For a few years, in my youth, I thought I knew and admired a work for piano and wind quintet by this Wallingford Riegger. It was on a Saga LP, along with Barber's "Summer Music" and other works for chamber winds by American composers. I eventually discovered that the attribution on the record label and sleeve was erroneous. I seem to recall it was actually the Poulenc sextet for piano and winds.

Clips from the real thing, (the Concerto for Piano and Wind Quintet by Riegger, that is) can be heard here.

But beyond the "dissonant counterpoint", quite a bit of difference between Crawford and Ruggles. And Crawford and Riegger were both firmly on the political left and Ruggles, er . . . was not.

I've never heard any Riegger, outside of a brief chamber duo. Always wanted to hear Study in sonority. Did his politics influence his music in any way?

[A pedant writes: Ruth Crawford never used the "Seeger" addition to her name. Only people who wrote about her. We shouldn't either].

. [moved]

So far, then, there's been a little about Riegger, virtually nothing about Feldman and a great deal of pointless bickering about... oh, it's gone.

So, Feldman. We're approaching a time when pretty much everything he wrote will have been recorded, several works in multiple versions which make clear quite a wide range of interpretative possibility in his work (I principally mean the fully-notated work). Somewhere in the distant past, an example was posted of one of Feldman's early "graph" scores, with a comment along the lines of it being somewhat defective as a musical composition.

A couple of further observations therefore:

Feldman may have thought so himself, to some extent, in so far as at a certain point he abandoned such notational practices never to return to them. One reason could be that performers couldn't be relied upon to realise the music in the way he imagined it just on the basis of the unspecific notations, for example it must often have happened that accidentally "inappropriate" harmonic combinations would have occurred (ie. drawing attention to themselves in opposition to the general sense of continuity in the music), so that what he later wrote would to an extent have functioned as a "written-out" version of the earlier work.

The next stage came in the late 1970s when the durations of the works became much more extended. At this point (am I wrong?) more people began to sit up and take notice, at least in Europe, or at the very least I did, and the music was more often and more widely performed. Why was this? One would normally expect wider acceptance to follow upon a move towards greater "accessibility" rather than the opposite. Or would one?

I wouldn't say that is was all pointless, or even all bickering, actually, although I do agree that it was not noticeably short of recycled material; your own contributions certainly had a point - several of them, actually...

Anyway - the topic!...

Best,

Alistair

This is presumably a more recent recording, though it appears to be a transcription;

Riegger, Wind Quintet. Cowell, Quartet Romantic; 7 Paragraphs for String Trio. Ruth Crawford Seeger, Suite No.II for Piano & String Quartet. Lou Harrison, String Trio. Becker, The Abongo (New Jersey Percussion Ensemble)
Add to cart | Price: $ 5.99 | Country: AMERICA | D/A code: Analogue | Code: 80285-2 | BRO Code: 62288 | Label: NEW WORLD
Genre: Chamber Music


(In Berkshire Record Outlet's catalogue, but Berkshire, Mass, not your Berkshire, Bryn!)(You'll need to Google your way in because of the way their cookies work.)

Ordered that one via Amazon UK Market Place this afternoon, Ron. With the shipping costs involved in ordering from Berkshire Records, I probably got a better deal for my £6.01 including p&p.

Thank you Mr. Derks - that's nice. We have never heard pizzicato horns before! It is rather a pleasant effect. But towards the end of the excerpt it all becomes a little brash does it not?