A while back I wrote an article on Alice McElroy Procter, a student of Howard Hanson and Ross Lee Finney who attempted to start her own classical music publishing house in 1952. Their flagship title was to be Panorama, collecting a who's-who of B- to Z-list American composers in the early 50's with the aim of cultivating a repertoire of pedagogical piano works worth listening to. It's about high time some of them get recorded, as there are some quite nice pieces nestled in those pages (including an H. Owen Reed leaf I'll get to later). Oddly enough, the first piece I've decided to record is one that actually escaped the confines of the American Music Company: Earl George's Intermezzo.
(Click for larger view)
As per George himself, I've only heard two other pieces of his (Thanksgiving Overture, Arioso for cello and piano) and they're just fine. He authored a good 100 pieces in his life but never achieved wide recognition, getting washed away in a sea of American classical success in the 50's. This is one of his earliest pieces, dating from no earlier than 1953 and harking back centuries earlier. Using a simple binary form, the Intermezzo alternates between a minimalist, harp-like texture, with a 2-on-4 F Dorian ostinato ringing on top of a quartal, 3-note cell. After eight bars the right hand jumps up to a mixed mode for four bars, returning to F Dorian as the left hand moves down a whole step. The B section is a deceptively simple three-voice chorale, almost plainchant in its hallowed compression but working with contemporary harmonic tools, resulting in heartbreaking passages and resolutions. The repeat of the piece is identical until the resolution of A2, a branching-off point for B2 to take us towards a smile-inducing final chord, an oddly tonal conclusion to a piece that had quietly reveled in the circle of fifths for so long. It's no wonder this piece got picked up for re-publication - you may have noticed that Intermezzo isn't the title printed here. Originally Little Prelude, it was plucked from the depths by Elkan-Vogel in 1955, receiving its new moniker. I prefer Intermezzo, as the piece seems to have slid in from between the walls of much larger events in life. It's far too delicate a work to accompany anything but itself, or possibly a pocket of airborne dust in a living room in an early Spring afternoon. Whatever you make of the Intermezzo I hope I didn't make too much of a hash of things in my recording, my first Soundcloud submission in well over a year.
Nationalism is a fickle beast, especially when opera is involved. The musical climate of post-revolutionary France was, much like Italy, dominated by opera, and substantial instrumental music wasn't given the press or acceptance it deserved (leaving good composers like Louise Farrenc in the proverbial dust). The symphony especially suffered, as no scene took off from Napoleon's favorite composer son, Étienne Nicolas Méhul, who was called France's Beethoven in his lifetime, apparently in vain. Berlioz didn't even get them to budge, which is a bit shocking now considering how popular his work is today. That being said, you'd think a nationalistic crossover artist wouldn't get any support among the birth of Empire. Well, you'd be partly right.
That jaunty number closed off the Fantaisie Symphonique by Théodore Gouvy (1819-1898), born in what is now Saarbrücken-Schafbrücke on the Franco-Prussian border and eternally split between the French and German cultures he shared. He wasn't able to get French citizenship until he was 32, and in the meantime studied privately. Becoming a master of chamber and symphonic forms, he gained much recognition behind the Instro Curtain (Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and Russia), but never held water in France. Which is odd, because those other countries seem to enjoy opera just fine, but France and Italy couldn't care less for lyric-less tunes. This would change with César Franck, but his change would be so big, coupled with the vast stormcloud that was Wagner, that Gouvy once again didn't stand a chance. With as much invention, charm, and formal command as he possessed, his work was still firmly planted in previous generations. But for those in the mood, it's all there - mastery of orchestration, astonishing harmonic depth, infectious subjects, and genuine, revelatory surprise. Check out the section at 3:16 for an ass-flattening pastorale. I was introduced to Gouvy via his third Symphonie, which I'd be more than happy to show you here if it would ever show up on YouTube, and contains all those traits and more. But then maybe I'd run out of room to show off his chamber work.
