Cover of a Naxos CD titled "A-Z of String Players by David Milsom"

Program Notes

This solo piano version of Companion Piece (for Morton Feldman), for piano (1989/1991) – premiered by Anthony de Mare at Sarah Lawrence College on November 21, 1991 – is based on the original duet for contrabass and piano written for Robert Black and Anthony de Mare who first performed it at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in England on November 20, 1989. (Feldman Homages and Encounters with Feldman)

I first met Morton Feldman in Buffalo in 1979. His apartment was neat, almost sparse: a Steinway, a work table, a Rauschenberg on one wall, the now-famous Brown/Feldman cover from TIME records on another, and many ancient Oriental, Turkish and Iroquois carpets. He talked about his music and compositional techniques that had as lasting an impact on me as did his intense passion for those carpets. He encouraged me to get close to the floor and look at their textures, reliefs, orchestration, what he called “symmetry even through imperfection,” and explained how he was translating these impressions into the musical notes of the string quartet that he was writing.

In this work I am commenting musically on Feldman’s Extensions 3, written for solo piano in 1952. I borrow two things from his work: 1) a quick juxtaposition of pianissimo (“Soft As Possible”) and fortissimo (“Loud As Possible”) in the way that soft sounds in my work are interrupted by unmotivated loud sounds; and 2) the last four bars of his piece – a poignant repeated figure – become a repetitive idea in Companion Piece that expresses loss and leads to stillness. Feldman’s sounds are “drier,” more minimal than mine; I put the pedal down in a way that he never would in order to flesh out the notes with a different, “wetter,” more lush kind of harmony.

Cover of a CD of Chester Biscardi: At the Still Point

Liner Notes

Text

Chester Biscardi: At the Still Point

New World Records/CRI NWCR686

Works

Performers

American Composers Orchestra, Paul Lustig Dunkel, conductor, with Susan Palma, flute, Jeanne Ingraham, violin, and Gilbert Kalish, piano; Judith Bettina, soprano, and James Goldsworthy, piano; Anthony de Mare, piano; Tara Helen O’Connor, flute, and Edmund Niemann, piano; Robert Dick and Keith Underwood, flutes; Robert Weirich, piano

Liner Notes

Text

Program Notes

Incitation to Desire (Tango), for piano (1984), was written for Yvar Mikhashoff who first performed it at the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo on April 14, 1985 and whose recording of it appears on a New Albion release in 1995. It was originally published by Quadrivium Music Press as part of the International Tango Collection which included 88 composers as varied as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Virgil Thomson. The Skaneateles Festival commissioned a version for clarinet, horn, violin, violoncello, percussion and piano which was premiered on September 3, 1993 and is dedicated to pianist Robert Weirich and ‘cellist Lindsay Groves; a version for solo marimba, commissioned by Makoto Nakura, was first performed in Kyoto on June 11, 2006. It is in one short movement starting with a brief, flashy introduction, then the tango itself entitled “In the style of a tango-canción” (originally a vocal form with instrumental accompaniment and strong sentimental character) with abstracted characteristic habanera rhythmic patterns in 2/4 meter and sentimental melody, and then a brief, driving coda. The title comes from H. C. Colles’ “Tango” entry in the Fifth Volume of the 1944 Third Edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians: “The movements of the dance are less presentable to a polite audience than those of the Habanera, and as now performed in the cafés chantants of Madrid and other cities of Spain the Tango has become nothing but an incitation to desire.”

Videocassette: 88 Tangos, March 1, 1986, (Yvar Mikhashoff, piano; Jeff Fontaine, lighting), Dance Theater Workshop and Composers’ Forum; Nominated in the Best Instrumental Performance Category, 2nd Annual Gay/Lesbian American Music Awards (GLAMA), 1998, for Incitation to Desire (Tango), for piano (1984), performed by Anthony de Mare on Gay American Composers (CRI CD 721).

Repertoire in Focus

'Incitation to Desire' by Chester Biscardi

July 25, 2022, Rhonda Rizzo, The Cross-Eyed Pianist

Liner Notes

Incitation to Desire

New Albion Records NAO73CD

Work

Incitation to Desire (Tango)

Performer

Yvar Mikhashoff, piano

Liner Notes

Program Notes

In Time’s Unfolding, for piano (2000), was commissioned by the Music Library Association to commemorate its 70th Anniversary in New York City in 2001. In response to the MLA’s request for music that would “look forward and reflect backward at the same time,” I created a work that reflects the past and celebrates the moment, in which time unfolds over a musical landscape that is at once poignant and painful, lonely, exuberant, heroic, and – in a concentrated way – epic. I evoke my childhood memories of music by Robert Schumann, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland that interweave with self-references to several of my earlier piano works – Mestiere (1979), Piano Concerto (1983), Piano Sonata (1986; rev. 1987), and Companion Piece (for Morton Feldman) (1989/1991) – and the song, “Recovering” (2000). Schumann’s influence appears as a direct quote from the opening of Carnaval, Op. 9 (1834-1835) as a way of moving the work forward, while I incorporate the sounds of Gershwin and Copland to subtly resonate in the texture of my work without directly imitating their music. The opening measures were suggested by the simple and stunning repeated two-chord introduction of Keith Jarrett’s version of “Something To Remember You By” (Howard Dietz/Arthur Schwartz) on his 1999 solo recording, The Melody At Night, With You (ECM 1675). The title comes from the seventh section of Galway Kinnell’s eleven-part poem, “When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone” (1990), where “as the conscious one among those others/uttering their compulsory cries of being here . . . all of them in time’s unfolding/trying to cry themselves into self-knowing -/one knows one is here to hear them into shining . . .”

