François Couperin's piece for harpsichord, "Les Barricades Mistérieuses" or "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" ("The Mysterious Barricades"), has caught the imagination of many artists, writers and musicians. These pages are devoted to charting the works it has inspired.

 

The pages are still under construction and I have a number of entries to add. But if you know of any references to the piece in novels, poems, paintings, or other pieces of music, I would be grateful to be informed about them. You can contact me at the following email address: sevnine AT miami DOT edu.

---

MUSIC

In 1971, the Moog synthesist Ruth White (b. 1925) released an album called Short Circuits which includes versions of a number of favorite classics. Among them is a rendition of "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" which, under the title "Variations on Couperin's Rondeau ("Les Barricades mystérieuses")," is the only piece on the album which deviates enough from the original for her to credit the result to herself.

Her variations involve the piece, played quite quickly, with a descant over the top playing a jaunty medley of bits and pieces, including some of Yankee Doodle. The result is actually rather pleasant. The cover is notable for its psychedelic art:

According to Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner (Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States, Ashgate, 2006, p. 37), White studied with George Antheil from 1951-4 (one of only three students of his). She founded The Electronic Music Association in the 1970's with Paul Beaver. Her first studio was self-built and was on display at the Kenneth G. Fiske Museum for Musical Instruments at the Claremont Colleges. (The museum is no longer open to the public.)

Ex-Police guitarman Andy Summers' album Mysterious Barricades (1987) takes its name from its second track. The only possible audible relation the piece bears to the original is its incorporation of a kind of rhythmic ostinato in 4/4 time. Summers' piece, however, is slow and spacey, quite the opposite in mood to the Couperin. Interestingly, though, given the appeal of Couperin's piece to surrealists, Summers dedicates his album to Erik Satie.

The composer Philip Corner (b. 1933) writes as follows of the Couperin:

On the basis of his daily improvisations, he developed Through the Mysterious Barricade which is, as he says, not “a composition in the ordinary sense, but a principle which can be manifested in various ways.” A score (available here) was published in 2003 that bears the following history of the ‘principle’:

In correspondence, Corner states that the published score is close to the class exercises at Rutgers with Emeka Nwabuoku (1938-2006), to whom it is dedicated. Of the near-daily meditational improvisations, here are three versions recorded by Corner. The first, the full title of which is "Through the Mysterious Barricade (after F. Couperin) LUMEN I (for Stan Brakhage)" was recorded on the night of January 27, 1990 (in a loft on Leonard St). Corner had recently seen some of the films by Stan Brakhage and the improvisations of this period reflect their influence on him. ("LUMEN" in the titles of these improvisations picks up on the title of Brakhage's film "The Riddle of Lumen.") Corner sent this improvisation to Brakhage as a consequence of which Brakhage made his film Passage Through: A Ritual which uses Corner’s improvisation as its soundtrack. The music in the LUMEN I version blends with a “repetitive street-warning signal coming in from outside.” The pieces lasts about 42 minutes and the Couperin is played starting around the thirtieth minute. In almost all of the versions of "Through the Mysterious Barricade" the Couperin is played very slowly, but never more so than in this version, in which it takes about 10 minutes. The effect is startling, the music sometimes slowing down so much as almost to be unrecognizable.

The second of these improvisations, titled like the first, with "LUMEN I" becoming "LUMEN II," was recorded on February 7 of that year. It too lasts over 40 minutes.

The third, LUMEN III, was recorded on February 23. (Listeners to this version, which begins very quietly and also incorporates a certain amount of ambient noise, should be warned that, around the ninth minute, things get very loud suddenly. They soon quiet down to an ordinary fortissimo.)

The version for gamelan with western instruments, which, as Corner notes, is “more of a composition than an improvisation” was published in the scorebook Especially for Gamelan and is available from Frog Peak Music (who publish Corner's music generally) or the American Gamelan Institute. It was performed by Gamelan Son of Lion, a group of which Corner was one of the co-founders. The workshop at Rutgers with Javanese musicians in 1992 also uses gamelan instruments, played by STSI Surakarta. You can listen to it here:

Finally, the session at the University of Katmandu, in Bhaktipur, “in which a version was realized closer to the concept of the African drum composition [the original Rutgers class-exercises from the 80’s] can be heard here:

It was recorded on October 15, 1998 and involves intoning and drums along with the piano. The rendition of the Couperin, in this version, is accompanied by drums and clapping and acquires a kind of rhythmic drive lacking in the other renditions by Corner.

Here you can hear Corner delivering some remarks before the Rutgers workshop of 1992:

(All quotations from Corner from personal correspondence. Music posted with his permission.)

