Mission Statement (with Arthur Honegger's Sarabande)

"While the brevity of these pieces is their eloquent advocate, such brevity stands equally in need of advocacy."

~Schoenberg on Webern's 6 Bagatelles, op. 9

In the hoary business of determining the "great works" (a practice I hiss at from across the street), a common attribute brought up is great length.  A problem with glib glances during perusal is that the viewer uses a critiquing shorthand to speed up the process, and finding a big page count is a quick indicator that the composer put in a considerable amount of time, which in itself is a glib indicator of quality.  And I often agree; plenty of works are wonderful through their vastness and complexity and if you are going to do anything you might as well go big.  The trouble comes when the viewer then dismisses short pieces because they don't appear to have taken up much of the composer's time, indicating that the composer just knocked it off between sips of coffee.  And for most small pieces that simply isn't true, and this blog was founded to disprove this idea, one page at a time.

I have a special fascination with pieces that fit on a single page, one that was cultivated by the constraint of having to build up a sheet music library through photocopying and not wanting money and shelf space going down the drain.  Brevity is captivating to me for a lot of reasons, as I value being able to get maximum effect and depth in the fewest strokes, and in music a page is about as short as it gets without being written on a napkin.  Pieces at this length are either very slow or very fleeting, and are hard to publish, seemingly not worth the print run unless bundled with others.  The rarity of these works adds to their appeal, tiny gifts lost in the shuffle.  The visual aspect of a single page makes the viewer confront the piece as a visual object much more than if the music was spread across several pages; the beginning, middle and end are laid out to see at once, and the piece is as much a painting as it is a score.  The composer takes a bigger risk in setting these pages out in the wild alone than including them in a larger work, as making them just movements from the whole is just the sort of bundling I was talking about.  And so for these inherent charms I've decided to share as many of these pieces as I can, because who else will?

(Click for larger view)

One of the most common places to find one-pagers is in collections, and our inaugural page, the Sarabande by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), comes from the Album de Six.  Honegger was a member of Les Six, a loose group of young French composers that also included Darius Milhaud (who also contributed just one page), Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, and Louis Durey.  They published a slim volume of piano pieces together in 1920, and this one's my favorite.  Honegger always had an eye for the dramatic and profound and the Sarabande is as rich as it is elusive, matching rippling diads in the right hand with a lyric, cello-ish melody in the left.  Its harmonies are prime Impressionism, and the pace is gentle.  Though I love a lot of Honegger's works it's a little sad he didn't write anything else like this.

Plenty more to come, but for now here's a performance of the piece:

~PNK