Merry Christmas from Forgotten Leaves

~PNK

Autumnal Classics - Hugo Weisgall's Four Songs, op. 1

You might be wondering why I'm finishing up my Autumnal Classics series well into December, a month so strongly associated with Winter that people eagerly put up fake snow for Christmas decoration well before it gets cold enough for snow to appear.  Aside from the practical reason of getting waylaid by professional engagements there's a more poetically satisfying reason for saving the last for so late.  Seasons are meaningless if they don't change, and virtually all the poetry of Autumn is drawn from what it will eventually become, the long night of Winter.  Autumn, more than any other season, signifies the inevitability of death, and now that Winter Proper is fast approaching it's time we approach its looming specter with as much dignity as can be mustered, which is where Adelaide Crapsey comes in.  I mentioned this seminal American poet in my article on Henry Leland Clarke's Puget Sound Cinquain, a voice and violin duet based on a poem using the cinquain form developed by Crapsey.  Crapsey's cinquains are some of my favorite poems of all time, marvels of untroubled, distilled beauty, and in the process of finding songs using them I've discovered a fascinating series of song sets.  A very diverse group of American composers set her poems, including George Antheil, Ben Weber and Harrison Kerr, many of whom were first spreading their compositional wings and saw these poetic baubles as perfect objects upon which to etch their first opuses.  A literal example of this is the Four Songs, op. 1 by Hugo Weisgall (1912-1997), one of the most acclaimed and prolific of American opera composers.  Published in 1940 and almost totally forgotten today, the Songs are some of the most sensitive and haunting songs of the American art song repertoire, as well as personal favorites of mine, and, luckily for my purposes, the first and last songs are both leaf-like.

All of the poems are about the chilling finality of death, and the first reflects a love long gone, and Weisgall intimates this wonderfully through gently insistent pulsations and an elliptical melody, pleading directly from the heart.  The harmonic language is nearly impressionistic (very far off from his mature voice), though with these being his first "official" pieces the song features some great surprises, such as that E-flat/B-flat perfect fifth six measures from the end.  He puts a real pressure on the pianist to play as palely as possible while still maintaining a round tone quality, and luckily the pianist on the only recording of these songs found a good enough piano for the job.

The internal songs aren't short enough to technically feature on this blog, but seeing Christmas is coming up I'd like to generous, and these songs certainly deserve bending the rules in order to be heard:

And now to the final song:

"Dirge" is the most adventurous of the four in terms of shaping melodies, staggering flow and harmonic outbursts.  The arching major 9th in the right hand of the first measure is a faint recollection of birdsong, quite apt for a song about never hearing birds again.  The last three measures close out the set with ambiguity and dull pain, each hand of the piano straggling through inverse motion and clamoring sonorities and that C infecting an otherwise normal E-flat minor triad.  It takes a great deal of restraint to write songs like this, making their maturity and wan sincerity all the more remarkable for a young artist.  Equally remarkable is the recordings here by singer Caroline Heafner and pianist Dixie Ross Neill, taking some achingly slow tempi with enormous grace.  Death is rarely welcome but we can still leave room in our lives for depictions of death as gorgeous as these.

~PNK

12 Works of Christmas - 5. George Crumb's A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979

Classical composers are rarely made the subject of merchandising deals, whether it be hats, toilet seat covers or bobbleheads, at least not living composers (I'm lookin' at you, anime'd Beethoven statuette).  There is, of course, one exception among contemporary composers, and that is previous Forgotten Leaves-'er George Crumb, whose gorgeously hand-engraved scores have been made into posters and t-shirts that you can buy from the fine folks at Sheet Music Plus.  Of course, those score samples are from movements he engraved in the shape of spirals and peace signs, so they'd be a more natural fit for a dorm room poster than the opening to Webern's piano Variations.  While this blatant extramusical flair, along with "stunts" such as amplification, extended techniques, wearing masks and spatial trickery, has gotten Crumb the ire of a large percentage of the American composition scene I still think Crumb is one of the great creative minds working in Classical music and I'll defend his goofier ideas until the end of time.  Crumb might also raise the ire of some classical purists in that he wasn't above writing some Christmas music, his contribution to the oeuvre de Noël being A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 for piano.  Inspired by the nativity frescoes of Giotto di Bodone's famous 1305 cycle in Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the piece manages to accurately depict the wonder and mystery of the Nativity using many of Crumb's favorite techniques, and three of the inner movements are leaf-sized, making it that much easier for me to show those techniques off.

