Works/Piano

In my motivic excursion on Rogers & Hart’s My Funny Valentine (for nowhere will you hear more than a remembrance of that familiar tune), I reflect on the memory of a love with its extremes of emotion—as seen in a scrapbook or an old movie. Unexpected harmonies make the melody’s familiar opening distant, but then quiet arpeggios begin the dance where the lovers first met and recognized their mutual attraction. A peaceful interlude is interrupted by raw open fifths and multimodal arpeggios of deep loss and hurt. Calm returns but is again interrupted—this time by sounds of violence—the emotional peak of an extended time of separation and pain.

A long fermata.

Then a distant memory of the melody returns, accompanied by gentle arpeggios, ending with a melancholy memory of that first dance.

Wharton’s Decorah Journal (or Small Town Journal) is a group of sketches for piano inspired by his hometown, Decorah, Iowa. The title of each movement refers to a family, an historic building, or an area. Goose Island Chase recalls a locale that still exists but no longer as an island. When Decorah was first settled, engineers built a water-powered mill and dug the necessary millrace. The resulting artificial island looked like a goose’s head. The ‘chase’ is the water rushing to power the waterwheel. (There is also a pun on the expression: “to go on a wild goose chase.”) The Weisers’ Waltz remembers a distinguished family and their mansion, which had a ballroom on its third floor – thus, the waltz. In the 1950’s, the house was torn down and replaced by a church parking lot. Waterstreet Drag refers to the main drag in town, Water Street. The housing subdivision called Minowa Heights brought forth the alliteration for Minowa Musette. Foxtrot on the Flat refers to another area of Decorah. Most of the town is hilly; the Flat, however, is flat. Well-respected citizens lived here in beautiful but less opulent houses than that of the Weisers’. Most of the houses on the flat were built in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, when the foxtrot was the hot, new dance craze. Mr. Porter’s Promenade recalls the Italianate home on Broadway of widely-traveled rock and butterfly collector Bert Porter and his wife Grace. Now a museum, it was the setting for the premier of Decorah Journal. Midnight Tango at Twin Springs refers to the park and waterhole where skinny dipping occasionally takes place. The Bear House Stomp is a doff of the hat to my parents’ house, built in the early 1900’s by Decorah merchant Ben Bear.