A lecture I had the privilege of delivering on the opening night of the 2022 Swan City Piano Festival here in Lakeland, FL. It highlights the performances of Robert Fleitz, John C. O'Leary, and Hannah Sun, and celebrates the good work of the festival.
Welcoming
Presentation
Swan City Piano Festival - June 9, 2022
Charles Hulin
“I like it but I don’t understand it.” Those are the heartbreaking
words people sometimes say about musical performances. Somehow the idea that one
needs specialized knowledge to really enjoy classical music can get into our
minds and stand in the way of own experience.
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about music, I
want you to know that the way music moves us is a mystery. And a mystery in this
sense is not something to be understood. It is something to be experienced. We don’t
measure a mystery. We enter into a relationship with a mystery. And that is an
invitation to know our own sense of joy.
John C. O’Leary, (jazz pianist and neuroscientist who you
will be hearing Saturday) has this to say about that mystery: “Art can create a
space where dialog can occur.” And so it is this evening that I am thinking of
the space that music creates and I’m starting the dialog in hopes that we might
all be able to fully experience the musical wonders of these days.
Over the next hour, I will share many specifics about the
music in this series of concerts, but first I would like to speak generally in
case anyone is struggling with that sense of just not knowing enough. If, over
the course of the concerts, that thought starts to creep in, I encourage you to
do what you would do in any good relationship: keep listening. Listen for a
melody you could sing. Listen for a rhythm to which you might move. Observe the
pictures the music paints. Tune into whatever emotion the sounds stir within
you. Seek to enjoy being with the music wherever it goes. And I will let you in
on a secret. Whatever you discover as you listen, that’s what we musicians want
to know. That is the valid experience as far as we are concerned.
Tomorrow night, Robert Fleitz will be presenting a recital
touching on the topic of home. We define home in many ways: our place of
origin, our sense of belonging, rootedness . . . and across the generations,
musicians have processed a great deal about what home is because the nature of
our field has often required that we leave home to study, to find work, to
travel and to perform.
Robert is so good about loving his Lakeland home and contributes
to its musical culture in wonderful, sustained ways. He is also very at home in
the world of new music. He makes me
think of one of our Juilliard teachers, Joel Sachs. Dr. Sachs said he woke up
one morning and realized that, through his research, he was so involved with a
day in the life of Schumann 100-plus years ago that he was missing out on
living now. He went on to say that there are Schumanns living today, and how
exciting and meaningful it can be to involve ourselves with those living
geniuses and their work.
In that tradition, what Robert has planned for us shows us a
bit of what has happened but will focus mostly on what is happening. To
put an exclamation point on the whole idea, he will go on to show us what he is
making happen by inspiring and commissioning composers to write music that will
be heard for the first time right here.
In terms of what has happened, Robert’s recital will feature
some well-known names from the past. For example, the concluding work of his
program will be a piece by Manuel de Falla which evokes the spirit of the people
of de Falla’s home region in Spain through gestures of Flamenco music including
fanfares and laments, suggestions of guitar strumming and castanet clicking,
and maybe even some heel stomping.
I mention that concluding work because it seems to me to be
the repertoire starting point for the real action of the evening. By that I
mean de Falla’s imaginative way of portraying sounds and scenes outside the
traditional world of piano music is one reasonable root for the music of the
more recent composers on the program. That is not to suggest that any of the
other composers were thinking of de Falla as they were writing but that their
musical approaches might seem closer to his than to those of the earlier
composers we will hear, Grieg and Chopin. To me, Grieg and Chopin seem more
like prehistory to what’s going on in Robert’s program. They are like the Garden
of Eden - a world that once was - ‘In the beginning, Chopin!’
And when it comes to longing for home, Chopin’s life and
death are the stuff of legend. He spent
most of his adulthood in France but always considered himself a Pole and arranged
on his deathbed for his heart to be smuggled into Poland and interred in a
pillar of Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.
Now regarding what is going on, Robert will share a veritable
rainbow of colorful works by living composers. We would do well to note that
his programming reflects the fact that the voices of women have become a much
more overt part of the musical conversation in these last fifty years. We will be
strangely soothed by the vaguely bluesy work “Homesickness” by Emahoy Geubrou,
a 98-year-old Ethiopian nun who spent her formative years in exile. We will be stirred by Asha Srinivasan’s eclectic
“Mercurial Reveries.” Srinivasan, a professor at Lawrence University, seeks to put
“old and new musics together on stage.” In “Mercurial Reveries” she does this
by filtering aspects of Hindi music through techniques reminiscent of Bartok
and Copland. And we will hear performance artist Meredith Monk’s minimalistic “Railroad”
which I think is the product of a beautiful creative process she has described.
She says writing a piece of music is a like cooking a soup. You have your
materials – in the case of a soup these are carrots and potatoes and broth and
so forth. You let those materials be the materials. You trust them. You don’t
judge them. You slowly boil them. You
refine them. And eventually there comes a time to put them into a form that
brings out their essence. “Follow that,” she says. Follow that essence.
And so we arrive at those composers who know Robert and write
music for him to play here first.
