TWENTIETHI-CENTURY PIANO MUSICSCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 Www.scarecrowpress.com PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright © 2004 by David Burge First Scarecrow Press paperback edition 2004 Originally published in 1990 by Schirmer Books, A Division of Macmillan, Inc. ISBN 0-02-870321-9 (cloth) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burge, David, 1930— “Twentieth-century piano music / David Burge— Ist Seareerow Press paperback ed. p.m. Includes bibliographical references and index. Discography: p. ISBN 0-8108-4966-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) : 1. Piano music—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. ML707.B87 2004 786.2'09'04—de22 004006478 ‘e an irements of Se The paper used in this publication meets the minimum a American National Standard for Information pans Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 Manufactured in the United States of America.Dedicated with affection and fond remembrances to my many former students. And with much love and thankfulness, to my wife, Liliane.Contents — oop ene Preface Part 1 From 1900 to the End of World War I . Claude Debussy . Arnold Schoenberg Charles Ives Maurice Ravel . Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff Other Composers Part 2 Between the Two World Wars Béla Bart6k Igor Stravinsky Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern Paul Hindemith . Sergei Prokofiev “Les Six” and Others in Europe Aaron Copland . Other Composers in America Olivier Messiaen Part 3 The Postwar Period 2); Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio Other Composers in Europe |. John Cage . ‘Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and the Mid-Century Piano Sonata The American Avant-Garde Part 4 The 1970s and 1980s 22; George Crumb23% 24. 2b: 26. Donald Martino Frederic Rzewski and William Albright Composers in the Far East and Europe Other Composers in America Selected Bibliography Chronological List of Works and Publishers Notes Discography Index About the Author CD Track List 221 228 238 247 258 261 268 273 2th 285 286Preface It has been my good fortune during all of my adult life (as I write this, I am nearly 74) to be associated with hundreds of composers from all over the world. I have performed, recorded, listened to, taught, and written about their piano music, rejoicing in the beauty and expressiveness of the best of it, happy that the twentieth century has provided such rich fare for my instrument. This brief book is a personal study of some of these riches. I am aware that many pianists today have not had the opportunity to become acquainted with more than a small fraction of this repertoire. This is due, toa considerable extent, to the unfortunate limitations of our present edu- cational perspectives, which tend to enshrine that which is already estab- lished and to regard alll else as peripheral. My aim is that what follows—a tour of what I consider the better repertoire for solo piano from the first nine decades of this century—will help change these attitudes by awaken- ing interest in this wonderful music. I also hope that pianists will come to see that if piano playing is to remain a living, relevant artform, the performance of this music is essential. I am aware, of course, that the views I express concerning some of the compositional developments since 1900 will not be acceptable to all. Some readers will find certain omissions inexcusable and select points of view infuriating, I hope this is true, for I would not ever wish to think that we all agree. In any case, there has been no attempt to make this book “com- plete.” Those searching for the closest thing to a list of everything written for the piano during the twentieth century will do well to examine Maurice Hinson’s amazing and invaluable Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire, to which I have continually referred in my labors. Nor have I, even in chapters devoted to a single composer, discussed every piece written for the key- board by that person. Rather, I have tried to explain why I, as a perform: ing pianist and experienced teacher, find specific works particularly impressive, moving, and beautiful. In so doing, I have been honest and true to my own feelings and experiences, and I trust no one will deny me that privilege. I would like to thank the hundreds of composers, performers, col- leagues, sradents, and friends who have been so continuously encouraging viiviii Preface to me in so many vital ways. A great debt ot ao Seo iaee the late William H. Bailey, my colleague at Whitman College in the 1950s, for hic often gentle and sometimes severe persuasions concerning musical Values, The men and women who took on thankless administrative tasks while | was chair of the American Society of University Composers in the early 1970s, especially Gerald Warfield, were all instrumental in plugging me in to the realities of the life of today’s composer. Various editors at Keyboard Magazine, Clavier, and The Piano Quarterly must be thanked many times over for inviting me over several decades to write hundreds of articles and columns concerning contemporary piano music; I thank them also for allowing me to draw heavily on my own previous work in certain portions of what follows. Above all, thanks are again due to Maribeth Anderson Payne, editor- in-chief in the mid-1980s at Schirmer Books, for cajoling me into under- taking this project and for printing the beautiful first edition. Without her beguiling insistence, this book would never have been written. And many thanks to the people at Scarecrow Press, who have been kind enough to reprint it in its original form (other than this preface and a few typos they have been kind enough to