Six Recent Works

Mel Powell - Six Recent Works

CD released in 1988

Die Violine (1987)
A Pierrot Lunaire setting for soprano, piano, and violin
Judith Bettina - soprano Mel Powell - piano Yoko Matsuda - violin

Only in response to the striking idea proposed by Leonard Stein would I have ever considered setting a German text [Die Violine] (for the first and no doubt the last time) and, moreover, setting it rather speedily. So it is friend Leonard who is responsible for this present addition to my collection of 'Overnight Pieces.' (Mel Powell)

Mel was immediately taken with the moonstruck atmosphere of the poem (no. 32 in the collection [Albert Giraud's Pierrot collection], and chose a most appropriate setting for the text with the violin as centerpiece, particularly as he had in mind as performers his dear friends Yoko Matsuda and Judith Bettina, for whom he had written several other pieces. (He did not have himself in mind as pianist. Happily, though, he was persuaded to join the others for this recording - the first time he has entered a recording studio as a performer in more than 30 years!) (Leonard Stein)

Madrigal for Flute Alone (1988)
Rachel Rudich - flute

"The culture of particular form has ended; the age of determined relationships has begun." Powell is fond of quoting Mondrian's famous remark, a remark which is in many ways reflected by the structural nuances shaping this lovely solo piece. ... It is just such perpetual variance - the manifold translations and reinterpretations - that projects a fixed "determined relationship" rather than a fixed "particular" utterance. If from the compositional point of view the piece accordingly proposes an elaborate associational maze, from any point of view it offers the listener a beautiful musical substance. (Peter Zaferes)

Strand Settings: "Darker" (1983)
A song cycle for voice with electronic-music accompaniment
Texts by Mark Strand from the collections of poems, Darker.
Judith Bettina - soprano

Mel Powell's mode of writing for the voice here aligns the composer with the great bel canto tradition and its ideals of vocal beauty. Along with Powell's tendency to avoid overly dramatic and noisily romanticized expression, this leads him to choose texts from poets such as Mark Strand. Strand's poetry shuns proclamatory drama. The collection entitled Darker is especially rich in images that fluctuate constantly between the interior world of "self" and the external world. All action is covert, lying deep beneath the surface. This conforms precisely with Powell's image of the essence of lyric poetry, which he once defined as the resonance of quiet obsessions. Perhaps there is an indication of Powell's feeling for these particular texts in the fact that, while melismatic treatment is a feature of most of his other vocal works, here the setting is largely syllabic. And the degree to which word and tone are correlated in this composition is suggested by Mark Strand's own comments. (Peter Zaferes)

I wish to say how much Mel Powell's settings of some of the poems in Darker have meant to me. They are exquisite, of course, and way beyond what anyone else has done with my work, but more than that, when I listen to them I reexperience my poems in a way that is actually pleasurable. They seem to have more life; they seem enhanced, not merely complemented; and they seem clear, free of any distortion. In Powell's settings, the poems have about them a kind of magical fullness, the result, I am sure, of a profound sympathy and understanding. (Mark Strand)

String Quartet (1982)
The Sequoia String Quartet:
Yoko Matsuda and Miwako Watanabe - violins
James Dunham - viola
Robert Martin - cello

Here is a brilliant example of Mel Powell's meticulous compositional craftsmanship and his singular skill at assembling complex musical structures that are at the same time richly expressive. In the present instance, the eloquent results are obtained by maintaining a judicious balance between multi-dimensional constructs, including varied 12-tone aggregates and other "scrambled" 12-note pitch sets - intricate techniques that have defeated other, less inventive practioners of the post-serial idiom, but which remain ripe with creative possibilities for Powell. (Mark Waldrop)

Computer Prelude (1988)

A "child of exasperation," Powell calls it. This is because the piece came to light first in quite different form: as a section of a work for two pianos. "After the composition was completed," Powell explains, "I began to assess various relevant 'practical' questions. How refractory were the individual and ensemble burdens here? How many months - years? - of rehearsal would be necessary in order for the players, however conscientious and well-intentioned they might be, to achieve reasonably accurate coordination? And so on. To my dismay, a stubborn inner censor kept asserting, more and more forcefully, that demands on the performers in this section of the composition were outrageous, entirely excessive. So, alas, at the end I decided that it had to be abandoned."
But evidently Powell was still reluctant to part with the material. Rather than banish it to the file cabinet (where perhaps many such entities rest in peace), he called on a "performer" uniquely impervious to difficulties such as beset mortal executants: the computer. The envisioned complexities of temporal structuring were thus "facilitated." (Peter Zaferes)

Nocturne for Violin Solo (1969; rev. 1985)
Yoko Matsuda - violin

The loneliness of the unaccompanied violin is underscored by the extremely introverted nature of this lovely monologue. In a sequence of moment-to-moment shifts, a whisper, a meditation, an intense cry, it bespeaks the nocturnal, true to the title, seeming to reflect dreams rather than declamations.
The opposite of a glittering showpiece, this work keeps even its severe demands on the performer hidden, the "virtuosity" submerged, so to speak. The stark effect of the whole results from the way a thought here is picked up there - as continual rumination rather than development; proposing puzzles, but not puzzles to be unraveled. External worlds, ordinary rules of order in an ordinary usage of time seem distant from this intensely personal zone.
Powell once wrote of the work that its "structural underpinnings derive directly from, and present a modest extension of, the idea of registral invariance introduced by Webern more than a half-century ago." (R. G. Naldec)

Tracklisting:

1. Die Violine {2:55}

2. Madrigal for Flute Alone {2:18}

3. Strand Settings: "Darker" {18:54}

4. String Quartet {11:43}

5. Computer Prelude {2:27}

6. Nocturne for Violin Solo {7:17}

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