Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 16

Dvorak’s Prophecy — “Essential Cultural History”

Kirkus Reviews, which previews books for booksellers, critics, and others in the know, has just previewed my forthcoming Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.

It’s been accorded a star (good news) – and the review itself grasps my book whole.

In summary: “Horowitz closes with a clarion call for American classical music to ‘acquire a viable future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past.’ His chronicle of ‘a failure of historical memory’ is feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence. Essential cultural history.”

The publication date is Nov. 9, 2021. Naxos will concurrently release six documentary films I’ve produced, exploring the “new paradigm” for American classical music that Dvorak’s Prophecy proposes. For more information, click here. 

Here’s the full Kirkus review:

DVOŘÁK’S PROPHECY [STARRED REVIEW] 
And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: Norton

Why is American classical music so White?

In 1893, visiting Bohemian composer Antonin Dvořák predicted that a “great and noble school” of American classical music would build upon the nation’s “negro melodies.” Instead, writes music historian Horowitz, classical music in America became “a Eurocentric subsidiary,” while African American melodies and rhythms were segregated in popular music. Yet Dvořák’s prophecy encouraged Black composers, including his assistant, Harry Burleigh, and mixed-race Englishman Samuel Colridge-Taylor, to compose classical works steeped in African American folk music that were widely performed and discussed at the turn of the 20th century. The villains in Horowitz’s indictment are modernists Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson, who all “maintained that there was no American music of consequence before 1910.” White outliers such as Charles Ives, who unabashedly quoted from popular songs in his symphonies and sonatas, and George Gershwin, who wrote an opera with African American protagonists, were dismissed as eccentrics or sentimentalists. At the same time, African American composers William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Levi Dawson, though taken seriously in the years between the world wars, plunged into obscurity because they didn’t fit into the modernist narrative. Horowitz is unafraid to tackle the third-rail issue of cultural appropriation, coming down firmly on the side of artists’ freedom to draw on any traditions that speak to them. He covers his back by enlisting African American tenor George Shirley to make the most forceful defense in a foreword: “I have no right to tell anyone they cannot perform the music of Black folk if they have the desire and ability to do so with proper respect for its content and distinctiveness.” Horowitz closes with a clarion call for American classical music to “acquire a viable future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past.” His chronicle of “a failure of historical memory” is feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence.

Essential cultural history.

Art Tatum and the “Black Virtuoso Tradition”

On the heels of his film with Alexander Toradze (my previous blog), Behrouz Jamali has released another remarkable film essay dealing with the art of the piano: The Black Virtuoso Tradition. It features what the New York Times once called “piano playing at its most awesome”: Steven Mayer playing Art Tatum.

The Black Virtuoso Tradition is an American musical phenomenon that I framed decades ago, inspired by Mayer’s eloquent advocacy of Black pianists who never wrote their compositions down – Tatum, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton. Steve – and only Steve — has been presenting this music (transcribed from recordings) as canonized American piano repertoire for decades.  If you add to that Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, Nathaniel Dett, and Margaret Bonds, and also such white composers as Gottschalk, Dvorak, Gershwin, Bernstein, and Bolcom, you wind up with one of the signature achievements in American music: piano cameos, many of them highly virtuosic, absorbing Black vernacular strains. 

The Black Virtuoso Tradition remains virtually invisible for two reasons. The first is that other pianists don’t purvey it. The other is that it combines “popular” and “classical” genres. It’s actually therapeutic – as I remark in Behrouz’s film, “it heals the schism driven like a stake through classical music in America.”

The inclusion of Dvorak may surprise. It’s my contention that by 1894 he had become an ‘American composer” as surely as Domenico Scarlatti, born in Italy, became “Spanish.” The proof in is in the pieces Steve plays: the G-flat and F major Humoresques; the American Suite (though it’s not in the film).

You’ll find Behrouz’s film on the website I’m constructing for my forthcoming book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (which W. W. Norton releases in early November). In tandem with that, Naxos will release six films I’ve produced with the visual artist Peter Bogdanoff, and an Arthur Farwell CD I’ve produced for PostClassical Ensemble. It is all to be found here, here, here, and here.

