A pair of viola ganders at Tui St. George Tucker

Tui St. George Tucker has been in my sights for quite a while, and while I'm not sure I can whip up a full article for her just yet (mostly due to a lack of decent recordings of her stuff), her sheer sui generis-ness can't be ignored any longer.  Named for a New Zealander (-ish?  -esque?) bird and primarily based at a North Carolina boy's camp, Tucker was a musical figure unlike any other, combining the technical variety of Ives with the amateur-applauding enthusiasm of the John Cage/Larry Polansky/David Mahler outsider tradition, Tucker went from 40's NY Avant-Garde fixture to near total obscurity, crafting a strange and charming body of work, all unpublished until after her death in 2004, when a website appeared and posted her oeuvre.  Her musical voice ranged from opaque atonality to nostalgic jazz throwbacks; drew inspiration from subjects as diverse as Zen Buddhist call-and-response games, Lutheran hymns, and peyote; developed a personal approach to microtonality; and expanded the technical and expressive possibilities of the recorder, arguably writing more music for it than any other 20th-century composer I can think of (aside from Fulvio Caldini, that is).  She also wrote a great deal of music for the viola, which brings us to a pair of leaves for the instrument that an enterprising violist performed as part of an American Female Composer retrospective and uploaded to YouTube.  Let's viola, shall we?

Compared to some of her wackier pieces (like that bit in the Peyote Sonata for piano that has a 17:16 rhythmic juxtaposition) the Partita and Cassation for solo viola are pretty normal looking.  The Partita is among a long line of muscular atonal curtain-openers for solo instruments inspired by Bartók - even though I can't prove it's inspired by Bartók it doesn't take too much squinting to divine that conclusion.  There's a lot of double-stops running around and scales switch on a dime, not to mention the brusque rhythms and restlessness.  At 2 minutes it'd seem a natural fit for college recitals, so it's good someone took the risk at least once.

On a graver note, Tucker uses a strange, non-abstract Jackson Pollack painting as the inspiration for a Cassation, starting on a slow plod down the stairs and switching things up right quick.  As in the Partita the harmonic language is highly reminiscent of darker Eastern European works from the 40's and 50's, albeit with a volatile execution, and would make a fine intro for George Crumb's Sonata for Solo Cello if anybody reading this is planning on doing a collegiate duo recital (*COUGH*COUGH*).  If nothing else it could be paired with Stravinsky's Elegy for solo viola, his only solo work for the instrument and just one of dozens of sorely underplayed viola works that I'd like to see performed live.  Seriously, if I had the money I'd sponsor seasons full of chamber recitals just for these blogs, and I bet someone out there has money, don't you?

So here's the deal - this stuff is nothing.  I don't mean nothing in that they're bad pieces, but rather that her music has so much more variety than these, just not in leaf form.  There's stuff like the Peyote Sonata for piano that features a 15:16 rhythmic juxtaposition:

Her many microtonal works for recorder, clarinet and other instruments, like the Amoroso:

And whatever this is:

There's a heck of a lot more where these came from, and you can see it all at the scores page of her website.  I'll warn you ahead of time that almost none of her scores were typeset, so most look like they were accidentally used to clean cannon barrels.  But isn't that exciting?  You're part of the excavation, diving into the wilds of unpublished music!  And the people running her website were pretty thorough, putting up a bunch of unfinished works and fragments alongside the finished ones, so anybody can play amateur musicologist if they wish.  Boys' camps in North Carolina never had it so good, let me tell you.  Also, if you're interested in any of this see if you can find a copy of the Centaur Records retrospective CD of her work, comprised of amateur recordings most likely made at Camp Catawba during her life and showcasing the full breadth of her peculiar oeuvre.

12 French Images in (Female) Leaves

In the age of the Inter-Butz it's easy to forget that not every scrap of information one could glean from the 'net is actually gleanable.  In spite of how obscure most of the figures and works I cover here are I've usually been able to get enough info for a good paragraph and some change - not so with today's subject, Annette Dieudonné.  Dieudonné became a student of Nadia Boulanger in the 1910's and after fourteen years took up the duty as herPA for most of her life.  Her bio stops about there pretty much every place you look.  As I'm no Boulanger expert I probably wouldn't have ever heard of her if not for my own efforts to look over every single French piano piece written in the 1910's and 20's.  Those surely well-used efforts unearthed a 1922 set of piano pieces, the Douze Images en Courtes Preludés, and once again I'm pleased to be defending well-crafted modesty.

Each image is conveniently (for FL) only a page long, and few of them are much more difficult than this one.  They're most certainly pedagogical pieces and appear to be the only piano pieces Dieudonné was able to get published; all her other published works are sacred choral music.  Her style is amiably clear and straightforward, totally entrenched in a kind of bittersweet elegance particular to French composers of the 1910's.  Even pieces one would expect to be extroverted, like "The Weasel"-

-still focus on rich voicing and serious harmonies, as if the weasel was dancing a courante at Fauré's birthday party.  I get the feeling that Dieudonné had little interest in extroversion, and diffuse color tricks like the right hand's lydian/myxolydian rippling in "The Garden's Tranquil Water-Path" resonated more in her soul.

