Between sickness and injury I’ve stalled on many projects. I considered seeing a doctor until I discovered that I had to fire all my doctors (and dentist) after changing insurances because of the Affordable Care Act. That was enough of an impediment to keep me from going, since I didn’t really think I needed to go anyway.
A lengthy e-mail exchange with a new correspondent caused me to revisit an event I had almost fully forgotten about: my senior recital. Like most of my conservatory years I have blotted that concert from my memory, though being questioned about it brought back most of what I could expect to remember. The first half of the program comprised 26 pieces by composers for every letter of the alphabet. It was intended as a tribute to radio. More specifically it was meant as an homage to the mixed tapes that I made in high school. These tapes were made by recording songs off the radio. Taken one at a time a song is a song is a song. What I discovered from the mixed tapes was that after listening to them many times over I could not hear the individual songs on the radio or from records without thinking of them in the context of the tapes. The tape itself and the series of songs it contained became a work in and of itself. The connections between songs were made especially blunt with these tapes because there was no silence between them. Indeed, there was rather brusque overlap because I had to stop recording the songs before they ended to avoid the radio announcer’s voice intruding on the song sequence. (I wish I had recorded more of the announcers’ voices, as tons of not-bad memories come back when listening to Cat Sommers’s Q105 aircheck from 1981 or Mason Leroy Dixon’s 1982 aircheck (also on Q105).)
I do not get terribly nostalgic for my college conservatory years. I blame nobody but myself for the bad college memories (which are far outnumbered by the good) but the bad times left stains on my life that took years to go away. You’ll notice that I neglect to mention the school by name in this story, as I do not want to attract some alumni search bot that pings the web for mention of its name. Some years ago they printed a blurb about me in the alumni newsletter, a blurb I wish they had informed me of ahead of time so that I could ask them not to print it. It was nothing awful or embarrassing but I still didn’t want it in there.
The individual who contacted me said he had just heard about my recital and wanted to get a copy of it and/or get details on what pieces were included in the A-to-Z part. I was surprised to hear of anyone talking about my senior recital 25 years after it occurred, but after my initial wariness wore off we embarked on a healthy correspondence. He even went so far as to buy a CD of the concert and send me a copy so I could identify the composers. I thought I had lost the printed program from that event but I finally found it, and it appears below, along with a number of audio excerpts from the concert.
Alkan – Song of the Mad Woman on the Seashore
The program opened with Charles Alkan’s Song of the Mad Woman on the Seashore, a certifiably unusual piece in its own right. I chose it as an opener partly on account of its peculiarity, but also because Alkan was a particular fascination of mine throughout high school and college. I consider the Mad Woman to be something of a standout among Alkan’s œuvre on account of how succinctly it represents the dark and turgid spirit that inhabited his inspiration. Certain other Alkan pieces (The Alleluia op. 25 comes to mind) also communicate that coldness but in a way that I find unsettling, and even disturbing. The Alleluia‘s raspiness borders on coarse, and its manifestation of religious exaltation feels almost insane to me.
Grant Covell – Sonnet
A 10-second Bagatelle by Beethoven followed (I muffed it) and Grant Covell’s “Sonnet”, from 30 Variations on a Theme by Mark Thomas, came next. The 30 Variations was written for me by Grant, a composition major who I knew from working at the college radio station. We remained in touch for a few years after college ended, eventually losing track until last week, when I found an e-mail address for him and wrote to ask if it was OK to use this music on my web sites.
Robert Helps – Valse Mirage (1977)
The centerpiece of the A-Z set was Robert Helps’ Valse Mirage (1977). Bob Helps was a friend of mine who taught at the University of Tampa (where I grew up) but I never had any dealings with him until college, when I booked him to play a solo recital in the same concert hall where I played this program. I arranged this concert in my role as Classical Programming Director at the school radio station. After much work and anticipation he unfortunately had to cancel. He had a reaction to a bug bite that caused one of his hands to swell up to the size of a watermelon. We stayed in touch for years after that, though, and coincidentally I bumped into him outside Carnegie Hall soon after moving here.
As virtually anyone who knew him would attest Bob Helps was one of the most generous souls you would ever meet. You could always expect him to have a new dirty joke to tell or humorous anecdote to share any time you saw him. On account of this there was one encounter I had with him that made a very strong impression. It did not involve this particular performance of his Valse Mirage but it might as well have, since I played it pretty much the same and thus made the same mistake.
