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

An Interview with Carson Cooman about Ab and Pooh

On August 8th, 2019, Judson Scott and Peter Nelson-King (myself) will be mounting East Coast Meets West, a recital of late 20th-century/early 21st-century works for trumpet and piano, trumpet and voice, and piano solo.  The recital features three world premieres by myself, as well as a fourth premiere, A Song for Ab and Pooh by Carson Cooman.  Cooman is an extremely productive musician, the composer of more than 1000 pieces and a very active church organist, with a YouTube channel featuring first recordings of many dozens of modern organ compositions.  I came across A Song for Ab and Pooh, one of his compositions for trumpet and piano, on his website, offered up for free owing to its short length.  An aleatoric composition (meaning that it has major elements left to be determined by the performer(s)), the trumpet is given a solo a piacere, with optional piano accompaniment that has "cells" of material to be treated at the pianist's whim.  It's musical content intrigued me, as well as its strange title, and to find out more I reached out to Cooman.  He was kind enough to do a correspondence interview, and here is the result of those questions.

Aleatoric music is an occasional practice of yours rather than a constant - what draws you to the format?

"I'm always interested in exploring a wide variety of possible elements in the writing of music. I've written a lot of music, but I always strive to make there be at least something about each piece that is different from things I've written before. I have no interest in writing the same piece over and over again. And here in the early 21st century, we are at a time in history with an amazing panoply of techniques and elements that can be brought to bear and combined in one's own ways in compositions. For the realization of certain musical ideas and concepts, aleatoric elements are one tool to draw upon. I love some of the unexpected rhythmic coordination aspects that can only be achieved with such kinds of notation. And I have written pieces (like Lutosławski made brilliantly "mainstream") that integrate aleatoric and strictly notated elements.

Music that has aleatoric, open form, or improvisational elements has always felt like a normal possibility to me perhaps because my instrument as a performer is the organ, which is the only Western classical instrument that has a completely mainstream, and entirely unbroken, tradition of improvisation. For all other instruments, it's become a specialized or abnormal thing. One can get a typical conservatory training in many instruments without ever improvising anything."

Who are Ab and Pooh, and is that who the piece was written for in terms of performance?

"The "Ab and Pooh" of the title are small stuffed animals (an eagle and bear) that have been with me for a long time; in Pooh's case, literally since the day of my birth. They've figured in "family lore" and our imaginations since childhood, and my brother (to whom the piece is dedicated) still to this day draws calendars that feature illustrations of these two characters doing improbable things; we give these to family members at Christmas."

The disconnection between the trumpet and piano parts is intriguing.  Was the trumpet part written by itself first, or did you conceive of them at the same time?

"I wrote them together, though the trumpet line is notated in detail and the piano part is just a set of elements for the pianist to use. I wrote them out originally under each other on the paper, and as I was going along it seemed that the piano ideas wanted to remain "elements," rather than being made into a fixed, strict, rhythmic accompaniment."

How do you feel about trumpet and piano as a medium?

"My brother was a trumpet player, and I was accompanying him on the piano since the first week he took lessons. I wrote a lot of pieces for him, beginning with something for his first few months of study that used less than an octave of range. As he grew to be an advanced player and attend conservatory for college, so did the difficulty of the pieces I wrote for him. We gave many public performances together during the years that he was actively playing and spent countless hours playing privately. So the medium seems completely normal to me, and I know well its standard repertoire (as well as plenty of obscure things). We also did a lot of trumpet/organ music, which is of course also an effective genre."

You're an extremely prolific composer, with a personally-catalogued oeuvre totalling more than a thousand pieces, and you aren't even 40.  Was this a wise move?

"I think the only way it would be unwise is if I had an expectation that a performer or listener needed to engage with my entire output (or even a large portion of it.) I'm happy for people to engage with it in whatever way they want and to whatever extent they want. If they find one or two pieces that suit them, that's great. If they want to (as some have) delve into an extremely large number of them, that's fine too.

The notion that there is anything strange about writing a large number of pieces is, in my opinion, a very unfortunate "post-Romantic" inheritance that we are still stuck with today. In the pre-Romantic era, there was nothing at all unusual about somebody composing a large number of pieces.

I think each composer has a sort of musical metabolism and a speed of working that forms very early and is extremely unlikely to change. Some people write a lot of pieces, some people write very few. Some people write those pieces very quickly, other slowly. Some work quickly and then revise, others agonize over each measure along the way, etc.

