Crawford: 9 Preludes, Beyer: Dissonant Counterpoint

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The American composer Ruth Crawford [known after her marriage as Ruth Crawford Seeger] and the German-American Johanna Beyer were not just contemporaries, they were friends. Traveling in musical circles that included composer-pianist Henry Cowell, the two women were vital in their generation's forging of a new musical idiom--one that shaped American music in the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond. Unfortunately, their work has been largely eclipsed by that of their male contemporaries. While Crawford's music has experienced something of a resurgence of interest in recent years, Beyer's work is all but unknown. Indeed, this is the first commercial recording of her music.

Pianist Sarah Cahill is seeking to remedy this injustice, and her disc of solo piano music by the two composers makes an unshakable case for their revival on the concert stage. Cahill is a strong advocate, both in her obvious passion and her technical and emotional fluency. Her articulation is crystalline: each note of Crawford's concise 9 Preludes is finely etched against a background of silence. Clocking in at just over a minute, Crawford's Piano Study in Mixed Accents is a devilishly difficult, densely packed work, but Cahill's fluid playing outlines the piece's structure clearly. The thrill of discovery surrounds the two Beyer suites. Beyer's indebtedness to Crawford's writing is clear: Dissonant Counterpoint even takes its name from the theory devised by Crawford and her husband, musicologist Charles Seeger. But Beyer's music is not mere mimicry; her writing, while harmonically linked to Crawford's, is lyrical where Crawford is angular. Cahill plays up the distinction, remarkably altering her sound to suit Beyer's more rounded lines. Crawford and Beyer couldn't have a better advocate than Cahill; here's hoping for an encore. --Anastasia Tsioulcas

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Composed between 1924 and 1928, Ruth Crawford Seeger's Nine Preludes chart the path to maturity of a composer whose work at the turn of the 1930s had almost reclaimed its place as a vital part of inter-war Modernism. Andante tranquillo has the feel of an objectified take on the Berg Sonata, given a humorous subtext in Allegro giocoso, before the quixotic mood swings of the oddly titled Semplice. The supple dynamic contours of Grave, mesto lead naturally into the Busonian searchings of Lento... read more

Album Description
An important new recording of Ruth Crawford's (1901-1953) transcendental "Nine Preludes" and "Piano Study in Mixed Accents," and the premiere recording of "Dissonant Counterpoint" and "Gebrauchs-musik" by Johanna Beyer (1888-1944), a revolutionary but tragically neglected figure in American modernism. With their piano compositions, these two women made phenominal contributions to American experimental music.

Crawford: 9 Preludes, Beyer: Dissonant Counterpoint

Tracks:

Prld No.1: Andante Tranquillo
Prld No.2: Allegro Giocoso
Prld No.3: Semplice
Prld No.4: Grave, Mesto
Prld No.5: Lento
Prld No.6: Andante Mystico
Prld No.7: Intensivo
Prld No.8: Leggiero
Prld No.9: Tranquillio
Pno Study In Mixed Accents
Dissonant Counterpoint: I
Dissonant Counterpoint: II
Dissonant Counterpoint: III
Dissonant Counterpoint: IV
Dissonant Counterpoint: V
Dissonant Counterpoint: VI
Dissonant Counterpoint: VII
Dissonant Counterpoint: VIII
Gebrauchs-Musik: I
Gebrauchs-Musik: II
Gebrauchs-Musik: III
Gebrauchs-Musik: IV
Gebrauchs-Musik: V

Amazon.com

The American composer Ruth Crawford [known after her marriage as Ruth Crawford Seeger] and the German-American Johanna Beyer were not just contemporaries, they were friends. Traveling in musical circles that included composer-pianist Henry Cowell, the two women were vital in their generation's forging of a new musical idiom--one that shaped American music in the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond. Unfortunately, their work has been largely eclipsed by that of their male contemporaries. While Crawford's music has experienced something of a resurgence of interest in recent years, Beyer's work is all but unknown. Indeed, this is the first commercial recording of her music.

Album Description

An important new recording of Ruth Crawford's (1901-1953) transcendental "Nine Preludes" and "Piano Study in Mixed Accents," and the premiere recording of "Dissonant Counterpoint" and "Gebrauchs-musik" by Johanna Beyer (1888-1944), a revolutionary but tragically neglected figure in American modernism. With their piano compositions, these two women made phenominal contributions to American experimental music.

Customer Reviews:

Significant, but stern.......2007-04-07

Before the revival of interest for the music of Ruth Crawford that took place in the 1990s, her Piano Preludes (composed between 1924 and 1928) were one of her regularly performed and recorded compositions. Stylistically the musical language is somewhere around Berg's Piano Sonata - but without the Viennese's lush post-romantic sweep and seductiveness - or the early "expressionist" piano compositions of Eisler, Krenek and Hauer. The deep-sounding rumblings of # 9 "tranquillo" are evocative of Cowell's clusters. The moods are not very varied, and except in the (slightly) more playful # 2 "Allegro giocoso" and # 8 "Leggiero" they are mostly somber, stern, brooding. The 1931 Piano Study in Mixed Accents is a brief (1:05) and virtuosic tour de force, an angry ascension from low to high register and back.

I first discovered the music of Johanna Beyer through her impressive 1937 Suite for Violin and Piano played by Miwako Abe and Michael Kieran Harvey on a New World Records collection with works by Cowell, Antheil, Ruth Crawford and others (see my review of Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe), and it made me want to explore more of this composer. Very little is known of her, there are not even any known photographs. She was born in Leipzig in 1888, moved to New York in 1924 where she participated in the circle of modernist musicians around Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford and Carl Ruggles. She died a premature death in 1944 of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , a neurodegenerative disease, and she fell into oblivion, until the late 80s and 90s, when a rediscovery of sorts took place. Her main output dates from the 1930s, as with "Dissonant Counterpoint" and "Gebrauchs-musik". Dissonant counterpoint is the theory formulated by Charles Seeger, consisting of a reversal of the rules of traditional counterpoint, establishing "dissonance, rather than consonance, as the rule". Well - what you see is what you get, in the same-titled piece as well as in "Gebrauchs-musik", which apparently pays tribute to Hindemith's "utility music" in title only, but not in compositional style. Beyer's dissonant counterpoint is terse, enigmatic, quasi-Webernian in its sparse, pointillistic textures (the piano part of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire also comes to mind), stylistically pretty close to Crawford's preludes. The liner notes are quite honest about it: "they are difficult, both to play and to understand, and the casual listener may not at first hear the rich musical detail embedded in the straightforward, two-part invention piano style".

This recording, made in 1999 and released in 2001, was the first commercial recording of music of Johanna Beyer. It contains thorough and informative notes by composer and musicologist Larry Polansky, who is the driving force behind the rediscovery of Johanna Beyer. Sarah Cahill, also highly instrumental in the rediscovery of this music, seems to acquit herself expertly.

This is not easy and seductive listening, but it is a significant recording, in that it enables us to hear two important female composers and early American modernists.

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