tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64644831924734647432024-03-13T07:06:51.627-04:00Unsung SymphoniesA blog dedicated to exposing and exploring lesser-known symphonies.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-79797065159656804112011-10-28T16:15:00.034-04:002013-01-24T11:28:13.617-05:00In Memory of James Yannatos: Symphony No. 5, "Son et Lumière"<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tukwNwPWCXs/TqsxDuF-DlI/AAAAAAAAIRY/md7GdrxYYOk/s1600/11-yannatos.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5668678495958339154" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tukwNwPWCXs/TqsxDuF-DlI/AAAAAAAAIRY/md7GdrxYYOk/s200/11-yannatos.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 133px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 200px;" /></a><br />
Last week, we got the sad news that James Yannatos — an accomplished composer and the longtime conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra — died at the age of 82.<br />
<br />
During my first few years as a graduate student in Harvard's Music Department, and until he retired in 2009, Dr. Y was a ubiquitous presence around the music building. I only got to interact directly with him through a few brief conversations and a quick e-mail exchange about Nadia Boulanger (who was one of his teachers and is a subject of my own research). But his students raved about him — they were lucky to have had such a thoughtful, generous, and musically inspiring mentor. (See <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/10/25/obituary-yannatos-dead/">the <span style="font-style: italic;">Harvard Crimson</span> obit</a> for a sense of the impact his whopping 45-year tenure had on them.)<br />
<br />
Although the Harvard community mainly knew Dr. Y as a conductor, he also left behind an impressive body of work as a composer — including several symphonies that we're fortunate enough to have on recordings with the man himself conducting the HRO in Harvard's Sanders Theatre. Today we'll focus on his <span style="font-weight: bold;">Symphony No. 5, "Sons et Lumière"</span> (1991), whose name, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.youtube.com">as he said</a>, comes from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_et_lumi%C3%A8re_(show)">sound and light shows</a> he would have witnessed in France — one of his many stops as a student before landing at Harvard.<br />
<br />
These nighttime extravaganzas feature stimulating light displays on the fronts of buildings, with accompanying sounds, as a way of drawing attention to structures' histories. (Here's a neat example of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z1xqjFRhF0">Notre Dame</a> getting the son et lumière treatment.) If Yannatos' "Son et Lumière" is a symphonic manifestation of a sound and light show, then the edifice it's meant to memorialize is nothing less than the globe itself, with its three movements entitled "Europe," "Asia Minor-Asia," and "Africa." As Yannatos himself wrote (according to <a href="http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=55048">these program notes</a>), "The title alludes to past as well as to present events in which the political face of Europe and Africa is changing." <br />
<br />
Of course, the early '90s were a heady time for the Western world, one in which many celebrated the end of the Cold War as well as a new image — however premature and, ultimately, naive — of a more unified global community. In other words, a perfect subject for a sound and light show.<br />
<br />
Let's say that the "light" part of Yannatos' sound and light show comes from the orchestration — a musical parameter long understood and discussed in terms of visual perception. The orchestration in the opening <a href="http://www.dramonline.org/albums/yannatos-wyner-fussell/notes">has even been called</a> a "collage of bright instrumental textures." A few things make it "bright": the emphasis on higher ranges, especially the soaring violins and solo trumpet ; creative percussion touches, like bells; and the overall clarity of the different parts and sections. Here's a segment from the opening:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Yannatos1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<br />
If Yannatos' creative combinations of glistening timbres reflects the "light" part of the sound and light show, the "sound" part comes, perhaps, from the melding of snippets of national anthems and folk tunes (see <a href="http://www.dramonline.org/albums/yannatos-wyner-fussell/notes">here</a> for a more detailed description). They're easy to miss because they're not all well known and because Yannatos masks them well — the regular shifts in instrumental combinations sometimes draw attention away from the pitches themselves. But appreciating the celebratory flavor of the work doesn't depend on recognizing the melodies. Here, in the first movement, some of you will recognize this sweeping, even plaintive reformulation of the Polish national anthem (listen <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M9wrLN_dV0">here</a> if you need a refresher).<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Yannatos2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<br />
