Extra: The Songs of Cole and the Johnson Brothers (A lecture demonstration from Lisa Williamson)

Wait to watch this after reading the post right above!

Florence Price's "Thumbnail Sketches" now for string quartet

A few months ago I was looking at Florence Price's "Thumbnail Sketches of a Day in the Life of a Washerwoman," a piece she wrote for piano, and I noticed that if I transposed up a half step it would work really well for string quartet.

The score and parts for my string quartet transcription are now available on this page of the IMSLP, and you can listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Please read what Michael Cooper has to say about this piece and this transcription. His post also has links to performances of three of the movements of the piece by pianist Kevin Wayne Bumpers.

American Discoveries

Since I started reading The Heart of a Woman, Rae Linda Brown's biography of Florence Price, I have come to realize that my knowledge of twentieth-century American orchestral music is not is comprehensive as I would like it to be (or thought it was). This could be due to the programming and re-programming of music by the same well-known (and accessible) American male composers alongside the same well-known (and accessible) male European composers, many of whom came to America to escape pogroms, Nazis, and totalitarian regimes.

In the case of Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Paul Hindemith, Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman, Kurt Weill, Ernst Toch, and Arnold Schoenberg (to name some of the better known men), the direction of influence almost always went "back" to Europe, which is completely understandable.

The American-born composers who dominated concert programs during the twentieth century like Charles Ives, Howard Hanson, Vincent Persichetti, Irving Fine, Samuel Barber, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein gave us a set of lovely framed musical pictures that defined an American "voice" for many of us. 

Then came a set of American-born (male) composers like Roger Sessions, George Crumb, Eliot Carter, John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Milton Babbit that stretched the idea of new American music towards the experimental, the minimalist, and the intellectual. The music that these composers wrote sometimes scared audiences away, but orchestras still programmed them because they wanted to have some skin in the game regarding new directions in music.

I'm not passing judgement. I'm just reporting on the male-dominated (and white-dominated) musical landscape that we are all starting to look at through a rearview musical mirror.

There have been female composers who held a place of importance in American music. Or of relative importance. The best known American woman composer would be Amy Beach. I was surprised to see the small number of people on this Wikipedia list of female American Composers, and I was equally surprised to see the people who didn't make that particular list (like Marion Bauer). I hope to see this list expand soon. I might have to take matters into my own hands.

Not present on this list are the three composers that have music on this recording of newly-discovered orchestral music by women: Priscilla Alden Beach, Linda Robbins Coleman, and Alexandria Pierce. The project represents a great deal of care and work (during a pandemic year) by the Landsdowne Symphony Orchestra, its conductor Reuben Blundell, and the the librarians that take care of the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Priscilla Alden Beach (1902-1970) wrote "City Trees" in 1928, and Howard Hanson gave the first performance that year with Rochester Philharmonic. "City Trees" is a lush and romantic piece that brings to mind the paintings of the Hudson River School. The trees depicted musically here progress from rural trees to early twentieth-century urban trees. In scope, variety, and color it brings to mind Respighi's "Pines of Rome," but (and I wrote this in my listening notes before reading the liner notes) the trees here might be better associated with Rome, New York than Rome, Italy. Turns out that the composer, a descendant of John and Priscilla Alden of Mayflower fame, spent her childhood in Rome, New York!

Beach went to Smith College, and the studied at Eastman (I imagine with Howard Hanson), and had a fellowship at Juilliard. She wrote music for a series of silent movies that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and then disappeared from musical life entirely to write books about pets and work as a laboratory technician. 

I wonder if there is more of her music hiding in a closet or a drawer, somewhere.

Professional life as a composer has been far less difficult for Linda Robbins Coleman. She enjoys an impressive career, and the American heartland (she lives in Iowa) has been good to her. What she has given back is music that reflects her love of the nature around her.

I noticed that "For a Beautiful Land," which she wrote in 1996, is "informed" by the Americana of Copland and Stravinsky. This piece is episodic, and is filled with interesting textures. Overall the wind, brass, and percussion sections seem far more present and important than the strings, though there is some enjoyable playful interaction that involves the strings. The woodwind solos and duets (there are a lot) are engaging and beautiful. "For a Beautiful Land" is relentlessly tonal, and, after a brief nod to Ravel's "Bolero," comes to a bold and optimistic conclusion.

Alexandra Pierce was born in 1934 and just died this past February. She studied at the University of Michigan, earned Master's degrees from New England Conservatory and Harvard, and her doctorate from Brandeis. She taught at MIT and at Antioch College, and spent the bulk of her career on the faculty of the University of Redlands (she retired in 2001). 

