12 French Images in (Female) Leaves

In the age of the Inter-Butz it's easy to forget that not every scrap of information one could glean from the 'net is actually gleanable.  In spite of how obscure most of the figures and works I cover here are I've usually been able to get enough info for a good paragraph and some change - not so with today's subject, Annette Dieudonné.  Dieudonné became a student of Nadia Boulanger in the 1910's and after fourteen years took up the duty as herPA for most of her life.  Her bio stops about there pretty much every place you look.  As I'm no Boulanger expert I probably wouldn't have ever heard of her if not for my own efforts to look over every single French piano piece written in the 1910's and 20's.  Those surely well-used efforts unearthed a 1922 set of piano pieces, the Douze Images en Courtes Preludés, and once again I'm pleased to be defending well-crafted modesty.

Each image is conveniently (for FL) only a page long, and few of them are much more difficult than this one.  They're most certainly pedagogical pieces and appear to be the only piano pieces Dieudonné was able to get published; all her other published works are sacred choral music.  Her style is amiably clear and straightforward, totally entrenched in a kind of bittersweet elegance particular to French composers of the 1910's.  Even pieces one would expect to be extroverted, like "The Weasel"-

-still focus on rich voicing and serious harmonies, as if the weasel was dancing a courante at Fauré's birthday party.  I get the feeling that Dieudonné had little interest in extroversion, and diffuse color tricks like the right hand's lydian/myxolydian rippling in "The Garden's Tranquil Water-Path" resonated more in her soul.

That isn't to say that "The Weasel" was her only attempt at humor, as "The Parakeets' Cage" squawks appropriately (though not without effective modal voicing, of course):

"Cypress Alley" is the most lugubrious of the bunch, its marching mountains of a left hand straight out of Debussy (such as the Berceuse Heroique") but might be closer to Holst in execution, and it takes a good 30 seconds for a flat to appear.  The succeeding "Lullaby" features much lighter voicing, showcasing how the light pinging of upper-register secondal intervals with the pedal down are great representations for sleepy recognition of the world's troubles, and is no poor shakes in the vast and wonderful piano lullaby rep.

Methinks that Dieudonné had a liking for birds and perfect fifths, and "The Aviary" goes whole hog on both fronts.  This isn't as tricky as it looks, but keeping the hands from running into each other is a special practice session all its own.  Actually, the most difficult part is the rhythmic precision required to land the bass-clef fifths in measure 6 and similar measures.  The quintal harmonies turn to quartal, and far more plodding, in the following piece, "The Poor in Church".  There's a sense of depressed plainchant, as Dieudonné presumably thought the Poor would bring the sorrows of the world to Church.  I'm not sure what the grace notes in the left hand are - perhaps the Church's organist playing the notes sloppily?  Though that's the problem with trying to interpret tone-painting - there's no end to it and you'll most likely overshoot the author's intentions.

Well, enough of that - here's a clown!

(If I'm being terribly honest, this one's my least favorite simply because it doesn't go far enough.  You need a lot of pyrotechnics and zip to make clown pieces work (like Debussy's "Général Lavine - eccentric") and this one just isn't wacky enough.  You also need an excellent pianist with a lot of 'tude to really clown the place up and not every serious pianist has the nerve to put a lot of work into clown music.)

"The Old Carriage" is another sad piece, eschewing the humor of a broken-down carriage (or car, I'm not sure which one she's referring to) in favor of lost strength.  The alternating seconds (from D/E to D/E-flat) intimates creaking unease, but once again perfect fourths and fifths lead the way.

"Bells on a Festival Morning" is pretty self-explanatory, requiring as much pedal as one can get without getting overwhelmingly jangly...or should it?

The set ends with "Clear Paths", possibly the most philosophical piece in the bunch.  A study in parallel motion, the piece exudes a calm and confidence that makes for a holistically reassuring ending.  The whole set is reassuring, a warm and sane contribution to the less-difficult piano rep and a nice resource for piano teachers looking for something left-of-center.  I'd be interested to see Dieudonné's sacred works as I'm sure they're welcome siblings to the sacred works of the Boulangers, which means we'd most certainly be in good hands.  Annette Dieudonné might be the most obscure figure I'll discuss this WHM but her sole piano work is worth more than a footnote in history.  I was considering making my own recording of these works, as there is no commercial recording, but thankfully Emile Naoumoff, Nadia Boulanger's last student, made a fine interpretation for his YouTube channel.  In case non-jazz improvisation interests you Naoumoff has been making daily improvisations for some time now.  Either way it's good that someone's looking out for the little gal, and people like him are exactly what Women's History Month needs.

~PNK

A Crumb Crumb for Sunday

For as much as George Crumb has become a symbol of the audience-pleasing end of the post-60's Avant-Garde in musical America it's easy to forget that he started out writing more conventional music in the 50's, dark Bartokian fantasies such as the Sonata for Solo Cello.  It wasn't until the early 60's rolled around when Crumb's music started to turn towards the outlandish-yet-accessible, extended-technique-rife marvels we perform frequently, and while most (including me) point to his Lorca settings as the great works of this period we can't overlook the Five Pieces for Piano (1962).  Those familiar with the piano parts in works like Vox Balanae (which I had the privilege of performing in Boston) know to expect lots of harmonics, pizzicatos, and simple preparation such as placing sheets of paper or glass rods on the strings or holding a paperclip to a vibrating low string to create a steady metallic buzz.  The Five Pieces is where all those techniques started to crop up, and a leaf in the middle might be the most subtle and elegant of them all.

(Click to enlarge)

As indicated in Crumb's gorgeously hand-engraved score, every sound in this "Notturno" is produced from inside the piano, plucking the strings either by fingertips or fingernails and adding various effects when most effective.  Right away we see the paperclip trick, a very simple yet unique effect that I've never seen done by another composer for reasons I don't understand.  Plucking strings on the inside of the piano is tricky because strings are very close together and unmarked, often requiring the pianist to label each string to be plucked with bits of labeled tape, and man alive, are there a lot of plucked notes in this piece, and the rhythms and dynamics indicated are very subtle indeed.  The most elaborate rhythm-'n'-technique package challenge comes in the third bar of the second stave, wherein a dense cluster of plucked notes has to be stopped without sounding in a specific order and in time, and while it might not be obvious there's a lot of risk of accidentally resounding strings simply by taking your finger off them and drawing the skin across the metal.  All of this is written in a luminously acidic language that has all of the economy of Crumb without his allusions to tonality or poetic word-painting.  As most of the US is encased in ice the static drama of this piece seems as apt as anything, and this newer recording I've included below might be the best I've heard yet of the piece.  You'll have to produce your own night conditions, though; there's no embed option for the sun going away.

~PNK

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

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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