Dessau's Bachian Farewell

It is often forgotten that the Second Viennese School was, in fact, comprised of more than three people, and today's leaf is the creation of one of the most prominent members of the younger generation of Serialists.  Paul Dessau (1894-1979) spent most of his career in exile from his German homeland, first in France and later in Hollywood, eventually emigrating to East Berlin in 1948.  Many of his exile compositions were early Disney soundtracks and silent movie soundtracks, but he never totally ignored the war, as evidenced by one of his most effective piano compositions, Guernica (after the Picasso painting).  I can't show that hear, as it's more than a leaf, but what I can show is the last piece he wrote before leaving Hollywood: B-A-C-H.

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The B-A-C-H motive (B-flat, A, C, B natural) is the most enduring musical cryptogram of all time, first coined by J. S. Bach as an inside joke and copied ever since.  There have been dozens of modern works paying tribute to this motive, and Dessau's is one of the densest.  Playing out across a mere 11 bars, the study is an assured intersection of serial rigor and expressionistic wroughtedness.  High grace and savage punctuation meet each other, and if this piece is a musical farewell to Dessau's piano students, as its published preface informs me, it's a fine way to send yourself off.  I've made my own recording that I think is a good reflection of how I want to hear the piece, although there is an arguable wiggle room available for those who disagree.

~PNK

Deer, Police, Niccolò

I love a good anthology, and in 1988 the great Italian publisher Ricordi released the Antologia di Autori Contemporanei, a who's-who of contemporary Italian composers who submitted short piano works, many of them written for the collection.  I'll get back to this collection with a few more leaves but today's is by Niccolò Castiglioni (1932-1996), a serialist who had a fascination with the upper frequencies of human hearing.  Near the end of his career he loosened up a bit on the serialism thing, and that happened to coincide with this collection, producing Das Reh im Wald.

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Das Reh im Wald (The Deer in the Woods) is simply a series of chords, none more than four notes, played very slowly.  Despite its simplicity the chords are tightly organized, and probably contradicts my previous statement about loosening up on serialism (though serial analysis without knowing the row beforehand is frighteningly difficult and largely pointless).  The cyclical nature of composing with rows is met by a set of four meters, endlessness seeing endlessness eye to eye.  It's very fitting for the subject matter, a calm being wandering through deep, chartless foliage.  The piece has no conventional arc, but despite its atonality there are moments of tension and climax, such as when two perfect fifths are offset by a ninth in bar 9 (Numerology?  Who cares?).  A glance may indicate this piece is easy to play, but it is surprisingly tricky, revealing not only inconsistencies in your touch but also in your piano.  Before I found a professional recording I made a YouTube performance, and my final cut took about 20 takes (and still isn't perfect).  So here's a pro doing the hard work for me:

This piece isn't Niccolò's first attempt, however.  I got a bout of déjà vu when I found Reh as I was already a fan of his infinitely charming piano travelogue Come io passo l'estate (How I Spent the Summer), detailing his vacation in the Italian Alps with his family.  The suite was written for young pianists, and is the first piece of his I know of that breaks from serialism.  Movement 8, Antonio Ballista Asleep in the Police Station, uses slow quiet chords, but the sonorities are denser and are very reminiscent of jazz.  Notice how the last measure is two major thirds offset by a whole step, and the first measure is three major thirds offset by whole steps (with one note overlapping).  As with the open fifths of Reh, Antonio has a peak in measure 12 with an eight-note split-5th/split-7th stack.  No YouTube performance for this one, but the recording I would recommend is by the British composer Thomas Adès on his album Thomas Adès - Piano.  His is the only recording that drops the Avant-Garde pretense and enjoys the piece as good ol' childhood wonder.

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~PNK

Charles Seeger leaves a Slow Dance for Thursday

The Seeger family is known by the whole country as including the great Pete Seeger but also includes two important figures in modern American classical music: Ruth Crawford Seeger (one of America's greatest female composers) and her husband Charles, a noted musicologist and formulator of theories of dissonant counterpoint.  There is some historical ire directed at him, as he was responsible for stopping Ruth's ultra-modernist composition career in favor of collecting folk songs, but I didn't start this article to pick a fight with a dead man.  He also composed, but only left behind a handful of works which are hard to find.  The good news is I found one, in a very unlikely place.

