
Stephen Lewis is a Portland-based pianist, music teacher and composer who has made it his mission to bring “neglected music” to new audiences via his Modernist Piano Series. He began his interest in performing this music during his undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory. Since then he’s given performances featuring some of the best works of the early and mid-twentieth century avant-garde, with a style that is rousing and exciting. After a performance of Modern “Night Music” last November, Lewis and I sat down for a conversation to discuss what he means by “neglected music,” some of the difficulties around performing this repertoire, and some broader sociological questions around the role of music in our society.
But first, a digression.
You have to eat your vegetables
Years ago I went to the Oregon Symphony to hear them perform Gabriela Lena Frank, Lutosławski and Beethoven. It was their 2019 performance featuring Frank’s Walkabout, Lutosławski’s incredible Cello Concerto with Johannes Moser, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. As Carlos Kalmar came to the podium to conduct the first piece, he made some comment to the effect of, “you have to eat your vegetables before you get dessert.” My girlfriend and I still discuss this off-handed comment at least once a month.
I know Kalmar intended that as a joke, but it still stung. Do people really consider listening to Gabriella Lena Frank and Witold Lutosławski “eating your vegetables,” an artistic inconvenience they must endure in order to get to the good stuff like Beethoven? Are people not moved by as fantastic a cellist as Johannes Moser performing one of Lutosławski’s best works? If people think Gabriella Lena Frank is jarring and difficult, imagine what they would feel about Boulez, Ferneyhough or Ustvolskaya! Kalmar’s comment seems indicative of the general attitude a lot of people take towards new music. To many, quote-unquote “new music” is boring, pretentious, self-impressed, atonal, and an affront to everything that makes music enjoyable.
This attitude misses one thing: avant-garde music can be exciting. It isn’t any less worthwhile a medium of expression than the received wisdom of the common-practice period. And in some ways, it expands the language with which we can express certain things, perhaps even better than the tonal language can. Sometimes we may want music to express things like confusion, disorientation, horror, or some ineffable melancholy.
It’s a well-told story at this point. After two World Wars devastated Europe, artists no longer felt that the old modes of expression were valid or worthwhile. If this art is the product of a dead civilization, we must seek something new, either by picking up the pieces of the old world (as Stravinsky and the neoclassicists did, or as Pound and Eliot did with The Waste Land), or by trying to build a new musical language from scratch, as Schoenberg and his acolytes did. This narrative, like all historical narratives, glosses over quite a bit.
For one, the old music never really went away. Well into the twentieth century were many composers who were “modern” in their own way without fully embracing the new “isms.” And they remain popular: Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Holst, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams, to name a few. There were also many composers who embraced the new expressive possibilities of the avant-garde without the ideological commitment to musical purity: here Szymanowski, Ligeti, Messiaen, Britten, Copland and Bernstein come to mind.
Secondly, the music of the avant-garde is due for re-evaluation. As we get further away from the ideological considerations of these composers, we can judge their music more fairly for what it is, rather than what the composers themselves thought they were doing. In hindsight, theory takes a back seat to aesthetics and expression. Additionally, we’ve had decades of composers who were influenced by the avant-garde prepare us post-hoc for a new hearing of their music.
Lewis’ goal is to make this neglected music vital. His performances do not feel like attending a stuffy lecture where we eat our musical vegetables, as it were. Instead, I feel like I am hearing someone passionately share the music they love. Lewis’ stage presence and performance demeanor invites us into this unfamiliar but exciting sound world.
To whet the palette, here’s a performance by Lewis of Schoenberg’s monumental Piano Suite, Opus 25.
Night music
Last November, Lewis performed one of these Modernist piano concerts at Lincoln Hall. On the program were five pieces representing different perspectives on the “night music” genre: Bartók’s Four Dirges and Out of Doors, Chopin’s Nocturne in B Major, Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, and Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus.