Her 1976 "Behemoth" is a five-movement tone poem that explores ideas presented in the Book of Job. Pierce's use of orchestral color is typical of the 1970s, but I do not find it derivitive of any particular composer. Her technique at orchestration is excellent--as good as any better-known twentieth-century composer (see the list above).  She often lets her material travel in a hocket-like fashion around her very large-sounding orchestra. Like Coleman's "City Trees," Pierce's "Behemoth" is very wind, brass, and percussion forward, with the strings mostly creating atmosphere (they engage in a healthy amount of pizzicato and tremolo) and giving support. 

I particularly like the transparent and layered third movement that has a dialogue between the oboe and the horn that seems to travel over a foggy plain: ephemeral, questioning, and suspended. A bright flute glides above, and fades away. The percussion-rich fourth movement has a solo flute and a gauze-like color in the strings that reminds me of "The Dance of the Seven Veils" from Salome.

You can buy the album here. It is both inexpensive and rich.

And the mystery composer is (naturally) Anton Titz!

This shouldn't surprise my friends. But the quality of the music might. It impressed Gluck, Prince Lobkowitz and Catherine the Great (Anton Titz's employer in Russia). And now, thanks to the power of the musical internets (and thanks to the IMSLP), his music can be enjoyed and played anywhere, and by anyone.

This edition is available on this page of the IMSLP. I also put a computer-generated recording of the whole thing there. I left off the second repeat of the Allegro agitato because I don't think that section needs to be repeated in this particular piece.



There are two more Violin Sonatas, so keep an eye on this space!

And, while you are waiting, you can read some posts I have written about Anton Titz through this link.

While we are waiting for approval from the IMSLP, here's an audio link to the first movement and part of the second movement that I generated from my Finale file.

The Daffodil Perspective

Elizabeth de Brito of The Daffodil Perspective hosts a UK-based streaming radio program that plays recordings of classical music from the past 400 years. She gives equal time to music by male and female composers. As far as I know, she is the first person to do this over any extended period of time.

Here's a graphic of what she has done this year (you can click for a larger view).



One of her goals is to "rewrite the past." I don't think that the past can be re-written, because the "past" was never "written" in the first place. I still appreciate the gesture.

I have added Elizabeth's blog to the sidebar, and will be following her progress over the next year.

Gerard von Brucken Fock Viola Sonata

The Dutch composer/pianist/violist/landscape painter Gerard Hubertus Galenus von Brucken Fock was Born in 1859 in Ter Hooge castle, near Middelburg, He studied composition with Clara Schumann’s stepbrother Woldemar Bargiel and with Friedrich Kiel.

He worked as the music critic for the magazine De Amsterdammer, and was very critical of Richard Wagner. His extra-musical activities included working as a farmhand and working with the Salvation Army in France. Brucken Fock was close friends with Julius Röntgen, the husband of Amanda Maier. Röntgen introduced von Brucken Fock's piano music to Edvard Grieg who later referred to von Brucken Fock as the "Dutch Chopin."

Yesterday John David and I read his Viola Sonata, Opus 5, which is in the IMSLP. I spent much of last night and this morning cleaning up and resubmitting the PDF of the viola part. It is a lovely piece, and one worthy of attention.



There's a great Dutch site about Brucken Fock that is loaded with pictures.

The Enemy of the Good: A Ramble with Pictures

John David and I really enjoyed reading through the Otto Müller "Grosses Duo" last week. Neither of us had ever heard of Otto Müller, and neither of us could find biographical information in the usual sources. I was sure that there would be a listing for Otto Müller in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, but among the dozen or so listings for composers named Müller there was no Otto to be found.

The Duo, published in 1872, is his Opus 11, and there is an additional listing in the IMSLP for a student violin piece that was published as Opus 65. I searched through the Internet Archive and all the publications in Jstor, but I found nothing. The only reference in the Worldcat is a listing for a 1905 Edison cylinder recording of "The Old Grist Mill," a piece for concert band. [Isn't it interesting that the person running an old grist mill in the Germanic world of old would have been a Müller?]

A Google Books search finally took me to a review of the "Grosses Duo" in the April 23rd, 1873 edition of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, a magazine started by Robert Schumann, and now (as in 1873) edited by one Joseph Müller, a librarian from Berlin.

