By Alan Green
This year we celebrate the centennial year of American composer Allen Sapp (1922–99). I am delighted that A-R Editions contributed to honoring his centennial by publishing my critical edition of four of his compositions, Allen Sapp: Piano Sonatas I–IV (Recent Researches in American Music, volume 90).
I first heard Sapp’s music when I came to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) for my undergraduate studies. His Third Piano Sonata was performed at a faculty composer recital in 1985, and on first listening, it made a very powerful impression on me. I decided to take the time to study it carefully. This first took the form of repeated listening, as I had made a tape recording of the recital from a broadcast of the recital on the local NPR radio station, WGUC. The performance was preceded by an interview with the composer, speaking about the work and his reasons for writing it. Piano Sonatas II, III, and IV were all written in 1956–57 while Sapp was on sabbatical leave from Harvard, living in Rome. A few excerpts from the interview will give you an idea of why I became interested in studying Sapp’s music:
[Piano Sonata III] is a piece I wrote very much for myself to play. I was worried because people would say “What are you writing? What’s up? Show me your latest piece” and I never had anything that I could play. I could show them orchestra pieces or choral pieces or string quartets, but I decided “by George, I’m going to write some piano music and be able to play it.” So this Third Sonata I wrote really for myself, to go back to Cambridge and play, to be able to say “Here’s what I’m doing, and here’s what it sounds like.” So there’s a lot of my own personal piano idioms and what works best for me in the piece.[1]
In the case of the Third Sonata, Sapp decided to choose a model composition as the basis for his inspiration:
I decided that I wanted to write a piece that would be a grand, big, energizing piece. . . . Sometimes I find a model . . . and in this case, the model is clearly one of the middle period Beethoven piano sonatas. I decided not to write in that style, or use any of those motives, but kind of borrow what I thought was going on. Here’s a man about my age, writing this kind of music for himself to play in Vienna, and I thought “well, I’ll do the same thing.” So the structure of the piece and the character of the piece is very much like the Waldstein Sonata, or the Appassionata Sonata, one of those kinds of pieces in the opus 50s of Beethoven.[2]
Sapp served in the U.S. Army during World War II as a cryptanalyst, decoding enemy communications. These cryptanalytical skills carried over into his career as a composer after the war:
I do a lot of what used to be called, during the renaissance, “reserve music” or “secret music,” that is, games, puzzles, cryptograms, wheels within wheels, and so on, which is not just there for fun, but which is part of a view of—not so much concealment—but of making it possible to discover things. The fun, for me, is to write a piece in which there is an outer skin that is really there to be perceived by everybody who is interested in music, or who can get the musical impression. But then there is an inner kind of thing which is sort of like the “works behind the watch face.” I believe this is true of all music that’s worth knowing, frankly. All great music has this kind of character, the games and the puzzles and the encipherment techniques. . . . The more we know about the great Classical style of Beethoven and Mozart, the more we see that beneath this wonderful outer, glorious surface there are all kinds of things inside which make it work, and that’s fun.[3]
Piano Sonata III, like most of Sapp’s post-1949 compositions, has extensive passages that sound as if it is a work in a particular key but using complex harmonic techniques. This is true, but it was written using Sapp’s own unique application of serial composition techniques. During his European service (1943–47), Sapp purchased many scores of music by European composers, including many works by the composers of the Second Viennese School. He made a careful study of several of these works, including an extensive analysis of Arnold Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, op. 26:
I became aware of the fact that [Schoenberg’s] processes were very similar to the processes that I’d been using in my own composing, ever since I first started writing. They weren’t systematic and they weren’t serial in the sense of that obligatory quality that was so much a factor in early serial writing. But the discovery of what was going on in that music was very similar to the process of encrypting and decrypting, which I had spent so much time doing in the war. That tied in immediately with the notion of some sort of linguistic statement which was then encoded in various ways. . . . I discovered that there was a first theme and second theme and third theme, and they were all in different, what I call, modes—different proto-keys—and I was carried along by that idea and felt that I had sufficient evidence to demonstrate it, and also to prove to myself that the composer was the master of the process, not the reverse. The tenor around Cambridge at that time was that if you were in the serial camp, you just generated this mechanical stuff and that you had no artistic control. Well, this is untrue, of course. It settled me into a firm understanding that the user of serial music was at all times perfectly able to make happen in the realm of melody and harmony and sonority exactly what he wanted. The control was only a corollary of the skill and the technique and the command of the musical medium of the composer. . . . The Schoenberg canon said “don’t use triads” because they’ll sound sort of key-like. And, of course, [in my music] I completely rejected that and wrote a lot of triads and seventh chords and so on. . . . The conscious effort in those two sonatas [Piano Sonatas III and IV] was to compose serial music which would, by any serious analysis, fit the canon of serial writing, but to a listener and a performer would appear to be sort of advanced twentieth-century music in tonal style.[4]
