A note about formatting

Readers of this blog may notice inconsistencies in the formatting, especially the indentation of paragraphs, but also matters of typography. I hope to resolve these issues (especially the indentation glitches, which drive me nuts) but so far I have not been able to do this on my own. Eventually all of this will be straightened out, I’m sure. In the meantime, I will continue to write and publish. (It's a blog, after all.)

News flash about FLORA

The series of blogs about my latest piece for the Ricciotti Ensemble is interrupted to bring you some important news about my new eighteenth-century opera, Flora. Yesterday (Friday 20 May) the piece was featured on NPR's "World of Opera." Tyler Duncan (a.k.a. Tom Friendly) alerted me to the broadcast, which has caused a bit of a stir on Facebook and also in my Email inbox. Check it out:

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136469565/flora-an-18th-century-british-invasion

There is a nice written piece about the work, and a link to the "hit single" (Tom Friendly's ballad at the country fair, which Tyler sings very, very well, with the able assistance of Zachary Stains, Philip Cokorinos and the Westminster chorus). There is also a link to a virtually complete performance, audio only. I have a DVD of one of the dress rehearsals, but the posted NPR link is something much better. No visuals, alas, but all of the dialogue is crystal-clear and the balance between singers and instruments is excellent, over all (though occasionally I would prefer more orchestra sound). The editors did not include the final dance music (too much floor noise, I'm sure), and there is a bit of trimming here and there to eliminate an awkward spot, tighten laughter or applause, etc. But this just makes the piece flow better, in the absence of any visual stimulus.

One great thing about this version is that all of the naughty dialogue comes through. A real plus.

Let me know what you think. Can you follow the story? Do you understand the double entendre? Is the Somerset dialect comprehensible? (Make that “Zomerzet.”)

If you wonder what “new eighteenth century opera” might mean, watch for future blogs about this, my most recent work for the musical stage. Flora, by the way, is really a ballad opera turned into an opera (more or less), and its full title is Flora: An Opera. The title of the 1728 original is Flora, or, Hob in the Well. These are all matters for further discussion at another time.

Ricciotti Review DELAY

The discussion of the Ricciotti concert on 15 May is turning into a feature review. I should be able to finish it tomorrow. Check back then. Sorry for the inconvenience!

The Ricciotti Ensemble, PART ONE

I first became acquainted with the Ricciotti Ensemble in 1987. Henry Brant introduced us. They are a Dutch youth orchestra who play in the street. Literally. The bus drives up, the forty-something members of the Ricciotti get out, they take music stands from large wooden cases, set them up, take three-ring binders of parts from other cases, the cellists sit on the cases, they tune as quickly as possible (more or less), the conductor gives a downbeat and they are off and running.

The first performance of the group was intended to be the last. The group was formed to play a single concert of the music the Dutch nobleman Unico Willem von Wassenaur, who composed six concerti in the early eighteenth century that were engraved by Carlo Ricciotti (an Italian violinst) and for many years misattributed to Giovanni Pergolesi. Igor Stravinsky, believing the Pergolesi attribution, used the Wassenaur concerti as a good chunk of the material for Pulcinella. This little musicological puzzle-knot began to unravel in the 1960s, and in 1970 a group of Dutch teenaged string players was asked to play a single concert of Wassenaur’s music, in a new edition based on the original eighteenth century publication. Instead of introducing “a group of teenaged string players” the announcer blurted out “Ladies and gentlemen, the RICCIOTTI ENSEMBLE.” The group enjoyed playing together, and the name stuck. Forty-one years later, and under their fifth director, they are still going strong. They don’t play Wassenaur much any more, and they rarely appear on a stage.

The Ricciotti have played on the street, in public squares, in old-folks homes, in prisons, schools, and even major venues in major cities. They have traveled to many countries, including Russia, Bosnia, Spain, the Dutch Caribbean, and the United States. (Phyllis and I organized the US tour in 1991—the only one to date. That needs to change.) The goal of the orchestra is to bring symphonic music to people who would not otherwise experience it. An excellent summary of their history and their aesthetic can be found on their extensive website. Begin at:

http://www.ricciotti.nl/index.php?id=77

I sometimes describe the Ricciotti as “the world’s greatest orchestra.” I got this phrase from one of the founding members, the Dutch violinist Jan Erik van Regteren Altena (Mondriaan Quartet, Schoenberg Ensemble, etc.). Other orchestras are bigger, and may play better in tune, but the Ricciotti has an aesthetic audacity that is unique. And if aesthetic audacity is your criterion, then it is absolutely the world’s greatest orchestra. It is artistic populism writ large, and it is an extraordinary success. It has been a training ground for many of the finest musicians in the Netherlands. It has spawned a remarkable repertory of new short pieces for orchestra (long orchestra pieces are SO yesterday) and unique arrangements. It insists on having two alto saxophones in the group, on a regular basis. And its repertory systematically breaks down the artificial categories that so debase and poison our musical discourse.

The Ricciotti repertory, in a nutshell, consists of short classical pieces that fit, or can be adapted for their instrumentation; arrangements of popular music; and avant garde works written especially for them. Over the years hundreds of new pieces and arrangements have been generated for them. My first piece for the Ricciotti was Atmo-Rag. (My idea of a rag by Brahms—which morphs into a rag by Ives—oh hell, it’s really a rag by Neely Bruce.) Not only did they ask me to write it—they asked me to guest-conduct. I went all over the Netherlands with them (another story for another time) and heard the piece something like twenty times. I would tweak it in the evening and hand out fresh edits and even an occasional change-of-note before the next performance. I learned more about how to write for orchestra from the Ricciotti Ensemble than from any text I had read, or from any of my teachers (and they were excellent). Truly, there is no substitute for experience. I learned about some really sneaky impossible trills on the oboe, I learned a lot about register, and I started my long, unsuccessful journey toward writing effectively for string instruments. (Though I have to say I’m getting better at it. How DID Corelli do that? And he made it sound so easy…)

Atmo-Rag was followed by the Santa Ynez Waltz (by the mid-1990s the Ricciotti had played it over 150 times), “One, two, ready, go!” and in 1997 the Grand Polka de bataille. The four-orchestra version of this piece is really a new work, I have to say. So that makes five pieces for the world’s greatest orchestra. I’ll write a sixth one whenever they want it—some ideas are already running around in my head.

