Two Jots from the Early Prime of Kabalevsky

Pedagogical music is great - it's necessary, accessible and has attracted the work of big name composers from across the ages.  The only catch is that, because much of it is simple by design, people who are famous primarily for their pedagogical work, such as Aleksandr Grechaninov, see their other works neglected because audiences don't expect their stuff to be up to "concert" standards.  Case in point: Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904-1987), one of the most famous Soviet composers of all time and one of a scant handful to see their work imported to the US back when we thought that was A-O-K (the '30's and '40's).  Known for his third Piano Concerto and his ballet suite The Comedians, Kabalevsky's most commonly-played stuff are his easier piano pieces, such as the first piano Sonatina and his Variations in D, both of which have been in countless piano collections in the last several decades.  These works are unchallenging for mainstream audiences, not only for their technical ease but also their pleasant Neoclassical language which was forced upon Kabalevsky by Stalinist compositional policy.  Most of Kabalevsky's work is similar in tone if not technical difficulty, but one can find more adventurous stuff if they dig a bit deeper.  My favorite work of Kabalevsky's is one of these alluring few and was written very early in his career, back in the twilight of the hayday of Soviet modernism before the clamps came down.

The Four Preludes, op. 4 were written between 1927 and 1928, the last couple of years before the end of a glorious era in Soviet arts administration that can best be described as a virtuosic free-for-all.  Guys like Roslavets, Mosolov, Lourie and many more really did whatever the hell they wanted in the name of modern music, and it all came crashing down because Stalin and the new, Proletarian-minded arts boards new just enough to be wrong.  Thankfully Kabalevsky wasn't gulag'd and his works have been preserved, such as these warmly experimental miniatures.  The first two are leaf-like so they get the spotlight today, and they're also wildly different from each other.  The first has a precious, childlike melancholy about it, the compact simplicity of the main motive contrasted against aching, chromatic chord undulations in the B section.  This section is a fine example of how tonality can be bent nearly to breaking without sacrificing a good melody/harmony relationship.  The second prelude is almost an etude, a fleet and lovely parallel fourths exercise and showcase for extended modal harmony.  I'd be tempted to add a subtitle about ocean spray or flying, especially because of the excellent decision (either by Kabalevsky or the editor) to add ritenuti here and there to give the impression of sharp swaying.  The other two preludes are a bit longer than these, but because I'm feeling generous (especially after coming off of a spectacular evening performing with my chamber group Cursive) I'll toss in the other two preludes free of charge.

That last one especially sounds quite modern for the time, though not dissonant - makes me think of a wine festival or cottonwood fluff.  Here's a fine recording of the set by Alexandre Dossin, a pianist I had the pleasure of seeing live at UPS many years ago.

~PNK

Happy Stravinsky's Birthday

Sound the trumpets!

Now we party.

~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

Alain in an All-Day Rain

Many years ago when I was a student at the University of Puget Sound I came across a CD called Radical Piano.  It was a collection of eclectically progressive works from the first half of the 20th century performed by Easley Blackwood, including Berg's Sonata, Copland's Piano Variations and works I'd never heard of before, such as Prokofiev's Sarcasms, Nielsen's 3 Piano Pieces, op. 59 and Blackwood's own Ten Experimental Pieces in Rhythm and Harmony.  I would later write about Blackwood's microtonal electronic music for my first article for Rhyme of the Unheard, a group-effort blog that gave me my start in this game (and it would later be reposted at Dregs of the Earth), so it's a nice memory trip to revisit my fond memories of his adventurous programming.  Most of the pieces were provocative, even aggressive, but one piece stuck out from the rest as a kind of hypnotic balm to the rest:

I had never heard of Jehan Alain before hearing this piece, so I'm really glad this was my introduction to his unique musical imagination.  This is dream-music done expertly well, focusing not so much on special effects or fragmentation but rather the enveloping sweep of walking through a dream world - the seemingly endless time frame, textures and sounds that wrap themselves around the dreamer like a blanket, unidentifiable moods and a feeling of weightlessness.  Its inspiration is the famous "Ballade des pendus" by Francois Villon, a haunting plea for understanding and mercy by men being sent to the gallows, and an appropriate sense of earnestness in the face of the foreboding permeates the work.  It's a wonderful piece, and it prompted me to look into his other works.

