The Airplane Sonata, and other New Music Gateway Drugs
As a young pianist, I was obsessed with everything young pianists are obsessed with: Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, Mozart, other pianists…
Our repertoire is a beautiful, vast collection of music spanning hundreds of years, yet I often wondered why I kept hearing the same pieces played over and over and over again. Sometimes more is more - it’s hard to find your unique place when surrounded by conformity.
With this mindset I often scoured my undergraduate music library, looking for new pieces, new composers, and new modes of expression where I could blaze my own trail.
One day I stumbled upon a piece by composer George Antheil with the curious title The Airplane Sonata. Intrigued, I did some reading and discovered the most fascinating persona: a nearly forgotten, brash young American from Hoboken, New Jersey trying to out-Stravinsky, Stravinsky in the 1920s. All across European concert halls he performed his absurdist works that blend a machine-like aesthetic (courtesy of the Italian Futurists) with jazz and plenty of innovative tricks to spare. (Read about his Ballet Mecanique premiere in New York, his patent with actress Hedy Lamarr that led to present day Wi-Fi technology, or even his writing a lonely hearts column for a newspaper under a pen name when times get tough for the self-described Bad Boy of Music).
Antheil was to me a personification of rugged individualism taken to the extreme, a composer/pianist set to make a name for himself at all costs. With my naturally shy and introverted demeanor I admired his boldness, a character trait I had difficulty expressing in my younger days.
Yet there I was on my senior recital, performing The Airplane Sonata alongside pianistic chestnuts: a Beethoven sonata, a flashy operatic transcription by Liszt, Bach Prelude and fugues, and Romantic showpieces by Chopin.
I loved it all, but The Airplane Sonata was just..,different. As of this writing it’s not my favorite work, and it might not even make my top 50, but it taught me something valuable: be curious and look outside the standard repertoire because you never know what you might find and what could turn into a grand passion.
Pianists are naturally curious and creative people.
We love a challenge and we all want to feel we are making a unique and lasting contribution in the arts. The Seventeen Minutes and Twenty-Two Seconds Commissioning Consortium is designed for pianists at all levels of their career who could benefit from joining a unique project that is a departure from the normal day-to-day career activities.
If you are interested in joining the consortium for yourself or your teaching studio, please click the link below.