That'll change your socks for ya. Recording his considerable oeuvre has only been in swing since the 90's, with 23 CDs to his name listed on Amazon. Aside from scattered labels such as Sony Classical and Lorraine, the big mover/shaker is CPO, who have made a name for themselves reviewing the grand and unknown among Romantic and early-20th century composers and don't make any false moves with their five-disc broadside (including that Symponie nr. 3 I was talking about). They've focused on pieces involving orchestras, so the works he's (arguably) most known for - piano duet - had to be taken care of by others, namely the Duo Tal & Groethuysen.
The resurrection of his work is inspiring, but even that may not uncover the second entry here. A useful technique for uncovering artists in a search engine is to search for the publisher and browse their authors. Editions Maurice Senart is a goldmine for impressionism, so while trundling their stuff in the Sibley Music Library at Eastman School of Music I found this:
Notice anything?
Beg your pardon?
No, this isn't a practical joke on the part of the good ship Sibley. A quick search on Worldcat, a database for university libraries that will pretty much turn up every score and recording in existence, shows six works under that name (plus duplicate listings). Wikipedia had nothing, and Grove Music Online came up cold. However, the answer was in store for me on another, less informative site: YouTube.
Phillip Sear is one of those blessed individuals whose adoration for obscure (mostly mid-to-late 19th century) composers is only matched by his persistence. He'll soon have 2,000 videos of himself playing from the nearly endless solo piano rep, mining the vast quarries of IMSLP, Sibley and CosandScores. This recording, taken from the set Tableaux du Caucase, comes with the best information I've yet uncovered on M. Ygouw. Opol Ygouw is a pseudonym, taken from the letters of the composer's real name: Léopold Gouvy. Léopold (1871-1968) was a nephew of Théodore's, and lived in the same big house as him, but certainly didn't write the same music. The three works I was able to see are dripping with impressionist technique, and reveal a curious voice with a flair for drama. Check out the boffo opening to his cello sonata:
His six works were published from 1921 to 1924, putting him ahead of Abel Decaux in terms of oeuvre but still behind Paul Dukas. I know of the French tradition of composers who wrote fewer, more perfect works rather than a lot of crap, but this may be pushing it. I still have no idea why he wrote so little music, but what he did leave is at least pretty interesting. I also haven't the foggiest why he didn't use his real name; perhaps the backlash against his uncle was so strong in his lifetime that it was dead to the industry. If anybody who's reading this knows more I for one would like to hear it, because he seems just eccentric enough to shine through the sands of time. At any rate, his uncle's music is out there to find, and if you see any opols at Sotheby's I'd say they're a good investment.
Most composition contests are loud, whether by design or by insecurity. The young, nameless figures who populate their Hopefuls are under pressure and anticipation, making sure the judges know that each and every note is bursting with creative energy and grant-winning spirit. This all too often results in pieces which leap out of the page and smack the committee across the face for even thinking John Q. Mozart from Scuttlebum State University wouldn't be up to snuff*. Keeping that in mind, it's always special to see a contestant putting their reputation on the line to show off something gentle - not unworthy, just gentle. These pieces never win, of course, but it's a real show of character for an artist to trust so much in their more modest work to put it right up front and beam as if it were their only child. So what if there was a contest dedicated entirely to those pieces? There was, from 1953 to 1971, and it was exclusive to the Eastman School of Music.
Edward R. Benjamin (1897-1980) was a Southern Industrialist whose work took him to Louisiana, North Carolina, and many places in between and afar. He was also an ardent patron of serious music in the South and elsewhere, and believed that life should be lived surrounded by beauty. And no other kind of music transfixed him such as that which "charms and soothes", calming, rich works that invoke restfulness in the listener. Arguably his most lasting contribution to the world of music was his founding, with the help of Howard Hanson, a highly esteemed composer and director of the school, the Edward R. Benjamin Award for Restful Music, an annual contest for Eastman students to award the best piece (or pieces) to invoke those qualities Benjamin held so dear. In 1958 Hanson decided to record nine of the winners for one of his contract albums for Mercury Records, Music for Quiet Listening, and with the reprinting of the record in 1994 (with a few other tracks to fill out the CD) it's the last anybody heard of the contest and most of the winners. That reissue is now out of print, which is a shame - it's both historically interesting and quite lovely.
