John David Lamb
   Selected Works

Saxophone Project

* Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano (1)
* Fables for Alto Saxophone and Piano (2)
* Follies for Baritone Saxophone and Piano (1)
* Affirmations for Saxophone Quartet (3)

(1) Paul Cohen (soprano & baritone sax), Lois Anderson (piano)
(2) Leo Saguiguit (alto sax), Yoko Yamada-Selvaggio (piano)
(3) The Impuls Quartet
Naeckens Vaenner NV1 Total time: 72:00

Callithumpian Concert

* Caricatures for Clarinet and Piano (1)
* Asymmetrical Dances (2)
* Night Music (3)
* Personae for Horn and Piano (4)

(1) Laura DeLuca (clarinet), Karen Sigers (piano)
(2) Ilkka Talvi, Marjorie Kransberg Talvi (violins)
(3) Marjorie Kransberg Talvi & Ingrid Frederickson (violins), Shari Link
(viola), Theresa Benshoof (cello)
(4) Peter Moore (horn), Meade Crane (piano)
Naeckens Vaenner NV2 Total time: 68:38

Bird's Eye View

* Against the Darkness (1)
* Pasatiempos (2)
* Partita (3)
* Divertimento (4)
* Flourishes (5)
* Beyond the Clouds (6)
* Cradle Tune (7)
* Heart-Springs (8)

(1) John Barcellona (flute), Peter Christ (oboe), Eugene Zoro (clarinet),
Pat Nelson (bassoon), Chris Leuba (horn), Lisa Bergman (piano), Spencer
Hoveskeland (bass), Gordon Rencher (percussion)
(2) Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby (flute)
(3) Ilkka Talvi (viola)
(4) Paul Rafanelli (bassoon)
(5) Mark Robbins & Jim Weaver (horns)
(6) Juliet Stratton (harp)
(7) Susan Telford (flute), Dan Williams (oboe), Sean Osborn (clarinet),
Francine Peterson (bassoon), Spencer Hoveskeland (bass), Juliet Stratton
(harp)
(8) Singers, David McBride (horn), J. D. Lamb (piano)/Eric Banks
Naeckens Vaenner NV3 Total time: 77:02

All available from the composer: [log in to unmask]

Summary for the Busy Executive: Forever young.

One of the best meals I ever had in my life was in a small town in
upstate New York. From the outside, it looked like a typical "family-style"
restaurant. If any one of us - my father, mother, sister, or I - had
been paying attention, however, we'd have noticed among the Fords,
Chevies, and Plymouths, the Mercedes and the Bentleys. We'd been driving
all day, and we hadn't changed, although we had washed up at the motel.
We opened the door to one of the most elegant interiors I'd ever seen,
with small intimate nooks lining the corridor to a main dining room. The
owner greeted us in a beautifully-cut tux. We felt like the Joads, but
the man seated us courteously and even graciously. The bill wasn't cheap.
My sister and I had baked Alaska for the first time in that restaurant.
Later, with my wife, I drove sixty miles out of my way to eat there
again. It was even better, mainly because my palate had learned to enjoy
more things. This review celebrates what you can find in odd corners of
the country.

John David Lamb (or just David, as he is known to his friends) studied
composition at the University of Washington in the Fifties. With timeouts
for brief intervals of grant support, he spent about thirty years in the
public school system, from which he has recently retired. He has continued
to compose.

The careers and personalities of classical composers fall, basically,
into four bins: the one who actually makes a living at it (rarer than
the whooping crane); the Quixote who puts his stuff in a drawer and hopes
for the future; the megalomaniac who rails that people *must* listen,
for the sake of their musical souls; the home hobbyist who drags out his
MIDI files, rather like people with their slides and family photo albums.
Lamb is Quixote, but make no mistake: Lamb is no duffer. He has formal
training and at least forty years of real composing experience. He has
written in just about every form. These CDs, however, represent his
chamber music only. We get these small-scale works because Lamb himself
paid for the recordings. I shudder to think what a reading of an orchestral
piece would set a composer back. I already hear the objection: only the
pieces someone is willing to take a chance on get recorded. No one other
than the composer was willing to take that chance. I would counter that
probably no one other than the composer had looked at these pieces or
knew these pieces existed. I get really tired with the free-market version
of the survival of art. As William F. Buckley remarked, the free market
tells you merely the cost and the price, not the value.

All this could drive an artist to wormwood and gall, but Lamb has
definitely avoided the trap. He is an artist who sees the point of art
not only as communication, but even as entertainment. When he writes a
piece, he keeps before him the image of the listeners he has asked to
give up time for his work.

I would describe Lamb's musical idiom as Postwar Neoclassical. One hears
a bit of Stravinsky in the rhythms and Hindemith in some of the harmonies
and in the counterpoint. Even Copland and Mahler occasionally peek out
from behind the curtain. He writes tonally, he loves building radiant
melodies, but he doesn't rehash other work. He has his own personality.
For me, this comes out most strongly in his rhythms. He dearly loves to
change meter, sometimes with each measure, and to build asymmetrical
syncopations, as you would find in folk music, where the dancers stamp
their feet *against* the pulse. Because of the metrical changes, Lamb's
dancers must also find their feet. I suppose this sort of thing goes
back at least to Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat and to Orff's Rundtaenze.
Lamb's melodies have the ever-fresh quality of folk tunes, but they
receive sophisticated handling.  One is always aware - as one is with
Mahler in his Wunderhorn settings - that a very canny musical mind has
searched for exactly the right note at any particular point in the phrase.

The artistic personality behind the music wins me over right away with
a modest, down-to-earth quality. As Debussy once remarked, "Music should
seek, humbly, to please." At least in the works here, Lamb achieves
sincerity without over-inflation. He doesn't blow smoke simply to impress.
You never doubt that the notes here come from the desire to express, as
clearly as possible, an inner drive or an emotion genuinely felt. Of
course, in art sincerity is never enough. That's where Lamb's craft comes
in.

Lamb credits the inspiration of the saxophone works to the virtuoso
Sigurd Rascher, always on the look-out for new, original work for his
instrument and a cheerleader to composers. Rascher's encouragement led
to the sonata for soprano sax, certainly one of the most substantial
works on the three CDs. What with one thing and another, it took Lamb
over twenty years to complete the sonata. It's a polished gem. The piece
begins with what I hear as a "Russian" melody, a la Mussorgsky, but the
harmony derives from Hindemith. The counterpoint as well presents a
Hindemithian exuberance and complexity. However, you hear mainly the
exuberance and smile at the complexity. The effect on the listener is
warmer than is usual with Hindemith, with less of a concern for
near-Palladian symmetry or marmoreal classicism. Lamb comes across as a
lyric, rather than epic composer. So despite a beautiful slow movement
with themes chock-full of Hindemithian fourths, one listens to something
not constructed or built, but sung and truly personal. The finale as
well is all Lamb, with characteristic off-balance rhythmic pirouettes.

The altogether lighter Fables and Follies managed to charm the socks off
me, despite some occasional stretches where I felt Lamb's inspiration
had faltered. I think it a matter of hanging around the same key center
too long or of insufficient contrast or of sticking to the middle and
low registers of the instruments. I felt this more in the baritone piece
than in Fables.  Lamb is primarily a composer of clear ideas. The style
doesn't really allow one to hide behind a welter of notes. Consequently,
he risks exposing a bad hand or an idea insufficiently worked. As
ingratiating and as "natural" as the music sounds, it is a cruel,
unforgiving style. Nevertheless, some of the writing seemed to turn the
baritone sax into a cello - that kind of lyricism.

No reservations at all about Affirmations, a full-blown saxophone quartet
and the longest, most ambitious piece on the program. The first movement
- sonata with slow introduction - brought to mind the pastoralism of
Milhaud's wind music, particularly something like La cheminee du Roi
Rene. Lamb wrote the entire quartet in the early Nineties. Despite a
continuing fondness for melodies featuring fourths, Lamb has largely
left Hindemith behind. The quirky rhythmic sense remains, however. I
continue to think, during the allegro sections, of little lambs leaping
suddenly straight up into the air.  The music exudes the sweet air of
Spring. The primary impulse of the second movement is tune, tune, tune.
Lamb, however, sells himself short when he writes in his liner notes,
"the cantabile sections are innocent and romantic with nothing to get
in the way of the melody." Nothing gets in the way, but there's considerably
more going on in the way of counter-tunes and classy accompaniment, free
of cliche. The finale is a rondo with a sly main theme (almost like a
playground taunt) and a couple of wonderful surprises along the way,
which I won't give away here. One of the outstanding episodes of the
piece is a lot like a hymn (Lamb himself thinks of it as "lush," for
some reason). It reminds us that more goes on than bumptious fun. I
should also mention that although Lamb works with a jeweler's precision,
he can nevertheless deliver an extensive movement. This three-movement
quartet - entertaining and delightful as it is - nonetheless runs to
twenty-five minutes.

