Rabelais Takes in on the Chin from Hanes

Gargantua eating a salad of pilgrims (etching by Gustave Doré for Chapter 38 of Rabelais’ novel, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

This Friday will see the release of GARGANTUA, a suite on seven movements composed by Simon Hanes for three drum sets, three electric basses, three trombones, three French horns, and three soprano voices. Presumably, the music was conceived as a reflection on the novel by François Rabelais with the same title. The was the author’s second novel, published in the mid-sixteenth century. For those with some command of French, the full title of the novel is La vie tres horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel jadis composée par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme. One might almost say that the magnitude of the protagonist is reflected in the length of the full title!

Those of my generation may recall that this author was a target of a priggish Midwestern community, which was the setting for Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man. (He was actually one of several targets, which included Geoffrey Chaucer and, the one receiving the most attention, Honoré de Balzac.) Rabelais had a gift for comic ribaldry, which began with Pantagruel and then continued with Gargantua.

Sadly, Hanes’ music never does justice to Rabelais’ talents. The advance material I received describes the score as “bracingly excessive in its every aspect.” That description is then elaborated as follows: “Pendulum swings from lyrical beauty to corrosive noise, jarring stylistic shifts that collide the transcendent mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen with the blistering metal of Behemoth; the polyphony of Tibetan Buddhist singing with the sonic sculptures of Edgard Varèse and the salacious swagger of Led Zeppelin.” Personally, I never was able to buy into this; and, before I had experienced even half of the ten tracks on the album, I was ready to scream “Enough already!” (To be fair, however, I was definitely amused by the throwaway quote from Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring!”)

Hanes clearly had a massive undertaking in mind, but his mass needed to be made of “sterner stuff.”