IN LATE 2004, I ENTERED A PERIOD of personal crisis, finding myself unable to compose. To fill the void (which would last for almost two years), I finished some other projects that were pending, wrote two books, orchestrated two massive piano pieces, and penned several hundred articles. I also made massive adjustments in my personal life, read piles of books, drove across the country, spent time in Europe, and found rare time to spend with my friends—all of which led me to interesting personal places.
First and foremost, I am a composer, so in my mind this period remains heartbreakingly unproductive. I simply did not produce any new material during that period. I tried, but each time I sat down at the piano, for some reason, nothing came.
What I could not have imagined is how much my compositional style would change during this bleak (for so it seemed) period. Absence does, sometimes, make the heart grow fonder—and sometimes the best thing an artist can do is to step back, rethink his path, and hone his personal aesthetic. I fed myself a steady diet of music, mostly by composers about whom little was said in graduate school. So instead of turning for insight and inspiration to my beloved Stravinsky, Bartòk, late Beethoven, Bach, and Webern—the Olympian pantheon, as far as I was concerned, during my student days—I gorged on Brahms, Britten, Tchaikovsky, Barber, and Copland.
Things began to turn for me; music, for the first time in my life as a composer, became about expression of something deeply personal and terrifying, not merely a discipline with elements carefully portioned according to design, composed with the hope that emotion would find its way into the bars on its own. When I received a commission to write a work for piano and violin, First Scenes from Red Room was the result, and it tumbled out.
Music to First Scenes from Red Room
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APPROACHING THE ROOM
The title is a personal allusion: my new study, recently completed, is my longtime dream of a haven, painted red, the color that gets me thinking most vividly. But the idea was not to simply talk about the color of my room: I aimed to capture a personal moment, compress two years of turmoil into seven vivid musical minutes. In other words, the piece I wrote to shatter my creeping writer’s block is about that same block. The form I chose (which is largely of my own invention, but owes massive debts to many other composers, not least being my teacher Lee Hyla) was a kind of obsessive roundelay, a musical surface favored by large repetitions of sections that crash into one another without much in the way of transition. Sometimes repetitions are exact; at other times, something changes.
Where in, say, a piece by Brahms, a return to a certain texture, tune, or gesture is comforting, like a familiar face, in First Scenes from Red Room (excerpted on page 40), repeated material equals struggle. It is an actor forgetting his lines, the unsettling feeling of being lost in a foreign city in which one could not exactly speak the language, or the struggle of an artist to find his or her way. But within this structure, there are unique gems, stolen moments of raw hope, set apart from the manic repetitions.
While the work is not especially technically demanding as new music goes—there are no extended techniques; I never aim to explain to a player what his or her instrument can do—there are certain tricky aspects. For one, the jerky rhythms in this piece are difficult to nail: Navigating the tempo and meter changes can prove difficult. There are some difficult double stops (especially the octaves and major sevenths right at the beginning, repeated plenty throughout), some uppermost register trills, and one especially high exposed note to be played pianissimo. There’s also a challenging glissando and some exposed octaves. One advantage to music that favors repeated sections is that mastering one complicated passage usually means you’ve earned much more.
For instance, the above-mentioned octaves and major sevenths happen not only in the first eight bars, but also in mm. 50-58, mm. 105-108, and again in mm. 213-219. This is only one example; there are dozens more like it. The real demands, however, are not technical but strictly musical: This dialogue requires performers who both know how to play their instruments and how to assume an actor’s role. Both instruments, separate characters, are at times in cahoots and at other times at cross-purposes; sometimes the two speakers agree, other times they argue. At times they aim to thwart one another, at others they lend ballast. At one point, violin accompanies piano. Neither seems able to refrain from speaking. Pulling this off with the intended musicality, playing it as if it were drawn from the Romantic tradition rather than doggedly attacking the piece as if it were “new music,” is the challenge.
The piece is about panic, fear, beauty, time lost, time regained, and should ultimately leave the careful listener feeling emotional blowback from a deeply personal struggle— one that boasts, as the existence of First Scenes from Red Room attests, a happy ending.
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A COMPOSER’S JOURNEY
Composer Daniel Felsenfeld is an essayist, critic, and annotator, having contributed articles about classical music to Strings, the New Yorker, Symphony, Playbill, Time Out New York, Newsday, Early Music, and more. He earned his doctorate at the New England Conservatory in 2000. Since then, he’s had performances at the New York City Opera (“Summer and All it Brings”) and The Kitchen (“The Last of Manhattan”), both written in collaboration with poet Ernest Hilbert. His piano piece “Insomnia Redux; 4AM,” commissioned by Jenny Lin, was performed in Gijon, Spain, as part of the New Millenium Piano Festival. Other recent New York premieres include a song cycle (“The Bridge”) commissioned by Marie Mascari. He is working on a commission from the New Gallery Concert Series of Boston for string trio.
Felsenfeld is the author of seven popular books about classical music, including a pair of recent biographies published by Amadeus Press comparing the parallel lives of composers Samuel Barber and Benjamin Britten, and Charles Ives and Aaron Copland.
He also maintains a classical music blog felsenmusick.blogspot.com.
The sheet music to his chamber orchestra piece, Thursday Night Overture, and other original compositions, can be downloaded free of charge from his website at danielfelsenfeld.com.
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