Opus 81a

November 26th, 2008

Once again, the month is nearly over, and I haven’t dug into this piece nearly the way I would have liked to.  All the same… some thoughts.

Did Wagner get the idea of leitmotiv from Beethoven, or was it simply in the air?  I’m no musicologist, so someone will have to answer the question for me.  Beethoven’s Lebewohl motive in the first movement is a prototypical–just as the entire Ring cycle comes out of the descending Eb major triad, Beethoven chooses mi-re-do… what else for a Classical composer who knows that the music will end up there at some point anyway.  Yes, I still think Beethoven is a classical composer, despite the steady appearance of more and more Romantic-era traits.

Compare the two sonata forms in this piece to those in Brahms’ Op. 1.  Brahms and Beethoven are using the same harmonic concepts for the most part, but Beethoven thinks in motivic terms, while Brahms is very clearly writing themes most of the time.  Beethoven is creating an organic, living piece of music in the only way he really knows how; Brahms has chosen sonata form from several other possibilities and is putting things where they are supposed to be.

In the first movment, we seem for once to have an instance where the development section is extended, but on second inspection, the exposition and the development are in roughly equal proportions–if the repeat sign on the exposition is observed.  The form is well-balanced, too, with the inclusion of the opening Adagio.

The second movement is loads of fun–harmonically evasive, and brooding in character.  Is it a developmental core without an exposition or recapitulation?  Is there any way to see the complete sonata as one large sonata form?  There might be a paper in that.

I’m absolutely in love with the two places in the last movement (one in the exposition and one in the recapitulation) where Beethoven uses triads with roots a minor second apart.  Gb and F the first time, Cb and Bb the second time.  Both times, the passage ends with a rarity that I just taught last week in Sophomore Theory–an augmented-sixth chord that resolves to a tone that is not the root of its triad (the third in this case).  If any of my students are reading this… hint, hint… finals are coming up!  Not only that, an enharmonic passage right at the beginning of the development.  Why play in Cb when you can play in B?

On a somewhat-related note… I had time this morning to compose, and the piano piece is ready for the computer.

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Writing for Piano

November 25th, 2008

Well, if you’ve been to my site, you know that I’m supposed to be at work on a cycle of piano pieces.  I wish I could say that I’m stuck on them, but that would imply that I’ve started–with a musical to conduct at the community theatre, the Musicircus to put together, then a trip to Nashville and a few concerts and basketball games, I have yet to write Note One.  Very embarrassing.  I paused to write a little choral piece after I finished the new horn and marimba piece for Nancy Joy, thinking that later that week I would dig into the piano pieces, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Not that I haven’t been thinking about it.  I have the first piece complete in my mind–I can hear the beginning, the ending, and have an idea about the middle.  The cycle is going to be called “Starry Wanderers” and each piece will deal with a planet.  Perhaps a more scientific version of Holst’s best-known piece (all based on astrology, which offends me as both an intellectual and a Christian, though the music is amazing in places).  The first piece is Martian Meditation, a reflection on the dry, barren, cold world that is next out from us, a reminiscence of what is to come (or perhaps what could one day have been–has humanity peaked in our exploration of space?). 

Anyone who has been in the same room while I was playing piano knows that I am no pianist.  I do what I can, and I think I play well enough for my theory teaching (although it doesn’t always feel that way).  So I’ve been casting about a little bit.  Starry Wanderers will be my first extended work for solo piano, and in some ways I’m stumped.

I’ve been working my way through the Beethoven Piano Sonatas now for over two years, and I’m starting to wonder what I’ve really learned from this exercise about the piano (I’ve learned plenty about Beethoven).  I suppose I would boil it down to this:

  • Piano music is at heart rhythmic.  The effects that Beethoven gets are often obscure on the page, and difficult to comprehend when played in “slow motion,” as I inevitably must, but when Ashkenazy takes over for me, they are there, clear as day.
  • Piano music is at heart harmonic.  The ultimate question to answer deals with what notes to push down, and this question has to be taken much more seriously than I have grown accustomed to.  First, not every note is immediately available to the ten fingers.  This is one thing that makes Beethoven so difficult–the mere density of notes means that not all of them are easy to acheive.  Second, because of the limited timbre (even compared to, say, a piece for clarinet and piano) and limitations on dynamics (the two hands can play separate dynamics, but fingers on the same hand can do so only with difficulty), the members of a chord have a certain equality on solo piano that they don’t necessarily have in other media.  As a rhythmic rather than a harmonic composer, this presents a challenge.

