POETS OF THE PIANO: ACTS OF FAITH
(Booklet available through hard-copy order)
X
‘Poets of the Piano’ is a series of programs that unites a wide variety of music under a common theme. Composers have sought in every generation to expand the possibilities of expression on the piano, that great spiritual machine, and where minds meet across the ages is the main exploration of ‘Poets.’
‘Acts of Faith’ follows the search for a spiritual experience in piano music. Not only did some of these pieces serve a liturgical purpose in worship, they also served as a creative gateway to a sanctified realm. Music has the power to bypass and overpower whatever is material, connecting to our sense of the eternal. These pieces strive specifically for that purpose.
The program itself is loosely modeled after a traditional church service. A grand organ prelude (BWV 565) opens, calling us to the sense of the monumental. This is followed by a hymn (BWV 639). Music of Philip Glass suggests a meditative prayer, and another hymn (BWV 645) precedes a ‘sermon’ on Elijah, a musical exegesis by Judith Shatin. The third hymn (BWV 659), used on the first Sunday of Advent, anticipates a different kind of salvation – the purifying apocalyptic fire of Alexander Scriabin.
X
“Music has been mandated by God’s Spirit.”
JS Bach wrote this in his family Bible, along with many other personal reflections on theology. Bach is, more than any other classical composer, associated with devotion. His life, marked by a limited circle of travel, is better understood through the development of his music – informed so often by the calendar of feasts, penitence and celebration that made up his church year.
One of his greatest achievements is his body of organ music, including dozens of preludes to chorales sung in the service. The three selections in this program come from three great collections of Bach’s preludes – the Orgelbüchlein (BWV 639), a collection of page-long preludes spanning the liturgical year; the Schübler Chorales (BWV 645), transcriptions of earlier cantata movements; and the Eighteen Great Chorales (BWV 659), his last and most elaborate collection.
Ich ruf zu dir, Herr, BWV 639 is a hymn of supplication. The melody rings over a brooding arabesque in the middle voice and a pulsating bass, invoking the quite intimacy of the penitent praying for mercy. Wachet auf, BWV 645, is one of the most famous examples of the chorale fantasia, a technique where the hymn tune is broken up into individual phrases and surrounded by a web of original music, serving as counterpoint to the original tune. The original hymn text comes from Jesus’ parable of the Ten Virgins, and those who kept their lamps ready for the coming of the Bridegroom. Nun komm, BWV 659, reflects on Christ’s divine origin and birth. The original melody – adapted by Martin Luther from a Gregorian chant –is heightened by Bach’s intense ornamentation, a soaring emotional rhapsody over a grounded three-part counterpoint.
Of course, these three preludes were all composed for organ. In the 19th century the rise of the touring virtuoso pianist led to the adaptation of all kinds of music to the concert piano – opera, symphony, ballet, and Bach’s organ works. Composers like Franz Liszt and Carl Tausig found ingenious ways to reduce this complex music to two hands. A generation later, Ferruccio Busoni, an Italian pianist-composer of uncommon insight, devoted a significant portion of his career to these adaptations, which are played by pianists all over the world.
Busoni published dozens of arrangements of Bach’s music for concert piano, including the famous Chaconne from the d minor Violin Partita. He was regarded by his contemporaries with love and devotion; Artur Rubinstein wrote in his memoir, “Busoni, with his handsome, pale, Christ-like face, and his diabolical technical prowess, was by the far the most interesting pianist alive.” He also must have had an impish and contrarian side, as Artur Schnabel wrote in his own memoir, “He had a great affection for freakish people; he felt a kind of sympathy for them.”
Busoni saw in Bach’s music those intimations of the eternal and non-material, and later in his career gathered his thoughts together in a tract called Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music. Describing music as “part of the vibrating universe,” he drew on his experience with Eastern philosophy to make a connection between music and pure spirit: “If Nirvana be the realm ‘beyond the Good and the Bad,’ one way leading there is here pointed out. A way to the very portal… beyond that portal sounds music… it may be, that we must leave Earth to find that music.”
Bach’s preludes transcended the congregational songs they came from, and Busoni’s arrangements transcended the earthly realm of instruments and sonority. Philip Glass is another composer focused on the transcendent possibilities of music. In his memoir, Words Without Music, he writes, “The high concept of art is language – the concept that makes transcendent feelings possible and understandable. I emphasize transcendence and epiphany because these experiences go together with language.”
His music is pre-occupied with “rhythmic structures and the kind of epiphany that is associated with that music,” a kaleidoscope of repetition and subtle variation that focuses the mind into an active meditative state.
In his memoir he also details four spiritual disciplines that he practices and that inform his musical art, one being Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism. Mad Rush was composed for the Dalai Lama’s first visit to USA in 1979. Incidentally, it was also originally composed for the Chancel organ in New York’s St Patrick Cathedral, later adapted by Glass himself for the piano.