So now I have introduced this unique and fabulous organization. Tomorrow a brief blog about what they actually did last Sunday night in the Westergasterrein.

Grand Polka de bataille: Four-orchestra version, PART THREE

During the day yesterday the four Ricciotti orchestras rehearsed their grand ensembles (the four historical Ricciottis plus the current one, intermingled) in the morning and played concerts all over Amsterdam in the afternoon. I decided to walk from the Hoogte Kadijk to the Westergasfabrik for the dinner and rehearsal of my piece in the evening. I expected it to take me 40 minutes, but it took almost an hour. No matter. It was a walk through some nice sights and I always need the exercise. I arrived at 6:15. Dinner was to be at 6:30, followed by rehearsal.

The concert began at 8:30. The four orchestras arrived in four different busses. Of course everyone had to eat. There were only two pieces to rehearse: mine and a quadraphonic version of De Gepikte Vogel of the late Jurriaan Andriessen (older brother of Louis). Since the Andriessen is perhaps the most-performed piece in the Riccotti repertory, and the majority of the players know it by memory, that part of the rehearsal was over in a flash.

Two of the orchestras were on the floor level, in the corners, to my left and my right. The other two were in the corners of a three-sided balcony directly above. Two layer cakes of orchestras, more or less side by side. The directionality of the composition would be vivid, I was certain. Since the first orchestra (Ricciotti players from the beginning, in the 1970s) had not played the piece, I rehearsed them very briefly. It’s just as well, because there were twice as many players in Orchestra One as there had been the day before, including Jan Erik van Regteren Altena, first violinist of the Mondriaan Quartet (his brother Edouard, the Mondriaan cellist, was playing in Orchestra Two) and many other excellent Dutch musicians. All of the percussion joined Orchestra One (as Gijs Kramers and I had agreed before); during the setup I ran through the non-percussion stuff. It was clear from the start that they could handle everything, and in five minutes that part of the work was done. I did a few spots with all of the orchestras, just to make sure the groups were comfortable and understood the basic idea of the piece, most notably that there are no rests. One measure of rest showed up shortly before the grand finale (when all four polka tunes are heard simultaneously).

We just had time to run the piece. The members of Orchestra Three began to count aloud, which was quite entertaining. The phantom measure of rest showed up again. When the time came for the actually performance, the phantom rest was still there. I think there is a mistake in the piece, although I don’t really know how that is possible. (Composers should always proofread their work…)

The Grand Polka de bataille is a wonderful musical joke, if I do say so myself. The audience loved hearing it, the players loved playing it. The conductor loved conducting it too, although after a while whoever conducts this piece has to forget about cueing and simply wave his/her arms.

There are some more things to be said about this piece, and this concert, but not today. My ride to Schiphol Airport is leaving in thirty minutes!

Grand Polka de bataille: Four-orchestra version, PART TWO

In the first orchestral versions of the Grand Polka de bataille, the original groups were mapped onto a more conventional group of instruments as follows. The string trio became the strings, except the double basses. The saxophone quartet morphed into brass, plus the two saxophones in the Ricciotti. The piano/organ parts turned into an avalanche of woodwind sounds, very difficult to play and not very gratifying. The percussion parts stayed with the percussion, plus the double basses to reinforce the timpani solo. (The Ricciotti Ensemble has no timpani, but they do have a set of roto-toms—a funky substitute for sure, but OK under the circumstances.)

Each of these groups has a distinctive sound. But four Ricciotti orchestras have the same instrumentation: woodwinds in pairs, two alto saxes, two horns, one trumpet, one trombone, one percussionist, a string section of moderate size. How to get each of them to sound unique? Fortunately for my purposes, one of the Ricciottis, composed of alumni from the 1970s, was not complete. Only one of each woodwind (no pairs), no trumpet, no trombone. I was allowed to move all the percussion to that orchestra. So that made for a distinctive sound by default. I decided to emphasize the strings in one orchestra, the brass in another (with a nice trumpet solo), and all the winds and saxophone in the final one. (Florid parts for the saxes and the high register of the bassoons makes for a special sound, that’s for sure.)

With a plan in mind, I could began to recompose in earnest. As I finished each orchestra, I sent the FINALE file to Rudi van Hest, who extracted the parts and printed them out. I promised the piece would be complete by May 3, and three of the four orchestral chunks were finished by that time. The fourth orchestra was dispatched to Amsterdam in cyberspace on the 5th.

Yesterday was the first rehearsal. I was able to guest-conduct two of the four orchestras, rehearsing them for ten or fifteen minutes. I was able to observe a third orchestra, and answered questions for the conductor and players as they came up. It was not possible to work with the fourth one, so we’ll hope for the best later today.

After the rehearsal I went with the four orchestras to a great dinner (four stews: vegan, beef, fish, shrimp; two salads: tomato, potato; couscous, potatoes, bread) for 150 people. At about 10:15 p.m. the current Ricciotti burst upon the scene, to play their thirteenth concert of the day. (Gasp!) Another entry in the Guinness Book of World Records—the largest number of concerts in one day, played by the same orchestra in separate venues.

Tonight at 6:30 we put the Grand Polka together. At 8:30 we play it for the public. I’ll report in full tomorrow.

