A Valentine's Rose for (by) Mr. Tenney

James Tenney isn't a name commonly associated with things people remember, but he was among the most singular figures in the American avant-garde music scene of the 60's, and was at the forefront of movements as diverse as minimalism and scoring Stan Brakhage shorts.  I've played a handful of his pieces and if there's anything I find attractive about his work it's that he had a predilection for tiny pieces, specifically pieces small enough to be mailed as a postcard, like this one:

Among them is the most memorable pseudo-Avant-Garde valentine I've seen yet, aside from the work of the great Baude Cordier:

Now, I can't be certain that the piece functions as a round, but it looks like every measure could sound OK on top of each other, meaning that the next voice might be able to enter at the start of any measure, though I have yet to wrangle a group of children together to test this.  I do know that the inner circle is identical to the outer one and the lyrics, taken from Gertrude Stein's poem "Sacred Emily", are exquisitely banal, even more than Stein's world-champion one-dimensionaler "I Am Rose".  The setting includes a neat off-set loop form where the words shift over one note each phrase repetition, a kind of rudimentary phasing.  While I'd like to think that the piece is a valentine to fellow composer Philip Corner, upon hearing a recording of one possible realization it feels more like an experiment to make people's heads explode.

There's also kindergartner's doing it, most likely a result of the anti-vaccination movement.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a valentine*.

~PNK

*Is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a valentine is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is

An Italian Prelude for Thanksgiving that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving

Can you think of any classical music having to do with Thanksgiving?  I can think of only one, and that's Earl George's decent Thanksgiving Overture of which I was unable to find a recording.  In lieu of that piece I've decided instead to Give my Thanks to IMSLP for helping me discover new works at the touch of a button, including my most recent discovery, the mid-19th century Italian pianist-composer Stefano Golinelli.  Music historians like to pretend that no worthy instrumental music was written in Italy between Boccherini (?) and the Casella-Respighi-Malipiero collective, but as guys like Giuseppe Martucci keep reminding us there's always more to life than what they taught you in Stuff 101.  Golinelli helps fill a hole in my personal understanding of Italian instrumental music, that of the era of Brahms and late Schumann, and his piano works are typical of the best pianistic traditions of the 1840's and 1850's, or at least as far as I've heard, which is five of his 24 Preludes, op. 69, the second of his prelude sets.  These preludes are part of the grand tradition of preludes in each major and minor key that that darned Bach guy started in the 18th century, and once again Golinelli's variations on the form prove that there's always room for one more really long cycle of preludes.

Unlike the Chopin Preludes, Golinelli kicks off the set relaxed and amiable.  The post-Chopin years were quite fruitful in harmonic and rhythmic malleability, the former seen in the left hand's sliding chromatic triads and the latter in the right hand's offset beat.  There's a fine discipline in this writing, as each hand never breaks their respective characters and the right never uses more than two notes at a time (and very prudently, at that).  This combination of ambling textures and tentative lyricism makes for a curiously wistful mood, a mildly daring way to start off a long cycle of pieces, especially so considering that most of the 24 Preludes I've seen come flying out of the gate.  The prelude also endears itself to me because I can't resist any piece that reminds me of the "Nocturne" from Grieg's Lyric Pieces, op. 54.  The YouTube upload has both this prelude and five others from the set, all of them worthy of a spin and proving once again that pianists shouldn't leave any stones unturned.

Oh, heck, let's also Give Thanks to YouTube for being endlessly generous, including offering this delightful Golinelli Tarantella, a fine accomplishment considering that Tarantellas are rarely delightful:

Happy Thanksgiving from Forgotten Leaves!

~PNK

P.S.  Don't you just love the word "ventiquattro"?

A haunted vanity - "A Spectre" from Five Woodcuts for piccolo and two violins

As I've yet to find too many horror-appropriate classical pieces it should come at no surprise that there are exceedingly few leaves that qualify (and most of those I'm keeping for my article on Kubiniana).  After much head scratching I remembered that I had a ghostly tune hidden, or rather written, right under my nose.  Back when I was taking composition lessons I finished three movements of a set of five "woodcuts" for piccolo and two violins at the beginning of my fascination with one-pagers; you can view the score, as well as the rest of my uploaded music, at my IMSLP page.  I challenged myself to confine each piece to one page, and the one that ended up with the most variety per second was "A Spectre".

