Etienne Schwarcz - Photographed by David-O.Net (CC Lic.)

There are some musicians/composers whose music, relatively unknown, finds its way into a person’s life like the perfect gift. Only recently such a gift came to me. The expressionistic and/or impressionistic or postmodern music of Etienne Schwarcz is lovely, offering the range of mood and melody that finds its place virtually in any given day. It sounds, to my streetwise ears, decidedly French. There is a certain quality to the strings, horns, and piano, and to their use, that lends itself to that impression. However, Schwarcz’s compositions just as easily speak to natural and human (architectural and social) vistas I recognize around me, here in North America. In other words, his music speaks to the human experience as I have known it. For example, a track from one album, Angel, “Pleurs” (Eng., tears) evokes the idea (of tears) without ever pinning an adjective to it, leaving it to the listener to draw from it as she or he will the kind of tears the song personally invokes. I am left with the impression that all manner of tears are called, save perhaps those of anger. Angel is generally a quiet album, mostly utilizing the piano in a manner reminiscent, to me, in a number of places, of the work of Harold Budd. In keeping with postmodern standards, there are surprises along the way, diversions along sudden avenues and departures into territory hidden but a moment before. There is an inherent playfulness to many of his songs that delights the mind. Even in pieces that feel distinctly wistful or nostalgiac he finds a way to lift them from the straight and narrow definition, and in so doing expands and transcends the moment of default apprehension.

Album Cover: Angel (linked to eMusic)

I was fortunate to run across Etienne Schwarcz’s work at eMusic. I don’t think I’d have run across his work if I’d not happened to be exploring the postmodern music available at eMusic and happened to give it a listen. In trying to find some useful material about the musician online for this post, I quickly discovered that even the Web has its limits. There is very little about Schwarcz online, and much of it is quite second-hand or tangential. Honestly, I should have expected that such would be the case. I know a very few people who are “fans” of postmodern music… if I can say I know any at all. I know a great many people who couldn’t name a single postmodern composer. Even so prestigious and erudite a blog as Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise yielded no results in my search for him.

The two albums I have of his, Angel and Le Carillon De L‘être (Eng., literally “to be the chime”), are consistently good works. But where Angel features generally shorter pieces, Le Carillon De L‘être offers a two part symphony of over a half an hour’s duration, “Symphonie Pour Une Femme Seule“, (Eng., literally “Symphony for a Woman Alone”), two shorter songs, and then another two part work, entitled “Laurie”, that lasts almost 20 minutes.

The symphony begins with, literally, striking chords. These evolve into a mellifluous space after a few transitions, and that mellifluous space yields itself to the complex and emotionally evocative. The two parts of the symphony are enchanting, spellbinding, and form a story that finds strength in a tempest and in the withstanding of a tempest. The workout given to the piano is phenomenal and potent. As a portrait of a woman alone, the listener is given the aural equivalent of an expressionistic painting of vibrant colors sometimes at odds with each other yet always cohering, always tending to the representation of the title. I would love to know the impetus for Schwarcz’s composing of this and the following pieces. It feels like both a flight of imagination and a recounting of some historical person’s being. Then again, for all I know, perhaps it is better that I do not know the particulars.

Album Cover: Le Carillon De L'être (linked to eMusic)

As a work of art, Le Carillon De L‘être caught me up in its sweep and, with the final two tracks, shook me with its force. “Laurie” is a powerful piece, beginning with tense strings and a distorted, ascending glissade (on bared piano strings, if I’m not mistaken) that yields to a haunting woodwind and another ascending glissade, and then another, until at last we reach the second part. These two tracks are different, taken together or in comparison to each other. The second half features a woman (”Laurie”?) speaking in French while strings continue to haunt and distress the background. In the foreground, with the woman’s voice, a piano plucks out the wintry threat like a cautious mouse attempting to get near a small fire. So it seems that “Laurie” echoes the initial symphony, but out of a darkness of age or isolation not known at the beginning. And it would seem that the album was destined to end with a cold, tragic sense. But in its final four minutes there is a change, as if fate had introduced something new to the scenario that would ultimately alter the anticipated dénouement.

I shall end this post with the only video I could find of Schwarcz at work. The piece is not one I have, but it is fairly representative of his sound and the quality of his composition. I hope that you enjoy it.