Unlike many high-profile contests, the Benjamin Award draw exclusively from a single student body, and upon reviewing the nine I had only heard of two people, one of whom in very brief passing. It's a fine reminder that just because somebody enters into a higher education program it's no guarantee they'll make the alumni hall of fame in their field. Some of the winners stuck it out in the classical field, becoming professors at Eastman and elsewhere, while others left the highbrow behind, such as Bill Pursell, who went on to be a pop pianist and session musician. The only two figures I'd heard of, Ron Nelson and Martin Mailman, largely eluded fame by gaining recognition in music for wind band, a surefire way to get performances but not widespread acknowledgement. And even with the later success of the contest winners none of the pieces on this disc have gotten any lasting recognition. Sadly, their brief time in the sun was written in to their very being, but not by any effort of the composers.
One issue with the compilation is having to listen to each piece in a row. Some compilations lend themselves to a full sit-down; not this one. The historical fascination in this kind of set is its function as a snapshot of the prevailing influences and ambitions of young composers during the greatest boomtime in American classical music. That being said, hearing all nine of the works together creates a pleasant blur. I don't intend to diminish the quality of the works by mentioning their self-similarity; it's an expected trait when era-binging and I don't hold it against the composers. They're students and haven't fully developed their voices (and may never), so its natural for there to be overlapping qualities, and none of the pieces were written with the intention of ending up on a compilation album of its peers. All of the works owe some of their existence to the granddaddy of all modern adagios, Gabriel Fauré's Pavane, as well as Maurice Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte. To quote the album's liner notes, they "possess a thoughtful serenity and a calm emotion devoid of cloying sentimentality," and aren't "morbid or dull-toned or cloudy." I think it's best to approach each piece on its own terms, perhaps taking in one with a fine scotch and leaving the rest for other times. The recording team thought each piece should stand on its own within the confines of an LP, recording each with a simple, high quality technique that allowed the purely musical qualities to come to the fore. For such modest music a lot of people care very deeply about its due treatment.
It's probably fitting that the contest was suspended in 1971, at the very end of academia's acceptance of the profitable and popular brand of American classical music that had dominated during the previous three decades. So ubiquitous was this style that some of the works on this disc wouldn't be out of place in a serious 50's Hollywood drama or TV show. I think its also fitting of not only the works' bid for singularity but also the all-too-predictable obscurity of the album that I was only able to find one of the tracks on YouTube. Its composer, Ron Nelson, is known almost exclusively for his powerful band piece Passacaglia on B-A-C-H. As with that piece's homaging bent, his Sarabande: For Katharine in April (1954 winner) seems to channel the spirit of Ravel, not so much in the Pavane but for The Enchanted Garden, the final movement of the Mother Goose suite and one of my several dozen votes for the most beautiful piece of music ever written. If you do find the disc my other recommendations would be Bill Pursell's Christ Looking Over Jerusalem and Paul Earl's And on the Seventh Day... For now, here's the Sarabande, and I hope that we can all find time for quiet listening in our lives - some of us certainly need it.
~PNK
*One of my favorite stories to this regard was when my undergraduate band professor and his star pupil returned from a band conference. The band director announced to the wind ensemble, "I have seen the future of band music, and it is very loud." The pupil told m about John Mackey's piece Asphalt Cocktail, the climax of which involved a percussionist throwing a metal trashcan full of chains onto the stage. He also retold another professor's joke about a piece that made his penis fall off.
As someone who has spent a good amount of time digging up unknown great works, I have spent much of that time in search of the answer to a simple question: what do people need from music? Many other questions orbit this one, such as: why do people gravitate towards some musics and not others, and what do the differences between people's tastes say about us? Is there any point in believing in any one standard for excellence? What does music accomplish for us on a scientific level? While there are a ton of answers for all these questions I still find myself asking, and I'm often surprised at how I can come to need certain pieces. And one such piece that has taken the hand of my psyche is a largely unknown organ piece from the mid-20's, something I never thought I'd utter.
