Julliard Professor Sachs Journeys Through Modern Music

Author: Richard Lawless

"Modern" was the key word in Joel Sachs' astounding performance at Middlebury's Center for the Arts this past Friday night.
The Julliard professor's repertoire for Friday's concert consisted solely of modern piano pieces, all written between the years of 1929 and 1996.
He began the concert with a selection of five pieces written by Leon Kirchner and played as one movement. The music began with a trickle of dissonance, which soon gave way to a flood of unusually organized notes.
The pieces did not have distinct melodies but were rather composed of usual chords played in strange rhythms that almost gave the impression of improvisation.
Sachs remarked on this characteristic of Kirchner's music in his program notes, writing that the pieces "defy analysis because of their spontaneous nature and unconventional architecture." There was a certain amount of restraint in the pieces by Kirchner, as the crescendos never quite swelled up to full volume.
Yet the movement was full of energy, seen clearly in Sachs' hands, which leaped across the piano and caused the music to swirl into a tempest of atonal chords.
Kirchner's pieces were followed by a selection of five short pieces by Roberto Sierra, entitled "Five Piezas Imaginarias."
Written in 1996 and pulled from a larger collection of 10 pieces, the five played by Sachs exhibited a similar atonal quality to the Kirchner selections yet were less restrained and delicate with dynamics, allowing the pianist to let loose.
The first piece made extensive use of the highest octave of keys, creating a piercing sound, especially when played forte.
The second piece began with a dissonant chord repeated by a swelling crescendo and was characterized by sudden bursts of notes.
Sierra's third piece began with a trickle of keys in the upper register of the piano and had a sudden, seemingly spontaneous ending.
The fourth piece opened with an otherworldly rumbling of notes that descended down the piano, later moving back up to the middle octave of keys.
Sachs concluded the set with Sierra's energetic fifth piece, which was distinguished by its parallel dissonant melodies played with each hand.
The next set of pieces was comprised of two canons, written by Conlon Nancarrow in 1989. Sachs took a moment to explain the complicated nature of Nancarrow's two pieces. The first canon had a musical ratio of seven to five.
This means that both hands were playing the exact same music, but the right hand was playing the music 1.4 times as fast as the left hand. Sachs began the piece, playing only the left hand for a minute or so, before bringing in the right hand.
Since the right hand was playing at a good clip faster than the left hand, it finished first, leaving the left hand to die out quietly. The second canon had a ratio of four to three, which meant that the right hand was playing roughly 1.33 times as fast as the left.
Just as in the first canon, the left hand started first, while the right patiently waited for its entrance. In this piece, however, instead of having the right hand finish earlier than the left hand, both hands finished at the same exact time, which was astonishing to hear and see.
Sachs started the second half of the concert with Stefan Wolpe's "Form IV - Broken Sequences." The piece was aptly named, as it had a fragmented nature with quick spurts of notes and sudden crescendos.
This piece was followed by Milton Babbitt's incredibly complex "Playing for Time," written in 1983, which Sachs played from memory. For his next piece, Sachs finally used the two massive speakers on the stage that curious audience members had probably been wondering about since they took their seats an hour before.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, entitled, "Synchromisms No. 6, for piano and electronic sounds," written by Mario Davidovsky, involved Sachs playing music on the piano which was accompanied by pre-recorded electronic noises.
At times the piano and the ambient, harmonic electronic tones were in relative harmony, and at othertimes, fierce hisses and blips furiously contrasted with the notes played by Sachs.
This piece was followed by a trio of pieces by Henry Cowell, about whom Sachs currently is writing a book.
The first of the three, "Deep Color," made use of the lower octaves of the piano, creating grumbling noises that eventually gave way to consonant tones before erupting into a stormy climax of low notes.
For the second Cowell piece, "The Fairy Answer," Sachs stood, plucking and gliding his fingers across the strings of the piano, while alternately playing keys with his free hand.
The final Cowell piece, "Tiger," was a brief storm cloud of dissonance that involved Sachs crushing keys with his elbow and forearm at a violent tempo.
Sachs ended the evening on a light note, with Francis Schwartz's "Baudelaire's Uncle."
Written in 1980, Schwartz's composition was part musical piece, part performance art, as Sachs would randomly pause from his playing to turn to the audience and make growling noises.
At a few points, he removed his glasses, pointed to one eye, and began making a loud hissing sound. Further into the piece, Sachs began to beat his chest and then switched to roaring out loud.
The piece ended quietly, with Sachs delivering a dramatic sigh. After riotous applause, Sachs gave an encore of another Henry Cowell piece in which he pounded the piano like a jackhammer, officially concluding a remarkable journey through contemporary music.