GEORGES LENTZ - composer
GEORGES LENTZ - composer
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Texts about the music:
(by musicologists Richard Toop and Gordon Kerry)
A recent and particularly fascinating addition to the history of such ideas is provided by the recent music of Georges Lentz,
born in 1965 in Luxembourg, but resident in Australia since 1990. Shortly before arriving in Australia, he had begun work on a
cycle of pieces entitled "Caeli enarrant…", which preoccupies him to this day. The title comes from Psalm XIX -
"The heavens declare the glory of God" (or in Handelian terms, "The heavens are telling…") and it reflects both Lentz'
fascination with the awesome beauty of the universe revealed by modern astronomy, and his spiritual/religious beliefs.
Early pieces in the cycle include works for orchestra, for strings, percussion and boy soprano, for string quartet and four
suspended cymbals, and for prepared piano, while others for two choirs and for computer sounds are still works-in-progress.
Then, in 1994, Georges Lentz evolved the idea of a seventh part of the cycle, entitled 'Mysterium' (shades of Scriabin!)
which would be a private, largely conceptual work: a labyrinth of abstract tones and durations intended as a kind of personal
'spiritual exercise' - a utopian dream of music, rather than music to be played and heard. In the composer's own words:
"The initial stimulus to launch myself into this idealistic project came to me after reading about Pythagoras' poetic notion of the
Music of the Spheres, music which, according to the great Greek thinker, is produced by the friction of the heavenly spheres
and is audible to God, but inaudible to human ears. I wanted to write music which does not evolve or unfold, but simply is."
Yet at another level, without wishing to be unduly intrusive, one can't help surmising a certain spiritual and artistic crisis, resolvable
in the first instance only through a retreat into extreme austerity. For the first couple of years, Lentz relates, he wrote only
single-line melodies in crotchets!
Yet whatever the circumstances, it is ultimately difficult for composers to devote themselves to the conception of music that is
not meant to be heard. Following some opportune prodding from his publisher, in 1997 Lentz began to start realising parts of
'Mysterium', and as a result, his view of the whole project has, in part, changed: the original abstract score, which has
now grown to about 60 pages, is no longer just an object of contemplation, but also a testing ground for new ideas. His first
realisation, Birrung for 11 strings (1997), had an austerity in keeping with its source. Yet in subsequent ones, such as the
two orchestral works - Ngangkar (1998-2000) and Guyuhmgan (2000-01) - one is struck by the rich colours
which are extracted from relatively limited means, revealing exceptional knowledge of orchestral sonority. Though both works are,
for the most part, very quiet, this doesn't make them remote. There is a luminosity in the sound of Lentz' orchestra, reminiscent at
times of Messiaen and Takemitsu, that draws in the listener, and once drawn in, one becomes aware of just how much variety,
even drama, can occur at the limits of the audible.
Lentz regards Ngangkar and Guyuhmgan as companion pieces, and indeed they have much in common beyond their roots in the
'Mysterium' material. The titles are both Aboriginal words meaning 'stars', and the choice of these titles reflects another
influence on his work, namely the paintings of Kathleen Petyarre and, above all, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Anecdotally, both
works were partly composed "in the peace of my favourite composing place, the beautiful 18th-century presbytery in the tiny
village of Ouren on the Luxembourg-Belgian border." Musically too, there are shared elements - long, richly harmonised chorales
whose melodic contours may reflect the composer's fondness for Gregorian chant and whose regular rhythms are sometimes
disturbed by much shorter or longer note lengths; mysteriously twitching 'aleatory' textures in which rhythms are only
approximately specified; the 'destabilising' use of quarter-tones; sinuously twisting melodies sometimes inspired by Asian music,
and not least, moments of sustained silence, which Lentz regards as "a precondition to any form of contemplation".
