Meyer Kupferman's Littlest Zeppelin

The priceless Meyer Kupferman never let an idea skate by, and the many-colored density of his writing allowed for even the briefest of pieces to have that certain je ne sais qupferman.  Among his many piano pieces lie the Five Little Zeppelins, turbulent sketches of constellations that all display his "gestalt" writing quite well.  While all of them are worth investigating, only the last, "Cygnus", is a leaf, and in my scan you can see the out-of-control ending to its predecessor, "Draco".

For those unfamiliar with limited aleatoric writing, the box in the right hand is a cell of music to be repeated for as long as the squiggly line persists, and it isn't meant to line up with anything.  The left hand is given single pitches to be held a piacere, at least as long as the performer feels is right for the solid lines trailing after them.  Both the sustaining and soft pedals are held down through the whole piece, and though the melody climaxes near the end of the third line the dynamic never breaches piano, eventually receding and ritarding to the quadruple piano finish, the right hand winding down to almost nothing.  It's a very "Neptune"-from-The Planets ending, the most graceful of a quintet of sturms und drangs, and I was sad to find there's no recording of the set.  Well, dagnabbit, I'll just have to go and do it myself.

~PNK

Ives leafs a Christmas Carol for the Eve

I've highlighted Ives's sentimentalism before on this blog, and nothing wells the tears of nostalgia in the American populace more than Christmas.  He had a real talent for weaving old popular tunes into crazy tapestries of sound and emotion, but his one Christmas song is surprisingly traditional, so traditional in fact that it could pass for a classic Christmas carol if tossed into a collection or on the radio.  And, unsurprisingly, it's called A Christmas Carol.

Even though the song appears to be Ripped from the Hymnbook, Ives includes a few small inventive elements to bring out an arrested, fragile pang in the heart.  The little rhythmic figure in the first beat of measure 3 turns into a leitmotif, stuttering the phrasing in measure 6.  Measure 8 is a Grand Pause, an achingly long time in the slow tempo and an illumination of Winter's enveloping silence.  The top of the phrase arc in measure 12 switches the time from a compound meter to a simple duple, giving the words an emphatic weight that works both with "hearts" and "die", awfully clever prosody considering Ives probably wrote the words.  Once measure 15 comes by the rhythmic leitmotif comes back, stuttering the phrases on expansive repeated pitches, allowing the Christmas sentiment to unspool across time and space.  Everything is piano or quieter, and the hushed quality brings the song's poignancy to the fore.  It's one of those rare songs that fits perfectly into a genre while commenting on the genre at the same time, as the piece is a normal hymn that's creative moments spark deep psychological notes.  It's title A Christmas Carol confirms that fact, as the listener is forced to admire it from the outside, treating it as a disconnected object rather than just another carol.  Either way you slice it the song is gorgeous, and best sung in the dead of night as a lone star pierces the heavens.  Even better if you're a countertenor like this singer.

Merry Christmas, and don't forget this lovely choral performance:

~PNK

Hilding dans le labyrinthe englouti

Despite the best efforts of some truly outstanding composers surrounding La Belle Époque, Scandinavia has largely yet to be seen as more than one entity in the Classical world.  Norway, Denmark and Finland all have internationally famous masthead composers (Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius respectively), but Iceland and Sweden still don't, though at least in Sweden's case many fantastic artists have found middling international success (such as Hugo Alfvén and Lars-Erik Larsson).  Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985) is one of the middlers as of this writing, yet he has the wonderful distinction of being Sweden's first modernist, though not a Webern-level modernist.  Rosenberg was more akin to a Swedish Impressionist, expanding upon familiar chords to exotic ends, and luckily for me plenty of piano music flowed from his pen.  His 1939 Improvisations are actually tightly crafted, miniatures valuing elegance and incisiveness above rhapsodic excess.  And though it isn't the only leaf in the pile, the sixth improvisation is the most evocative.

