tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625399548284932402024-03-14T02:02:54.484-07:00Re-ComposingPeter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.comBlogger97125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-73049351240099009812023-07-05T17:58:00.000-07:002023-07-05T17:58:52.159-07:00An Interview with David Victor Feldman on the Humphrey Marshall Evans III Society<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg11hLC8JOKrFjZecFQycih7VLh01rT_QJcGs4HPwvKx6Ys4hmoQLXrPgdKIaAZ-5QiRH_LJMoabk0OSNOqP3MF7E13VHfZFug__B0ckjSGTjq4LMqGAsBvKbCjh1NlXtNm8nLnWpp65xoYglU2w44FHfcKSFstfOwUmb6vzrOB1prWbMayq4wCAcWtqEQ/s7074/evans%203.png"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg11hLC8JOKrFjZecFQycih7VLh01rT_QJcGs4HPwvKx6Ys4hmoQLXrPgdKIaAZ-5QiRH_LJMoabk0OSNOqP3MF7E13VHfZFug__B0ckjSGTjq4LMqGAsBvKbCjh1NlXtNm8nLnWpp65xoYglU2w44FHfcKSFstfOwUmb6vzrOB1prWbMayq4wCAcWtqEQ/w400-h205/evans%203.png" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">There is an inherent loneliness in seeking unknown art, and likewise in the work of collecting and preserving it. Much of my time doing it is spent pulling scores from library shelves, scanning through eBay listings for random jewels, and lengthy online searches, activities that aren’t known for group interaction. And because the art you end of trying to preserve is unfamiliar for one or some of many reasons, there is a natural resistance in any potential audience, and you risk continued loneliness in your efforts. As such, I’ll occasionally come across a Society, Foundation, website or other effort to be the authoritative one-stop shop for a composer, and in some cases the entire enterprise is run by one person. Sometimes they’re a relation of the composer, but other times they have thinner connections or none whatsoever, such as with </span><a href="https://www.parlettpages.uk/bax/" style="font-family: arial;">Graham and David Parlett’s cataloguing of Arnold Bax’s work</a><span style="font-family: arial;">. So every now and then I’ll write about a forgotten composer by way of their preserver, and interview the living champion in order to understand what they do, how they do it, and what all this is for.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">One day some years ago I posted on Facebook, asking my music friends to recommend composers to me that I may not have heard of before. David Victor Feldman, who I had met through modern music groups, sent me scans of two scores by the Yale-educated composer Humphrey Marshall Evans III (1948-1982) who I most definitely had not heard of. The scores, <i>Night Sky Music 3</i> (1969) and <i>down wanky pleasure lane...</i> (1970), were highly intriguing, dating from the peak of the 1960s-‘70s American Avant-Garde and full of juicy mysteries. Inscribed by hand, they are beautiful graphic works, making players engage with ambiguous spatial notation, complex instructions, theatrical extramusical elements and much more, all imaginative and expertly drafted. But I couldn’t hear any of it, as none of Evans’s works had been commercially recorded and I was unable to play through the pieces myself.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Some time later Feldman created The Humphrey Marshall Evans III Society on Facebook, and he periodically posts scores and fragments, links to Evans ephemera, and calls for recollections and more information from those who knew Evans and his cohorts. Feldman is slowly but steadily building a definitive Evans archive, and the group members, including myself, are quite enthusiastic about his efforts. He seemed like the ideal first candidate for my interview series, so I reached out to him to talk about Evans and the quest to save his work from the dustbin of history. Here’s an opening statement from him:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><i style="font-style: italic;">I heard about Humphrey from Robert Morris when I was an undergraduate. By way of background, Bob was born in '43 and Humphrey in '48, so Bob was just a few years older when he taught Humphrey and Lucky Mosko advanced 12-tone theory during their post-graduate year where they picked up Master degrees in music theory. I was born in '57, so Humphrey and Lucky had left the Yale campus four years before I arrived. Bob had a score to show me, to a piece basically of Lucky's called </i>Outer's Covering: tamara settings for molly<i style="font-style: italic;">, but Humphrey was the guest composer of one of the "settings" (also called "pieces" below). These settings all had titles like "MARILYN and the SHOES", "MARY and the SHOES," "ROBIN and the SHOES," etc. To give you some idea, let me transcribe the instructions:</i></div><div style="font-style: italic; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="font-style: italic; text-align: justify;"><i>"GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS 1) Everything is a notation. 2) Each notation (and each fragment enclosed within dotted lines) should be considered contextually, distinct from every other notation. (Similarities in notated gestures need not be perceptible either to performer or listener.) 3) This piece occurs somewhere during a larger nonexistent gesture: it represents neither the beginning nor the end. Since each gesture (and the piece) is conceived as only an inner portion of a larger gesture, always keep in mind the nonexistent beginnings and end of the piece and of each fragment. INSTRUCTIONS for PERFORMANCE 1) The individual pieces may be placed in any order. 2) Any or all of the pieces may be excluded from any or all of the performances. 3) Any number of people, with or without instruments, may perform the settings. 4) Settings may be performed simultaneously and/or consecutively with or without pauses. ALTERNATIVE INSTRUCTIONS And or all of the previous and following instructions may be ignored (including duration indications)."</i></div><div style="font-style: italic; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i style="font-style: italic;">The settings themselves are striking works of graphic art, with some music notation. You might compare the work to Earle Brown or Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, but they clearly supply graphic improvisation prompts, and this piece drops the performers into ironic and paradoxical quandaries. The composers do seem to having something in mind, but also mean to withhold their explicit intentions. It seems humorous and also trippy. Besides the score, Bob had wondrous things to say about Humphrey and Lucky. Humphrey in particular had won the BMI prize for student composers multiple of times. But there was nothing for me to hear. So I filed the name in the back of my head. For years. Around 1995 AltaVista (the pre-Google) came online and lead me to a webpage devoted to artists dead from AIDS. There was a listing for Humphrey and titles of some works. Still nothing to hear or see. Lucky Mosko got his degree and had a career teaching composition at Cal Arts and conducting new music around the country (with some sort of regular gig at Harvard). Eventually I got to hear some of his music when a CD came out. Years go by again, I have a random-google-moment, and this time Lucky has died and his papers have been settled at Harvard. Among the boxes of Lucky's stuff, there is a box or two of scores by Humphrey and there are tapes, though not many digitized (and what is digitized only available to hear on campus). But I don't live far, so I made some trips to the rare book room of their music library and photographed all of Humphrey's scores, and listened to what little I could. Then I started tracking down Humphrey's friends and by now I have a pretty good picture of his very unusual life, from his home-schooled childhood in India, where his parents were likely spying for the CIA, to his high school years in the DC area, where he became a favorite student of Grace Cushman who ran Peabody's pre-college division, to his years at Yale, his one year at Cal Arts, and then his time in NYC up until his death. He had day gigs, most notably working for the famous publisher Maurice Girodius (who first published Lolita but generally made his money on porn). Humphrey's great success in the publishing industry was discovering V.C. Andrews and making her first manuscript, </i>Flowers in the Attic<i style="font-style: italic;">, into one of the best selling books of all time. But in NYC he stops composing, but unhappily, and presumably becomes an alcoholic as a result. He was a gay man, with a taste for "rough trade." Whether he actually died of AIDS or cirrhosis I'll probably never know. He came down with hiccups that just wouldn't go way, and a month latter he was dead, at 34. That's young to die from cirrhosis, but I have reports that he drank enough to make it plausible. The scores are quite diverse, fastidiously notated, but also generally somewhat open (non-deterministic). His big idea, it seems to me, was to compose for people (with instruments) rather than for instruments (played by people). So he orchestrated with a palate of personalities, rather than a palate of timbres. That said, he meant these pieces to be robust rather than specific to particular performers, so the scores draw out the human being in the performer, whatever the personality might be. But that makes it sound like he composed "`theater pieces," and actually, the notes always matter, he just opposes the alienation between person and personae that typifies classical music practice. And that opposition takes the form of throwing up paradoxes, so that the performer can't simply "serve the composer's intentions," as so many performers see their jobs, but still without everything falling apart into a free-for-all. Humphrey, Lucky and Burr van Nostrand were the "Yale Bad Boys," and they livened up the campus and staged many events that were hugely popular (during the late 60s). Humphrey and Lucky studied with Donald Martino. Martino found them puzzling but basically supported their experiments on the condition that the preparation of score roles rose to the level of his exacting professionalism. So they were having lots of fun but taking that fun very seriously. Burr is still alive and I've had many conversations with him. He's had some tough luck though, not only cancer, but also losing his home in the Paradise, CA fires. At some point I acquired three or four boxes of Humphrey's papers, so between my oral histories and Humphrey's diaries and clippings, I have a reasonable picture of his life and thoughts. COVID interrupted my research, but I was finally able to get his friend Robert Withers to deliver Humphrey's personal audiotapes to a transcription service, and while that took forever, and when they finally finished I was busy teaching, I'll finally be getting down to do some serious listening now.</i></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBGizwrl-SK0w367Uwy3OckHK5KCeEOmtr3dklu9wW6R64zCw7QyiAx--OkT9M3Xj6-igEqccvULmihSYNMqEylDbKuMmlKxB3BlDVVAKbt20FrcwsLYtzsG--_NaSy0NMf-SQJMVpp_NiSO1teDg3XNllkV0kHKdBZ3pjKt5l-ILVvj7knN6Zl7TGhRU/s7114/evans%204.png"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBGizwrl-SK0w367Uwy3OckHK5KCeEOmtr3dklu9wW6R64zCw7QyiAx--OkT9M3Xj6-igEqccvULmihSYNMqEylDbKuMmlKxB3BlDVVAKbt20FrcwsLYtzsG--_NaSy0NMf-SQJMVpp_NiSO1teDg3XNllkV0kHKdBZ3pjKt5l-ILVvj7knN6Zl7TGhRU/w400-h90/evans%204.png" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I was happy to hear about Burr Van Nostrand, as I had written </span><a href="http://re-composing.blogspot.com/2013/03/burr-van-nostrand.html" style="font-family: arial;">a short article</a><span style="font-family: arial;"> years ago about a big revival of his works at NEC but otherwise hadn't thought about him in a while. Van Nostrand was one of the most colorful composers in Boston in his day, so to see one of his confederates also get the resurrection treatment is delightful. It seems that if there are contemporary players for Van Nostrand, there's hope for Evans, and any performance of the works I'd seen is bound to be a must-see event.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Below is my correspondence interview with Feldman, with Feldman's responses in italics.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">+</div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A 1968 WGBH program introduced Evans with the phrase "Evans has been accused of creating 'freaked out' sound instead of music." You yourself described his contribution to Mosko's <i>Outer's Covering</i> series as "humorous and also trippy", and I can recall some pieces from the time that could fit all these descriptors on the surface. You arrived to the new music scene too late to observe any of Cage's happenings, or the Yale Bad Boys events, but in your opinion does Evans's music really fit into that whole atmosphere, or was he just writing experimentally in similar veins? </span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">The answer will depend upon what you mean by "Evan's music." He left not only music, but stage works too, and these seem more like happenings than like (what people usually mean by) "plays" (I think they're "out there" even by the standards of theater of the absurd). One could easily take these stage works as "pieces," so as works of music in some reasonably extended sense. I think Humphrey would have made a joke out the question "is it music or not?" So there's a continuum of activity, from those Yale Bad Boy events, to his written happenings (whether they were ever realized or not), to his more obviously musical manuscripts, to his very most unconventional manuscripts. In the end, I suppose that the key difference between a work of music and a happening rests on that hardness of edge between the audience and the performers. I suspect that that was always in play for Humphrey, though I can't think of a statement in his own words that would clarify that especially. But I don't think, past a certain time, that he was ever merely "writing experimentally" in the sense he conceived his works primarily as the sort of sonic objects that audio recording can serve well. In other words I don't think he ever bought into the teleology that the purpose of a musical performance was only the making of specified sounds. I think it's important to say that he didn't feel he had to choose sides in the new music wars. I think Boulez and Babbitt were as important to him as Cage, and he took rock just as seriously. But it seems to me that nothing was merely an aspirational model for him. As soon as he "got something" he needed to assimilate it and also attempt to exceed it. Despite the hippy vibe, he was very competitive.</span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Graphically adventurous scores, especially hand-engraved ones, were all the rage then, starting in Europe but catching on big with the younger university composers. Berio and other international names certainly set the scene, but I suspect Crumb winning a Pulitzer for <i>Echoes of Time and the River</i> really cinched it. It seems to have faded after the 1970s, what with the simultaneous cooling-off of the Avant-Garde boom of the '60s and '70s, the rise of Neo-Romanticism, and the shift away from publishing hand-engraved scores. Is there a way to know if Evans would have put the work into that sort of music typography if he weren't entrenched in the times? </span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">I think there's a lot to unpack here. During the 60's there was a gulf generally separating the traditional classical music world and the contemporary music world (I'm using what I remember as the term of art of the day; later people would speak of new music, experimental music, and lately contemporary classical music). Orchestras and recitalists simply programmed very little music by living composers, and most works of contemporary music got performed by specialists on concerts solely devoted to such music. Traditional classically-trained musicians not only had not taste for innovations even as mild as atonality, but they also had a great deal of concern for their personal dignity and even the dignity of their instruments (which meant that extended techniques were a deal-breaker). Conservatory students, and even more so, conservatory-bound students, concentrated nearly solely on common-practice works, the only music that mattered for their intended careers (and the only music their teachers could help them learn anyway). Meanwhile universities were the important employers and for contemporary composers, but universities demanded that tenure track faculty do "research." Merely well-crafted compositions in received styles did not count as research then. To make room for more conservative composers meant putting the question to role of composers in the academy writ large. So this affected hiring and tenure decisions as well as the treatment of students. Now my point is that something had to give. At some point classical music started to look like a dying art, even to its own conservative audience. Conductors and recitialists felt pressure not to cut out the living entirely. Auditions requirements started to include a "modern" work. The skill sets taught in conservatories slowly expanded. So at some point that gulf started to shrink, but the new connections involved compromise on both sides. Highly skilled players showed a willingness to take up new works and thereby expose them to a mainstream audience, but they generally wanted pieces that didn't push the envelope too hard. This was quite opposite the demands of new music specialist who did want to show off unique skills and to play works that would attract as much attention as possible for their unique character. Anyway, not pushing the envelope too hard not only meant conservative sounds and conservative techniques, but also a relatively straight-forward path to mastery. Players favored scores in traditional notation, and indeed perfectly professional traditional notation. Most didn't have time to read complicated "rule books" and learn extended notations, nor did they care to improvise or deal with graphic notations. (Of course the gulf has continued to shrink, extended techniques have become more standard, but most players still want scores that tell them clearly what to do.) So back to Evans. Evans learned manuscript preparation for Martino who learned it from Dallapiccola. Mosko too, and Mosko passed the skills to his students at CalArts. In fact, Zappa liked to hire Mosko's students as copyists, because if one hire would flake out, the next one could pick up at the next bar and no one would ever see the difference. It was Martino's deal with Evans and Lucky that he didn't mind how weird the music was, provided the scores were prepared magnificently. Thus I believe he "put in the work" as you say simultaneously as an act of conformity and nonconformity. I wouldn't compare Evans to Crumb so much as to Feldman and perhaps Haubenstock-Ramati. Crumb's scores are straightforward to play. In fact he told me himself that he used the circular staves and the like to force players to memorize the music. Feldman was putting players in new situations and Haubenstock-Ramati was making work that simultaneously lived in the visual art world. Humphrey never met an artform he didn't like, and though he was a composer first, he left fiction, poetry, visual art and he made films (presumably lost though). But you're asking me to predict a future that never happened. He died before the personal computer age, so I can't even guess what he would have done in an age where Finale and Sibelius became standards (and those platforms certainly don't easily support notational eccentricity). If famous players eventually had taken an interest in his work with the implicit requirement that the scores have a standard format, I'd guess he'd happily meet those commissions. I'm not aware that he ever received a commission. In fact, I don't think he had any idea where he fit in anymore once he left CalArts and academia and came to New York. Some of his friends feel that the resulting disconnect lead to his alcoholism and that eventually killed him. He was definitely struggling to find a new way forward, and talks about it in some of his letters, and there's a partial manuscript but as best I can tell, he never brought himself to finish it. I think it could have become a landmark in the history of LGBT+ new music.</span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Were the scores easy to photograph? My experience with the hand-engraved scores, especially manuscripts and self-published works, is that they can be difficult to read and even more difficult to scan or photograph. Consider how unreadable a Christian Wolff score can be with 50 years of yellowing and staining. The ones you've posted and sent me look quite pristine; did you clean them up, or did they just look that good? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>They looked pretty good to start with and I did some cleaning up. Mostly I was photographing original manuscripts, so they were on those translucent onion skin paper with jet-black rapidograph ink. Harvard would not let me scan anything, so I used camera batteries as weights in order to get everything to lie flat, and I brought some solar desk lamps to provide uniform illumination. In some cases I wasn't happy with the focus, so I ordered the material out of storage for a second round, and brought my laptop to check the quality on-site. But I did use the computer to rotate pages slightly in order to make the staves perfectly horizontal, and that sort of thing. I also edited out any distracting artifacts. Some of the materials had some color, so I tweaked the colors until the results looked to me the way I remembered the originals.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKnAYeoeepRGeBaNpcybNnuXxu3fA9vX7qtUKjiVDQakkyoyN1vg8b8i3Jigju_3bSKW6ZjtpgF02Dx2WtRK5r3NqzRZzUZ5xfil7rjF_SMPwlSMF6Amjo1VOj56hHd9QkwzI6fu4HZV57fs0XSnesjn7kE-HVuOyoVIR18fal7BDtw8--unKseHDxxBI/s3942/evans%201.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1336" data-original-width="3942" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKnAYeoeepRGeBaNpcybNnuXxu3fA9vX7qtUKjiVDQakkyoyN1vg8b8i3Jigju_3bSKW6ZjtpgF02Dx2WtRK5r3NqzRZzUZ5xfil7rjF_SMPwlSMF6Amjo1VOj56hHd9QkwzI6fu4HZV57fs0XSnesjn7kE-HVuOyoVIR18fal7BDtw8--unKseHDxxBI/w400-h135/evans%201.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Back in December, you posted in the Facebook group that you had finished transferring Evans's tapes into .wav files - is there a plan to release performance recordings? And will the surviving scores be collected for more public perusal? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>It appears that more survive than you currently possess, but that doesn't mean they are accessible to you or others. I must confess that I haven't begun to go through all the files in earnest. Still, the basic answer is yes, in time I will release everything I have to the public. But the more nuanced answer is that I feel I need to be careful initially about the sound files. They're generally live performances, not by professionals, the sound captured without the benefit of excellent equipment or professional engineering, and the tapes generally 50 years old on top of all that. Experience has taught me not to expect anyone ever to bring imagination to their listening. People always hear exactly what they hear, so even a little 60-cycle hum or tape hiss turns into a deal breaker. Thus I don't want to release any sound that might hurt Evans' reputation and I have hours of repeated listening to do in order to determine the best use for each track. If and once I manage to get people interested, at that point there will be no harm in distributing it all.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Your comment that Evans may have written more for specific performers rather than for instruments, in a way that any stranger could theoretically perform it, is intriguing in both positive and negative ways. Classical composers can be led to worry quite a bit about the utility and longevity of their works - it's one reason I've never considered writing electronics into my music, as the technology can become obsolete quickly, even unusable. People also fade, and intentions can't always be easy to transmit in written or engraved instructions. Personal collaborations can be brilliant, of course - one wonders if Berio would have written a fraction of his groundbreaking vocal music if he'd never worked with Cathy Biberian - but unless a composer cares about making their intentions clear through scores, it's hard to know if any performance is true to their vision. Your comment about "ironic and paradoxical quandaries" brings back memories of performing from Cage's Song Book and big group works like Michael Finnissy's <i>Vigany's Cabinet</i>, where instrumentalists are left to interpret extramusical non sequiturs. You defended his music as requiring more personal engagement from performers without loosening the pieces enough that they fall apart, but how receptive do you think today's classical musicians are to that kind of challenge? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>I didn't mean to suggest that Evans wrote for specific performers. I was trying to express a more theoretical pivot. A typical way of thinking about music centers everything around sound. In particular, when a human being plays an instrument, the "music" comes from the instrument. This does not mean necessarily that the instrumentalist effectively disappears. Audiences, even classical music audiences, will connect with the human presence. If the music seems to "express" something, perhaps listeners like to feel, or believe, that that something starts out inside the human performer, and gets out through the instrument. Now I'm sure standards of decorum have varied over time and from place to place, but in my experience, a classical performer may receive admiration for their deep concentration (which might be understood then to help the listeners concentrate) or their general grace, but performers also routine receive criticism for "too much body English" that suppose distract us from the music or seems meant to compensate visually for a lack of expression in the sound. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that nobody thinks this way about rock, say, or even jazz. Those audiences expect, or at least welcome, a total performance. Now total performance suggests sound plus a theatrical element. And yes, composers have been experimenting with "theater pieces" for years. And one could have a whole conversation about the boundary between "theater with music" and "music with theater." But Evans viewpoint wasn't about adding theatrical elements to musical compositions. It was more, I think, about creating music that was fueled by the personalities of the performers, whomever they happened to be and whatever their personalities, rather then merely asking for a bit a grace and playing on the expectation (myth?) that whatever comes out (genuinely) started out on the inside. Of course theater generally involves actors playing roles, thus following a script and projecting feelings and emotions of a character. Those "theater pieces" essentially ask instrumentalists and singers too to play scripted roles. But Evans was interested in something else. I think he would be sympathetic to the notion that the purpose of a art is self-discovery. In particular, when we truly open up ourselves to a work of art, we learn things about ourselves. So he wanted his pieces to be vehicles for self-discovery even for, or firstly for, the performers. Whoever you are, you could become more yourself by playing one of his pieces, and you could and bring your whole self to the stage. Thus an Evans piece will be an interaction of actual personalities and much as an interaction of sounds. Maybe its an idea so obvious in jazz and rock that no one would need to spell it out, but it's still not typical or characteristic of classical music even 50 years after Evans' work. I should round this out by noting that while the '60s were a time of great experimentation and lowered inhibitions, there were also a time keenly aware of repression, continuing inhibitions, conformity and convention. Evans was a gay man and gay men were typically in the closet, or even so out of touch with their desires that, buried, they became a locus of inner conflict and frustration. Traditional classical music demands all kinds of conformity, to the tuning, to the tempo, to the style. Of course experimental composers were de facto non-conformists in their roles as composer, but often they still required performers to conforms themselves to the demands of the non-conformist score. Even with a score like Earle Brown's </i>December 1952<i>, in my experience musicians can be very judgmental about how far you can go, and specifically how far you can go lest the performance becomes more about you than about Brown's piece. Evans aimed to make pieces that would work because you made them about you, because he was fascinated by people and their interactions, and art seemed to offer the possibility of giving people the opportunity to be more themselves than they realized possible.