I invite you to listen to the opening of the first movement of Piano Sonata III (particularly the fine recording of it made by Lambis Vassiliadis on the Koch label), commencing with a brilliant arpeggio in A minor. Or the boogie-woogie bass riff, coupled with Count Basie-like comping in the right hand, from the opening and closing sections of the rollicking finale of the third movement. Then start looking closer, and you will see that this is indeed a serial composition. But, more importantly, this is an entertaining work with immediate appeal, fashioned with great skill. Howard Pollack, in his book Harvard Composers, wrote that Sapp’s Piano Sonatas III and IV
. . . were big works, and had more the feel of repertory status. . . . They represented, especially Sonata No. 4, a continued expansion of the composer’s chromatic adventurousness, but they retained a fundamental tonal bearing, and often came to rest on triads. . . . The piano writing combined aspects of Debussy’s lushness, Bartok’s percussiveness, and Schoenberg’s jaggedness.[5]
Allen Sapp passed away in January 1999. In the years that followed, my career took me in different directions, and I had little time for studying or even casually listening to his music for the next decade or more. This began to change in recent years when I would have occasional conversations at professional conferences with James Zychowicz, Director of Special Projects at A-R Editions. Jim and I were students at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in the 1980s, and he too was impressed by hearing concerts of Sapp’s music at this time. Jim encouraged me to work on editing and publishing Sapp’s music, and the opportunity finally came during the summer of 2020 when the entire world “enjoyed” a sabbatical leave.
At that time, Jim encouraged me to write to Prof. John Graziano, editor of A-R’s Recent Researches in American Music series. I initially proposed a volume of only the three “Roman Sonatas” from 1956–57 (Piano Sonatas II, III, and IV). Prof. Graziano responded, asking me, “I wonder if it would make more sense to have a volume of the piano sonatas, including the first, if it is extant.”[6] That thought had not occurred to me, but I will be forever indebted to Prof. Graziano for his suggestion. I greatly enjoyed learning Allen Sapp’s Piano Sonata I, written in 1941 while he was an undergraduate student at Harvard with the guidance of Walter Piston and Irving Fine. It is in Sapp’s early neoclassical style, and now that it is published I hope it will receive the performance and recognition it rightfully deserves. Howard Pollack commented that Sapp’s Piano Sonata I “is in a sort of neo-baroque idiom, with its quartal harmonies, modal melodies, bitonal clashes, and vigorous rhythms, clearly [reflecting] the composer’s admiration for Piston.” It “looked ahead to Sapp’s later work . . . in its crisp piano writing full of octaves.”[7]
Irving Fine gave the premiere performance of Piano Sonata I in the spring of 1941 at a meeting of the Harvard and Radcliffe Music Clubs at the home of Prof. Edward Ballantine. In a letter to his parents following this concert, Sapp remarked, “This Sonata of mine is fiendishly difficult, and although [Fine] is a superb pianist, he has been practicing it for weeks; oft the time he was very worried about it . . . The performance was magnificent! Mr. Fine played it so brilliantly I could hardly keep from crying.”[8] One passage in the second movement proved to be so difficult that Irving Fine wrote an ossia (mm. 168–85), to which Sapp gave his approval. The ossia is included in my edition published last year by A-R Editions (see example 1).
Example 1. Allen Sapp, Piano Sonata I, movement II, mm. 168–74, showing opening of Irving Fine’s ossia.
In total, Allen Sapp composed ten piano sonatas, as well as three sonatas for piano, four hands, several other works for two pianos, and many other works for solo piano. I hope to produce more critical editions of Sapp’s music for A-R Editions in the coming years. But for now, I hope you will enjoy becoming familiar with Allen Sapp’s music through this first volume of piano sonatas.
Alan Green is professor and head of the Music & Dance Library at the Ohio State University, where he also teaches courses in music research methods and bibliography. He is an active member of the Music Library Association and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, and he currently serves as Project Coordinator for Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM). In addition to his edition of Allen Sapp’s Piano Sonatas I–IV, Green is the author of Allen Sapp: A Bio-Bibliography and has published articles in College Music Symposium, Music Reference Services Quarterly, Fontes artis musicae, and Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.
[1] Allen Sapp, interview with Peggy Schmidt, broadcast on WGUC-FM, recorded ca. 1985, Ohio State University Music & Dance Library, Allen Sapp Collection, cassette 147 (digital transfer surrogate file).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Allen Sapp, interview with the author, 7 December 1991, audiotape in the personal collection of the author.
[5] Howard Pollack, Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students, from Elliot Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 224.
[6] John Graziano, email to the author, 17 June 2020.
[7] Ibid., 221.
[8] Allen Sapp, letter of 4 May 1941 to his parents, Sapp (Allen) Papers, Mus. Arc. 11.2, Music Library Storage, State University of New York at Buffalo.
