Preludes and Fugues For Piano: an interview with composer David S. Lefkowitz
Mendelssohn. Hindemith. Shostakovich. Slonimsky. Ever since J.S. Bach wrote his Well-Tempered Clavier, composers have followed his example and written their own. Now acclaimed composer, music theorist, and professor David S. Lefkowitz has joined this auspicious lineage by composing Preludes and Fugues for Piano.
Featuring the virtuosic playing of concert pianists Steven Beck, David Kaplan, Michael Mizrahi, and Mika Sasaki, this two-disc recording highlights not only Lefkowitz’s intricate craftsmanship and masterful command of the forms, but also pushes the piano’s tonal capabilities to its limits and beyond. In Book 1, Lefkowitz explores the relationship between the prelude and fugue. In Book 2, he took flight from the sound world of the piano’s natural tones by preparing the piano using everything and anything—sponges, decks of cards, brass bolts, chopsticks, golf tees and more. The effect? These preludes and fugues usher the listener into new sound universes, while the strength of Lefkowitz’s masterful understanding of form ties the music to its lineage.
Lefkowitz’s love of and respect for the music of Bach shines through these pieces. In his preludes and fugues, he celebrates the “incredibly vast, endlessly fascinating structures” that Bach built. Simultaneously, he creates his own “structures and edifices.” In this recording one hears all styles of music, from post-tonal to jazz, funk to klezmer—all celebrated within forms championed by Bach. They’re a reminder that in the right hands, old can be new again, structure can both ground and free the imagination, and when innovation and form combine, music can become transformative. It is an honor to feature David S. Lefkowitz and this recording on No Dead Guys.
At what age did you begin composing and when did you decide to make music your career?
Short answer: I started writing music when I was 21, and I guess I would say that I decided to make music my career when I got into Eastman School of Music for my doctorate.
Longer answer: I actually wrote my first composition when I was 10 or 11: I wrote something for piano with fast notes which I found intimidating as a player. I asked my piano teacher, if I wrote a piece of music would I have to be able to play it? I guess he thought “hmm – here’s a way to get David to practice harder,” so he said “yes”. I put that composition away and didn’t write anything original for another decade. In the meantime, though, I wrote arrangements of jazz tunes for a capella singers, formed an a capella singing group at Cornell (it still exists!), and sang and played clarinet and bassoon in as many as five other groups, so…music was there all along.
Are you a pianist? If not, how challenging was it to write virtuosic preludes and fugues for the instrument?
Good question! I am not a pianist, or at least I don’t play well. I took four years of piano lessons as a child, and then another two or so during graduate school, but I never practiced hard enough to get to a performing level.
It is a challenge to write for piano. I have played four-part Bach fugues, and I do play through all of my music, so I have some idea of the issues. But it is a constant learning process.
Congratulations on creating a thriving, international career as a composer, as well as a music theorist and professor. Given your interest in post-tonal music, what was it about Bach’s monumental Well-Tempered Clavier that inspired you to compose your own set of preludes and fugues?
Well, to me Bach has always been the greatest composer, and I listen to Bach’s work more than that of any other composer. The way he rises above the devices and techniques that he uses to create music that anyone could listen to is simply amazing, and I have strived to achieve that level of effortlessness in my simplest and even in my most complicated music.
But Bach wrote within the confines of one specific musical language—one that had been invented not even a century before he was born—called “tonality.” Today we have many musical languages—and I created several others in this two-volume set. I think of my musical languages as newly discovered lands. In each prelude I explore these lands, and discover beautiful vistas or environments, while in each fugue I create structures that exist within those environments. I like to think that that is what Bach does with his preludes and fugues; we’re just doing it with different languages.
I understand that your latest recording, Preludes and Fugues for Piano, started as a pandemic project. How do you feel that era influenced your creative process?
Well, generally speaking, to create something of this breadth and depth, a composer needs time alone. During the pandemic I had that time alone. But that is not necessarily unique to the pandemic—lots of creative artists go on creative retreats of one sort or another.
But more particularly, the pandemic had a lot of us looking inward, exploring—researching!—parts of ourselves or parts of the world that had been invisible before. For me this was especially true for the second book of preludes and fugues, which started with something like nine months of experimenting with piano preparations of all sorts. So in this book the lands I was exploring were not merely created out of notes, as the first book was, but out of sounds and resonances of other music, such as Indonesian Gamelan or Jazz.