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw14fb52tSJme2HgQ0j6jTsGT4aQ1jGof2Z0fiSv63rL54l2mNH6U5pu4cyG01PBnx4uTHKQdYHI-2KZbPDeFjaPcBqkxiyjouCEd6Sqzzc9bhPCmqfHL_kONqgd9PLXT1WPWLtPk1mKzYlM-b750ai63nQlcl1BmL4cLa0GmbjNq_F2KzVMcghd5t-jk/s2917/evans%202.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2051" data-original-width="2917" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw14fb52tSJme2HgQ0j6jTsGT4aQ1jGof2Z0fiSv63rL54l2mNH6U5pu4cyG01PBnx4uTHKQdYHI-2KZbPDeFjaPcBqkxiyjouCEd6Sqzzc9bhPCmqfHL_kONqgd9PLXT1WPWLtPk1mKzYlM-b750ai63nQlcl1BmL4cLa0GmbjNq_F2KzVMcghd5t-jk/w400-h281/evans%202.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">For decades, we've been in an era of resurrecting forgotten composers from the past - whole record labels exist for this sole purpose. However, the hard modernists of Evans's generation have mostly been passed over, perhaps because their music isn't quite old enough to be considered unjustly neglected, or perhaps because the music community just doesn't have any interest in that type of modernism any more. It's one thing to preserve scores and recordings, but another thing to spur on contemporary performances, which is where real change takes place. Do you think there are enough musicians interested in mounting works like Evans's, and his contemporaries, to hope for a wider revival? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>History is not simply the past, but rather all the stories we tell about the past to make it legible and also useful to our present purposes. I believe that this logically gives rise to a phenomenon that you might call the historical uncanny valley. Some things are both too recent and not recent enough to be easily made legible; some things linger on the border between relevant and irrelevant (and even embarrassing), so we don't yet know how to use them to define ourselves and our current goals. In particular, we don't know what we should be citing as precedent and what we should be reacting against. Norman Rockwell is a nice example of an artist whose legacy suffered a historical uncanny valley. There was a time where it would have been inconceivable for an art museum to hang him; it would be like they were surrendering to their enemies. But ultimately the work aged to the point were curators could say to themselves that Rockwell's canvases help tell the full story of a time only partially documented (artwise) by works of the usual suspects. I hear a lot of work by composers, some with big careers, who are still working very much in the modernist vein. If I'm hearing a piece by, say, Liza Lim, and someone asks me what makes it 21st century music and not music from 1970, there first thing I would say is, if I could bring this work via time machine to a contemporary music audience of 1970, they wouldn't be shocked by it, certainly not the way an 1870 audience would have been shocked to hear Webern. Sure, there's been some evolution in taste, judgement and norms, but no wholesale rejection of the modernist aesthetic. But my point is that the very viability of our ongoing modernisms make those old modernisms tricky to frame. The old work is still competition for the new and its not clear what comparisons and contrasts to draw usefully. And dead composers can't do you favors if you play their work, and in many cases you can't even say "premiere." But time will pass, and at some point the classical music world (if it survives) will ask what was really happening during the 1960s and 1970s. That was an age when reputations got made by LPs, and so their were very few composers whose whole oeuvre was available for the listening public. It was one or two names from each European country: Germany-Stockhausen, France-Boulez, Poland-Penderecki, Hungary-Ligeti, Italy-Berio, Greece-Xenakis, England-Peter Maxwell Davies...and I'll add Japan-Takemitsu. It seems to me that those names are still dominating conversations (on the internet say) about the period today. Of course it's tautological that receiving the exposure they did, in their own time, has made these figures particularly influential. But we're going to find a lot of other very interesting work, and a lot of other fine work, when we dig. Many composers were unlucky, or just not good at self-promotion, or they were a little too radical or little too conservative then in ways that wouldn't matter to us now. So my answer is, yes, I'm hoping for a revival. I don't know when. Evans has a very colorful life - only son of CIA agents (I think), childhood homeschooled in India, one of the Yale Bad Boys, and then working for the notorious publisher Maurice Girodius and writing his own gay porn as a day-gig, and finally discovering (and essentially rewriting) V.C.Andrews </i>Flowers in the Attic,<i> one of the top-selling novels of all time. He's an interesting guy and he wrote interesting music, and I think his life has something to say about gay history and perhaps the impact of AIDS on the arts (He died literally one day before AIDS was defined by the CDC and became a thing. I'm not sure he had HIV, or if he did that that's what killed him, and I don't have access to his death certificate not that that would help, but many of his friends believe he died of AIDS). Some people might say "what does being gay have to do with the music?" but in Evans' case, I would say, a great deal. He was unconflicted about his sexual orientation, but definitely aware that not everyone enjoyed his freedom, and his music is really about freedom.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I believe that most serious artists have one or two Evans's squirreled away in their mental repertoire, artists who they believe are unjustly neglected, and that they feel like one of the only people on Earth who really know their work. In my time doing this sort of research I've known a few composers who ended up being the sole protectors, or at least sole promoters of the works of a deceased, forgotten composer, and I myself may be that for one or two names. If you fit this role for Evans, do you feel a responsibility to keep your work going, not knowing if anyone will continue it after you're gone? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>My plan has been to write a book, part biography, part musicology. I've done dozen of interviews and I have had access to really an amazing about of primary sources. But it's challenging work. It can be very hard to figure out what's going on in a composer's mind from his messy personal notes and sketches. Robert Morris taught Evans the advanced serial theory of the day, and Babbitt was interested in teaching him at Juilliard, but it never worked out. While it's not surprising now to find composers who see the importance both of, say, Babbitt and Cage, but I think it was unusual back in that day to aim to synthesize such disparate, even diametric, influences. My point is that makes Evans' scores both interesting and challenging for a musicologist or a theorist, because you typically don't bring the same methodological tools to bear on such different composers. But I'm not sure that I'd call Evans "unjustly neglected." No one is guilty of neglecting him, rather, he simply disappeared. Dying young was part of it, but long before that he withdrew from the contemporary classical music world, perhaps on account of depression or simple writer's block or despair at figuring out where he fit in. If anything, rather than neglect, he may been the victim of too much early success: all those BMI prizes, orchestras playing his music when he was still in college, Tanglewood, people writing about him, putting him on television, etc. So I feel deeply in my gut that his disappearance has something to say about the sociology and culture of the classical music world and the contemporary classical music world. I'm still meditating over exactly what though. So yes, I do want to rescue those scores from those western Massachusetts archive boxes where they just sit silently almost all the time. Already some of the people I'd have wanted to talk to about Evans have passed away. It's clear that my carpe diem has saved the fabric of his life from falling down what we now call the memory hole. But it was speculative for me. Evans was described to me in the 1970s, by Robert Morris, as someone from whom I should expect great things. But there was nothing to hear and almost nothing to see. So his scores, sure, I want float them out to the world and give them the chance to sink or swim. But I also simply find his whole story compelling. I have the odd feeling that I've made friends with the man albeit decades after his death. And yes, that he's counting on me. And maybe it's a kind of "paying it forward," as I'm a composer myself. And neglected (justly or unjustly, not for me to say).</i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf-IhfVLaG4y6sQzuX2fW1t0YUyON_AbjbCNirA6JwWbEheJ_EuwUsycswu6hom02lCujv3FgylJqUCpxr1YPLnEn0OrMRttlkMxrCgi03RkHp_DIyBbAXDwM1MlX1x5CFSj1JZp9bZdFxZ3a9d4LvS4YjT_VSoi-EfNlBcg4FFExjBIjs_kyGpEnGWq4/s4074/evans%205.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="4074" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf-IhfVLaG4y6sQzuX2fW1t0YUyON_AbjbCNirA6JwWbEheJ_EuwUsycswu6hom02lCujv3FgylJqUCpxr1YPLnEn0OrMRttlkMxrCgi03RkHp_DIyBbAXDwM1MlX1x5CFSj1JZp9bZdFxZ3a9d4LvS4YjT_VSoi-EfNlBcg4FFExjBIjs_kyGpEnGWq4/w400-h158/evans%205.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">I extend great thanks to David Victor Feldman for taking the time to answer my questions and further promote Evans and his music, and hope the Society grows its collection and reach. In the meantime, I'll keep looking for fellow travelers who are willing to put in the time and effort to bring composers back from oblivion, and hopefully more interviews are on their way.</div><br />~PNK</span></div> </div>Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-649558633840763922023-06-06T23:52:00.000-07:002023-06-06T23:52:38.713-07:00Eugene Cines - One Foot In and a Dozen Out<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span face="Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">Film music is a field that, while fascinating in itself, probably won't be making an appearance on this blog very frequently. Economics has a driver's seat role and creativity is optional. That isn't to say that film music can't be spectacular, and there are many wonderful figures I could pontificate upon if given the chance, but there are other blogs dedicated to the craft and the music I write about has a much smaller audience from the get-go. Another step farther away from the concert hall is "library" music, whereby a record company puts out an album of copyright-free music for a steep initial price. The music is designed for background use in movies and commercials, and records are often programmed for "drama" and "horror" and the like. There's been a big movement in the last couple of decades to unearth this kind of music (focusing on albums from the '60's and '70's), and whole blogs are dedicated simply to filesharing them.* the composers remained anonymous in a <i>de facto </i>sense; who would bother to remember their names? So when I found out the composer of an obscure but delectable piano piece I'd found was a regular contributor to library albums, it opened a curious research door I never before knew existed.</span></div>
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<span face="Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">Eugene Cines (1918-2004) is a man without a biography, at least as far as the internet is concerned. A New Yorker from the cradle to the grave, his work was mostly limited to TV music, such as the Music Director position for the movie-of-the-week show <i>Studio One</i>. He was also a regular library music composer, specifically for Boosey & Hawkes. Until I started research for this article I had no idea Boosey & Hawkes had a library music program; this <a href="http://librarymusicthemes.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=214">forum question</a> reveals a staggering list of their library product, a reminder that not only is there more out there, you can drown in it if you're not careful. I can't think of any other sheet music publisher that had a program like that. Either way, Cines had a niche, and some of the music he wrote under their support was pretty spiffy:</span></div>
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<span face=""Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">He even popped up on an NBC Background Music Library album (NBC 116, VA), whose two sides are "Sea Atmospheric" and "Sea Atmospheric, Scenic." His lone contribution, "Solo for Alto Flute", seems a bit outside the confines of library music, appropriate for a windswept vista but pointing towards concert legitimacy (and an easy linking piece for your next alto flute recital).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The good, consistent work Cines provided for Boosey & Hawkes must have been the way in for him to publish his "real" music, and in 1974 they published <i>Abbreviations</i></span><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">, a set of three serialistic piano miniatures. It didn't sell, and is not listed on their website, but there are some copies at Sheet Music Plus, though they couldn't be bothered to list his full name or include a cover photo. Perhaps that's for the better; the covers for Boosey & Hawkes music at the time were composed of ugly, blocky script and an unfortunate color scheme (pale yellow background and dusty purple words), and combined with Cines's lack of a name meant doom for the <i>Abbreviations</i></span><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">. It's a shame, because they're quite nice, fine additions to the longstanding tradition of <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2013/05/dessaus-bachian-farewell.html">brief, concentrated dodecaphonic piano literature</a>. And as I recently got around to performing the whole set for YouTube, it's high time I celebrated these pieces the way they deserve.</span><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiasoYXwdi3Hyz0wMNeUoAsqD40DeWZqApRZbsX18h4fYSW3rTyLZbDHQFJL7L-QOCuWxwzj9vfIs3zUXpiBtGkRDJwrHVicVpUHOcxs4Pap3yfPbo62V1pYd9WukypYaymImaY2BZQXaESzbJzp1uZw0aNb2n3pzthF5EU-8eAjNJapIRxL9iFjUIG/s3569/image_2023-06-06_232422243.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3569" data-original-width="2624" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiasoYXwdi3Hyz0wMNeUoAsqD40DeWZqApRZbsX18h4fYSW3rTyLZbDHQFJL7L-QOCuWxwzj9vfIs3zUXpiBtGkRDJwrHVicVpUHOcxs4Pap3yfPbo62V1pYd9WukypYaymImaY2BZQXaESzbJzp1uZw0aNb2n3pzthF5EU-8eAjNJapIRxL9iFjUIG/w470-h640/image_2023-06-06_232422243.png" width="470" /></a></div></span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ej_tKS-AljQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="ej_tKS-AljQ"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The ability to imbue serial music with an emotional core is a treasurable one with composers, and Cines manages this with a very modest effort in these <i>Abbreviations</i>. While perhaps not the most emotional of the set, the first one is the shortest, only one page long, and develops its material with assured care. Considering how deliberate and transparent Cines's revealing of the source row is in this first piece is, one wonders if these have been used for teaching theory - and someone like me could fantasize about having a college theory teaching post and saying "Now, take a look at this piece - oh, is this something nobody's heard before? How delightful! Mind if I play it?" An indulgence, sure, but then at least someone might play them besides myself.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWiswdWvKIhidTgA4qWH1qbkp482ZGzcphgXAD_kimDGvmY-5NOh3rMRd-mHFS6v8srp3dDPiLTodrzsdLfhlSGrNCbGBJBIt7S2YeLHqVOqHpEgza6P_cKz3FIypcF4tOho0-iirs_p6npSvg0jVjG-1R2HskQdKN_hTZM1C_MwzJ9Z3zE95sWRk5/s3560/image_2023-06-06_233217561.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3560" data-original-width="2616" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWiswdWvKIhidTgA4qWH1qbkp482ZGzcphgXAD_kimDGvmY-5NOh3rMRd-mHFS6v8srp3dDPiLTodrzsdLfhlSGrNCbGBJBIt7S2YeLHqVOqHpEgza6P_cKz3FIypcF4tOho0-iirs_p6npSvg0jVjG-1R2HskQdKN_hTZM1C_MwzJ9Z3zE95sWRk5/w470-h640/image_2023-06-06_233217561.png" width="470" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicG3Hmajz9dqyg-Dt2HviH8ix8WcjYwGVV_cAU9rPP4U7yQn_GybLIwuhZvm81APQO8Rbp_DiPxrBBsCN1_MXz8PctN3zBy8pRfcFxmB1gin-CRbjRBrNEwSnpELpqVubk5_mCU44dAR8Rwm9_2kxgMY1rE5Ta20BkHs5wQcZUjqynryrX9RWVO1GK/s3566/image_2023-06-06_233311005.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3566" data-original-width="2632" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicG3Hmajz9dqyg-Dt2HviH8ix8WcjYwGVV_cAU9rPP4U7yQn_GybLIwuhZvm81APQO8Rbp_DiPxrBBsCN1_MXz8PctN3zBy8pRfcFxmB1gin-CRbjRBrNEwSnpELpqVubk5_mCU44dAR8Rwm9_2kxgMY1rE5Ta20BkHs5wQcZUjqynryrX9RWVO1GK/w472-h640/image_2023-06-06_233311005.png" width="472" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3PewOxBfxuY" width="320" youtube-src-id="3PewOxBfxuY"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The second piece is where Cines starts to swoon. Much like Ben Weber, he knew how to milk a row for a good melody, and from the first few bars the listener is transported to a dark, romantic world. That swoon does a slow dance with pregnant pauses and spidery arpeggiations, both hallmarks of post-Second Viennese School composition that aims for the dramatic. But the drama is still muted, all movements arrested in enigmatic, mauve chords. The attention to finicky detail here is reminiscent of other serial micro-classics, like John Heiss's <i>Four Short Pieces</i> from the same period.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoh-esGf_CdL_Mu_yTlzcN7rR0Sh5U1cUDBT0fbYTAAIX1ctXJO4fuqs-guIsYZx83QamdVN5ld9z6NVWTdpRcJKLAUhHp2aoK6fL3DM8ftU_TmA9L7yLi05RR6HHwuVJunRt0ozVQxUSXIM1c4_Ah4KmBfHvy1Y7pEVZWfKPFGEYHmw52bUItngp8/s3561/image_2023-06-06_233917250.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3561" data-original-width="2624" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoh-esGf_CdL_Mu_yTlzcN7rR0Sh5U1cUDBT0fbYTAAIX1ctXJO4fuqs-guIsYZx83QamdVN5ld9z6NVWTdpRcJKLAUhHp2aoK6fL3DM8ftU_TmA9L7yLi05RR6HHwuVJunRt0ozVQxUSXIM1c4_Ah4KmBfHvy1Y7pEVZWfKPFGEYHmw52bUItngp8/w472-h640/image_2023-06-06_233917250.png" width="472" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqVJQWCbGiyuL4aUaMJLdJQa6H4RF1HnQ8Nl7QpdAJ3Pix5zh7MS77I7enT-KORDc-2QoMo9xLo7lL2qSsAvc9RA3YhMNxMQF6dFIfRCxLFONqfLsV2yQhedwgEIC6-LnWzrVcttcqmxsZ_Y63fpMMOZG0xAvg5vAI6E56n8quWs-IkGnLTse4kvtI/s3560/image_2023-06-06_233954204.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3560" data-original-width="2640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqVJQWCbGiyuL4aUaMJLdJQa6H4RF1HnQ8Nl7QpdAJ3Pix5zh7MS77I7enT-KORDc-2QoMo9xLo7lL2qSsAvc9RA3YhMNxMQF6dFIfRCxLFONqfLsV2yQhedwgEIC6-LnWzrVcttcqmxsZ_Y63fpMMOZG0xAvg5vAI6E56n8quWs-IkGnLTse4kvtI/w475-h640/image_2023-06-06_233954204.png" width="475" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq0H9A71GzXSymmmdL0vCOgW5wCLLzaQLcRJWqar24dj2CTmsmMa4c22pnEGcWDp9jeLFoOWpg51_2I3mKudNvJNpBAgsGQ0Xz2Z_-ay114hkXtafzKiRS_ACBFWdd7wrtrk-KKt68_hK0iytjrMagWwPZyowyAzEKUUt8FYlLTxYC8t6gdwRdMfhu/s3562/image_2023-06-06_234026143.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3562" data-original-width="2608" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq0H9A71GzXSymmmdL0vCOgW5wCLLzaQLcRJWqar24dj2CTmsmMa4c22pnEGcWDp9jeLFoOWpg51_2I3mKudNvJNpBAgsGQ0Xz2Z_-ay114hkXtafzKiRS_ACBFWdd7wrtrk-KKt68_hK0iytjrMagWwPZyowyAzEKUUt8FYlLTxYC8t6gdwRdMfhu/w468-h640/image_2023-06-06_234026143.png" width="468" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E0x7J6eVqHQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="E0x7J6eVqHQ"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The final piece lets the drama into the foreground, and it's a black, alien one. Now we have <i>fortissimo</i>, now we have extended technique, now we have the violent rustling of bat wings and the struggle for good against the abyss. Like all good screen composers, Cines is a natural storyteller, and without functional harmony gesture and line strut on the ear's stage. And to cap off this twilight ballet, the music shoots away into mystery, a squid vanishing in its own ink.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">One day I'll mount my "sui generis" recital, one featuring the sole published works of their composers, and pieces like this will not only feature there, but are rich and endearing enough to make mounting the recital worth it in the first place. Maybe one day Cines's descendants will contact me and send me a box of his unpublished concert works, but until that day comes I'll keep his <i>Abbreviations </i>close to my heart as tiny gems of serial piano music. Considering the relative ease of putting them together, it's too bad that more pianists haven't found them yet - but if they all knew about them, where's the fun in me writing about them?</span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span face="Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial;">*This is a funny case where copyright hounds have to be kept chained - the music was <i>designed </i>to be copyright-free.</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-63472444615960325832023-05-27T23:11:00.000-07:002023-05-27T23:11:16.134-07:00Hello Again with Helena Łopuska<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtHYDbVWZJdVrOmOjBh3DaClC2zew8eRID3O5uhzBMhZBVdy4AHjFIuHKmq3EVDt7trtGGhB4khzMSgZa-13CV608IH4n9Qd5KSvUUZ_bWmCfBgyN3OK_43QMWCq9cHbyG6PemHi6W7xO3XIOrAEfdr-2Y7PfBGtccJzJW8sKK_lG4x9JI0t4Wm78e/s2306/image_2023-05-27_154458379.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="2306" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtHYDbVWZJdVrOmOjBh3DaClC2zew8eRID3O5uhzBMhZBVdy4AHjFIuHKmq3EVDt7trtGGhB4khzMSgZa-13CV608IH4n9Qd5KSvUUZ_bWmCfBgyN3OK_43QMWCq9cHbyG6PemHi6W7xO3XIOrAEfdr-2Y7PfBGtccJzJW8sKK_lG4x9JI0t4Wm78e/w400-h165/image_2023-05-27_154458379.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I was recently invited to perform experimental music in a guest spot at the Seattle bar/gallery Vermillion, and preceding the show <a href="https://youtu.be/GzHv-6aqkiI">I was interviewed by the show host, Christian Pincock</a>. 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.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@PSearPianist">PSearPianist</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@PianoScoreVids">Gamma1734</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@PianoMusicSheWrote">PianoMusicSheWrote</a>. 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.</span></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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. <a href="https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Łopuska,_Helena">The scores are here</a>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kvNeWdqyrqA" width="320" youtube-src-id="kvNeWdqyrqA"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">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 <i>Chanson Sans Parole, Op. 2</i>. 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 <i>infante défunte</i>. A central section of reserved, tragic pomp gives way to more cascades, ending just as they began, in a mist of tears.</span></div></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mHI6IYOHwcQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="mHI6IYOHwcQ"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Her <i>Mâtiné printanière, Op. 5</i> 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.</span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gnIDkSTNNS0" width="320" youtube-src-id="gnIDkSTNNS0"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Question, Op. 6</i>, 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.</span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jeBfPBPyNLI" width="320" youtube-src-id="jeBfPBPyNLI"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;">The best of her available works is </span><i style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;">Le Soir, Op. 4</i><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;">, 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.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: arial;">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.</span></div></span></div><p></p>Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-70622194398173260242019-11-14T15:39:00.000-08:002019-11-14T15:39:42.939-08:00Time and the Traveler previews - Edgar Bainton and Valley Moonlight<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A week from Saturday, baritone David Hoffman and myself on piano will present</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://livemusicproject.org/event/david-hoffman-and-peter-nelson-king-time-and-the-traveler/&source=gmail&ust=1573860791448000&usg=AFQjCNHmzREjozvtZvVuRGzq7tr77zI34w" href="https://livemusicproject.org/event/david-hoffman-and-peter-nelson-king-time-and-the-traveler/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Time and the </a></i><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://livemusicproject.org/event/david-hoffman-and-peter-nelson-king-time-and-the-traveler/">Traveler</a></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a program of British Impressionist art songs ranging from the well-known masterpiece </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Songs of Travel</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, to unknown delights, such as the scarcely-heard (and still unrecorded) </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Valley Moonlight </i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bainton" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Edgar Bainton</a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (1880-1956).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bainton is best known for <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P0TaOlkmbE">And I Saw A New Heaven</a></i>, a classic choral work that is popular in the Anglican musical tradition to this day. His instrumental and secular vocal works, however, were forgotten soon after his death, and only in recent decades has there been a renewed interest in his work, such as his three symphonies and finely-crafted miniatures, such as his string orchestra set <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN_wSHDzQCE">Pavane, Idyll and Bacchanal</a></i>. Faithful audience members of my previous recitals may recall <i>Before Dawn</i>, a Christmas recital by myself and soprano <a href="http://www.paperpuppetopera.com/">Juliana Brandon</a>, where we ended the show with Bainton's rousing New Year's song <i><a href="https://imslp.org/wiki/Ring_Out%2C_Wild_Bells_(Bainton%2C_Edgar_Leslie)">Ring Out, Wild Bells</a></i>, and will understand my enjoyment at revisiting his work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is no recording of <i>Valley Moonlight</i>, and I wouldn't want to spoil the revelation of hearing it live, but I can share the poem it sets. It is perhaps a mark of Bainton's taste that he found a single, untitled poem in a cycle to set, knowing that it contained striking imagery, nearly begging to be set to music. That is no. 5 of Gordon Bottomley's <i>Night and Morning Songs</i>, a poem cycle I'd never heard of before but was glad to be introduced to by this song.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The song's textures are fluid and illusory, perfectly matching the mysterious, sombre tone of the source text. It's through the internet's miracle of the free exchange of media that the song, and its source text, are available today, and I like to think the song's inclusion here is a long-needed rediscovery. It isn't the only one, so join us at Queen Anne Christian Church for a recital of autumnal colors and themes of loss, loneliness and man's place in the universe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Time and the Traveler - </i>Saturday, November 23rd at 7:30 pm. Queen Anne Christian Church (1316 3rd Ave W, Seattle, WA 98119). $15 suggested donation at door.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-74454656085997349622019-08-05T16:42:00.001-07:002019-08-07T11:12:24.220-07:00An Interview with David Mahler about Martin Bartlett at the Claremont Hotel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On Thursday, August 8th, trumpet player <a href="https://www.pugetsound.edu/faculty-pages/jscott/">Judson Scott</a> and myself will mount <i><a href="https://www.waywardmusic.org/?p=4558">East Coast Meets West</a></i>, a unique recital of contemporary works for different combinations of trumpet, piano and voice, with a couple of piano suites thrown in as interludes. The second of these suites is by <a href="http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=84646">David Mahler</a>, a highly original composer who has worked in experimental, non-academic circles for many decades. As his career has taken him back and forth between Pittsburgh and Seattle, we thought a work by him would be ideal for our program, which aims to bridge the gap between the Pacific Northwest and Northeast coast musical worlds. Among his recent works is the piano suite <i>Martin Bartlett at the Claremont Hotel</i>, inspired by his friendship with the eponymous composer, and I'll be performing the suite in a few days' time. I was fortunate enough to secure a correspondence interview with Mahler on the work and his career, and here's the result of that happy meeting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>How did you come to work both in Pittsburgh and Seattle?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pittsburgh became home in 2005, when my wife chose to attend grad school at Pitt (Ed.: Pittsburgh University). An intended one year sojourn has stretched into nearly fourteen years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I grew up in the Chicago area, taught school for three years in Portland, Oregon, and spent two back-to-school years at Cal Arts in Southern California. My move to Seattle in 1972 was virtually on a whim, not for work or study purposes. I lived there for twenty-three years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Do you prefer one city over the other, either for personal or musical reasons?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Seattle is my memory home, but Pittsburgh is home.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I still have very dear friends in Seattle, and love returning at least a couple of times a year.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the reasons Pittsburgh is home is because of its communal nature. Almost without exception, strangers are friends, and a passerby whom you've never met, when they ask how you're doing, really expects you to tell them. Pittsburgh, where the spirit of Mister Rogers lives, is the friendliest city I've ever known.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Living in Pittsburgh is like living in a model railroad layout. This city's topography is crumpled and, because it grew in a "pre-sluice" era, the city's engineers early-on built inclines and public steps in order for people and goods to navigate its hills and gullies. The hills in Seattle are neat and tidy compared to the topography of Pittsburgh. For as long as I've lived here, I can go out for a walk and still get lost!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Economically, Pittsburgh is stable. Affordable, too! Though these hills and valleys are uneven, Pittsburgh's economic playing field strives to be level.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The amenities of Seattle cannot be matched here, or in many cities. But tradition and age are perhaps a trade-off for amenities. History radiates from this west-of-the-Alleghenies outpost, going back to the time when Pittsburgh was the frontier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I love Pittsburgh's proximity to other cities and regions. Who knew how beautiful West Virginia is? And there are many cities within five-hundred miles of Pittsburgh: Asheville, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., among others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Musically, Pittsburgh and Seattle are two impressive cities, if quite different. The independent music scene in Seattle seems vibrant to me, whereas music in Pittsburgh is more tied to institutions. Exceptional players abound here, as they do in Seattle. Local composers here are cherished as contributors to a Pittsburgh musical legacy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Who is Martin Bartlett?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Composer Martin Bartlett, born in 1939 in England, moved with his family to Vancouver, B.C. in 1952. From the late 1960's through 1972 he lived in the San Francisco Bay area, where he immersed himself in electronic musical instrument construction. He then spent the rest of his life living in Victora and Vancouver B.C., composing, performing, building instruments, and adding Indonesian gamelan music to his long list of passions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Martin was a founding member of the Western Front Society in Vancouver, and directed its music program for many years. His work as a composer is vital to an understanding of the development of electronic and computer-controlled music.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Martin and I became close friends in 1975, remaining so until his death from AIDS in 1993.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>What is the significance of the Claremont Hotel in Seattle (now Hotel Andra)?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Knowing he was dying of AIDS, Martin visited me from his B.C. home early in 1993 for a final goodbye. Seattle's Claremont Hotel was Martin's choice for our rendezvous.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>The score includes the following quote in the front:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>"If you're not part of the problem, you're not part of the solution." ~<i>Scientific Canadian</i>, 1981</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>As far as I know, this magazine has never existed. Did it exist, or is this a joke?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The quote is from Martin's own publication, <i>Scientific Canadian</i>, vol. 1, no. 2, which he produced and had typeset and printed while traveling in India in 1981. The publication joins the many projects and people that represent the spirit of creative irreverence I was privileged to experience at the Western Front.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>The movement titles seem to just reflect the content - is there a further significance?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I think of <i>Martin Bartlett at the Claremont Hotel</i> as a kind of theatrical set, and the six sections as scenes. Each section is a reflection of, or from, Martin. The titles and sections are mostly triggered by my last visit with him. "Entrance" and "Exit (to the bells of Vancouver)" are obvious, a beginning and an ending, that's all. My lasting memory of Martin's deep, resonant voice shines in "Ghost Soliloquy", and "Be Still" is how Martin Was - collected, always confident, at ease. "Anthem, Flourish" is an arrangement of the Canadian National Anthem, and "Beloved" is my setting of the French Canadian folk song, "Un Canadien Errant".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Is the set designed wholly as a memorial, or only partly?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This set of pieces is a memorial to Martin, but also a gift of gratitude to pianist Nurit Tilles, who devoted great time and energy to playing and recording my piano music, and who, before I met her, had written the entry on Martin Bartlett for the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. The piece is dedicated to her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>East Coast Meets West </i>is presented as part of the Wayward Music Series. Thursday, August 8th at 8 pm, Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle. $5-$20 suggested donation at the door. See you soon...</span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-27889245459649802282019-07-25T10:48:00.000-07:002019-07-25T10:48:17.000-07:00An Interview with Aaron J. Kirschner about his Teasdale Songs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On August 2nd, 2019, the <a href="https://www.waywardmusic.org/">Wayward Music</a> series will present <i><a href="https://www.waywardmusic.org/?p=4555">Songs from the Exotic</a></i>, a unique song recital by vocalist Emily Ostrom and pianist Peter Nelson-King. Four major song sets are presented along with miniature gems (and a world premiere by Yours Truly), and among those sets is the enchanting <i>Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale</i> by Utah-based <a href="https://www.newmusicusa.org/profile/aaronkirschner/">Aaron J. Kirschner</a>. Having earned degrees from the University of Iowa, Boston University and the University of Utah, Kirschner has won international success with his compositions and has established a firm place in the Salt Lake City music scene as a composer, clarinetist and theorist. This performance of his <i>Teasdale Songs</i> is the Pacific Northwest premiere of the work, and to celebrate this I did a correspondence interview to get a closer look at these songs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>How did you come across <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Teasdale">Sara Teasdale's</a> poetry?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While I've known Teadale's poetry for many years, the specific idea of setting it came about in 2015. The soprano Elaina Robbins commissioned me to write a short, preferably bird-themed song, yet I struggled to find a suitable text. While my wife was antique shopping in a small town in Wyoming, I came across a first edition of Teasdale's Pulitzer Prize winning <i>Love Songs</i>. I happily added this wonderful collection to my library, and overnight the setting of "Swans" practically poured out; I had a complete sketch of the song before my wife woke up the next morning. I knew then that I wanted to set more poems from the collection, yet had to set them aside as my engagements moved towards large-scale instrumental mediums - particularly my Oboe Concerto Symphony. When I finally had a chance to return to vocal writing working with the baritone James Martin, I knew instinctively that I needed to work "Swans" into a larger cycle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Teasdale's work, when she was in her peak of fame late in her life, was conservative compared to the poetry trends of her time, and many modern composers prefer to choose poetry for songs that is as "modernist" as the music they want to write. How did you balance using "old-fashioned" poetry with modern compositional techniques?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To me, the most strikingly conservative feature of Teasdale's work (and <i>Love Songs </i>in particular) is the acceptance of female submissiveness in romantic relationships. This stands in such stark contrast to much of today's poetry and art song, let alone public discourse, that I knew I could not ignore the interplay of the poetry's themes and the current socio-political climate. It would not do to treat these poems as if I were writing in 1917, nor do I even think it is possible. And yet, the beauty in the poems must be celebrated regardless of the context of 2019. In many ways, this was one of the greatest challenges I have faced as a composer. I did not want these songs to be an overt critique of conservative attitudes towards romantic relationships - many, both in 1917 and today, find personal happiness in such environments. Rather, I wished to celebrate the beauty of Teasdale's poems, while structuring the music in such a way as to allow multiple readings of the overall message and story. "Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale" can be read as a celebration of both the message and verse, a subtly ironic setting (with the harmony pushing against the text in a way very much in contrast with the Romantic music it superficially resembles), or even as a religious allegory. Even I, as the composer, am not sure which is correct, nor do I think they are mutually exclusive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The structure forms a kind of mirror, with outer movements featuring dense, neo-romantic piano writing and inner movements relying on sparser content and atmosphere. Did this concept come from the poems, or did you find poems to fit the content?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll be honest: I hate this question, as it presumes a false dichotomy of text-first versus structure-first attitudes towards vocal composition. Unquestionably, the text drives the music; every note of my vocal writing is in deference to the text. However, the most important factor to me was the overall emotional journey. The outer two songs, as an affirmation of love and the peace of acceptance, naturally lend themselves to a different character than the middle two, which take aim at the more frustrating and emotionally draining issues of romance. Thus, I feel that the "mirrored" structure arose naturally, with the music and text both in service of the larger narrative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Have you considered other poets of Teasdale's time for art songs?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've absolutely considered other poets of Teasdale's time, but only insofar as I will consider any poet or poem. I am not generally concerned with the time period of the poets I choose. I am looking for beautiful verse that music can defer to (this is much harder to find than it sounds!) and, at least in the case of my cycles, fits into the larger narrative arc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>When John Harbison arranged his <i>Mirabai Songs </i>for chamber ensemble after originally writing them for voice and piano, he stated that chamber songs were generally more successful at the time, and that art songs were a waning format. This was more than 30 years ago. Do you see voice and piano songs having a future, or at least one that is appealing to modernist composition?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think there's a distinction that needs to be made between simply calling something "modern" music and actually calling something "Modernist". At the risk of encouraging Adorno-ish jokes, much of what we call "modern" music is really older "Modernist" music - in 2019, we are legitimately seeing art created over a century ago still referred to as "modern art". That said, to the question about piano/vocal art song versus chamber/vocal music...I see these as two distinct genres of music, both appealing to current composers. Again, I go back to deference to the text. Art song text differs from chamber/vocal text (and both differ again from opera); setting Teasdale is fundamentally different from setting Cummings. Teasdale's projects much better into the art song genre, while Cummings's - at least in my experience - is much better set as chamber/vocal. The text, not the instrumentation, is the motivation for vocal writing. The appeal of the text drives vocal composition, and given the large variance of wonderful texts I see no reason that any of the genres of vocal music should wane in appeal as we continue in the 21st century.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Songs from the Exotic</i> is performed on August 2nd, 2019, at 8 pm in the Chapel Performance Space of the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle. I hope to see you all there...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-88345239743386166812019-07-19T14:14:00.003-07:002019-07-19T14:14:55.470-07:00An Interview with Carson Cooman about Ab and Pooh<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On August 8th, 2019, <a href="https://www.pugetsound.edu/faculty-pages/jscott/">Judson Scott</a> and Peter Nelson-King (myself) will be mounting <i><a href="https://www.waywardmusic.org/?p=4558">East Coast Meets West</a></i>, a recital of late 20th-century/early 21st-century works for trumpet and piano, trumpet and voice, and piano solo. The recital features three world premieres by myself, as well as a fourth premiere, <i>A Song for Ab and Pooh</i> by <a href="https://carsoncooman.com/">Carson Cooman</a>. Cooman is an extremely productive musician, the composer of more than 1000 pieces and a very active church organist, with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/CPCooman">YouTube channel</a> featuring first recordings of many dozens of modern organ compositions. I came across <i><a href="https://carsoncooman.com/music/a-song-for-ab-and-pooh/">A Song for Ab and Pooh</a></i>, one of his compositions for trumpet and piano, on his website, offered up for free owing to its short length. An aleatoric composition (meaning that it has major elements left to be determined by the performer(s)), the trumpet is given a solo <i>a piacere</i>, with optional piano accompaniment that has "cells" of material to be treated at the pianist's whim. It's musical content intrigued me, as well as its strange title, and to find out more I reached out to Cooman. He was kind enough to do a correspondence interview, and here is the result of those questions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Aleatoric music is an occasional practice of yours rather than a constant - what draws you to the format?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I'm always interested in exploring a wide variety of possible elements in the writing of music. I've written a lot of music, but I always strive to make there be at least something about each piece that is different from things I've written before. I have no interest in writing the same piece over and over again. And here in the early 21st century, we are at a time in history with an amazing panoply of techniques and elements that can be brought to bear and combined in one's own ways in compositions. For the realization of certain musical ideas and concepts, aleatoric elements are one tool to draw upon. I love some of the unexpected rhythmic coordination aspects that can only be achieved with such kinds of notation. And I have written pieces (like Lutosławski made brilliantly "mainstream") that integrate aleatoric and strictly notated elements.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Music that has aleatoric, open form, or improvisational elements has always felt like a normal possibility to me perhaps because my instrument as a performer is the organ, which is the only Western classical instrument that has a completely mainstream, and entirely unbroken, tradition of improvisation. For all other instruments, it's become a specialized or abnormal thing. One can get a typical conservatory training in many instruments without ever improvising anything."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Who are Ab and Pooh, and is that who the piece was written for in terms of performance?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"The "Ab and Pooh" of the title are small stuffed animals (an eagle and bear) that have been with me for a long time; in Pooh's case, literally since the day of my birth. They've figured in "family lore" and our imaginations since childhood, and my brother (to whom the piece is dedicated) still to this day draws calendars that feature illustrations of these two characters doing improbable things; we give these to family members at Christmas."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The disconnection between the trumpet and piano parts is intriguing. Was the trumpet part written by itself first, or did you conceive of them at the same time?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I wrote them together, though the trumpet line is notated in detail and the piano part is just a set of elements for the pianist to use. I wrote them out originally under each other on the paper, and as I was going along it seemed that the piano ideas wanted to remain "elements," rather than being made into a fixed, strict, rhythmic accompaniment."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>How do you feel about trumpet and piano as a medium?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"My brother was a trumpet player, and I was accompanying him on the piano since the first week he took lessons. I wrote a lot of pieces for him, beginning with something for his first few months of study that used less than an octave of range. As he grew to be an advanced player and attend conservatory for college, so did the difficulty of the pieces I wrote for him. We gave many public performances together during the years that he was actively playing and spent countless hours playing privately. So the medium seems completely normal to me, and I know well its standard repertoire (as well as plenty of obscure things). We also did a lot of trumpet/organ music, which is of course also an effective genre."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>You're an extremely prolific composer, with a personally-catalogued oeuvre totalling more than a thousand pieces, and you aren't even 40. Was this a wise move?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I think the only way it would be unwise is if I had an expectation that a performer or listener needed to engage with my entire output (or even a large portion of it.) I'm happy for people to engage with it in whatever way they want and to whatever extent they want. If they find one or two pieces that suit them, that's great. If they want to (as some have) delve into an extremely large number of them, that's fine too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The notion that there is anything strange about writing a large number of pieces is, in my opinion, a very unfortunate "post-Romantic" inheritance that we are still stuck with today. In the pre-Romantic era, there was nothing at all unusual about somebody composing a large number of pieces.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think each composer has a sort of musical metabolism and a speed of working that forms very early and is extremely unlikely to change. Some people write a lot of pieces, some people write very few. Some people write those pieces very quickly, other slowly. Some work quickly and then revise, others agonize over each measure along the way, etc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The most cursory examination of music history shows there's no correlation between quality and either the number of pieces somebody writes or the time that they take to write any given piece. There are prolific composers who have written tons of excellent pieces, and there are composers who have written few works and none of them are very good. And vice versa. I remember the late Harold Shapero telling me that as a student he decided to go study with Paul Hindemith because "Hindemith was a fast, prolific composer, and I wanted to be really fast too." But in the course of that study Shapero realized that he'd always be a very slow composer. Their relative speeds were baked into both him and Hindemith from the start, and it wasn't something he was going to learn to change in lessons. And both Shapero and Hindemith wrote very high quality music.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tangentially: there's also not necessarily a correlation between being a prolific composer (having a large catalog of compositions) and writing those pieces quickly. While this is certainly true in some cases, it's not necessarily the case. <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/search?q=persichetti">Vincent Persichetti</a> said that people always commented on his being prolific and assumed that he must write quickly, but he always insisted that he wasn't actually that fast of a composer at all. He just wrote constantly. He taught at Juilliard for decades but lived his whole life in his native Philadelphia. For driving himself back and forth to New York from Philadelphia, he devised a kind of desk that he could put over the steering wheel of the car so that he could keep composing while driving. (It's amazing he died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking rather than a car accident.)"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>East Coast Meets West </i>is presented as part of the <a href="http://waywardmusic.org/">Wayward Music Series</a>. Another interview is coming, and I'll see you then...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-54173873604199927372017-09-22T11:24:00.001-07:002017-09-22T11:24:57.051-07:00Summer's-End-Pieces - Yehudi Wyner's Exeunt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yeah, yeah, Summer technically ended yesterday, but as it's still a nice day, and the weekend is starting, there's no problem with one more article, right? I may also have made the premiere recording of today's work, so that probably counts for something.