Chartum

В дополнение к теме http://www.forumklassika.ru/showthread.php?t=27846

Здесь процитирован первый из посвященных Сати фрагментов Оксфордской истории западной музыки Тарускина. Речь идет о Сарабандах и Гимнопедиях, а также о национальном в искусстве, псевдомодальности, вводных тонах, могучей кучке и спартанских девушках.

The Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin, Vol.4 The early Twentieth Century, Oxford press 2005 pp.64-69

Satie was not the first French post-Wagnerian to write a sarabande. Proclaiming one’s disaffection for the “music of the future” by making an end run around the recent past was already a time-honored – even a shopworn – strategy among the would-be Wagner resisters of the Societe Nationalė. <…> By the end of the century just about every French composer had a work “dans le sltyle ancient” in his or her portfolio <…>
Satie’s Trois sarabandes differed from these efforts, however. While faithfully cast in old “baroque” dance forms (two or three repeated “strains”, with repetitions fully if needlessly written out rather than marked with repeat signs), their musical style was at once more up-to-date and more pseudoarchaic, showing how notions of the ancient and the ultranovel had been joined in an anti-Wagnerian amalgam <…>
…the truly subversive aspect of the Sarabande [#1] was not the superficial outlandishness of appearance [имеется в виду большое количество случайных знаков в записи Сарабанд]. The truly ticklish thing about it was that all of its important cadential functions have been tonally denatured <…>
This kind of harmony was often described as “modal” and compared with that of the French music of the sixteenth century and earlier – a music that just then, and not at all by coincidence, was starting to be published <…>. In fact, however, it was only a pseudomodal style and it was altogether modern. (It, too, had a Russian counterpart in the folk song harmonizations of Balakirev and Russian nationalists; what Balakirev sought among the peasantry the French were seeking in theire music past – namely, novelty that could claim the pedigreed authority of “authenticity”.) As we learned many chapters back, even when the “medieval” or “church” mode in which a piece of old polyphonic music was written contained no leading tone, the leading tone was nevertheless supplied at cadences, just as it is in the modern “harmonic minor”. The chaste, charmingly antiquated cadences of Balakirev and Satie conformed to no ancient model. They were a classic case indeed (or, as it came to be called, a “neoclassic” case) of the new passing itself off as old. And for a final irony, this newly manufactured “modal” harmony was quickly and widely adopted as the “authentic” French manner of harmonizing the newly revived and popularized Gregorian chant. <…>
Satie’s next step was to purge the music of that rich harmonic texture and rely on the suppression of leading tones to make possible a “new diatonism” – music that despite (or even because of) the virtual absence of sharps and flats seemed not merely artless but strangely fresh and rare, as if stripped of memory. What became Satie’s most famous composition, the Trois gymnopėdies for piano (1888 ), was of this type. The curious name was another pseudoclassical affectation. Satie probably found it in a popular music dictionary of the time, such as Dominique Mondo’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1839), which defined gymnopėdie (from the Greek gymnopaidia) as a “nude dance”, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions”. The slow waltzes that Satie came up with in response to this description surely bore scant resemblance to any ancient model, but they bequeathed a minor genre to later composers (Peggy Glanville-Hicks and John Adams, to name two) who have occasionally written “gymnopedies” on the Satie model. <…>
Satie’s little dances for piano were radical staff. They already fully exemplified the esthetic position that Ortega, the later theorist of the avant-garde, would spell out in the 1920 in his famous “seven points”. Rather than attempting to provide its audience with a vicarious emotional or spiritual life, the ascetic “new artistic sensibility” Ortega described tended:

1. to dehumanize art
2. to avoid living form
3. to see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art
4. to consider art as play and nothing else
5. to essentially ironical
6. to beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization
7. to regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence.

When one considers that these early benchmarks of anti-Teutonic modernism were written ten years before the death of Brahms, Satie’s little Sarabandes and Gymnopėdies can seem, despite their primitive innocence bordering on infantilism, positively amazing.