Preview Lecture: Swan City Piano Festival
June 8, 2023
Charles Hulin, D.M.A.
1. Introduction
One of our local aesthetic heroes, Frank Lloyd Wright, is purported to have said, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Many other people have also purportedly said that, and Wright doesn’t strike me as someone who wouldn’t think he was good at talking about a thing. But if it is his statement, it sounds like he thinks the whole project of talking about music is absurd. While talking about music doesn’t seem nearly as hard to me as dancing about architecture, if anybody should have been able to dance about architecture, it ought to have been Frank Lloyd Wright. But I believe the entirety of the statement is buttressed on deep inner experiences of being moved by music that simply cannot be summed up with words.
And so I would like to muse for a few moments about how it might be that music moves us in inner spaces. My focus is that music is somehow a means of travel by which we glide over the shapes of life and quickly glean insights from doing so, all without leaving our seats right here in Harrison.
When we travel from place to place on earth, we never really go in a straight line. Because it’s a round planet, our straightest lines across its surface all end up being arcs. Every single journey we make has a rise and a fall. And for the curious, we travel one degree around our sphere roughly every seventy miles we go.
In the world of music, this arc-edness, or arched-ness, is called phrasing. We might even call it form. It’s both about how the music is shaped and about how we performers ride those shapes. That we call interpretation. And whether or not you think you understand what I’m talking about, you do. And not only that, you have done it yourselves!
As we sing “Happy Birthday” together, note the rise in your energy from the first statement to the higher second statement. And then, at the apex of the song, as we proclaim the name of the one with a birthday, we take more time with our singing. Finally, as the music arrives at its resting place, we all decelerate and some of you even add harmony emphasizing the completion of the journey!
Music teachers talk about what you just did with terms like “defying gravity,” “finding the escalator,” “keeping balls in the air.” I think this activity of phrasing is one of the things that makes us humans really love music. Those journeys up and down are so grounded in the realities of our existence.
To go a little further, as with any journey, where and how you begin, and what you take with you, determine so much about where and how you can go.
As we hear the first tense measures of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, we have a sense that something like the extraordinarily sympathetic second movement is needed to mitigate that storm and stress. But even after that sublimely lyrical essay, we remember the first movement and desire the further unfurling we find in the sonata’s third movement. Starting at the beginning of Beethoven’s Pathetique, we can feel the logic of the relatedness and distances of its other movements. They are possible starting there. But we could not go so logically from there to music like Debussy’s First Arabesque, for example.
Here I think of another arc word – ARK – which is a chest in which you might keep your most special things, or a vehicle in which you might survive a journey. And in those ways, music is also an ark. It conveys our consciousness so lightly and singularly through seas of human emotions crystalized by composers into beautiful patterning free of the chaos of our day-to-day experiencing.
So I invite you during this Swan City Piano Festival - during this particular season of listening and being moved - to ask where and how the journey of each piece you hear begins and what weights of feeling it is carrying. Imagine where it might go and then ride its up and downs to discover its realities.
Now I am going to highlight some of the works you will hear these next few days and comment on the itinerary - on the programing - of our artists which is especially brilliant this year. I’ll begin each little discussion by emphasizing when and where each event will be taking place because a bottom line of enjoying these performances is being at the right place at the right time! All of that information is available, ingeniously color-coded in the program, and I encourage you to check and double-check so you’ll be sure to make it to the things you’re wanting to hear.
2. Jihye Chang’s concert will be preceded by Erica Porter’s composer’s perspective presentation Friday at 6:15 right here at Harrison. That composer’s perspective time will introduce us to her musical world and to this year’s commissioned work titled “Glimpses.” Starting the evening by hearing from a living composer is perfect for Dr. Chang’s concert because she is engaged with a project and a passion to perform new works alongside what she calls her “bucket-list” of more established repertoire.
The subtitle for Friday’s performance is “Etudes (Fantasies) and Variations” and the programming is quite frankly, fascinating and fun. There is only time to highlight a few of the many works you will hear but maybe my words will serve as a bit of guide for your listening.