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Wyner">Yehudi Wyner</a> has been chugging along as a stately Boston professional for some time now - his career stretches from the 1950's until today, and while he'll probably never burst into the popular consciousness there are a number of his works I'm quite fond of, especially the <i>Three Short Fantasies </i>for piano from 1963, performed here by Wyner himself:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps the reason I've never talked about him before is that none of his works jump up and down too much, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/tempo/article/boston-longy-school-of-music-rodney-listers-friendly-fire/4F4B4AC37D860CE009FAF62DE3A237BC">though I did have the privilege of reviewing a work of his for actual money as part of a concert review I had published in the British periodical <i>Tempo</i></a>. I may talk about the <i>Fantasies </i>at length in the future, but today we're covering one of his earliest works, published in this sumptuous collection:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This 1980 anthology collects quite a few excellent songs, from stone classics, such as two of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgyFjh3gqgU">Elliott Carter's <i>Three Poems of Robert Frost</i></a>, to remarkable obscurities, such as "A patch of old snow" and "Fire and Ice" by William Ames, two songs I hope to cover in the future. O'Neal took the offer of making an anthology on behalf of Associated Music as a challenge, and opportunity to spotlight songs he loved that hadn't gotten a fair shake in the market, especially considering that at that point nobody bought one-sheets of classical songs anymore. It's this spirit that brought this ditty to my attention:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Written one year after he snagged a Masters in Music from Yale, <i>Exeunt </i>sets <a href="https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/for-k-r-on-her-sixtieth-birthday/#content">a wry poem</a> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilbur">Richard Wilbur</a> with clarity and style. The feel is almost Neo-Baroque, the sleepy counterpoint reminiscent of a Bach-era recitative, though with open-voiced Modernism informing the harmonies. I appreciate music that can depict the feel of Summer's heavy, thick heat, those times when you don't feel like breathing too much, and the long, enveloping lines of this song do that just fine. All fast movement is the murmur of insects, aside from a bit of a "bridge" at the bottom of the first page where time and pacing is thrown into surprising variation - it's not too often one sees an 11/8 bar like that. However eerie things get, though, Wyner has the sentimentality to have the last two "anchor" notes in the bass make a IV-I resolution, even with a neat major third at the full stop. It's a small gem of a song, a fine companion to other heavy death songs, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGnxUE5Hat4">Ives's dour classic "Like A Sick Eagle"</a>. Too bad there's no studio recording of it, though I was able to make due with my own means.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's good to get back to business. C-ya,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">PNK</span>Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-30687562620466022592017-09-21T14:59:00.004-07:002017-09-21T14:59:47.366-07:00Summer's-End-Pieces - Ned Rorem's The End of Summer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In my last article I had mentioned that Hugo Weisgall walked a bit of a tightrope in achieving great success as an opera composer while sticking to his atonal guns, and today's composer, Ned Rorem, also has some serious tightrope-walkin' and gun-stickin' to his name. One of the most famous American composers I've covered here, Rorem has spent his 70-year career producing a vast body of work that consolidated American and French attempts at modal harmony, great attention to textural detail, and a great balance of poignancy and seriousness. He is arguably America's greatest composer of art songs next to Ives, writing so many of them, and of such high quality, that his achievements with them have overshadowed a remarkably large body of instrumental music, including 3 symphonies, several concerti, and dozens of other orchestral, chamber and solo works, all possessing his unique musical voice. One could argue that his works since the late 1970's have largely been rearrangements of the same material, but I'd also argue that after a certain point he was an old man and his ability to continually compose at his age is remarkable in its own right, and the pieces sounded great, anyways. It's one of these later works that we're looking at today, one of many of his works to get excellent recordings this century as part of Naxos's <i>American Classics </i>series.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I did a bit of writing on Rorem's earlier songs in <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-pair-of-whitman-leaves-by-ol-neddy.html">my Forgotten Leaves article on two Walt Whitman settings of his</a>, so check it out for context on where he came from. He debuted during a time when modal and polytonal harmonies were all the rage in America, and as the 60's rolled through and academic music took a hard right turn into Darmstadt-ville he too shook things up, though not in the same way as his contemporaries. First, here's an early song of his:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's obviously lots to like here - simultaneous familiarity and creativity, establishing a musical world that unfurls in variation. While his works display a full range of emotions, of course, his harmonic language and Francophonic soul wrapped the listener in a warm quilt. By 1985, however, he'd been through the looking glass - a decade before, in response to Vietnam he'd written one of his most chilling works, his <i>War Scenes</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's about as atonal as Rorem works get, so 1985 Rorem was able to relax a bit and write slightly more "normal" music while retaining his newfound edge. That said edge:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This blistering recording of today's work, <i>The End of Summer</i> for clarinet, violin and piano, comes courtesy of the fine folks in Fibonacci Sequence, recorded alongside Rorem's <i>Book of Hours </i>for flute and harp and <i>Bright Music </i>for larger ensemble. Considering how great <i>The End of Summer </i>is it may come off a bit goofy for me to say that it's the <i>least </i>of the three works on the disc, but only by a bit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The three movements of <i>The End of Summer </i>have a cyclical feel, loosely bookended by a typically Roremish <i>perpetuum mobile</i>. The sinister racing up and down strange scales sounds great, though is horrible to play, meaning I'll probably never program this work with Cursive, but Fibonacci Sequence operates at a different level than I. The first movement, "Capriccio", opens with a very <i>Red Violin </i>soliloquy before spilling musical marbles down musical marble chutes, and the nutso display is broken up by dramatic hushes (relatively) and another Rorem staple, semi-ironic Parisian café music. The second movement, "Fantasy", allows for the most experimentation and formal variety, allowing the instruments to drift through moods and genres as if in a dream. The closing "Mazurka" takes us back to sinister form, though never in a truly frightening way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sorry for the shortness of my critique - it's just that overly-explaining Rorem defeats the purpose of Rorem. Abstrusity was never his game, and so all his technical refinements were dressed in approachable garbs, resulting in works that were as easy to program as they were to conceptually understand. Perhaps that's why he's remained so successful for so long, even if this work isn't <i>exactly </i>his most memorable. But if every piece I wrote about for a themed article series was the best thing its composer ever wrote, what kind of a world would we live in? Huh? <i>Answer me that, readers!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">...it's still a great piece. So see you tomorrow.</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-71200811408004899372017-09-20T16:33:00.003-07:002017-09-20T16:33:45.966-07:00Summer's-End-Pieces - Hugo Weisgall's End of Summer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You know what's rare? Someone known in our time as an opera composer. There have been a couple Americans who've managed, like Gian Carlo Menotti and Daron Hagen, but overall the lifespan of the standard new opera is a handful of contractual performances and a line on a few resumes. This is why Hugo Weisgall is a man of noteworthiness, penning multiple operas that have gained acceptance into the second-tier American opera rep - especially considering his music is atonal. Think about it - <i>opera fans liking atonal music that isn't by Schoenberg or Berg</i>. It's a tad unthinkable, but Weisgall's operas <i>The Tenor </i>and <i>The Stronger </i>are still revived, with other shows of his like <i>Six Characters in Search of an Author </i>still snagging rave reviews in spite of usual seat-filler-killers like dense harmonic experimentation and dramatic unease. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Adding to this noteworthiness is that Weisgall's other works are usually excellent and worth reviewing - s</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ome time ago I talked about his <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2015/12/autumnal-classics-hugo-weisgalls-four.html">Opus 1 song cycle on poems by Adelaide Crapsey</a>, and while that was as tonal as his music ever got it still showed a creative and earnest voice refining poetic expression with great promise. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XJWFB53/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=IUH2FORJYAX0G&colid=3QPB83DL7Q9OJ">A new recording of his rich and exciting Sonata for Piano, sharing disc space with Hindemith's underheard Ludus Tonalis</a>, was released just this year, and perhaps it'll nudge a few more of his works back into the contemporary music limelight</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. Today's work is also rich and exciting, and is part of a very small, but vital, collection of works about the last days of t-shirt season - </span><i style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">End of Summer</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, a song set for voice, oboe and string trio, an instrumental combination I've enjoyed (with or without voice) for years now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>End of Summer </i>sets two poems by Po Chii-i (translated by Weisgall himself) and one by a certain George Boas (who may or may not have been a Christian writer - the ones listed certainly didn't write poetry), breaking the songs up with a pair of interludes - and I must say, y</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ou gotta love any art song set that begins on eating lunch. The two Po Chii-i poems are part of the rich heritage of old Chinese poetry that 20th-century songwriters love to set, though Weisgall wisely avoids aping any Chinese music <i>per se </i>as to avoid cross-cultural embarrassment. Throughout the set, and most of his work, he explores an individual, highly contrapuntal language of atonality, spun with easy expertness and never trying to shock the audience. "After Lunch", the opener, displays this with a kind of sardonic humor that old Chinese poetry seems oddly good at, with the tempo marked "Aloof, and quite without expression". The lyrics, an amusing mixture of boredom and upper-crust display, are well-matched by a sub-sprightly waltz time, lack of overt drama and slippery <i>glissandi</i>. This is followed by a full-bodied interlude for solo oboe, quite <i>espressivo </i>and as sad as a loon who lost the mating game. Despite it being as long as the first song the "Quasi Fantasia" fits on one page, so I'm glad to reprint it here as an illustration of Weisgall's melodic invention at work:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second song, "Hearing Someone Sing a Poem by Yuan Chen", is prime-cut tragedy, as icy and constrained as a frozen river. The tempo is almost unconscionably slow (63-69 to the <i>sixteenth note</i>!), and this sense of static horror is a perfect way to set the deep sorrow that artists feel knowing that their mentors and colleagues have passed on, never again to create new works and initiating the inevitable decline of what they made in life. This is followed by a fitful, nervous "Scherzo", punctuating dovetailing counterpoint with sinister unisons:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"De Senectute" closes the set with great austerity and weight, blanketing the listener like humid haze. Much like "Someone..." the tempo is awkwardly slow, forcing the musicians to think and move through a curtain of molasses. This song in particular shows off tenor Charles Bressler's great command of pitch and assured, mature tone, doubly impressive in a song this exposed and risky. I have to applaud Weisgall for being able to extend the dramatic tension and almost crippling sense of yearning throughout such a long song, as things could have easily descended into monotony in the hands of a lesser composer. A lesser composer would also have had trouble pulling off a closing minute like this one, with each chord following a natural progression through atonality and proving their value and finality at the softest of dynamics, reminding me in particular of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSmUNNp9gt8">Carl Ruggles's <i>Angels</i></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>End of Summer</i>, along with Weisgall's other large chamber song cycle <i>Fancies and Inventions</i>, was recorded in the 1970's; this recording hasn't been officially re-released except as an archival on-demand deelio, which is what you're hearing now. In lieu of that we could encourage more performances, the only hitch being that the sheet music publisher, Theodore Presser, decided to sell the score without parts - the instrumental parts are rental only, something that is guaranteed to keep 90% of prospective performers from taking the plunge. I guess it'll have to come down to some creative MS Paint-ing to extract parts from the full score, though you didn't hear it from me...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Till tomorrow,</span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-83486269622667487432017-09-18T16:18:00.004-07:002017-09-18T16:18:36.593-07:00Summer's-End-Pieces - Stenhammar's Sensommarnätter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It's good to dust off the old blogs every once and awhile, and in my case it's been too much of awhile - when there are no deadlines there's no angry manager staring at you waiting for the pen to stop moving. A fine theme has presented itself to me for this week, concerning a fact that many people forget: summer isn't quite over yet. Rather, it officially changes to Fall this Thursday, and Monday-Wednesday are <i>de jure S</i>ummer days, and while some people can't stand the heat of Summer I am always struck with a tinge of melancholy as the rains return...well, not <i>so much </i>melancholy this year considering how our wildfire season went, but a bit, regardless. As such, I can spend this week talking about a number of pieces based on a great poetic theme, the End of Summer. I've long wanted to cover this concept, not only because of the blogworthy works that I've found based on it, but also because it's a transitional phase that means different things to different people, emotionally as well as musically. I'm also happy for this first article because I can finally talk about a Swedish composer on Re-Composing (for my Leaf article on Hilding Rosenberg click <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2013/12/hilding-dans-le-labyrinthe-englouti.html">here</a>).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While Sweden has been very good at producing musicians of world renown, including conductors (Neeme Jarvi), trumpet players (Hakan Hardenberger) and trombonists (Christian Lindberg), its composers have never enjoyed the same level of fame, or at least "important" status. It's not that there haven't been a number of great composers to come from the shore of Middle Fennoscandia - far from it, in fact - there's just that little matter of <i>luck </i>that hasn't been on their side. It's also important to note that public taste only allowed for less than a handful of superstars to come from the Nordic countries in the first place: Mr. Grieg from Norway, Mr. Nielsen and Mr. Ruders from Denmark, and Mr. Sibelius and Mrs. Saariaho from Finland. None of Sweden's major composers have quite risen above the fame level of Denmark's Niels Gade, a wonderful composer when you get to know him but still afflicted with the pesky syndrome of international obscurity. With Sweden a few pieces have cracked the Hot Overseas charts:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">+ Dag Wirén wrote a lovely <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bKlWxFSpTI"><i>Serenade </i>for strings</a> that gets a bit of radio play over here, as well as that <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9yqYrLnAtA">Little Serenade</a> </i>by Lars-Erik Larsson</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">+ The strikingly progressive Liszt-era composer Franz Berwald saw a renaissance this last century, especially his <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0G1Z9dwyPU">Symphony no. 3, "Singulière"</a></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">+ Kurt Atterberg has a few pieces that have followings in the States, specifically his luscious <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWjOfsWJi14">Symphony no. 2</a></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One man who hasn't gained <i>any</i> clout away from home, but perhaps should have, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Stenhammar">Wilhelm Stenhammar</a>, whose most respected pieces are his 2 finished symphonies and 6 string quartets. I can vouch for the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CphTCAvAurc&index=1&list=PLcri4FMQzREPGnqfq0Ac07kbRsTQx1c1A">third string quartet</a> possessing great craftsmanship, enchanting melodies and moments of appealing surprise, all qualities present in today's featured piece, <i><a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Sensommarn%C3%A4tter,_Op.33_(Stenhammar,_Wilhelm)">Sensommarnätter, op. 33</a>. </i>The end of Summer has a kind of special quality when one lives as far north as in Sweden, largely because Summer is more notable there, as well. I had the privilege of visiting Sweden during the Summer and not only is the weather surprisingly pleasant but there's the entrancing effect of the Midnight Sun. Perhaps in reflection of similar feelings the <i>Sensommarnätter </i>(Late Summer Nights) possess a sense of foreboding sadness that perfectly fits the change in seasons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The work is set in five movements of alternating speeds, opening with a deeply-cast lyricism. Appropriately enough for a nocturnal work, the first melody is in the tenor, <i>portament</i>-ing its way up the bass cleff so fully as to make cellists salivate. It's hard not to like how most of the melodic material, and interior texture, of the movement is simply moving around scales, as one has to like new ways to make that sound interesting. Much effect is also gotten by expanding the harmonic and technical scope of the left-hand material as ideas are repeated, especially the huge arpeggiated chords in the last iteration of the "B" theme.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second movement is a kind of etude for repeated attacks with one hand, one that looks reasonable on the page but is surprisingly difficult, as most pianists will want to alternate hands instead. As soon as you think you're tired with all that, however, Stenhammar switches it up to a sprightly "B" section with bounding arpeggios that scoop from one chord to another with humorous grace; later it's "A" business as usual.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The third movement is arguably the best of the bunch, a diffuse nocturne that alternates between lithe preciousness and deep anticipation. Much like the opening movement there is an expert marriage of melody and harmonic ambition, and the piano technique surprises in its elaboration without becoming a chore. One of the more remarkable moments is the great welling up in the bass of E major after the opening section nearly resolves, showing Stenhammar experimenting with planing sevenths and fourths. It's one of four expansive figures that feel like enormous sighs, with the second and fourth phrases allowing the pedal to release as the left hand assumes material introduced in an ascending series of thirds and the right to rise into space, like Debussy's perfumes turning in the evening air.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fourth movement is one of those sinister galloping pieces, a genre that quickly went out of fashion once Modernism got rolling along but is amply served here. This is the most difficult of the movements to play, as there are not only very fast inverse cascades at <i>pp </i>but also widely-spanning motorific bits in the left hand that get tiring quickly. Many other devilish bits abound. I'd like to mention here that I've never tried to play this movement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The last movement rounds the set out with another ingenious pairing of melody and harmony, this time in a kind of moderate <i>passepied </i>in character of those wistful early Debussy movements from the <i>Suite Bergamasque </i>and the <i>Petite Suite</i>. Even though the material is simple on the surface there are many novel harmonic movements and small textural touches that make for a fine closer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The whole set exudes a lively combination of charm and untroubling seriousness that make it one of Stenhammar's most appealing works. There have been a few album-length overviews of Stenhammar's piano works, including a pair of piano sonatas, but the </span><i style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Sensommarnätter </i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">are my favorites and his best chance of securing a place in the international piano rep. A couple of the movements might appear a bit too old-fashioned for modern tastes but I think their variety and invention easily overcome any creakiness. Stay tuned this week for more late Summer delights, as things get much weirder and wilder from here...</span><br />
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-76107290854960971972017-03-22T12:58:00.000-07:002017-09-18T11:19:39.536-07:00An Open Letter to Groupmuse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.waywardmusic.org/?p=3149">Tomorrow, March 23rd at 8:00 pm, <i>Tall Wind</i>, the newest program by my chamber group Cursive, will see its one-night-only performance (deets in this link).</a> Cursive is a group dedicated to the ideals of this blog, shining a light on excellent classical music that has been swept under the rug by the establishment and history, though with a focus on music from the latter half of the 20th century. This is our third program and features some of Seattle's best and most adventurous new music performers playing scarce works such as Tison Street's <i>Variations </i>for flute, cello and guitar and Chinary Ung's fabulous <i>Tall Wind</i>. It's been a dream come true to be able to mount programs like this repeatedly and I hope all my musicians the best for tomorrow night. I've been having a bit of trouble finding ways to use this blog to promote our cause, a risk that one takes when most of the programmed pieces lack recordings. However, a situation presented itself just today which required my action and helped me expound on Cursive's cause.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.groupmuse.com/calendar">Groupmuse</a> is a community project that creates a framework for local chamber groups to do house concerts in any home in the greater Seattle area that signs up to host. All the money gathered from seat sales goes to the musicians and hosts and audiences have an easy, safe way to get the chamber music experience in a comfortable and relaxed environment. It's a great deal for everybody, especially the musicians, except for one caveat: at least half of the program has to be "standard rep". Their reasoning (<a href="https://www.groupmuse.com/mission">viewable here in their mission statement page</a>) is that "standard rep" works have stood the test of time for their "substance and profundity", and that ensuring that some older works make it on to every concert keeps the artistic quality high. For many soloists and groups they were going to perform a standard work anyways, so this isn't an issue, but it is for groups like mine, other modern groups and groups that just don't like having to make every program built around something you hear on the radio every day. I've never considered submitting a Cursive program for their consideration because I know it'll be rejected solely based on the rep, but that doesn't mean that Groupmuse upholds this policy 100% of the time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The only Groupmuse performance I attended was one by Trio Pardalote wherein they performed Hans Krasa's <i>Theme and Variations </i>and Jean Cras's gorgeous <i>String Trio</i>, the latter being the reason I wanted to go. Neither of these works is in the "standard rep" but both have what could be called cult followings. It was a great concert but was a bit deceptive, as it gave me hope that I could make a program that was as "standard" as that and get it selected. I made a piano recital program of British Impressionist works, pieces that were not only rarely heard but that general audiences would probably really like, and submitted it only to have it rejected multiple times. One could argue that I'm not a big enough name to be selected, or that the videos I had of myself performing on my Groupmuse page weren't good enough, but what cheesed me off was how the rejection notice came with the suggestion that my program could have been rejected because it didn't have enough standard rep on it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Today I got an email from Groupmuse with a link to a survey asking if we had any suggestions for changing the model. One of the questions was if Groupmuse failed to meet any of its mission statements - my response (slightly reformatted and revised) is below, and I'd like to submit it as an open letter, not just to Groupmuse but to the music community at large. The issues addressed here matter not just to Groupmuse but to the whole classical music industry, and I hope that it will help focus the reasons I run Cursive, and write this blog, for readers and colleagues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>An Open Letter to Groupmuse:</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You asked me in your survey if there were any issues with your business model, such as if your concerts didn't meet the goals stated in your "Mission & Values" page on your website. My main issue is with the insistence that at least half the
music performed needs to be "standard rep" classics, a claim that
wasn't necessarily upheld at the Groupmuse I attended. I was at Trio Pardalote's recital where they
performed the Jean Cras String Trio and the Hans Krasa Theme and Variations,
both excellent pieces but neither or them "standard rep". What is or isn't "standard rep" is
subject to change, and they way that someone like myself who's well-versed in
classical music and was at that last concert interprets this clause is that
you're trying to make sure that at least half the program consists of work(s)
old enough to have been written when the "standard rep" pieces were
new(er) works. </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I fully understand why
you'd want this, as works before modernism largely fit the popular image of
what classical music is supposed to sound like and lack things that audiences
new to modern music might find ugly or offensive, such as strange harmonies and
rhythms or unpleasant thematic material.
