Petit Hommage à Jehan Alain

Petit Hommage à Jehan Alain was commissioned by and is dedicated to C-Squared (Lisa Cella and Franklin Cox)

As a young organist for nearly a decade before seriously turning to composition, my sensibility as a musician and commitment to contemporary music grew through organ repertoire, and that of the early modern French school in particular (Duruflé, Messiaen, Langlais). Although I perform and love the music of all of these composers, in retrospect none has burned so deeply into my musical identity and compositional voice as that of Jehan Alain. Alain died tragically in 1940 at the age of only 29, leaving behind a small but utterly idiosyncratic body of repertoire. His composition Litanies was the work that inspired me to become an organist, and his seemingly unreachable Trois Dances lured me through nearly all the rest of his music.

In looking back at the music I have written over the past fifteen years or so, I cannot help but feel the specter of Alain haunting my compositional voice. I have never sought to imitate him and I have rarely referred to works while composing, and yet I seem to have traced a musical path which he paved for me. This Petit Hommage is an introspective musical investigation of his ghostly presence in my music, constructed as a fragmentary fantasy of reflective contemplation and violent torment, two forces held in constant tension in Alain’s compositions. As in so many of Alain’s works, quasi-vocal chant melodies provide a point of departure (cf. my Music for a Royal Palace, Epilogue for a Dark Day, Song for a Glacial Boulder), with drones and ‘exotic’ scales a foundation (cf. my earliest compositions to my recent Liber Pulveris, and here expanded to an 18-note scale with a three-octave periodicity). Now I find myself having recently (re)discovered what Alain had been showing me all along: rhythmic complexity which captures the improvisational spirit (cf. my Song for a Form Carved by Water and Liber Pulveris).

When this piece was composed had not yet written for the pipe organ, feeling that my indebtedness to Alain would be so overwhelming that I could only imitate him. Here, the combination of alto flute and cello is sufficiently removed that I feel can explore his voice in mine without suffering possession by his musical spirit. Although some fragments within the Petit Hommage intentionally evoke one or another of Alain’s works, there is just one literal quotation: an extended unison melody which hinges the two halves of the Petit Hommage, borrowed from the recapitulation of the second theme from his Deuxième Fantaisie composed in 1936. For years, I have wanted to recast this musical moment from the organ to the cello, as it moves through the heart of cello’s register and is punctuated by chords built on the cello’s lowest C.

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