Bartók’s Four Dirges open surprisingly tenderly, with soft notes and a tasteful amount of dissonance. It was an appropriate opening for a concert of Night Music: not a bombastic, impressive entrance, but a subtle creeping-in. The music really shined through Lewis’ delicate pedalling and use of silence. While each individual chord or melody note may not be that dissonant, the tones accumulate and leave a blurry cloud of resonance behind. The second movement opens with a bare folk melody in C# minor that builds into some polytonal moments. I find this aspect of Bartók’s piano writing fascinating: while he was certainly a capable pianist, he allowed himself to indulge in simplicity. His Mikrokosmos piano suites are very simple, but allow young piano students to explore typically difficult things like mixed-metered rhythms, polytonality and dissonance in a very plain and straightforward manner.
After that Lewis led into a more traditional piece of “night music”: Chopin’s Nocturne in B Major. In his remarks between Four Dirges and the Nocturne, he draws a connection between the two composers due to them both being refugees. Bartók fled Hungary for the United States due to the rise of fascism in Hungary, and Chopin fled to Paris after Russia invaded Poland during the 1830 November Uprising.
For Klavierstucke VII, much of the audience sat with eyes closed. The piece was generally quite spacious, with individual notes constellating around the central C#. Lewis played with a deep focus into the score. The overtones that rang out danced above the piano, asking the listener to focus intensely within the sound of each note. This is not what one would expect from Stockhausen, who was about as systematic as they come. To close out the first half of the program, Bartók’s Out of Doors suite made use of scattered animal calls and noises creeping around a central tone cluster. Lewis nicely balanced these elements, drawing forth the melodies that could easily become buried within the texture.
The back half of the program post-intermission was taken up by the first six movements of Messiaens’s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. The first movement was hypnotic and surprisingly tonal, punctuated with some low dissonant chords that sound like tremors tearing apart the foundations of harmony. The second and third movements contrasted nicely with the first, while preparing the listener for what’s to come. The fourth moment, meanwhile, was almost cheeky. The fifth featured some tricky upper-register runs that under Lewis’ hands felt fluid. The momentous sixth movement ended the set with its grandeur and chaotic textures. The performance was gripping through its finale that grew bigger and bigger and bigger.
Neglected Music
Interpreting modernist piano literature is challenging. Unlike the classics, there isn’t as much received wisdom about what is the correct way to approach the music. With those classics, one is ascending to the top of a mountain, perfecting each step precisely along the way; when interpreting this repertoire as Lewis is, one is exploring an undiscovered underground cave system. The terrain is unmapped, each movement is uncertain, but one persists in spite of any wrong turns to chart a course for future explorers.
There have been great interpreters of modern piano music: David Tudor, Mauritzio Pollini and Glenn Gould come to mind. But they may be fighting a losing battle against composers who see the uncertainties of musical performance as a necessary inconvenience. Lewis told me that this is why a lot of avant-garde composers turn towards electronic music: to take performance out of the equation entirely in favor of composition in itself.
After the performance, Lewis and I sat down for coffee to talk about this project of performing “neglected music.” He told me that his conception of “neglected music” is closer to that of the German phrase neue musik. To us in America, “new music” has a straightforward meaning: music that is new, music that has yet to be canonized. Neue Musik, meanwhile, means music that is by its nature challenging and vital, regardless of when and where it first came to be. In this frame of mind, Beethoven’s late string quartets are still neue, despite being nearly two centuries old, because they bristle against our conceptions of what music can be. They are still provoking debate over whether the Grosse Fuge is the true ending of the Bb major string quartet, or if it stands on its own, for instance.
What Lewis and I were really getting at in our conversation was a question about the meaning of music. Or, rather, whether music has any meaning. Especially in Europe, the idea that music has meaning is a given. One may protest, “of course music has meaning!” But the question of what music means, and how it means it, is a much tougher question to answer. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in some sense “about” the four-note bah-bah-bah-baaaaah theme, but that cannot tell the whole picture–maybe it’s about fate, maybe it isn’t.
Lewis told me that much of his interest in the meaning of music comes from his doctoral work at UC San Diego, which was about musical narrative and topic theory. Topic theory is in some ways a counterpart to theory. If traditional theory is about structure, then topic theory is about what adorns that structure. He used Beethoven’s Appassionata as an example. It’s a textbook instance of sonata form, but that tells us little about the experience of listening to it. That explanation gives us the floor plan with none of the decorations. Beethoven’s themes and gestures in the Appassionata evoke storms, thunder and lightning, delicate raindrops and wind. There is also the personal and political dimension to Beethoven’s music that is left under-discussed in theory-focused analyses. There are for sure critics who are aware of these distinctions and try to bridge this gap—Adorno and Rose Subotnik, for instance.
