The past keeps expanding, like the universe, and its stars grow farther and farther away. We don’t know exactly why the universe is expanding, but can see its effect; we are all too aware of time passing, and spend much of our time in denial. And art needs advocates who are clear-eyed in the face of this encroaching oblivion.
I was recently invited to perform experimental music in a guest spot at the Seattle bar/gallery Vermillion, and preceding the show I was interviewed by the show host, Christian Pincock. Pincock is a good egg, and had hosted a piano recital of mine at his house and threw a new-piano-warming party where I got to show off a heap of rare pieces. In the interview, he probed as to why I’m so fixated on rediscovering forgotten gems, and the truth came to me in speaking that dead artists are increasingly dead, and everyone they touched in life are also increasingly dead. Living artists can advocate for their work, and there is a machine dedicated to active artists and the dissemination of their work. “Classics” are an extremely small slice of what can be found – most art is unknown. Our tastes are made narrow from birth by market forces and apathy, and at times obscure works that get shared outside of the system feel like a kind of samizdat, circumventing establishment out of the moral urgency of preserving that which cannot preserve itself. And in the years since I stopped regularly blogging here, I have found a great deal more composers in need of advocacy. Now that Summer is upon us, and my performances have accordingly slowed down, it seems like a great opportunity to restart and catch up with all the unjustly forgotten music I can.
When people ask me how I find my music, I frequently point to other people/organizations like myself, and these days the most enjoyable resource for casual researchers is probably YouTube channels. A special class of musician, notably pianists, have channels dedicated to amateur recordings of obscure works, channels like PSearPianist, Gamma1734, and PianoMusicSheWrote. The latter is an admirable general resource for people looking for female composers to program, as they have covered dozens and dozens of names across many centuries. This is where I found the music of Helena Łopuska (1886-1920), and even though a pro CD exists with all her published works, channels like these, whatever is distributed widest, will be the taste-directors of the future. And Łopuska is perfect for them, and me, as only a few works are available, the composer died young and unknown, and the high quality of her work is as obvious on first listening as all subsequent ones.
Information is scanty – she was Polish, studied piano and composition at the Warsaw Conservatory as well as in Leipzig and Moscow, under Zygmunt Noskowski for composition at the latter. She toured around in Germany and Poland, eventually marrying the Polish violinist and teacher Adam Wyleżyński (1880-1954), and had a few large works premiered to success in Warsaw. Apparently there was also a violin sonata composed, but from what I’ve gathered her only published works are five piano miniatures, and only four are available. How she died, and whether it was in 1920 or 1921, I can't say, and like most of the composers I feature here her only legacy will be through the works of hers that are preserved and can be widely disseminated. But I'm sure that you'll find her works just as enchanting as I have, and there's no time like the present to look them over. The scores are here.
All of Łopuska's surviving works are in the wonderful post-Chopin miniature tradition, and show how one can push against harmonic convention with sensitivity and still transport the listener. One can see this even in the earliest of her published works, the Chanson Sans Parole, Op. 2. Plucking along through long, wistful arpeggios, her song without words dances through chord changes like a fairy-tale maiden drawing diaphanous curtains from her face. While no Polish piano composer of the time could really escape Chopin, Łopuska's inspiration here appears to be Fauré - the harmonic moves are unusual in a most sotto voce, antique fashion, their song for Ravel's infante défunte. A central section of reserved, tragic pomp gives way to more cascades, ending just as they began, in a mist of tears.
Her Mâtiné printanière, Op. 5 is anchored by one of the most elegant reverie-triggers in music: the pinging, off-beat pedal note. Everyone from Vaughan Williams to Josef Suk utilized this to hypnotize the listener, and a fascinating dissertation could be written on its history and effectiveness. This anchor, an octave in the middle of the keyboard, is a bit swifter than some others but not more insistent, and Łopuska threads it through a singing, harp-like texture to support one of the best melodies in Polish piano music. I'm deeply impressed by how effective the piano writing is, getting maximum color glow with easy tools, as well as how easily she uses the pedal tone as a hinge into a minor key. In skilled hands it's a frictionless magic trick, perfect for the Spring morning the composer is depicting - a birdsong, clear and distant.
Question, Op. 6, the youngest of her published piano works, is also the shortest and most urgent. The recording here doesn't do it justice, as a committed pianist would embrace its Vivace tempo and get closer to 60 bpm to the bar, matching the rushing worry at its core. Once again a captivating melody is supported by flawless, memorable harmonies, and again a mid-voice repetition tethers the music through deft harmonic shifts. Fauré is still an antecedent, but Grieg is stronger recalled, with the profound bass gong of a flat 7th and a melodic echo answering in the tenor. Like the most difficult questions, its full context doesn't materialize until the end, but nothing is actually resolved.
The best of her available works is Le Soir, Op. 4, pushing the farthest into harmonic modernism and the atmosphere of the soul. Another great melody curls through the evening air like a lost ribbon, and functional harmony gives way to folk-like strums and timeless washes of suspension arpeggios. Even when voices dovetail through each other in rapture the piano writing is smooth as silk, and more washes draw us through scenes of dreaming until evaporating. Hunting horns call us to the open, and we catch a brief shimmer of a home-key cloud as it passes into the horizon. It's one of my favorite Polish piano works, a perfect marriage of invention and elegance. If Łopuska had lived longer she might have been a major figure in Polish composition, but considering the turbulence that nation would endure in the succeeding decades, nobody can say for sure. At least we now have a handful of gems from her to keep her name alive - none of them overstay their welcome or insist too much on their brilliance, and that is the proof of real brilliance, indeed.
It's good to be back, and it's good to know that others believe in this sort of thing just as much as I do. Stay tuned for many more discoveries in the posts ahead.
