Barraqué and the Serial Idea

Abstract

It was through Schubert and Beethoven that Jean Barraqué came to his vocation as a composer. He himself indicated 1940 as the date when his ‘conversion’ began; he was twelve years old, and his practical experience of playing the piano and the violin as well as daily singing classes at school had done nothing to deflect him from his childhood ambition to enter the priesthood. Then one of his teachers played him records of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, and he was immediately fired with an obsessive enthusiasm for music. He refers to three other works which he went on to discover for himself: the Arpeggione Sonata, the Pastoral Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. He had at that time a burning desire to emulate the great masters, and he would copy out major orchestral scores and compose his own imitations of them. At fifteen, he says, his idea of a composer was of someone who wrote the Missa Solemnis. The work was to remain his constant touchstone, just as Schubert was always, for him, ‘that purest of musicians’. No doubt, too, there was something about the nature of the particular works to which he was first drawn that determined the scale on which he later customarily worked. He could not conceivably have composed Bagatelles or Moments Musicaux; these would have seemed to him too self-contained, too ‘finished’. In fact, he was deeply committed to what he called ‘l'inachèvement sans cesse’; if creative thought was a continuum, then no creative act could properly be regarded as ‘finished’.