Jean Catoire’s Opus 312

The fifth volume in Nicolas Horvath’s project to record the complete piano works of French composer Jean Catoire is the second of the three volumes that consist of a single composition. The composition is Opus 312, whose duration is a little more than three hours. It constitutes a radical shift in Catoire’s approach to composition, differing entirely from the works that had been encountered in the first four volumes of this collection. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first piece that can be divided into discrete individual movements, all of roughly the same duration, between five minutes and six and a half minutes. The entire composition consists of 32 of those movements.

This is a case in which the image of a score page in the booklet is particularly useful, if not downright essential:

This is basically the prototype for all 32 movements. Note the absence of clef signs or key signatures. All that really matters is the overall shape of the distribution of note heads, which “fan out” and then “fan back in” on the basis of the number of notes. In addition, there is the (invisible) vertical “axis of symmetry” that runs down the middle of the page. In other words that overall shape serves as a “theme,” whose “variations” arise by virtue of working with different pitch classes.

Fortunately, that booklet is included on the Amazon.com download page. Lawrence Ball’s essay does not discuss this implicit symmetry in his remarks about individual compositions.  Opus 312 is one of the few compositions to be mentioned at all, and Ball says nothing about symmetry providing an underlying overall plan. Ironically, he does talk about reflection, but in a different context:

This sound is mirror, rather than object or objective material. As such the music is hard to capture, being as it is diverting light that would usually go from composer to performer to listener instead the light comes from within the listener. Allow the sound to work ON you rather than your awareness work on it.

In that context, I would suggest that it is through a gradual recognition of the mirrors on the pages of Catoire’s score pages that the attentive listener is induced to allow the sound to “work,” so to speak.

With the benefit of the score page reproduced in the booklet, the attentive listener will probably “get” the overall plan of Opus 312 before half a dozen of its movements have elapsed. What that listener makes of the remaining movements will depend on the his/her/their personal dispositions. That is where Ball’s remarks kick in as a valuable contribution to coming to know how the act of listening to this music differs from just about any other act of listening.