Wayne Alpern : Modern Music Review

by Steven Miller

Wayne Alpern’s Modern Music presents itself as twenty miniatures for solo piano (Steven Beck, the interpreter), and on its surface, one hears a blend of Baroque, Romantic lyricism, jazz-inflected harmonies, and classical dance forms. Upon listening more closely, one can hear how Alpern’s modernism lives in the structuring of rhythm, in the choice of intervallic motion, and in the way he scaffolds tradition to support stylistic inclusion without dissolving coherence.

In other words: Alpern is a polystylist at work; he is a craftsperson of interval and pulse, placing himself in a lineage of classical form but remolding its internal logic for a 21st-century expressive balance.

From the first bars of “March,” Alpern signals that meter will never be the scaffolding in the background, but it will be a material he sculpts to form a sound that has groove in a classical voice. One can hear chord gestures reminiscent of Stravinsky in “March,” but what really gets the attention is how those chords articulate unexpected subdivisions, shifting weight against the beat to cleverly destabilize your foot’s instincts. In many pieces on Modern Music, the primary rhythmic interest is not extreme asymmetry but micro-displacement through accent shifts, syncopated figures, and dynamic variance around a stable pulse that has groove.

Consider “Raga,” the piece uses 10/8 grouped as 3+3+2+2, which already pushes against Western habitual duple/triple norms. But beyond that, Alpern layers subtle cross-accents so that the 3+3 opening feels stable, then the later 2+2 feels like a surprise pivot. That motion of ostensibly a fixed meter but experienced as tilting into a new balance is a recurring device elsewhere on the album.

In “Gigue,” Alpern writes a bright 6/8 dance, but he uses counterpoint and its various rhythmic interactions to regularly underscore a pattern that has gestures that allow the listener’s expectation to re-anchor in just how much groove is in the classical-based composition. What results is a rhythm that moves, that subtly elastic pulse that dance music is made of. This is not metric novelty, it’s the art of rhythmic dramaturgy.

When footfalls (in your mind) begin to expect resolution at bar-ends, Alpern will delay, reaccent, or mutate. In “Reverie”, for example, what seems a steady arpeggiated undercurrent is laced with micro-slips; Beck’s reading ensures that these slippages are audible but never forced. This gives the piece a kind of felt latency, getting the attention of one’s ear in ways that will entertain and surprise.

If rhythm is Alpern’s time canvas, his harmonic / interval work is his paintbrush. Across much of Modern Music, he negotiates a core dialectic of staying close to tonal/diatonic reference while injecting contemporary intervals and color tones. In “Prelude” and “Variations”, Alpern uses chord voicings that place extended tensions inside functional contexts. The listener hears a familiar sonority of progression but senses that inner voices are altered to give the music energy. That internal “bent note” is what gives the harmony its edge, and unanchors our expectations just long enough to surprise.

In “Partita,” the dance forms (allemande, courante, etc.) are present in gesture and rhythmic outline, but each dance phrase carries a modern harmonic tilt with modulations, bitonal pivots, and inner voice displacements that refuse total historicism. The result is part court dance, part harmonic groove.

“Fughetta” is especially enjoyable in the contrapuntal layers that Alpern threads in coloristic voice-leading. Alpern is gifted in bending the rational rules of genre in service of expressive hybridity. Even in “Novelette,” a smaller piece, the nimble phrasing and intervallic show how the harmonic core is structurally coherent and modern. Alpern’s grounding in tradition, Baroque, classical forms, counterpoint, and dance suites while weaving in popular idioms harmony.

Alpern describes his aim as synthesizing tradition and freedom. Modern Music is Alpern using tradition to light up potential shapes and paths that subtly move our preconceived notions of classical music. The genius is that modernism in solo piano composition need not come from radical breaks or abstraction, but from precision in rhythmic and intervallic design. Alpern’s craftsmanship animates it with calculated shifts in meter, accent, and harmonic coloring. The result is music that feels rooted in classical yet open to the pulses of jazz, popular gesture, and subtle surprise.