Alain is mostly known today for his organ works, well-set in the French organ tradition that influenced the likes of Abel Decaux and Rene Blin, and for his tragic early death - he was part of a motorcycle unit in the French army in WWII and was killed in action at the age of 29.  While he hasn't gained the kind of international reputation earned by his main influences, Debussy and Messiaen, he has achieved a small but impassioned fanbase, and most of his works remain in print and have been recorded at least once.  The oeuvre of his that I'm most familiar with is his piano literature, published in three volumes posthumously and mostly consisting of enchanting, experimental miniatures.  They reveal a wide array of influences, such as Baroque music, far Eastern cultures and modern poetry, but today I'd like to spotlight one of his most Debussyian pieces, and I'll give you three guesses as to which piece influenced this one:

All of your guesses were most likely "Jardins sous la pluie" from Estampes, and luckily for you this one is called Il pleuvra toute la journee... (It will rain all day...).  Alain's method is highly concentrated - create clashing arpeggios, daisy-chain them together at a high intensity and speed, make a big landing, echo with intentional ambiguity.  The harmonic language is certainly impressionistic but with more instability than Debussy or even the early Messiaen pieces Alain was familiar with.  The title has a great deal of poetic weight to it, allowing the piece to take on a psychological arc of anger and resignation rather than a programmatic one.  This tactic is quite Debussyian - Debussy hated the term "impressionism" being attached to his work and instead considered himself a symbolist like Baudelaire.  Many of his titles, chiefly the titles tacked on to the ends of his Preludes for piano, were poetic evocations rather than strict instructions, such as with the seventh prelude, "Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest" ("What the West Wind Saw") - he piece has similarities to a rushing wind but is more interested in psychological allusion.  Alain also places evocation over strictness by writing without a written meter (even though the piece is clearly in 4/4) and leaving the last bar open rather than writing in an ending barline.  This tactic was pioneered by Satie and was adopted by a number of similar-minded (as much as one can be to Satie) composers such as Federico Mompou and Manuel Blancafort (and myself, occasionally).  Another little touch is the pair of fermati in the last bar - normally the composer would only adorn the final note with one, but that moment of hesitation adds a whole new layer of interpretive poetry for the performer.  As the long streak of really nice May days here in Seattle was recently snuffed by cold-'n'-rainy interludes this is a nice piece to look at, and hopefully we'll be able to look at more Alain music in the near future.  Remember - if your weather reporter says rain is coming, play the piano.  It's the only solution.

~PNK

A Monday Modinha by a Mozart (not that one)

It's always bugged me that Villa-Lobos has remained the sole face of Brazilian classical music for decades, not because I'm an expert in the field but more because I was always a bigger fan of Camargo Guarnieri.  Usually dropping his first name of Mozart (seriously) in his published works, Guarnieri worked closely with Brazilian folk models for much of his music but took a great many technical and expressive risks and added to many a hard-worn genre (symphony, string quartet) with immense creativity and flair.  The piano was his canvas for a great many excellent works and he had a knack for miniatures by themselves and in sets, and his Suite Mirim is a fine and accessible introduction to his work by way of little ivory ticklers.  Cast in four movements, the Suite is based on traditional Brazilian dances, keeping it in line with the traditional point of a suite but not about to fall for the old "allemande" trick.  All four dances ("Ponteado", "Tanguinho", "Modinha" and "Ciradinha") are short but only one has that leafy thinness we so desire at FL, the third.

