Each one of us surely has an individual concept of sin, generally from direct personal experience: I sometimes describe it as “anything that is more fun for the doer than for someone else!” Defining commission might be slightly more difficult. For the purpose of this narrative, I choose to define the term as “the solicitation of a new musical composition, whether or not money is involved.” In my nearly half-century of commissioning new music, much of the time I have been the recipient of extraordinary generosity: most of my composers have donated their music, while others have asked for only modest fees.
Calvin Hampton
The first time I solicited a composer to write something specifically for me was in 1957, when I asked my Oberlin classmate and fellow organ major Calvin Hampton if he would provide an offertory for a summer service at First Presbyterian Church, Canton, Ohio--my first major (if only month-long) church “gig.” His response came in the form of a lovely three-minute aria, titled Consonance. While not a major work by this important composer, it does illustrate the advantage of choosing the right friends; namely, ones who go on to become well-known, thereby considerably increasing the value of their manuscripts. Equally useful, subsequently such friendships may provide one with material for articles about “what they were like before they became well-known”--a perfectly good academic topic indeed, if one includes the proper footnotes.
Neely Bruce
In the fall of 1960 I moved to Rochester, New York to begin graduate study. There I met the next of my composer friends. On my second day at the Eastman School, as I waited in the fourth floor corridor to meet with my advisor Dr. M. Alfred Bichsel, head of the newly established Church Music Department, a striking younger student walked up to me and asked, with lilting southern inflection, if I could tell him where to find Dr. Bitch-el. I was captivated by Neely Bruce, a freshman who had come to audition for the Polyphonic Choir, a new choral ensemble established for this sacred music area. As Dr. Bichsel’s rehearsal assistant, I saw young Bruce regularly. We became friends, and Neely, a precociously talented pianist and composer, eventually supplied the concluding piece for my 1961 master’s recital Organ Compositions Based on the Kyrie fons bonitatis.
When he left Eastman after that single year to attend the University of Alabama, I was devastated. I wrote sad poems (a la Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dame Edith Sitwell)--filled with lines such as:
Our night for love designed, speeds silent on and on,
And time, which only breathless seconds since had seemed so kind,
Is gone.
Neely didn’t answer letters or write poetry. He did, however, write music, and some months later I received the penciled score of his first work for harpsichord--Nine Variations on an Original Theme. The piece held such emotional intensity for me that it was not until 1979 that I copied it out while on my first sabbatical leave, prepared it for performance, and then gave the premiere the following year. Whatever one may think now of such a youthful endeavor, the work certainly is well-crafted for harpsichord--one result of Neely’s frequent opportunities for experimenting with the instrument’s textures at the small two-manual Sperrhake harpsichord, shoehorned into the third-floor dormer room I rented at one of Rochester’s “organ student houses,” 20 Sibley Place.
During my seven years of teaching in Virginia I played a fair amount of 20th-century harpsichord music: Ned Rorem’s Lovers, the Falla Concerto, the Martinu Sonate. But there I was primarily a choral conductor and organist (and enjoyed premiering several new works written for choir or organ by St. Paul’s College colleague Walter Skolnik and New York composer Robin Escovado). My only harpsichord “commission” of this period went to the builder William Dowd, along with almost half a year’s salary, for my first truly first-rate harpsichord, one of his early Blanchet-inspired instruments, delivered to Norfolk in January 1969.
Rudy Shackelford
Shortly after moving to Dallas in 1970, an unanticipated package reached me at Southern Methodist University. This contained Virginia composer Rudy Shackelford’s piece Le Tombeau de Stravinsky. Since my SMU colleague Robert Anderson was a devoted exponent of wild and wooly new organ music, it seemed fitting for me to take on Rudy’s serialism. I also liked the work, and included it on my first Musical Heritage Society disc, The Harpsichord Now and Then, released in 1975.
Ross Lee Finney
Another challenging work, more thorny than I usually care to learn, is Ross Lee Finney’s unique essay for the instrument, Hexachord for Harpsichord. In four movements (Aria, Stomp, Ornaments, Fantasy), the 12-minute work was commissioned for me to play at a Hartt School of Music contemporary keyboard music festival scheduled for June 1984. Drawing few registrants, the event was cancelled, so I gave the first performance that fall in Dallas, not playing it in the composer’s presence until a concert in Hartford the following year.