correct). ‘The first edition is “dedicated with affection to my students.” In the fourteen years since that edition appeared, my affection for the wonderful people with whom I had to work as a teacher—many of whom are now covered with honors as pianists, composers, and teachers throughout the world my thoughts (and €-mails) be dedicated to the perso living such a long, conductors, critics, authors, —has grown immensely. They are ID forever. However, this second edition must als erson who has made it possible for me to continue active, productive, and happy life: my dear wife Liliane David BurgeBee edt From 1900 to the End of World War |CHAPTER ONE Claude Debussy Between the spectacularly mourned death of Victor Hugo in 1885 and the commencement of World War I nearly thirty years later, no Euro- pean city provided a better stage for artistic revolution than Paris. The word stage is particularly apt: There was not only great public interest in the arts—painting, literature, theater, dance, and music—but also a de- cidedly theatrical sense of participation. People dressed to be seen; they walked and gestured to be observed; and conversation was an art to be cultivated and admired. In the exclusive salons the arts vied with politics and morality for a place in sophisticated, if not always profound, dis- course. For the less well heeled, the cafés of the grand boulevards and the Latin Quarter became centers of heated debate on every possible artistic subject. An unprecedented cross-pollination between painters, poets, writers, and composers took place in this fertile milieu. Ina relatively short time new kinds of artistic thought and stimuli, far removed from the Germanic traditions of the academy, came to- gether in this remarkable city. Interest in things non-European led Paris museums to fill up with marvels of African and Egyptian art as well as every sort of decorative splendor from China and Japan. The Interna- tional Exposition of 1889 included not only the Hall of Industry with its remarkable scientific exhibits, but also performances by dancers from the island of Java, until then perceived only as a hazy place somewhere on the other side of the world. These dancers were accompanied by gamelan players, whose metallophones and gongs produced exotic sounds that excited the imagination and uncovered new possibilities for western musical composition. " ; ‘i The need for new ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing was in the air. Sarah Bernhardt declared and then proved that a woman could play Hamlet; Gauguin went to Tahiti to find a “new vision”; the Schola Cantorum peered back into history and revived the church modes; and—more important than any of these —artists looked within themselves, examining their dreams and subconscious selves and forging a new esthetic that allowed them to break from the conventions that had governed them.4 From 1900 to the End of World War I Striking out against the academy, members of the Société des ay tistes Indépendents made a virtue of unfettered artistic individualism, these artists let it be known that no sin was unforgivable except thay y not feeling. And, striking out against the conformity ofa hierarchica, society, anarchists of the mid-1880s, not unlike their counterparts a cen, tury later, tossed bombs and vented their hatred of political and intel. lectual coercion. In so doing they challenged the esthetics of the time a5 well, a challenge that was not lost on the creative men and women who argued their nights away in the cafés of the Left Bank. By no means did all of Parisian society sympathize with such ad. vanced tendencies. It was a time of relative political stability. Social con. formity was the norm in the upper classes, and the nonconformity of the Société and the spiritual defiance of the Symbolists posed almost as much a threat to bourgeois complacency as the bombs of the anarchists, This complacency served only to heat up the artistic community, driving them closer together into what was soon to be called the avant-garde. Born on the outskirts of Paris to poverty-stricken parents, Claude Achille Debussy (1862-1918) showed an extraordinary affinity for music at a very early age. Due not only to his talent but also to fortuitous circumstances, he was able to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten. There, in spite of his truculent behavior and well-documented dis- like for the accepted rules of harmony and musical composition, he emerged more than a decade later as the winner of the Prix de Rome. At the age of 25 he returned to France after two unhappy years in Italy and soon became a member of the Parisian avant-garde. Finding few musicians in whom he could confide, he regularly attended meetings of the Symbolist poets, especially the “Tuesdays” held at the home of Stéphane Mallarmé. There he met writers such as Paul Verlaine, painters such as James McNeill Whistler and Odilon Redon, and others. He im mediately felt an affinity for the Symbolists’ attempts to explore the writ- er’s psychological state rather than for the emphasis on objective de- scription and technical perfection, the aim of the earlier Parnassians. And he instantly understood the new painters’ desires to translate thei immediate, subjective impressions of a scene onto canvas rather than t© continue formal transcription of exact likenesses, the object of older artists. Thinking of applying these ideas to music, Debussy journeyed © i Bayreuth in the summers of 1888 and 1889 and, for at least a brief ' period, felt an overwhelming stimulus from the colorful, heavily cht matic music of Wagner’s music dramas, especially Parsifal and Tristan Although Debussy soon recognized that the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwet* (universal