Notes for Living Language

A musical language, a stylistic legacy, a cultural heritage. A perceptive composer recognizes their roots, but simply reproducing what one knows is something less than composing. An artist can build on their history with a creative vocabulary, bringing it forward into the present, giving thoughtful tribute while also seeking renewal. The result can be inimitable.

One can gather from Béla Bartók’s recording of his own Improvisations that the pieces were conceived with capricious spontaneity. But the work nevertheless shows the essence of Bartók’s aesthetic and style: a total integration of his beloved folk source material and a compositional process guided by harmony, intervallic consistency, and melodic invention. Like the best of Bartók’s piano music, it shows a carefully calibrated wildness of imagination, even in the meditative movements.

Endless Shout is part of an open-ended, striated network of sonic codes that announce membership in what literary theorist Houston A. Baker Jr. calls the “blues matrix.” Baker’s notion of “blues utterance” presents a living, mutable, mobile, noisy, unstable, vibrant—and ultimately infinite set of postmodern possibilities. The work pays homage to the great stride and boogie-woogie pianists: James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Thomas “Fats” Waller, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, Dorothy Donegan, and Winifred Atwell. Endless Shout is dedicated to Muhal Richard Abrams (1930-2018), whose passion for the music of these brilliant artists led me to a deeper understanding of their impact on American culture, while provoking me to reinterpret blues utterance in the light of my own present-day experience. The piece was commissioned by the pianist Frederic Rzewski. —George Lewis

Frédéric Chopin’s op. 41 Mazurkas are strikingly varied in mood. The unique rhythmic hesitancy that is typical of the Polish mazurka dance, often lingering on the second or third beat of the bar, invites a performer’s intimate approach. Like improvisations, the pieces have both big and subtle surprises, and a quirky eloquence. Chopin’s Mazurkas are not deconstructions of the dance, but idealized expansions, infused with national pride. The composer’s signature harmonies are the portal to maximized expression in a miniature form.

Unconstrained musical tendrils flow separately and converge, arriving at moments of distillation. Streams sprawl, quiver, pulsate, and flourish. Constellations are held apart at a distance, yet are intimately and tenderly connected through their shared material. The temporal and timbral fluidity from ancient qin improvisation inspired the confluence of gestures and harmonic colors, making this piece both contemplative and a spontaneous exploration. This commission is dedicated to Jacob Greenberg with admiration. —Wang Lu

The natural accent patterns and contours of the Czech language formed the basis of Leoš Janáček’s kaleidoscopic music. In the Mists was written at a sensitive time in the composer’s life, some years after the death of his daughter and while his operas were struggling to find performances. The hazy, impressionist feeling of the pieces does not obscure a definite progression of attitudes: tentatively finding one’s way in the dark; weighty sadness with episodes of panic; temporary composure followed by articulated defiance; and finally, a noble, expansive grief. 

In Conversation with David Fulmer about Schubert Spinning Chains

(These comments are condensed and edited from a public talk sponsored by Hunter College in March 2021.)

Your piece is the culmination of a long collaboration, and many discussions about Schubert, a composer who both of us have loved for a long time. Our first discussion of the commission was six years ago already, wasn’t it, when we had that wonderful conversation at City Sandwich, in Hell’s Kitchen? In commissioning you, I realized that it’s unique that you're a composer-performer who performs standard repertoire as well as contemporary music. There actually aren't too many of those!

***

I’ve known and played the Schubert pieces for more than half my life. The Ländler are on a miniature scale, of course, and the sonata is very large, like all of the later Schubert sonatas. I first heard the sonata in a performance at McCarter Theater in Princeton by Richard Goode, whom I idolize—I think this was 1991. It was then that I was really awakened to Schubert’s depth and his daring. I hadn’t heard any of the big Schubert works before, I had only heard small pieces and played some of the piano impromptus. I was attracted to the cyclical aspects of the sonata, very clear motives that are reused through the piece, and that clued me in to the grand ambition of the sonata. It’s a big, brilliant form, and no one manages large forms with such control, while also taking so many risks, like Schubert. Another late piece that is also cyclical, which I know you and I both love, is the G major string quartet. I think we wouldn’t hear that kind of large-scale control again until the romantic symphonists—Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler. And I was also drawn to the sonata’s boldness and its variety, from the martial opening theme to the thunderstorm episode in the second movement.

