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notescape | composing | intermission | teaching
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20 Little Piano Pieces from Around the World A
study of technique for the beginning pianist of any age “Such responsibly accurate documentation, translation and explanation of these brief musical selections from diverse cultures can broaden the interests of young students in world music. This is an important objective for all of us as we approach the twenth-century. TenBroeck Davison's drawings of a variety of instruments and Ellen Appleby's bouncy cover help illustrate this diversity.” Loran Olsen continues, “they are enjoyable and should be in any alert teacher's lending library. The pieces should help spur interest and illustrate...the music of our world.” --American Music Teacher Contents
DISTRIBUTED BY to purchase
CD
VMM 3047 ·
Toshiyuki Shimada and the Portland Symphony
Orchestra performed the overture in a concert tribute to Duke Ellington at
Merrill Hall,
1991 written for the 20th anniversary of the Belmont Orchestra, Timothy McFarland, Director, with a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. For orchestra (flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons in pairs, 2 horns in F, 2 trumpets in B flat, percussion, and strings) intermediate, 5'. CD
VMM 3032 The Moravian
Philharmonic Orchestra, (click
Cheaper
by the Dozen (Pachelbel’s Minute History of Music) 1 Cheap Trills pays homage to Victor Borge. Originally for piano solo, the orchestral version is dedicated to Toshiyuki Shimada, Music Director and Conductor of the Portland Symphony Orchestra. All (almost all) the notes come from the masters. A story goes—a woman seated next to a man on an airplane observed him writing notes down on a piece of paper and asked what he was doing. He said, “composing.” She said, “Oh, I thought all the music had already been composed.” “The
movements have pun-riddled titles . . . the music, mostly juxtaposed quotes
from the classics, achieves its aim . . . with vintage Borge tricks . . . it
is quite funny.” —Keith Bramich, Music & Vision, CD
VMM 3052
iXXXThe
glance, 1985 A commission from
the late Larry Hill for the Boston Pro Arte Orchestra first performed at the For strings and piano, intermediate level, 15' Score at
Poems by TenBroeck Davison, James Merrill, & Lloyd Schwartz. Valerie Anastasio-soprano, Don Wilkinson-baritone, Mark Earley- harmonica, David Patterson-piano. available from all the on-line record
stores
Saving
Daylight Time: Songs from a A cycle of 15 songs for voice and piano with treble obbligato, 35' TenBroeck
Davison, great granddaughter of Richard W. Sears, founder of the first
mail-order firm, Sears Company, and daughter of Robert TenBroeck Davison, a
long-time
Last
Words.
1987. Poems by James Merrill. Commissioned for An Evening of Words and
Music featuring Merrill, poet-in-residence at According to Helen Vendler, a noted poetry critic and professor at Harvard, James Merrill “did exquisite things with sonnets….beautiful things with the love lyric…was very funny.” Born in 1926, James was the son of Charles Merrill, a founder of the stock brokerage firm, Merrill, Lynch & Company. James Merrill published 14 books of poetry and received the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He died in 1995.
“I love your settings--so full of lightness and intelligence…”--James Merrill “The songs, like Merrill‘s writing, showed great variety. David
Patterson‘s jingle-jangle version of ‘At a Texas Wishing Well’ would bring a
smile to one of the Sons of the Pioneers. His setting of ‘Last Words,’ on the
other hand, is lovely, lyrical and poignant.” -- Dead Lloyd
Schwartz is Frederick
S. Troy Professor of English at the
Spin 1998 commissioned by The Pappousakis Flute Competition, for flute and harp or piano The Pappoutsakis Flute Competition James Pappoutsakis was for many years a
member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and served on the faculties of the
Boston Conservatory, The 1999 first prize went to Hyuncheong Park who studied with Andras Adorjan at the Hochschule fur Musik in Munich, Germany, Julius Baker at The Julliard School, and Paula Robison at The New England Conservatory. Spin for flute & harp or piano. Commissioned for the prestigious Pappoutsakis Flute Competition of Boston, Spin follows an American neo-classical style. This playful piece sets out moderately spinning faster and faster, eventually winding up at break neck speed in a final flourish. At each turn, another image of nature is conjured up from the colorful and sensitive interplay of the flute and harp or piano. Technical difficulty of the piece is around 6 on a scale of 10. Duration 7 minutes to order score
to order score
Preludes for String Quartet 1990 commissioned by the New England String Quartet who gave the first performance at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, intermediate level, 15' Billy, Out of a Mist, D Train, Soldier, 23, Sister
Score at
