In Dark and Blue: Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestra, and: 3e quatuor (Sorgin-ngo) pour quatuor a cordes (review)

Maurice Ohana. In Dark and Blue: Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestre, [1989]. Réduction pour violoncelle et piano. Paris: Gérard Billaudot (T. Presser), c1998. [Note, 1 p.; score, p. 3-34 and part; ISMN M-043-05392-7; G 5392 B. $29.75; duration: 189. Score and orchestral material available for hire from Éditions Jobert.]

Maurice Ohana. 3^e quatuor (Sorgin-ngo) pour quatuor à cordes, [1989]. Paris: Gérard Billaudot (T. Presser), c1995. [Score, 22 p. and 4 parts; G 5627 B. $37.50; duration: 219300.]

Maurice Ohana (1913-92) was recognized as one of the leading composers of his generation in France as long ago as the 1960s. Both innovative and forward-looking, he contributed to almost every vocal and instrumental form, including three operas, music theater, a host of choral and other vocal music, several large-scale works for orchestra, seven concertos, three string quartets and other works for diverse ensembles, as well as solo instrumental music. Ohana's works for guitar, for harpsichord, and for piano, as well as many of those for vocal forces, have become part of the repertory for performers of contemporary music. Even since his death, Ohana's music continues to be performed, recorded, and broadcast in mainland Europe, and in France the biennial Prix Maurice Ohana, awarded alternately to composers and pianists, has been established in his memory. Ohana's music has received critical attention since the 1950s. Yet in the United States, and even in Britain, much of his music remains to be discovered. Why has a composer so obviously part of the compositional mainstream been largely overlooked outside mainland Europe?

Part of the reason may result from the complexity of Ohana's cultural background. In countries where the predilection for nationalistic programming persists, he is not a composer easily compartmentalized. A British citizen born in north Africa of Spanish-Gibraltarian parentage, but educated, trained, and resident in France, Ohana's bureaucratic nationality did not correspond with his cultural identity. (For this reason the writer André Gide once likened Ohana to a French Joseph Conrad.) In France, where a fascination for the exotic and acceptance of the eclectic approaches tradition itself, and where the cultural continuum from which Ohana stemmed is readily understood, Ohana's cosmopolitanism was never a problem and his music was, from the outset, accepted by the French as their own. Ironically, the cultural complexity that should be the key to understanding Ohana's music--his roots providing the catalyst for his creative inspiration--became one of the causes of his comparative neglect.

Another reason is the result of musical taste, fashion, and circumstance--one Ohana shared with others of his generation. Emerging as a composer during the years following the end of World War II, Ohana vigorously eschewed the new serialism of his contemporaries, which he once described in characteristic iconoclastic terms as "mere academic sterility . . . as intimidating and terrifying as the propaganda systems of the Nazis" ("Pierre Ancelin avec Maurice Ohana," Les lettres françaises, arts [September 1964], cited in Caroline Rae, "Iconoclast or Individualist," Musical Times 132 [1991]: 70). Distancing himself from his contemporaries involved at Darmstadt, Ohana was among many composers who sought more independent paths. A student of Daniel-Lesur at the Schola Cantorum, Ohana immersed himself in the medieval and Renaissance vocal repertories, looking toward plainchant and his inherited folk-music traditions as the natural source of his compositional style. His language owes as much to his Andalusian Spanish roots and his experience of African tribal music and interest in jazz as to his French training and environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ohana was among the composers, including his friend and associate Henri Dutilleux, excluded from representation in the programs of the Concert du Domaine musical. As a result, Ohana's music was not exported to the United States, nor to...