An additional problem is made clear at the blog Sonatas and Interludes.  This is a major problem–how to write new piano music that isn’t just more George Winston.  I don’t see myself as a “new-age” composer, and I certainly don’t want my music to sound that way.  On the other hand, there is something to some of the cliches of the form.  My first hearing of the music of Valentin Silvestrov left me very disappointed because it seemed very “new-age” in idiom.  I resolved (because I have an unexplainable fascination for all things Ukrainian) to really listen again, and beneath the surface, I have come to believe that there is more than just trying to do whatever it is that “new-age” music purports to do for performers and listeners alike.

So… this is my problem.  Tomorrow is a day off from teaching, but I will be at school, hopefully left alone long enough to get the first piece in the set down.  Perhaps an update.

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Musicircus

October 31st, 2008

I had no idea what to expect tonight at the Musicircus–the last time I participated in a similar event was in the Spring of 1995 at the University of Cincinnati, and tonight’s event was heavily modelled on that experience.  That concert was all new music, while tonight was much more eclectic.

I hope all the performers and the audience are as pleased as I am with the results.  Turning about 30 small  (and not-so-small) pieces into an hour-long celebration of music and the joy that it can bring was a very healthy activity for all of us, I think.  It was refreshing to see audience members I had never seen before along with many of our faithful fans, as well.

Organizing this kind of thing means that someone–tonight, me–has to lose the sense of spontaneity and discovery of the event.  It takes a lot of preparation to be so random.  All the same, there were some wonderful “moments:”

About a third of the way into Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge, Krista Margrave and Melody Gum started an a capella version of “I’ll Fly Away.”

Kevin Coons’ fantastic vibraphone solo growing out of the texture of the evening.

The minute of silence–it was randomly chosen, but it came at just the right place in the hour to give some relief.

All the performances were fantastic, and it seemed like everyone had a good time… and I dare say John Cage made a few converts this evening.

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Election

October 28th, 2008

I said this wouldn’t be a political site, and no political opinions are put forth in this post.  On the other hand, I have been having a blast tracking the mathematics in this election, and there are two cool sites that I’ve been enjoying.

http://www.evstrength.blogspot.com/ tracks the statewide polls and shows the path this election has taken.  It shows a state-by-state breakdown of which candidates can expect to get which electoral votes, and interestingly, allows you to compare the polls to the same date in 2004.

Also interesting is http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/, which uses about 10,000 simulated elections each day to project a winner.  I’d be really interested to learn more about their computer model for the election.

Living in a state that is polling so far for McCain that neither candidate has been here in weeks (we don’t even get that many TV ads), the statistics are much more interesting than the actual campaign… it makes me miss living in a swing state.

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Opus 79

October 27th, 2008

This month, I actually had more of a chance to dig in to the sonata I’ve assigned myself.  I’m finding that the more I can do at the piano with each piece, the more I get to it… of course, we also had fall break, but the trend doesn’t bode well for Opus 106, which will be coming up in short order–March of next year.  Honestly, “Hammerklavier” has been looming on the horizon since the start of this project, but that was sort of the point all along.  I will not avoid the piece just because it is hard.

Back to the topic at hand, though, Opus 79.  What a little gem!  When I teach Forms next fall, we will be interested in this little piece.  Again, I should be reading Beethoven’s biographies along with this project, but it’s very interesting to me that just when much of his music was getting bigger he came up with these two littler sonatas.  Market forces, perhaps?

The first movement starts with a theme that feels like a rondo theme in a way, but the movement has nothing to do with that form.  If each of these sonatas is a different experiment, perhaps that is the idea in this one.  Not that it falls into the category of “sonata-rondo” like, say, the finale of the Schumann piano quintet, but more and more Beethoven seems to be trying to break out of the mold of the sonata, of writing music by formula.  I’ve always been taught that this was what Romantic composition was, but to see it in action is another thing entirely.  I think back–two years ago now!–to the Opus 2 sonatas that seem so much more “by the book,” as though Beethoven had read Caplin’s (amazing) book on Classical form.  At any rate, even though this piece is relatively small, it isn’t the same composer as those littler pieces.

