Happy Stravinsky's Birthday

Sound the trumpets!

Now we party.

~PNK

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.

Join us June 9th at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford to hear this and other dark gems.  For more blogging, I'll see you tomorrow...

~PNK

England in its Sunday Best

While many of the leaves on this blog's slowly-growing branches were written by composers I was already endeared to, sometimes a page-long pearl glistens from a distant, unexpected pool, and in today's case from a composer I'd never think to investigate.  Best known for his church anthem Call to Remembrance, the 18th-century Brit Jonathan Battishill is a stranger to me and, as a guest in these blogly halls, in quite a strange land.  It was only three months ago that I wrote the first post on a post-Rococo, pre-Romantic composer, spotlighting a piece that Mozart wrote for the glass harmonica, and I regret to admit that today's post isn't exactly going to quicken the pace for leaves from the Age of Reason, but at least the piece is capital-"f"-Fine enough to tide over even the most ardent of post-Beethoven deniers.

(Click to enlarge)

Written back when English organs typically didn't have pedals, the Air in D major doesn't need foot action to warm the cockles of the heart.  The continual, inversely flowing counterpoint wraps around the listener's ear like the belt to a fuzzy robe, maintaining a British stateliness throughout, especially that bit in the treble and bass of the last two measures of the second system that sounds right out of Holst's "I Vow to Thee My Country".  This is gooey part-writing at its most nourishing and before hearing it I didn't know I would have died without hearing the giant's steps of tenths and octaves in the third system - important public health information in these leaves, that's for sure.  It's a shame it's a bit too short for a church offertory piece, though repeating it might make the pewsitters feel the pressure to plunk down a few coins - warm, contrapuntal pressure flowing from the pen of an artist Charles Wood would've admired and a half.

~PNK

Synthetic Nostalgia for Sunday

Much like the hullabaloo created by the revival of Entartete Musik - music suppressed by the Third Reich - there was similar hubbub when, around the same time, there was a big revival of Russian Classical composers who were suppressed by the Soviet Empire.  Most of this music, though much of it was written before the revolution, was created in that wonderful window of the first decade of the U.S.S.R.'s existence, ending around 1928 or '29 when hearings were held decrying Avant-Garde music as "formalist" and not fitting the Social Realism that was gaining traction in the government's eye.  This first decade, what I call the Lunacharsky* era, was presided over by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Education, who was ousted by Stalin during his rise to power.  Lunacharsky was an interesting figure, one that was able to run the state censorship board while allowing many fascinating artistic movements, such as Futurism and Constructivism, to work with the freedom they'd had in the previous decade, as well as saving many historic buildings from destruction by the Bolsheviks by arguing for their architectural value.  The Classical music being written at this time was some of the most invigoratingly original music to ever come out of Russia, taking the baton from Scriabin's late mystical music and running in all sorts of incredible directions, creating what I think of as the Scriabinist school.  While there were a ton of great composers working during this period and the years leading up to it three in particular were singled out as the most important composers of the time.  Two of them, Alexander Mosolov and Arthur Lourié, excelled brilliantly in Futurism, "machine music", such as Mosolov's The Foundry, and striking experiments in engraving.  The third, Nikolai Roslavets, was dubbed the "Russian Schoenberg" for his experiments in "synthetic chords".  Roslavets flew right out of the gate with his first compositions in the 1910's, crafting passionate, dark rhapsodies in strikingly exotic harmonies, using them so naturally that the pieces surge with depth and meaning.  His emotional range was so great that he wrote his blackly iridescent Three Etudes for piano (1914) -

- relatively hot on the heels of the lush impressionism of his Nocturne for oboe, two violas, cello and harp (1913), one of the most ingenious unused chamber groupings I've ever seen, so unique that it is literally the only piece in its genre:

It's easy to see that Roslavets never had to sacrifice the heart of his music in order to push boundaries, and his craftsmanship and sincerity weren't stunted even when he became a victim of political maneuvering and purges like so many of the best and brightest of his generation and he was forced to simplify and "tonalize" his language.  After his death his apartment was ransacked by a Soviet goon squad and many of his scores were confiscated; a lot of them are lost to this day.  Luckily we still have most of his work and many previously lost scores have been reconstructed, making everything in print one way or another.  I was lucky to find a collection of his piano pieces at a used bookstore of all places, and among them were some of my favorite Roslavets pieces, the Five Preludes (1919-22), which ends with a disarmingly wistful ditty.

