Townsend: Songs from the Poets 5

This is the last of the songs that I will be putting up for now. The poet is Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), one of the greatest writers of 19th century France, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables among many other works. He is somewhat less-known as a poet in the English world. This is the only poem I have not used a translation for because I wanted to keep the flavor of the French. Here is the poem:

Nuits de Juin

L'été, lorsque le jour a fui, de fleurs couverte

La plaine verse au loin un parfum enivrant;

Les yeux fermés, l'oreille aux rumeurs entr'ouverte,

On ne dort qu'a demi d'un sommeil transparent.

Les astres sont plus purs, l'ombre paraît meilleure;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel;

Et l'aube douce et pâle, en attendent son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

Which translates as:

June Nights

In summer, when day has fled,

the plain covered with flowers

pours out far away an intoxicating scent;

eyes shut, ears half open to noises, we only

half sleep in a transparent slumber.

The stars are purer,

the shade seems pleasanter;

a hazy half-day colours the eternal dome;

and the sweet pale dawn awaiting her hour

seems to wander all night at the bottom of the sky.

When I first started writing this song, the influence of the French in my ears caused my setting to sound all too much like Fauré, so I went back and made the harmonies a little less sweet! Along with the portrait of Victor Hugo, I have included several photos of Vancouver Island at dusk, a magical time and place that I never got tired of growing up.

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Townsend: Songs from the Poets 4

This song, on a poem by the wonderful Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966), is one of my favorites. The story goes like this: Akhmatova was trapped in Leningrad along with Dmitri Shostakovich during the siege of the city during WWII. It was a horrible time: one of the most brutal sieges in history. I talk about it here in connection with the Symphony No. 7 of Shostakovich, composed at the time. At first Shostakovich did not want to leave, but finally he relented and was flown out on Oct. 1, 1941 after a month of shelling. The city suffered for 900 days altogether. On that same flight out was Anna Akhmatova who wrote her poem "Music" as a hommage to Shostakovich. Here is the poem:

Music

There is a magic burning in it,

Cutting its facets diamond clear,

And it alone calms me in minutes

When others do not dare come near.

When my last friend cast down his eyes,

It was at my side at the grave,

It sang as thunder in spring skies

As if all flowers started raving.

When I chose the poem to set as a song, it immediately occurred to me to make my music also a hommage to Shostakovich. The obvious choice for a quote was the famous march theme from the first movement of his Symphony No. 7, so I suggest you follow the link above and listen to that symphony. The little quote you hear at the beginning of the song echoes again here and there. But Shostakovich's influence can be heard throughout in things like the harmony. Like the symphony, we end in a radiant C major. You may find the images disturbing. I have chosen a photo and a painting of Akhmatova and a photo of Shostakovich. But then there are two photos from the siege of Leningrad. These clash horribly with the song at that point. But I left them because I think the whole point of the poem (and the song) is to take us into another world with "magic burning in it" where we can escape the horrors of this world and experience beauty...

UPDATE: Anna Akhmatova's dates added.

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Townsend: Songs from the Poets 3

The next song from my cycle Songs from the Poets is on a poem by Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) who was something of a scourge of post-WWII British society. His poem "Annus Mirabilis" describes when "sexual intercourse" was invented: between the end of the banning of D. H. Lawrence's erotic novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and the Beatles' first LP, Please Please Me in 1963. Here is the full text of the poem:

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for the ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:

Everyone felt the same,

And every life became

A brilliant breaking of the bank,

A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me) -

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

As soon as I read it, I wanted to set those words. Of course I wove into the texture references to some songs on the Beatles' first LP, namely "I Saw Her Standing There", "Love Me Do" and "Twist and Shout". I have accompanied the recording with photos of Philip Larkin and the covers of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Please Please Me, the Beatles' first LP:

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Townsend: Songs from the Poets 2

Robert Graves, whom I talked about in this post, is a figure that has long fascinated me. An officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in WWI, he was badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme and never fully recovered his health. The casualty rate among officers commanding in the trenches was 90%. After the war he pursued a degree at Oxford where he was close friends with fellow student T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia").

