Sibelius's Kantele Lullaby

The kantele is a a plucked string instrument traditional to Finnish music, normally equipped with 5 to 15 strings on the small variety and 38 strings on the concert variety, tuned to make a diatonic scale.  Like many folk instruments it has enjoyed a long history in its own wheelhouse but only recently has seen any development in classical music.  Jean Sibelius needs no introduction from me, and as the grand statesman of Finnish music its no surprise he wrote a piece for an instrument native to his country.

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The IMSLP uploader Nikolaos-Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis (who I'll get to later) offered some info on the piece:

"The Lullaby for violin and kantele JS 222 (11/9/1899) was printed in 1935 in the periodical Väisänen, and thus it has been generally known since then. The birthday of the writer Juhani Aho was celebrated at the home of the painter Pekka Halonen, whose mother had taught him and his brother to play some Finnish folk song tunes on five-stringed kantele (traditional stringed Finnish instrument, also common in other areas of the Baltic, and Russia). Pekka Halonen performed a Waltz, and Sibelius composed a violin part to the kantele's music."

Realizing that the original printing was hard to read, Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis made a typeset version:

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The violin part, composed on top of an accompaniment from time immemorial, plays beautifully off the enchanting harmonies, allowing for light dissonance and creating a plaintive, distant feeling.  It's perfect as a lullaby, and I couldn't imagine it being played on any other instruments.  Here's a performance on YouTube that shows the kantele part first before looping the full piece, performed by two unrelated men who look like brothers:

~PNK

Get the Party Started with James Cuomo

I've recently come across a treasure trove at the BU library: nearly 100 scores from Media Press, Inc. (http://www.mediapressinc.com/home.php), a small publisher of modern music run out of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (or at least near it).  Still operating since 1969, many of Media Press's pieces are quite short and span a wide range of instrumentations and techniques, and have a unique presentation (often coming in small, economical formats).  Because I'm an absolute mark for this kind of thing I vacuumed up a pile of scans from BU's trove, noticing that a few of them were a mere page.  I'll return to the company in time, but for now I'd like to introduce James Cuomo, who lives in Paris and has a pretty fascinating resume (including producing the tapes for John Cage's happening HPSCHD.  He's gotten eight pieces published by MP, and two of them are not only leaf-like, but pretty funny as well.

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Commissioned by the University of Illinois Summer Youth Music program, for zebulon pike and henry was written to be easy to play and double-reed centric.  I'm sure most composers have let the idea of basing a piece around the tuning process flash their brainpans (I know I have), and this one has a successful aleatoric structure.  At the top you'll notice a line for rebabs, which are fiddles from North Africa and the ancestor to the violin.  Cuomo mercifully allows for any melody instrument to play this line, but I'm wondering how the UI Summer Youth Music program got a hold of multiple rebabs.  Considering this piece would most likely come at the start of an evening's concert, it's a nice way to start off the diversions.  But all parties must come to an end.

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Though Dry Ralph is performable by one trombone, Cuomo has stated that he prefers at least three.  We're offered four fragments and a set of criteria for each, and oddly enough the guidelines only make things more confusing.  I don't think there are any recordings of this piece, so the multiple parts could overlap or might not.  Whatever the results they're sure to be odd and pungent.  The two pieces offer a typical Saturday night story: you get all riled up for the big party and end up dry heaving in a trash can by the end of the night.

Cuomo's website: http://www.cuomo.info/

Cuomo's YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/jimcuomofilms/videos?view=0

~PNK

Happy Birthday with John Heiss

There are a heck of a lot of composer birthday gifts that get published for the public, and that's because they're all pieces of music.  I found this leaf lounging on the stacks at the BU and saw that it's not much more than an odd reharmonization of Happy Birthday to You, actually bothering to license the song to get this piece published.  The copyrighting of Happy Birthday is one of the longest-standing and most glorious scams of the 20th century (aside from the mafia controlling olive oil), but I guess Heiss just had to shell out the dough to get his semi-joke to press.  It is a really good piece, though, and its lack of a recording isn't adding to Heiss's fame any (what little of it there was).  Also, today is my brother's birthday, so I'm putting this piece up, as well as my own performance, in tribute:

~PNK

A late morsel by Stravinsky

If one thing can be said about Igor Stravinsky's long career as a composer (from the turn of the century till his death in 1971), it's that he never let any piece slip past him.  You have to make a pretty concerted effort to find a lackluster work by Our Igor, and conveniently for me he left us three leaves near the end of his life.  This first one, Double Canon Raoul Dufy in Memoriam (actually my favorite) is from 1959 and is in a series of pieces written "in memoriam"; others include the Elegy to J.F.K. for voice and three clarinets, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas for voice, string quartet and trombone quartet, Epitaphium (which I'll get to later) for flute, clarinet, and harp, and Variations Aldous Huxley in Memoriam for orchestra.