Written without meter (as I do), "A Spectre" was written at a time when I was bizarrely writing eighth rests backwards, so I'm sorry if that's confusing.  The opening statement is a knock on a violin body with the other icily running as close to the overtone series as I could get with the artificial scale I wrote the piece in.  The joke was a play on the spectralist school of composition, a gang of French composers who drew their compositional water from the harmonic spectrum blown into thousands of pieces and analyzed by computers.  After that the nerd stuff gets booted out and I tried to make my ghost as wacky as possible.  At the time I was deeply invested in Stravinsky's "primitivist" music, or rather the music he wrote in between Petrushka and Pulcinella, which included a lot of concise, hyper-dramatic chamber music like the Three Pieces for String Quartet, Renard, Berceuses du chat and the Three Japanese Lyrics.  This love affair with terse exoticism is present in every second of the piece, though I'll eat my own legs before even daring to compare myself with the great Igor.  The notes with slashes through them in line three refer to two different extended techniques - one violin plays the notes behind the bridge and the other presses the bow down too hard in order to create a scratch tone.  These sounds make a demented march which leads into a reprise of the "spectre" motive.  I apologize for rambling on about my own work, but since there's no recording I have to use my imagination.  The good news is that you'll only have to use your imagination if you feel like it, as per that lack of recorded evidence I mentioned earlier, so if you're not in the mood to indulge my own work you can look forward to regularly scheduled programming next time.  Or can you?

~PNK

Rieti's Crumb of a Lullaby

After much rumination I regret to announce that I don't "get" Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994).  A man who saw the entirety of the 20th century pass before him, his grew out of the post-WWI Italian Avant-Garde and honed a semi-ironic Neoclassical voice, only deepening his own groove long after his work became marginalized in an uncaring America.  He's one of those rare cases where I have trouble telling whether or not he's serious or ironic in his mature style, a burbling, deceptively simple approach that is as close as one can get to a Neoclassical counterpart to Max Reger's swiftly tilting Romanticism.  A charitable interneter uploaded a bunch of his piano works to Scorser, Russia's response to IMSLP's copyright crackdowning, and you can click here to stick a toe in Rietian waters (but only click the "PDF" buttons).  I've managed to record a few particularly accomplished miniatures, including these two works from his 6 Short Pieces (1932), "Elegy" and "Barcarole":

Both of those works exhibit his mature style with grace and unexpected beauty, though they occasionally swoop through their chord changes a bit quickly for my taste.  The third piece I recorded comes from a decade earlier, the opening to his Avant-Garde miniature set Briciole (literally "Crumbs").

One of a handful of his works in the public domain (available here as a Google Books scan), Briciole is the most available works from his striking early days as a Futurist.  Featuring a satirical blend of Chopin and Debussy, a Marionette dance and two pieces about music boxes, the "Berceuse" is the best and easiest to advertise of the set.  Using a simple, hypnotic rhythmic structure, Rieti bets all his chips on pinging, clustered harmonies and plays to win.  The audience is given a stepwise melody to follow, meaning that thick chords, such as the mid-register clusters in measure 3 don't seem like cheap special effects, and liberal pedal use brings out the nocturnal mystery of his textures.  The slightly differing, icy arpeggios up high are a particularly subtle effect, high enough that holding down the pedal blurs them enough to the point that the listener can't tell how they differ but know something's up.  The lullaby has no real conclusion, just a variation and final sparkle as the sleeper falls into the Deep.  While I can't say I'll become a huge fan of Rieti his Berceuse is a strange and inviting window into the hall of mirrors that was inter-war European experimentalism, though ultimately it may lead to an entirely unseen realm.

~PNK

A Viol Toy for Sunday

One advantage Renaissance music had, specifically Elizabethan instrumental music, was an overabundance of genres - flipping through large collections like the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book produces a wealth of genres, not only a ton of dance forms but also oddities like "dump", "robin", "nancie" and "dream".  It's a shame almost all of these have never returned (with the exception of Herbert Howells's excellent clavichord sets, Lambert's Clavichord and Howells's Clavichord), because I'd love to see someone like Ligeti take a crack at a "fortune" or "whistle".  The Elizabethan viol player and composer Tobias Hume was no stranger to these forms, and just the other day I was introduced to a charming 30'' piece of his in one of the more intriguing forms, "toy":

I promise not to tell if you admit to not being able to read that.  Written for bass viol, the piece is designed to be accompanied by a chord instrument such as a lute or guitar, and thankfully a wonderful man on YouTube can play both viol and guitar.  Ernst Stolz is a Renaissance music expert who has put up dozens of performances of pieces from all walks of the 16th and 17th centuries, and he was kind enough to supply the score with this performance.  He also included that neat woodcut at the top of this article, so if you're not a fan of playing soccer just imagine how annoying it would be to play wearing pantaloons.

