Hart is obviously an important figure in early twentieth-century Australian music. For our purposes here, his huge creative impulses are less significant because they seem to lie more with vocal and operatic music than in music for the piano. Hart's pupils included Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Margaret Sutherland.
The piano music is all much of a muchness. We cannot claim to have examined all of it, as there is such a huge amount, but we have certainly looked at a representative selection of the Hart output. His musical thinking is strongly tied to writing for the voice so that almost inevitably the piano pieces all seem to have a melody with accompaniment texture. The melody is placed in the right hand, usually within a vocal range, while the left hand does what accompaniments usually do, that is, arpeggios and chords. It does not make for an interesting output. The harmonic language is in itself very conventional so
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that even works written late in his life still have a 19th century feel to them. Hart was also obviously attached to English folk tunes. There are many settings, all aimed at a young market and therefore of easy to intermediate technical difficulty. The three books of English Folk-Songs published by Stainer & Bell contain an introduction written by Hart, addressed 'To the Young Musician' and extolling the virtues of Folk-Songs in general and English Folk-Songs in particular. At one point Hart makes a political point:
..they are all real English tunes, and so they belong as much to Australia, New Zealand and Canada as to England. French children have French folk-songs, Russian children have Russian folk-songs- indeed every nation has its own national music.
Hart's love of English folk-music extended to the composition of larger works such as Strawberry Fair. Folk-Song Fantasy on the West Country Folk-Song as well as Cold Blows the Wind To-night, True Love. Folk-Song Fantasy on the Somerset Folk-Song, both published in Australia in the early '20s. These, although obviously more ambitious than simple one or two page settings, are still, pianistically, of only moderate scope and interest and therefore only marginally more interesting.
There is, however, one set of piano pieces that seem to stand aside from the bulk of Hart's output for piano. This is a set of fourteen short pieces entitled Fourteen Experiments and dated 1917. Here Hart essentially tries his hand at assymetric bars and phrase constructions as well as occasionally delving into unrelated triads. As such, these pieces are important in the history of Australian piano music. True, what may have been experimental in Europe in 1917 is hardly that in Hart's hands. Nevertheless, this is a cycle of piano pieces that would work in a recital situation and that are worth publishing. We have a fine copy in Hart's hand. The pieces are mostly of one page duration.
1. Moderato. A kind of choral in 5/4.
2. Andante. A tranquillo piece with the time signature 3/4 4/4 (i.e. 7/4 consisting of 3+4)
3. Misurato. A piece in 5/4/ with the odd 4/4 bar insertion. 4. 4/4 3/4 time (i.e. 7/4 consisting of 4+3)
5. A piece in 4/4/ but experimenting with the harmony in a relatively mild fashion.
6. Moderato consisting of 6+4+3+6.
7. "The Travelling Man", bars of 4/4 and 5/4 intertwined. 8.Allegretto of 5+4
9. Moderato in 4/4 but using some unexpected harmonies, but firmly anchored in B Major.
10. Shifting harmonies, 4/4/ and 3/4 freely intermixed. 11. Lento, somewhat like the previous piece.
13.Superimposition of 5 and 4
14. Return to the mood of the first piece. 3,4 and 5 mixed.
The pieces are all of very moderate difficulty. Hart’s complete piano legacy is still awaiting thorough exploration.
Dorian Le Gallienne (1915 –1963)
Le Gallienne was an influential teacher and was spoken of very highly and with great affection by all who worked with him at Melbourne University, including Don Banks, Keith Humble, James Penberthy and Helen Gifford. In his role as a music critic, he was acutely aware of the poor state of art music in Australia and of his responsibilities in that direction. He was a great lover of the Australian bush, but this love never appeared in his music as any obvious or cheap display of jingoism.
He suffered from poor health and died relatively young and resultantly his output is not large. The language is lean and muscular, with elements of tonal ambiguity and bitonality ever present, though usually strongly resolved. His command of larger forms, of which his Symphony is the prime example, is evident in the Sonata for piano. It must be said that Le Gallienne's inclusion in this book rests solely on his Sonata, for there is little else for the instrument. The incidental music to Macbeth, written as a piano score, consists solely of beginnings and 'etc' signs. There is a charming Nocture in C Sharp Minor, which used to be widely played as it was published in an examination book by the A.M.E.B.. An unpublished Symphonic Study for piano (one of the manuscript copies has '1940' on it) actually supports an argument I make below about Le Gallienne's piano music: it is unusually sparse and austere as a purely pianistic work and almost looks to me as a short score of an unrealized orchestral work. Nevertheless, there is sufficient material in this manuscript to produce a performance copy of this work. Both here and in the Sonata and late Sonatina, Le Gallienne is the exception that proves the rule, for he writes successful music for the piano without being a pianist himself and without the music being particularly pianistic. Some short works held at the State Library of Victoria are omitted from the discussion below. There is also a set of Three Piano Pieces, from 1946, the first of which contains some seeds of the Sonata, with wide spaced texture,
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whilst the second utilizes counterpoint in which the lines are already doubled in major thirds.
