Kentner Anderson's 25 Decades
I'm so grateful to the Horszowski Trio for taking on this piece for
The Village Trip
September 27 7pm
at Greenwich House Music School
46 Barrow Street, New York, NY 10014
tickets:
https://www.thevillagetrip.com/event/25-decades-the-horszowski-trio/
I deliberately programmed my piano trio with Brahms. A short answer to the question, why? is that I want the Brahms audience for my piano trio. That narrows down New York's millions considerably.
Moreover, so many innovations Beethoven made are acknowledged and *classified*, brought into the classical order, by Brahms. I love the high 20th C modernists I worked with all my life. They were, late in life, doing what Brahms did, and "classifying". I'm going much further in that direction -- exaptations of modernist techniques applied by someone with Brahms' penchant for "classifying".
Conversations before music changed drastically in and around 1918 are interesting again. And I was always curious about that conversation out of respect for our dear, beloved German composers. We have great composers in the US and conversation here is interesting, vital, not to be missed or ignored.
And the pre-1918 convsersation is also very important and a bit lost, eclipsed. The conversation is not exactly forgotten, but rendered irrelevant. I suspect this is because the scene is now dominated by romanticism unexamined. I defend free play in the void, but I go in the other direction, in the direction Brahms took.
The trio works like this. I've expanded this a bit from a quick note I dashed off to the Horszowski Trio --
This piece is a scherzo. Its sense of humor is more like Schumann's than Brahms. They both loved Jean Paul Richter who had a very particular sense of wit, had his own definition of wit -- relating things, marrying things that seem to be far apart.
Wit is the faculty that discovers likeness between remote or dissimilar things — Jean Paul's own image is of wit as "the disguised priest who marries every couple," joining objects nobody expected to see paired. It sits opposite Scharfsinn(acumen), the faculty that finds difference rather than likeness — the two form a matched pair in his system, not a hierarchy.
Another Jean Paul principle is the inverted sublime -- what might inflate others (Kant's sublime), Jean Paul keeps in hand through *applied finitude*, leading to a celebration of the small, the every day things that matter.
Inverted sublime is Jean Paul's term for the mechanism of humor, built as a direct mirror of Kant's sublime. Where the sublime works by confronting an overwhelming infinite — a storm, a starry sky — and finding the mind's reason equal to it, the inverted sublime confronts an overwhelming finite triviality and finds it, held up against the infinite, comically small. Same structure, opposite direction: the sublime elevates by scaling up to the infinite; the inverted sublime deflates by measuring something petty against that same infinite and letting the disproportion do the work. Humor, on this account, is the sublime's mirror image, not its opposite.
Do we see the inverted sublime in Melville's cetological lists in Moby Dick?
The ending, with Gillian Welch's cowboy song, "My Morphine" feels close enough to the ending of the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, which ends with a deus ex machina with bug spray. In answer to a the tight spot they got themselves into, they're all knocking themselves out with bug spray. Harpo is the last one up and he grabs a girl and sprays them both.
Now, the Cowboy song ending was the instigation of this piano trio. It sat around as a settting of the song for two guitars and voice, like Brahms' Sarabande that became the heart of op. 88. The opening 5 minutes needed to be fast paced, joyous and tinged with Schumann/Richter/Marx Brothers wit. The piece needed something to lament. And it was necessary to build a town and a society and those had to work, not without friction, but with a sense that all are *dancing around their differences*. That's where Brahms comes in. He also loved Richter, but he did not have Schumann's irony. What I have discovered in Brahms through all this experience is that he did appreciate Jean Paul Richter's celebration of the small. Yes, Brahms makes very big things, but I see them getting small -- First piano concerto, 2nd theme and the transition into it, like water pouring into a small bowl of the Bürgherlich, fire-side 2nd theme. And the Tragic Overture's 2nd theme is a little fragile thing in the woodwinds.
Brahms' tone is more like Adalbert Stifter's, serious in tone, without irony.