Grand Polka de bataille: Four-orchestra version, PART ONE

Having announced that this blog will resume, it’s about time I actually resumed it! There being no time like the present, I decided I would write brief descriptions of the music I’ve been writing in the last six months. I’ll start with the most recent one.

I write this from Amsterdam, where I am visiting my friends Charles van Tassel and Cécile Roovers and getting ready for a performance of the latest version of my Grand Polka de bataille. This is a work that exists in three earlier versions. It was originally composed in 1996 for a concert that Keith Moore organized at Wesleyan. Keith was a masters student in composition at the time, and he had the inspiration for a concert that consisted entirely of polkas, featuring the Circus Polka of Stravinsky. He had at his disposal a unique combination of groups and instruments: a string trio (two violins and cello), a saxophone quartet, three grand pianos, a small but quite boisterous pipe organ, and three percussionists.

Imagine a battle of the bands, but they are all polka bands, with oddball constituents. The string trio starts with a tune of 32 bars in D major. Then the saxophone quartet plays another tune in another key. The three pianos and organ play a third tune, ostensibly in a third key but more like a total flurry of dissonant sixteenth notes. The fourth polka tune is for percussion alone, highlighted by a virtuoso timpani solo and a not-so-virtuoso one for snare drum. The initial statements of the tunes are followed by trading eights in the same order, then a scramble of four-bar phrases for 32 bars, a scramble of two-bar phrases, a scramble of one-bar fragments and a scramble of one-beat fragments. The scrambles were generated by a simple chance technique—using a shuffled deck of cards, the suit I turned up (clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades) determined which fragment from which tune was plugged into the appropriate slot in the 32-bar framework. The result—the structure of the polka tune (the macro-level) remains totally predictable, but after the mid-point of the piece what is going to happen next (the micro-level) is completely unpredictable, and becomes disorienting in the extreme.

Shortly after the premiere of this admittedly eccentric but extremely entertaining work I was asked to do an orchestral version. The Wesleyan Orchestra, under the direction of Mel Strauss, did the piece first. Then I modified it slightly for the Ricciotti Ensemble, a group with a somewhat different instrumentation (two alto saxophones, just one trumpet, just one trombone, fewer percussion instruments.) The Wesleyan Orchestra has only played the piece once, but the Ricciotti has played it often (including a performance for Dutch troops serving in Bosnia, another story for another time).

On 4 April, out of the blue, I received the following Email from Gijs Kramers, the current conductor of the Ricciotti Ensemble:

Hi Neely,

At present, I am the conductor and artistic director of the Ricciotti Ensemble, for which you wrote a few very nice pieces in the past!

In May we will be celebrating our jubilee (41 years, and we always celebrate a year late...) In the weekend of the 14/15th we will get together with a lot of people from the old days. On Sunday we will perform throughout Holland with 4 orchestras from 4 different decades and in the evening we will join forces and do a show with the whole lot.

I would very much like to play the Grand polka de bataille then, as this is one of the most fun pieces in our repertoire, but it would obviously be amazing if it were possible to make a version of this for 4 orchestras rather than 4 groups.

Do you have a version like that as well? Or is it something you could possibly make for us? Or would it otherwise be possible (if you have it digitally) to send us the score so we can do it ourselves?

Thanks a lot, hope to hear from you, with best wishes, Gijs Kramers,

It took me about a nanosecond to agree to make a version of the piece for four orchestras, but how to actually make this happen, five weeks before the performance? A very interesting compositional problem—more on this subject tomorrow.

A recital in memory of Carl Viggiani

Last night I played a long-awaited recital in memory of Carl Viggiani. All Chopin and Bruce. I’m posting the program notes here, preceded by a list of the pieces. I’ll have more to say about the event in future posts. It was a watershed, but I’m not sure what it means. The audience was enormously enthusiastic, and I was pleased in many ways. However, I woke up this morning thinking about little else than all the wrong notes I played, how I had a tendency to over-play the fine August Förster piano, that I don’t really have the focus I need to play a piece like the B minor sonata, etc., etc. This was not the kind of feedback I was getting, of course—some of the compliments were truly remarkable, and I am profoundly grateful that my playing is meaningful to so many of my friends and colleagues. I’ll sort all of this out in my mind, and get back to you. For the moment, here are the paragraphs I wrote for the program.

I had a real sense of the presence of Carl in the Wesleyan Chapel, and of course Phyllis. More about that in the future as well…

A recital in memory of

CARL VIGGIANI

Neely Bruce, pianist

Saturday 2 April 2011 at 7:00 p.m.

Wesleyan Memorial Chapel

An introductory improvisation, in the style of Chopin

Trois nouvelles études, avec préludes (Chopin)

Prélude in F minor, Op. 28, No. 18

Etude in F minor [playing three against four]

Prélude in Ab major, “A mon ami Pierre Wolff”

Etude in Ab major [playing two against three]

Prélude in C# minor, Op. 45

Etude in Db major [legato and staccato in the same hand]

Nocturne in Db major, Op. 27, No. 2 (Chopin)

Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48, No. 1 (Chopin)

Fugue in A minor (Chopin)

A Fugue for Carl Viggiani (premiere; by Neely Bruce)

Nocturne No. 1 (Bruce)

Nocturne No. 9 (Bruce)

Sonata in B minor, Op. 58 (Chopin)

Carl and Jane Viggiani were two of the first people I met when I came to Wesleyan. We always enjoyed each other’s company, and my wife Phyllis and I would see them in various social circumstances over the years. Carl and I would cross paths on campus occasionally and grouse about university politics.

All this was to change after Carl’s retirement. In the mid-1990s I began to relearn the piano repertory of my youth, concentrating on the music of Chopin. By 1999 (the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death) I was playing all-Chopin concerts. If I remember correctly, it was in the summer of 1998 that I got a phone call, out of the blue, from Carl Viggiani. “Neely,” he said, “you don’t know this about me, but Chopin is my favorite composer.” He went on to say that he was an amateur pianist, and he had played the music of Chopin almost all his life.

