Jeremy Denk C. 1300–C. 2000 Disc 1
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Jeremy Denk c. 1300–c. 2000 Disc 1 1. Guillaume de Machaut: Doulz amis (2:21) 2. Gilles Binchois: Triste plaisir (1:58) 3. Johannes Ockeghem: Kyrie – Christe eleison from Missa prolationum (3:01) 4. Guillaume Dufay: Franc cuer gentil (2:05) 5. Josquin des Prez: Kyrie from Missa Pange lingua (3:07) 6. Clément Janequin: Au joly jeu du pousse avant (1:17) 7. William Byrd: “A voluntarie, for my ladye nevell” from My Ladye Nevells Booke (3:38) 8. Carlo Gesualdo: “O dolce mio tesoro” from Madrigali, Book VI (2:56) 9. Claudio Monteverdi: “Zefiro torna, e di soavi accenti,” sv 251, from Scherzi Musicali (1632) (4:38) 10. Henry Purcell: Ground in C Minor, Z. T681, from Ye Tuneful Muses (3:28) 11. Domenico Scarlatti: Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 551 (3:39) 12. Johann Sebastian Bach: Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, bwv 903 (11:55) Disc 2 1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major, K. 545 – II. Andante (4:34) 2. Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111 – I. Maestoso; Allegro con brio ed appassionato (8:29) 3. Robert Schumann: “In der Nacht” from Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, No. 5 (4:12) 4. Frédéric Chopin: Preludes No. 1 in C Major & No. 2 in A Minor from 24 Preludes, Op. 28 (3:02) 5. Richard Wagner (tr. Franz Liszt): “Isoldens Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde (7:24) 6. Johannes Brahms: Intermezzo in B Minor from Klavierstücke, Op. 119, No. 1 (3:55) 7. Arnold Schoenberg: “Mässige Viertel” from Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11, No. 1 (3:19) 8. Claude Debussy: “Reflets dans l’eau” fromImages , Book I (5:09) 9. Igor Stravinsky: Piano-Rag-Music (3:07) 10. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Klavierstück I (2:33) 11. Philip Glass: Etude No. 2 (4: 24) 12. György Ligeti: “Automne à Varsovie” from Etudes, Book I, No. 6 (4:23) 13. Gilles Binchois: Triste plaisir (2:13) 1 his impractical sequence of music exists for a semi-practical reason. Lincoln Center asked if I could come up with an unusual piano recital, something like a happening or an installation, for its annual White Light Festival. I confessed to them that as I progressed through my forties, and navigated through what seemed like my third midlife crisis, I found myself thinking more about a story I first encountered as a blond, wide-eyed seventeen-year-old at Oberlin College, in good old Music Appreciation 101. That story, the history of so-called classical music, feels closer to me now, not just more relevant, but more alive. Back in class, it Thad been a series of cool revelations; now, it was more like an emotionally necessary resource. Wouldn’t it be amazing, I wondered, to experience this sweep and arc in one sitting? To get the perspective of time, to hear sounds and their priorities shifting? The Lincoln Center people also felt the idea was intriguing, and so here we are. You might call this album a version of time-lapse photography, which brings us from the 1300s to the present day in a series of sonic snapshots. I was aiming for a healthy mixture of light and dark, of optimism and pessimism—wonder at unfolding human ingenuity, along with a sense of loss from the relentless replacement of one achievement by another. As I constructed the program, I kept imagining protagonists in time travel films, who are often hapless, accidental historians, just trying to make sense of it all. They constantly ask questions, to fill in the gaps. How did we get here? And where the hell are we now? 2 n obvious disclaimer up front: I’ve curated a partial account of a corner of music history—the Western classical music canon. I didn’t feel it was possible to attempt more, from my position at the piano, and I don’t mean to privilege this story, but only to tell it, A affectionately. Lincoln Center’s mandate was eighty minutes* without intermission, so history had to be experienced without even a bathroom break. Impossible choices had to be made. I’m sure every listener will be outraged by some omission or other, but I made choices based on a mixture of personal affection, historical awareness, and the desire to provide a compelling narrative. Many of the early works were written to be sung, and I transcribed them as simply as I could for the piano so you can hear the fascinating notes, minus the words. To find a foothold, I started in the medieval era with two threads—the secular and the religious, worldly love and love of God. At the same time I felt it was essential to deal with a more purely musical love: the art of counterpoint, a foundation of the long story to come. If you don’t care about counterpoint, you should. It is music’s superpower, something