Babbitt Takes it Easy for Leaf's Sake

While Milton Babbitt's music has long been associated with musical pedagogy, the last word anybody has attached to it is "easy".  Babbitt quickly gained a reputation for writing works of staggering intellectual and technical difficulty, and despite his apparently kindly nature this rep stuck with him throughout his strikingly long career.  He wasn't completely averse to writing easier pieces, though, and one of his more well-known piano pieces is also one of his easiest - Semi-Simple Variations.

Written in 1956 and published as part of Isadore Freed's excellent pedagogical series for Presser, the piece not only structures itself around palindromic rows, but it also serializes the rhythms palindromically, making it an early example of total serialism.  While most musicians recoil from that term as if they had been offered a rat king for lunch, Babbitt maintains a steady, almost jazzy feel, and the experiment is surprisingly pleasant.  The plot thickens when you realize that Babbitt's other pleasant piano piece also dates from 1956, and is even shorter and easier to play, the only leaf I could find Babbitt had mustered in his 95-year life.

Steady readers may remember my article on Hall Overton's A Mood, published in the excellent easy-to-intermediate anthology American Composers of Today, edited by Joseph Prostakoff and supported by the Abby Whiteside Foundation.  It's probably the first and last time Babbitt wrote a piece that the listener could hear in their head by looking at the score - the two hands each start with the germ row at different transpositions and slightly different contours.  The notes are selected in a way not only to appear modal at first, but to also sit on either white or black notes, a plus for younger pianists.  I found a theory class curriculum that uses the piece as analysis homework, and you can see the full spread here if you want to see the "magic square".  Here's the analyzed version:

Of course, that doesn't mean anybody cares, and the people least likely to care are elementary school children taking piano lessons to avoid being drafted to the local youth soccer team.  Robert Taub made a pro recording of the Duet in 1985, but I found a performance by a small child at the Babbitt Memorial in 2011, held in the small recital room at New England Conservatory.  Taub's out-of-print, expensive Babbitt CD might hold a better performance, but you just can't beat the charm of a girl under 5 feet playing it just fine.

~PNK

A Vanity - Forget-Me-Not

At 11:46 p.m. on Monday night I finished my first completed original piece in some time, a chaser to my arrangement of Angelo Musolino's Fugato for brass quintet.  Unbeknownst to many I have my own IMSLP page, and there's nothing more enlightening for a classical musician than to try composing on for size.  I keep coming back to the piano, as it was my first instrument and will inevitably be my last, and the piece is titled Forget-Me-Not.  It's only two lines long, but the flowers are small to begin with.  It's like finding a forget-me-not in the keyhole of your bedroom door after midnight.

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~PNK

Musolino, Fugato, Bella

Not all anthologies are thick, and while sometimes a thin anthology can seem like a rip-off it can also compliment the few pieces that were included.  4 Short Piano Pieces was an elusive volume published in 1958 by Composers Editions, Ltd., or Accentuate Music - I'm not really sure which one has precedent over the other - and none of the featured pieces ever saw the light of day again, save for a hard-to-research sequence of reprints by the same publisher in different collections.  I found the volume while searching for pieces by Ned Rorem, whose fine-looking Slow Waltz is included as well as pieces by three composers I'd never heard of before: Joseph Maneri, Berge Kalajian and Angelo Musolino.  Maneri (better known by Joe) was a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who developed a distinctive microtonal jazz language for decades and is still releasing albums.  The demo for his song "Paniots Nine" was used as the introductory music for the brilliant movie American Splendor.  Suffice to say, his contribution, Theme and Three Variations, is the worst of the four.  Berge Kalajian was sucked into film composing after writing a couple handfuls of concert pieces, and that's the last anybody heard of him.  I may do a Re-Composing article on his lovely Piano Piece (Summer 1958), and it sadly appears that it's the only piece of his I'll see without an act of God.  The final piece, Musolino's Fugato, is not only a leaf but so good that I made an arrangement for brass quintet*.