A large piece for flute and orchestra by Luca Francesconi, "Les Barricades Mystérieuses," was composed in 1989. It is recorded on the CD Per Orchestra (Ricordi 1023, 1995), which includes three other pieces by Francesconi. I quote in full the composer's very interesting liner notes on the piece:

The commissioning body for this flute concerto asked me to take my cue from a famous harpsichord piece by Couperin which has the same title. On a first reading, Couperin's piece seems utterly innocuous, inoffensive. But also inexplicable. Highly regular yet elusive; easy on the ear, but without a theme; tonal but with worrying, perhaps even distressing, harmonic suspensions. Infinite, interminable, with neither head nor tail. A joke, perhaps? The first listeners must have interpreted it as such. But not him - Couperin amused himself by inventing highly accomplished structures, allowing chasms of meaning to be glimpsed, unfathomable depths which only he understood.   It is as if a mysterious design were lying beneath the brilliant surface of his music. In this piece hidden barriers prevent the musical argument from flowing in any direction whatsoever; the music breaks up against invisible walls or turns back on itself, it spins round, it repeats itself; and it is transformed into a flow that is almost physiological, primitive, Dionysian. This was the fascinating mystery: immovable irrational barricades which confront a lucid, rational construction. I have tried to investigate this mystery.   The flute soloist attempts to build up a long melodic line, a great passacaille, as François le Grand would have said. But a haunting rhythm is always winding around, hidden, in the orchestra. In irregular waves, a barricade rises up with its primitive energy to confront the soloist. The first barrier, and the most archaic one, is the rhythm. Then the melody, always circular. Then the harmony, which expands without respite, like a play of false perspectives.   Unlike Couperin's work, mine is not static but creates a process of change: the flute and the orchestra will contaminate each other reciprocally. Al the end the orchestra will play like a gigantic piccolo. So no harpsichord, no galant Baroque quotations in my barricades, but a hard clash between instinct and reason.

 

Tyler White has a harpsichord concerto from 1990 entitled Mysterious Barricades, commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. The concerto quotes the Couperin towards its close. The piece as a whole is

something like a tombeau for everything I love about the French Baroque (and maybe Western high culture in general), in which intricate ornamentation becomes a vehicle not only for poise, for elegance, for deep expression combined with emotional restraint, but also for a kind of self-annihilating microrhythmic tension. (Personal communication from the composer.)

 

Serbian guitarist and composer Dusan Bogdanovic composed Mysterious Habitats for solo guitar in 1994. The work is based on Couperin's piece. It has been recorded several times. Here is a performance by Joe Galambos:

A piece for solo percussion and electronic sounds from the mid-nineties by Scott Smallwood, Mysterious Barricades, also gives its name to the album it is recorded on. According to Smallwood, his piece has no musical relation to the Couperin:

When I heard the title of his piece, it immediately invoked some rather striking sonic images for me. I liked the title very much, and so I simply stole it. I figured that since it had nothing to do with the music, that it could represent a kind of fantastical form instead. So, in a sense it was no different than calling it "fantasia" or "sonatas and interludes". In my piece I sort of vaguely tried to sonify what that title might actually mean, but mostly I just used it to evoke a kind of abstract impression. (Personal communication from the composer.)

 

The Italian composer Gabriella Zen composed Le Barricate Misteriose (Hommage à Couperin) for 12 cellos in 1995. It was commissioned by the Villa-Lobos Orchestra.

 Robert Xavier Rodriguez's Sinfonía à la Mariachi (1997) was commissioned by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra. Its third movement is called Las Barricadas Misteriosas. Here are the composer's notes on that movement:

The third movement, Las Barricadas Misteriosas (The Mysterious Barricades) is a serene adagio.  Here the Spanish and Indian antecedents of mariachi join, accompanied by the additional element of the French, represented by Les Barricades Mystérieuses for harpsichord by François Couperin (1668-1733). Four programmatic elements thus revolve in a delicate musical mobile reminiscent of Charles Ives’ Unanswered Question: Couperin’s elegant rondeau (in the harp and high strings) is overlaid by strands of a tender Spanish lullaby (Señora Santana, in the oboe) decorated by reappearances of the mystical Indian birdcall motifs in flutes and percussion (as in the previous movement). All, as usual, gives way to the mariachi, which is this time represented by four trumpets in answering pairs (a reference to the traditional mariachi practice of trumpets echoing long, melancholy phrases both before and behind the audience).

The piece has been recorded by the Mexico City Philharmonic, conducted by Benjamin Juarez, but the recording has not yet been released.