A Pair of Birthday Cards from Donald Martino

It's notable when a man reaches great recognition for his art while having his works entirely self-published.  It's more notable when that publishing company is named after a Great Duke of Hell:

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Donald Martino (1931-2005) became one of the most acclaimed serialist composers of his generation, sticking to his guns at a time when the future of serial composition was looking dimmer each day.  Taking the baton from his teacher Luigi Dallapiccola, Martino shook off the stereotype of serialism as the realm of the dry and emotionless, crafting an impressive oeuvre both rich and enveloping.  After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his chamber work Notturno, it's natural to assume he'd spent some time before that sticking tubes into clarinets:

As can be gleaned from a cursory search Martino was a clarinetist and wrote a great many pieces for the instrument, such as the oft-recorded A Set for Clarinet and the Triple Concerto for clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet.  So with his decades of experience both behind the music stand and behind the behind of the music stand, it's logical for him to engrave birthday cards he wrote for his friends.

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Using the French musical cryptogram system (the same one used by Debussy and Ravel in their Hommages to Haydn), Charles: Happy Birthday to You turns the first name of Charles Wuorinen into a motive for the fellow serialist's 50th.  Written in a wild improvisatory swoop, Martino's elaborations mirror the volatile, often stuttering nature of Wuorinen's music, leaving no key unpressed and vaulting across the whole of the clarinet's range.  "Happy Birthday" makes its appearance in the most ear-splitting manner possible, possibly a commentary on its obscene overuse ever since the Hill sisters couldn't keep their pens capped.  The best part of this is that there's another one:

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At this rate John Heiss'll think Donald's trying to get a piece of his turf.  This time the recipient is Arthur Berger, whose general obscurity in the public eye is matched only by the love by his friends.  I haven't the foggiest as to how he derived the motive, but the zoop up and down the staff in the "X" bar should clear the fog right up.  Berger's music, while serial in his life's later half, was always much calmer and more thoughtful than Wuorinen's, and 15, 5, '92 A.B. is appropriately smoother.  That "X" bar also has a double tenuto marking on the high "D", a trick I've only seen elsewhere in pieces by Thomas Adès and Kaikhosru Sorabji.  At the end we get a similar cryptogram, this time presumably of Martino's own birthday and at a much quieter dynamic level, implying that Martino pales in comparison to his elder friend.  As I'm not here to play favorites (too much), we'll just say that whomever is humble in the other's presence, they both won.

~PNK