Melody, the ultimate mystery in music: Babayan in long interview

Sergei Babayan spoke with Spanish music magazine Melómano about his programme SONGS, his upcoming recital in Madrid and the art of writing a good transcription:

Melómano: What can the Spanish public expect from ‘Songs’, the programme with which you will give your first recital in our country?

I wanted to invite the audience on a journey into the greatest question in music: What makes a good melody? This journey will take us from Franz Schubert to Charles Trenet. I hope the listener will enjoy following the way in which modern folk song and art song have evolved over time, both in their original form, with sung words, and as a transcription for an instrument, a song without words.

Regarding songwriting, you say that melody ‘remains the ultimate mystery’. Would you like to elaborate on this statement for the audience that will be reading it?

Melody is an eternal mystery, no Artificial Intelligence will be able to explain how exactly Bach and everyone after him could come up with a lead voice in music that would captivate our ear and stay with us. Every aspect in composition can be studied and analyzed, patterns can be detected and laid bare – but a beautiful melody cannot be explained, much like love has no explanation.

The recital will begin with Liszt's transcriptions of various songs by Schubert. Can these be considered as a starting point or a synthesis of the rest of the programme?

I find it useful to dive into the world of song with Schubert as a starting point. Franz Schubert has given us hundreds of eternal melodies, many of them very popular and of great influence on popoular and folk music. And Liszt has chosen many of them for different levels of transcriptions, both arrangements very faithful to the original score with voice, and highly virtuoso masterpieces inspired by the original song. That bandwidth of transforming a song into piano music fascinates me.

Each part of the programme shows different approaches to melody: the first part showcases romantic and post-romantic lyricism, and the second part brings together neoclassical or folk-inspired pieces. Does this selection, which also avoids the ‘greatest hits’, conceal a didactic intention?

My goal is to tell a truly interesting story through music, not to give an academic lesson. There is nothing encyclopedic about this programme, very important composers and entire musical traditions are missing. I look at different lineages in musical writing and play what I enjoy most and what makes a compelling sequence of keys and emotions. There are very well-known melodies; but there is also a masterpiece like the song by Hindemith, a composer nobody would associate with sing-along hit music: The profound beauty of his melodic line comes from the immensely complex musical construction on which it has been built. It is perfect. I am fascinated by this.

What nods to Spanish music can we find in ‘Songs’?

There is an Iberian element which I have always felt very attracted to, and it goes beyond strictly Spanish music. The works of Mompou, Ponce, Guridi and Albéniz have an elegant lightness about them, which makes the melody float in the air and is highly suggestive, alluding to visual and almost olfactory associations with the Iberian world.

The concert also includes two songs by Komitas, a composer of great relevance in your native Armenia. Would you like to expand on this?

As an artist who grew up in Armenia, I feel an almost genetic connection with the church music and folksong that Komitas collected and wrote down. It was everywhere at his time, and at mine, too. Komitas became the first Armenian composer accepted in the Western world as the genius he was and his merits for capturing and preserving the specific tone of Armenian melody cannot be overstated. There is a fragile, almost minimalistic simplicity about his works that has touched me deeply since my earliest childhood. His works are construed in such delicate perfection that one could not remove a single note. That in my view is what makes true greatness in art.

Finally, there are also references to popular music and jazz, like that improvisation ‘Hommage à Edith Piaf’ by Poulenc, En avril à Paris by Charles Trenet or Oh lady, be good by Gershwin.

Artists such as George Gershwin, Alexis Weissenberg and Francis Poulenc were fantastic pianists and had a deep understanding of the possibilities and the wealth of our instrument. Keith Jarrett was trained as a classical concert pianist. Performing these demanding arrangements is a beautiful way of paying tribute to music. You see, there are many arrangements for the piano of some of the greatest songs, but both pianistically and musically many of them are of no interest whatsoever, compared to the beautiful original song. The piano transcriptions of these pieces by Trenet and others are extraordinary works of art. There is only a distinction to be made between good music and bad music.

In 2018, you released a CD with your own piano transcriptions of works for orchestra by Prokofiev. Your new programme ‘Songs’ includes new transcriptions you have written, for songs by Grieg and Fauré. Can you tell us about the process of writing a transcription?

Taking a piece of music composed for orchestra or the human voice and making of it a piece for piano solo is a work of love that grows over time. I would always be faithful to the melody and harmonies, but transforming the colours of an orchestra and of a singer into a work that uses the range of the piano in a meaningful way requires a deep immersion into the writing of a given composer. Take ‘Au bord de l’eau’ by Fauré: In order to transcribe this song, I would spend many, many hours playing Fauré’s piano music, his Nocturnes, his Barcarolles and Romances – and only when I feel that I have truly internalized, that I have in my hands Fauré’s particular pianistic use of harmonies and colours, only then would I venture to write down a transcription of a piece originally created for a different instrument.

Read the full interview in Spanish here.