Performing, humidly, at Little Island last month (photo by Rob Davidson). In case you missed it and were hoping for another scenic outdoor piano recital: you’re in luck, because I’ll be playing at Caramoor’s Spanish Courtyard July 24. The following is a brief note I wrote about the program:
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When I’m working to understand a piece of music, I find it helpful to think about its balance of complexity versus simplicity—which aspects operate on which levels, how do they relate to each other, how do they define the piece’s language and structure? My favorite pieces are usually a calculated mix of the two, rather than being all to one side or the other. This dialectic might be a useful way to approach tonight’s program, whose contents might, at first glance, seem only tangentially related.
Robert Schumann’s music is usually associated with a kind of hyper-Romantic emotional complexity, hinging on dramatic contrasts, idiosyncratic forms, and dense webs of personal and literary references. I’ve long admired his Canonic Etudes, in part because they play against these stereotypes so strongly. Composed originally for the Pedalflügel, a special piano fitted with an organ-like foot-operated keyboard connected to the bass register, the Etudes are beautifully understated studies in the contrapuntal possibilities enabled by two extra appendages (they are most often heard today in their four-hand or two-piano arrangements). All six etudes are, in fact, perfect canons, with the canonic voice sometimes at the unison and sometimes at the fifth, for a more fugal effect. Schumann’s steadfast commitment to counterpoint sometimes results in unexpected harmonic twists, yet the music never feels haphazard or underworked. Just beneath the wild Romanticism, Schumann turns out to have been every bit as rigorous a technician as Bach or Brahms; it’s just that he usually chose to emphasize the complexity of other aspects of his music. In the Canonic Etudes, he knew to keep the rhetoric simple: all are short, A‑B-A forms with clearly-delineated and traditionally-phrased melodies and neatly resolved endings, relating to each other in shared attitude and compositional process, rather than any sort of overarching drama or shared themes.
When I composed the suite It takes a long time to become a good composer in 2010, I was thinking about Schumann. The piece is an attempt to fuse some of Schumann’s more radical structural ideas (the telescoping, nesting doll forms of pieces like Carnaval and Kreisleriana) with a pared-down, anti-virtuosic piano language derived from Copland and Stravinsky. The resulting music is, in some ways, less committed to structural rigor than anything I’ve written. I didn’t compose it with an overall through-line or process in mind. Instead, its developmental engine comes from its odd cocktail of jump-cuts and stylistic references jostling against each other. The core of the piece is its long central movement, Everything is an onion, which gradually surrounds a somber passacaglia with buzzing activity before dismantling it (fittingly) into layers. As the piece progresses, it moves generally from the idea of music as “material”—small, abstract chunks of harmony, texture, or figurations—to music as melody, and, finally, song. The effect is a gradual de-tensioning of the structure, a progressively freer interrelation of materials, like falling asleep directly into a strange dream.
It’s been remarked that the Piano Sonata represents Copland at his sparest, most severe, most aspiringly “modernist”; its language is all planes and angles, harmonies stripped to their essence, ornament eliminated. The sense of “placeness” associated with Copland’s music is absent here, or perhaps it places itself in an imaginary realm halfway between the American West and a 1920s Paris salon. The musical texture is notable for its absence of counterpoint, instead often focusing on unadorned melodic lines. Chords seem as though they have big chunks of missing notes, the yawning gaps between their intervals creating startling and uncomfortable dissonances. Tempos change frequently, and phrases fill uneven numbers of bars, cutting each other off without warning. Essentially, Copland has found the reverse balance of complexity and simplicity of Schumann’s; the richness of his Sonata lies in the contrast of its surface and its rhetoric. It communicates complex ideas in admirably clear language. The effect is dramatic, almost in a theatrical sense as if musical material were playing different characters (perhaps it’s not coincidental that the piece is dedicated to the playwright Clifford Odets). Sometimes the music is a dialogue, as it is between the right hand and the left in the second movement, and other times a monologue, in the long, discursive, ultimately tragic arias of the third. In the end, we feel as if we’ve absorbed a story much grander than the piece’s 23 minutes could possibly contain, full of vivid settings, plot twists, intersecting character arcs, and sharply-observed details.