***

One thing that we talked about in early discussions of the commission was that Schubert is rarely a muse for contemporary composers, the way that his contemporaries like Beethoven and Schumann were. I'd like to speak a little about how I hear Schubert as a modernist and as a distinctive, pathbreaking figure—within the style that he embraced.

What I say to people is that Schubert was not a modernist every day of the week. But he’s a composer of very extreme contrasts, and the extreme intimacy of the writing is always daring—it’s unsurpassed in that sense. He also experiments a lot, in many areas—being spontaneous not just with melody, but with instrumental texture, with dynamics, with form, and above all with harmony. He takes tons of big and small compositional risks, which ultimately show his mastery of large forms that contain all those choices.

Schubert’s music has mostly soft-edged surfaces—not always, but mostly—which I believe are a kind of cover for hard ideas. Uncompromised ideas. And those ideas have to do with character and with an urgent intention. That, to me, is an interesting duality, and a very modern aesthetic—a subtle disjunct that speaks to my modernist side. Always sensing something bubbling under the surface which is so stubbornly driven, even in the gentlest music.

He’s also inscrutable and elusive, even as he’s highly expressive. Sometimes the contrasts in the writing are also downright bizarre, and surreal.

***

I do want to talk about the disc's title, Schubert Spinning Chains. It’s an extension of the title of your piece, David, Chain by Chain, and it also alludes to other aspects of Schubert’s life and work. The A major sonata, the big piece on the disc, was written during this completely astonishing period at the very end of Schubert’s life. And remember, Schubert was only 31 when he died; he should have been in the prime of his life. The last three piano sonatas were written in blindingly quick succession, essentially all in one month, September 1828, even though he was working from sketches he had made earlier that year. It’s likely that Schubert contracted syphilis as early as 1823, the year he wrote the set of Ländler, but the devastating effects of the illness really fell within his last year.

He was living in Vienna at his brother’s home, in self-enforced solitude, and away from his circle of sophisticate Viennese friends. So he was in isolation, but in a fevered creative state—it’s a particular kind of captivity that I can only imagine. To be so amazingly productive, just turning out one masterpiece after the next, in those conditions, it’s a high-water mark of musical creativity and of heroism. And I think the A major sonata, more than the others of the last three sonatas, really is about heroism, as a subject, and the shapes that heroism takes, as extroverted and introverted expressions. So in that sense he’s making light of his bondage, with strength and humor—spinning the chains that bind him. And also, thinking about isolation and illness, for me, locates the music squarely in the middle of this pandemic. It’s had deep resonance for me this year. Also, obtusely, the disc title is also a reference to "Gretchen am Spinnrade," Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel, one of his best-known songs that has a text by Goethe.

***

On a technical level, of course the modern piano isn’t incompatible with Schubert’s music, but my approach is informed by occasionally having played fortepiano, and adjusting its sense of intimacy, and scale of volume, to the modern instrument. With Schubert’s extreme dynamics, you can’t play a Schubert triple forte on a modern Steinway as a Shostakovich triple forte. You have to apply a sense of scale, on the softer end as well—there are some triple pianos. I think with your piece, David, I’m able to broaden that range a little, while still striving for what I idealize in Schubert’s music—a singing tone, and the full spectrum of resonant sound color.

***

In your program note for the piece, you mention that Schubert "spins intricate chains of song,” and I know you wanted to capture that quality in your work. Can I tell you about the way that I view your piece? I see your work as a kind of constantly refocusing camera lens on Schubert’s melodic style. You zoom out to see big, florid gestures of melody, like at the beginning and end of the piece, where you take in a lot of the piano’s high-low range. And then the piece also zooms in, like an extreme close-up, to concentrate on single-note melodies moving very slowly, which happens around the four-minute mark. You also described the piece to me as a meditation on voices, as in a Schubert song, and I take that to mean a single voice and also choirs of voices, which are captured by the resonant pedaling you call for.