The reviewer mentions that the piece was dedicated to Ernest II, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, (the brother of Prince Albert who married Queen Victoria) and states that the "Grosses Duo" is, at 49 pages, indeed big. Then he mentions something about the greatness of God being only in the dimensions, and in that regard this duo is the smallest ever put on paper. He calls the motives "everyday," the passages "threadbare," and the accompanying figures "uninteresting." He likens the sound of the piece to the way warm sugar water tastes: not absolutely ugly or unnatural, but immeasurably boring. He declares that one would require the patience of Job to make it through the piece just once. In the footnote to the review he makes sure to mention that he finds the cover tasteless.

While many people have another Mueller on the brain this weekend, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about Otto, the unknown Müller. I guess one lousy review in the most important publication in the Germanic musical world can destroy a composer's chances of having his music played.

I like to think that if Joseph Müller had been a violist (rather than a librarian) he might have liked the piece. It is great fun to play, but the PDF in the IMSLP is really difficult to read. I took action with my iPad and my magic pencil and spent a couple of days cleaning up the PDF. The cleaned-up viola part is now in the IMSLP.





So now I can get to one of the points of this post: the great being the enemy of the good. Germany in 1873 was a hotbed of great composers. The recently dead cast long shadows, and the great composers who were living wrote a lot of great music. Perhaps this critic considered it his job to cut down and insult composers who were not among the greats. Having spent a couple of decades of my life as a critic, I can understand the way he might have felt about his position in relation to the musical world.

Once very early in my "career" as critic I wrote a note to the editor about a recording I didn't like. It wasn't a review. It was just a note to explain why I was not writing a review. The editor published the note in the magazine as if it were a review. I was really upset. I wrote a letter of apology to the person who made the recording, but never heard anything back. Could Joseph Müller have had any second thoughts about his review? I wonder.

As a violist and a former (reformed) critic I can say in these humble pages that I think the Otto Müller Duo is good. It's good enough to warrant the practice time and rehearsal time required to give a good performance, and it's good enough to warrant the time it took to clean up the part.

UPDATE: I found an entry for Otto Müller in German Wikipedia!

Otto Müller, son of the composer and Regenschori of St. Ulrich in Augsburg, Donat Müller (1804-1879), received his first music lessons from his father. He subsequently studied German literature and music at the University of Munich as well as harmony, counterpoint and organ at the conservatory.

After a first two years as a concert director in Winterthur, he worked at several theaters in Switzerland, most recently in Lyon. In 1869 he moved to Vienna, where he was first employed as an organist at the church on the court. In addition he gave private music lessons. Later he was appointed choirmaster at the Hernals Redemptorist Church, a position he held for ten years. He was also the professor of harmony and counterpoint at the school of the Vienna General Church Music Association until 1915.

His honorary grave is located in the Grinzinger cemetery (group 18, number 138) in Vienna.

The Kunc Viola Sonata is Finished!

You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP.

Kunc, Kunc, and More Kunc

Sunday's concert has passed and John David and I have moved on to new repertoire. But I now have the piano score on my desk, and have been entering it into Finale and learning a great deal about piano writing (and about the piece!) in the process.



I have also started questioning the sparse record of the lives of the Kunc family. It seems that Pierre Kunc's younger brother Aymé Kunc did not win the "second prize alongside Maurice Ravel" in the 1902 Prix de Rome. Aymé Kunc won the first prize that year. Ravel was, according to Arbie Orenstein, a finalist, but he did not win any prizes. The second prize went to Albert Bertelin, and the third prize went to Jean Roger-Ducasse.

Aymé Kunc completed in the Prix de Rome four times before winning the Grand Prize (a generous four-year stipend and lots of fame).

Ravel won the third prize in 1901. Ravel is a household name, and Aymé Kunc remains a footnote in Ravel's biography (and a thorn in his side). Aymé's work is not yet entirely in the public domain, but there is an entry for him in the IMSLP that has two pieces.

There is an entry for Pierre Kunc (whose work is in the public domain) as well. And there's also an entry for Aloys Kunc, the father of Pierre and Aymé.

I'll go back to my engraving work now.

Pierre Kunc

In addition to the Viola Sonata by Algernon Ashton, John David Moore and I will be playing Pierre Kunc's Viola Sonata on our January 20th concert. We got hold of the music purely by accident. John David requested something from interlibrary loan, and the Kunc Sonata came in its place. I like to think that a savvy librarian knew that we would like the piece and that we would perform it. That librarian was right!

There is close to nothing written about Pierre Kunc in English, but I did come across a French webpage dedicated to Kunc. I brushed aside the huge number of names dropped in this article, and learned that Pierre Kunc was the third of twelve children who were part of one of the most important musical families in France. He had several celebrated teachers, including his parents and the violinists Paul Viardot (the son of Pauline Viardot), and Charles de Beriot (the husband of Pauline Viardot's sister Maria Malibran).


