An Italian Prelude for Thanksgiving that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving

Can you think of any classical music having to do with Thanksgiving?  I can think of only one, and that's Earl George's decent Thanksgiving Overture of which I was unable to find a recording.  In lieu of that piece I've decided instead to Give my Thanks to IMSLP for helping me discover new works at the touch of a button, including my most recent discovery, the mid-19th century Italian pianist-composer Stefano Golinelli.  Music historians like to pretend that no worthy instrumental music was written in Italy between Boccherini (?) and the Casella-Respighi-Malipiero collective, but as guys like Giuseppe Martucci keep reminding us there's always more to life than what they taught you in Stuff 101.  Golinelli helps fill a hole in my personal understanding of Italian instrumental music, that of the era of Brahms and late Schumann, and his piano works are typical of the best pianistic traditions of the 1840's and 1850's, or at least as far as I've heard, which is five of his 24 Preludes, op. 69, the second of his prelude sets.  These preludes are part of the grand tradition of preludes in each major and minor key that that darned Bach guy started in the 18th century, and once again Golinelli's variations on the form prove that there's always room for one more really long cycle of preludes.

Unlike the Chopin Preludes, Golinelli kicks off the set relaxed and amiable.  The post-Chopin years were quite fruitful in harmonic and rhythmic malleability, the former seen in the left hand's sliding chromatic triads and the latter in the right hand's offset beat.  There's a fine discipline in this writing, as each hand never breaks their respective characters and the right never uses more than two notes at a time (and very prudently, at that).  This combination of ambling textures and tentative lyricism makes for a curiously wistful mood, a mildly daring way to start off a long cycle of pieces, especially so considering that most of the 24 Preludes I've seen come flying out of the gate.  The prelude also endears itself to me because I can't resist any piece that reminds me of the "Nocturne" from Grieg's Lyric Pieces, op. 54.  The YouTube upload has both this prelude and five others from the set, all of them worthy of a spin and proving once again that pianists shouldn't leave any stones unturned.

Oh, heck, let's also Give Thanks to YouTube for being endlessly generous, including offering this delightful Golinelli Tarantella, a fine accomplishment considering that Tarantellas are rarely delightful:

Happy Thanksgiving from Forgotten Leaves!

~PNK

P.S.  Don't you just love the word "ventiquattro"?

A haunted vanity - "A Spectre" from Five Woodcuts for piccolo and two violins

As I've yet to find too many horror-appropriate classical pieces it should come at no surprise that there are exceedingly few leaves that qualify (and most of those I'm keeping for my article on Kubiniana).  After much head scratching I remembered that I had a ghostly tune hidden, or rather written, right under my nose.  Back when I was taking composition lessons I finished three movements of a set of five "woodcuts" for piccolo and two violins at the beginning of my fascination with one-pagers; you can view the score, as well as the rest of my uploaded music, at my IMSLP page.  I challenged myself to confine each piece to one page, and the one that ended up with the most variety per second was "A Spectre".

Written without meter (as I do), "A Spectre" was written at a time when I was bizarrely writing eighth rests backwards, so I'm sorry if that's confusing.  The opening statement is a knock on a violin body with the other icily running as close to the overtone series as I could get with the artificial scale I wrote the piece in.  The joke was a play on the spectralist school of composition, a gang of French composers who drew their compositional water from the harmonic spectrum blown into thousands of pieces and analyzed by computers.  After that the nerd stuff gets booted out and I tried to make my ghost as wacky as possible.  At the time I was deeply invested in Stravinsky's "primitivist" music, or rather the music he wrote in between Petrushka and Pulcinella, which included a lot of concise, hyper-dramatic chamber music like the Three Pieces for String Quartet, Renard, Berceuses du chat and the Three Japanese Lyrics.  This love affair with terse exoticism is present in every second of the piece, though I'll eat my own legs before even daring to compare myself with the great Igor.  The notes with slashes through them in line three refer to two different extended techniques - one violin plays the notes behind the bridge and the other presses the bow down too hard in order to create a scratch tone.  These sounds make a demented march which leads into a reprise of the "spectre" motive.  I apologize for rambling on about my own work, but since there's no recording I have to use my imagination.  The good news is that you'll only have to use your imagination if you feel like it, as per that lack of recorded evidence I mentioned earlier, so if you're not in the mood to indulge my own work you can look forward to regularly scheduled programming next time.  Or can you?