The most cursory examination of music history shows there's no correlation between quality and either the number of pieces somebody writes or the time that they take to write any given piece. There are prolific composers who have written tons of excellent pieces, and there are composers who have written few works and none of them are very good. And vice versa. I remember the late Harold Shapero telling me that as a student he decided to go study with Paul Hindemith because "Hindemith was a fast, prolific composer, and I wanted to be really fast too." But in the course of that study Shapero realized that he'd always be a very slow composer. Their relative speeds were baked into both him and Hindemith from the start, and it wasn't something he was going to learn to change in lessons. And both Shapero and Hindemith wrote very high quality music.

Tangentially: there's also not necessarily a correlation between being a prolific composer (having a large catalog of compositions) and writing those pieces quickly. While this is certainly true in some cases, it's not necessarily the case. Vincent Persichetti said that people always commented on his being prolific and assumed that he must write quickly, but he always insisted that he wasn't actually that fast of a composer at all. He just wrote constantly. He taught at Juilliard for decades but lived his whole life in his native Philadelphia. For driving himself back and forth to New York from Philadelphia, he devised a kind of desk that he could put over the steering wheel of the car so that he could keep composing while driving. (It's amazing he died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking rather than a car accident.)"

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East Coast Meets West is presented as part of the Wayward Music Series.  Another interview is coming, and I'll see you then...

~PNK

Summer's-End-Pieces - Yehudi Wyner's Exeunt

Yeah, yeah, Summer technically ended yesterday, but as it's still a nice day, and the weekend is starting, there's no problem with one more article, right?  I may also have made the premiere recording of today's work, so that probably counts for something.

Yehudi Wyner has been chugging along as a stately Boston professional for some time now - his career stretches from the 1950's until today, and while he'll probably never burst into the popular consciousness there are a number of his works I'm quite fond of, especially the Three Short Fantasies for piano from 1963, performed here by Wyner himself:

Perhaps the reason I've never talked about him before is that none of his works jump up and down too much, though I did have the privilege of reviewing a work of his for actual money as part of a concert review I had published in the British periodical Tempo.  I may talk about the Fantasies at length in the future, but today we're covering one of his earliest works, published in this sumptuous collection:

(Now THAT is a pretty sweet cover)

This 1980 anthology collects quite a few excellent songs, from stone classics, such as two of Elliott Carter's Three Poems of Robert Frost, to remarkable obscurities, such as "A patch of old snow" and "Fire and Ice" by William Ames, two songs I hope to cover in the future.  O'Neal took the offer of making an anthology on behalf of Associated Music as a challenge, and opportunity to spotlight songs he loved that hadn't gotten a fair shake in the market, especially considering that at that point nobody bought one-sheets of classical songs anymore.  It's this spirit that brought this ditty to my attention:

Written one year after he snagged a Masters in Music from Yale, Exeunt sets a wry poem by Richard Wilbur with clarity and style.  The feel is almost Neo-Baroque, the sleepy counterpoint reminiscent of a Bach-era recitative, though with open-voiced Modernism informing the harmonies.  I appreciate music that can depict the feel of Summer's heavy, thick heat, those times when you don't feel like breathing too much, and the long, enveloping lines of this song do that just fine.  All fast movement is the murmur of insects, aside from a bit of a "bridge" at the bottom of the first page where time and pacing is thrown into surprising variation - it's not too often one sees an 11/8 bar like that.  However eerie things get, though, Wyner has the sentimentality to have the last two "anchor" notes in the bass make a IV-I resolution, even with a neat major third at the full stop.  It's a small gem of a song, a fine companion to other heavy death songs, such as Ives's dour classic "Like A Sick Eagle".  Too bad there's no studio recording of it, though I was able to make due with my own means.

It's good to get back to business.  C-ya,

PNK

Summer's-End-Pieces - Ned Rorem's The End of Summer

In my last article I had mentioned that Hugo Weisgall walked a bit of a tightrope in achieving great success as an opera composer while sticking to his atonal guns, and today's composer, Ned Rorem, also has some serious tightrope-walkin' and gun-stickin' to his name.  One of the most famous American composers I've covered here, Rorem has spent his 70-year career producing a vast body of work that consolidated American and French attempts at modal harmony, great attention to textural detail, and a great balance of poignancy and seriousness.  He is arguably America's greatest composer of art songs next to Ives, writing so many of them, and of such high quality, that his achievements with them have overshadowed a remarkably large body of instrumental music, including 3 symphonies, several concerti, and dozens of other orchestral, chamber and solo works, all possessing his unique musical voice.  One could argue that his works since the late 1970's have largely been rearrangements of the same material, but I'd also argue that after a certain point he was an old man and his ability to continually compose at his age is remarkable in its own right, and the pieces sounded great, anyways.  It's one of these later works that we're looking at today, one of many of his works to get excellent recordings this century as part of Naxos's American Classics series.