And here’s an index to Behrouz’s film:

00:00: Kevin Deas narrates pertinent history

4:00: Louis Moreau Gottschalk: “The Banjo”

8:19: Scott Joplin: “Pine Apple Rag” (of Schubertian eloquence)

11:33: Commentary on Gottschalk and Joplin.

16:13: Joplin: “Maple Leaf Rag”

18:50: James P. Johnson: “Blueberry Rhyme” (an intoxicating reverie with pearly filigree)

23:11: Fats Waller: “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”

25:28: Commentary – ragtime vs. stride piano

35:40: Antonin Dvorak: Humoresque in F

38:17: Dvorak: Humoresque in G-flat

41:35: Art Tatum: Humoresque

46:40: Discussion – Tatum (with a clip of him playing)

55:00: Tatum: “Tiger Rag”

Toradze’s Piano Stories

Behrouz Jamali has created the kind of film I had always hoped to see about Alexander Toradze. 

I permits Toradze to speak for an hour without abridgement or abbreviation. It abjures soundbites. 

I believe it should be seen by all devotees of the piano, and to fledgling pianists at music schools and conservatories.

Born in Tbilisi in 1952, Toradze graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, toured the West as a Soviet artist, defected to the United States in 1983, and has since taught and lived in the US while maintaining an international career. His father, David, was the leading Georgian composer.

In sixty minutes, Toradze tells three stories.

The first is about why his father had to quit playing jazz in a famous Moscow restaurant in 1940. This is a story about Russian pedagogy and the generosity of Reinhold Gliere. 

The second story (at 18:16) explores how jazz represented American freedoms to Soviet musicians of Toradze’s generation, and how as a touring Soviet artist in 1978 he refused to fly to Miami from Portland, Oregon, because he insisted on hearing Ella Fitzgerald (“a goddess”) and Oscar Peterson.

The third story – and, to me, the most important – is about how Toradze applies stories to music to achieve a kind of “authenticity” having nothing to do with literal adherence to the score. The focus is Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata (33:43), which Toradze performs in a manner unknown to Prokofiev and yet conveying its own kind of truth. 

Toradze’s reading is invested in the experience of wartime. One repeated-note theme, for instance, is for Toradze “drops of tears” (41:00). I comment that Toradze interprets the Prokofiev sonata via a process of “infiltration” of thought and feeling. “You can’t just surrender to the composer,” I suggest, “or you surrender yourself.” 

Typically, Toradze needed to find a “story” when returning to Beethoven’s Op. 109 Piano Sonata (52:00). I tell him: “It’s not important whether your story is true. It’s true for you. It’s an instrument of interpretation; it lets you inhabit the music.” 

If you want to hear more Toradze, I recommend his singular recording of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinski Orchestra. Here Toradze’s story is that the concerto remembers and mourns Prokofiev’s friend Maximilian Schmidthof, who committed suicide. This detailed reading transforms and amplifies the music in surprising (and controversial) ways. In music, an “agogic” accent is achieved not via loudness, but a slight delay. The tremendous agogic accent Toradze interpolates at 11:42 (just after the first movement cadenza), and which Gergiev thunderously absorbs, is not to be found on the page.  

A superb recent zoom interview with Toradze by the conductor Gerard Schwarz may be found here.

Savage Beauty — Take two

Three months ago I blogged about Min Xiao-fen’s exceptional new recording, “White Lotus,” in which her pipa is mated with Rez Abbasi’s guitar. The music comes from her soundtrack to a classic Chinese silent film: “The Goddess.”

I’m delighted to see that NPR has now done an enterpirising seven-minute feature.

Here’s an excerpt:

ABBASI: And there is that scene [in “The Goddess”] where the principal comes to visit the mother and son. And we both dig into a kind of the blues . . . It’s like a blue pipa.

(SOUNDBITE OF MIN XIAO-FEN’S “HATHA (SUN AND MOON)”)

MIN: It’s a little bit like the swamp kind of idea, because, you know, Chinese [music] has a blues, too. . . . And so that’s why I feel this American style for blues swamp is the perfect match with the Chinese blues.

