Katarina Tomašević

THE 2005 “STEVAN MOKRANJAC” AWARD
DEJAN DESPIĆ: DIPTIH for English horn and strings

It has been precisely ten years since composer Dejan Despić, moved by Borges’s inspiring poem Moments, composed his “small musical autobiography” for chamber orchestra, giving it, one might say, a rather pessimistic title: Na kraju puta (At the End of the Road ). It was Despić’s 125^th opus, a composition with which the author achieved one of the pinnacles of his creative career and at the same time created a work whose formal logic, based on “total self-quotation”, remains, as far as we know, unparalleled in music history [1]. Since then, in the past decade, Dejan Despić has been unflaggingly active in numerous fields of his diversified activity, gratified, as an author, to witness some of his “old” works, actively performed on domestic and international podiums, become anthological; meanwhile, he has composed as many as 55 new works, providing an opportunity for at least another, considerably extended, and somewhat altered, edition of his musical autobiography.

Over the course of 2005, which saw the celebration of Despić’s important anniversary – his 75^th birthday and half a century of prolific creativity! – the repertoire comprising six authorial concerts held in Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Belgrade [2] was, for the given time span, not only a remarkable retrospective of the most representative pages of the composer’s output, diverse and rich in terms of both genre and content, but also a unique opportunity to once more reexamine and test, “at the gathering” of the compositions created in different “stages” of the author’s life, the well-known theses about the “stable constants” of his music identity.

Carefully conceived as a unique musical self-portrait, the repertoire “time travel” of Despić’s successful authorial concerts included three newer works which had not been previously performed: the 2001 suite for flute and clarinet Pas de Deux , op. 159, was sounded for the first time at the Gallery of Matica Srpska on March 30^th, while the compositions Dosta je već… (Es ist genug…), Rečitativ (Recitative), Koral i varijacije (Chorale and Variations ) on the theme of Felix Mendelssohn for two violoncellos and strings, op. 141 (1999), and Diptych, op. 166, for English horn and strings [3], were premiered at a well-attended and highly successful Belgrade concert held at the Atrium of the National Museum on November 29^th. In addition to another 65 works by local authors, all three compositions were competing for the prestigious “Stevan Mokranjac” Award for 2005 [4] .

Diptych won the award, and the prize was presented to the author at the Hall of the Kolarac Foundation on November 16^th 2006 (the year in which the 150^th anniversary of Mokranjac’s birth was being celebrated!), on the same day when the 15^th International Review of Composers was opened, precisely with the performance of the award-winning composition. The performing ensemble were the strings of the Symphonic Orchestra of Radio Television of Serbia conducted by Bojan Suđić and the soloist – the marvelous Yasna Miličić-Brandstätter, who deserves much credit for the creation of Diptych .

Background – The Book of Fairy Tales…and Other Stories

The vitality of Despić’s output on the current concert scene is due, at least in part (and not a small part at that), to the author’s close collaboration with outstanding and at times first-class performers, whose reproductive skills has often inspired the creation of his works. The composer’s gift for continuous, constructive dialogues with eminent performers is complemented by his inexhaustible curiosity to conquer the scantily explored territories of the classical instrumental medium. It was precisely on these roads of Despić’s recent composing path that Diptych was created, another one in a series of the author’s concertante compositions, which has enriched not only domestic, but also world literature intended for certain instruments, such as the English horn, which are seldom treated soloistically.

The decisive step in the creation of Diptych was taken by the agile Yasna Miličić-Brandstätter, the oboist whose dynamic artistic biography, fashioned mainly on the international scene, is marked by a collaboration with the world’s most eminent conductors and soloists, as well as by frequent performances with leading European ensembles for new music [5]. The first joint creative dialogue between the artist and the composer was their work on the CD project Knjiga bajki (The Book of Fairy Tales ) (1999), realized in German production: Despić was entrusted with the “task” of composing for the oboe miniature programmatic “preludes” that would constitute musical “stitches” between the texts of “the world’s most beautiful fairy tales”, read by two actors [6]. Guided by a desire to provide a more distinct colouring relief for the musical interludial ambience on the one hand and assert her own interpretative individuality on the other, Yasna Miličić-Brandstätter decided to perform some of Despić’s miniatures, originally written for the oboe, on the English horn. Since their first joint project had met with a positive reception, a new step in the collaboration ensued – the compact disc Knjiga bajki II ili …i druge priče (The Book of Fairy Tales II or … and Other Stories ), Despić’s opus 152 from 2002 [7], a more extensive cycle of miniatures, this time composed for the Märchen wind trio (oboe, clarinet and bassoon), which was subsequently also presented as an autonomous music work, and with much success, in joint concert performances by the members of the ensemble – the “leading” Yasna Brandstätter, Yoko Koyama and Chiahua Hsu. Dating from the same year, 2002, is Despić’s Quartetto per due (op. 154), conceived as a “mathematical variation” on all the possible “duetic” combinations of the oboe, English horn, violin and viola [8], a composition that bears testimony to the composer’s growing focus on the coloring and timbre specificities of the English horn as an instrument. Soon afterwards, in 2003, Despić gladly accepted Yasna Brandstätter’s suggestion that he should enrich the meager concertante literature for the English horn by a separate, concise and economical, albeit expressively composed concertante work which, according to the members of the jury for the 2005 “Stevan Mokranjac” Award, “captivates and charms with its liveliness and content, taking the reader into (…) a world of a musically inventive dialogue between the soft, warm sonority [of the soloistic instrument] and the string chamber orchestra” [9] .

