Songs Without the Words

for solo piano

This is an enterprising collection of some of Sir Arnold Bax’s greatest songs, arranged by Italian pianist Ennio Caironi. The songs of Bax are hardly the best known portion of his œuvre at present, but this volume will be welcomed by pianists (and their audiences) wishing to explore them as solo piano arrangements and so to be beguiled by their extraordinary melodic invention and harmonic subtleties.

From the Introduction…

The corpus of works for voice and piano by Sir Arnold Bax remains, to this day, largely overlooked, despite comprising more than one hundred compositions produced over the span of four decades. Bax engaged with the art song form primarily during his formative and early professional years, and seemingly often regarded his songs as experimental workshops in which to refine musical ideas not yet fully crystallised. These ideas thus often functioned as preparatory material for larger instrumental works. This substantial and significant repertoire remains virtually unknown, even among ardent admirers of Bax’s œuvre. A number of songs remain unpublished, many others appear to be lost; recordings are few, and public performances exceedingly rare. The causes of such neglect can be ascribed to manifold reasons, including the considerable technical demands and often dense textures of the piano accompaniments, which can at times overpower the vocal line. However, the opportunity to offer piano arrangements of some of Bax’s most significant songs yields the chance to rediscover a repertoire unjustly overlooked by the wider public and to appreciate the generous inspiration that Bax infused into even his most intimate works.

The selection of songs for this volume was relatively straightforward. Ten works were chosen to represent nearly the full arc of Bax’s creative life from youth to maturity, and the songs are presented in chronological order of composition, from The White Peace of 1907 to Watching the Needleboats of 1932. This collection highlights a remarkable diversity of poetic and musical registers: there are lyrical and romantic songs (Youth); pieces imbued with melancholy (Far in a Western Brookland); songs of irony and bitterness (Carrey Clavel); others with a light, folk-like character (The Market Girl); and still others with a mystical tone (Eternity and Parting). Despite the wide variety of poetic sources and expressive moods, the musical imprint of Bax’s unmistakable voice and compositional style is clearly discernible in each piece, whether in its harmonic richness and complexity or in the distinctive evolution of his melodic lines.

Sample pages

(Click to enlarge)


	Composer	Title	Grade	Forces	Total duration
	Sir Arnold Bax arr. Ennio Caironi	Songs Without the Words for solo piano	7 to 8	Piano	30 mins
#	Composer	Movement		Forces	Duration
1	Sir Arnold Bax arr. Ennio Caironi	The White Peace		Piano	2½ mins
2		Parting			5½ mins
3		Far in a Western Brookland			4¼ mins
4		Youth			3 mins
5		When I Was One-and-Twenty			3¾ mins
6		The Market Girl			1½ mins
7		Eternity			3 mins
8		Carrey Clavel			2 mins
9		In the Morning			2¾ mins
10		Watching the Needleboats			1¾ mins