“When I was very young, just beginning all of this, in the late ’20s, there were very few American composers - maybe a couple hundred,” Elliott Carter, the 103-years-young indefatiguable maestro of American music said, in a recent interview with NPR, “now there are twenty thousand.” That number, twenty thousand, is almost incomprehensible to this composer. My mind simply shuts down – largely as a defense mechanism, to save me from a wave of paralyzing despair – when I try to fathom the sheer multitude of fellow composers, each struggling vainly to find musicians, listeners, a paycheck.
But that first number Carter shares, the “couple hundred” American composers active in the first few decades of the century, isn’t really much less daunting. How many composers in any particular generation can expect their music, their name to live on? How many brilliant composers of singular genius must be left out of the history books and anthologies?
Hugo Distler is one such composer, seldom even afforded even a little real estate in the footnotes of Twentieth century music history. A German composer active mainly during the 1930s, he certainly faced a compositional marketplace much more overcrowded than Carter’s New England. Distler also seems in many ways to have been born in the wrong century, his music and religious attitude having more in common with Protestant Germany in the 17th century than the decadence and violence of the Weimar Republic or the Nazi regime.
Hugo Distler was a primarily a composer of church music, writing mostly for choir and organ. He worked as an organist and also a schoolteacher; this, coupled with time spent in both Lubeck and Leipzig, serves as a parallel between Distler’s career and that of Johann Sebastian Bach. Distler’s music, however sounds much older.
In the 1920s there were essentially three strains in modern music: a jazz-inflected pop idiom, dissonance-heavy modernism, and a neo-classicism that tried to recreate the past glories of the symphonic age. Hugo Distler lived well outside this realm, composing music that owed more to the austerity of chant and the mystery of Passion plays than to any modern movement.
That is not to say there was nothing fresh or innovative about Distler’s music. His rhythmic fluidity and use of modes may have been borrowed from the Renaissance era, but his harmonic language did have a modern edge: he routinely used the interval of a fourth as his harmonic building block, rather than the more typical third. This decision to expand the harmonic field to include more perfect intervals is perhaps what helps lend an air of antiquity to his works, especially in an age when composers were including more raw dissonances.
I first encountered Distler’s music as an undergraduate, in a counterpoint course. (The professor didn’t care at all for Bach, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise; it was in the same class that I was introduced to another relative unknown by the name of Froberger.) The seeming antique-ness, the clever contrapuntal tricks, and intriguing harmonic field sucked me in immediately. Nor did it hurt that the compositions we studied were easy enough for someone with my limited keyboard abilities to kinda sorta play.
I could go on geeking out over this guy, but it would make more sense to link to some of the dude’s music. (As invisible as the guy is to most of the world, he’s still at least a little known in Germany, and among organists and lucky counterpoint students). I think the real lesson to be learned from Distler, though, is that no composer deserves to be overlooked. True, we simply cannot give each composer her or his due; from a time-management perspective, it would be impossible. And yet, it is possible for us to devote a little less attention to the Beethovens, the Brahmses - and yes, even the Ligetis and Vareses – in order to explore the hidden depths of our musical roots.
