Indian Fantasy印第安幻想曲

by Rira Lim

Beginning in the nineteenth century, many scholars became interested in music that was removed from the immediate cultural space of cultivated Western art music, including not only music of preceding generations, but also vernacular and folk music. Various efforts and projects to preserve such music grew. Around this time, many composers of different nationalities became interested in collecting folk song from all around the world, and a number of outstanding 2 composers pursued their own original field work in folk song. Such composers, and arguably, early ethnomusicologists, included Ralph Vaughan Williams in England, Aaron Copland and Percy Grainger in America, Leoš Janáček in Czechoslovakia, and Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers not only collected and studied folk materials, but sought to incorporate it into their compositions, and even to organically generate folk material. Although he was not a direct part of this movement, Busoni was extremely interested in the folk music of North American Indians, and made use of it in several of his original compositions, such as the Indianische Fantasie (Indian Fantasy) and the two books of the Indianisches Tagebuch (Indian Diary). Busoni first became acquainted with Indian music through the work of Natalie Curtis, a former student of his and an American ethnomusicologist. Curtis wrote The Indian’s Book, first published in 1907, a resource that was a standard text on Indian music. According to Busoni’s letters to his wife, Busoni and Curtis met briefly in 1910 during Busoni’s American tour when the first performance of his Turandot was given in New York. On 21 March, 1910 from Columbus, Ohio, during one of his American tours, Busoni wrote: “Miss Curtis was formerly my pupil in harmony…She has devoted the whole of this year to the study of Red Indian songs and has brought a beautiful book out. She gave it to me ‘In remembrance of the first performance of Turandot in New York’.” In the following year, on 9 March, 1911, he wrote to his wife about his inclination for                     composing works using Indian motives: “I thought at first of putting one or two scenes into one act, with Red Indian ceremonies and actions (very simple) and to join them together with one of the usual ‘eternal’ stories: mother, son, bride, war, peace, without any subtleties.” In 1913, he began to work on composing the Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, Op. 44, dedicated to Natalie Curtis, then completed the score in 1915. Curtis heard the piece performed for the first time in 1915 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, with the composer himself at the piano. Curtis wrote "With the first bars of the orchestral introduction ...the walls melted away, and I was in the West, filled again with that awing sense of vastness, of solitude, of immensity." During the same period, he composed two other compositions based on Indian song, the Indian Diary Book I, for piano, and the Indian Diary Book II, for small orchestra, subtitled Gesang vom Feigen der Geister (“Song of the Spirit’s Dance”). Both works were published in 1916. This study compares Busoni’s two original piano compositions, the Indian Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, Op.44, and the Indian Diary Book I, to provide a clear understanding of the composer’s intention in creating two different versions from the same origin, with appropriate evaluation of the relationship between these compositions. Since the later work for solo piano is transformed  from the work for piano and orchestra, this research will also focus on how Busoni treats the change of character and instrumental relationship combination between the pieces. Structural and formal analysis will be the framework of the comparison of the two compositions. Although these two compositions are very closely connected to each other and worthy of research, little in the way of comparative analysis and critical research has been done. Moreover, in spite of their outstanding artistic achievement, they have still remained Busoni’s unknown works, and the performances of these pieces have rarely been heard. This research will advance knowledge of Busoni as a distinguished and creative composer of original piano music who truly understood the instrument and will encourage a more wide range of his original compositions to be performed in concerts.