Shadows Magic and Macabre - Two Poetic Piano Suites by American Women Composers

While there's several warehouses full of settings of poetry by classical composers, there aren't nearly as many pieces based on poetry but don't set the words.  The latter half of the 19th century was chockablock with tone-poems, vast swaths of programmatic music inspired by poetry or novels or whatsits, but most of those have tripped into the gaping maw of history and there hasn't been much modern action to take its place.  There have been a few, such as Irwin Bazelon's Prelude to Hart Crane's "The Bridge" for string orchestra (one of the better recent pieces for the ensemble by an American), but I've been particularly interested in digging up bill-fitting piano works ever since I found Martin Bresnick's For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, a 35-minute suite for speaking pianist after the William Blake book that includes a video projection using Blake's illuminations.  Another catalyzer was David Diamond's The Tomb of Melville, inspired by another Hart Crane poem, "At Melville's Tomb", and quite possibly Diamond's most beautiful work (don't worry, its time is coming).  However, today's subjects are both chronologically jammed between those three works and more female in their authorship.  They were conveniently recorded as the first and last pieces of an obscure piano album, New Dimensions: Music by Women, by the pianist Paula Ennis-Dwyer, and an individual more blessed than myself uploaded the works to YouTube.  Separated by many years of artistic shifts and a generation gap or two, the two works are fascinating nuggets in the rep that could be quite inspiring to composers with cross-pollination aspirations if anybody had heard them.

Miriam Gideon (1906-1996) really shouldn't need an introduction here, as she consistently proved herself over her long career to be one of America's most consistently excellent composers.  Her work maintained modernist rigor and creativity while also exuding vast amounts of charm and excitement for layaudiences, a combination that gives her music a distinctly (and deliciously) American feel.  Among her some-150-or-so works, my favorite (that I've heard) is Of Shadows Numberless (1966), the opener to New Dimensions and one of Gideon's works available at her ACA page.  It's inspiration is John Keats's exquisite "Ode to a Nightingale", a near-hallucinogenic tidal wave of nature imagery and high Romance.  However, rather than go the tone-poem route and paint each word in note form, Gideon picked a handful of depictable lines from which to form a suite, similar to how Persichetti made is Poems for piano.

The first movement is "Magic casements opening on seas of perilous foam", and you hardly need music to drink in that line's velvet tones.  Gideon's language is comparable to elegantly contrapuntal polytonality, though all the lines and harmonies are so neatly interlocked that easy analysis is both a distant dream and totally unnecessary.  The sweetly clashing lines moving in opposing motion vaguely intimate fine stencils or lace, and they nicely set up the suite's air of gossamer mystery.  As surreal as the piece can get Gideon isn't afraid to clear the air with a nice melodic reprise or turn for the cute.  The second movement, "The blushful Hippocrene", takes a mocking, caustic turn for the bounce, swerving erratically between 2/4 and 3/8 until a "distantly; dance-like" section dons the una corda dampers.  Hippocrene was a fountain on Mt. Helicon, formed by Pegasus's hooves and revered by the Muses, and drinking from it was said to provide poetic inspiration.  Methinks that Gideon used this section to turn the traditionally stuffy Greek mythology that so many Romantic poets couldn't escape into a burlesque act, and the results are both funny and elusive.  The third movement is a half-page reprise of "Magic casements opening", and the fourth moves into tense realms in its depiction of "The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves".  An interruptful perpetuum mobil with a coy double-trio, it's an easy cousin to Bartók's Diary of a Fly, the black key-white key interlacing reminiscent of the incessant chatter of a fly's wings, and nothing bad has ever come from depicting a summer eve, so things don't get too annoying.  The most beautiful movement is the fifth, "White hawthorne and the pastoral eglantine", and these pictures of white hawthorn and eglantine rose are mere tastes of the movement's suffused dream quilt.  It's core is mirrored, bitonal chords, split and rocking under an una corda blanket and a distant, pinging melody.  I won't spoil it for you, suffice to say that the movement impressionists with the best of 'em.  The final movement, "Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows...", begins with a quasi-recitative before arpeggiating into a reprise of "Magic casements", and in the final bars Gideon reveals the most poignant variation on the opening figure one could ever imagine, closing the case on a gleaming note.

Tina Davidson (b. 1952) is a composer I'd never heard of before I found the recording of the Gideon, and her recent developments may keep me from investigating further.  After dabbling with Crumbian extended techniques in her college days, Davidson fell down the post-minimalist stairs and hasn't gotten back up after some decades.  Before she left her shoelaces untied she crafted 7 Macabre Songs (1979) for piano, based on the poems of the same name by Howard Nemerov.  I knew about the poems before, as they were set to music by the article-beckoning Louis Calabro, and the poems were actually dedicated to him, though I don't know how the two men knew each other or if the poems were published before or after the songs.  Coincidentally, Calabro was one of Davidson's teachers at Bennington College, and I can only assume that his settings were the inspiration for Davidson to write her own set.

If Gideon's muse was luxuriant and Old World, Davidson abides by her muse by keeping things simpler and twenty times creepier.  She's right to do so - the source poems are slivers of a malicious grin, epigramatically short and deeply unsettling.  Nemerov was a stickler for strict forms, and the neat rhyming schemes of the "songs" only heightens the Woyzeck-ian nightmare state.  Davidson uses each song to expand on single textural and technical ideas, focusing more on sound effects than theory.  "The Ground swayed like a Sea" follows tidal surges of chromatic clusters and their twinkling, coldly dramatic crests.  "The officer wore a thin smile/Over his dental plate" stomps on stopped strings and minor seconds, its stifled horror reminiscent of John Cage's prepared piano works, such as Root of an Unfocus; 100 Monopoly dollars will go to whomever can name a recent movie that used this piece to great effect.  "Roses were planted and grew again/Out of my pain" morphs between tinkling upper keys and string plucking so smoothly it's nearly unnoticeable, like how you can't see plants grow but they somehow get bigger behind your back.  "Under the pie crust...I must" employs that trick wherein the pianist silently depresses the bottom octave of the piano and holds it with the middle pedal, and when they play notes above it without the right pedal they leave a resonant trace behind, a great dramatic effect pioneered by George Crumb.  "It is forbidden to go further/Darkness stand in the wall" takes a break from terror to allow nostalgically atonal melodies to unfold in the night.  It's the closest the set gets to conventional expression, and it's a stark contrast to the evil humor of "My husband bluebeard has a blue beard".  The swift scales and claws-out trilling is a very old-school technique for musical horror, at least as old as the witch's sabbath from Symphonie Fantasique.  Davidson is smart enough to save the best for last, and "My death with a nail in his foot" takes things inside the piano for closure in the Black World.  The pianist has to slap the lowest strings with their hand and play a note while stopping it, sliding along the length of the string to touch off harmonics.  Higher notes occasionally poke out a melody, but the piece is trapped in a permanent dramatic stasis - until the very end, when a measly three notes eke out one of the best eerie endings I've ever heard in a piece of music.

The other two works on the album aren't up to the Gideon/Davidson snuff, though if you're a fan of Shulamit Ran or Nancy Van de Vate you may want to spin them 'round.  No matter - the outer works are more than good enough for a sit-down with your record player.  Of Shadows Numberless is a lush Old World Ode that has become one of my new favorite piano pieces, and 7 Macabre Songs is the best horror-themed piano piece I've heard since Abel Decaux's Clairs de lune.  The performances by Paula Ennis-Dwyer are excellent, simultaneously sensitive and daring and quite attentive to the dramatic potentials of the music.  There's another recording of the Gideon, by the pianist Margaret Mills on an album that includes works by Elizabeth Lauer, Richard Wilson and Anthony Newman, but Ennis-Dwyer's is much better.  The works are contrasting testaments to the power of artistic cross-pollination and worthy additions to the piano rep, and there's still time to put on theme recitals for Spring and Halloween if anybody's up for the challenge.  Gideon and Davidson drank from the blushful Hippocrene, and what sprang forth made everybody's day.