I did a bit of writing on Rorem's earlier songs in my Forgotten Leaves article on two Walt Whitman settings of his, so check it out for context on where he came from.  He debuted during a time when modal and polytonal harmonies were all the rage in America, and as the 60's rolled through and academic music took a hard right turn into Darmstadt-ville he too shook things up, though not in the same way as his contemporaries.  First, here's an early song of his:

There's obviously lots to like here - simultaneous familiarity and creativity, establishing a musical world that unfurls in variation.  While his works display a full range of emotions, of course, his harmonic language and Francophonic soul wrapped the listener in a warm quilt.  By 1985, however, he'd been through the looking glass - a decade before, in response to Vietnam he'd written one of his most chilling works, his War Scenes:

That's about as atonal as Rorem works get, so 1985 Rorem was able to relax a bit and write slightly more "normal" music while retaining his newfound edge.  That said edge:

This blistering recording of today's work, The End of Summer for clarinet, violin and piano, comes courtesy of the fine folks in Fibonacci Sequence, recorded alongside Rorem's Book of Hours for flute and harp and Bright Music for larger ensemble.  Considering how great The End of Summer is it may come off a bit goofy for me to say that it's the least of the three works on the disc, but only by a bit.

The three movements of The End of Summer have a cyclical feel, loosely bookended by a typically Roremish perpetuum mobile.  The sinister racing up and down strange scales sounds great, though is horrible to play, meaning I'll probably never program this work with Cursive, but Fibonacci Sequence operates at a different level than I.  The first movement, "Capriccio", opens with a very Red Violin soliloquy before spilling musical marbles down musical marble chutes, and the nutso display is broken up by dramatic hushes (relatively) and another Rorem staple, semi-ironic Parisian café music.  The second movement, "Fantasy", allows for the most experimentation and formal variety, allowing the instruments to drift through moods and genres as if in a dream.  The closing "Mazurka" takes us back to sinister form, though never in a truly frightening way.

Sorry for the shortness of my critique - it's just that overly-explaining Rorem defeats the purpose of Rorem.  Abstrusity was never his game, and so all his technical refinements were dressed in approachable garbs, resulting in works that were as easy to program as they were to conceptually understand.  Perhaps that's why he's remained so successful for so long, even if this work isn't exactly his most memorable.  But if every piece I wrote about for a themed article series was the best thing its composer ever wrote, what kind of a world would we live in?  Huh?  Answer me that, readers!

...it's still a great piece.  So see you tomorrow.

Summer's-End-Pieces - Hugo Weisgall's End of Summer

Note: this article features videos auto-generated by YouTube which might not be viewable outside the U.S.A.

You know what's rare?  Someone known in our time as an opera composer.  There have been a couple Americans who've managed, like Gian Carlo Menotti and Daron Hagen, but overall the lifespan of the standard new opera is a handful of contractual performances and a line on a few resumes.  This is why Hugo Weisgall is a man of noteworthiness, penning multiple operas that have gained acceptance into the second-tier American opera rep - especially considering his music is atonal.  Think about it - opera fans liking atonal music that isn't by Schoenberg or Berg.  It's a tad unthinkable, but Weisgall's operas The Tenor and The Stronger are still revived, with other shows of his like Six Characters in Search of an Author still snagging rave reviews in spite of usual seat-filler-killers like dense harmonic experimentation and dramatic unease.  Adding to this noteworthiness is that Weisgall's other works are usually excellent and worth reviewing - some time ago I talked about his Opus 1 song cycle on poems by Adelaide Crapsey, and while that was as tonal as his music ever got it still showed a creative and earnest voice refining poetic expression with great promise.  A new recording of his rich and exciting Sonata for Piano, sharing disc space with Hindemith's underheard Ludus Tonalis, was released just this year, and perhaps it'll nudge a few more of his works back into the contemporary music limelight.  Today's work is also rich and exciting, and is part of a very small, but vital, collection of works about the last days of t-shirt season - End of Summer, a song set for voice, oboe and string trio, an instrumental combination I've enjoyed (with or without voice) for years now.

