Choleric and Crimson Clusters

Leaving aside such historical curiosities as the battaglia genre, the composition of keyboard clusters is a twentieth-century phenomenon that first appears sporadically in early Ives and Ornstein, and comes of age in the work of Henry Cowell. In Cowell’s piano piece Amiable Conversation (1922), for example, very wide clusters act as mediators in a dialogue between melodies in different registers. He also devotes about a dozen pages of his book New Musical Resources (New York; London: A. A. Knopf, 1930) to the various types of clusters as well, illuminating them from the standpoint of instrumental technique while also establishing notational practices that have remained more or less the same up to the present day.

It seems that composers have revisited this category of sounds on a fairly regular basis, finding new ways to broaden our notion of its expressive potential. Karlheinz Stockhausen subjects the cluster to serial differentiation in Klavierstück X (1961), wherein these massive sounds are intended as counterparts to more durchhörbare (transparently audible) chordal sonorities. Frederic Rzewski’s “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” (from North American Ballads, 1979) makes a case for clusters as a lyric device, in the sense that the right elbow is consigned to bringing out a simple melody; though even here the composer relies on the relentlessly mechanical connotations of this resource for programmatic purposes. As a final historical instance, Helmut Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel (1980) and Serynade (1998) are works in which the composer subjects clusters to various filtering techniques (by subtracting some notes, providing for artificial resonance by the silent depressing of keys, etc.), in the process going further than his predecessors in emancipating these sounds from connotations of stubbornness, intransigence, and mechanicity. Instead, he strives for a more sober “structural hearing” that, in Lachenmann’s preferred terms, suggests possibilities for “perforating” their facade-like character, laying out their hidden dimensions through compositional differentiation.

Enter Rebecca Saunders (born 1967), whose varied and impressive catalog is receiving increasing attention on the European continent, especially Germany. Her music is also enjoying more and more performances in her home country, the UK, even as it is largely ignored or unknown in the United States. Her remarkable recent piano duet Choler (2004) and the thematically related solo piano piece Crimson (2004–5) are welcome additions to the keyboard repertoire that also address the developments discussed above. While these pieces are certainly much more than mere studies in cluster, this particular aspect will probably be what demands the greatest amount of attention from performers. The rhythmic challenges are surely unusual as well as daunting, particularly in the elfin middle section of Crimson (starting in m. 136), where the pianist must rapidly tap out sixteenth-note triplets on the frame of the instrument with the palm of the hand, in counterpoint to repeated tone-groups in the highest register that, in their turn, need to be both carefully voiced and still quiet enough to balance the tapping sound.

The challenges inherent in Saunders’s cluster writing, however, are at least twofold. First, the individual tones of each cluster must be heard by the performer, which requires a highly-developed ability to judge hand positions, especially with respect to the planar rotation of the wrist. Otherwise the uneven timbre will, paradoxically, make the clusters seem more shallow, preventing a listener from detecting any nuances. Second, the clusters are often to be executed quite rapidly, which requires a different kind of agility—namely, that of the entire upper body—than most performers are accustomed to developing.

These unconventional challenges, however, amply reward the performer who surmounts them. For this reviewer, Crimson sets a new standard with regard to differentiated employment of clusters. In that...