~PNK

Rieti's Crumb of a Lullaby

After much rumination I regret to announce that I don't "get" Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994).  A man who saw the entirety of the 20th century pass before him, his grew out of the post-WWI Italian Avant-Garde and honed a semi-ironic Neoclassical voice, only deepening his own groove long after his work became marginalized in an uncaring America.  He's one of those rare cases where I have trouble telling whether or not he's serious or ironic in his mature style, a burbling, deceptively simple approach that is as close as one can get to a Neoclassical counterpart to Max Reger's swiftly tilting Romanticism.  A charitable interneter uploaded a bunch of his piano works to Scorser, Russia's response to IMSLP's copyright crackdowning, and you can click here to stick a toe in Rietian waters (but only click the "PDF" buttons).  I've managed to record a few particularly accomplished miniatures, including these two works from his 6 Short Pieces (1932), "Elegy" and "Barcarole":

Both of those works exhibit his mature style with grace and unexpected beauty, though they occasionally swoop through their chord changes a bit quickly for my taste.  The third piece I recorded comes from a decade earlier, the opening to his Avant-Garde miniature set Briciole (literally "Crumbs").

One of a handful of his works in the public domain (available here as a Google Books scan), Briciole is the most available works from his striking early days as a Futurist.  Featuring a satirical blend of Chopin and Debussy, a Marionette dance and two pieces about music boxes, the "Berceuse" is the best and easiest to advertise of the set.  Using a simple, hypnotic rhythmic structure, Rieti bets all his chips on pinging, clustered harmonies and plays to win.  The audience is given a stepwise melody to follow, meaning that thick chords, such as the mid-register clusters in measure 3 don't seem like cheap special effects, and liberal pedal use brings out the nocturnal mystery of his textures.  The slightly differing, icy arpeggios up high are a particularly subtle effect, high enough that holding down the pedal blurs them enough to the point that the listener can't tell how they differ but know something's up.  The lullaby has no real conclusion, just a variation and final sparkle as the sleeper falls into the Deep.  While I can't say I'll become a huge fan of Rieti his Berceuse is a strange and inviting window into the hall of mirrors that was inter-war European experimentalism, though ultimately it may lead to an entirely unseen realm.

~PNK

A Viol Toy for Sunday

One advantage Renaissance music had, specifically Elizabethan instrumental music, was an overabundance of genres - flipping through large collections like the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book produces a wealth of genres, not only a ton of dance forms but also oddities like "dump", "robin", "nancie" and "dream".  It's a shame almost all of these have never returned (with the exception of Herbert Howells's excellent clavichord sets, Lambert's Clavichord and Howells's Clavichord), because I'd love to see someone like Ligeti take a crack at a "fortune" or "whistle".  The Elizabethan viol player and composer Tobias Hume was no stranger to these forms, and just the other day I was introduced to a charming 30'' piece of his in one of the more intriguing forms, "toy":

I promise not to tell if you admit to not being able to read that.  Written for bass viol, the piece is designed to be accompanied by a chord instrument such as a lute or guitar, and thankfully a wonderful man on YouTube can play both viol and guitar.  Ernst Stolz is a Renaissance music expert who has put up dozens of performances of pieces from all walks of the 16th and 17th centuries, and he was kind enough to supply the score with this performance.  He also included that neat woodcut at the top of this article, so if you're not a fan of playing soccer just imagine how annoying it would be to play wearing pantaloons.

