Music on Benjamin Geer

Tondauer

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0000

In 2020 I started a project called Tondauer, to make Creative Commons licensed editions of sheet music. It happened because of the Covid-19 lockdown that year: I was learning to play Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude Op. 104a, No. 2 (MWV U 123), because it suited my mood of restless frustration at the time.

I started with a 19th-century edition that could be downloaded for free. Then I bought an edition with fingerings, and wondered why it had different notes. I looked in vain for the composer’s manuscript, but found only an earlier draft. I had been reading R. Larry Todd’s biography of Mendelssohn, so I emailed him to ask if he knew where the manuscript of the final version was, and he replied that it hadn’t been found. This meant that the only sources were the first editions, which were published after the composer’s death.

I had learned something about how critical editions are made while working in the field of digital humanities. So I decided to make my own critical edition. Over several months, as libraries and archives gradually reopened, I got digital reproductions of the first German and British editions. The two editors had worked together to publish them simultaneously, but they didn’t have the same notes, either. In my edition, I tried to make a plausible explanation of what had happened, and reconstruct the composer’s intentions as well as possible. In the end I tried to make the edition I wished I had had, and added fingerings with the help of Penelope Roskell.

More recently I’ve been working with musicologist Florence Launay on editions of forgotten works by female composers, starting with Armande de Polignac’s Preludes for Piano, which had survived only in a single copy of the first edition, preserved by her descendants. Florence had photocopied it, and pianists had been recording the pieces using photocopies of that photocopy. Now that we’ve published a corrected edition with Florence’s preface, I hope more pianists will enjoy playing these Preludes.

Fanny Hensel – September

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 1841, Fanny Hensel (1805–1847) wrote Das Jahr (The Year), a large-scale piano cycle with a movement for each month of the year. She published ‘September’ in 1846 as part of her Op. 2, but Das Jahr was first published in its entirety in 1989. Subsequently, a magnificent revised autograph manuscript was discovered, in which each movement is copied on paper of a different colour, illustrated with a drawing by Hensel’s husband Wilhelm, and preceded by a poetic epigram. Furore Verlag has published a critical edition.

Considering the music, poetry, and illustrations together, Marian Wilson Kimber sees the work as depicting not simply the cycle of the year, but also the stages of an individual’s life.¹

The epigram for ‘September’ is from Goethe’s poem An den Mond (To the Moon):

Fließe, fließe, lieber Fluß
Nimmer werd’ ich froh.

Translation:

Flow, flow, dear river
Never will I be happy.

There are countless interpretations of the poem. For Tobias Klein:

The retreat into nature and especially into the solitude of the night is presented as consolation in the face of the disappointments and frustrations to which the individual is exposed in society…. The river appears in this context as a symbol of change and transience, as well as of ambivalence, as it can be both destructive … and invigorating….²

The piece displays ‘an artful application of the three-hand technique’, ‘in which a melody played by the thumbs in the middle register of the piano was surrounded by material assigned to the other fingers above and below, to create the illusion of three hands at the keyboard’.³ The harpist Elias Parish-Alvars (1808–1849) invented this technique, the pianist Sigismund Thalberg (1812–1871) transferred it to the piano,⁴ and it became widely used in the 1830s. In ‘September’, the upper voice seems to suggest the flowing water of the river.

The movement’s ingenious harmonic development⁵ is an example of how Hensel’s work anticipated the avant-garde of the second half of the 19th century.⁶

Bibliography #

Klein, Tobias. n.d. “Interpretation: An den Mond – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” https://lyrik.antikoerperchen.de/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe-an-den-mond,textbearbeitung,372.html.

Manning, Laurence. 2015. “Fanny Hensel, compositrice de l’avenir ? Anticipations du langage musical wagnérien dans l’œuvre pour piano de la maturité de Hensel.” Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique 16 (1–2): 121. https://doi.org/10.7202/1039618ar.

Todd, R. Larry. 2010. Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn. Oxford University Press.

Walker, Alan. 1987. Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847. Cornell University Press.

Wilson Kimber, Marian. 2008. “Fanny Hensel’s Seasons of Life: Poetic Epigrams, Vignettes, and Meaning in Das Jahr.” Journal of Musicological Research 27 (4): 359–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411890802384409.

Kimber, ‘Fanny Hensel’s Seasons of Life’. ↩︎
Klein, ‘Interpretation: An den Mond’. ↩︎
Todd, Fanny Hensel, 264, 233. ↩︎
Walker, Franz Liszt, 234. ↩︎
Todd, Fanny Hensel, 275–77. ↩︎
Manning, ‘Fanny Hensel, compositrice de l’avenir’. ↩︎

Chopin, Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2

Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Frédéric Chopin, Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2.

Benjamin Geer, piano.

Recorded 20 May 2023.

J. S. Bach, tr. Busoni – Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

J. S. Bach, Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr, piano transcription by Ferruccio Busoni.

Benjamin Geer, piano.

Recorded 8 July 2021.

Trying to Be a Jazz Guitarist

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I started playing jazz guitar around the time I went to university. I wanted to combine the improvisational tradition of jazz with non-tonal harmony and large-scale structures. But I thought I should start with bebop.

In 1995–96, while working as an English language teaching assistant in France, I had the opportunity to play in an amateur big band as well as a quintet:

Here are some earlier recordings, from 1991:

When I was about 30 I stopped playing, mainly out of frustration from my own slow progress and from the difficulty of trying to be a musician while needing to earn a living in some other way. I wish I had kept at it.