Elie Siegmeister (1909-1991) Piano Music,
Vol. 2
Elie Siegmeister is
one of a handful of American composers who gave rise to a distinctly American
style of music in the twentieth century. Strongly influenced by the works of
Charles Ives, Siegmeister extended his own imaginative use of musical colour
and drama over virtually every instrumental and vocal genre. The qualities that
bind together all his music are deeply rooted human emotions and strongly
expressive characterizations, along with a focus on traditional compositional
architecture and techniques.
Elie Siegmeister
was born in New York City in 1909 into an upper-middle-class family of
Russian-Jewish origin. Although he demonstrated no extraordinary aptitude for
music study as a boy, frequent trips with his father to hear the New York
Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera eventually stirred his creative
imagination. After early piano lessons with Emil Friedberger, he went on to
study music theory and composition with Seth Bingham at Columbia University,
from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in 1927.
Following four
volatile years in Paris, under Nadia Boulanger's tutelage, Siegmeister returned
home to begin a career as a composer, joining forces with other young New York
firebrands such as Marc Blitzstein and Henry Cowell. In particular, his
involvement with the Composers' Collective of New York (1932-1936) gave him an
outlet to introduce his music to students and working people He further
attempted to "connect" with the American public throughout the 1940s,
following his own discovery of the American folksong tradition. Many of his
most popular works come from this period and coincide with an overall shift in
American composition towards music of simplicity and directness.
While Siegmeister
did not embrace the wave of American avant-garde composition that began around
1950, his musical language was tempered by a consequent increase in complexity.
This was a period of profound evolution for Siegmeister at a time when he was
clearly looking inward in search of a more personal means of expression. What
resulted was a synthesis of dense musical textures with obvious jazz and folk
elements. Thus, he achieved dramatic intensity while maintaining a direct link
to a broad audience.
As an educator,
Siegmeister enjoyed a lengthy tenure, from 1949 to 1976, at Hofstra University,
where he also served as composer-in-residence. In addition, he served from 1960
to 1965 as vice-president of the American Music Center and was elected to the
Board of Directors of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
in 1977. He died in 1991 in Manhasset, New York, having spent a lifetime
expressing the American spirit in music in the face of ever-changing attitudes
and values.
Composed in 1946,
Siegmeister's Sunday in Brooklyn enjoyed
particular popularity, following three successful orchestral works in the same
vein, Wilderness Road (1944), Prairie Legend (1944) and Western Suite (1945). A typical product of
Brooklyn, he was well placed to create a work that reflected various aspects of
suburban life in one of America's most vibrant communities in the mid-1940s.
The work's five movements range from representations of quiet family moments to
teeming crowd scenes, while the unmistakably popular style of this work
reflects the influence of George Gershwin. The first piece of the set, Prospect Park, depicts a stroll through
Brooklyn's most famous oasis, with sliding harmonies supporting broad, sweeping
melodies. The second piece, Sunday Driver, represents
the hectic pace of modem life, rather than a leisurely country drive. The
nervous energy is projected through an underlying, ongoing eighth-note (quaver)
pulse, divided into a 3+3+2 grouping. The third piece, Family at Home, has a cozy, intimate quality,
established by a gentle, chordal ostinato in the left hand. Its lyrical style
recalls Prospect Park. The
shortest and most tender piece of the suite is the fourth, Children's Story, dedicated to his two
daughters, Mimi and Nancy. The poignant music reflects a father's fond memories
of time spent with his young children. The final piece, Coney Island, is appropriately raucous and
spirited in nature. It is also the most vividly programmatic of the set in its
depiction of gathering crowds and other sounds typically heard at the famous
amusement park.
Completed in 1964
and dedicated to the pianist Alan Mandel, Siegmeister's single- movement Piano Sonata No.2 represents a vast
departure from his American Sonata, composed
twenty years earlier. It illustrates his growing interest in more organic
structures and complex, sometimes explosive sonorities. Indeed, Siegmeister
himself claimed the work as one of the most violent he had written. The sonata
uses tonal effects unique to all his solo piano music, including hammered
notes, tone-clusters, plucked strings and harmonics. His continuing efforts to
compose in a leaner style are shown in the single-movement design of this
work. Three well-defined and distinctly contrasting elements, each exemplifying
a single aspect of sonority, rhythm and lyricism, are presented in a
multi-sectional structure that resembles sonata-allegro form. The adoption of
this form is no surprise, but his efforts to cut out extraneous figuration mark
this sonata as undoubtedly his most tightly knit.