The piece is elegantly constructed in a sort of modular form, the sections all woven together by a simple harmonic refrain. These modules can cycle in and out on either side of the refrain, and really could be altered infinitely – Glass wrote that music was needed of indefinite duration, since nobody knew quite what time the Lama would arrive. The published version does not continue indefinitely, but has specific directions for concert performance, which are followed here.
Judith Shatin, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia, has devoted a number of works to Jewish themes and liturgy. These Chai Variations on Eliahu HaNavi, composed in 1997 during residency at the Brahmshaus in Baden-Baden, originate from a Hebrew folk song used at the end of the Sabbath, or Passover Seder, calling for the return of the Prophet Elijah with the Messiah. Shatin writes,
“The opening melody of the traditional song Eliahu HaNavi lodged in my ear’s mind and my mind’s ear after composing Elijah’s Chariot, for amplified string quartet and electronics created from recordings of a shofar. The blend of the ancient shofar with the newer technology of the string quartet, and the still newer method of digital technologies created an arc from ancient times to our own. After completing Elijah’s Chariot, I became obsessed with this melody, and decided to compose a set of piano variations on it. Here, rather than changing technologies, I dramatically varied the degree to which the elements of the melody are featured in the foreground, as well as shifting the stylistic character and timbre of the variations, finding another way to build an arc across time. And, given the meaning of the word ‘Chai,’ which means ‘living’ in Hebrew, and the mystical association it has with the number 18, I chose to compose 18 variations. I left the order of the variations up to the performer, highlighting my deep sense of collaboration between performer and composer. “
While she has emphasized to me the spirit of Brahms in the piece, I like to use artistic license to imagine in the music so many of the indelible images associated with Elijah in the Old Testament: in ‘Dark,’ his ominous warnings to King Ahab about the worship of Baal; ‘Gentle’ being that “still, small voice” that followed wind, fire, and earthquake; 'Flamboyant' or 'Whirling' the whirlwind or chariot of fire; ‘Shining,’ his ascension into heaven, and so on. My own order of the Variations reflects the Biblical narrative, as well as the multiplicity of styles woven into the piece, especially the lyrical and pointillistic.
Alexander Scriabin’s faith began in his childhood devotion to the Orthodox church, but by the end of his life he believed in his own visions and philosophy alone. His music, mystic, sensuos and hallucinatory, also showed a mastery of craft and profoundly intuitive pianism that guaranteed its iconic status in the repertoire.
Like Busoni, Scriabin was a sort of composer-philosopher, aspirational and cosmic in his language, but with a darker edge. He saw the world around him as one-ness with himself, and in his worldview he was both the creator and potential destroyer of everything. He was the master of his universe. Ultimately he believed his music could cause an awakening in people that would inspire them to experience the world the way he did, as a product of individual consciousness that paradoxically united everything into one. Like Busoni’s “vibrating universe,” Scriabin saw artistic creation as the creation of an entire cosmos.
In another striking similarity, both Scriabin and Philip Glass described a sensation of ceasing to exist in the moment of artistic creation, or ecstasy. Scriabin mused, “the entire history of the universe may be considered as a striving towards absolute being, towards ecstasy, which borders on non-being and represents so to speak the loss of consciousness.” In a more personal passage, he wrote “in the ecstasy to which creation brought me, I completely forgot myself, and time, as also space, completely disappeared.”
Glass considered the state of creation as one that had to be achieved through abandoning his sense of himself, a “sacrifice” of “that last aspect of attention, the ability to watch ourselves.” Considering his music from the past, he describes only the evidence that it exists, but not the process of its creation: “I wrote it, but I wasn’t there. The ‘I’ that was watching wasn’t there… I’ve lost awareness of myself. The ordinary witness has been lost – the artist Philip has robbed the daily Philip of his ability to see himself.”
Scriabin’s music became a mirror of his lifelong spiritual journey, and such is the power of music to illustrate his concepts better than in words. Vers la flamme was composed in 1914 and is inspired by a vision Scriabin had of the world ending in purifying flames, like the “refiner’s fire” of Malachi. In his prose and poetry flames were a recurring symbol – “I am fire. I am chaos… I am a fire which has enveloped the universe and plunged it into the abysses of chaos… Catch fire, sacred temple… we will all melt in an ethereal vortex. We shall be born into the vortex.”
Vers la flamme is a musical depiction of that world-ending event. Musically it starts in the depths, a static, primordial ooze of sound. Little by little a spark catches, which Scriabin likened in the score to an awakening: “…with nascent emotions.” Ecstasy and despair are one and the same: “with an ever more tumultuous joy.”
He reflected in his notebooks on an eternal cycle, drawn from his reading of the Hindu concept of recurring cycles of creation, that he tried to reflect in his art, of “languor – flight – struggle – triumph,” a continual cycle of existence, death and rebirth. These concepts trace the musical flow of Vers la flamme - the sultry opening harmony, the music awakening and catching fire, the struggle of roaring flames - expressed by intense tremolos on piano - and the final triumph of a long descent from the bottom of the keyboard to the top. The fiery, fearless transition from the old to the new is the ultimate Act of Faith.
--- Nathan Carterette