Pastiche or Perfect?

by Peter Abken

Many composers chose to emulate old styles in contemporary compositions. A strong motivation is an interest in channeling one’s creative effort through a structure. This desire to accept and work within a structure isn’t unique to music. An apt metaphor came from poet Robert Frost, who famously said that “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”[1] He preferred having the challenge and beauties of rhyming verse. Similarly, most composers chose a net offered by traditions and practices of the past.

Even Arnold Schoenberg, who abandoned the precepts and rules of tonal harmony in the early 20th century, felt compelled to create a structure (the so-called 12-tone row) for writing his new atonal music. But if a composer goes too far the other way, leaning heavily on past structure, his or her work risks seeming to repeat what has already been done, and becomes vulnerable to the criticism that it is merely “pastiche,” or worse, “derivative.”

This essay is about several modern guitar works that deliberately harken back to the Baroque as their foundation. Given that anchoring, how should they be regarded: pastiche or perfect? In my view, it is important to keep in mind that unlike, for example, proofs of mathematical theorems, music cannot be perfect (apart, perhaps, from the works of J.S. Bach?). Instead, by “perfect” I mean a subjective judgment, as in “that’s perfect!”, declaring the music to be fully successful on its own terms, including what was borrowed from the Baroque. Further, the music should have some aspects that build on that foundation, or diverge from the familiar structural framework, to make a composition unique. If successful, “pastiche” carries no derogatory connotation and is only a partial description of a work’s artistic merit.

I’ve been thinking about this topic since hearing Leonela Alejandro’s performance of Leo Brouwer’s Variations on a Theme by Django Reinhardt (1983) last May and my own current efforts to learn Spanish guitarist-composer José María Gallardo del Rey’s California Suite (c. 1994). Both of these multipart works are organized in Baroque dance movements that typified instrumental music in the 17th and 18th centuries. They stretch historical boundaries in different ways.

In the classical guitar literature, there are many examples of “modern” pieces that borrow from an antiquated style. In addition to the two just mentioned, I’ll add two others for further perspective that are also favorites of mine: Manuel Ponce’s Suite in A Minor (1929) and Alexandre Tansman’s Suite in modo polonico (c. 1962). Both of these were written for Andrés Segovia and bear his imprint and alterations.

Suite in A Minor is really a highly unusual and special case: Segovia and Ponce deliberately attributed the newly composed Suite to baroque lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss as a “little joke” on violinist Fritz Kreisler, who himself had passed off some of his own original compositions as rediscovered Baroque works. [2] It successfully fooled Kreisler, other performers, and critics for decades — perhaps not surprising in view of the fact that Weiss’s and other Baroque lutenists’ works were largely unknown in the early 20th century. Even Segovia’s young student, John Williams, performed it as a piece by Weiss at his debut at Wigmore Hall in 1958. [3]

When Ponce finished the Suite, Segovia was mostly delighted but was unhappy with the Gigue (too “innocent” sounding). He wrote to Ponce: “But I need another gigue…. Spend fifteen minutes at the piano, and write one for me…” [4] Ponce delivered. The replacement Gigue is a brilliant finale to this Suite — as are the final movements of the other neo-Baroque suites discussed here.

Today, few aficionados of Weiss’s music would be deceived because Ponce’s style only superficially resembled baroque lute music. For example, among many other differences, the Gigue has a long three-measure, single-note scale uncharacteristic of the Baroque lute and, in particular, of Weiss’s gigues. Ponce’s Suite is at the extreme of being purely an imitation and was written without any intention of breaking new musical ground. However, there was a real artistic, and perhaps financial, reason for its derivative creation: a dearth of classical guitar repertoire for Maestro Segovia to perform. Hence the need to invent it. That said, Ponce’s Suite in A Minor is nonetheless a fine composition in its own right and deserves to be played!

Tansman was a hugely prolific 20th-century Polish-French composer who developed a close association with Segovia, for whom he wrote and dedicated Suite in modo polonico. Its name means “Suite in the Polish manner.” Tansman obviously made a cultural identification using the phrase but also, indirectly, a historical one: his use of Latin mimics the naming convention, including absence of capitalization, found in 16th- and 17th-century European lute and keyboard manuscripts.