This monumental two-disc release was recorded by four different pianists: Steven Beck, David Kaplan, Michael Mizrahi, and Mika Sasaki. What drew you to these pianists and why did you feel they were the best artists to record your music?
This was a joint decision with David Kaplan, my wonderful colleague at UCLA. I knew that nearly three hours of sometimes virtuosic music would be too heavy of a lift to ask of any single pianist, so David and I discussed dividing it in half, in thirds, or—as we did, in the end—in quarters.
We both wanted to use pianists who had worked with or were associated with Decoda, the chamber ensemble which David is one of the founding members of, making for a cohesion between the performers. I knew Mika Sasaki and of her beautiful playing.Then David told me a fun fact about Steve Beck and Michael Mizrahi: they had the same teacher growing up, and had even played two-piano pieces together. Since the culminating piece of the two volumes is for two pianos, this seemed like kismet.
Preludes and Fugues for Piano is a stunning accomplishment. In Book 1, I was struck by the elegance of your musical architecture and your mastery of the forms. Book 2 was the one that I feel best combines head and heart. As most of the pieces in Book 2 are written for prepared piano, what can you tell me about the materials you chose to use?
You’re right: it’s certainly true that in part of Book 1 I really was exploring the prelude and fugue relationship, and when I got to the second book I was feeling quite comfortable with those ideas…so you’re right that Book 2 more easily combines head and heart. I felt free to bring in inspirations that I have always loved, some musical, some visual, a few conceptual. What’s interesting about those inspirations is that first, using a variety of preparations, I would ask myself, in what way or ways does this set of sounds speak to me? And my answer could be “like the paintings of Sonia Delaunay,” “like Funk,” or “like fractals, echoing themselves at multiple levels.”
I used a lot of materials that deaden the sound of a piano, including sponges, stacks of decks of cards, rubber erasers, and poster putty. I used materials that created clangy sounds, such as brass bolts and tambourine jangles, and materials that take the vibrations of the strings and transform them in unusual ways, including chopsticks, golf tees, straws, and alligator clips. Most go between or on specific strings, but I also cover many strings or the entire piano, using pull-chains for ceiling lights, snare-drum snares placed on pieces of paper resting on the strings, and heavy towels or blankets to muffle the sound of the entire piano, the way that fog might muffle the sights and sounds of a city.
It’s not just the materials but the way you use those materials that determines the resulting sounds. Placing a heavy wad of putty very close to the node may produce the harmonic, but also a pitch bend. Moving the chopstick even a little bit in one direction or another can completely change the sound.
The rollicking rhythms of your “Drums” and “Funk” and the ethereal sounds of “Slendro” grabbed my ear immediately. What can you tell me about the challenge of arranging these sounds into structured preludes and fugues?
“Funk” has this spectrum of sounds, from wooden drums at the top, through a xylophone sound, a marimba sound, down to unaltered piano in the middle low register, and then notes that sound like a jazz bass at the very bottom—really, a jazz quartet with drums, mallet percussion, piano, and bass. That means that I can have the fugue come in at different registers, creating contrasting sounds instead of contrasting notes. It’s a very different approach to fugue, but it works! The prelude, then, introduces us to the funk sound world. “Drums” is similar, with this range of drum sounds from more wooden and less resonant at the top to more resonant “skin” drums—like tom-toms and a bass drum—at the bottom.
But both “Funk” and “Drums” are held together in other ways, as well. In the prelude of “Funk”, the third of the four beats in each measure is stretched, in a way that sounds like the performer is relaxing a bit at that spot in each measure. In the fugue, the third beat is shortened. In the end, the joke is that the prelude has stolen a series of sixteenth-notes from the fugue.
The prelude of “Drums” is like a temporal barbershop pole: as the main theme speeds up, it comes in again at a slower tempo, which then speeds up, etc. (They also move up in register as they accelerate.) It’s like a time fugue, with the difference between the lines being how accelerated each is. It’s exciting, but also exhausting. The fugue answers that with an easier approach to fugue, where the differences between the lines are the sounds.
