Fall House Concert

Sunday night, we had our first house concert at our place here in Lakeland. There were thirty in attendance, mostly friends from church and a few neighbors. We called the event "Piano, People, and Pies." Ten folks brought pies, including my colleague and his wife, Dr. Hawkins and Lisa, who dropped off a fantastic sweet potato pie and pie pockets in the morning, even though they couldn't attend the actual concert.

The repertoire was
Malotte "Lord's Prayer" for horn and piano
Gottschalk "Caprice on Home, Sweet Home"
Hulin Thanksgiving Sonata for horn and piano
Ross "Variations on Auld Langsyne"



The Gottschalk is a lovely version with some Chopin nocturne quality and some three-hand effect. I cut out half of the repetitive section at the end.

The Thanksgiving Sonata is a "medley sonata" as Dr. Guthrie described it. I composed it for Kathy and me, and it features most of the well-known Thanksgiving tunes as its themes. There are three movements:
I. Plymouth - mostly dissonant depiction of the Pilgrims' struggles at sea and here on the American continent.
II. Spacious Skies - a majestic lullaby about the grandeur of the frontier.
III. Rondo - with ASH GROVE as the primary theme.
I like the piece a lot. If anyone ever really has a need or interest in such a work, let me know.

The Ross variations are from my ancestral anthology (click here for blog dedicated to that collection). Ross was a Scottish composer who wrote several concerti, but this is the only work of his that I've explored.

The pies were as follows:
Chocolate with cookie crust
Lemon Meringue
Butterscotch Meringue
Two Pecans
Peanut
Pumpkin
Sweet Potato
Lemon Chess
Cherry

In general, it seemed like a success. With that much pie, the deck was sort of stacked in our favor. Plus, we had an ace up our sleeve, Kathy's charming 97-year-old grandmother who sat in the back corner of the den and conversed with all of these new people.

I felt a little unhappy with my effort, and for a simple reason. Several reasons, actually. I need to get the piano voiced and regulated. Also, I needed a little more regular practice going into the event. But most of all, I was reminded that a bottom line for me ought to be simply to do a good job with the basics of musicianship: tempo, balance, phrasing . . . and having a plan about these things. Composers have a reasonable expectation of at least that much. Spontaneity can be good, but not as one's total interpretive strategy. A plan lets the performer know how to judge his or her efforts. And, playing works of less-than-genius quality might require more conscious planning to give the pieces their best chance.

Chowan Pianofest 2010

This weekend was our third Pianofest here at Chowan and it fulfilled my hopes, as well as surprising me a bit.

The primary purposes of Pianofest, as I see them, are to refresh our enthusiasm here about pianistic work and to inspire us. Hopefully, the various events being open to the public also results in a general growth of interest in the art of piano-playing.

Our first concert involved my colleague, Paula Pressnell, playing the four impromptus of Schubert's Op. 90 in order. Between nos. 1 and 2, Mark Puckett played Chopin's preludes in e, b, D flat, and g. Between nos. 3 and 4, Josiah Antill played Liszt's B Minor Ballade. Mark, Josiah, and I experimented with designing powerpoint shows to enhance the audience experience of these pieces. Mark's show started with a few sentences about the context in which Chopin composed his pieces, followed by images inspired by the pianist von Bulow's poetic titles for those four preludes: Suffocation, Tolling Bells, Raindrop, and Impatience. Josiah's powerpoint presented the association of Liszt's piece with Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon" and the subsequent slides led us through the phases of the poem as we listened to the piece.

We learned from this concert that Mrs. Pressnell is a particularly good Schubert player and that Schubert sounds especially good on the Grotrian. The first impromptu put us in just the right mood to experience the unique phenomena known as the classical piano recital.

While I'm interested in innovation and feel it is my responsibility to provide my students some introduction to basic skills in a variety of styles, it was good to be reminded that the piano recital is its own unique art form and was perfected some years ago in Europe. The piano recital can be, and often is, an experience of reflection, bordering on the sacred. It creates a container or clears a space for contemplating great Western and human values: the work of the mind and the soul, the the experience of longing, and the search for peace. Again, Paula's playing, as well as the student's powerpoints and pianistic efforts, directed us to such beautiful and lofty ruminations. And I don't think I'm just describing my experience as the sense of calm and engagement was palpable in the hall throughout the concert.

Special thanks to Terrell Batten for the great work with the spotlight, in particular at the close of the concert when he noticed that there was no other light left for Mrs. Pressnell's final bow and quickly remedied the problem!

I played our second concert, which was a concert built around the sixth Beatitude of Jesus: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. I chose various works to express the idea of purity through musical means from a pure experience of the sound of the instrument in Jahn Adams's "China Gates" to the pure quality of the transcription of Bach's Chaconne (originally for violin) for piano, left hand alone, by Brahms. I also played Haydn's Sonata No. 48, which took me back to my childhood, and managed to play it without mishap. (It was the first piece I had a memory slip in on my first solo recital around 25 years ago!)

The main message I got from preparing and performing this recital was to strive for musical purity in my work. By that I mean to keep my feet planted on the earth and to focus a little more on musical fundamentals like knowing the mood that is to be created, establishing and maintaining a tempo, analyze and plan to highlight the relationships of tones melodically and harmonically (phrasing and balance). . . If I want to add in something more imaginative or creative, it's probably safest to think of it in just those terms - something added into the basic work of musicianship, not something to completely and instantaneously transform my approach.