One area of Western music I'm not much of an authority on is sacred music, and the organ is Christianity's chosen instrument (aside from the human voice, of course). It's impossible to talk of organ repertoire without having most of your material coming from the church, and because I find a big chunk of sacred music I've come across to be purely functional I haven't done too much independent listening into either church or organ rep. I most likely wouldn't have heard of today's piece, or its composer, if I hadn't been researching another figure entirely: Robert Russell Bennett, Broadway's most famous arranger and the author of two astoundingly good orchestral pieces, Abraham Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form and Sights and Sounds: An Orchestral Entertainment. I'll get to those guys later, as well as the piece I was searching for in the first place, his inventive and haunting Organ Sonata. The CD I'd loaned out, David Britton's Organo Deco, featured the Sonata as well as five other organ works that Britton felt reflected the Art Deco spirit (all performed on a Deco-styled organ from the late 30's). While the other works aren't much to write home about (such as Leo Sowerby's very early Comes Autumn Time, which sounds a lot better in its orchestral version), one other work has stuck with me for quite some time: the Prelude on "Iam sol recedit igneus" (1924) by Bruce Simonds, a Yale professor and concert pianist. This is one of two works he wrote for the instrument, and as far as I can tell the only things he ever published. Organ music, much like guitar music, is largely written by its performers, and it's not uncommon (especially in a sacred music setting) for a performer to contribute only a work or two to the rep before retreating from composition. In the case of Simonds, not only was he an interloper, but the piece is actually pretty wonderful.
The piece takes inspiration from an inner verse of the chant "Lux Beate Trinitas", and "Iam"'s title translates to, "As fades the glowing orb of day" (or "As now the sun's rays declining" as the CD booklet tells me). The sacred prelude tradition goes way back (with Bach's 371 chorale preludes a staple of music theory classes), though I feel this piece as being a more extended study than the name "prelude" allows for, stretching for more than ten minutes. It takes the sunset cue from the text and sprawls, with a lush, hallowed intensity, across the subconscious. In my Gardner Read article I talked about how a reliance on extended, resonant simplicity can invade our inner space, taking us into a different state of mind. I'm not sure Simonds was really a composer (the small inconsistencies in the score tell me he wasn't a professional), but if he wasn't it's all the more remarkable how the Prelude accomplishes this effect in spades. He relies on few elements, largely a central theme derived from the chant itself, and slowly develops and resets it through a fine, quiet drama. A simple structure reveals itself, whereby different castings of the theme envelop distant and progressively mounting quotes from the chant. Simonds knows organ colors very well, using stops and writing density to effortlessly achieve his arc. And as much control is evident in the piece this is music written from and for the heart. There is no larger technical device present; it's all a sung dream, a cathartic close to a universal day. There's no need to explain anything; you know it already, and it surrounds you.
As I said before I'm no expert on organ music, and this piece may be fairly run-of-the-mill in comparison to its more impressive cousins. I'm also not Catholic, and so I can't speak for the religious significance of the chant or this setting. I do know this piece's staying power, if only for me personally. I've come to need it in a small way, and it's a need that's impossible to put into words. It's something of a given that defending music with words is partially a lost cause, and this isn't any truer than with a seemingly artless piece like this. It certainly isn't really artless, but rather has the illusion of artlessness. I am referring to a quote by the composer Leland Procter (husband of Alice McElroy Procter), here talking about his first symphony: "Art is most perfect when it ceases to be art - when there is an impression of artlessness. I do not underestimate the importance of artfulness or craft, but the greatest impact is achieved when the craft of musical composition is relatively inconspicuous, except to the analyst." I've come to appreciate this philosophy more and more, as that's where the appreciation of music springs from in the first place. I'm also reminded of Clarke's Third Law, an oft-repeated statement on the future of science that states: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The implication is that technology's ultimate goal is to become invisible, allowing for purely intuitive living and doing. I've come to realize that the greatest composers are those that have achieved a level of craft where they no longer think of how they compose, and simply do as they were born to do. Simonds's Prelude isn't a "how" piece - it's a pure emotional statement, an epiphany at the gloaming of the mind's eye.
