I've written about Nikolai Kapustin's music in the past and maybe one day I'll even blog about his preludes and fugues, which I have really enjoyed over the years. But right now I want to talk about how I have found that I enjoy his piano sonatas okay while I'm listening to them and then can't remember most of them after the fact.
One of the reasons I suspect Kapustin's piano sonatas go in one ear and out the other for me is a problem of thematic differentiation. Kapustin would have hated having his sonatas compared to the piano sonatas of Medtner but I think the comparison is apt, at least in the sense that both composers seemed to write one gigantic sonata in an installment plan,
as Kyle Gann sort of put it about Medtner years ago.
But I think there might be another way to describe the difference between Kapustin's piano sonatas and his preludes and fugues. A fugue is an elaborative process for a riff, or, if you will, the fugue subject often has a groove it can be used to explore and Kapustin's fugues work better than his piano sonatas do for me because the fugal composition process is so inherently open-ended and groove-driven (if you're any good at it) that it is in some ways more compatible with jazz than too many of the post-A. B. Marx approaches to sonata forms in the West. After all, Russian theorists don't necessarily seem to think about sonata forms the way Germans do.
But let me finally get to Ethan Iverson's old blog post because I found it helpful.
...
Speaking of Mary Lou Williams: In addition to being a wonderful pianist, Williams was a real historian of the music. Her 1979 History of Jazz tree is profound document.
There are a few dead branches, including
“classical books.” Mary Lou Williams always said that jazz was a feeling, and
she was undoubtedly right. However, there’s no way she could have written all
those terrific arrangements for large ensembles without training from
“classical books.” Perhaps by the time of her History of Jazz tree she
was frustrated by the some of the overtly European jazz sounds of the 50s, 60s,
and 70s.
...
Notice what the trunk of the tree is. Blues, spirituals, ragtime, swing ... the leaves and branches are all up in the heights of the tree. Kapustin's debt to Oscar Petersen and Art Tatum is palpable. So is the influence of Ellington, to a lesser extent.
But if I had to describe what it is about Kapustin's piano sonatas that seems to have something missing in relationship to the History of Jazz Tree, it's not just that there's a lack of structural differentiation between themes (Haydn and Clementi wrote monothematic sonata forms so anyone who has studied 18th century music knows that thematic contrast isn't the least bit necessary!).
The problem may be, if I dare to suggest so, is that Kapustin's jazz/classical synthesis has some wonderfully effective and affecting moments in polyphonic music where he stays true to the spirit of both jazz and classical music but in sonata forms it becomes more awkwardly apparent that his musical inspirations are all the leaves on the tree and you will hunt in vain for signs of the musical genres that form the trunk in the History of Jazz Tree. No ragtime, no blues, certainly no spirituals since in the Soviet Union such openly and overtly religious music would not be much supported. Suffering? Lots of Soviet composers had the suffering part down! That was surely not the problem!
Yet even in ragtime there's the long tradition of "ragging the classics" attested by Edward Berlin and other ragtime historians. What I find encouraging that others my find exasperating is that the boundaries between the roots of jazz and the "roots" of other styles are all more permeable and less fixed than purists across styles and genres tend to want them to be.
But the stump of the tree of jazz, if you will, is not something Soviet composers and musicians necessarily always (and depending on the time and place, ever) had access to. Which is yet another reason why I cut slack to efforts at synthesizing "classical music" with blues, jazz, country, rock and other American vernacular or "popular styles". I continue to disagree with John Borstlap that there's something at all like a "vulgarization" of Bach's legacy of fugal writing in what Nikolai Kapustin did.
Kapustin did not study composition formally and in some ways you can hear that. He trained extensively in piano literature and learned jazz parallel to his classical training all of his life. I think you can hear that in his work in both good ways and bad and it may be that he benefited from not studying formal composition so much in the sense that no one was around to tell him "You can't do this because it can't be done". At another level, though, it also meant, perhaps, that he was not necessarily exposed as much to the musical genres in the "trunk" as to the leaves on the limbs and that this may be why his preludes and fugues sound more effective to me than his piano sonatas.
Nevertheless, I think the direction he was going in for a jazz-classical synthesis worked better than most because he never misunderstood which "side" he was on. He was clear that he was on the classical side all along. At another level, compared to a variety of Western European composers who crashed and burned emulating blues and ragtime Kapustin may have been up in the leaves of the trees but in crucial ways he got closer to the "trunk" than many other composers who have attempted jazz-classical synthesis.
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