An Interview with David Victor Feldman on the Humphrey Marshall Evans III Society

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 Graham and David Parlett’s cataloguing of Arnold Bax’s work. 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.

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, Night Sky Music 3 (1969) and down wanky pleasure lane... (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.

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:

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 Outer's Covering: tamara settings for molly, 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:

"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)."

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, Flowers in the Attic, 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 was happy to hear about Burr Van Nostrand, as I had written a short article 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.

Below is my correspondence interview with Feldman, with Feldman's responses in italics.

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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 Outer's Covering 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? 

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.

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 Echoes of Time and the River 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? 

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.

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? 

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.

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? 

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.

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 Vigany's Cabinet, 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? 

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 December 1952, 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.

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? 

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 Flowers in the Attic, 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 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? 

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 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.

~PNK

Eugene Cines - One Foot In and a Dozen Out

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 de facto 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.

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 Studio One.  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 forum question 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:

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).

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 Abbreviations, 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 Abbreviations.  It's a shame, because they're quite nice, fine additions to the longstanding tradition of brief, concentrated dodecaphonic piano literature.  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.

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 Abbreviations. 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.

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 Four Short Pieces from the same period.

The final piece lets the drama into the foreground, and it's a black, alien one.  Now we have fortissimo, 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.

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 Abbreviations 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?

~PNK

*This is a funny case where copyright hounds have to be kept chained - the music was designed to be copyright-free.

Hello Again with Helena Łopuska

 

The past keeps expanding, like the universe, and its stars grow farther and farther away. We don’t know exactly why the universe is expanding, but can see its effect; we are all too aware of time passing, and spend much of our time in denial. And art needs advocates who are clear-eyed in the face of this encroaching oblivion.

I was recently invited to perform experimental music in a guest spot at the Seattle bar/gallery Vermillion, and preceding the show I was interviewed by the show host, Christian Pincock. Pincock is a good egg, and had hosted a piano recital of mine at his house and threw a new-piano-warming party where I got to show off a heap of rare pieces. In the interview, he probed as to why I’m so fixated on rediscovering forgotten gems, and the truth came to me in speaking that dead artists are increasingly dead, and everyone they touched in life are also increasingly dead. Living artists can advocate for their work, and there is a machine dedicated to active artists and the dissemination of their work. “Classics” are an extremely small slice of what can be found – most art is unknown. Our tastes are made narrow from birth by market forces and apathy, and at times obscure works that get shared outside of the system feel like a kind of samizdat, circumventing establishment out of the moral urgency of preserving that which cannot preserve itself. And in the years since I stopped regularly blogging here, I have found a great deal more composers in need of advocacy. Now that Summer is upon us, and my performances have accordingly slowed down, it seems like a great opportunity to restart and catch up with all the unjustly forgotten music I can.

When people ask me how I find my music, I frequently point to other people/organizations like myself, and these days the most enjoyable resource for casual researchers is probably YouTube channels. A special class of musician, notably pianists, have channels dedicated to amateur recordings of obscure works, channels like PSearPianist, Gamma1734, and PianoMusicSheWrote. The latter is an admirable general resource for people looking for female composers to program, as they have covered dozens and dozens of names across many centuries. This is where I found the music of Helena Łopuska (1886-1920), and even though a pro CD exists with all her published works, channels like these, whatever is distributed widest, will be the taste-directors of the future. And Łopuska is perfect for them, and me, as only a few works are available, the composer died young and unknown, and the high quality of her work is as obvious on first listening as all subsequent ones.

Information is scanty – she was Polish, studied piano and composition at the Warsaw Conservatory as well as in Leipzig and Moscow, under Zygmunt Noskowski for composition at the latter. She toured around in Germany and Poland, eventually marrying the Polish violinist and teacher Adam Wyleżyński (1880-1954), and had a few large works premiered to success in Warsaw. Apparently there was also a violin sonata composed, but from what I’ve gathered her only published works are five piano miniatures, and only four are available. How she died, and whether it was in 1920 or 1921, I can't say, and like most of the composers I feature here her only legacy will be through the works of hers that are preserved and can be widely disseminated. But I'm sure that you'll find her works just as enchanting as I have, and there's no time like the present to look them over. The scores are here.

All of Łopuska's surviving works are in the wonderful post-Chopin miniature tradition, and show how one can push against harmonic convention with sensitivity and still transport the listener. One can see this even in the earliest of her published works, the Chanson Sans Parole, Op. 2. Plucking along through long, wistful arpeggios, her song without words dances through chord changes like a fairy-tale maiden drawing diaphanous curtains from her face. While no Polish piano composer of the time could really escape Chopin, Łopuska's inspiration here appears to be Fauré - the harmonic moves are unusual in a most sotto voce, antique fashion, their song for Ravel's infante défunte. A central section of reserved, tragic pomp gives way to more cascades, ending just as they began, in a mist of tears.