“Slendro” is different, and quite special. I wanted to respect as much of the gamelan tradition as possible. In addition to the sounds—lots of metallophones, xylophones and drums—there are gongs which punctuate the end of each cycle of measures. Most importantly there is the relationship between the higher sounds to the lower sounds: as in traditional gamelan, there are often two or even three layers of the same music, one played twice as fast and the other four times as fast as the lower one. So again, this produces a different sort of “temporal fugue.” The prelude serves as a slow, dramatic introduction to the dance.
The pieces I found most emotionally powerful were “Marcellel Cahn,” “Doyna & Terkisher Tanz,” and “Nigun, Hora & Freylekh” preludes and fugues. Why did you choose to integrate traditional Jewish melodies into these particular pieces?
Thank you! These are among my favorites—they certainly are close to my heart.
The “Doyna & Terkisher Tanz” and the “Nigun, Hora & Freylekh” don’t actually use traditional Jewish melodies, but they certainly use traditional Jewish musical tropes or gestures. These emerge nearly automatically from using the scales (or “modes”) of Jewish Klezmer music, which are often more “lumpy” or uneven than traditional western classical scales, so using these Klezmer scales felt natural. Plus, the preparations used on the piano created sounds that reminded me of eastern European cimbaloms and zithers.
What I find fun is the idea of integrating a folk music—Klezmer—with the high art of fugue.There are gestures that I use in these pieces that are straight out of Klezmer practice, but at the same time both fugues really work, in far more traditional ways than most of my other pieces (both Klezmer fugues are actually double fugues!). Most especially, the idea of a warm-up piece, demonstrating some of the emotional potential of Klezmer, leading to a dance piece, describes almost perfectly what I have done, which works from both the Klezmer and from the prelude-and-fugue angle.
“Marcelle Cahn” is a very different story. The prelude is marked “Dreamily, but tinged with sadness,” which is, I think, a good description of Marcelle Cahn’s 1927 painting “Femme et Voilier” (Woman and Sailboat). I had been experimenting with the clangy, “music-box” sound created by positioning screws between the strings just before the bridge, and thinking how sad and lonely but dreamlike the sounds were. Surfing the web I came across this not so well known 20th-century French artist Marcelle Cahn. Seeing her photo took my breath away: she looked like she could have been one of my grandmother’s sisters. Researching her more led me to settle upon two of her paintings as inspirations, and a new scale that is somehow “more sad than sad.” That this idea is one I associate with a 20th-century Jewish artist may or may not be a coincidence—I’ll leave that to the listeners to decide!
What can you tell me about your inspiration for (and the construction of) the jaw-dropping (and finger-busting) two-piano “Chaconne & Triple Fugue Prelude”?
The twin inspirations for the prelude were a Chaconne by Purcell, and Maurice Jarre’s barn-raising music in Peter Weir’s movie Witness. Both use ostinato basses—a repeating bass-line pattern, above which the music gets more and more elaborate. But in Witness the bassline builds, too (it’s barn-raising music!). So in this Chaconne the ostinato also builds: first it’s one measure, then two, then three, etc., until finally it reaches 18 measures long.
Meanwhile, the simple c-minor melody line gets more and more elaborate, reaching a total of seven different simultaneous lines toward the end, and featuring more and more chromaticism, until by the end it’s just one enormous schmear of chromaticism.
The main melody of the fugue is almost exactly the main melody of Fugue No.2 from Book 2 (“Bells”—the one with the chopsticks). In “Bells”, though, the actual pitches get completely obscured by the preparations. In the “Triple Fugue” (the fugue of No.13, the last of the two volumes), I resurrected that melody, and put it into a tonal context. This main melody begins with a single note repeated five times; over the course of the piece, those five notes start sliding up or down chromatically, as well, emphasizing the chromatic content.
As for the rest of the fugue, it really does reach gigantic proportions: where most of the fugues have just one fugue melody, stated in three or four voices, this one has three melodies, stated in five voices (reaching as many as seven voices, at one point). It’s the only triple fugue in the two volumes. The second melody is in 25/16 meter—with five groups of five sixteenths per bar. But the third melody is about as tonal as it could be. In the end, all three melodies come together in one tonally-based celebration.
