The Compleat Composer

Jean Barraque is a 33-year-old French composer who detests daylight, the concertgoing public ("Asses! Imbeciles!") and his own music. His ambition in life, he explains, is "to live 60 years, more or less, taking the bus and the Metro and avoiding suicide." Until recently, there was an excellent chance that Barraque would achieve this modest, Prufrockian goal. But now Composer Barraque, who has written only "a few hundred pages of manuscript" and has never been performed in the U.S., stands in sudden danger of becoming a celebrity. In a book titled Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music (Grove Press; $2.95), French Critic Andre Hodeir concludes that Barraque is the greatest composer to appear in the last 50 years.

Hodeir is known as a writer of stupefyingly erudite jazz criticism and a composer of dense, twelve-tone works in jazz style (Paradoxe I, Evanescence). He may also become known as the man who tried to murder modern music. In his new book, Hodeir argues that since Debussy's death in 1918, there has been only a handful of composers of any merit and even these have possessed seriously flawed talents. Stravinsky, who along with Picasso "is the most pampered artist of our time," started well with Le Sacre du Printemps--his only work likely to survive, according to Hodeir--but he has long since adopted the role of "The Great Dilettante" and sunk to sheer boredom as "the stylist in him has devoured the artist."

Forlorn Worlds. Schoenberg, it is true, broke new paths, but had no clear notion where they led. Berg "wasted the last years of his life in a sterile attempt to retrace his steps," used the tone-row when it was not "essential to the spirit of his music." Bartok was on the wrong track because he was seeking a new classicism, while Messiaen (with whom both Barraque and Hodeir studied) was "an ultimate failure as a composer." Hindemith's music is "a lamentable error," Shostakovich's displays complete "mediocrity," and Britten and Menotti are reflections of "forlorn little worlds."

As for the works of U.S. composers in general, they seem either to have been tainted--as were Piston, Thomson and Copland--by "the musically short-sighted Nadia Boulanger" (famed French teacher of composition), or by the other "neoclassic" influences that ruined Roger Sessions, Ben Weber and Milton Babbit, or by the phony addiction to the use of "folk tunes as oxygen tents," presumably as employed by composers like Henry Cowell and Alan Hovhaness. Even Edgar Varese and John Cage, those shrieking, slamming avantgardists, are "un-rigorous and aesthetically unsuccessful."

Utter Strangeness. The twelve-tone idiom is music's only salvation, according to Prophet Hodeir, but of all twelve-toners, perhaps only Jean Barraque measures up to Critic Hodeir's ideal: "A world of utter strangeness." In Hodeir's view, Barraque's Sequence for soprano and chamber orchestra is one of the "rare works in the history of music," and "the greatest piece of music written in Europe since Debussy's last period." Barraque's unfinished La Mart de Virgile, to which he expects to devote the rest of his life, is more "monumental than anything ever conceived in the past." According to the composer, it will be scored for four different orchestras and four choruses (small, medium, large, huge), and take 17 hours to perform. "It doesn't matter whether the public can stand it," says Barraque. "Art is made for the creator only."

Hodeir's fellow critics in France find Composer Barraque interesting but by no means a musical messiah. Barraque himself agrees. "Contemporary music makes me sick," he says. "My last work makes me sick. It lurches."

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