ABBASI: Yeah. Chinese opera’s drenched in the blues, actually.

How I wish the musical fusion of East and West more frequently attained the synergies explored in this remarkable recording. One father of all such synergies was the master American composer Lou Harrison, who in his majestic Piano Concerto fused gamelan with Brahms. It worked because he dealt not only with intermingling surface attributes, but intermingling creative idioms: from the inside out. 

Inimitable

It is my privilege to partner a new Myrios Classics CD: Mozart’s two most important four-hand piano sonatas, importantly performed by Kirill Gerstein and Ferenc Rados.

Gerstein customizes his Myrios recordings in exceptional ways. Three years ago, he invited me to contextualize his Gershwin CD via “The Gershwin Moment.” His new Mozart CD comes with a 40-page booklet illustrated with unforgettable photographs (by Kaupo Kikkas) of his inimitable duet partner, Ferenc Rados. 

Gerstein also commissioned an eloquent tribute to Rados by Stephen Isserlis. And I contributed as follows: 

“A Most Intimate Communion”

About Ferenc Rados and Kirill Gerstein

In the shrinking world of classical music, Ferenc Rados is not a household name. But for certain chamber musicians and pianists, it conjures a singular personality and mentor, born in Budapest and living there still. At the Liszt Academy, a generation of prominent Hungarians — the pianists Zoltan Kocsis, Dezso Ranki, and Andras Schiff, the original members of the Takacs String Quartet – studied with him. 

If he were to discover himself called “legendary,” Rados would doubtless feast on so tired an appellation; it would become a choice object of wicked dissection. His droll, affectless manner; his curious way of peering upward while dipping his chin; the slight play of mirth on his compressed lips – all this projects a mixture of teasing intellect and fatalistic marginality still to be found in Eastern Europe. The mixture is combustible: at any moment, he may submit to gusts of laughter which shut his eyes, jerk his head back, and yank open his jaw. His shuffling walk and careless attire are also deeply characteristic. Born in 1934, he is old enough to remember the Nazi occupation and much else. 

In conversation, Rados is clever and reflective, inimitable and characteristic. His speech is grave and gentle. He is unhurried. “As my time is worthless,” he explains, “I can afford to spend it in this fashion.”

Rados’s copious collection of turn-of-the-century musical postcards is telling. Here are paintings of “innocent” ladies and “inspired” gentlemen, playing or listening, miming “feeling” with  skyward glances directed at angels with harps. Rados has collected more than half a dozen renderings of “Chopin’s Last Chords”; the haggard composer, slumped in a cushioned chair, fingers the keyboard with thin infirm fingers. “Now do you understand Chopin?” Rados asks. He is a connoisseur of clichés.

Kirill Gerstein met Ferenc Rados in 2004, having previously studied in Russia, Boston, New York City, and Madrid. He calls Rados “the single most influential person in my musical life and the one with whom I have studied the longest.” He regularly shares with Rados his concert recordings. He continues to play for him whenever possible. 

The following conversation took place days after Gerstein had finished editing the two Mozart performances on this CD. 

KG:

I first met Rados in 2004 at Prussia Cove, the chamber music festival that Steven Isserlis directs in Cornwall. Steven had found a way to get him there. Rados would drop into different rooms and offer musical advice. Steven suggested that I “play something for Rados.” It turned out to be the second Beethoven violin sonata – in a room packed with musicians. Afterward, as Rados subsequently put it, he felt “bloodthirsty.” My playing irritated him so much that these three hours seemed like a public dismemberment. He pointed out many musical clichés in my interpretation. He said: “Why do you play so quickly? Because it says ‘Allegro vivace’? That is like saying ‘Long live Soviet-Chinese friendship.’ It is something that does not exist.” 

The whole experience, lasting several hours, was wonderfully deflating. Here was a brilliant mind with information and ideas I could barely begin to grasp. So I asked to play for him again – the first Schubert impromptu, in C minor.

