Peter Child's Doubles is a set of three sets of mostly bi-tonal character pieces for piano, bookended by a prologue dedicated to Walter Civitarelle (with Messaien-like bird calls), and a rag in memoriam to William Albright, Child's composition teacher at Brandeis, and a prolific composer and performer of ragtime. Doubles I (the first set) is dedicated to the composer's elder daughter, Madeleine (Maddie), the Doubles II to MIT pianist and pedagogue David Deveau (who gave the world premiere of both Doubles I and II), and Doubles III to myself, a former student of Deveau's, and then a PhD candidate in Operations Research, and an Affiliated Artist of the Music and Theater Arts section at MIT.
In the fall of 1998, I had just returned from a summer field trip to collect and research contemporary Chinese piano music in Beijing, and was preparing for a series of recitals featuring this newly acquired music, when Peter told me that he was working on a third set of Doubles pieces, this time for me, and that he had completed the first one (an atonal but romantic and Chopin-esque Mazurka). I was of course overwhelmed and thrilled, but at the same time audacious enough to ask if he would mind changing the focus of the pieces to one featuring Chinese melodies from my childhood, so I could showcase them on the same concert series as the one for the pieces I had uncovered in Beijing. He graciously agreed, and hence I faxed him the first set of melodies, from which grew the Doubles III pieces based on three Chinese Songs. After he finished the Chinese set, he offered to write a few more based on Malay folksongs, and I similarly sent him a bunch, from which he selected three for the Malay set.
The three Chinese pieces — Precious Jewel, Spring Song, and Floating — are based on songs about: (1) a mother's love [mp3]; (2) bird of spring (dance of youth) [rm]; and, (3) the small white boat (moon) on the silver river (milky way) [mp3]. The three Malay pieces — Cockatoo, Riversong, and Sampan Variations — are based on songs about: (4) a two-teethed old sister cockatoo, Burong Kakak Tua; (5) the Bengawan Solo [mp3], the longest river on the island of Java; and, (6) rowing (Dayung Sampan, the Malay equivalent of "Row, row, row your boat").
Peter was not aware of the words to these melodies, the titles of the songs, or the stories behind them, when he composed the pieces. It is remarkable that the resulting compositions fit so well the character of their original songs. Is it possible that such simple melodies can be imbued with the character of the songs, so much so that Peter responded to their underlying emotion character when composing the pieces. The names for the pieces were chosen afterwards. Peter writes, when he presents the Doubles pieces in 2002 at the MIT Music and Theater Arts Visiting Committee [1],
"Take, for example, the individual movements of my piano piece Doubles. Many of these are meant to be specific in terms of their affective connotations. However, in most instances they were composed before I named them, and in naming them I simply attended to the emotional associations that they evoked in me."
All of Doubles III are in two keys with the exception of Floating. The keys are frequently highly disparate, for example: Precious Jewel and Spring Song are in keys only a half step apart, G major and Gb major, and C minor and B minor, respectively; the Sampan Variations are in F major and B major (a key closely related to F# major); and, the spritely Cockatoo combines a key with no accidentals and one with six flats, C major and Eb minor. It turns out, for the performer, that making distant keys sound distinct is a much easier task than when the keys are closely related (i.e. in the same mode and sharing many accidentals), as in the case of Riversong, which is in the keys of Eb major and Gb major, having three and six flats respectively. Occasionally, the two hands switch keys, as in the case of Spring Song, where the two keys toggle incessantly between the two hands, and in the sometimes jazzy, sometimes undulating, Sampan Variations. The uni-tonal Floating comes as relief from the bitonal dissonance in the middle of the set, and ends with fading bells tolling as the boat drifts away from the buoy. The Epilogue, written soon after William Albright died, is a quirky but graceful rag, and arrives like a dessert at the end of the bi-tonal meal.
[1] Why Compose? Paper presented to the MIT Music and Theater Arts Visiting Committee on October 29, 2002. Url - web.mit.edu/child/www/whycompose.html