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Slow Dance was first published in the 1946 supplement to the Boletín Latino-Americano de Música, an artifact of an earlier age when America took serious steps to unite with Central and South America in the classical realm.  You'll notice a 1976 copyright at the bottom, and that's because I came across this in Soundings, a New Music periodical from the 70's that featured Seeger in one of their issues.  I'm not sure when exactly it was written.  The only other pieces of his I've seen are two pieces for solo voice, The Letter and Psalm 137, both of which are wonderful and demonstrate the dissonant counterpoint he helped develop.  This piece seems to be free from that language, instead opting for an emphatic, layered quartal/quintal language.  The piano creates a rhythmic juxtaposition via sets of four eighth notes that are accented in a three-note loop, off-setting the rhythm and turning a three-bar phrase into a 12/8 measure.  The violin part is in 18/8 on top of 12/8, or rather 6/8 on top of 2/4, making for constant rhythmic complexity with little effort.  Though I've never had the privilege of playing this with a violinist I've made due with singing the part while playing the piano, and I can attest that this piece is gorgeous.  I smell a concert with this on the program with Gardner Read's 6 Intimate Moods, Ruth Crawford Seeger's Violin Sonata, Johanna Beyer's Suite for Violin and Piano, and maybe Ives?  Can a violinist get in cahoots with me so we can plan this?  Or at least do a YouTube performance of this one beautiful piece?

~PNK

Gardner Read has a bit of violin fun

I'll be the first to admit that this post is a tie-in to my Re-Composing article on Gardner Read (1913-2005), but no matter - we've got a lovely violin piece to talk about.  One of the handful of Read works that has been recorded is the lovely 6 Intimate Moods, op. 35 for violin and piano, and the moods include such gems as "Whimsical" and "Hysterical".

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The fourth mood is "Coquettish" for violin alone, and is the closest Read ever got to joining the lineage of American classical composers who attempted a fusion of jazz harmonies and moods with classical techniques, including John Alden Carpenter, Paul Bowles and Norman Dello Joio.  Even with that statement it's more Stephan Grapelli than Charlie Parker, and possesses a biting humor reminiscent of Bartok.  The violin writing is excellent and makes good use of double stops and pizzicatos.  I unfortunately couldn't find a recording on YouTube but there is one in the Naxos Music Library that isn't too much better than decent.  Could one of my violin friends make a YouTube performance if they're so inclined?  I can't see how that could be a bad thing, and the world could use a few more good Gardner Read recordings.

Happy bowing,

PNK

A Sorabji fragment for Monday

The funniest thing about today's leaf is the reputation of its author, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988).  A Parsi-British man of great eccentricity, Sorabji was best known as a critic in his life but gained a mysterious, legendary status as a composer of impossibly difficult and unbelievably lengthy piano works.  As an example, his fifth piano sonata, Opus Archimagicum, lasts about 6 hours, and that's not even his longest piece for he instrument.  He also wrote imposing orchestral, chamber and vocal works, but he is best known for his piano pieces, including the notoriously difficult Opus Clavicembalisticum (1930), lasting over 4 hours via a 290-page score and opening like this:

Contrary to popular belief Sorabji did write some short pieces, including the 20 Frammenti Aforistichi, many of which are shorter than anything Webern could muster.  However, we're looking at one of his earliest works today, Désir Eperdu (1917).

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I've often heard the term "super impressionist" attached to Sorabji and this piece is a fine example of something more conservative than that.  He had only started composing a few years prior so this piece isn't quite up to his later insular standards.  I've also heard Sorabji called "un-analyzable", and I agree in that I don't think he kept himself to any strict theoretical standard, instead writing from his gut, ears, and eyes.  I'm still not convinced that he actually sat down and played some of the pieces he wrote, but they look incredible, vast organic tapestries of dense counterpoint and dozens of themes fighting for breathing room.  Désir Eperdu ("distraught desire") retains that tapestry feel by being printed landscape style and being defined by horizontal movement nocturne-ly.  You could make an easy Chopin connection in the left hand writing, but the mood is too volatile for any genre label.  It ends on an unresolved outcry, fitting for a desire as distraught as this.  Here's a semi-par recording:

 

~PNK