Her Mâtiné printanière, Op. 5 is anchored by one of the most elegant reverie-triggers in music: the pinging, off-beat pedal note. Everyone from Vaughan Williams to Josef Suk utilized this to hypnotize the listener, and a fascinating dissertation could be written on its history and effectiveness. This anchor, an octave in the middle of the keyboard, is a bit swifter than some others but not more insistent, and Łopuska threads it through a singing, harp-like texture to support one of the best melodies in Polish piano music. I'm deeply impressed by how effective the piano writing is, getting maximum color glow with easy tools, as well as how easily she uses the pedal tone as a hinge into a minor key. In skilled hands it's a frictionless magic trick, perfect for the Spring morning the composer is depicting - a birdsong, clear and distant.

Question, Op. 6, the youngest of her published piano works, is also the shortest and most urgent. The recording here doesn't do it justice, as a committed pianist would embrace its Vivace tempo and get closer to 60 bpm to the bar, matching the rushing worry at its core. Once again a captivating melody is supported by flawless, memorable harmonies, and again a mid-voice repetition tethers the music through deft harmonic shifts. Fauré is still an antecedent, but Grieg is stronger recalled, with the profound bass gong of a flat 7th and a melodic echo answering in the tenor. Like the most difficult questions, its full context doesn't materialize until the end, but nothing is actually resolved.

The best of her available works is Le Soir, Op. 4, pushing the farthest into harmonic modernism and the atmosphere of the soul. Another great melody curls through the evening air like a lost ribbon, and functional harmony gives way to folk-like strums and timeless washes of suspension arpeggios. Even when voices dovetail through each other in rapture the piano writing is smooth as silk, and more washes draw us through scenes of dreaming until evaporating. Hunting horns call us to the open, and we catch a brief shimmer of a home-key cloud as it passes into the horizon. It's one of my favorite Polish piano works, a perfect marriage of invention and elegance. If Łopuska had lived longer she might have been a major figure in Polish composition, but considering the turbulence that nation would endure in the succeeding decades, nobody can say for sure. At least we now have a handful of gems from her to keep her name alive - none of them overstay their welcome or insist too much on their brilliance, and that is the proof of real brilliance, indeed.

It's good to be back, and it's good to know that others believe in this sort of thing just as much as I do.  Stay tuned for many more discoveries in the posts ahead.

Time and the Traveler previews - Edgar Bainton and Valley Moonlight

A week from Saturday, baritone David Hoffman and myself on piano will present Time and the Traveler, a program of British Impressionist art songs ranging from the well-known masterpiece Songs of Travel, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, to unknown delights, such as the scarcely-heard (and still unrecorded) Valley Moonlight by Edgar Bainton (1880-1956).

Bainton is best known for And I Saw A New Heaven, 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 Pavane, Idyll and Bacchanal.  Faithful audience members of my previous recitals may recall Before Dawn, a Christmas recital by myself and soprano Juliana Brandon, where we ended the show with Bainton's rousing New Year's song Ring Out, Wild Bells, and will understand my enjoyment at revisiting his work.

There is no recording of Valley Moonlight, 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 Night and Morning Songs, a poem cycle I'd never heard of before but was glad to be introduced to by this song.

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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.

Time and the Traveler - Saturday, November 23rd at 7:30 pm.  Queen Anne Christian Church (1316 3rd Ave W, Seattle, WA 98119).  $15 suggested donation at door.

~PNK

An Interview with David Mahler about Martin Bartlett at the Claremont Hotel

On Thursday, August 8th, trumpet player Judson Scott and myself will mount East Coast Meets West, 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 David Mahler, 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 Martin Bartlett at the Claremont Hotel, 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.

How did you come to work both in Pittsburgh and Seattle?

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.

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.

Do you prefer one city over the other, either for personal or musical reasons?

Seattle is my memory home, but Pittsburgh is home.

I still have very dear friends in Seattle, and love returning at least a couple of times a year.

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.

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!

Economically, Pittsburgh is stable.  Affordable, too!  Though these hills and valleys are uneven, Pittsburgh's economic playing field strives to be level.

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.

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.

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.

Who is Martin Bartlett?

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.

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.

Martin and I became close friends in 1975, remaining so until his death from AIDS in 1993.

What is the significance of the Claremont Hotel in Seattle (now Hotel Andra)?

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.

The score includes the following quote in the front:

"If you're not part of the problem, you're not part of the solution."  ~Scientific Canadian, 1981

As far as I know, this magazine has never existed.  Did it exist, or is this a joke?

The quote is from Martin's own publication, Scientific Canadian, 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.

The movement titles seem to just reflect the content - is there a further significance?

I think of Martin Bartlett at the Claremont Hotel 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".

Is the set designed wholly as a memorial, or only partly?

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.

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East Coast Meets West 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...

~PNK

An Interview with Aaron J. Kirschner about his Teasdale Songs

On August 2nd, 2019, the Wayward Music series will present Songs from the Exotic, 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 Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale by Utah-based Aaron J. Kirschner.  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 Teasdale Songs 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.

How did you come across Sara Teasdale's poetry?

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 Love Songs.  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.

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?

To me, the most strikingly conservative feature of Teasdale's work (and Love Songs 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.

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?

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.

Have you considered other poets of Teasdale's time for art songs?

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.

When John Harbison arranged his Mirabai Songs 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?

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.

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Songs from the Exotic 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...

~PNK