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PHILLIP RAMEY – PIANO MUSIC, VOLUME TWO: 1966–2007 by Benjamin Folkman Although the American composer Phillip Ramey has produced scores in a variety of genres, the piano has been his preferred medium throughout his career. Solo-piano works comprise at least half of Ramey’s output: his near-50 compositions for the instrument include six sonatas, the substantial Piano Fantasy and numerous multi-movement sets. He has also composed three piano concertos, along with the Concert Suite for Piano and Orchestra and the Color Etudes for Piano and Orchestra. An earlier Toccata Classics CD of Ramey’s piano music (tocc 0029) presented three of his sonatas (Nos. 1, 2 and 5), the Fantasy and several shorter works, performed by the British pianist Stephen Gosling. Space did not permit the inclusion of any of his most significant piano cycles, apart from the solo version of the Color Etudes. For Volume Two, the composer has designed a programme around favoured works omitted from Volume One: the Piano Sonata No. 4, the early (1966) Diversions and a collection that represented a crucial stylistic breakthrough for him and became his first piano composition to reach print: Epigrams, Book One. Three of Ramey’s most recent scores (the latest composed in 2007) are also heard here. Born in Elmhurst, Illinois, on 12 September 1939, Ramey began piano lessons at age seven. His teachers gave him solid grounding in keyboard technique, at the same time fostering the traditionalist notions of musical culture that prevailed in the American heartland. This early orientation coloured Ramey’s first compositions – would-be P Rachmaninovian effusions produced at age seventeen. The period of study, from 1959 to 1962, that Ramey spent with the Russian-born composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899–1977) was crucial for his development – first at the International Academy of Music in Nice and then at DePaul University in Chicago. His later composition studies at Columbia University (1962–65) had little influence on his style, 2 et although a subsequent association with Aaron Copland prompted him to experiment with tocc atonality and serial manipulation (Epigrams for Piano, Book One, 1967), while exploring pianistic 2007 colour-effects and tone-clusters (Harvard Bells: Soundpiece for Piano, 1968). He assimilated these researches in his highly individual Piano Fantasy (1969–72), where the synthesis of many stylistic elements resulted in a newly profuse style of keyboard writing. Often devising sonorities of extraordinary thrust and weight, Ramey ‘orchestrates’ the piano through widely disparate register contrasts and combinations that require perfect control of chordal voice- leadings and can involve perilous leaps for the hands. He also demands extreme digital fluency s for an abundance of scintillating ornament that stems from purely musical concerns and is quite r. unrelated to mere decoration. As Ramey has observed, ‘for me, the piano, not the organ, is the ly King of Instruments.’1 The composer’s high-octane keyboard style, which pushes the piano ts beyond its normal limitations, reminded Copland of Franz Liszt. g Eventually, Ramey reintroduced triadic gestures to articulate points of tonal arrival, is bringing long-lined lyricism to such works as Canzona for Piano (1982), the Horn Concerto (1987) d and Piano Sonata No. 5 (For the Left Hand) (1989). His most recent works are J. F. K.: Oration for A Speaker and Orchestra (2007), incorporating a text drawn from speeches of President Kennedy, ic and Piano Sonata No. 6 (2008). e Ramey is also a well-known writer on music, the author of hundreds of sleeve notes for d, recordings and an exhaustive trove of programme notes produced during his sixteen-year tenure (1977–93) as Program Editor for the New York Philharmonic. In 2006 he received Musical Pointers the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor/Nicholas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography for his book Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time, published by Pendragon all Press in association with the U.S. Library of Congress.2 en Seeming contradictions lend idiosyncratic qualities to Ramey’s music. Noting one such the the paradox, the composer-novelist Paul Bowles observed: ‘Although Phillip Ramey claims that inal toccata. As someone who has been inluenced by Ramey’s writing since I was a child, I ind that harmony is his principal concern, to me it seems clear that a veritable obsession with form 1 Where no published source is given, Ramey’s comments were made in conversation with the writer, or are American Record Guide taken from his autobiography, now in preparation. 2 A fuller account of Ramey’s life and achievements is found in the booklet notes for the previous Toccata Classics album of his piano works, tocc 0029. 