Jean Catoire’s Piano Works: Volume 6

The sixth volume in Nicolas Horvath’s project to record the complete piano works of French composer Jean Catoire returns to a collection of multiple compositions. However, those pieces cover a rather broad range of individual durations. The volume begins with Opera 318 and 319, both of which are less than ten minutes in duration and both of which continue the fifths intervals that formed the structure of the three-hour Opus 312. In addition to the shorter duration, these compositions show a gradual departure from an unrelentingly steady pulse, which had played a fundamental role in the overall architecture of Opus 312. These two pieces are then followed by three pieces, Opera 320, 321, and 322, whose durations are all somewhat longer than thirteen minutes. Here again, the steady pulse is interrupted with shifts in the timing of individual open fifths.

The overall duration then jumps up to 40 minutes with Opus 410. This may be taken as somewhat of a “running start” into prolonged duration. The remaining composition in this volume is Opus 420, whose duration is about three hours and twenty minutes. One thus gets the impression that Catoire has decided to develop a “rhetoric” of open intervals organized around different overall durations. After listening to Opus 420 for the first time, I thought that an appropriate title might be “Variations on a Tolling Bell.” On the other hand, I would say that those variations were already in play in Opus 318, quite possibly motivated by the experience of listening to Opus 312.

If rhetoric does, indeed, figure significantly in Catoire’s approach to composition, it might be worth considering that attention to rhetoric is supported more by syntax than by semantics. By way of comparison one might consider the poems that Gertrude Stein collected under the title Stanzas in Meditation. These poems were probably meant to be read aloud. However, how one declaims them is more a matter of syntactic structure than one of “delivering a semantic message,” so to speak.

However, there may be another way in which listeners (and, perhaps, performers as well) can approach Catoire’s manuscripts. In this case the source comes from John Cage, who liked to tell the story of his asking Gita Sarabhai what the purpose of music was. Her reply amounted to an engaging synthesis of Western and Eastern logics: “the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”

In the examples of Catoire manuscripts that I was able to examine (thanks to the accompanying booklet), there are no dynamic markings. There is considerable variation in the “density” of the notation; but dynamic level has less to do with whether one note is louder (or softer) than another than with the extended stretches over time during which a sound decays to inaudibility. To embrace that approach to dynamics is, indeed, both sobering and quieting.

So it is that we return to Stein’s syntactic foundation. Like Catoire’s compositions, her stanzas differ considerably from one another where length is concerned. Some may easily yield to parsing when one listens to them being read. However, the longer they get, the harder it is to avoid retreating to pencil and paper in order to hang several pages of text upon a single diagram. If that is what happens in Catoire’s scores, then what is a listener to do with one of those three-hour compositions? Sarabhai might have said “Just listen to the moment; and, when the mind is no longer stressed by complexity, structure will come to it.”