M. JOCELYN, "IL SANTUARIO" -- tratto da Faulkner

Speranza

There was a time – and not all that long ago – when composers fell into highly categorised frameworks.

Career, predilections, and aesthetic choices met clearly identifiable norms as if the trajectories were marked out in advance.

But changes in our society and successive stylistic questions have modified the order, resulting in a situation that is doubtless uncomfortable for timorous followers but highly stimulating for intrepid minds.

Of these, Oscar Strasnoy is an unusual representative, sometimes disconcerting and, in the final analysis, quite fascinating.

Let us listen to him decipher the path.

"I was born in Buenos Aires into a family of agnostic Jews fleeing Russian (and European) barbarity and misery."

"They were seeking salvation in a rich, modern country like the Argentina of the first half of the 20th century."

"At the end of my adolescence, I had to make the decision to abandon Argentinian provincialism for the modernity and richness of Europe."

Let us clarify.

Oscar Strasnoy was born in Buenos Aires on 12th November 1970.

His Russian lineage is proclaimed.

An acknowledged musical heritage is also proclaimed: his biological father is a violist, his uncle and an aunt who were composers.

And there's gratitude towards the adoptive country going through a period in which cultural life was particularly intense -- this was before the dictatorship.

There, they frequented the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, this friend of the family whom Strasnoy was unable to know but whose texts he would twice set to music: "Operetta" and "Storia".

And there are also some powerful musical personalities present: Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim, for example, and Mauricio Kagel whose personal, familial, and artistic career is, in many respects, closely akin to Strasnoy's.

"Kagel is the Gombrowicz of music."
Shared irony.

Marked by his Argentine childhood (first piano, composition and conducting studies at the Buenos Aires Conservatory), Strasnoy, who would soon refuse to write tangos as he would refuse to enter the ’standard European’ music mould, would explain that his situation was "a bit complicated."

And so it was the choice of Europe.

The first movement carried him to Vienna where he hoped to work with Michel Gielen, but it was Hans Zender, whom he would meet up with again a few years later at the Musik Hoch Schule in Frankfurt, in particular to give himself over to the analysis of Pierre Boulez’s "Pli selon pli".

In the meantime, Strasnoy settles in Paris and was accepted at the Conservatoire where he was going to benefit from the wise advice of Guy Reibel, a tenured professor of electro-acoustic composition and musical research, Michaël Lévinas and Gérard Grisey, whose memory still remains so vivid amongst his former students.

"Grisey quite liked my music," Strasnoy would say, "but he liked it because I was not trying to write HIS music."

Strasnoy then pricked up his ears and made his choices: Edgar Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen (the Stockhausen of Kontakte, Klavierstück X, and Stimmung), György Ligeti, and Luciano Berio; among his favourites, he also mentions György Kurtág and Salvatore Sciarrino.

KEYWORDS:

LUCIANO BERIO
SALVATORE SCIARRINO.

These were references, but Strasnoy wanted to map out his own path.

"I have no intention to belong to a club."

Dogmatism does not enter his sphere of activity.

"The idea of school always revolts me."

"The artist is and must be an individual."

"The history of art is made up of exceptions, not rules."

One can well imagine that he had little indulgence for the Schoenberg inventor of a new language.

"Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic music is infinitely more antiquated than his free atonal music."

Nor would he tolerate the rules of IRCAM.

"I fled after a fortnight. Music for standardising composers horrified me."

Strasnoy would thus make his own choices – and refine them in the course of different ’residencies’.

The first residence is at the Villa Medici Outside the Walls.

This was followed by one at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.

Then at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto.

And then New York, thanks to a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.

As for conducting, Strasnoy practised it from time to time, having been conductor of the Orchestre du CROUS de Paris and having also conducted the Orchestre National d’Ile-de-France, Ensemble 2e2m, and the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra.

And even though, as a pianist, he founded the "Quintet Ego Armand", the piano is no longer topical.

He now concentrates all his energy on composition – composition and thinking about how and why.

At the centre of this activity is melodrama (opera) but, dare we say, an unconventional opera in the text-action-music relationship.

Reduced forces, exploded text, unexpected progressions.

His catalogue already boasts eight titles:

"Midea", a chamber opera premiered at Spoleto, revived in Rome, and crowned by the Orpheus Prize, thanks to Berio’s judgement.

Then L’instant (ex-Ephemera), premiered in Créteil (France).

Next, were the two aforementioned Gombrowicz works, Operetta and Storia, which were followed by a pocket opera for countertenor and viola d’amore on a text by Alessandro Tantanian, premiered in Buenos Aires.

Then came "Il Ballo", commissioned by the Hamburg Opera.

And then "Un retour", a chamber opera premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

Then "Cachafaz", Copi’s barbaric tragedy, premiered at the Théâtre de Cornouaille in Quimper, directed by the iconoclast Benjamin Lazar, and revived at the Opéra Comique in Paris.

Belonging to the same family, since it was also staged, is the "Préparatifs de Noce" (avec B et K) – original title: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen (mit B und K) –, a surprising (and convincing) approach in which the text of Kafka’s novella is confronted with Bach’s ’Wedding’ Cantata.

Beyond a construction, reflection.

"If one can exhume an urn and, by studying it, reconstruct a civilisation, even more can one describe the evolution of the world by unearthing the rituals of marriage."

This Bach-Kafka dialogue is quite revealing about the work carried out by Oscar Strasnoy: a construction – and, more precisely, the composer speaks of ’scenario’ and montage.

An approach illustrated by the series of ’Bloc-notes’, concertante pieces that extend other scores in the form of sketches or derivatives.

Even more is the series, four independent pieces for orchestra: Incipit [Sum 1], Y [Sum 2], Scherzo [Sum 3], and The End [Sum 4].

And here, the montage is especially refined since, for each score, it consists of evoking, in a more or less identifiable way, references such as the final chords of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony in The End, interwoven references and homages – and it is thus that Strasnoy, in Sum 2, pays tribute to the slow movement, quoting " Warum?", the third piece from Schumann’s Phantasie Stücke, Op. 12.
As concerns form, it is not a matter of a musical mosaic but of musical urban planning, as the composer emphasises in his dialogue with Dorota Zorawska (Les stratifications de la mémoire, Editions A la ligne).

"I prefer the idea of thinking out a work as one would think out a city."

"The city-work proposes a work made up of several works (a hyper-work), a constellation having as a centre an original piece round which one or several works or pieces of pre-existing works turn, forming a subject from several perspectives."

Question regarding the Bach-Kafka conjunction.

"How can one bring together two works written 250 years apart?"

"In the same way a modern building in a contemporary city can adjoin a construction from the 18th century."

Finally, these proximities, these allusions and references, bring into play an essential dimension for Oscar Strasnoy: memory.

This memory that is awakened by music, stimulating the imagination and nurturing creation.

"Memory is the only thing that belongs individually and exclusively to the unique beings that we are."

And also, a fine phrase:

"Memory is the musician’s sight."

The elaboration of an oeuvre is underway, already hailed by distinctions – Prize of the Académie du Disque Lyrique for the recording of Hochzeitsvorbereitungen (mit B und K), SACEM Grand Prize in 2010 –, and prestigious invitations: Centre Acanthes in Metz (July 2011), guest composer at the Festival Présences in Paris (2012).

Finally, as a matter of interest, let us point out that Strasnoy, broad in his horizons (but with no particular taste for improvisation or ’open’ works), is interested in cabaret songs and has provided proof of this by collaborating with Ingrid Caven.