The performance will begin with Schumann’s enigmatic first opus, the Abegg Variations. Why enigmatic? Because its theme is derived from the musical notes that spell the name of one of Schumann’s friends. It is a little unclear if the Abegg of the variations was the friend as she appeared to be in daily life, or an idealized version of a friend in Schumann’s mind, or - my favorite option - the deeply noble inner Abegg whom Schumann was gifted to recognize. Whatever the case, those variations end with a fantasy, paving the way for the many imaginative flights of the evening. Of this early work, Schumann wrote to his mother, "What hopes and prophetic visions fill my soul's heaven…. Is it not a consoling thought that this first leaf of my fancy that flutters into the ether may find its way to some sore heart, bringing balm to soothe its pain and heal its wound?" You can hear he was so sensitive he could hardly stand himself, a quintessential Romantic almost too feeling for this life in this world.
Next will be the beautiful Berceuse of Chopin. A berceuse is a cradle song and how tenderly the single Chopin might have longed for experiences of family in his own life. With this work we hear one of those gentle beginnings that only allows for the delicate journeys of baby’s dreams.
Hear the opening passage of Chopin’s Berceuse. Note that Chopin is already varying his materials a few measures into the piece. This berceuse is itself a theme and variations.
I got a Glimpse of Erica Porter’s commissioned “Glimpse” and it seems to me that it starts in a similar place to Chopin’s Berceuse but provides shimmering sounds for our own times.
Next up, Dr. Chang has arranged what she calls a “Bouquet of Etudes,” and the expression pinpoints her way of programming with such accuracy. I remember my own mother arranging flowers, choosing each for its color and height and texture, and then placing them one by one until each was in just the right place to fulfill the beauty of the whole. That’s exactly how Dr. Chang’s “bouquets of etudes” work.
If you are wondering what an etude is, it’s a study. And most etudes are studies regarding particular problems for both performer and composer. The challenges of etudes can be technical or musical or something else altogether. Among other things, the etudes on this program explore the capabilities of the instrument. At times the piano will ring like bells, then sound like brass, and sing the sweetest songs . . .
By the way, if you’ve not been keeping track, Dr. Chang’s program will definitely get you caught up on etude writing in the 20th century. She begins with a bit of Czerny who bridged from the Classical to the Romantic pianists, but she leaps over the likes Chopin and Liszt to the more modern foundations of today’s piano writing with a selection from Debussy’s etudes. This etude, so called “for the five fingers,” begins with a quote of an exercise by Czerny but, as one commentator puts it, it “blooms wildly from there.”
Another seminal etude of our time in Dr. Chang’s bouquet is Ligeti’s “Fanfares” written in the 1980s which is full of figures from the composer’s horn trio.
A favorite of mine follows: Earl Wild’s transcription of Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.” Wild’s writing is in the grand tradition of Liszt and others who take a tune on a journey through many textures and moods. If you’re like me, you’ll melt at the sweetness of the effect.
Newer etudes will abound as well, including Alex Tedow’s “Clump” which is a start-and-stop sort of trip in a style that has been described as “intellectual music for all demographics” You’ll hear “catchy melodies, striking harmonies, likeable quirkiness” all in a framework of “complexity and ingenuity.” (Wes Taylor, Eastman School of Music)
And yet another etude represents several on the program composed for Dr. Chang. This is “Silver Bells!” written by Sungji Hong just this year. This etude was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” and conveys that poem’s resonance through repeated patterns, eerie lines, and imitations of the complex pitch profiles of many types of bells.
Perhaps a review of a stanza from Poe will pique your interest.
Hear
the sledges with the bells—
Silver
bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they
tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In
the icy air of night!
While the
stars that oversprinkle
All the
heavens, seem to twinkle
With
a crystalline delight;
Keeping
time, time, time,
In
a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells,
bells, bells, bells,
Bells,
bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the
bells.