Since we're talking about a sound and light show, it makes sense that Yannatos ends where he began, with the same harp glissandi and tense, quick alternation of notes in the strings we started with. That's because despite all the spinning of lights and swirling sounds, we're still recognizing one stationary object — here, the earth. (Yes, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Cooper">Sheldon Cooper</a>, we know that the earth actually moves.) The movements' geopolitical titles suggest a journey, but the world is still the world, just as Notre Dame is still Notre Dame.<br />
<br />
Yannatos <a href="http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=55048">also offered</a> an alternative, more general interpretation — that his title "refers to vibrations and waves that move through real time and space in the form of sound and interplay between the various levels of musical sound and meaning, referring to our physical world as we live it, our sensory world as we see, hear and feel it, and our spiritual world as we attempt to comprehend it." Indeed, there's something visceral and physical about the way in which energy seems to ebb, flow, now suddenly build, and now quickly dissipate in the work. And this is hard for a building to express, no matter how much sound and light you add to it. Take the last minute of the first movement, where a triumphant chorale gives way to a calmer passage that picks up steam only to fade out into the distance:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Yannatos3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<br />
The examples here have come only from the first movement, so you'll have to explore Asia and Africa on your own — or, as we at <span style="font-style: italic;">Unsung Symphonies</span> hope, courtesy of some local orchestra finding a way to recognize Dr. Y's contribution to the Harvard Community, the Boston area, and the musical world at large (a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert in his memory of this or another work, perhaps?). <br />
<br />
And it'll be interesting to see what kinds of tributes his students come up with. Here's one idea, hard to execute and maybe a little over-the-top: a <span style="font-style: italic;">son et lumière</span> outside Harvard's Memorial Hall (home of Sanders Theatre), with Dr. Y's Symphony No. 5 as the soundtrack.<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div>Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-86581453323351834732011-10-19T17:36:00.007-04:002013-01-25T09:32:20.233-05:00Innocuous as a Film Score: Williams' Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aoau9N39-c0/Tp9CdXc4mQI/AAAAAAAACow/ht0GSePkupA/s1600/NightBus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aoau9N39-c0/Tp9CdXc4mQI/AAAAAAAACow/ht0GSePkupA/s1600/NightBus.jpg" /></a>On October 25th, roughly two months before the movie is released in American theaters, John Williams' soundtrack for Steven Spielberg's <i>The Adventures of Tintin</i> will hit European shelves--thus ending a three year score drought from the 79 year old composer and sending starved aficionados into a frenzy. Short clips from the score have been steadily appearing on the internet, and one in particular--track 1 "The Adventures of Tintin," set to accompany the film's stylized main credits--quickly caught my attention. (Listen to sneak-peak <a href="http://www.cinematicsound.net/?p=1441">here</a>). Scored for chamber forces (clarinets and saxes, accordion, upright bass, harpsichord, muted brass, drum-set) and composed in a sprightly quasi-jazz idiom, it is sprinkled with synchronized fragments of themes and a walking bass through-line. Though vastly unlike the boisterous style Williams is best known for, it is an immediately familiar sound to anyone familiar with certain cues from <i>Catch Me If You Can</i> and <i>Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban</i>, particularly the manic "Knight Bus" cue from the latter (listen <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP_uoA4j8Kw">here</a>).<br />
<br />
Where does this hyperventilating style spring from? The answer lies in a concert work Williams composed in 1968, his <i><b>Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion</b></i>. The piece is worth examining not only for its place in Williams' oeuvre, but the way in which it was part of an important development in American music mid 20th century -- the birth and ascendancy of the modern wind ensemble, a creature we have already encountered in <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/10/no-strings-attached-gianninis-third-for.html">Giannini's 3rd Symphony</a>.<br />
<br />