This phone call was the prelude to a unique and wonderful friendship. Carl and I would meet from time to time and talk about Chopin. I would play pieces for him, just to try them out. He was most encouraging, and really enjoyed my playing. He totally approved of my project to relearn the Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt, etc., I had played as a young man. He encouraged me to start performing Mozart again. “Neely,” he said, “there is someone missing from this project of yours.” This was his way of saying “Why aren’t you playing any Mozart?” (I think Mozart was his second-favorite composer.)

Carl was particularly fond of my performance of the B minor Sonata. I think this is the finest romantic piano sonata, and one of the great pieces of all time. The third movement is certainly a candidate for the single most beautiful piece written for the instrument. Carl shared my enthusiasm for this work, and was equally convinced of its greatness. “Neely,” he said, “when I die I don’t want a memorial service—I want you to play the B minor Sonata in my memory.”

I agreed to do it, of course. He reiterated this several times, and also told his family and some friends. As it turned out, there was a memorial for Carl. Many spoke and read eloquently. Three pianists played. The complete performance of the sonata was put on hold. I announced it for the fall of 2010, as part of the series Chopin @ 200 that my pianist colleagues and I planned in October and November. Because of Phyllis’s final illness it was necessary to reschedule yet again. Tonight I honor my promise to the dead.

There is an elegiac quality to much of Chopin’s music. It seems that he knew from an early age that he would not live very long, and this knowledge informed his composing. I played the D flat Nocturne at my sister’s funeral, and other Chopin pieces at funerals and memorials for other family members and friends. The pieces I play tonight are designed to tell a story that ends with the sonata. In keeping with that narrative, and the meditative nature of this event, please maintain a reasonable silence and refrain from applause until the end. Thanks, and enjoy the music!

Blogging to resume at neelybrucemusic

Dear friends—I have not written a blog in a year and a half. This has been a time of great sadness for me. My beloved wife of thirty-six years, Phyllis Ruth Bruce (née Behuniak) died on November 8, 2010 of pancreatic cancer. I will write more about Phyllis as it seems appropriate, and as I am able. For a fine memorial piece in the Hartford Courant, let me refer you to:

http://articles.courant.com/2011-01-02/features/hc-exlife-20110102_1_female-composers-choir-director-neely-bruce

The power of music is immeasurable. Music has gotten me through the most difficult period of my life, and I am ready to write about it again.

Some previews, and other news

August 4, 2009

I have some exciting news as a composer—I'm writing what amounts to a new opera. Details will be forthcoming as soon as it's appropriate to make an official announcement. In the meantime, because so much time is spent composing (and practicing) and September 8 (when I have to start teaching again) is right around the corner, I will not be blogging as frequently as I have, at least until the opera-composition task is out of the way. But there is much to be said, and I'll try not to get TOO far behind.

Later today, at a private home overlooking Long Island Sound, Phyllis and I will present a preview of some things we're doing this fall. First on the program will be the song cycle Gitanjili by John Alden Carpenter, on texts of Rabindranath Tagore. We have performed these pieces at least a half-a-dozen times over the past decade, including a performance at the Dartington International School of the Arts (Tagore was a consultant in the founding of Dartington College and visited the school many times in the early twentieth century). We're getting geared up to do the cycle again at South Congregational Church in Middletown as part of an event that will be a tribute to Tagore, with a short speech, readings from his poetry, some of Tagore's own musical compositions, and a public exhibition of prints of some of his paintings. That's going to happen on Sunday 27 September, and we'll be ready for it!

After the Carpenter songs, I'll preview the Twelve Fugues of Gerald Shapiro. They are coming along, but they are the sort of thing one needs to play privately as many times as possible, before playing them publicly. I'll be playing them for the composer again this coming Thursday, two days from now! Yikes! (As anyone knows who plays new music, playing for the composer can be nervewracking—but forewarned is forearmed.) Shep is a great critic, and has a very clear idea of what he wants his music to be. So the fugue preview today is preparation for the next composer preview, as well as the public performances in October. I will have at least two more private performances of these pieces in August. I've become very fond of them, as has my teacher, Sophia Rosoff. I'm about to find out what a few other people think.

News Flash about A. P. Heinrich

July 30, 2009

Through a series of surprising connections on FaceBook I find myself contemplating the remarkable music of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1780-1860), known in his day as "The Beethoven of America." One of the early champions of the performance of this most original composer (he is the subject of my DMA thesis), I have become aware of a small groundswell of interest in his music among the next generation. I've just been in communication with two other Heinrich fans, and I think it's time to start playing his music again.

After the premiere of the Gerald Shapiro fugues in October I'm going to start practicing APH, relearning the pieces I did in the late 1960s, early 1970s. There's a lot of misrepresentation out there about this man. For a sample, check out Bernard Holland's piece in The New York Times on February 25, 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/arts/music/25cham.html

I promise I will return to the subject of Shep's fugues on Saturday. But for the moment all I can think of is Papa Heinrich! Now to force myself to practice for my lesson in NYC with Sophia Rosoff…

More about Hansel and Gretel

July 27, 2009

I have just discovered that this blog was never posted. I'm still getting used to Blogger.com and I'm sure this was posted earlier. However, it seems to have disappeared somehow, so I'm putting it up again, a month later! (Good thing I save these blogs as files.)

