Musica Callada - 2 - sonorities & borrowed time

" What is he playing?
    —It's a fragment of Mompou's Silent Music.
    —That's what I call a good ear.
    —That's what I call using Mompou as background music while I work and having read Jankelevitch's essay on Mompou, Le message de Mompou. Jankelevitch is a philosopher at the Sorbonne. Look at the apparent independence of the fingers, feel the sensation of clarity in each note. You have to go back to Chopin to find such rare magic at the piano..."

The written extract above is from "The Pianist", a novel by Manuel Vazquez Montalban. It is true that the sonority and clarity - and poetry - of Chopin's music was of central importance to Federico Mompou; indeed, Mompou wrote his own set of variations on one of his namesake's melodies. With every session of playing Musica Callada, I'm furthering my understanding that poetry, sonority and rubato are cornerstones of the language of both of these composers.

Wilhelm von Lenz, who studied with both Liszt and Chopin, believed rubato formed the very heart of Chopin’s playing: “He would say, ‘A piece lasts for, say, five minutes, only in that it occupies this time for its overall performance; internal details are another matter. And there you have rubato.’”
“Rubato” may be written in only nine of Chopin’s manuscripts - only nine! -but is essential to nearly all of them.
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“Look at these trees,” Franz Liszt said, “the wind plays in the leaves, stirs up life among them, the tree remains the same, that is Chopinesque rubato.”

With Mompou, where does the borrowing of time begin and end? The composer... [please take over, Mr Antonio Iglesias - ]

The images above and below are from a composition of mine composed in 1988: 'Primordial'. Clearly Mompou was in the ear and mind of the 17-year old that penned this work. Between 2008 and 2013 most of my early scores suffered water-damage and now those open-ended drifts of notes are even more elusive, as they evaporate into blurs on the page... Time & sound dissolve. 

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'Phantasms and Majicks', a composition of mine from 1987, has similar abstract concerns: the primacy of sonority and rubato.
​In fact, this looks like it's borrowed heavily from the last movement of Mompou's 'Cants Magics'. Shameless appropriation, Mr Long!

This evening, in my work on Mompou's music I've been particularly relishing the chords in Book 2: there are many different characters to be found here. In no 12, the harmonies bring the music of Olivier Messiaen to my mind:

And in no.16, Bill Evans makes an appearance -

I'll hand back to Mr Iglesias for the final words tonight -
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Signing off -
Chris  
6 Feb 2022

Musica Callada Books 1 & 2 - to be performed in 'Pianoscapes' on February 20th.
​See 'Pianoscapes' page on this website.