While the Preludes are all written in Roslavets's highly individual Scriabinist language, the fifth prelude is a fond look back at tonality.  The extended tonal chord progressions are almost too traditional even for the more conservative composers of his time, banking heavily on the great sensitivity that seasoned performers of Scriabinist music get so good at.  This idea is actually more Schoenbergian than you'd think, as he ended his 1913 free atonal song cycle Pierrot Lunaire with a song that makes meaningful reference to the key of E major called "O Alter Duft", or "O Scent of Old".  While Schoenberg's use of major chords was more ironic than sentimental, very much fitting the pessimism and horror of the cycle, it seems that Roslavets needed the solace and warmth of the circle of fifths.  The older I get the more I realize that the only thing that really helps a piece of art become timeless is sincerity and hopefully the world will be able to see Roslavets's music as being more timeless than most - the fact that you can get many of his scores for free here is a good start.

~PNK

Mozart's Walk through the Crystal Garden

Those of you who a.) saw the Golden Globes last Sunday and b.) are awesome might have noticed that the excellent Mr. Holmes was completely shut out, a doubly heinous crime considering that it featured one of the great stunt instruments of musical history, the glass harmonica.  It's part of a major turn of one of the film's main plots and is one of the only times it has appeared in a film, and considering the time period when the plot takes place (the turn of the 20th century) it's surprising that anybody would be playing it, much less teaching lessons on it.  The instrument is the most famous member of the crystallophone family, instruments that produce sound with glass, and is part of a larger family of friction idiophones, operating by the same mechanism of someone creating a tone by rubbing a wet finger on the rim of a wine glass.  The latter device became something of a vogue technique for composers writing for percussion in the late 20th century, specifically inspired by the use of crystal glasses in pieces by George Crumb and Joseph Schwantner, but that hasn't inspired a revival of the full glass harmonica, or armonica.  The most common form of the instrument is one designed by America's favorite renaissance man and horndog Benjamin Franklin - a set of concentrically-arranged glass bowls, each one a half-step apart in Western equal temperament, are partially submerged in a tub of water and turned with a foot pedal, allowing the player to simply touch their fingers to the bowls' rims to produce the notes.  Oddly enough, one of the biggest proponents of crystallophones in our time is Linda Rondstadt, and she produced an all-crystallophone album in the early Oughts performed by Dennis James.  The heyday of the instrument was in the late 18th century and use of hit virtually disappeared by the 1820's, as it was seen as an impractical novelty instrument and hardly any music was written specifically for it.  One of those pieces, however, was written by none other than Mozart himself, and it's actually quite lovely.

As producing sounds via glass friction is somewhat difficult Mozart's piece here is mercifully slow, though there are a few 16th-note passages to keep the performer on edge.  The mood is reverent and nostalgic, rife with suspensions and a handful of surprising harmonic twists, all made all the more enchanting coming from the glass harmonica's unearthly sound.  Both metallic and intangible, one can imagine that its tone quality is what one would hear walking through a greenhouse on a distant planet.  The performance here is a little incomplete, as the performer Martin Hilmer doesn't bother with the recap of the B section, but the technique is excellent as there are only a few notes that don't sound (and understandably so; I've never been able to make a note on a crystal glass).  Now, if there was only a leaf written for the cristal baschet...

~PNK

Merry Christmas from Forgotten Leaves

~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