About stylistic features
Dodecaphony
Konstanty Regamey as a composer, mostly autodidact, started practising dodecaphony when it was only J. Koffler who used this technique in Poland and his achievements were known only in the narrow circle in Lviv. He reached dodecaphony from the perspective of total chromaticism of a sound material, so similar to Schönberg. Konstanty Regamey’s first attempts were Persian Songs, especially Quintet which is a result of using dodecaphonic constructivism in a virtuoso instrumental texture, the final effect of which is a neo-romantic expression. According to the composer, the application of the rules of classical dodecaphony does not yet determine the piece’s style and does not create new musical language; therefore, Konstanty Regamey treated dodecaphony only as a specified compositional technique thanks to which he composed in various styles, e.g. in Quintet (movement 2) in Brahms’s style, in Music for Strings (movement 4) and later in Autographe he got near the neoclassical style, and in 4 x 5 he demonstrated five ways of treating series. In the uncompleted opera Don Robott, he serialised not only music (melody, harmony, polyphonic blocks) but also all the aspects of the stage composition as visual elements, lighting, movement of singers and groups of characters on stage. After 1968, Konstanty Regamey used dodecaphony only occasionally. The composer’s struggle to develop dodecaphony, and at the same time to create individual musical style, diverged from the direction of development of European dodecaphony that led to total serialism discovered by O. Messiaen. Konstanty Regamey, seeking expressive and colourful music with an original expression, affirmed the views that this is music growing out of neoclassicism and neoromanticism, but at the same time avoided excessive systematisation. As one of the first Polish dodecaphonists he was listed in the work of B. Schaeffer (Klasycy dodekafonii) next to, e.g., F. Martin and L. Dallapiccola.
Excerpt from music notation of Cinq Poèmes de Jean Tardieu used to analyse the
dodecaphonic series, made by Krystyna Tarnawska-Kaczorowska; Oblicza Polistylizmu
(Faces of Polystylism), p.190.
Polystylism
According to the composer, the music of the 1950s is monotonous in style and static in texture, as the construction of a piece comes down only to contrasts of dynamics and sonoristic qualities. Konstanty Regamey used various techniques within one piece, often from different historical periods. He believed that work should mirror the artist’s personality and that one style or one school is a limitation and impoverishment of one’s creative potential. Konstanty Regamey was interested in aleatoricism, he preferred detailed notation but believed that improvisation is not a European tradition and musicians do not feel its essence and cannot improvise. He recognised the role of aleatoricism as a factor enriching the piece’s texture, but defined its limits; he did not accept complete freedom. An example of Regamey’s aleatoricism is the “crowd effect” in the first composition from Five Poems of Jean Tardieu, where the impression of complete freedom was achieved based on the skeleton of precisely written vocal parts; in the last part of 4 x 5, four quintets improvise on the foundation of a strictly notated tutti group. Konstanty Regamey’s view was close to W. Lutosławski’s, who, using the so-called controlled aleatoricism, defined its boundaries in his works. An original feature of the composer is the tendency to express humour, jokes, irony and persiflage in music. Laughter as a vocal effect appears in the fifth of the Five Studies and in Three Songs of the Clown. The performance term “prokofieusement” in Music for Strings became famous, suggesting to the performers to extract the irony and esprit of the composer. Many of Konstanty Regamey’s works end with a sonic surprise: repetition of the same motif (Sonatina for flute and piano), a whisper at the end of the Five Studies, a slowing down of the tempo, reminiscent of the braking of a gramophone record (Lila). Konstanty Regamey’s compositions bear the mark of stylistic pluralism, express his characteristic polystylism and are evidence of his excellent ability to write in various styles. This tendency is already noticeable in his first piece composed during the occupation in Warsaw, Persian Songs, and in Variations and Theme there is a variation in the style of Bach; in Music for Strings, although composed in the dodecaphonic technique, the composer uses a significant contrast of two series: one on which he builds perfect chords, the other with dissonant sounds; in Five Poems of Jean Tardieu, he juxtaposes the avant-garde, sonoristic choral texture