Carnival in Romans

Carnival in Romans is my contribution to the classic genre of symphonic poems that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—you could call it my Pines of Romans! Such beloved chestnuts form an indispensable cornerstone of the orchestral repertory, and were among the first pieces of classical music I came to love as a child. As this work’s subject derives from an episode in the history of France, I drew my primary inspiration from francophone favorites, from the justly famed to the unjustly forgotten. Claude Debussy’s La Mer, Maurice Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole, Jacques Ibert’s Escales, Vincent D’Indy’s Jour d’éte à la montagne, Gabriel Pierné’s Paysages franciscains, and Jean Cras’s Journal de bord are all referenced somewhere in this piece, however glancingly, as well as Ottorino Respighi’s famous Roman trilogy, Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, and Alexander Glazunov’s From the Middle Ages—and that’s not even everything!

The late Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Carnival in Romans tells the story of a late medieval tax revolt against the ruling class by largely middle class artisans in the small walled town of Romans in the south of France. This extraordinary book not only describes the events of the rebellion itself—which was of course quickly and violently crushed—but dramatically reconstructs an entire way of life now largely lost to us, with its own curious traditions, myths, means of living, and those peculiar approaches to politics and religion specific to every individual time, place, and people.

We open with what Ladurie calls The Shadow Carnival, in which slowly festering resentments gradually come to a boil ahead of the Mardi Gras festivities of the year 1580. A whirlwind of brief themes wildly interact like the many residents of a small walled town cutting loose before the solemnities of Lent, a sealed container filled with energy and ready to explode. These interlocking melodies are elongated, expanded and explored in The Land of Cockaigne, referencing an oft-told fable of a mythical realm where the harsh world is turned topsy-turvy, hunger giving way to plenty as poor peasants are made into kings. Many such themes were enacted as part of the Mardi Gras festivities, notably in the variety of contests including shooting, footraces, and the Sword Dance, a ritual form of mock combat performed by the guilds that stood at the center of the revolt underway in Romans on the night of Mardi Gras. Although the conspirators were able to seize parts of the town and briefly control the town council, the ruthless local judge, Guerin, whose own documents form our primary source reporting these events, ordered the cold-blooded murder of the revolt’s leader in the early hours of the morning and a massacre of those still resisting. Finally, a brief series of harsh trials ensued, ensuring no such revolt would happen again for many years, although ironically many of the rebels’ demands were eventually met within the next century by the French monarchy.

Musically, Carnival in Romans explores a kind of convergent evolution where I attempt to limn common ground between a variety of heterophonic textures in a rhythmically discontinuous space. In this piece, as in the late medieval milieu of Romans in 1580, peasants and lords, the city and the surrounding countryside, coexist in uneasy harmony, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in rude and even violent opposition. Accordingly, this work identifies common elements in the music of post-spectral composers such as Julian Anderson and Kaija Saariaho and attempts to combine them with similar ideas from post-Birtwistle composers like George Benjamin and Judith Weir. The mechanical pastoral of the latter might represent the countryside, while the more intricate techniques of the former point toward the city—or perhaps that’s exactly backward?

Finally, as this piece is a direct homage to the programmatic symphonic poems of the late Romantic period, I should add that although the material of Carnival in Romans is entirely abstract, and no actual folk or world music is directly represented, the problematic orientalist aspects of so many of its predecessors, from Scheherazade to Le chant du rossignol, neither can nor should be ignored, and are even occasionally deliberately evoked. This is because—setting aside questions of moral anachronism—it is my belief that the arts flourish in the presence of genuine encounters with the new and unfamiliar, wherever they may be found, and drawing inspiration from the unexpected and unknown strengthens, not weakens, our shared artistic objectives, leading potentially to innovation, real conversation, and new syntheses which would not otherwise exist, so long as we act ethically, our efforts neither appropriating the work of others without proper acknowledgment nor stealing from and profiting off of communities not our own.