That isn't to say that "The Weasel" was her only attempt at humor, as "The Parakeets' Cage" squawks appropriately (though not without effective modal voicing, of course):

"Cypress Alley" is the most lugubrious of the bunch, its marching mountains of a left hand straight out of Debussy (such as the Berceuse Heroique") but might be closer to Holst in execution, and it takes a good 30 seconds for a flat to appear.  The succeeding "Lullaby" features much lighter voicing, showcasing how the light pinging of upper-register secondal intervals with the pedal down are great representations for sleepy recognition of the world's troubles, and is no poor shakes in the vast and wonderful piano lullaby rep.

Methinks that Dieudonné had a liking for birds and perfect fifths, and "The Aviary" goes whole hog on both fronts.  This isn't as tricky as it looks, but keeping the hands from running into each other is a special practice session all its own.  Actually, the most difficult part is the rhythmic precision required to land the bass-clef fifths in measure 6 and similar measures.  The quintal harmonies turn to quartal, and far more plodding, in the following piece, "The Poor in Church".  There's a sense of depressed plainchant, as Dieudonné presumably thought the Poor would bring the sorrows of the world to Church.  I'm not sure what the grace notes in the left hand are - perhaps the Church's organist playing the notes sloppily?  Though that's the problem with trying to interpret tone-painting - there's no end to it and you'll most likely overshoot the author's intentions.

Well, enough of that - here's a clown!

(If I'm being terribly honest, this one's my least favorite simply because it doesn't go far enough.  You need a lot of pyrotechnics and zip to make clown pieces work (like Debussy's "Général Lavine - eccentric") and this one just isn't wacky enough.  You also need an excellent pianist with a lot of 'tude to really clown the place up and not every serious pianist has the nerve to put a lot of work into clown music.)

"The Old Carriage" is another sad piece, eschewing the humor of a broken-down carriage (or car, I'm not sure which one she's referring to) in favor of lost strength.  The alternating seconds (from D/E to D/E-flat) intimates creaking unease, but once again perfect fourths and fifths lead the way.

"Bells on a Festival Morning" is pretty self-explanatory, requiring as much pedal as one can get without getting overwhelmingly jangly...or should it?

The set ends with "Clear Paths", possibly the most philosophical piece in the bunch.  A study in parallel motion, the piece exudes a calm and confidence that makes for a holistically reassuring ending.  The whole set is reassuring, a warm and sane contribution to the less-difficult piano rep and a nice resource for piano teachers looking for something left-of-center.  I'd be interested to see Dieudonné's sacred works as I'm sure they're welcome siblings to the sacred works of the Boulangers, which means we'd most certainly be in good hands.  Annette Dieudonné might be the most obscure figure I'll discuss this WHM but her sole piano work is worth more than a footnote in history.  I was considering making my own recording of these works, as there is no commercial recording, but thankfully Emile Naoumoff, Nadia Boulanger's last student, made a fine interpretation for his YouTube channel.  In case non-jazz improvisation interests you Naoumoff has been making daily improvisations for some time now.  Either way it's good that someone's looking out for the little gal, and people like him are exactly what Women's History Month needs.

~PNK

A Crumb Crumb for Sunday

For as much as George Crumb has become a symbol of the audience-pleasing end of the post-60's Avant-Garde in musical America it's easy to forget that he started out writing more conventional music in the 50's, dark Bartokian fantasies such as the Sonata for Solo Cello.  It wasn't until the early 60's rolled around when Crumb's music started to turn towards the outlandish-yet-accessible, extended-technique-rife marvels we perform frequently, and while most (including me) point to his Lorca settings as the great works of this period we can't overlook the Five Pieces for Piano (1962).  Those familiar with the piano parts in works like Vox Balanae (which I had the privilege of performing in Boston) know to expect lots of harmonics, pizzicatos, and simple preparation such as placing sheets of paper or glass rods on the strings or holding a paperclip to a vibrating low string to create a steady metallic buzz.  The Five Pieces is where all those techniques started to crop up, and a leaf in the middle might be the most subtle and elegant of them all.

(Click to enlarge)

As indicated in Crumb's gorgeously hand-engraved score, every sound in this "Notturno" is produced from inside the piano, plucking the strings either by fingertips or fingernails and adding various effects when most effective.  Right away we see the paperclip trick, a very simple yet unique effect that I've never seen done by another composer for reasons I don't understand.  Plucking strings on the inside of the piano is tricky because strings are very close together and unmarked, often requiring the pianist to label each string to be plucked with bits of labeled tape, and man alive, are there a lot of plucked notes in this piece, and the rhythms and dynamics indicated are very subtle indeed.  The most elaborate rhythm-'n'-technique package challenge comes in the third bar of the second stave, wherein a dense cluster of plucked notes has to be stopped without sounding in a specific order and in time, and while it might not be obvious there's a lot of risk of accidentally resounding strings simply by taking your finger off them and drawing the skin across the metal.  All of this is written in a luminously acidic language that has all of the economy of Crumb without his allusions to tonality or poetic word-painting.  As most of the US is encased in ice the static drama of this piece seems as apt as anything, and this newer recording I've included below might be the best I've heard yet of the piece.  You'll have to produce your own night conditions, though; there's no embed option for the sun going away.

~PNK