kingdom of the heart's content, op. 11
Notes from the composer:
The seasonal piano pieces that make up Kingdom of the Heart’s Content, Op. 11 are a selection of the best of the piano sketches written between 1952 and 1956, when I left Richmond, Virginia for college. My piano teacher, Marie Frick Costello, and later my composition mentor, the distinguished Virginia composer, John Powell, encouraged me to keep a notebook of musical fragments, much as a painter might keep a sketchbook. Since I lived in the city’s historic Fan District, there were many picturesque places about which to write, as well as friends and childhood experiences to provide subject matter for these vignettes. Some of these pieces, as I played them, were so improvisatory as to be unnotatable, whimsical and mercurial to the point of being kaleidoscopic. In this edition, especially in Monument Avenue and Park Avenue Triangle, italicized performing indications have been included as a guide to how they were originally conceived. However, the sudden shifts of mood, as they existed in my mind, may be more extreme than many performers will be comfortable performing. Still, these indications can serve as general guidelines. The title is a paraphrase of one by William Butler Yeats, which a literary friend showed me in Junior High School: The Land of Hearts-Desire. |
Six Preludes For piano (for Virginia Bodman), op. 14
Notes from the composer:
Virginia Bodman, wife of my Viola Professor, Lyman Bodman, was a piano accompanist of extraordinary musical depth and power. She also had a phenomenal ability to read music at sight, a skill she graciously used to assist me in my composition assignments at Michigan State University. As a sight-reading pianist she had a friendly competitor, Warren Martin, assistant director in those days of the Westminster Choir in New Jersey, and something of a musical legend at the Westminster Choir College and at Princeton. These two friends loved nothing better than to challenge one another’s acumen with unknown music. So, on one of Martin’s many visits to their home, he was given one of my assignments as a challenge. They had so much fun using what I had written that I composed new works specifically for his future visits. The results, assembled later, are this set of six Preludes, all but one written between January 1959 and June 1962. (The one exception is No. 4, which was amended from a Gottschalk study I had made at the University of Miami in 1956-57 when I was studying with Renée Longy.) For the most part, these pieces were child’s-play for such adept pianist as these two were, so in No. 3 I set out to perpetrate a nearly unplayable piece, consisting of a sublimely-innocuous, right-hand melody linked to an asymmetrical, left-hand accompaniment filled with almost-impossible leaps. The right and left hands reverse this arrangement on alternating phrases. Click here to listen to a recording. |
Partita for keyboard, op. 38
Notes from the composer:
The keyboard Partita is perhaps the most personal of my works. For this reason, and, to a lesser extent, because of a seemingly intractable problem at the end of the Overture, I’ve kept the work to myself since the early 1970’s. All the music written during the creation of the dark, modernist opera, Frankenstein, the first with librettist and novelist, John Gardner, has a severe and hallucinatory quality. However, the Partita, written before the opera’s completion, and during my wife Kazu-e’s final illness, was intended to be a kind of baroque refuge from the opera’s despair and the sadness of events. Still, despite the work’s academic restraint, there are several moments which betray some of the opera’s character, an outburst in the Gigue, for instance, and some of the sadness being experienced at the time, especially in the Air (which Kazu-e loved) and the resigned and painful Sarabande, which I consider my best short work. The idea of writing a Partita came from hearing our friend and accompanist David Yeomans’ brilliant performance of the Bach Sixth English Suite in Kansas during the spring of 1971. Yeomans later became professor of piano of the State University of New York at Fredonia. David Yeomans sent me an impromptu reading of it soon after it was completed. James Bonn gave me a similar private performance at his home around the same time. He later assigned it to one of his students at the University of Southern California, Joanne Kong, who is now a successful harpsichordist/pianist teaching at the University of Richmond in my own home town. William Lutes performed it on a program of my works in Memorial Hall, Wednesday, February 15, 1975. Cathy McGlasson performed and provided and editorial guidance on the work over the years. Erica Rumbley performed the work at the concert inaugurating the Joseph Baber Papers in the Special Collections of the University of Kentucky Libraries. Ian Stewart, the youngest and latest of the musicians who’ve helped me on the Partita, was instrumental in solving the intractable problem mentioned above. |
six sinfonias for piano, op. 47
Notes from the composer:
The Six Sinfonias for Piano, Op. 47 were written in 1980 as a wedding gift for Catherine McGlasson, a close friend, keyboard accompanist, and string-playing colleague of mine. The character of these works very much reflects the personal introspection of the dedicatee, thoughtful and private in nature. Only now have they been edited and recorded for public performance with the knowledge and good wishes of Ms. McGlasson herself. Catherine McGlasson, pianist, harpsichordist, violinist, violist, and Suzuki Master is Artistic Director of Suzuki Talent Education of Appalachia located in Kingsport, Tennessee. Click here to listen to a recording. |
three toccatas for piano, op. 33
Notes from the composer:
The Three Toccatas of Op. 31 were written in the spring of 1969 for pianist Dwight Peltzer, who was in residence, along with the Illinois String Quartet in which I was performing, at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. SIU, Carbondale was famous at that time for its impressive roster of Artists in Residence. They included soprano Marjorie Lawrence, visionary Buckminster Fuller, Irish Poet Thomas Kinsella, linguist Edmund Epstein, and novelist John Gardner. Dwight Peltzer was a contemporary music specialist. The music which he performed was of such a high degree of atonal complexity that it seemed to most of us to be improvisatory. My colleagues suggested I write a complex-but-tonal piece to settle the matter. Peltzer was delighted with this idea. When I presented the first Toccata to him, he, of course, read it at sight. After getting to know him, I discovered that he was an accomplished performer of 18th and 19th century music as well and often combined his modernist works, many dedicated to him, on his classical and romantic programs. The premiere of the First Toccata took place on May 9 in Carbondale. Peltzer then took the work on tour, performing it at the University of Chicago and the University of Massachusetts, among other venues. The concert in Amherst led to his appointment there as professor of piano. When I finished the Second and Third Toccatas, I sent them to him in Massachusetts. Marla Waterman, soprano, on the faculty of SIU, sang a number of my songs that spring of 1969. Dwight Peltzer very tastefully accompanied her, a romance blossomed, and they were soon married. On November 1, 1996 Dwight phoned me in Lexington to say that he and Marla were still married and still performing my Shakespearean Songs. He had phoned to ask for replacement copies. |