Picaresque Music
I'm realizing my two recently chamber works are echt picaresque.
Piano Trio (pno, vln, vc) 2022/2025
and
Clarinet Trio (pno, cl, vln) 2021/2025
These works developed gradually over years. I hope to record them both soon.
This is certainly picaresque --
Doubt is at the heart of the matter. The picaresque attitude is skeptical, agnostic, and this brings with it something akin to the stoic and Epicurean mindset, but heightened by being embedded in a predominantly Christian morality that structured for the easy control of the masses, usually corrupt in its administrative heirarchies. And it's odd that nontheless, I like Christendom as much as the Pre-Raphaelites did. Happy to delve into that if you ask.
One can get a full sense, the fullest sense of the picaresqe without reading Lazarillo de Tormes or Don Quixote.
Here's my quick list, the influences of my picaresque.
I did picaresque programs in Brno,Moravia, and at Weill Hall in New York.
Here's Morenica, with Joan planted in the audience.
"dame lo que me demando....." with sainty fauxbourdon
and sorry for my horrible dipthongs.
Morenica Dame un Beso
All the bawdy word play wherein eliding syllables leads to raunchy subtexts.
The vsersion for viheula and voice by Miguel de Fuenllana.
Bach
I call this the Grimmelshausen picaresque.
This, right before the first cadence --
But we get the same impression in the Prelude to BWV 997 -- a German agumented 6th chord precedes the cadence in the minor dominant.
Rodrigo's Aranjuez Concierto --
Before the cadenza in the slow movement the orchestra and guitar arrive together in the key of C# minor, but then the orchestra steps away (by minor thirds, I think), leaving the guitar alone for its cadenza in C# minor.
That is precisely where picaresque intersects with wabi-sabi.
Rodrigo's Fandango --
Trickster antics prevail, but there is a moment of sincereity. I don't remember the key, but might remember the tune in scale degrees:
earnestly:
3 4 5 - 5 - 6 - 6 - 5
56 b7 - b7 - 6 - 6 -5
But this is laughed off with --
b7 8 9 b7
But it's faux sincerity. Sincerity is not impossible in the picaresque, but faux sincerity is more likely.
Manuel Ponce
In a letter to Manuel Ponce, Segovia praises Ponce's Prelude for guitar and harpsichord saying, "it's picaresque". Much of Ponce's work is picaresque.
Jonathan Dawe
Dawe's Bragadoccio was written especially for the Brno picaresque program.
David Del Tredici
His Last Rose of Summer is picaresque, ending with farting noises played on the mouthpiece of his nephew's trombone.
His Herrick's Oratorio brings back the subject of doubt. "I do believe" is repeated until we knw for certain that David struggled. We talked about this and he affirmed that he was trying to convince himself. It was the last big work of his that was produced before he died.
Milton Babbitt & the old Princeton
Dawe is of this school;
Del Tredici, no less so. He explained to me that his tonal msuic gets its edge from his Princetonian modernist background. That is obvious, and it's funny that he was a hero amongst the anti-Princetonians.
Babbitt's punny titles
- Swan Song No. 1
- Soli e Duetinii (he claimed the titles is "an homage to a music for which I feel little affinity"
-The Joy of Sextets
Rolv Yttrehus
--Plectrum Spectrum
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey