BAGATELLE

"Ann Silsbee’s Bagatelle is a beguiling bitonal mandala, a brief musical moment of content copied and superimposed in out-of-phase overlay." 

Silsbee composed the piano solo Bagatelle in Ithaca in 1963, two years after she graduated with her B.A. in Music from Radcliffe and several years before her graduate studies. In just over two pages of manuscript, she demonstrates a concise control of dissonant small-form modernism. Bartók’s influence is clearly felt—especially in the brief, lilting tune harmonized in minor sevenths halfway through—but she isn’t composing a knockoff “From the Diary of a Fly,” as the closely-textured, semi-tonal figures might suggest. A year before Terry Riley’s In C (1964) officially introduced pattern-based Minimalism to the world, Silsbee was composing short, undulating scalar patterns in quasi-canonic imitation, their organic unfolding interweaving adjacent notes in murmuring dissonance—black keys for the left hand, white for the right—protominimalism with a modernist touch. Silsbee’s piece evinces a shared attraction to the nascent Minimalist style on one hand, and to “traditional” binary- and sonata-forms on the other.

                -Richard Valitutto, Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards