released July 31, 2022

Carmen Staaf performed on a Fazioli piano. Recorded June 10, 2022, by Michael Perez-Cisneros, Big Orange Sheep, Brooklyn, NY. Mastered by Dave Darlington, Bass Hit Recording, New York, NY.

Liner notes by James Falzone

"A Mouse and 88 Keys"
Peter Kenagy’s Stuart Little suite for piano

"Many years ago, I went to bed one night in a railway sleeping car, and during the night I dreamed about a tiny boy who acted rather like a rat. That's how the story of Stuart Little got started.” ~ E.B. White

How does music without words tell a story? It is a question composers have struggled with for centuries as they try to convey extra-musical narratives through their works. The narrative may exist only in the abstract or in the mind of the composer, such as in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6, or it may be connected to an already existing storyline such as in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf or Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which are based on a folk tale and a poem, respectively. More contemporary examples exist in compositions of Duke Ellington or in the music of prog rock bands such as Genesis and Rush. No matter the origins of the extra-musical material, the inclination for composers to conjure images and stories through sound is a powerful aesthetic pull usually defined as “program” music. Composer and trumpeter Peter Kenagy enters this tradition with his charming and deftly crafted suite for solo piano, Stuart Little, which uses E.B. White’s classic children’s story by the same name as the inspiration and extra-musical narrative that underpins the music. Though Kenagy may not have conceived of his piano suite while sleeping on a train, his deep connection to E.B. White and Stuart Little make for truly compelling listening.

Described not so much as a story but as a series of vignettes detailing the daily activities of a remarkable boy who is “normal in every way except that he is only just over two inches tall and looks exactly like a mouse,” Stuart Little was first published in 1945. The book was somewhat of a surprise in White’s output considering his success as a writer and editor for The New Yorker and Harpers, not to mention his lasting contribution to academic writing as a co-author of Elements of Style, a volume nearly every high school writer has used as an aid. Yet his contributions to children’s literature in Stuart Little and, later, Charlotte’s Web, are White’s most lasting legacy. As Kenagy states: “His writing in the 30s and 40s is a window into the day-to-day art and politics of the times. He’s a great humorist in an American style that goes back to Mark Twain.”

Each vignette takes us through a different moment in Stuart’s life including run-ins with the family cat, romance with a castaway songbird named Margalo, one-off substitute teaching jobs, boat rides, and cross-country road adventures in a miniature, invisible car. Each moment is detailed by White in a matter-of-fact way that feels as much like fact reporting as the fantastical fiction that it is. “I read the book as a child and enjoyed it, but when reading it to my own children, I started to appreciate the lightness and dry sense of humor in it,” explains Kenagy. “The charming little vignettes tickle the imagination. There’s something musical, smart, and quick about his writing that just moves right along and I think that ties in with jazz as a mode of expression.”

Peter Kenagy is uniquely qualified to create a jazz piano suite based on White’s story. Leaving aside his personal connection to the books as a child and eventually a dad, it is Kenagy’s remarkable fluency in various styles of music that enable him to craft a work simultaneously entertaining, witty, and just plain swinging. Born and raised in Seattle and educated at New England Conservatory and the University of Illinois, where he obtained a doctorate in music, Kenagy is a prominent trumpet player, composer, and educator presently living in Boston. Releasing numerous critically acclaimed recordings and performing widely with his own ensembles, Kenagy is also a Professor at famed Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses in ear training and jazz history. All of this experience as a performer, composer, and educator converges in Kenagy’s Stuart Little suite, which could only emanate from the mind of someone versed in traditional classical forms, with a deep knowledge of jazz styles, and the wide-open ears and imagination necessary to tell the adventures of an intrepid boy/mouse through 88 keys.
“Peter has an encyclopedic knowledge of so much music, including late romantic, bebop, and post-bop lineages,” states pianist Carmen Staaf, who worked closely with Kenagy on initial sketches of the score and interprets it brilliantly on the recording. “He’s a great piano player himself, so he really knows how to write for the instrument. His voicings are perfect encapsulations of harmony with nothing extra, just direct expressions of sophisticated harmonic ideas.”

We only need to listen to the opening two minutes of Stuart Little to hear what Staaf is referring to: darting, complex rhythms that still manage to swing, melodies that we walk away singing, and chord sonorities that feel right at home in contemporary classical music or modern jazz. Like Stuart Little himself, who goes from “town to country” during the course of White’s story, Kenagy’s music moves seamlessly between a sophisticated, complex urbanism and a more expansive, pastoral soundscape. There is irony here in the parallels between Kenagy’s sojourn as an artist, growing up in the Pacific Northwest with time in both the Midwest and East Coast, and our boy/mouse protagonist, who leaves home in search of his lost love. “I’m a Westerner, so the East Coast is not native to me and sort of a fascination,” offers Kenagy in affinity with the story’s main character. “Like Stuart dreaming of going North, I’ve always dreamed of going East.”

At the heart of what makes this suite so compelling are the intriguing references to the history of jazz piano stylings, which prove to be a perfect sonic metaphor for the narrative structure of the story. “I believe that the playful character of Stuart can be captured through jazz: the ambiguity of his mouse-like appearance, the NYC setting, the expansive Northern setting, E.B. White’s era and the America of the mid-20th century. It’s not so much nostalgia, but a celebration of modernism that is found in jazz,” Kenagy explains.