~PNK

Opium Dreams - the Grand Illusions of Gabriel von Wayditch

The term "outsider artist" is as annoying as it is difficult to define - thrown around far too often, constantly shifting the line between outsider and simply unique, and ultimately a marketing buzzword.  There's simply no exact demarcation line for when an artist qualifies as an outsider, and oftentimes what people mean by "outsider" is "talented, determined and mentally ill".  The term comes from the study of the art of asylum inmates, and all the qualifiers for the "genre" come from these artists.  The general idea is that these artists are disconnected from reality just enough so that they make art but have no need to follow pre-existing forms and conventions, and it's easy to see how people could label anybody sufficiently left of the dial as an outsider.  This problem will only get worse as the years pass, as it is easier these days not only for anybody to create art but even easier to distribute it to a global audience, making the inside/outside demarcation even fuzzier.  That doesn't mean that the outsiders aren't trying, and before the Grand Hooie that is the internet and digital self-publication came about Gabriel von Wayditch (1888-1969) spent his life crafting 14 grand operas that to this day remain largely unperformed.  Perhaps the answer lays in the fact that they range up to eight-and-a-half hours long and can take place anywhere from Jerusalem to Venus.

Wayditch was the child of a Hungarian inventor, Dr. Aloysius Wayditch von Verbovac, and a Prussian Baroness, Helena von Dönhoff, and among the former's accomplishments were a deep-sea thermometer and the concept of 3-D film in 1913.  The concept of 3-D movies in the 1910's makes my head explode, but his concept was deemed impractical and never implemented, his contributions unrecognized when 3-D did eventually become popular 40 years later.  He was trained in piano, composition and conducting at the National Hungarian Academy of Music (now the Franz Liszt Academy of Music) under Emil von Sauer and Hans von Koessler.  While I don't expect anybody to recognize the latter, he ended up being the teacher to arguably the most important generation of Hungarian composers ever, a class including Bartók and Kodály.  Those guys went on to develop what we think of as Hungarian, and to some extent Eastern European, classical music (with help from plenty of others), so Wayditch's proximity adds a fascinating note not only to his biography but also to his music.  The problem with asking the Influence question is that Wayditch moved with his father to New York in 1911, the second year into work on his first opera, Opium Dreams.  His family's fortunes ran out, but Wayditch kept on composing without any promise of performance or even understanding, separated from Hungary but still steeped in its culture.  Opium Dreams, featuring his own Hungarian libretto and a 110-piece orchestra, lasted four hours and was never performed then and is still unperformed today.  He pulled a couple of orchestral suites out of it, as well as a performably short piano piece, Reminisces from Opium Dreams.  Of course, that doesn't mean any university holds a copy of that score, or any Wayditch scores, because history has a way of making me angry.  The rest of his compositional career was spent in near total isolation in the Bronx, and each piece following Opium Dreams was enormous on nearly every level.