The genesis of John Towner Williams (1932-) as today's preeminent film composer was surprisingly eclectic; after a stint arranging for the US Airforce band during the Korean War, Williams went on to study classical piano at Julliard while playing jazz piano in nightclubs. He made the fateful hop to the West Coast in the following year, studying composition at UCLA and playing piano for film studio orchestras. He would progressively graduate to arranging, then composing TV and film scores. Williams, of course, was not (and still is not) primarily known for his concert music, but over the course of his six decade career he has produced an impressive body of "art music," mostly for large orchestra. This includes 11 fine concerti, the most recent of which (oboe) premiered this spring with the Boston Pops, and two symphonic works.<b>[1] </b><br />
<br />
The second of these symphonic efforts<b>[2] </b>, the <i>Sinfonietta</i>, was written free of a commission, but was picked up by the Eastman Wind Ensemble for performance in 1970, under the baton of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Hunsberger">Donald Hunsberger</a>. Hunsberger inherited the position of conducting the EWE from its founder, Frederick Fennell, who essentially invented our modern notion of the wind ensemble as distinct from the military band. In the EWE, the obligatory doublings and arrangements common in earlier music for winds were replaced with single performers per part, an emphasis on extended technique, and original commissions from leading art music composers.<b>[3] </b>Hunsberger continued Fennell's legacy, particularly by issuing a series of printed scores with MCA Music and starting a recording series with the same label of new wind works with the EWE. The one single recording of the <i>Sinfonietta</i>'s was thanks to Hunsberger's MCA series, placed on an 1972 LP where it was paired with Penderecki's <i>Pittsburgh Overture</i> and Mayazumi's <i>Music with Sculpture</i>. The recording, though re-issued in <a href="http://www.jw-collection.de/classical/sinfonietta.htm">Japan in the late 90s</a>, is now virtually unobtainable, and the clips I present below are from an admittedly low-quality bootleg.<b>[4]</b><br />
<br />
The <i>Sinfonietta </i>is a short but demanding work. Williams' early concert style can best be described as "dissonant," and here we find almost nothing of the catchy themes or rich harmonies that typify the composer's more public sonic persona. Instead, we get unvarnished atonality, couched not even in the triadic deformations and octatonic scales of his later aggressive concert works. The title "Sinfonietta" would seem to entail a smaller duration and scale than a full blown symphony (it is a descriptor adopted by many 20th century composers, most notably Janacek and Prokofiev), though it also serves as an escape clause from the rigor and importance ascribed to its parent genre. Williams' <i>Sinfonietta </i>is short--but hardly unprecedentedly so--hosting 3 movements instead of the usual four and lasting just short of 17 minutes.<br />
<br />
Critics were of mixed opinion on whether Williams lived up, or down, to the diminutive title. One reviewer for <i>High Fidelity Musical</i> America claimed it "is too modestly titled; it is a real symphony in size and scope -- rather Hindemithian, but full of life and juice on its own."<b>[5]</b> A critic for <i>Gramophone</i> magazine was more mixed in praise, calling it "straightforward" and "well laid out," and that "there are some nice ideas, and some banal ones, but only in the first movement are they clinched by the overall form they give rise to."<b>[6]</b> The <i>Gramophone </i>critic shared with a less kind reviewer from <i>The Music Journal</i> a certain anxiety with Williams' status as jazz and film composer rather than classical artist: "Competently scored, appropriately laced with <i>modernisms</i>, it proceeds as innocuously as a film score--a medium, incidentally, at which Mr. Williams is said to excel."<b>[7]</b><br />
<b><br />
</b><br />
That last review smacks of irony in more ways than need to be tackled here. The <i>Sinfonietta </i>may be many things, but innocuous it certainly is not--and its vast bulk is far too strident to work as effective underscore. The opening movement is motivated largely by the clash of two loud, querulous themes. The first consists of widely spaced, homophonically moving chords for woodwinds, slowly ascending by semitone (in the first appearance, mm. 1-9, that upwards progress is deceptively small, a minor third from G5 to B5). The second theme is introduced at m. 27, something akin to a fugue subject, although it is not privy to a standard fugue exposition (entries are loosely on A, B, Eb, and C). There is a whiff of something cinematically familiar to this theme, perhaps the "Conversation" from <i>Close Encounters</i>, but by and large it is more <i>Miraculous Mandarin</i> than friendly alien.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RFboAKqLiDE/Tp8mK5nb6GI/AAAAAAAACoo/BGp-BoP5dCU/s1600/Fugue+Theme.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="45" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RFboAKqLiDE/Tp8mK5nb6GI/AAAAAAAACoo/BGp-BoP5dCU/s400/Fugue+Theme.bmp" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">First Four Measures of Second Subject, <i>Sinfonietta </i>Mvt. 1 </td></tr>
