Playing And Mourning Part 2

Canons are obvious occasions of play in music. When we mourn, we understand music as memorial - it remembers for us if and when we forget. How does music remember? There is the Renaissance idea of soggetto cavato: we carve a space in music by way of names, by happy coincidence that letters spell notes. Josquin is exemplary. Remember Ravel's Hommage to Haydn? Or Feldman spelling C-A-G-E in his tribute to Cage? Sometimes music remembers by way of stylistic reference: we step into the shoes of those who have come before us. It is necessarily an intimate act as what we do is, in some way, to deny ourselves for the sake of another's memory. And yet it should not solely be characterized as an act of self-denial. In remembering there are associations with warmth and familiarity, the way one remembers one's grandmother by making a recipe, following it to the letter, tracing each handwritten step, that she passed down to you. I wonder what we'll find when we take a close look at Le Tombeau de Debussy, a publication in the now-defunct Parisian Revue Musicale that commissioned ten composers to write (mostly for piano solo - though Ravel provides us with a movement for violin and cello) hommages to Debussy after his death in 1918. The ten: Paul Dukas, Albert Roussel, G F Malipiero, Bartok, Florent Schmitt, Stravinksy (the chorale which eventually found its way into the Symphony of Wind Instruments), Ravel, de Falla, and Satie. How do composers mourn the passing of another? How do we remember?