Graves is perhaps most famous for his autobiography Goodbye to All That, written on the occasion of his departure from England. For most of his life he lived in Majorca. He also wrote the hugely successful historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God which were made into an excellent BBC series. He wrote a widely read account of The Greek Myths and a controversial study of the myths of The White Goddess. He did many translations of classical texts for Penguin Books.

But Graves always regarded as his real vocation that of poet--everything else was just to pay the rent! Apart from his war poems, which he later omitted from his poetry collections, he scarcely participates in any of the 20th century literary trends. His poetry somehow stands outside of his own time. He strongly believed, as witnessed in the book The White Goddess that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son. She is the muse for all poetry--all his poetry, at least!

One of the poems by Graves that I chose to set describes the sensation of encountering that muse or goddess as manifested in a woman and the feelings of inadequacy that emerge. Here is the text of the poem:

Your Private Way

Whether it was your way of walking

Or of laughing moved me,

At sight of you a song wavered

Ghostly on my lips;  I could not voice it,

Uncertain what the notes or key.

Be thankful I am no musician

Sweet Anonymity, to madden you

With your own private walking-laughing way

Imitated on a beggar's fiddle

Or blared across the square on All Fool's Day.

And here is my setting for voice and guitar. I have included images of Robert Graves and at the end, a sculpture of the White Goddess:

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Townsend: Songs from the Poets

As it says in my bio, from 2008 to 2011 I wrote a set of twelve songs for voice and guitar on poems selected from a wide variety of poets. I had thought for years about setting some of Robert Graves' poems, so the first three are from him. For the rest I chose one poem each from Li Po (also known as Li Bai), Philip Larkin, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, Anna Akhmatova, Victor Hugo, John Donne, Rainer Maria Rilke and Aristophanes. With the exception of the Victor Hugo, all the poems are either in English or in English translation. Last weekend, six of the songs received their premiere and the next day we went into the recording studio to see if we could put them down on tape. We were mostly successful so over the next few days I will be sharing some of the songs with you.

I am grateful to Cherie Hughes and Roberto Limón for all their work in preparing these songs--there were some very tricky bits and they had no other performances to refer to for help!

I will start with the song "Listening to a Monk from Shu Playing the Lute" on the poem by Li Po (701 - 762), one of the most famous poets of the Tang Dynasty in China. He was also famous for two other things: as a calligrapher and as a drunkard! I have prepared a clip with a painting of Li Po reciting poetry followed by the only example of his calligraphy extant, then a painting of a performance on the pipa, the Chinese lute that was so popular during the Tang Dynasty. Next is a photo of a pipa from that era and last another painting of a pipa player.

Here is the poem in the translation of Vikram Seth:

The monk from Shu with his green lute-case walked

Westward down Emei Shan and at the sound

Of the first notes he strummed for me I heard

A thousand valley's rustling pines resound

My heart was cleansed, as if in flowing water.

In bells of frost I heard the resonance die

Dusk came unnoticed over the emerald hills

And autumn clouds layered the darkening sky.

In my setting I incorporate some sounds and ornaments of the pipa and I try to have the music simply respond to the poetry. In order to suggest the sound of the "bells of frost" I have used a technique stolen from John Cage--I have 'prepared' the sixth string of the guitar and the resulting odd, bell-like sound you will hear as the first and last notes of the song.

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Townsend: Suite in A major, Minuets and Gigue by J. S. Bach

Today, to end the year, I'm completing the Suite in A major by putting up the last two movements, the minuets and gigue. The recording engineer, for some reason, did not separate these tracks, though he should have, so I have to put them up together.

The minuet is a graceful, courtly dance of French origin in 3/4 time. It was adopted into the suite in the late 17th century and placed between the sarabande and the gigue. Minuets usually come in pairs and since each is a binary dance, the form is AABB (first minuet) AABB (second minuet) and finally, AB (first minuet again, this time without repeats). So the whole form is ABA with A being the first minuet and B the second. The second minuet, in the music of Lully, who popularized the dance, is often scored for a trio of instruments such as two oboes and a bassoon and so the whole structure was often called "minuet and trio". In this form, it was the only dance of the baroque suite to survive into the classical era where it became a standard part of the symphony. A lively version became the classical scherzo such as was used by Haydn and Beethoven.

