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Publication Date

10-23-2005

Year of Release

2005

Note(s)

This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts Degree in performance. Ms. Cushing is a student in the piano studio of Dr. Leslie Petteys.

Program Notes

William Bolcom wrote the Twelve New Etudes between 1977-86. The pieces won him the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in music. Bolcom's style assembles contemporary ideas with popular music, stemming from his experience as a leading jazz and ragtime pianist. Each of these Etudes addresses both contemporary and traditional techniques which are listed at the beginning of each piece. Premonitions deals with "'free-falls' into piano keys, size of tone, without banging, and inside-piano plucking." Both hands play sharply accented tone clusters. Sometimes the left hand chords are arpeggiated, giving the impression of strumming, perhaps of a harp. Premonitions is a study in sound, using tone clusters to emphasize dynamic contrasts from ffff to ppp. The dissonant chords in this piece are sometimes deceptively harmonic. Listen carefully to hear occasional seventh and ninth chords within the clusters.

Franz Liszt was one of the first piano virtuosi. He stunned audiences with his prodigious technique and lured women with his handsome features and strong build. Liszt converted the piano from a chamber instrument to a concert instrument by exploiting the Romantic piano's expanding dynamic and technical capabilities. Even the term "recital" as it is used today, was first used in publicity for one of Liszt's concerts. Ricordanza, meaning "remembrance," is from the Douze Etudes D'Execution Transcendante, a set of studies described as a "miraculous exploration of piano mechanism." The set was finished, after several revisions, in 1851 while Liszt was living in Weimar, Germany with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who scandalously left her husband and fortune to be with Liszt. She was the last long-term romantic conquest of his life. The main theme of Ricordanza is a delicate, sweet melody accompanied by basic chords in the left hand. The theme returns several times throughout the piece between contrasting sections. Each section has a distinct personality, (one feels like a gypsy dance, another like a nostalgic procession) and they surface like memories of long-forgotten characters.

Johann Sebastien Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier to promote equal temperament, a new method of keyboard tuning. Equal temperament allowed ease of modulation between keys, ideal since each of the two volumes of the WTC contain a prelude and fugue in each key. A Baroque prelude was generally a free form written (and often improvised on the spot) to introduce and establish the key of the following piece. This prelude is stately, yet heartbreaking. The embellished melody line is driven by the steady rhythm of the repeated half-note chords. A fugue is a stricter form of composition in which a musical subject is stated alone in one voice and then imitated by other voices. This fugue is significant because it is the first in which Bach uses mature contrapuntal devices such as numerous stretti, plus the inversion and augmentation of the theme.

Beethoven was known as a brilliant improviser and composer during his lifetime. He was not, however, the most virtuosic pianist of his time. He played with brute passion and dared to be impolite harmonically and physically as he stormed the piano, pounding wrong notes, and breaking the thin strings of the Classical pianos. But his student, Carl Czerny, said that his improvisations brought forth tears, and often audible sobs, from his audiences, "for apart from the beauty and originality of his ideas, and his ingenious manner of expressing them, there was something magical about his playing." Beethoven wrote Sonata op.10, no. 2 between 1796 and 1798, and it was one of his favorites for years afterwards. The first movement is a cheerful, perhaps sarcastic, reflection of other classical composers, especially Haydn. The mysterious second movement contains long melody lines, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of Beethoven, who is known more for motivic melodies rather than lyrical ones. In the third movement, the lively staccato notes of the theme are developed extensively and are imitated in several voices, giving the impression of a fugue.

Recitatif, also from Bolcom's Twelve New Etudes, works on "recitative style, rubato, finger-changes for smoothness' sake, and smooth passage of line between hands." Although the tempo is free, Balcom shows how he would like the proportions of the rubato by his detailed rhythmic notation. The performer does not necessarily have to play each note for the exact amount of time indicated, but rather they should use Bolcom's markings as a guide for shaping the lines. The Recitatif contains several haunting, introspective melodies. These legato lines are frequently interrupted by jazzy chord progressions.

George Rochberg was one of numerous serial composers during the beginning of the twentieth century. But with the sudden death of his son, Paul, in 1964, Rochberg turned back to tonal music, a decision that distressed both critics and colleagues who labeled him a "sell-out." Rochberg said that he "was dissatisfied with the narrow structures within which musical thought could take place. Basically, serialism is an ice-cold, stingy, parsimonious form of human expression." Rochberg's new style often used exact and idiomatic quotations from the tonal tradition. Carnival Music was written in 1969, not long after Rochberg's initial shift away from serialism. Toccata-Rag, the finale, uses quotes from the ragtime style of Scott Joplin. Rochberg then uses syncopated rhythms from the ragtime sections to form short, dissonant triplet motives in the "modern," middle section. These unexpected additions to the rag humorously shock the listener, especially at the very end of the piece, where a traditional ragtime cadence is jolted by a banging cluster and a sweeping arpeggio to the tonic.

Note

Smith Recital Hall

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Fine Arts | Music | Music Performance

Marshall University Music Department Presents the Senior Recital, Alanna Cushing, piano

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