The next two operas he wrote were uncharacteristically short, 90' and 45' respectively, but were still in Hungarian and required huge orchestras - The Caliph's Magician and Jesus Before Herod.  One can see a pattern emerging with the subjects of his operas: they all revolve around fantastical, exotic, ancient or even alien lands and peoples (especially intriguing is Venus Dwellers).  While this is nothing new, Wayditch upped the stakes by having frequent scene changes and complex plots, making narrative clarity an absolute top priority for anybody attempting to stage these things.  In fact, for his entire operatic oeuvre, Wayditch only saw one opera staged in his lifetime, Horus, in 1939 by the Philadelphia La Scale Opera Company.  While we have no recording of this performance, assessing it is even more difficult because of its review by the notoriously anti-modern Henry Pleasants, author of the anti-modernist diatribe The Agony of Modern Music.  The performance was later included favorably by Nicolas Slonimsky in his book Music Since 1900, an encyclopedia of important musical events of the 20th century (what he saw of it, anyways), but that wasn't enough for anybody to revive it.  His biggest opera was his last, The Heretics, an eight-and-a-half-hour epic to presumably be spread across multiple evenings, and he died while writing page 2,850 of the full orchestral score.  Before I found out about this, I thought that nobody in the 20th century even came close to Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji in terms of the sheer volume of music written, and while Sorabji's collected scores most likely eclipse Wayditch's in page count alone I don't think anybody else has hand-written a single piece 2,850 pages long, let alone an opera.  That is, except for the Guiness World Records holder for the longest opera, Robert Wilson's 13-and-1/2-hour The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, though that piece's legitimacy as an opera is extremely questionable.

After Wayditch's death, his son Walter was determined to get his music exposed to the world, and in the 70's both The Caliph's Magician and Jesus Before Herod were recorded on the Musical Heritage Society label.  After Walter's death in 2005, all the scores were miraculously delivered to Frank Oteri, a notable rabblerouser of modern American music and one of Walter's best allies.  Oteri has become Wayditch's greatest advocate, writing the Grove Music Encyclopedia for him and re-issuing the MHS recordings on CD, which you can get here and here (the second "here" is cheaper).  He also wrote an article, Enter the World of Gabriel von Wayditch, as part of a Wayditch retrospective mounted at the Brooklyn Museum by the Hungarian Cultural Center that also included a performance of Reminisces from Opium Dreams by pianist Lloyd Arriola and a ballet featuring orchestral excerpts from his pieces.  

Of course, this still has nothing to do with what the operas sound like.  In the liner notes to the CD, Oteri warns that the two operas were written before Wayditch had reached his matured style, but after I snagged the thing and gave it a spin I can safely say that there's not one problem with that.  The operas were written in 1917 and 1918 respectively and sound the part - Wayditch's early language is an intoxicating, dark fairy tale vernacular, much like if Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle wanted to be as emotionally fraught as Strauss's Death and Transfiguration.  Everything is big, from the orchestrations to the dynamics, to the phrasing, and I can only imagine how exhausting it would be to mount even the 45-minute Jesus Before Herod, for the orchestra and especially the singers.  Wayditch was a great student of impressionism and its tricks, though while much of the technical framework will be familiar to fans of stuff like Stravinsky's The Firebird, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Florent Schmitt's La tragédie de Salomé, everything put together is still quite personal.  Wayditch was composing at full strength, and even listening to the operas can be an exhausting experience, though in the best possible sense of the word.  They manage to avoid being too dated despite how old-fashioned they can seem, staying ahead of the curve in terms of imagination and low repetition.  As with all opera recordings the pieces can seem trying simply because one can't see the action as it unfolds on screen, and the performances by the Budapest National Opera orchestra and the San Diego Symphony Orchestra are not exactly perfect, but considering what they have to work with the listener should leave these minor quibbles at the door.

I can tell that some of you are dying to hear them now, and unfortunately no blessed individuals have uploaded them to YouTube.  However, I can give you a taste, but the catch is that it's inside of one of the more maddeningly unfilled holes in Wayditch's possible revival.  In 2009, the documentary studio Normal Life Pictures released a trailer for an in-progress documentary on Wayditch, showing footage of Walter Wayditch showing the filmmakers his father's manuscripts, which are even more intimidating in front of the eyes as they are in the imagination.  Playing behind it are excerpts from The Caliph's Magician and Jesus Before Herod.  Any viewer hearing that ecstatic, wide-eyed stuff and seeing the huge scores would doubtless be interested in seeing the full thing.  Sadly, the page on Normal Life's site has been taken down, and there doesn't seem to be any current information on the project, once again stopping a possible Wayditch revival in its tracks.  That doesn't mean you can't do your part, though.  The scores are out there - Oteri has them all, and perhaps with some support he could commission them to be scanned and copied.  You can grab the CD reissue of the MHS LPs at whatever available price suits you best, listen until your ears fall off, and then start pestering Normal Life Pictures to get to releasing the documentary or at least leaking the raw footage so people like me don't have to camp out in front of their New York headquarters with weaponized Michael Moore DVD's.