There are few more exciting moments in research when you stumble across a hold of unseen work. There have been many cases of talented artists left out of the eye of the art establishment, with a wide variety of reasons for their hermitage. One part of being an artist that isn't brought up enough is the importance of being sociable to your fellow artists, and the obscurity of Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) is largely due to simply being withdrawn and odd. So withdrawn that information about her early life is very hard to come by. A German expatriate, she came to America in 1923 (although she had been in the country from 1911-1914, though nothing is known about what she did), studying at Mannes College of Music. Her ticket to possible recognition came when she began studying with Ruth Crawford Seeger (wife of Charles Seeger), Henry Cowell and Dane Rudhyar, all major figures in the American Ultra-Modernist scene in New York. She also worked with the even-more-obscure Canadian-American Jessie Baetz, and if anybody has any idea as to how I can get ahold of her scores I'd love to hear them. Despite having connections to many figures in the scene she remained very private, and her works were rarely performed (though she maintained a friendship, and possible romantic connection, with Cowell until the early 40's). She eventually succumbed to ALS, dying in her early 50's. It's difficult to tell if being more outgoing would have helped her reputation more in her lifetime, because long after the fact it's difficult to know where to start with her work.
Beyer's compositions are among the most fearlessly inventive and wide-ranging of her time and place. Music of the Spheres (1938) is one of the earliest works for an ensemble of electronic instruments; Messiaen's Oraison for ondes martenot ensemble is the only one I can think of that predates it (or Marinetti's Futurist instruments). It's one of the more accessible entryways for her experimental style, focusing on processes and odd pitch and rhythmic structures rather than arc, harmony or programmatic context. It's almost minimalistic in feel, but with Beyer it's difficult to tell her real motives by the works alone. Her pieces range from distressingly naive (such as the Sonatina for piano) to baffling, such as this:
This is only one of a series of such "pieces" at the beginning of the Piano Book, a multi-volume (I think) pedagogical piano series in the same vein as Bartok's Mikrokosmos. It's possible that these first, note-less works were intended as exercises to coax music-making out of children before they were able to read music; the fact that the plant-like figures vaguely resemble notes makes this page all the more intriguing. I can't tell if they're not supposed to be played, because what purpose do they serve otherwise? The music doesn't begin until after a bunch of these things. Also, the book's progressive difficulty isn't terribly challenging, so my Mikrokosmos comparison may have been un-apt.
If history has remembered Beyer for anything it was her works for percussion of which there were many and make up a significant contribution to the development of percussion music in the 30's. To be blunt, I'm not really a fan of early percussion music; I feel that too much of it is too taken by the mere fact of percussion instruments playing by themselves to constitute a satisfying musical experience. I put the Waltz (1939) up because it took up the least amount of time and I've actually seen it live (or maybe it was the very-similar IV). Normally I'd point out a lack of musicality in these pieces but with Beyer I really haven't the foggiest as to what her motives were. The Waltz at least leaves you with a smile, and has an identifiable process at work that doesn't overstay its welcome. Speaking of processes, a work that has attracted some scholarly attention is her Suite no. 1b for solo clarinet, specifically the fourth movement:
(Click for larger view)
I got the score for this, as well as a bunch of other scores by Beyer, off of Larry Polansky's website. An advocate for the early Avant-Garde in America, Polansky wrote about the use of "tempo melody" in the fourth movement to this and the 1a clarinet suite. "Tempo melody" is shown in the indication of "m=m", or "measure = measure". Essentially, however long it took to play the previous measure is how long the next measure is to be played, accounting for different numbers of notes. For example, if the first measure had two notes in it and the second three, the tempo shift would be a 3 : 2 ratio. Polansky noted that the integer ratios found in the tempo shifts have related ratios in pitch relations, but I'll not bore you by inserting his chart. I've heard two decent performances of this movement, and the tempi get outlandish, compounded with the great difficulty of the piece without the speed issues. There is an effective arc to be found in this piece, but I'm not sure the performers were able to get a handle on it, or if that was Beyer's wish to begin with. Polansky has become one of her greatest posthumous advocates, as he got many of her compositions published by Frog Peak Music, a composer's collective.
In 2008 the non-profit record label New World Records released Sticky Melodies, a 2-disc retrospective of her work that covers nearly everything she tried to accomplish (in what we've found, that is). I don't own it, but judging by the preview clips available on Amazon there's a pretty wide swath of moods, techniques and listenabilities. In addition to that set I would recommend tracking down an album by violinist Miwako Abe that includes her dark and lovely Suite for violin and piano as well as works by Crawford Seeger, Cowell, Polansky and Antheil. As with all Beyer pieces I suggest treading with caution, because as intrigued and enthusiastic as I am about getting her work out there I'm not sure we'll ever get to her true core. But that's all part of the uncovering process, and I'm very grateful that people like Larry Polansky are working for her welfare long after her death.