The gigue is a lively dance originating in Britain where it survives to this day as the Irish and Scottish jig. In the 17th century it was adopted by composers on the continent and found a place as the last dance in the suite. It is usually in 3/8 or one of the compound meters such as 6/8, 9/8 or 12/8, though there are a couple of exceptions by Bach. I talk about one of them in this post. In Bach's hands the gigue can get rather complex at times with each half becoming semi-fugal and the second half inverting the subject of the first half. The gigue to the Suite in A major is not one of these, but a rather straightforward gigue in 6/8 time.

Time signatures like these, called "compound" are a simplification of the Medieval mensural notation. Mensuration is the relationship between any note value and the next smaller note-value. In modern notation this relationship is always duple: every smaller note is half the value of the larger note. Less abstractly, every half breaks down into two quarter notes, every quarter into two eighths and so on. In mensural notation, there are always two options: duple or triple. The breve could break down into two or three semibreves and this was indicated by the time signature. A circle indicated a triple division and a half-circle, a duple division. This latter time signature survives into modern notation and music teachers who don't know their history tell their students the half circle (equivalent to 4/4 time) is a "C" standing for "common time". Actually, it stands for "tempus imperfectus cum prolatio imperfecta"! Triple was "perfect" and duple "imperfect" to Medieval musicians.

In modern notation we have replaced these complexities with two things: meters where the subdivision is triple, not duple, we call "compound" and we think of the beat as a dotted note (divisible in three). In all other cases, we use the triplet sign of a bracket with a "3" in the middle. Inelegant, but simpler than the Medieval system.

Between 1717 and 1723 Bach was employed by Prince Leopold of Cöthen (now spelled Köthen) and this is where he wrote the six cello suites. In the clip I have included a picture of the St. Agnus Church in Köthen, which Bach attended, the first page of the manuscript of the cello suites in the hand of his wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, the opening of the first minuet and some pictures of myself. Accompanying the gigue are photos of the Bach monument in Leipzig, just outside the Thomaskirche, where he is buried, the Bach Museum and archive, also in Leipzig and the first page of my edition of the gigue.

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Townsend: Suite in A major, Sarabande by J. S. Bach

The next movement in the Suite in A major (transcribed from the First Cello Suite in G major, BWV 1007) is the Sarabande. As I mentioned earlier, the sarabande, one of the four core dances of the Baroque suite, originated in Mexico and first appears in Europe in guitar tablature. Originally it was a sexy and vigorous dance which led to its being banned in some places. The earliest versions are just strummed chords. Unfortunately, there seem to be no examples of the early sarabande on YouTube. But here is a later example, by Johann-Anton Logy:

As time went on, the sarabande was slowed down and became the heart of the suite with the most expressive depth. There are a few sarabandes where Bach has written out ornamentation. For most he has not. This could mean either that he thought it was unnecessary or just that it was unnecessary for him to write it! Much of the time, I think Bach does not need added ornaments. But I have put in a few in this sarabande. There are only a couple of portraits of Bach from his lifetime, both of which I have already used, so for this clip, I have put in an 18th century etching of the Thomaskirche Square and the first page of the First Violin Sonata, in Bach's original manuscript. Then the opening of my transcription of the sarabande and some photos of me.

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Townsend: Suite in A major, Courante by J. S. Bach

This is the third movement of the Suite in A major by J. S. Bach, which is my transcription of the First Cello Suite in G major, BWV 1007. Here is the first movement and here is the second.

There are only two basic forms used in the Baroque suite: the prelude and the binary dance form, though occasionally one runs into a rondeau such as the Gavotte en rondeau from the E major violin partita. The two basic forms could be compared to prose and poetry in literature. The prelude is a very free kind of form without repeated sections. It tends to be one large gesture. Sometimes it is just a series of arpeggiated chords, other times it can resemble an Italian concerto movement. But the form of the prelude always contrasts with the dance movements that follow in its openness and free structure. It is like prose, it just flows.