JH:

You just sent me a link to a Ferenc Rados performance of the same piece. He makes it a veritable Winterreise. An arduous life-narrative.

KG:

The Schubert consumed several hours. Then we worked on the Dvorak E-flat Piano Quartet. This time I was able to catch my breath and attempt to implement what he was getting at. He said: “This is perhaps somewhat understandable. Perhaps this is more believable.” Emboldened, I asked: “May I play for you in Budapest?” He said: “Perhaps it is not impossible.”

After that, I made countless trips to play for him three days at a time, about eight hours a day. 

I would return home and to concertizing, and try to process new insights in some order. Sometimes it felt like flying an airplane while rebuilding it. Gradually, I tried to shed as much vanity as I could and ask him about everything, no matter how rudimentary. It was possible because Rados possesses an incredible warmth behind all the sarcasm and gloom. I played for him old pieces, new pieces. 

Our Mozart recording began with a public performance, at the Salzburg Mozarteum in 2016. Two weeks before the concert, we were rehearsing and he spun into a dark black hole and said good-bye. He seemed to have foreclosed the project. I sent him a cajoling email a few days later. As it happened, the concert went so well that he uncustomarily received people backstage; he almost managed to smile. The next day he departed for the train station in good spirits with his wife Rita. Rita later told me that when their train was delayed for five minutes, he said: “See, I told you I hate travelling.”

Some time later, I proposed: Why don’t we record the two Mozart sonatas we performed in Salzburg? Quite aside from the pleasure of making music with him, I wanted Rados’s playing captured in exemplary studio sound, and on an excellent instrument. We wound up rehearsing for four days in Berlin, then recording for three days. He was relentlessly self-critical. I cannot count the number of times he said “It is best that you take me to the airport now.” Only in retrospect is that hilarious. 

JH:

Let’s talk about the two Mozart four-hand sonatas you recorded. We don’t normally think of Mozart as an innovator of musical genres. We think of Haydn doing that, or Liszt or Wagner. But there are two genres of Hausmusik – of domestic music-making – that Mozart revolutionized. Before Mozart, wind serenades were garden-music for the open air. And Mozart’s first wind divertimentos sit incongruously in the concert hall; they were never intended for concentrated listening. Then Mozart shattered that convention with three wind ensembles – two serenades and the Gran Partita – in which the players are not servants but princes, each allotted a substantial and characteristic role. 

And he did the same thing with the piano duet – in particular, with the F major Sonata on your recording. You should not be surprised that I had never envisioned a performance of that piece so big, weighty, and eventful, so crammed with nuance and rubato and interpolated ornamention. Your reading is more distant from the parlor than I had thought possible.

As for the C major Sonata – I would call it the apex of the piano duet as Hausmusik. It’s a big work, but full of intimate repartee. And humor. In fact, your performance of the slow movement is amazingly droll. I can see Rados’s evil glint. 

KG:

The F major Sonata would be a masterpiece in whatever genre. Its scope and complexity are symphonic. Rados, you know, lives outside the world of stylistic fashions – outside the bubble of Classical or Romantic or period-performance. For him, interpretation is based on foundational elements of musical substance – structural and metric stresses, harmonic relationships, motivic declamations. And I agree that the C major Sonata is the apex of Hausmusik for piano duet. 

JH:

Do you want to comment on your interpolated ornaments? 

KG: 

Rados played primo [i.e., the top part] in the F major Sonata, and I played primo in the C major Sonata – so those ornaments in the rondo are my fault. My experiences with jazz and improvisation perhaps played a role there. I spontaneously added them and Rados seemed amenable and amused.

JH: 

Would you say that you found more humor in this piece as a result of playing it alongside Rados?

GK:

For sure. “Entertaining” and “amusing” are words Rados uses very often. They mean something more to him than in today’s somewhat cheapened usage. They register high expectations.

JH:

I find the finale of the C major Sonata sublime in the way certain finales in Schubert are sublime – the finales of his D major and G major Piano Sonatas. The child in paradise. And paradise is infused with folk music, with the vernacular. This isn’t a typical Mozart world, I would say.