</tbody></table>The two themes contrapuntally collide for the first time at m. 56, and as soon as the brass takes up the second melody, a stretto quickly makes the already dense texture even more hazardous to navigate aurally. There is no doubt that Williams is capable of wringing a big "orchestral" sound from the wind ensemble at moments like this (both themes join at 0:25)<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Sinfonietta1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<br />
The first movement's middle section is more sparsely orchestrated, with small motivic cells being traded between instruments in a manner similar to early attempts at "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klangfarbenmelodie">Klangfarbenmelodie.</a>" However, these independent ideas begin to coalesce into firmer lines in 8ves. Once amassed, the woodwinds once again confront the stern fugue theme, now barely able to resist buckling under the pressure of the low brass. A final pronouncement of the initial homophonic theme brings the movement to an arch-like conclusion, only to disintegrate with an eerie sustained wind chord at its close. (for the truly curious, a 6z-16, which contains two semitone clusters a fifth apart).<br />
<br />
The <i>Sinfonietta</i>'s slow second movement is a procession of sorts, with quiet and steady pulse from timpani and pitched percussion undergirding its duration. The first 24 measures feature a dissonant conversation between three oboes, with (once again extremely loose) fugal introductions for all three. This yields to a lushly scored chord constructed mostly out of sus2 dyads, a jazz-cum-Ligeti sonority of the sort Williams would later claim was inspired by the ensemble scoring of jazz great Claude Thornhill. This passage is comparatively short-lived, however, and soon the drive of the opening procession returns with a vengeance, cresting with a gigantic climax chord similar to the culmination of the fourth of Webern's <i>6 Pieces for Orchestra</i>. Here is the tail end of the oboe trio, leading into the rumination on that jazz chord.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Sinfonietta2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<br />
And so we arrive at the final "Allegro Molto" movement -- and it is here we discover the original source for the "Knight Bus" style introduced at the beginning. Where a jazz mindset may have provided one or two complex chords in previous movements, here it dominates; a sense of rhapsodic group improvisation pervades, and represents the first of several real contributions Williams would make to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_stream">Third Stream jazz</a>: a style invented by Gunther Schuller that attempted to blend classical forces and forms with jazz sensibilities.[<b>8</b>]<br />
<br />
Following a cacophonous opening, Williams thins the texture down to percussion, solo winds, and a very busy contrabass part. Playing solo or with their 2 other basses, the perfomer runs through a constant stream of 8th notes roving in scalar figurations -- an atonal walking bass, in other words. The material placed above this motor rhythm ranges from quirky to ominous. One can easily discern the seeds for various special effects of the "Knight Bus" cue here, from the off-kilter piano/vibes melody presented in major ninths to the car-horn imitations.[<b>9</b>] A recollection of that noisy opening "restarts" the walking bass, which collapses under the pressure of heavier brass lines, and it is not long before the whole movement slams into a wall of a pyramid chord and goes silent. Since, short of convincing an orchestra to play the whole piece, it is unlikely you can hear this work independently, here is the entire last movement.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Sinfonietta3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<br />
Having lain dormant for decades, this final movement of the <i>Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion</i> served as a fount for some of the most memorable <i>movie music</i> of the last decade. While it seems unlikely Williams will ever return to the genre of the symphony again, we should take comfort in knowing that in film music--and indeed in all music--no good idea, however obscure, ever lacks for a creative application in some surprising form.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: right;">---Frank Lehman</div>---------------<br />
<b>1</b>.I<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">n this way Williams is part of the same tradition of film composers contributing to the concert hall as Korngold, Rózsa, Previn, and Herrmann, although none of his concert works directly </span>utilize<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> music from his film scores (w</span>ith one exception, his Elegy for Cello and Orchestra.). <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Williams routinely downplays the importance of these pieces, claiming they are </span>exercises of personal compositional growth and/or gracious "offerings" to performers with whom he has established a personal relationship; nevertheless, several are works of substance and deserve to be evaluated as "serious" contributions to orchestral literature.<br />