The rest of the suite is nearly always a series of dances, the four 'core' dances, the allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue with galanteries or optional dances often inserted between the sarabande and the gigue. All these dances have the same form: AABB, that is, they are in two halves, the second usually a bit longer, and each half repeats. Performers often leave out the repeat of the second half, but in my recording, I repeat both halves. Harmonically, the first half usually moves to a cadence on the dominant (in a minor key, often on the relative major). So in this suite, in A major, the first half of every dance movement has a cadence on E major. In the second half, the music returns to the tonic and ends with a cadence on A major. Every movement does exactly the same thing! But how the music goes to the dominant and returns to the tonic is different every time! And Bach and every other Baroque composer did this in hundreds and hundreds of dance movements. Bach just did it better.

The clip today is of the third movement, the courante. This courante is in the Italian style, quick and without the hemiolas one finds in the French-style courantes. To accompany the performance I have included a portrait of Bach as a young man (disputed by some), an etching of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach spent most of his career as cantor, the beginning of my edition of the courante and some photos of me.

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Townsend: Suite in A major, Allemande by J. S. Bach

I managed to put up the first movement of this suite yesterday without actually mentioning anything about the music! Let me fix that. The instrumental suites of Bach, whether for keyboard, lute, violin or cello, are multi-movement works inspired largely by the French style. German musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries were synthesizers, taking what they liked and admired from both French and Italian models. Bach learned a great deal about harmonic clarity and drive from the model of Vivaldi, but for the suite, the model was J. J. Froberger (1616 - 1667), a 17th century keyboard composer whose Dix suittes de clavessin, published after his death, were the model for the instrumental suite for every German composer afterwards.

The core of the suite was four courtly dances in the French style: the allemande (a sober dance in duple time, as the name tells us, originating in Germany), the courante (a quicker courting dance in triple time that comes in both Italian and French forms, the French being a bit slower and with hemiola effects), the sarabande (originating in Mexico as a sexy sensual dance and first found in Europe in guitar tablature, it was slowed down considerably and made more dignified with the accent on the second beat) and the gigue (imported from England and Ireland, a quick dance in compound time, usually 6/8). This international set of dances became the core of the baroque suite. Added to these four dances was the prelude, often in the style brisé or 'broken' style of the lute, meaning that it was largely chordal with the chords broken up into interesting arpeggios as we heard in the prelude yesterday. Another addition, usually between the sarabande and the gigue, were dances known as galanteries, that could be a pair of minuets, or a single air, bourrée, gavotte or chaconne. Oddly, this feature of the Baroque suite was the only one that survived into the classical period where the standard arrangement of the multi-movement instrumental piece was the sonata with four movements consisting of a quick sonata-form movement, a slow movement, a pair of minuets and a rondo.

Here is the allemande to the Suite in A major. I have included a portrait of Bach that he had done in Leipzig when he was applying for admission to a learnéd society, a photo of the "Bachhaus" in Köthen where he lived from 1717 to 1723 and composed the suites for solo cello, then there is the opening of my edition of the suite and some photos of me.

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Townsend: Suite in A major, BWV 1007 by J. S. Bach

One of the shortcomings of the classical guitar is that it has not attracted compositions by the great composers. There is no Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Bartok or Shostakovich for guitar. Instead, up until the First World War, what we have are "guitar composers", that is, composers who are guitarists and write primarily for guitar. They include Robert de Visée, Francisco Corbetta, Fernando Sor, Dionisio Aguado and Francisco Tarrega--none of them renowned composers outside of the guitar world. Then, between the First World War and the Second World War, the remarkable performing career of Andrés Segovia inspired a host of good composers to write for guitar. These included Manuel Ponce of Mexico, Joaquin Turina and Federico Moreno Torroba of Spain, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco of Italy and many others. Unfortunately, none of these were first-rank composers either, though they produced a lot of quite good music. After the Second World War, another guitarist set out to inspire composers to write for his instrument and he succeeded in attracting some quite important names, mostly from his own country, Great Britain. The guitarist was Julian Bream and as a result, there is a lot of excellent repertoire by Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, Lennox Berkeley and Hans Werner Henze and others. His partnership with the outstanding tenor Peter Pears also resulted in a lot of excellent music for voice and guitar, by Britten and Berkeley in particular.