The slow movement is fun, because I can nearly play it!  Again, one that will come up in Forms next year, because it is a wonderful example of a ternary form that also displays interesting motion (within the A sections) to the III chord in minor.

Then the real rondo–those triplets against the eighth-two-sixteenths are unforgettable, and I can again only admire the pianists who pull them off so smoothly.  I’ve been practicing that rhythm all month, and I hear it, but the hands don’t seem interested in playing it.  Too bad.

I’ve talked with some people in person about what set of pieces to tackle next.  Mariah Carrel-Coons, our accompanist at OPSU, jokingly suggested the Scarlatti sonatas.  More within my reach perhaps, as a pianist, but not quite what I had in mind.  Several pieces have suggested themselves to me.  The Mahler symphonies would be a heck of a trip, and I could spend two months on each, doing analysis in my spare time, as usual.  If I were to continue with Beethoven, the quartets would be the next logical direction–a section of his work largely unfamiliar to me, and a direction I would like to take as a composer.  The options are plentiful–the Ligeti Etudes for piano have been calling to me; I could take a tour through the Preludes of Chopin or Debussy, with a little less time for each piece.  Any suggestions?

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Language

October 18th, 2008

I’ve been polishing up my paper about Benjamin Britten’s settings of English texts that predate modern English (the youngest text is by John Donne, who scholars generally consider to be in the “Early Modern English” era, although a few scholars still argue that there isn’t any such thing).  It is amazing to me (though perhaps it shouldn’t be) that something that seems as static as language… really isn’t.  One of the best courses I took in graduate school was “The History of the English Language” with Terence Odlin–just absolutely fascinating.  It gets me to thinking about whether we can notice language drift in our own lifetimes.  I’m not just thinking of neologisms, or changes in vocabulary.  Of course those will take place… five years ago “blog” was some kind of word out of a Lewis Carroll poem.  I’m thinking of the kinds of pronunciation changes that occured between, say, Chaucer and Donne, or between Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson; or the huge grammatical shift that happened in the hundred years after 1066.  Is there anything like that happening now?

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Topeka

October 5th, 2008

This weekend, Becky and I went to Topeka, Kansas to take care of some personal business and made a mini-vacation out of it.  If you haven’t been to Topeka, you’re missing out!  We had never been there before, but we were pleasantly surprised by what we found.  In fact, I’ve decided that Kansas gets a bum rap.

We had an appointment in downtown Topeka, which was a little desolate, but on the whole very respectable for a state capital.  The statehouse is a big building–unfortunately, no time to go in, but it looked interesting.

Our next stop was an hour up the road in Manhattan, Kansas, the Little Apple.  To get there, we drove through the Flint Hills region in the late afternoon.  If you think Kansas is flat and boring, you haven’t seen this terrain–unlike anything back in Ohio.  It rolls and heaves, and there is even a scenic overlook on the road into Manhattan.  After our appointment, we wandered around town, which is home to Kansas State University.  If Craig Weston ever leaves his job teaching composition at Kansas State, I will be putting in my application.  Having spent both grad school and undergrad at big, public universities, K-State felt like home.  A used bookstore complete with cat where I picked up a couple of scores (Purcell and Britten) for a song.  The pep band was strolling around the commercial district getting everyone (except us) ready for the game tomorrow.  We left before the drinking got going, since that’s not really our thing, and since we had left Guymon at six a.m.

A nice night at the Country Inn and Suites in Topeka on Wanamaker Road.  I recommend it to anyone who can afford to not stay at the Motel 6.  Saturday was our first “fun” day, and Topeka showed off for us.  The city is clean, easy to get around and generally very friendly.  The Zoo, in Gage Park, was great–we were charged by the black leopard and you can get really close to most of the animals.  Lunch was at Glory Days Pizza, touted as the best in town, and for a couple of Donatos-deprived Columbusites, much appreciated.  The cheese was baked on over the toppings, and the sauce was excellent.  Becky is a pepperoni purist, which works for me.

