It’s a bit of a challenge to have gratitude for some things happening in the our world today, but in concert music I have lots of gratitude for the defeat of the fascist serial-music hoards and the ability to hear and appreciate a wide variety of compositional approaches, including the unabashedly tonal. If you feel the same way, you’ll wig out at the music of Paul Schoenfield. His Four Parables are regarded by fans as “a sort of Gershwin Concerto in F for the new millennium.” Since I played that work in my senior recital at music school, I’m totally rad over Schoenfield’s work!
Schoenfield has studied and worked all over, including on a kibbutz in Israel. He is a scholar of math and Hebrew, and his music is inspired by a wide variety of musical experiences including jazz, pop, folk and vernacular traditions, as well as scholarly compositional techniques of various periods of music. Though now concentrating on composition, Schoenfield was formerly an active concert pianist, having recording the complete violin/piano works of Bartok with Sergiu Luca. Bartok and Gershwin seem to be his primary influences, though he has found an elegant approach to what we call “crossover” music that makes some of the vernacular quotations of composers such as William Bolcom sound a bit forced to me.
His Four Parables were created around separate incidents in Schoenfield’s life. The first, Rambling Till the Butcher Cuts Us Down, is a musical response to a a news item about an elderly quadriplegic murderer being released from prison. It represents wild silliness in the face of existential dread. Senility’s Ride (No. 2), is about another elderly man comparing his youthful days to his present condition. Elegy concerns the death of a young friend who had refused medical attention in lieu of religious alternatives. Dog Heaven is the most jazzy of the four movements, as befitting a wild story Mr. Schoenfield invented for two children whose pet was given away by their mother as a punishment. The Four Parables shows some of the changes in structure and harmony since Gershwin’s time but keeps an irrepressible spirit connected with both the Roaring 20s and today’s Generation X.
Four Souvenirs reminded me of some of the violin-piano works of William Bolcom. The pieces involve such dance forms as the square dance, tango and samba. Schoenfield conceived of Cafe Music after sitting in for one night at the pianist at a restaurant in Minneapolis. He says his plan was to write a sort of high-class dinner music which might – just barely – find its way into a concert hall. It’s a stylistic smorgasbord of light classical, Hassidic, Broadway, ragtime, gypsy, etc.
– John Sunier