Another thing I think that your piece captures is a sense of improvisation and experimentation that is always there in Schubert—as you know, harmonically speaking, he’s a sleepwalker. This happens everywhere in both the Schubert pieces I include on the disc. He always goes to very unexpected areas with harmonic modulations. It’s always fascinating how he finds his way back from those remote places, and what’s transformed in the process. The music is always changing that way.

***

You’re familiar with some of my solo discs, and you know that I think a lot about curation, because context influences everything that we hear. One thing I’ve been doing during the pandemic, actually, is listening to a lot of freeform radio and college radio, because I have some background in radio, and trying to get a sense of curation strategies that juggle very different musical genres—for instance, going from rockabilly music to eighties synth-pop. It’s less of a stretch, of course, to go from Schubert to your piece, but I placed your piece at the end of this disc because I wanted your work to be heard as an echo and an outgrowth of the principles that Schubert holds dear—and as I said, as a study of different ways to view the music from up close and from afar. And more generally, as a meditation on Schubert’s piano writing, which you and I agree was as adventurous as Beethoven’s.

Ultimately any curatorial choice about ordering is personal and a little bit arbitrary. But I think that points of reference, whatever they may be, have to stay in our consciousness as we move from old to new music, whether that has to do with musical texture, character, mood, harmony, gesture, any number of things. For instance, I have a disc that juxtaposes pieces by Debussy with Second Viennese School music, and my aim was to draw attention to the sensual possibilities of both sides of that programming.

***

Like you, I care deeply about the relevance that music has to our daily life—how it enriches our lives but also how it reflects things that happen to us, in this era, every day. Including modern sounds on a disc with classic repertoire is an obvious way to bridge that gap. But I was particularly very curious about a contemporary approach to listening to Schubert that could be reflected in a new work. I really didn’t know what that would be, and you gave me one satisfactory answer. 

Thoughts on Neo/Classic.

My new disc is out! Here are some of my thoughts on this project, taken from my liner notes.

The Classic era of the late 1700s: an age of invention, changing social structures, and balance, simplicity, and order in the secular arts.

Neoclassic music: a rejection of opulence and indulgence in sound, and an orientation towards form, transparency, and concision. Its freshness often has a startling impact.

Maurice Ravel’s Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn is a gauzy valentine which uses the musical notes of the great composer’s name to make an antique, miniature tribute.

Haydn’s two-movement D-major sonata is about omissions: what’s implied in a silence and not stated, and a harmonic resolution which coyly delays to the very end of a movement.

Elliott Carter’s 90+ is a birthday tribute to the composer Goffredo Petrassi: ninety regular, accented pulses in a constantly changing context, with a few more notes to wish his friend more happy returns. Carter’s three-dimensional counterpoint of lines and shifting tempos shows an unusual concentration of character, and refinement of complex ideas.

A wildly contrasting two-scene drama, Mozart’s little-heard Fantasy and Fugue in C follows uninhibited extravagance with a dignified theme, thoughtfully examined.

Haydn’s three-movement b-minor sonata begins with austere pomp, followed by an amiable minuet (with some interrupting bluster), and finishes with a furious dervish.

A new contract with Brunswick Records was the occasion for Stravinsky’s Serenade in A, whose four movements each fit on one side of a 78 RPM record. Starting with a riff on Chopin, it explores a minuet and a perpetual motion before embracing sweet nostalgia.

Phyllis Chen’s grandfather, a Chinese calligrapher, reduced his art down to pure essentials. His Classicism was about expressive precision. The curving phrases in SumiTones, a commission heard in its premiere recording, use printed noteheads in shades of grey and black. The dreamy piece is a meditation on the dance between brush and paper.

An operatic comic aria by Gluck about common folk inspired variations by Mozart. They transform the original’s humor into something more florid, yet always down-to-earth. First improvised in concert by the composer with Gluck in attendance, they were later crafted into one of Mozart’s biggest and most charming sets of keyboard variations.

Hanging Gardens interview on textura.org

The fine folks at textura.org interviewed me about Hanging Gardens. Here’s what I had to say.

