Summer 1981, Lukas Foss began to compose SOLO, his first piano piece in twenty-eight years, for the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff who premiered it in Paris in March 1982. An initial twelve-tone motive reigns. Yet this is not twelve-toone music. The motive is like a theme which undergoes constant change. Nor is this minimal music; in spite of insistent repetitions, each repetition also contains a change implying development, growth and forward movement. Solo is a long development section, “senza sonata”; lumbering, struggling eighth-notes, circling, spiralling, forging ahead, always on the way, never pausing, never giving up, forever closing in on…

In the Spring of 1982, Lukas Foss and the Lincoln Center Chamber Players premiered a new version of Solo at the New World Festival in Miami, Florida. This version has an extended coda in which three other instruments join the piano, after some ten minutes of silent observing of the solo part. The three instruments are a keyboard instrument, a harp or cello and percussion.

The score has the word “Fine” written a bar before the end. This paradox should be explained: the last bar is like an appendage or error–the piano playing on without its master or the phonograph needle (metaphorically speaking) returning to the opening automatically, as the engine stops.

Here the 1981 version with Yvar Mikhashoff, piano

and here the 1982 version, called Solo Observed, with the add of cello (or harp), vibraphone (or marimba), and electric organ (or accordion) after 9/10 minutes.

Another piece by Lukas Foss, this time for accordion, an uncommon instrument in contemporary music (with some excellent exceptions, e.g. Gubaidulina).

The title, Curriculum Vitae, is explained by the fact that this piece contains some autobiographical reminiscences dating back to the composer’s youth which we find in the form of quotations: one of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, the Turkish March, the Nazi anthem.

Beyond these flashbacks, however, there are no other quotes in the song. Although some appear to be, such as the tango fragment, they are actually fake and a work of imagination.

It is an interesting piece, both tragic and comic, tonal and atonal, simple and complex.

• Lukas Foss, Curriculum Vitae (1977), for accordion
  Guy Klucevsek, accordion

Lukas Foss, compositore nato a Berlino nel 1922 ed emigrato negli USA con la famiglia per sfuggire al nazismo. Deceduto il 1 febbraio 2009 a 86 anni, Foss è tanto conosciuto e apprezzato negli USA quanto poco in Europa.

Eccovi il suo furioso String Quartet no. 3 del 1975, nell’esecuzione del Columbia Quartet (Benjamin Hudson, violin; Carol Zeavin, violin; Janet Lyman Hill, viola; Andre Emelianoff, cello).

Alcune note:

STRING QUARTET NO. 3 is Foss’ most extreme composition; it is themeless, tuneless, and restless. It is probably the first quartet without a single pizzicato since Haydn. The four strings are made to sound like an organ furiously preluding away. The sound vision which gave birth to this quartet may be the most merciless in the quartet literature.

Though some of the pages of the music may look unusual (see image, click to enlarge), QUARTET NO. 3 is notated in every detail. There are no performer choices, except for the number of repeats of certain patterns. Repetition? Actually something is always changing, even in the introduction, which contains only two pitches, A and C, combining in various ways – a kind of prison from which the players are liberated by a sudden all-interval flurry. There follows an extended fortissimo section of broken chord-waves with ever-changing rhythmic inflections. This leads into a rigidly structured pianissimo episode of accelerating and retarding twenote cells. The idea of an exhausting fortissimo followed by an equally unalleviated pianissimo is reminiscent of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, a work for which Foss has a special passion. Foss’ pianissimo section is however unmelodic and active. At one point near the end, the musicians are granted the one and only sustained sound; then the frantic waves and counter waves resume, this time in rhythmic unison, each moment of change cued by the first violin. The closing C major chord is neither a peaceful resolution nor a joke, but rather like an object on which the music stumbles, as if by accident, causing a short circuit, which brings the rush of broken chord patterns to a sudden halt.

STRING QUARTET NO. 3 was written for the Concord Quartet who obtained a grant from the New York State Council toward the commission of the piece and premiered it at Alice Tully Hall, New York on March 15, 1976.