KG:

I also find that movement very Schubertian. This kind of Central European village flavor, translated into something so polished – it’s rusticity elevated to heaven. The long, expansive melodic constructions of the F major Sonata occupy another kind of paradise. I can imagine Rados making fun of trying to turn the slow movement of the C major Sonata into something big and operatic. 

Rados once said to me that the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is more “neurotic” and “nervous” than that of the so-called Romantics. The phrases are shorter, more declamatory, or comprise conjoined smaller elements. If you look at the action of older pianos, of “fortepianos,” the key depth is shallower, the mechanism is lighter, more quicksilver.

JH:

I hear a rare degree of give-and-take in your Mozart performances with Rados. Wouldn’t you say that the piano duet, as a genre, requires a greater degree of mutual intimacy than, say, a violin sonata or cello sonata or piano trio? Look at the famous trio of Pablo Casals, Jacques Thibaud, and Alfred Cortot – completely different musical personalities. You can’t do something like that with a piano duet.

KG:

Yes, it’s a unique kind of chamber music. Your own instrument is being played by your partner. Even two-piano music is less unforgiving and merciless in this respect. Even the smallest differences in timing and attack are glaring. And the piano duet demands a togetherness of attitude. It very seldom works. It’s a most intimate communion.

Parts of this essay are adapted from my 1990 book “The Ivory Trade.”

A Soldier’s Tale for Today — Premiered

In PostClassical Ensemble’s new version of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, a “cautionary fable” for today, the Soldier weds the Princess – and the narrator continues:

But where’s the fiddle – which won the bride?

It was not to be found inside

And the Devil, where is he?

Awaiting the Soldier – naturally.

With the instrument in hand,

He played, his victim to command.

The Soldier came, dropping his head

Not resisting, hypnotically led.

A dusty road he encountered anew

To the Princess, he did not wave adieu.

The moral of this little tale?

Cherish your fiddle – it’s not for sale.

In other words: SAVE THE ARTS. Our new Soldier’s Tale (for which I wrote a new rhymed libretto) is timely in other ways. As I put it in a program note: “It’s a Covid-period entertainment: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive.” It’s also greatly abridged and simplified. In a facebook review, Philip Kennicott wrote that Soldier’s Tale “usually feels too long, or too short, sprawling or disjointed, depending on the cuts. But on Sunday it was just right.”

Another thing that seemed right last weekend at the Stone Hill Theatrical Foundation‘s terrific outdoor auditorium near Flint Hill, Va., was coupling Stravinsky with Daniel Schnyder’s Berlin Suite 1920 – adapted by the composer for the same set of seven players, plus Schnyder’s own soprano saxophone. Kennicott: “Schnyder’s suite could be a godsend for groups that program the Stravinsky, and wonder how to flesh out the rest of a program.”

Schnyder – a frequent PCE guest, alongside the phenomenal bass trombonist David Taylor, who also took part – is a master of pastiche: he inhabits multiple musical worlds with uniform facility. Of his Berlin suite, he writes: “Reflecting on a specific past moment, my suite resembles a novel, painting, or movie set in another time. For these other artforms this is totally normal. But for music the idea of depicting a past time in the now has only been practiced with remote Baroque or Classical periods. To my knowledge, this may be the first 21st century composition to look back 100 years to the early 20th century. It is a sound picture or aesthetic audiograph of a time not so remote.”

Schnyder’s suite was also embellished with some narration of my own, read – as was the Stravinsky – by a distinguished stage actor: Ed Gero. It begins:

Berlin! 

Between two world wars, the city of Threepenny Opera and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 

of Bertolt Brecht’s grating lyrics and disheveled voice

of Marlene Dietrich in top hat and trousers, 

a city of broad boulevards and massive stone facades, 

of street fighting between Communists and Nazis, 

of topless revues and streetwalkers for every taste,

of privation so severe and inflation so rampant that Artur Schnabel could be paid for playing the piano with a suitcase of bills 

– and could spend half of them on a couple of sausages on the way home.

Stefan Zweig called it “The Babylon of the world.”

