December Rains

This relatively short piano piece of 1993 was commissioned by Zurich University of the Arts for an in-house piano competition.
It need hardly be said that such a combination of factors means that the composer has to write music with an ample amount of virtuosity. In Section 1 of the piece, Schlumpf met this demand in relatively “conventional” fashion – meaning that he avoided unusual performance techniques, not that the music itself is “conventional.” It is primarily his use of rhythm that makes the music independent and fresh.

Most of the passages in Part A have irregular metrical preconditions. This means, to put it simply, that the player must often distinguish between long and short rhythmic cells in irregular succession, where “long” refers to three-unit cells and “short” to two-unit cells measured against a relatively fast regular pulse.

Let’s take an example from the opening of the piece. The music begins in the top staff (right hand) with a catchy figure that is then repeated several times. In metrical terms, the figure’s cells are long – long – long – short, or, as described above, 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 units. This straightforward situation receives an element of tension from the lower staff (left hand), which, in an entirely different rhythm, presents a freely written bass line that stands in a constantly changing relation to the ostinato upper voice.

As the overall form of Part A is laid out as an arch, the opening right-hand figure recurs toward the end of the piece. Initially it appears in a lower register with a bass that is likewise composed as an ostinato. This time, however, it appears in two-bar cycles, in that the motif, though actually filling a single bar, enters first on the off-beat and then, in the next bar, on the on-beat. In other words, the bass plays on the downbeat one time and immediately after the downbeat the next time. By employing harmonic modulation, metrically regrouping the three-unit and two-unit cells, and manipulating the tonal space to the original register in the right hand and to the lowermost register in the left, the opening situation is continuously varied up to the very end of the piece.

Equally striking is the unisono cadenza, a cascade of irregularly pulsing fast notes that are stretched or compressed at the beginning by means of several changes of tempo. Eventually the entire melody gradually descends from the high register and, in the end, crashes dramatically in a large crescendo.

The course of the music might be visualized as a heavy rainstorm pouring down on a roof: first it gathers force, then it grows louder, and finally it recedes. (Other passages may, of course, evoke similar associations.) A possible lead to the “rain” metaphor is given in the title, which became December Rains simply because the initial sketches originated in December 1992.

If the cadenza can only be mastered with great technical virtuosity, the concluding December Song (Part B) calls for completely different qualities of performance, first and foremost those of a “singing” piano. Indeed, the object is to have the piano convey, to the greatest possible extent, the impression that someone is actually singing. And this on an instrument whose mechanism (striking the strings with hammers and allowing the sound to decay) is as remote as possible from the human voice, where notes are sustained and modulated in many different ways. But the truly astonishing thing is that the impression of “sung” melody really can arise in our minds if the pianist employs subtle articulation and intelligent pedaling.

Moreover, and very much unlike the Part A, it is important here to use a form of agogics that strikes an ideal and very subtle balance between delicately tightening and then relaxing the tempo curve.