Most fugues start the countersubject at the fifth, but Musolino devilishly starts his at the tritone, and each restatement of the subject is slightly different to fit an attractive, decidedly mid-century tonal language.  The piece is fully formed within the Big American Idiom, with lots of quartal and quintal harmonies, comprehensible melodic snaking and strong architecture.  There are a lot of fanfare moments, all in fourths and fifths for good effect, and he exhibits an expert grasp of dramatic pacing.  Musolino became known in the 50's and 60's for jazz and light classical music, and through his life would develop a unique voice that utilized classical and jazz devices interchangeably.  You can see his brief but delicious Phantasmagorical Episode here for a full show of that language, and if you squint your ears you can see the seeds of it being sown in the Fugato.  The good news is you don't have to squint hard enough, because I made a recording.

~PNK

*I'm happy to send you a copy of my arrangement, BTW.

Witold's Brass CUBE

Brass instruments were made for fanfares, and any fanfare without one is so lacking it may as well be a waltz.  Late in his career, Witold Lutosławski, one of my favorite composers, was commissioned to write a short series of fanfares for various organizations, and one of them leafed its way into my grasp.

Lutosławski was known for a number of different styles and techniques in the course of his career, including populism, serialism and aleatoric methods, but Fanfare for CUBE uses none of those styles and is perfectly well off doing its own thing.  Mostly written in Debussy's Lydian/Mixolydian mixed mode (a major scale with a raised fourth and a lowered seventh), the brass quintet shows how nice it is to hear the first five notes of a Lydian scale played at once.  It naturally expands and contracts, only breaking the scale in bars 6, 7 and 8 to make a semi-VI-V-vi dim-I resolution.  There's not much more to say, and why bother?  Sometimes a CUBE is just a CUBE.  Here's a recording, along with Witold's Fanfare for the University of Lancaster as a chaser.

~PNK

Baude Cordier crafts the original super-valentine

People complaining about baffling New Complexity scores is nothing new, as in the Middle Ages there was a similar movement of performance and notational complexity for its own sake - ars subtilior.  Borne in France in the mid 14th century and centered around Avignon, the style extended the precedent set by the established ars nova style by adding a lot of rhythmic variance, most notably the use of red-colored notes to indicate a rhythmic alteration by a third.  While that might not sound like much on paper, these pieces can get pretty wacky, difficult to perform even in today's hyper-notated performing environment.  Take the meter shifting in Johannes Ciconia's charming Venetia mundi splendor, for example:

 

Believe it or not, this isn't nearly the wackiest stuff I've seen from these guys, and the still nascent state of notation of the time made reading these scores a challenge in itself.  These pieces were most likely intended for a very small, elite audience, and was arguably the first time new music was created through technical experimentation.  It's also notable that almost all this music was written on secular texts rather than sacred ones, allowing for a wide variety of subjects from love to war to birthday odes.  How fun would it be for somebody to add goofball shapes on top of this complexity?

Enter Baude Cordier (c.1380-<1440), master of eye music (like the circular canon at the top of the article).  Not content to let straight lines keep him enslaved, he set out to make his Belle, bonne, sage recognizable from several yards away.  I mentioned in my article on Hans Otte that printing templates make bookmaking less artful, and Belle, bonne, sage is one of the finest examples of art music made by hand.  Look at those giant, ornate first letters!  Check out the expert penmanship on the notes!  There are actually three visible hearts, and it's easy enough to see the Big One and the small one linked to the bottom staff line of the Big One's upper half like a gumball-machine-prize key ring.  However, if you look in the Big One's lower half and squint hard enough at the cluster of colored notes it may start to resemble a heart if you want to feel the love.  All kidding aside this is a gorgeous piece of Medieval art, a loving synthesis of sight and sound that would make for a lovely valentine to your equally nerdy beloved.  And just in case you think this piece is unperformable, here's Ensemble Organum singing the pants off it.  Happy Valentine's Day!
 