<>Although composed
when he was only 23, Siegmeister considered the
Theme and Variations No.1 his first substantive composition
and it reveals an assured sense of compositional technique rare in such a young
composer. Written in 1932, this set of 26 variations is a young man's rebellion
against what he perceived as the overly "pretty" neo-classical style
so prevalent among composers in France during the 1920s. The overall
uncompromising and unrefined temper of this work reflects the influence of Charles
Ives and Igor Stravinsky Modelled on Beethoven's
Variations in C
minor, Siegmeister's
variations are also in the form of a chaconne, in which the theme is actually a
harmonic progression in the key of C minor. The following continuous series of
variations repeats this progression, with each variation given a specific
rhythmic figuration or technical pattern.
In 1979, fifteen
years after completing his Piano Sonata
No.2, Siegmeister returned to this form in his Piano Sonata No.3. A similar number of years
separated his work on the first and second Piano
Sonatas, and as before, his return to the sonata revealed an
evolved, albeit more subtle, approach to this structure Contrary to the one-movement
scheme of the second, with the new sonata he returned to a traditional
three-movement plan, thereby increasing its overall length significantly. He
also continued his quest to absorb elements unique to the American musical
scene into his own contemporary language. Lastly, the sonata's design is much
more sprawling and expansive than that of its predecessor. Superficially, the
first movement seems the least cohesive of the three. More than in any of his
other works for solo piano, Siegmeister indulges in wild and unpredictable
handfuls of figuration. This tends to mask what is actually a rather tightly
unified sonata-allegro structure. The leisurely second movement, constructed in
ABA form, illustrates his intriguing manner of modifying his essentially atonal
language with discreet hints of jazz. Though it is sometimes difficult to
define, his link to a jazz style is present in the movement's opening seventh
chords. The initial phrase also demonstrates his increasing inclination towards
the juxtaposition of contrasting elements within a short, concentrated space. The
third movement, also in ABA form, opens with a dreamy introductory section that
links the stillness of the preceding movement to the imminent frenetic,
toccata-like section. In the main section, Siegmeister uses the same percussive
intensity he employed in the first movement but in a more strident fashion.
There are neither breaks in the driving intensity nor compromises in the amount
of physical endurance required to manage the fantastic leaps, expansive chords
and rapid staccato passagework.
Siegmeister's final
suite for solo piano, From These Shores, was
completed in 1985 and fulfilled a commission from the United States Information
Agency's Artistic Ambassador Program. In the course of this work, Siegmeister
reflects on various aspects of the American experience. Each of the suite's
five movements takes its inspiration from the words of five of America's best
loved authors, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Langston Hughes
and William Faulkner.
The overall style
of the work echoes the density and harmonic complexities of the Piano Sonata No.3 and On This Ground; indeed, certain passages
seem to be interchangeable There is, however, more sophisticated interplay of
sound and colour in particular movements in From
These Shores. The composer also interjects frequent and
finely-controlled rubato effects throughout. Each piece, apart from the final
movement, is in ABA form. The first movement, Whitman,
was inspired by a fragment from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. As Siegmeister indicates in the preface to
the suite, "Starting from Paumonok asks
where we came from." This is the most rhapsodic movement, containing
sweeping arpeggios, loosely woven counterpoint and fluctuating tempi. The
second movement of the suite, Mark Twain, was
inspired by the comic whitewashing scene from The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and is the lightest of the set. The
thematic ideas are exceedingly short and concise, frequently emphasizing
rhythmic characterization over melodic substance. The third movement, Thoreau, was inspired by Henry David
Thoreau's most famous work, Summer in
Walden. As Siegmeister wrote, "Summer
in Walden reflects the sunlit loneliness of the New England
woods." This piece is rivalled only by the Summer movement from On
This Ground in its quiet stillness. The fourth movement of the suite
was inspired by one of the leading African-American poets, Langston Hughes. To
head this movement, Siegmeister chose the line, "I play it cool" from
Hughes' poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred. In
Siegmeister's words, Hughes' statement "presents the black poet's dancing,
laughing, sardonic, bitter-sweet images of Harlem". Throughout this
movement there is a captivating energy present, sometimes restrained, often
boundless, always unpredictable. The final movement, Faulkner, is based on an excerpt from Faulkner's Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel, A Fabel. The
passage reads, "I don't fear man … because man and his folly will endure …
They will do more. They will prevail" Siegmeister's choice of Faulkner's
broad challenge to mankind is certainly an appropriate way to conclude this
series of musical meditations on the American ideal.
Kenneth Boulton