3 and its dramatic possibilities is the driving force behind his music’.3 Thus even at its most cerebral, Ramey’s idiom remains lucid and emotional, conveying the impression that matters of some urgency are under discussion. He tends to shun melodic repetition and sequencing, yet frequently employs descending stepwise bass-lines that evoke a sequential flow. His homophony, grounded in pre-twentieth-century melody-with-accompaniment ideals, largely excludes motivic counterpoint. But his chromatic harmonic progressions involve voice-leadings of considerable polyphonic interest, with strategically placed, tonally unambiguous minor- ninth chords often resolving dissonance. In his best works, this composer manages to say a good deal in a short time. As he has written: ‘I have always believed that dramatic excitement in music arises almost entirely from a composer’s scrupulousness in stating what he has to state in as concise and straightforward a manner as possible’.4 Diversions Under Tcherepnin’s tutelage, Ramey rapidly grew beyond his juvenile latter-day Romanticism: he quickly developed a fascination for Prokofiev and Bartók, and arrived at a style marked by pithy forms, linear textures, wide keyboard spacings and biting bravura. Following Tcherepnin’s advice that he try writing for ‘underprivileged instruments’, Ramey in 1961 penned the Sonata for Three Unaccompanied Timpani, which became his first published composition and has remained in print for over forty years. Son engagement au service de la difusion de la litérature classique pour piano A series of commissions for percussion ensemble followed, and in 1966, while working on these scores, Ramey took time out to write a set of what, in a programme note, he classes et l’atribution de prix spéciaux ; cela lui a également valu d’être invitée en qualité Phillip Ramey at the time of the composition 3 Testimony for Ramey, writen in 1992. of his Diversions 4 Quoted in Benjamin Folkman, programme note for Ramey’s Horn (photograph by Glenn Anderson) Concerto, New York Philharmonic, 23 April 1993 4 surface, terms ‘eclectic bagatelles’, the Diversions. Ramey observes that these are ‘among the few of my classique, early works I found unnecessary to revise’. The premiere was given by Frances Cinikas on musique 1 July 1969, in Chicago. On 24 October 2007 Mirian Conti played the Diversions in New York atteint City at the National Arts Club, the first presentation of this music in nearly four decades. Ramey , characterises the individual pieces as follows: en ‘Sarcasm,’ replete with secundal dissonance, is a perky number in best neo-Prokofiev bad- des boy manner. A two-part invention, ‘Solitude’, follows, somber and tonally free. The prankish accords de basse et des arpèges dans le registre aigu ; mais ce n’est qu’une fausse réexposition ‘The Mouse and the Bear’ contrasts sly-sounding tone-clusters with jubilant bitonal chordal du writing. Romanticism comes to the fore in ‘Night’, an essay in restrained lyricism. ‘Petrushka’ paisible evokes Stravinsky’s capering puppet with gentle grotesquerie – a piece where I heroically des avoided pressing into service the famous tritonal Petrushka Chord. ‘Specter’ does its haunting dans over and under a sour repeated harmony, indulging in contrasts between the grim and thème the arch. ‘Windmills’ is a jaunty march garnished with insistent whirling arpeggios in the accentué keyboard’s upper register. Diversions finishes with an energetic and joyous toccata, ‘Homage solennel to Prokofiev’, a small tribute to the great Russian master who cast a benign shadow over motifs much of the music of my youth. Epigrams, Book One Ramey’s first book of Epigrams (1967 – a second followed in 1986) marked a decisive stylistic La turning point. He had become friendly with Aaron Copland, who urged him to widen his désignant comme « percussive ; une sorte de danse de la guerre », Ramey ajoute que cette horizons beyond the Tcherepnin-Prokofiev-Bartók axis. In his autobiography, completed in La 2007, Ramey recalls: plupart du temps, de violents accents à contretemps animent la mesure à 7/8 qui prévaut ici ; bref Aaron had shown me the score of his just-finished Inscape and played through it (I managed Ramey to talk him into changing one note, where he had violated a row statement). Getting to know Inscape provoked me to try my hand at deliberative twelve-tone writing for the first time, au and to that end I began a set of eleven brief, largely atonal piano pieces called Epigrams. Six of them were composed at Dartmouth [College], with Aaron’s encouragement, during the summer of 1967. 2008 5 That autumn, Ramey served as Copland’s assistant during a European concert-tour and found time to continue work on Epigrams, composing two in Cologne and one in Bologna. He completed the set in New York in December. He notes that ‘Both Sasha [Tcherepnin] and Aaron were enthusiastic about my new modernist, semi-serial style’, and, at their joint recommendation, the firm of Boosey & Hawkes published Epigrams, Book One in the autumn of 1968. For the first known performance of Epigrams – given by the composer-pianist David Del Tredici in New York City on 19 February 1969 – Ramey provided the following brief programme note: Epigrams consist of eleven short, serially inflected piano pieces.
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