Le Chaos, from ‘Les Élémens’

Program notes

About the Work

This is one of the most astonishing few minutes in all of early music. ‘Le Chaos’ is the prologue to Jean-Féry Rebel’s ballet Les Élémens (‘The Elements’) of 1737–38, and it sets out to depict, in sound, the primordial chaos before Creation: the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) tangled together before they separate into order. To represent that confusion, Rebel did something unprecedented: he opened the piece with a shattering dissonance in which all seven notes of the D harmonic minor scale are sounded at once. It is often described as the first notated ‘tone cluster’ in the history of Western music. He knew exactly how daring this was, writing that he had ‘dared to undertake to join to the idea of the confusion of the elements that of confusion in harmony.’

From that crunching, chaotic chord, the music gradually sorts itself out: over the course of the piece the elements emerge one by one, the dissonance resolving, order arising from disorder, until harmony is finally established. It is a vivid piece of musical storytelling and a genuine shock to hear, proof that the Baroque era could be every bit as experimental as our own. As the opening of Raphaël Pichon’s French Baroque programme, it is the perfect curtain-raiser: chaos giving way to the elegance and order of Rameau and Gluck that follow.

What to Listen For

Everything is in the very first sound. Listen for the opening chord: not a clear, consonant harmony but a thick, grinding cluster of clashing notes, all the notes of the scale piled on top of one another, held by strings, bassoon and harpsichord. To ears expecting Baroque elegance it is genuinely startling, almost like something from a modern score.

Then follow the process of creation: listen for how, out of that chaos, individual lines and clearer harmonies gradually emerge, the music sorting itself into order, with dance-like sections representing the different elements taking shape (brilliant violin runs for fire, piccolo trills for air, flowing flute lines for water, sustained bass notes for earth). The journey from that first dissonant shock to the eventual establishment of clear, ordered harmony is the whole drama of the piece in miniature: the birth of cosmos from chaos, painted in sound three centuries ago.