Gebrauchmusik or “music as untold poetry”?

In an attempt to determine the place of Diptych in the author’s complete oeuvre, one might say that the work, at least ostensibly, belongs to the bulk of instrumental and, as the composer himself calls it, “absolute, abstract” music of mostly neoclassical orientation [10] which, having been predominant in Despić’s output until the early 1980s, was long considered as the identifying marker of the composer’s musical identity in the early phases of his work. The composition’s neutral title, Diptych, merely suggests the fact that it is about “two sonic paintings”, while the results of a formal analysis clearly identify typical features of Despić’s architectonically neat, melodically articulate, rhythmically and agogically plastic music discourse, enriched with subtle textural details. A significant indicator of the author’s keen sense of proportion is the composition’s timeline. Between the “two sonic paintings”, complementary rather than contrasting in character, is an axis of symmetry; both “paintings” are, so to speak, of the same duration (about 3 minutes) and the tempo of the first is twice as slow as that of the second. The effect of a delicate contrast between two thematically apparently independent formal entities that are, however, essentially related on the micro-motivic plane is realized on the global plane by, among other things, the distribution of sound volume: the melancholy-elegiac sung narrative of the soloistic part of the first “painting” unfolds in a dialogue with the parts of the string quartet, while the more dynamic “second painting”, now lively and playful, then nervous and punctuated by sharp accents, is realized with the participation of the entire string orchestra. Economizing on the volume of the accompanying sound of the strings serves to provide a sufficient mass of acoustic space, necessary for the “free breathing” of the English horn. Bearing in mind the information about the work’s origin on the one hand, and the exact facts about the formal aspects of the composition on the other, a logical conclusion on the “musical nature” of Diptych would confirm the aforementioned thesis according to which it is a clear example, understood in the Hindemithian sense, of “music for use” (Gebrauchmusik).

According to Despić’s own definition, “the focus of absolute, ‘abstract’ music [is] on the sound structure.” However, the focus of “music that proceeds from literary, primarily poetic inspiration is on the expression of emotions .” [11]. Far from being an indifferent, detachedly objective and rational expression, Despić’s music discourse flows spontaneously and naturally, first creating a meditative-nostalgic, “faun-like”, so to speak, atmosphere of the “first painting” ( example 1 ), while in the “second” – painted with an energetically sparkling, exuberant agogic motion in a bright and slightly more cheerful gamut ( example 2 ) – it occasionally allows a penetration of “conflicting”, dissonant and rhythmically pregnant motives ( example 3 ) that disturb the music flow, which is generally elegantly harmonious and of Ravelian refinement. Gestures of the “poetization” of instrumental narration can be identified in the macro-dramaturgy, based on the procedures of withdrawing from and reapproaching the basic, lyrical platform of expression  [12], as well as in the elastic, supple structuring of the melodic-recitative physiognomy of the soloistic part which is, at least in the first part of the composition, given the role of a narrator of sorts. In a manner very much related to the sounding of poetry in Despić’s inspired cycles of vocal lyric poetry [13], Diptych ’s dramaturgical and emotional relief is built by changing the intensity of the tension between the modal and chromaticized areas of sound, where the former impart an archaic colour to the music and the latter provide expressionistically charged kinetic potential.

In the concluding part of this concise review of Diptych , we intended to merely point out, by briefly focusing attention on the composition’s affective spectrum, the high degree of correspondence between Despić’s so-called “absolute” and “programmatic” works, particularly the recent ones, and his instrumental and vocal compositions. Being a direct result of the author’s intensive preoccupation with the phenomena of poetry “as unsounded music” and, on the other hand, of “music as untold poetry” [14], this correspondence is manifested in the ongoing, mature phase of Despić’s creative work on a new level and by new meanings, but it remains recognizable as one of the key constants of the author’s creative path, based on the “esthetics of harmonious, pleasing and lovely” [15] and on the poetic view of “music as a language of emotions” [16] .  

Translated by Dušan Zabrdac

Summary

In 2005 academician Dejan Despić celebrated the 75^th birthday and 50 years of his fruitful work (180 opuses!). Six concerts held in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Kragujevac were the excellent occasion for the remarkable retrospective of Despić’s most successful works. Still extremely active on many various fields, during the last decade Despić composed 55 new works; many of them were the results of composer’s close collaboration with most prominent musicians, whose art often inspired his investigations for new coloristic combinations within the classical, mostly chamber sound. Previous excellent collaboration with Yasna Miličić–Brandtäter, world–wide known oboist and English horn player, encouraged Despić to compose an inspired concerto piece for English horn and strings – Diptych , op. 166 (2003). The work had its premiere in Belgrade, on November the 18^th, at the concert in the Atrium-hall of National Museum. The following year, the jury of the Serbian Composers’Association recognized Diptych as the best achievement of Serbian composers in the previous concert season and awarded it with the prestigious prize “Stevan Mokranjac.“

This article gives a concise description of the awarded composition and searches for the answer whether the work represents just an excellent, typical example of Gebrauchsmusik or – as the author would say – the piece of “music as unsaid poetry.“