Indeed, when asked to reveal the stylistic allusions found in the work as they relate to jazz piano players, Kenagy offers an astonishing list: Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Hank Jones, John Lewis, Bud Powell, Ran Blake, and Barry Harris. These references are not in mere passing, however, and the writing reveals a deep connection to the essence of these players and their harmonic styles. Carmen Staaf, whom Kenagy met in high school in Seattle, played with again as students at New England Conservatory, and has recorded and performed with in varying contexts ever since, executes all these influences with aplomb, channeling the history of jazz piano without ever losing her own voice. (Side note: Peter, Carmen, and I share a connection to pianist and long-time New England Conservatory faculty member Ran Blake. The ways Peter subtly incorporated Blake’s style, especially surprising bass lines and splashes of dissonant chords in the right hand, and Carmen’s effortless performance of these elements, are a real highlight of the suite for me.)

When we turn our attention from backstory to the music itself, the magnitude of Kenagy’s accomplishment grows. He has captured the essence of the story without ever falling into sentimentality or easy text painting. In lesser hands, we might hear “chase music” when Stuart is being chased by Snowball the house cat, or “traveling music” when Stuart is driving in his invisible car. But Kenagy never indulges in these easy grabs within a composer’s bag of tricks, instead gifting us with a distillation of the spirit of each vignette. “I plotted out the key events of the book that I wanted to represent, but I didn’t want the listener to have one specific interpretation or have to follow a script to understand the music. I never wanted that strict adherence to the story, but more of a fantasy on the themes.”

Examples of these musical fantasies abound in the suite, but two will suffice to reveal a hint of the inner beauty and logic of Kenagy’s writing.

A vignette Kenagy simply calls “The Cat” references several chapters in the original story and tells of an early morning encounter between Stuart and the cat Snowball, who is first found lounging in the morning sun “thinking about the days when he was just a kitten.” Stuart and Snowball eventually engage in a bit of territorial swagger trying to see who is more fit, with Stuart eventually finding himself caught, surprisingly, in a rolled up window shade. Snowball takes this moment to engage in a bit of subterfuge and alter the scene to seem as if Stuart has gone missing down a dangerous mouse hole, throwing the whole family into a prolonged tizzy as they search for him. Finally, Stuart is rescued by his older brother George who pulls down the window shade in which our hero is trapped. Finally rescued, Stuart explains away the incident with his usual nonchalance: “It was simply an accident that might happen to anyone.”

The way Kenagy captures these moods sonically is worth an examination. We first hear a melancholic, nostalgic sounding melody with a lilting chordal underpinning that travels through several key centers, not unlike Snowball’s memory of his days as a kitten. The music turns on a swinging dime and we’re off into what Kenagy indicates in the score as “exercise and heroics,”—Stuart and Snowball jockeying for territory—when a final unresolved rolled chord signals Stuart’s compromised position in the window shade. A return to the nostalgic theme heard earlier accompanies Snowball as he goes about his ruse, the music finally ending in Stuart’s rescue with another rolled chord, this time full of resolution, signaling the type of incident that “might happen to anyone.” What I love about this passage is Kenagy’s minimalist approach and what he leaves to our imaginations. These few minutes boil the mood of this moment in the story down to its essence, bringing out everything we need to understand about the relationship between Stuart and Snowball without ever devolving into melodrama. The two rolled chords act as bookends, one a question, the other an answer, offering us an example of program music at its finest.

Another wonderful moment to pause, listen, and wonder about, is what Kenagy indicates in the score as “Adventures on the Road.” At this part of the written text, Stuart has just purchased a fine set of clothes and has set off in pursuit of his love Margalo in a miniature invisible car, driving through Central Park and other New York City highlights. Kenagy’s aesthetic choice here is to give over much of the passage to improvisation, executed with brilliance by Staaf in the recording. Using the spontaneity of improvisation here is an effective gambit as Stuart navigates cross town traffic, all the while pining for his lost love and wondering about the future. It is the sense of the unforeseen that improvised music captures so profoundly and which Kenagy has put to such good use in this moment in the story. “I didn’t want the piano player to feel boxed in to my ideas and wanted them to be able to get back to the real sense of creativity in their own musicianship,” offers Kenagy about his use of improvisation in this vignette and many others in the suite. “The automobile scene especially relies on that sense of taking off into the wild blue yonder, and improvising seemed crucial there.”

“This is a piece that only Peter, with his unique musical experiences and studies, could have written,” offers the suite’s first interpreter, Carmen Staff. The question remains what the future of Kenagy’s Stuart Little suite will be: a recording to be listened to as entertainment, a soundtrack to a story that can be acted out by children and parents, a piano score that can enter the repertoire and be played by adventurous pianists in recitals. I would suggest all of the above. With such a deep understanding of E.B. White’s writing and the nuances of the original Stuart Little story, Kenagy’s composition offers a lasting work of programmatic music that will delight listeners and performers for decades to come.

James Falzone
Clarinetist and Composer
Dean and Professor of Music
Cornish College of the Arts
Seattle, WA