End of Summer sets two poems by Po Chii-i (translated by Weisgall himself) and one by a certain George Boas (who may or may not have been a Christian writer - the ones listed certainly didn't write poetry), breaking the songs up with a pair of interludes - and I must say, you gotta love any art song set that begins on eating lunch.  The two Po Chii-i poems are part of the rich heritage of old Chinese poetry that 20th-century songwriters love to set, though Weisgall wisely avoids aping any Chinese music per se as to avoid cross-cultural embarrassment.  Throughout the set, and most of his work, he explores an individual, highly contrapuntal language of atonality, spun with easy expertness and never trying to shock the audience.  "After Lunch", the opener, displays this with a kind of sardonic humor that old Chinese poetry seems oddly good at, with the tempo marked "Aloof, and quite without expression".  The lyrics, an amusing mixture of boredom and upper-crust display, are well-matched by a sub-sprightly waltz time, lack of overt drama and slippery glissandi.  This is followed by a full-bodied interlude for solo oboe, quite espressivo and as sad as a loon who lost the mating game.  Despite it being as long as the first song the "Quasi Fantasia" fits on one page, so I'm glad to reprint it here as an illustration of Weisgall's melodic invention at work:

The second song, "Hearing Someone Sing a Poem by Yuan Chen", is prime-cut tragedy, as icy and constrained as a frozen river.  The tempo is almost unconscionably slow (63-69 to the sixteenth note!), and this sense of static horror is a perfect way to set the deep sorrow that artists feel knowing that their mentors and colleagues have passed on, never again to create new works and initiating the inevitable decline of what they made in life.  This is followed by a fitful, nervous "Scherzo", punctuating dovetailing counterpoint with sinister unisons:

"De Senectute" closes the set with great austerity and weight, blanketing the listener like humid haze.  Much like "Someone..." the tempo is awkwardly slow, forcing the musicians to think and move through a curtain of molasses.  This song in particular shows off tenor Charles Bressler's great command of pitch and assured, mature tone, doubly impressive in a song this exposed and risky.  I have to applaud Weisgall for being able to extend the dramatic tension and almost crippling sense of yearning throughout such a long song, as things could have easily descended into monotony in the hands of a lesser composer.  A lesser composer would also have had trouble pulling off a closing minute like this one, with each chord following a natural progression through atonality and proving their value and finality at the softest of dynamics, reminding me in particular of Carl Ruggles's Angels.

End of Summer, along with Weisgall's other large chamber song cycle Fancies and Inventions, was recorded in the 1970's; this recording hasn't been officially re-released except as an archival on-demand deelio, which is what you're hearing now.  In lieu of that we could encourage more performances, the only hitch being that the sheet music publisher, Theodore Presser, decided to sell the score without parts - the instrumental parts are rental only, something that is guaranteed to keep 90% of prospective performers from taking the plunge.  I guess it'll have to come down to some creative MS Paint-ing to extract parts from the full score, though you didn't hear it from me...

Till tomorrow,

PNK

Summer's-End-Pieces - Stenhammar's Sensommarnätter

It's good to dust off the old blogs every once and awhile, and in my case it's been too much of awhile - when there are no deadlines there's no angry manager staring at you waiting for the pen to stop moving.  A fine theme has presented itself to me for this week, concerning a fact that many people forget: summer isn't quite over yet.  Rather, it officially changes to Fall this Thursday, and Monday-Wednesday are de jure Summer days, and while some people can't stand the heat of Summer I am always struck with a tinge of melancholy as the rains return...well, not so much melancholy this year considering how our wildfire season went, but a bit, regardless.  As such, I can spend this week talking about a number of pieces based on a great poetic theme, the End of Summer.  I've long wanted to cover this concept, not only because of the blogworthy works that I've found based on it, but also because it's a transitional phase that means different things to different people, emotionally as well as musically.  I'm also happy for this first article because I can finally talk about a Swedish composer on Re-Composing (for my Leaf article on Hilding Rosenberg click here).