A modinha is a sentimental love song and likewise the "Modinha" is the most delicate and modest of the four dances, and even just glancing at the first line one can see how well those classes in close-voiced imitative counterpoint payed off.  The reduced volume and thorough craftsmanship allude to sentiments long dead, like faded floral stenciling or an antique photograph of a young bride in a tin box.  It's a little marvel of economy and class and adds a rich heart to a very fleeting set whose harmonies veer into the privately quixotic.  You can hear (and see) the Suite below, and as we enter our second week of nice days here in Western Washington it's nice to remember that we were just recently stuck indoors with mugs of tea - though the more Guarnieri I hear the more I want to swap the tea for a caipirinha.

~PNK

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.

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

Roy gets a Little Suite Tooth

Variety is the spice of recital, and there's no easier way to accomplish this than the mini-suite.  Tiny dabs of color and movement built to contrast one another, there are plenty of stellar examples (such as Little Suites by Lou Harrison and Leon Kirchner) and today's Suite is one of the best.  While the great Roy Harris is primarily known as a symphonist he did whip up a CD-full of piano pieces, most notably his Piano Sonata, op. 1 (named by Hunter Johnson as American piano music's "Declaration of Independence") and his two sets of American Ballads.  I'd like to submit my vote for his best piano work as his Toccata, but luckily for Forgotten Leaves his Little Suite is a hair's-breadth close second (and most certainly not the first loser).

The first movement shows off Harris's mastery of both singing lines and resonant modal harmonies*.  While the melody seems simple enough, the clanging voice-leading underneath is never the same across its six iterations.  After each scale, Harris rings the low bells and holds them with the middle (sostenuto pedal), allowing the pianist to change the pedal for the upper chords freely.  The effect is gorgeous, the kind of movement that elusive middle pedal is made for, though I'm not sure how you can use the una corda pedal at the same time you use the other two.

Now, before y'all's cry foul about that third movement being spread across two pages, notice that the first page's portion is only two lines long, and the fourth movement is only two lines long.  Therefore, dear readers, one could simply put "Slumber" under "Sad News" and everything would be dory of the hunky persuasion.  However, "Children at Play" just isn't profound enough for a closer, so shush.  "Sad News" makes good use of a slow 7/8 and wavering, harp-like, clashing chord movement.  Harris was a lifelong student of Renaissance music, and the last two measures of "Sad News" display such sweet-'n'-deft harmonic counterpoint Fux could faint.  "Children at Play" bounces between D major and B-flat major in the left hand while the right sticks to the former, though harmonic variation slips in as fast as a two-year-old drops one toy to play with another.  Methinks Harris was a big fan of 7/8 in all its subdivisions, and if he intended the Suite as pedagogical music young students may have more practice than they want in store for them.  Despite the shallow sonority of the movement it's actually the most difficult to perform, putting the pianist's skill at hand separation to the test.  Thankfully things slow down for "Slumber", bringing us back to the world of chorales.  The simplicity here is quite deceptive, its gentle departures from functional tonality ornamented by pinging fifths that suggest an endless breadth of emotion.  

Harris was a pioneer of that brand of broad, polytonal lyricism that would become the American national classical language in the 40's and 50's, but works like the Little Suite and the Toccata show why he did it better than pretty much anyone else (except Copland, of course).  His harmonies rang deeper and truer than the rest of the pack, and talking about them is no substitute for hearing them, and Geoffrey Burelson made a meal of the Little Suite and the rest of Harris's ivory ticklers on his CD for Naxos.  As the whole Little Suite isn't even four minutes long I don't see the harm in the copyright infringement of me including his performance below, and only a cold-hearted orb would shut down these delightful morsels.

~PNK

*Yes, yes, I did notice how the tune devolves into "Joy to the World", and no, I'm not putting this article off until Christmas just to make that reference more cute, thank you very much.

