Fêtes - Variations on Happy Birthday
Composed by Ivan Tcherepnin, Bellagio (Italy), 1975
Probably written for Leon Kirchner
Notes by Elaine Chew, January 18, 2007
I first contacted Ivan Tcherepnin between 1995 and 1996, upon the recommendation of one of his former students Lynn Chang, when I was creating a concert program of Chinese and Russian music. His father, Alexander was instrumental in encouraging Chinese composers to write in their own style through his own teaching, and by creating composition competitions in China for young composers, and thus shaped the contemporary Chinese musical genre. I called Ivan to get recommendations on pieces his father, a Russian composer, might have written in the Chinese style, influenced by the years he spent in China. Ivan kindly recommended that I look at Alexander's Five Chinese Concert Etudes. I subsequently performed the Shadow Play from the set and sent Ivan a copy of the tape. I didn't think much of the tape until I attended a lecture by Ivan at Harvard, and was pleasantly surprised when he used my recording as an example of his father's compositions.
Ivan Tcherepnin passed away in 1998, and his memorial service was attended by many in Paine Hall at Harvard. When Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin, Ivan's wife, was sorting through his music, she came across a copy of a score for Ivan's Fêtes - Variations on Happy Birthday and decided to give it to me. In early 2000, the Aurelius Ensemble, a music group I had founded at MIT, put together a concert of music by members of the Tcherepnin family, including a newly commissioned piece by Stefan (Ivan's son), in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Alexander's birth. It was on this occassion that I first performed Ivan's Fêtes. Ivan's grown-up daughter, Sarina, who was at the concert, came up to me afterwards and exclaimed that I played it better than her father could have imagined.
The variations on Happy Birthday, were probably written for Leon Kirchner, Ivan's former composition teacher. In the variations, the composer explores the gamut of musical styles from Baroque to Jazz, and the full range of the piano keyboard from the lowest note to the highest. All forms of the familiar Happy Birthday melody are employed — as-is, in fragments, inverted, in retrograde, in retrograde inversion, augmented, in stretto (in layers of the above), interleaved between the two hands, interspersed between the melodic lines. The composition also spares none when it comes to expression, the chorale-like calm declaration of the theme soon gives way to the quirky fugue on the retrograde inversion of a Happy Birthday fragment, and rhapsodic interludes. The whimsical gigue layers a remarkable number of combinations of the melodic transformations. At the apex of the composition, we arrive at the furious thumping of Happy Birthday at the lowest registers of the keyboard, that then dissolves into the music-box-like tinkling of Happy Birthday inverted on the uppermost keys on the piano. A walking bass leads into the jazzy last section, with accented notes outlining the profile of Happy Birthday. A grandiose organ-like cadenza heralds the end, which harks back to the chorale opening. The serene closing is interrupted by loud and clumsy chords in the wrong key — Ab major instead of C (a musical joke ... if one is not listening carefully, one is liable to clap at this point), before the composer gives the true cadence.