Working with Finney was quite daunting. A most distinguished and individual composer, he basically disregarded my several suggestions as to texture, and provided me with a nearly-illegible score, the successful realization of which absolutely required a damper pedal, unfortunately not available on most harpsichords. I struggled to read his chicken scratches and tried to parlay his ideas into something that made sense on a plucked instrument. Eventually I wrote him a detailed letter filled with questions and suggestions for possible improvements, not knowing if I would be ignored, despised, or possibly even removed from the project.
Instead, this generous and intelligent man wrote back that it was all very helpful--reminding him of the careful editing his Piano Sonata had received years earlier from its first performer, John Kirkpatrick. For Hexachord’s last movement, the most unplayable of the four, he promised a revision, although current work on his opera left him little time. When the promised revision arrived, it was accompanied by this note:
I don’t know whether this is better or worse. I’ve spent the vacation week on it and now am so loaded with commitments that it’s the best I can hope for. . . . I tied my right leg to the piano stool so I hope I didn’t think in terms of pedal. . .
Responding to a tape of the first performance, Finney wrote,
I like immensely your performance . . . It seems to me that you have done a wonderful job of projecting the music and it sounds better to me than I feared it would. I like all of your revisions, particularly the ending of the last movement, and I will see that your corrections get in the copy with Peters so that when it is published, they will be included. . .
Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. The printed score from Peters does not present the preferred ending, but rather a more-protracted, rather anemic one.
Herbert Howells
A major commission from the 1970s was Herbert Howells’ Dallas Canticles, the unique Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis composed for St. Luke’s Church, where I was organist and choirmaster from 1971 until 1980. This lovely work was first performed there in 1975. The dedication and copyright of the work, basically a gift from the generous English composer, led to some early adventures in music publishing and the nurturing of professional and personal connections with the American composer, church musician, and publisher Gerald Near.
Gerald Near
Undoubtedly the most ambitious of my commissions thus far is Near’s three-movement Concerto for Harpsichord, composed for performance at the 1980 national convention of the American Guild of Organists in Minneapolis. Gerald, a Minnesota resident at that time, had not been included in the group of composers invited to provide new works for the gathering, so I asked him to write a concerted work for my program in Orchestra Hall. He took on the project, and, most generously, accepted no fee for this major work.
The performance was carefully prepared, with the composer conducting a superb string ensemble comprising players from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The work was greeted with warm applause and considerable affection by the large crowd of attendees. And why not? The piece is very appealing, with memorable melodies, lush harmonies, and an appropriately balanced scoring. Critic Byron Belt, writing in The American Organist for August 1980, concentrated his remarks on the plethora of new scores heard during the convention. Of the Near he commented “ . . . its obvious popular appeal was instantly audible in a splendid performance by Larry Palmer (to whom it is dedicated) and the orchestra under the composer.” In The Diapason (August 1980), Marilou Kratzenstein opined, “The Distler [Allegro Spirituoso e Scherzando] and Near works are both very idiomatic to the medium. By skillful orchestration, the harpsichord part comes through clearly even when accompanied by a 22-piece string orchestra. Both of these attractive works were given clean, crisp performances. It was a pleasure to be present at the premiere of the Gerald Near concerto, which will likely become a favorite with harpsichordists in the near-future.” A future “for the Near” has taken considerably longer than anticipated, but, at last, Gerald’s lovely work had its second performance in October 2004, this time with the SMU Meadows Symphony under Paul Phillips.
Ever peripatetic, Near lived in Dallas for a time, where he held several church positions. When I needed a piece to conclude a program given in conjunction with the Dallas Museum of Art’s major show of El Greco paintings I turned again to Gerald. He spent some time at my house trying various ideas on the harpsichord. The resulting Triptych, completed in 1982, was first played in public at the Museum in January 1983. It certainly achieved its requisite Spanish flavor in the concluding movement, a brilliant neo-Scarlattian romp. Before that Final there are two lovely miniatures--an impressionistic Carillon, and the lyrically Italianate Siciliano (inspired by the composer’s love interest at the time). All three movements are idiomatically conceived for the instrument.
