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.
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.
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...
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.
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 Noëlbeing 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.
(Click to enlarge)
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.
(Click to enlarge)
"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!
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!