Importantly, although Tansman drew inspiration from Polish lute and dance music of this era, this Suite does not directly imitate it, in contrast to Ponce’s for the High Baroque. Eclectically, Tansman drew on pre-tonal modes (such as the Lydian, the first six notes of which were known as the “Polish mode”[5]), Baroque polyphony mixed with modern harmony, along with his own style which was, in general across his many

compositions, influenced by then contemporary composers such as Ravel, Stravinsky, and others. 

In the Suite’s nine movements, Tansman mixed a varied collection of short pieces to fashion a suite-like structure that had Baroque characteristics, as I will argue. He included Entrée and Gaillarde, which were Western European court music and dance, and Polish dance and other song names, such as Kujawiak and Oberek (mazurkas) and Kolysanka (lullaby). The sixth movement is named Rêverie which, as its name suggests, is a dreamy lento that could stand-in for a slow sarabande. [6] Notably, the Suite ends with a high-energy, vivace giocoso Oberek, a whirling Polish rural dance that gives Tansman’s Suite a brilliant finale. 

Going beyond Ponce’s pure Baroque pastiche, Tansman’s offered an imaginative synthesis of musical pieces by fusing disparate movements into a coherent whole. His use of the Entrée (for example, commonly used by S.L. Weiss at the start of many of his suites), the interlude of Rêverie between faster movements, and the Polish Oberek in lieu of a gigue were perfect ways for Tansman to create an analogous suite structure that effectively mirrors a Baroque suite’s. In other words, the roles these components play are the counterparts of those in a Baroque suite. 

José María Gallardo del Rey’s California Suite sits squarely in the neo-Baroque genre. Its first three movements are Preludio, Allemande, and Sarabande. They were clearly inspired by Bach, yet at the same time the Suite’s score hints at neo-Romanticism by the appearance and nature of plentiful tempo and dynamics markings, and other performance and expression markings, absent in Baroque manuscripts. For example the Preludio is to be played andante molto expressivo and the Allemande andantino expressivo y con fantasia. More speculatively, I will suggest that the first two movements contain melodic and harmonic expressiveness that, I think, echoes Rachmaninov’s, if only faintly. I’ll leave establishing that possible connection to future research! 

Similar to Bach’s Prelude from the Suite for Unaccompanied Cello No. 1, the Preludio is a perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion), with undulating sixteenth note runs interrupted briefly at points by a syncopated top voice, while middle and bass voices fill in and maintain the sixteenth note pulse. Bach’s Allemande from BWV 996, Lute Suite No. 1 in E minor is perhaps closest in feel and texture to Gallardo del Rey’s Allemande. Both have weaving polyphonic sixteenth-note melodies over a walking bass line in sections and, in addition, elsewhere, Gallardo del Rey’s has an inner voice accompaniment adding to the implied counterpoint, à la lute-like style brisé. 

Finally, contrasting with the previous two movements, the Sarabande is marked grave maestoso in 3/4, with a majestic dotted quarter- and eighth-note movement involving full block chords. Following that opening, its melody moves no faster than eighth notes. Further, the chords contain a chromaticism not found in the Baroque. Clearly, unlike Ponce, Gallardo del Rey was under no obligation to create a strict imitation.  

Gallardo del Rey was well aware of Ponce’s Suite and evidently wanted to try his hand at a similar neo-Baroque composition. Indeed, he discusses Ponce and Segovia, including Ponce’s Suite in A Minor, in a recently filmed a video “‘Travel Notebooks’ Letters from Segovia to Ponce.” [7] But Gallardo del Rey didn’t just follow in Ponce’s footsteps. As discussed, he added neo-Romantic elements to his Suite, and, in a clever twist, concludes it with a surprising, anachronistic Waltz! This alone merits a “pastiche and perfect”!

In the Waltz, to my ear and imagination, Bach went by the wayside and Busby Berkeley stepped in. After its opening measures, and especially following the brilliante marking in the score and on through its flashy closing bars, this piece evokes the kinetic and kaleidoscopic Hollywood spectacles Berkeley choreographed and staged. This work from 1994 is titled California Suite, presumably because Gallardo del Rey was in California in the early 1990s, living and working in close proximity to the world of Hollywood. 

