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SON ET LUMIÈRE

Rebel's Chaos
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While it’s always an astonishing thing to observe how deftly a composer like Handel or Rameau sets words to music, it’s just as amazing when a composer represents specific ideas with vivid, suggestive instrumental music that has no words at all. Nineteenth and twentieth century tone poems come to mind most readily for this sort of thing: Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Ravel’s La Mer are just two examples of a fun musical conceit. But the tone poem wasn’t the invention of the symphonists. Examples abound in the baroque era too: Schmeltzer’s Fencing School and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are just a couple of titles from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

None of these baroque examples, however, has quite the ker-pow of Rebel’s Chaos, the opening movement of his programmatic orchestral suite, The Elements. For one, in the better-known pieces by Vivaldi or Moussorgsky, the composers are dealing with subject matter that people have experience with: a storm, the twittering of birds, an old ox. Rebel, by contrast, has created a musical representation of something nobody has ever witnessed: the coalescence of primal chaos into the elemental substances, earth, water, air and fire, a proto-Big Bang, if you will. But what makes this piece all the more wonderful is that Rebel represents his birth of the cosmos in a completely avant-garde fashion.

Chaos, despite its title, is a very tightly-organized movement, consisting of five distinct thematic components, which in their order of introduction are: (1) Chaos, (2) Air, (3) Water, (4) Fire, and (5) Earth. These are the five actors in this orchestral skit.

The opening harmony, famous as a fact in music history books though less well-known through concert experience, is not so much a harmony in the baroque sense of the word, but the dissonant coexistence of multiple possible harmonies to represent chaos. Rebel takes all seven notes of the D minor scale—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si (ti)—and sounds them all simultaneously.

Click anywhere on the music examples below to hear the passages played on your computer. This is a D minor scale:

(Click anywhere on the music above to hear the passage on your computer.)

Here is Rebel’s representation of Chaos, in which all the notes of the D minor scale sound simultaneously.

(Click anywhere on the music above to hear the passage on your computer.)

This "chaos" chord is a polyharmony—something that Stravinsky also famously does in Petroushka—rather than a tone cluster, which could involve even more notes than Rebel uses here. Rebel's Chaos chord consists of a consonant D minor chord between the basses and violas against a dissonant A major ninth chord between the violas and violins.

(Click anywhere on the music above to hear the passage on your computer.)

The D minor chord is the smooth resolution of the A major ninth chord, but the whole is harsh when the two are sounded together, as you heard above.

In Rebel’s cosmos, Chaos quickly sets into a churn, and the churning has rhythm, and rhythm suggests the beginnings of form. Almost as soon as form becomes discernible, air emerges, as represented in the flutes and piccolos, high above the rest of the ensemble:

(Click anywhere on the music above to hear the passage on your computer.)

The Air “theme” doesn’t start off as much, just a single, very high, sustained note that floats in place like air. It does its job extremely effectively. It’s not even very friendly air yet, but sharp, acrid and probably unbreathable. Later on, as all four elements become better established, Air begins to develop in other interesting and more attractive ways, particularly in its interactions with Earth and Water.

The next element to emerge from the Chaos is Water, represented by slow, flowing, high-register scales. Fire and Earth appear next, at the end of the example, Fire represented by flickerings in the violins at the top of their range—accompanied by Air, naturally—and Earth as low repeated-note rumblings in the bass section.

(Click anywhere on the music above to hear the passage on your computer.)

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