Could one describe Wayditch as an "outsider artist"?  He was certainly outside the American musical scene, not only in his heritage and compositional style but also socially, as he had virtually no contact with anybody in the scene during his life.  However, there's no part of me that believes him to be an outsider to classical music itself, and from what I've heard there were plenty of composers with stranger music who were regular fixtures in major musical organizations, such as John Cage and Edgard Varèse.  He was certainly quite sane - it would have taken an incredible intellect and fortitude to write that much music with any kind of focus.  Another term for outsider art is "visionary art", a label often ascribed to art created from subjective religious or spiritual experiences, and while Wayditch's music has nothing to do with a religious experience (such as Arthur Ferris's angelically informed harp-violins) one could call his fantastic settings and grand scopes as "visionary", but that's not particularly helpful.  It is marketable, so if Wayditch ever does get the publicity push he deserves I'd expect to see both "visionary" and "outsider" to crop up quite a bit in the ads.  And really, who cares if they're accurate or not?  Wayditch is Wayditch in spite of labeling, and his music is astonishing in its scope and wonderful to hear, so if anybody reading this is an opera patron I've got a few shows you could suggest for your local company.  They can't do Aida EVERY year.

~PNK

Visual Music/One-Off - G. Ackley Brower's 3 Sketches

Ahhh, the Public Domain.  The internet's pluralism and bottomless volunteer personnel allows for media you would have never heard of rise to the surface by the power of copyright holes, and the Sibley Music Library has been a great friend to me in this regard.  Wide field searches can catch you all sorts of stuff, and when Grover Ackley Brower's 3 Sketches for piano, op. 6 came up I noticed the odd detail of a missing death date for its composer.  This can sometimes be a sign of a composer so bad nobody much cared to follow his life to the end, but it occasionally points to something else, such as with the infinitely mysterious Dante Fiorillo.  Brower made his career editing other people's works, such as Schubert, Mendelssohn and Easthope Martin, and most notably books by Sergei Taneyev, but was also a pianist and composer with a symphony, string quartet and piano sonata under his belt.  Not that I was able to find any of those scores in Worldcat, of course; the 3 Sketches are his only published works anybody felt like keeping around.  For personal reasons, the 1920 publication date, the word Sketches in the title and the fact that he assigned an opus number to the thing were all intriguers, and upon opening the file I was greeted with surprising style and class:

1920 was a bit before Modernism started to take hold in American classical music, but the ad wizards behind Carl Fischer were inspired in their choice of designer - this is the very definition of pre-Deco minimalist class.  The use of empty space is phenomenal in just the way that I can't fully explain it, but maybe that wire-frame, enormous 3 knows how to.  As most publishers stuck with white for their margins as to save on ink, this jet black stare would've been an intimidating presence on the shelf.  There's something overwhelming about the combination of a solid black wall and that small print, kind of like how the title of Edwin Roxburgh's Labyrinth overwhelms the publisher name at the bottom.  The fonts are actually more akin to the 40's and 50's than the end of the 10's - I've seen the "opus 6" font in a lot of trailers for b-grade horror movies from the 50's.  It's a beautiful piece of enticement - you have no idea what it hides, but you want to find out.

