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Lori Sims – May 5, 2014
Three-Page Sonata
Charles Ives
1874–1954
Before completing his two large piano sonatas, Ives left behind numerous experimental piano
fragments, including the Three-Page Sonata of 1905 (The title alludes to the three pages of
the original manuscript.) The little piece reveals in miniature many Ivesian qualities that
were to characterize his mature work: thick tone clusters, polyrhythms, musical quotations
and allusions, and, not least, musical humor. The work was not published until 1949, by
which time Ives was disenchanted with some of his early creations and treated them as a
joke. Sometime, probably in the early 1940, he added a note to the manuscript: “Made
mostly as a joke to knock the mollycoddles out of their boxes & to kick out their softy ears.”
The Sonata, in three short segments, opens with the BACH theme (B-flat is B and B is H in
German notation), a perfect theme for a young chromatically inclined composer. Written for
all intents and purposes without bar lines, the short movement takes the concept of
counterpoint to its tonal and rhythmical extremes. The middle segment is a haunting adagio
written on three staffs; single notes in the bass and treble are rhythmically syncopated against
chords in the middle voice. Ives inserts a quasi-quote of the Westminster chimes.
The final segment is a march that alternates with a little ragtime theme. After three pages of
unresolved dissonance, Ives concludes with a C major chord.
Excursions, Op. 20
Samuel Barber
1910-1981
As one of America’s foremost composers, Samuel Barber always gracefully avoided being
drawn into the doctrinaire world of twentieth-century compositional “isms,” particularly
serialism. Instead, all of his works, from music for solo piano to opera, comprise a lush
lyricism, occasionally freely atonal, but more often flagrantly and unfashionably tonal.
Barber was not composing for the academy, but rather, for audiences, musicians and critics
who embraced his more conservative idiom.
“These are Excursions in small classical forms into regional American Idioms. Their
rhythmic characteristics, as well as their source in folk material and their scoring,
reminiscent of local instruments, are easily recognized.” Composed between 1942 and 1944,
they began as a response to a request by pianist Jeanne Behrend for a “longish piece” for
piano, something that would be appropriate to perform on one of her programs of American
music. Barber completed Excursion I in June 1942, the other three in May and September
1944.
The title, “Excursion,” is particularly apt for these four pieces, which venture ever farther
from a single musical idea.
Excursion I is a boogie-woogie toccata.
Excursion II is a blues fantasy on the opening of Debussy’s prelude “Claire de lune.”
Excursion III – a set of variations – is based on the folk-tune “The Streets of Laredo.” Barber
frequently shifts the style of the variations between the two brief strains of the melody.
Excursion IV is an “exuberant and joyous barn dance” with echoes of a fiddle and accordion.
Many critics panned the Excursions, considering them not weighty enough for a serious
composer. Composer and New York critic Virgil Thomson commented: “They do not travel
much further in subject matter than a New York night club.”
Fantasy (Variations), Op. 25
Ben Weber
1916-1979
A polymath, whose interests ranged from philosophy and science to gourmet cooking,
American composer William Jennings Bryan “Ben” Weber was born in St. Louis and studied
medicine before switching to music, majoring in voice and piano. He was essentially selftaught in composition. He was an outstanding music copyist, and supported himself by
serving as secretary to composer Virgil Thomson and pianist Artur Schnabel among others.
Weber was an unabashed Serialist, the first American composer to apply the twelve-tone
system of Arnold Schoenberg. Weber, however, saw serialism as a pathway to exploring new
and unexpected sonorities. He described working with a row like “walking into a forest: at
first, everything is a blur but as you enter and walk on, you gradually discover what is most
beautiful and most interesting.” Weber was by no means committed to the “mathematical”
aspects of the style. In an essay for American Composers Alliance, Roger Tréfousse, one of
Weber’s students, wrote: “He used twelve-tone rows in very much the same way that John
Cage used chance operations; to move out of conscious thought and to create a music he
hadn’t heard before. His music is often lush and romantic, even tonal, resembling that of
Alban Berg more than the more austere Schoenberg. His works were popular among the
country’s music intelligentsia of the mid-twentieth century but faded into obscurity after the
“demise” of the serialist style.
Afflicted with poor health in his later years, he led a reclusive life, avoiding self-promotion
and taking only a few private composition students. Many of his compositions were gifts to
friends, including the Fantasy, composed in 1946 for pianist William Masselos. Weber
dictated an autobiographical essay, How I Committed Suicide in Sixty-One Years, shortly
before his death.
The Fantasy consists of a theme and three variations, a passacaglia and a final free fantasy.
Both theme-and-variation and passacaglia forms are predicated on repetition, a device that
renders the permutations of the tone row audible to listeners. This is particularly true in the
passacaglia because Weber accentuates the regularity of the eight-measure pattern of the
ground.
Piano Sonata
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
1884-1920
American composer, pianist and teacher Charles Tomlinson Griffes was one of the most
promising American composers of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, he did not live
to fulfill his potential, dying after only a dozen or so years of creativity. His musical studies
in Germany instilled in him a thorough command of German late Romanticism, but after his
return to the United States in 1907, he became influenced by the impressionism of Debussy
and the oriental harmonies of Japan, introduced to him by a singer who had returned from
Japan with copies of Japanese melodies. Because Griffes had to support his widowed mother
and family, he took a post as music instructor at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY,
where he felt isolated, unappreciated and unhappy as a schoolmaster. He hoped it would
prove a temporary situation, but it lasted until his untimely death in the great Influenza
pandemic.
Known mostly for his delicate miniatures, Griffes embarked with the Piano Sonata on a new
path, inspired by composers in the forefront of expanding the limits of tonal harmony: Liszt,
Skryabin, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The last three had developed new scales (different
combinations of half, whole and augmented intervals) on which their harmony was
constructed: Skryabin devised several different modes; Schoenberg worked with the entire
chromatic scale – as did Liszt in some of his late works; and many of Stravinsky’s works are
based on the traditional Russian octatonic scale. Composed in 1917-19, Griffes’ Piano
Sonata is based on an original scale consisting of two tetrachords (four-note groups) a perfect
fifth apart (B♭, C♯, D, E♭, F G♯, A, B♭). It is written in one movement, which can be
analyzed as a large sonata form; but it contains three sections, each with its own melodic
material, including a smaller sonata form, an ABA slow section (development) and a rondo
(recapitulation). It is a powerful, assertive and harmonically complex work, yet it is oddly
accessible to the first-time listener.
The main theme, which comprises all the notes of Griffes’s scale, is clearly and forcefully
repeated several times just after the introductory measures of the piece so that the listener can
firmly establish it in the ear. A second lyrical theme presents the classic sonata form contrast
and is also clearly discernable. The second section introduces a new, almost Japanesesounding theme followed by a stormy middle part. The third section is not an exact repeat of
the main theme but is recognizable, again, especially because Griffes is kind enough to
generate enough repeated phrases. The thematic transformation within a large three-part
structure recalls Liszt’s B minor Piano Sonata.
From a pianistic point of view, the Piano Sonata owes much to Liszt. Griffes uses the full
extent of the keyboard, in one long passage, playing the bass part with the right hand and the
treble with the left. Many people attribute its violent energy to the emotional effect of the
Great War, of which Griffes was indirectly a casualty.
Only 36 when he died, Griffes was in the process of devising his own tonal language. Had he
lived, the Piano Sonata would have occupied a different place in the composer’s oeuvre, not
as an end point or summation. As it is, musical scholars, while recognizing Griffes’s
importance, differ considerably in their understanding and analysis of the Piano Sonata.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
[email protected]
www.wordprosmusic.com