Monday, June 6, 2016

SPECIAL CURSIVE PREVIEW - Two of Emily's Images


Well, it finally happened - I have my own chamber group.  After years of collecting pieces and yammering about them into the void I finally realized that the first step to accomplishing something is to try.  The group, Cursive, premiered on May 26 with its Black Anemones program, part of its mission to perform neglected modern gems with a modular ensemble, in this case flute, piano, trumpet and voice in different combinations.  On June 9 the final performance of this program will come to pass and I'd be pleased as a punch who is also the jolly good fellow at a New Year's party if everybody could come 'round, and to help publicity I'll be publishing little preview articles on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday showing off bits of our program with hopefully insightful commentary.

Once a blue moon ago I looked at a short piece by Vivian Fine for this blog, a movement from her Four Songs for voice and string quartet.  That dense, pitch black work was from her early years among the American Ultramodernists, and over the years her music went through a more tonal Neoclassicism and out the other side into a refined, personal language with at least a passing resemblance to her fellow female American composition master Miriam Gideon, also covered on these blogs.  The piece we're talking about today, one that Cursive is playing on the 9th, is from her late period and is a fine entry in a genre of piece I wished I saw more - pieces based on single lines of poems.


This genre was covered on Forgotten Leaves before with Vincent Persichetti's excellent Poems for piano, wherein piano miniatures were written from single lines of poems Persichetti liked rather than the full poems (though with attribution for those who wish to investigage).  Fine took this idea a step further by opening up the "first line" index of a collection of Emily Dickinson poems and choosing ones that she thought she could set without reading the poems themselves.  The results are as varied as they are organic, as a swirling, chromatic motive runs through each piece but the moods are all strikingly contrasted.  For the purposes of Forgotten Leaves movements three and four, "Exultation is the Going" and "The Robin is a Gabriel", are leaflike, and the former starts, and continues, with a bang.  The contrasting, off-kilter meters and staggered relationship between the flute and piano make for a piece that requires something of a trance state to pull off.  Those oddly strangled power chords give the pianist a sense of exultation playing them but the subtly slow tempo makes the going heavy and frightening.  It's a real dramatic risk, subjecting an audience to this kind of thing, and Fine was an expert at harnessing that risk to make something great.  Then there's some relief:


The fourth Image has no piano part, allowing the flute to lightly flit across the staff paper without percussive restraints.  As I myself don't know the poems these lines come from I'm not sure how a Robin could be a Gabriel but the effect is quite nice and also reveals the components of the main theme.  In case you're wondering, those parenthetical dotted quarter notes in the fourth stave are just to help rhythms.  It's also nice to be able to write without meter and let phrases be naturalistic.


~PNK