Taking Little Stock(er) is Better than No Stock(er)

In the course of the completely unsystematic way I find obscure works I've run across comparatively few composers from Minnesota, home of most of my extended family, aside from the wonderful Aaron Jay Kernis and the less wonderful Rolv Yttrehus.  Carl Ruggles doesn't really count, as he was a New Englander for most of his life and only spent a handful of years in the state despite his vigorous efforts to turn a local orchestra into a new music powerhouse.

One Minnesotan that came to the fore in my research as quickly as I was unable to find any other pieces of theirs was Clara Stocker, a figure obscure enough that I wasn't able to find any pictures of her online (hence the condensed score header above).  Born in Duluth and taught early on by her mother Stella, Stocker was a music critic to two different Duluth newspapers (the News Tribune and the Herald) and wrote program notes for the Duluth Symphony.  She also taught French, and one of her most interesting studies was an attempt to teach phonetics using musical notation, or tonetics, and wrote papers on French Tonetics in the 20's which are available through Internet Archive (and more completely in JStor if you've got a institutional registration).  She was also deeply interested in Finnish culture and art, maintaining a friendship with the painter Juho Rissanen and writing a number of works based on Finnish music and legends (including the only other piece of hers to be published, a set of Finnish folk song arrangements for recorders).

The only piece of hers I've seen in print (aside from those recorder pieces) is the Two Little Pieces for piano, published in 1937 by the seminal periodical New Music Edition (which has been previously featured here) along with two pieces by the Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla.  They were the result of the summer of 1936, spent studying with John J. Becker, a member of the American Five and someone I'll get to later (with one of my own performances to boot).  Becker was a pioneer of free dissonance and an important, if now forgotten, figure in the birth of modernist music in America, and Stocker's work here reflects his influence in its use of dissonant counterpoint.

(Click each for larger view)

Now, you'll probably see that the first of the two pieces is technically longer than a page, and that's fine, because I'm more fond of the second, and I never said that pieces shorter than a page weren't admissable (and we'll be seeing more of those soon enough *COUGH* Howard Skempton *COUGH*).  Both pieces are acidic contrapuntal whirls, fascinating little artifacts from a time when American music could have gone in any direction and not just the most academically provable and financially viable ones.  The first piece, Vivace, is too hard for me to make a recording quickly, and sounds best played as fast as possible to cover up wrinkles in the counterpoint.  The second piece, Moderato poco scherzando is an enchanting duet, like a pair of songbirds separated by mountain peaks.  Both of them are best played with sparse pedalling and a keen ear for harmonic flexibility, and I wonder how many other of her works are written in this style.  I've made a YouTube performance of the second one so you can judge for yourself how successful her tutelage under Becker was; I choose to think it worked out just fine.

~PNK

A Pair of Canadian Nostalgiana

While I was in college I would go develop little habits upon returning home for vacation, including going through some of my old piano lesson rep.  My favorite series of pedagogical collections was the Celebration Series, published by Frederick Harris Music to create printed versions of the Royal Conservatory of Music repertoire.  There wasn't a lot of modern music in these books (I only had volumes 4-7), but what they did have turned out to be unique for its reliance on Canadian composers (as it was a Canadian publication).  I got little encouragement to explore modern classical music from my teachers before entering college, so I played it by ear (sorry) and took what I could get, including works by Canadian composers I had never heard of before (and some never heard from since).  I went through them again recently and found two leaves that are quite nice, and I've made new performances of them for this blog.

(Click for larger view)

The more difficult of the two is Ghost Town by Clifford Poole (1916-2003), who taught at various universities including the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto.  He appears to have written a lot of pedagogical piano music, as a cursory search on YouTube reveals about 20 different performances of his work on the first page alone (out of more than 1,000 matches).  Ghost Town is one of the more intense pedagogical pieces I've seen, and it'd be a good candidate for being reprinted in other collections, including American ones.  It's a very concentrated piece of writing, with effective materials and high expression.  I'd be a little curious to know if he had a particular ghost town in mind, as Canada is the possessor of a heck of a lot of plains territory that has a history similar to the American West (minus Mexico).  I never took a lesson on this one, which is a shame, but I've vindicated its name with this new performance (though not the only recording):

(Click for larger view)

Nestled at the very back of an easier collection, the lovely Barcarole (for Vivienne) is a nicely nostalgic piece of postludia, spanning nearly the whole range of the keyboard and featuring some really subtle writing for a children's piece.  I was also not taught this one, and though I have no proof of this its composer, David Gordon Duke, may have had trouble promoting his music in the U.S. because of the unfortunate similarity, in name and birth year (1950), to the notorious White Supremacy spokesman David Ernest Duke.  That, or nobody around here cares about his music, just like the majority of Canadian composers.  Too bad, really; I quite like this little piece, first published in 1977:

~PNK

Julia Perry Seethes a Jazzy Seethe

You think that music academia wouldn't leave any modernist stone unturned, especially if the composer in question is one as interesting as Julia Perry (1924-1979), who wrote a heck of a lot of music in her unfortunately short life (including seven symphonies and an opera).  She's among a small number of African-American female composers, the club also consisting of the likes of Florence Price and Dorothy Rudd Moore.  She was talented and lucky enough to study with Luigi Dallapiccola and Nadia Boulanger, and got a number of works published during her lifetime, though not many recordings.  One piece of hers I've taken quite a liking to is this short Prelude for piano, nestled in the pages of Black women composers : a century of piano music (1893-1990).

(Click for larger view)

A welcome addition to the pseudo-repertoire of American piano works that straddle the line between impressionism and jazz, the Prelude is a dark and seething reflection of the deep internal.  Those stacked chords are awfully satisfying to play, and in my performance below (which I think counts as the premiere recording [!]) you can see me dig into the keys, fully appropriate to the music.  It's midnight music, best played in low light and perhaps with a scotch at hand, and I'm a little peeved it hasn't entered the piano rep (yet).  I'm really glad I was introduced to Perry this way, as other works I've seen of hers seem to be somewhat harder to pin down emotionally, but far be it from me to prevent a note adventure.  Check her stuff out, and I hope my crack at the Prelude isn't too grating.

~PNK