Here’s how movement one of the Berlin Suite looked and sounded, with PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez:

A Soldier’s Tale for Today

In the wake of World War I, Igor Stravinsky was living in Switzerland, cut off from his family estate in Russia. He was receiving no royalties from his publisher in Berlin. Stage performances of his music by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe were very infrequent. His concert works were virtually dormant. With the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz, he conceived a small, portable entertainment, requiring neither a large theater nor a large orchestra, in fact suitable for outdoor performance. They imagined a small touring company of players – as an aspiration that proved impractical. But the work itself has vigorously survived.

The pertinence of A Soldier’s Tale today is self-evident. It is a Covid diversion: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive. For its return to live music with a live (outdoor) audience, PostClassical Ensemble will premiere a new version of A Soldier’s Tale. I have written an abridged, rhymed libretto with a new moral: SAVE THE ARTS. Our performances are Saturday and Sunday, May 8 and. 9. The venue — Stone Hill, Va. — is verdant.

Our PostClassical Ensemble program marries  A Soldier’s Tale with Daniel Schnyder’s Berlin Suite 1920, in which the spirit of the Weill/Brecht Dreigroschenoper — a work kindred to the Stravinsky — is omnipresent. Schnyder and the bass trombonist David Taylor, who also join us, are frequent PCE guests. Both are singular postclassical artists who straddle multiple musical worlds. We’re also joined by the distinguished stage actor Edward Gero, who has previously played Dmitri Shostakovich and Senator Joseph McCarthy for PCE productions.

A Gripping New Version of The Rite of Spring

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring might at first glance seem an unlikely candidate for keyboard transcription. It calls for a huge orchestra, colorfully deployed. But the percussive ferocity of the writing, its sheer physicality, is an irresistible lure for pianists. 

Stravinsky himself left a piano-duet version. It’s actually the first version, part of the compositional process and never intended as a concert work. But a concert work it has become, typically played on two pianos. Solo piano versions have also been created. At PostClassical Ensemble’s “Interpreting Stravinsky” festival of 2011, we heard the four-hand version (on two pianos), and also a version of the closing Danse sacrale in a version for four pianos and percussion. We also heard the Danse sacrale played by Rex Lawson on a pianola – the complex player-piano that fascinated Stravinsky, and for which he created versions of The Rite of Spring and other symphonic scores, in addition to an Etude (1917) specifically conceived for pianola.

Over the past year – during Covid – the pianist Alexander Korsantia has created yet another Rite of Spring. He has equipped his piano with two additional pedals for the left foot. One activates a bass drum, the other a combination of drum and tambourine. As Korsantia is a pianist of extraordinary attainments, the result is riveting, original, unforgettable.

You can see Korsantia perform his version of The Rite of Spring at the top of this blog. You can hear him talk about it by accessing the latest PostClassical webcast – our singular series of two-hour shows on the WWFM Classical Network. 

The larger topic of this webcast, “The Russian Stravinsky,” is how to interpret the music of a composer who insisted his music not be interpreted. Korsantia is a product of what I would call a “Russian school” of Stravinsky interpretation that erupted in the 1960s, when the neo-classical Stravinsky first became widely known to Soviet pianists and conductors. They seemingly resisted Stravinsky’s strictures against interpretation, or his Paris polemics that music meant nothing beyond itself. 

If you listen to Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto performed by Alexander Toradze and Valery Gergiev, you aren’t hearing anything like performances of this piece, composed in Paris in 1923-24, once purveyed by the composer. It’s weightier, slower, and in the central Largo more unmistakably religious. It sounds “Russian.”

Korsantia is a product of Toradze’s amazing Toradze Piano Studio in South Bend, Indiana. When he performs Stravinsky’s Tango (also on our PostClassical webcast), he interpolates the four-note motto of Beethoven’s Fifth.

What did Stravinsky himself sound like? Our webcast samples his 1938 recording, with his son Soulima, of Mozart’s C minor Fugue for two pianos. It is an essential point of reference. I would call this the most insolently impersonal Mozart performance ever recorded. It is nothing if not an act of interpretation.

