creation : 23.06.1966 at Strasbourg
duration : 22′
musicians: 6 percussionists
dedicated : Percussions de Strasbourg
Composed for six drummers, voice and piano in 1966, for the Groupe instrumental des percussions de Strasbourg, which premiered it in this city on 23 June 1966, Chant après chant belongs to the second Book of Virgil’s Death, a vast cycle conceived around the novel by Hermann Broch, this second book evoking “the nocturnal anguish that decides a creator, on the threshold of death, to destroy his work”. Barraqué planned to produce several random versions of this fragment of Virgil’s Death, one of which was to be reserved for percussion instruments only. In the original version here, piano and voice join the six percussion desks, which bring together nearly one hundred and forty instruments belonging to more than thirty different species (among them: Mokoubyos, Creole timpani, Thai gongs, etc.).
Such a broad use of percussion instruments, with “sometimes rich but often limited possibilities,” notes the composer, “influences the writing itself; it is therefore often directed, inflected according to purely sonic imperatives that determine the fluctuation of musical discourse in the formal commentary. A family of timbres, considered to be true driving agents (with, at the extremities, long-resonance instruments as opposed to short-attack instruments and, in the centre, instruments with multiple possibilities), allows, despite the proximity of determined and indeterminate sounds, a serial articulation on the polyphonic level. In spite of the instrumental limitations of the work’s programme, the texture is very complex, with intensities playing an essential role. The composer has been led to open up the dynamic range to the maximum; this is particularly noticeable in the many rolling effects that run through the work, some of which range from the most tenuous pianissimo to the paroxysm of force. To the waves and crackling of the drums, the piano contrasts a sometimes pointillist, often sumptuous writing, which is inserted into the sound device like a foreign body and gives it an additional tension.
Curiously, the voice is less predominant in Chant après Chant than it is in Séquence. Rather, it slips, sometimes furtively, into the openwork space of a polyphony of varying density. On a few occasions, she escapes from it for an instantly muffled cry. Yet the sung text probably carries more weight than it does in Sequence. He commissioned the composition of the work. Barraqué established it himself, borrowing shreds of phrases from Hermann Broch and setting them in a poetic commentary that he freely wrote. The whole is asymmetrically arranged around the central figure: “Seas of Silence”, which is whispered by the voice of the instruments, abandoned for a moment. This central figure, preceded and followed by a long “pause” (to use the author’s terminology), is one of the avatars of the silence-sound-silence triptych, one of the main motifs of Virgil’s Death.
An epic work, a paroxysmal work, Chant après Chant occupies, in The Death of Virgil, a situation that we could have really appreciated if the second Book had been completed. As it stands, this important fragment constitutes, in the same way as the restored Time, a whole whose unity can be apprehended on the level of vocal, instrumental and poetic style, as well as on the less accessible level of form.
André HODEIR