Piano Trio on Irish Folk Songs [1925]

Gigue

It took Frank Martin an uncommonly long time to develop a distinctive identity as a composer. The earliest work representative of his mature style, the oratorio Le vin herbé, was completed when he was fifty-one and his first great success came with his Petite symphonie concertante four years later. The turning point was his discovery in the mid-1930s of a way of adapting Schoenberg’s serial technique to his own, far from atonal ends. This is not to say, however, that the music he wrote before that time is without interest. Indeed, the long process of development, which was largely a matter of reconciling the mixed French and German elements in his Swiss background, produced some fascinating scores, many of them well worth a place in the regular repertoire.

Had Martin attended a major conservatoire, the process might have been hastened but his potential might also have been limited. His study of mathematics and physics, for example, was surely an important factor in refining the special interest in rhythm that led him to join the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute in Geneva in 1926. At the same time, in his efforts to escape classical harmony, he was experimenting with folk music of various cultures, including Indian, Bulgarian and, as the present work so vividly demonstrates, Irish. Written in France in 1925 - by a composer clearly aware of the bitonal language of Milhaud and other members of the Groupe des Six - The Piano Trio on Irish Folk Songs is to a large extent a study in rhythm and in structural factors other than conventional development and recapitulation.

The structure of the first movement is based on tempo. Comparatively slow at first, as violin and cello introduce the first theme against quietly repeated chords on the piano, the tempo accelerates with the entry of every new idea. As the composer has observed, “returning themes play almost no role here; it is the rhythmic relationship of the various melodies that secures the unity of the movement.” Finely calculated though it is in matters of tempo and rhythm, it makes a brilliantly reckless effect, not least through the virtuosity of the scoring.

The central Adagio, on the other hand, is firmly based on recurrences of the opening cello melody. “This melody return always in the same form,” says Martin, “in the same register and the same tonality, set only against a constantly changing melodic and rhythmic background.” The jazzy syncopations and bitonal harmonies that arise as a result of the textural diversity are no less interesting than the structure. But as far as the individual independence of the three parts is concerned, the final Gigue - more Bartók than Les Six in this case - is the most exciting movement of all. It owes little, as Martin says, “to harmony and polyphonic imitation” and everything “to rhythm and melody, which are the basis of Irish song and dance.”