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.