As for the piece itself, Brower was raised in the finest clubs New York had to offer, and his Sketches are steeped in that kind of jazz-informed salon-impressionism that John Alden Carpenter and Howard Hanson pulled off so well in their piano works, though perhaps more on the salon end of things than the impressionist.  His trick is to keep things unpredictable, rapidly shifting key, texture and tempo to give the illusion of improvisation.  Brower clearly had an ear for the French Way but never plunges into experimentation, his figurations always familiar and pianistic.  Romantic performance practice was still the norm, and so a player who was already used to pushing and pulling for dramatic effect would find a lot to work with here, and much of the piece relies on surprise and coyness.  The catch is that the pianist has to commit to the goofiness completely, or else the piece will just seem odd and poorly written.  The good news is that Philip Sear, a British pianist who I previously featured in my article on Theodore Gouvy and his pen-named nephew Opol Ygouw, pulls the movements off nicely.  He also seems to know the most about Brower and his career, or at least a tremendously nerdy student of his does, as I wasn't able to find out much of anything beyond what he wrote in the video description.  The Sketches probably won't become your favorite piece now or later, but it is charming, unpredictable and quite fun to play, and that cover is to die for regardless of its contents.  Print, play, listen, excellent.

~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

Willem Pijper's Belated One-Off

Here we are, the reason I started this (last) month in the first place (not that I'm the Sun, of course) - Willem Pijper (1894-1947).  Probably the most famous of the founders of the Dutch Society for the Development of Modern Creative Music, Pijper hasn't yet gotten the international break he deserves, most likely for reasons that will send me gnashing into the shadows.  While Daniel Ruyneman may have had more variety in his work, Pijper had a highly sophisticated and unique voice that showed a mastery of a host of modernist techniques and should have catapulted him beyond his homeland's scene.  As my deadline has passed I don't have the time I thought I did to stretch my arm out in his oeuvre and knock the gems into my shopping cart, so this has begrudgingly become a One-Off.  You could just as easily ignore the piece I'm going to talk about and look at his Piano Sonata or the Piano Concerto or the Symphony no. 2 or one of his string quartets or the Flute Sonata, with many of his scores available at his IMSLP page.  For the finale to Lowlands Month I decided to showcase a true masterpiece, five minutes of perfection that should have entered the rep long ago and is a fine representation of his imagination and confidence - Piano Sonatina no. 3.

Pijper came of age in the wave of Expressionism, with Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and the fine folks at Universal Edition leading the central European musical Avant-Garde.  As such, his music is drenched in the newly minted techniques of free atonality that I so love - roving fourths and fifths, bi- and poly-tonality, chromatic snaking, extended tertian harmonies, disparate, at times superimposed meters, jazzy rhythmic bouncing, and machinistic ostinatos.  Starting as delicately as possible, a quintal soundpool supporting a distant, forlorn melody, giving way to a music box variation on the same harmonic material.  The melody is so lilting and touching it's easy to forget how tightly the materials are treated, how every gesture in the piece can be drawn from that first bar-and-a-half.  I like to think of Pijper's combination of organic development and thick atmosphere as the "Smoke 'n' Mirrors" method of composition, and each variation on the source material is dipped in a new timbral concoction, each one more enchanting than the last.  By page 2 we see the first instance of meter superimposition, as Pijper lets the barlines disconnect to create interesting rhythmic textures, a nice brain twister for the performer.  The tension ramps up through a compound triple section, skittering across opposing major chords and climaxing at the 8/8 bar on the third line of page 3, a very Petruska sonority indeed.  He slides back into the opening chords, expanded a bit and cut off for a dramatic gesture similar to parts of "La Ruelle" from Abel Decaux's Clairs de Lune.  Things get back into gear with a dance-reprise of the tranquillo section from page 1, and perfect fourths whirl in the right hand over a perpetually shifting arpeggiesque left hand.  The top of page 5 delights in stacked pentatonic scales, spread out over the piano's upper register like a carillon, then quickly zipping through the recurring downward figure and reaching its top speed at Mosso assai, ma ben marcato.  Jumping major chords hammer across a four-note ostinato comprised of the same two perfect fifths that started the piece, breaking the barlines again to disconnect the listener from the propulsion, like watching a bird follow a high-speed train and getting distracted by telephone poles, your eyes unable to focus.  The final reprise leads to a very mid-century American kind of coda, a major chord sounded over an uncertain depth of bass, quite common in serious 50's dramas and masterful here.  It would have been so easy to let experimentation wreck the denoument, but Pijper keeps his cool, letting a single perfect fourth close the piece.

