Vol. XX No. 2
October 2004
An Afternoon of Music Marks a Triple Anniversary

By ANDREW THOMAS

I have spent more than half of my life in this astonishing school, and reflecting on those years, what I have learned, and the amazing people I have known during this time has prompted the desire to share a small sampling of my own music and some music by other composers in a concert that I call my "110 Year Recital," since it is a celebration of my 65th birthday as well as my 35 years teaching in the Pre-College Division and 10 years as its director.

Andrew Thomas (Photo by Howard Kessler)
The program, with works by Francis Poulenc and William Bolcom in addition to my own music, is largely quiet and meditative. I hope the feeling of the recital will be that of a gathering of friends—a late afternoon concert with no need to impress people, but rather a time for sharing some very special music.

The critic Roland-Manuel described Poulenc's music as "sometimes verging on triviality but never falling into vulgarity." The enigmatic Nocturnes fit this description perfectly. Laconic yet deeply expressive, at times banal and "nose-thumbing," they are simultaneously filled with a profound spirituality. I find the paradoxes within these pieces satisfying in the way they reveal the surprising depths that can hide in commonplaces.

In 2000, Victoria Mushkatkol, a wonderful teacher on the Pre-College piano faculty, asked me to write a work for her faculty recital. I was deeply honored by her request and, on thinking about the project, considered writing a companion piece to an earlier piano work of mine, Music at Twilight. My partner, Howard Kessler, pointed out that the earlier work was an evening piece, and that the word twilight also referred to the early morning hours. He wrote me a beautiful poem describing a venturing out into the first gray glimmers of light at dawn—the strange, ill-defined and shifting shapes, the first stirrings of birds. This became the framework for the music, which is very quiet, and which utilizes silently depressed keys to release mysterious harmonics in other regions of the piano. Victoria gave a masterly and evocative premiere of the work in 2001, and in this concert I will give my own first performance of Morning Twilight.

The Graceful Ghost Rag by William Bolcom is dedicated to the memory of the composer's father, and The Poltergeist—a Rag Fantasy is dedicated to the great and innovative producer at Nonesuch Records from 1965 to 1979, Tracey Sterne. These two "black rags" (in the late pianist Paul Jacobs' description) are written in extreme flat signatures, resulting in what the great ragtime pianist Eubie Blake called "lots of black keys." Dream Shadows, which is dedicated to the composer William Albright, is, by contrast, a "white rag" in C major, with an alluring art deco sophistication.

I wrote

Dances on the Cuchabamba-Las Pampas Railway for Jonathan Hollander's Battery Dance Company in 1983. The music is scored for piano-four hands and percussion, and the pianists play the percussion instruments simultaneously as they play piano. For the title, I chose two Latin American cities for the marvelous sound of their names, and for the fact that, since both cities lie on the spine of the Andes Mountains, it would be an engineering impossibility to construct a railroad between them. I hope this describes the delight and waywardness of the score. Pianist Andrew Violette, who premiered the work with me at the Battery Dance Company, is my "partner in crime"' in this performance.

Anniversary Recital
Andrew Thomas, Piano
Juilliard Theater
Saturday, Oct. 9, 6 p.m.

Free event; no tickets required.
During the years I have taught composition in the Pre-College, student outlooks on composing and my own views of composition have changed dramatically. In the 1970s, there were two clear compositional paths: tonal/Americana and serial. My advanced students were resolutely in one or the other school, and they all looked with disdain on the composers on "the other side." This was an interesting time, and it was enlivened by avant-garde jazz and by difficult-to-classify yet impossible-to-ignore composers like George Crumb. As the battles of that period receded, the Pre-College students came to the School with less awareness of the technical and theoretical differences among contemporary composers and instead went through a period when they all wanted to be John Williams.

As I reach an age where I can look back a little, the sound and fury of the moment doesn't concern me much. I tell my Pre-College students that they should develop the style they particularly love to the fullest extent, but that they should also know that, if it is a fashionable style, it will be "old hat" by the time they graduate from college. The certainties of the moment vanish as quickly as an MTV clip. If learning can be approached with intense focus as well as tolerance and curiosity for different viewpoints, students can prepare a solid musical foundation and technique that will enable them to continue to grow throughout their life. The music I am playing on October 9 is representative of some of the styles and idioms that have attracted me over many years. I look forward to sharing this program.

Composer Andrew Thomas, director of the Pre-College Division since 1994, has been on the Pre-College faculty since 1972.
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