The priceless Meyer Kupferman never let an idea skate by, and the many-colored density of his writing allowed for even the briefest of pieces to have that certain je ne sais qupferman. Among his many piano pieces lie the Five Little Zeppelins, turbulent sketches of constellations that all display his "gestalt" writing quite well. While all of them are worth investigating, only the last, "Cygnus", is a leaf, and in my scan you can see the out-of-control ending to its predecessor, "Draco".
For those unfamiliar with limited aleatoric writing, the box in the right hand is a cell of music to be repeated for as long as the squiggly line persists, and it isn't meant to line up with anything. The left hand is given single pitches to be held a piacere, at least as long as the performer feels is right for the solid lines trailing after them. Both the sustaining and soft pedals are held down through the whole piece, and though the melody climaxes near the end of the third line the dynamic never breaches piano, eventually receding and ritarding to the quadruple piano finish, the right hand winding down to almost nothing. It's a very "Neptune"-from-The Planets ending, the most graceful of a quintet of sturms und drangs, and I was sad to find there's no recording of the set. Well, dagnabbit, I'll just have to go and do it myself.
I've highlighted Ives's sentimentalism before on this blog, and nothing wells the tears of nostalgia in the American populace more than Christmas. He had a real talent for weaving old popular tunes into crazy tapestries of sound and emotion, but his one Christmas song is surprisingly traditional, so traditional in fact that it could pass for a classic Christmas carol if tossed into a collection or on the radio. And, unsurprisingly, it's called A Christmas Carol.
Even though the song appears to be Ripped from the Hymnbook, Ives includes a few small inventive elements to bring out an arrested, fragile pang in the heart. The little rhythmic figure in the first beat of measure 3 turns into a leitmotif, stuttering the phrasing in measure 6. Measure 8 is a Grand Pause, an achingly long time in the slow tempo and an illumination of Winter's enveloping silence. The top of the phrase arc in measure 12 switches the time from a compound meter to a simple duple, giving the words an emphatic weight that works both with "hearts" and "die", awfully clever prosody considering Ives probably wrote the words. Once measure 15 comes by the rhythmic leitmotif comes back, stuttering the phrases on expansive repeated pitches, allowing the Christmas sentiment to unspool across time and space. Everything is piano or quieter, and the hushed quality brings the song's poignancy to the fore. It's one of those rare songs that fits perfectly into a genre while commenting on the genre at the same time, as the piece is a normal hymn that's creative moments spark deep psychological notes. It's title A Christmas Carol confirms that fact, as the listener is forced to admire it from the outside, treating it as a disconnected object rather than just another carol. Either way you slice it the song is gorgeous, and best sung in the dead of night as a lone star pierces the heavens. Even better if you're a countertenor like this singer.
Merry Christmas, and don't forget this lovely choral performance:
Despite the best efforts of some truly outstanding composers surrounding La Belle Époque, Scandinavia has largely yet to be seen as more than one entity in the Classical world. Norway, Denmark and Finland all have internationally famous masthead composers (Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius respectively), but Iceland and Sweden still don't, though at least in Sweden's case many fantastic artists have found middling international success (such as Hugo Alfvén and Lars-Erik Larsson). Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985) is one of the middlers as of this writing, yet he has the wonderful distinction of being Sweden's first modernist, though not a Webern-level modernist. Rosenberg was more akin to a Swedish Impressionist, expanding upon familiar chords to exotic ends, and luckily for me plenty of piano music flowed from his pen. His 1939 Improvisations are actually tightly crafted, miniatures valuing elegance and incisiveness above rhapsodic excess. And though it isn't the only leaf in the pile, the sixth improvisation is the most evocative.
