Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: A Celebration

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) A Celebration

Notes by Gregory Weinstein

Perkinson came of age as a composer in the 1950s, a time of stark division in the American classical music world. On one side was a group of composers committed to increasingly arcane experiments. Milton Babbitt famously noted his desire to move composition into the academic sphere, rejecting the listening public and wondering “Who cares if you listen?” At the same time, the canon of old and new Romantic composers became increasingly entrenched in the concert world. Mainstays of the concert hall, such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler, were being joined by twentieth-century counterparts such as Sergei Rachmaninov and Samuel Barber.

The “high art” canon of classical composers has traditionally been inhospitable to black composers. Not one has truly entered into the classical mainstream. (Perhaps the most prominent twentieth-century African-American composer, William Grant Still, found his matier nearly untenable: critics condemned his early “ultramodern” work as too complex, then dismissed his later “racial” works as overly simplistic.) Thus, Perkinson’s pragmatic approach to the notion of a “black composer” could be seen, at least in part, as a tactical move: a desire to be judged solely on the merits of his music.

Perkinson’s diverse career must be positioned against the racially restricted world of classical music. He received an academic training in composition, studying with Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music and Earl Kim at Princeton University. Yet he refused to enter the isolated world of academia, preferring instead a diverse array of musical jobs. He produced a great deal of “high art” music, but he was equally well-versed in jazz and popular forms: he briefly served as pianist for drummer Max Roach’s quartet and wrote arrangements for Roach, Marvin Gaye, and Harry Belafonte.

In light of Perkinson’s musical catholicity, one must resist the temptation to impose constricting artistic visions on his compositional output, since he clearly imposed no boundaries on his models. Perkinson wrote the earliest work on this disc, the Sinfonietta No. 1 for Strings, in 1954 when he was 22, although it was not premiered until 1966. Stylistically, the Sinfonietta reveals the influence of several composers, particularly the counterpoint of his “teachers,” J.S. Bach and Vittorio Giannini, and the idiom of the day’s “Romantic” American composers. The slow movement, for example, seems reminiscent of the Adagio from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, composed nearly twenty years earlier (better known in its later configuration as Barber’s Adagio for Strings), while the last movement resembles somewhat the style of Aaron Copland with its expansive melodic fourths, particularly in the lyrical middle section. Despite its tangible connections with other composers, the Sinfonietta reveals many characteristics that Perkinson would develop throughout his career, including pointed and controlled dissonance and metrical ambiguity (particularly in the third movement, where he changes meters frequently and disrupts the rhythmic flow by altering the relative positions of the themes).

Grass, a work for piano, strings and percussion, dates from approximately the same period as the Sinfonietta and its compositional style is quite close to the Sinfonietta’s first movement. While the Sinfonietta was nominally an autonomous composition, Grass is based on an eponymous poem by Carl Sandburg.

Perkinson explained, “It was written during a time when I imagined that I was going to be involved in the Korean conflict and was written from the perspective of a black person being involved in the Korean conflict.” Although he declined to elaborate further or describe how the music relates to the poem, leaving such connections to the listener’s imagination, the repeated opening motive is obviously based on the rhythm of the poem’s refrain: “I am the grass, I cover all.” The piano and percussion effectively contrast against the strings. Perkinson employs rhythmic devices similar to those in the Sinfonietta, but to greater extremes: displacements are more abrupt, meter changes and metrical ambiguity more common, and repetition is frequently employed. The work is in a ternary form, with a placid middle section bracketed by two active outer passages. Like the Sinfonietta, Grass is a tonal composition, though it employs a high degree of dissonance, often more exposed than in the earlier work (e.g., the piano chords before the middle section).

Perkinson composed his Quartet No. 1 during the same period as the Sinfonietta and Grass, and its use of dissonance and counterpoint is often similar. The quartet, however, marks one of the first times Perkinson presents an explicit trope on an African-American tradition: the composer acknowledges in the title that the quartet is “based on ‘Calvary’ (Negro spiritual).” Perkinson was familiar with the spiritual from church services but cautioned, “When I sat down to write this string quartet, I was not trying to write something black; I was just writing out of my experience.” The spiritual provided the basis for the melody of the first movement, although it is transformed to the syncopated and angular style characteristic of Perkinson’s compositions from this period. The movement is generated through the development and transformation of the Calvary melody, providing a rich source of motives and intervals for Perkinson’s counterpoint. If the spiritual tune is present in the second and third movements, it is heavily disguised. Both movements — the second is slow and expressive while the third (a rondo) is more agitated — feature striking alternations of homophonic passages with precise counterpoint and voice transfers.