In order to beef up the repertoire, guitarists have long looked to music written for other instruments. An early example is Luys de Narvaez' transcription of a chanson by Josquin des Prez for vihuela, a predecessor to the guitar. Robert de Visée transcribed an overture by Jean-Baptiste Lully for both baroque guitar and lute. Here is a performance:

Tarrega transcribed music by Chopin for guitar. In the 20th century the practice of transcription took off in a big way and guitarists looted the repertoire for lute, harpsichord and piano to adapt to their instrument. They were so successful that some pieces originally for piano, like "Asturias" by Albéniz, are now better-known on guitar. Segovia was a particularly successful transcriber and it is his version of "Asturias" that is most often played today. Another very successful transcription was his adaptation of the famous Chaconne from the D minor violin partita. He transcribed a lot of other music by Bach as well. The most promising source of repertoire suitable for the guitar turned out to be the music for solo violin and cello. Bach also wrote music for lute (though it was likely composed not for an actual lute, but rather for the keyboard instrument that sounded rather like a lute called the "lautenwerk"), though the textures are sometimes too thick to be comfortable on guitar.

One of the most successful transcriptions, made by John Duarte rather than Segovia, was of the first cello suite, originally in G major, but transcribed in D major. I started out to work on this with José Tomas when I studied with him in Spain. He had some misgivings about the Duarte transcription. The problem is that when you put the whole suite up a perfect fifth, from G to D, it sounds rather thin and in need of a bass line. So Duarte supplied one. The only problem with that is that neither Duarte nor anyone else is really capable of writing a bass line that would do justice to a piece by Bach. Tomas, who played an eight-string guitar going down to a low C, played through part of the suite in the original key and convinced me that it had much more sonority down low. When I got time, I sat down and figured out that on a six-string guitar the best option was to go as low as possible. With the sixth string tuned to D, that meant A major. So I transcribed the whole suite in that key. Apart from a couple of notes suggested by Oscar Ghiglia in the gigue, I didn't feel the need to add anything!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Pepe Romero followed exactly the same procedure in his transcription of the Third Cello Suite which he plays in D major, up a tone from the original C major--and with virtually no added notes.

It is an interesting question why transcribing Bach is often successful, but we avoid transcribing Beethoven, Mozart and all those other great composers. I think it is because Bach's music is not so tied to whatever instrument he originally wrote for. If you can play the notes, then the piece is going to come across. But we shudder to think how playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on any other instrument would distort the effect.

I will put up the whole suite, which is in six movements, but for today, here is the prelude:

This suite is included in my book of Bach transcriptions, now out of print. I am thinking about re-issuing it as an e-book through Amazon. Here is the link to the original edition.

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Townsend: El Decameron Negro III Balada de la Doncella Enamorada by Leo Brouwer

The third and last of the three movements of El Decameron Negro by Leo Brouwer is titled "Balada de la Doncella Enamorada" which translates as "Ballad of the Maid in Love". It is the longest movement and in some ways the most charming. It is in rondo form, meaning that there is a theme--interestingly enough, a very standard 8-measure theme, with two measures of introduction and two measures of transition at the end--and this theme keeps coming back. There are two episodes, one in the subdominant and another, perhaps, in the mediant. In between there is the rondo theme, which also returns at the end. So the form is ABACA. The title and the reference to African folk-tales in this and the other movements is like window-dressing. The bones of the music are really very neo-classical. In fact, the model for this piece could very well be a Beethoven piano sonata: three movements, the first in sonata form with repeated exposition, the second a set of variations and the third a rondo. You could do far worse! I've been working myself up to something similar, so far unsuccessfully. Here is the first movement. Here is the second movement. Now for my performance of the third movement. I have included scans of the rondo theme from the original manuscript and from the printed edition. I think you can see, in red, my corrections of the published version. Then a photo of the composer and some photos of my hands and myself.

If you want a Beethoven sonata for comparison, you might try this one:

The character of the themes and the harmonies is quite different, of course, but the formal plan is the same as the Brouwer piece.

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Townsend: El Decameron Negro, II Huida de los Amantes by Leo Brouwer

This is the second movement of Leo Brouwer's El Decameron Negro. My performance of the first movement is here. The full title of the second movement is "Huida de los Amantes por el Valle de los Ecos" or "Flight of the Lovers through the Valley of Echos".