<b>2.</b> His first symphony (1966), written at the prodding of his then mentor Bernard Herrmann, was premiered in America and then Europe, both times under the baton of his friend Andre Previn, in 1968 and 72 respectively. Williams, unsatisfied with the proportions of the piece, reworked it in the 1980s, but a performance of the revised symphony never materialized despited being programmed in 1987.<br />
<b>3. </b>A terrific source for information on the development of the American wind ensemble is the volume <i>The Wind Ensemble and its Repertoire</i>, edited by Frank J. Cippola and Donald Hunsberger himself.<br />
<div><b>4. </b> Williams was to benefit twice more from his association with the EWE and Hunsberger. First with a commission to celebrate the school's 50th Anniversary that became his <i>Nostalgic Jazz Odyssey</i> (1971-72) and premiered alongside new works by Howard Hanson. The second was an all-Williams Eastman Philharmonia concert in 2001 <a href="http://www.esm.rochester.edu/news/2001/04/188/">initiated by Hunsberger</a>.</div><div><b>5.</b> <i>High Fidelity Musical America</i>, Vol. 22/1, 1972.</div><div><b>6. </b><i>Gramophone</i>, Vol. 50/1, 1972.</div><div><b>7. </b><i>The Music Journal,</i> Vol. 30, 1972.</div><div><b>8. </b>An excellent treatment of Williams' links to that style can be found in Greg Akkerman's 2004 dissertation, "An Original Composition in a Postmodern Confulent Style for Orchestra and An Analysis of Escapades for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra by John Williams." </div><div><b>9. </b>Even a respite at measure 67 (1:47) seems to have a correlate in a portion of the "Bus" cue where the bus interior squeezes down to fit through narrow spaces!</div><div><br />
</div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-44319318677069724202011-09-29T17:54:00.005-04:002013-01-25T09:37:24.314-05:00The Basque Mozart Effect: Arriaga's First (and Only) Symphony<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5HuKxm3LSl8/ToTnuW_9raI/AAAAAAAACio/pHui-IynbiA/s1600/ArriagaFlag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5HuKxm3LSl8/ToTnuW_9raI/AAAAAAAACio/pHui-IynbiA/s320/ArriagaFlag.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>For some of the composers we've covered here, it is truly baffling that they aren't better known. These are the symphonists whose works are accessible, profound, perhaps even popular at the time of their premieres, but for some whim of concert programming, didn't quite make it into the canon.<br />
<br />
Then there are those for whom obscurity--however undeserved--is not a surprise. Such is the case with the Basque composer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Cris%C3%B3stomo_Arriaga">Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga</a> (1806-1826), whose marginal status today is the result of a convergence of sorry circumstances: a brief life, a small output, and a musically non-mainstream nationality.<br />
<br />
Arriaga's composing career was stunted because of his incredibly short lifespan. He died from tuberculosis 10 days before reaching his 20th birthday, although his teacher, the eminent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Joseph_F%C3%A9tis">François-Joseph Fétis</a>, held that Arriaga's work ethic led him to counterpoint-exercise himself to death.[1] Arriaga developed into an extraordinary musical prodigy at the prodding of his organist father. At thirteen he penned his one and only opera, with an in-vogue Turkish abduction plot, <i>Los Esclavos Felices</i> (The Happy Slaves). Yet he was so shy that at its premiere in his hometown of Bilbao, he hid away until tremendous applause at its conclusion drew him out. He moved to Paris at age 15 to study at the Paris Conservatoire. His truncated tenure was highly productive, for what it's worth. He wrote arias, fugues, a cantata and Stabat Mater, three string quartets--works that stunned Fétis as well as the extremely difficult-to please head professor Luigi Cherubini. And a single Symphony in D.<br />
<br />