It’s funny what you said about the piece being finger-busting. Watching the video of this prelude and fugue made my jaw drop: you see that Steve Beck scarcely even breaks a sweat speeding through the cascade of notes (Michael Mizrahi also had no troubles, but I didn’t have the right camera angle to show his right hand). There are something like a million notes in this pair of pieces, but while it sounds finger-busting it seems that it is quite do-able.
Do you offer sheet music for your Preludes and Fugues for Piano? If so, where might we purchase it?
Contact me! At lefko@ucla.edu.
What advice can you offer pianists who are interested in playing your music but worry about putting props in their pianos?
Well, the first thing to know is that the amount of stress that the preparations put on the strings is a fraction of the stress that the hammers produce. And pulling a string an eighth of an inch to the side is nothing compared to how much some of these strings vibrate on their own. As long as they proceed carefully, the piano will not be harmed.
Another thing to keep in mind is that no two sets of preparations will produce exactly the same sounds. This is especially true of “Bells,” for instance, where the exact positioning of the chopsticks can make an enormous difference in the sound. This is “a feature not a bug”—as the sounds will change, so will the performances, which is so much of what music is all about.
Lastly, performers should know that no two pianos will facilitate the preparations in the same way. In general, the strings of a 9-foot pianos have so much mass and momentum that preparations will have proportionately less effect. 7’ or 6’ pianos will likely work better, although even there, where the frame’s crossbars are placed and where the bass strings cross the tenor strings will affect the ability to place the preparations.
Anyway, not even half the pieces have preparations! And since some of those that do can be performed without preparations, the preparations should not be the biggest concern.
What current and future plans are you most excited about?
I’m working on a large string quartet right now. After that…who knows?!
What advice do you offer your students on how to create their own careers in music?
Classical music is meant to be deeply meaningful, and to reward repeated, careful listening. This means that a composer must always be searching for ways to reinvest their music with meaning, and must always be challenging themselves to write music that requires themselves to listen to their own music carefully. So my first piece of advice is not to think that their first task is to “find their style” (which presumably they would then stick to)—that approach to developing their musical voice almost guarantees that their music will become stale and will, at some point, cease to be imbued with meaning, cease to challenge themselves or others.
This leads directly to my second piece of advice: question authority: the authority of the unquestioned presuppositions about music that we inherit from our predecessors. For instance, who says that a scale must repeat every octave (or, put another way, that a scale is defined by the intervals within an octave)?
But this leads directly to the third piece of advice: in order to question authority, you need to understand the authority that you’re questioning. The greats—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók (heck—let’s add Boulez!), or Mozart, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Mazzoli, Montgomery—are great for really good reasons. We need to understand what made them great, not because of their stature or what our teachers tell us, but because of the incredibly vast, endlessly fascinating structures that they built with their music.We study them not in order to repeat them, not in order to imprison ourselves within those musical buildings, but so that we can learn to create our own structures and edifices.
This means that being a composer is a long road, but it allows us to have careers that will last over that long haul. If you commit to this road, you shouldn’t get discouraged by short-term challenges. Instead, you learn from your mistakes and continue questioning, interrogating, building, and developing your own musical worlds.
Composer, music theorist, and professor David S. Lefkowitz’s works are commissioned and performed by leading soloists and ensembles world-wide. His impressive list of national and international awards include ASCAP, the Society of New Music's Brian M. Israel Prize, the ALEA III International Competition, the Washington International award, the National Association of Composers, and the Fukui Harp Music Awards Competition, and his compositions have been performed by the Chicago Civic Orchestra, at the Gaudeamus Music Week, a portrait concert at the Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and at Segerstrom Hall. Recent commissions include works for Suzana Bartal, Inna Faliks, Quatuor Diotima, Sibelius Piano Trio, Debussy Trio, Quartet Integra, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Herzen University- St. Petersburg, and the Russian String Orchestra.
Highlights of his discography of close to 30 recordings include Harp’s Desire, music for harp, recently released on Albany Records (Troy1499), Ruminations for the Sibelius Piano Trio (YAR52638), Inner Worlds, (YAR 88328), Music of Contradictions: The Music of David S. Lefkowitz on Albany, and this fall will see the release of a new world premiere recording featuring Quartet Integra on Yarlung Records (YAR 407246-20).
Lefkowitz is Professor of Music Composition and Theory at UCLA. He holds degrees from Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Eastman School of Music.