Though the trick is as old as Bach, "pedal" sonorities are an easy and effective way to add depth and sophistication to a piece - sustaining a bass note or chord beyond the point it would have changed in a tonal context, letting the resulting dissonances rattle and hum. Rosenberg's pedals create a huge span across the keyboard, requiring a light and swift touch to keep the tempo up. My first thoughts, as they are wont to be, went to Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie, one of my favorite pieces ever and one I played incessantly in High School. The Improvisation never reaches that piece's glorious heights (or depths?), but it makes a dang fine case for itself in the Hall of Echoes. The tightly-voiced, tempo-shifting inner lines have a passing resemblance to ancient choral music, especially after the gorgeous shift from D minor to B-flat sostenuto, as undulating, plainchant perfect fifths take over for a time before winding down into D. The piece doesn't have a large arc like La Cathédrale Engloutie, but rather circles around a handful of sonorities, its dynamics never breaching pianissimo, its melody never evolving. The change to B-flat is a moment of woozy clarity, but that soon gets lost in itself, as if the listener is passing a hole in a cloudbank to see the sun, but forced to continue onward. It's a listening experience akin to being lost in a maze - vacant and elliptical, echoing nothing back except your perception of it. Though if the labyrinth was really englufed, one could swim to the surface. This recording (luckily the only recording uploaded by the performer from the whole set) uses the sostenuto pedal of the piano to hold the "pedal" notes while allowing the right sustaining pedal to change freely, keeping things from getting too muddy. She also employs a heck of a lot of sensitivity, letting the plainchant sting from the placid surface, making this a labyrinth I wouldn't mind getting lost in. Except for the requisite disembraining* by the Minotaur.
~PNK
*Because Christmas is the perfect time to make an Ubu Roi reference.
Though he's not talked about much today, the music of Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) was once very popular, as he was one of the most prolific and high-profile figures in French Neo-Classicism in the years between the World Wars (and beyond). The Neo-Classical style utterly dominated French music at the time, and it's all to easy to write off its authors as riding trends (much like the American populist style of the 40's and 50's), but when they were good they were good, and Tansman had a consistently excellent grasp of the language that bespoke a personal identity. Though he lived and worked in France for the majority of his life, he was Polish by birth and maintained a strong sense of his heritage in his works. His Quatre Danses Polonaises from 1932 are an excellent synthesis of Polish folk music and Neo-Classical techniques, and as I perused it a leaf blew my way that resonated very well with the Holiday conurbation.
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One of Tansman's prettiest pieces, the Dumka keeps a deep emotional resonance so treasured in Eastern European music, at once yearning and dolorous. Much like Debussy's The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Tansman is able to use modern harmonic and textural techniques in a way that doesn't distract from the tune, or its recognizably Polish harmonic structure. Americans are trained to think of snow whenever we hear Slavic music, so the Dumka may spark those warm Christmas feelings in US listeners. I personally think that Lutoslawski's 20 Polish Christmas Carolsis the definitive document of Eastern European Christmas music, but I can't fit that into a leaf article (but perhaps Re-Composing). The Danses Polonaises also exist in an orchestral version, and that's the version I've got a recording of. The Dumka is the third movement, and shows off Tansman's creativity in orchestration - with a haunting treat in the last five measures. The other dances are pretty boss, too.
