I've hosted an online copy of the manuscript score to Douglas Leedy's The Leaves Be Green. Stephen Malinowski has now made an edition (online here in PDF form) that is much easier on the eyes than my scan, and also has the score nicely lined-up to facilitate the introduction of extemporaneous repetitions of variations encouraged by the composer. The Leaves Be Green is a work for solo harpsichord or clavichord in (quarter-comma) meantone temperament, at once an hommage to an old traditon of keyboard variations, to South Indian tala cycles, and an excellent example of the range of west coast music experiment to boot.
Malinowski has also made an arrangement of The Leaves Be Green for viol quartet, ingeniously solving some intonation problems by using a quartet of two basses and two trebles. I can imagine that, without the built-in decay and sympathetic resonances of the keyboard instruments over the long tones, this will be quite a different piece, but nevertheless quite a beautiful one. If anyone is interested, I can provide copies of the scores and parts to this arrangement. Many thanks to Mr. Malinowski!
1 comment:
A fine looking score - the expression 'a forest of notes' is for once justified.
But the hand-written version does valuably include the (by now) historical) details of DL's deliberations over tuning - which really should not be left out of it - and the context of repeatability.
One curious feature of the piece is its very frequent (harmonic and melodic) use of the tritone. In meantone the tritones C-F# and G-C# are nearly but not quite pure 7/5; it would be relatively easy to adjust them against the major thirds so that both are only imperceptibly out.
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