On the Life of a Twenty-First Century Composer: Michael Hersch

The Composer Michael Hersch in 2007

Three years after his solo-piano work The Vanishing Pavilions appeared, Michael Hersch unveiled Last Autumn, Part II of his massive trilogy, in October 2009 at St. Mark's Church in Philadelphia. The unusual instrumentation, for French horn and cello, was written for cellist Daniel Gaisford and the composer's hornist brother, Jamie (co-principal of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra). The music critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns, a long-time follower of Hersch's music, in an article published before the premier, prepared his readers for hearing a work lacking "typical points of reference" that leave "listeners further unmoored from what they know." He added, "Music with such ambiguous destinations can be frightening."

The piece premiered on a rainy autumn evening in a church filled with musicians and music lovers eager for this major new work by a composer many of them knew personally. In the program notes, Aaron Grad provided some background to the composition, remarking that Hersch entrusted the score to two of the very few musicians in the world who could rise to its ferocious challenges. The forty-one movements, more than half in Book I and the remainder in Book II, were performed with a single intermission between the two. Unlike books of preludes written by Chopin or Debussy, where there may be little or no perceived connection between pieces (enabling performances of single preludes), the movements of Hersch's composition seem to connect in ways that require a hearing of the whole. Several movements from Book I recur almost verbatim in Book II (such as Lullabys I and II, and Scherzo [B]). At least one other movement from Book I—March, number IX—returns, slightly altered as XXV in Book II.

Words like ferocity, intensity, urgency, and uncertainty come to mind when listening to Last Autumn. Both instrumentalists showed meticulous technical command: The cellist executed triple and quadruple stops, extraordinary leaps and wide ranges with little or no time for preparation, sustained bowings, and rapid passagework. The composer's brother on French horn dazzled the audience with his mastery of this most unforgiving instrument. This was not virtuosity for its own sake, but a new kind of playing that combined the meeting of technical challenges with an overarching expressivity that, for the listeners, almost made the complexities fade away.

Complex chordal structures and clusters (pitch simultaneities in close proximity, although not necessarily purely chromatic ones) permeate Hersch's massive solo-piano cycle, The Vanishing Pavilions. The composer premiered the piece from memory in the autumn of 2006 at Saint Mark's Church in Philadelphia. The composition of this two-and-one-half-hour work—a score of some 350 pages—had occupied most of Hersch's time between 2001 and 2005. Writing about the premiere, David Patrick Stearns noted:

The evening felt downright historic. [Hersch] conjured volcanic gestures from the piano with astonishing virtuosity. Everything unfolds in open-ended, haiku-like eruptions, though built on ideas that recur throughout the 50 movements, from a lamenting, chant-like melody to passages of such speed and density you'd think the complete works of Franz Liszt were played simultaneously within three minutes. Overtly or covertly, The Vanishing Pavilions is about the destruction of shelter (both in fact and in concept) and life amid the absence of any certainty. And though the music is as deeply troubled as can be, its restless directness also commands listeners not to be paralyzed by existential futility.

The Vanishing Pavilions was released as a double-CD set on the Vanguard Classics label in 2007.

Christopher Theofanidis, a composer colleague and friend of Hersch's, describes the experience of listening to The Vanishing Pavilions: "I usually listen in single sittings, but sometimes in bits and pieces. I am always cognizant of Hersch's formal rigor, not in the usual way, i.e., developmental, but more modernistic in terms of relationship of materials. There is a juxtaposition of something violently virtuosic and something Spartan...