Chopin and Wildflowers

Most beginner pianists dream of playing Chopin some day. For me, after hacking through the famed Fantasie-Impromptu as a child, my first serious attempt was with the Etude op. 10, no. 5, “Black Key.” I was about 14, certainly no prodigy. I vividly recall the overwhelming sense of despair at the face of the seemingly insurmountable difficulty, all in stark contrast to the jovial character of the piece. I knew I would never be able to play it at the intended tempo. During the many weeks of learning the etude slowly, however, I started to understand what was so special about Chopin. There was much more to Chopin than virtuosity and romantic tenderness.

This charming video was found on youtube. Horowitz playing for his wife Wanda presumably in their living room. Also check out this strange but refreshing performance by Ignaz Friedman.

When I see those tiny wild flowers, perfectly shaped down to the minutest detail in nature’s infinite resolution, I think of Chopin. Both nature and Chopin are infinitely fine. You can play Chopin—any piece!—very slowly and would find that not a single note is out of place. Every figuration is meticulously crafted, perfunctory repeats are rare, and every harmony moves in flawless contrapuntal precision to the next. There is very little filler, even during all those tempestuous presto runs and arpeggios.

James Petts - Blue flower (detail)

Going back to the etude, in these unassuming opening bars, we find a neighbor embellishment (the classic I-IV6-4-I) in the left hand. The right hand subtly parallels this moving line. The music blossoms from the high range to the middle. The way Chopin saves the bass hit until bar 2 (not an obvious decision if you think about it) subtly undermines the squareness of the four-bar phrasing. The next two bars are in V, but with lots of internal harmonic motions. Instead of the more conventional I6-4 or V/V, Chopin employs a ii (a flavor of minor v/V or a V9 chord). The right hand again conceals a line moving in counterpoint to the left hand. The first phrase is an example of Chopin “spin[ning] gold out of the most obvious, clichéd chords,” to borrow Jeremy Denk’s words. The next phrase begins in a similar manner. In bar 7, however, the ii chord (Ab minor)—just a little embellishment previously—comes into a full bloom, unexpectedly moving to a chromatic third (Bb major) before nonchalantly dropping back to the original key. Slightly unconventional motions like this give the harmony a fresh twist. And every little note participates in this scheme. All of this flies by in just about 8 seconds.

You can listen to Chopin like a field of wildflowers. But when you listen to it like a single wildflower, you find tiny beauties that live in detail.

Playing Babbitt by Ear: How I Composed More Semi-Simple Variations, Intermezzo, and Fugue on a Theme by Milton Babbitt for Piano Four-Hands

Published on Contemporary Music Review in January, 2022.

Abstract:

Milton Babbitt’s Semi-Simple Variations (1956) is—as are many of Babbitt’s works—a model of structural unity. A careful analysis reveals its horizontal and vertical symmetry, even distribution of pitch classes, and corroboration between disparate musical parameters. The discoveries from analysis are often lost on the act of listening, however. The resultant music sounds wacky, unpredictable, and fascinatingly idiosyncratic. In 2016, for Princeton University’s Milton Babbitt Centenary Celebration, I composed More Semi-Simple Variations, Intermezzo, and Fugue on a Theme by Milton Babbitt for piano four-hands as a response to the brilliant surface of Babbitt’s music. In this essay, I analyze Babbitt’s theme and first variation, then I discuss how my piece adopts Babbitt’s melodic snippets and hexachords within a seemingly incompatible stylistic domain.

Read full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07494467.2021.1989224

An Ode to the Piano

There is a crisis surrounding the piano. The instrument is, and will continue to be, a central fixture of the contemporary ensembles that give life to new music. And yet for many living composers, pianists and non-pianists alike, writing a solo piano work is a daunting task. The richness of the solo piano repertoire—along with two centuries’ worth of performance practice and cultural significance—have set the genre apart as a forbidding proving ground, wherein the composer temporarily exits the conversation with his or her peers to engage with the giants of the instrument: Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy. Moreover, some of the most exciting developments in the musical languages of recent decades have rendered the piano, for lack of a better term, anachronistic. The shifting timbres and kaleidoscopic microtones that today’s composers have inherited from electronic and spectral music are simply impossible to produce on an instrument so thoroughly designed for a past century of melodies, counterpoint, and chords. 