art work) did not have the same aims that had attracted him to tas Symbolists, the music itself left its mark on his own developing style.Claude Debussy 5 Also in 1889 he heard for the first time the J International Exposition in Paris. These sound musical forms had a profound effect, and Debu the first of many western composers whose work the East. Although perceptible changes in Debussy’s style occurred through- out his career, certain unmistakable characteristics are found in all of his music. Especially in matters of harmonic treatment and timbre he was to leave an indelible impression on the history of music. As is the case with every great Composer, not everything he did was understood at first, not even by his most ardent admirers, who perceived that his music was sensitive and well wrought, but often rather vague. Perhaps inevitably, a newspaper critic linked his music with the work of that group of late nineteenth-century French painters who also had achieved a certain vagueness, “what those imbeciles call Impressionism,”! as Debussy com- mented wryly. Indeed, impressionism, a term more applicable to painting than to music, was a word he never found appropriate. Rather, following the lead of the Symbolists, he wished to go beyond the “impression” in order to express his inner feelings about the impression. To do this he created what was virtually a new musical language, free of superimposed formal constraints and deterministic tonal harmony; a language, in short, that reached into the subconscious and was uninformed by overemphasis or rhetoric. In a statement that would have appealed to Freud and Jung, Debussy declared he wanted music “to appear as though it came from a shadow.”? In the mid-1890s, by then the composer of Prélude a “L’aprés-midi d'un faune” and a brilliant string quartet, Debussy was established. By the time of his opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, completed in 1902, he was France's most famous composer. Javanese gamelan at the s and the free-flowing Ssy Was soon to become showed the influence of Debussy wrote piano music throughout his lifetime. The early Suite bergamasque (completed, 1890), though not demonstrating the forward- looking tendencies of works written a decade or so later, displays De- bussy’s control over the diatonic harmonic style then still in vogue in Paris. The beautiful third movement, “Clair de lune,” certainly deserves its fame, if not the maudlin treatment it still receives in countess arhythmic performances. Has any composer appropriated to himself a single sound more firmly than the young Debussy with the per fectly spaced pianissimo chord that begins measure 15 (example 1.1)? Although the opening tune of the fourth and last movement Debussy imbues it with a distinctive “Passepied,” seems quite ordinary, b inct flavor through subtle use of staccato and legato in the first few measures and through wisps of counterpoint further on (example 1.2). A considerable change in style is evident in Suite: Pour le piano6 From 1900 to the End of World War I ExAmPLe 1.1, Debussy, Suite bergamasque, “Clair de lune,” mm. 15-16, ‘Tempo rubato EXamPte 1.2. Debussy, Suite bergamasque, “Passepied,” mm. I-11. Allegretto ma soa troppo PIANO — (1901), the single-movement Lisle jayeuse (1904), and particularly in the three-movement Estampes (1903). In these works Debussy becomes more adventurous in his choice of subject material, mirroring his continuing exploration of new sounds and sound combinations. In the first move ment of Estampes, “Pagodes,” for example, we hear the composer's f& flections on the harmonic style of the Javanese gamelan; in the seco" movement, “La soirée dans Grenade,” we hear his reflections on th singular rhythms of the folk music of Spain. The third movement, "J" dins sous la pluie,” is a particularly interesting display of the manne? i? which Debussy found it possible to suspend tonality for lengthy passas®> within an otherwise tonal work. Debussy may have heard passages 0? similar nature in Wagner's late operas, passages that usually serve (0 lth a dominant sonority to its distant resolution and for which convention" tonal analysis is difficult. Debussy’s lithe treatment of nontraditional ba”Claude Debussy 7 monies, however, is much different from what he heard at Bayreuth—it depends far less on the eventual gravitational effects of a long-delayed return to a tonic. Although Debussy had decided opinions on all musical matters,’ as a composer he was not trying to form a new system or champion one particular style over others, Rather, his harmonic genius allowed him to see that it was possible to move from one tonality to another without employing the conventional modulations taught at the Conservatoire. Sometimes, in fact, he was able to set up a long, schematic pattern in lieu of a traditional modulation, and this pattern could be repeated in se- quence at length with great dramatic effect. Example 1.3, from “Jardins sous la pluie,” is relatively short; the full score reveals a much longer non-tonal sequence beginning after measure 56. ExampLe 1.3. Debussy, Estampes, “Jardins sous la pluie,” mm. 49-56. > aim opp —= A Anion et augzmenter peu a per a = = * Notice the disarmingly simple succession of unrelated major triads in measures 52 and 53 of example 1.3. Measures 54 and 55 repeat the chords exactly, only a half step higher. It all flows so easily that one is unaware of the daring nature of the progression. As Peter Yates com- ments, “his music seems in our ears less courageous than it is."* Debussy’s keen ear for pianistic sonority had already brought forth a simple, lucid beauty in such passages as the opening moments of the early “Clair de lune.” In his later works this sense was developed to such