and stylization characteristic of the Italian Renaissance madrigal. A special example is the Incantation Symphony, in which the composer combined distant styles: a prehistoric spell from Formosa as an ethnomusicological document, an 8th-century Hindu spell, an Assyrian incantation to conjure demons, a quote from Adam de la Halle's virelais with the text of an Italian love sonnet by Gaspara Stampa, interwoven with an instrumental serial theme. Konstanty Regamey perfected this method of composition, achieving in his last work, Visions, a strong expressive, coherent stylistic unity of elements of sonoristic technique with traditional musical language, primarily in the area of choral texture. Currently, stylistic pluralism, analogous to the tendency in 20th-century literature to abandon genre purity by blurring the boundaries of literary genres and combining different forms and styles of narration, is a compositional attitude sanctioned by postmodernist stylistics. One of the pioneers of such an attitude was Konstanty Regamey (with e.g. Ch. Ives). There are interpretations explaining this position of Konstanty Regamey with the Renaissance diversity of his talent, the genetic and biographical polyculturalism of his personality and his multifaceted activity (theoretician of new music, music critic and essayist, pianist and composer, philologist and expert in 40 Indo-European and Eastern languages, mediator of the cultures of the East and the West).
Attitude to Oriental music
As an Oriental philologist and researcher of Sanskrit and Tibetan dialects, Konstanty Regamey was one of the most prominent experts in Oriental music. He was searching for a key to this music for a long time, not to limit himself to a fascination with different scales and rhythms, unintelligible to listeners from the West. Getting to know the ontological foundation of Oriental music, created in the process of improvisation with a totally different track of time, led Konstanty Regamey to state that the role and function of Eastern music has nothing to do with European concert practice. He believed that the influence of Oriental music on Western music was impossible and opposed the thesis of A. Daniélou, who thought that the music of the East would renew the music of the West. According to Regamey, the synthesis of these kind of music is not possible; the only achievable thing is to take over and adapt ready-made forms of Eastern music which can give results but would require the cultivation of new musicians and recipients. He believed that the attitude of composers like O. Messiaen, who fragmentarily borrow rhythmic or melodic schemes from Hindu music and introduce them into the work created in the Western musical tradition is not acceptable. The extreme form of such musical conglomerates as products of Western consumer culture, which according to Konstanty Regamey has led to the point of absurdity, is free jazz seeking inspiration in Hindu music.
Connections with Oriental music are evidenced by quarter tones, the use of which Regamey was a pioneer of in Polish music already in 1948 in Variations and Theme (under the influence of A. Panufnik's Lullaby composed a year earlier). Konstanty Regamey did not create a system of quarter tones like, for example, A. Hába, but he used them only as transitions in passages and grace notes, thus broadening the sound spectrum, and giving a strong expressive effect. Due to the melodic nature of microtones, he rarely used them in harmonic vertical aggregates (Autographe). The use of quarter tones especially in the cosmogenic poem Alpha created a specific climate of meditation and ecstasy, and the return to purely diatonic music entails climate change. Konstanty Regamey introduced clusters already in Persian Songs and Quintet, i.e. at a time when H. Cowell's invention was not yet widespread in Europe. These are clusters with the so-called moving interior (the first to use them was D. Shostakovich in Symphony No. 2), in which the volume and internal density change during the sound (3rd part of Condensazioni in motofrom 4 x 5). Konstanty Regamey completely rejected quoting authentic ragas and any attempts at synthesis of Eastern and Western languages. In Hindu music, he only sought inspiration and aura of sound to create his own modes maintained in the Hindu climate. In his works (Five Studies, 2nd part of Incantation Symphony, 2nd part of 4 x 5) he did not create a synthesis of two different traditions but his own style using means and stylistic features of Hindu music. An authentic Hindu text allowed him to obtain a true oriental aura on a scale previously unseen in Western music (Five Studies, Alpha).
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