Maurice Ohana, "Two Studies for Piano and Percussion"

Etude d'interpretation No. 11 (1983) - 11'39
(Sons confundus)

Etude d'interpretation No. 12 (1983) - 6'03
(Imitations - Dialogues)



Maurice Ohana's Two Studies for Piano and Percussion (1983) are part of a long-term project for fifty graded piano studies: the Etudes d'interpretation. The only ones to include percussion, they are nevertheless central to Ohana's concern with sound as well as technique. We can see from many of his larger instrumental and choral works (i.e. Synaxis, Office des Oracles, Lys de Madrigaux, and Signes) that a combination of piano and percussion is an important element in his magical sound world.

In this analytical, materialistic age, what kind of response is possible to such disturbingly beautiful music as Ohana's? Listening to Sons confondus, one recalls a Debussyan criterion: Music is made for the inexpressible. What I would wish is that it should seem to emerge from the shadows and return again from time to time." In Ohana's music, there is an unashamed delight in sound, and a simplicity that reminds one of le Douanier Rousseau. But there is also a toughness that is far from childlike. In Imitations/Dialogues (for skin and wood percussion, the first being for metal) the sounds become demonic, the fragile moth-like delicacy of the first piece having concealed an energy that now explodes in savage fury. The roots here, although perceived through American Negro Spiritual and Black rhythm, are unmistakably African. 0hana's magic and innocence are never fer from such untamed primeval power.

One of the early critics of Debussy's Pelleas spoke in terms that apply perfectly to Ohana: "He recedes to a state of pre-music, to the moment before music takes on being and form." Ohana's awed and ceaseless explorations of the origins of sound stem from a simple reverence for life. His music is a response to, and an interpretation of, the natural world around him. He warns us that our technological, computerized world is in danger of divorcing music altogether from the elements from which it is born.

Maurice Ohana, "Trois Contes de L'Honorable Fleur"

TROIS CONTES DE L'HONORABLE FLEUR
Opera de chambre

1. Ogre mangeant des Jeunes Femmes sous la Lune
2. Le Vent d'Est enferme dans un sac (debut)
3. Le Vent d'Est enferme dans un sac (fin)
4. La Pluie remontee au Ciel

MICHIKO HIRAYAMA, soprano

Michel DEBOST, flute
Claude MAISONNEUVE, hautbois
Jacques DI DONATO, clarinette
Jean-Pierre LARROQUE, basson
Pierre THIBAUD, trompette
Jacques TOULON, trombone
Paul BOUFIL, violoncelle
Jay GOTTLIEB, piano
J ean-Louis FORESTIER, percussion

Direction: DANIEL CHABRUN
Editions Jobert

Maurice Ohana, "Silenciaire"

-- Liner Notes Continued --
Silenciaire
(Editions SALABERT, Paris)

Percussions de Strasbourg

Jean Batigne _ Gabriel Bouchet
Jean-Paul Finkbeing _ Detlef Kieffer
Georges Van Gucht _ Claude Ricou

Ensemble Instrumental
direction
Daniel CHABRUN

Silenciaire is a meditation on one of the most precious commodities of our civilisation. It is a cluster of ideas for string orchestra and percussion instruments, which stems from a personal concept of silence. The work was composed for the Lucerne Festival Strings, who gave the first performance in September 1969, along with the Strasbourg Percussion group. It is a synthesis of colours. Two worlds of sound are compared and contrasted with each other. Within a largely contrapuntal framework, they clash with each other or melt and blend. The work is made up of 4 episodes, called "adventures". Each forms a frame within which the various groups of players can choose freely the moment at which they will enter, and play with the others. Waves of sound grow out of the silence and dwindle back into it, seemingly governed by a magnetic force, rendered, relentless by a series of strident chords used to open and close the work. This also occur at two other points. An inner landscape of tangible irridescence, and palpable rhythms, arises from the "pointillist" percussion texture and the third-tones used in the string parts. This evokes the stony silence of underground caves, where, in the flame of a torch, a petrified landscape lights up, frozen stars sparkle and a strange flickering rebounds. Here and there, out of distance, comes the sound of bells, and birds singing, as if they were shreds from another world...maybe that wonderland of our childhood.

Maurice Ohana, "Sibylle"

-- Liner Notes Continued --

Sibylle, a meditation on womanhood, was written in 1968. Using the various vocal aspects of the female voice, the work is an almost theatrical composition. Scored for soprano, percussion and tape-recording, it was first performed in the Halles in 1971, during a concert given by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

In the Aeneid, Virgil introduces the sibyl to guide Aenas in his descent to Hell. Ohana has taken the sibyl and made her descend into herself, an attempt to have an introspective angle on womanhood. Cries, now exasperated, now of pain: now delirious, seductive, bachannalian...sighs, yelps...which seem to rise out of the body, follow one after another. The voice which is one minute tender, prophesying Man's frailty in an oracular poem is, suddenly unfettered and hisses out sounds: "Ssigma...kriss...", with disconcerting violence. Counterpoint, made up of contrasting timbres, interwoven like a length of rope, becomes finally immersed in a flood of tape-recorded sounds. "At this point," says Ohana, "the fire mixes with the percussion and cries, grows and finally dies down against a background of cinders, beneath one last lingering note, wherein the voice of a star lives on..."

