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Dear Dmitri,

First, I want to say I am an avid fan of your music, finding your voice one that most uniquely captures the broadest range of human emotion, from the depths of despair, to adoration, to unembarrassed silliness. However, on a walk today, I was listening once again to your 15th symphony, and felt obliged to write, hopefully not bothering you too much during your long sleep, to ask about that first movement. I know that you purportedly told someone that you didn’t know yourself why you included all of the musical quotations in this work, but felt nonetheless obliged to include them – but perhaps since then, with so much time available for introspection, you may have discovered your internal motivation.

The 1st movement simply seems so out of place with the rest of the symphony. At the start, as always, I enjoyed following your train of musical thought, beginning with the long flute solo, a melody so characteristically yours. But, then upon the first appearance of the frantically paced repetitions of the theme from William Tell Overture, I could only wonder, what on earth were you thinking? Why this? As the movement concludes and the 2nd movement begins, with its haunting cello solo, you returned to what you, and only you, manage to express in music, the sounds heard by someone whose eyes have seen terrors. The ultimate grief. Yet, throughout, my thoughts kept returning to the 1st movement, wondering what the connection is, as it seems not to remotely belong to the same world as the music that follows it. In your other works, despite the extreme contrasts, the whole somehow always seems connected, to all come together as a unified statement – but with this 15th symphony, that 1st movement stands apart from the rest, as if to say, I don’t know them, and I have nothing to do with the rest of that humanity who is crying out. Your later quotations from Wagner, while attention grabbing, didn’t seem quite so out of place, as the quotation brought to mind the entire mythos that he created and absorbed that into your own world.

Anyway, I’ll await your reply. Perhaps it will come to me in a dream one of these nights, as the sounds and sentiments expressed by your music visit me in my sleep.

With best regards,

Stanley

Most Saturday afternoons, I read through music for piano four hands with my good friend Karen Littlefield. As time goes by, I search further and further afield, always on a search for new music. My go to source, as always, is the International Music Library (IMSLP). Yesterday, I downloaded a sonata for four hands by the French composer George Onslow. I’ve heard several of his pieces previously, so seeing he had a four hands piece, it was worth a try. While I wouldn’t call the music profound, it was nevertheless a pleasure to play – and certainly worthy of being heard. I did find one video on YouTube of a performance. As Karen likes to tell me, after we play these, I should write a blog entitled “letters to dead composers” and share with them our thoughts. I can say that even with major known composers, somewhere in the piece, we will find an occasional section that causes us to pause and say “huh, whatever was he thinking when he wrote these bars?” Happy to say, such a letter to George Onslow, would not include any similar comment. All around, good job, George!

Onslow (1784-1853) did not break any new ground, at least so far as I can tell from the several pieces I’ve heard, which was likely the reason for the decline in his reputation over time. However, he certainly was a composer who knew what he was about, and so having played through this one work, I look forward to acquainting myself with more of his work. From this piece, he has a sure sense of form and counterpoint, and writes some striking melodies and harmonic shifts, although all within a classical/romantic framework.

Whenever I read criticism of Bruckner’s symphonies, usually something about their length and lack of structure, I am always surprised. To the contrary, from the very first time I heard these works, I was right there, going along for the ride, following his every turn of musical thought. I am far from being a scholar of Bruckner, but have tried without success to discover if he was familiar with Schubert’s last piano sonatas or inspired by them. When listening to any of his symphonies, the final Schubert sonatas always come to mind, as I hear the Bruckner works as taking the next step in a progression that Schubert first contemplated in these final works. Unlike Beethoven, who in his later works experimented with formal structures in a variety of ways, Schubert did not. Instead, he consistently followed classical structures (sonata form, scherzo/trio, rondo) but stretched them out to greater lengths. His pattern of a first movement in sonata form, a second extended song form in slow tempo, a scherzo/trio and a final rondo, can be heard emulated in the Bruckner symphonies. To my mind, they closely follow the model of the Schubert late sonatas, only Bruckner goes well beyond Schubert, taking the concept to new extraordinary lengths.

In doing so, Bruckner achieves, at least to my ears, a music that is “oceanic” in feeling. As his music moves from theme to theme, shifting dramatically from tidal waves of sound to gentle landler, slowly pacing itself, letting the music gradually unfold over long periods of time, for me, more so than any other music I can think of, it opens the door to an unlimited interior expanse. Bruckner was a religious man, but when I hear his music, if he was praying to a God with it, that God was Poseidon. The music speaks of the ocean in all of its moods and in all of its vast expanse.

Yesterday, I completed the score to “Le Lay de Plour,” setting the poem by that name by Guillaume Machaut for contralto, flute, violin, cello and piano. There is a modern day story behind this piece, starting with a chance hearing on YouTube of contralto Laure SLABIAK singing a Bach aria, reaching out to her via Facebook, and then via a string of emails, deciding on the scoring and the texts. I wanted to write something for her in French, and my initial thought was to set poems by Verlaine, adding to the single poem of his, Chanson d’automne, that I had previously set for soprano and violin, included on my latest CD.

But then, after having ordered several volumes of Verlaine’s poetry, I couldn’t find any poems of his that I liked as much or better than Chanson d’automne. The body of his work, to my mind, reflected the outpourings of an anguished, angry and unsettled man. Nothing I wanted to set to music. After searching through numerous poems by French poets over the last century and coming up flat, I turned to the past, and started, for the first time, to examine the poems of Guillaume Machaut. Always a favorite composer, I had never hitherto, thought about his work as a poet or paid the least attention to his words in the music I listened to. Having found the text and his own melodies for “Le Lay de Plour” on-line, I at last found poems that sang to me. Reading on-line, I learned that the lay is a highly complicated poetic form, composed of twelve stanzas of varying length and meter, with no pattern of rhyme repeated from one stanza to the next. That complexity made it all the more interesting as the basis for a musical work, as the variation in lines and rhyme schemes opened up all kinds of possibilities for musical expression, meters, tempos and combinations of instruments.

The score and parts went out yesterday, crossing the ocean in an instant. Now, to hear it…