Every collector reaches a level in their work where they ask a simple question: why? Why put work into preserving these things, things that you may be unique in desiring? What is their real value? Why do you need to collect at all? With classical music, I find myself questioning its collector appeal simply because I feel relatively alone in what I do (not to say there aren't other hopeless obsessives on YouTube and the like). I'm also curious as to why I collect certain composers' work, usually in cases where I have hesitations in showing that work to others. Every collector has attachments to their finds that are tricky to explain by purely objective standards. This is where Gardner Read comes in.
The music of Gardner Read (1913-2005) can be best described as sitting neatly between John Alden Carpenter and Ned Rorem, but that doesn't do a whole lot for people uninitiated in the American Classical Canon (TM). Read's works inhabit a rich, yet stately, sound-world, heavily influenced by impressionism but possessing an American solidity, never raising its voice. He is mostly known today for authoring one of the definitive handbooks to music engraving, Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice, and despite having a work list nearly 200 strong no frequently-performed works bear his name. I probably would have gone a good while longer having not heard of him if it weren't for his position as a Professor in Composition at Boston University, my Masters Alma Mater, and for a career-spanning collection of his works at BU's main library. These kinds of library collections (the M3's for those unfamiliar with the Library of Congress system) are oeuvre sets, and BU houses the life's work of such luminaries as Debussy, Shostakovich, and Josip Slavenski (who I may get to in a later article). This is what the Read collection looks like:
Those crusty volumes haphazardly stuck in the shelves were donated by Read himself; he also donated dozens of other great works by lesser-knowns to the stacks as a gift to people like Mr. Y. Truly. It should be noted that the library staff isn't too keen on keeping these scores organized, and I suspect I'm the only person in a while to take an interest in them. The M3's are only pulled out by students for classwork and I highly doubt Read has come up in Music History recently. Also, Read is one of the more accessible composers from the mid-20th century to remain sophisticated, so I'm not sure why more students aren't playing perfectly good recital material like the 6 Intimate Moods for violin and piano (which contains a leaf) or the Threnody for flute and piano. Am I nuts for caring about him?
I need to warn you that there aren't a lot of recordings of Read's work on YouTube and half of them are very old, very bad recordings, so I don't have much to play for you. I can give little examples like the above Night Song for piano. To make a stab at it, the main reason for the neglect of Read's music today is its way of never jumping out and smacking the listener over the head. Nothing smacks the listener over the head, and historical memory is largely written on shallow criteria. While some of Read's pieces are loud and exciting there are a heck of a lot more written from a subdued, internal space. The bulk of the pieces I've seen from him are patient and inviting as a philosophy, utilizing economical techniques and a masterful handle on long form to create their catharses. That first line from the Night Song isn't an anomaly for Read's piano writing, as a number of other piano pieces and a lot of his lovely songs grow from a similar place. I grew up on this kind of music (Debussy and Chopin being my first classical heroes), so I've found a lot to love in his oeuvre but sympathize with those who start checking their watch at the sight of a nocturne. He has a very good pile of night pieces, like the Petite Berceuse for piano, the songs Lullaby for a Man-Child, Lullaby for a Dark Hour, At Bedtime, When Moonlight Falls, and one of his best pieces, Night Flight for orchestra:
The piece is inspired by the beloved novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and depicts the magical, mysterious space above the clouds, evoking mood and atmosphere rather than telling any kind of story. One thing Read is very good at is bringing the listener into a subconcious world without resorting to minimalist techniques, and the economical writing and long-form focus serve that purpose excellently. It should be standard rep for American orchestras, with its ingenious orchestration, modest length and programmatic context. I especially like the use of a repeated oboe note to represent the beeping radio in the cockpit. Another work that invades the subconcious the best is the ass-flattening De Profundis for horn and organ (recorded by the great trombonist Christian Lindberg for his album The Sacred Trombone along with Read's Invocation for trombone and organ).I'm actually kind of mad that piece isn't uploaded, though it would be nice to hear it played on an actual horn.
