Contraponientes (Part 3): An Invention for St. Vincent

Camilla in her 'sevillana' dress, courtyard of the Grand Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba

A few days after my doctoral recital at the University of Cincinnati, my teacher, Joel Hoffman, provided this incisive observation (I paraphrase): “Ethan, the music on that recital was all well and good, but it sounded like the music of someone anxious to build a career. I think there is more ‘art’ in you than that.” Some may have interpreted that comment as a criticism, a hot needle to pop the bubble of the post-recital glow. I didn’t hear it like that, though. Joel’s advice made me introspective, and I recognized the truth at the heart of what he was saying. The three years of my doctoral studies were terrifically fruitful and artistically rewarding. At the same time I was a young, married father who started the degree with one child at home, and finished it with a second. My assistantship covered my tuition and provided a stipend of $600 per month--just a bit more than the rent for our two bedroom apartment. My wife--having chosen to not put our children in day care--taught after-school french classes at several parochial schools, and then had a stipend of her own as a graduate student in french literature. We were nearly broke most of the time. I remember one experience with a mixture of humiliation and gratitude when Patricia (my wife) happened into a woman from our church at the grocery store--without a word this woman paid for the whole cart of groceries. If we were poor, it was no secret! So, yes, I did everything I could to write the kind of music that would improve my chances for employment--music that could be (I thought) immediately accessible, fun for performers to play, attention-grabbing competition winners. I spent a lot of time wondering how sound could be translated into another golden line on a CV. Joel’s words dismantled the facade of careerism on which I’d spent my strength, and I harbored them with gratitude.

A Quixote on his Rocinante on parade in Alcalá de Henares, Spain

Five months later, our little family was settling into a year-long residency in Spain. A friend’s parents actually owned a beautiful, spacious apartment that we rented in the Madrid bedroom community of Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes. Since leaving Cincinnati, and after two summer residency programs, I hadn’t written a note of music in nearly four months. This proved a valuable gestation period of detachment from what I considered the ‘circus’ of competitive artistic sport in the U.S. I was away, far away from all the harbingers of career ‘success’ in nearly hermetic isolation. Besides, these first several weeks in Spain were necessary to acclimate the children to new schedules, for me to setup my workspace at the ‘piso’ (‘flat’ in Spanish), to meet some key figures for my research, get permission to access space in the National Library, etc. 

The central square, or "Plaza de Cervantes," Alcalá de Henares

Routine around the flat quickly coalesced into a predicable pattern: after a morning run into and around the town square (the Plaza de Cervantes), I would get cleaned up, eat breakfast and set my schedule for the day. Often this would include going into Madrid (a 35-minute train ride) to the conservatory, the National Library or other archive. Patricia and the children--when I was in the city--would eat breakfast and play in the morning, watch Japanese anime cartoons on TV in Spanish, hit a local playground, have lunch and put the children down for naps. Early afternoon would mark the opening of the ice cream kiosks, more playground time, dinner, books, bedtime, etc. We did our level best to assure that Patricia, a voracious academic, made time for her own pursuits. Some days I would take the children into the city or to playgrounds, or simply outside for soccer on the spacious patio. The whole experience in those first several weeks made for an odd combination of adventure and monotony--but mostly monotony. Without a car, we walked everywhere and depended on buses and trains. All that would change soon enough.

Breakfast at the 'piso,' with special guest, Natalie Lauritsen (left)

After these initial weeks of adjustment, with daily routines settled into pattern, I started to think about composing again. The first, best thought I had about a new piece occurred late one afternoon on the commuter train out of Madrid headed home. I had been reading Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music and I was thinking a lot about absolute music--or music that refers to nothing but the material itself. I hungered to learn how to compose again, how to think more carefully about motivic development and structure; how to lose myself in the process of construction without any thought as to how that work might ultimately be received by performers or the public. My mind then turned to those greatest of didactic composition teaching pieces: the two-part of inventions of J.S. Bach. I loved the clarity of these pieces. Often I would sight read through them at the piano to clear my head before a composing session. They were pure artistic statements, technically accomplished with perfect counterpoint, and completely devoid of any emotional or psychological baggage. Wanting to effectively use the opportunity to start over as a composer, I chose to write an invention for solo piano. 

