LAST ONE!

Cowell – Cowell started helping the pianists develop extended techniques. He very niceley let the pianist stand all night, reaching across the entire soundboard of the piano to play things like the Bansheee.  All sorts of extended techniques were developed by him.

John Cage – John cage prepares pianos. mmm. I like the sound of that. I mean…. He puts things in the piano. I mean….he screws them. I mean….

start over.

John Cage is an avant garde composer who studied with Cowell and Schoenberg. His sonatas and interludes are cool, but not on the final. Naxos has Berman playing them. Precussion takes a front seat to melody. It’s pretty sweet. Just ask Bruce before you play any.

George Crumb, however, is super important. All his scores are in his disctinctive handwriting and are almost works of art in themselves. The five piano pieces were published in 1962 and are a good standard for anyone looking to play 20th century music.

AMURICUH

This is the real Amuricuh. None of that fake liberal, tree-hugging Amuricuh you see on the news. We need to fight for the….

Anyways….

Aaron Copland who studied with Boulanger, along with everyone else, wrote a bunch of music for piano that isn’t immediately thought of when we think of the Copland sound. That’s more Rodeo or Appalachian Springs. His Passacaglia and Variaitions and Sonata are way more dissonant. I love the variations, and think that the Semitone, or rather 7th that dominates the pieces is super distinctive and if I could play this piece, I totally would.

Carter is another one of those composers who is super famous. lol. He is still alive (101 and still kicking) and writing some of his best music now. Listen to Ursulla Opens on youtube play it. She rocks it, even though its’ not on our listening for the final

However, Samuel Barber is. Julian knows all about this guy.  🙂 The Sonata is one of the most famous pieces and the fugue at the end is WICKKKKKED hard. But, its also super cool.  The syncopation is pretty cool in the opening. Also, this is 0ne of the few 20th century pieces Horowitz played, and you should listen to it.

Good spelling bee words

Stockhausen and Messiaen. There are letters in those spellings that don’t sound in the names. That’s problematic for us english speakers.

Stockhausen was a big composer for the piano. Inicidentally he is now dead. (2007) He was a working composer. He liked to figure things out, solve problems. The opening pulsing repetitions and the following characters are all super cool. I would really like to play some Stockhausen, but it’s wayyyyy too hard.

Messiaen is a composer who also works through his compositions. The amount of mathematical and calculated writing in his music is really fantastic. The Mode de valuers et d’intensites is really the trademark serialist work of his. However, his other works including the selection from the 20 Jesus Contemplations are not so serial. Instead, they incorpporate serialist techniques, including additive rhythm, to help create a sense of structure. His musical language is unique and very recognizable.

Ginastera

Ginastera has a lot of music that you hear highschoolers play. However, the music is really pretty good. The rhytmic drive and dissonant clusters really help give his music vitality. His first sonata is by far the best, and his Creole dances are pretty sweet.

Russians

Prokofiev and his 6th Sonata, the first of the War Sonatas. It is really really cool, but I think 7 is better. Biting sonorities and Motoric rhythms pervade his music. Also, Julian will tell you that the second concerto is the best, but I think three is my favorite. 2 is the hardest….but 3 is so much more beautiful….to me!

Shostakovich had problems with identity. Not really, but he was denounced and then taken back into the Russian party multiple times. He had to change his music around, and so his voice often times is obscured by political necessity. While it is easy to dinstinguish him, the 24 preludes and fuges are a look back at Bach, (Get it?) and the final one in D minor is probably the best. Nicole played it, I think.

Some of those foreigners…

Poulenc is probably best known for his artsongs, and as Julian said “for the French guy smoking a cigar, all chill.” His suite, Napoli is three movements. A Barcarolle, A Nocturne and an Italian Caprice. The short, short barcarolle is very pretty, and the Nocturne is highly styled after Chopin. The third movement was the best, in my opinion.

Karol Szymaniowski is probably the only other Pole we know other than Chopin. That’s becasue he is a balla. Huge impressionist, his etudes are really a treat and his music is very pianistic, albeit difficult.

