Joseph Fennimore
The people who remember Joseph Fennimore's piano playing in the late 1960s and early -70s still talk about it with admiring astonishment. "A pianist of talent and temperament," declared the New York Times after Fennimore's 1967 New York City debut. "He was wonderful," echoed the Washington Post a few years later, "a rarity in an age of fine pianists."
Other critics, recognizing a musical personality of compelling individuality, seemed to stammer for words. "There is no question that Fennimore is full of beans," wrote one, only partly in alarm. Another noted "a freshness and an almost improvisatory quality to the playing," adding: "I have rarely heard as much comment about a performance as I heard at intermission. Opinions were violent, both favorable and unfavorableit's a great experience to see piano playing mean so much to the pianist and to the audience." Still another summed up his review thus: "Joseph Fennimore is the name. If the concert managers, booking agents and the public have any sense at all you will be hearing more of it."
To anyone familiar with Fennimore's musical personality and the subsequent development of his career, reading such statements gives a twinge. In 1974, with what looked like a career of enormous promise ahead, he gave a farewell recital in New York; apart from a couple of appearances as an accompanist, he hasn't played in public since.
"I don't like to practice," Fennimore admits with characteristic briskness, in explaining his early (at age 34) retirement from concertizing. The litany goes on: "I don't like to travel. I don't like conductors. I don't like to play the same programs over and over again. The pianos you usually run into are wretched, ill cared-for. My musical tastes were narrowing more and more, and I found that I like things that nobody else wanted to hear. I had no successful association with management, and my fees were never large enough to tempt me. I wonder why I played as long as I did."
Those are arguments hard to refute, and there were other strains, too. Fennimore was being drawn more and more into composition, at which he had worked since his teens, and he was finding the tension between the two pursuits too much to handle. Add to this the running of an innovative concert series, "Hear America First," and you see the problem.
"I made the decision when I started to realize that I wasn't immortal, that my health was vulnerable. I started to have serious nervous attacks and muscle spasms. I decided that if I was going to be an anonymous, struggling musician it should be in something that consumed me more than just playing the piano. Writing music interested me more in every way, and I was never smart enough to be driven by money, so the choice seemed clear.
In September 1983, though, a handful of Fennimore's friends heard what was teasingly termed a "second farewell recital." It was presented in Kiggins Hall on the campus of Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, as a wedding present for a friend. The program was taped the day before, and from that session comes most of the present recording.
Much to the regret of those of us in attendance that afternoonthose of us who reveled in playing full of a color and spontaneity rarely encountered in any agethe recital presaged no return to the concert stage. Actually, it had been the product of a distracted period, when Fennimore's work at composition had seemed to dry up. Playing the piano had been a temporary diversion.
Asked if there might be another performance in the future, Fennimore makes no pause to consider: "I can't think of any reason why there should be."
Born in New York City on April 16, 1940, Fennimore grew up in the upstate towns of Ballston Spa and Scotia. He began piano study at six, and at thirteen made his first appearance with an orchestra. He continued his studies at the Eastman School of Music, where he was a piano student of Cecile Genhart. At the Juilliard School, where he subsequently received a master's degree, his teacher was Rosina Lhevinne.
Those who knew him during his Juilliard years remember Fennimore as something of a cult figure among fellow students. Although he received official recognition in the form of the Van Cliburn and the Loeb Awards, presented to the outstanding graduating pianist, and was invited by Mme. Lhevinne to represent her class in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (an invitation he politely declined), he
left Juilliard under a cloud of disaffection. "Schools teach every one to swim in the same direction at the same time," Fennimore explains. "Like all establishments they reflect contemporary corporate mentality. They exist first for the sake of their own perpetuation, and whatever good they do their student body is a by-product of the school's pursuit of its own best interest. They would turn artists into team players' but I know of no art worthy of the name created by committee."
After leaving Juilliard, Fennimore went to Aspen for further training, and on a Fulbright grant studied in London with Harold Craxton. It was during this period that he also entered a few piano competitions and, although he won two in the international category, he realized at once that he would never be successful in this genre of music-making. "Competitions," he declares, "are gladiatorial games. They are inhuman, inartistic, mostly invalid, and represent an abdication of responsibility by the music business."
