Piano-flute-oboe (PFO) trios are a distinctive orchestration for chamber music. The texture is relatively thin, which lends extra transparency and vulnerability to the sonic palette.
Paradoxically, the fact that it’s so difficult ever to achieve a formal understanding of conversation is what makes conversational analysis a worthy science, according to the Dutch linguist-sociologist Paul ten Have. Listening to Madeleine Dring's PFO trio, I am led to wonder whether linguists would find their task easier if they studied musical conversations in chamber music performance, instead of (or in addition to—) studying the spoken word. PFO trio is synonymous with clarity!
Representing a conversation as conforming to a closed set of rules—a deterministic pattern in which each ‘move’ is predictable and coherent—is notoriously inadequate and widely misses the mark. Instead, every conversational ‘move’ restores our sense of open-endedness and and indirection. Each conversational turn (re-)orients or references the preceding ones, but not uniformly so. There is no context-free understanding; each turn reveals the agency and autonomy of the current speaker(s). We discern the inter-subjectivity of the participants as each reorients himself/herself to the social action. The timbre and gestures of piano, flute, and oboe are so dramatically different that inter-subjectivity is an especially prominent feature—for performers as well as listeners. The ‘situatedness’ of each of the three voices is in general more direct, say, than in a string trio or a piano trio.
The genius of this PFO trio music is that the listener is generally unaware of the craftsmanship. When well done, the timbral and narrative balance between the voices achieves a spontaneity and lightness that don’t draw attention to the composer or to the performers unduly. Extroverted crispness and panache abound in well-written, well-performed PFO trios.
Madeleine Dring (1923-1977) exemplifies PFO trio form. Dring studied at the Royal College of Music, where her composition teachers included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, and Gordon Jacob. In 1947, she married Roger Lord, an oboist. They had a son in 1950. Insofar as family responsibilities precluded her undertaking large-scale works, most of Dring’s compositions are smaller pieces. Many other works in the PFO trio repertoire are also miniatures, ranging from 3 minutes to 10 minutes in length.
Madeleine Dring’s style is particularly conversational—idiomatically resembling the writing of Francis Poulenc and George Gershwin. Interestingly, she didn’t exert herself to make her voice-leading ‘easy’, ostensibly because she herself had perfect pitch and found few intervals ‘hard’. And this disparity—the fact that either the flute or the oboe part is endowed with superior intervallic sense and the other part is not—is a feature of some of her PFO trio; this feature characterizes some of the conversations that Dring’s PFO trio enacts. As such, it becomes clear that some parts are more autonomous than others. The inter-subjectivity of the voices is not rigorously symmetrical. The capabilities and endowments are no more ‘fair’ or ‘just’ than other aspects of real life are ever truly fair or just. We experience the vital honesty of that in the PFO trio literature. That realism is, in fact, a major part of its charm.
Here is a list of PFO trios. You can scroll through it in this panel, or you can download it as HTML file here. I come up with more than 80. But probably I have missed some—I only spent an afternoon compiling this at home. I have not plowed through a conservatory’s library, only Google and Secrest-Schmedes’s book.
There are surely some of these pieces that merit more frequent performance and recording. Such a relevant and approachable conversational idiom, the PFO trio is a form that’s light yet satisfying for audiences. The short durations of most of the PFO trio works enable construction of varied programs around diverse periods and attractive themes. In terms of PFO trio repertoire, Allégresse’s programs are excellent examples of what is possible and readily marketable.
- Allégresse Trio
- Annie Gnojek, flute
- Margaret Marco, oboe
- Ellen Bottorff, piano
[Annie holds a master’s degree from the University of Kansas. She is currently Adjunct Professor of Flute at Ottawa University and principal flutist of the Lawrence Chamber Orchestra. Margaret serves as co-principal oboe for the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra and performs regularly with the Kansas City Symphony, the Kansas City Lyric Opera, and the Kansas City Ballet Orchestra. She is Associate Professor of Oboe at K.U. A graduate of University of Missouri Kansas City Conservatory of Music, Ellen is currently interim Professor of Piano at the University of Kansas.]
- Allégresse Trio website
- Secrist-Schmedes B. Wind Chamber Music: Winds with Piano and Woodwind Quintets. Scarecrow, 1996.
- Paul ten Have website
- Ethno/CA website
- International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS)
- DSM. Hargis: Music to Live For, Aided and Abetted by Gestures. CMT blog, 23-JUN-2007.
- DSM. Playful Illocutionary Acts in E-Flat. CMT blog, 26-OCT-2006.
- Drew P, Heritage J, eds. Conversation Analysis. Sage, 2006.
- ten Have P. Doing Conversation Analysis. Sage, 2007.
- Hester S, Francis D, eds. Orders of Ordinary Action: Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Ashgage, 2007.
- Johnstone B. Discourse Analysis. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
- Schlegloff E. Sequence Organization in Interaction: Volume 1: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge Univ, 2007.
- Turnbull W. Language in Action: Psychological Models of Conversation. Psychology Press, 2003.
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