Whether you adore his work or despise it, whether you hold his antisemitism against him or choose to ignore it, you can't deny that Richard Wagner was one of music's great geniuses; his "music of the future" was far ahead of his time and enormously influential to late-19th century composers. That being said, it's entirely understandable why some modern listeners may be put off by his work, as the majority of his output was comprised of obnoxiously long operas. Wagner was a megalomaniac to end all megalomaniacs, including commissioning instruments to be built for his as-of-then unperformed works and building a radical new theater for his own 15-20 hour Ring cycle. That isn't to say that all his work is intolerably huge, as is proved by this sliver of a piece:
Though it bears a dedication of December 26, 1881 (very near the end of Wagner's life), the Elegie's harmonic language bears some resemblance to that of the ever-taught Tristan und Isolde, written in the late 1850's, and some references state that it was written in 1858. Either way, it remains some of the most sensitive music Wagner ever wrote (and is as close as I'm able to highlight fellow musical futurist Liszt's En rêvein this blog). Man, those opening chords - he digs into them so hard, only to recede into unpredictable harmonic movement. Measures 5 & 6 feel very much like the undulations in the slow movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, and that was pretty much as beautiful as Schubert ever got, so kudos. The hairpin dynamics compliment romantic pianism very well, requiring both incredible sensitivity and a willingness to throw your whole weight into the keys. The piece has probably been eluding capture for a while thanks to poor publication, but earlier this year one Francisco Javier Hernando Rodríguez was kind enough to make a very readable engraved version in honor of Wagner's bicentennial. As you can see at the top, the Elegie began its life as a two-line scrabble, and you can see the original up close as well as the typeset version and a subpar published version here. Perhaps it would have been more resonant to publish this article the day after Christmas like the dedication, but I think publishing it ahead of its time is more in the spirit of the "music of the future". Whichever way you look at it, the Elegie is an apt representation of the darkest month of the year, and his bicentennial is slipping away faster each day - and this performance is just as fine a memorial as anything.
In 16 measly bars, Chopin whipped out his shallowest overplayed work. In a set of 24 inventive, exquisitely crafted preludes this is the most played (after the "Raindrop", of course), and that kind of stinks. All those harmonic subtleties and explorations of piano textures can't fight for air next to Ol' Catchy Tune, and countless kiddie piano recitals have helped it dig its claws further into the rep. One of the fine bunch of Italian composers to revitalize Italian instrumental music at the beginning of the 20th century, Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) saw the ditty and inspiration struck. He'd been writing quirky atonal music at the time, and his Two Contrasts, op. 31starts with a fine homage to the A-Major Menace:
With a few extra bars and a bunch of extra subtleties, Casella turns the prelude on a wry ear. You could make a point that all of 19th century salon music owes its livelihood to Chopin, as he infused a lot of creativity and emotional depth to a previously shallow genre of music - Casella infuses that with anise and absinthe. All the original architecture is there in spirit; he just enriches it with extended tertian fuzziness. You may notice at the top that this is called Grazioso, or "gracious" for the Anglo-inclined. I'll let you guess what the other movement is called - it should be apparent when it starts.
My Stanchinsky article got me thinking about untimely deaths in composition, and a name from the far side of the Iron Curtain came to mind - Valery Zhelobinsky (1913-1946), who was quite prolific in his short career. Stalin aside, the big reason most music from Stalin's oppressive policy haven't gained traction after the fact is primarily for being shallow, irritating populist pap. I can't say that Zhelobinsky's music totally escape the Stalinist tractor beam, as the music of his I've seen sits squarely under Shostakovich's wing, but some gemlets rise to the surface. His Six Short Etudes, op. 19 were performed by Vladimir Horowitz, and are among the only works of his to be recorded (at least the first one, here performed by Raymond Lewenthal on a pretty interesting album).
His 24 Preludes, op. 20show the full scope of his skill for piano writing, and find their place comfortably among the long line of 24-strong Russian prelude sets alongside Cui, Shostakovich, Scriabin and many others. The problems arise with the overabundance of moto perpetuo pieces, with constant 16th notes in the right hand and boom-chik left-hand stride figures, like this:
In reality there should be more like this:
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And there are some, but this one is far too gorgeous to ignore. It perfectly captures that turn-of-the-century Russian blend of expansiveness and melancholy, and seeing that this year is the centenary of Zhelobinsky's birth it's an all-too-convenient elegy to boot. It's almost enough to make one forget the political circumstances in which it was conceived, and Zhelobinsky was often able to use restrictions to his advantage. There's a subpar recording on YouTube that popped up for the centenary, but I made my own version, and with November almost gone it wasn't a moment too soon. https://soundcloud.com/peter-nelson-king/valery-zhelobinsky-24-preludes ~PNK
One of the most prolific composers of the 20th century, Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) first gained prominence as a member of Les Sixand made a career far outshining that paltry moniker. With an opus list ending at 443, Milhaud managed to keep a smile affixed on nearly everything he wrote, and you can imagine his work went through many phases of smile. His time with Les Six was pretty dang early in his career, just beginning to pry himself off of Debussy's language and get his own grooves into motion - and for the Album des six, he offered one of his most enchanting works from this transitional period.
