PROGRAMME NOTES
1 October 2005
“XX Century Piano Music: New Forms, New Sounds”
The twentieth century saw an unprecedented wealth of new forms and styles in the arts, especially in the art of music. New forms and content called for new instruments, and although some of these were indeed invented, none of them seemed to offer the same powerful expressive possibilities as the established, classical instruments. Most composers took on the hard task of making the “old” instruments sound new, by exploring their sonic potential to the utmost, and “extending” their possibilities to include added, distorted or electronically modulated sounds.
Tonight's programme includes pieces for the piano as we know it (used in a conventional way) producing unconventional sounds with the help of clusters, harmonics, polyrhythm and resonances, as well as a piece which employs “extended techniques” to achieve different sounds (a semi-permanent preparation, invented by John Cage, in an attempt to substitute a piano for a percussion ensemble).
The first piece on the programme was written 100 years ago. Charles Ives, born 1874 in Connecticut, was the son of a US army bandleader in the Civil War. The composer was immersed in music from a very early age — marches, waltzes and ragtime (as well as the lullabies he heard from his mother) were later to find their way into his compositions. Ives' father liked to “experiment” (much like John Cage's father); one of his experiments placed little Charles in the middle of the town square, with two bands on each side, simultaneously playing different tunes. Later in life, Ives loved exploring polyrhythm and metre in his symphonic, chamber and solo works.
Three Page Sonata (the manuscript being laid out on three pages) is one of Ives’ most fascinating shorter pieces for solo piano. The first movement is built around the four notes, spelling BACH, and their inversions and transpositions (techniques explored later by Schoenberg and others). It is written in a free-flowing, non-metrical “prose style.” The slow middle movement comes after a gradual transition, its melody originally to be played on celesta or glockenspiel with the piano accompanying; later revision of the work gave both parts to the pianist. The music is mesmerizing and transcendentally blissful. The third movement is a slow military march in which the two hands play much like two separate bands, sometimes in unison, sometimes juxtaposing march/slow waltz, slow waltz/fast waltz, ragtime/crazy waltz etc. It ends with a frantic jumble of wildly fast waltz, slow ragtime, dissonant tremolo and the suddenly humorous chord of C major.
Daughters of the Lonesome Isle was written in 1945, seven years after John Cage (1912 - 1992) invented the prepared piano. It was originally written to accompany a dance by Jean Erdman, but following its premiere has been performed as a solo piano piece. It evokes images from Irish mythical folklore (the story of the Prince of the Lonesome Isle).
The piece is constructed in 17 sections, where ascending and descending chromatic passages, creating dark and ghostly moods, alternate with a series of dances — slow, fast, quiet, exuberant and ritualistic. The piano preparation is moderately complicated and makes the instrument sound like a percussion ensemble.
Galina Ustvol'skaya (b. 1919) has urged all those who love her music to refrain from analyzing it. In spite of that, a few words about her work are in order, as it has not become known to the musical world until the last decade.
Ustvol'skaya's music always carries the mark of the extreme, whether in brutality, tenderness or sorrow; her dynamics are extreme too, ranging from pppppp to ƒƒƒƒƒƒ. Rebellion against restriction finds expression in the lack of bar-lines.
Sonata #5 (written in 1986) is one of her later works, in which the piano sounds like combinations of her favourite instruments — eight double basses, piccolo trumpet and tuba, voice and wood hammer.
The piece consists of 10 contrasting parts (the last repeating the first almost literally), unified by the note D flat, which sounds all through the sonata, much like Liszt's leitmotif, but in even more extreme form. This D flat is always present, always different, ranging from obstinate, cruel and brutal to mystic and illuminating.
The music of Morton Feldman (1926 – 1987) has been compared to Rothko’s painting; the huge canvases with transparent layers of colour and lack of borders find their musical equivalent in vast durations (String Quartet No. 2 has the potential to last up to six hours), layers of overlapping, divinely vibrating harmonics, and single notes or clusters spaced in such a way as to evoke a sense of timelessness.
Intermission 5 is one of Feldman's early, short pieces; it reveals the tendencies that were to be explored on a larger scale in his later piano works, such as extremely low dynamics (with a few louder “colour spots”), slow tempo, sustained pedal throughout the piece and pointillistic use of single notes and clusters, widely spaced, to create a motionless, hypnotic atmosphere.
Gilles Tremblay (b. 1932) is one of Canada's most celebrated composers. A student of Olivier Messiaen and a close friend of the legendary Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, his work from the 1950s reflects the reigning avant-garde trends of musical life in Paris at the time. His piano cycle I. Phases II. Réseaux explores the possibility of drawing new sounds out of the piano, realized through the extensive use of silently depressed keys. A virtuoso pianist himself, Tremblay uses the instrument with admirable understanding of its potential and has created music of unique sound and formidable technical difficulty.
Olivier Messiaen dedicated Ile de Feu I (the first of his four Rhythmic Etudes) to the people of Papua New Guinea, from whom he took the principal themes that, according to him “have all the violence of the magical organizations of that country.” This short and extremely challenging piece opens with the Papuan theme right away, to be repeated several times throughout the etude, accompanied by percussive sounds, bird song, dissonant resonances, gongs and, in the end (in a longer, augmented version), with a melody that Messiaen learned from an Indian raga. The Papuan theme alternates with short, breathtakingly virtuosic passages, one of which interrupts and divides its very last exposition, half of which is accompanied by the bird song, half by the gongs.
© 2006 Tzenka Dianova. Use by permission only.
School of Music Theatre, University of Auckland
©2005 - 2008 Tzenka Dianova | Powered by 