Contemporary Classics August 10, 2021 Inspirational Piano

In a recent conversation with composer Brendon Randall-Myers about his new composition “A Kind of Mirror” written for pianist Miki Sawada, we talked about what were his inspirations for this piece.  And in this conversation he mentioned several piano pieces from the past.   And my first thought was I love these pieces and these pieces would make a great show. But the way early next month you will hear my show with Brendon Randall-Myers pianist Miki Sawada  where we will be playing the music from their new release “A Kind of Mirror” just after the album is released.

We will begin with Michael Gordon’s “Sonatra”  In his original program notes for Sonatra, composer Michael Gordon writes that he conceived of the piece for solo piano as a sideways tribute to Frank Sinatra, but with the sonata form as an equal and opposite force that tugs at the music from within.   Michael Gordon noted  “When I started writing Sonatra, I decided that since I would probably only ever write one piano piece in my entire life, I wanted to use all the keys on the piano, and use them often. I constructed long chains or links of major and minor thirds that ceaselessly wind their way up and down the piano. Eventually they start cascading and intersperse with glissandos half the length of the keyboard, sounding to me like the performer has at least four hands.”    

But here is the twist – it is composed both in equal temperament and just intonation. Equal temperament is a tuning system designed for keyboard instrument which now dominates Western music, which gives an equal perceived step size from pitch to pitch by dividing an octave into equal steps. Just intonation or pure intonation tunes all musical intervals as whole number ratios (such as 3:2 or 4:3) of frequencies.  Just intonation is the temperament used in most music around the globe and is the natural temperament for singing.   These two forms of the piece produces two works of very different personalities and auras.

Pianist Vicki Chow says “It’s by far the most challenging piece of music I’ve worked on.   When I first looked at the score, I knew immediately that I’ll live with it for the rest of my life. Every few months, I slowly worked up each section, like chipping away at a slab of marble. I had to pace myself, push myself, and be sharp at every twist and turn.”  She continued    “Performing it with just intonation adds another hurdle to overcome, because you can easily feel as though the arpeggios spiraling up and down the length of the keyboard are wrong.”

Georgy Ligeti’s Etudes for piano. Ligeti composed a cycle of 18 études for solo piano between 1985 and 2001.  They are considered one of the major creative achievements of his last decades, and one of the most significant sets of piano studies of the 20th century, combining virtuoso technical problems with expressive content, following in the line of the études of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy, and Alexander Scriabin but addressing new technical ideas as a compendium of the concepts Ligeti had worked out in his other works since the 1950s. Pianist Jeremy Denk wrote that they "are a crowning achievement of his career and of the piano literature; though still new, they are already classics."  

Book 2:  L'escalier du diable (The Devil's Staircase).  A hard-driving toccata that moves polymetrically up and down the keyboard featuring an ascending chromatic scale motif and then turns into an impression of bells ringing in different registers and times.  

Book 3:  White on White.   A white-key study except for the very end, beginning with a serene canon and with a whirling fast middle section.

Book 3:  Pour Irina. Another étude with a gentle beginning, becoming more and more frenetic due to the introduction of progressively shorter note-values and additional pitches.

Book 3:  À bout de souffle (Out of Breath). A manic two-part canon that ends abruptly with slow pianissimo chords.

Book 3:  Canon.  A short canon between the hands, played once vivace and then a second time presto impossibile, with a slow quiet chordal canon to finish with.

There are 8  memory pieces:

cage (in memory of john cage) 05:53

spartan arcs (in memory of yvar mikhashoff) 03:10

wed (in memory of kate ericson) 04:46

grind (in memory of jacob druckman) 01:50

diet coke (in memory of bette snapp) 01:41

cello (in memory of anna cholakian) 04:53

wiggle (in memory of frank wigglesworth) 04:01

beach (in memory of david huntley) 08:46

Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de le Nuit.  This work is in 3 movements each based upon a poem by Aloysius Bertrand from the collection Gaspard de le Nuit:

Ondine - which is based on the poem "Ondine", a dreamlike tale of the water nymph Undine singing to seduce the observer into visiting her kingdom deep at the bottom of a lake.  There are five main melodies. The opening melody is a song similar in form and subject to the main theme in Sirènes from Claude Debussy's Nocturnes. This is interrupted by the second theme before opening up a longer third melodic passage formed from the latter part of theme 1. Then a short simple melody yeilds to the final distinct theme which is a menacing short rising figure.

Le Gibet is based on the poem of the same name and the movement presents the observer with a view of the desert, where the lone corpse of a hanged man on a gibbet stands out against the horizon, reddened by the setting sun. Meanwhile, a bell tolls from inside the walls of a far-off city, creating the deathly atmosphere that surrounds the observer.

Scarbo is based on the poem "Scarbo" and this movement depicts the nighttime mischief of a small fiend or goblin, making pirouettes, flitting in and out of the darkness, disappearing and suddenly reappearing. Its uneven flight, hitting and scratching against the walls, casting a growing shadow in the moonlight, creates a nightmarish scene for the observer lying in his bed. With its repeated notes and two terrifying climaxes, this is the high point in technical difficulty of all the three movements.