Although Perkinson expressed his supreme enjoyment for writing for large ensembles, he often seemed most at home when composing with a specific player in mind. Perkinson wrote Lamentations, a suite for solo cello, in 1973 for cellist Ronald Lipscomb, who gave the premier performance at New York’s Alice Tully Hall. The piece is subtitled “Black/Folk Song Suite;” the composer explained, “the common denominator of these tunes is the reflection and statement of a people’s crying out.” The first movement, labeled “Fuging Tune,” draws on both the traditional fugue, as developed by J.S. Bach (one of Perkinson’s favorite composers and primary influences), and a type of composition called “Fuging Tunes,” popularized by 18th-century American composer William Billings. Perkinson composed the second movement, “Song Form,” in an AABA format, a parallel to the similarly titled movement of his Sinfonietta (if not to the earlier work’s tone and texture). The third movement features another trope of the Calvary spiritual. Titled “Calvary Ostinato,” the movement features a repeating pizzicato bass line over which Perkinson composed another form of the Calvary melody. In the virtuosic final movement, Perkinson has the cello maintain a constant pulsing pedal note (alternately D and C) while creating intricate melodies around the repeated note, including a brief quotation of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.

Blue’s Forms, a 1972 work for solo violin, takes much the same format as Lamentations. Like the cello piece, it is intimately connected to its dedicatee, violinist Sanford Allen, who premiered the work at Carnegie Hall. Based on traditional blues schemes, the work is in three movements and is based in the key of G — the lowest open string on the instrument. Perkinson exploits the ambiguity between major and minor modes created by the so-called “blue notes,” the lowered third and seventh degrees of the scale. This ambiguity is present from the opening chord, where the blue third melts into the major. The first movement is in AABA form with the A sections 8 bars in length and the B extended to 12 measures. There is a great deal of repetition between sections — the A’s are nearly identical, but the harmonic plan seems more in line with song form than with traditional blues. The second movement is to be played muted and freely, employing slippery diminished seventh chords and syncopation. As with the opening movement, it ends on a half-cadence, leading into the finale. The third and final movement is a dizzyingly rapid perpetual motion. The meter varies, using different multiples of sixteenth notes, but the end result is one of continuity with disorienting syncopations and slight variations in meter.

Composed nearly thirty years after Blue’s Forms, Perkinson initially conceived of Louisiana Blues Strut as a fourth movement for the earlier work, but he ultimately left it separate, remarking, “I just couldn’t get my head in the same place.” Subtitled “A Cakewalk” (a dance form reputedly with origins in the musical practices of slaves but with many modern descendants), this movement takes the form of a rondo with a laid-back groove.

On one level, Blue’s Forms and Louisiana Blues Strut are sophisticated works for solo violin that both visually and aurally remind one of virtuosic compositions dating back to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas. The pieces also draw attention to the correspondence between the repetitive harmonic scheme of the blues and that of Baroque forms such as the chaconne and passacaglia. However, Blue/s Forms (and its successor) is also a subtle commentary on the blues, invoking that genre’s varied origins and formal components while blending it with the traditions of classical solo composition.

The string trio movement presented on this disc is Perkinson’s final composition, written quite literally on his deathbed in February and March of 2004. This movement is unique among the works presented on this memorial: its utter simplicity stands apart from the complex musical designs of the Sinfonietta and “Calvary” Quartet (for example). The cello presents a repeated chromatic descent, so characteristic of operatic lament basses, while the violin and viola trade and embellish a minor-mode theme. Yet even here, in this most poignant movement, Perkinson’s rhythmic games are afoot, as he occasionally adds and subtracts a single sixteenth note from a measure. It seems appropriate that Perkinson would compose at the end a work whose deliberate counterpoint so clearly evokes Bach, one of the earliest and most enduring influences on his unique compositional style.

Gregory Weinstein is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. His research interests include African-American music, including hip-hop and popular music.