In 2020, Liliya Ugay wrote “Raqs” for the Swan City Festival.
Raqs means dance in Arabic, and the piece is an interesting programming
parallel to the Flamenco-informed music of de Falla. Liliya’s dance inspiration
comes from her homeland of Uzbekistan and I encourage you to google Uzbek dance
between now and tomorrow night so you can see the sometimes lyrical/sometimes
dramatic style of dance that develops from small movements of the fingers, expands
through the arm, and ultimately includes the whole body twirling in climactic
passages. To my ear, Liliya’s music is permeated by those sorts of progressions;
and in playing it, it seems even the pianist’s body is drawn into expressing a
similiar choreography.
[Brian Dozier Brown’s “Lacustrine” is this year’s commission
to be discussed at its premier tomorrow.]
Finally, I want to comment on an especially bright spot in my
preparation for this lecture, and that was my first experience of the music of
Krists Auznieks. Robert will be playing his “Pathmarks” which reaches deep into
a prehistory of Bach through the more recent rooting of composers like
Stravinsky. No doubt you will hear many layers in this music moving at
different paces and playing out expanded ideas of counterpoint. And that is one
side of what struck me as so beautiful about this work. Its structure is so
intelligent and substantive at the same time that it generates an affect of
genuine warmth and joy. That’s such a difficult balance to strike!
View Auznieks "Pathmarks" here.
On Saturday, as I referenced earlier, John C. O’Leary will
be with us. A musician and a scientist, he is concerned about communication. In
discussing a recent project, he noted that there is often a lack of
communication between science and society. One element in the struggle for
communication has to do with the means by which the information is
communicated. Sometimes the words are too technical, the presentation too
dense, the framing disorienting, and so forth.
While I don’t know exactly what John will play on Saturday,
one thing I admire about his work is the way it communicates so clearly. We
might think of the texture of a piece of music in terms of a continuum from
transparent to opaque. Some pieces make their composers’ choices immediately
and disappointingly apparent. Other works are so thick we almost wonder if
there was an organizing hand at play at all. I think what John’s music offers is
a very satisfying version of translucency. There’s light to see a lot of what’s
going on in his music. We can almost narrate it as it unfolds: There’s a groove
that’s making us move. And now what’s going on with that bass line? Wait! It
feels like there’s an extra beat in these measures! Oh, and here comes
that sweet series of chords again. Sounds a little like Schumann.
As John improvises, he takes us by the ear and makes sure we
hear the choices he wants us to consider. It’s almost as if the music is its
own interpretation. But when and how those choices arise remains a mystery. To
use a different metaphor, John has a way of making us feel at home as he leads us
through unfamiliar terrain.
I’m going to let you in on another secret. Just in case you
are not already a jazz enthusiast, you might be intrigued to know a lot of us
classical pianists really enjoy listening to jazz. There’s something about composing
happening more or less in real time that fascinates and inspires us. It’s one
of the most creative things.
John C. O'Leary plays "Blackbird" here.
Now, about Sunday. If I were to give Hannah Sun’s program a
title, I would call it “Transformations.” Transformation was a quintessential
concern for Romantic-Era composers, and I think the desire for transformation
might be one of our most deeply human traits.
Hannah’s program will begin with a master of transformation,
a composer with the Midas touch, the legendary Chopin. And while I described
his music as the prehistory of Robert’s program, Hannah’s program positions us
to be awed by the vast and exquisite nature of the musical world that was his.
The brightness of that world will suddenly appear when
Hannah plays the first of Chopin’s 24 Etudes. You’re likely to think, “My
goodness, a human hand can do that!” Like Bach before him, Chopin initiated his
magnum opus with a piece in C major that is basically hymn-like harmonies
energized by rolling chords. The description sounds simple, but the effect is
stunning. For the sake of comparison, I will play the first few measures of
Bach’s prelude and the opening phrase of Chopin’s last etude, the so-called “Ocean
Etude,” in which he uses the same strategy as in the etude Hannah will be
playing.
For nearly two centuries, Chopin’s etudes have provided the
fundamental technical training of professional pianists. With them, Chopin
revolutionized the very way we touch the instrument, and he elevated the etude
form from a mere study to a concert-worthy demonstration of sweeping
musicality. It is this transformational quality that typifies Chopin’s genius.
Whatever he turns his hand to, he imbues with an expressiveness than had not
been imagined before. We will experience that most compellingly in the
juxtaposition of two nocturnes, the first by the inventor of the form and the
second by Chopin.
The Irish pianist John Field created the nocturne, by
combining a singing melody with a flowing accompaniment. His nocturnes provide
a reposeful setting for his rather impressive skill at manipulating melodies. I
will play a portion of the nocturne Hannah has programmed to give us both a
sense of the nighttime tone of his music as well as the quality of his melodic
gift. I want to point out that he varies the melody in such enchanting ways
that we could easily not even realize we are hearing the same melody twice!
