Diclavis enorma

On Monday evening, I did something I haven’t done in ages. I went to a senior recital. Tim, a piano performance major at Wheaton College, is the son of one of my sister’s former colleagues and a good friend of a couple of our interns (one former, one current). Yes, small world.

He started the program with two Bach arrangements: Busoni’s of the Wachet auf chorale followed by Rachmaninov’s of the prelude from the E major violin partita. Tim played both very well, but it was clear he was anxious to get on with the rest of the program.

The next piece had been written for the recital by David Gordon, a visiting professor at Wheaton and one of Tim’s instructors. It was called Diclavis enorma.

The work’s title is an invented combination of two obscure medieval Latin terms – “diclavis” which refers to a keyboard instrument that has a full complement of chromatic pitches, and “clavis enorma,” which designates a special quarter-tone key on a keyboard instrument . . .

It is scored for three keyboards – grand piano, two toy pianos, and a set of eleven microtonally tuned call bells (“the kind that you would find next to a ‘ring bell for service’ sign”) – and a sampled recording of the same three keyboards with the standard piano tuned with 24 pitches to the octave. The work is in three continuous movements that explore the possible relationships (“timbral, rhythmic, textural, and harmonic”) between the keyboards.

I have to admit my expectations weren't very high. But what followed was a delightful surprise – it's a wonderful piece, and Tim played the hell out of it. The rhythmic interplay between the keyboards (live and recorded) in the first movement (Motus perpetuus) was so animated, and after the first couple of minutes, the microtonality sounded (surprisingly) perfectly natural. The second movement (Musica ornata) was somewhat melodic and lyrical, and the third (Passacaglia) brought back motives from the first two through a series of variations (I think). A great performance of a darn good piece.

La valée des cloches (The valley of bells) from Ravel's Miroirs was next, and after the Gordon piece, it was an amazing contrast. So plaintive and evocative, it sounded like music from another planet.

Tim ended the concert with Brahms's huge F minor sonata. Yep, a masterpiece; yep, he played it well. Quite well . . . but I'm still not a big fan of Brahms.

After the recital, I asked Tim what he was planning to do next, and he said he was going to take a year off, "to read the books I want to read and study the music I want to study." I wish I would have been that bold. Good for him.

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On a completely different note, it's been quite a while since I've been on a rural college campus, and Wheaton College was wonderfully peaceful that night. It’s a lovely – almost bucolic – campus with brick-paved sidewalks and lots of trees. It was just getting dark as I made my way over to the recital hall and there were just a few students walking around. Exactly what you would expect.

But I couldn’t help but think of the events at Virginia Tech the day before. It was at the front of my mind because it had been everywhere in the media. Just listening to the radio, watching television, seeing the papers, reading the news online – it had been impossible to avoid.

And impossible not to be affected by it.