~PNK

A Languedoc Tantum Ergo

Perhaps it's due to the glut of brilliant talents that French classical music produced at the fin de siècle, but even a cursory glance at the compositional scene of the day shows that France had no shortage of regional heroes.  Paris has always been the center of culture in France, and a combination of a healthy reaction to that kind of artistic exclusivity and increasingly prominent efforts to collect European folk music saw a number of composers celebrate their regional heritage through their works, such as Guy Ropartz with Brittany and quite notably Joseph Canteloube with Auvergne, whose Chants d'Auvergne are sung quite frequently.  Heck, I would've covered Joseph-Ermend Bonnal on one of these blogs earlier if recordings of his stuff weren't so hard to find, and his heritage included the Basque region that stretches across both Southwestern France and Northeastern Spain.  Likewise, Déodat de Séverac's most written-of attribute is his celebration of his Languedoc heritage.  Séverac (1872-1921) is one of those outer Impressionists that I've always known about but never really explored, partially due to his music never really taking flight with Impressionist technique and as such getting lost in the shuffle.  That isn't to say that his music isn't worth investigating - he's just a slightly awkward 'tweener, clearly enamored with the musical elite around him but unsure of how to make their art his own.  He is mostly remembered for his piano works, including the ambitious pictorial suites En Languedoc and Cerdaña, and there are plenty of recordings of his piano works (including an exquisite oeuvres complètes series by Satie champion Aldo Ciccolini.  The other piece of his that still gets played is much shorter than those - in fact so short it can be written on a leaf.

I'll freely admit that Séverac's setting of the Tantum Ergo isn't recognizably Languedocian, but nobody said that a hometown hero can't talk about anything but his native soil.  Written in 1920, the year before his untimely death, the Tantum Ergo has some of the most novel synthesis between all that stepwise-motion voice-leading your theory teachers kept talking about and the kind of French post-Romanticism that Franck and Chausson pioneered.  The lines wax and wane with an intense yearning, kneading into each syllable in that gorgeous way that only a capella choirs can bring to life.  While the harmonies are entirely tonal he'll find perfect spots to phase between junction chords à la Franck.  His dissonances are held on to only long enough to press against the temples, quickly sliding to the next poignant moment, and it's this continual liquid passion that makes the piece so precious.  There are dozens of performances to choose from but the performance below by Schola Cantorum Oxford has the most clarity and simple mastery of any of them, accentuating each supple curve and fully aware that the piece thrives on not wasting anyone's time - hugging the listener's heart and carefully releasing it back into the world.

~PNK

Roy gets a Little Suite Tooth

Variety is the spice of recital, and there's no easier way to accomplish this than the mini-suite.  Tiny dabs of color and movement built to contrast one another, there are plenty of stellar examples (such as Little Suites by Lou Harrison and Leon Kirchner) and today's Suite is one of the best.  While the great Roy Harris is primarily known as a symphonist he did whip up a CD-full of piano pieces, most notably his Piano Sonata, op. 1 (named by Hunter Johnson as American piano music's "Declaration of Independence") and his two sets of American Ballads.  I'd like to submit my vote for his best piano work as his Toccata, but luckily for Forgotten Leaves his Little Suite is a hair's-breadth close second (and most certainly not the first loser).

The first movement shows off Harris's mastery of both singing lines and resonant modal harmonies*.  While the melody seems simple enough, the clanging voice-leading underneath is never the same across its six iterations.  After each scale, Harris rings the low bells and holds them with the middle (sostenuto pedal), allowing the pianist to change the pedal for the upper chords freely.  The effect is gorgeous, the kind of movement that elusive middle pedal is made for, though I'm not sure how you can use the una corda pedal at the same time you use the other two.