Maurice Ohana, "Four Improvisations for solo Flute"

-- Liner Notes --

Four Improvisations for solo Flute
Assez libre - No. 2 - Petite flute - Rapide

Michel Debost, flute

French Office of Radio-Television
Production Director, general editor: Charles Duvelle

Certain composers glean a sensation of security by clustering in groups. Others prefer to follow the main trends of academic composition and take no risks. Then, there is that little minority which abandons the main edifice, rejects the wellworn concepts and rules on which it is based, and draw their inspiration from other sources.

Why continue to deal the same cards with which they were playing in previous centuries? asks Maurice Ohana. What was previously a game, today lies at stake. Composition becomes a dangerous ritual, preparing for a final tete-a-tete with the Minotaur, waiting at the bottom of the creative labyrinth: preparing for the encounter with the fatal mirror and ultimate judge of truth and falsehood.

There is not one work by Ohana in which he does not question the nature of the composer. This reveals a lucid mind revolting against wasteage of sounds, rejecting the insignificant. This is the crux of a mental process, the revelation of riches discovered along the path of research, a quest punctuated by spontaneous outbursts of seams, which hitherto lay buried deep in the obscurity of the undiscovered. Perhaps this constant reference to ancestral paths will reveal a chance of reconciliation with nature -- to get in tune with the Universe. Hence the unrest that every discovery by Ohana awakens in us -- that fragment that suddenly fills us with nostalgia: a passage describing some imaginary continent: a land in which, we are certain that we would be happier to live.

The Four Improvisations for solo Flute, were first performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal in 1962. In spite of the lapse of time between this work and Sibylle, the Improvisations, could be taken as the bright side of the same mystery. A meditation bathed in sunlight and blue sky, dipped in the invention of the breath and the exhilarating freedom of song. Escaping the bounds of the diatonic system, these serene and joyful monodies dance playfully on the lips of some divine nymph. -- Michel Bernard

Mauricio Ohana, "Tres Graficos para guitarra y orquesta"

-- Liner Notes --

Concerto: Tres Galficos para Guitarra y Orchesta (1957)
(dedicated to Narciso Yepes)

1. Grafico de la Farruca y Cadencias [8'35]
2. Improvisacion sobre un Grafico de la Siguiriya [7'01]
3. Grafico de la Buleria y Tiento [5'32]

Narciso Yepes, Guitar
London Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Friihbeck de Burgos

Production and Recording Supervision: Dr. Rudolf Werner
Recording Engineer: Heinz Wildhagen
Printed in Germany by Neef, Wittingen

Because of the influence of their works - poetical and musical respectively -it has been said of Juan Ramon Jimenez or Mannuel de Falla that they were "universal Andalusians." Such a description, can be given to Mauricio Ohana in a radical way. It is not so much a description as a precise and concentrated definition. Ohana was born on Gibralta in 1914 but from the point of view of heritage, spirit and artistic feeling he is keenly aware of being Andalusian. His work, established in the European milieu from the beginning, has an ideal point of departure: late Manuel de Falla, from the "Fantasia Betica" to the "Concerto", without forgetting the "Homenaje a Debussy" (Tribute to Debussy) for guitar.

A pupil of Lazare-Levy (piano), Alfredo Casella and Daniel Lesur, in 1947 Ohana became one of the leading lights of the "Zodiaque" group in Paris, an early reaction to serial intellectualism and academic neo-classicism -as Claude Rostand points out -brought about from attitudes of great individual liberty. Instrumental imagination, interpreted as a refined apotheosis of "colour" functions in Ohana -historically and physically Mediterranean with the same power as plastic, poetic and dramatic suggestions. After a "Sonatina" and "Caprichos" for piano (194548), Ohana's capacity for expression is revealed in the "Lament for the death of Sanchez Mejias", for speaker-baritone, chorus and orchestra (1950). Garcia Lorca's verses are transfigured into musical material even when subjected to a realistic conception which in the "Graficos para guitarra y orquesta" becomes deeply essential. In the sixties Ohana's aesthetic evolution crystallised into forms free from all external pressure and at the same time established within the most pungent contemporary prosody: "Studies for Percussion (1963), Signes (Signs) for wind instrumenrs, zither in third tones, flute. piano and percussion (1965). "Syllabaire pour Phedre" (Spelling-book for Phedre), "Cris" (Cries) for twelve a cappella voices and percussion (1968) are certainly a long way from pieces like "Cantigas" (Songs) or "Homenaje to Luis de Wilan" (Homage to Luis de Milin).

The personal voice of Ohana makes itself heard in a world so steeped in tradition, "folklore" and the same natural kind of sound as that of the guitar. Whereas in the "Tiento" for solo guitar he goes deeply into the values of "jonda" music (Andalusian popular song), in the "Tres Graficos", to the introspection of the popular "Farruca", "Siguiriya"', "Buleria" or "Tiento", there is added the profile and perspective of an orchestra which creates a space dimension in which the guitar performs its diffiult task. A dimension which in turn is suggested by the guitar part with its interval characteristics (including microtones), its harmonic, rhythmic and tonal attributes. We have here a southern Spain experienced from afar - lyrical, serious and brusque in its fundamental Andalusianism; geometrical and exact at times, misty and vague on occasion: sweltering in noonday heat of the sun and hidden in the darkness of the night, alternately. This is music which springs from the people just as did Falla, Garcia Lorca and Pablo Picasso, three great Andalusians who form the precise "blueprint" in which the universal Andalusian Mauricio Ohana takes his place. -- Enrique Franco (Translafed from the Spanish by Gwyn Morris)