Most of these features are immediately apparent in Ngangkar. An opening melody, shared between clarinet and alto
flute, leads to a soft patter of string textures around a sustained central note (G sharp). The flute re-enters with a sort of miniature
'bell orchestra' of high pitched percussion instruments, and then comes the first of the chorales, initially in the strings, then involving
the winds. The flute returns again, and then so too does the chorale-like music, but now with trills that give it an almost dance-like
quality. Till now, the emphasis has been on the middle and upper registers of the orchestra, but about half way through the piece
this changes, with appearance of tuned Thai gongs, and a chorale entrusted to violas, cellos and basses. Familiar elements - flute,
high percussion, the sustained G sharp - recur, then suddenly there is an extended silence, and the low gongs resume. At the very
end comes an eerie, repeated string chord which may well remind filmgoers, not entirely inappropriately, of the first 'alien
transmission' in Contact.
For Lentz, one primary difference between the two works on this disc is that Ngangkar is very much a view of the
night sky
from Earth, from the ground level, whereas Guyuhmgan engages more with
extraordinary celestial images picked up by, say, the
Hubble telescope - in effect, space viewed from space. As such, the gestures are often bigger, and the textures more complex,
and more likely to be directed towards temporary climaxes. The use of instruments, too, is sometimes more radical, as witness the
multiphonics that end the various Tibetan-inspired oboe/cor anglais duos in the first part of the work. Listeners may be particularly
struck by several passages including computer sounds (created in collaboration with Gordon Monro). At one level these could be
seen simply as an extension of the pitched gongs used in Ngangkar, and still present here. But at least equally important for Lentz
is that they enable him to present the same materials found in the orchestral parts at 'inhuman' speeds, and this becomes, for him,
a way "to highlight the inadequacy of human perception and comprehension in the face of the complexity of reality".
While many of the elements in Guyuhmgan may be familiar from the earlier work, the way they are put together here is rather
different. In Ngangkar, one element at a time tended to predominate, but here the music is usually multi-layered, and ever more
so as the piece proceeds. Picking up from the composer's own analogy, one might say that on earth one can only look upwards to
contemplate the heavens, whereas in 'deep space' (as in Swedenborg's heaven) every direction is potentially awe-inspiring.
Guyuhmgan begins with dense but barely audible and pointillistic string textures, held in place once more by a sustained G sharp
occasionally tending towards B flat (though in this piece there will be other 'focal pitches' too). As the orchestra settles on the G
sharp, the electronic music enters for the first time, and from it emerges the first oboe/cor anglais duo, initially on its own, then
underpinned by other instruments, and eventually by electronic music. A sequence of string-dominated tuttis leads to a first chorale,
and then to a particularly dense and hyperactive electronic passage. Subsequently, the computer has its own 'solo', which also
incorporates a long 'silence for contemplation', analogous to the one in Ngangkar. Thereafter chorales are omnipresent, though
only as one layer among many, and eventually the human and mechanical music fade away together.
This is an era in which, compared to earlier decades, more or less grandiose musical assertions of belief and spirituality abound.
Lentz' music expresses something rather different: belief and awe, yes, but also something of the discomfort and provisional
doubt that a Gallic composer might naturally inherit from Pascal and Descartes. Gordon Kerry cites the following eloquent
statement of the composer's current position: "The words that perhaps best sum up my spiritual attitude these days would be
'and yet'. I can't help doubting many of the dogmas that were inculcated into me as a child, and yet I still have an unshakable belief
in a higher (metaphysical) reality. This reality may or may not turn out to be a utopia. My way of questioning these ideal worlds
in my music is not by shattering them through ff-outbursts (in my opinion a cliché), but through the use of silence - the most
glorious sound, in one way, but also the most terrible, terrifying one. We all know that eternal silence is our common 'final
destination'. Hence my music is, to my mind, also and above all about the problem of bearing this silence, about the problem
of loneliness."
© Richard Toop 2002
Psalm XIX:1-2
Of course, Christian mysticism made something of a comeback in Western art music in the last decades of the twentieth century.
The post-war avant-garde had sought freedom from the cultural weight of the past in the hermetic systems of Boulez, the political
activism of Henze and Nono, the exploration of eastern religion by Cage and Stockhausen. A more recent generation including
Arvo Pärt and John Tavener have married a radically simple harmonic palette to a program based on traditional Christian texts.
