Fomenting its gestural language from spirals, springs, coils, vortices, loops-de-loop, and other calligraphic flourishes, Fiddlehead is an irrepressible stream of piano energy based on the inter-vals of a minor second and major third. A descending chromatic sequence recurs throughout, acting as a moderating influence.
—Timo Andres
Like Andres, singer-songwriter Robin Holcomb frequently crosses the boundaries between vernacular and concert music; her fusion of genres and traditions has been characterized as “art-folk.” A native of Georgia, Holcomb shuttled between the East and West coasts before settling in Seattle. Yet much of her music and poetry remains rooted in the hardscrabble soil of North Carolina’s High Country—“Satie goes to Appalachia,” as one critic put it. Andres likens Wherein Lies the Good, which was originally featured on Holcomb’s 1995 album Little Three, to a patchwork quilt stitched together “out of references to country music and American parlor songs.” The piece reflects her natural proclivity toward minimalism, with its spare textures, repetitive patterns, and laid-back lyricism spiced with “wrong-note” harmonies. Holcomb’s medley ranges from rollicking dances to music of hymn-like serenity, culminating in a tantalizingly truncated “Amen” cadence at the end. “Wherein Lies the Good has quickly become one of my favorite pieces to perform,” says Andres. “It encapsulates so many particularly American musical moods, at once familiar and difficult to place.”
Duke Ellington’s status as a grand master of jazz has never been in dispute. But the fact that he was only belatedly elevated to the pantheon of great American composers illustrates how siloed the worlds of classical music and jazz remained through much of the 20th century, even as those categories became increasingly irrelevant to musicians working in both traditions. “The Single Petal of a Rose” is one of half a dozen songs that Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn composed in homage to the young Queen Elizabeth, whom the Duke met on a concert tour of England in 1958. (The story goes that after the Queen expressed regret at being unable to hear the Ellington band in person, he presented her with a recording of The Queen’s Suite, of which he allowed only a single copy to be pressed.) Ellington’s tender ballad speaks for itself. In his words, the music is “so delicate, fragile, gentle, luminous. Only God could make one, and like love, it should be admired but not analyzed.”
San Francisco–born Gabriella Smith describes herself as a “composer and environmentalist” focused on “connecting listeners with the natural world.” Her musical environmentalism has taken many forms: a Latin Requiem set to a litany of names of extinct species; a wake-up call to the effects of climate change, titled Lost Coast; and various works incorporating field recordings of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Her lifelong interest in the natural environment is reflected in the titles of compositions like Circadian Rhythm, Tumblebird Contrails, and Anthozoa. The inspiration for Imaginary Pancake, by contrast, was purely musical: an indelible image from childhood of a pianist’s outstretched arms as he played at the extremities of the keyboard. Smith’s piece begins in just that way, in a clangorous moto perpetuo. As the pianist’s hands gradually converge, and even cross, the texture grows lighter and more translucent, but entropy soon reasserts itself. The tonal “pancake” eventually flattens out until it’s finally reduced to a thin batter of tinkly, hand-stopped chords.
Another of Ellington’s ballads that was predestined to become a jazz standard, “Reflections in D” made its debut on a 1953 album showcasing his prowess at the keyboard. The influence of the impressionist composers stands out in this delicately nuanced tonal sketch: Ellington’s shimmering parallel harmonies, in particular, are straight out of Debussy’s playbook. (Andres pairs the Frenchman’s “Reflets dans l’eau” with “Reflections in D” on a recent YouTube video.) Alvin Ailey captured the music’s yearning mood in a solo he choreographed for himself in 1962.
Like Stravinsky, whose music he admired, Copland was at once a folksy nationalist and a sophisticated cosmopolite. His studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the early 1920s expanded his musical horizons, and from then on, his work embraced a wide range of classical and popular elements. Although he’s best known for his trio of Americanist ballets from the 1930s and 1940s—Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring—he had already made his mark on New York’s contemporary-music scene with such uncompromisingly modernist works as the jazzy Piano Concerto, the lean, dissonant piano trio Vitebsk, and the prickly Piano Variations of 1930. Copland waited until the end of the decade to produce another major piano piece, which he described as lying “somewhere between the Variations and Our Town,” the score he wrote for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s classic portrait of small-town America.