(Click to enlarge)

This first movement, "Berceuse for the Infant Jesus", is a bit of a cheat as I had to photoshop the page together from two lines splayed across two pages, but it's easy to see its leafy qualities.  It's the definition of simplicity, little more than three bars of music repeated twice with slight variations, but it shows off Crumb's dramatic imagination quite well.  The left hand figuratively plucks an E-sus harp with an added B-flat below while the right hand lilts a melody in the black-key pentatonic mode; this is followed by a ppp overtone thunk (achieved by placing the fingers on the strings at precise points and then playing the keys with the other hand), something stirring under a manger crib.

(Click to enlarge)

"The Shepherds' Noël" features a bit more inside-the-pianoing, such as plucking the strings with a fingernail and running the fingertips along a block of strings.  The "B" section switches from distant echoes to mild braying, an effective bit of tone-painting for the sheep that wouldn't shut up for the best Christmas ever.

(Click to enlarge; ignore the black dots)

"Adoration of the Magi" is the only leaf-sized movement to be a direct depiction of one of the frescoes (the others being depictions of seasonal themes inspired by the cycle) and is the most spirited of the bunch, letting the pianist dance a bit on the black keys while stopping them with his fingers, creating a percussive, pseudo-pizzicato effect.  It also features probably the most difficult effect in the piece, balancing a plucked string with a harmonic with a plucked string normale, theoretically achieving a very metallic minor 9th.  After a spooky interlude the Magi realize how important the baby they trekked across the desert to see is and the pianist slaps the bass strings with his palm, setting off a celebratory pseudo-canon in opposing pentatonic modes.  One lesson we learn from Crumb is that concentration of ideas is key to memorability and, in many cases, likability, and the Little Suite for Christmas is not only a great addition to Crumb's piano music but also one of the easiest of his pieces to perform, making me wonder why I don't hear it more often around this time of year.  The best performance I could find on YouTube features a number of frescoes from the cycle, so you too can marvel at how much money the church spent on getting Giotto all that hard-to-make blue paint.  Here's wishing you all a Merry Crumbmas!

~PNK

12 Works of Christmas - 1. Grieg's Christmas Lullaby

It's odd - for a holiday that people most associate with classical music, Christmastime radio programming features very little classical music written about Christmas, opting instead to showcase hour after hour of good-to-middling arrangements of the same dang carols we hear every year.  I've actually made a point of tracking down interesting classical pieces written about Christmas to curtail this very problem, and this year I'm doing my own "12 Days of Christmas" schtick to show the best of them off.  First up - a much-belated visit to the world of one of my favorite composers, Edvard Grieg.

While Grieg's piano and orchestral pieces get a lot of play (and in the case of his Piano Concerto way too much play, if you ask me) his songs are largely neglected, mostly due to vocalists' unease in singing in Norwegian despite Norwegian pronunciation not being all that dissimilar from most other Northern European languages.  There are some recordings of his lovely song cycle Haugtussa by the likes of Anne Sofie von Otter, however, and hopefully this appropriately soporific gem will trickle into Winter concerts eventually.  Going to sleep is a big part of the ritual of Christmas for many children, and so this Christmas Lullaby is a welcome, non-Santa variation on the theme, featuring subterranean rocking in the bass and surprising harmonic subtlety in the right hand and melody, reminding us once again how well Grieg's music has aged since his death over a hundred years ago.  The melody chromatically tiptoeing down the stairs in the vocal part is straight out of Debussy's Beau Soir, but the unexpected shift to G minor is pure Grieg, deftly tiptoeing back into D major in the bass.  And hey - Anne Sofie von Otter sang it!

~PNK