Piano Sonatas I–IV

This volume presents a critical edition of Allen Sapp's four earliest piano sonatas, the first written at just age nineteen while he was a student of Walter Piston at Harvard in 1941. Piano Sonatas II, III, and IV were completed while Sapp was on sabbatical from Harvard and living in Rome in 1957. The three Roman piano sonatas are remarkable in that they were composed using serial procedures, yet they were intentionally written to have strong tonal centers (especially the third sonata). Irving Fine, who gave the premiere performance of Piano Sonata I, composed an ossia of a passage in the second movement, which is included in the edition.

Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)

Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an early age. The composer Charles Ives mentored the young Carter, taking him to concerts in New York and encouraging his developing interest in music. Carter’s childhood, characterized by immersion in a culturally enriched environment and exposure to the modern world, provided the elements from which his artistic aesthetic and musical language would later be forged. When Carter entered Harvard College, he focused his studies on English literature, Greek, and philosophy, although musical activities continued in the form of lessons with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, as well as singing with the Harvard Glee Club. Carter completed a master’s degree in music at Harvard in 1932, after which he moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger for three years. He received a doctorate in music from the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1935.

Musician, Wrestling (1935–1946)

After his return from Paris, Carter embarked on a composing career, writing a variety of pieces, most of which he soon discarded. Carter’s remaining early works (“pre-Carter”) reflect the opposed influences of Walter Piston (objectivity, craftsmanship) and the poet Hart Crane (experimentation, rebellion). These contravening tendencies appear in the short choral works of the period, most of them written for college choruses, and more ambitious works like the score for the ballet, Pocahontas, and the Symphony no. 1. Balancing craft and expression proved difficult and Carter was often dismayed to find that works which he had intended to be accessible to performers or audiences were deemed too difficult. The Piano Sonata, completed in 1946, finally showed that Carter could bring together the demands of formal clarity and emotional intensity in a personal way and on a large scale.

A Modernistic Education (1924–1935)

Carter’s formative years in New York, Harvard, and Paris brought him into contact with a broad range of contending and often contradictory aesthetic ideas and musical movements, including primitivism, expressionism, ultra-modernism, and neo-classicism. While in high school he encountered the ideas and music of American ultra-modernists and European modernists, often of an experimental or mystical nature, but at Harvard he was taught the classicist ideas of T.S. Eliot and sang with the Harvard Glee Club in the American premiere of Stravinsky’s neo-classical opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. While Carter’s neo-classical leanings were encouraged by Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger, the visionary romantic poetry of Hart Crane presented a different model for an artist’s life and work.

A COMPOSER IN AFRICA: AN INTERVIEW WITH STEFANS GROVÉ

South African composer Stefans Grové celebrates his eighty-fifth birthday this year. Grové studied under Erik Chisholm in Cape Town, took his Master's at Harvard under Walter Piston and attended Aaron Copland's composition class at the Tanglewood Summer School. He taught for over a decade at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore before returning to South Africa in 1972. He is Composer in Residence at the University of Pretoria.