During my student days the Fromm Music Foundation served somewhat as a pole star to guide those of us that wished to learn more about contemporary composers. It was all very well and good to have access to recordings of the music of composers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Hindemith, as well as “pioneering” American composers such as Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions. However, during the middle of the twentieth century, a new generation of composers was emerging, whose work deserved not only performance but also documentation of those performances through readily available recordings. To that end the Fromm Foundation made arrangements with Columbia Records for the production of recordings under the rubric Twentieth Century Composers Series, to be released on Columbia’s subsidiary label, Epic Records.
Today Sony Classical released a ten-CD box set that reproduces the content of all of the recordings released under that series supported by the Fromm Foundation between 1956 and 1963. This accounts for eight of the CDs. There is also a CD of compositions by Lukas Foss, which was not released until after Paul Fromm terminated his series but included works commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. Finally, there is a CD of solo piano music performed by Leon Fleisher. Fleisher plays works by three composers closely affiliated with Fromm, Leon Kirchner, Copland, and Sessions, along with a selection by Ned Rorem.
I first became aware of Fromm and his Foundation through the sponsorship of the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies. The papers delivered at that seminar were published in The Musical Quarterly, and in 1962 they were all reproduced in a book published by W. W. Norton & Company entitled Problems of Modern Music. This became one of my “bibles” during my undergraduate years, even though one of my fellow students scribbled on the title page, right under the title itself, “Mainly, it doesn’t sound good!”
Kidding aside, the Princeton Seminar served as a reminder that “new music” was trying to negotiate a delicate balance between cerebral approaches to invention and expressiveness that would make for a compelling performance. Fromm himself seems to have appreciated the risks involved in getting that balance right. Nevertheless, he maintained his advocacy, reinforcing it with what amounted to his own manifesto:
For the earnest listener, perhaps nothing is more gratifying than to become familiar with a work that is new to him – to sense its message and to get to know its gestures as he knows the gestures of a friend.
In retrospect I would say that much of what I have been writing aligns with that manifesto, although I feel that my choice of the adjective “attentive,” rather than “earnest,” may have involved a bit of push-back against what I have long felt was a shadow of elitism cast by Fromm’s achievements.
That said, it is worth acknowledging that giving this collection its fair share of attentive listening is best approached on a disc-by-disc basis. There is considerable individuality on each recording, and attention requires a willingness to get to know each instance of that individuality on its own terms. To choose an example not included in this collection, I found that I had to “deep-end” my attention to Elliot Carter’s second string quartet by listening to a recording many times in close succession before I could come even close to recognizing those “gestures of a friend.”
Leon Kirchner at the piano on the original cover of the recording being discussed
Given all of that context, in this article I shall “begin at the beginning” with the first CD in the collection. This presents two chamber music compositions by Leon Kirchner, both involving violin and piano. Kirchner himself plays the piano part in both of those selections. The first is his first piano trio in two movements, composed in 1954, in which he is joined by violinist Nathan Rubin and cellist George Neikrug. This is followed by his 1952 “Sonata concertante,” in which he accompanies violinist Eudice Shapiro.
Kirchner studied with Arnold Schoenberg as an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was drawn to Schoenberg’s “twelve-tone” techniques as an effort to get beyond structures built on the foundation of the centuries-old dominant-tonic (V-I) cadence. After many years of listening to performances of Schoenberg’s music, I finally realized that the expressiveness of his compositions resided in his rhythmic gestures, rather than in how he chose to lay out his pitches in both sequences and simultaneities. As a result, while I had not previously listened to either of the compositions on this Fromm CD, it did not take me long to recognize that each had its own individual rhetorical plan that was revealed through the underlying rhythmic patterns.
I have no idea how Kirchner rehearsed these two pieces. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that, from his own position behind the keyboard, he could lead the other instrumentalists down paths, each of which had its own sense of “rhetorical direction.” Awareness of those directions might easily elude the casual listener. However, that awareness reveals itself to a level of attention consistent with what would be granted to a piano trio or sonata by Johannes Brahms. Put another way, the expressiveness of Kirchner behind the piano keyboard is consistent with the expressiveness he would later bring to conducting the music of both Ludwig van Beethoven and Alban Berg for a recording discussed on this site almost exactly a month ago.
In the immortal words of Duke Ellington, “It’s all music!”
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