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.

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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.

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"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

Autumnal Classics - The Fall of the Leafe by Martin Peerson

Every year I'm forced to agree more and more with cranky middle-aged people that Spring is, without question, the most overrated season.  As a lifelong Northwesterner I've been subjected to more than 25 dismal, bland Springs and have concluded that Europe's poets and artists hung on to Spring just because it beat dying of hypothermia.  Now that we live in more electrically civilized times where people comfortably live year round in frostpiles like Iceland artfarts like myself can better appreciate seasons with real poetic vitality, like Autumn*.  While the least-depicted season in classical music might still be Winter Autumn's aural evocations still remain elusive in the concert hall, though certainly not for a lack of trying by inspired composers.  Last year I used October to highlight some horror-themed pieces, so this year I'm trying something different and using November, a month more rarely considered than one thinks when Thanksgiving is removed from the equation, to highlight some autumn-inspired works of note by an international cadre of great composers.  There's plenty to find in the leafpile, so much so that my first article is a two-parter, starting with the smaller part and going all the way back to the Elizabethan age.

I've been neglecting the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book for far too long as a source of leaves, mostly because it never occurs to me to listen to Renaissance music until it's too late.  One of the major sources of British keyboard music from the late Renaissance, the Book compiles over 300 works by such luminaries as William Byrd, John Bull, Giles Farnaby, Orlando Gibbons and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck among other names and many anonymous works to boot.  One of the more minor names, one of which I was completely unaware until just recently, is Martin Peerson, who was esteemed in his day and held powerful musical posts at St. Paul's Cathedral and possibly Westminster Abbey, most likely because very little of his music remains extant.  His entire surviving keyboard output is preserved in the Book, and one of his pieces gave inspiration to the next work to be featured in these blogs - The Fall of the Leafe.

The Fall of the Leafe takes the form of an alman, the Elizabethan word for an allemande, a German dance popular in the Renaissance that showed up in the works of Bach and others.  The mood is stately and sad, cast in two similar parts, each with a dirge-like A section and a B section marked reprise featuring a flowing descant line in the right hand on top of the same harmonic material in the left, as well as bars half the length of the A section, giving the feeling of double time.  The wedding of melody and harmonic motion her is superb, Peerson weaving some of the most yearning moments I've seen in Elizabethan music since Alfanso Ferrabosco's Dovehouse Pavane.  Of particular interest is the use of repetition in the third part of each section, such as in the piece's third bar where the melody finds itself in a downward rut.  There's a sense of arrested development in these moments, as if the player wants to continue but is rooted, or rather confined by space and time, a great reflection of humanity's increasing melancholy in the face of seasons turning for the darker.  My favorite moment is the third bar of the piece's second half where the left hand descends to the bottom of the virginal's range via some highly sophisticated part-writing for the time, allowing the natural, private resonance of the era's keyboard instruments quake the performer's hands in a way only they can truly appreciate.  It's a wonderful example of the expressive powers of Elizabethan music and I'm glad my research called my attention to it and its author.  It also touched the heart of a much better-known British composer hundreds of years later, resulting in a piece we'll look at next time in a different blog...

~PNK

*Autumn is a much more beautiful word than Fall, so much so that I can't think of a single autumnal work that calls the season "Fall" in its title.

A Lithuanian Nightingale for Saturday

The recent resurrection of the amazing works of Vytautas Bacevicius has put a new face on Lithuanian classical music, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the bulk of American music lovers didn't know Lithuania even had a face of classical music.  This is understandable, as Lithuania is a small country tucked away in a corner of what was the Eastern Bloc for most of the 20th century, and before that the most exposure it got artistically might have been its passing inclusion in Alfred Jarry's batshit anti-art masterpiece Ubu Roi.  However, one name did rise to international prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, not only in music but in painting and literature - Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis.  A dedicated proponent of the symbolist movement, Ciurlionis crafted a considerable body of paintings and musical pieces that show a vivid and fearless imagination with an emphasis on epic fantasy and rich aesthetics.  Before we get to his music I need to show more of Ciurlionis's boss paintings:

Now that's the kind of thing that inspires people to go to art school.  It's clear that Ciurlionis had a passion for unique naturalism, and few piano pieces of his live up to that goal better than The Nightingale, op. 19, no. 3:

Many of Ciurlionis's pieces are miniatures in a Scriabinist vein, though the textures and harmonies he uses are very different, leaning towards sturm und drang forebodingness.  One wouldn't think that a nightingale would inspire creeping dread but Ciurlionis did it and did it with real craftsmanship.  The piece is essentially variations on an ostinato, the first measure in the left hand transposed and unfurled over and over while a right hand whistles and dances in the air.  The melodic figures here are highly chromatic and skewed towards odd angles, deftly imitative of how varied and improvisatory the song of the nightingale really is.  His tempo marking, Con grazia e rubato, quasi un' improvvisazione, allows the pianist to bend and sworl through the bird's turning song, and this pianist takes great and wonderful license in this regard.  It's a great addition to a long line of fascinating nightingale pieces (though nothing will beat Ervin Schulhoff's Bass Nightingale) and a sly introduction to Ciurlionis's very personal music, and at leaf length what more could you need?

~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

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:

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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

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQG_E2de-M

Embedding disabled by request, sorry :(

~PNK