The mission statement talks about supporting "substance and
profundity", which is all well and good, but just because something was
written before 1910 doesn't mean it has either of those qualities. Plenty of vapid classical music has
"stood the test of time" simply because general audiences like it,
and the establishment knows this and programs those pieces anyway. That isn't to say that more modern music
can't be vapid - there have just been more composers making music with each
passing year. There will always be vapid
music, profound music and stuff in between. </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What your policy does is keep groups from performing music that is
possibly unpleasant, or is written by a composer whose name doesn't appear at
least once during every orchestra season.
It ensures some kind of consistency in drawing an audience, as the
general public hasn't been encouraged to venture any farther than that in the
classical genre, but it does little to expand the possibilities of local
classical performance or do justice to works that deserve play but aren't
famous. Classical performers and record
labels have been doing a lot of work in the last few decades to unearth excellent
works that have been forgotten by the public and classical establishment and
give them a new lease on life; whole record labels and groups have been
established solely for that purpose.
Doing this isn't just for the sake of the music but is also a good
business strategy as per supply and demand - create demand for your product by
supplying something that the public can't get anywhere else. </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is why I came to the Trio Pardalote
concert, because they were playing great works that nobody else in the area is
performing. There's so much great music
out there that doesn't get performed frequently that every chamber group in the
community could perform full seasons of extremely obscure music, with no
overlap, and have enough left over to do the same for decades. That doesn't mean they have any encouragement
to do so or even scratch the surface of this hidden rep. If you want to keep the music pleasant, or
stylistically consistent with music more than 100 years old, that's fine, but
you ought to change your "mission statement" to reflect what you're
really going for. On the other hand, if
you're really looking for substance and profundity, you could aim for
programming that kind of music while still leaving the door open to music
that's new to audiences, both recently written and written long ago. I was there with the audience of the Trio
Pardalote concert, one that was both engaging and fulfilled the "substance
and profundity" goal, and the audience loved it. </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's so much out there that general
audiences could appreciate if they were shown the way. People need encouragement to explore the
arts, both creators and consumers, and there's no reason Groupmuse can't be an
open and supportive environment for exploration. Your structure is fantastic - it's a great
deal for the musicians and creates a framework for fun, relaxed concerts in
otherwise unlikely venues. Why not open
the door to performers and audiences who want something more than what they
hear every day on the radio, who want a concert-going experience that doesn't
kowtow to what the establishment thinks is "standard", who want to
make their own way through the vast and wonderful world that is classical
music?</span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Sincerely,</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Peter Nelson-King, founder of Cursive</i></span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-31404401482974812572016-12-30T13:57:00.004-08:002016-12-30T13:57:49.942-08:00In Memoriam 2016 - Pauline Oliveros<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Do you Deep Listen?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I don't mean whether or not you listen deeply, but rather if you practice <a href="http://deeplistening.org/site/content/home">Deep Listening</a>, an altogether more obscure and delicious type of listening. Chances are you think that I'm foisting a Zen riddle or bad popsicle stick joke on you, but some of you will recognize that phrase as the calling card of one of the premiere ambient music groups in the US, one whose importance and recording sites were both very large indeed. I'm referring, of course, to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Listening_Band">Deep Listening Band</a>, a group created by the great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Oliveros">Pauline Oliveros</a>, a singular figure in Classical music and beyond who kept on trucking to the very end.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Oliveros was able to surmount incredible odds to make a career in music, specifically being taught the accordion when she was a child*. Once she reached college she bounced around a few institutions before settling in at San Francisco State College where she came under the tutelage of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Erickson">Robert Erickson</a>, one of America's great compositional never-heard-a-'im's, and first met her longtime co-conspirator and co-genius <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Dempster">Stuart Dempster</a>, as well as the one and only <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Riley">Terry Riley</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You see, these were the Days of Wine and Hallucinogens, the heady and wacky era of New Music when the cultural revolution was seeping into academia, the era of John Cage's greatest influence, and Oliveros took to it all like a ring in a bell. She was an original member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, an important early center for electronic music on the west coast, and became the director of it when it moved to Mills College on the Wrong Side of the Tracks**. During this time she developed the <a href="http://deeplistening.org/site/content/expandedmusicalinstruments">Expanded Instrument System</a>, an improvisational technique that combined live instrumental playing with electronics and sound processing environments, and would continue to refine and employ this system throughout her career, especially with the DLB. She wised up after a while and moved back to California to teach at UC San Diego, in a department that Erickson co-founded, and eventually became the director of the university's Center for Music Experiment (sic). However, she left that position, at the end a tenured one, in 1981 to move to upstate New York and become an independent musician and composer, a bold move that freed her creatively and allowed here to further immerse herself in nature, a foretelling move if there ever was one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1988 (my birth date, by the way <i>JEALOUS MUCH?!</i>), she heard about the Fort Worden Cistern in Port Townsend, WA, a massive military well that had long ago been drained and was built to hold millions of gallons of water. Joined by Dempster on trombone and the vocalist Panaiotis (check his Wikipedia page for pronunciation), Oliveros descended into the cistern to make an album-length improvisation that took advantage of the cistern's incredible 30-second echo. The result was <i>Deep Listening</i>, the first album to capture what would become a band, institute and philosophy. Deep Listening is a little hard to define (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Listening-Composers-Sound-Practice/dp/0595343651/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483125482&sr=1-1&keywords=deep+listening">Oliveros wrote a book on it</a> if you need a longform explanation) but Oliveros offered a single sentence version: "listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing". It's essentially a way of creating an immersive soundspace ruled by sympathetic, resonant improvisation and geared at achieving higher sonic awareness, though that sentence in itself is a bit goofy. However you want to define it the results with the Band are excellent, and the group has put out 15 albums as of this writing. Their future is a bit uncertain with Oliveros's passing but the albums will continue to stand as a testament to the Band's magical creativity, and founding member Stuart Dempster is still alive and kicking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Speaking of Dempster: his 80th birthday was back in July, and there was <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/events/24093751/swarmstew-honoring-stuart-dempster-on-his-80th">a concert/happening</a> in his honor at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle. I stopped in, as I had worked with Dempster years prior when he visited the University of Puget Sound, and I enjoyed every second of his birthday jam, a nearly 2-hour improvisation preceded by the audience humming outside and ended with Dempster himself (seated practically right next to me the whole night, unbeknownst to myself until he got up) leading a big group dance/conga line/whoopinanny. Among the musicians were Seattle trombonist/Indian music specialist/goofball Greg Powers on flugelbone (a fascinating flugelhorn/trombone hybrid) and squeaking pig toy and the unearthly vocalist Ione, whose mouth improv must be seen to be believed. Also present was Oliveros, who had quite the talent with a harmonica and looked happy to still be performing at her age. I clandestinely made a nearly 20-minute video of part of the improvisation with my phone, so hopefully one day I'll upload the footage to YouTube and get sued by somebody, but rest assured that it was a warm and fuzzy 80th bash and I'm very happy I went. I'm also very happy I was able to see Oliveros perform live before her passing, and I guess that what I saw was one of her last performances - and thankfully it was a great one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's a lot to the life and career of Pauline Oliveros, electronic and improvisation music iconoclast and overall musical legend, but I feel that nothing could be a better eulogy for her career than showing you guys some Deep Listening goodness. Here's the original <i>Deep Listening </i>album in full, originally released in 1989 by New Albion and still in print as one of the coolest ambient music projects of all time. Rest in peace, Pauline.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">~PNK</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*<i>ZZZZZZIIIIIIINNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">**<i>ADOUBLEZINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG</i></span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-41938288172214540982016-12-29T00:04:00.000-08:002016-12-29T00:04:04.100-08:00In Memoriam 2016 - Gregg Smith<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As this past month has had me checking the "recent death" pages of many a site each and every day I've been antsy about making sure I don't miss anybody notable or "men of my own heart" as it were. Wikipedia's list was pretty eye-opening (<a href="http://re-composing.blogspot.com/2016/12/in-memoriam-2016-steven-stucky.html">Steven Stucky</a> was totally left out of national news, for one) and helped me remember a few figures who I'd mourned in previous months but had since slipped my mind. A few people are bound to slip through the cracks regardless of my vigilance, however, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/arts/music/gregg-smith-choral-leader-who-elevated-standards-dies-at-84.html">Gregg Smith</a> was nearly one of them, largely because even the majority of people who knew of him didn't know he was a composer. Gregg Smith was, and should remain, best known as the founder and leader of the <a href="http://greggsmithsingers.com/">Gregg Smith Singers</a>, one of the most revered choirs in America for their pioneering work in championing new music and historically valuable American music. Equally at home recording William Billings and Elliott Carter, the Singers have had a career spanning more than 60 years and over 130 albums, making them one of the most prolific recording choirs of all time. I could go on for ages about the Singers' accomplishments, including showcasing this Christmas Carol album -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">- or their recent recording of Stravinsky's "notorious" arrangement of <i>The Star-Spangled Banner</i> -</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">- but Smith's composing career is why we're really here, though my review of it will have to be brief. Smith's own compositions were almost exclusively choral works, covering a wide swath of poetic sources and shaking up the traditional choir "sound" with some instrumental variety. Almost none of it was recorded, or at the very least searching for it has been something of a challenge, but there is one work that I'd like to spotlight here, and that's the only one that showed up, without any direct involvement by Smith, on a new music compilation completely devoid of choral music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Steps</i>, a setting for voice and guitar of a poem by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_O%27Hara">Frank O'Hara</a>, New York experimental writer and <a href="http://snippetsfromstrangers.tumblr.com/post/23998157957/bbook-frank-ohara-and-edward-gorey-poet-frank">Harvard roommate of Edward Gorey</a>, might not be enough to be representative of Smith's compositional "voice" but is certainly a bubbly and engaging work that adds a fresh perspective to the voice and guitar rep. This 1975 piece may have been inspired by the 1972 National Book Award co-win of <i>The</i> <i>Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara</i>, the first of several posthumous collections of O'Hara's work, but might also have been simply because the text is pretty boss. O'Hara's poetry stretched the boundaries of form and content, featuring everything from snippets of diary entries to telephone conversations, and were primarily autobiographical, and reviewing the lyrics to this piece (viewable by opening the performance video in a separate window and looking at the description) make me want to have met him, badly. The writing here for the voice and guitar is showy and full of wild climaxes, following the ditzy, yet highly observant and sometimes grim, nature of the text. Surprisingly for someone primarily devoted to vocal composition, Smith's guitar writing is quite sophisticated and untroubled, though I'm not sure if he worked with a player or learned all by himself. The piece has never been published, the only copy I know of donated as a gift by Smith to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but it was recorded by none other than David Starobin, America's premier new music guitarist.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That previous recording was done at the SFCM, so it sadly looks like Smith's best shot at a "hit" isn't getting the repeat performances it deserves. That doesn't mean we all have to sit on our hands, though, so perhaps you guys know some guitarists, some guitarists who wouldn't mind playing from a manuscript gotten from the archives of a school in the worst housing market in the States, someone who knows a singer with a taste for satirical theatrics. The Singers wouldn't be afraid to play it, so why should we?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rest in peace, Gregg.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-57804238248094616022016-12-28T17:40:00.000-08:002016-12-28T17:40:05.440-08:00In Memoriam 2016 - Pierre Boulez<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Earlier this year I used this same image in <a href="http://re-composing.blogspot.com/2016/01/withdrawn-month-pierre-boulezs-3.html">an article</a> about a piece that the pictured composer, Pierre Boulez, had withdrawn from his catalog, the infuriatingly enticing <i>Trois Psalmodies </i>for piano. It's the most happy, inviting one I could find of him, and while I've been making an effort to get flattering, sunny photos of the people I've talked about for these <i>In Memoriam </i>articles there's an added pressure with Boulez, partially because that for a lot of people, including a part of me, Boulez was the troll under modern music's bridge. For decades there was no way to experience the cutting edge of Avant-Garde classical music without running across his name or his works, and the latter's reputation was primarily painted with the brush of his <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXJWHG_6KAI">Piano Sonata no. 2</a></i>, an especially brutal work that has gained quite a status since its authorship in the 1950's. While I personally favor that work over <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OE7UmKmix0">Jean Barraqué's Piano Sonata</a>, as forbidding an "opus one" work as there ever was, I'll probably never see eye to eye with Boulez's <i>oeuvre </i>or ideals. Sticking to music that doesn't kowtow to popular tastes or Classical music's "relaxing" market niche does make him quite admirable, but it's mostly just not music I can use - and I say that as a man who has spent this entire blog championing works by artists whom the general public found no use for. For this memorial article, however, I'll talk about a work that is the most appropriate musical eulogy for Boulez, and some of you may have heard a different version of it without even realizing it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The <i>Memoriale </i>is one of the several versions of <i>...explosante-fixe...</i>, originally written for flute, clarinet and trumpet in the early 1970's as a eulogy for Igor Stravinsky*. I may have mentioned in my last Boulez article that he kept revising and recycling this piece for decades, culminating in a work for flute, midi and orchestra, and that I personally heard Gunther Schuller express disdain at the fact that Boulez was allowed to publish all the revisions as separate pieces and collect royalties for all of them. I'd argue that they're all fairly different from one another (and Stravinsky himself constantly revised and rearranged his own works and nobody complains about <i>that</i>, now <i>do they?!</i>), and my favorite one is the one here, scored for flute, two horns and string sextet. Another composer I personally met, Daron Hagen, claimed that he preferred Boulez works where he "was trying to be Debussy, and not playing mind games with himself (*motions with hands*)", and I can't think of a more Debussy-esque piece of his than this. The <i>Memoriale </i>is lush, a bit capricious and enchanting to a "t", several spins of a kaleidoscope with core material diced up in the lens. The younger Stravinsky would certainly have approved, as the softly jutting flute line and cushioning, sympathetic strings would be right at home in the <i>Firebird</i>, itself heavily indebted to the harmonic doors that Debussy opened for the world. There's also an indebtedness <i>Memoriale </i>has to Debussy directly, as his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYyK922PsUw" style="font-style: italic;">Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune</a>, allowing a flute solo to dictate rises and falls and cycle back to the same phrases over and over. It's a lovely rest-stop for Boulez's career of making works to stand one's skin on end. And luckily for you guys somebody uploaded a score/recording combo video so you can see Boulez's subtly ingenious orchestrations at work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Rest in peace, Pierre.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*Fun fact: the premiere of <i>The Rite of Spring </i>is closer to Beethoven's time than ours.</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-12502198559642441102016-12-22T11:59:00.001-08:002016-12-22T12:48:31.833-08:00In Memoriam 2016 - Steven Stucky<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I mentioned in my peek at <a href="http://re-composing.blogspot.com/2016/12/in-memoriam-2016-roland-dyens.html">Roland Dyens's <i>Songe Capricorne</i></a>, <i>Re-Composing </i>is spending the rest of this month paying tribute to the composers we lost in 2016, many of whom were major figures and at least a couple who were living legends. Back in February we lost a man who gained as much acclaim and credibility as an American composer can without actually becoming necessarily famous, Steven Stucky (1949-2016). Stucky is a composer that I had never heard of before college and have since strangely forgotten to really investigate, even though I've heard a number of his works and I ran across his scholarship when reading about Witold Lutoslawski, one of my favorite composers and one upon which Stucky was an expert. He's even unfamous for a Pulitzer Prize winner, snagging it for his <i>Second Concerto for Orchestra</i>, an unusual winning work in that it still hasn't been recorded in the 13 years since its composition. As I'm writing this I'm admiring one of his later works, a <i>Symphony </i>from 2012 that sounds like it's right up Ludovic Morlot's alley (*HINT SSO PROGRAMMERS*):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps he needed to attach himself to a movement or school of thought to be recognized, like post-minimalism or post-modernism or post-postism. The education system in this country, as well as the general public, prefer to think of artists in broad, historically categorizable terms related to technique, oftentimes smudging or ignoring their actual <i>modi operandi</i> in the process. You'd think that performers and other composers would be the experts on different the different "camps", and they usually are considering their first-hand knowledge of the techniques and aesthetics involved, but the more you understand an artist the more you see them as an individual and want to promote them on their own terms, rather than as a package deal with several other artists whom they might not agree with or even think are worth giving the time of day to. A number of mediocre talents have sustained careers through sticking with the categories, while more individual composer have to work at it a bit. That isn't to say that Stucky was eccentric (which would have won him <i>those </i>kind of fans (the best kind:))) - his music had an untroubled, "normal" brilliance, if that makes any sense, and he allowed himself to change with inspiration and simply do good work, which is kind of the only thing we can ask of composers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While my own investigation of his work will take a bit of time I can freely speak on what has the potential to be his best-known work, one that I performed in my time at UPS with the Wind Ensemble: the <i>Funeral Music for Queen Mary</i>, a model work of Everything-Old-Is-New-Again-ism. Ya see, there was a wave of composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who went about "recomposing"* works from the Renaissance, Baroque and early Classical periods, such as Grieg with his suite <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7HfUvYYygs">From Holberg's Time</a> </i>to Stravinsky's <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVEcJnlHUMM">Pulcinella</a> </i>and Respighi's <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0TvuyN7siA">Gli Uccelli</a> </i>and <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSqymoJeV6s">Ancient Airs and Dances</a></i>. This practice continued sporadically through the century until gaining a resurgence after the 1970's when postmodernism became the <i>mot juste du jour</i>. These kinds of works have gone from being fashionable to being nearly inevitable in any given orchestral season, but no matter how many homages/riffs/caricatures we see of older works I'll still remember Stucky's <i>Funeral Music for Queen Mary </i>as being one of the best.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Purcell's stately funeral march, composed in 1694 for the funeral of Queen Mary, has persisted through the centuries as one of the most loved English Baroque works, though it's probably best known these days in its "switched on" form that Wendy Carlos made for <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI-mDTdeKR8">A Clockwork Orange</a></i>. Stucky's recomposition for wind ensemble does more than beef up the orchestration and throw in a modern harmony or two, instead weaving together three different Purcell pieces from the same funeral service through diffusion and dark psychological episodes. Each work is presented clearly but then superimposed and whorled, sometimes as rubbing a pencil line into a cloud and other times as an overwhelming anarchy of mourning. Stucky's orchestrations are ingenious, showing deft coloring choices and expert balancing, delivered with perfect pacing - all skills he was able to hone through his study of Lutoslawski's works, some of the most finely orchestrated and paced works of the mid-century Avant-Garde scene. It's stirring and unsettling, satisfying and haunting all at once and I'm very glad I was given the chance to perform it with an excellent group. I may return to Stucky's music in a later article but for now this will more than suffice as an introduction and fond farewell. Rest in peace, Steven.