Saturday, May 30, 2015

Forgotten Leaves meets the new Sopranino Tuba repertoire


Classical music is generally a polite environment, free of trash talk and slams (at least when Satie stays out of it).  That doesn't mean that the scene isn't entirely insultless, such as today's case.  I'm a member of a Facebook group called Composers for Performers, Performers for Composers, and just today a one Dillon Henry (whose name is the reverse of the usual) decided he was fed up with Bill Smith, a fellow CFPPFC composer whose work tends towards the New Complexity end of things.  Unamused, Henry posted the following just today:

(Click to enlarge)

John Stump has been influential after all.  Scored for sopranino tuba, an instrument you readers might recognize as about as extant as the contralto triangle, When once confined in a heuristic demolition of neo-Napoleonic platitudinal radii pulls no punches in its quest for pure musical horsehockey.  Not confined by barlines, staves or sense, Henry shotguns the score with impossible extended techniques, Greek constellations and at least one Frasier reference.  One of the best details is a noteless repeated section with the instruction "Just fucking throw 'Dies Irae' in there a few times for good measure."  Another repeated section says to "Dauntily consume a hard-boiled egg."  I could go on for hours but that's the opposite of fun and, as everyone knows, fun rules.  Also, have that hard-boiled egg.

~PNK

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Reger Kills Fugues and Patriotism with One Stone (leaf)


My introduction to Max Reger (1873-1916) came from an amusing book called The Best, the Worst and the Most Unusual, an overview of notable achievements in (mostly Western) literature, sports, music and the arts as decided by a wide survey of critics in the mid-70's.  Reger's name popped up as the "worst" composer, and the entry rattled off a number of eccentric and unattractive details of Reger's personality and biography (including his odd dietary habits, obviously the most germane factor in assessing one's oeuvre) while inaccurately calling him out as attempting to blend modern classical techniques with 16th century marching band music, while not a single piece of his displays that particular genre as an influence.  Reger was enormously prolific during his brief composing career, writing over 150 works of often striking complexity and craftsmanship in a wide variety of instrumentations, always sticking to the grand "absolute music" tradition of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.  His style pushes tonal writing to its breaking point in terms of daisy-chained diminished chords, gnarly counterpoint and Wagnerian denial of the tonic, and part of his quixotic reputation comes from how he would sometimes take such leaps in tonal logic that the development from one key to the next would be so abrupt as to give the listener whiplash.  I'll admit that I don't like every work of his I've heard but I'll never fault someone for trying as hard as they can within their own artistic language.He was especially skilled at writing fugues and managed to churn out dozens of them despite their being very difficult to write - I know, as I took fugue class at two different schools and mostly wrote crap.  One of his most celebrated works, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by J. S. Bach, op. 81, ends with a 7-1/2-minute fugue that is among the greatest I've ever heard (though nothing will top this one by this guy).  On a more modest scale, we've got this little guy:


This fughetta lacks an opus number but was written in 1916, the year of his untimely death of a heart attack at age 43.  The "deutschlandlied" is Deutschland uber Alles, the German national anthem, and Reger was correct in thinking that it would make a nice subject for a fugue with its clear stepwise motion and neat harmonic progression.  While this is far from the thickest of the Reger fugues little chromatic squibbles are still present and the piece serves as a good introduction to his habit of logically elliptical harmonic motion.  The end has that dark, accented quality that the end of Bach's fugues often take on and prompted Arnold Bax to say that the finales of Bach pieces sound like "the running of a sewing machine".  Either way you slice it the Fughette is a congenial leaf that would make a fine encore to an all-Germanic piano recital, and it's nice that, when the pianist Markus Becker mounted a multi-CD overview of Reger's complete piano output, he didn't forget this piece.

Embedding disabled by request, sorry :(

~PNK