Crawford - Beyer: 9 Preludes

Johanna Magdelena Beyer (Composer), Ruth Crawford (Seeger) (Composer), Sarah Cahill (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Sarah Cahill
• Composer: Johanna Magdelena Beyer, Ruth Crawford (Seeger)
• Audio CD (November 18, 2009)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: New Albion Records
• ASIN: B00005J72N
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #491,540 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The American composer Ruth Crawford [known after her marriage as Ruth Crawford Seeger] and the German-American Johanna Beyer were not just contemporaries, they were friends. Traveling in musical circles that included composer-pianist Henry Cowell, the two women were vital in their generation's forging of a new musical idiom--one that shaped American music in the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond. Unfortunately, their work has been largely eclipsed by that of their male contemporaries. While Crawford's music has experienced something of a resurgence of interest in recent years, Beyer's work is all but unknown. Indeed, this is the first commercial recording of her music.

Pianist Sarah Cahill is seeking to remedy this injustice, and her disc of solo piano music by the two composers makes an unshakable case for their revival on the concert stage. Cahill is a strong advocate, both in her obvious passion and her technical and emotional fluency. Her articulation is crystalline: each note of Crawford's concise 9 Preludes is finely etched against a background of silence. Clocking in at just over a minute, Crawford's Piano Study in Mixed Accents is a devilishly difficult, densely packed work, but Cahill's fluid playing outlines the piece's structure clearly. The thrill of discovery surrounds the two Beyer suites. Beyer's indebtedness to Crawford's writing is clear: Dissonant Counterpoint even takes its name from the theory devised by Crawford and her husband, musicologist Charles Seeger. But Beyer's music is not mere mimicry; her writing, while harmonically linked to Crawford's, is lyrical where Crawford is angular. Cahill plays up the distinction, remarkably altering her sound to suit Beyer's more rounded lines. Crawford and Beyer couldn't have a better advocate than Cahill; here's hoping for an encore. --Anastasia Tsioulcas

Product Description

Crawford -9 Preludes (Cahill) by Sarah Cahill

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Significant, but stern, April 6, 2007

By 

Discophage (France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Crawford - Beyer: 9 Preludes (Audio CD)

Before the revival of interest for the music of Ruth Crawford that took place in the 1990s, her Piano Preludes (composed between 1924 and 1928) were one of her regularly performed and recorded compositions. Stylistically the musical language is somewhere around Berg's Piano Sonata - but without the Viennese's lush post-romantic sweep and seductiveness - or the early "expressionist" piano compositions of Eisler, Krenek and Hauer. The deep-sounding rumblings of # 9 "tranquillo" are evocative of Cowell's clusters. The moods are not very varied, and except in the (slightly) more playful # 2 "Allegro giocoso" and # 8 "Leggiero" they are mostly somber, stern, brooding. The 1931 Piano Study in Mixed Accents is a brief (1:05) and virtuosic tour de force, an angry ascension from low to high register and back.

I first discovered the music of Johanna Beyer through her impressive 1937 Suite for Violin and Piano played by Miwako Abe and Michael Kieran Harvey on a New World Records collection with works by Cowell, Antheil, Ruth Crawford and others (see my review of Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe), and it made me want to explore more of this composer. Very little is known of her, there are not even any known photographs. She was born in Leipzig in 1888, moved to New York in 1924 where she participated in the circle of modernist musicians around Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford and Carl Ruggles. She died a premature death in 1944 of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , a neurodegenerative disease, and she fell into oblivion, until the late 80s and 90s, when a rediscovery of sorts took place. Her main output dates from the 1930s, as with "Dissonant Counterpoint" and "Gebrauchs-musik". Dissonant counterpoint is the theory formulated by Charles Seeger, consisting of a reversal of the rules of traditional counterpoint, establishing "dissonance, rather than consonance, as the rule". Well - what you see is what you get, in the same-titled piece as well as in "Gebrauchs-musik", which apparently pays tribute to Hindemith's "utility music" in title only, but not in compositional style. Beyer's dissonant counterpoint is terse, enigmatic, quasi-Webernian in its sparse, pointillistic textures (the piano part of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire also comes to mind), stylistically pretty close to Crawford's preludes. The liner notes are quite honest about it: "they are difficult, both to play and to understand, and the casual listener may not at first hear the rich musical detail embedded in the straightforward, two-part invention piano style".

This recording, made in 1999 and released in 2001, was the first commercial recording of music of Johanna Beyer. It contains thorough and informative notes by composer and musicologist Larry Polansky, who is the driving force behind the rediscovery of Johanna Beyer. Sarah Cahill, also highly instrumental in the rediscovery of this music, seems to acquit herself expertly, with a lighter touch (and much better recording) than the mystically heavy-handed Schleihermacher in Crawford's Preludes (American Ultramodernists 1920-1950), more frenzy but less snappy articulation than Reinbert de Leeuw (on DG's survey of the composer, Ruth Crawford Seeger: Portrait) or Alan Feinberg (with a more opaque recording, in The American Innovator) in the Piano Study in Mixed Accents.

This is not easy and seductive listening, but it is a significant recording, enabling us to hear two important female composers and early American modernists.