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

Short-Shrifted - William Baines

In English culture one composer stands for dying young, personally and as a symbol of his generation, more than any other, George Butterworth (1885-1916).  One of the most sensitive and melancholic of the Pastoralists, Butterworth published a handful of song cycles and orchestral pieces before going off to the front of WWI, eventually dying in the Battle of the Somme, his body lost to the war.  His cycle A Shropshire Lad from poems by A.E. Housman, as well as its orchestral epilogue, the Rhapsody, have become musical symbols of the U.K.s "lost" generation of young men lost to the Great War, and his early death at 31 might have given his music some artificial support after his time, though judging by its quality it would have been well-remembered regardless of its author's tragic passing.  Another young death in British composition that has made much less of an impact on its country's psyche is that of William Baines (1899-1922), dead at the much more tender age of 23 from tuberculosis and in many ways a more daring and individual composer than most of his English contemporaries.

My introduction to Baines came from the inclusion of his piece Tides, as much of a posthumous breakout hit as he'll ever get, in the 2002 Rarities of Piano Music festival, an annual nine-day festival of piano rarities at Schloss vor Husum in Germany that has featured some favorite pianists of mine and this blog, such as Marc-André Hamelin and Kolja Lessing.  The Danish record label Danacord has put out 17 CDs of highlights from the festival and Tides made the cut, performed by Jean Dubé, alongside works by Szymanowski, Reger and Ignaz Friedman.  British Impressionism, or rather the Impressionist side of Pastoralism, what I call the post-Elgar British composers such as Vaughan Williams and his ilk, never equaled the evocative dreamscapes of the French Impressionists in the large scale but some individuals tried to go for the gold, such as Frank Bridge in many of his miniatures and the early work of John Ireland, and Baines's music (most of which can be seen in score form here) is the most non-Pastoralist Impressionist work I've seen come from England in its near-total avoidance of British folk influence and commitment to the ambiguous moods of his French predecessors.  Tides has become one of his most popular works because of its near-surrealism, a far cry from the likes of Butterworth, chockablock with juxtaposed scales, Scriabin-esque chord structures, bursts of virtuosity and deep foreboding.  I've always had a soft spot for pieces that treat the sea in a sense of danger (such as Irwin Heilner's creepy song The Tide Rises) and Tides expertly captures the mood of standing on the shore of a vast ocean in the dead of night.  The second movement, "Goodnight to Flamboro", is almost Ivesian in its placement of popular-style music in a pantonal landscape, and why the first movement alone has caught on more than the whole thing baffles me.  I am grateful for anything of his to catch one regardless of which part of it, as nowadays much of his music is available and the many amateur performances of his piano pieces has made him a minor favorite in the New Digital Repertoire, a movement that I'm doing everything I can to further and one that hasn't gotten nearly enough discussion in the mainstream.  This amateur fanbase has produced such a variety of Baines recordings that I can show you this one, a selection from his warmly etched Four Sketches, without breaking any copyright laws:

The Sketches are some of his earliest pieces, written when he was 19 and 20 and showing considerable maturity and thoughtfulness for formative works, a time most composers prefer to forget after they've achieved Tenure Grant Academy status or whatever it is composers get these days.  These years were strangely lucky ones for Baines as he was pulled into the British army in 1918, only to be relieved of his duties because of septic poisoning, obviously the most attractive illness for the Classical music set.  He would continue composing and performing through the aftermath of his sepsis, a disease he never really recovered from, and only a few years later succumbed to the aforementioned TB, the fatal illness of choice by those who want to die wanly and sexily.  While I can't exactly point to any of his pieces as evidence or reflection of his atrocious health (always the most tasteful treatment of another's illness) most of his works are imbued with an arresting sense of loss and distant nostalgia, a very English brand of saudade or dor.  One of the best pieces of his for expressing this is his Twilight Pieces, the first piece, "A Fragment" capturing the quality of fading sunlight in heavy summer air:

The second piece, "Quietude" also takes great pains to never let the chords naturally resolve, a Pastoralist answer to Wagner delaying the tonic until after the fourth or fifteenth hour.  There are a few tricks here that I've never seen in another piece of this time, such as this chord:

Or this little grace note, part of "Quietude"'s moment of physical outburst:

On a more swift, non dolorous note of delivery, here's "The Naiad" from the Three Concert Studies:

I always like those chord progressions where a simple form is chosen and the permutations are either flying farther out from the center or collapsing inwards, as the first half of that main left hand ostinato shows.  Baines also understands that an audience used to more conventional chords will accept any foreign dissonance as long as it moves by quickly enough and has a superficial logic, either with itself or with other harmonies in the phrase.  There were a ton of fairy-folk-inspired pieces by British composers around this time and this is one of the most magical and exciting, rewarding those who can afford the crispest piano to perform it on.  In case you're wondering, no, Baines never finished a full piano sonata, though not for a lack of trying.  Aside from an early, uncharacteristic Symphony that wasn't performed until 1991 (link here, though beware of amateur hour performance) Baines never wrote a "big piece", something that often ends up "cursing" composers after their deaths in the eyes of overly discriminating musicologists with their eyes peeled for analyzable, symphony-length works ripe for dissertationing.  For an example, imagine if Federico Mompou had never written Musica Callada and how much critical attention he would have gotten then.  This attitude was high-order phooey then and is even higher-order phooey now that there's a huge market for classical music outside of the strict confines of concert halls and academic studies.  For my money Baines well earned his place in the canon of British music and his works are gifts that keep on giving intellectual and emotional rewards, and his gradual resurrection through the internet can only be a good thing - an attitude I wish more performers would adopt, if only for the sake of works like these 7 Preludes.  Goodnight, Flamboro and otherwise.

~PNK

Withdrawn Month - Benjamin Britten's Young Apollo, op. 16 (1939)

Opus numbers are tricky things - originally created by 17th century publishers to help differentiate works with similar titles and used inconsistently by composers to catalog their own works ever since.  The heyday of opus numbers was the 19th century, especially among Germanic and Russian composers, as its usage largely died out in the 20th century as part of a general shift away from the Old Ways.  The notable 20th century exceptions include Darius Milhaud, whose opus'd works number over 400, as well as the young American composer Carson Cooman who has more than 1130 opus'd works to his name in 20-odd years of composing (including works supposedly written this month!) because of his habit of assigning an opus number to every stray thought that floats through his head.  The main problem with assigning opus numbers is determining what "deserves" a number, as composers often end up leaving opus numbers off of occasional pieces, pieces they don't particularly like or other marginalia.  Occasionally, though, composers assign numbers to works and then withdraw them without reassigning the number to a new work, leaving a hole in their catalog to the dismay of musicologists.  Such is the case with Benjamin Britten and his piece Young Apollo, assigned an "op. 16" and then suppressed immediately after its premiere in 1939.  Britten left a number of works on the shelf without opus numbers, such as the Temporal Variations and Two Insect Pieces for oboe and the unfinished Sonatina Romantica for piano, but Young Apollo is the only work with an opus number to get the shaft, and after hearing it I really can't imagine why...well, maybe I can but it's still insufficient.

Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and scored for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, Young Apollo is sprightly, diabolical fun.  Starting with a several-octave drone and some of the most exciting scale-running I've heard in a while, things get of to a Lydiany start in the solo quartet and then bounce down a cobblestone road in search of a pot of gold.  This is Britten at his most stereotypically Neoclassical, ironically hanging onto simple riffs and overlapping major and minor chord permutations in an effort to create that brand of intellectually-intriguing unease Neoclassical composers of the time loved to dead-horse-beating levels.  It's also Britten at his most self-explanatory, an attribute he wasn't totally alien to but most notable here, a vast simplification from his Piano Concerto, op. 13 written the year before.  That isn't to say there isn't craftsmanship and atmosphere here, as there certainly is, it's just that there's little depth and variety on a nuts-and-bolts level.  It's an interesting case of what is clearly an Occasional Piece in every sense of the word lasting longer than its role would normally allow it - it's too repetitive to be a full overture but hardly a bagatelle.  Britten felt it wasn't doing him any favors regardless of however we wish to designate it and it remained unpublished until after his death, proving once again that if there's anything publishers are good at it's ignoring the wishes of their authors.  Luckily for us we can get works like this out of their disdain for the purest sense of Authority.  More on that in an upcoming penny dreadful...