I find it admirable that Lewis has found a way to make old music sound new again. That has been the goal of many arts organizations lately: to present the classics not as ossified relics of a grand past, but as living works of art that are relevant to us today. There is one hesitation I have with this pursuit, however. The term “neglected music,” begs the question, “neglected by whom?” Certainly not academics and critics, who continue to litigate these centuries-old aesthetic debates. Nor by contemporary composers, who have made use of the expanded harmonic, rhythmic and textural vocabulary of the avant-garde in a much less systematic way. It must be then that it has been neglected by audiences, performers and arts organizations.
Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: we think this music is not gonna fill the hall, so we do little to promote it. Presenting this music to an audience is like eating your artistic vegetables: not something you want to do, but something you feel obligated to. So we don’t promote it, and thus the prospective audience doesn’t show up. Lewis mentioned how “pathetically small” the audience was at a performance of Charles Ives’ piano sonatas by Steve Drury at Lewis and Clark College, and placed the blame squarely on the college for doing little to promote it.
However, this music may be less “neglected” than we think. According to Bachtrack, the USA does a far better job programming twentieth-century and contemporary music than most other countries. This could be compensating for our lack of performances of “early” (Medieval and Renaissance music), Baroque and Classical music. Interestingly, the country whose balance of eras most closely mimics the US is Sweden. It could also be that European countries tend to have a much stronger repertoire of homegrown composers dating back much further than that of the US.
Lewis said, “Classical music has been dying for over a hundred years–but it’s still alive.” And to be sure, Lewis is still a great interpreter of the classics: check out his performance of Bach’s Partita in G below. He is keen in his awareness of how performances shape our perception of the musical past. And just as Glenn Gould’s controversial interpretations reshaped how we think about Bach’s music, Lewis may play a role in reshaping how we think about musical modernism. What was once considered cold and academic, under skillful and critical hands, can become rousing, moving and enlightening.
If you want to hear some of Lewis’ performances in person, he has a few coming up in the next few months. He will be performing his own Capriccio as well as Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 6 at ChatterPDX on March 9th. He is also preparing a concert to be performed in Newport in April featuring Brahms’ Horn Trio, Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne and music by Paul Lansky.
That’s just the beginning. He also let me in on some of the repertoire he’s currently working on, which ventures even further into the difficult territories of the late twentieth century and contemporary piano repertoire: Chinary Ung’s Seven Mirrors, Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X, Tristan Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli, Rebecca Saunders’ Crimson, and Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade. He also mentioned the music of George Walker, Louise Talma, and Beethoven’s massive Hammerklavier sonata being on the agenda.
Thanks for a wonderful feature about my project! I really appreciate it.
Just a small correction: my research in narrative theory and music was part of my doctoral work at UC San Diego, not while I was an undergrad at Oberlin.
Thank you, Stephen. We’ve updated the story to reflect this.
Vegetables, hmm. I’d like to think maestro Kalmar was speaking from experience, in that when one’s palate matures, one comes to love vegetables at least as much as dessert – surely this should resonate in foodie Portland – but I fear your interpretation is more likely.
Imagine also what kind of volcanic reaction Beethoven would have to his 5th symphony being called a dessert.
But be careful not to fall into the same trap with “confusion, disorientation, horror”. While those are certainly my reactions (not emotions, which are absent) listening e.g. to the Boulez piano sonatas – my emotional resonances while listening to any amount of Berg, Messiaen, Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Bartok etc. are (aside from occasional undeniable frissons of horror) not so very different from listening to music of other eras. They didn’t write the cheeriest music, but neither did Mahler, who packed the hall pre-pandemic.
I agree wholeheartedly with this, a fitting summary of Steven’s efforts: “What was once considered cold and academic, under skillful and critical hands, can become rousing, moving and enlightening.”