Liner Notes

Chester Biscardi: In Time’s Unfolding

Naxos 8.559639

Works

Performers

Da Capo Chamber Players (Patricia Spencer, flute; Meighan Stoops, clarinet; Curtis Macomber, violin; André Emilianoff, violoncello; Blair McMillen, piano); James Goldsworthy, piano; Mark Helias, contrabass; Greg Hesselink, violoncello; Paul Neubauer, viola; Daniel Panner, viola; Marc Peloquin, piano; Yonah Zur, violin

Liner Notes

Program Notes

Mestiere, for piano (1979), was commissioned by Tulane University for the 1979 Festival of Piano Music in New Orleans and is dedicated to Robert Weirich. The Festival created a context for it: my work would come on the first half of the program between Muzio Clementi’s Piano Sonata, Op. 36, No. 3, in C Major (1797) and Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53, in F# Major (1907), followed by an alternating mix of etudes by Chopin and Debussy on the second half. Mestiere is a celebration of the contrasting sonorities – incisive and lyrical – that are natural to the piano. The Italian title can be translated as “craft, business, occupation – whatever is necessary to one’s profession or art”. By extension “Mestiere” is what one is and does, what is integral to one’s life and work. The title comes from Cesare Pavese’s collected journals, Il mestiere di vivere (1935-1950) (The Business of Living).

From the celebratory opening to the quiet, still ending, I play with sudden changes, expansions, and contractions of sounds. Dynamics and pedaling (all three are used) are gradated and subtle. I create areas of “frozen registration” from which I try to break free – a tone remains in a certain place until intuitively I feel that it must move. The freely, fast flowing music in Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata (1945-46) resonates in this work, and there are hints of a three-note gesture and a chord from Toru Takemitsu’s Piano Distance (1961) where the music is the direct and natural result of sounds themselves. There is a direct quotation from the third movement, “Farben“, Mässig (“Summer Morning by a Lake: Chord-Colors”, Moderate), from Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909). I also adapted material from my earlier works, including they had ceased to talk (1975), Trusting Lightness (1975), and Eurydice (1978).

Mestiere may be performed together with Di Vivere, for clarinet in A and piano with flute, violin and violoncello (1981), which shares the same inspiration from Pavese’s journals. Di Vivere may be performed as a quintet or a duet for clarinet in A and piano.

The quintet, the duet or the piano solo may be performed individually or in one of the following combinations:

I. Di Vivere duet and quintet
II. Mestiere and Di Vivere duet and quintet
III. Mestiere and Di Vivere quintet
IV. Mestiere and Di Vivere duet

Juxtaposed Landscapes

Juxtaposed Landscapes: An American Composer Journeys into Japan

Convocation Address, Sarah Lawrence College: September 18, 1990

Program Notes

This work was inspired by the daily life in the garden of the Villa Corsi-Salviati in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy (which is also where the first opera, Dafne, was written in 1597). You can hear birds, ducks, frogs, lizards, mosquitoes, bats and a bee, and you can visualize a maze (one of those proper English gardens in which you get lost), a pond, water lilies, a Water Nymph, a gardener on his bicycle who meets one of the frogs, a greenhouse, a Cypress tree, the planet Venus, bonfires, and, finally, a sad moon. Where’s the cat?

Nel giardinetto della villa was written in 1994 for my friend, the pianist James Goldsworthy, and his then mostly eight-year old students. It’s a student/teacher piece as well as a concert work in its own right. It’s in eight short movements that explore different keyboard techniques and musical styles (for instance, hand positions, use of fingering, grace notes, etc., and different types of minimalism – e.g., Meredith Monk style in III, ostinato in V, etc.) as a way of introducing new music to young pianists and audiences. All of the movements are interrelated musically and within an overall narrative. There’s also a kinship in this work with Maurice Ravel’s five-movement Ma Mére l’Oye suite.

Nel giardinetto della villa
In the Little Garden of the Villa

I. L’alba: Un cinguettio d’uccelli
I. Dawn: A Chirping of Birds

II. Le tre anitre e le lucertole nel labirinto
II. The Three Ducks and the Lizards in the Maze

III. Lo stagno e le ninfee
III. The Pond and the Water Lilies

IV. La gatta Biancaneve e la rana
IV. The Cat Snow White and the Frog

V. Bruno, il giardiniere, in bicicletta
V. Bruno, the Gardener, on His Bicycle

VI. Le zanzare e i pipistrelli nella limonaia
VI. The Mosquitoes and the Bats in the Lemon Tree Greenhouse

VII. Il crepuscolo: Il cipresso e Venere
VII. Twilight: The Cypress Tree and Venus

VIII. La luna triste e i falò
VIII. The Sad Moon and the Bonfires

Liner Notes

Music by My Friends

Albany Records TROY695-96

Works

Incitation to Desire (Tango) | Mestiere | Nel giardinetto della villa

Performers

Bennett Lerner and Chester Biscardi, piano

Liner Notes

Program Notes

Since the early 1970s, I have been interested in the ways literature and painting influence musical ideas and forms – how literary images or use of color can inspire everything from the smallest melodic shape to a work’s overall structure.

The structure of Piano Sonata (1986; revised 1987) is based upon Jasper Johns’ Voice 2. Voice 2 has gone through three transformations: originally an oil and collage triptych (1971), later a three-panel lithograph (1982), and, in a final version, a nine-panel interchangeable series made of the 1982 lithograph. Johns borrows material from earlier works and utilizes overlapping, extension, and repetition as the main ingredients of form. Piano Sonata is divided into three sections which reflect three musical textures: angular and pulsating; fast runs and chords; and lyrical. As with Johns’ series, the three sections of Piano Sonata evolve into nine interactive sections and a coda.