[The Kunc family in 1905]

In spite of being overshadowed by his younger brother, Aymé, who won the Grand Prize in the 1902 Prix de Rome, Pierre Kunc had a great deal of success in France. From 1899 until 1925 he taught piano and organ at the Ecole Sainte-Genevieve in the rue Lhomond in Paris, and he held several important organ positions including one at Notre-Dame of Bercy in Paris and one at Saint-Suplice, which was also in Paris. He also served as the choirmaster at the Monte Carlo Opera, and in 1909 the Institute de France gave him the Prix Trémont. His work has fallen into obscurity because so little of his music was published. This Viola Sonata and his Rapsodie, also written for viola and piano, were Pierre Kunc’s only pieces of chamber music to see publication.

Kunc wrote his Viola Sonata for Paul-Louis Neuberth to play on his “Viola Alta,” a nearly 19-inch viola with proportions more like that of the violin. The instrument was developed in the 1870s and was abandoned (probably because of its unwieldly size) in the early 1920s. The work was completed in 1921, and Neuberth gave the first performance in 1922 with the pianist Rachel Blanquer.

I made a new edition of the viola part and uploaded a PDF into the IMSLP. After this concert I will start the piano part, which I hope to have completed by March or April. My hope is that our performance will be the first of many!

Algernon Ashton

John David and I are playing a concert later this month that will include Algernon Ashton's Viola Sonata.



Algernon Bennett Langton Ashton was born in Durham, England in 1859, and moved to Leipzig with his family at the age of four. At the suggestion of Ignaz Moscheles, Ashton entered the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied with Carl Reinecke, Ernst Richter, Salomon Jadassohn, Benjamin Papperitz, and Theodor Coccius. He graduated in 1879, and entered the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt where he studied with Joachim Raff. Ashton settled in London, and taught piano at the Royal College of Music from 1885 until 1910. He died in 1937.

In addition to being a prolific composer, Ashton kept a 58-volume daily diary. He was famous for finding graves of distinguished people and writing letters to the Musical Times to comment on the condition of the gravestones. These letters were published in two volumes by Chapman & Hall (Truth Wit and Wisdom, and More Truth Wit and Wisdom), but his diaries were lost.

Ashton's 160 published works include four cello sonatas, three violin sonatas, two piano quintets, eight piano sonatas, works for choir, songs, salon pieces, and fantasie pieces. Many of his unpublished works, including 24 piano sonatas, one in each key of the chromatic scale, 24 string quartets, and four symphonies are believed to have been destroyed when German bombs hit his family home during the Blitz.

Here's a link to his Fourth Piano Sonata, Opus 164 and a link to one of his Phantasiestucke, Opus 12.

Concert of Music for Viola and Piano by Women

John David Moore and I play two concerts a year. One has music written by women and one has music written by men. We can honestly say that we play as much music written by women as we do music written by men. Or we could say that we play as much music written by men as we play music written by women.

Our program for this March has two transcriptions and two pieces originally written for viola and piano. Mel Bonis’s Sonata for Cello and Piano works very well on the viola. I believe my transcription, which I just uploaded into the IMSLP, is the first viola transcription (though I would be very happy to learn that I am not alone in my viola adventure with the piece). The original was published in 1905 with a dedication to Maurice Demaison, a Paris art critic.

Mel (Mélanie) Bonis (1858–1937) entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of sixteen, where she studied organ with César Franck and Auguste Bazille, and harmony with Ernest Guiraud. Her more than 300 works include nine volumes of music for solo piano and piano four hands, music for organ, vocal music, orchestral music, and chamber music.

The other transcription is from the Dutch composer Henriette Bosmans (1895-1952), considered to be one of the most important Dutch composers of the early twentieth century.

Bosmans wrote her Impressions for Cello and Piano for the French cellist Gérard Hekking, the principal cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1903 through 1914. Like much of her cello music, these pieces were written for the upper register of the cello, so they can, for the most part, be played on the viola in the intended octave.

The rest of the program has works written for viola and piano by the British composers Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Kalitha Dorothy Fox (1894-1934).

Maconchy spent her childhood in Ireland. She studied composition with Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. Dame Elizabeth (thanks Lisa) was a prolific and highly decorated composer. She wrote her Viola Sonata in 1937, but it remained unpublished until 2015.