You can also sample, on our webcast, Rex Lawson’s pianola performance of the Dance sacrale – again from PCE’s Stravinsky festival. And we hear Stravinsky performing his Piano Sonata on a Duo-art piano roll. PCE Music Director Angel Gil-Ordonez, encountering this performance for the first time, found it “less musical than a pianola” – and that memorable response, too, is part of our webcast.  

George Vatchnadze, another Toradze Studio product, next performs Stravinsky’s Sonata – using an edition prepared by Soulima after his father’s death. In a preface, Soulima advises interpreters of this work to ignore his father’s strictures against interpretation – and George does, thoroughly.

Finally, we hear Angel conducting PostClassical Ensemble in a performance of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in which the slow movement is much slower than Stravinsky prescribed. The result is memorably droll. The entire reading exudes a lyricism at odds with “Stravinsky style.”

I would add that Stravinsky’s own recordings of his music, as conductor, are outstanding – more robust that what we hear from conductors like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen. They project what George Balanchine called the “dance element” in Stravinsky – an earthy physicality to set the body moving. But they aren’t “definitive” — the last word. As Korsantia remarks during the webcast discussion, there comes a time when a parent must relinquish his offspring.

THE RUSSIAN STRAVINSKY “POSTCLASSICAL” WEBCAST – A Listener’s Guide: 

Part One:

5:16: Igor and Soulima Stravinsky perform Mozart’s Fugue in C minor (1938)

18:16: Danse sacrale from The Rite of Spring, performed by Alexander Korsantia (solo piano and drum)

26:23: Stravinsky talks about The Rite of Spring

30:02: Another excerpt from Korsantia’s Rite of Spring

37:12: Stravinsky’s Tango performed by Korsantia

46:10 Giya Kancheli’s Instead of Tango performed by George Vatchnadze

Part Two:

00:00: Stravinsky performed his Piano Sonata

21:32: George Vatchnadze performs Stravinsky’s PIano Sonata

47:44: Angel Gil-Ordonez conducts Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, with PostClassical Ensemble

Savage Beauty

One of the highest achievements in present-day world music is the Chinese-American fusion. It is wondrously explicable. China’s seismic political and cultural upheavals produced an earthquake of creativity. Conservatory-bound composers wound up on the countryside, absorbing folk music styles exploring timbre in ways they had never imagined. And – following Chinese speech, in which tonal inflections impart meaning – Chinese folk tunes subtly manipulate pitch, sliding between notes that are separately voiced by keyed Western instruments. A generation of important Chinese composers, paradoxical beneficiaries of enforced rural relocation, wound up studying in the West. For many, Bela Bartok became a lodestar for his way of retaining the spontaneity and savage beauty of folk elements. And so they discovered a middle ground between Chinese and Western instrumental performance – a musical kaleidoscope sounding “Asian” to American ears for its sighing speech-song and taut percussion patterns, yet equally foreign, in harmonic idiom, to Chinese audiences. 

This new music spawned a new virtuosity of which Min Xiao-fen is a peak exemplar. She is both a demonic artist and a great instrumentalist. Her musical adventures have led in many directions. Her present collaboration with Rez Abbasi – showcased on a new CD titled “White Locus” – is special. His virtuosity is as protean as hers. Born in Karachi, raised in Southern California, he is a keen student of jazz, ethnic, and classical music. The resulting combination of pipa, guqin, ruan, and sanxian – all plucked instruments – with acoustic and electric guitars produces a limitless range of juxtaposition: of similarity and imitation; of dialogue and contradiction. The strumming physicality, the skittish passagework, the delicacy of inflection accessible to both players yields a veritable lexicon of East/West fusion. To this are added the complex melismas, shifting vibratos, and rapidfire ornamentation of Xiao-fen’s vocalism, as rooted in scat as in timeless Chinese tradition. 

Though the new Xiao-fen/Abbasi CD derives from Min Xiao-fen’s original score for the classic Chinese silent film The Goddess (1934), it requires no video component to saturate the senses. Here, for instance, is the first, introductory track, in which Xiao-fen’s haunted vocalism overlays guqin and acoustic guitar. And here is “The Flower Song,” in which Eastern and Western plucked instruments – ruan and guitar – engage in a dialogue so symbiotic that it never registers as a juxtaposition of “East” and “West.” 

