On Reading Emerson

for piano

by
Kyle Gann
2006
On Reading Emerson (2006)

Pianist Sarah Cahill asked me to write a piece about one of our

mutually favorite authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I resisted the impulse
to title the piece "Whim," though like Emerson, "I hope it is somewhat
better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation."
Of course my conception of Emerson is filtered through Charles Ives,
who wrote of him, "As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens
with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them
along the ground first." To create that effect in music, I did the reverse:
write a bunch of passages of music around a single (or double) idea,
and arrange them along the ground before fitting them together.
Because I think of Emerson as ever aware of the interpenetration of
opposites, almost every chord in the piece contains a tone from the
opposite chord, and because he is all encompassing, I have used, for
the first time in my life, a 12-tone row. (It only appears twice, and
elsewhere in fragments, and is never transposed, retrograded, or
anything.) Like Emerson's writing, the piece is peppered with
quotations, three of which the listener may recognize. The fourth will
not be recognized; it is from a song that I began writing in college on
Emerson's "The Rhodora" and never finished, because the only good
phrase I wrote was the one I resurrect here, setting the lines:

Why thou wert there, O, rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew....

I thank Sarah for giving that phrase a home at last.

- Kyle Gann

Duration: 8 minutes
 for Sarah Cahill

On Reading Emerson
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On Reading Emerson
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On Reading Emerson
 7

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On Reading Emerson
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@
August 2 - September 17, 2006
Germantown, NY

On Reading Emerson