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, -
It's about time we return to the catalog of Media Press, Inc., the Champaign, IL. company that gave us the work of James Cuomo among others. A native of Wisconsin, Raymond Weisling (b. 1947) was fascinated both by electro-acoustic music and Javanese Gamelan, the latter of which led to him moving to Indonesia in 1980 and never looking back. Before he decamped for water-locked pastures he had four pieces published by Media, and the most alluring of them is scored for a unique wind septet and paints a tone-picture of the story of Poon Lim:
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On 23 November, 1942, the British merchant freighter Belmond was torpedoed in the South Pacific. The only surviving crew member, Poon Lim (born 1918), was rescued after spending 133 days and nights upon the waves in a small life raft.
Poon Lim...a Night Upon the Waves is an impression of the marooned night - no light but stars, no sound but waves. While the score baffles at first, an instruction page is included. The instruments enter in the order specified by the dotted arrows, and each note is held for the duration of a slow lung of air. After the note is finished the player takes a slow, full breath, aligning tge music to biological processes. The players continue at their own pace, and the texture is one of quiet, naturally asymetric pulses, like the swelling of waves beneath your back. The ensemble is unusual, bottom-heavy and inwardly resonant, and one can imagine distant ship horns or whales. There's no recording, but the effect can be easily reproduced at a piano and it's an easy piece to perform. If you've got seven winds and a spare half hour Poon and I would love to make your acquaintance, but it may take a bit to scrape up a makeshift liferaft to attend the performance.
Though Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) needs no introduction here, it's important to note his career's parallel-yet-opposed relationship to Stravinsky's, from era touchpoints to their wildly differing interpretations of Neo-Classicism. By the '60's, each man had attained lasting and unprecedented acclaim in their own craft, and at this time Stravinsky entered a super-concentration phase. Perhaps his advanced age had given him the wisdom to say just as much with one stroke as others would with five, and I can't help but think that Poulenc felt the same of his own work. He had never shied away from simplicity before, but now the close was near and the need to choose his words may have risen in priority. Just a few years before his death, he wrote the Sarabande, his only work for guitar.
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The other leaf on David Leisner's album Music of the Human Spirit, Poulenc's meditative dance is a far and melancholic cry from Lou Harrison's Serenade. Working with a slow heartbeat and the semi-stunted, chest-born resonance of the guitar, he weaves a haunting song with a minimal, yet effective, antique modality. Much like Harrison he banks on repetition, getting a lot of mileage out of strains so natural they feel ingrained in our collective memory. This isn't Neo-Classical so much as it is Neo-Baroque, harking to Dowland's lachrymose. The guitar stands in for a lute, and the more limited resonance of the lute would work wonders here. Once again Leisner's recording is my favorite, but there are about 17 dozen YouTube performances to choose from, including the very nice one below. Consider the Sarabande a gift from me to you for a rainy day - Washington has entered the Wet and Dark, and so this piece seems more than necessary.
