Jean-Louis Haguenauer

Ready to impress: French pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer is ready to wow Indonesian music fans this weekend at the French cultural center, l’Institut Français d’Indonesie (IFI). (Courtesy of IFI)

Renowned French pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer will visit Jakarta for a series of piano masterclasses and a piano recital.

French pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer has been invited by the French cultural center, l’Institut Français d’Indonesie (IFI), to conduct masterclasses for young pianists on June 4 and a piano recital at the Soehanna Hall on June 5.

His program consists exclusively of music by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), the great French composer who revolutionized the way the piano is treated as an instrument.

Debussy was determined to “musicalize” what the Impressionist painters did for the visual arts. With the sophisticated use of new harmonies and a creative way of using the pedals, he created a sound of, among others, “piano without hammers”.

It is a totally different way of hitting the piano keyboard — in fact, in many passages of his works, pianists just don’t “hit” it but “extract” the sound from the instrument. Debussy created a new kind of magic from the piano, not only with the notes, but with those wondrous spaces between the notes.

Debussy, and a bit later Maurice Ravel, brought French music back to a height only achieved during the Renaissance and Baroque eras with composers such as Jean-Philippe Rameau and Francois Couperin.

In fact, both Debussy and Ravel wrote musical hommages to those older masters. Thanks to Debussy and Ravel, there is always a specialist in “French music” in most music conservatories, since it takes a different paradigm to perform it.

Its idiosyncrasies have influenced many non-French composers. The great Hollywood musical scores of Andre Previn, John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith wouldn’t have sounded like they did if their composers hadn’t learned those peculiar orchestrations and harmonies from the French masters.

But the glory of French music didn’t last throughout the 20th century. It all ended with the coming of the “avant-garde” movement so heavily subsidized by the United States during the Cold War era.

In the propaganda war against the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, intellectual freedom and cultural power of the US that would influence almost the whole Western world. In France, this political movement was headed by politician/composer/conductor Pierre Boulez (1925-2016).

Boulez aggressively banned music by past and present French and foreign composers, mostly Soviet ones such as Shostakovich and his “sympathizers” such as Benjamin Britten (who he banned in Britten’s own home country when Boulez got the position of the director of the BBC Orchestra) in countries where he spread his political artistic wings, which brought collateral damage to the classical music world.

Since then, “classical-contemporary music” was a state-funded fraud, from which politicians dressed up as “composers” amassed huge fortunes by saying that music should serve for the future, not the present.

Unfortunately that future never came, as Boulez admitted on his 83rd birthday in the British newspaper The Telegraph in an interview entitled “I was a bully, I am not ashamed”.

The French government, through its subsidies to Boulez’s organization, l’Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), had funded “music” that has no audience, despite all of French radio’s attempts to force-feed it to people (with “world premieres” never followed by performances elsewhere).

Absorbing about three-quarters of the French government subsidy for music, Boulez and IRCAM composers have not yet produced a musical masterpiece worthy to be a French asset in the repertory of 20th and 21st century classical music.

Benoit Duteurtre’s stinging but funny book, Requiem pour une avant-garde, which was published in 1995 and says that musical “analysis” has replaced music in Boulez’s circles and that audiences were expected to endure atonal concerts like religious sermons, demonstrates what had become increasingly apparent in the West: Abstraction in all the arts has reached a dead end and a new generation of artists has turned its back on the self-conscious avant-gardism of their predecessors. Abstraction was only ever an idea, seductive but ultimately inexpressive and sterile.

So things have changed and although classical music in Europe has suffered from the damage, it is here to stay, clearly moving to Asia for its survival and rebirth. It is time to revive music by great composers banned by the avantgardist politicians-cum-artists and I especially hope that the music of Olivier Messiaen whose hour-and-a-half masterpiece, the Turangalila Symphonie, which was labelled “brothel music” by Boulez, would be more often programmed throughout the world as one of the pillars of French music of the 20th century.  

And now, far away from Paris, the Jakarta public will listen for the first time to a live performance of the two books of Preludes one century after they were written; each book contains 12 exquisite musical pictures.

Haguenauer is a Debussy specialist and a virtuoso pianist who was the subject of the feature film, La Spirale du Pianiste.

The 24 preludes were written in the last decade of the composer’s life, sporadically between 1909 and 1913. Debussy was the first Western composer who was inspired by the gamelan music he heard at the Paris Expo in 1889, not by its surface exoticism but by the sonority, texture and complex polyphony of it.

Since then, Javanese gamelan music was one of the important catalysts in the flowering of Debussy’s mature style and it left its mark on his work in a much broader and more profound way than is generally supposed.

A French pianist performing French music. Is that special? Not really. In fact it should be quite normal. But considering that Debussy was highly influenced by Indonesian music, why have Indonesian classical musicians not yet been able to present an all-Indonesian program?

With the wealth of folk music from 17,000 islands, any Indonesian classical composer shouldn’t have any problems in finding our own identity. This should be a question in everyone’s mind after Haguenauer’s concert on Sunday, which I am sure will be mind-opening for everyone who witnesses his artistry.

The writer is a composer and pianist

Popular

To my horror, it’s just a movie!

RI, Australia strengthen partnership on taxing crypto assets

Pentagon chief congratulates Prabowo on being elected President