The mazurka is a Polish dance that was popularized by Chopin's many entries in the genre, and Milhaud's Mazurka brings a lot of whole tones to the table. The melody is doused in sultry swinging chromaticism, a much more languorous take on the usually stiffer mazurka rhythm. The bass line swoops freely, creating surprising shifts in character and tonality. Deep, yet deft, pedaling is required to make the piece really shine, and thankfully the different modes shift on a bar-by-bar basis. Small touches keep things lively after multiple plays, such as the right hand chord in bar 34 (six from the end), and I've always loved "super-resonance" lines, ones that indicate notes should be held across the barline, only to reveal that there's nothing there. I feel like this piece should be played all the time, but perhaps its leafiness accounts for its lost-in-the-shuffle status. Or maybe people just don't want to be upstaged by this performance, which just about nails it (and what more needs to be said?):
Sometimes a piece jumps right the Sam Hill out of nowhere and snaps at your heels, unrelenting until the second you write an article about it. Such is the case with a piece uploaded just an hour ago on Inciptisify, arguably the premiere channel for disseminating pieces by young contemporary composers (I've featured it before). It's composer, Sehyung Kim, is only a year older than me and has so far slipped past my radar, but his Korean-Kazakh heritage is enough for at least a peek. That peek takes the form of six bars of varying length for piano.
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Sijo is an ancient Korean poetic form that explores deep metaphysical and natural questions with a strict syllabic form. The Wikipedia article goes over it much better than I can, but sijo already appeals to me for its haunting brevity and heightened evocation. Kim has composed a bunch of them, as evidenced by worklists and his Soundcloud, which is where Inciptisify got the recording for Sijo_280412, "der Schnee kommt". The numbers refer to the date when the piece was composed, and with this kind of micro-piece titling becomes a non-issue - John Cage eventually abandoned titles, as well as the I-swear-to-God-his-time-on-this-blog-is-coming Gardner Jencks. In case you're wondering, "Der Schnee kommt" means "the snow comes", which is exactly what I'm taking bets on now considering I live near Seattle and snow is about as consistent as lightning strikes.
Sijo_280412 is an egg of resonant simplicity. It's a philosophical puzzle: while different keys of the piano are struck, the placement of a finger on different parts of the strings results in the same pitch (sort of) sounding for all of them. Are there eight different pitches or only various shades of one? His organization is also elegant. The small numbers above each harmonic refer to their order in the overtone series - 7 was skipped presumably to keep the tight 4-to-4 ratio between the first and second staves intact (and it might have sounded gross). The pauses reveal an interesting architecture: decreasing in length in one way, increasing the next, and circling the drain in the third. The final line also circles the harmonics before bringing the piece back to the natural E. The wide spaces between the thunking, gong-like E's perfectly evoke the muted, desolate beauty of a snowy landscape, the more disparate harmonics even reminding the listener of the crunch of a boot penetrating the surface. You can look in all directions and infer the changing landscape, but it's all enveloped by the E - static, immense but ultimately fragile, as one slip of the finger on the string brings it all down. Daylight Savings Time is finally over, and the cold months are done lying in wait, so Kim's Sijo couldn't be more timely. Well, maybe if there was actual snow. I live in Seattle, so that day seems unlikely to come.
For as wild and visionary as Charles Ives's music was, he retained a distinctly Romantic sentimentalism and nostalgia. These feelings come most to the fore in his vast song output, some 150-strong and rippling with the mist that comes upon the eye. While some of his songs have gained a modicum of fame for themselves, one of the lesser-known and -recorded ones struck me for its particularly Deep Fall qualities and expression of his mature voice.