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*Blog title drop! (finally)</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-65147700321566801912016-12-21T11:32:00.000-08:002016-12-21T11:32:06.943-08:00In Memoriam 2016 - Roland Dyens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">OK, the bright side of life first. I'll take a selfish attitude to start so I can insist that, yes, some good things happened this year (though if I were a Cubs fan like certain best friends of mine I'd count the ultimate "Hell Freezing Over" sports event of the year as a good thing). I was able to get a full-time job through a 20-minute interview, the shortest I'll probably ever get in my life, and it's worked out for nearly 3 months now. I still have both my spleens, and...wait... My chamber group Cursive played two excellent, challenging programs this year and are in preparations for a third, the cherry on top being that the musicians involved <i>actually appreciate being in the group and the work that we're doing</i>. I secured future housing with an amazing deal, I don't have any terminal illnesses, and I'm not in crippling debt due to student loans, loansharks or my own multitudinous sins. However, all of us, and I mean everybody who can stand to speak to me without projectile vomiting, can agree that this year sucked supreme shit of every type, shape and species of origin imaginable. Full-stop, cheek-bulging shit-sucking. Let me sum it up with much funnier writing than my own:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Let me say this as clearly as I can: there's nothing America did worse this year (that I know of) than electing Trump president. Nothing. I just heard about how bird flu is ripping through South Korea without proper government acknowledgement or action and <i>every chicken in a meat/egg plant has been ordered to be killed</i>, and Trump's 99.99999% potential presidency is still worse. What the fuck. I'd break my legs in protest but that would only prevent me from sprinting to Canada until my lungs explode. Fuck Trump, fuck this country, fuck the media and fuck humans in general. Fuckity fucker fuckfuckfuckeatmyanuswithshitsauceandbastardinteriorfuckfuckfuckfuckdonkeyanus. And while there have been big wallops of despair like that we've had to endure an obscene number of small wallops (smallops?) of despair in the form of celebrity deaths, including the one-two punch of pop-music legends David Bowie and Prince. I mean, for fuck's sake. The big'un's, of course, dominated social media and the news when their deaths were announced, but dozens of little guys went largely or totally unnoticed, leaving people like me with the sad responsibility of checking Wikipedia's deaths page every day to make sure I don't miss anything. I didn't get into this habit until late this year and most likely wouldn't have bothered if it weren't for the sheer volume of these kinds of deaths, and in doing so I found that a number of classical composers near and dear to my heart left us this year, some of them too young to go and a lot of them well-established and even legendary figures. Normally I'd spend December covering Christmas music (and I might squeeze in a few nods before the month is out) but I've decided that for this year-end I'll talk about my favorite composers that passed away this year, because, sadly, hardly anybody else has bothered to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I was in Middle School I went to my first classical guitar recitals, perhaps not so surprising as classical guitar recitals aren't something that parents think to take children to as primary cultural education. It was at a Unitarian Universalist church in Kirkland, WA, and the soloist was Michael Partington, arguably the Pacific Northwest's best-kept classical music secret. Partington is a wonderful guitarist whose talent and heart seem larger than this area, making many of us wonder how he hasn't been snatched up by a label or lured to the Northeast or LA by all those that "success" and "money" nonsense we all claim to be above but secretly all want. We'll treasure him while he's still around, and his recital made a fine impression on me at the time, so much so that I bought one of his CD's. The woman selling the discs claimed the one I ended up buying had "fireworks" on it, and though I can't tell if I heard the same fireworks it succeeded in shaping my impressions of what good classical guitar music should be, featuring classics like Lennox Berkeley's <i>Sonatina </i>and Richard Rodney Bennett's <i>Impromptus</i> as well as lesser-known stuff like a pair of etudes by Seattle native Tom Baker. You can get the CD <a href="https://www.amazon.com/20th-Century-Guitar-Michael-Partington/dp/B000CA9TX2/ref=sr_1_6?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1482344439&sr=1-6&keywords=michael+partington">here</a> and it's worth the money, and among the better pieces on the disc is a work by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Dyens">Roland Dyens</a>, a Tunisian-born French guitarist-composer who passed away this year two days before Halloween.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'll admit that I haven't heard much of Dyens's music, not just because of the dumb luck that I never got around to it but also that classical guitar rep doesn't get much discussion music world, aside from with guitarists, of course. The instrument's modest volume and the overwhelming influence of Spanish national music on the rep has kept most "serious" composers away, even though a number of big-time composers, including the likes of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, have written major works in the field, and I consider at least one pair of works, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Music-Ten-String-Guitar-OHANA-MAURICE/dp/B002N5KEDS/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1482345595&sr=1-1&keywords=ohana+naxos">Maurice Ohana's two large cycles for the 10-string guitar</a>, to be considerable contributions to modern music in general. Much like the Cuban giant Leo Brouwer, Dyens promoted his compositions through his own performance, such as here with his best known piece, <i>Tango en Skai</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Songe Capricorne </i>("Dream of Capricorn") doesn't have the same crowd-pleasing flair that the <i>Tango </i>does but it's a work very near and dear to my heart - not only did I hear it at the right place and the right time but it further proves that composers can be technically inventive and still hushed and soulful. Dyens's music largely had an air of improvisation and <i>Songe </i>is no exception, shifting moods with emotive grace and allowing for much wiggle room for the performer. The piece shows the truly comprehensive knowledge of the instrument that Dyens had, utilizing chordal counterpoint as well as rushing 16ths, the rich tenor of the guitar's main voice as well as advanced harmonics. While the whole piece is excellent a particularly striking section is the opening to the "bridge" of the piece, with hard harmonics cutting into a string of 16th's at uneven rhythms. All of the fine details, such as the final chords which are explicitly marked to be unstrummed, are in service of a great dramatic sensibility, helping the piece create a portrait of enormous yearning in a vast landscape. It's a piece that has the ability to outlast its creator, and hopefully we can help it last longer than we can even dream of. Rest in peace, Roland.</span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-1091480541367555092016-10-13T12:01:00.000-07:002016-10-13T12:06:44.331-07:00Halloween Classics - Baba Yaga in music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>NOTE: This article features music tracks auto-generated by YouTube which might not be viewable outside of the U.S.A.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anybody can make up monsters, but the ones that stick in the culture, folklore in the past and now most commonly in specific media, usually strike a chord deep within the human consciousness. If people learned anything from pop psychology in the 70's it was that folklore persists because of psychological and emotional parallels between folklore and human needs and anxieties - "Little Red Riding Hood" can be interpreted as a warning for girls to stay away from predatory men, to quote a famous extrapolation by the likes Bruno Bettelheim's <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uses_of_Enchantment">The Uses of Enchantment</a></i>, the parent text to most theories of this sort, and Angela Carter's story "The Company of Wolves" from her collection <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloody_Chamber">The Bloody Chamber</a></i>. The latter was adapted into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Company_of_Wolves">a rapturously insane film</a> by Neil Jordan (co-writing the screenplay alongside Carter herself), a good sign that there's a great deal of appeal in this most haunting version of the story. In some ways these connections we create with fiction and (supposed) fact are obvious if one is able to slip into the mindset of those who can't speak directly of what lies beneath the surface of life. However, some folk tales are so vivid, so creative and so off-the-wall that they defy easy explanation, owing more to pure art than subconscious messages, and that's where Baba Yaga sprints in on giant chicken legs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Arguably the most famous of all Slavic folk characters, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga">Baba Yaga</a>, and her hut, stand tall as crowning achievements of weird storytelling. Depicted by herself or as one of three identically-named sisters, Baba Yaga has many characteristics of a classic witch - she's an old woman with an iron will and magical powers, powers which she often uses to evil and destructive ends. However, the tools she uses to wield those powers are unique - a mortar and pestle used to fly around, and a hut that stands on huge chicken legs - and her tales often let her help those in need. Her first known appearance on record even noted her uniqueness in the Slavic pantheon, equating many of the other gods to the Roman pantheon but recognizing her singular existence in the culture. Another interesting ability is the occasional skill of sniffing out the "Russianness" of people who visit her, much like the scent of the blood of an Englishman if you ask me. Her domain is the depths of the forest, and if I had to paint her in symbolic terms I'd burrow into that woodsy connection pretty deep. Forests have long been sources of conflicting experience for humankind, teeming with life and potential food and safety but forbidding in their density and lurking dangers; Baba Yaga's personality, alternately helpful and wrathful, fits with this pretty snugly. The good news is that you don't have to take just my word for it, as there are a ton of adaptations and portraits of the Grand Crone to choose from, a heap of which we're talking about today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Late Romantic and early modern Russian composers were many things, firstly excellent, but also way into capturing the Russian identity in their music, both abstractly and programmatically. The latter method brought a heck of a lot of identity into musical form, from the landscape (such as Borodin's <i>In the Steppes of Central Asia</i>) and climate (such as Tchaikovsky's <i>The Seasons</i>) to stories both literary (such as Mussorgsky's <i>Boris Godunov</i>, based on Pushkin's play) and folkloric. Folkloric adaptations, especially fantastical ones, were quite popular in <i>la Belle Époque</i> all over Europe, spurred by increasing urbanizing and distance from peasant innocence, but many Russian composers of the day made them their specialty. Rimsky-Korsakov's most famous pieces are in this vein, such as his "orientalist" pieces like <i>Sheherazade</i>, and his acolyte Anatoly Lyadov crafted <i>The Enchanted Lake</i>, one of his most celebrated pieces, in this vein. And wouldn't you know it, both of these guys tipped their hats to ol' Babby Yags.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lyadov's other most celebrated orchestral miniature is his sinister scherzo <i>Baba Yaga, op. 56</i>, as good a model for 19th century witchy writing you'll see outside of Berlioz. Actually, not so far outside, as many of the tricks employed show up in that witch's sabbath at the end of <i>Symphonie Fantastique</i>, such as a jerkily jaunty compound meter, loud full-orchestra stings and chromatic skittering. There's also a lot of Wagner in the language, such as the dated, yet classic, use of chromatic downward planing ripped right out of the ride of the Valkyries. Dating from 1905, Lyadov's piece is a bit, I dunno, passe (?) for the time, its tricks a little played out and familiar. As much as I appreciate Lyadov's piano music not everything he wrote was indispensable, though this is an easy and welcomed addition to any Halloween concert.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are similar techniques at play in a considerably older piece yet in some ways more memorable piece, written in 1862 by one of the lost-and-found fathers of Russian classical music, Alexander Dargomyzhsky. Dargomyzhsky is almost totally unknown to mainstream Classical music fans, never achieving much success in his home country or abroad during his lifetime, but his opera <i>The Stone Guest </i>was highly regarded by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mighty_Handful">the Mighty Handful</a> and was considered the gap between the work of Glinka, the earliest Russian composer of international note and one who set the stage for all those who came after, and the Handful themselves. None of his pieces have entered the standard repertoire since his death but I certainly hadn't heard of <i>Baba Yaga, Fantasy-Scherzo</i> before researching for this article, and chances are I'd have gone my whole life without hearing it. The latter half of the piece is definitely witchy enough, starting off on another jabbing bassoon solo, but the mood before it is much more staid, even tragic, and the use of more conventional minor and major chords rather than a smorgasbord of diminished schmears lends the piece an air of dignity unseen in many horror-themed works. Biographical info on Dargomyzhsky in English is scanty, at least over the internet, but part of me would like to think that he took the inherent ambiguity of Baba Yaga's appearances in folklore to heart. It's hard not to be fascinated by a villain with more human qualities than not, and of all the Baba Yaga settings it's the one that seems the most like a portrait of a person rather than a Satanic imp.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Originally I was going to discuss Rimsky-Korsakov's 1880 <i>Fairy Tale, op. 29</i> here as another Baba Yaga setting, having been brought to it as per <a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Fairy_Tale,_Op.29_(Rimsky-Korsakov,_Nikolay)">IMSLP's subtitle for it</a> on the work's page there. Upon listening to it, though, it seemed a lot less sinister than I was expecting. Then I took a look at the description of the recording I had found and saw that it was based on Pushkin's prologue to his poem "Ruslan and Ludmila", based on a corresponding folktale. "Ruslan and Ludmila" is a wild and fantastic tale of similar vintage and flavor as Baba Yaga, and also features her signature hut on chicken legs, and it was this connective tissue, as well as Pushkin's other allusive indications, that inspired the <i>Fairy Tale</i>, or <i>Skazka</i>. The <i>skazka</i>, translated alternately as "fairy tale", "folk tale" and just "tale", became a quite popular miniature piano form among Russian composers in the decades following this one; Nikolay Medtner wrote so many of them he was practically hip-deep in them by the end of his life. Whereas the piano <i>skazki </i>were short, dramatic works similar in feel to the <i>ballade </i>or <i>legend</i>, Rimsky-Korsakov's use of the title is of course more literal and much more extensive. Clocking in at three times Lyadov's <i>Baba Yaga</i>, the piece eschews curtain raising in favor of creating a diffuse atmosphere of magic and mystery, maintaining the fine sense of thematic architecture shared by <i>Sheherazade </i>and others but removing the need to trundle the audience along on storytelling rails. There's a lot to like here, especially the orchestration; Rimsky-Korsakov was the great creative master of his scene in that regard, and not only are his ideas masterful they are also brilliantly balanced and paced, never blowing out the speakers and perfectly matching the sense of wonder and unease he was trying to create. It's not exactly Halloween, <i>per se</i>, but it is fantasy and went over well with audiences at the time, though I can see why it's not one of his more popular works - 15 minutes is kind of long for what feels more like an interlude rather than a main piece. Still, I'm glad I got to hear it and the relationship it has with Baba Yaga is quite intriguing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However, there's one piece that you're all waiting for, one that will define Baba Yaga for all time. You know, that one that was written by a Mighty guy and later orchestrated by a master Impressionist and was inspired by a painting of a clock? Yeah, that one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This one is now and forever the most famous Baba Yaga piece out there. "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" is the 9th movement of Mussorgsky's <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_at_an_Exhibition">Pictures at an Exhibition</a></i>, a piano suite based on paintings by artist and architect <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Hartmann">Viktor Hartmann</a> created during his travels. The Baba Yaga painting used as a reference for this movement wasn't of Ms. Yaga herself but rather was of a clock modeled after her hut:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's a pretty boss clock and this is a pretty boss piece. While the other pieces might have depicted the hut standing or stalking, this one has it running at full speed, or Babs Yags flying in her mortar depending on who you ask. Mussorgsky had a knack for depicting energy and savagery in his music and here the language is at once terrifying and cathartic, each percussive slam matched with a surprisingly satisfying harmonic shift or fresh motive. <i>Pictures </i>was highly regarded by the Impressionists among Mussorgsky's other works for its progressive language, and some people argued that Mussorgsky's unique voice was due more to a lack of formal education than creative will. Whether that's true or not is not for me to make the final call on, but what I <i>can </i>make the final call on is its balderdashedness in terms of modern relevance or intrinsic value. I've performed this piece before and as exciting and fulfilling as it is to perform the whole work this one is probably the most entertaining from the musician's point of view, and in a normal article this would be the rousing closer. And it is - if you don't like piano music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It could be argued that there was no ballet company more singularly important to musical and theatrical history than the Ballet Russes under the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, a company that mounted the revolutionary first productions of Debussy's <i>Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune</i> and Stravinsky's <i>Petrushka </i>and <i>The Rite of Spring</i>. Even though it's impossible to objectively prove it, no other company has been more talked about and lauded, from the mindblowing choreography of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaslav_Nijinsky">Vaslav Nijinsky</a> to the sheer number of bleeding edge composers whose music was mounted. Another seminal name is brought up in more academic circles and isn't nearly as famous as Nijinsky's, the set designer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Benois">Alexandre Benois</a>, and any time we can talk about Benois is a good time. Educated in Paris, the Russian Benois returned to Moscow and founded the periodical <i>World of Art</i> which did much to promote Aestheticism and art nouveau in Russia. He moved back to Paris in 1905 and spent most of his time as a set designer, principally with the Ballet Russes, and his designs for their productions of <i>Les Sylphides</i>, <i>Giselle</i> and <i>Petrushka </i>are all considered masterpieces in the field, the last one of which has been revived multiple times to great success. He also served as the curator of the Hermitage Museum in the first decade following the October Revolution where he did much to preserve Russian art history. Before all that revolution and ballet stuff, however, he produced one of his most beloved works, <i>The Alphabet in Pictures</i>, a picture book of the Russian alphabet for children. Each letter is assigned with a colorful subject, many having a specifically Russian cultural reference, and the results are simply <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=alexandre+benois+alphabet&espv=2&biw=1600&bih=770&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj34IK9rdjPAhUqqlQKHaIQBkwQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=Q7ChC6pmhznO5M%3A">stunning</a>. Original copies of it fetch up to $10,000 in auctions and I can't say that I disagree. In 1910, Nikolay Tcherepnin, the first in one of the most successful compositional dynasties in Russian music, composed a piano suite based on 14 of the 36 represented letters (the alphabet was reduced to 33 in 1918), and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Piano-Music-Nikolai-Tcherepnin/dp/B004Y9DF78/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1476384840&sr=1-4&keywords=nikolai+tcherepnin">a recent recording by David Witten</a> brought it to my light as well as the world's - and wouldn't you guess who flew in with a mortar and pestle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It's debatable whether or not this is more experimental than Mussorgsky's Baba Yaga (though the fact that Mussorgsky's piece was written decades earlier most likely answers that question immediately) but it can be said that Tcherepnin's Baba Yaga is easily the funniest. The tinkling arpeggios plopping on augmented chords is more akin to the improvisatory caprice of Debussy's "Le poisson d'or" from his second book of <i>Images</i>, and the cute <i>ppp </i>ending chord is equally spritely. However, most of the piece is a black gallop, that offset bass pattern bumpity-bumping chromatically contracting and expanding chords in the right hand. The tunes might not be as iconic as Mussorgsky's but Tcherepnin more than makes up for that with his expert piano writing, as detailed and subtle as anything of his day, and believe me that there was a heck of a lot of competition. And why can't there be room for a funny-scary Baba Yaga? The set came from a kid's picture book and the tone is properly accessible throughout the suite, so a witch that's a bit humorous is exactly the kind of thing kids love at Halloween. It'd make a fine encore as well, totaling a mere 1'20'' for a witchy bolt off stage*. It can't really be the encore for this article, though, as I've spent the most amount of time talking about it of all the pieces and even included the sheet music for the benefit of busy work scrolling - perhaps I'm trying to tell you that there's a certain Russian composer that we'll be talking about next week, one whose name rhymes with "pickle-eye"...**</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*Somebody needs to get on a Baba Yaga hut costume right pronto.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">**Hey, more costume ideas!</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-71783542510908929632016-10-05T12:25:00.000-07:002016-10-05T12:30:39.494-07:00Special Cursive Preview - Ben Weber's Romance in a Cynical Age<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'm pleased as punch to remind the world that Cursive, my modern chamber group specializing in performing the kind of unknown modern music that gets featured on this blog, has a new program, <a href="http://livemusicproject.org/event/cursive-imagist-alchemy/">Imagist Alchemy, coming up this Thursday, October 6, at 7:30 pm</a> at <a href="http://www.kenyonhall.org/">Kenyon Hall</a>, West Seattle's greatest old-timey theater. The program will feature works for different combinations of voice, flute, viola and cello by mid-century American composers inspired by the Imagist poetry movement of the first half of the 20th century. The composers include the likes of David Diamond, Adolph Weiss, Paul Pisk and Ben Weber, and Re-Composing is finally going to put the spotlight on these forgotten (some more than others) composers in the days leading up to Imagist Alchemy's big show. Our Cursive previews are ending today with one of the most appropriate composers for this blog since its inception, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Weber_(composer)">Ben Weber (1916-1979)</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hailing from St. Louis, Weber accomplished the curious feat of establishing a position of success and acclaim for himself during the American classical boom years of the 1940's and '50's while not experiencing any of the public adoration that contemporaries like Bernstein, Piston and Schuman got. Weber was largely self-taught, and while that can sometimes reap popular benefit (such as with the popularly eccentric Paul Creston) his inspiration came from more dodecaphonic climbs. Weber was one of the first composer to write 12-tone music in America, breaking that new ground with Wallingford Riegger in the late '30's, but rather than adopt the Second Viennese School's attitudes and ascetic aesthetics Weber decided to use dodecaphonic music in a more Romantic Way. For example, take his ravishing <i>Violin Concerto</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This certainly isn't tonality but it sure ain't Webern, either. Ben Weber understood how serialism could be used as a tool first rather than a philosophy, as merely a way to keep the composer honest in his atonal dealings and to avoid too cozy familiarities. And there are cozy familiarities here, too, but primarily in tone and passion. There's an enormous sweep to this piece, with thick, resonant chords and classically successful orchestration, and the violin part is one of the great Tall Dark Strangers of the rep. I'm of the mind that trained musicians can "sing" through anything as long as the composer writes likes they want them to, and this is expressed gorgeously by this performance by violinist Oliver Colbentson with the Nurmberger Symphoniker under the direction of Werner Heider, another composer who might drift to these blogly shores. I'm always impressed with composers who can accentuate tension and release atonally and Weber is one of the best I've seen from America at that. A more placid example of his language is his brief pedagogical piano piece <i>New Adventure</i>, played here by some guy*:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This little number was published by Theodore Presser as part of the <i>Masters of Our Day </i>series in the '50's, edited by Isadore Freed and Lazare Saminsky (two more guys who are bound to appear on these blogs). While his piano works, such as this one, are largely as neglected as anything else he's written, one piece has become his best candidate for longevity: the <i>Fantasia (Variaitons), op. 25</i>. Written for the great William Masselos, the <i>Fantasia </i>is arguably his most representative statement for the instrument, showcasing not only his prowess with dodecaphonic composition but also his sense of melody and emotional power. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/New-York-Variations-John-Corigliano/dp/B000007NEC/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1475693647&sr=1-1&keywords=new+york+variations+hough">It was recorded brilliantly by Stephen Hough in the late '90's for an album</a> that also featured Copland's <i>Piano Variations</i>, Corigliano's <i>Etude Fantasy </i>and Tsontakis's <i>Ghost Variations</i> (a hell of a program, to be sure). That CD also marked the last time a Weber piece was commercially recorded, and searching on YouTube reveals that it might be the last time it was performed for posterity, either. The good news is that a number of excellent pianists have taken a crack at it, such as Christopher Czaja Sager in this 1972 performance:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That recording is a bit scratchy but it's all there - confident, exciting piano writing, wild yet refined variation and a glorious clash of tonal memories and atonal virtuosity. If it was the only Weber piece to get played again in the future I wouldn't be too sore about it, and thankfully it's still in print through Sheet Music Plus - <a href="http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/search?Ntt=ben+weber">oh, wait</a>. More tangible good news is that many of his pieces remain in print, including dozens through the ever-essential <a href="https://composers.com/ben-weber">ACA</a> (such as his one ballet, <i>The Pool of Darkness</i>, another piece that begs to be performed by Cursive), and all the published ones can be got through Interlibrary Loan and copied. It's through libraries that I got his <i>Four Songs</i> for voice and cello, a work featured on Imagist Alchemy. Combining the poetry of Ezra Pound, a man at the forefront of Imagism and who famously cheerleaded for classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, with ancient Latin and Sanskrit poetry, including one by Emperor Hadrian himself. The concert isn't coming a moment too soon, either, as this year, one that is three quarters over already, is the Centenary of Weber's birth, though sadly I haven't heard of any other groups taking charge and performing some of his many worthy compositions. The last time there was an all-Weber program was likely <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/04/arts/music-review-a-serialist-with-a-penchant-for-lyricism.html?_r=0">this retrospective concert on the 20th anniversary of his death</a>, one that featured his works for the combination of flute, cello and celesta, one so cool I wish I'd thought of it first. That concert featured tribute works by Milton Babbitt, Ned Rorem (who performed the piece himself) and Lou Harrison, and all around sounded like a lovely time. Hopefully Cursive's performance Thursday night will add a little notch more to Weber's performance pole, and there's always more room for a lyric serialist in the future.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*I should have "Some Guy" as a title on my business cards.</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-18074068798511603942016-10-04T00:56:00.000-07:002016-10-04T12:41:34.583-07:00Special Cursive Preview - Adolph Weiss, an Expressionist from Baltimore<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the American Dream can mean a lot of things, it's a sad fact that 90% of achieving it is being born in America - though that doesn't always serve one well. Case in point, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolph_Weiss">Adolph Weiss</a>, a man who followed his heart and honed his craft, only to see himself never rise above the B-minus list of American composers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Today's Cursive preview, spotlighting composers featured on <a href="http://livemusicproject.org/event/cursive-imagist-alchemy/">Cursive's new program Imagist Alchemy (Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:30 at Kenyon Hall, Seattle)</a>, focuses on one of the first Americans to study with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna, Adolph Weiss (1891-1971). Born in Baltimore a few years before Walter Piston and nearly a decade before Aaron Copland, Weiss inherited his compositional ambitions from his father, who was himself a student of one of Classical music's most accomplished eccentrics, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Busoni">Ferruccio Busoni</a>. He worked with Schoenberg in the 1920's at the Academy of Fine Arts, eventually settling in New York and flying right out of the gate on a modernist rocket bike. While most of America wasn't used to music more modern than <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt3ED7akSIo">this</a>, Weiss was composing <i>this</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Chamber Symphony is a choice genre that gained vogue among a select few composers of the first half of the 20th century and then again in the latter half, which is to say that it didn't really gain vogue but some fabulous people worked in the form, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgFTLquN8eI">Schoenberg</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za52JOpDCUc">George Enescu</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-LQWxKgQ18">Franz Schreker</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-VQnW3mDAE">John Adams</a>. There's far more to unpack than we have time for here but I'll try to shake out a short version. This is one of the firmest statements of Expressionism I've heard from an American composer (though at this point still working in Vienna), full of breakneck mood shifts and bursts of mad abandon. Imitative counterpoint and organic development is the name of the game, though I'd class this as a far cry from Beethoven in that regard. The woodwinds-heavy texture, lets instruments get caught in strange loops and zoom around in nutty logic. This is helped here by a wonderful performance that infuriatingly goes uncredited, even though someone in the comments section has already asked who the performers are, and there's no commercial recording of this piece I know of. The spirit of expressionism is perfectly captured around 6 minutes in, where icy, spasming flutes accompany a rapturous cello solo - the passionate and the insane, together at last. It's a brilliant and dense 16 minutes and I can't believe that I have no idea who's performing it here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One work of his that did get a commercial recording is his <i>Theme and Variations</i> for orchestra, written nearly a decade after the <i>Chamber Symphony </i>and sounding quite a bit more like another American Expressionist, Carl Ruggles. The statement of the theme is a crowded subway of deeply buzzing chords, hiding the theme itself in the upper lines and creating an impression of spotlights progressively shining up the lengths of skyscrapers. The pacing is more erratic here, eschewing the blinding arpeggiation of the <i>Chamber Symphony </i>in favor of oblique dramatic statements, and while I can't say that I enjoy it as much as the <i>Chamber Symphony </i>its architecture is certainly compelling and it's a bold and dangerous creature of its time, riding the wave of High American Modernism to the very top before it fell back in the populist wave of the late Depression.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Weiss was among a highly select number of bassoonist composers, and at 16 was even in the Russian Symphony Orchestra of New York, joining the New York Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler the following year. It's perhaps because of this woodwind-centered background he contributed some highly substantial works to the woodwind repertoire, including this major <i>Trio </i>for clarinet, viola and cello in 1948, a work simply begging to be performed by Cursive. If the <i>Theme and Variations</i> was too dense and stately for your tastes the <i>Trio</i> gets back to Weiss's roots with a lot of mysterious, liquid interplay between the three voices and an off-kilter, sometimes jaunty sensibility. It's chamber music at its most intimate, suitable for the living rooms of the excellently demented. It's in the description of the video for the second movement of this piece, by the way, that I found the best information on Weiss's method in the web, in the form of program notes by possible future Re-Composing subject Lester Trimble:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i style="background-color: #fce5cd;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: start;">Adolph Weiss has been referred to as "Schoenberg's first official American student in Germany." He did indeed spend an important period of study with Arnold Schoenberg at the Berlin Academy, which led over the years to an easy camaraderie with the 12-tone system and with serial technique in general -- in short, with the "numerology" of advanced music -- to the extent that his compositions are created first in purely numerical form. They are written in columns of figures on the pages of a simple, loose-leaf notebook. [No Excel in 1948 . . .] Then, when the words have been completed in every detail, they are transcribed upon score paper in conventional notation. It is a startling experience to observe the composer at the piano, playing a new, untranscribed composition from an enigmatic page of small dots, lines and numbers.</span><br style="background-color: white; text-align: start;" /><br style="background-color: white; text-align: start;" /><span style="background-color: white; text-align: start;">This does not mean, as one would assume, that Weiss is straightjacketed by any "logic of numbers." On the contrary, he finds freedom and endless stimulation toward new musical ideas in a tone row, and, as his attitude toward composition is unusually fun-loving and spontaneous, his musical fantasy remains unfettered. Somehow, in his career as a composer, he has acquired an uncanny facility with numbers. He can work in them more conveniently than in conventional notation, and, concomitantly, finds his thiking dis-encumbered from traditional habits of five-line staff writing. The music, however, is "heard" before it is written; numbers and notes are simply the graphics of sound, and Weiss employs them as such.</span><br style="background-color: white; text-align: start;" /><br style="background-color: white; text-align: start;" /><span style="background-color: white; text-align: start;">The Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Cello is formed in two movements, marked respectively Andante and Allegro Molto. Both movements are characterized by a high degree of compositional complexity, with intervallic leaps accounting for much of the melodic movement. The Allegro Molto is, in character, a Scherzo. It remains in 2/4 meter throughout, with cross-accents and fast imitative interplay imparting an almost breathless quality to the music. Occasional disguised references are made to thematic material of the opening movement, while several of the rhythmic motifs have a distinctly retrospective flavor. Here, as in the Andante, the linear approach predominates.</span></i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Never in my life would I have guessed such a bizarre method from music that sounds so, well, not written with numbers first and notes at the very end. For example, one piece of his to get commercially recorded that hasn't made its way to YouTube is his "Scherzoso Jazzoso" <i>American Life</i>, available to listen <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Carpenter-Gilbert-Angeles-Philharmonic-Orchestra/dp/B003XSVWO4/ref=tmm_msc_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1475566859&sr=1-1">here</a> in the form of a 30 second snippet. As jazzy as it undeniably is Weiss still obeys his Expressionistic sense of phrasing and eruptive gestures. A piece that has no recording whatsoever, especially not a commercial one, is the work that Cursive is performing this Thursday night, the 1930 <i>Sonata for Flute and Viola</i>. While I don't want to spoil too much you can expect a lot of bewitching modalities, imitative counterpoint, virtuosity and occasional rude shrieking. And what better way is there to use the flute/viola combo than rude shrieking?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">Well, maybe that was the problem, as Weiss's obvious talent and passion never materialized in much public exposure. The serious lack of commercial recordings is sad but understandable, as the American market never fully supported music like this, even in the heady years between the Wars. Weiss kept on keeping on until his death in 1971 and with a little elbow grease and access to Interlibrary Loan services we might be able to unearth more forgotten gems by America's first Second Vienneser.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://livemusicproject.org/event/cursive-imagist-alchemy/">See ya Thursday</a>,</span></span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-3773767074285052972016-10-03T19:28:00.002-07:002016-10-03T19:28:05.102-07:00Special Cursive Preview - David Diamond's Vocalises<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'm pleased as punch to announce that Cursive, my modern chamber group specializing in performing the kind of unknown modern music that gets featured on this blog, has a new program, </span><a href="http://livemusicproject.org/event/cursive-imagist-alchemy/" style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Imagist Alchemy, coming up this Thursday, October 6, at 7:30 pm</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> at </span><a href="http://www.kenyonhall.org/" style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Kenyon Hall</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, West Seattle's greatest old-timey theater. The program will feature works for different combinations of voice, flute, viola and cello by mid-century American composers inspired by the Imagist poetry movement of the first half of the 20th century. The composers include the likes of David Diamond, Adolph Weiss, Paul Pisk and Ben Weber, and Re-Composing is finally going to put the spotlight on these forgotten (some more than others) composers in the days leading up to Imagist Alchemy's big show. I can't say I'll be able to cover all of them but there's still plenty to talk about, starting with a warm return to one of the former biggest stars in American music, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Diamond_(composer)">David Diamond</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I previously covered Diamond's haunting piano miniature <i><a href="http://re-composing.blogspot.com/2014/05/corridors-of-azure-shells-david.html">The Tomb of Melville</a></i>, and hopefully I made a case for it being one of the most beguilingly lovely piano pieces in American music. It's absence from modern recitals, or recitals in general, is only partially understandable by its limbo state of out-of-printdom, as Diamond used to be as big a name as Schuman, Harris and Piston. Best known for his string orchestra piece <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atMdLWtlkn0">Rounds</a></i>, Diamond's signature works show off one of the most skilled and assured voices in the big American national style of the '40's and '50's - modal block chords, expert counterpoint and lots of 'Merican 'tude. That doesn't mean that all of his works sound the same of course, and for maximum Diamond variety one should turn to his later works ('60's and forward) and his earliest works from the '30's, such as his ballet <i>TOM</i>. These early years are what we're examining today with one of his first works, soon to be featured by Cursive in Imagist Alchemy: <i>Vocalises</i> for voice and viola.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Voice and viola works are elusive and alluring beasts, possessing a warmth and darkness because of the instrumentation but never getting performed. This piece is a trio of vocalises, so the voice sings on an open syllable, allowing itself to weave through the viola's copious double stops with a snake-like silkiness. Diamond was only 20 when he wrote this, meaning that he was under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger, American music's favorite French auntie, and it's very easy to see the Old World influence in this piece. It's not just Francophonic, either, but vaguely Renaissance, the lilting melodies and stark chord progressions highly reminiscent of an Old Master landscape. One could also point to <i>Christina's World</i>, one of the most famous paintings in the whole world, and I'd like to think that Old World and New World landscapes aren't mutually exclusive. The version we're playing is slightly modified to accommodate a flute, but don't let that deter you, as flute and viola are a fascinating combo in themselves and the musicians are much boss. Here's a splendid recording of the original that really brings out the bucolic solitude of the piece, and here's to wishing all my readers a happy time checking their schedules to see if they can make the concert.</span><br />
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-80280566598235686852016-07-21T14:24:00.000-07:002016-07-21T14:24:07.923-07:00Short-Shrifted - A Paean to a Frightening Hungarian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's usually little risk in unearthing rare music, the worst being disappointment or a racist pop song or two. In classical music this is largely due to music being a mostly abstract medium and the standard of what music is publishable and worthy of repeat performance high enough to disallow most repulsive lyrics and subject matter, though not so high as to prevent something as wickedly brilliant as </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bartók</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'s <i>The Miraculous Mandarin </i>from premiering. Speaking of Bartók, today's Short-Shrifted subject is not only Hungarian but was one of the first defenders of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bartók</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'s music, as well as the work of Kodaly, in the 1900s, ensuring him a place in the history of Hungarian Modernism even if he did nothing else. We of course wouldn't be talking about him if he was merely a critic, but talking about what we're here for is a double-edged sword. You see, on one hand we have a lovely violin work on our hands that begs for the internet to uncover more compositions by its author, but on the other hand, the author's other works, and unsettling biography, make searching potentially risky in the realm of psychological damage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9za_Cs%C3%A1th">Géza Csáth</a> (1887-1919) was quite a piece of work in both positive and negative ways, starting out on the positive end with a prodigal talent in various fields. A violinist from childhood, Csáth (the pseudonym of József Brenner) began writing music criticism when he was 14 and wrote the aforementioned support for </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bartók and Kodaly in college. He went into medicine and worked initially in a psychiatric hospital, his experiences informing his novel <i>Diary of a Mentally Ill Woman</i> and leading to his lifelong obsession, a gradually crippling morphine addiction. During the 1910's he wrote a number of stories under the influence, collected as <i>Tales Which End Unhappy</i>, one of my new favorite titles, and translated in the above book and the Penguin Books collection <i>Opium and Other Stories </i>as part of Philip Roth's excellent Writers from an Unbound Europe series in the '70s. These stories were highly transgressive and disturbing, probing into the psychology of addiction, sadism and outright evil, perhaps most famously in "Little Emma", a story wherein children enact public executions. All of this would be one thing if </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Csáth was as articulate and civil as other transgressive writers like Chuck Palahniuk, but his morphine addiction only worsened as he lost jobs and credibility and eventually was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He escaped to his home, eventually fatally shooting his wife with a revolver (!), taking poison (!!) and slitting his wrists (!!!). This, however, didn't succeed in killing him, and he eventually finished the job by taking poison while running from the police (!!!!). <a href="http://50watts.com/In-combating-myself-I-can-only-report-one-bloody-defeat-after-another">To quote his diary</a>, "In combating myself I can report only one bloody defeat after another."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Heck of a story, though not as ridiculous as the case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Unterweger">Jack Unterweger</a>, an Austrian serial strangler who wrote in jail and became a critical darling, his fame prompting an early release and subsequent defense in the face of more stranglings, as if writers were incapable of such acts. You might be wondering why I'm talking about such horrible people in the first place, and the answer is simple: there's always room for the Death of the Author. Opera companies around the world don't keep performing Wagner's <i>Ring </i>cycle because he was a megalomaniacal anti-semite, they perform them because they're monumental achievements in the art form and hugely important to music history. The more you delve into the nitty gritty of artists' biographies the more unpleasantness you uncover, such as Gertrude Stein's support of Fascism and William Burroughs' accidental killing of his wife during an ill-conceived party trick, so why dwell on these things? Their work is why we keep their names alive in the first place and focusing on that above all else is what keeps their work relevant. Case in point, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Pean_(Cs%C3%A1th,_G%C3%A9za)">Géza Csáth's <i>Paean</i></a></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Pean_(Cs%C3%A1th,_G%C3%A9za)"><i> </i>for violin and piano</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Published c. 1910, around the time </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Csáth started taking morphine, the <i>Paean </i>(confusingly translated into French as <i>Pean</i>, which is a kind of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ermine_(heraldry)">ermine-type texture used in royal crests</a>, instead of the correct French spelling </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Péan</i>) appears to be the only published piece of music by </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Csáth, at least the only one to surface in our time, making him a member of the Sui Generis club of composers with only one published work. In stark contrast to his prose (and probably for our psychological benefit) the <i>Paean</i>, subtitled a Pastorale on the cover page, is a gentle summer's breeze of a piece, packing a lot of grace and depth into its mere 2'30'' runtime. While not exactly Modernist the work is somewhat Impressionistic with its extended-tonality chords and modal arpeggiation, or at least very late Romantic in its style. It's somewhat melancholic for a paean, which is typically a song of exultant religious reverence, such as a hallelujah, leaving the listener to ponder where </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Csáth's reverence truly lies. It makes up for its dreamy, moderate tempo with great expressive intensity, especially in the <i>fff con passione </i>near the end. And who doesn't like a piece that ends with a major-7th chord? While </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Csáth's language here certainly isn't ripping off his Modernist admirees there are tinges of the same Hungarian nationalist language that Kodaly would perfect in his most famous works, such as the half-diminished cascade in the <i>con passione </i>measure. It's all so lovely that I have no choice but to want to see more of his music, but considering </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Csáth's later life his manuscripts might not be accessible or usable. The best thing we can do now is to perform this modestly immodest gem at every conceivable opportunity and prove that there is light at the end of a dark and terrifying tunnel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span>Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-14551113603760869362016-06-08T17:44:00.001-07:002016-06-08T17:44:14.417-07:00SPECIAL CURSIVE PREVIEW: Short-Shrifted - Happy Birthday, Erwin Schulhoff!