Charles Wuorinen's Third Piano Sonata: A Performer's Perspective

CHARLES WUORINEN’S THIRD PIANO SONATA: A PERFORMER’S PERSPECTIVE ALAN FEINBERG Getting older is no problem. All you have to do is live long enough. Groucho Marx FIRST CAME INTO CONTACT WITH CHARLES WUORINEN and his music in the late 1970s. At that time he was already a formidable force as composer, performer, conductor, organizer, concert promoter, commissioner , and advocate: a musical citizen of the first order. Over the years I have probably performed between forty to fifty of his works. The “Schrift” that I would like to celebrate in this article is his Third Piano Sonata. This sonata was written for me in 1986 as part of a National Endowment of the Arts Consortium grant that included Ursula Oppens and Robert Shannon. I have played the piece many times over the last thirty-plus years—most recently at an eightieth birthday celebration sponsored by New York University. For this article, I was asked to provide a performer’s perspective on Wuorinen’s music. I have tried to do that by discussing some of the public issues that composers and performers of newer music encounter, as well as some I 56 Perspectives of New Music aspects of this specific piece, which is but one among a huge catalog of Wuorinen’s works encompassing many different musical forms. I am neither an historian nor an academic, but I hope to offer some thoughts on the sonata, to explore its context, and to express my deep admiration for the work and for its composer. * * * All the pointless trumpery of counterpoint, which does not cheer the listener up at all and thus misses the whole point of music, is regarded by them as a thrillingly mysterious series of combinations that bears comparison with an improbable intertwining of mosses, weeds and flowers. —E.T.A. Hoffman1 In the current year of 2018, a thirty-year-old twelve-tone work is a bit of a dinosaur. Mr. Hoffman’s “trumpery” has now been turbocharged with additional elements such as twelve-tone matrices and time-point intervals. It is also reasonable to note that most of the music written in the last few decades is not essentially contrapuntal. Sadly, it is in fact hard to think of even a few twelve-tone works written after 1950 that have “cheered up listeners” enough to become part of the “standard répertoire.” This was not the case for a number of earlier twentieth century composers: Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, etc. At times, when following public discussion about the contemporary music scene, it seems that twelve-tone composition may be considered outmoded and unsuccessful (possibly even evil) by certain critics, and that it has far too few new adherents. In an era where everything changes with astonishing speed, and everyone must compete so hard for attention, the young lions and promising styles of yesterday become the somewhat ignored elders and passé methods of today. It seems an inevitable fate for composers unless they have a big platform and a large financial baton to beat the times with. During my lifetime, the historically normative cycle, in which each new generation assimilated the styles and innovations which preceded it, has been suspended. Somehow the later developments of dodecaphony and serialism have not really been assimilated by the classical music world in general. Despite a long list of masterpieces (in multiple genres) by the Second Viennese School, Krenek, Boulez, Stravinsky, etc., the average conservatory music student and the average performer, (not to mention the public at large) are fairly ignorant of, and uninterested in, the lines of musical succession that followed the earlier Charles Wuorinen’s Third Piano Sonata: A Performer’s Perspective 57 twelve-tone (serial) repertoire and, more importantly, its musical fruit. As a result, performers, audiences, and presenters often imagine twelve-tone music not as just another style, but as a uniquely difficult and impenetrable music, full of hurdles for the listener and performer. The truth is—as I have heard him assert many times—Wuorinen’s music is not necessarily any more difficult or full of “hurdles” than a great deal of the standard fare; it’s just not “standard.” I recall that catchphrases like “freeing from...