It's just about perfect, and I try to avoid slapping that adjective on too many pieces, but this one fits the bill.  Plenty of Pijper's other pieces are impressively creative and assured but I can't think of another that has the third Sonatina's impact.  If you somehow found a way to set my other Lowlands Month articles on fire and made for the kerosene, this one piece would still stand as a testament to the untapped wealth of the Netherlands' art history.  Belgium kind of slipped past me, and I'm sorry for that (to be honest I just couldn't think of anybody), and maybe this whole thing will keep me away from theme months, but I hope you've liked the people I highlighted and can go forth on your own.  Here's the score, below's the recording, and all's good.

~PNK

Daniel Ruyneman's Hieroglyphic Daydreams

Sheesh!  Lowlands Month is almost over and I've got a scant handful of hours left with only two articles up!  To ratchet things up, let's talk about the two guys I really wanted to get in this blog, starting with Debussy's Dutch worshiper, Daniel Ruyneman (1886-1963).  He was a founding member (along with Sem Dresden, Bernard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer, and the subject of this month's last article) of the Dutch Society for the Development of Modern Creative Music in the 1920's, the real birth of modern Dutch music and a treasure trove of adventurousness.  While Ruyneman had one of the most varied oeuvres of this crew his music has eluded wide exposure, and considering people were willing to go out of their way to play a piece with as wacky of an instrumentation as Hieroglyphs, that's an odd fact indeed.

Arguably Ruyneman's most well-known piece, Hieroglyphs (1918) is a richly atmospheric piece that elicits the same question from anybody who hears it - what the heck are cupbells?  Cupbells (or cup-bells) are a mallet percussion instrument Ruyneman invented consisting of 25 copper bells that span two octaves.  The only recording I've heard uses a vibraphone, and I'm not sure any cup-bells survive today, but that doesn't take away from Hieroglyphs's kaleidoscopic majesty.  Unfolding quite slowly, Ruyneman uses the glacial tempo to slice the beats into wildly varied rhythmic subtleties, creating sparkling aquatic textures like these:

(Click for larger view)

The instrumentation is quite unique, favoring decaying, undulating metal over girthy strings 'n' winds.  Ancient Egypt has been a fascination of Europe's for a long time, but this is one of the only ones that entirely sidesteps cultural ignorance, largely by not referencing "Egyptian" music at all.  Hieroglyphs is a study of exoticism itself, as Egyptian hieroglyphs were untranslatable for centuries before the Rosetta stone was discovered, and staring at an indecipherable text does elicit at wonderful aesthetic experience, a sensation captured here exquisitely.  And if you can't read music, the piece looks pretty dang cool - look at all the dots and lines!  Here's the recording to help unravel the mystery.

The most adventurous pieces of his I've seen are unfortunately not available on YouTube, such as the crazy Kleine Sonate for piano (published by Universal-Edition in their usual excellent engraving) and the Sonata for Chamber Choir (a quirky, lyric-less exercise in choral coloration).  However, I can at least use this blog once again to republish pieces that need the help.  Another early work of Ruynemans is the Pathematologien for piano, a unique work in its time for its focus on psychological states - only Lord Berners's Fragments Psychologiques comes to mind as a contemporary.  The three pathematologies (pathology, specifically psycho-pathology) are "Hallucination", "The Voice of the Past" and "Impression", not the most scientific of terms but evocative nonetheless.  As YouTube has only offered me the first one in recording let's throw that one up on the board.

