Contemporary aesthetics

Luis de Pablo celebrates his 90th birthday this year. He is a Spanish composer with a universal spirit and a vast cultural background. A passionate propagator of contemporary music - also as an act of resistance against Francoism, before being forced into exile - he is the author of 200 refined scores, a highly personal synthesis of consonance and micro-intervals, free form and complex metre, as well as non-Western music. The book, published by Aedam Musicae, gathers together the composer's letters to musicologist Jean-Noël von der Weid, each of which is accompanied by an introduction and explanatory notes, interesting additions that shine here and there with the thousand lights of a surrealist imagination or a Baroque virtuosity akin to Góngora. Introduced to some remarkable figures of Iberian literature, we come into close contact with the humanist universe of this warm personality, also in an introductory biographical note presenting some of his masterpieces.

Since the 1990s, Editions Minerve has produced an excellent series of glossaries, most of them dedicated to musical terminology. In a recently published fourth, revised and expanded edition, renowned musicologist and composer Jean-Yves Bosseur has turned his attention to the vocabulary specific to contemporary music, selecting 94 terms (words, expressions or antinomic pairs), including a number of notions redefined since the middle of the last century (in particular notation), thus exploring a very broad panorama of the artistic, philosophical and theoretical issues underlying the various trends in musical creation today. Not limiting himself to his own definitions, which are clear and precise, he happily complements them with contributions from composers and musicologists, and numerous quotations from texts and positions, some of which have never been published before, providing sometimes contradictory points of view, inviting debate and reflection, and reflecting the welcome diversity of today's aesthetics.

Another book by J.-Y. Bosseur, published by the same editors, is devoted to the serial spirit in the arts: music, of course, but also literature (Michel Butor and Georges Perec in particular) and the visual arts (from Josef Albers to the present day, via three representatives of Zurich concrete art: Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Richard-Paul Lohse). If, in the aftermath of the war, a form of serialism was sectarianized as an absolute, the founder of the theory of composition with twelve sounds, Schoenberg, never confused ends and means, seeing this tool as a non-hegemonic aid to creation. The moralizing and intolerant attitude of certain followers of post-Webernian serialism has contributed to a negative image of this writing technique, whereas the much freer and more open approaches of Dallapiccola, Henze, Stravinsky and Zimmermann testify to the potential fertility of a method that can be used as ferment for the creative imagination. The author makes no secret of the controversies over who invented the technique (Hauer versus Schoenberg), nor of the paradox between the ultra-determined order of integral serialism and the impression of disorder or staticity in its sound realization, nor the criticisms of composers as diverse as Cage, Carter, Ligeti, Xenakis and Kagel, the latter denouncing the academicism and harmonic taboos of immediate post-war serialism and speaking of "neurotic hyper-organization". And yet, in its various metamorphoses, the serial spirit has also inspired many masterpieces, from the Second Viennese School to the present day.

Jean-Noël von der Weid: Luis de Pablo, bâtisseur d'essentiel, 144 p., € 18.00, Éditions Aedam Musicae, Château-Gontier 2020, ISBN 978-2-919046-77-5

Jean-Yves Bosseur: Vocabulaire de la musique contemporaine, Fourth edition, 216 p., € 19.00, Éditions Minerve, Paris 2020, ISBN 978-2-86931-158-9

Jean-Yves Bosseur: L'Esprit sériel, d'un art à l'autre, 200 p., € 22.00, Éditions Minerve, Paris 2018, ISBN 978-2-86931-150-3