Along these same lines, as I worked on the Chaconne and looked for a convincing way to pace and inflect the music, my faith, which I sometimes practice, was affirmed - the answer was in the score. For me, the slur and phrase markings were a major key to interpreting this work. The breakthrough came when I started to think of them more like bowings. The longer the marking, the more energy went into the line and the less energy went into the individual notes. The shorter the marking, the less energy went into the line, and more energy into the individual notes.

Thank you, Taylor Yandell, for the photos of my first performance of the Chaconne.

I concluded the evening with Gottschalk's Berceuse. This piece is based on a song he wrote in which a mother sings to her baby while the father is away. I assume the father is away fighting in the Civil War. I had been wondering how the low bass octaves figured into this scene, and I had been trying to keep them in the background. During the concert, I realized that they might be thought of as the distant rumbling of the cannons of war.

On Saturday, I held a masterclass that was attended by a diverse audience including music majors, music appreciation students, several students from a studio in the next town, and a few interested folks from the community. I like teaching before an audience like this as it gives people who are not musicians some insight into the discipline of music. The young students played well, and it's always inspiring to hear the results of the hard work that developing pianists are doing.

Chowan Pianofest 2009

Chowan Pianofest was this weekend and consisted of three concerts. The first was a lecture-recital about which I have commented at length on the Skinner Anthology Blog.

On Saturday night, we presented our first-ever Pianofest ensemble concert. Chowan piano majors joined our guest pianist, Ariel Dechosa, to perform duets I wrote specifically to show off some of the students' strengths and interests. I joined Ariel for Gottschalk's arrangement of the William Tell Overture, and my colleague Paula Pressnell and I played duets by Beethoven and Dvorak. Mrs. Pressnell also played Haydn's Sonata No. 52 in her characteristically well-planned, remarkably clear, and quick fashion.

Another interesting aspect of the program was the opening sequence of solo works. My student, Terrell Batten, performed the famous Bach Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, followed by Chopin's Prelude in C Minor. After those two works, another student, Josiah Antill, performed James M. Guthrie's Prelude in C Minor that explores aspects of the Bach and Chopin Preludes simultaneously.

I was very pleased with my students' work on this concert. Each one entered into the project earnestly and seriously. Mark Puckett showed fine technical and musical discipline in Grieg's Ase's Death and Debussy's Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum. Terrell conveyed a moving personal connection with the music he played, and Josiah played the last movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata with good variety of sound while maintaining a steady sense of momentum.

On Sunday afternoon, Ariel Dechosa presented a concert including the third sonata of Brahms and the sixth of Prokofief. Ariel played the Brahms with beautiful focus and made a number of the transitions in the work sound profoundly right. His performance of the Prokofief was also eye-opening in terms of dexterity, energy, strength, and musicianship. I think there are several amazing facts regarding this work: it was concieved in the first place, concieved for piano, concieved for one person at a piano, and there are people who can play it well!

The juxtaposition of these three concerts that surveyed such a wide range of styles led to excellent discussion in Monday morning's theory class in which students had many thoughtful questions about aspects of piano playing from issues regarding memorization and fatigue to considering patterns like Alberti bass and extended techniques like playing the piano with one's fist or forearm.

One of the ongoing issues is the theme of battle in music. On Friday night, I played Kotzwara's once-popular Battle of Prague. While this piece, written in the late 1700s, seems to have very little in common with the musical vocabulary of Prokofief's Sixth, Ariel noticed many similarities in terms of the representative aspects of both works and the ways one has to maneuver about the keyboard. Dr. Guthrie and I have continued to wonder about the battle genre and about its progress since the Civil War. I've started to entertain the idea of writing a battle piece, but would rather not glorify battle in my work. Battle has become so devastating and impersonal that a work like Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima might better reflect battle in our age than a more traditional battle narrative.

For archival purposes, a number of Chowan students also did a great job with recording this weekend's concerts, under the supervision of Dr. Guthrie. I'm sure all the pianist participants really appreciate that work.

Gottschalk and Gershwin

This week I had the fun of performing excerpts from several Gottschalk works for a documentary on Cuban jazz that should be completed in November. Gottschalk travelled in Cuba and wrote some works that contain quintessential rhythms that have come to be associated with jazz and permeate much of the music we hear today.

In addition to practicing the excerpts, my preparation also included finding shoes and cuff links that looked like something Gottschalk might have worn.

I coached the excerpts with Dr. Mike Davison, one of my colleagues at UR who is an expert regarding Cuban jazz. He suggested that I play more percussively as Cuban music is very percussion-oriented. At the same time, Gottschalk was a 19th century parlor pianist known for his polish and charm. It's interesting to conjecture what type of performance would have amounted to flamboyance , exoticism, and visceral appeal in that world of poetry and highly melodic music.

Sometimes we classical musicians assume that a jazz influence is somehow a sign of primal and raw expression. But I think the composers who incorporated touches of jazz into their concert music were viewing jazz as modern, sophisticated, and suave as often as they were viewing it as being expressively primal or raw. I wonder if some unexamined, inherited prejudice may be at play that robs us of recognizing a wider range of expressiveness in this music.

Last night we went to Richmond Ballet's performance of George Balanchine's Who Cares? based on the music of George Gershwin and premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1970 . The ballet injects the rhetoric and forms of a traditional ballet with the jazzy flirtatiousness and glitz of a 1920's Broadway show -
a prime example of the neoclassical impulse.