Beauvais, Malibran, Bach, Harrison

Jeanne Beauvais, annotated score for Vernon Martin's Ladies' Voices

Jeanne Beauvais (1917-2007), a veteran Broadway and classical singer, performed and socialized with many of mid-century New York’s leading composers, including Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, and Leonard Bernstein. She appeared with some of the city's finest opera companies, but was perhaps best known for her turn as Madame Dubonnet, the headmistress of a French finishing school, in the 1970 revival of the musical The Boy Friend (a nostalgic parody of 1920s musical comedy). A longtime resident of Carnegie Hall's artist studios, where she taught voice, Beauvais was integral to the campaign to save the beloved venue from demolition in the 1950s.

This copy of Vernon Martin's nine-minute Ladies’ Voices contains Beauvais’s performance markings from its 1963 New York premiere by the After Dinner Opera Company. Little is known about the composer, but the work is based on Gertrude Stein's play of the same name, a whirlwind of out-of-context gossip. While New York Times reviewer Alan Rich was lukewarm about the musical value of the evening, which featured seven short operas with piano accompaniment, he waxed enthusiastic about the performers: “...the evening’s real triumph belonged to the marvelous people responsible for imaginative, vivid and powerful realizations of music into performance.”

Malibran, the daughter of tenor Manuel Garcia and older sister of mezzo-soprano and composer Pauline Viardot, made her operatic debut in 1825 as Rosina in a King’s Theatre production of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. She quickly became a celebrity, with a tempestuous reputation cemented by her accidental death at the age of 28 after a riding accident. While contemporary accounts that mention her compositions at all tend to describe her process as artless and effusive, even absent-minded, Malibran wrote over 40 pieces of salon music, many published in multiple editions during her lifetime. This song, “Au bord de la mer,” sets a text by French Romantic poet Émile Deschamps, who later wrote the libretto for Hector Berlioz's opera Romeo and Juliette. Dedicated to Baron Paul Pérignon, the song was first published in the 1820s, then reprinted as part of the posthumous series Dernières pensées, album lyrique faisant suite aux Matinées musicales. Like most of her compositions, it could be performed by reasonably skilled amateurs, although the repeated lines of verse and short cadenzas allow some space for an adventurous singer to attempt a few embellishments of her own.

C.P.E. Bach (right) accompanying the flute-playing King Frederick the Great on the harpsichord at the Berlin court.

Detail from Flötenkonzert Friedrichs des Großen in Sanssouci ("Flute Concert with Frederick the Great in Sanssouci") by Adolph von Menzel, 1852, via Wikimedia Commons.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Six Easy Keyboard Sonatas (Wq. 53)

A prolific composer and publisher, and prominent theorist of keyboard music's proper performance, C.P.E. Bach wrote in a dizzying variety of genres for keyboard instruments (including the suite format preferred by his father, Johann Sebastian). But many of his over 150 sonatas, in particular, were quickly recognized as milestones of the keyboard repertoire for their melodic and emotional freedom.

At the same time, Bach was an astute businessman, and most of the works he actually had published were intended for the avid amateur market. This collection of six “easy” pieces, composed between 1762 and 1766, was the last of Bach’s seven Berlin sonata collections, penned during his long residence as harpsichord player at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great. The first Breitkopf publication dedicated solely to Bach’s work, the set was published simultaneously in treble- and soprano-clef editions (seen here). Whether the reassuring title was fact or merely good marketing, the collection sold well at least through the early 1770s: Bach’s correspondence with the publisher makes frequent reference to requests for more copies. 

Pictured here is the third movement (Presto) of the sixth and final sonata, in F major. Peruse the full set of Bach's six sonatas here.

Lou Harrison playing on a gamelan metallophone in 1983. 

Courtesy Betty Freeman Papers, Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives

Lou Harrison, Gending Alexander

American composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was particularly noted for his percussion music and cross-cultural explorations of Asian and Western musics, and he adapted the sound of the Indonesian gamelan to his orchestral compositions as early as 1951.  Yet it was only in the 1970s that he founded a gamelan ensemble of his own, and began intensive study of the Javanese gamelan tradition with virtuoso K. P. H. Notoprojo (Pak Cokro). Made up of several struck instruments, from gongs to tuned metal keys (metallophones) to drums, the ensemble has been central to Indonesian court life and religious ritual as far back as the 12th century. Although Harrison became increasingly committed to fitting his works into the authentic style and structure of traditional gamelan, musicologists Leta Miller and Fredric Lieberman argue that he treated the music primarily as another compositional resource that reflected his personal value system of peaceful cultural exchange. His gamelan compositions retain this individualist stamp, with unusual instrument-tuning methods and a Western-influenced emphasis on audible melody. 

Harrison's composition Gending Alexander for Javanese gamelan was first performed April 22-24, 1981 at the University of Delaware. Below is the score for the piece, written in kepathian notion—though traditionally, gamelan compositions are passed down orally.

Hover over the image to view annotations explaining kepathian notation and Harrison's piece.