Leo Brouwer’s Variations on a Theme by Django Reinhardt is the only true theme and variations work in his vast compositional output. This work, I think, is the most virtuosic of those discussed here, both to perform and the most challenging to analyze and understand. As its name suggests, it is not a formal Baroque suite but resembles one by virtue of the names of many of its movements. Although writing a tribute to the French jazz master, Brouwer nonetheless chose to work within European classical musical tradition. None of the variations are in a jazz idiom. The theme and variations structure was realized in eight movements that carry names that shape — and constrain — style in each movement, just as they had for the three other composers discussed to this point.

After brief Introduction and Theme movements, there follow six variations: Bourrée, Sarabanda, Giga, Improvisazione, Interlude, and Toccata. The first three are movements of traditional Baroque dance suites, and one flows into the other without pause (marked attacca [attack or join] in the score). The dreamy theme of Reinhardt’s Nuages (clouds) is a quickly rising and slowly falling shape: a three-note rise of a minor second interval followed by a perfect fifth upward, followed by a languidly chromatic descent over three and one half measures by another perfect fifth. Although present throughout the variations in different guises, the theme is enmeshed in highly chromatic passages of varying rhythms, meters, and tempos. To borrow from musicologists’ lingo, the theme, or parts of the theme, emerge over and over in various “textures,” all of which are inventive and interesting to the ear.

The last three variations are freer forms. Looked at another way, the structure resembles consecutive suites. The first would be the Baroque suite linked by attaccas, concluding with the highly charged molto vivace of the Giga. Then the second starts with the Improvisazione, which is in the tradition of an improvised Baroque prelude. It situates the three-note theme fragment in an undulating line punctuated by chordal passages marked tranquillo. Improvisazione segues attacca into the Interlude played lento, which continues the tranquility and restates the theme most clearly in a three-voiced variation. It is a slow movement analogous to that of a traditional sarabande. This “second suite,” as well as the entire set of variations, concludes with the vivace of the Toccata, a genre from the Baroque that is associated with virtuosic, improvisatory keyboard or lute writing. Brouwer’s Toccata gives the Variations a dazzling finish.

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Finally, now to return to the opening question of this essay, pastiche or perfect? In fact, there are no sharp criteria on which to decide this question. A pastiche work is not necessarily undesirable or substandard. The question comes down to a matter of musical and artistic taste. Since I already tipped my hand by writing these works are among my favorites, they all really pass muster for me on the “that’s perfect!” consideration. All composers here were “playing with the net up,” adhering, to varying degrees, to musical conventions from the Baroque or earlier. Given each work’s exceptional quality and originality, in my view the label of pastiche applied to any carries no implication of their being in any way derivative.

Ponce’s Suite in A Minor is pure pastiche by design and nonetheless has had an enduring appeal to aficionados of the Baroque because it is an imaginative, beautiful work despite its tight confines. Tansman’s Suite’s name makes clear that it is “in the Polish manner” from centuries ago, yet he constructed and composed this work with much more latitude for self-expression than Ponce could with his. Gallardo del Rey’s four-movement California Suite hews closely to Baroque conventions, but then bursts these bounds by finishing with a flamboyant Waltz, perhaps inspired by Hollywood musical productions. Brouwer’s Variations on a Theme by Django Reinhardt is the freest of all, where the net seemed lowest. But as shown, a Baroque structure is evident in the naming convention and progression of movements applied to its variations on a jazz-based theme. The degree of musical inventiveness sets this work at a far remove from a pure-pastiche extreme.

[1] Newsweek, January 30, 1956, p. 56

[2] Ponce apparently used some of Bach’s works as his model, not Weiss’s; however, he and Segovia realized Bach’s catalog was too well known. See Kevin R. Manderville, “Manuel Ponce and the Suite in A minor: Its Historical Significance and an Examination of Existing Editions” (2005). Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations. Paper 2756, p. 21, and see the Segovia correspondence he quotes.

[3] Manderville, p. 29.

[4] Manderville, p. 24.

[5] Maja Trochimczyk, “Mazur (Mazurka),” https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/dances/mazur/

[6] Rêverie existed earlier than this full suite and was originally named Canzonetta, a vocal genre known from late 16th century Italy; however, Rêverie, the name adopted for this piece, was more commonly used by 19th-century Romantic composers.

[7] The YouTube video is in Spanish but with English subtitles available. The original title is “‘Cuadernos de Viaje’ Cartas de Segovia a Ponce.”