60 Years of Tailleferre with Quynh Nguyen

Cover of Quynh Nguyen’s Tailleferre album (courtesy of Crossover Media)

In April of last year, I announced that Nicolas Horvath had launched a project with the Grand Piano label to record the piano music of Germaine Tailleferre; and I wrote about the first album to be released through that project. While this effort progresses slowly but surely, Music & Arts Program released a single-CD survey of the the piano compositions in Tailleferre catalog this past May. The album, entitled The Flower of France, was recorded by Vietnamese American pianist Quynh Nguyen, who has received degrees from the Juilliard School, the Mannes College of Music, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

It is, of course, unfair to try to compare Horvath’s “complete works” project (with only the first of three planned albums currently available) with Nguyen’s effort to provide a representative sample that cuts across the complete canon. That said, the Wikipedia page of Tailleferre’s compositions provides a chronological list, which begins with an impromptu for piano dated 1909. This can be found on both CDs, although Nguyen’s track listing gives the date as 1912. If Horvath has tried to present the works chronologically, then he concludes with “Au pavilion d’Alsace,” composed for a World’s Fair in 1937. On The Flower of France it appears as Track 21, roughly in the middle of the total number of 40 tracks.

While these overall scopes differ, there is at least one way in which these two albums are similar. This involves the difficulty of attentive listening when the subject is a very large number of very short pieces. A four-movement symphony may not have the qualities of a narrative arc, but there still tend to be a generous number of structural cues that lead the attentive listener from a beginning through a middle into an end.

Musical miniatures are more like haiku, which are limited by the number of syllables and by how those syllables are grouped into three lines. When a haiku is recited, it almost always is over before you know it; and one encounters that same phenomenon is listening to Tailleferre’s miniatures. The problem is that one seldom commits to reading (or listening to) several dozen haiku in a single sitting.

At the risk of sounding heretical, I might offer the “modest proposal” that the CDs of both Horvath and Nguyen make for admirable sources of background music. I say this not to denigrate the quality of the music itself. Rather, when one is dealing with such miniatures, familiarity first begins to grow through the “background,” rather than the “foreground.” If the CD is played through several times (hopefully over the course of several days), then mind will begin to cultivate familiarity; and that familiarity, in turn, can enable more attentive listening, through which one can appreciate not only the composer but also the methods engaged for composition.

By way of establishing context, I should confess that I have been nursing these ideas knowing that I shall be visiting Flower Piano two weeks from today. Sometimes, there is much to be gained by wandering around the San Francisco Botanical Garden, letting the sounds from the keyboard come to you, rather than luring you to seek them. If I spend enough (but not too much) time listening to Tailleferre’s miniatures, maybe I shall detect one or two of them wafting across the Garden space to me!