it can do that no other art form quite can. Great writers occasionally The power of musical counterpoint lies in two or more things going on at once, continuously, acting upon each other from moment to moment. You can define it as the interaction of independent musical voices, but the word “interaction” feels insufficient to describe the magic of the way voices converse, intertwine, and conflict with each other—the infinitely expressive possibilities of combination. Adding a second voice to a lonely singer is exponential. It adds another dimension—not just notes in a row, horizontally, one after the other, but also vertical distances between simultaneous notes: intervals. Intervals can feel more or less resolved, more dissonant (painful?) or consonant (soothing?); passing smoothly from one to the next, or grinding against each other with difficulty, they create a form of musical breathing, an inner drama, a frame for meaning. I chose to begin with a short song by Machaut—Doulz amis (Sweet Friends)—not because of any particular musicological primacy, but because it seemed to capture some of the haunting beauty of medieval counterpoint. The simplicity of two voices allows us to hear the intervals contract and expand, and to meditate on the building blocks of a language. In the first few seconds, Machaut visits many of the essential combinations (octave, fifth, third), the same that will govern musical structure hundreds of years later. But the sense of things—why one pair of notes comes after another—is subtly alien. Sounds, and the grammar of sounds; feelings that are familiar, recurring, intensely personal, love and loss, but experienced and expressed at a remove. The Binchois lament Triste plaisir adds one voice, to get to three. In the text of this song, the lover expresses himself in a sea of paradoxes: Sad pleasure and grievous joy, Bitter sweetness, painful discomfort, Laughter in tears, forgetful memory These are my companions so long as I am alone. *Admittedly, this eighty-minute mark has been stretched. After some consideration, also, I felt that the first movement of Beethoven’s Op. 10 wasn’t enough to represent his mark on history, so now we have the first movement of Op. 111—also in C minor, also restless, but with more of the existential angst of Beethoven, more of his mature thinking. 3 I’ve been ambushed by them, so that anyone can see them Within my heart, in the shadows of my eyes. Sad pleasure and lover’s joy!* The voice of the poem’s speaker dominates, on top. The two lower voices work discreetly behind the scenes, casting the lover in changing lights. Irreconcilable notes in the melody reflect the poem’s impossible conjunctions, creating a web of contradictions and tensions in a compact musical space. But the final sonority is an open fifth—a G and a D with no note in between. I like that word “open” (unusually communicative for musical jargon) to refer to an interval that feels neither light nor dark, major nor minor: just pure sound, empty of connotation. With the Ockeghem mass, we add another voice to make four. (I curated a stepladder in the first few tracks, 2, 3, and 4, to create the sense of an evolving language, of voices added to voices in the saga of music history.) Four gives richness, a sense of group, of communal worship. No lonely lover—just the plea for mercy from God—and so no voice dominates, all are equal, often indistinguishable, handing off notes to each other, overlapping and eliding. This new permutation of counterpoint creates a totally different expressive world—serene, liquid, seamless, blissful. The second half of the Ockeghem (Christe eleison) returns us to just two voices, in close and intricate dialogue. They somersault around and about each other, like children exploring a sophisticated game—a child’s game that is actually tremendously serious, and will obsess centuries to come. You could call it the art of imitation (Simon Says)—the idea that all musical voices must spring from the same material and address a shared fundamental idea, a few shared notes or shapes. So not only must voices be harmonious with each other: they must also possess the same genes. *Lyrics to Triste plaisir translated by David Wyatt © 2012, courtesy of LiederNet Archive. 4 You hear a loose version of this imitative game in Dufay’s Franc cuer gentil, a song praising the beauty of a beloved. The three voices constantly relate and connect to each other, but not systematically. Dance makes its first serious appearance on this disc, with flurries of joyful interplay and subtle, elegant interactions of rhythms. In Josquin’s famous Missa Pange lingua, which takes us back to religious austerity, a few fundamental notes govern everything and there is a cumulative effect of the self-similar voices piling on.