~PNK

A Languedoc Tantum Ergo

Perhaps it's due to the glut of brilliant talents that French classical music produced at the fin de siècle, but even a cursory glance at the compositional scene of the day shows that France had no shortage of regional heroes.  Paris has always been the center of culture in France, and a combination of a healthy reaction to that kind of artistic exclusivity and increasingly prominent efforts to collect European folk music saw a number of composers celebrate their regional heritage through their works, such as Guy Ropartz with Brittany and quite notably Joseph Canteloube with Auvergne, whose Chants d'Auvergne are sung quite frequently.  Heck, I would've covered Joseph-Ermend Bonnal on one of these blogs earlier if recordings of his stuff weren't so hard to find, and his heritage included the Basque region that stretches across both Southwestern France and Northeastern Spain.  Likewise, Déodat de Séverac's most written-of attribute is his celebration of his Languedoc heritage.  Séverac (1872-1921) is one of those outer Impressionists that I've always known about but never really explored, partially due to his music never really taking flight with Impressionist technique and as such getting lost in the shuffle.  That isn't to say that his music isn't worth investigating - he's just a slightly awkward 'tweener, clearly enamored with the musical elite around him but unsure of how to make their art his own.  He is mostly remembered for his piano works, including the ambitious pictorial suites En Languedoc and Cerdaña, and there are plenty of recordings of his piano works (including an exquisite oeuvres complètes series by Satie champion Aldo Ciccolini.  The other piece of his that still gets played is much shorter than those - in fact so short it can be written on a leaf.

I'll freely admit that Séverac's setting of the Tantum Ergo isn't recognizably Languedocian, but nobody said that a hometown hero can't talk about anything but his native soil.  Written in 1920, the year before his untimely death, the Tantum Ergo has some of the most novel synthesis between all that stepwise-motion voice-leading your theory teachers kept talking about and the kind of French post-Romanticism that Franck and Chausson pioneered.  The lines wax and wane with an intense yearning, kneading into each syllable in that gorgeous way that only a capella choirs can bring to life.  While the harmonies are entirely tonal he'll find perfect spots to phase between junction chords à la Franck.  His dissonances are held on to only long enough to press against the temples, quickly sliding to the next poignant moment, and it's this continual liquid passion that makes the piece so precious.  There are dozens of performances to choose from but the performance below by Schola Cantorum Oxford has the most clarity and simple mastery of any of them, accentuating each supple curve and fully aware that the piece thrives on not wasting anyone's time - hugging the listener's heart and carefully releasing it back into the world.

~PNK

Roy gets a Little Suite Tooth

Variety is the spice of recital, and there's no easier way to accomplish this than the mini-suite.  Tiny dabs of color and movement built to contrast one another, there are plenty of stellar examples (such as Little Suites by Lou Harrison and Leon Kirchner) and today's Suite is one of the best.  While the great Roy Harris is primarily known as a symphonist he did whip up a CD-full of piano pieces, most notably his Piano Sonata, op. 1 (named by Hunter Johnson as American piano music's "Declaration of Independence") and his two sets of American Ballads.  I'd like to submit my vote for his best piano work as his Toccata, but luckily for Forgotten Leaves his Little Suite is a hair's-breadth close second (and most certainly not the first loser).

The first movement shows off Harris's mastery of both singing lines and resonant modal harmonies*.  While the melody seems simple enough, the clanging voice-leading underneath is never the same across its six iterations.  After each scale, Harris rings the low bells and holds them with the middle (sostenuto pedal), allowing the pianist to change the pedal for the upper chords freely.  The effect is gorgeous, the kind of movement that elusive middle pedal is made for, though I'm not sure how you can use the una corda pedal at the same time you use the other two.

Now, before y'all's cry foul about that third movement being spread across two pages, notice that the first page's portion is only two lines long, and the fourth movement is only two lines long.  Therefore, dear readers, one could simply put "Slumber" under "Sad News" and everything would be dory of the hunky persuasion.  However, "Children at Play" just isn't profound enough for a closer, so shush.  "Sad News" makes good use of a slow 7/8 and wavering, harp-like, clashing chord movement.  Harris was a lifelong student of Renaissance music, and the last two measures of "Sad News" display such sweet-'n'-deft harmonic counterpoint Fux could faint.  "Children at Play" bounces between D major and B-flat major in the left hand while the right sticks to the former, though harmonic variation slips in as fast as a two-year-old drops one toy to play with another.  Methinks Harris was a big fan of 7/8 in all its subdivisions, and if he intended the Suite as pedagogical music young students may have more practice than they want in store for them.  Despite the shallow sonority of the movement it's actually the most difficult to perform, putting the pianist's skill at hand separation to the test.  Thankfully things slow down for "Slumber", bringing us back to the world of chorales.  The simplicity here is quite deceptive, its gentle departures from functional tonality ornamented by pinging fifths that suggest an endless breadth of emotion.  

Harris was a pioneer of that brand of broad, polytonal lyricism that would become the American national classical language in the 40's and 50's, but works like the Little Suite and the Toccata show why he did it better than pretty much anyone else (except Copland, of course).  His harmonies rang deeper and truer than the rest of the pack, and talking about them is no substitute for hearing them, and Geoffrey Burelson made a meal of the Little Suite and the rest of Harris's ivory ticklers on his CD for Naxos.  As the whole Little Suite isn't even four minutes long I don't see the harm in the copyright infringement of me including his performance below, and only a cold-hearted orb would shut down these delightful morsels.

~PNK

*Yes, yes, I did notice how the tune devolves into "Joy to the World", and no, I'm not putting this article off until Christmas just to make that reference more cute, thank you very much.