#YOUTUBE POULENC SARABANDE FREE#
At no point does he attempt traditional prosody*, but rather pays the poems proper respect by leaving them alone, letting his piece roam free in the wilds of a singular and powerful sentence. Each Poem uses a single line of an existing poem as a starting point, crafting an abstract miniature to fit the moods and meanings of the fragment. The term was used for many decades before him to musically mean all sorts of things, but with Persichetti it would take a unique and serviceable form. While none of these genres traversed farther than his own scores, the Poems are the most worthy of revival and analysis, and the most ignored. The third form is confined to his early years and appears in three volumes of piano works - the Poems. He also wrote 12 Serenades, and much like the Parables they have only a loose set form: a Serenade is a suite of short pieces with a semi-light atmosphere, and a Parable is a single, dramatic movement of pure abstraction. One of American music's great Deans, Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987) pioneered three genres for himself, the most well known of which is the 24 Parables for various instruments. Youth and ambition can create striking semi-failures, and none are more consistent in failure than the christening of a new art genre. It's such a lovely piece that it deserves better than that, but for now we'll have to do - thankfully it's only October. As the frozen months approach these pieces will become more and more invaluable for singing the psyche, and if I've got the time I'll make a better effort to record The Falling Snow a bit better than the performance below - though to be fair the performer appears to be quite young. The Falling Snow also adheres to starkly simple motivic development, so logical as to be almost primeval. Even the most abstruse composers employ an internal logic in their writing, and Agnew's approach to pan-tonality appeals both to pianistic chord construction and stepwise horizontal movement - a reminder that seemingly predictable paths can lead to surprising destinations. The pulsing pedal note (note held beneath shifting upper harmonies) has long been a fascination of piano composers since Chopin, and what floats above Agnew's E is among his most enchanting, Scriabin-esque harmonies. The textures of Winter were exploited by a whole host of impressionists, and perhaps following in Debussy's footsteps Agnew illuminates snow's ability to mute the world.
For example, here's a page from For 9 Piccolos : His IMSLP page is chockablock with nuggets of experimentation and humor, the work of a singular artist with nothing to lose. One particularly wacky figure on the site is Nikolaos-Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis (say that five times fast!), a Greek composer a year younger than me who studied in England and is currently working as a nature guide in Helsinki. But that's all part of exploration, so I hope you've got enough curiosity to sidestep the junk. Let me warn you that, because of the free and democratic nature of the site, an absence of quality control is not only inherent but essential, so you may step in some cowpies in your searches.
While a handful of big names have released their work through the site (such as Leo Ornstein, Frederic Rzewski and Vivian Fine, whose work should be no stranger to leaf readers), the majority of contemporary composers with pages are the Young and Tender, many in college or fresh out the door. Not only is it the largest depository of older music on the planet, but it's also a fantastic platform for composers to self-publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, one of the best things to happen to copyright law since the internet was created. I've made it no secret that the International Music Score Library Project is one of my favorite websites, if not my favorite.