FIVE QUESTIONS WITH JACOB GREENBERG

Pianist Jacob Greenberg is a longtime member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) (and the director of its in-house Tundra imprint) but also a solo artist of considerable renown. Albums by the Oberlin College and Northwestern University graduate have appeared on Nonesuch, Sony, Naxos, Tzadik, New Focus Recordings, and New Amsterdam, among others, featuring works by contemporary composers such as Elliott Carter and György Kurtág as well as Schumann, Mozart, and Beethoven. A major addition to the Brooklyn-based artist's discography is his recent two-disc set Hanging Gardens, which features the pianist performing pieces by Debussy, Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg, the latter represented by the remarkable song-cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens); Greenberg's joined on the piece by soprano Tony Arnold, who also partnered with him on a 2013 recording of Olivier Messiaen's Harawi. textura spoke recently with the pianist about Hanging Gardens and why the pairing of Debussy and the Second Viennese composers turned out to be so complementary.

1. In the liner notes you wrote for Hanging Gardens, you state that despite the differences between Debussy and the Second Viennese composers (Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg) in musical philosophy and approach, they're aligned by, in your words, “a common embrace of sensuality in music.” It wouldn't take much to convince most listeners of that quality in Debussy's music, but it probably wouldn't be the first word those same listeners would use to describe Schoenberg's. Could you elaborate on how the music these composers wrote is, in your estimation, sensual?

The clues are everywhere. To start, a listener needs to connect the Second Viennese with their most immediate musical ancestors, Brahms and Mahler. Arnold Schoenberg was committed to continuing the legacy of Austro-German music, and he wrote hyper-expressive pieces in increasingly concentrated forms. It's a Romantic sensibility, with more changeability and eccentricity, and, notably, an intense sensitivity to musical texture; this is where the influence of art and literature comes in. Schoenberg's correspondence with Kandinsky makes clear the painterly link between his work and Expressionist art, and Schoenberg's openness to Symbolist poetry in Pierrot Lunaire shows him to be under the same literary influence as Debussy. In the Society for Private Musical Performances, Schoenberg's concert series in Vienna, Debussy and Ravel were programmed constantly.

So while it's entirely possible to play the music of Schoenberg and his students in a dry manner—which, to generalize, was the early performance practice of the Second Viennese School—one can't ignore the advances of performers like Boulez, who not only humanized these composers, but revealed their amazing orchestral imagination and the depth of their harmonic palette. I think that few pianists have approached Second Viennese piano music—which can sound the driest of all, if one tries—with an ear to sound colour and an awareness of counterpoint that, to me, is like layered strokes of paint on canvas. Those are some of the most striking aspects of the music, and they're the things that can really entrance a listener.

To mention the pieces I play on this album: Alban Berg's Sonata is defined by its passion and decadence. It has a wide-ranging keyboard style that's full of surging melodies, sumptuous rolled chords, and surprising whole-tone harmonies. Anton Webern's Variations, by contrast, creates a spare yet truly three-dimensional piano texture. Notes and chords are like points of coloured light, some delicate, some blazing. I'll say more about Schoenberg's The Book of the Hanging Gardens later.

2. You also write that the Debussy selections on the release “offer a chance to view the music of Arnold Schoenberg's school, assumed to be arid and formalist, through a tinted lens.” How specifically do the Debussy works presented enable the listener to hear the music of the Second Viennese composers in a newly refracted manner?

As I've curated the order of pieces on the album, I mean for the transitions to give some insight. Debussy's "Sarabande" from Pour le Piano leads to Berg's Sonata, which begins in the same dreamy mood in triple meter. I go from the Berg to one of the most abstract of the Debussy Études (“Pour les sixtes”), which harmonically wanders through fragmented episodes of agitation and stillness. One can draw lots of comparisons between the Debussy Préludes and the Second Viennese pieces with regard to their textures and moods. Just a few personal associations that I can highlight: I hear Webern's concentrated, melodically expressive phrasing in pieces like “Des pas sur la neige” and “Canope,” and I connect Berg's extravagance to “Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest” and “Feux d'artifice.” Context is everything when listening, and it forms our tastes and opinions about music. It's a pleasure to curate a listening experience on my self-produced albums.