The competitions Fennimore won afforded enough of a performing career that he could see himself ill-suited to the life of a traveling virtuoso, and he began to turn exclusively to composition. His last composition teacher was Virgil Thomson, with whom he worked from 1972 to 1974.
"I think that I have something to say about music, whether I'm playing, writing or talking," says Fennimore. "It's on the inside. I was born that waynever did anything to acquire itwith good ears and emotional sensitivity." Indeed, what has struck many who have heard Fennimore's playingquite aside from the obvious brilliance and expressivenesshas been its remarkable spontaneity. it is music-making utterly uninhibited by academicism, though that statement implies no lack of intellectual content. Rare, in fact, is a musician so widely read, so intellectually probing, so articulate as Fennimore. And, when talking about the evils of The System, musically speaking, he pulls no punches.
"I think that there are probably more fine instrumentalists today than at any time before. But the nature of our time, our civilization, our musical culture, nips them in the bud. Instrumentalists are poisoned by orchestral playingthere's no question but that that's deadly. And universities are poisonous places for any kind of artists. The politics, the regimentation, the mass production, the cynicismit's all lethal to art."
As an example of what's wrong, he cites the decline of the composer-performer, the virtuoso who also composes. Most of the pre-20th century music now thought valuable came from such individuals, but the type has fallen into disfavor.
"It has to do with education. You have to be either a composition major or a performance major. Doing both is discouraged. It isn't that they are mutually exclusive pursuits, but the careerism involved in attaining distinction in either is a full-time job in itself. Nobody has the energy to pursue two such impossible careers.
"There's not one composer I admire who was not some kind of performera good performersomewhere in his career. You can't possibly write music if you don't know how it feels in the making."
Speaking of repertory, Fennimore has other iconoclastic ideas. He admits to deriving little pleasure from playing the works of the Classical Viennese tradition: "Redolent of young princesses of negligible talent, they twaddle on skillfully, effortlessly, occasionally charmingly, but mostly routinely. Written for an instrument utterly foreign to the modern Steinway, these works must be played with allowances for the excellence of today's instrument, while attempting to forge or imitate qualities it does not possess. While admiring the genius of these composers, I still can easily weary of the arch brilliance of Mozart, the hollow pomposities of Beethoven and the easy humor of Haydn."
"Not until the works of Schumann and Chopin do I find music personal and intense, unconcerned with seducing the audience, although it can indeed do so. Late Beethoven essays the personal and intense, but it is too profound for me. The small keyboard works of Brahms produce excruciating soul-states in which I can indulge happily. So do many of Scriabin's piano pieces."
"I require ecstasy or despair to pique my interest. Certainly, music can depict all degrees between, but I leave that to others. I need to play music that either sings or dances about matters of life or death, but this is not always the kind I write. We do not choose what we writeonly what we play."
Or, he might add, whether we play. Even those of us who delight in Joseph Fennimore as composer and wag can't help hoping that, as a pianist, this won't be his last farewell recital.
The Griffes works were recorded in concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, March 2, 1974. The remaining music was recorded at Kiggins Hall, Emma Willard School, Troy, New York, September 4, 1983; Tom Lazarus was the recording engineer.
Two compact discs of compositions by Joseph Fennimore are available from Albany Records: selected vocal works (TROY023) and chamber music featuring cello (TROY065).
Cover photo by Gordon Hibberd.
Produced by Bedford Pace III.
Prelude in B minor, Op. 11, No. 1 (3:06)
2.11 A.S.C.H.-S.C.H.A. (Lettres dansantes) (:47)
2.15 Reconnaissance 1:45)
2.16 Pantalon et Colombine (:56)
2.17 Valse allemande (:46)
2.18 Paganini, Valse (1:12)
2.21 Pause, Marche des "Davidsbundler" (4:02)
3.1 F Sharp minor, Op. 8, No. 2 (2:08)
3.2 F Sharp Major, Op. 42, No. 3 (:59)
3.3 F Sharp Major, Op. 42, No. 4 (2:20)
3.4 C Sharp minor, Op. 42, No. 5 (3:23)
3.5 A Flat Major, Op. 8, No. 8 (3:03)
3.6 D Flat Major, Op. 8, No. 10 (2:12)
3.7 B Flat minor, Op. 8, No. 11 (4:06)
3.8 D Sharp minor, Op. 8, No. 12 (2:27)
Sonata (13:30) (recorded in concert)
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