~PNK

A Carol for my Grandparents

In my research for my "12 Works of Christmas" articles I came across many pieces and composers I'd never heard of before, and one of the more intriguing figures I discovered was Harold Samuel (1879-1937).  Samuel wasn't really a composer, at least not a full-time one, but was a very active and highly respected British pianist, one of the first to play Bach's works extensively in the 20th century.  His Bach knowhow was so extensive that he had all of Bach's keyboard works memorized, something one prepares for with little time for anything else, though through that he did compose a number of songs and small instrumental pieces.  That doesn't mean anybody knows about them, as the usually authoritative Grove Music Online had one sentence on his composition: "He was also a minor composer."  Well, it's hard to be anything but minor in the face of contemporaneous British masters like Howells, Bax, Bridge, Ireland, Moeran, Grainger, Delius and Baines writing the crap out of piano and vocal music at the time.  IMSLP had a handful of songs written by him and a piano set, Two Sketches, which caught my eye for more reasons than one.  The first sketch, "Campden Hollow", is a haunting and nostalgic elegy for the English countryside that, while not necessarily groundbreaking, does have a chord or two I've never heard before (and I might get to it eventually, along with the songs).  The second piece had a more timely nature:

Written on Christmas Day, 1925, "A Carol" is a good example of very active piano writing that doesn't get in the way, featuring a babbling brook of thirds in the middle voices that compliment the melody rather than overwhelming it.  The tune is an original and is in the tradition of the best up-tempo Christmas carols - that is, ones in compound meters like "Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella" and the "Sussex Carol".  The harmonies aren't new per se but they are deeply felt, such as that heart-resounding addition of the G-flat in bar 9 and the incredibly delicate shift to E-minor on the third page.  It's a piece that's so self-explanatory and apt for the season it's a shame it isn't better known, as it'd be a welcome addition to just about any Christmas concert.  I made a recording myself for this year and am presenting it as a gift to my Grandparents, who are eternally generous and kind and I don't get to see nearly as often as I should because of the thousand-mile distance between us.  Here's to a Merry Christmas to yours, mine and ours, wherever they may be.

~PNK

12 Works of Christmas - 11. Percy Grainger's Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol

In my review of Ivor Gurney's Carol of the Skiddaw Yowes I mentioned that British Pastoralist composers were well-suited to reviving old Christmas carols and recomposing them with craft and gusto.  While the Gurney was hecks good and the Bax that I couldn't find a recording for is really hecks good, today we're looking at probably my favorite Christmas-themed piano piece, Percy Grainger's Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol.

For those who didn't spend most of their Christmases in rural England, Mummers plays are folk plays put on by troupes of amateur actors in small towns.  The tradition goes back centuries and is still kept alive by awesome people but after the first World War the troupes largely died out.  It might have been a consideration of preserving this dying tradition that inspired Grainger to set this carol (not to be confused with the "Sussex Carol"), transcribed by the seminal folk song collector Lucy Broadwood, as part of his British Folk-Music Settings series, though I'd think that above all Grainger saw its inherent tunefulness and potential for rich harmonies.  Grainger's extended tonality and part-writing here is unbelievably sumptuous and yearning, able to draw a full orchestra from the piano and requiring enormous sensitivity from the performer.  The close proximity of the tune to Grainger's clustered chord voicings adds another difficulty to the performance, especially when it buries itself in the middle of the tenor range in the second verse.  Every Graingerian trick is in play, from hyper-specific tempo shifts to imitate human singing inconsistencies to passionate added grace notes and a generous helping of fermati.  While it's one of the most solemn Christmas pieces around it also instills great peace in the listener, and Penelope Thwaites knows how to instill peace like nobody's business.

