Four Pieces After Rooseveltians

Four Pieces After Rooseveltians for the Roosevelt Arts Project is a set of pieces, each dedicated to the memory of a friend and neighbor in Roosevelt, NJ, my hometown of 50+ years.

Caprice is dedicated to the memory of Sol Libsohn. From the first, I was taken with Sol’s work – both his photographs and his abstract paintings – by their composition as well as their subjects. I was fascinated by the strength of interest in both foreground and background, so that I was encouraged to shift my focus back and forth. Sol was boyishly exuberant about everything. I remember also many visits to Sol and Bess, listening to Sol’s collection of early jazz recordings, about which Sol was a major enthusiast, and discussing everything from politics to bread machines (Sol and I were both bread machine devotees at the time). Caprice’s overall shape is ABA, meaning there are 3 roughly equal sections where the last section closely resembles the first. In the A sections there’s a underlying rhythmic pattern, sort of a distorted tango, over which there are flighty melodic gestures that have difficulty finding a place to land. The effect is off-beat (literally) and recalls the ensemble work of small jazz groups of the 1920’s and ‘30’s. The B section takes the A material and turns it inside out, at one level exchanging foreground and background.

I got to know Judy Trachtenberg when I was editor of the Borough Bulletin. At the time, the Bulletin was transforming itself into a non-profit corporation, and Judy, with her experience at the NJ Center for Non-Profits, was generous with expert advice and time-saving contacts. Judy was like that with many other groups in town, especially RAP, which benefited greatly from her devotion and energy. She exhibited a straightforward reserve in our conversations, yet gave way to joyous abandon when she sang. Intermezzo is dedicated to Judy’s memory. Like Caprice, it has an ABA structure. The A sections are chorale-like; a hint of melancholy in the simple harmony of the first becomes more dense – a bit more pointed and unsettling – in the second. In the middle (B) section, the A melodic material becomes transformed into an idyllic dance.

Ed Schlinski was a builder, artist, and philosopher. Whatever the subject, Ed appeared to have a ready opinion, and a strong one. I remember one occasion where he held forth – at some length – on the perfection of the classic spoon and how modern attempts to update the design merely screwed it up. Ed could debate with the best of them and, in my experience, rarely hesitated joining an argument when one was going on. He was not shy about displaying hard edges, in both his speech and his work. Bagatelle is dedicated to his memory. Its compound, asymmetrical meter gives rise to an edgy surface. The phraseology is structured much like an argument, with tit-for-tat give-and-take. Like the previous two pieces, Bagatelle has an ABA structure. In the B section, the harmonies in the A sections become melodic figures, and the rhetoric more drawn out.

Finale is dedicated to the memory of Bernarda Bryson Shahn. Bernarda was the first person I met in Roosevelt. I was looking for a quiet place away from Princeton to write my dissertation and she was looking to rent her attached house (which had an upright piano) to musicians. When I came out to meet her, Bernarda was sporting a cast on her arm. She told me told me it was the result of an encounter with a charging ram she had tried to vault at an archeological dig in Turkey – remarkable for anybody, but particularly astonishing for a woman then in her seventies. It was the time of the Ervin hearings (1973) and since Richard Nixon had been a fascination of mine, dating from a paper on Alger Hiss I wrote in high school, we had our first of many political discussions. During the time we lived next door to each other, we had frequent long, far-ranging conversations, fueled by coffee so strong I suspected she needed a special license to serve it. She had an elegantly succinct way of talking and a seemingly endless capacity to absorb and to listen. She was always alert to every detail, a characteristic I found reflected in her art as well. Finale is a rondo, which is, in a way, an extension of the ABA structure in the other pieces: ABACADA. This is the most highly structured piece of the set. Even though the ideas are apparently simple, their construction is tightly constrained and the manner they weave together is intricate. The result is a complex yet upbeat fabric, reflecting for me a salient feature of Bernarda’s persona. The “A” theme has a number of symmetrical details, each of which invites combining the theme with itself, as heard throughout the A sections. Themes in the B, C, and D sections contrast with the A theme but also combine with it and with each other, so that each successive A section is an accumulation of all the preceding material.

Composition of Four Pieces After Rooseveltians was assisted by an Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.