An Analysis — Thoughts on Barber's Excursions, Op.20 No.1

Recently, I’ve been expanding my repertoire into the 20th century with some good ditties by the American neo-Romantic composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981).

Excursions, Op.20, is a set of four pieces of American style written for piano. Jeanne Behrend, an accomplished American pianist and friend of Barber’s, asked the composer to write an involved piano work that would “would be appropriate to perform on one of her programs of American music.”¹ So along came Excursions in 1942.

Excursions opens with the following note from the composer:

These are ‘Excursions’ in small classical forms into regional American idioms. Their rhythmic characteristics, as well as their source in folk material and their scoring, reminiscent of local instruments are easily recognized.

You should have a listen so the following ramble makes some sense…

Analysis

There has been some analysis done on these pieces, and I have learned from others’ studies, but I think I’ve come on an original discovery relating to the first movement.

But first, here’s some brief(ish) thoughts on the piece. If you look back at the above quote, Barber almost makes it too easy on us to get started on the analysis. He gives us the following things to look for:

• A small classical form
• Regional American idioms

In a 1957 dissertation, Russell Friedewald identifies the classical form as a five-part rondo, using the pitch collections of the (incessant) left-hand ostinato to identify formal sections.² It gets way cooler, though, than rondo form… (Which, by the way, was popularized in France by Jean-Baptiste Lully in the 17th century. That’s a pretty old form!)

Boogie-Woogie

In his 1954 book on Samuel Barber, Nathan Broder identifies the first movement (which bears the emotive title of I. Un poco allegro) as a boogie-woogie.³ According to Collins English Dictionary, a boogie-woogie is “a blues-based style of jazz piano playing in which insistently repeated bass figures employing eighth notes accompany melodic variations in the treble.”

The boogie-woogie was very popular in the early and middle parts of the 20th century, but there are oral history records of the boogie-woogie being played in Texas as early as the 1870’s.

Here’s an old recording of Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie, recorded in 1928. The song’s lyrics also have directions to the boogie-woogie dance. (“Boot Scootin’ Boogie”, anyone?)

I’ve also heard the boogie-woogie called “eight to the bar music,” because of bass pattern of eight eighth notes per measure (or bar).

Anyways, we’ve also got a highly improvisatory right-hand. There’s no real sing-able melody in the movement. Each section has it’s own melodic ideas, but sometimes those ideas bleed into or find their way into other sections.

Blues Form

Boogie-woogies are usually in 12-bar blues form, and blues harmonic progression is some variant of I-IV-I-V-I. So it’s unsurprising that Barber would use this chord progression to provide the bass for each section of the “rondo”. But wait—there’s more!

This first “excursion” is actually proportionate to 12-bar blues. If you scale the blue up nine times (not play the form nine times, but actually “enlarge” it), you find that the measure counts of each section map almost perfectly onto the 12-bar structure with an added coda.

Blue Notes

As for another American idom that you can find in this movment, Barber employs extensive use of blue notes.

These are notes from the blues tradition that are sounded slightly lower than expected (this usually translates to a half-step lower on piano because, well, piano). Common blue notes are the lowered third, fifth, and seventh.

Barber adds to these with lowered ninths and the occasional 13th. Some of the far-out sounding sonorities (mms. 30, 38, 46, and 52 come to mind specifically; the downbeat of mm. 52 is a GREAT crunch) are easily (and only) explained as blue notes.

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This first movement of Barber’s Excursions is great. I thought it was kind of…weird when I first heard it, but the more I sit with it the more it grows on me—the more it grows me. It’s a great example of how a neo-Romantic composer joins the old (a five-part rondo) with contemporary idioms and dissonances.

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