Tonal Legacies – de Kennesy, Deussen and Anderson

There is a particular kind of American record — you know it the moment the disc starts spinning — that arrives wrapped in the pedigree of the academy and then proceeds to ignore everything the academy is supposed to stand for. This new North/South Consonance release is exactly that kind of record, and I confess I spent much of it trying to decide whether that was a compliment.

Three composers, three sets of impeccable credentials, and music that sounds like it wandered in from around 1920 and never bothered to check a calendar.

Start with Stefania de Kennesy. She studied with Milton Babbitt — Babbitt! — the high priest of total serialism, the man who titled an essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” with a straight face and a certain relish. You would think some residue of that rigor might survive in a pupil’s fingers. It does not, not here. Sunburst, from 1993, is pure pianistic showmanship — glittering right-hand figuration, big Lisztian arm gestures, the kind of piece that exists to let a virtuoso show off a well-oiled octave craft and a sense of theater. There’s nothing wrong with that ambition, and the pianist dispatches it with evident relish, the tone bright and slightly hard-edged in what sounds like a fairly close, dry acoustic. But Babbitt would hardly recognize his fingerprints. Beating Down, the piano trio revised in 1995 from earlier material, is more conservative still — square-cut phrases, a harmonic language that rarely strays past extended tonality, textures that Brahms would have found comfortably familiar. Reactionary is not too strong a word. I don’t say that as an insult, exactly. I say it with a raised eyebrow.

Nancy Bloomer Deussen presents a gentler puzzle. Her teachers were Vittorio Giannini, Lukas Foss, and Ingolf Dahl — a fascinating grab-bag, spanning Italianate lyricism, restless experimentalism, and Stravinskian neoclassicism respectively. None of that variety quite prepares you for how thoroughly her own music looks backward, toward the pastoral English tradition of John Ireland and E.J. Moeran — that soft-focus, folksong-inflected world of hedgerows and modal inflection. The Two Pieces for violin and piano (1990) breathe gently, almost diffidently; the Piano Trio from 1993 unfolds with the unhurried confidence of a composer who has made peace with an idiom rather than wrestled it into being. It is lovely, undemanding music. Whether it needed to be written in 1993 rather than 1923 is a question the disc doesn’t really want you to ask.

Beth Anderson, younger, studied with Cage, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley — about as radical a trio of mentors as American music has produced. And yet Trio: dream in d sits comfortably tonal, formally four-square, its title lower-cased with a coyness that feels almost like a wink at the avant-garde she’s declining to embrace. Only Net Work, revised in 1984 from music originally written for the Commotion Dance Company, shows any real minimalist pulse — patterned, repetitive, propulsive in a way that at least gestures toward Riley’s own language. It’s the freshest ten minutes on the disc, honestly. You can practically hear the dancers.

So — three composers, three eminent lineages of teachers, and a program that reads almost like an act of quiet rebellion against everything those teachers represented. I don’t doubt the sincerity for a second; there’s no cynicism audible anywhere in these performances, which are uniformly committed, well-prepared, and recorded in a natural, unforced acoustic that lets chamber textures breathe without artificial glare. The playing has warmth. It has technical assurance. What it doesn’t have, quite, is the courage of its own late-twentieth-century moment.

I keep circling back to puzzlement rather than pleasure, and that troubles me, because plenty of listeners will find genuine comfort in music this untroubled, this well-made, this determined to please rather than provoke. Fair enough. Not every disc needs to argue with history. But when three composers who studied with Babbitt, Cage, Riley, and Foss all arrive, independently, at essentially the same conservative destination, you start to wonder less about the music and more about what American composition programs were actually teaching — and what, exactly, these gifted students quietly decided to leave behind.