Piano Sonatas I-IV by Allen Sapp (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Piano Sonatas I-IV by Allen Sapp Edward Komara Allen Sapp. Piano Sonatas I-IV. Edited by Alan Green. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2021. (Recent Researches in American Music, v. 90) [1 score (x, 88 p.) ISBN 9781987207651, $200] During his lifetime, Allen Sapp (1922–1999) was better known as an education administrator than as a composer. Yet he was thoroughly trained in music composition at Harvard University's music department in the 1940s, and subsequently he composed over 140 works. The scores appearing in print during his lifetime were reproductions of his holographs. The Music Library Association encouraged the initial research and recovery of his music by awarding the 1991 Walter Gerboth Award to Alan Green. Published by A-R Editions a year before the centennial of the composer, Green's edition of the first four of Sapp's ten piano sonatas (1941–1989) sets the standard for the future of his score publications. Green's curation of the Sapp legacy has resulted in his thesis "Allen Sapp: Composer, Teacher and Administrator" (MA thesis, SUNY Buffalo, 1994), the book Allen Sapp: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), the placement of Sapp manuscripts at SUNY Buffalo upon the composer's death in 1999, and his biographical entry in Grove Music Online. The first important secondary study was Howard Pollack's chapter on Sapp and Robert Middleton in Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students, from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992; henceforth Pollack). Two important dissertations followed. David Curtin's "The Piano Music of Allen Dwight Sapp: A Performer's Guide to the Complete Miscellaneous Works" (DMA diss., University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music, 1997) presents the piano music other than the sonatas. Charles Hogan's "The Piano Sonatas of Allen Sapp: A Study of Style and Language" (DMA diss., University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music, 2010) is a probing study into dodecaphony, [End Page 655] texture, harmony, and form. Finally, there are Sapp's brief summaries of Sonatas II, III and IV in the notes accompanying Lambis Vassiliadis's recording of those works (Koch Discover International DICD 920535 [1999], CD). The task of this review is threefold: to evaluate Sapp's first four sonatas; to recognize the editorial work of Alan Green in editing the compositions from manuscripts; and to use A-R Editions' newly-published edition towards clarifying the various published comments from Sapp, Green, Hogan, and Pollack. As Hogan shows (pp. 3–4), Sapp composed his piano sonatas in groups of three; each of them may be associated with a particular time in his life. Sonatas II, III and IV ("the Roman sonatas") were composed in Rome, Italy in 1957 during a rest leave away from his grueling teaching post at Harvard. Sonatas V, VI, and VII came in 1980 after time-consuming administrative positions at SUNY Buffalo (1961–1975), Florida State University (1976–1978), and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (1978–1980) and upon his return to teaching at the last institution in 1980. The final completed trilogy (VIII [1986], IX and X [both from 1989]) came shortly before he was elected to faculty leadership positions in 1989 and 1990. Sonatas XI and XII were begun (Green, Bio-Bibliography, 49) but found unfinished after his 1999 death (Hogan, 4). His first sonata (1941) is something of a lone wolf that lacks companion sonatas, as Sapp admitted to Hogan (p. 7): "That was One; that was isolated. I didn't do anything more with that because of the war and the army involvement." Implicit in nearly every sonata is the composer's wife Norma Bertolami Sapp (1921–1995). They met as students in 1941 and married in 1943. As a pianist in the 1940s, she performed in Harvard's concerts of new music. Later, she gave the premieres of Sapp's Sonatas II (revised), IV, V, VI, and VIII, with accomplished performances of III in the 1970s and '80s. According to Green (Bio-Bibliography, 48), she never recorded commercially, and one opportunity to record the Roman sonatas in 1993 was cancelled due to her arthritis and anemia. This is regrettable, partly for her...