It doesn't take long for Ives's personal, extended tonality to kick in, and the chords in bar three are pure Concord Sonata. Ives's harmonies were formed by instinct and adventure, and so they retain a certain tonal structure while spinning into unpredictable ends. The rhythms fall on in a three-on-four pattern, creating a hypnotic pulsation and evoking Autumn moments quite nicely. There's a kind of bitter humor at the end, and the performance below brings it out with an impish gleam in its eye. I guess this isn't Halloweeny per se but it's fine October leaf nonetheless. And as it's passed the singing public by for a long time, it's as much a fallen leaf as the song's subject. Happy Halloween from Forgotten Leaves!
Classical music is a largely humorless enterprise, save for the illustrious oeuvre of P.D.Q. Bach. Perhaps academia is to blame, or perhaps composers fearful of their reputation among the pompous and vindictive, but either way classical jokes are few and far between (and often not funny). One of the most prolific classical humorists, Joseph Haydn, wrote the "Surprise" symphony, wherein loud orchestral hits interject quiet passages, and this was considered the height of classical trickery for some time. There's also that guy who wrote a piece for each key of the piano exactly once, but it's humor value lies in how much you care about how many keys a piano has and how important serialism is to your life. In this mire of stiffness one device has cropped up not once but three times in leaf form, each time separated by decades of time and composer M.O.'s - and we're looking at all three today. With the image above in mind, take a wild guess what it is.
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See it?
As you can probably guess, repeat signs are usually followed by more music, or at least have another ending as to give the section closure. Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) was a charming and clever lad, and many of his works exude a sunny smile, one that would shine across the works of Debussy and Ravel. His Petite Valse may not seem that odd at first glance, but that repeat sign gives it a snickering new dimension. As the bar is the dominant ending to the phrase, it wants to lean to the tonic, and the pickup note leads back to the first bar. However, there is no exit - following the score forces infinite repetition. The pianist Georges Rabol decided that if he was to circle around the mulberry bush he was at least going to put an octave jump in there for yucks.
It's an elegant trap, and recalls a scene from Animal Crackers:
And if Chabrier could do it, Erik Satie (1866-1924) could certainly up the ante. Satie was one of the most eccentric and enigmatic composers in history, and his extensive piano oeuvre includes such gems as Pièces froides and Embryons desséchés (I'll let you translate that). His superb piano set Sports et Divertessements is one of his most extensive and varied works, and near the set's end this appears:
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If you'll tear your eyes from the beautiful fountain penmanship for a second, you'll notice that symbol at the end of the score, and the lack of a double bar. The symbol means that you go back to where it appears earlier in the score, and that just so happens to be the very beginning. When Satie calls something Le Tango perpétual you'd better believe he means it. It's the most famous of the three by far, and Satie's influence ensured at least one direct Tango descendant (but we'll get to that later). YouTube's scrolling score project illuminates how the Devil's preferred music is the path to madness.
If one were asked to name the most humorless composer of all you couldn't give a much better answer than Anton Webern (1883-1945), the master of serial purity and smile suppression. His mature style is so spare and emotionally cold you'd be hard pressed to find a jokey moment in all that empty space. With that in mind, there may be a reason he left off the opus number for his 1924 Kinderstück.
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Is "lovely" really the most appropriate mood for this piece? "Quizzical" seems more apt, and it shall remain quizzical to me because I'm of the opinion that life is too short to divine the root collection of serial pieces without good reason (it's not palindromic, that's for sure). I can see some humor here, what with the "lovely" at the top and the bubbling texture in the meat of the thing, but I can't see the appeal for children, if that's at all what Webern had in mind. And ultimately, it's that dang stinger under the last bar that cements this piece in the joke rep, the one at the start of this article, and the one that the pianist in the recording below chooses to ignore - but he does squeeze a heck of a lot of charm into his go at it. Perhaps rather than asking the question of "Why the repeat?" should we be asking "How can we use the repeat to our advantage?" The problem is that every time I get an answer to one I come back to the other.
