A Persichettian Chinese Songlet

It's Persichetti time again!  I previously covered Vincent Persichetti in my review of one of his piano Poems, and that piece got a lot of detail and originality into a mere 20 bars.  Today's piece, All Alone from his Two Chinese Songs, op. 29, has a much smaller toolbox to work with.

Persichetti was remarkably skilled in nearly every instrumental combination and every performing level, and All Alone might be the simplest piece he ever wrote.  The piano never plays more than one note at a time, a mere drone to support the singer's Dorian lament.  The voice part is little more than the Dorian scale with a couple of turns, expanding in expression with each repetition.  As the voice's passion increases, you'll notice that the repeated una corda B-flat in the piano becomes shorter and shorter in length, heightening the song's urgency, ultimately whole-stepping up to make a perfect fifth with the voice.  The song's poignancy is secured by never breaching piano, those hairpins confined to sotto voce and a reduced vocal span.  I heard that Persichetti would sometimes compose while driving by taping staff paper to his steering wheel, and this is the first time I've believed that tidbit.  The poem is an anonymous children's song as translated by Arthur Waley in his 170 Chinese Poems, and it needs little amplification to speak its mind.  Persichetti has left it as simply as it came, the voice earnest and human, the drone a bell at the far end of a silent lake.  The two Chinese Songs could be seen as warm-ups for his seminal (and distressingly unrecorded) haiku cycle A Net of Fireflies, but they need no introduction or explanation - just ears.

~PNK

A question or few on Ruggles's Exaltation

One of America's great composing legends, Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was a man of deep concentration.  That is, while he only wrote some 15-20 pieces in his whole life, he worked incredibly hard on them and they exhibit a concentrated dramatic power unlike anything else.  Working mostly within a dissonant counterpoint system (developed contemporaneously with Charles Seeger's method), his mature works sound like the War in Heaven - intensely dramatic, vaulting and anguished - and sport apocalyptic titles such as Men and Mountains, Angels and Sun-Treader.  And I love them so - in fact, Angels is one of my favorite pieces for brass, possibly one of my favorite pieces ever.  I haven't gotten around to featuring him on one of my blogs yet because, well, at this point he's well-known in America and I normally don't cover well-known people.  Oh, sure, I linked to his song Toys in my Cos Cob Song Volume article, but that was small potatoes and a bit before his style was developed (but it's still dang fine, and a blast to perform).  He was much more productive as a painter, and you can see some of his wonderful work here.  His only leaf (that I know of) is also the last piece he completed and his only piece of outright sacred music, an odd fact considering how cosmologically themed his pieces were.  It's incidental that I'm doing a piece of Christian sacred music today, because I've got a confession to make.  Specifically, I'm not sure I get this piece.

At first glance, Exaltation doesn't look that different from a normal chorale, but then the odd notes creep in.  Ruggles was notably free from the constraints of formal compositional training, having never learned tonal theory or studied other composers' works - he composed largely through trial and error, contributing to his glacial pace - but despite this he keeps to the chorale guidelines of stepwise motion and tight voicing.  That doesn't mean he can't have jarring dissonances every third or fifth beat, and at first these clashes are off-putting in the context of this otherwise conventional, and quite American, hymn.  However, many of them obtain a bittersweet luster after multiple hearings, and these become more important once you find out the piece was written in memory of Ruggles's wife Charlotte, who died the year before.  A trumpet colleague of mine was fortunate enough to have visited Ruggles at his house, and noted that near the end of his life Ruggles's eyesight was so bad that he had enormous staff paper made for him and he composed with it on the floor, so his usual sluggish pace became even more strained, and a more heartless critic would be tempted to wonder if the "wrong notes" were as unintentional as the critic wanted them to be.  I got the chance to perform Angels some years ago with Judson Scott at the University of Puget Sound, and after the performance he quoted Rilke ("Every angel is terrifying.") and we played it again, a move I thought was unnecessary at the time but still sparks a few synapses when I hear this piece.

Or maybe I'm thinking way too hard about it.

Anyways, Exaltation only grows in value the more you hear it, and the recording by Gerard Schwarz (yes, that Gerard Schwarz), a brass ensemble and the Gregg Smith singers repeats it about six times with instrumental variation.  Presser's published version is just the bare chorale with no words, as Ruggles intended the chorus to hum, perhaps to heighten the sense of nostalgia and loss, but the recording finds words for it (and I'm sure it's a hymn I'd recognize if I was of the churchin' folk), and they could have been working from an alternate version Ruggles kept in his desk drawer.  It's a lovely solution to a semi-problematic piece, and is a nice eulogy to Ruggles as well.  You can listen to everything Ruggles wrote in a couple of hours, so have at and take in, lest the angels terrify you too much.