These lush miniatures show the influence of Debussy more than anything else I've seen of Ruyneman's, with plenty of whole-tone and modal stuff floating around.  For a hallucination it's a pretty languorous one, like falling asleep in a sweltering greenhouse, and the other movements are similarly calm.  Pathematologien is a piece that baffles me as to its absence from Public Domain sheet music sites like IMSLP, as it was most certainly published before 1923 (though it oddly lacks a copyright date).  Ruyneman's piano writing is deft enough to be able to balance all those open octaves, often a bad sign in piano music but well-handled here (and the other movements are more sparing in their textures).  That calm doesn't forbid the occasional fortissimo, of course.  This recording, while not labeled, is most likely by Pietro Van Doesburg from his Repertoire De Stijl CD, a collection of piano works from the Dada era, and he captures the hallucination's arc with passion and patience (though those first chords are the theme song for the "Componist van de Week" show).

Like many composers who came of age in Impressionism and Expressionism (that Kleine Sonate I mentioned earlier), Ruyneman eventually settled into Neo-Classicism.  This period bore his other most well-known work, the Sonatina for piano.  The ornate experimentation of his earlier work has given way to the sparest of textures.  There are no more than two pitches being heard at any given time for the majority of the piece, using piano-lesson-friendly leaps and implied pedaling to eke out harmonies.  There were an awful lot of adventurous sonatinas in the 20th century, so many I may devote an article to that genre's evolution through modernism, but Ruyneman's Sonatina sticks to simplicity and relative ease of performance.  That isn't to say it's the easiest piece in the world, but Ronald Brautigam makes it sound like a piece of cake in his recording.

Perhaps Ruyneman's biggest downfall was his lack of a consistent identity.  I don't mean that composers should only write in the way that makes them easiest to recognize, and I find it delightful when people write outside their box.  However, the general public is drawn back to an artist with the guarantee that what they liked in piece A will be present in piece B.  Ruyneman cut such a wide swath in terms of technique and mood that one is never sure what to hear in his next piece, which can both discourage and reward exploration.  I prefer to pitch these cases as being easy to approach from all angles - if you don't like one piece, the next one will be quite different.  Whatever the style, Ruyneman's works were all inventive and of high quality, and the kinds of pieces he attempted alone should be enough for you to take a sip.  Next time, the grand finale to Lowlands Month - Willem Pijper.

~PNK

Visual Lowlands Music - Bernard Zweers's Symphony no. 3, "To My Fatherland"

In my Bernard Wagenaar article I said that I'd limit myself to 20th century Lowlands composers, and lo and behold I've caught myself doing a late-19th-century showcaser, but I'll allow it for a Visual Music entry.  Bernard Zweers (1854-1924) is credited for creating a uniquely Dutch compositional voice in a time when Dutch composition was so far from the limelight it was growing icicles, and his Symphony no. 3, "To My Fatherland" is his most famous work, despite its infrequent exposure.  The low number of performances is due to its length at over an hour and the enormous orchestra it requires (including a four-piece saxhorn section!).  I'll leave you to find it on YouTube, mostly to avoid linking to an hour-long work in a brief article, and also to not distract from the cover of the Noske edition, which is the best use of the Franz Stuck font since an actual Franz Stuck painting.

It's sad to note that Noske lost quite a bit of money on the score due to poor sales, because this is some choice fin-de-siècle design.  The center square is a perfect marriage of modernist geometric design and late-19th-century botanical stenciling, a shockingly common detail in covers from this time and quite welcome despite its overexposure.  The gold-green color scheme is unexpected and quite glowing despite its age, as if the leaves are set in a bed of gold and the dots are pods.  The surrounding bands of dots are quite interesting for the time, more reminiscent of 60's futurism than Belle Époque.  They infer a third dimension that the centerpiece lacks, and their combination with the border lines gives the impression of peering through the walls of a 19th-century greenhouse, tastefully organized with spare order.  Shame about the library sticker, though I'm sure whatever plants Zweers is growing in there can break out and overtake it if properly watered.

~PNK