There are a number of interesting things about this movement. It brings together two elements that are new to Brouwer's work and that will return again and again in his later music. The first of these is the influence of the 'minimalists', namely Philip Glass and Steve Reich. At the beginning of this movement, as we hear arpeggios that have more and more notes added to them creating groups of 4, 6, 8 10, 20, 11 or 14 notes, there is evident the influence of the early music of Philip Glass. The way these ideas develop, though,  owes nothing to Glass, but is typical of Brouwer. He uses brief canonic passages, which Glass would never do. Later on he uses arpeggio figures that only the guitar could execute. In these figures, which occupy the middle of the movement, slurred pairs of sixteenth notes are played against triplets. The repetition of smaller and smaller parts of the arpeggio, combined with a diminuendo, suggests the echos of the title. Brouwer has always had a unique gift for exploiting the timbres of the guitar. This brings me to the second element: the evocation of nature. More and more, especially in pieces like Cuban Landscape with Rain, Brouwer creates lovely passages that seem drawn directly from nature.

Considered from a more technical view, this movement is a series of variations on a simple arpeggiated major seventh chord. But, of course, the beauty is all in the details.

Again, I have included in the video a scan of the first page of the manuscript and of the published edition. I was lucky enough to get a copy of the manuscript which revealed quite a number of errors and omissions in the published score. It is often easy to determine if there is a misprint in a piece by Fernando Sor or Giuliani, where the musical 'vocabulary' is very clear. But in a piece by Brouwer, a misprint can go undiscovered forever unless you ask him directly. There is a glaring misprint of a chord in Brouwer's Danza del Altiplano that you would never guess! (For those studying the piece, in the original Max Eschig edition, without the later introduction, it is on page two, third system, last measure: the last eighth note chord in the measure should read, from the bottom, B, C, E, not A, C, E, the B being the second string open.) And the publishers never seem to get around putting out a new edition, or, much cheaper, just a little sheet of errata. Oh, well... Also in the video are photos of Leo Brouwer, myself working with him in a master class in Toronto and some pictures of my hands.

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Townsend: El Decameron Negro, I El Arpa del Guerrero by Leo Brouwer

One of the recording projects I have been most happy with was my recording of Leo Brouwer's El Decameron Negro. It was written in 1981 and published in 1983. Mine was the first recording, in 1987. I sent a copy to Leo in Havana and when I next saw him, in Quebec at a Guitar Foundation of America conference, he was very gracious and complimented me on the tone quality of the recording.

This piece represents a major shift in Brouwer's approach to composition. With this piece he turns away from the atonal, aleatoric avant-garde style he had been using since the early 1960s and returned to a style that used tonal harmonies, though often in new ways. I attended a panel of composers in Toronto in the 1980s that included Brouwer, Stephen Dodgson and Gilbert Biberian and posed to them all the same question: why are you returning to using tonal harmony? Brouwer's answer at the time was that atonal music caused a fatigue to write and listen to. He later gave a much more complete explanation:

…I became saturated with the language of the so called old avant- 

garde…the atomized, crisp, and “tensional” language of this kind 

suffered, and still suffers today, a defect related to the essence of 

compositional balance, a concept that is present in history: Movement, 

tension, with its consequent rest, relaxation. This “law of opposing 

forces” – day-night, man-woman, ying-yang, time to love-time to hate 

– exists within all circumstances of mankind….The avant-garde lacked 

the relaxation of all tensions. There is no living entity that doesn’t rest. 

This is one of the things I discovered….In this way, I made a kind of 

regression that moves toward the simplification of the compositional 

materials. This is what I consider my last period […which] 

encompasses the essential elements from popular music, from classical 

music, and from the avant-garde itself. They help me to give contrast 

to big tensions.

This is exactly the point I have tried to make on several occasions on this blog. If you search under "harmony" you will probably find over a dozen posts on the issue, but here is a typical one.