Melded together in this setting of Emma Lazarus’s well-known text are diverse voices and instrumental sounds of the world—African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and European. Students and teachers will be especially interested in words long a part of our American history set to music expressive of today’s multicultural mood. For
You Shall Go Out With Joy 1997 Isaiah 55:12 commissioned by Jeffrey Rink for the A
five-note scale known from Appalachia to Score available from the composer
We Must Cultivate Our Garden 1983 text from Candide by Voltaire after Genesis 2:15 composed for the inauguration of Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts, January 6, 1983. Duet and piano or other keyboard instrument, easy 3'
--Michael
S. Dukakis
Pied Beauty poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins 1979 for five performers, tintinnabula, and recorded sounds, 25' Score and recorded sounds in Harvard University Archives
“…at Thursday’s concert under John Adams’ direction at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art… David Patterson’s ‘Pied Beauty’ was altogether
fetching.” -- “A very interesting attempt to explore, in musical terms, some aspects of
notescape | composing | intermission | teaching Your Name: David Patterson
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notes 02138, our zip code, is a cipher for what great composer and organist/harpsichordist? “You know what I mean,” said the student defending Velveeta as the composer of The Seasons--his answer on a listening quiz. My collegue, Nicholas Tawa, suggested I counter with: Mozzarella, yes. Velveeta, never. Teddy lived across the street. For some time, he had been observing children coming to my apartment for piano lessons. When he got a little older, 8 years of age, he asked if he could come over for a lesson. After a thunderous round of experimentation all over the keyboard, I thought of a good opening question to ask him: “Which way is up and which way is down on the piano?” He thought for awhile and answered, “The black keys are up and the white are down.” When I entered Ivan Tcherepnin's apartment and saw John Cage across the living room I exitedly called out his name. Cage said, “Shhh. Don't tell a soul.” I would see Professor John Huggler on his way from class, I, on my way to class. One day I asked him if he could quickly tell me the difference between classical music and jazz that could help me with my upcoming discussion in an introductory music course. His reponse was not only quick but accurate, insightful. “In classical music the performer strives for a standard or ideal sound, whereas the jazz musician aims to create his or her own individual voice.” What abbreviated word beginning with capital P and appearing under the lower staff of many piano pieces resembles a dog? My
five-minute piano lesson with Luise
Vosgerchian,Walter W. Naumburg Professor
of Music, Emerita, What a difference her “physics” made! To play fast I should practice a piece at a slow tempo for three months. When playing at full speed for the first few times (maybe more), endurance should be the only serious physical challenge remaining. To play legato, you can use your fingers--no pedal, by momemtarily holding down both the key you are coming from and the key you are going to (overlapping the fingers, so to speak). Practicing became efficient and more fun since I knew what I was doing with my fingers.
“Monsieur Messiaen” I asked? As if
checking to make sure that he was Olivier
Messiaen, himself, he replied cheerfully with increasing certainty and
widening smile, “Oui, c’est moi !” After introducing myself, he asked what I
was doing in Arriving late one afternoon to my lesson with Nadia Boulanger at her apartment on the rue Ballou, now rue Lili Boulanger, I was asked to give a reason for not being on time. Speaking truthfully, I told Mademoiselle that Messiaen's analysis class had run late. “You are studying with that old man?”she retorted. “You know, he is not a very nice man.” Sitting at the piano, which is where she always sat during my lessons, Mademoiselle played a progression of ninth chords the way Maurice Ravel beautifully voiced them in his music. Upon repeating the same progression this time with the palms of her hands coming down on the keys so as to produce clusters of sound, she uttered, “And that’s how Messiaen writes his music.” Dr. Lincoln Spiess
again took his place behind the old grand piano to present another lecture to
music history students at Thinking about copyright matters in a piece I'd completed, I had a chat with my godson, Stefan Tcherepnin. “I've just written a piece called ‘Cheap Shot’ that's made out of bits and pieces of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and ends with a passage from the 1812 Overture. Through these notes one can hear, quite clearly, ‘Happy Birthday.’ Wouldn't that be a copyright question, since the birthday piece was written in the ’30s by the two sisters, Mildred and Patty Hill?” Stefan smiled and said, “No--Well, wouldn't that be a matter for Tchaikovsky to take up?” Intermission is over. . .