While Sweden has been very good at producing musicians of world renown, including conductors (Neeme Jarvi), trumpet players (Hakan Hardenberger) and trombonists (Christian Lindberg), its composers have never enjoyed the same level of fame, or at least "important" status.  It's not that there haven't been a number of great composers to come from the shore of Middle Fennoscandia - far from it, in fact - there's just that little matter of luck that hasn't been on their side.  It's also important to note that public taste only allowed for less than a handful of superstars to come from the Nordic countries in the first place: Mr. Grieg from Norway, Mr. Nielsen and Mr. Ruders from Denmark, and Mr. Sibelius and Mrs. Saariaho from Finland.  None of Sweden's major composers have quite risen above the fame level of Denmark's Niels Gade, a wonderful composer when you get to know him but still afflicted with the pesky syndrome of international obscurity.  With Sweden a few pieces have cracked the Hot Overseas charts:

+ Dag Wirén wrote a lovely Serenade for strings that gets a bit of radio play over here, as well as that Little Serenade by Lars-Erik Larsson

+ The strikingly progressive Liszt-era composer Franz Berwald saw a renaissance this last century, especially his Symphony no. 3, "Singulière"

+ Kurt Atterberg has a few pieces that have followings in the States, specifically his luscious Symphony no. 2

One man who hasn't gained any clout away from home, but perhaps should have, is Wilhelm Stenhammar, whose most respected pieces are his 2 finished symphonies and 6 string quartets.  I can vouch for the third string quartet possessing great craftsmanship, enchanting melodies and moments of appealing surprise, all qualities present in today's featured piece, Sensommarnätter, op. 33.  The end of Summer has a kind of special quality when one lives as far north as in Sweden, largely because Summer is more notable there, as well.  I had the privilege of visiting Sweden during the Summer and not only is the weather surprisingly pleasant but there's the entrancing effect of the Midnight Sun.  Perhaps in reflection of similar feelings the Sensommarnätter (Late Summer Nights) possess a sense of foreboding sadness that perfectly fits the change in seasons.

The work is set in five movements of alternating speeds, opening with a deeply-cast lyricism.  Appropriately enough for a nocturnal work, the first melody is in the tenor, portament-ing its way up the bass cleff so fully as to make cellists salivate.  It's hard not to like how most of the melodic material, and interior texture, of the movement is simply moving around scales, as one has to like new ways to make that sound interesting.  Much effect is also gotten by expanding the harmonic and technical scope of the left-hand material as ideas are repeated, especially the huge arpeggiated chords in the last iteration of the "B" theme.

The second movement is a kind of etude for repeated attacks with one hand, one that looks reasonable on the page but is surprisingly difficult, as most pianists will want to alternate hands instead.  As soon as you think you're tired with all that, however, Stenhammar switches it up to a sprightly "B" section with bounding arpeggios that scoop from one chord to another with humorous grace; later it's "A" business as usual.

The third movement is arguably the best of the bunch, a diffuse nocturne that alternates between lithe preciousness and deep anticipation.  Much like the opening movement there is an expert marriage of melody and harmonic ambition, and the piano technique surprises in its elaboration without becoming a chore.  One of the more remarkable moments is the great welling up in the bass of E major after the opening section nearly resolves, showing Stenhammar experimenting with planing sevenths and fourths.  It's one of four expansive figures that feel like enormous sighs, with the second and fourth phrases allowing the pedal to release as the left hand assumes material introduced in an ascending series of thirds and the right to rise into space, like Debussy's perfumes turning in the evening air.

The fourth movement is one of those sinister galloping pieces, a genre that quickly went out of fashion once Modernism got rolling along but is amply served here.  This is the most difficult of the movements to play, as there are not only very fast inverse cascades at pp but also widely-spanning motorific bits in the left hand that get tiring quickly.  Many other devilish bits abound.  I'd like to mention here that I've never tried to play this movement.

The last movement rounds the set out with another ingenious pairing of melody and harmony, this time in a kind of moderate passepied in character of those wistful early Debussy movements from the Suite Bergamasque and the Petite Suite.  Even though the material is simple on the surface there are many novel harmonic movements and small textural touches that make for a fine closer.

The whole set exudes a lively combination of charm and untroubling seriousness that make it one of Stenhammar's most appealing works.  There have been a few album-length overviews of Stenhammar's piano works, including a pair of piano sonatas, but the Sensommarnätter are my favorites and his best chance of securing a place in the international piano rep.  A couple of the movements might appear a bit too old-fashioned for modern tastes but I think their variety and invention easily overcome any creakiness.  Stay tuned this week for more late Summer delights, as things get much weirder and wilder from here...

~PNK