Ex. 73:1. D. Le Gallienne. Three Piano Pieces. bars 3-6 of II.
The last piece of this set fills the complete spectrum of dynamics from a dead moment where the composer asks the pianist to play 'with no expression' to a full-blooded ffff.
Sonata for Piano (1951) 1. Allegro Moderato 2. Alla Marcia 3. Molto Lento
The composer Robert Hughes supplied this note for the sonata in the copy produced for the Australian Music Fund:
The three movements of this sonata were composed during the latter part of 1950 and early in 1951. Although the composer had not written a finale, he permitted public performance of the completed movements as an unfinished sonata. David Fox played it at a concert of Le Gallienne's music in Melbourne on 9th July 1951. At that time, there was no doubt that he had planned a work in four movements, but there is no evidence that it was ever completed. No sketches for a finale could be found among the manuscripts collected after his death in 1963.
Le Gallienne wasn't a pianist and it is quite possible that he simply ran out of compositional steam, writing for an instrument that he perhaps didn't have a strong affinity with. The work functions surprisingly well in its incomplete state and lends a rather sombre air to the overall effect. The other factor might have been the substantial weight and nature of the second movement, meant originally to function as a scherzo, and which might have stolen the thunder from the originally planned finale.
The writing is clean and linear and almost suggests that an orchestral palette, with much implied doubling and colouristic venturing, was in the composer's inner ear when composing this piece. Some of the longer piano chords seem to be begging for orchestral crescendi and percussion rolls – but perhaps this is simply a peculiarity of my own inner ear.
The Sonata begins very simply in defining the thematic material.
Ex. 74:1. D. Le Gallienne. Sonata. bars 1-5 of I.
But this almost folksong like opening leads to quite violent outbursts soon after.
Ex. 75:1. D. Le Gallienne. Sonata. bars 29-32 of I.
and the raw material is piled up into quite tense contrapuntal overlays. There are orchestrally driven episodes reminiscent of Shostakovich, here and in the widely separated tessitura characteristic of the 2nd movement.
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This second movement consists of an angular march followed by a slightly slower 3/4 in which the right hand plays sometimes awkward parallel triads (in an imaginary trumpet section) while the left hand imitates pizzicato lower strings.
Ex. 77:1. D. Le Gallienne. Sonata. bars 34-36 of II.
There is a still slower central section, followed by a violent return to the two quicker ideas. This second movement is a large statement and made the composition of a finale a problematic proposition.
The third movement is another example of the composer's linear approach to the keyboard, this time in a very expressive mode:
If to some ears this very fine Sonata ends somewhat unsatisfactorily, I suggest a solution below.
The Sonatina (1962) was written very close to the composer's death and represents his final thoughts on the piano. It is still unpublished and this needs to be rectified in the near future. On the manuscript there is a note by composer Robert Hughes, dated 1964, and obviously another result of his tidying up Le Gallienne’s manuscripts:
The passage contained within the brackets on page 5 is drawn from material in the pencil sketch and is inserted as a possible completion of the gap in the original manuscript. Bars five and six of this passage are not original but follow the material as a suitable bridge to Bar seven of the original pencil sketch.
For the moment, and until the pencil sketches can be restudied, we should accept Robert Hughes' solution. He knew La Gallienne well and presumably had insight into his colleague's methods. Besides, what he suggests works very well. The Sonatina begins, like the Sonata, very simply, with parallel movement in octaves.
Ex. 79:1. D. Le Gallienne. Sonatina. bars 1-6.
It continues in much the same linear vein, and in a style very close to that of the Sonata, both in subject matter as well as in the essentially two-part counterpoint, which constitutes much of the work. The Sonatina is in one movement. It is not a light piece meant for young players and is a serious and sometimes sombre essay gradually winding down via a Hindemithian path to a cadence in B flat major.
Ex. 80:1. D. Le Gallienne. Sonatina. bars 115-120.
It struck me, while playing through it, that this piece may well be the way to 'complete' the unfinished Sonata, if one wanted to somehow do so. The Sonatina certainly fits well stylistically into the world of the Sonata and returns to the mood and texture that opens the Sonata. It must at least be a possibility.