Field did that all so nicely within the boundaries he had set
for the form, but Chopin knew so much more was possible. As I say to my
students, anything that can happen at night can happen in a Chopin nocturne: a
lovely dream, a nightmare, an obsessive thought, a bout of insomnia, an asthma
attack . . . and always the hope of a coming sunrise. You can sense the range
even in the words Chopin writes on his scores. The story of one of his
nocturnes can be tracked through his expressive directions: Larghetto, appassionato,
cresc., con forza, smorz., sotto voce, pianississimo, forte poco stretto,
fortissimo, legatissimo, rallentando e dolcissimo.
Hannah will follow up her performances of Chopin and Field
with her own essay in transformation, a work called “Plastisphere.” We will see
and hear that she transforms the instrument into a harp, a wave, and an ocean
with the songs of birds above and whales below. With those transformations she
creates a space where dialog can occur about the way we treat the oceans and
the creatures that call them home. As a composer, I especially appreciate that
this music resonates with the piano writing of Ravel and Debussy without ever
becoming derivative. That’s also hard to do!
Hannah Sun plays her "Platisphere" here.
After her own music, Hannah will treat us to one of the golden
treasures of the standard piano repertoire, Beethoven’s 30th sonata,
Opus 109. Beethoven’s music functions as a hinge connecting the Classical and Romantic
periods, and he is arguably the source of all things transformational since
that time. The thing that moves me so much about Beethoven’s way of being
transformational is that he takes the humblest materials – simple scales and
triads – and turns them into the noblest and most enduring of musical
expressions. It’s like alchemy. And how he does it also reminds me of another
Juilliard professor, one of Hannah’s teachers, Jerome Lowenthal, who would
sometimes describe a piece of music as the story of interval (an interval being
a very simple measurement between two notes). In this Sonata, Beethoven begins
with a third that grows ever so gently into a fourth. And it happens again and
again all along the path of a descending scale. That interval takes a little
journey and begins to be transformed. Next it broadens as the drama of the
music starts to be revealed. That passage is so sweet and intense, but in
another way, it’s just a matter of rising and falling through the notes of a
scale. Fast forward to the second movement and the mood has become very
stern, but the materials are the same only now the third is falling. I won’t
continue to outline how Beethoven generates a complete range of characters from
those basic materials but please know as you listen that the expressiveness of
all you hear in this piece arises from his insight into the possibilities of those
intervals and that scale.
After Beethoven, Hannah will share a selection of Rachmaninoff
preludes, preludes in which Rachmaninoff continued Chopin’s work of transforming the
form. Suffice it to say Rachmaninoff’s
preludes are always gratifying to hear and to play. The improvisatory and discursive
qualities traditionally associated with the prelude form make it a perfect
match for some of Rachmaninoff’s most intimate musical impulses. And the heroic
B flat prelude is a positively oceanic tour de force
Hannah has chosen to conclude her recital with one of Franz
Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, and in doing so, she brings this season of the Festival
full circle. Like de Falla and Liliya Ugay, Liszt transformed his piano writing
with an infusion of dance music from back home. When the piece starts, we will
immediately know we have entered a new soundscape conditioned by the
instruments of the Gypsy (Romany) orchestra. Shimmering cimbalom tremolos and
reckless fiddle tunes will evoke moods from the mournful to the menacing, the
proud and the nostalgic. This music is just one of many signs of how fully
Liszt entered the space of dialog. Liszt took numerous opportunities to spend
time with the Romany people trying to understand their culture and their music-making.
His own introduction to the Hungarian Rhapsodies grew into a two-volume work
reflecting on those experiences. But he went even further, involving himself in
their lives by assuming responsibility for the welfare and education of a
promising young Romany violinist who later named his own son after Liszt.
To conclude this whirlwind tour of the festival performances,
I would like to reference a philosophy put forward by the former president of
Juilliard, Joseph Polisi. Throughout his tenure at the school, Dr. Polisi
developed and promulgated an approach to the role of the artist that he called
“artist as citizen.” It can be briefly outlined with two quotations from his
book by the same name. In the preface, he writes, “I have formed the conviction
that artists must become active members of their communities, working
effectively and methodically to ensure that the arts are a vital element in the
fabric of society. Performing artists must no longer believe that their ‘work’
stops at the end of the performance. Active involvement of artist-citizens who
are well-informed about the political, economic, and social components of our
world will be the only way to realize the positive impact of the arts on our
schools, organizations, and this world as we move forward in the twenty-first
century.” In the epilogue, he concludes, “My messages in this volume reflect an
optimism about the decades ahead because of my faith in the Juilliard
tradition, a tradition that instills in its practitioners a love for life, a
dedication to the highest levels of the artistic profession, and a belief that
artists bring a positive and transformative element to our society. With that
belief in mind, I know the future is in good hands.”
In so many ways, the Swan City Piano Festival epitomizes
this artist-as-citizen model. As we see over these next few days how local
institutions are involved, children are engaged, masterclasses are provided,
interdisciplinary work is commissioned and presented, musical wonders are made
accessible, and we are all challenged to consider the world’s cultures and
creatures, I think we might join in Dr. Polisi’s optimism in recognizing that
the future of the arts is indeed in good hands.