Milhaud used French sounds coupled with Jazz influences as well as Spanish rhythms.  The Saudades de Brasil has these Brazilian infulences. Rhythmic drvive along with polytonality are what make these pieces kick.

Hindemith was all involved with the Nazis during WWII even though he left and ended up teaching in the states, I think at Yale. H wrote the Craft of Musical composition in 1937. I don’t really like his music all that much, but listening to Gould play it always makes me happy…in a funny way. The Suite “1922”, is five movements and includes a march a schimmy, a Boston,  A Ragtime, and a not dance a “Nacthstuck”.  If you know what these dances sound like, you can sorta extrapolate them from the suite, but the forms are not all textbook examples. They have some play to them, and the reliance of counterpoint and the harking back to dance suites of the Baroque, highlight Hindemith’s neo-classic style.

Stravinsky

I don’t like ballet.

Stravinsky had his phases and his life changes….primitivism, neoclassicism, serialism. But, he’s a cool guy and if you listen to his interviews, very smart. He loved Bach, incidentally. His sonata for piano is a big work, with the second movement remniscient of Bach/Mozart with the RH melismatic passages and the LH pizz. The clear texture of the third movement is an allusion to Beethoen’s early fugues particularly op. 54, and Bach.

Bartok, then.

Well, since I made so much fun of Bartok for having an easy name…here is his post.

He is a huge composer for the piano. And, if you are looking for a good set of his. The complete music for solo piano is put out in a set by Gyorgy Sandor, his student and former Julliard Teacher. I think the label is Hungaraton, but I’m not sure. Maybe Harmonia Mundi. Anyways, its cheap and good playing. So everyone knows how B cataloged all the folk music and yadda yadda. What many people don’t know is about his “axis of tonality”, the tritone. Besides using all the wholetone, octa, penta and chromatic scales, B loved travel the distance of a tritone and even use that as a basis for his pieces.

The Allegro Barbaro is loud. There is no way to play it but loud. And yet, it’s awesome. Obvious Hungarian scales are heard, and the biting Bartokian sounds are also juxtaposed with his lyrical voice. Tempo Guisto v. Parlando Rubato. These are the names for the styles of folk music found in B’s music.  Highly ornamented melodies help to instill a folk element to the melodic ideas that pervade the piece.

The Improvisations are also pretty cool.  Based on pentatonic collections, the sounds are sparser and more folksy than the AB. However, because they come from later in B’s life , they are harsher in accents and rhytmic focus.

Why do all these people have names that don’t sound like they are spelled?

Seriously. Leos Janacek.  Dohnanyi. Kodaly. Bartok. Well…Bartok is easy.

Janacek was best known for his pieces for piano, of which, In the Mists is pretty famous. He studied the Czeck voices and tried to develop music that notated pitch inflections and speech rhythms in his vocal style. His piano work, From An Overgrown Path  is 10 pieces based on childhood memories. The folk influences are easily heard.

Dohnanyi. He worked at FSU. The end. No but seriously, his Variations on a Nursery Rhyme are awesome. So ironic, and audiences LOVE it. However, his Ruralica Hungarica is the piece we listened to and again the folk influences are evident. To be honest, I did not like this piece all that much.

Ives gripes, and Griffes cries.

See what I did there….I took the other compoer’s name and found a verb that sounded like it and used it with the other other composer.

Its funny.

Ives labeled all the movements of his second sonata, Concord (1908-15) with names of famous American thinkers. Emmerson, Hawthorne, Alcotts and Thoreau. He may be one of my favorite composers ever, and if you haven’t heard the unanswered question or his three improvisations for piano or even Central Park in the Dark….go!!! His songs are most famous, but this sonata is really hard. Originally premiered in 1939 by John Kirkpatrick, listen to Gilbert Kalish’s recording. He rocks. Really.

Griffes wrote his sonata between 1917-1918. It is full of exotic impressionistic sounds, as he was heavily influenced by the French composers Debussy and Ravel. The sonata has dissonant harmonies and very angular melodies but the Romanticism imbued within it is clearly apparent. Nick played this piece last year. Pretty good one.