Babbitt Takes it Easy for Leaf's Sake

While Milton Babbitt's music has long been associated with musical pedagogy, the last word anybody has attached to it is "easy".  Babbitt quickly gained a reputation for writing works of staggering intellectual and technical difficulty, and despite his apparently kindly nature this rep stuck with him throughout his strikingly long career.  He wasn't completely averse to writing easier pieces, though, and one of his more well-known piano pieces is also one of his easiest - Semi-Simple Variations.

Written in 1956 and published as part of Isadore Freed's excellent pedagogical series for Presser, the piece not only structures itself around palindromic rows, but it also serializes the rhythms palindromically, making it an early example of total serialism.  While most musicians recoil from that term as if they had been offered a rat king for lunch, Babbitt maintains a steady, almost jazzy feel, and the experiment is surprisingly pleasant.  The plot thickens when you realize that Babbitt's other pleasant piano piece also dates from 1956, and is even shorter and easier to play, the only leaf I could find Babbitt had mustered in his 95-year life.

Steady readers may remember my article on Hall Overton's A Mood, published in the excellent easy-to-intermediate anthology American Composers of Today, edited by Joseph Prostakoff and supported by the Abby Whiteside Foundation.  It's probably the first and last time Babbitt wrote a piece that the listener could hear in their head by looking at the score - the two hands each start with the germ row at different transpositions and slightly different contours.  The notes are selected in a way not only to appear modal at first, but to also sit on either white or black notes, a plus for younger pianists.  I found a theory class curriculum that uses the piece as analysis homework, and you can see the full spread here if you want to see the "magic square".  Here's the analyzed version:

Of course, that doesn't mean anybody cares, and the people least likely to care are elementary school children taking piano lessons to avoid being drafted to the local youth soccer team.  Robert Taub made a pro recording of the Duet in 1985, but I found a performance by a small child at the Babbitt Memorial in 2011, held in the small recital room at New England Conservatory.  Taub's out-of-print, expensive Babbitt CD might hold a better performance, but you just can't beat the charm of a girl under 5 feet playing it just fine.

~PNK

Musolino, Fugato, Bella

Not all anthologies are thick, and while sometimes a thin anthology can seem like a rip-off it can also compliment the few pieces that were included.  4 Short Piano Pieces was an elusive volume published in 1958 by Composers Editions, Ltd., or Accentuate Music - I'm not really sure which one has precedent over the other - and none of the featured pieces ever saw the light of day again, save for a hard-to-research sequence of reprints by the same publisher in different collections.  I found the volume while searching for pieces by Ned Rorem, whose fine-looking Slow Waltz is included as well as pieces by three composers I'd never heard of before: Joseph Maneri, Berge Kalajian and Angelo Musolino.  Maneri (better known by Joe) was a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who developed a distinctive microtonal jazz language for decades and is still releasing albums.  The demo for his song "Paniots Nine" was used as the introductory music for the brilliant movie American Splendor.  Suffice to say, his contribution, Theme and Three Variations, is the worst of the four.  Berge Kalajian was sucked into film composing after writing a couple handfuls of concert pieces, and that's the last anybody heard of him.  I may do a Re-Composing article on his lovely Piano Piece (Summer 1958), and it sadly appears that it's the only piece of his I'll see without an act of God.  The final piece, Musolino's Fugato, is not only a leaf but so good that I made an arrangement for brass quintet*.

Most fugues start the countersubject at the fifth, but Musolino devilishly starts his at the tritone, and each restatement of the subject is slightly different to fit an attractive, decidedly mid-century tonal language.  The piece is fully formed within the Big American Idiom, with lots of quartal and quintal harmonies, comprehensible melodic snaking and strong architecture.  There are a lot of fanfare moments, all in fourths and fifths for good effect, and he exhibits an expert grasp of dramatic pacing.  Musolino became known in the 50's and 60's for jazz and light classical music, and through his life would develop a unique voice that utilized classical and jazz devices interchangeably.  You can see his brief but delicious Phantasmagorical Episode here for a full show of that language, and if you squint your ears you can see the seeds of it being sown in the Fugato.  The good news is you don't have to squint hard enough, because I made a recording.