El Decameron Negro consists of three movements of which "El Arpa del Guerrero" (The Warrior's Harp) is the first (though Brouwer has indicated the movements can be played in any order, everyone usually follows the printed order). Brouwer has said that the inspiration was a collection of African folk-tales. The original Decameron is a 14th century collection of 100 tales by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375). I cannot find, however, the African collection that was the direct inspiration. What I do find is a 1972 Italian film directed by Piero Vivarelli entitled Il Decamerone Nero which consists of five African folk-tales. Perhaps this was the inspiration.

In any case, "El Arpa del Guerrero" is a brilliant and lyric re-interpretation of both tonality and sonata form. It is set in an irregular 5/8 time signature that tends to give everything a different lilt. There are two main themes, the 5/8 arpeggio you hear at the beginning and a tranquillo contrasting passage in chords with rising appoggiaturas. These two ideas are developed in interesting ways and the movement ends with a brilliant ascending passage and a statement of simple E major harmony. Up until then, the movement has been rather coy about what the tonic chord might be: D flat? A minor? But this ending resolves the tensions.

I have accompanied the recording with a photo of the first page of the original manuscript, the original published cover, the first page of the published edition (if you look very closely, you can see some red ink marking misprints in the printing), a photo of Leo Brouwer, a couple of photos of my right hand and a photo of me. Here is the first movement of El Decameron Negro, "El Arpa del Guerrero":

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Townsend: Cinco Preludios by Pujol, No. 5

This is the last of Máximo Diego Pujol's five preludes for guitar. The quickest of the set, it is a candombe, the quicker variety of tango showing African influences in the rhythmic syncopations of the chords near the beginning and the repeated notes in the return to the A section after the slow middle section. It also ends with some percussion: tapping on the guitar. Here is the recording with the usual photos: the composer, first page of the score, tango dancers and myself.

Unfortunately I don't have recordings by myself of most of the Villa-Lobos preludes, just No. 4, which I have already posted here. They would have been useful in doing a comparison of the preludes by Pujol with the ones by Villa-Lobos. I will do that comparison, but I will save it for another post.

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Townsend: Cinco Preludios by Pujol, No. 4

The fourth of Pujol's preludes depicts "the secrets of a porteño's binge" according to the composer. A porteño is an inhabitant of Buenos Aires. You could translate the title, Curda tangueada as "Drunkard's Tango". This prelude has a slow first section, with a faster middle section. Then the first section returns with a different accompaniment. All through these preludes Pujol has made excellent use of the different kinds of textures and arpeggiated accompaniments the guitar is good at. As before, accompanying the recording are photos of the composer, first page of the score, tango dancers and myself.

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Townsend: Cinco Preludios by Pujol, No. 3

Máximo Diego Pujol likes the occasional pun as in the title of his third prelude: Tristango en vos. As he explains, "tristango" is a portmanteau word combining the words "tango" and "triste" (sad). The "en vos" means "in you" and is a reference to the including of the key in some titles, such as "Symphony in D". Again, the prelude is in two sections, an opening slow tango and a contrasting vivace (lively) section. The form is slow, quick, slow, quick. When the slow section returns it is first in a varied form, with the melody very high, then in its original form. Here is the piece accompanied by a photo of Pujol, the first page of the score, tango dancers and a photo of myself.

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Townsend: Cinco Preludios by Pujol, No. 2

The second of the five preludes by Máximo Diego Pujol is in the slower milonga style, melancholy and contemplative. The title is Preludio tristón. The slow outer sections frame a quicker middle section. As with the first prelude, the images include the composer, the first page of the score, tango dancers and myself.

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Townsend: Cinco Preludios by Pujol, No. 1

Máximo Diego Pujol was born in Buenos Aires in 1957 and is both a classical guitarist and a composer. His compositions are profoundly influenced by the great Argentinean tango composer Astor Piazzolla. There are three basic kinds of tango: the tango proper is urban and moderate in tempo; the milonga, of rural origin, is noted for its contemplative and somewhat melancholy character. The quicker candombe reveals its African origins with its rhythmic richness such as the abundant syncopations, ostinatos and displaced accents.

I believe that the first pieces I saw by Pujol--and the first published--were the Cinco Preludios (Five Preludes) I am going to post now. I learned them soon after they were published and have enjoyed playing them ever since. They are modern in sensibility, but not in compositional technique. They are direct and expressive without hidden complexities.