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Truth be told, I don't know that much about Raoul Dufy beyond a handful of his paintings, but the piece isn't supposed to be an evocation of him or his work.  Stravinsky's work became more and more concentrated at the end of his life, and adopted the practice of letting the lines end in the score mid-stave when there weren't any more notes.  This is more apparent in other works (such as Movements for piano and orchestra), but in the case of the Double Canon works in its favor, an elegant solution to this contrapuntal nugget.  The practice of small counterpoints dates back to the Renaissance (when most pieces were only a few minutes anyway), and plenty of Bach's smaller pieces would qualify for this blog.  The practice has largely fallen by the wayside with strict counterpoint itself, but at least we have this little heartbreaker from 1959 to sate ourselves.  It's a testament to his creativity that, while the leaf begins with an inverted canon at the 2nd, the second canon covers Stravinsky's restarting of the first, this time in reverse - ending at a unison.  That's a magic you can't fake, and here it's in tribute to a man whose best known for a picture-book style, often with boats.  I can't say I'm an expert on Dufy, but Stravinsky saw the unfakeable spark in him and that's the best thing you can ask for in a eulogy - a reminder that great minds can always meet each other at the unison.

~PNK

Why Not?

Why not indeed.

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...

...

...

Oh, all right, I'll say some more.  The coyness is largely due to my lack of information on this piece and its composer, or more accurately inaccurate information.  I found this piece nestled in the back of a piano collection put out by the Cleveland Composers Guild in the 1970s (original compositions of intermediate difficulty for students).  I'd stumbled across the thing at the Boston University main library after finding some good stuff in a song collection put out by the same group.  My main confusion comes when I tried to find out who wrote the piece, as my internety searches came up with two possibilities (aside from the English composer named John White).  One of them (b. 1931) did play cello for the Cleveland Symphony (for a while) and is listed as a composer in multiple places (and is a member of the Society of Composers, inc.).  The other may not be a composer, but is at least apparently connected with the CCG, playing harpsichord on one of their LPs from olden tymes.  It appears to be the first one who wrote Why Not?, but then again the second one could have divined it in between recording sessions.  Either way, it's nice, a jazz-esque interlude, perhaps for a turn of events in a sequel to On the Waterfront.   It's the last piece in the collection, perhaps a more adult twilight the close a child-oriented set.  Somebody should whip up a recording eventually.  I mean, why not?

~PNK

An Early Quest of John Cage

Few conceptual artists have had the staying power of John Cage (1912-1992), whose work and reputation needs no introduction from myself.  But, come to think of it, there are a lot of ways to introduce Cage to others, and to one's self, and too many of his own philosophical ideas and other people's notions on the "What It Is" of his pieces mainly serve to get in the way of natural musicianship.  The fastest way to hear a poor recording of a composer's work is to focus on their earlier pieces, before their artistic sensibilities had crystallized, and listen to well-meaning interpreters over-idea things - that is to say, applying an idea later realized to a piece written before the idea had physical examples.  I've heard too many recordings of The Rite of Spring and Petrushka that assume all of Stravinsky's works should to be played mechanically and with hair-width staccatos.  This problem is exponentially applied in the case of Cage, and Quest (1935) is a fine object lesson.

