Thursday, July 21, 2016

A Few Oboe Bagatelles for Thursday


NOTE: This article features music tracks auto-generated by YouTube which might not be viewable outside of the U.S.A.

We have entered an age where every living artist, high and low, is expected to have either a personal website or at least a detailed page on another website with a bio, worklist and relevant links, and as user-friendly website-builders become more prevalent the number of living artists without websites (at least in this country) will continue to creep to 0.  Understandably young and obscure artists are the ones that are most likely to lack such internet presence, such as composition students, but once commercial recordings get made of their works it's time to dust off the ol' Wix account.  This message hasn't gotten to some people, of course, as today's subject, Donald Wheelock (b. 1940), is a glaring example.  As of this writing there are at least three commercial CD's dedicated solely to his work with others on compilation discs and this is about as extensive his web presence gets.  That's pathetic; it's just a single paragraph in a white void, without a single work listed or even a photograph.  Part of why I keep harping on the worklist thing is that only four pieces of his have been published, two of which have fallen out of print and one that's only available through a wildly obscure publisher and one of which is only included in the AIDS Quilt Songbook (a detail that Sheet Music Plus doesn't help out with as they don't list individual composers for their copies).  It's a shame because what I've heard of his work is quite promising, ranging from dense-but-appealing Modernism early on, like today's subject, to hallucinatory soundscapes like his his Music for Seven Players and more Neo-Romantic approach more recently, such as with his meaty, early-Schoenberg-ian cello sonata.  One particular work of his that I've been looking at is his Ten Bagatelles for oboe and string quartet, largely because I'm considering it for a program of oboe and string works for my chamber group Cursive (alongside works by Joan Tower, Richard Wernick, Donald Martino, Richard Donovan and David Evan Thomas) but also because there's a lot to love here.  


The Bagatelles are in the long and fine tradition of post-Webern miniatures, often only a minute long but wheedling through tone sets and extended techniques with grace and mystery.  None of them are longer than three pages, which might seem longer than that with something like a piano piece but for five players can be quite short indeed; in fact, these pieces might have the most players ever featured in a leaf on this blog so far, save for a couple of Media Press pieces by James Cuomo and Raymond Weisling.  In the case of the leaves in this piece they can be as short as 20 seconds, which is the case for the one above, which dashes through chromatic counterpoint like a mouse stealing crackers.  All-pizz. string pieces never cease to be entertaining and this one manages to squeeze in a lot of variation on common material in what is barely enough time for the performers to wink at the audience.  Wheelock has well-learned the Schoenbergian lesson that just because a piece is atonal that doesn't mean it can't abide by principles of balance and resonance and give the performers writing well-suited to their instruments.



Mirrors and canons abound in the more sinister second movement, as one tone series will trot through the viola part only to skip across the cello part down an octave a few measures later and the oboe's second bar is revisited on the inverse at the end.  Wheelock must have found a fleck of moon on his sleeve when writing this as it's mood is highly reminiscent of "Der Mondfleck" from Pierrot Lunaire, though I doubt he later attempted to decapitate the oboist, as that song's whirligig insanity is eschewed in favor of walking the dog.



While there are other equally short Bagatelles in the set the eighth is the last neat leaf, and Wheelock unintentionally left the most sumptuous for last.  Set at a very slow 40 eighth notes per minute, the movement plays out like a song of farewell to a blasted landscape, leaning into mysterious, out-the-back-door phrase endings and stuttering entrances.  Those little swells in the last bar were a favorite of Schoenberg and his school, giving each strained chord its own birth and death.  It's around hearing this one that I realized that the same series of notes, most likely a dodecaphonic series, has been running through each piece, and how I might want to do some actual analysis occasionally, though if I did that my readers would all vanish.  For that matter, does that 32nd-note skirting in the first violin in bar 6 really need analysis to stand on its own?  The best music doesn't need to be scientifically proven, it just is, and for 9 minutes the Bagatelles prove themselves over and over again as more than worth their time and an essential addition to the modern oboe repertoire.  I haven't the foggiest as to whether or not Wheelock will make a website in the future, or if the Bagatelles will ever come back into print, but in the meantime you can hear the rest of the piece and others on a CD from Albany records that's going for pretty cheap at the moment, because sometimes the best things in life are cheap after all.


~PNK