Charles Shadle - A Tale of My Native Land

Yun Chang March 24th Piano recital at Killian Hall
Piece written by Dr. Charles Shadle

Late in the spring of 2015 the gifted MIT student-pianist Yun Chang appeared at my office. It seems that he was taken with my Nocturne: On the River, recently performed by the MIT Symphony Orchestra. Did I have any pieces for solo piano, about 10 minutes long? I told him that I would check to see. But as I suspected, everything I had was either too long (a pair a big sonatas) or, frankly, too easy. So I decided to take the opportunity to write a substantial single movement work of some virtuosity for Yun. Completed in June, A Tale of My Native Land was the result.

The title of the work derives from the “Seven Tales of My Native Land”, the lost first collection of stories by the young Nathaniel Hawthorne. When contemplating composing this piece I thought about the great Romantic single movement pieces of Chopin and Liszt, of Mendelssohn and Schumann. I particularly liked the idea of a composition that was implicitly, but not explicitly narrative; where the “tale” was a musical one, even if the material occasionally might suggest extra-musical elements. In addition, a walk in the New Hampshire woods had me thinking about the nature of New England-ness, a quality I wanted the bring to the piece. Consequently, A Tale of My Native Land sometimes evokes fiddle-tune, folk-song, or Protestant hymnody. The final ingredient of the piece takes us back to Hawthorne, in that my Ballade seeks to duplicate some of that author’s sense of the uncanny. The supernatural, as part of the Puritan legacy of deep anxiety about the spiritual world, invariably informs Hawthorne’s work. Often it can be quite oppressive, quite dark. But sometimes in manifests in a wistful fancifulness that I find compelling and that I believe informs A Tale of My Native Land. Certainly it is less “Young Goodman Brown” and more “Feathertop”. I hope that like that animated scarecrow it lurches on its way, by turns giddy or melancholy, but always leaving a little enchantment in its wake.
- Charles Shadle