Now, before y'all's cry foul about that third movement being spread across two pages, notice that the first page's portion is only two lines long, and the fourth movement is only two lines long.  Therefore, dear readers, one could simply put "Slumber" under "Sad News" and everything would be dory of the hunky persuasion.  However, "Children at Play" just isn't profound enough for a closer, so shush.  "Sad News" makes good use of a slow 7/8 and wavering, harp-like, clashing chord movement.  Harris was a lifelong student of Renaissance music, and the last two measures of "Sad News" display such sweet-'n'-deft harmonic counterpoint Fux could faint.  "Children at Play" bounces between D major and B-flat major in the left hand while the right sticks to the former, though harmonic variation slips in as fast as a two-year-old drops one toy to play with another.  Methinks Harris was a big fan of 7/8 in all its subdivisions, and if he intended the Suite as pedagogical music young students may have more practice than they want in store for them.  Despite the shallow sonority of the movement it's actually the most difficult to perform, putting the pianist's skill at hand separation to the test.  Thankfully things slow down for "Slumber", bringing us back to the world of chorales.  The simplicity here is quite deceptive, its gentle departures from functional tonality ornamented by pinging fifths that suggest an endless breadth of emotion.  

Harris was a pioneer of that brand of broad, polytonal lyricism that would become the American national classical language in the 40's and 50's, but works like the Little Suite and the Toccata show why he did it better than pretty much anyone else (except Copland, of course).  His harmonies rang deeper and truer than the rest of the pack, and talking about them is no substitute for hearing them, and Geoffrey Burelson made a meal of the Little Suite and the rest of Harris's ivory ticklers on his CD for Naxos.  As the whole Little Suite isn't even four minutes long I don't see the harm in the copyright infringement of me including his performance below, and only a cold-hearted orb would shut down these delightful morsels.

~PNK

*Yes, yes, I did notice how the tune devolves into "Joy to the World", and no, I'm not putting this article off until Christmas just to make that reference more cute, thank you very much.

A Hyllning for Hilding from Across the Baltic

Some of you may remember my article on Hilding Rosenberg's sixth Improvisation, and that piece is a mere taste of the work of one of the most inspiring Scandinavian composers of the 20th century.  Some of you may also remember Poland's border on the Baltic Sea, and so it's natural that the good stuff from Sweden would float over to Warsawian shores.  In 1982 the incomparable György Ligeti met Rosenberg and composed a violin & cello duet in his honor, and when the big publishers bother to publish your leaf there's a chance it's pretty boss.

A hyllning is a tribute, and the parenthetical description alludes to the soundworld of Bartók, inarguably the most influential Hungarian composer of all time and pioneer of classical fauxlk music.  All the germ material is set up in the first line, a snakily modal melody in the cello accompanied by doubly-stopped fifths in the violin.  After that it's just a matter of variations, and each twist of the pen proves more inventive and beautiful than the last.  The lines are steadily reduced with each repetition, letting the gradual crescendo cathart like crazy once bar 13 comes around.  The last line ramps the quarter notes, giving the impression of acceleration downward, with lots of insistence pushing the instruments to the final four chords.  Ligeti was a man of seemingly endless range, and while he had previously taken audiences to the borderlands of luscious noise he shows a true mastery of good ol' polytonality here.  As tricky as the double-stops may seem they sound whomping fantastic, especially the last couple of bars with their kneading minor seconds.  I'm not sure who did the recording below but I have a feeling it's the phenomenal Arditti Quartet, modern music's BFF and my vote for Most Unflappable Chamber Group.  I've never seen a Swedish-Polish combo restaurant, but I'd never have guessed that their food would taste so sweet.

(Nice picture, rauthku.)

~PNK

Bosch's Butt Song

Special thanks to Matt Adelson for suggesting this!

Of all the people who need no introduction on this blog, the most introduction-unneeded is Heironymous Bosch, though you may be wondering why I'm featuring a Medieval painter.  First, look at his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in the world:

If you squint at the right panel (hell), you may notice a harp.  An Oklahoma Christan University music student named Amelia was looking over the painting and discovered a hilarious detail in the most insane part of this astonishing painting:

See it?

