In search of what he called “the dark and the beautiful and the endless,” American composer Ingram Marshall (1942-2022) blended electronic and acoustic elements to create awe-inspiring soundscapes. The Listeners’ Club archive includes Marshall’s atmospheric Fog Tropes (1982) and Wanderer’s Night Song (1992).
Timo Andres made this impromptu recording of Marshall’s 2002 solo piano work, Authentic Presence, following the composer’s death. He wrote the following program note:
Ingram Marshall was one of my graduate school professors, though our composition lessons were as likely to take place hunting for mushrooms in the nearby woods as at the piano. Authentic Presence is one of Ingram’s few purely acoustic pieces. The electronic-music tools of delay, reverb, and sampling are integral to his composing style, taking their place alongside 1970s California minimalism, Balinese and Javanese harmonies, and early American hymns in his musical nature preserve. Hazy memories of the civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome” cycle through the dramatic episodes of Authentic Presence; the piece has a pleasantly un-rigorous formal logic to it, concerned perhaps with following a train of thought rather than any set musical program.
Brahms: Intermezzo in B minor, Op. 119, No. 1
Almost certainly by coincidence, the longing opening measures of Authentic Presence contain echoes of the tritone-infused melody of Leonard Bernstein’s Maria from West Side Story.
Timo Andres finds a more concrete connection with Brahms’ Intermezzo in B minor, Op. 119, No. 1, composed in the summer of 1893. (We explored this dreamy, autumnal music in a previous post). Andres writes,
During a concert year or so ago, I had the spur-of-the-moment idea to follow Authentic Presence directly with the first intermezzo of Brahms’s op. 119. It was a game of harmonic free-association more than anything (the piece begins with the same major-seventh chord Ingram’s ends on). But I liked the effect so much that I decided to retain the pairing. It’s often said that the late piano pieces are like super-concentrated versions of Brahms’s symphonies and sonatas, and op. 119 no. 1 might be the most intensely distilled of the lot. The skeleton is deceptively traditional—a simple A‑B-A form made up of regular eight-bar segments. But the music constantly subverts these expectations, playing little rhythmic and contrapuntal games, creating chains of ever-longer nested phrases. There’s so much subterfuge going on that it allows a delicious interpretational freedom: one can’t possibly do justice to every element in a single performance, but any choice will work out all right. It ends in one of those trademark Brahmsian twilights, summing up far more than the piece’s three minutes could possibly contain.
Featured Image: photograph by Michael Wilson