Acknowledgments Allen Shawn cello music Five Miniatures was recorded July 30-31, 2015, in Greenwall Music Workshop, Bennington College. Recording Engineer: Reinhard Humburg. Three Pieces and Serenade were recorded August 17, 18 and 19, 2015 in Greenwall Music Workshop, Bennington College. Recording Engineer: Reinhard Humburg. Session producer for Serenade and Three Pieces: Daniel Shulman. Suite for Cello Quartet was recorded at Bard College between June 19 and 21, 1989, and originally released on the Opus One label, Opus One 148. Recording engineer and editing: Max Schubel. Many thanks to Stephen White, Executive Producer/Partner, AMP Recordings. Blues and Boogie was recorded between Sept. 27 and 28, 1994 at Bard College, and originally released on the Northeastern Label, Northeastern NR 258-CD. Recording and Editing: Scott Kent. Many thanks to L.E. Joiner of Northeastern Records. Editor and Mastering Engineer: Da-Hong Seetoo Photograph of Allen Shawn: Copyright 2016 by Alex Burgess Photograph of Maxine Neuman: Copyright 2015 by Edith Honsel Cover Art: Wall Painting III by Robert Motherwell. 1952. Oil on fiberboard, 48 x 72 in. Art ©Dedalus Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Photo Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY Piano Technician: Stephen Snyder. Suite for Cello Quartet and Blues and Boogie published by GunMar Music. All other compositions available from the composer. Thank you to Angel Kwasniak of Bennington College Buildings and Grounds. Deepest thanks to Reinhard Humburg and Maxine Neuman for making this recording possible. WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1626 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 Maxine Neuman, cello | Allen Shawn, piano TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. Bennington Cello quartet | Duo Cellissimo BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2016 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. The Composer The Music Allen Shawn (born 1948) grew up in New York City in a literary A composer is probably not the most reliable spokesperson for his or her own music. Putting our family. His mother was a former journalist, his father an editor. music into a larger context feels as artificial as would “contextualizing” our own children. Indeed His brother, Wallace, is a playwright and actor. His twin sister, hearing a piece we have labored over, and whose every detail we have weighed, on a program Mary, is autistic, and lives in an institutional setting. alongside other contemporary works, or music by Scarlatti and Beethoven, is a bit like seeing our Shawn started composing music at the age of ten, and was child onstage in a school play—a shocking moment where an intimate relationship is suddenly encouraged in his composing by his piano teachers, Frances Dillon placed at a distance, out of reach. It is also the moment when our music becomes independent of us. and Emilie Harris, who introduced him to the music of Stravinsky, Music is an outlet for unidentifiable impulses. We seek to create music precisely because we Schoenberg, Berg, Prokofiev, and Ives. His composition teachers prefer it as an outlet to words. A piece may lead with its heart or with its brain, but if there is no included Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Nadia Boulanger and Jack Beeson. chemical reaction between the two, the result is only half a piece: all brain leading to sterility, all For the past 30 years he has lived in Vermont and has been on heart to something too gooey and lacking in interest. The process of composing is a kind of dance the music faculty of Bennington College. An active pianist, he is between planning and thinking on the one hand, not knowing and feeling one’s way, on the other. also the author of four books, Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey (2002); Having composed with joy as a teenager and then having gone through an awkward and self- Wish I Could Be There (2007); Twin (2011); and Leonard Bernstein conscious period when I was studying, I didn’t fully recover myself and start writing decent music — An American Musician (2014), as well as articles for the New until around 1978, when I was 30. One of the first musicians I met and worked with in New York York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The Musical Times, City at that time was cellist Maxine Neuman, who became a close friend and a central person in my The Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Magazine. musical life when I moved up to Vermont and started teaching at Bennington College, where she also He has been a recipient of both a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and taught, in 1985. an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In a sense this recording is a tribute to the influence Maxine’s cello playing and eagerness Among his works are a dozen orchestral pieces, including a Symphony, two Piano Concertos, for new music had on me, since she played the premieres of all of the pieces on this CD, and all but a Violin Concerto, a Cello Concerto, and a Double Concerto for Clarinet and Cello; five Piano Sonatas one was composed specifically for her. I grew up loving the violin, the instrument my brother Wally and many additional piano pieces, including several for piano four-hands and two pianos; much played, and writing pieces for the two of us to perform. When I arrived at Bennington I fell in love chamber music; vocal music; and three chamber operas. His recordings include numerous chamber with the cello because of hearing Maxine. music CDs; four volumes of piano music, including a recent CD devoted to his work by the German I composed my Suite For Cello Quartet (1989) in response to Maxine’s request for a work that pianist, Julia Bartha; his Piano Concerto performed by Ursula Oppens with the Albany Symphony, would go on a recording of 20th Century Cello Quartets. No composer can resist the chance to have conducted by David Alan Miller; and his chamber opera, The Music Teacher, to a libretto by his a work recorded, and particularly not one who has only a few recorded works available. But the brother Wallace, on Bridge Records. request came at a moment when my music was changing. I had just written two extroverted and highly tailored major pieces —a Symphony and a Concerto—that had been successfully performed. The experience had left me feeling that there was something else I needed to say. I wrote the Suite in two kinds of lyricism, the Vivo and Allegro Frettoloso (frettoloso means “fretful scurrying”), two kinds the winter of 1988-89 in a very focused frame of mind, but I felt almost alarmed by the sudden shift in of athleticism. The Marcia Trionphale is celebratory. The piece is challenging to play. At times the my language it represented and in what seemed at the time, laughable as this may sound, to be its naked, two cellos suggest four. rather depressive personality. I saw its five-movement form as a unity, as essentially a sustained slow Serenade was composed in 1990 when I was on sabbatical from Bennington, a leave that movement interrupted by two faster movements—a “primitive” allegro, and a waltz-like intermezzo. encouraged me to dream up a sustained large-form work that is continuous, while also divided It was a piece in which I couldn’t imagine changing a note, yet I was at first ashamed of its dark-hued into distinct, varied sections. The net effect has something cyclical about it. As in the Suite there intimacy. Attending the first rehearsal was one of the most gratifying experiences of my musical life. is a sense that slow music anchors the piece, with the introduction of mostly solo cello linking up I realized that I had found another side of what I wanted to do, or had at least more fully realized a 17 minutes later with the extended coda that closes out the work, and also giving rise to many of side of my work that had always been there, but had not yet been well expressed. the main ideas in the intervening three sections. The first of these is highly motoric, with a lyrical Blues and Boogie was written in 1991 on a request from my good friends Amy Williams and Tom secondary theme. This is followed by a meditative Andante in a gentle 6/8 that has the character Calabro. (Tom plays in the Suite for Cello Quartet on this CD.) Nevertheless it was Maxine and I who of a lullaby but also rises to intense expressive peaks. A quilt or collage of animated dance-like ended up giving the premiere, and recording it for Northeastern Records, the recording reissued on this materials follows, referring at times to the motoric elements of the earlier fast music, while being CD. Despite its jazzy tone, it is also a good example of a healthy coexistence of influences. What one more diversified. This third section eventually comes to rest in the Serenade’s extended, elegiac Coda. might expect from the title to be a stylized music is simply a natural personal expression. Jazz is in my Like the Suite and Three Pieces on this recording, the Serenade is dedicated, with gratitude, to blood, but the techniques that make for a jazz musician are not ones I possess; my structures and Maxine Neuman. thinking are not very jazzy. There are Bartokian harmonies and some row forms woven into Blues and —ALLEN SHAWN, FEBRUARY 2016 Boogie, and there are moments where the outward affect and the inner motivation seem to be at odds.