In an effort to get more of his stuff online I have made a performance of his Impromptu, op. 42 for YouTube. The Impromptu is one of his best piano pieces and is highly reminiscent of Ravel's Neo-Baroque works:
Most of his piano works were marketed by their publishers as pedagogical works, and his most advanced work for piano, Driftwood, has never been published; I was lucky and got to scan a copyist's version from the BU collection. It appears Read relied on these small pieces for income and actually re-published the Impromptu in a revised version as the Intermezzo, op. 42a. Comparing the covers of these two works is a nice era comparison, as the Impromptu was published in 1940 and the Intermezzo in 1959. The Intermezzo cover is about as modern as the marketing for his works ever got, by the way:
I read that Copland and Read got into a minor spat that ended with Copland calling Read a "romanticist", and Read questioned whether his music was too lush for the Neo-Classical Populist language for which Copland was the Sun God. As modestly romantic as Read must have appeared in the 30's, 40's and 50's, that's nothing compared to how out of place he must have looked after the 60's ended and the hard Avant-Garde took over in the U.S. He did try his hand at more advanced compositional techniques, including aleatoric music and extended instrumental technique, but more often than not they would feel like his music. An attractive example of that tendency is the Canzone di Notte for guitar, which has the guitarist tapping the body of the guitar among Read-ish arpeggios. The lower line is an elegant notational solution to where the guitarist taps.
He retired from teaching in 1978 and kept composing into the 90's, including the excellent-looking 5 Aphorisms for violin and piano, which would make an excellent framing piece on a recital that starts with the 6 Intimate Moods (violinists: take note). One late work that got recorded is the Fantasy-Toccata for harpsichord, using the crunchy tone quality of the instrument to augment crunchy polychords. The harpsichordist Mark Kroll was actually a Professor Emeritus at BU and performed the piece all over the U.S. and Europe:
I wish I could show you the first two symphonies (both written in the 30's), both of which won first prize in two different contests, but the recordings on YouTube are dreadful, so I'll let you find them at your own risk. The third piece that got first prize is actually one of my least favorite works of his, the Nocturnal Visions song set from the 80's. It may have been apparent that Read was running out of ideas, as the first song is just a revision of an older one without proper credit. Most composers find themselves in Read's position at the ends of their careers, but the difference is that you can tell from Read's music that he was a really nice guy, and that's a little sad. The good news is that his colleagues and students knew he was a nice guy, and a very understanding teacher who didn't force his rhetoric upon his students. Upon his death in 2005 BU's website published an obituary (http://www.bu.edu/today/2005/cfa’s-gardner-read-dies-at-92/), and it mentions a 1998 concert of his works at BU that appears to have gone over well. I think Read is far more deserving of his own study room than Arthur Fiedler, who not only has a special library area but a ghastly stone relief outside the door. Maybe it's not that I'm crazy, but rather I just feel for Read and his desire to make beautiful music, and think it shouldn't be forgotten.
In the end it may have been the surface modesty that kept Read from broader academic and public acceptance, and his personal evolution was always on his own terms and not the zeitgeist's. There are some CDs out there if you want to investigate his work further, and I would recommend The Art of Song, a 1999 collection of his vocal works recorded by D'Anna Fortunato and friends. His songs are quite lovely and would be welcome to Ned Rorem fans. Perhaps if more people hear his pieces I'll start to feel less odd for wanting his pieces to be heard. And if you think that a full investigation won't turn up anything terribly exciting, I'll leave you with one of his most invigorating orchestral pieces, Toccata Giocosa:
When Albany Records was in full swing of their several-CD tribute to the music of George Walker (b. 1922), the first Black Classical composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1996; Lilacs for voice and orchestra), I'd like to think that it was George who insisted upon the prefix "Great American" for the titles. Therefore, the volumes come with headings such as Great American Orchestral Music vols. 1-3, Great American Chamber Music,Great American Concert Music, etc. Rather than sputtering in confusion and crying out "Who does he think he is?!" I choose to take these titles as a question: what is "Great American Music", anyways? Is Walker just self-aggrandizing or does he believe his music reflects a legitimate concept?