Georges Lentz, by contrast, is undogmatic about both his religious orientation and his musical modernism, and has felt at liberty,
especially in the works from the early 90s, to use a number of radically different stylistic gambits to achieve his expressive
purpose. His harmony ranges between strident density and radiant consonance; his rhythmic gestures can be aphoristic to the
point of terseness, or generate considerable momentum; single pitches can have supreme centrality, or the processes of twentieth
century serialism can be brought into play; melodies range from simple modal phrases, to fragmented lines distributed note by note
among different voices, rather like the medieval practice of 'hocket'. In these early works, Lentz is also interested in aspects of
Tibetan music, notably monastic chant and the sound of the gyaling, a double reed instrument which is almost always played in
pairs, so that slight modifications of pitch (such as note 'bending'), and ornamentation (trills) create an immense variety of
expression.
Georges Lentz often works on several pieces concurrently and over a long span of time. He began work on
"Caeli enarrant...III"
in 1990 and "Caeli enarrant...IV" in 1991, completing both works in 2000.
The former is for strings (6 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos),
3 percussionists and boy soprano and falls into three movements played without a break. A characteristic gesture acts as a
gateway into the piece: swift string glissandos crystalise around a single chime, opening out on a bleak landscape of long held
notes, ricocheting pizzicatos and short, nervous motives. The narrow intervals and microtonal inflections of the next movement
reflect Lentz' interest in the Tibetan gyaling. By way of complete contrast, a shower of metallic sound leads into the lambent
third movement. Here lush textures and simple harmony support a long breathed vocal melody redolent of Gregorian chant,
before a short reminiscence of some of the work's earlier gestures. The whole piece is generated out of a strict serial process,
which, the composer has noted "gives the music a sense of rotation and symbolizes the idea of the circle and the spiral, a
recurrent feature in the universe. Even the 'beautiful' modal chords towards the end of the work are influenced by the tone
row. However, the use of this technique is merely a means of expression, never a dogmatic system. The established rigid
pattern is therefore often destroyed in the course of the composition, opening the doors wide to intuition, even randomness."
"Caeli enarrant...IV" is for string quartet and 4 suspended cymbals. There is considerable thematic reference between the
work's four movements, and it plays continuously; balancing this is the use of dramatically different musical manners and
gestures. Single instruments sound a central pitch (F) in turn, creating a simple, regular rhythm. New tones are progressively
added; sudden dissonances demand attention. In the last moments of the movement, the music breaks with the regularity of pulse
in favour of more extravagant gestures; a background of soft, sustained high sounds contrasts with disembodied percussive
gestures and isolated diatonic harmonies lead straight into the second movement. Here we meet a faster tempo beginning with a
fanfare of diatonic chords, use of strongly profiled rhythmic cells and dance rhythms as ostinatos; then a contrasting section based
on long held background chords - with pizzicato figurations gathering to a series of densely dissonant chords characterized by
intense 'hairpin' dynamics. Material from the first part of the movement re-emerges before final cadential chords mask the
beginning of the third movement. This is characterized at first by microtonal coloring of a central pitch with increasingly
prominent cymbals, a reminiscence of the fanfare chords and busy rhythmic, hocketing unisons. Significantly, a version of the
slow part of this movement exists as a work for string orchestra entitled Te Deum laudamus of which the composer has written:
Does it make any sense to 'praise God' while the TV is showing me pictures of Iraq, Rwanda, the Balkans, the Middle East…?
My personal answer to these questions is obviously contained in the music." There is indeed a kind of Heiliger Dankgesang here,
achieved by viol-like timbres. Dissonant clusters lurk and burst forth, but are interrupted by ringing diatonic upper register chords.
A return to the central tone idea acts as a bridge into the final movement characterized by aleatoric sounds, flautato writing and
the percussive use of instruments. There is one final arresting gesture and the rest is silence.