Then in the evening came the highlight of the trip, for me.  We happened to be in town on a weekend when the Topeka Symphony Orchestra performed at its home at Washburn University.  The campus there is beautiful, and the hall wonderful.  The orchestra was fantastic–we talked to a cellist, and apparently, they get about six rehearsals for every concert.  We saw Beethoven, a Mozart horn concerto and Brahms’ second symphony.  Not a flawless performance, but a stirring one, all the same.  There were some sour moments in intonation, but the energy was right.  I wouldn’t complain about being able to subscribe to their season.

The concertmistress and the principal cello are married, both on faculty at Washburn and are a duo together–the Elaris Duo.  I picked up their CD after concert and WOW!  A great CD all around–such fantastic tone and blend.  The highlight of the disc for me is the Kodaly.  I asked them if they had ever done the Ravel Sonata for Violin and Cello, and they said they are considering it for their next recording.  A couple of dream performers to add to my list!  It makes a composer want to tackle that medium.

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Opus 78

September 30th, 2008

Well, the end of another month, and I didn’t spend as much time with my Beethoven sonata as I had hoped, but there were other musical experiences taking place.  My first-year theory students are through the “fundamentals” and we can now start to talk to each other about theory–today we discussed a definition of “tonal harmony.”  On September 21, the Harrington String Quartet came to OPSU and played a fantastic concert of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, and last Sunday was my first premiere in Oklahoma.  Add to that a couple of football games to eat up a Saturday or two, and finishing the horn and marimba piece, and it’s been a little busy.  But mostly good work, and I can’t complain.

But the Beethoven sonata–No. 24 in F# major, Opus 78.  I did get a chance to revisit it this afternoon, knowing that I would need to write tonight.  It really is a wonderful miniature among the giants that precede it.  I’m always amazed that Beethoven wasn’t stuck on one plan or another for his sonatas.  Myself, I tend toward the three-movement fast-slow-fast structure, so much so that in this horn and marimba piece I’ve just finished, I deliberately departed from that model–it begins in a quick tempo and ends slowly (I couldn’t resist the four-mallet tremolo at the low end of the instrument, pianissimo with soft mallets).  We’ll see what the player who commissioned it thinks.  So many of Beethoven’s earlier sonatas have that “standard” sonata cycle–like a little symphony for piano–he clearly got tired of being stuck with that.

Some things I need to work out.  My second-year theory students are studying modulation right now, and it strikes me that the development section of the first movement of Op. 78 begins in the parallel minor.  Should the parallel key be added to the list of “closely related keys?”  It certainly is easier to get to than any other key–no real pivot chord is required, only a dominant function that remains a dominant function.  Something to think about.  Similarly, in the rondo, Beethoven visits the key of (yes!) D# major, and along with it, D# minor.  Where Schubert or Chopin would have changed the key to Eb, Beethoven soldiers on through with six sharps–a real stretch for an ersatz pianist like myself.  More than ever I am in love with rondo form–the last movement of Brahms’ second symphony is what I think music will sound like in heaven.

So–here’s to next month–may I get to this writing earlier and have more intelligent things to say.  Op. 79, here I come!

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Last night’s premiere

September 29th, 2008

It took over a year, but I have finally premiered a new piece at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and finally had a performance of one of my pieces in Oklahoma.  I knew, of course, that performances would be harder to come by, and to be honest, I haven’t pushed much to have things played locally, if only because there aren’t that many places to have them played.  But that rant is for another time.

Last night, Mariachi OPSU, with the help of my fantastic colleague Matthew Howell, gave the world premiere of “El Piano de Genoveva.”  This is a setting of a poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde.  I found it interesting because it is a love-song to a piano.  The speaker sings the song to the piano because the woman who owned the piano is dead.  Wonderful pathos.  I think the piece works, and the performance wasn’t perfect by a long shot (we had to put the electric guitar part on ice for this time around).  It is the first really tonal piece I have written in a very long time… since about 2001, I think.  With some reworking, it will be good to go.