* * * *
BLOG #13 – CHANGE OF BLOGGING SCHEDULE; H&G WRAP-UP

June 25, 2009

It’s hard to believe that I wrote Blog #12 about Hansel and Gretel in Urbana and only now am finishing up the task, almost seven weeks later! Of course I have very good excuses. I’ve begun a number of new pieces, I have to practice for the premiere of Shep Shaprio’s Twelve Fugues in the fall, ditto Tom Johnson’s Organ and Silence, and above all I’ve had to recruit, organize and conduct 80+ trombones for the New York premiere of “Orbits” by Henry Brant. And I’ve been busy writing as well. I’ve been able to keep up with my other blog, the one on the Ives Vocal Marathon website.

But something clearly has to change. There are too many things to write about that are not related to the Ives songs, and I’m getting restless to discuss and promote my own work to a greater extent. So here is the New Blogging Policy—three days a week I’ll write about the Ives songs, and three days a week about my own music and other projects. Specifically:

MWF see the latest musings about the Ives songs at www.ivesvocalmarathon.com
TuThSat read about what I’m doing otherwise at www.neelybrucemusic.com

Notice that today is a Thursday—I’m getting started with the new schedule right now. This includes new announcements of upcoming events, to be posted later today.

And what about wrapping up Hansel and Gretel? The main thing I have to say about this piece is that it works. I’ve seen three different productions with different strengths and problems. I’ve conducted it, I’ve played the piano part in the orchestra, and recently in Urbana I sat in the house and watched/listened to a Sitzprobe, two piano dress rehearsals, two orchestra dresses and three performances. I’ve observed the reaction of audiences in three different cities in two different countries, as well as groups of school children in many towns around and about Connecticut in the late 1990s. I have gone over the parts more times that I care to remember, and tweaked the piece and tweaked the piece until I know it represents my final intentions. And of course I wrote the thing in the first place. I know it inside and out, as composer, copyist, performer, spectator and observer of other spectators, all this over a period of twelve years. I have earned the right to say it works!

I also know that this opera has succeeded in making the dance an integral part of the drama, one of my conscious goals in composing it. I learned that the preparations for the Illinois production began with Rebecca Nettl-Fiol teaching the dance steps, before the cast learned a note of the music or even read the book together. The first two rehearsals were entirely devoted to dancing. The principals were also required to take dance classes the semester of the production. The result was a seamless integration of the dancing into the flow of the show, to the delight of composer, cast and audience alike.

This opera has, I believe, a bright future. I just have to find the key that unlocks the door to it. There are seven directors around the United States who have expressed an interest in doing it, and I’ll be sending out some sample vocal scores very soon. And I hope the wonderful singers who devoted so much energy and expertise to my work will tell others about it. Electronic communication is remarkably fast these days, but word-of-mouth moves more slowly than in the past. We’ll see what happens. My goal is to replace Humperdinck on the stages of the world in five years.

For the record, the wonderful cast of the Urbana production was as follows—my deepest thanks to you all.

The singers:

Hansel: Jeremy Fisher
Gretel: Alison Wahl
Their Father: Chadley Ballantyne
Their Stepmother: Yoo-Sun Na
A Wicked Witch: Laura Kimmel
A Messenger Bird: Jackie Schiffer
A Duck: Sam Lopata

Non-speaking roles:

Storybook Reader: Renata Herrera
A White Cat: Young-Sun Lee
A Pigeon: Joseph Hutto
Lead Dancer: Aaron White
With other dancers and a Chorus of Birds, big and little

A New Organ Stop

July 27, 2009

Not really meaning to take a week off, nonetheless I did it. The principal reason was practicing Twelve Fugues by Gerald Shapiro! But it's time to catch up. I've been analyzing the fugues as well as practicing them, and I'll have a lot to say about them, starting tomorrow. This is just a short note about yesterday at South Congregational Church in Middletown.

Five years ago the baritone soloist at our church died. His name was Heyward M. Foreman, Jr., but everyone called him Woody. Woody was not a musician by profession, but he had a wonderful natural voice. He also had an uncanny resemblance to my father. We were friends for years. He beat two forms of cancer and died of a hospital infection. He was so popular that there was an outpouring of generosity from his family and friends towards the music program at South Church. We decided to build a new stop for our 1963 Schlicker organ in his memory.

These things take time, of course, but after five years of planning and the usual delays the stop was installed and presented to the public yesterday. Woody's widow Mary, his two sons, and his grandchildren were there, along with lots of other Foremans. (Mary said they would double the size of the congregation, and she was about right!)

The stop is an 8' trumpet, installed on the great. It has a real 16' extension and the lowest C is quite something. It is the work of the Austin Organ Company of Hartford. Its indefatigable president Mike Fazio was there to do the installation himself, with an able crew of course. The result is fabulous. This organ was always very good (it's the study organ for the Schlicker that used to be in the Wesleyan Chapel, now in St. Laurence Church in Killingworth) but it had three problems. First of all, it lacked color. Second, the only reed on the manuals is on the Swell, limiting the solo possibilites quite a bit. Most important, it's not an enormous instrument, though it's beautifully proportioned to the space—and while there was a nice kick to the top and a good full sound on the bottom, there wasn't a great deal in the middle.

The new trumpet takes care of all of these problems. It is very colorful (one young man in the congregation was amazed that it sounded "just like a trumpet"). It's on the Great. And it really fills in the middle register.

I will have more to say about this beautiful instrument in future blogs, when I start to write more about Tom Johnson's masterpiece, Organ and Silence. But for now—thanks, Mary, and all the Foremans, for your generosity. Thanks, South Church, for following through with an amibitious project in difficult times. And thanks to Mike and all the guys at Austin Organ Company for doing such a great job. We now have the best organ in Central Connecticut!

Shep's Fugues: General considerations

BLOG #22, July 16, 2009

As some of you will know, since 2004 I have been writing fugues myself from time to time. But there is a big difference between Shep’s fugues and mine, and that is the nature of their subjects. My fugues are based on the names of family and friends. Shep writes his own subjects, and thinks about them for a long time. So my fugues are essentially games. I don’t think this makes them trivial, because some games are very serious, and games can even be matters of life and death. But the basic idea of my fugues is to generate a subject by a pseudo-random process and see what I can do with that.

