Categoria: studio

Nikolas Slonimsky (originariamente Nikolaj Leonidovič Slonimskij; 27 aprile 1894 - 1995): Studies in black and white per pianoforte (1928), eseguiti dall’autore (registrazione del 1972).

« My first Gradus ad Parnassum in America was the publication in 1929 of my anti-pianistic Studies in Black and White in New Music, a quarterly founded by that formidable champion of modern devices, Henry Cowell. True to my spirit of contrariness, I went against the mainstream. While composers vied with each other in piling up dissonance upon dissonance, I decided to write a piano suite employing only literal concords. Furthermore, I decreed that the right hand should play on the white keys only, and the left hand on the black keys. Consequently, there is no need of accidentals.
« No key signature was required in the right hand as the flats in the left hand were arrayed like a ladder. I described this procedure as consonant counterpoint in mutually exclusive diatonic and pentatonic systems, for I have always been addicted to polysyllabic self-expression. I wrote the studies in the summer of 1928, and both the whimsical idiom and the titles of individual movements reflect the simple sophistication of the period: Jazzelette, A Penny for Your Thoughts, Happy Farmer, Quasi Fugato, Anatomy of Melancholy, March, The Sax Dreaming of a Flute, Sin² x + Cos² x = 1, and Typographical Errors. There is also a Prelude in which euphonious dissonances are discreetly employed, while the harmonies betray my early adoration of Scriabin whose family I intimately knew in Russia. Henry Cowell reported to me in mock horror that the sales of my opus were almost commercial in numbers, which threw a dark shadow of suspicion on my modernism, for it was a dogma that real modern music did not sell. »

Nicolas Slonimsky