~PNK

12 Works of Christmas - 9. Ivor Gurney's Carol of the Skiddaw Yowes

It's a bit odd that America loves Christmas so much but there's next to nothing in the way of serious recompositions of old carols for voice and piano in the American art song rep, save for John Jacob Niles' lovely setting of "I Wonder as I Wander", which isn't Christmassy in the least but still gets played around this time of year.  My research has found that the two best sources of classical music rejuvenating old carols are France and England, with both countries making a big effort in the first part of the 20th century to collect folk songs, bringing many fine melodies and poetry to light.  Folk music revivalism was central to England's Pastoralist movement, with guys like Holst, Grainger and even later Neo-Classical composers like Britten rewriting ancestral tunes to fit their unique languages.  England also takes Christmas pretty seriously, and at the intersection of these cultural forces we find some excellent Pastoralist Christmas music, such as Holst's In the Bleak Midwinter, Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony and Arnold Bax's A Christmas Carol, a song that I adore and really really wanted to write about but couldn't find a good recording of to use.  In searching for suitable replacements I remembered about Ivor Gurney, an important figure in the British art song canon whose career was stifled by chronic mental health issues and an early death from tuberculosis after composing almost nothing for nearly a decade.  He wrote hundreds of songs using a wide variety of sources and his musical language is as nuanced and sensitive as anything from his contemporaries, making me wonder why most of his instrumental music (which is just as good as his songs from what I was able to find) is so hard to get a hold of..  For our purposes one of his songs in particular is proper to mention, his Carol of the Skiddaw Yowes.

You might be wondering what a yowe is, much less how a yowe could be skiddaw.  "Yowe" is an archaic spelling of ewe, and Skiddaw is a mountain in the Lake District in North West England, a popular vacation spot and home to a number of poets in the 19th century such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.  While the "Lake Poets" were mostly active in the early 19th century the author of this song's poem, Edmund Casson (not Ernest as it says at the top) published in the 1900's and '10's and is so obscure that the only detailed information I was able to find on him came from a listing for one of his books on AbeBooks, which you might recognize as not being an encyclopedia.  In its original published form it was called "Carol of the Skiddaw Shepherds" and Gurney's title change is interesting not only for putting an archaic word in the title but also shifting the perspective slightly from the shepherds (the obvious subject of the poem) to the sheep, perhaps to strengthen the connection of Christmas with the agnus dei.  Gurney's language is pure Pastoralism, rife with added-note chords, sophisticated counterpoint and passages seemingly written in the hirajoshi mode commonly heard in Japanese shamisen music.  Unlike many shepherd-based carols I've seen Gurney keeps the tempo up, not wasting any of our time and setting the harmonic flow at a fast enough speed to massage the inner ear without stewing in dissonances.  It's a lovely addition to the Christmas song rep, gently flowing and imbued with a kind of motherly concern in dark days.  I hope that if anyone sees sheep wandering around alone this holiday season they'll try to keep them safe and warm.

~PNK

The 12 Works of Christmas - 3. Thomas Adès's Fayrfax Carol

You'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary composer with more swift and total a rise to glory as Thomas Adès.  He had scored a multi-CD contract with EMI, a rare feat for any classical composer, while still in his 20's and his works keep getting high profile premieres and tons of acclaim.  I've been a big fan of his for years, ever since I heard stuff like Asyla and Traced Overhead as an undergrad, and his solo piano CD is among my favorites, introducing me to the works of Alexei Stanchinsky, György Kurtág and Niccolò Castiglioni.  His music hits that triumphant sweet spot between unique technical achievements and audience appeal, featuring advanced stuff like bizarre meters, exquisite arrhythmic overlays, microtonality in accessible, entertaining packages, and this Christmas season is as good enough a time to feature his preciously surreal Fayrfax Carol.  I wasn't able to find a full score for the piece but I do have a watermark-heavy first page to give you...because it's Christmas.

If you squint enough you can see how the basic melody is used to create a cascading canon, sliding the harmony around like water droplets melting off an icicle (always the first image that comes to mind, I'm sure).  The effect is richly modal, actually highly reminiscent of Michael Nyman's music to the films of Peter Greenaway in its harmonies and line interplay, though much less bombastic.  The "B" section is more like standard hymn material, a simple melody lilting across a mostly static lower register, though not without some surprising harmonic shifts.  The "A" section returns with deeper fervor and sadness and everything returns to the hushed, hallowed mood of the best Christmas music.  I'd also check out January Writ in a couple weeks.