 

~PNK

Maurice Wright Calls his Horn for a Fresh Glass of Think

While Maurice Wright may not be the most well-known composer in the country, he's certainly one of the most approachable.  I don't mean to say that his music is simplistic or overtly populist - what I mean is that his music bathes in a wonderfully amiable glow.  I've actually gotten in contact with him and he's like a genuinely nice man, a fine reminder that most artists are de facto normal people and not untouchable gods and divas who shriek at the very mention of fan contact - most non-famous composers are delighted to hear from admirers.  Wright's music is both quite sophisticated and easy to comprehend, sticking to natural structures and phrasing and immersed in an attractive atonal language reminiscent of George Perle's serial tonality.  The trick is that the listener rarely has to think about how his pieces are made - they're enjoyable enough on the surface, and Wright often writes on quirky extramusical subjects.  For example, his Suite for piano is a travelogue of a driving trip he took in the Rocky Mountains, and features a musical portrait of beer guzzling*.  All these elements are present in his Music for French Horn (1975), published by new music best-friend Mobart in their collection Five Compositions for French Horn alongside works by Curt Cacioppo, Edgar Warren Williams, Conrad Pope and Carlos Rausch.  No, I don't expect my readers to know who any of those people are.  Set in three movements, the outer two are goofily titled The Strongest Man and The Unobtrusive Model.  Only the middle movement, The Search for Knowledge, is leafy.

(Click for larger view)

It might be Wright's idea of a joke that a piece called The Search for Knowledge is only three staves long, though I'm more busy trying to figure out if his idea of a joke is jamming the search for knowledge in between the strongest man and an unobtrusive model.  Evidently Wright's method for searching for knowledge involves strolling around a community garden whistling elliptically.  Or perhaps humming a song he forgot the words to while doing his laundry.  The tune is chromatic yet oddly similar to what we imagine our ancestors singing while whittling, though Wright writes a lot of small details into its fabric.  There's not much of an arc, just a point when you start to notice the motives repeating and realize that's a perfectly fine way for the piece to go.  It ends on a mid-volume semi-palindrome, with its humorous lack of a resolution leading nicely into The Unobtrusive Model's upbeat humorousness.  Unfortunately I don't have a recording of this piece, but I do have a recording of his Music for Trombones from the same year, and that piece is amiable, too.

~PNK

*I chose that picture of him for just this reason.

Stravinsky Sings of Bassoons, and 2013 Answers

It's time again to visit Stravinsky's leaf oeuvre, as he left so many miniatures behind it would be entirely possible to make the whole first half of a concert from his leaves alone.  While he made a point to publish a few of them (such as the Double Canon), others were discovered among his papers after his death, such as the elusive Lied ohne Name.  

Written in 1917, at the height of his primitivist period (my favorite, BTW), the Lied ohne Name ("song without words", a form pioneered by Mendelssohn) went unpublished until the mid-60's when it was included in a bassoon technique book, and it didn't get its own edition until 1979.  Stravinsky certainly wasn't so famous and powerful in 1917 to get every stray note the publisher treatment, and bassoon duos aren't exactly a big-money market.  That hasn't stopped this charming piece from receiving a few recordings, mostly on all-Stravinsky albums like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's phenomenal 1996 Grammy winner Shadow Dances, one of my all-time favorite classical albums and a gold standard for Stravinsky interpretation.  Equally unstopped was the composition of an Avant-Garde deconstruction of the work for the festival crowd, though we had to wait until 2013 to experience it.

(Sorry about the poor quality)

Written for the Festival Ars Musica 2013, violinist/composer Paul Pankert's Variation ohne Name grows from the core notes of the Lied and stretches out into some very odd, atmospheric places.  Pankert swaps Stravinsky's amiable walking speed for static anticipation, the vast spaces allowing extended techniques to flow.  With rhythms as hard to count as these a less-than-literal touch can be either an asset or a poison, but in the case of the Variation the improvisational, bravura lines can wax and wane without the audience catching wise to any mistakes.  It might be a little silly to expect a profound examination of the Lied, and thankfully Pankert only sets out to have fun, getting as much cheeky elaboration as he can into 16 bars.  Obviously these two leaves demand to be performed together, so here's just such a performance (the premiere, of course).

~PNK