I.
waitings
a pause, to begin
October (1969, rev. 1976), four movements for left hand alone, is the earliest work available publicly by the composer Hans Abrahamsen (b. 1952, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark), whose Schnee (2008) and let me tell you (2013) later catapulted him onto the North American musical landscape. In the program note for his concerto left, alone (2015), he recalls:
I was born with a right hand that is not fully functional, and though it never prevented me from loving playing the piano as well as I could with this physical limitation, it has obviously given me an alternative focus on the whole piano literature and has given me a close relationship with the works written for the left hand by Ravel and others. This repertoire has been with me since my youth.
My very first public performance of one of my own works was in autumn 1969. The piece was called October and I played the piano with my left hand and the horn, my principal instrument (the only instrument that can be played with only the left hand). Part of the piece requires the performer to play natural harmonics of the horn directly into the open strings of the grand piano to create resonance. The pedal was kept down by an assistant lying on the floor.
According to Hans Brofeldt, the title has two meanings. First, Abrahamsen started at the Royal Danish Conservatory in October (when he was only sixteen), and second, it reflects the piece’s autumnal character. In 1976, Abrahamsen revised the work, leaving the horn, brick, and, I can only guess, the grounded assistant holding the pedal down, out of it.
The four movements are unified by a metronome marking of 56 to the eighth (mvt I), quarter (mvt II), and sixteenth (mvt III). Later installments of this essay explore the relation of this work to the Danish musical landscape at the time, as well as the (hi)stories it invokes. As far as I know, there has been, until now, no recording of October available to the general public.
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me
into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon clouds over
new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?
The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn
(Andrew Zhou, piano)
of
tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?
The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.
Read Part II.
October is published by Wilhelm Hansen (Music Sales). The work was recorded October 13, 2019. The two versions are different takes, in particular of the fourth movement, comprising only a repeated tritone with no articulatory marks: first, with a weighted, brushy stroke, then with a blinking staccato, as in Schoenberg’s op. 19, no. 2. “Everything that Acts is Actual” by Denise Levertov, composed in 1949, from Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (New Directions, 1979). As regards the title of this essay, I draw the listener-reader to Conversations with Denise Levertov (ed. Jewel Spears Brooker, University of Mississippi, 1998) in which she notes, in a 1971 interview with William Packard for New York Quarterly (reprinted in Packard’s The Craft of Poetry, Doubleday, 1974): “I regard the end of a line, the line break, as roughly equivalent to a half comma, but what that pause is doing is recording nonsyntactic hesitations, or waitings, that occur in the thinking-feeling process. This is where dance comes into it.”