~PNK

A Pair of Whitman Leaves by Ol' Neddy

Ned Rorem needs little introduction here, often hailed as America's greatest art song writer and deservedly so (after Ives, of course).  Walt Whitman also needs little introduction, and when you name your blog after leaves it's only a matter of time before you write about Leaves of Grass.  Arguably the most famous collection of poetry by an American, plenty of its poems have been set as art songs and Rorem's contributions to that oeuvre make up a Thanksgiving-sized portion.  As both men were gay pacifists this isn't surprising, and Rorem's songwriting is deft enough to match Whitman's highly personal, loose verse, even when the resulting song is a mere page.  I sense excellence afoot.

Rorem was musically raised in post-WWII Paris, where urbanity and elegance were king, and To You meets both those criteria with a wry smile.  The poem is the slightest of the slight, illuminating a moment of humanity that might as well not even exist for how ignored it is.  The looping piano texture, elongated via a three-note cell underneath a four-noter, peddles along in the spirit of a brisk walk or casual bike ride, forcing the social contact to be fleeting.  Oddly enough, the song's resolution is almost too tonal, a Neo-Classical ironicalism in keeping with the poem's tone.  And wouldn't you know it, Rorem wrote it so fast he wrote down the time of day it was completed, as if he saw a cute boy pass by while sitting in a café in Hyères and couldn't bear to let him get away without a song.

A much darker Whitman is heard in Look Down, Fair Moon, taken from his Civil War sequence Drum-Taps.  Rorem blew everybody out of the water in 1970 with his devastating Drum-Taps-sourced cycle War Scenes, but this song predates it by more than a decade and is composed in a noticeably different style (his original style).  Much like To You the poem captures a fleeting emotion, but it's the kind of emotion that brings the heart to its knees.  The huge motional crescendo is drawn with wide intervals and slow marching, the top of the arc so searing it threatens to break the piano in half.  However, the moment passes with a softly wrinkled denoument, its dissonance so subtle at pianissimo the audience isn't sure if they heard it correctly.  If you can hear it correctly in the Donald-Gramm-at-Town-Hall performance (bookended by two Whitman non-leaves) below you'll probably also notice that he transposed everything down as to not embarrass himself.  I can't guarantee he didn't make any memory slips, but thankfully the songs are good enough that I couldn't give a whoop-de crap.  Join Donald and Ned in urbanity and horror, if you're not distracted by a cute boy passing by your café table.

~PNK

In Futurum, No One Can Hear You Play

Much like Stalin's artistic overlording, the Third Reich implemented an artistic suppression program, though their justifications for suppression involved labeling Jewish and modernist art as "degenerate" (entartete), and a special death camp, Theresienstadt (in the Czech city of Terezín) was notable for housing artists, as well as being the camp they showed to visiting foreign dignitaries as a nice clean façade for the Final Solution.  Nearly a whole generation of Jewish composers were sent to Theresienstadt and other camps, and their music was resurrected much later in the 20th century to much acclaim and popularity, showcasing some truly unique voices, the greatest of which may be Erwin Schulhoff (1892-1942).  A composer of incredible versatility and fecundity, Schulhoff was sent to the Wülzburg concentration camp and died in 1942 from tuberculosis, and the revival of his works is one of the great humanitarian efforts in 20th century art.  And dang, did he write some doozies.

While his music went through a number of transformations, his earliest notable period was one of Dadaism, starting in the late 1910's right alongside the likes of Braque and Duchamp (though they never met him).  His experimentations with dadaism (including the baffling Symphonia Germanica (please click that link)) were contemporaneous with his development of "sophisticated jazz", easily the best and most sophisticated of the many European attempts to blend jazz with classical music between the wars, and the two styles meet in his 5 PIttoresques.  While the outer four are decent examples of the early stage of his jazz pieces (though they pale in comparison to later masterworks such as the 5 Jazz Etudes), the third pittoresque, In Futurum, out-bizarres all expectations.

Not since the works of John Stump has the world seen such extensive perversion of musical engraving.  Not one parameter is sacred, from the impossible 3/5 and 7/10 meters to the use of rests rather than notes.  This silent piece predates John Cage's 4'33'' (which will NOT be making an appearance on this blog, in case you were wondering, as there are zero pages in the score), though it is predated by Alphonse Allais's Marche Funebre, which I'll get to at the proper time.  While nothing can be physically played there is an arc to the piece, with a mid-level climax at the pair of faces in the third stave.  These cartoon emotion-notes should appear in more pieces, and are a perfect jab at simplistic tonal resolutions.  The big halt is at the last bar of the fifth stave, a Grand Pause accentuated by five exclamation points, and the piece ends with two happy faces, just like music should.  There's never been a commercial recording (I wonder why?...), but I did find this hilarious performing solution by a student pianist who should be very proud of his work.

~PNK