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

In Futurum, No One Can Hear You Play

Much like Stalin's artistic overlording, the Third Reich implemented an artistic suppression program, though their justifications for suppression involved labeling Jewish and modernist art as "degenerate" (entartete), and a special death camp, Theresienstadt (in the Czech city of Terezín) was notable for housing artists, as well as being the camp they showed to visiting foreign dignitaries as a nice clean façade for the Final Solution.  Nearly a whole generation of Jewish composers were sent to Theresienstadt and other camps, and their music was resurrected much later in the 20th century to much acclaim and popularity, showcasing some truly unique voices, the greatest of which may be Erwin Schulhoff (1892-1942).  A composer of incredible versatility and fecundity, Schulhoff was sent to the Wülzburg concentration camp and died in 1942 from tuberculosis, and the revival of his works is one of the great humanitarian efforts in 20th century art.  And dang, did he write some doozies.

While his music went through a number of transformations, his earliest notable period was one of Dadaism, starting in the late 1910's right alongside the likes of Braque and Duchamp (though they never met him).  His experimentations with dadaism (including the baffling Symphonia Germanica (please click that link)) were contemporaneous with his development of "sophisticated jazz", easily the best and most sophisticated of the many European attempts to blend jazz with classical music between the wars, and the two styles meet in his 5 PIttoresques.  While the outer four are decent examples of the early stage of his jazz pieces (though they pale in comparison to later masterworks such as the 5 Jazz Etudes), the third pittoresque, In Futurum, out-bizarres all expectations.

Not since the works of John Stump has the world seen such extensive perversion of musical engraving.  Not one parameter is sacred, from the impossible 3/5 and 7/10 meters to the use of rests rather than notes.  This silent piece predates John Cage's 4'33'' (which will NOT be making an appearance on this blog, in case you were wondering, as there are zero pages in the score), though it is predated by Alphonse Allais's Marche Funebre, which I'll get to at the proper time.  While nothing can be physically played there is an arc to the piece, with a mid-level climax at the pair of faces in the third stave.  These cartoon emotion-notes should appear in more pieces, and are a perfect jab at simplistic tonal resolutions.  The big halt is at the last bar of the fifth stave, a Grand Pause accentuated by five exclamation points, and the piece ends with two happy faces, just like music should.  There's never been a commercial recording (I wonder why?...), but I did find this hilarious performing solution by a student pianist who should be very proud of his work.

~PNK

Meyer Kupferman's Littlest Zeppelin

The priceless Meyer Kupferman never let an idea skate by, and the many-colored density of his writing allowed for even the briefest of pieces to have that certain je ne sais qupferman.  Among his many piano pieces lie the Five Little Zeppelins, turbulent sketches of constellations that all display his "gestalt" writing quite well.  While all of them are worth investigating, only the last, "Cygnus", is a leaf, and in my scan you can see the out-of-control ending to its predecessor, "Draco".

For those unfamiliar with limited aleatoric writing, the box in the right hand is a cell of music to be repeated for as long as the squiggly line persists, and it isn't meant to line up with anything.  The left hand is given single pitches to be held a piacere, at least as long as the performer feels is right for the solid lines trailing after them.  Both the sustaining and soft pedals are held down through the whole piece, and though the melody climaxes near the end of the third line the dynamic never breaches piano, eventually receding and ritarding to the quadruple piano finish, the right hand winding down to almost nothing.  It's a very "Neptune"-from-The Planets ending, the most graceful of a quintet of sturms und drangs, and I was sad to find there's no recording of the set.  Well, dagnabbit, I'll just have to go and do it myself.

~PNK

Poon Lim and the Seven Winds

It's about time we return to the catalog of Media Press, Inc., the Champaign, IL. company that gave us the work of James Cuomo among others.  A native of Wisconsin, Raymond Weisling (b. 1947) was fascinated both by electro-acoustic music and Javanese Gamelan, the latter of which led to him moving to Indonesia in 1980 and never looking back.  Before he decamped for water-locked pastures he had four pieces published by Media, and the most alluring of them is scored for a unique wind septet and paints a tone-picture of the story of Poon Lim:

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On 23 November, 1942, the British merchant freighter Belmond was torpedoed in the South Pacific.  The only surviving crew member, Poon Lim (born 1918), was rescued after spending 133 days and nights upon the waves in a small life raft.

Poon Lim...a Night Upon the Waves is an impression of the marooned night - no light but stars, no sound but waves.  While the score baffles at first, an instruction page is included.  The instruments enter in the order specified by the dotted arrows, and each note is held for the duration of a slow lung of air.  After the note is finished the player takes a slow, full breath, aligning tge music to biological processes.  The players continue at their own pace, and the texture is one of quiet, naturally asymetric pulses, like the swelling of waves beneath your back.  The ensemble is unusual, bottom-heavy and inwardly resonant, and one can imagine distant ship horns or whales.  There's no recording, but the effect can be easily reproduced at a piano and it's an easy piece to perform.  If you've got seven winds and a spare half hour Poon and I would love to make your acquaintance, but it may take a bit to scrape up a makeshift liferaft to attend the performance.

~PNK