Your eyes are not lying to you - that's a piece of music on a man's butt.  The right panel is about Hellish tortures, and in this case this man has become an instrument (get it?!?) for a demon.  It's written in the usual format for Medieval music, and Amelia decided to transcribe the song in modern notation.

(Click for larger view)

This discovery of course set the internet on fire.  In addition to Amelia's MIDI realization, there are many other mixes and realizations, and considering how essential his piece is to music history and the fabric of the universe those versions are all awesome.  I'll just include the original MIDI version for brevity's sake, but when a demon threatens you with anal beads after writing a song on your rear end, you'd better play that piece in every possible iteration.

~PNK

Babbitt Takes it Easy for Leaf's Sake

While Milton Babbitt's music has long been associated with musical pedagogy, the last word anybody has attached to it is "easy".  Babbitt quickly gained a reputation for writing works of staggering intellectual and technical difficulty, and despite his apparently kindly nature this rep stuck with him throughout his strikingly long career.  He wasn't completely averse to writing easier pieces, though, and one of his more well-known piano pieces is also one of his easiest - Semi-Simple Variations.

Written in 1956 and published as part of Isadore Freed's excellent pedagogical series for Presser, the piece not only structures itself around palindromic rows, but it also serializes the rhythms palindromically, making it an early example of total serialism.  While most musicians recoil from that term as if they had been offered a rat king for lunch, Babbitt maintains a steady, almost jazzy feel, and the experiment is surprisingly pleasant.  The plot thickens when you realize that Babbitt's other pleasant piano piece also dates from 1956, and is even shorter and easier to play, the only leaf I could find Babbitt had mustered in his 95-year life.

Steady readers may remember my article on Hall Overton's A Mood, published in the excellent easy-to-intermediate anthology American Composers of Today, edited by Joseph Prostakoff and supported by the Abby Whiteside Foundation.  It's probably the first and last time Babbitt wrote a piece that the listener could hear in their head by looking at the score - the two hands each start with the germ row at different transpositions and slightly different contours.  The notes are selected in a way not only to appear modal at first, but to also sit on either white or black notes, a plus for younger pianists.  I found a theory class curriculum that uses the piece as analysis homework, and you can see the full spread here if you want to see the "magic square".  Here's the analyzed version:

Of course, that doesn't mean anybody cares, and the people least likely to care are elementary school children taking piano lessons to avoid being drafted to the local youth soccer team.  Robert Taub made a pro recording of the Duet in 1985, but I found a performance by a small child at the Babbitt Memorial in 2011, held in the small recital room at New England Conservatory.  Taub's out-of-print, expensive Babbitt CD might hold a better performance, but you just can't beat the charm of a girl under 5 feet playing it just fine.

~PNK

A Vanity - Forget-Me-Not

At 11:46 p.m. on Monday night I finished my first completed original piece in some time, a chaser to my arrangement of Angelo Musolino's Fugato for brass quintet.  Unbeknownst to many I have my own IMSLP page, and there's nothing more enlightening for a classical musician than to try composing on for size.  I keep coming back to the piano, as it was my first instrument and will inevitably be my last, and the piece is titled Forget-Me-Not.  It's only two lines long, but the flowers are small to begin with.  It's like finding a forget-me-not in the keyhole of your bedroom door after midnight.

(Click for larger size)

