Performance Practices in Late Twentieth Century Piano Music

American Music Teacher, April-May, 2005 by Ellen Rennie Flint

Performance Practices in Late Twentieth Century Piano Music (DVD), by Stewart Gordon. Alfred Publishing Company, Inc. (16380 Roscoe Blvd., RO. Box 10003, Van Nuys, CA 91410), 2004. 55 mins. $19.95.

Keeping with its tradition of providing authoritative and affordable materials for music students and teachers, Alfred Publishing Company, Inc. now offers an exceptional DVD featuring Stewart Gordon in a discussion of piano music and compositional practices of the late twentieth century. Speaking in his unique and personable style, Gordon exhorts today's musicians to "follow [the composers of the twentieth century] and grow in our own art just as they [the composers] grew in theirs."

The title of the DVD, Performance Practices ..., is a bit misleading, for in this lecture-recital, Gordon presents less of a discussion and demonstration of performance techniques than an introduction to and historical overview of the development of compositional techniques of late twentieth-century piano music. Nevertheless, Gordon offers important historical perspectives and insights into analytical techniques that, while based in the vocabulary of traditional harmony, may be used to understand much of late twentieth-century music. The video is especially valuable for those teachers and older students who, perhaps because of feelings of dissociation, avoid the more cryptic and initially inaccessible late twentieth-century music.

Gordon's varied program begins with a work composed in the neo-romantic style by Richard Faith. Encouraging viewers to draw on their own knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, Gordon employs the traditional vocabulary of analysis and speaks about four-bar phrases, dominant seventh chords, half cadences and so forth, to guide the viewer through the piece. By applying such techniques, he explains, we can begin to understand the thought processes of one composer and develop new techniques we can use to look at, understand and interpret other late twentieth-century music.

Proceeding from the neo-romantic style exemplified by Faiths work, Gordon continues with performances and abbreviated discussions of two works (one by Leo Kraft and one by Sol Berkowitz), which were influenced by the jazz idiom of the 1950s. The final section of the video presents a discussion of non-tonal music and concludes with a stunning performance of "Dream Images" from George Crumb's Makrokosmos I.

In this fifty-five minute video, Gordon leads the viewer from the more familiar neo-romantic style of twentieth-century music to that which is the "most difficult...to approach"--non-tonal music. The progression of the discussion is logical, and Gordon's profound respect for the music is evident throughout. Reviewed by Ellen Rennie Flint, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.