in new - there is a lot of what we may call bluff. Currently, even some prominent names, experiencing intense professional scrutiny closely follow all the slightest changes of fashion - and, since they possess a certain technique and skills in the application of cliché, they often deceive the audience. Take the great artists of the past - Mozart, Bach, or Brahms; from Russian music, take Mussorgsky, Glinka, Tchaikovsky. Those never cheated the audience, never fooled anyone - they were always honest and sincere. At present, unfortunately, the idea of honesty often disappears from art. Even significant composers, and to a much greater extent, artists, often indulge in bluffing, whereas the audience, having lost the criteria, takes this bluff at face value.
In our society, false art has often substituted true one. There was a long period when the true art was suppressed, whereas false art was hailed, presented as true, and the entire mass media industriously persuaded the people that this was true art. This was how, in particular, they managed to fend the people off the concert hall. When before the war, Soviet music was played, people went to listen to it. In the 20s, concert halls were packed. Nowadays, one has to organize the audience; there is even an expression, filling groups. Once there was an authors concert of some secretary-composer, related to his nomination for the Lenin award. I asked a clarinetist from the State Orchestra: How was the concert? And he told me: It was wonderful - one to five. - What do you mean? - Fifty people on the stage, ten in the stalls. This is a standard picture. Here also lies one of the reasons for the fact that opera houses, especially provincial ones, stay empty. For a long time, all had been done to divert the public from art.
Unlike some other composers who got carried away by serialism, I have never rejected intention, because purely abstract reasoning deprived of any intentional content, makes music more superficial. One may compose a lot of good pieces, but they will be, so to say, beautiful musical architecture with very little spiritual content. For example, I appreciate Xenakiss music, but objectively speaking, it is very superficial - it has almost no psychological content. In a sense, this is objective music. If we attribute Xenakis to French music, he will appear to continue the tradition of Roussel and Varèse, but in no way is he even close to Debussys tradition. To me, other things are more appealing. In my opinion, Debussy is one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. I think that he is even more innovative, if we use this word, than Stravinsky or Webern - but Debussys innovations do not lie on the surface. In Stravinskys music, the new immediately strikes you; whereas one initially takes Debussy as very traditional. However, when you start to analyze, you see that he was a much more daring thinker than many of his contemporaries. In this respect, Debussys music, in his best pieces, like Pelleas and Melisande, is to me as promising as Mussorgskys music - which was really appreciated almost one hundred years after [his death], or possibly has not yet been appreciated even today.
Edison Denisov
Denisov was born in Tomsk, Siberia into the family of a radio-physicist, who gave him the very unusual first name Edison, in honour of the great American inventor. He studied mathematics before deciding to spend his life composing. This decision was enthusiastically supported by Dmitri Shostakovich, who gave him instructions in composition.")