~PNK

Autumnal Classics - The Fall of the Leaf by Gerald Finzi

Last time I inaugurated this month's theme of Autumnal Classics with a gorgeous Elizabethan number by Martin Peerson called The Fall of the Leafe.  I mentioned that the piece served as inspiration for a much later work by a better-known British composer, and today we're looking at that piece, a much revised elegy by the singular Gerald Finzi, one of the most distinguished of England's Pastoralist composers.  A shy, careful and deeply earnest composer, Finzi is second only to the much-lamented George Butterworth as the candidate for England's chief Autumnal composer.  Certain composers' works fit certain seasons (such as Milhaud's music capturing all the byzantine vitality and contrast of summer) and even when Finzi is writing about spring one can feel the weight of the forest's lost youth on his shoulders.  

Untroubled by financial worries and perpetually drawn away from hectic urban life, Finzi never let a wrong note leave his grasp and often revised, repurposed and discarded works until they were either perfect or buried, and the most extensive example of the former two acts can be seen in the evolution of a never-completed triptych.  In 1920 Finzi wrote a Prelude that he intended to be part of a chamber symphony, but as that project fell away he revised it with the hopes of it becoming the first part of a triptych on the seasons called The Bud, the Blossom and the Berry.  He completed and performed a two-piano version of the "Bud" movement, and when the triptych didn't come through as planned he rewrote it in the Prelude version for string orchestra with the intention of adding a contrasting movement.  He never wrote the other part, and the Prelude languished until receiving its premiere the year after Finzi's death, conducted by his son Christopher.  While I'm not reviewing the Prelude I can't help but include it as reference for what is to come, as well as by its own virtue of being a lushly wrought pang of melancholy.

While I can't speak for the "Blossom" movement of the triptych, the "Berry" movement did get some substantial work done on it before transforming into a separate work, The Fall of the Leaf, op. 20, drawing its title from the Peerson piece.  The piece doesn't directly reference Peerson's work or Renaissance music, but I feel that Finzi simply felt a kinship with a man who embellished a standard form of his day with unexpected poetic depth on an eternally haunting theme.  Much like the Peerson piece Finzi's Leaf is bound to a preexisting form, subtitled "Elegy", here foregoing real formal structure in favor of a soliloquy on death.  As graceful as the title may sound The Fall of the Leaf contains some of Finzi's most dramatic, volatile music, shifting keys without warning and plunging into dissonant outbursts, though not without Nature's beating heart at the center of it all.  Finzi is the rare composer where every piece of his in unmistakably his own, especially with his signature melodic writing that pulls the heartstrings along perfectly crafted stepwise motion.  The piece underwent more revisions than almost any other work in Finzi's oeuvre, and his desire to perfect it kept him from completing the orchestration of the final version of the piece before his death.  His longtime friend and colleague Howard Ferguson finished the orchestration and the piece received its premiere the same way the Prelude did, dutifully conducted by Finzi's son as a memorial to his father's gifted soul, and like many of Finzi's most beautiful works it serves well as a memorial.  Sometimes people write their own epitaphs in an instant, other times across decades, and it can be assuredly said that The Fall of the Leaf was well worth the wait.

~PNK

One-Off - Frank Bridge's Lament (for Catherine, aged 9 "Lusitania" 1915)

Known throughout most of the 20th century as one of Benjamin Britten's teachers, Frank Bridge is now recognized as one of the finest British composers of his time, with piles of recording project springing up in the 80's and 90's when people realized how gorgeous much of his music is.  While Bridge wrote some arrestingly beautiful and creative works throughout his career, one piece in particular sticks in my mind as a perfect wedding of aural beauty and immense sadness.  On May 7, 1915, a German U-Boat fired torpedoes at the RMS Lusitania, a civilian ocean liner, and sank it in the Atlantic.  1,195 people died, and the incident cause international furor, catalyzing the already messy first World War and giving America more reason to declare war a couple of years later.  Among the lost was Catherine, a 9-year-old girl and friend to Bridge, who died with her family, and the loss was too much or Bridge to let pass him by without writing an elegy.  What he created is probably the most beautiful piece of music ever written about a nautical disaster.