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I chattered about it in a <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2014/01/in-futurum-no-one-can-hear-you-play.html">Forgotten Leaves article</a> some time ago but it deserves all the reposts it can get. Everything here is a joke, from the tempo marking of "timely-timeless", the clashing meters and clefs, the fact that there aren't any actual notes, those dang faces...pure genius. This is at the Dada extreme of the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schulhoff">Erwin Schulhoff</a>, one of the greatest composers to get his music banned and his person killed by a tyrannical government. Czech by birth, Schulhoff started at the Prague conservatory under the tutelage of Dvořák when he was only 10 years old, fast becoming a rising star and studying with the likes of Debussy and Reger. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the first World War he moved to Germany and would move back and forth from there and Prague throughout his career, securing plenty of prestigious premieres in the '20s. Schulhoff was an astoundingly diverse composer, his works ranging from Neoclassicism to Dadaism to Jazz-influenced works, among the first of their kind and arguably the best overall of the first half of the 20th century. Of course, we can't have anything nice for too long, and once the '30s rolled around he found himself in the crosshairs of the Nazi party for his Jewish heritage and Communist sympathies; by 1939 already in trouble with the Czech government for his political leanings, he was forced to perform under a pseudonym when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. He applied for citizenship in the Soviet Union but was arrested trying to leave the country and was shipped to the Wülzburg concentration camp. He died in 1942 from tuberculosis, and his works remained suppressed in Nazi-controlled countries, only to be rediscovered in the 60's at the start of the long-term effort to resurrect the music of Jewish composers suppressed, forced into exile or murdered by the Third Reich. Of all those reborn artists Schulhoff has had the best success among modern audiences, who have responded well to his clever, skillfully wrought and entertaining works, and multiple record labels have recorded scads of his pieces, including some <i>Hot Music</i> -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">- a stunning <i>Duo for Violin and Cello</i>, one of the best works in the genre -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">- and his <i>Piano Sonata no. 3</i>, one of my favorite sonatas of the first half of the 20th century.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All of these pieces warrant whole articles of discussion but only one Schulhoff work made its way into the inaugural concerts of my chamber group Cursive. Judging by the piles of performances on YouTube, Schulhoff's <i>Sonata for Flute and Piano </i>from 1927 could be his greatest posthumous success and I can't exactly blame the public and performers for the People's Candidate. I kind of don't want to talk about it too much because, you know, the market of our performances of the thing will weaken and all that, but there's a good chance that bits and pieces won't overwhet anybody's appetite. There's a particularly lovely bit that's brief enough to leave the rest of the piece hanging but whetful enough to warrant special attention, the slow movement, the "Aria":</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I've been meaning to do a long writeup on what's going on in the piano at the beginning, that off-centered undulation that taps into the depth of dreaming. There's also something to be said for how the right hand slides gradually down through keys, a trick pioneered by Chopin in his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxL9lPFhEqQ">E-minor <i>Prelude</i></a> and emulated enough times to fill a book. My favorite bit, through rehearsals and the previous concert, was that moment in the left hand (thankfully repeated later) is the low C major triad followed by a D-sharp minor triad in a higher register, snuffing out profundity in order to leave us wanting more. But the whole thing is lovely, too:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The whole sonata as well as seven other pieces, and maybe a surprise or two, are available for you to hear this Thursday night at 8:00 at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford. <a href="http://livemusicproject.org/event/wayward-music-presents-cursive-black-anemones/">Click here for deets</a> and keep a little space in your day for the 122nd birthday of Czechoslovakia's favorite son, or at least my favorite son on this special day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-90504563349358451452016-04-01T14:17:00.002-07:002016-04-07T04:33:56.054-07:00Short-Shrifted - William Baines<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In English culture one composer stands for dying young, personally and as a symbol of his generation, more than any other, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Butterworth">George Butterworth (1885-1916)</a>. One of the most sensitive and melancholic of the Pastoralists, Butterworth published a handful of song cycles and orchestral pieces before going off to the front of WWI, eventually dying in the Battle of the Somme, his body lost to the war. His cycle <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5qZJ3whgvM">A Shropshire Lad</a></i> from poems by A.E. Housman, as well as its orchestral epilogue, the <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igscl299lH4">Rhapsody</a></i>, have become musical symbols of the U.K.s "lost" generation of young men lost to the Great War, and his early death at 31 might have given his music some artificial support after his time, though judging by its quality it would have been well-remembered regardless of its author's tragic passing. Another young death in British composition that has made much less of an impact on its country's psyche is that of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Baines">William Baines (1899-1922)</a>, dead at the much more tender age of 23 from tuberculosis and in many ways a more daring and individual composer than most of his English contemporaries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My introduction to Baines came from the inclusion of his piece <i>Tides</i>, as much of a posthumous breakout hit as he'll ever get, in the 2002 Rarities of Piano Music festival, an annual nine-day festival of piano rarities at Schloss vor Husum in Germany that has featured some favorite pianists of mine and this blog, such as Marc-André Hamelin and Kolja Lessing. The Danish record label Danacord has put out 17 CDs of highlights from the festival and <i>Tides </i>made the cut, performed by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bioOVGwA77M">Jean Dubé</a>, alongside works by Szymanowski, <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2015/05/reger-kills-fugues-and-patriotism-with.html">Reger</a> and Ignaz Friedman. British Impressionism, or rather the Impressionist side of Pastoralism, what I call the post-Elgar British composers such as Vaughan Williams and his ilk, never equaled the evocative dreamscapes of the French Impressionists in the large scale but some individuals tried to go for the gold, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzZrE821Kvo">Frank Bridge</a> in many of his miniatures and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCP20tDn2hY">early work of John Ireland</a>, and Baines's music (most of which can be seen in score form <a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Baines,_William">here</a>) is the most non-Pastoralist Impressionist work I've seen come from England in its near-total avoidance of British folk influence and commitment to the ambiguous moods of his French predecessors. <i>Tides </i>has become one of his most popular works because of its near-surrealism, a far cry from the likes of Butterworth, chockablock with juxtaposed scales, Scriabin-esque chord structures, bursts of virtuosity and deep foreboding. I've always had a soft spot for pieces that treat the sea in a sense of danger (<a href="http://re-composing.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-gentle-death-of-lilacs-rare-gems.html">such as Irwin Heilner's creepy song <i>The Tide Rises</i></a>) and <i>Tides </i>expertly captures the mood of standing on the shore of a vast ocean in the dead of night. The second movement, "Goodnight to Flamboro", is almost Ivesian in its placement of popular-style music in a pantonal landscape, and why the first movement alone has caught on more than the whole thing baffles me. I am grateful for anything of his to catch one regardless of which part of it, as nowadays much of his music is available and the many amateur performances of his piano pieces has made him a minor favorite in the New Digital Repertoire, a movement that I'm doing everything I can to further and one that hasn't gotten nearly enough discussion in the mainstream. This amateur fanbase has produced such a variety of Baines recordings that I can show you this one, a selection from his warmly etched <i>Four Sketches</i>, without breaking any copyright laws:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The <i>Sketches </i>are some of his earliest pieces, written when he was 19 and 20 and showing considerable maturity and thoughtfulness for formative works, a time most composers prefer to forget after they've achieved Tenure Grant Academy status or whatever it is composers get these days. These years were strangely lucky ones for Baines as he was pulled into the British army in 1918, only to be relieved of his duties because of septic poisoning, obviously the most attractive illness for the Classical music set. He would continue composing and performing through the aftermath of his sepsis, a disease he never really recovered from, and only a few years later succumbed to the aforementioned TB, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illness_as_Metaphor">the fatal illness of choice by those who want to die wanly and sexily</a>. While I can't exactly point to any of his pieces as evidence or reflection of his atrocious health (always the most tasteful treatment of another's illness) most of his works are imbued with an arresting sense of loss and distant nostalgia, a very English brand of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade">saudade</a> </i>or <i><a href="https://bucharestlounge.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/the-meaning-of-the-romanian-word-dor-according-to-four-transylvanian-women/">dor</a></i>. One of the best pieces of his for expressing this is his <i>Twilight Pieces</i>, the first piece, "A Fragment" capturing the quality of fading sunlight in heavy summer air:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second piece, "Quietude" also takes great pains to never let the chords naturally resolve, a Pastoralist answer to Wagner delaying the tonic until after the fourth or fifteenth hour. There are a few tricks here that I've never seen in another piece of this time, such as this chord:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Or this little grace note, part of "Quietude"'s moment of physical outburst:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On a more swift, non dolorous note of delivery, here's "The Naiad" from the <i>Three Concert Studies</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I always like those chord progressions where a simple form is chosen and the permutations are either flying farther out from the center or collapsing inwards, as the first half of that main left hand ostinato shows. Baines also understands that an audience used to more conventional chords will accept any foreign dissonance as long as it moves by quickly enough and has a superficial logic, either with itself or with other harmonies in the phrase. There were a <i>ton </i>of fairy-folk-inspired pieces by British composers around this time and this is one of the most magical and exciting, rewarding those who can afford the crispest piano to perform it on. In case you're wondering, no, Baines never finished a full piano sonata, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6uTQTJlGR4">though not for a lack of trying</a>. Aside from an early, uncharacteristic <i>Symphony </i>that wasn't performed until 1991 (link <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJnWyYmLNDc">here</a>, though beware of amateur hour performance) Baines never wrote a "big piece", something that often ends up "cursing" composers after their deaths in the eyes of overly discriminating musicologists with their eyes peeled for analyzable, symphony-length works ripe for dissertationing. For an example, imagine if <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Mompou">Federico Mompou</a> had never written <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxuv_g5vE1o">Musica Callada</a></i> and how much critical attention he would have gotten then. This attitude was high-order phooey then and is even higher-order phooey now that there's a huge market for classical music outside of the strict confines of concert halls and academic studies. For my money Baines well earned his place in the canon of British music and his works are gifts that keep on giving intellectual and emotional rewards, and his gradual resurrection through the internet can only be a good thing - an attitude I wish more performers would adopt, if only for the sake of works like these <i>7 Preludes</i>. Goodnight, Flamboro and otherwise.</span></div>
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Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62539954828493240.post-53880694535149856022016-03-19T17:30:00.000-07:002016-03-19T17:30:40.652-07:00Short-Shrifted - Pierre-Octave Ferroud<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's a saying in Hollywood: "you're only as good as your last picture". It's an unsympathetic reminder of the fact that most people only value others in so much as what they can do for others and the quality of those actions, and the only way to stay relevant is by a continuous string of quality. The goal is to create a legacy, a good reputation that ensures that you won't have to keep proving yourself, but nobody knows where legacy's goal line is - which brings us to the ultimate obstacle to creating a legacy, death. It's always easy to look back fondly on someone's works, especially artists, right after their deaths (such as how this year there'll be a Bowie-shaped hole in every record store), and how rose-colored our lenses become is due to a complicated tangle of factors including the artist's reputation just before their death combined with what it was in the previous years as well as which works entered the popular consciousness most recently. However, few incidents incite this kind of backward praise than an untimely death or incapacitation, such as how <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266452/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Death to Smoochy</a> </i>never got respectable viewership until after the suicide of lead actor Robin Williams. This effect is no stranger to Classical composers, though admittedly the niche nature of those who actually follow composers' careers, even back when that was a thing, means that not many of the Short-Shrifted, subjects of my new series on Re-Composing, have gotten the same attention as those in more popular genres. The most consistently remembered of these are composers whose work or lives were snuffed by Totalitarian regimes and the Nazis, their resurrection part of a large-scale movement in the later decades of the 20th century - the most successful of these were concentration camp composers like <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2014/01/in-futurum-no-one-can-hear-you-play.html">Erwin Schulhoff</a> and early Soviet modernists like <a href="http://forgotten-leaves.blogspot.com/2016/01/synthetic-nostalgia-for-sunday.html">Roslavets</a>, Mosolov and Lourié. A scant handful of composers are actually better known for dying young than for any one piece that they wrote, such as the Belgian-born <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Lekeu">Guillaume Lekeu</a>, dead at 24 from contaminated sorbet and author of the pseudo-famous <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdOMn468FN8">Adagio pour quatuor d'orchestre</a></i>, and the thoroughly disappointing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hurlstone">William Hurlstone</a> who was at least able to contribute to the distressingly small <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmu8YeHJX9k">bassoon sonata</a> rep before his death at 30 from bronchial asthma. The most dramatic of these has to be Heikki Suolahti, a Finnish composer who died at age 16 after writing the <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVh2moDz70s">Sinfonia Piccola</a></i>, a work that fascinated Sibelius (though not myself). Short-Shrifted aims to praise composers who died well enough before their time that their works quickly fell out of view, possibly never to be appropriately revived, and I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better opener to the series than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Octave_Ferroud">Pierre-Octave Ferroud</a> (1900-36).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The above set of pieces for flute is not only one of Ferroud's earliest pieces but also the only piece of his to remain performed in this day and age, a slightly unfortunate case as they're his least challenging and, more importantly, representative works in his <i>oeuvre</i>. Their universal claim to public domain status, something the rest of his music lacks, has a hand in this as well, and the effect is as if the only piece by Beethoven that got performed was that blasted <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_hxUL_yluo">Minuet in G major</a></i>. For a more impressive introduction we have to get both later and a bit goofy:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A disciple of Florent Schmitt, the most outlandish of the Impressionists, Ferroud broke on the Paris scene in the 20's, one of the most exciting places and times to be a composer, and the above piece, <i>Types </i>(1922-24, originally for piano), is as good as any for an unofficial breakout piece. The piece is a trio of satiric character sketches - an old lothario, a self-important society woman and a frantic businessman - and shows Ferroud's budding language with clarity and flair. Ferroud was unique among French composers in his ability to synthesize Impressionist harmonies and colors with Neoclassical rigor and acidity, creating works both enchanting and forceful, a difficult feat and a singular achievement in his scene. These qualities didn't go unnoticed by his peers, among them Maurice Ravel, one of his chief influences. There's a double-fisted irony in this: a.) Ferroud parodied Ravel's more precious works in the second <i>Type</i>, and b.) they have a common cause of death, effects from car accidents. However, while Ravel's death was a drawn-out exacerbation of a possibly pre-existing brain condition brought on by a car accident, Ferroud's was the much more immediate effect of decapitation. While that doesn't quite scale the dramatic death heights of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alb%C3%A9ric_Magnard">Albéric Magnard</a> (burned along with his house by German invaders in WWI) or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Granados">Enrique Granados</a> (drowned trying to save his wife from drowning) it's still one for the books and, if I may suggest comical conspiracy, makes a case for him being a victim of necessary peacekeeping between the warring camps of Impressionism and Neoclassicism, as naturally ne'er the two shall meet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(This recording is too slow; listen to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmuwZ0FpW1A">this</a> (if you're in the U.S.) to hear the true potential of the opening movement)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">His <i>Symphony in A major</i> (1930) is arguably his masterpiece, a dense blast of extraordinary Neoclassical writing and one of the best symphonies written by a French composer in any time. Any Neoclassical work walks the rickety tightrope of tasteful irony, trying to acknowledge that the newer old ways are dead and irreverently call back to the older old ways while still maintaining objective beauty and craftsmanship, and Ferroud's <i>Symphony </i>has aged better in this respect than most pieces from this time, keeping the quality high without seeming too stiff or too silly (I'm looking at you, Poulenc). Among the <i>Symphony</i>'s admirers was Prokofiev, who suggested a listening of it to his friend Boris Asafiev (whose sole claim to fame is writing a trumpet sonata nobody wants to play). Prokofiev was less impressed with Ferroud's 1927 comic opera <i>Chirurgie </i>("Surgery", of all things) but any comedy about grim subject matter has some intrinsic value and the music, snipped out here for an orchestral suite, has more than enough fine qualities to pique my interest:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The influence of Stravinsky is so obviously apparent in these works as to need little comment but Ferroud's music never feels cheapened by its allegiance to the cream of the crop (unlike <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuUZa-o2-kw"><i>some </i>Poulenc pieces</a> which are blatant <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z91FdT6QEj4">Stravinsky</a> ripoffs (start at 3:50)...son of a bitch...). Likewise there is a great variety of moods in his works, such as the lovely opening to his concentrated, subtly orchestrated <i>Serenade </i>(1929), at times a dead ringer for Ned Rorem's early symphonies -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">- or his charming-yet-impressive <i>Trio d'anches </i>(1933):</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But if there's one medium Ferroud got the most variety out of, and one that seems the most obviously resurrectable on the concert scene, it's his piano works. I mentioned that <i>Types </i>was originally for piano -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">- and as unplayable as it sounds, looks, and is it's clear that Ferroud had high hopes for the instrument's potential. His piano works encompass the whole of his career and style, sometimes laying his techniques bare for the world to see, such as how the haunting <i>Prelude and Forlane</i> (1922) reveals his ingenuity at blending incongruous scales together to create liquid, novel lines:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Two piano works in particular beg for repeat performances. The first is <i>Fables</i>, a collection of miniatures that span the whole of Ferroud's emotional range and are able to contain his unique language in a compact, playable style, and the fact that these highly likable quickies haven't been played regularly since their conception in 1931 infuriates me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The other is the <i>Sonatina in C-sharp minor</i>, his "big piece" for the instrument. Full-blown sonatas, while never all that popular among the French (despite some excellent piano entries by the likes of Paul Dukas and Vincent d'Indy), had fallen out of fashion during the latter half of <i>la belle époque</i> and sonatinas, once a shallow teaching medium, were totally revitalized as a dynamic platform for invention and charm. While many countries, notably the Netherlands and Sweden experienced Sonatina Fever (with composers as disparate as Sibelius and Bartók trying their hand at them) the French were particularly deft at them and Ravel, Roussel, Milhaud and Hahn all wrote excellent works in the genre, though the champion was the sadly neglected Maurice Emmanuel at six varied, luscious pieces (now <i>there's</i> an article I need to write). Ferroud's <i>Sonatina </i>isn't quite as dense as the <i>Symphony</i> but takes a great crack at it and all the Ferroudian hallmarks are here - primitive melodies juxtaposed on illusory arpeggios, earnestness on top of foreboding, and remarkably tasteful virtuosity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Many of Ferroud's score can be downloaded at his <a href="http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Ferroud,_Pierre-Octave">IMSLP page</a>, further proof that we are living in the best world we've ever had right now (except for Trump's existence, of course). There's such greatness for new players to explore that there's no way to go into it here, but I can leave you with a contrasting pair of works: the <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34AqNvhBfVQ">Central Park in the Dark</a>-</i>style <i>Foules </i>(Crowds) (1924) and the teenage-conceived <i>Andante Cordial </i>(1919/1926). Here's to meager vindication of the untimely deceased and hopefully more articles to come.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">~PNK</span></div>
Peter Nelson-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042073634867935017noreply@blogger.com2