There's been an awful lot of slow, quiet music here at Forgotten Leaves, inc., so let's change that with the help of Debussy. The Paris Conservatory had a tradition at the beginning of the last century of commissioning brand new audition pieces for each incoming class. In 1904 they asked Debussy for a short piano piece, and in a fit of hilarious inspiration he gave them this:
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Now that's what I call Klassikal Komedy. Employing his trademark impressionist tricks, Debussy makes sure the pianist is blindsided with rapid mood swings and Looney Tunes-esque timing. As an entry piece it'd certainly be challenging enough for fledgling pianists brought up on Chopin and Liszt, and I doubt the Conservatory ever got an audition piece this wacky before or since. Here's a recording, for yucks:
I've made it no secret that the International Music Score Library Project is one of my favorite websites, if not my favorite. Not only is it the largest depository of older music on the planet, but it's also a fantastic platform for composers to self-publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, one of the best things to happen to copyright law since the internet was created. While a handful of big names have released their work through the site (such as Leo Ornstein, Frederic Rzewski and Vivian Fine, whose work should be no stranger to leaf readers), the majority of contemporary composers with pages are the Young and Tender, many in college or fresh out the door. Let me warn you that, because of the free and democratic nature of the site, an absence of quality control is not only inherent but essential, so you may step in some cowpies in your searches. But that's all part of exploration, so I hope you've got enough curiosity to sidestep the junk.
One particularly wacky figure on the site is Nikolaos-Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis (say that five times fast!), a Greek composer a year younger than me who studied in England and is currently working as a nature guide in Helsinki. His IMSLP page is chockablock with nuggets of experimentation and humor, the work of a singular artist with nothing to lose. For example, here's a page from For 9 Piccolos:
While many of his works may seem less serious than Satie's furniture music, he is also able to produce haunting slivers of music, perfectly capturing those moments between seconds of real time where melancholy overwhelms. That brings us to my favorite work of his, Narcosis.
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Once again I must point out how simply removing meter and barlines can do wonders for a piece's enchantment index. Constructed from elusive quartal spiderwebs, Narcosis joins Peter Josheff's A Veltin Infusionin the canon of piano pieces best found under a bed or in the confines of bay windows, tiny pockets of light for an ambivalent world. Analysis is a moot cause - the piece is meant to be felt rather than thought. Much like Persichetti's Poems, Narcosis draws inspiration from a poem, but in this case the author is Nikolaos himself:
Waves of Symbolist nostalgia wash over me, and I'm nagged more and more by the feeling that Baudelaire and Mallarmé need to be set to piano more frequently than they are. I shouldn't say much more about Narcosis as to not spoil your individual experience, so I'll just include Nikolaos's own performance below, uploaded with the score by inciptisify, an excellent YouTube channel for those interested in contemporary music. Let's toast to IMSLP and Creative Commons for making Nikolaos's dreams (and mine) possible, but not too loudly - we might disturb the crystal, never-ending sleep.
Australia's leading impressionist, the Re-Composingly featured Roy Agnew was very familiar with the miniature, with several sets and suites under his belt by the time of his death. The beginning of the 20th century revolutionized the piano miniature as the premier workshop medium for modern music, as they didn't take up too much time and one performer could manage a considerable range of colors and moods with little time and effort. 1927 saw Agnew well into his mature style, and his 3 Lyrics featured some highly sophisticated and many-colored music - though only one leaf, perhaps his lone leaf.