3. Given that there are a number of vocal settings by Schoenberg you could have chosen for the recording, what made you decide on Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens) as opposed to something like Pierrot Lunaire?

I've played The Book of the Hanging Gardens with soprano Tony Arnold for many years. The poetry by Stefan George is singularly passionate, and the backdrop of the cycle is the lush, mysterious Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or an imagined ancient landscape similar to it. The songs are as evocative of romantic love as they are of physical sensation. The song I often talk about is number 11 in the cycle, which depicts the two lovers touching each other lightly in the afterglow of passion. The tactile delicacy of the music feels like breaths and whispers. Elsewhere in the piece, the piano writing is impetuous, and gives physical shape to the poetry's obsession, longing, and desperation. For me, therefore, the only way to describe the music is in terms of sensuality. The piece also goes to such extremes: the last song's illustration of the central character's banishment to a barren wasteland will haunt me forever. On the recording, the end of the song cycle is followed by Book Two of the Debussy Préludes, starting with “Brouillards,” which shares the Schoenberg cycle's harmonic ambiguity and vivid sense of place.

4. I don't mean to oversimplify, but I recall that when the music of Glass and Reich started to gain attention there was in the air a corresponding conviction that their tonal music symbolized a tacit rejection of the direction the music had taken under Schoenberg's influence and that soon enough his works would be little more than historical footnotes. Yet here we are a century removed from the writing of his pieces and not only are we still listening to them many have become part of the standard repertoire. How do you account for the longevity and staying power of his music?

My immersion in all kinds of music has convinced me not only of the essentialness of the Second Viennese aesthetic in music's evolution, but the potency of the distinct musical personalities of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, who truly can be embraced as warmly as Debussy has been embraced. The three are so very different, and their music is a fantastic reflection of character, showing how each of them was a study in contradictions. One can't forge a new style without showing allegiance to the past, and each composer wore this conflict in his own way. So it's that depth of character that draws us in; it speaks to people differently, but memorably, and is important to artistic longevity.

And yes, the music is often jarring, and is meant to be. But one doesn't love Schumann, for instance, just because he composed in a generally tonal style; one loves him for all his quirks. Likewise, I love Debussy because I sense that underneath his music's beauty is a restlessness, always seeking new dimensions of experience. To allude to Schoenberg's written essays, style and idea are completely linked, and it's the quality of the composers' communication that makes me think deeply about them. One can listen with the same basic criteria, the same standard of appreciation, applied in all directions. And with familiarity of music comes understanding, maybe nowhere more than with the Second Viennese composers.

5. A scan of the discography at your site shows that in both your solo releases and the ones you've issued with International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), with whom you've been a longtime member, the focus has largely been on contemporary material and living composers. What prompted you to commit so fervently to the contemporary period from the beginning of your career as opposed to eras associated with Bach, Mozart, and Schumann (even though pieces by them also have been recorded by you)?

I don't think it's an either/or. I came to be involved in new music in the most traditional way, through historical listening: I was curious about contemporary composers' influences and lineage, and those things gave me some useful inroads. But to return to my earlier point, it's the distinctiveness of a composer's language that fascinates me. When I work as a pianist with young composers, I'm drawn to a creative voice that can uniquely intersect with my performing personality. In that sense, I listen in the same way to Mozart as to composers whom I and my ensemble commission for new work. The question is always the same: What makes music special and worthwhile?

The challenge of performing is a challenge of identification. How can you enlarge yourself to encompass a new language, to find yourself in something unexplored? I've found that I most identify with composers whom I believe to revel in conflict—however submerged—and are thereby revolutionary and radical in a particular way. I'm also attracted to the challenges of new music because I think that dissonance has a greater probability of truth than comfortable sounds. But everything needs to be shaped by expert hands and ears. In this era, as in all others, most art is poorly conceived. I find a lot of optimism, though, in fostering new work, and composing myself. I'm also terribly spoiled by the vastness of the piano repertoire; there's never any excuse to play bad music, or teach it to my students. So I try to choose wisely. Fortunately, my tastes are discerning but also pretty broad, so I'm never at a loss.