Piano Music by Sam Hayden on Métier

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

This coming Friday Métier Records will release an album described on its Amazon.com Web page as “the first ever recordings of Sam Hayden’s complete music for solo piano.” Since Hayden was born in 1968, one has to wonder how long that “complete” attribute will apply. Thus, to be more specific, the album consists of two CDs presenting four compositions. The earliest of those pieces, “…still time…” and “Piano Moves,” were composed in 1990, “Fragment (After Losses)” was composed in 2003, and the seven-movement “Becomings (Das Werden),” which fills the first CD, was completed in 2018. All of these compositions are performed by pianist Ian Pace.

That Web page also provides the following one-sentence summary: “His solo piano works have in common constant transformation, existing at the extremes of gesture, polyphony, density, register, dynamic range and textual juxtaposition, very much reflecting an aesthetic alignment with modernist traditions and very much at the cutting edge of the avant-garde, while retaining an open and interesting experience for even less adventurous listeners.” While I cannot argue with any of the claims in that sentence, I came away feeling that I had seen this movie before and that my reactions while listening evoked memories of past encounters with “cutting edge” recordings. Three of those past encounters continue to hold a tight grip on both memory and my capacity for attentive listening. They are John Cage’s Music of Changes, the nineteen compositions given the title Klavierstücke (piano pieces) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the two “books” entitled Structures by Pierre Boulez. Whenever I approach an opportunity to listen to any of those pieces, I find myself recalling a caustic letter that Arnold Schoenberg wrote to René Leibowitz in which he asserted vigorously, “I do not compose principles, but music.”

Whatever any of us may think about Cage, Stockhausen, and Boulez, there is no question that those three aforementioned pieces are organized around some very rigorous principles. By the same count, however, articles about Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions often include a twelve-by-twelve array of pitch classes to summarize the “permissible” statements of the row, including the row itself, its transpositions, and the transpositions of its inversion. It is much more difficult to find articles about the experience of listening to such music. Ironically, one of my own attempts showed up almost exactly a year ago on this site when PIAS released a recording of Isabelle Faust playing Schoenberg’s violin concerto. In taking on that challenge, I could reach all the way back to when I led a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania discussing all the structural details of the first of Boulez’ Structures books, capped off with playing a recording in an effort to prioritize the listening experience over the details of the marks on paper.

All this serves as prologue to the assertion that, as of this writing, I have no idea how much of any of Hayden’s compositions, particularly that major undertaking of “Becomings,” can be attributed to “principles” and how much is “music.” Like it or not, the very nature of listening does not really signify in the domain of “music theory.” If there is a domain for listening, we are more likely to find it in the literature of phenomenology, rather than that of either the theory or practice of music. This is an opinion that began to emerge when I read descriptions of musical compositions written by David Lewin. Lewin himself may have called his texts “analyses;” but he knew how to home in on the ear-brain connection, rather than the “grammar” of the score pages. (Ironically, before Lewin ventured into the domain of phenomenology, he had written at some length on the application of group theory, a discipline of abstract algebra, to the analysis of music!)

As far as Hayden is concerned, I would prefer to suspend judgment until I have had an opportunity to listen to his music in performance, rather than through a recording. Given that both Hayden and Pace are based in England, I may have to wait for some time for that opportunity to arise. At best the release of this album may inspire other pianists to take on Hayden’s music; and there are definitely some adventurous pianists here in the Bay Area. Watch this space for further developments!