Discussing "Caeli enarrant...III", Lentz once (1996) pointed out that "one of the central features of the work is silence,
a precondition to any form of contemplation and an analogy to the absence of (visible) matter in huge portions of the
universe. In a world dominated by speed, noise, fun and mass culture, we seem to have lost the patience to abandon ourselves
to time and silence. Yet silence has a strange and individual quality. Not every silence is the same. It is 'coloured' by its acoustic
environment, i.e. the music that precedes it. It is thus not simply absence of sound, but, as it were, 'spiritual music'. Analogously,
I believe that the parts of the universe that do not contain any visible matter are still filled with 'spirit', a higher presence beyond
time and space."
In 1994 he began work on the seventh and final part of the "Caeli enarrant..."
series, 'Mysterium'. This has proved to be a quite
new and different enterprise for Lentz. It grew out of his growing interest in the Pythagorean formulation of the Music of the
Spheres, which, as the composer puts it, "is audible to God, but inaudible to human ears". This ideal, or as John Donne
described it, 'equal music' doesn't recognize the opposition of sound and silence, and, unlike human music, does not need space
and time to exist. Lentz, therefore, wrote this work as a conceptual piece in open form without fixed instrumentation - "abstract
lines and dots, ideally meant to be read rather than played". He is quick to add: "This may sound naïve, even pretentious - it is hard
to attempt this kind of project without seeming overly ambitious". In order, however, to communicate at least something of the
composer's vision, some kind of performance must happen, so Lentz has used material from 'Mysterium' to create works like
Birrung (an Aboriginal word meaning 'stars') and Nguurraa ('Light')
on the present recording, as well as larger orchestral works
like Ngangkar and Guyuhmgan. As the titles suggest, the
Pythagorean vision is mediated for Lentz by an exploration of Australian
Aboriginal spirituality (as expressed by painters like Kathleen Petyarre and the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye), but not by an
appropriation or imitation of Aboriginal music. Aboriginal cosmology, like the Hebrew Psalmist's, understands the physical world
as the 'written' record of divine agency; Lentz suggests that "one possible way to listen to 'Mysterium'
might be to simply imagine
a starlit sky with all its different constellations and concentrations, its darkness and light, the vastness of its silence."
The 'Mysterium' works are, as a whole, quiet throughout. As Lentz
says, "tension results solely from the polarity between sound
and silence, tonal and quarter-tone elements, homophonic lines and complex polyphonic material, a regular crotchet beat and
graphically notated rhythmic unpredictability, expanded and contracted time. My overall aim was to write
music that would be as 'pure' as possible. Hence the severe self-imposed restrictions."
In Birrung (1997), for instance, Lentz draws from the string ensemble a varied array of homophonic and
polyphonic textures, and
harmony which visits the extremes of dissonance and consonance, but all at a soft dynamic level, and without gestures which
impose a sense of closure on the music. Similarly, in Nguurraa (2000-2001), the clarinet's opening melody might have been
playing unheard for some time and the soft piano chords at the end by no means seek to sum up a musical argument, but rather
point to an ongoing discourse.
'Mysterium' sets out to uncover an image of the ideal world. This ultimate reality, as Lentz sees it, may or may not turn out to
be utopian. Unlike more doctrinaire composers, Lentz is increasingly less inclined to enforce an interpretation through the use of
dissonance or noise. His music is aware of the ambiguity of silence: "The words that perhaps best sum up my spiritual attitude
these days would be 'and yet…'. I can't help doubting many of the dogmas that were inculcated into me as a child, and yet I
still have an unshakable belief in a higher (metaphysical) reality. This reality may or may not turn out to be a utopia. My way of
questioning these ideal worlds in my music is not by shattering them through ff-outbursts
(in my opinion a cliché), but through the
use of silence - the most glorious sound, in one way, but also the most terrible, terrifying one. We all know that eternal silence is
our common 'final destination'. Hence my music is, to my mind, also and above all about the problem of bearing this silence,
about the problem of loneliness. My fascination with lonely places (the Australian Outback, for ex.) is also a metaphor for this
(existential) loneliness." This recent interpretation of silence is noticeably more ambiguous than the earlier statement from 1996.
This is music that admits to both Pascal's terror and Messiaen's joy at the infinities of space.
© Gordon Kerry 2001
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