3. Tal Cohen will be performing Saturday at 7 at the Polk Museum of Art.
Regarding Tal Cohen, he is a Grammy Award winner whose music traverses many cultural worlds synthesizing his own geographical journeys from Israel to Australia to Miami and now even responding to some extent to what he sees on the walls of our own gallery here in Lakeland. The venerated and versatile Terrence Blanchard has said that Tal Cohen “has the promise of being at the top of the curve changing our minds about music” and I especially like that quote because of all my own talk about arcs!
Jazz aficionados in this audience have no need for my thoughts about Tal Cohen’s music making, but for those piano enthusiasts who might feel a little outside of jazz, I would suggest that jazz at the piano is part of the same big conversation about music at the piano that classical pianists and many others have been holding since the first few loud and soft tones were sounded from the earliest forte-pianos.
That conversation spans these always-relevant issues: What can be said with just two hands on some number of keys? How can we make such an instrument sing? How can we invoke experiences of flow? How do we articulate such experiences with moments of emphasis and color? How might we employ the instrument’s percussiveness? And on and on. If you are lucky enough to have a seat for Saturday’s concert, I believe you will hear these and other such questions answered in personal and creative ways throughout the evening.
4. Sun-A Park will conclude the festival on Sunday at 3 at First Presbyterian Church.
Dr. Park has provided such a well-crafted program that one could talk about its depth and interconnections all evening, but I won’t!
She will begin by serving us a delicious morsel of the music of Francois Couperin.
If you are not familiar with the Couperin line of musicians, allow me to explain that, for nearly a century, numerous Couperins served as musicians at Saint Gervaise in Paris, and that is a dynasty reminiscent of the Bachs in Saxony. Francois was the J.S. Bach of the Couperin line and was making music around the turn of the 18th century.
The exquisite Couperin work Dr. Tak will play should provide a sense of the ornamentation, the discursiveness, and the gentle dance-like quality of his harpsichord style. And as lovely as all that is, she’s sharing that music as a background to a great masterwork by Ravel, his Le Tombeau de Couperin.
You might guess that the word “tombeau” is a cognate for the English word “tomb,” and if you did, you would be right. For the purposes of Ravel’s music, tombeau refers specifically to a memorial monument. In fact, all the way back to the 16th century, musical and poetic tombeaux were written to memorialize important figures.
Having witnessed the horrors of the First World War as a military ambulance driver, Ravel sought a way to move forward through music, a way not laden by the expressive weight of German Romanticism but graced with a charm and character suggestive of an earlier Gallic time. And so his tombeau contains dance forms from Couperin’s era, each one modernized in memory of specific fallen friends.
After intermission, and concluding the festival, Dr. Tak will present a very famous work that is literally and overtly structured around a theme of movement. I am referencing Pictures at an Exhibition, a work so well-known that I don’t even need to mention that it’s by Mussorgsky! Its journeys happen on least two easy-to-follow levels.
Mussorgsky has been thought of as a man with uneven legs, perhaps struggling with his weight, and it seems he has depicted his own asymmetrical gait with a promenade that alternates between measures in 5 and 6. Through this personal stamp on his music, he invites us into what it feels like to move like him. Throughout this work, this music returns to remind us of his physical journey, part of his way of experiencing.
And where did he doing this promenading? He did it in an art gallery where his physical journey was transformed into an imaginative one, compliments of his late friend, Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann. The year after Hartmann’s death, Mussorgsky viewed his drawings on the walls of the St. Petersburg Architectural Association. Those drawings gave Hartmann’s impressions of locales from the markets and gardens of Limoge and Paris to scenes of the hardness of life in ghettos of Poland to ancient moonlit castles in Italy as well as his own designs for objects and buildings never completed in the physical world.
I think it is profoundly fitting that the musical journeys of this year’s
festival lead us to a compelling vision of one such structure, Hartmann’s Great
of Kiev, an edifice that can only be experienced through Mussorgsky’s memorable
music. Maybe you will find yourself dancing about that architecture deep
inside.
