Remarks apropos the Sonatas with no Style.

I agree with the poet of An die Musik, the theme song of the Schubertiads: Is not the greatest comfort of music that it allows us, while it lasts, to live in a more perfect world? Music’s own unities and totalities, which is only to say, its various principles of style, transport us to a realm apart. But that is not always what we want. When I began this music, I was fed up with the allure of style and I deplored the effect of style in separating music from my tawdry, heartbreaking everyday world of disease, poverty, pollution and imperious presidents. I didn’t expect my piano piece to articulate a political doctrine, but perhaps to bear witness to our dismaying reality simply by renouncing any escape into the exclusionary world of one style or—it is the same thing—one technique. Therefore, I would leave the front door unlocked, be “at home” to welcome any who came: Expression or Abstraction, Tone rows or Tonic and Dominants, Necessities or Accidents, Sincerity or Artificiality—even, if it came to that, Kitsch. No fear, I could suffer Kitsch. Cliché? Yes, again. There’s always food for one more. Above all, I would be Plain and Ordinary.

The attitude is not original. Indeed, it may be a genre or (no!—don’t say it!) a style! I don’t know where the anti-style history of music should start, but certainly not later than Mussorgsky, who advocated a brutal realism that recognized no aesthetic contraints. In a review for The Nation, Benjamin Boretz observed the circumvention of style in Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish (a fully political work). Boretz used an epithet normally reserved for certain poetry of the same period, “confessional”.* A good term for a tendency widely felt; Shostakovitch comes right to mind. Yet, my cycle is not confessional. As I turned away from style, I determined instead to depend on form—our traditional anti-narrative of heterogeneity, the sonata cycle. That is why you will hear expositions that repeat, recapitulations that recapitulate and even (in the rondo) a development with sequences and a vamp. Trust the form: If your eyes are closed, you should still know when the music has finished. Of course Bernstein and Shostakovitch use sonata form. But – Wait! – I did not USE it. It’s the other way around: I mandated the Sonata Principle to use my music her way. We negotiated, but form never bends to my mere whim. Its angst, if any, is not personal. That is the Enlightenment looking in its own mirror. (The Rondo is more personal.) And, although I have adopted the notion of a plurality of sonata forms that I hope you know from Charles Rosen’s fine book, I am not ready to accept the notion that there is one “sonata style”. Nevertheless, we do have, by aggregation, a heritage of sonata rhetoric, a rhetoric called to service here.

More than a year after first playing these sonatas, it is clearto me that my music does not entirely fulfill its ambition of avoiding style, despite some fairly sharp incongruities among the movements. I still want the title as a momento, but in our age, only a fool will put notes on paper without some consciousness of methodology and some technical obsessions—unities are inevitable. For those who like footnotes, I will record that a scant few of lessons with the qanun master, George Sawa, had me thinking hard about modes. (I was trying out traditional Arabic beginners’ tunes and on my viola.) It occurred to me to rely in a sonata exposition on a melodic move to the fifth of the mode instead of a tonal modulation, as in a kriti, and that such a restraint left open the possibility of reserving the real modulation for the recap. It is an arrangement related to the harmonic logic of some fugues by Bach that start with tonal instead of real answers, and it is an alternate interpretation of sonata, not a license. In my second movement, the repeat of the exposition is written out with ornaments. If you want more ornaments, here or elsewhere, you must do your own. True to tradition, the Coda is entirely unwarranted. By the way, I never intended the music to be played without style. That would be another project.

NOTES ON PEDALING

The music requires three working pedals. No adaptation to fit a piano without a sostenuto pedal will be satisfying for the second, third or fifth movements.

RIGHT
The sustain pedal is marked here and there where I thought it was essential to notate it, but it is shown schematically, not with full nuance. Where nothing indicated, ad lib.

LEFT
The use of soft pedal is rather fully notated, but it is optional in the fourth movement.

MIDDLE
The sostenuto pedal is indicated in the second movement by “x’s” across the stems of some notes. In the fifth movement, a graphic symbol is used and is illustrated there at the top.

In the second movement, the x’s are really redundant, and sometimes omitted, as the indicated rhythmic values tell the pianist what to do. The same holds for the third movement, where I did not bother with most of the x’s. But in the fifth movement, the notes to be sustained are not written out for their full length, and the durations are shown by the graphic pedal symbol. If these words are confusing, just look at the score page, which is not at all confusing.

In some places, the middle pedal wants the left foot and elsewhere the right, depending which other pedal is called for. There is one spot where I turn my ankle and use all three pedals.

And A NOTE ON DYNAMICS AND ACCENTS

In close proximity, ^ is louder than >, Otherwise, > appearing alone, is extremely variable and may even equal sf. I prefer to leave accent fluid, a variable of performance and interpretation. Similarly, ff is always very loud, whereas f is optionally very loud. My notation is not lazy—the intention is to establish the identity of the composition while leaving its characterization open. The particular mood of any passage, like our own moods, might change radically from day to day. When our friends change their clothes or hairdo or when their moods alter, we still know them—I wish it to be the same with my compositions.

*”Liturgy and Vilification,” reprinted in his Music Columns from the Nation, 1962-1968, selected and introduced by Elaine Barkin, Open Space, Red Hook, New York. The collection, published without date, is a monument of critical listening.

David Lidov
Toronto, 2005
lidov@yorku.ca
www.yorku.ca/lidov