My official 20th year of blogging began on February 24th, although I failed to post on the 19th Anniversary this year. (I promise I won't forget next year when it's the 20th!) It's been a very busy winter, but a few days off means I'm finally back with new stuff to share.
I was recently asked by a former classmate to make a "Happy Birthday" greeting to our mutual teacher, Irma Vallecillo, who was having a milestone birthday in March. Irma was my primary teacher during my DMA years at the New England Conservatory. She is a wonderful pianist, teacher, and mentor. Inevitably, my mind turned to ways to honor her with a musical birthday greeting, and so I started thinking of music I associated with her. Irma's most prominent career highlights featured her work as a collaborative pianist with the likes of clarinetist Richard Stolzman. She also recorded a lot with the tenor Paul Sperry, including many songs by Charles Ives.
Thinking of her playing Ives reminded me that she began her career as a very talented and ambitious solo pianist* who had recorded the transcendentally difficult Ives Piano Sonata No. 2 ('Concord') in recordings that are available here. I haven't even managed to pretend to fantasize about learning that whole sonata myself, but I have assigned the more manageable third movement ('The Alcotts') to a few students, and I once prepared it informally to perform for a talk on Ives. This music rises to a few moments of wild grandeur, but much of it is very gentle and intimate, suggestive of a pianist quietly improvising in a vaguely hymnlike fashion, with impassioned diversions along the way.
As it happens, last summer was my first ever visit to the Alcott House in Concord, MA, which is about twenty minutes from my home. My college-age daughter and I were looking for something to do while waiting to pick up my son in Concord, and so we ended up on an Orchard House tour, noticing two humble pianos in the modest home. (Actually, quick research tells me the smaller keyboard instrument is a melodeon.) That visit and my visit with this music this week both brought to mind these words from Ives' preface to the sonata, regarding the "Alcotts" movement:
Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves - much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony. [according to this article, it's likely the Alcotts never had a true spinet!]
If Ives was worried about "automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment" in 1920, once can only imagine what he'd think of the current cultural moment. But rather than speculate about how Ives might lecture the kids of today, the most important take-home message is how much Ives allowed his own very creative imagination to guide him as a composer. The Concord Sonata is nothing if not a triumph of imagination over convention, including many passages which can best be described as playing "at the Fifth Symphony [of Beethoven, of course]." That tension between admiring the boldness found in Beethoven's tightly structured edifices and finding freedom in playing at, with, and against those edifices is what makes Ives so Ives.
On Saturday mornings at the school where I coach chamber music on weekends, there's an older gentlemen who's always hanging out in the room where my 8:30am group meets. He always politely excuses himself from the room (which has a very nice piano) when I show up, but when I arrive, he's more or less playing at the piano - just a series of what sound like improvisatory meanderings which are almost more like talking than music. Of course, to be clear, he is playing music - but the sound suggests a stream-of-consciousness more than anything specific like a song or sonata.
'The Alcotts', though written out as a composition, evokes that kind of flow. It has no time signature, and moments seem to float by in the way a mind naturally wanders, including various meditations on Beethoven's famous motif. Much of the music is recognizably in a key, but Ives is happy to try out various sonorities which have nothing to do with the key. They sound less like harmonic dissonances and more like a pianist casually trying out new sounds by brushing the keys or even hitting wrong notes by mistake. While all of this may sound haphazard, the effect is really magical in the way it creates an aura of nostalgia and imaginative freedom.
That's too many words, so here is Irma playing "The Alcotts":
Ives is known for mashing various tunes together in many works, with simple hymns and folk songs often introduced into more complex and dissonant contexts. So, it might seem particularly natural and obvious to insert "Happy Birthday" into Ives, but I was still pleased at how elegantly the birthday tune fits neatly on top. As I think I've mentioned before, the "Happy Birthday" melody is a very interesting melody which I've used many times in theory exercises. It has four matching phrases with almost exactly the same rhythm, with the third phrase featuring a slight variant that propels the music forward. The first phrase leaps a small distance to the tonic and settles a step down on the leading tone (7th scale degree), the next phrase leaps a step higher so it can land on the tonic, the third phrase leaps up dramatically a full octave, and the final phrase is a modified inversion of the first two. These features make it fairly easy to recognize even when a lot of other stuff is going on!
The most satisfying moment in this little mashup is how the second phrase ending (from scale degree 2 to 1) is mirrored in the Ives in the movement from C to B-flat. Except this cadence is the moment where the imaginative world of 'The Alcotts' expands with a surprise A-flat major chord in the left hand against the tonic B-flat. I love how Ives opens up so many new possibilities with that sonority, so having the first half of "Happy Birthday" end there is unsettling in the best way. The second half of the mashup leans into the quiet, shimmering dissonance. The tune is still in B-flat, while Ives' left hand stays in A-flat (he even uses separate key signatures for the two hands), and we end with two extraterrestrial pianissimo harmonies which might almost be someone gently cleaning the upper keys with a cloth.
On the day of Irma's birthday, I'd made a recording on a more humble piano, but I managed to get a better recording today, so here we have a birthday greeting from the Alcotts by way of Charles Ives...and me. I also worked on a score which incorporates the birthday tune into Ives' two piano staves, but I think it's cleaner as shown here. I did make a few little changes to what Ives wrote to accommodate, and there are a few little imperfections in the playing...but I'm sure Beth Alcott had a finger slip here and there as well.
...and, of course, this now goes into my ever-growing "Happy Birthday" playlist as #13.
* I remember her telling me that another former teacher of mine, Thomas Schumacher, accompanied her when she was learning the fiendish Prokofiev second concerto, now a competition staple but not so often played then.
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