There is a sense of gamesmanship in Shep’s fugues too, but it is definitely not the focus of these compositions. Rather, the expressive character of the subject is what counts. And even if there is a direct connection between the subject, or the fugue, and a person, it is of a different nature, as the reader will learn when I consider these pieces individually.

Then there is the question of contrapuntal devices. I’m always on the lookout for tricky things to do with my subjects. I delight in multiple stretti, finding useful retrogrades, fun ways to combine and recombine the subjects in a double fugue, etc. Of these various devices Shep likes to write stretti, but that’s about it. Such contrapuntal games do not interest him—again, the expressive nature of the pieces is what is important.

Shep’s avowed model is the keyboard fugues of Shostakovich. I must confess that these fugues are a mixed bag for me, although Shep has done me a great service by communicating his enthusiasm for them. He especially likes the performance of Keith Jarrett, which I must say is far superior to other performances I have heard. With Shep’s encouragement I’ve listened to them many more times, and find that they grow on me. (My teacher Sophia Rosoff also really likes the Shostakovich preludes and fugues, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I like them too, just as much as Shep and Sophia!)

There is one more thing. Since Shep is not primarily a pianist, he is not particularly concerned that his piano music be “pianistic.” The result is that the pieces are usually straightforward and of intermediate difficulty, but when they are hard they are really hard. I can also report that they were written one voice at a time, with three or four different instruments in mind (a saxophone quartet, for example), then reduced to two staves and tweaked if necessary to make them playable by one person at a keyboard. So these fugues, while almost never virtuosic by design, contain passages of great difficulty and always require attention to the voice leading.

These are pieces of great beauty and subtlety. Every day I find some new felicity of voicing, or something distinctive about the harmony, or figure out some new rhythmic effect. They are a joy to work on, but they are keeping me on my toes! And they are pieces one must practice every day. Yikes! It’s July 16 and the premiere is less than three months away. Gotta get to the piano… Saturday I’ll start commenting on individual pieces.

Twelve Fugues by Gerald Shapiro

BLOG #21, July 14, 2009

[The reader may notice that I wrote this entry on the 14th and posted it on the 16th. That was simply a function of getting used to working through Blogspot, rather than posting my blogs directly to my website as before. From now on there should be no such inconsistencies, knock on wood!]

Gerald Shapiro, a.k.a. Shep, is one of my oldest friends. We teach at Brown and at Wesleyan, an easy hour-and-a-half drive. We met when we were freshmen at the Eastman School of Music in 1960-61. We lost track of each other for the rest of the ‘60s, but when Shep showed up at the University of Illinois around 1970, for a performance of his milestone piece of live electronic music entitled “From the Yellow Castle” we reestablished contact, and have seen each other on a regular basis since I came to Wesleyan in 1974. We’ve collaborated on lots of projects since then. He wrote a fabulous piece for Wesleyan Singers back in the day when I was the choral conductor here, he arranged for me to write a piece for Trio Saxiana (two saxophones and piano), he helped me with the tour of the Ricciotti Ensemble in the early 1980s, we both wrote pieces for a tour of the Mondriaan Quartet, and so on. A complete list of these projects would be an interesting exercise in itself, and would chronicle some neat pieces and bring back lots of great memories—the stuff future blogs are made of.

About five years ago we were sitting around, talking about piano playing. I was telling Shep about my lessons with Sophia Rosoff and the pianistic principles of Abby Whiteside. We were also reminiscing about unorthodox methods piano practicing recommended by the late Armand Basile (he was teaching at Eastman the one year I was there) and generally talking shop about aspects of piano playing. Shep is a sometime pianist—he likes to play and has a good sense of rhythm, and from time to time writes piano music. I feel that my playing has taken a series of quantum leaps since beginning to work with Sophia in 1998, and I said—“Since I’m playing so well these days you should write me a big piano piece to play.” He thought this was a good idea, and agreed to do it.

At first both of us imagined it would be a big piano sonata, or some other magilla of a piece. But it turned out to be a set of twelve fugues, elegant, brief and to the point. They appeared one or two at a time, over a period of about three years. The whole set has been in my possession about two years, and I’ve practiced them off and on since they began arriving. Since the completion of the Ives Vocal Marathon my principal focus as a pianist has been to prepare these pieces for their first performances in October of this year. I’m going to write briefly about each one for the next several blogs. These are beautiful, subtle pieces that raise interesting issues about the technique of composition, how to play the piano, and the current state of the art of music. I’ll begin with the first of them in the next blog.

BLOG #20, Seven Songs on Poems of Emily Dickinson

In 1970 I set seven poems by “The Belle of Amherst” to music using a different method than I usually employ for setting texts. First, I chose the poems using chance operations. Here are the results:

Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea [76]
I felt a cleavage in my mind [937]
It’s such a little thing to weep [189]
The reticent volcano keeps / His never slumbering plan [1748]
My friend must be a bird [92]
From all the jails the boys and girls / Ecstatically leap [1532]
God permits industrious angels / Afternoons to play [231]

(The numbers in brackets are the numbers of the poems in the Thomas H. Johnson edition, published by Little, Brown and Company. Just the act of looking up the numbers raised some issues about these little pieces. Clearly I didn’t use this edition when I composed them almost 40 years ago—the punctuation is almost completely different, and there are even a couple of different words. What to do? Shall I start doing critical editions of my own songs? The mind boggles… Well, not today, that’s for sure.)

The vocal lines are in a free chromatic style—not serial, but lots of pitches all the time, often with a key center but no clear modality. My model for these melodies was clearly Charles Ives in his more experimental aspects. David Barron and I were doing all-Ives programs at the time, including songs like “August,” “Paracelsus” and “The New River.”