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The textures of Winter were exploited by a whole host of impressionists, and perhaps following in Debussy's footsteps Agnew illuminates snow's ability to mute the world. The pulsing pedal note (note held beneath shifting upper harmonies) has long been a fascination of piano composers since Chopin, and what floats above Agnew's E is among his most enchanting, Scriabin-esque harmonies. Even the most abstruse composers employ an internal logic in their writing, and Agnew's approach to pan-tonality appeals both to pianistic chord construction and stepwise horizontal movement - a reminder that seemingly predictable paths can lead to surprising destinations. The Falling Snow also adheres to starkly simple motivic development, so logical as to be almost primeval. As the frozen months approach these pieces will become more and more invaluable for singing the psyche, and if I've got the time I'll make a better effort to record The Falling Snow a bit better than the performance below - though to be fair the performer appears to be quite young. It's such a lovely piece that it deserves better than that, but for now we'll have to do - thankfully it's only October.
Youth and ambition can create striking semi-failures, and none are more consistent in failure than the christening of a new art genre. One of American music's great Deans, Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987) pioneered three genres for himself, the most well known of which is the 24 Parables for various instruments. He also wrote 12 Serenades, and much like the Parables they have only a loose set form: a Serenade is a suite of short pieces with a semi-light atmosphere, and a Parable is a single, dramatic movement of pure abstraction. The third form is confined to his early years and appears in three volumes of piano works - the Poems. While none of these genres traversed farther than his own scores, the Poems are the most worthy of revival and analysis, and the most ignored. The term was used for many decades before him to musically mean all sorts of things, but with Persichetti it would take a unique and serviceable form. Each Poem uses a single line of an existing poem as a starting point, crafting an abstract miniature to fit the moods and meanings of the fragment. At no point does he attempt traditional prosody*, but rather pays the poems proper respect by leaving them alone, letting his piece roam free in the wilds of a singular and powerful sentence. His sources span the breadth of great Anglo-American poetry from the late 19th century to the Imagists and beyond. Though they are all short, most no more than three pages, the three volumes (opp. 4 & 5 (1939) and 14 (1941)) contain only two leaves. All the Poems were recorded by Mirian Conti, as well as works by Gould, Diamond and Bloch, on an album released by Albany Records in 1998, and as I established in my Harold Brown article they tightly control which tracks of theirs escape into the aether. Keeping that in mind, one leaf has escaped, diffuse, alluring and touching nigh to tears.
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Persichetti's language, at least for the mature works of his that get performed, went through many styles and techniques but always maintained an acidic atmosphere of dissonance, eschewing sentimentality and predictability. The Poems reflect this as well but, unlike his more famous works, most often written in a sophisticated and layered modality, inhabit a language unto themselves. Impressionism never became a real force in America, despite the best efforts of the likes of Charles Griffes and Quincy Porter, so the elusive, smoky harmonies that float off this leaf are a sound to behold. Taking its cue from a line from William Watson's "The Fronteir", "Wake subtler dreams, and take me nigh to tears" swoops through a close-voiced internal logic to gaze on the valleys of pan-tonality. Extended tertian sonorities abound, and the asymmetrical rhythmic structure mirrors the pulsing landscape of dream. The performance by Mirian Conti is excellent, sensitive to a dramatic texture both dense and fragile. As with each poem Persichetti is careful with attribution and got permission from the publishers for the single lines from which he launched. In 1939 he felt the need to ask for the 1894 poem; in 2013 Watson's copyright is a moot argument, so I've reprinted the whole poem below. The YouTube video spans the whole first volume, and "Wake" begins at 3:37 if you wish to skip to is, though I'd recommend hearing it in the context of its delicious siblings. The other two volumes are equally accomplished, so track down the CD (such as in the Naxos Music Library for those with a subscription) if you're so inclined. To paraphrase an entry from volume II, the Poems stand as a testament to Persichetti's ability to capture dust in sunlight, and memory in corners.
At the hushed brink of twilight - when, as though
Some solemn journeying phantom paused to lay
An ominous finger on the awestruck day,
Earth holds her breath till that great presence go, -