Though the trick is as old as Bach, "pedal" sonorities are an easy and effective way to add depth and sophistication to a piece - sustaining a bass note or chord beyond the point it would have changed in a tonal context, letting the resulting dissonances rattle and hum.  Rosenberg's pedals create a huge span across the keyboard, requiring a light and swift touch to keep the tempo up.  My first thoughts, as they are wont to be, went to Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie, one of my favorite pieces ever and one I played incessantly in High School.  The Improvisation never reaches that piece's glorious heights (or depths?), but it makes a dang fine case for itself in the Hall of Echoes.  The tightly-voiced, tempo-shifting inner lines have a passing resemblance to ancient choral music, especially after the gorgeous shift from D minor to B-flat sostenuto, as undulating, plainchant perfect fifths take over for a time before winding down into D.  The piece doesn't have a large arc like La Cathédrale Engloutie, but rather circles around a handful of sonorities, its dynamics never breaching pianissimo, its melody never evolving.  The change to B-flat is a moment of woozy clarity, but that soon gets lost in itself, as if the listener is passing a hole in a cloudbank to see the sun, but forced to continue onward.  It's a listening experience akin to being lost in a maze - vacant and elliptical, echoing nothing back except your perception of it.  Though if the labyrinth was really englufed, one could swim to the surface.  This recording (luckily the only recording uploaded by the performer from the whole set) uses the sostenuto pedal of the piano to hold the "pedal" notes while allowing the right sustaining pedal to change freely, keeping things from getting too muddy.  She also employs a heck of a lot of sensitivity, letting the plainchant sting from the placid surface, making this a labyrinth I wouldn't mind getting lost in.  Except for the requisite disembraining* by the Minotaur.

~PNK

*Because Christmas is the perfect time to make an Ubu Roi reference.

A Tansman Dumka for Friday

Though he's not talked about much today, the music of Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) was once very popular, as he was one of the most prolific and high-profile figures in French Neo-Classicism in the years between the World Wars (and beyond).  The Neo-Classical style utterly dominated French music at the time, and it's all to easy to write off its authors as riding trends (much like the American populist style of the 40's and 50's), but when they were good they were good, and Tansman had a consistently excellent grasp of the language that bespoke a personal identity.  Though he lived and worked in France for the majority of his life, he was Polish by birth and maintained a strong sense of his heritage in his works.  His Quatre Danses Polonaises from 1932 are an excellent synthesis of Polish folk music and Neo-Classical techniques, and as I perused it a leaf blew my way that resonated very well with the Holiday conurbation.

(Click for larger view)

One of Tansman's prettiest pieces, the Dumka keeps a deep emotional resonance so treasured in Eastern European music, at once yearning and dolorous.  Much like Debussy's The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Tansman is able to use modern harmonic and textural techniques in a way that doesn't distract from the tune, or its recognizably Polish harmonic structure.  Americans are trained to think of snow whenever we hear Slavic music, so the Dumka may spark those warm Christmas feelings in US listeners.  I personally think that Lutoslawski's 20 Polish Christmas Carols is the definitive document of Eastern European Christmas music, but I can't fit that into a leaf article (but perhaps Re-Composing).  The Danses Polonaises also exist in an orchestral version, and that's the version I've got a recording of.  The Dumka is the third movement, and shows off Tansman's creativity in orchestration - with a haunting treat in the last five measures.  The other dances are pretty boss, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WERhS1jnVXY (embedding disabled, sorry)

~PNK

Wagner's Elegy to the Future

Whether you adore his work or despise it, whether you hold his antisemitism against him or choose to ignore it, you can't deny that Richard Wagner was one of music's great geniuses; his "music of the future" was far ahead of his time and enormously influential to late-19th century composers.  That being said, it's entirely understandable why some modern listeners may be put off by his work, as the majority of his output was comprised of obnoxiously long operas.  Wagner was a megalomaniac to end all megalomaniacs, including commissioning instruments to be built for his as-of-then unperformed works and building a radical new theater for his own 15-20 hour Ring cycle.  That isn't to say that all his work is intolerably huge, as is proved by this sliver of a piece:

Though it bears a dedication of December 26, 1881 (very near the end of Wagner's life), the Elegie's harmonic language bears some resemblance to that of the ever-taught Tristan und Isolde, written in the late 1850's, and some references state that it was written in 1858.  Either way, it remains some of the most sensitive music Wagner ever wrote (and is as close as I'm able to highlight fellow musical futurist Liszt's En rêve in this blog).  Man, those opening chords - he digs into them so hard, only to recede into unpredictable harmonic movement.  Measures 5 & 6 feel very much like the undulations in the slow movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, and that was pretty much as beautiful as Schubert ever got, so kudos.  The hairpin dynamics compliment romantic pianism very well, requiring both incredible sensitivity and a willingness to throw your whole weight into the keys.  The piece has probably been eluding capture for a while thanks to poor publication, but earlier this year one Francisco Javier Hernando Rodríguez was kind enough to make a very readable engraved version in honor of Wagner's bicentennial.  As you can see at the top, the Elegie began its life as a two-line scrabble, and you can see the original up close as well as the typeset version and a subpar published version here.  Perhaps it would have been more resonant to publish this article the day after Christmas like the dedication, but I think publishing it ahead of its time is more in the spirit of the "music of the future".  Whichever way you look at it, the Elegie is an apt representation of the darkest month of the year, and his bicentennial is slipping away faster each day - and this performance is just as fine a memorial as anything.

~PNK