Contemporary music
Editions Contrechamps continues to publish works devoted to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. For their part, Editions Allia have just published a translation of a collection of conversations by Steve Reich.
Among Contrechamps' recent publications is the reissue of a work by Lausanne-based art historian Philippe Junod. Consisting of nine reworked earlier articles, supplemented by copious notes and an extensive bibliography, it critically examines the equivocal relationship between music and painting, their reciprocal influences and the resulting metaphors, speculations on different kinds of synesthesia, the multiple metamorphoses of sphere music and the limits of the comparison, so often subjective and fluctuating, between the works or personalities of composers and painters.
Although some of his numerous writings on music may seem historically dated, Adorno nonetheless exerted an important influence on a significant part of musicological thought in the second half of the last century, particularly through his analyses of scores. A collection of texts, for the most part unpublished in French, that the German philosopher devoted to the functions of sound colors, the relationship between the arts, Wagner and Richard Strauss, reveals his mistrust of an emancipation of timbre outside motivic-thematic elaboration, his ambivalence towards the author ofElektra or his tireless questioning of all aspects of musical aesthetics.
A pivotal work in Luigi Nono's output, his dreamlike string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotimacomposed in 1979-80, is the subject of a monograph in which Laurent Feneyrou not only provides a detailed analysis, including a description of its conception, its structural complexity and its use of musical borrowings, but also reveals its autobiographical, political and poetic significance, in connection with Hölderlin, whose fragments are quoted in the score.
Still active at over 85, American composer and pioneer of minimalism Steve Reich had long been thinking of a book in which he could freely discuss his memories, the developments of his musical itinerary, his sources of inspiration (from Pérotin to jazz, via Bach, Bartók or Stravinsky), his encounters and his works. To this end, in 2020 and 2021 he recorded a series of 19 interviews with musicians and other artists with whom he has collaborated, including conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, young composer Nico Muhly, Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. A transcription of these relaxed conversations, this book sheds light on many aspects of the thinking of the author of The Desert Music as well as the circumstances that gave rise to his main compositions.
Philippe Junod: Contrepoints. Dialogues entre musique et peinture, 236 p., Fr. 27.00, Editions Contrechamps, Genève 2020, ISBN 978-2-940068-66-1
Theodor W. Adorno: The Function of Color in Music, Écrits musicaux III, 351 p., € 28.00, Editions Contrechamps, Genève 2021, ISBN 978-2-940068-63-1
Laurent Feneyrou: Luigi Nono / Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima, 300 p., € 15.00, Editions Contrechamps, Genève 2021, ISBN 978-2-940068-62-3
Steve Reich: Conversations, 384 p., € 24.00, Editions Allia, Paris 2023, ISBN 979-10-304-1703-6