While Bridge began his career transitioning from late romanticism to a sophisticated impressionism, his music took a dark turn after the Great War was underway.  Bridge was a pacifist and the War shook him to his core, and his late works are strikingly original in their harmonic language and bold structures.  The Lament doesn't reflect the language he would later perfect in his masterful Piano Sonata, but it does show an intensely wrought and unbearably melancholic vision of the emotional capabilities of impressionism.  While many of the devices are familiar to fans of Debussy and Ravel, such as whole tone chords and planing figures, what matters most is how these figures pitch, bow and settle, and how Bridge is able to synthesize exotic harmonies with yearning tunefulness.  That yearning is brought out through closely knit melodic voicing, constantly in movement and surprising in their resolutions.  While it is easy to follow the tune the use of superimposed varied rhythms heightens the sense of despair, though the piece never explodes in anguish like so many anti-war works do.  Bridge wasn't a political activist in any sense of the term, and his pacifism was driven by the loss of friends and colleagues.  Lament isn't a call to action or a vindictive howl - it merely acknowledges the hole in the universe left in the wake of Catherine and the nearly 1200 other souls who perished in a disgraceful war crime.  Its commitment to private anguish is what makes it timeless rather than a historical anecdote, though it remains criminally underplayed for reasons that can only make me sad.  While the score above is the piano version, I've chosen the string orchestra version for the recording, as Richard Hickox and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales savor every nuance and fleeting emotion the score has to offer.  I could have waited until May to write about the Lament, but I think its emotional impact is universal and all too essential, and listeners should be able to pull it out when they need it the most.  It doesn't insist or overbear - it merely offers a profound solace that can't be found anywhere else.

(Watch out for a loud electronic snap at the very beginning)

~PNK

Visual Music - Labyrinth by Edwin Roxburgh

There's a bunch of pianist-composers, guitarist-composers and conductor-composers, but I can't say I've heard of too many oboist-composers (except for Heinz Holliger, of course).  A student of Herbert Howells, Edwin Roxburgh (b. 1937) is one of those blessed contemporary composers who maintains an impressionistic sense of enchantment in his work.  There's some classic titles in there like Stardrift, Le Miroirs de Miró and Moonscape, the latter of which actually has two separate performances on YouTube - that's quite a compliment for a living composer, as most of them can only muster one for any given piece, if any at all.

Perhaps Moonscape's relative popularity is its flatter learning curve than some other contemporary piano works, such as Roxburgh's Labyrinth.  It was written to close out a performance of the first book of Debussy's Preludes on a piano with a nine-note bass extension to a super-low C, and though I haven't heard the piece played on that kind of piano I can guess it'd be swell, considering those notes are too low for people to recognize their pitches.  The recording I heard was pretty good despite the lack of low notes, and the piece itself is crashing, horrific and really, really cool.  It's the kind of ultra-dramatic color showcase that could inspire young people to the piano.  Roxburgh's publisher, United Music Publishers (UMP), is largely minimalist with their covers, so I was delightfully surprised when I saw this:

(Sorry about the stickers)

This is what happens when you make the cover artist write the title with a crayon taped to the end of a six-foot pole while blindfolded.  It's entirely appropriate, and evokes that feeling when you're in a labyrinth and you come across a foreboding warning written by somebody once lost in its walls, taken by the Minotaur*.  The cramped framing and small print below do wonders to make the word and the concept overpower the viewer, like it'll burst from the paper at any second and consume them.  There's also a distinct lack of curves, inferring a name more forced than graced.  I don't know who the artist is on this one (a sad pattern that will emerge as this series continues), but whoever he is I salute him as a scholar of the creepy.  If you want to hear the main show, here's a CD with it:

http://www.amazon.com/Edwin-Roxburgh-Reflets-Dans-Glace-Reflets/dp/B000QFBWBA/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1383114513&sr=1-2&keywords=edwin+roxburgh

~PNK

*Just like any other Wednesday.