Pujol describes the first prelude, Preludio rockero as follows:

"Rockero" is related to rock music: anyone or anything connected with rock music can be described as "rockero". Buenos Aires was the scene, a few years ago, of an important rock movement, though there is some controversy as to whether it is truly 'national'. Be that as it may, the influence of rock on Argentine music, even before its world-wide acceptance, has been great, notably so on the tango.

And here is the Preludio rockero, No. 1 from Cinco Preludios by Máximo Diego Pujol. The photos are of the first edition of the score, the composer, the first page of the score, tango dancers and myself:

UPDATE: I forgot to tie this in with my previous post about the Latin American prelude form. These preludes by Pujol, like those of Villa-Lobos, also for guitar, break with the long tradition of the prelude which was a piece in one tempo with one main musical idea. The modern Latin American prelude for guitar always has contrasting sections with different themes and different tempos. The preludes by Pujol for example, have a quick inner section if the outer sections are slow and a slow inner section if the outer sections are quick.

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Townsend: La Burgalesa by Federico Moreno-Torroba

Federico Moreno Torroba (1891 - 1982) is one of the finest composers to write for guitar in the 20th century. He was one of the first that Segovia encouraged and his first piece for guitar, the Suite castellana (composed, I believe, in 1927) is a real gem. Torroba had a genuine gift for melody and he was an excellent harmonist. The flavor of his music, while undeniably Spanish, is not that of the Andalusian south, but rather that of his birthplace, Madrid. For a long time I rather avoided his music because it seemed too facile to me but more and more I have come to love its charm and grace. He wrote a great deal for guitar, the largest and perhaps most significant piece being the suite titled Castillos de España. During his lifetime Torroba was most famous for his zarzuelas, a kind of light opera in Spanish. His extensive writing for voice probably explains his gift of melody! He seems to have been a rather shy man as there are very few photos available of him.

Back in Alicante in the mid-70s when I was studying there with José Tomas, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to buy music, though the international community of guitar students had an intense need for scores! The only music store in Alicante had almost no sheet music so about the only thing we bought there was strings. I took a little trip to London where I buried myself in music stores like Schott's for hours and in the music floor of Foyles for even longer. But we students had specialized needs. For one thing, Tomas was justifiably renowned as, well how should I put this... His fingerings of the repertoire were respected as being the best. A new student like myself was counseled to seek out more senior students for their copies of standard pieces with the correct revisions and fingerings. Quite a few of the published editions of guitar music by Torroba and others, had passages that were simply unplayable. Segovia would just slap a few fingerings on and send it to the publisher. Later on he or Tomas or someone else would get around to 'fixing' the awkward passages. It is hard to write for guitar if you are not a guitarist!

So there were three categories of scores floating around the student community in Alicante at the time.

1. Published scores on which fingerings and 'corrections' had been written in pencil (always in pencil!)
2. Photocopies of handwritten scores with fingerings and corrections incorporated.
3. When the photocopies had gone through several generations of copying they turned into an unreadable grey on grey so the score had to be recopied by hand.

La Burgalesa, the first piece I learned by Torroba was in the third category. This piece was published in a volume of Pièces caractéristiques in the key of F# major. Very awkward indeed! The solution was to transpose the piece to E major, a good key for guitar. So the version of La Burgalesa that one learned in Alicante was this transposed one, with fingerings by Segovia. I copied it out by hand and my penmanship at that time was quite bad! I still have that copy and here is an excerpt:

Click to enlarge

To this day, I don't think the E major version has ever been published and you see guitarists on YouTube playing it in both keys. The F# major version is playable, though the resonance is different and some bass notes can't be held as long. Here is my performance of La Burgalesa by Moreno Torroba. The title just refers to someone, a female someone, from Burgos, a town in northern Spain.

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Townsend: Toccata by Štěpán Rak

Štěpán Rak (b. 1945) is a Czech composer and guitarist who has written a lot of very original music for guitar. He is rumored to be the only guitarist capable of actually improvising a fugue! This insouciant little piece is over in barely more than a minute and a half.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the tempo marking is Presto diabolico!

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