Les Barricades Mystérieuses

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Les Barricades Mystérieuses (The Mysterious Barricades) was composed in 1717 for the harpsichord by François Couperin. It is the fifth piece in his "Ordre 6ème de clavecin" in B-flat major from his second book of collected harpsichord pieces (Pièces de Clavecin).[1][2] It is emblematic of the style brisé characteristic of French Baroque keyboard music.[3]

Music

The work is in rondeau form, employing a variant of the traditional romanesca in the bass in quadruple time rather than the usual triple time.[2]

"The four parts create an ever-changing tapestry of melody and harmony, interacting and overlapping with different rhythmic schemes and melodies. The effect is shimmering, kaleidoscopic and seductive, a sonic trompe l'oeil that seem to have presaged images of fractal mathematics, centuries before they existed."[4]

The piece was voted at #76 in the Australian 2012 Classic 100 music of France countdown.

Title

Les Barricades Mystérieuses was originally published with the spelling Les Baricades Mistérieuses ["single r" in the first word, and "i" rather than "y" in the second word]. All four possible spelling combinations have since been used with "double r" and a "y" being the most common. There has been much speculation on the meaning of the phrase "mysterious barricades" with no direct evidence available to back up any theory.[5] Nevertheless, of those that link the title to features of the music itself, Evnine believes harpsichordist Luke Arnason's is the most plausible:

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"The title Les Barricades Mystérieuses is probably meant to be evocative rather than a reference to a specific object, musical or otherwise. Scott Ross, in a master class filmed and distributed by Harmonia Mundi, likens the piece to a train. This clearly cannot have been the precise image Couperin was trying to convey, but it is easy to hear in Les Barricades the image of a heavy but fast-moving object that picks up momentum. In that sense, the mysterious barricades are perhaps those which cause the "train" to slow down and sometimes stop... This hypothesis seems to fit in with the pedagogical aims of Couperin's music, since the composer presents himself as something of a specialist in building sound through legato, style luthé playing...Moreover, it seems to form a set with the following piece, Les Bergeries. This latter piece, though more melodic than Les Barricades, set in a higher register and more bucolic in feeling, is also an exercise in using a repetitive motif (in this case a left hand ostinato evocative of the musette) to build sound without seeming mechanical or repetitive. Both Les Barricades Mystérieuses and Les Bergeries, then, are exercises in building (and relaxing) sound and momentum elegantly.[5]

While the title reflects the musical structure, there may be more at play. The suggestion of barricades is "a double entendre referring simultaneously to feminine virginity and the suspensions [of] harmonic [progressions] of the music, [whose] lute figurations [from the style brisé ] are imitated to produce an enigmatic stalemate", as Judith Robison Kipnis explained the work's title and its interpretation by her husband Igor Kipnis.[6]

File:Jean Honore Fragonard The Love Letter.jpg
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The Love Letter (1770)

Other suggested meanings for the title include:

  • impeding communication between people
  • between past and present or present and future
  • between life and death
  • between the immanent and transcendent
  • women's underwear, or chastity belts
  • allegedly a common way of referring to women's eyelashes among the Salonnière of the 17th century
  • masks worn by performers of Le Mystère ou les Fêtes de l'Inconnu (The Mysterious One or the Celebrations of the Unknown One) staged by one of Couperin's patrons, the Duchesse du Maine in 1714[7]
  • a "technical joke...the continuous suspensions in the lute style being a barricade to the basic harmony".[8]

An other suggestion of the titles meaning: The barricade between the sensory world and the spiritual world. Listen to how the movements in the music are climbing or attempting towards something that it disires to cross.

Homages and references in other works

The piece has been used as a source of inspiration by many others across different artistic fields including music, visual arts and literature. Some have simply used the title while others have created new works inspired by the original.[9]

Music

  • 1971 Moog synthesizer rendition entitled Variations on Couperin's Rondeau ("Les Barricades mystérieuses") on the album "Short Circuits" by Ruth White.
  • 1973 harpsichord piece entitled Barricades (Rock piece after Couperin). on the album "Bhajebochstiannanas" [an anagram of Johann Sebastian Bach] by Anthony Newman.
  • 1982 piece for Sinclavier, "Las Barricadas Misteriosas" composed by Sergio Barroso.
  • 1984 written for, and incorporating texts by Christopher Hewitt, a piece for women's chorus, piccolo, bassoon, harpsichord and clapping entitled "Les Barricades Mysteriéuses" by Juilliard composer Andrew Thomas.
  • 1986 album entitled Heavenly Bodies including the "Appia Suite", one movement of which is entitled "Les Barricades mystérieuses", by British Jazz composer Barbara Thompson. Rerecorded in the same year to be the title track of the German film Zischke.
  • 1988 rock piece entitled "Mysterious Barricades" on the album of the same name by former Police guitarist Andy Summers.
  • 1989 work for flute and orchestra called "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" by Luca Francesconi.
  • 1989 piece for three recorders called "Les Barricades" by Matthias Maute.
  • 1990 a harpsichord concerto entitled "Mysterious Barricades" commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony composed by Tyler White.
  • 1994 quintet arrangement for clarinet, bass clarinet, viola, cello and double bass in the album "America: A prophecy" by Thomas Adès.
  • 1994 piece for solo guitar entitled "Mysterious Habitats" by Serbian guitarist Dusan Bogdanovic.
  • 1995 sextet arrangement for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello entitled "Les Barricades mystérieuses", the fourth of nine movements that make up the composition Récréations françaises by French composer Gérard Pesson.
  • 1995 commissioned by the Villa-Lobos Orchestra for 12 cellos, Le Barricate Misteriose (Hommage à Couperin) composed by Italian composer Gabriella Zen.
  • Mid-90's solo percussion and electronic piece entitled Mysterious Barricades on the album of the same name by Scott Smallwood.
  • 1997 commissioned by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, Las Barricadas Misteriosas is the third movement of "Sinfonía à la Mariachi" by Robert Xavier Rodriguez.
  • 2002 folk song "Mysterious Barricades" on the album Letter to the Editor by Max Ochs.
  • 2003 piece for drums, voice and instruments entitled "Through the Mysterious Barricade" by Philip Corner. This was revisited in 2011 with a new work entitled ""Petite fantasie sur Les Barricades Mystérieuses (déjà une révélation) d'après François Couperin."
  • 2007 "decomposition and performance" for piano entitled "Les Barricades" Canadian performance artist Yawen Wang.
  • 2009 electronic piece entitled "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" by Portuguese composer António Ferreira.
  • 2009 music video "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" by French electro-acoustic artist Mulinex.
  • 2010 piece for oboe, horn, violin, viola, cello and harpsichord entitled "The Mysterious Barricades" by Korean composer Jung Sun Kang.

Visual arts

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Film

Literature

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See also

References

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  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Igor Kipnis, French Baroque Music for Harpsichord, EPIC LP cat.no. BC1289, 1964, Library of Congress r64001444 Permalink http://lccn.loc.gov/r64001443, also http://catalog2.loc.gov/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=207082&recCount=25&recPointer=3&bibId=9856129
  7. ↑ The mirror of human life': Reflections on François Couperin's Pièces de Clavecin by Jane Clark and Derek Connon (Redcroft, King's Music, 2002), cited in Evnine.
  8. ↑ (François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition, new version, London, Faber and Faber, 1987, pp. 400–2). Cited in Evnine.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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