~PNK

Musolino, Fugato, Bella

Not all anthologies are thick, and while sometimes a thin anthology can seem like a rip-off it can also compliment the few pieces that were included.  4 Short Piano Pieces was an elusive volume published in 1958 by Composers Editions, Ltd., or Accentuate Music - I'm not really sure which one has precedent over the other - and none of the featured pieces ever saw the light of day again, save for a hard-to-research sequence of reprints by the same publisher in different collections.  I found the volume while searching for pieces by Ned Rorem, whose fine-looking Slow Waltz is included as well as pieces by three composers I'd never heard of before: Joseph Maneri, Berge Kalajian and Angelo Musolino.  Maneri (better known by Joe) was a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who developed a distinctive microtonal jazz language for decades and is still releasing albums.  The demo for his song "Paniots Nine" was used as the introductory music for the brilliant movie American Splendor.  Suffice to say, his contribution, Theme and Three Variations, is the worst of the four.  Berge Kalajian was sucked into film composing after writing a couple handfuls of concert pieces, and that's the last anybody heard of him.  I may do a Re-Composing article on his lovely Piano Piece (Summer 1958), and it sadly appears that it's the only piece of his I'll see without an act of God.  The final piece, Musolino's Fugato, is not only a leaf but so good that I made an arrangement for brass quintet*.

Most fugues start the countersubject at the fifth, but Musolino devilishly starts his at the tritone, and each restatement of the subject is slightly different to fit an attractive, decidedly mid-century tonal language.  The piece is fully formed within the Big American Idiom, with lots of quartal and quintal harmonies, comprehensible melodic snaking and strong architecture.  There are a lot of fanfare moments, all in fourths and fifths for good effect, and he exhibits an expert grasp of dramatic pacing.  Musolino became known in the 50's and 60's for jazz and light classical music, and through his life would develop a unique voice that utilized classical and jazz devices interchangeably.  You can see his brief but delicious Phantasmagorical Episode here for a full show of that language, and if you squint your ears you can see the seeds of it being sown in the Fugato.  The good news is you don't have to squint hard enough, because I made a recording.

~PNK

*I'm happy to send you a copy of my arrangement, BTW.

Witold's Brass CUBE

Brass instruments were made for fanfares, and any fanfare without one is so lacking it may as well be a waltz.  Late in his career, Witold Lutosławski, one of my favorite composers, was commissioned to write a short series of fanfares for various organizations, and one of them leafed its way into my grasp.

Lutosławski was known for a number of different styles and techniques in the course of his career, including populism, serialism and aleatoric methods, but Fanfare for CUBE uses none of those styles and is perfectly well off doing its own thing.  Mostly written in Debussy's Lydian/Mixolydian mixed mode (a major scale with a raised fourth and a lowered seventh), the brass quintet shows how nice it is to hear the first five notes of a Lydian scale played at once.  It naturally expands and contracts, only breaking the scale in bars 6, 7 and 8 to make a semi-VI-V-vi dim-I resolution.  There's not much more to say, and why bother?  Sometimes a CUBE is just a CUBE.  Here's a recording, along with Witold's Fanfare for the University of Lancaster as a chaser.

~PNK

Baude Cordier crafts the original super-valentine

People complaining about baffling New Complexity scores is nothing new, as in the Middle Ages there was a similar movement of performance and notational complexity for its own sake - ars subtilior.  Borne in France in the mid 14th century and centered around Avignon, the style extended the precedent set by the established ars nova style by adding a lot of rhythmic variance, most notably the use of red-colored notes to indicate a rhythmic alteration by a third.  While that might not sound like much on paper, these pieces can get pretty wacky, difficult to perform even in today's hyper-notated performing environment.  Take the meter shifting in Johannes Ciconia's charming Venetia mundi splendor, for example:

 

Believe it or not, this isn't nearly the wackiest stuff I've seen from these guys, and the still nascent state of notation of the time made reading these scores a challenge in itself.  These pieces were most likely intended for a very small, elite audience, and was arguably the first time new music was created through technical experimentation.  It's also notable that almost all this music was written on secular texts rather than sacred ones, allowing for a wide variety of subjects from love to war to birthday odes.  How fun would it be for somebody to add goofball shapes on top of this complexity?