For listeners attuned to the relaxed charm of Copland’s populist style, the most striking aspect of the three-movement Piano Sonata may be its highly concentrated intensity; in his words, “every note was carefully chosen and none included for ornamental reasons.” Copland’s economy of expression is especially notable in the outer slow movements, both spare in texture, somber in mood, and infused with his trademark “open” harmonies (liberally spiced with dissonances). Another salient feature of the work is its thematic integration. For example, just as the first movement’s gaily tripping interlude prefigures the restless, jazzy rhythms of the central Vivace, so too do the three portentous chords that open the finale recall the main theme of the Molto moderato.
Ellington and his orchestra recorded this mellow swing ballad in 1938, 20 years before “The Single Petal of a Rose.” “Prelude to a Kiss” proved so popular that he reworked it as a vocal piece, fitted out with lyrics by the (white) songwriting team of Irving Gordon and Irving Mills that began: “If you hear a song in blue, / Like a flower crying for the dew, / That was my heart serenading you, my prelude to a kiss.” Although Billy Strayhorn arranged the original big-band version of the song, Ellington is credited with the melody; the lush, sophisticated harmonies; and the arrangement for piano, bass, and drums.
As an elder statesman of America’s musical avant-garde, Rzewski was often tagged as a “political” composer. The vein of social activism he mined in works such as The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a set of piano variations on a 1970s-era Chilean protest song, harks back to the music that Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and other politically committed composers wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. But after Rzewski first came to prominence as a co-founder of the live electronic-music collective Musica Elettronica Viva in the 1960s, he carved out a broader niche for himself as the creator of elegantly crafted music that is at once powerfully expressive and sonorously imaginative. A case in point is Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, one of four “North American ballads” written in the late 1970s for pianist Paul Jacobs. Inspired by a work song from South Carolina, much of the piece is based on material from the song, including the mechanistic figuration of the opening, the slow blues passage, and the fugal counterpoint that follows. The soft, machine-like tremolos with which it opens are evocative of a spinning mill. These hazy sonic clusters soon give way to more sharply defined, but no less insistent, minimalist figurations. The music builds to a mighty climax, which the pianist allows to reverberate before picking up the musical thread in a tranquil vein until the rustling tremolos re-emerge and ultimately die away.
Octogenarian Philip Glass has long been the public face of minimalism—or, as he prefers to call it, “music with repetitive structures.” Repetition—of harmonies, melodies, and rhythmic patterns—is the thread that runs through nearly all Glass’s compositions, from chamber music and symphonies to the operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and The Voyage and the scores to such films as Koyaanisqatsi and The Hours. The same radically simplifying forces are at work in the 20 Etudes for solo piano. The last of these beguiling “studies”—which Glass says he wrote “to explore a variety of tempi, textures, and piano techniques”—is a tenderly ruminative exercise in looping arpeggios and slow-moving chords.
Andres has worked with Glass for more than 10 years, playing the etudes in performances around the world. In 2023, he acted as co-editor of a new edition of the complete Glass etudes, working closely with engraver Cory Davis and designer Stephen Doyle to create a fresh engraving of scores.In that edition, published by Artisan Books, Andres writes, “The scores’ straightforward tidiness turned out to have been an invitation for expression, variety, and interpretation, and I’ve spent the last 10 years interpreting and reinterpreting them. As with all great music, each time I play one of the etudes, I find ways to characterize its structure more vividly and explicitly, to give the listener some insight into the core idea of the piece. What I’ve come to realize is that Philip’s music, like Schubert’s impromptus, has more to do with change and variation than it does with repetition. The same notes and rhythms that at the beginning of a piece might sound fiery and determined may, by the end, take on a quality of wistful resignation. With each recapitulation and ritornello, time has passed and one’s perspective has shifted.”
—Harry Haskell