The piano thus presents a paradox, an inherent confusion: it is indisputably the instrument of modern concert music, the inheritor of the classical tradition, but it is also stuck in the past, an impediment to progress. At the very least, there is no clear sense of what constitutes, or ought to constitute, a twenty-first century piano idiom. 

One way to overcome the weight of the piano’s history and the limitations of its physical design is to “reinvent” the instrument, to dissociate the piano from its inherited cultural context and reimagine it anew. Since the mid-twentieth century, composers have called for performers to play inside the piano, to prepare the strings with screws and bolts, to bow the piano, to retune to unfamiliar temperaments, to augment the piano with electronics, to combine two, three, four, or hundreds of pianos. Rebecca Saunders’s crimson and Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade use the ingenious, detailed control of pedaling and sustain to enable sonorities that are quite unfamiliar without altering the physical instrument or the mode of playing. Dan Trueman’s groundbreaking work with bitKlavier allows for the alteration of the piano’s tuning and attack envelopes, creating an exhilarating sense of freedom as the digital piano escapes from the stifling constraints of its acoustical counterpart.  

An impossible hairpin, from Beethoven’s op. 81a, “

Another way to overcome the weight of the piano’s history and the limitations of its physical design is to simply deal with them head-on. The piano embodies the full complexity of Western classical literature and performance practice. One could imagine the “traditional” pianistic tropes—tangles of overt polyphony, performer-centric interpretive flexibility, subtly voiced harmonies, dangerous speed (as in Chopin’s exhilarating prelude op. 28, no. 16)—not as a heavy burden, but as a deep pool of resources. Even the instrument’s physical limitations can partly be overcome, if not through an actual alteration of the instrument, through the imagination. For many pianist-composers, the piano has always been something more than a piano. Under the fingers of Mozart and Beethoven, for example, the piano is a horizonless environment, a hybrid space in which a complex meta-music flourishes. In his sonata K. 576, Mozart is clearly thinking not just of the piano, but of the many shades of orchestral timbre: a powerful unison string section is followed by a soft, light, solitary flute. Beethoven’s sudden shifts from pianissimo to fortissimo—as in the famous op. 57 “Appassionata” sonata, for example—represent not just a change in instrumental dynamics, but a movement from the most intimate whisper to the most extraordinary fervor, a dramatic expansion in scale from the palace chamber to the orchestra hall. In his op. 81a sonata, “Les Adieux,” Beethoven calls for dynamic inflections that are, quite simply, impossible to play. These gestures—crescendos on a decaying note, swells on a sustained chord—infuse the music with a spirit of metaphor, of impossible overreach: this is music that can be only partially executed on the piano, with the rest coming to life, unsounded, in the composer’s and pianist’s heads. 

I wish to cultivate a loving, holistic view of this massively complex instrument. There is much to explore even while staying strictly within the limits of the traditional instrument (the eighty-eight identical keys that can only be played loudly or softly, not “more beautifully or less beautifully,” as Charles Rosen observes in Piano Notes). Through detailed control of voicing, chord spacing, pedaling, and resonance, one can find fresh sonorities in this familiar instrument. There is no need to deny the piano its memories. From its invention (imagine the joy of Bartolomeo Cristofori when the first hammer bounced back from the string!), through the vast stretches of repertoire and performance practice it accumulated over centuries, to its amalgamation with various genres and mechanical transformations, the piano’s journey is storied and fascinating. From this one composer-pianist’s point of view, the piano is starting to look much less like a symbol of obsolescence, and much more like an instrument with limitless potential.