Stifter’s response to Hebbel in the introduction to Bunte Steine
Bunte Steine (1853) — six novellas, published in two volumes, framed by Stifter’s famous preface on the sanftes Gesetz, the gentle law. His claim: what’s commonly called great — storms, earthquakes, violent upheaval, the great man and his great deed — is really the smaller thing, a mere effect; the true greatness is the constant, sustaining ordinary: grain growing, water flowing, light falling. Written in the long shadow of the Napoleonic Wars and the disillusioning collapse of 1848, the preface reads as a direct philosophical rejection of the “great man” mode of history those decades had made dominant — and the collection’s closing story, set during the Napoleonic Wars themselves, puts that rejection in a real historical frame rather than leaving it abstract. Not every story is purely gentle — Turmalin stays genuinely dark — but the governing wager throughout is the same one Schiller’s whole apparatus denies: dignity doesn’t require resistance to an overwhelming force. It survives in what quietly continues.
Brahms does earthquakes, wars and other big things and pours them into the small.
The US had a cult of the small. it's been lost. Jean Paul's is a humorous small, Adalbert Stifter's is not ironic, more like Brahms, and in the US -- Emerson, Whitman, William James, Dewey, they created a cult of the small that did not last longe enough. Some feel it as our core identity, our early blossoming American strength.
William James --> his student Gerturde Stein -- > and her influence upon Parisian modernism
William James' small is at the heart of 20th C, but it's lost now.
More on the American small HERE.
And I am an instructive case -- I never really *felt* Karl Kraus until now.
Brahms, Schumann, Stifter and Jean Paul lived were in the shadow of Napoleon, giving them a good distaste for empty grandiosity. Karl Kraus was responding to the pomposity of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, which relied on grandeur to keep the populace in thrall.
Only recently did I really feel the need for something like Karl Kraus' acerbic tone.
"In these great times, which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard times as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves red-handed, are groping for words; in these loud times which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions: in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me – none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted.
And as the piece was writing itself, with my help, what was going on around me started to creep into it. Program music would work the other way around. This is not really program music. But I realized that the piece bears on Declaration of Independence 250th anniversary. For 25 decades we've been dancing around our differences.
The last major development in the piece (which will be played for the first time by Horszowski Trio) is measure 100, where the cowboy song is foreshadowed and it feels like a rupture; I'm happy about that. The trick was bringing it back -- how to recover from the rupture and resume the exposition? -- the piano solo keeps B and G# (of the rupture) going until it's wedded to the [GAB] trichord in m. 105, that pulls the exposition back into its world.
The governing musical concept there is that the melodic/harmonic elements must be held tightly so that a rupture like measure 100, can be felt. If the surface is too capricious, with too many ruptures, then rupture is not possible. The feeling of a rupture reassures me that the elements had been holding.
That's very classical. I worked with modernists who were classical in many ways, romantic (which can lead to centrifugal forces) in other ways. Like Brahms, I want to pull things together, keep the center holding.
My musical project and my hopes for America are very similar.
The links in the chain to the Marx Brothers --
The real chain: Busch's Max und Moritz directly inspired Rudolph Dirks's Katzenjammer Kids (1897) — a documented line, not inferred. That strip was everywhere in American newspapers exactly when the Marx Brothers were coming up through vaudeville, making it a genuine channel for German comic mischief-and-comeuppance to enter the culture they grew up in.
So: Jean Paul and Busch likely share a German root (Grimmelshausen) rather than a direct line; Busch demonstrably begets Katzenjammer Kids; that strip is part of the water the Marx Brothers swam in. Not "Jean Paul reached Groucho" — more that a broader German comic technique, which Jean Paul theorized most explicitly, was in the air both Busch and American newspaper comics breathed. The picaresque is demonstrably in the Marx Brothers; Jean Paul specifically is the harder, unproven claim, but Jean Paul gets into that water.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey