Chet Biscardi's Madrigal

Dear Chet,

The video from your performance last month is now up on YouTube –

What you do in this piece is of great interest to me. When I do this kind of thing I get flak for it – the likes of ending my piano trio with a cowboy song.

Beethoven ended one of his pieces with a street song, and it became known as his “Gassenhauer” Piano Trio in B-flat, Op. 11, which gets that nickname becuase of its variations on “Pria ch’io l’impegno” from Joseph Weigl’s comic opera L’amor marinaro (1797). Scott Johnson & I talked about this. We both agreed that modernist purity is an aberration. So while I was the biggest fan of some modernist purists, they were not necessarily fans of my music or Scott’s.

My cowboy song and some of Scott’s rock idoms could be considered novelties, like Kupferman’s “Gestalt” music, but I’m interested in something more precisely like what you are doing. And I think I’m doing it too, in my own ways. Del Tredici was all over this. His “Herrick’s Oratorio” is a masterpiece. It’s on YouTube.

I think we’re seeing the leap that Schoenberg made across 1918 slowly and carefully bridged, with the reintroduction of all that Schoenberg discarded in his (understandable) bridge burning. And what was discarded also involved some historicist pride.

Yes, there are some musical developments that follow previous musical developments. The question is, are those irreconcilable with what they preceded? That’s the disagreement between Scott Johnson and a modernist purist.

( I word this carefully in honor of a comment that Jeff Nichols once offered in a conversation.)

This kind of thinking brings with it a specific hearing of your Madrigal. I will not hear it as a superimposition, not a collage. It’s a re-integration of musical realities that fashion and other circumstances (WWI was a wound that forced Schoenberg’s bridge burning) had separated into unreconcilable and stranded musical assets. And I probably lean on this too hard, but I hope you bear with me.

I think of our Sarah Lawrence colleague Meyer Kupferman. He wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. The way he did it was often unconvincing, but he tried it too early. I think he sometimes succeeded, as in “New Space” and “Icarus”.

Illicit Pluralisms

a composer interested in Carter and Glass; Davisovksy and Sondheim….

This is a case where one might think they’re an island, but then, through a leap of faith one thinks instead: “maybe others are doing this too”, and then, once open to that possibility, one sees it in action – a seedling that is sprouting and not some aberrant behavior of a lone actor. Recognizing it requires something like Coleridge’s “esemplastic imagination” to leap across doubt, such as that doubt that comes from feeling entrenched in drift and stagnation.

Best Wishes,

William