~PNK

*I'm happy to send you a copy of my arrangement, BTW.

Norman Lloyd's Dramatic Episode

So there was this Kickstarter a couple of years ago:

I'm glad to say that this project was funded 101%, though I haven't the foggiest when the CD will get released - I'd buy it.  Peter Mennin was one of the more interesting mid-century American composers of his ilk, and has a well-established cult following around his 9 symphonies.  His two piano works, the well-wrought Five Pieces and the striking (and strikingly difficult) Piano Sonata, are fine additions to the rep and should be sought out as you will (scores for both pieces HERE, recording of the five pieces HERE).  Much less known to me, and the world, is Norman Lloyd, a student of Copland's and most well known for this:

The Fireside Book of Folk Songs was a classic collection of Western culture's folk heritage, cast in easy piano arrangements and adorned with sweet, picture-book illustrations.  Plenty of people had this in the Boomer years but I bet few people paid attention to its editors, and Norman Lloyd has never had a revival as of this writing (aside from that unreleased CD).  A cursory look at the works of his in University libraries looks promising enough (like the intriguing Night Mist for string orchestra), and his two piano pieces are quite lovely.  The Piano Sonata might not be the most surprising American work in the genre but it's certainly breezy, well-written and enjoyable - it'd make an interesting match with the Mennin Sonata's sturm und drang.  I actually came across the other piece, Episodes, in the Boston University library stacks, and didn't think about it much until I saw the Kickstarter and gave it a whirl.  The Episodes are quite fun to play and maintain a level of elegance and sophistication despite their relative simplicity (especially in the face of those Mennin pieces).  Much to my delight I found that one of them was a leaf, and I whipped up a recording so you can be given the chance at delightment.

The chromatically cycling, emotionally fraught melody is heightened by the icy upper registers of the piano, each note emphatically pronounced by a tenuto-staccato mix.  The held diad implies a Sus-2 chord (for those who remember jazz theory), and the melody's snaky plodding is reminiscent of the opening to the "Cemetery" movement of Abel Decaux's Clairs de Lune (second Decaux callback this week!  I'm on a roll).  This builds and builds to the  ice-clash fortissimo in bar 6, the low register clangs in with much doom.  A more sensitive section reveals Lloyd's ability to write polytonal music with utmost clarity and an ear for dramatic pacing, and the piece ends with more bell-like chords, leaving things neatly unresolved.  The fifth and final episode is light and whirling, more than stark as a contrast and a joyous end to an already entertaining set of miniatures.  This is easily the darkest movement but isn't unwelcome in the least bit, and offers the pianist a lot of emotional wiggle room.  I took some liberties with the time but the melody was asking for it, and I may get around to the other episodes in the future.  So once again, why hasn't this CD been released yet?  I'm sure people would like it, and I've got my fingers poised over my mouse in hopes of a pre-order button appearing, so chop! chop!, Mr. Silberstein.

~PNK

A Persichettian Chinese Songlet

It's Persichetti time again!  I previously covered Vincent Persichetti in my review of one of his piano Poems, and that piece got a lot of detail and originality into a mere 20 bars.  Today's piece, All Alone from his Two Chinese Songs, op. 29, has a much smaller toolbox to work with.

Persichetti was remarkably skilled in nearly every instrumental combination and every performing level, and All Alone might be the simplest piece he ever wrote.  The piano never plays more than one note at a time, a mere drone to support the singer's Dorian lament.  The voice part is little more than the Dorian scale with a couple of turns, expanding in expression with each repetition.  As the voice's passion increases, you'll notice that the repeated una corda B-flat in the piano becomes shorter and shorter in length, heightening the song's urgency, ultimately whole-stepping up to make a perfect fifth with the voice.  The song's poignancy is secured by never breaching piano, those hairpins confined to sotto voce and a reduced vocal span.  I heard that Persichetti would sometimes compose while driving by taping staff paper to his steering wheel, and this is the first time I've believed that tidbit.  The poem is an anonymous children's song as translated by Arthur Waley in his 170 Chinese Poems, and it needs little amplification to speak its mind.  Persichetti has left it as simply as it came, the voice earnest and human, the drone a bell at the far end of a silent lake.  The two Chinese Songs could be seen as warm-ups for his seminal (and distressingly unrecorded) haiku cycle A Net of Fireflies, but they need no introduction or explanation - just ears.

~PNK

A question or few on Ruggles's Exaltation

One of America's great composing legends, Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was a man of deep concentration.  That is, while he only wrote some 15-20 pieces in his whole life, he worked incredibly hard on them and they exhibit a concentrated dramatic power unlike anything else.  Working mostly within a dissonant counterpoint system (developed contemporaneously with Charles Seeger's method), his mature works sound like the War in Heaven - intensely dramatic, vaulting and anguished - and sport apocalyptic titles such as Men and Mountains, Angels and Sun-Treader.  And I love them so - in fact, Angels is one of my favorite pieces for brass, possibly one of my favorite pieces ever.  I haven't gotten around to featuring him on one of my blogs yet because, well, at this point he's well-known in America and I normally don't cover well-known people.  Oh, sure, I linked to his song Toys in my Cos Cob Song Volume article, but that was small potatoes and a bit before his style was developed (but it's still dang fine, and a blast to perform).  He was much more productive as a painter, and you can see some of his wonderful work here.  His only leaf (that I know of) is also the last piece he completed and his only piece of outright sacred music, an odd fact considering how cosmologically themed his pieces were.  It's incidental that I'm doing a piece of Christian sacred music today, because I've got a confession to make.  Specifically, I'm not sure I get this piece.

At first glance, Exaltation doesn't look that different from a normal chorale, but then the odd notes creep in.  Ruggles was notably free from the constraints of formal compositional training, having never learned tonal theory or studied other composers' works - he composed largely through trial and error, contributing to his glacial pace - but despite this he keeps to the chorale guidelines of stepwise motion and tight voicing.  That doesn't mean he can't have jarring dissonances every third or fifth beat, and at first these clashes are off-putting in the context of this otherwise conventional, and quite American, hymn.  However, many of them obtain a bittersweet luster after multiple hearings, and these become more important once you find out the piece was written in memory of Ruggles's wife Charlotte, who died the year before.  A trumpet colleague of mine was fortunate enough to have visited Ruggles at his house, and noted that near the end of his life Ruggles's eyesight was so bad that he had enormous staff paper made for him and he composed with it on the floor, so his usual sluggish pace became even more strained, and a more heartless critic would be tempted to wonder if the "wrong notes" were as unintentional as the critic wanted them to be.  I got the chance to perform Angels some years ago with Judson Scott at the University of Puget Sound, and after the performance he quoted Rilke ("Every angel is terrifying.") and we played it again, a move I thought was unnecessary at the time but still sparks a few synapses when I hear this piece.

Or maybe I'm thinking way too hard about it.

Anyways, Exaltation only grows in value the more you hear it, and the recording by Gerard Schwarz (yes, that Gerard Schwarz), a brass ensemble and the Gregg Smith singers repeats it about six times with instrumental variation.  Presser's published version is just the bare chorale with no words, as Ruggles intended the chorus to hum, perhaps to heighten the sense of nostalgia and loss, but the recording finds words for it (and I'm sure it's a hymn I'd recognize if I was of the churchin' folk), and they could have been working from an alternate version Ruggles kept in his desk drawer.  It's a lovely solution to a semi-problematic piece, and is a nice eulogy to Ruggles as well.  You can listen to everything Ruggles wrote in a couple of hours, so have at and take in, lest the angels terrify you too much.

~PNK