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.
Youth and ambition can create striking semi-failures, and none are more consistent in failure than the christening of a new art genre. One of American music's great Deans, Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987) pioneered three genres for himself, the most well known of which is the 24 Parables for various instruments. He also wrote 12 Serenades, and much like the Parables they have only a loose set form: a Serenade is a suite of short pieces with a semi-light atmosphere, and a Parable is a single, dramatic movement of pure abstraction. The third form is confined to his early years and appears in three volumes of piano works - the Poems. While none of these genres traversed farther than his own scores, the Poems are the most worthy of revival and analysis, and the most ignored. The term was used for many decades before him to musically mean all sorts of things, but with Persichetti it would take a unique and serviceable form. Each Poem uses a single line of an existing poem as a starting point, crafting an abstract miniature to fit the moods and meanings of the fragment. At no point does he attempt traditional prosody*, but rather pays the poems proper respect by leaving them alone, letting his piece roam free in the wilds of a singular and powerful sentence. His sources span the breadth of great Anglo-American poetry from the late 19th century to the Imagists and beyond. Though they are all short, most no more than three pages, the three volumes (opp. 4 & 5 (1939) and 14 (1941)) contain only two leaves. All the Poems were recorded by Mirian Conti, as well as works by Gould, Diamond and Bloch, on an album released by Albany Records in 1998, and as I established in my Harold Brown article they tightly control which tracks of theirs escape into the aether. Keeping that in mind, one leaf has escaped, diffuse, alluring and touching nigh to tears.
(Click for larger view)
Persichetti's language, at least for the mature works of his that get performed, went through many styles and techniques but always maintained an acidic atmosphere of dissonance, eschewing sentimentality and predictability. The Poems reflect this as well but, unlike his more famous works, most often written in a sophisticated and layered modality, inhabit a language unto themselves. Impressionism never became a real force in America, despite the best efforts of the likes of Charles Griffes and Quincy Porter, so the elusive, smoky harmonies that float off this leaf are a sound to behold. Taking its cue from a line from William Watson's "The Fronteir", "Wake subtler dreams, and take me nigh to tears" swoops through a close-voiced internal logic to gaze on the valleys of pan-tonality. Extended tertian sonorities abound, and the asymmetrical rhythmic structure mirrors the pulsing landscape of dream. The performance by Mirian Conti is excellent, sensitive to a dramatic texture both dense and fragile. As with each poem Persichetti is careful with attribution and got permission from the publishers for the single lines from which he launched. In 1939 he felt the need to ask for the 1894 poem; in 2013 Watson's copyright is a moot argument, so I've reprinted the whole poem below. The YouTube video spans the whole first volume, and "Wake" begins at 3:37 if you wish to skip to is, though I'd recommend hearing it in the context of its delicious siblings. The other two volumes are equally accomplished, so track down the CD (such as in the Naxos Music Library for those with a subscription) if you're so inclined. To paraphrase an entry from volume II, the Poems stand as a testament to Persichetti's ability to capture dust in sunlight, and memory in corners.
At the hushed brink of twilight - when, as though
Some solemn journeying phantom paused to lay
An ominous finger on the awestruck day,
Earth holds her breath till that great presence go, -
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.
I've made it no secret that the International Music Score Library Project is one of my favorite websites, if not my favorite. Not only is it the largest depository of older music on the planet, but it's also a fantastic platform for composers to self-publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, one of the best things to happen to copyright law since the internet was created. While a handful of big names have released their work through the site (such as Leo Ornstein, Frederic Rzewski and Vivian Fine, whose work should be no stranger to leaf readers), the majority of contemporary composers with pages are the Young and Tender, many in college or fresh out the door. Let me warn you that, because of the free and democratic nature of the site, an absence of quality control is not only inherent but essential, so you may step in some cowpies in your searches. But that's all part of exploration, so I hope you've got enough curiosity to sidestep the junk.
One particularly wacky figure on the site is Nikolaos-Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis (say that five times fast!), a Greek composer a year younger than me who studied in England and is currently working as a nature guide in Helsinki. His IMSLP page is chockablock with nuggets of experimentation and humor, the work of a singular artist with nothing to lose. For example, here's a page from For 9 Piccolos:
While many of his works may seem less serious than Satie's furniture music, he is also able to produce haunting slivers of music, perfectly capturing those moments between seconds of real time where melancholy overwhelms. That brings us to my favorite work of his, Narcosis.
(Click for larger view)
Once again I must point out how simply removing meter and barlines can do wonders for a piece's enchantment index. Constructed from elusive quartal spiderwebs, Narcosis joins Peter Josheff's A Veltin Infusionin the canon of piano pieces best found under a bed or in the confines of bay windows, tiny pockets of light for an ambivalent world. Analysis is a moot cause - the piece is meant to be felt rather than thought. Much like Persichetti's Poems, Narcosis draws inspiration from a poem, but in this case the author is Nikolaos himself:
Thanks for Hayk Melikyan for supplying the score for this article!
With a new job still taking time away from my productiveness and a lot of performing at the beginning of the month my big Nikolay Tcherepnin article is still in the works, but thankfully a leaf has fallen into my lap that begs for articlizing. This descent into blog eligibility came about oddly compared to much of the music I cover here in that I heard the piece before seeing the score. Shocking, I know! But this is the way it'd probably be without a little help from my friends, as no amount of internetty searching could give me any solid info on this:
If you heard the Tcherepnin works from the Baba Yaga article and the article of his 6 Horn Quartets this should come as unexpectedly as a voice from beyond the grave. This "Old Russian Song" is a rare piece for piano right hand alone, a genre that hasn't gotten much attention as many pieces already feel like they're for the right hand alone (...Chopin...). It took me ages to find the score for this piece, as eventually I had to resort to contacting the pianist, Hayk Melikyan, through his official Facebook page - eventually his manager sent me a scan and I can't stop thanking them for their help as otherwise I probably would have never found this piece.
As far as I can tell this piece has only been published in a mid-1980's Soviet collection edited by Nikolay Kopchevsky (...who?...) and I still don't know if it's part of a larger set. It's a minor revelation in what can be done with a single hand, putting all its chips on pacing, right-hand dexterity and pedalled atmosphere and winning big. Most composers don't have the guts to write music this sparse and precious, always going for Bigger rather than Better, and I've long admired these kinds of pieces, such as when Persichetti proved that his simplest song could also be one of his most powerful. This is definitely a piece from late in Tcherepnin's career, during a period of wistful experimentation that included his enchantingly oblique Sentimental Pieces (another Forgotten Leaves candidate) - the dramatic arc is flat and repetitive, forward motion is nil and the harmonies are insinuated through Syrinx-esque chromatic trailing. And, man, how many people I'd kill to have thought of that final denoument. Hayk Melikyan's performance is arresting in its sensitivity and amplification of Tcherepnin's subtleties and little brilliances, making this a heck of an interlude on your next mixtape, and maybe my next recital. Surprisingly great work all around, and hopefully you won't have to wait too much longer for the Big Tcherepnin Show...