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Quest was actually written as the second movement of a larger work, the first one supposedly for "various objects" (a link to pieces like Living Room Music), but that initial movement is lost.  Quest was written at the tail end of Cage's apprenticeship under Schoenberg, a time when Cage almost literally worshiped the man and was still quite unsure of his own voice.  Cage admitted that he had no inner ear for harmony, a fact all his compositions share, and Schoenberg told him that dealing with this problem would be like "coming to a wall through which he could not pass."  Cage later recounted that the most Schoenberg did for him was to reaffirm his resolve to write music, and how to live fully as a composer.  It's evident from this piece that none of Schoenberg's techniques rubbed off on him, as I would think more of Dane Rudhyar as a reference point.  Rudhyar was a singular philosophical entity, and used the piano as a "symphony of gongs" to craft cathartic, thunderous, improvisational works on cosmic themes.  Rudhyar made a point of leaving harmony up to intuition rather than system, and Cage's approach to free atonality has some striking similarities to Rudhyar's (specifically in bars 7 & 14, with vaulting melodies over rich harmonic bases).  The open fifths and title also allude to a mystic space.  As with many works by young composers the piece takes radical turns in character and material very quickly, so a performer with good dramatic and textural sense is required to make it work.  Unfortunately, the only YouTube recording I could find is rubbish.

It's not so much that there are wrong notes or rhythms, but it's more that there's no sense of pacing, line, arc, or atmosphere, and when given a piece with no tempo marking you should try to make a meal of the thing.  I'll never understand the impulse to play Cage's pre-I-Ching works with no sense of drama or texture (such as this recording of his 1933 Clarinet Sonata, which imagines all notes as being in different rooms from one other).  I know that Cage never had much interest in deep harmonies, but it'd be nice to at least savor what he gave us.  In case you're wondering there are better performances out there, and I'll look forward to the day they get uploaded.  As a palette cleanser I've included an excellent performance of Bacchanale (1940), Cage's first major work for prepared piano, by Margaret Leng Tan, one of the few performers to nail the dramatic qualities of Cage's music.  Bacchanale is a fine introduction to the dry, nocturnal world of the prepared piano Cage cultivated, reminiscent of a Hiroshige print of the Moon through pines (if such a print exists).  Here's to eternal quests, mine and yours included.

~PNK

P.S.  I found one!

Mission Statement (with Arthur Honegger's Sarabande)

"While the brevity of these pieces is their eloquent advocate, such brevity stands equally in need of advocacy."

~Schoenberg on Webern's 6 Bagatelles, op. 9

In the hoary business of determining the "great works" (a practice I hiss at from across the street), a common attribute brought up is great length.  A problem with glib glances during perusal is that the viewer uses a critiquing shorthand to speed up the process, and finding a big page count is a quick indicator that the composer put in a considerable amount of time, which in itself is a glib indicator of quality.  And I often agree; plenty of works are wonderful through their vastness and complexity and if you are going to do anything you might as well go big.  The trouble comes when the viewer then dismisses short pieces because they don't appear to have taken up much of the composer's time, indicating that the composer just knocked it off between sips of coffee.  And for most small pieces that simply isn't true, and this blog was founded to disprove this idea, one page at a time.

I have a special fascination with pieces that fit on a single page, one that was cultivated by the constraint of having to build up a sheet music library through photocopying and not wanting money and shelf space going down the drain.  Brevity is captivating to me for a lot of reasons, as I value being able to get maximum effect and depth in the fewest strokes, and in music a page is about as short as it gets without being written on a napkin.  Pieces at this length are either very slow or very fleeting, and are hard to publish, seemingly not worth the print run unless bundled with others.  The rarity of these works adds to their appeal, tiny gifts lost in the shuffle.  The visual aspect of a single page makes the viewer confront the piece as a visual object much more than if the music was spread across several pages; the beginning, middle and end are laid out to see at once, and the piece is as much a painting as it is a score.  The composer takes a bigger risk in setting these pages out in the wild alone than including them in a larger work, as making them just movements from the whole is just the sort of bundling I was talking about.  And so for these inherent charms I've decided to share as many of these pieces as I can, because who else will?

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One of the most common places to find one-pagers is in collections, and our inaugural page, the Sarabande by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), comes from the Album de Six.  Honegger was a member of Les Six, a loose group of young French composers that also included Darius Milhaud (who also contributed just one page), Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, and Louis Durey.  They published a slim volume of piano pieces together in 1920, and this one's my favorite.  Honegger always had an eye for the dramatic and profound and the Sarabande is as rich as it is elusive, matching rippling diads in the right hand with a lyric, cello-ish melody in the left.  Its harmonies are prime Impressionism, and the pace is gentle.  Though I love a lot of Honegger's works it's a little sad he didn't write anything else like this.

Plenty more to come, but for now here's a performance of the piece:

~PNK