The accompaniments are made up of individual sonorities or short phrases—usually three or four gestures, but the third song (“The reticent volcano…”) has five, and the last song (“God permits industrious angels…”) has only two. These gestures are always fragmentary and usually distinctive as to contour, pitch content, register, etc. Each is indicated as a single measure of music and given a letter: A, B, C, D or E. Variables include the number of beats of rest between gestures. The damper pedal is to be held down throughout the entire set of seven songs. The voice part and the accompaniment are not coordinated.

Pitches are always specified, that is, there is no improvisation, but each accompaniment is quite free in another way. The various gestures are linked with concatenation operators, for example:
A • B • C • D *

to indicate that the performer may play the fragments in any order, as many times as he or she chooses. A spacious, open reading of these piano parts is the way to go—the gestures should not interfere with the voice, though obviously they will overlap often. Both performers should allow plenty of time to hear the resonance of the instrument, which will change constantly.

Why am I writing about these songs today? Two reasons. Phyllis has decided to learn a lot of my music that she has not sung before, and is starting with these songs. So we are practicing them. I’m not sure about public performance, but we’ll certainly do them for a class of mine this fall.

The other reason is that I had occasion to play the accompaniments as a solo on Michael Pestel’s magnificent 1920s prepared German Steinway. I have described this piano on my other blog more than once (go to http://www.ivesvocalmarathon.com/ and search for “Pestel”). It turns out that these little accompaniments make an amazing piece for prepared piano. We hope to record them that way later on this summer, with and without the voice part. In the meantime, my mind is full of ideas for compositions involving the prepared piano. As if I didn’t have enough to think about!

BLOG #19, Organ music

Later this morning I will be meeting at South Church with a young woman named Sharon who wants some tips about playing the organ. She is a pianist who has a summer job in a small church and wants to get some advice. The organ, of course, is a tremendously seductive instrument, and I think she’s feeling the pull. (She writes enthusiastically about practicing and playing services on Face Book—a dead giveaway.) As my professor Hubert Kessler used to say, back in the day in Illinois, the thing that is so majestic about the organ is the “effortlessness” of the thing—all that enormous sound, produced with so little effort. (On the part of the player, at least.)

Sharon is a college student who lives in the greater New Haven area. In the summer she comes to the shaped note singings we have here in Middletown. The connection between organ playing and The Sacred Harp brings to mind a project of a few years ago, which I mean to reinstitute later this morning. In the summer of 2003, and for some time thereafter, I began my practice sessions at South Church by improvising on Sacred Harp tunes. My intention was to work through the book in a systematic fashion, then write a sort-of-shaped-note-tradition response to J. S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. This project came into my mind at the same time I was writing “The Sacred Guitar,” a set of seven free pieces, “take-offs” as it were, on Sacred Harp tunes. There were two immediate effects—first, I played “The Sacred Guitar” on the organ (with appropriate elaborations) and found it worked beautifully. Then I began to introduce this sort of improvisation into the services at South Church. (For this purpose, by the way, I use a copy of the 1936 edition of The Sacred Harp I inherited from William Satler.) I kept a notebook of what I thought was working particularly well. When the South Church sanctuary was restored and painted two years ago the notebook, like everything else in the choir loft, was packed away. It’s time to dig it out and resume systematic practicing along these lines.

This meeting with Sharon will also be the occasion to stick around and practice Tom Johnson’s Organ and Silence. I’m playing this unique collection of pieces in Kansas City on Friday, September 4th of this year, as part of the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music. I’ll be writing a lot more about this conference and Tom’s pieces in future blogs. If you’d like more information right now see:

http://2ndminimalism.org/

Practicing the organ, and writing organ music, are very satisfying activities. Writing this blog is firing my imagination and making me want to get more performances of my organ pieces. There are over seventy of them, composed over a period of almost fifty years!

Blog #18, Additions to my catalogue

I’m going through the academic exercise of updating my curriculum vitae, which Wesleyan requires me to do from time to time.

Obviously, this entails updating the catalogue as well. So here’s a list of what I have to work into the catalogue in the next few weeks. In it’s final form it will have dates and (estimated) timings, just like the entries do now.

“Two for Helen,” settings of Emily Dickinson in honor of the 92nd birthday of Helen Boatwright

Scotsman (a humorous song on an anonymous text)

A Garland of Sacred Song

The Portals of Saint Bartholomew

Where I am… (a quasi-improvisational piano piece; see last Thursday’s blog)

A Friendly Fugue for…
Peter Alan Hoyt
Mary Luongo
Joyce Hubbard
Lorry Yelding
Mary Decker Klaaren

A Double Fugue for…
Sarah and Richard
Peter Standaart
Kay Briggs
Jennifer and Andrew
Jim and Carol

A Partita for Wilhelm Gertz Prelude; Fugue; Allemande; Eccosaisse; Gigue

Trazom: A prelude for piano, based on a familiar passage from Mozart

Modal Study No. 1

Arrangements of earlier works for two pianos:
A Fugue for Bitsey Clark Chorale Fantasy on Old 124th

The Year of Jubilo

Fifty-Four Nifty African Countries (mnemonic chant)Spatial Chorales (2003)

Lamentation for Good Friday (1996)

The last two items are omissions. (There may be others—I have to go through the catalogue with the proverbial fine-toothed comb…)

Otherwise this is music I’ve written since the summer of 2006. I think it’s striking that there are so many fugues. I never thought that at this point in my life I would be so interested in imitative counterpoint. I have a handful of unfinished fugues as well, and ideas for lots of others. In addition to the fugues there is a great deal of imitative counterpoint in Portals (see earlier blogs on this subject), though the spatial nature of that work insures an emphasis on its non-imitative aspects.