Vincent Persichetti
Dear Vincent Persichetti responded to questions concerning his then-unpublished 1951 Harpsichord Sonata by sending a copy of the manuscript. I loved the work immediately, and still find this first essay for harpsichord to be Vincent’s most arresting and accessible work for the instrument! By the time I was engaged to play a harpsichord recital for the Philadelphia gathering of the International Congress of Organists in 1977, his Sonata was available in printed form. The concert was scheduled to be played in historic St. George’s Methodist Church in the central city, so Persichetti, who lived in Philadelphia, planned to attend, but heavy rain that afternoon delayed him. (It also knocked out power to many venues, causing consternation, and cancellation, for some concurrent organ recitals.) The composer arrived at the church just as my program ended, so I offered to play his Sonata for him after the audience departed. I did so, he made cogent comments (some of them concerned keeping steady tempi and he advised playing the work exactly as he had notated it), and he autographed my printed score (“Thanks to Larry Palmer for a meaningful Benjamin Franklin performance in my own city.” [The reference to Franklin refers to the bridge bearing his name. St. George’s is adjacent to the bridge access road, allowing considerable noise every few minutes from public transit vehicles.]). Then he drove me back to the hotel.
Thus began an acquaintance, nurtured by a Sonata commission from me, occasional piquant notes, or the random, unexpected telephone call from the composer. When he published an incorrect wording of the dedication in my commissioned Sonata VI (crediting Southern Methodist University with payment of the commission fee, an error that I feared might cause problems with some of my academic colleagues), Vincent assured me that he would think of some way to make it up to me. A year or so later, he telephoned with the news that his latest piece, Serenade Number 15, would bear the inscription “Commissioned by Larry Palmer.” “To make it official,” he said, “send me a check for one dollar.” Because this was a time of high inflation, I sent him a check for two dollars, eliciting the response, “How wonderful--this is the first time I’ve ever had a commission doubled!”
It was even more gratifying for me, since I gained two works from a significant composer for a total fee of $502.
Persichetti’s concise Serenade consists of five short movements: the moody Prelude, marked desolato; a quicker Episode; the even faster Bagatelle; a gentle, cantabile Arioso; and the closing Capriccio--made up of a delicato single line, in the texture of a Bach composition for solo stringed instrument. The seven-minute work reminds that, while Persichetti was a distinguished academic, whose mind espoused complicated serial techniques, his soul remained true to the song-inspired expressivity of his Italian heritage.
Rudy Davenport
The 1990s saw a veritable spate of harpsichord writing by Texas-based composer Rudy Davenport. First introduced to me in 1992 through Fr. Tom Goodwin, a harpsichord-playing Catholic padre on Padre Island, Rudy provided me with nine unique works for solo harpsichord or small ensemble with harpsichord. His first national exposure came at the combined 1998 Southeastern and Midwestern Historical Keyboard Societies’ meeting in Texas, where a program devoted to Davenport’s harpsichord writing concluded with the haunting Songs of the Bride, the composer’s settings of texts from The Song of Solomon for solo soprano, oboe, and harpsichord. (Six of these works comprise the program for the compact disc Music of Rudy Davenport, issued by Limited Editions Recordings in 2003.)
Some of my most enjoyable concert experiences have been those involving making music with others, and none has offered more delight than performing music for multiple harpsichords (usually two prove difficult enough to nudge into some semblance of compatible tunings). A Davenport work of exceptional charm, but one not graced with a completely written-out score, is his At Play with Giles Farnaby, a set of seven variations and a fugal finale on Farnaby’s For Two Virginals (Number 55 in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book). Rudy heard this short piece when it was performed by colleague Barbara Baird and me during our 1994 summer harpsichord workshop in New Mexico. His jaunty take on it, as well as the delightful and crafty contrapuntal ending have been an audience favorite on the two occasions we played together. This duo harpsichord work was an especially intensive collaboration, in its creation as well as its performance. Since the divergence of our ways after 1999, I have missed such exuberant music making, as well as the active involvement in fine polishing and editing Rudy’s engaging works.
Glenn Spring
But that void has been filled by the reintroduction into my artistic life of the Denver-based composer Glenn Spring, first encountered at the 1990 Alienor Harpsichord Composition competition finals in Augusta, Georgia. There his William Dowd: His Bleu was one of the winning works. Eventually Spring’s composition was published in The Diapason’s February 1992 tribute to the eminent harpsichord maker. A short while later Glenn’s son Brian moved to Dallas, giving us yet another reason to “stay in touch.” After Brian’s departure from this part of Texas there were years of diminishing communication, a situation suddenly reversed by Brian’s “out-of-the-blue” early morning call from Korea, where he was employed as an English teacher. He must have told his father about this call, for shortly thereafter I received a copy of a 1999 keyboard work, Glenn’s seven-movement charmer Trifles (now a prize winner in the most recent Alienor Competition, 2004). I liked it, learned it, and began playing it in recitals here and there.