Caricatures, a suite of miniatures, began as a series of musical sketches
of Lamb's friends. Since most of us don't know Lamb's friends, we have
to take the suite as pure music - not very hard to do. Lamb points out
that because the pieces are early, one can easily spot the influences.
The opening allegro strikes me as very French, with again a strong
reminder of Milhaud.  The second movement, "Andante pastorale," comes
across as a moderato Scandinavian dance, by a Grieg who perhaps loved
writing rounds. The "scherzando" third movement has elements of Stravinsky's
Petrushka. The slow waltz of the fourth movement owes, as Lamb himself
hints, quite a bit to Berg. The finale, however, shows the composer at
his most characteristic, with yet another asymmetrical dance and happy
tune.

Up to now, we've talked only about wind pieces. The two string works
- the aptly-named Asymmetrical Dances (indeed, I don't know whether
Lamb has ever written a symmetrical dance) and Night Music - come as a
refreshing change of pace. The dances, a series of violin duets written
over the years, began as "something to play" with his string-playing
friends when they "ran out of Bartok." Bartok's own duos as well as
Stravinsky's violin writing in L'Histoire seem the models. Here and
there, I also hear a bit of Swedish or Latvian fiddling. Lamb's duets
are fun to listen to, without pandering, and they must be a gas to play.
Night Music, essentially a two-movement string quartet of about eighteen
minutes and in many ways the most interesting music of all on the three
CDs, shows a different side to Lamb. It scarcely sounds like the composer
I've heard so far. The concern for the wonderful tune persists, but it's
a different kind of tune and a different harmonic support. I suspect
Lamb wanted to stretch his expressive legs into new territory. The first
movement - "Faebodlat" - according to the composer is a lament inspired
by Swedish farming. In the summer, the men would go off to the city to
earn money, leaving the women alone to take care of the farm. It was a
lonely, difficult life, and the movement captures that as well as the
monotony of the life, without the music ever itself losing interest.
There's a quality of hard stoicism to it, far removed from Lamb's usual
sunny musical disposish'. The second movement, "Polska," dances mainly
in moderate three-four time. One of the tunes bears a strong resemblance
to the third movement of Grieg's Symphonic Dances, but the effect is
less straightforward in Lamb. Lamb's players aren't as suave as Grieg's,
the music not so new-paint-bright, and eventually the melancholy of the
first movement tints the second. Happiness comes in fits and starts, to
be overwhelmed by anger and regret. Come to think of it, it's a pretty
Bergian movement, without resort to Berg's idiom. The emotions of the
piece lie fairly close to the bone.

Personae of 1999 took the composer roughly forty years from the first
sketches to completion. It's not a stretch to imagine that a composer
as fond of melodic fourths and fifths as Lamb to want to write for the
horn.  The composer describes Personae as a set of self-caricatures.
Again, it's hard either to agree or to disagree, since I don't know Lamb,
so again the music stands or falls all by itself. It's a beautiful work,
with the opening motif a breezy update of the finale to Schumann's
"Rhenish" Symphony. I'm a sucker for the sound of the horn myself, though
it's a bear to write for.  The slow second movement daydreams, with one
secondary theme evoking the Appalachian "come-all-ye." The third movement
is another slow one, but more a hymn than a ballad. I must say that any
element of caricature (in the sense of ironic distance) in this music
so far has escaped me. Indeed, it seems to me to come from deep within
Lamb. The final "Valz sentimentale" is yet another slow movement, but
with Schwung - a handsome end to a handsome work.

The third CD, Bird's-Eye View, contains examples of my least favorite
genre - the piece for single melody instrument. I except string instruments,
because ever since Bach at least, composers can make them sing more
than one line. Truth to tell, I don't much like Gregorian chant either,
preferring their use in polyphonic music - not "Ave maris stella" but
Josquin's Missa 'Ave maris stella,' for example. To me, composers have
too hard a job to keep things interesting. About the only such piece
that wakes me up is Varese's Density 21.5. Consequently, I will skip
over Pasatiempos and Divertimento, for solo flute and solo bassoon,
respectively.

Against the Darkness, for small ensemble, is program music based on a
Lamb chamber opera. Again, I'm not a huge fan of narrative music not by
Strauss or Elgar, but I will concede that I can follow Lamb's plot (he
gives the general outline of it in his liner notes) through the music.
I don't want to go any deeper right now because I'm sure my prejudice
against the genre affects my reception of the work. Others who have heard
the piece like it a lot, and there's certainly nothing wrong with the
music. I simply feel no imaginative sympathy.