K. Dorothy Fox is one of the sixty-three women with entries in Corbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, and was a member of the Society of Women Musicians (SWM), which was affiliated with the Royal College of Music. We know about her death (a suicide reported in the minutes of the SWM), but nothing of her life. Fox’s Sonata for Viola and Piano (which is in the IMSLP), one of ten pieces in her catalog, was published in 1925 with a dedication to G.H.B. Fox. There are mentions in various periodical publications of a G.H.B. Fox who played chess and cricket, but it is unclear whether he was a musician or how he may have been related to the composer. We do know that this Sonata was once broadcast on the radio from Bournemouth, and that it was part of a concert on July 12, 1931 concert celebrating the twentieth anniversary concert of the SWM. That concert also also included a piece by Elizabeth Maconchy.

It's That Time of Year Again (Our Annual March Concert of Music Written by Women)

My friend John David and I play two recitals every year. Half of the music we play comes from female composers, and half of the music we play comes from male composers. I'm very excited about this year's Women's History and Awarness Month program, because it has some really terrific music on it, and everything was written originally for the viola.

Minna Keal's "Ballade," was written for the viola, but it is sometimes played by cellists (in the same octave, save a few notes, as the viola), and my Luxury Suite has a version for cello that is sometimes in the same octave as the original. Lionel Tertis, the great British violist and muse for composers interested in writing for the viola, admired the Ballade. Keal wrote it in 1928, while she was a student at the Royal Academy of Music. She revised it for publication in 1992.

Pamela Harrison's 1946 Sonata for Viola and Piano is a terrific piece that was written during the later part of England's viola-centric period (with Lionel Tertis as its focal point). Vavaria Gaigarova's Opus 8 Sonata is one of her earlier works. She dedicated it to Vadim Vasilyevich Borisovsky (1900-1972), who taught viola at the Moscow Conservatory.

The pieces by Harrison and Gaigarova were both published long after the death of their composers. Harrison died in 1990, and her Sonata was published in 2001; Gaigarova died in 1944 (at the age of 41), and her Sonata was published in 1969, four years before the death of Borisovsky, its dedicatee (and editor).

Musings Up and Down the Fingerboard: A Violin Ramble

[UPDATE: You can hear a recording from the concert here. There's a program in the folder as well.]

A few days after I finally had the chance to practice exclusively on the violin (rather than on the viola) in order to sound like a violinist for this forthcoming concert above, my instrument decided to develop a crack. Perhaps it was reacting to the extreme changes of temperature and humidity we have been having in the Midwest, or perhaps it was reacting to too much sudden "exercise." In the 20 years I have had the violin, this is its first crack. At any rate, I made the decision to use a different violin for the concert: my Grandfather's violin, which had been sitting unplayed in various family closets for a number of years.

I switched my new Larsen strings and Westminster E from my normal violin to it (if you are violinist who has never tried a Westminster E, I advise you to do so right away: it will change your life), and discovered bit by bit that it is a terrific fiddle.

Getting to really know a new violin is complicated. You have to instinctively learn the curvature of the bridge, and know what kinds of colors come from which unconscious combination of bow speed and pressure, not to mention the way the instrument responds to the weight and characteristics of different bows.

After I made the decision to use this instrument for the concert, I decided to spend about an hour per day playing scales and arpeggios slowly in every key. At 60 beats per minute for each note, there is enough time to pay attention to what by bow arm needs to do in order to keep the bow perpendicular to the string, particularly during string crossings. There is also enough time to pay attention to shifting properly (I'm concentrating on "old finger" shifts these days), and actually thinking of the names of those notes with multiple ledger lines up on the E string. There is enough time to make sure that everything is in tune in every key, and there is time to fix it if it is not. The whole three-octave gamut, as outlined by my friend Hřímalý, takes me about an hour. It is an hour I know my bow has behaved, my vibrato has been free, the sound has been vibrant, and I have made it comfortably from one note to the next through every bit of step-wise and tertian musical terrain. It is always an hour well spent.

At 60 b.p.m. there is even time left over to use as a sort of "free brain" state which is a sort of meditative state for me. While I was navigating the key of F# major (again with the F# major!), for example, I was thinking about the seasonal cyclical nature of these scales and arpeggios, which begin in C major and add flats until no more can be added, and then bloom into sharps, dropping one at a time until the cycle of fifths has come to an end. I was thinking about the bird I heard singing this morning: a steady pitch that seemed to serve as a warning that it may look bright outside, but it is terribly cold. The fact that the birds are singing means that spring will come eventually. They have not been defeated (and there are a good many singing outside my window as I write).

I started thinking about the 12 tonalities we have in western music, and the 12 months we have in the year, and then I switched to Kreutzer and started thinking about the violin again. Then I took a break and decided to write this post.

