Easley Blackwood

The guiding principle of the Harvard Music Department, it is often said, is that music should be seen and not heard. The recital by Easley Blackwood Monday night was one of the department's rare gestures of support to performing music. Composer-pianist Blackwood performed works by Schoenberg, Charles Ives, himself, and Harvard's own John Perkins (of Music 154 fame).

The program began with five piano pieces from as sorted opera by Arnold Schoenberg. Except for the final Op. 11 No. 3, all were in Schoenberg's innovating twelve-tone idiom.

As if to demonstrate the indebtedness of twentieth-century music to Schoenberg's pioneering efforts, as well as to pay the composer a personal tribute, Blackwood followed the Five Pieces with his own Three Short Fantasies, Op. 16 and John Perkins' Caprice (1963), which Blackwood commissioned when the two composers were colleagues at the University of Chicago. Both works begin with Schoenbergian flurries of pianistic cacophony; both depend for internal variety on the alternaton of different timbres, registers, and pianistic effects; and both are long--perhaps too long for the basically epigrammatic nature of the twelve-tone idiom. Without demeaning the compositions themselves, I must say that by the time Blackwood got to the Perkins Caprice, the startling newness and intriguing qualities of the style had worn off, and the concert came dangerously close to becoming tiresome.

Of the three major compositions, the Fantasies came across most strongly--perhaps because the composer himself was playing them, perhaps because they contain more traditional elements than the works of the other composers. In the midst of all that atonality one could actually hear thirds and complete triads, and both the second and third pieces seemed to end on notes operating as tonics. As a group, the Fantasies could be construed as a sonata-like succession of contrasting movements, with a traditionally slow and pensive second movement acting as the keystone.

At times, Charles Ives' atonality is so intense that it was difficult to distinguish his style from that of the music on the first half of the program. There are telling differences, however: Ives' melody lines are much longer, and he is careful to relieve the cacophony by recalling more traditional modes of expression. His style is basically an expansion of the tonal idiom rather than a negation of it.

The Second Sonata is an amazing piece of music. Subtitled "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," its four movements are labelled, respectively, "Emerson," "Hawthrone." "The Alcotts," and "Thoreau." In "Hawthorne" Ives unleashes all his powers of satire as he incorporates Debussy-like ragtime, fragments of Protestant hymns, and purposely misharmonized American bombast -- "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," for example--into an acid brew that recalls the "This Scherzo Is a Joke" movement of the Piano Trio. Mendelssohn and the Beethoven Fifth make their appearance in "The Alcotts," a merciless parody of all the cliches of nineteenth-century musical sentimentality. Of the four, the "Thoreau" movement is the kindest to its namesake. Its big surprise is the sudden addition of a lyrical, low-register, and entirely unseen flute. Monday night the flutist was nowhere on the program and even refused to come out for a bow.

Blackwood is an excellent pianist. In addition to superb technique, he has an uncanny instinct for voicing. This sort of music is so often made to sound like an inchoate mass of notes; Blackwood, aided by his composer's understanding of musical structure, made it come alive.