In 1992 I played a different version of this program in New York, changing maybe 8 or 9 pieces, but keeping Helps’ Valse Mirage as the centerpiece. I sent him a tape of the performance and quickly heard back from him after he listened to it. When I answered the phone and heard his voice I expected his typically generous and congenial personality to be at work. It was not. He sternly and unsympathetically informed me that I had played the last portion of the piece in double time, something that should have been obvious to anyone who could read music. The tone of Bob’s voice was unlike any I had heard from him before. Until then I knew him as a friend. This was Robert Helps the artist talking, and his demeanor was deadly serious. We were on the phone but in my mind I was waiting for that gleam in his eye to come back and for the mood of the conversation to go back into more familiar territory. I don’t remember that happening during this call.
Short Pieces By Luening, MacDowell, Nielsen, Ornstein, Pinto, Quinet, Revel, Sorabji. Check the program above for titles.
Even as the concert was in progress I winced a bit when arriving at Carl Nielsen’s The Jumping Jack, a slight, silly piece that ended up on the program solely for my inability to find anything more interesting by a composer whose named started with N.
I wanted there to be one piece on the program written by a person better known for something besides the fact that they wrote music. It didn’t matter how amateurish it sounded, I just wanted some name on the program that was recognizable as coming from a different discipline than music.
I had seen piano music by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which could have been a memorable (if morbid) curiosity. Leo Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak were other writers who wrote music on the side.
I winced at Nielsen not so much on account of the music but because of what I had tried to hard to get in its place. What I was really after wasn’t Nietzsche or Tolstoy (or Nielsen, for that matter). It was Richard Nixon. I’m not going to rewrite the whole story now but you can read about it HERE.
In short I had read in a book about music at the White House that Nixon, when he was in college, had written a theme song for a club of which he was a member. I spent years trying to get through to him to see if he or his handlers could send me a copy, unaware until the end that he knew full well about my inquiries and deliberately chose to ignore them.
The L-S sequence of pieces perhaps best illustrates how the rapid fire succession of pieces causes the series to become a work in and of itself.
The L-S sequence also reveals an error on the program. I did not play Erik Satie’s Vexations, though it would have been hilarious to have played it a dozen or so times and frighten the audience into thinking I would go all the way. Vexations is a 1-page piece that should be repeated 840 times (although the origins and authority of that piece’s claim to fame are murky). Had I embarked on Vexations the concert might have lasted 20 hours.
Instead I played a Frammenti Aforistici (I have no idea which one, there are over a hundred) by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, the curmudgeonly British composer whose surname has been my online screen name since I first got online in the early 1990s. It’s a crisp, mean little piece.
Wireless Fantasy is a musique concrète by Vladimir Ussachevsky. If I did this program again I would include it (I chose to conform with the radio theme of the program) but I would not allow myself to just sit at the piano, doing nothing. It goes on longer than I remember and it seems I should have contributed something more beyond the weirdness of piping in this mysterious sounding work through the concert hall’s speakers. I might add a photo montage. Listen to it, it’s good stuff:
The second half opened with Cage’s “Dream” Dreamed, by Daniel Goode, a composer who had responded to an ad I placed in the now defunct EAR Magazine. EAR targeted musicians, with a particular focus on contemporary music and composers of the day. The ad I placed said something like “COMPOSERS: I will play your piano music at a well known conservatory.” A lot of music came in as a result of that ad, some of it high quality, much of it not. Daniel Goode’s Cage’s “Dream” Dreamed was a standout. It was both an appealing piece of music and its inclusion was as close to a coup as I could muster as far as giving a world premiere performance of a composition by a reasonably well-known composer. Mr. Goode was also an alumni of the conservatory, which gave the performance added resonance.
The EAR ad itself became a running joke among my friends because I invited the composers to mail their scores to “M. THOMAY”, not my real name (M. THOMAS). I did this intentionally so I would know upon arrival that the envelopes came from that ad. Folks just started calling me “M. Thomay” and “Mel Tormé”, an amusing flourish which lasted throughout college.
I played a different version of the program in New York in 1992. That was when I met Don Garvelmann, a friend of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, whose Frammenti Aforistici punctuated the program with its tremulous thud. Don and I talked about this program a lot over the years, which is why it surprised me how thoroughly I’d forgotten the conservatory version.
