Pianist Conrad Tao Revives the “Protest Genre”

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

According to my records, I have been listening to recordings of pianist Conrad Tao since February of 2012, shortly after a partnership was formed by (now defunct) EMI Classics and the Juilliard School. This was one of the earlier migrations of “singles” albums into the digital domain. Pianist Tao was one of three Juilliard students to be featured on a half-hour digital release. At the core of his album was an intense account of Igor Stravinsky’s “Trois mouvements de Petrouchka” (three movements from [the ballet] “Petrushka”), which was more than enough to command my attention. This selection was preceded by two selections from Claude Debussy’s first book of piano preludes. However, a real kicker came at the end, when Tao performed his own Three Songs set, which he had composed in 2010.

In building up a catalog of recordings, Tao has subsequently covered equally interesting ground. Since that “debut” release, his approaches to repertoire have been consistently adventurous. However, on his latest album, American Rage, released about a month ago, his adventures have led him into the genre of protest music, resulting in a recording that serves up an unabashedly political reminder that, as Mao Tse-Tung once wrote, revolution does not take place at a dinner party.

The “program” of the album is framed by two protest songs, both realized as virtuoso solo piano music by composer Frederic Rzewski for his North American Ballads collection. The album opens with “Which Side Are You On?,” originally written by Florence Reece, whose husband Sam was a union organizer involved in the bitter and violent struggle between miners and mine owners in 1931 now known as the Harlan County War. The final selection, “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,” evokes the dehumanizing machines of industrialized cotton production and its violent impact on the workers. Rzewski’s settings are technically demanding unto an extreme, delivering an uncompromising rhetoric to account for the darkest consequences of the Industrial Revolution; and Tao’s account of that rhetoric could not have been more consistent with the composer’s intentions.

The primary selection on the album is Aaron Copland’s three-movement piano sonata. By the time I was born in 1946, Copland had established an “American as apple pie” reputation, making him our country’s “unofficial representative” of “American style.” This amounted to a decision to overlook the political sentiments that Copland cultivated in Paris during his work with Nadia Boulanger in the Twenties. He never enrolled as a member of a political party, but his progressive sympathies definitely aligned with the miners in Harlan County. His biographer Howard Pollack wrote about Copland’s “deep admiration for the works of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, all socialists whose novels passionately excoriated capitalism’s physical and emotional toll on the average man.”

Those sympathies probably motivated Copland’s well-known “Fanfare for the Common Man,” long before the media turned that music into an anthem for mindless tub-thumping nationalism. Composed between 1939 and 1941, the piano sonata reflects those aforementioned influences from writers such as Norris, Dreiser, and Sinclair. As a result, the music established a sense of social struggle that Rzewski would subsequently escalate to a more intense level of virtuosity and rhetoric.

Less convincing is Julia Wolfe’s “Compassion.” At best the piece suggests that Wolfe had a keen understanding of Rzewski on both technical and rhetorical grounds. However, this is a post-9/11 composition. By all rights, Wolfe’s music should have reflected an overall change in worldview that was global, rather than merely national. However, there is little sense of either Copland or Rzewski serving as a point of departure. At best the score draws upon the rhetoric of minimalism; but that rhetoric does little to reinforce any semantics of protest, let alone the bridge that rage establishes between semantics and rhetoric.