I met Min Xiao-fen in 2004 during my tenure as Artistic Advisor to the Pacific Symphony. Subsequently, she’s been a frequent guest with PostClassical Ensemble (the DC-based chamber orchestra I co-founded in 2003 with the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez). She’s played Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis for us. Also, we’ve commissioned and premiered compositions by Zhou Long and Daniel Schnyder featuring  Xiao-fen (the Schnyder being a devilishly difficult pipa concerto).  

The back-story: Min Xiao-fen arrived in the United States in 1992 feeling a “need for something new.” She had grown up in Nanjing, where her father was a pipa master. He taught her his instrument, and also to sing Beijing Opera. The family also knew Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Her sister became a prominent erhu virtuoso, her brother a symphonic conductor. When she graduated from high school in 1977, the Cultural Revolution had not quite subsided – music conservatories remained closed. She successfully auditioned for Nanjing’s leading traditional music ensemble and wound up playing eighty concerts a year, including European tours. Meanwhile, she began singing in Chinese clubs, backed by saxophone, electric guitar, and drums. Her voice proved adaptable to cooler Western styles. Some of her father’s colleagues were not pleased.

A turning point came in New York City when John Zorn invited her to improvise – which she had never attempted. That led to performing Thelonious Monk tunes for Jazz at Lincoln Center. She thought Monk “was actually a monk. “My contact with his music felt physical,” she recalls. Her transformational Monk renditions remain a Min Xiao-fen signature.

The ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman once remarked that “musical borders can be crossed, but the value of crossing them depends on the degree to which you respect them.” Some hybrids are slapdish. The intermingling of styles in “White Locus” is complete and comprehensive. 

(This blog post is adapted from my booklet note for “White Locus.”)

How Do You Play a Flower Pot?

How do you play a flower pot? What makes washtubs sound best? How about coffee cans?

For the answers, check out Lou Harrison’s instructions, in his exquisite hand, for his Concerto for Violin and Percussion, e.g.:

“For the washtubs, drill holes (4) up from center on the sides of inverted galvanized iron tubs & suspend by strong elastic cords.” For the coffee cans, “cork or rubber-ended pen-holders make good beaters . . . & are best for the clock coils as well.”

So far as I am aware, Harrison’s violin concerto is the most memorable, most original by any American. It also creates a visual spectacle ideal for Covid-era streamed performances. And here it is (above), streamed by PostClassical Ensemble and accessible on the web until March 5. The soloist is our concertmaster Netanel Draiblate. The conductor is our Music Director Angel Gil-Ordonez. Our principal percussionist, Bill Richards, contributes a tour of all the musical junk at hand.

Harrison invented the percussion ensemble with John Cage and Henry Cowell. With Cage, he plundered junkyards and import stores in search of new percussion resources. Their implements included old brake drums and a variety of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian instruments. The eminence gris of American percussion, William Kraft, once told me:

“It was totally new to explore Asian percussion and junk percussion, as Cowell, Cage, and Harrison did.  I found Lou’s percussion writing more fascinating than Cowell’s or Cage’s. I think he was the most musical, and the most in tune with sound.  I think the Harrison Concerto for Violin and Percussion is a masterpiece – you don’t find music like that written by Cowell or Cage. The solo part for the violin is a virtuoso part, extremely well written. And all the sounds, whether produced by maracas or flower pots, are so well integrated that you forget that they’re exotic.”

You could say that Harrison’s concerto combines the experimental panache of an amateur with the craft of a professional. The first two movements were composed in 1940, then revised in 1959 when the finale was added. Harrison gratefully acknowledged the influence of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto of 1935: “among the highest musical achievements of the century. . . . It really walloped me.” Berg’s molto espressivo violin writing echoes through Harrison’s score. 

Harrison’s music is an original, precise, and yet elusive product of  far-flung cultural excursions.  He espoused “world music” before there was a name for it.