It is an example of a piece that has more meaning in rehearsal, though, than in performance, necessarily.  During the process of composition (I finished it just after the middle of August), I had to come to terms with the intersection between my musical language and the somewhat orthodox stylings of mariachi, a highly traditional, extremely stylized medium.  Then, over the last seven weeks, the students and I had to learn to be mariachis in a new kind of way–there isn’t really a tradition of concert music for mariachi.  This dialogue has been extremely interesting and educational.  The Hispanic students in the class helped me with the finer points of my translation (I had high school Spanish, but the idioms are always the problem), and we met on this very interesting common ground between new music and ethnomusicology and and traditional Mexican art forms.  We had some good discussions, and everyone got to think a little bit differently about what we do in music.  Which is the point of college teaching, after all.

I should thank Jan Radzynski for dropping the suggestion to write a piece for mariachi since we have the ensemble ready to go–if he hadn’t put the seed in my mind, I probably would have been content with the old traditional songs.  Thanks, Jan, and Happy New Year!

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Playing and Listening–More to Bob

September 17th, 2008

This is a partial response to Bob Specter’s response to my response… well… anyway.  It’s been a mildly busy week (that’s my story) and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit and think about something that stuck in my brain about Bob’s last posting.  Don’t go looking for it–I’ll just quote it:

“2) Having grown up playing an instrument in an orchestra and brass ensembles, I feel that by immersing my entire focus into my past [sic; “part” (?)] and how it facilitates the “piece”, that takes all the energy I have. It is interesting to talk to people about the Canadian Brass performance of the Barber Adagio, and not have them have a clue how hard breath control can be. Now I see that as technique, not as the musical plumbing (open sevenths, etc.), and I wonder if someone who focuses on the musical plumbing loses the ability to appreciate the variances in the performance (and performers).”

Over the last year, my opportunities to perform have dwindled significantly, while the amount of time I spend thinking about the theory of music has grown to encompass most of my working time.  On top of that, the playing I’ve done has largely been in popular styles where the “text” of the music (i.e., the written score) isn’t taken as seriously as in, say, a Mahler symphony. 

The results have been interesting.  I am “hearing” like never before, either from lack of preparation time (come in on Sunday morning, read the charts in rehearsal, go to Sunday school, go back and play the service, hoping I remember the key change after the third verse) or from being immersed in styles where “note” is less important than “feeling.”  I am literally living and breathing music theory most of the time, and it is showing in my performance–what is improvisation other than simply living and breathing music theory?

So the “plumbing” isn’t a way to deal with music that circumvents or minimizes some aspect of the musical experience.  On the contrary–once one “groks” the plumbing, it ceases to be something that one thinks about and the effect is the same, except that it now becomes possible to label and explain the plumbing to others in a more efficient way.  We could do without it–simply talk about “that moment that happens at 2:43 on track 17 in the recording by George Solti,” and this works for people who are very involved with a few pieces or for a group of people who are discussing a single, communally-understood work.  But for full-time musicians, who must often absorb a great deal of music in ridiculously short periods of time, there must be some way to generalize, to categorize, to compare and contrast the great moments in Mahler with the great moments in Messiaen, and compare them both to the somewhat cruddy moments in certain Broadway-style musicals.  The difference is similar to the way a person like myself deals with a computer  and the way a professional computer person deals with it–I can’t talk to an IT professional about computers for very long because I don’t even know the jargon; the IT guy, on the other hand, lives and breathes the stuff.

In my freshman theory classes, someone always brings up the complaint that analyzing a piece of music takes all of the “magic” (by which I think they mean “emotional impact”) out of the piece.  It is true, that I now find that I must on occasion force myself to step back and notice the beauty as well as the plumbing (of course, sometimes the beauty is in the plumbing, as with Webern or Babbitt).  For this reason, after we finish an analysis in theory class, I try to take another minute and have the class listen again to what we’ve been studying.  I imagine that visual artists and natural historians must do the same thing from time to time–after studying the way Seurat uses points of color to make other colors in Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, it is imperative that we step back and let the beauty of the scene again wash over us.

On Sunday, we have a fantastic group of musicians coming to OPSU: the Harrington String Quartet.  Since I organized the concert, I know the program in advance, and I have already been listening to the music they will be playing.  I’ve thought about the music, and I’ve written the program note.  I’ve been looking forward to this concert all summer, and it’s going to be fantastic.  I’ve been pushing it on the students, of course, but it won’t matter if I’m the only one there on Sunday–I will enjoy it.  And I think, based on what Bob has written, that I am going to make this one of those “step back” moments and just soak up the music.

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