Elles (Toulouse-Lautrec) (1989)

Music for a Lithographic Slide Show for Violin, Alto Sax, Horn, Synthesizer – 25 min.

Audio

Score (Free Download)

Prints (Free Download)

Program Note

The music for Elles (1989) was written to be performed along with a slide display of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographic folio, one piece for each of the prints in the series. The pieces are intended to be be listened to only while observing the prints, so the experience should be (in a decidedly “low-tech” way) multi-media. The music responds not only to the emotion and atmosphere of the prints, but also to their abstract texture and technique.

The “Elles” series is generally considered a milestone of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s career. These lithographs commissioned to be sold as portfolios intended for the erotic print collectors’ market prove to be a financial failure; rather than erotic, the series is intimate, replacing licentious explicitness with natural honesty. The images are reminiscences drawn from Lautrec’s thematic exploration of the daily routine of life in brothels. Technically “Elles” (which translates as the feminine pronoun they) holds an important position in the history of printmaking, extending the pictorial possibilities of the medium to achieve fluid and expresssive effects previously associated only with painting. Lautrec demonstrates a preference for a modern flat design style over the traditional chiaroscuro, but uses color, ink density and the paper itself to conjure the mood and atmosphere of light and shadow. (These comments are drawn from Nora Desloge’s Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection catalogue.)

The titles and order of the plates (as established by cataloguers) are as follows:
1. Cover for Elles (Elles, couverture)
2. The Seated Clowness — Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o (La Clowness assise [Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o])
3. Woman with a Tray — Breakfast (Femme au plateau —Petit déjeuner)
4. Sleeping Woman — Awakening (Femme couchée — Réveil)
5.Woman at the Tub — The Tub (Femme au tub — Le tub)
6. Woman Washing Herself — The Toilette (Femme qui se lave — La toilette)
7. Woman with Mirror — The Hand Mirror (Femme à glace — La glace à main)
8. Woman Combing Her Hair — The Coiffure (Femme qui se peigne — La coiffure)
9. Woman in Bed, Profile — Awakening (Femme au lit — Au petit lever)
10. Woman in Her Corset — Passing Conquest (Femme en corset — Conquête de passage)
11. Reclining Woman — Weariness (Femme sur le dos — Lassitude)
12. Frontispiece for Elles (Elles, frontispice)

Performance Notes

Elles was composed expressly for the exhibit of the Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection exhibit at the Dixon Gallery in Memphis. It was premiered in a concert sponsored by the Dixon Gallery and the Memphis Composers Alliance and was performed by the MCA Synthesizer Quartet: Julian Ross, violin, Allen Rippe, saxophone, and Robert Patterson, horn, with the composer as synth-player. The composer highly recommends commentary on the “Elles” series found in the Baldwin M. Baldwin Toulouse-Lautrec Collection Catalogue written by Nora Desloge. This collection has been donated to the San Diego Museum of Art; the catalogue is distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle and London. Slides of the lithographs and a Macintosh disc bearing the ELLES-CZ voices formatted for use with the Opcode CZ Editor-Librarian, and tape demonstrating the ELLES-CZ voices are available from the composer.

Elles is approximately 25 minutes in duration.

Synthesizer Notes

Each of the pieces is built around a voice designed on the Casio CZ 101 synthesizer. It is possible to approximate these voices on other synthesizers, but the performers wishing to render an authentic “original instrument” realization will want to find a synthesizer in the CZ series and program it according to the data provided in the charts which follow. The appeal of the CZ (apart from being cheap and extremely portable) is the directness, clarity and intimacy of its voices, perfectly suited to the lithographic technique of Toulouse-Lautrec, and mixing easily with the acoustic members of the quartet. Keyboard velocity sensitivity is not available on this instrument, and this should be considered a welcome stylistic limitation of this work, but the synth performer should allow his sense of articulation and timing to be sensitively attuned to the CZ sounds. The following three pages provide all the data needed for programming a CZ and descriptions that might be useful in imitating the sounds on a substitute synthesizer.