Enter Baude Cordier (c.1380-<1440), master of eye music (like the circular canon at the top of the article).  Not content to let straight lines keep him enslaved, he set out to make his Belle, bonne, sage recognizable from several yards away.  I mentioned in my article on Hans Otte that printing templates make bookmaking less artful, and Belle, bonne, sage is one of the finest examples of art music made by hand.  Look at those giant, ornate first letters!  Check out the expert penmanship on the notes!  There are actually three visible hearts, and it's easy enough to see the Big One and the small one linked to the bottom staff line of the Big One's upper half like a gumball-machine-prize key ring.  However, if you look in the Big One's lower half and squint hard enough at the cluster of colored notes it may start to resemble a heart if you want to feel the love.  All kidding aside this is a gorgeous piece of Medieval art, a loving synthesis of sight and sound that would make for a lovely valentine to your equally nerdy beloved.  And just in case you think this piece is unperformable, here's Ensemble Organum singing the pants off it.  Happy Valentine's Day!
 

 

~PNK

Maurice Wright Calls his Horn for a Fresh Glass of Think

While Maurice Wright may not be the most well-known composer in the country, he's certainly one of the most approachable.  I don't mean to say that his music is simplistic or overtly populist - what I mean is that his music bathes in a wonderfully amiable glow.  I've actually gotten in contact with him and he's like a genuinely nice man, a fine reminder that most artists are de facto normal people and not untouchable gods and divas who shriek at the very mention of fan contact - most non-famous composers are delighted to hear from admirers.  Wright's music is both quite sophisticated and easy to comprehend, sticking to natural structures and phrasing and immersed in an attractive atonal language reminiscent of George Perle's serial tonality.  The trick is that the listener rarely has to think about how his pieces are made - they're enjoyable enough on the surface, and Wright often writes on quirky extramusical subjects.  For example, his Suite for piano is a travelogue of a driving trip he took in the Rocky Mountains, and features a musical portrait of beer guzzling*.  All these elements are present in his Music for French Horn (1975), published by new music best-friend Mobart in their collection Five Compositions for French Horn alongside works by Curt Cacioppo, Edgar Warren Williams, Conrad Pope and Carlos Rausch.  No, I don't expect my readers to know who any of those people are.  Set in three movements, the outer two are goofily titled The Strongest Man and The Unobtrusive Model.  Only the middle movement, The Search for Knowledge, is leafy.

(Click for larger view)

It might be Wright's idea of a joke that a piece called The Search for Knowledge is only three staves long, though I'm more busy trying to figure out if his idea of a joke is jamming the search for knowledge in between the strongest man and an unobtrusive model.  Evidently Wright's method for searching for knowledge involves strolling around a community garden whistling elliptically.  Or perhaps humming a song he forgot the words to while doing his laundry.  The tune is chromatic yet oddly similar to what we imagine our ancestors singing while whittling, though Wright writes a lot of small details into its fabric.  There's not much of an arc, just a point when you start to notice the motives repeating and realize that's a perfectly fine way for the piece to go.  It ends on a mid-volume semi-palindrome, with its humorous lack of a resolution leading nicely into The Unobtrusive Model's upbeat humorousness.  Unfortunately I don't have a recording of this piece, but I do have a recording of his Music for Trombones from the same year, and that piece is amiable, too.

~PNK

*I chose that picture of him for just this reason.

Stravinsky Sings of Bassoons, and 2013 Answers

It's time again to visit Stravinsky's leaf oeuvre, as he left so many miniatures behind it would be entirely possible to make the whole first half of a concert from his leaves alone.  While he made a point to publish a few of them (such as the Double Canon), others were discovered among his papers after his death, such as the elusive Lied ohne Name.  

Written in 1917, at the height of his primitivist period (my favorite, BTW), the Lied ohne Name ("song without words", a form pioneered by Mendelssohn) went unpublished until the mid-60's when it was included in a bassoon technique book, and it didn't get its own edition until 1979.  Stravinsky certainly wasn't so famous and powerful in 1917 to get every stray note the publisher treatment, and bassoon duos aren't exactly a big-money market.  That hasn't stopped this charming piece from receiving a few recordings, mostly on all-Stravinsky albums like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's phenomenal 1996 Grammy winner Shadow Dances, one of my all-time favorite classical albums and a gold standard for Stravinsky interpretation.  Equally unstopped was the composition of an Avant-Garde deconstruction of the work for the festival crowd, though we had to wait until 2013 to experience it.