The partita for solo viola contains five brief movements. Lamb acknowledges
this as the earliest piece he's willing to keep. It embodies for him a
kind of manifesto - a reaction against "the empty ... essentially ugly
music" of the time. I've never actually met anyone in favor of ugly,
empty music, so I really don't know why Lamb needed a manifesto. Basically,
he wanted to write tonally, with recognizable tunes - as if someone was
out to stop him. At any rate, based on what I know of Lamb's later music,
this presents the composer at the beginning of his road. The tunes haven't
the distinctive stamp of his later work, but it's a beautiful, thoughtful
piece nevertheless, wonderfully suited to the autumnal sound of the
viola. In the last two movements, "Scherzo" and "Charivari," we get the
Swedish fiddling routine characteristic of the mature composer.

Flourishes, five duets for horns, opens with a Tippett-like fanfare,
followed by a scherzo with a rolling gait a little reminiscent of Malcolm
Arnold's Three Shanties. The third-movement "Intermezzo" brings back the
Tippett (or perhaps Britten) sounds of the start then settles into a B
section, full of a nostalgia that seems particular to Lamb. I love horn
duets anyway, and Lamb has provided some gems.

Lamb wrote Beyond the Clouds inspired by the playing of Lynne Palmer,
"who taught me all I know about the harp." You've got to know your
compositional onions if you want to master writing for the tricky solo
harp. It's a bit easier if you regard the harp as essentially a diatonic
or even modal instrument; its essential musical character really hasn't
changed in the thousands of years it's been around. The nineteenth century
added a bit of mechanics, and chromaticism became possible, but in no
way easy. Things like the dodecaphonic Krenek sonata or the quartal
Hindemith sonata are, in addition to great music, tours-de-force. But
the harp all by its natural is pretty wonderful. People have thought it
the preferred instrument of heaven for a reason. Lamb's music is gorgeous,
mostly "white-note" stuff, with enough chromatic pinches to keep things
interesting.

Cradle Song, a lullaby in quintuple time for chamber ensemble, is simply
one extraordinary tune and its own excuse for being. The orchestration
is worth mentioning - full of surprising colors without a lot of players.
It made me hungry to hear an orchestral work by Lamb.

In Heart Springs, Lamb has set four poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - two
relatively well-known, two not - all for women's chorus, horn, and piano.
Hopkins gives composers fits because of his odd rhythms and extremely
concise expression. This leads to often clunky and even incoherent
settings.  Lamb's own odd rhythms, however, take Hopkins's in their
stride, and one can always follow the rhetorical shifts. Lamb has produced
songs that marry tune and word to an unusually close degree, and the
tunes are beautiful, besides.  The horn also adds that extra bit of
Romantic yearning - pure lagniappe. The first song, "Cuckoo," remembers
Mahler's cuckoo, particularly its song in Mahler's early "Um schlimme
Kinder artig zu machen," but Lamb quickly strikes out on his own, with
an enchanting broken canon between women and horn, painting the words
"Repeat that, repeat." In "Spring and Fall," Lamb strikes a simple,
almost naive pose, avoiding the over-inflation into Significance of so
many other settings of this poem. For the most part, the women continue
in two parts - in some places, down to unison - only, untouched by piano
or horn. "Heaven-Haven" (also set by Barber as "A nun takes the veil")
continues this very direct, pared-down expression, but relaxes it a bit
with interludes for horn and piano. Barber looks almost garish in
comparison. The final "Inversnaid," a Hopkins poem new to me, is the
most gnarly of the group, but again Lamb turns the knots and twists into
something wonderfully playful and leaves his audience in smiles.

I've written at such length in the frank hope that the review will spark
enough demand for Lamb to recoup at least some of his costs. The only
source for these CDs is Lamb himself. The performances were well worth
the money.  Outstanding performers include Paul Cohen on soprano and
baritone sax (a cello-like tone on the bari), Ilkka Talvi on viola, Laura
DeLuca on clarinet, all the horn players (Robbins, Weaver, McBride, and
in particular Peter Moore), and the Heart Springs ensemble. The chorus's
diction is clear enough that you don't need the text Lamb provides in
the notes. They sing well in tune, rhythmically spot on, and with
character: they know what they're singing about. The Impuls Quartet
and the ad hoc string quartet negotiate the interpretively difficult
Affirmations and Night Music respectively, and the recording itself is
first-rate.

A rare bit of treasure.

Steve Schwartz