My mind immediately flits to the old idea of the Great American Novel, a mythical beast tamed by the likes of John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and later parodied by Philip Roth with The Great American Novel, featuring the Patriot League of baseball and a Communist conspiracy. Wikipedia's definition has it as "distinguished in both craft and theme as being the most accurate representative of the zeitgeist in the United States at the time of its writing or in the time it is set." That's just fine for narrative art, but how would that be accomplished in an abstract medium such as music? I can't place too many non-operatic examples, so let's loosen this puppy a bit to fit "the zeitgeist of America through classical music." Unfortunately we've still got a ways to go. I've long thought that great composer write for all time rather than their specific time, being aware of their context and transcending it.
When I think "Great American Music" I think of Charles Ives, a totally unique and enormously influential genius whose work precedes many defining traits of what would become the American classical vernacular in the middle of the 20th century (a vernacular in which Walker began). Ives's sound is one of enormous vigor, using big, resonant, quasi-tonal harmonies to evoke the vast expanse of our Manifest Destiny (however immorally we acquired it). It's that particular trait that held over into the younger generations, and almost every composer to gain real traction in the 40's and 50's focused on big open sonorities, matching vigor with a serious lyricism. You get the sense that this is the real deal, that other musics are just messing around. This tough and tender combination is what I find so endearing about American classical music, and holds my love for these composers with a tender iron grip. George Walker fits both those criteria, but developed an effective and original way of exploring them in a career spanning seven decades.
Walker initially gained fame as a piano prodigy, entering Oberlin Conservatory at age 14, moving to Curtis Institute of Music and eventually getting his doctorate from Eastman School of Music. As with most established and ignored composers I'm not sure what occurred in his life to keep him from the limelight, aside from his race, which was still a considerable issue in his early career. He did get some recognition for the piece that remains his most popular, Lyricfor Strings:
You may have noticed this performance is by a string quartet rather than a string orchestra, and that's because this piece began its life as the middle movement of his String Quartet no. 1, which is a truly fantastic piece. It's a fine sister piece to Barber's Adagio for Strings, which also began as the middle movement of a string quartet; the difference is that Walker's outer movements are just as good as the gooey center. This piece is from 1946, one of his earliest great pieces, and you can easily leapfrog from that piece to his Piano Sonata no. 1 (1953):
That's Walker playing the piano there; his reputation isn't a dirty rat lier in the least. Here we see both the criteria I'd mentioned, elaborated upon with enormous skill and sincerity. His harmonic language takes a lot from composers before him such as Harris, Schuman, Piston, and other "New Romantics" as Gerard Schwarz would call them. The second and third movements are actually folk-song settings (the former a variations set). Also, in the first movement we see Walker pointing towards a very sophisticated kind of piano writing that would crystallize in his works from the 80's. I'll demonstrate with the first page of his still-unrecorded Bauble:
(Click for larger view)
In the lower staves we see thundering lines, vaulting across octaves and creating big harmonic spans in their wake. These effects are more pronounced in counterpoint, and the piece of his that really explodes this technique is the Piano Sonata no. 4, a really fantastic piece that's on a CD with the two string quartets (available on Amazon, BTW). Despite their intimidating presence on the page these lines retain a certain singability, and their's harmonies are often jazz-friendly; this piece in particular wouldn't phase me as an improvisation. I have yet to find hard evidence of a jazz influence upon his works, but pieces like Bleu for unaccompanied violin might be clues:
In the process of reigning in this review, I realize that my previous assessment of "Great American Music" may have been too simplistic, because there is a heck of a lot of variety in our classical scene and Walker has a distinct identity. It's more that American composers tend to refer back to those concepts despite their disparity. And I'd like to think the hallmark of American art should be rugged individuality rather than a single National image, and plenty of composers have that, too. Walker fits both kinds, and that's pretty neat; he's kept on chugging, too, and I'll leave you with a piece from the 2000s as a tribute to that. All in all, I'd be wary of anybody who walks down the street calling himself a "Great American" something, but in Walker's case I think he's earned it.