(Sorry about the poor quality)

Written for the Festival Ars Musica 2013, violinist/composer Paul Pankert's Variation ohne Name grows from the core notes of the Lied and stretches out into some very odd, atmospheric places.  Pankert swaps Stravinsky's amiable walking speed for static anticipation, the vast spaces allowing extended techniques to flow.  With rhythms as hard to count as these a less-than-literal touch can be either an asset or a poison, but in the case of the Variation the improvisational, bravura lines can wax and wane without the audience catching wise to any mistakes.  It might be a little silly to expect a profound examination of the Lied, and thankfully Pankert only sets out to have fun, getting as much cheeky elaboration as he can into 16 bars.  Obviously these two leaves demand to be performed together, so here's just such a performance (the premiere, of course).

~PNK

Norman Lloyd's Dramatic Episode

So there was this Kickstarter a couple of years ago:

I'm glad to say that this project was funded 101%, though I haven't the foggiest when the CD will get released - I'd buy it.  Peter Mennin was one of the more interesting mid-century American composers of his ilk, and has a well-established cult following around his 9 symphonies.  His two piano works, the well-wrought Five Pieces and the striking (and strikingly difficult) Piano Sonata, are fine additions to the rep and should be sought out as you will (scores for both pieces HERE, recording of the five pieces HERE).  Much less known to me, and the world, is Norman Lloyd, a student of Copland's and most well known for this:

The Fireside Book of Folk Songs was a classic collection of Western culture's folk heritage, cast in easy piano arrangements and adorned with sweet, picture-book illustrations.  Plenty of people had this in the Boomer years but I bet few people paid attention to its editors, and Norman Lloyd has never had a revival as of this writing (aside from that unreleased CD).  A cursory look at the works of his in University libraries looks promising enough (like the intriguing Night Mist for string orchestra), and his two piano pieces are quite lovely.  The Piano Sonata might not be the most surprising American work in the genre but it's certainly breezy, well-written and enjoyable - it'd make an interesting match with the Mennin Sonata's sturm und drang.  I actually came across the other piece, Episodes, in the Boston University library stacks, and didn't think about it much until I saw the Kickstarter and gave it a whirl.  The Episodes are quite fun to play and maintain a level of elegance and sophistication despite their relative simplicity (especially in the face of those Mennin pieces).  Much to my delight I found that one of them was a leaf, and I whipped up a recording so you can be given the chance at delightment.

The chromatically cycling, emotionally fraught melody is heightened by the icy upper registers of the piano, each note emphatically pronounced by a tenuto-staccato mix.  The held diad implies a Sus-2 chord (for those who remember jazz theory), and the melody's snaky plodding is reminiscent of the opening to the "Cemetery" movement of Abel Decaux's Clairs de Lune (second Decaux callback this week!  I'm on a roll).  This builds and builds to the  ice-clash fortissimo in bar 6, the low register clangs in with much doom.  A more sensitive section reveals Lloyd's ability to write polytonal music with utmost clarity and an ear for dramatic pacing, and the piece ends with more bell-like chords, leaving things neatly unresolved.  The fifth and final episode is light and whirling, more than stark as a contrast and a joyous end to an already entertaining set of miniatures.  This is easily the darkest movement but isn't unwelcome in the least bit, and offers the pianist a lot of emotional wiggle room.  I took some liberties with the time but the melody was asking for it, and I may get around to the other episodes in the future.  So once again, why hasn't this CD been released yet?  I'm sure people would like it, and I've got my fingers poised over my mouse in hopes of a pre-order button appearing, so chop! chop!, Mr. Silberstein.

~PNK