A special confluence of friends occurred when Charles and Susan Mize, having contracted for Richard Kingston’s opus 300 Millennium harpsichord, a spectacular nine-foot Franco-Flemish instrument with contemporary brushed steel stand and computer-compatible music desk, asked me to play the Washington, D.C. dedication concert on the instrument. I thought it desirable that Charles should play on his new instrument at that event, so I commissioned Glenn Spring to write a work for two players at one instrument. The pleasing result was Suite 3-D, comprising Denver Rocket, Big D[allas] Blues, and D C Steamroller (honoring the three D’s of our home cities), interspersed with two quiet, lyrical movements (Romance, Night Thoughts). For a second performance on my home concert series (Limited Editions), long-time colleague Charles Brown brought both his musical and histrionic skills to the work, serving as collaborative harpsichordist as well as creator and reader of witty verses before each movement.
The most recent sins of commission, from the year 2004, have included another ensemble work by Spring, Images from Wallace Stevens for Violin and Harpsichord, first performed February 13 in celebration of the 20th season of house concerts (program number 60). Meeting Glenn’s wife, violinist Kathleen Spring, at the Mize harpsichord dedication program, I invited her to join me in this anniversary season, and inquired about possible violin and harpsichord pieces from her husband’s catalog. He responded by offering to compose something for us. Consisting of seven movements, the Images are inspired by short bits of Stevens’ poetry, so much of which evokes musical connections.
Tim Broege
Tim Broege’s score Songs Without Words Set Number Seven, composed for the SMU Wind Ensemble’s conductor Jack Delaney and me, had its first performance by the group and mezzo-soprano Virginia Dupuy on April 16, 2004. The most notable and prominent part for harpsichord is Broege’s reworking of the famous Lachrimae Pavan by John Dowland as each section is presented by the solo harpsichord, then reprised by the full ensemble, heard as the fifth of the work’s nine movements. (This setting may be extracted and played as a solo harpsichord composition).
Simon Sargon
My 35th annual faculty recital at SMU in September 2004 featured the first public hearing of composition professor Simon Sargon’s harpsichord reworking of Dos Prados (“From the Meadows”), another lovely pavan, originally conceived for the single-manual 1762 Iberian organ in SMU’s Meadows Museum, and now, with a few changes of texture and tessitura, effectively adapted for solo harpsichord.
Involving composers in our performing lives is one of the most rewarding actions we can take. For us it provides the excitement of adding new pieces to our repertoire; for them, it is an affirmation of their necessary contributions to the ongoing vitality of our art; and perhaps not least, this is one pleasure that is neither life-threatening nor fattening! I urge each of you to join me in committing some sins of commission in the near future.
Sources
Calvin Hampton: Consonance remains unpublished; however an increasing number of his organ works are available from Wayne Leupold Editions (available through ECS Publishing).
Neely Bruce: Nine Variations is available from <[email protected]> (or 212/875-7011).
Rudy Shackelford: Tombeau de Stravinsky is published by Joseph Boonin (B.319).
Recording: The Harpsichord Now and Then (Larry Palmer, harpsichord), MHS LP 3222.
Ross Lee Finney: Hexachord for Harpsichord is published by Edition Peters (67034).
Herbert Howells: Dallas Canticles, Aureole Editions (available from MorningStar Music).
For additional information about the commissioning of this work, see my article “Herbert Howells and the Dallas Canticles” in The American Organist, October 1992, pp. 60-62.
Gerald Near: Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings 1980 (Aureole Editions 149; performance materials on rental only) and Triptych for Harpsichord (Aureole Editions 02) are both available from MorningStar Music.
Recording (Triptych): 20th Century Harpsichord Music, vol. 2 (Barbara Harbach, harpsichord), Gasparo GSCD-266.
Vincent Persichetti: his nine Harpsichord Sonatas and Serenade 15, are published by Elkan-Vogel.
For additional information see my article “Vincent Persichetti: A Love for the harpsichord (Some Words to Mark his 70th Birthday)” in The Diapason, June 1985, p. 8.
Rudy Davenport: Scores are available from the composer at <www.RudyDavenport. com>.
For additional information, see my article “Rudy Davenport’s Harpsichord Music of the 1990s” in The Diapason, April 2004, p. 18.
Recording: Music of Rudy Davenport (Patti Spain, soprano; Stewart Williams, oboe; Larry Palmer, harpsichord), Limited Editions Recordings LER 9904.
Glenn Spring: Scores are available from the composer at <[email protected]>.
Tim Broege: Scores are available from the composer at <[email protected]>.
Simon Sargon: Scores are available from the composer at <[email protected]>.
