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Hans Haass: Fugue in C Major (1926)

From the album Piano Music without Limits: Original Compositions of the 1920s

Experimental music for the player piano is usually associated with the work of Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who beginning in 1948 worked for many years in obscurity in Mexico before being discovered and championed in the late 1970s and 80s. (Nancarrow was featured here in August 2009.)  But in fact the history of original, “unplayable” music for player piano goes back much further, to the first decades of the 20th century. Although the earliest pieces date from the late teens, the majority of compositions in this vein were written in the 1920s, in the experiment-happy environment of Weimar Republic Germany.

The period’s dominant mood of “new objectivity,” as well as the general adulation of the machine in both capitalist and socialist thinking, led to a fascination with so-called “mechanical music.”  This could mean anything from gramophone recordings to new electronic instruments, but it was perhaps best exemplified by the player piano, which was able to reproduce with utter precision and superhuman ability virtually anything that was demanded of it.

At the new music festivals in the towns of Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden in 1926 and 1927, a handful of works for player piano were premiered by Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and other composers.  These pieces were deliberately composed to take advantage of the mechanical potential of the instrument (specifically, a model of player piano known as the Welte-Mignon), apart from all conventions of piano technique derived from the physical nature of the human hand.  The paper rolls which stored the musical information were created not through live recording, as was customary, but by hand-pricking each tiny perforation in order to exactly determine the pitches, durations, tempo, and dynamics of the music.

One of the pieces premiered in 1927 was this Fugue in C Major (also known as theCapriccio Fugue) by Hans Haass, an accomplished composer and concert pianist who had became a director of recording for Welte-Mignon in 1925.  He recorded over 300 rolls of popular and classical music, and knew as well as anyone the capabilities and limitations of the machine.  According to player piano expert Jürgen Hocker, Haass’ pieces for the Welt-Mignon are the among the most adventurous and depart radically from the conventions of piano composition.  

Though recognizable as a fugue thanks to its omnipresent theme and consistent imitative polyphony, this composition is really a showpiece for the unique effects of the medium: breakneck tempo, simultaneous use of the entire keyboard, and ultra-fast runs and trills which overload the ear’s ability to distinguish individual notes, creating what Hocker calls “clouds” and “hurricanes” of sound.

(Note: This post is based on my dissertation research on music technology in early 20th-century Germany.  More music and information on this fascinating period will be forthcoming over the next two years.)

July 22, 2010, 2:35pm

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Julián Carrillo: Preludio a Colón (1924)

From the album Julian Carrillo (date unknown)

Born in Mexico City in 1875, Julián Carrillo is a fascinating and little-known composer of the 20th century.  Around 1895, Carrillo began using his violin to experiment with microtonal intervals— distances between notes smaller than the semitone or minor second which is the smallest difference between two pitches in the conventional Western system of tuning.  The realization that a virtually infinite world of tones lay dormant between the notes of the equal-tempered scale took on revelatory significance for Carrillo, who christened his discovery “el sonido trece” (“the thirteenth sound”).  Carrillo’s experiments in microtonality were among the first efforts in what would become a major strain of new musical investigations in the 20th century— perhaps first brought to public awareness by Ferruccio Busoni in his Outline of a New Aesthetics of Music, written in 1907.  (N.B.: The link is to the 1911 translation of the text, which is faulty, but alas, the only English version available.)

Carrillo’s music met with great public success during his lifetime.  Championed by Leopold Stokowski from the 1920s on, his works were premiered in several cities in the United States.  In 1930, Carrillo returned to Mexico from abroad and formed the “Orquesta Sonido 13,” a group dedicated to his microtonal compositions.

He had a set of 15 microtonal pianos built for him and exhibited at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels— the same event which saw the famous Poème électronique of Varese, Xenakis, and Corbusier.  Carrillo’s “metamorphic pianos” were admired by other microtonal composers such as Alois Hába and Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

Carrillo also developed a new system of notation meant to rationalize musical production and make it easier to write microtonal intervals.  Like the many other efforts in this vein undertaken in the 20th century, Carrillo’s innovations did not catch on.

The title of this piece translates as “Prelude to Columbus.”  It is written for soprano, flute, guitar, violin, octavina, and harp.

December 09, 2009, 5:31pm

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Josef Matthias Hauer: “VII. Suite for Orchestra, 1st movement” (1926)

From the album Symphonic Works

The Viennese composer Josef Matthias Hauer is one of the stranger characters in 20th-classical music.  He beat Arnold Schoenberg to the discovery of twelve-tone composition by a couple of years when he published his piano piece Nomos in 1919, and he later anticipated the emergence of algorithmic thinking in music with his Zwölftonspiele (“Twelve-tone games”), in which the compositional structure is derived in a systematic way from the intervalllic structure of the “tropes” (complementary hexachords forming a complete twelve-tone pitch set).  But in spite of these would-be claims to fame, Hauer remains a marginal figure.  Even now, recordings of his music are hard to come by.

In contrast to the music of the Viennese School, which (with the partial exception of Webern’s later works) in spite of its rejection of tonality remained deeply indebted to the musical syntax of the Austro-Germanic tradition stemming from the 18th century, Hauer’s twelve-tone music is largely unmoored from conventional classical-romantic phrase structure.  Its constantly flowing, meandering melodies suggest a kinship with the Fortspinnung principle of Baroque music, in which the continual evolution of melody is paramount.  Together with the atonal harmonic language, this gives Hauer’s music a delightfully manic quality reminiscent of a  perpetuum mobile.

October 23, 2009, 4:29pm

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Velimir Khlebnikov: “The Radio of the Future” (written in 1921; radiophonic recreation by Miguel Molina Alarcon and Leopoldo Amigo, 2006)

From the album Baku: Symphony of Sirens (Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant Garde)

In 1921, the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov wrote a remarkable essay entitled “The Radio of the Future,” in which he projects a vision of the new wireless medium as a synaesthetic panacea for modern man— “the spiritual sun of the country, a great wizard and sorceror” which will unite humanity by allowing for the instantaneous, universal transmission of text, sound, flavor, and scent.

Khlebnikov’s essay, which must be read to be believed, has been imaginitively realized in sound by the scholar and sound artist Miguel Molina Alarcon of the Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain.  He has used the sonic references in “The Radio of the Future” to construct  a sound-collage that evokes the heady, futuristic atmosphere of Khlebnikov’s writing.

The album from which this track is taken is one of the most remarkable documents of experimental music I have yet discovered.  Consisting of one disc of reconstructions and one disc of historical recordings, Baku: Symphony of Sirens offers entry into the bizarre and beautiful sound-world of the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde.  I will be featuring more of it in due time.

March 27, 2009, 10:15am