I’ve been writing on my other website about A Garland of Sacred Song—see the various “Composition lessons from Charlie.” These are songs for David Rinald and Susannah Knoble to perform—there are four of them so far.I’m also struck at how many of these pieces involve gamesmanship.

From time to time I pick up Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. I’ve got to read this book from cover to cover. I have other books on this subject I have yet to read.

Anyway, the whole art of musical composition has a profound element of play in it, and that seems to be where a lot of my ideas are coming from right now.

Blog #17, Independence Day

Happy Independence Day everyone! I hope all readers of this blog will take a few minutes and sing through my setting of the First Amendment, which can be downloaded elsewhere on this site. We’re going to sing from The Sacred Harp at my house tomorrow (Sunday 5 June) and sing the First Amendment as well.

My previous blog elicited spirited responses from both Susan Matheke and Ian Ganassi. Just to set the record straight, Ian did indeed do the exercise, and I stand corrected. I jumped to the conclusion that didn’t do it because I didn’t see him fill out the paper. He wrote to me that he “assigned two instruments to each of [his] responses,” which indeed I noticed at the time.

Susan liked the blog, but took exception to my use of the word “routine” to describe a dance phrase. What I learned from her response is that dancers really don’t like the word “routine,” which has pop culture overtones they find objectionable. My piano teacher Sophia Rosoff has a similar aversion to the word “exercise” when used in the same sentence as “Abby Whiteside,” as in “Abby Whiteside has a wonderful exercise for developing awareness of flexion and extension in certain Chopin etudes.” At her insistence, in Sophia’s presence I always refer to “Abby Whiteside principles” and never to “Abby Whiteside exercises.”

What is interesting is that in both cases I have inadvertently used words that have (for me) a positive connotation and have (for others) a negative one. I suppose everyone does this from time to time, and I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. However, I would like to observe that to a person such as myself, whose life is almost chaotic in its irregularity, the word “routine” has connotations of blissful self-assurance, especially if that “routine” is a springboard to making beautiful art. Similarly, the word “exercise” means something desirable, even wonderful, to someone who needs more of it and is afflicted with middle-age spread.
So I can say with pleasure, and some measure of pride, that blogging has become an important part of my daily routine. And speaking of exercise, it’s time to get in the swimming pool.

Blog #16, Where I am

Tuesday I got a call from Susan Matheke to see if I could fill in as an improvising pianist for a dance workshop she is doing at the Educational Center for the Arts. Susan is a wonderful dancer and choreographer, and the head of the Dance Department at ECA. Her husband Willie Feuer is also on the ECA faculty, and the two of them were members of the legendary Viola Farber Company, back in the day.

Working with dancers is a special joy. Every time I do it I wish it did it more. To see Susan work with so many talented students and adults in such a high-energy situation was inspiring. Two things stood out. First, her students have such a high degree of concentration that they can learn rather complex routines almost instantly. Susan demonstrates once, and eighteen people just do it! A little has to be fixed, but surprisingly little. The other thing was how easily Susan could get some interesting but rather etude-like and somewhat routine sequences to turn into art with the simplest instruction—a tribute to her imagination as a teacher and the ingenuity of her students alike.

There were two examples of this. First, she gave the instruction to cross the open dance space doing one of the routines, but on the return do the same routine but interrupt it—either with “silence,” or with a sudden stop, or with some unspecified surprise. The musicians (Ian Ganassi and myself) had a similar instruction. We made straightforward eight-beat phrases for the first cross, and really opened it up for the second one. Instant choreography, instant music, very satisfying—just for us, though. Not for the public.

The last part of the workshop Susan handed out a sheet of paper. Ian didn’t do this, but I did, along with the dancers. The paper had instructions at the top, and three incomplete sentences, with space to write:

Please finish these beginning phrases with a simple sentence or two. Then create a small phrase of movement for each phrase. To get started on your phrases you may want to find one word or idea in your sentences that seems to stand out.

I am from…

I am now…

I will be…

I will make no attempt to describe what the dancers did as a result of this exercise, because I saw too little of what it was to say anything meaningful. As a musician and as a composer, however, I have something to report. In such a situation there is no time to think, and first impressions are essential. So I wrote the first things that came into my head, which were place names (a combination of autobiography and wishful thinking):

I am from the South—Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee

I am now from New England—Middletown CT Maine

I will be from South Carolina from France from London from Illinois

I have reproduced the punctuation as I wrote it, no editing, but I have not attempted to reproduce the space on the paper. I used the piece of paper as source material for a series of pitches, register free, all over the keyboard. I made no use of letters other than those of the musical alphabet, but I did allow that H was B natural and S was E flat. (For more about my use of letters as pitches see my earlier blog about the Friendly Fugues.) I also eliminated Susan’s original instructions, using only the words in my own hand. The resulting series:

B E Eb B A A B A A G E G A Eb Eb Eb Eb E E Eb Eb E E

F E E A D D D E C A E

F Eb B C A A F F A C E F D F Eb

I found this series of pitches a provocative combination of redundancy and self-imposed limits. The distribution of these pitches is also beautiful, suggesting but never confirming certain tonal centers (though the F major seventh chord does occur). Specifically, the numbers of the pitches are (in the order of appearance):

B—4x

E—11x

Eb—9x

A—10x

G—2x

F—6x

D—4x

C—3x

So in addition to a little pocket money, from this unexpected gig I got a new piano piece! The working title is “Where I am.” (I hope I can come up with something better than that, but for now “Where I am” will do just fine.) There were four groups of dancers, so I played the series four times, with different register games going on each time through. All of this will be written down sometime soon, before I forget it. Perhaps Susan will dance to this music sometime, or she and Willie can make a duet out of it.

Susan and Willie, by the way, have become first-rate tango dancers, as well as heirs to the Viola Farber legacy.