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David Patterson, recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in Teaching and the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Massachusetts Boston. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON (click
Eric Conn apprenticed at Sheffield Labs in Richard Connette, composer and performer, grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, recipient of
the Bessie New York Dance and Performance Award. Last Forever: Old
and New Songs Out of Alexandra DuBois has been awarded the Dean’s Undergraduate Composition Prize at Indiana University and named as the recipient of the first commission offered through the Kronos: Under 30 Project—a collaboration of the Kronos Quartet, Dartmouth College, and the American Music Center. Mark Governor, composer, honored at the Sundance Film Festival for
his score to Notes From Underground and subject of an Emmy-award
winning PBS documentary about the creation of his dance work, Piece By
Piece. Receipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Robert Kraft composed theme music for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, music for the daytime serial Days of Our Lives, and scored Seven Minutes in Heaven, a feature film whose executive producer was Francis Coppola. David Kravitz, tenor at Emmanual Music in Miguel Picker, composer/musician and video editor at WGBH in Leslie Saunders, composer/arranger who has spent time in Nigeria and Ghana, West Africa collecting traditional music for two volumes of adaptations for piano solo. Alicia Witt, winner of the Bartok-Kabalevsky International Piano
Competition, played Zooey on the TV’s Cybill show, and appeared as a
pianist in the serial,
Leslie Saunders, composer/arranger, who has spent time in Nigeria and Ghana, West Africa collecting traditional music for two volumes of adaptations for piano solo. Daniel Barrett, recording artist and producer who can be seen in a Peter, Paul and Mary video, "Lifelines" and as a member of the Mary Chapin-Carpenter Band, Morphine, Ani Difranco and The Indigo Girls Band, Steve Earle Band, Aimee Mann Band, Paula Cole Band, The Gil Evans Orchestra, Patty Griffin Band, and the Story. Christina E. DeVaughn, soprano affiliated with the Concord Baptist Church of Roxbury who performed in the acclaimed Black Nativity and reached the final round of the 2000 National Association of Teachers of Singing regional competition. Olga Mayorska, graduate of Kharkiv College of
Music, Ukraine, CLARA SCHUMANN Wonder Child She was “not just any
wonder child, but, more, a child and already a wonder,” reported Eduard
Hanslick the music critic. The “wunderkind” Clara Wieck was the most talked
about prodigy in Dedicated to Him In September 1840, the popular German concert pianist, Clara Wieck, married the respected German music critic and all-but -unknown composer, Robert Schumann. If her concertizing was somewhat curtailed by her responsibilities as the wife of eight children (one of whom died in infancy), her composing was restricted. “I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out. But Clara herself knows her main occupation is as a mother, and I believe she is happy in the circumstances and would not want them changed,” Robert recorded in the marriage diary. He did not share with Clara the ambivalence she felt over composition. The same year she had composed Three Romances she had confided in her diary, “I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not wish to compose-there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that. . . . ” Clara Schumann autographed Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Opus 20 (1853) with the words “dedicated to him.” The eight variations never obscure the F-sharp minor “theme”--his piano miniature, Bunte Blatter No. 4, quoted note for note. Clara’s new piece inspires Johannes Brahms, the Schumanns’ close friend, to compose his own set of variations. “On a theme by him” and “dedicated to her” adorn page one of his manuscript. With the death of her
husband Clara Schumann returned to performance full time, greatly expanding
her concert schedule. She became a crusader for the works of Bach, Beethoven,
and Brahms and the voice of Robert Schumann, presenting more and more of his
compositions in her programs. In August 1873, at Always dressed in black, Clara Schumann played with her head bent over the keyboard. She was one of the first to perform the masters from memory, to the annoyance of musical conservatives who thought it pretentious of her not to rely on the score. With patience and insight, she cultivated in the emerging middle-class audience a taste for difficult music, and elevated the concert from a mere variety show to the shorter, modern solo recital. Acclaimed unequivocally
as a preeminent pianist of the Romantic era, Clara Schumann concertized in The Clara Schumann article is co-authored with Robert V.
Guarente, author and musician. It is an excerpt from a larger work. His
contribution to this article is recognized here with a sincere apology for
this late recognition. 7/04/07
Litzmann,
Berthold. Trans. by Grace Harlow. Clara Schumann. An Artist's Life, Vol. I
& II. May, Reich,
Nancy B. Clara Schumann: The Artist and Woman.
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