I see and hear my creative friends out there suffering. Much of it I presume, beyond the financial upheaval, has to do with the fact that with cancelled events and opportunities for live contact our creativity is stifled. I’ve been amazed at what my friends and colleagues have been doing online to keep their powers of creation alive. In this spirit, I’m looking to the French double meaning of “création” as not only creation, but also a first performance or premiere (yes, one of those English false friends whose French equivalent is not the same) and will plan to put up as often as I can during this time of isolation an informal performance of music, that, as far as I am concerned, has either never been recorded on the piano, or is at the very least rare or unavailable as a recording online.

This is the first entry, “Langsam” (1918) of the German-born American composer Armin Loos’s collected “5 Early Pieces” (1918-29). Loos, born 1904 in Darmstadt, wrote this aphoristic jewel when he was 14. At nine measures, like the last of Schoenberg’s op. 19, to which it clearly owes its harmonic language, it contains a curious epigraph in curious German at the end: “Trauer umhüllt wie holdwolliges Ooloon [sic], in rasendem Aufschrei….”/”Sadness envelops like gracefully woolly Oolong, in a furious cry….”.

More on Loos: http://www.musicalobservations.com/publications/armin-loos/index.htmlA modest entrée.

The others in the set are far more elaborate.