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.