The program, you ask? Who are these composers?

The German composer Emilie Mayer (1821–1883) wrote six symphonies, several concert overtures, a great deal of vocal music and piano music, and a considerable amount of chamber music (nine violin sonatas, thirteen cello sonatas, eleven piano trios, seven string quartets, three string quintets, and two piano quartets). She studied with Carl Loewe, Adolf Bernhard Marx, and Wilhelm Wieprecht, and worked hard to see that her music was published and performed. Mayer was well respected during her lifetime, and in 1885 she was (posthumously) made an honorary member of the Munich Philharmonic Society. After her death, performances of her music stopped. Most of her music is housed in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, and remains unplayed.

The American composer Marion Bauer (1882–1955) grew up in Walla-Walla, Washington, moved to New York in 1903, and traveled to France, where she traded lessons in English for lessons in composition and analysis with Nadia Boulanger. Bauer was the first of Boulanger’s many American students. When Bauer returned to New York, she helped found the American Music Guild, the American Music Center, and the American Composer’s Alliance. She and Amy Beach were founding members of the Society of American Women Composers. Bauer taught composition, analysis, and music history at New York University from 1926-1951, and she taught at The Juilliard School from 1940-1955. She was a mentor and teacher to Ruth Crawford (Seeger), Aaron Copland, and Milton Babbitt.

The French composer Mel (Mélanie) Bonis (1858–1937) entered the Paris Conservatory in 1877. She studied organ with César Franck and harmony with Ernest Guiraud, but her parents made her withdraw because they disapproved of her romance with fellow student Amedee Hettich. In 1883 Bonis’s parents arranged for her to marry Albert Domange, a businessman twenty-two years her senior, and she set music aside in order to raise a family. In 1893 she rekindled her relationship with Hettich, who helped introduce her music in the salons of Paris.

Beware the Whims of a Music Editor!

I decided it was time to listen to a few recordings of Paul Juon's Opus 15 Sonata since I'm playing it in a week or so. I'm using an edition published in 1946 by International Music that was edited by Milton Katims. The only reason I'm using the Katims is because the edition in the IMSLP prints out rather small. I need all the clarity I can get, so I chose to use the International edition. I figured that an edition from a reputable publisher wouldn't have wrong notes in it.

I was wrong.

For some reason Katims decided to change one of the notes in the main theme from the C-natural (clearly indicated in the part by the composer, in both the first statement and in the recapitulation) to a C-sharp. [For non-alto-clef readers, it's the eighth note that the viola plays, and it gets repeated three times in the measure.]



Here it is in context:



That altered note (as you will hear in the videos below) changes the main theme considerably.

Spencer Martin plays from the Katims edition:



These very fine (and unnamed players, who are probably Russian) use the 1910 German edition:



I put a query to the 1000-plus-member group of violists on Facebook about the problem, and I didn't hear a peep (though my flutist friend Jean Petree, whose mother is a violist, knew the piece). I imagine that nobody gave that C-sharp (or those C-sharps) a second thought. I wouldn't have questioned it myself if I hadn't come across that Russian recording. Thank goodness for the IMSLP!

(For the record, Katims also changed the measure before the 5/4 section in both the exposition and the recapitulation.)

Martin Perry Plays Ives and Binkerd: Ramble After a Recording

There is really no way that I can write an unbiased review of Martin Perry's brand new recording on Bridge of the Charles Ives "Concord" Sonata and three of Gordon Binkerd's Essays for the Piano (the first recordings of these pieces), so I will let my biases fly and ramble.



The Ives "Concord" Sonata is a work of time and place for me. I spent a good part of my last year in high school listening to John Kirkpatrick's recording, and reading Essays Before A Sonata. It was at Martin Perry's apartment in New York in the early 1980s (he now lives in Maine) that I first met a live person who actually played the "Concord" Sonata (it was Stephen Drury). It was also in Marty's apartment that I first read Proust and made the immediate connection with the Saint-Saens D minor Violin Sonata, a piece that I played with Marty back in my days as a flutist who really wished she were a violinist (and I'm living proof that wishes like that can come true).

I was thrilled to hear that Marty made a recording of the piece on the excellent Bridge label, and I just finished listening to it.

The Ives is music of place for me (since I grew up outside of Boston, and had significant events happen at Walden Pond), and it turns out that the Binkerd is also music of place. Gordon Binkerd (1916-2003) spent his career teaching composition at the University of Illinois (50 miles up the road from me), and these three piano pieces sparkle with the prairie landscape that I have grown to love. Marty has never been to this part of the country, but he does a really good job of picking up Binkerd's clues and making it aurally recognizable. The connection to the Ives "Concord" Sonata is unmistakable.

