In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION IFTY DOESN’T SEEM SO OLD any more. It used to be regarded as something of a zenith for creative artists, even if one could hope for additional productive years—a good many more, if one were lucky—beyond that point; it was also, inevitably, the beginning of a decline. But in an era that has seen many composers continue to work prolifically well into their sixties, seventies, eighties, even (recently) their nineties, those at the halfcentury mark seem by comparison barely to have reached their first maturity . So, however much we may admire a composer at the age of fifty, and however appropriate, both for traditional and for other reasons, we may find it to take the measure of his or her achievements at that point, we do so now in full awareness that any portrait of the artist drawn today is likely to be, at best, incomplete, and could easily turn out to be more a sketch than a finished painting. This is probably even truer for Joël-François Durand than for many of his contemporaries, despite his impressive accomplishments to date—for Durand, as he himself has pointed out, was a late bloomer. At twentyseven , by which time others his age might have had the better part of a decade’s worth of work behind them, Durand was producing his Opus 1, the String Trio. Coming late to music, however, has its advantages. In Durand’s case, it ensured that he wasn’t embarking on a career as a composer simply because he couldn’t conceive of doing anything else, or because he hadn’t had (or hadn’t taken) the opportunity to consider F viii Joël-François Durand In the Mirror Land alternatives. His education, up to and beyond the point at which he began to take music seriously, was unusually well rounded and ensured that disciplines other than music would play an integral role in his developing inner life as a composer. The circumstances of this development are abundantly exposed in the self-interview, “In the Mirror Land,” included here and, indeed, of sufficient significance as a personal statement to encourage its title’s adoption as the title of the book as well. The device of the “conversation with oneself ” is not unprecedented in composers’ writings (György Ligeti, for one, did something quite similar in the 1970s), but it may never before have been carried to such length.1 Here, we learn of the role played by literature, philosophy, and the visual arts in helping Durand discover just what musical composition could mean to him as a thinker—and not just about music. Although music remains, inevitably, the core experience throughout this education (both within and without the classroom), it becomes clear that without these other influences, his formation as a composer not only might have been quite different, it might never have happened at all. Their importance is evident simply from the fact that it is really not appropriate to give them that traditional designation of “extramusical ” influences—for it is clear, from the way Durand talks about them, that the crucial issue here is not simply the impact they have had on the music that he has written over the past two decades-plus. It is also, to a great extent, the converse as well: learning to be a composer has affected his thinking, in fundamental ways, about the work of certain writers and painters. One notable example of such reciprocal effect is the place of Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard in Durand’s artistic landscape. Bernhard was a serious music student before he gave up his aspirations in that direction to become a writer, and many literary critics have judged that this earlier experience played a significant part in the development of Bernhard’s distinctive style, with its very long sentences, nearly complete absence of paragraph breaks (thought by some to promote a musical flow), and incessant use of repetition (often likened to motivic structure). But although Durand agrees that these qualities are important hallmarks of Bernhard’s writing, for him at least as relevant is the way in which that author’s prose resonates with his own, independently developed musiccompositional predilections, such as the gradual progression by reduction, in almost imperceptible increments, to a final essence of understanding. Under the influence of that resonance, Durand effectively invites us to (re-)read Bernhard, not in disregard of the...

Share