Settling into my little studio at the flat, I sketched out the very first measures.
I began with a simple, somewhat chromatic, motoric motive in the right hand in contrary motion counterpoint:

The work unfolded chronologically, starting from the beginning, blossoming into virtuosic strides across the expanse of the keyboard, but never far from the initial motive:

And with lots of rhythmic acceleration:

By no means did this new piece write itself, and despite the fact that some sections posed stubborn challenges, much of it came in fits of quick ideas replete with a sense of harmonic and gestural inevitability.  

As this new ‘invention’ came together, I began to understand that--notwithstanding the coherence the motives and gestures already enjoyed--the whole work needed some kind of conceptual model. The structure required a unique kind of inspiration so that all of those hard wrought gestures didn’t simply track the path of least resistance and go to all of the familiar, predictable places. For the first time in this work, I turned away from the material itself to an architectural structure that posed compelling questions about predictability, expectation, and unanticipated juxtapositions. Each of which could make for a suitable musical analogue. That inspiration was the Grand Mosque of Córdoba.

Arches in the Grand Mosque-Cathedral, Córdoba, Spain

The Grand Mosque is probably the most important historical attraction in the Andalusian city of Córdoba. The mosque, or ‘mezquita’ (in Spanish) is no longer a mosque at all, but a cathedral. As the Catholic monarchs defeated Moors from North Africa, sacred sites were converted from places of Islamic worship to Christian ones. By the time the Moors left their last stronghold in Grenada at the end of the 15th century, many such spaces were ‘converted,’ as it were.  The juxtaposition of Moorish architecture (pillars and arches and all) with the symbols of Christianity would be inspiration enough. However, the site of the mosque was originally the site of a Visigothic Catholic church dedicated to St. Vincent. When the Moors originally conquered southern Spain beginning in the 8th century, they too converted the sacred spaces of their vanquished to their own purposes. Hence, a church became a mosque that became a cathedral--each bearing the mark of its predecessor; each shining a light on its own culture and values by virtue of the juxtapositions. Christians and Muslims, in effect, living and worshiping side by side through the ages seemed a beautiful idea. (During the time of the Córdoban Caliphate, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together peacefully). To extend the notion further, the distance of the holy site is but hundreds of yards from a monument honoring the Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides, one of history’s great citizens of Córdoba. 

Grandma Madeline keepin' it real with the kids in the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba

As I considered this sacred space composed of unlikely companions, I considered the companionship of the two composers that had inspired my work: Stravinsky and Bach. Although the work was very much mine, their influence could be felt throughout. So, at the middle of the work, as figures swell into rapid sextuplets in what is surely to be a climax, the gesture is immediately cooled, the course abandoned, and a misty haze lifts to reveal several excerpts--quoted verbatim--of Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C-major from book two of the Well-Tempered Clavier:

Bach stands alone and apart for a while, and then I work to gently fold him into the fabric of my work:

   

                          

Taking Bach into the ‘bosom’ of the work culminates at the end, as the theme from the prelude becomes the subject of a stretto in augmentation I fashion after my own material:

I put a double barline on the work on December 15, 2003 in that little studio office in Alcalá de Henares--several weeks before I would actually step inside the Grand Mosque myself. The whole exercise of writing this work was a breakthrough for me. Of course, there would be other false starts in the years to come, my own personal “Wellington’s Victory” pieces that failed to live up to their promises. At the same time, it was a piece of firsts: the first in many years to find important early inspiration in its own material; the first to seek musical analogues (not programmatic ones) from non-musical structures; the first piece I would write as a DMA--a student in no one’s studio.

Grandpa Ed with his 'sevillana' in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque-Cathedral

We went to Córdoba two months later with Patricia’s parents Ed and Madeline Quayle in a rented car in the early light of a weekday morning. We wanted to experience for ourselves the ancient Andalusian air in the city where three great world cultures, for a time, harmoniously lived and thrived within the same walls. If art is a reflection of the world we’ve inherited, perhaps art can anticipate a world yet to be.

Pianist Nick Phillips went on to record the work for an Albany Records release. Here is a recent video showing all of the athletic finger work.