The Bad Boys! George Antheil, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein - Steffen Schleiermacher, piano
Hat Now 1994
Today is the 10th anniversary of the passing away of Leo Ornstein at the astonishing age of 109 years.
Notes from the booklet (enclosed):
It is Antheil- Futurist, Vorticist, self-made enfant terrible of the 1920's avant-garde who provides a name for this collection of piano works by three independently minded American composers. Indeed, Antheil wrote an autobiography at the age of 35, Bad Boy Of Music, that stands as the classical music world's equivalent to Charles Mingus's Beneath The Underdog, for sheer audacity and self-mythologization. "...I reached in under my left armpit in approved American gangster fashion," he writes of an early Eastern European performance, "and produced my ugly little automatic. Without a further word I placed it on the front desk of my Steinway and proceeded with my concert. Every note was heard, and, in a sense, I suppose I opened up the way in Hungary for modern music of a non-Bartok-Kodaly variety."
Antheil's most important work, both as a self-promoter and as a composer took shape in Europe (Berlin and Paris, especially) during the early 1920's. Travelling there in search of a lost blonde love named Anne Williams, he started playing piano professionally and soon became one of the first American students of Nadia Boulanger. Like much of the French avant-garde - Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Antheil's music fell under the influence of jazz, and the works presented here (both composed in 1922 or 1923) explicitly refer to that preoccupation. In 1927, impressed by the rhythmic complexity of Antheil's music, Pound wrote Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, a book that harmony should be thought of primarily as a rhythmic, rather than a tonal, concern.
Back in the U.S in the 1930s, Antheil turned his attention to opera and Hollywood film music, but these solo piano works and his performances of them had polarized and galvanized fans. "Riots came to be the order of the day at my concerts," he recounts in Bad Boy Of Music, "because I was one of the few pianists of that period always to end a concert with a modern group, preferably of the most 'ultra' order. In fact, I invariably closed with a piece of my own, the "Mechanisms,' the 'Jazz Sonata,' 'Fireworks and the Profane Waltzers,' "Sonata Sauvage,' or something equally cacophonous. I also played works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Ornstein."
The fiery ultramodern pianist Leo Ornstein was born in Russia, , in 1892, and came to the States at age nine. Better-known to many as a player than a composer (converse of Antheil), Ornstein too loved bombastic, mechanistic rhythms and was was also influenced by jazz. His own reportedly wild and outlandish performances of "Danse Sauvage," written in 1915, earned him intense notoriety, as did a 1914 London recital of his own work that he announced as "futuristic music." Hailed by some as the leading Futurist musician, Ornstein's piano music predates Antheil's by a decade- "Suicide in an Airplane" was composed in 1913; " Impressions de Notre-Dame" in 1914- and is contemporaneous with the earliest works represented here by that other piano ultramodernist, Henry Cowell.
The centerpiece of this collection is a set of short, brilliant studies by thai baddest boy- if also the most genteel- of the three, Henry Cowell. Born in 1897, raised in San Francisco, and always a West Coaster at heart, Cowell began his influential reconsideration of the piano as an instrument when he was literally but a boy. At age 13 he composed "Adventures in Harmony," which used his newly-coined term, "tone clusters." Later Bela Bartok would write to him asking for permission for the use of his "clusters.") This piece, like many of his later works, also made use of innovative techniques such as striking the keyboard with fists, forearms, and elbows, and in 1914 he demonstrated his new technique of placing objects directly onto the strings of a piano for what must have been a completely bemused Aan Francisco Musical Society.
(...) The compilation of Cowell's piano on Bad Boys, selected and stunningly rendered by Steffen Schleiermacher, ranges in date from the early 1910's ("The Tides of Manaunaun," "Anger Dance,") to the late 1920s ("The Banshee," "Tiger"). On one hand, these compositions set a course for composers such as Cage and Nancarrow (whose piano-roll pieces bring to fruition the call for mechanization of the Futurists, first heard in Ornstein and Antheil). On the other they predict many piano developments specific to improvised music, from the energetic deployment of clusters characteristic of Cecil Taylor to the internal surgery carried out on pianos by Nick Couldry, Carlo Inderhees, and Denman Maroney. In fact, Cowell clearly had improvisation in mind with many of his extended techniques. For instance, instructions at the top of the score for "Aeolian Harp" (1923) read: "Lento.In improvisatory style."
(...) Taken together with these historically important and musically rewarding pieces by Antheil and Ornstein, Cowell's piano music looks to the future we currently occupy,. A crucial link between Scriabin and Sun Ra, his wide-eared musical mind drew on music from all over the world, particularly classical musics of China, India, and Japan, which he is said to have known far better than he did the standard Western classical repertoire.
(...) these early piano pieces are startling reminders of his singular and motivational place in the front ranks of the avant-garde.
John Corbett, Chicago, June 1994 (thanks to David Grubbs for historical assistance).
The Bad Boys! Henry Cowell, George Antheil, Leo Ornstein
Henry Cowell (1897-1965):
Three Irish Legends:
1-The Tides Of Manaunaun 1912
2-The Hero Sun 1922
3-The Voice Of Lir 1920
4-Aeolian Harp 1923
5-Banshee 1925
6-Anger Dance 1914
7-Dynamic Motion 1913
Five Encores To Dynamic Motion:
8-What's This 1913
8-Amiable Conversation 1917
10-Advertisement 1914/59
11-Antimony 1914
12-Time Table 1914/15
13-Tiger 1928
George Antheil (1900-1959):
Second Sonata ("The Airplane Sonata") 1922
14-First Movement
15-Second Movement
Sonata Sauvage 1922/23
16-First Movement
17-Second Movement
18-Third Movement
19-Jazz Sonata 1922
Leo Ornstein (1892-2002):
20-Suicide In An Airplane ca.1915
21-Impressions De Notre-Dame (Op.16 No.1 ca.1915)
22-Impressions De Notre-Dame (Op.16 No.2 ca.1815)
23-Wild Men's Dance (Op.13 No.2 ca.1914)
Steffen Schleiermacher - Piano
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