Drew Massey's notes mention that Binkerd's Essays were published in 1976. That happened to be the year I spent obsessed with Ives. Who knew that I would meet Martin Perry at Juilliard the following year, and who knew that I would move to Binkerd's Illinois in 1985? Binkerd retired from teaching in 1971, but he stuck around here for the rest of his life. I could have seen him in the grocery store, in the library, or even at a concert.

All these highly personal coincidences are wrapped up in this remarkable recording.

I said earlier that I cannot be unbiased, so it is with a great deal of bias that I tell you that this is extremely thoughtful and extremely beautiful playing. Marty is a person of serious musical intelligence, and he uses it to bring out all the cyclic material in the "Concord" Sonata in a way that provides a strong structure for the piece. All the musical thoughts have their places. He allows for great amounts of exuberance in the exuberant parts, and extraordinarily touching introspection in the introspective parts. Listening is a rather cathartic experience, and an experience that helps put some of the craziness of the world into perspective for me, if only by presenting a world of pure feeling, pure sound, and a bunch of nostalgia in such a clean and fresh package.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Perhaps the problem with curiosity is that every time we find out something new (perhaps I should drop the "we" and speak for myself), er, I find out something new, it throws a wrench into everything that I thought was so. Every chronology, whether personal or historical, is subject to interpretation, and a new twist or insight can alter the map significantly.

Take the Classical Period. There's a hell of a lot of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to learn, study, play, and play again. A lifetime's worth, or perhaps three. I used to feel like I had a handle on the gist of the period, and I used to think I had a good narrative to give to my students to help them understand the music, the people who wrote it, and the times they lived in.

Now Pleyel has entered my life, much the way Titz did: through string quartets they wrote during 1780s, and I find it difficult to look at music the way I did. It's as if an easy-to-see triangle has become a polyhedron, with sides that interact with one another in ways I will never understand.

(Some of those "sides" are named Boccherini, Dittersdorf, Stamitz, Gluck, Clementi, Vanhal, Titz, and Pleyel.)

Everyone knows the name of Pleyel. Heck. There is even a website for the piano company that Ignaz Pleyel opened in 1807. He was born the year after Mozart in a lower Austria (the town that is mentioned in the Wikipedia article seems no longer to exist), and seemed to be a middle child (he was the 24th of 38 children) of a school master and his very fertile and always-pregnant wife. 38 children. Imagine. If she started at 14, she would have had to have one child per year until the age of 52, and live to tell the tale. Now this is curious.

Anyway, Ignaz had excellent teachers (Vanhal and Haydn), and he got a good job in the French city of Strasbourg (the border city with the German name). In 1791 (the year that Mozart died, and a tough year for musicians in France--what, with the Revolution and all), Pleyel went to London. Haydn, Pleyel's old teacher, was in London, so Pleyel had some healthy competition. So did Haydn, for that matter. It certainly made musical life in London even more lively. Pleyel happened to return to Strasbourg during the Reign of Terror, and to escape being put in prison or being killed, he wrote music to celebrate the Republic. He became a French citizen, and moved to Paris to start a publishing business. He began by publishing a complete edition of Haydn's string quartets, and made his fortune by publishing music by Boccherini and Beethoven, among others.

This is all very impressive, but what I find most impressive is the quality of his "Prussian" String Quartets, which are available in the IMSLP. You need to follow some complicated directions to get the score to print out properly, but the parts are original, intact, and very readable, both visually and playing-wise.

Here are the first three, the second three, and the third group of three.

I hope you're curious.

More (or less) About Music in Imperial Russia

I have learned from Robert K. Massie's biography of Catherine the Great (a great book I have just started reading) that Catherine the Great was one of those people for whom music gives no pleasure (Nobokov was such a person). Her husband Peter was also (according to her account, which might not be that reliable) a lousy violinist. How unthankful it must have been for Anton Ferdinand Titz to work for an employer (appointed for life, probably) who hated music.

Here are some recordings of music by Titz, and a short talk in German about him that are on YouTube;







And there are even a a few sonatas for violin and harpsichord. I encourage anyone with manuscripts of this music to either scan them into the Petrucci Library or send copies to me, and I will make modern editions to upload.

