A fixture of New York’s downtown music scene since the 1970s, John Zorn wears multiple hats as saxophonist, record producer, and composer whose category-defying catalog amalgamates a wide spectrum of styles and genres from classical to bebop, and from klezmer to cutting-edge rock. Famously prolific, he is known for his often zanily postmodernist “file card” pieces appropriating music by other composers, as well as improvisatory “game pieces” for a cornucopia of ensembles. The latter exemplify Zorn’s commitment to collaborative music making, which is fundamental to his artistic philosophy. “I don’t ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets,” he told The New York Times. “It doesn’t work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who’s playing.” Zorn put that principle into practice with his celebrated avant-garde rock band Naked City, whose farewell album in 1993, titled Absinthe, was inspired by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and other “decadent” poets of the late 19th century.
Arguably the foremost exemplar of the “maverick” tradition in American music, Ives has been ranked with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók as one of the 20th century’s seminal creative geniuses. Inspired by his father—a bandmaster in Danbury, Connecticut—he studied composition with Horatio Parker at Yale but opted to pursue a successful career as an insurance executive instead. His highly idiosyncratic musical language, a rich stew of vernacular styles, European Romanticism, and radically avant-garde elements, contributed to the widespread perception of Ives as an uncouth amateur for whom composing was a mere sideline. Not until the 1950s were such works as the “Concord” Piano Sonata, Three Places in New England, and the monumental Fourth Symphony recognized as masterpieces and widely performed.
Belatedly premiered in 1948, the Piano Trio dates from around 1909, a period when Ives was working to build his newly formed insurance partnership into one of the top-producing agencies in the country. How these two spheres of activity related to each other in his mind is a mystery, but Ives clearly had an exceptional knack for synthesizing the disparate elements of life and art. He had already demonstrated this ability in works like his Symphony No. 2, in which quotations from European classical composers intermingle with parlor and college songs, hymns, and other kinds of popular music. The trio similarly celebrates the diversity of America’s musical landscape by incorporating a motley array of “borrowed tunes” from the vernacular tradition. Ives impishly annotated the manuscript “Trio ... Yalensia & Americana Fancy Names Real name: Yankee jaws—at Mr. Yale’s School for nice bad boys!!”
With its clashing juxtapositions, grinding dissonances, and freewheeling disregard for the conventional niceties of musical form and expression, the trio validates the bad-boy image that Ives presented to the world, at least in his artistic life. The second of the three movements, teasingly titled “TSIAJ” (for “This Scherzo Is A Joke”), is a chaotic medley that careens from one familiar tune to another, seemingly without rhyme or reason. But there was method to Ives’s madness: He explained that “doing things like this (half horsing) would suggest and get one used to technical processes that could be developed into something more serious later, and quite naturally.” This serious experimental impulse is apparent in the trio’s unexpectedly euphonious finale, which attempts to recapture the Romantic past but repeatedly goes off the rails. As critic Alex Ross observes, Ives “was incapable of asserting a monolithic point of view; instead, he created a kind of open-ended listening room, a space of limitless echoes.”
In 1795, Beethoven introduced himself to the famously demanding Viennese public with his Op. 1 set of three more or less conventional piano trios. Some 15 years later, he bade farewell to the genre with a vastly richer and more complex work, the “Archduke” Trio in B-flat Major. The archduke in question was Rudolph, son of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and younger brother of his successor, Emperor Franz I. As Beethoven’s diligent composition pupil, lifelong friend, and most magnanimous patron, Archduke Rudolph was more than deserving of the tribute the composer paid him in the dedications of such masterworks as the Missa solemnis, “Emperor” Piano Concerto, “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata, and “Archduke.” Beethoven’s relations with the young nobleman, whom he described to another close friend as “an amiable and talented prince,” were singularly warm and free of tension and guile. Surely it is not reading too much into the trio to see Beethoven’s feelings for the archduke mirrored in its majestic phrases and nobility of conception.
Beethoven sketched the B-flat–Major Trio in 1810 and completed the score early the following year, shortly before starting work on his Seventh Symphony. As the last and most overtly symphonic of his seven canonic piano trios, the “Archduke” points the way to the trios of Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Brahms. In the spring of 1814, Beethoven played the trio on a benefit concert for a military charity in Vienna. According to composer Ludwig Spohr, the performance “was not a treat, for, in the first place, the piano was badly out of tune, which Beethoven minded little, since he did not hear it, and secondly, on account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left of the virtuosity of the artist which had formerly been so greatly admired. In forte passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys till the strings jangled, and in piano he played so softly that whole groups of tones were omitted, so that the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part.” Pianist Ignaz Moscheles gave a more forgiving account of the concert: “In the case of how many compositions is the word new misapplied! But never in Beethoven’s, and least of all in this, which again is full of originality. His playing, aside from its intellectual element, satisfied me less, being wanting in clarity and precision; but I observed many traces of the grand style of playing which I had long recognized in his compositions.”
The opening bars of the Allegro moderato—with its broadly arching piano melody, piquant intensifications of harmony, and ecstatic violin and cello outbursts—set the stage for a movement charged with dynamic drama and tender lyricism in equal parts. After such boldly striding music, the delicate, mincing tread of the Scherzo is all the more delightfully startling. Yet here too Beethoven works on an expansive scale, deftly transforming the cello’s bouncy staccato theme first into a flowing legato melody and then into a slithering, chromatic fugue. An even sharper contrast lies in store in the luminous Andante, which Beethoven marks “cantabile, ma però con moto” (“songlike, but with movement”). A softly pulsing melody limned in block chords gives way to a pearly cascade of triplets in the piano part, the two hands in contrary motion, accompanied by unison sighing figures in the strings. This is the first of four richly imaginative variations that Beethoven weaves upon his simple D-major theme, topped off with a coda that pivots adroitly back to the home key before striking off in a new and totally unforeseen direction. Like the first movement, the finale is marked Allegro moderato, but its antic spirit and ingenious rhythmic repartee might almost come from a different world.
—Harry Haskell