Format : Score and Parts
SKU: FA.MFRO001P
8.27 x 11.69 inches.
Over the years 1908-16, Debussy had produced a viable scenario for Usher on his third attempt. Butwhen he came to making a complete draft of the music, he seems to have lost interest during Roderick Usher's long monologue, even though he was setting his own text. As in No-ja-li he jumped to the next passage that interested him, in this case the exciting final melodrama and the collapse of the Usher house itself. In the process of completing the missing half of the score, I discovered that by reusing Debussy's material for similar psychological situations across the opera, and by metamorphosing existing ideas (as Debussy does with Melisande's theme in his opera Pelleas et Melisande), the only things I really needed to add were linking material and any passages where fast music was required. So the 'nightmare scherzo', and Lady Madeline's escape from her coffin and her final bloody revenge on her brother are all mine, but most of the rest is existing Debussy in changing contexts (in which the Russian technique of 'changing backgrounds', both harmonic and textural, proved extremely useful, as it did to Debussy in his Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune). Eventually, both my completed ballet No-ja-li and the House of Usher were successfully premiered in 2006 and the latter soon began to find its way into the established repertoire in Europe and the US. To further support this, I transcribed some of the highlights of Debussy's score as A Night in the House of Usher for organ, and subsequently piano--with a focus on Scene 2 and the final, horrific and maca-bre melodrama. This climaxes in the double deaths of Roderick Usher and his Sister Madeline, together with the disintegration of the ill-fated House of Usher into the stagnant lake-all beneath a blood-red moon.In this form it was first performed by Ian Buckle in the Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds in 2010.
SKU: AY.FRD37
ISBN 9790302114659.
John La Montaine's Twelve Relationships for Piano Solo consists of twelve short canons: Bold and Plain, Teasing, Plaintive, Bittersweet, Wayward, Saucy, Entreating, Piquant, Brooding, Spirited and Jubilant. It was originally composed in 1965. A canon is the strictest form of composition, in which two or more parts take up in succession exactly the same musical subject. Each of the canons in Twelve Relationships is at a different interval. That is, the second entrance of the subject begins on a different note in each canon, and that note is always different from the first entrance. Twelve different intervals are utilized in the twelve canons. Each of these canons is strict in its succession of intervals from the first note to the last. The first canon is at the octave and therefore in one and the same key. All of the others at different intervals, since they are strict, are simultaneously in two different keys. There is no other known set of canons so composed. The title Twelve Relationships may be understood in two senses. One refers to the form, the intervallic relationships mentioned above. The other refers to the content, that is, to the psychological relationships that are implied by the titles of the individual canons and which form the musical substance of the pieces. Jocelyn Mackey (Pan Pipes, music critic): Twelve Relationships contains twelve two-part canons with titles like, Plaintive, Sprightly, Saucy, Brooding. The first, Bold and Plain, is composed with imitation at the fifth, while a different interval is used in each of the other eleven. Just as the Well-Tempered Clavier contains preludes in each possible key, each possible interval of imitation is used in this set of canons. Amazing contrapuntal skill..