Anton Ferdinand Titz in the Petrucci Library

I have spent the past two days in a heightened state of musical-archaeological bliss. A very kind person scanned the manuscript of an otherwise unknown (not even mentioned in Grove) Duo for Violin and Cello by Anton Ferdinand Titz into the Petrucci Library. I'm not sure if the piece has ever been played before (even in Titz's lifetime) because the parts were filled with errors that would have made it unplayable from the manuscript. What a treat it was to correct them, and what a thrill it is to hear this wonderful whimsical piece.

Look at the cover page. Titz lettered it himself. Look at the backwards capital F!



You can hear a synthesized audio file here. Here's a link to the PDF file.

Previous Titz-related posts:

Doesn't This Make You Curious?
The Dedicatee of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets

Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers

Bálint András Varga's Three Question for Sixty-Five Composers is a goldmine. It was published in Budapest in 1986, and just came into print in an English language edition, which has been revised to include post 1986 updates, and a handful of younger composers who are still living.

Here are Varga's questions:

1. Have you had an experience similar to Witold Lutoslawski's: he heard John Cage's Second Piano Concerto on the radio--an encounter which changed his musical thinking and ushered in a new creative period, the first result of which was his Jeux vénitiens (1960-1961). [N.B. Varga was referring, of course, to John Cage's Concert for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra.]

2. A composer is surrounded by sounds. Do they influence you and are they in any way of significance for your compositional work?

3. How far can one speak of a personal style and where does self-repetition begin?

I'm surprised to find composers I haven't heard of before, like Sandor Balassa, who responded to the third question in a most compelling way.

The artist, while changing his subject, tells of this and that--what he has experienced and dreamed of in the course of his life.

The permanent and repeated moments are manifested through the author's personality and his limitations. The fact that his subjects are communicated by him, means that we see through his eyes, we experience his works filtered through his personality.

He goes on to say:

I also want to tell people to remain faithful to their youthful ideals. Why should I only do so just once? The fact that modernist music has lost the sympathy of listeners is due in part to its renunciation of the principle of repetition. Look, I am no linguist. I have no intention of inventing new languages. I would like to communicate something in the language we have, so that my message should reach its addressees. My main concern is for them to understand me.

My next excerpt of particular note comes from Sir Harrison Birtwistle's response to the second question:

Color is like orchestration, if you like. You can't divorce color from a picture, it is part of it. You cannot divorce orchestration from a composition.

I just find smell very evocative, in a purely Proustian sense. Like taste. I do not know if it has anything do do with music but it seems to me to be a very potent recaller of material. Smell is something . . . I smelt something the other day that I hadn't smelt for forty years: the smell of a dairy. The sour smell of slightly stale milk--no matter how you clean the place you can never get rid of it. I went to a farm, and I smelt this and it was amazing--it was my childhood.

But do you get any musical ideas from smells?

No.

Then there's Elliot Carter:

To work out a series of stylistic devices and then use them as formulae bores me as a prospect and it bores me in others who do it. Self-repetition is to me a sign of fatigue.

and George Crumb:

All of the great composers of the past had immediately recognizable fingerprints. With a more recent composer like Stravinsky, for example, even though he is referred to as having changed style many times, what strikes me about his music over his whole lifetime is its consistency.

I find the response to the third question by the "humble" Morton Feldman quite interesting:

Many people feel that if they hear one piece of mine, they heard it all. Yet all Rembrandts are more or less the same. All Giottos are more or less the same.

You are not hurt when people make this remark? Perhaps you agree?

About my music? I don't agree. It means they are not listening. All Proust is the same. Kafka is the same. All gardens in Vienna are the same.

Why is it people expect music to be so different? I'll tell you why. Because people get very bored, they can't listen to music. They can't listen to music . . . My problem is that I want all my pieces to be the same but I haven't got the discipline to make it the same . . .

Pierre Schaeffer's response to the third question comes as a surprise:

I cannot answer this question because I am not a composer. Why did I stop writing which I had always regarded as an experiment? I had a positive and a negative reason.

The positive reason has nothing to do with music. I used to work a great deal in radio and television--but after all, we only have one life and for me, writing was my actual vocation. I only have a few years left to write my books: philosophical works, novels, and other things. For me, music was an accident. An unfortunate accident.

The negative reason: music today is in a crisis. My contemporaries try to flee from their all-encompassing metaphysical fear in that they seek an impossible sort of music: stochastic or repetitive music, Stockhausenian blah-blah, Cageian clownery. I do not wish to become the victim of new simplicity--I prefer to reject it all.

There are many more interviews I could quote, but I'll save further discovery and delight for you. Gunther Schuller's interview is so compelling that I cannot bear to take only an excerpt. It certainly whets my appetite for his forthcoming memoir Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, which happens to also be published by the University of Rochester Press.