After his death, Arriaga's relatives promoted an image of Arriaga as the "Spanish Mozart" (or indeed, given his birthplace in <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Bilbao&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0xd4e4e2b66180ea9:0x404f58273cb9ed0,Bilbao,+Spain&gl=us&ei=GOyEToLVHIjt0gHVuoEO&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CDwQ8gEwAA">Bilbao</a>, the "Basque Mozart" for members of Basque nationalist movements). The comparison is not just apt, it's spooky. Arriaga was born exactly 50 years (to the hour!) after the birth of W. A. Mozart. Like his predecessor/past-soul incarnation, Arriaga wrote in a mostly Viennese classical style, which was still the dominant popular and academic idiom of his day. He had a remarkable melodic verve and mastery of counterpoint, but died before these skills solidified into something truly revolutionary. Perhaps his failure to even glance the surface of the canon owes to the lack of overt "Spanishisms" in his music. Spain since Domenico Scarlatti had more or less slipped off the radar of mainstream European concert composition, and despite his promise, Arriaga neither established a national school of Spanish music at home, nor did he introduce a curious "ethnic" flavor that would have entranced central European audiences. No castanets, no <i>jota </i>rhythms. Though a few commentators have discerned vague "Latin flavor" in his melodic writing, Arriaga was a cosmopolitan composer at heart rather than a purveyor of local color. <br />
<br />
The Symphony in D was written during Arriaga's time at the Conservatoire, and was probably performed there once. (At least the composer would have been able to hear his orchestral masterpiece, provided he wasn't still so shy to avoid the premiere.) It is a smoothly conceived and executed work, displaying more than just facility, but a real fluency with Classical symphonic form. The first movement is a churning allegro in D-minor, but it starts off with a lengthy slow introduction in the parallel key of D-major.[2] Things pick up with the entrance of the movement's<i> Sturm-und-Drang</i> exposition, full of dissonant thunderclaps and angsty string palpitations. Especially skillful is the motivic consistency; parts of the main theme and its transition are incorporated into the second subject in the relative major F. Here is a fairly substantial portion of the expo, leading halfway through the second theme. Listen for the 4 eighth-note rhythmic motif ba-ba-ba-BUM, where that last BUM always lands on a note much lower than the first.<br />
<br />
[All excerpts come from the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Symphonies-Arriaga/dp/B000RLRB7W">Concerto Koln Cappricio recording</a>]<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Arriaga1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span></div>The symphony's slow second movement is based around a pair of unhurried themes framed once again within a sonata structure. The second of these is particularly beautiful, a lyrical melody one might easily mistake for Mozart (on a good day). Next up, a minuet+trio movement (no shock there), although the minuet is so jagged and full of tutti-alternating-with-concertino scoring that whatever gentility the dance might originally have boasted is surely purged here. The cheeky syncopation of the opening, combined with the extreme economy of melodic materials (scarcely more than arpeggios in 2-voice imitation) leaves a distinct and welcome Haydnesque taste.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Arriaga2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Arriaga leaves the most impressive display of his burgeoning compositional talent to the last movement's <i>Allegro con moto</i>, where we are returned to the tempestuous mood of the opening. True, the throbbing accompaniment and troubled but energetic theme are heavily reminiscent of Mozart's 40th Symphony. But perhaps the commentator Alan Pedigo isn't totally off-base in claiming that the movement is "flavored with variations of the rhyhtm and melody of the Fandango and Andalucia."[3] The off-beat chords in the woodwinds anticipate more violent bursts when the first theme concludes and heads into the second theme area. We have, then, another rather dangerous dance.[4]<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Arriaga3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The development is short but in its way substantial, and at one point just happens to launch into a fuguetto based on the second subject. Where lapsing effortlessly and unexpectedly into fugue was a mark of Beethoven's late style, for young Arriaga it seems motivated by a combination of showing-off and free wheeling joy in counterpoint that Fetis so admired.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Arriaga4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The modified transition section of the recapitulation is the most remarkable portion of the symphony. To understand what's happening here, we need to return to the exposition, and inspect the way Arriaga gets from the D-minor of the first subject to F-major of the second. The strategy there is already a little odd, as it involves a passage that very quickly takes us to a chromatic destination (C-minor) as part of a sequence falling in major seconds. The ultimate goal is the pitch Bb, which acts as the seventh of a downward arpeggiating C-dominant for F-major.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Arriaga5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The question Arriaga must have posed himself is "how do I change this transition in the recap so that I end up *back* in D?" His answer is to re-position that chromatic event so that it affects A rather than the tonic D. The result is a shocking motion from A-major to Ab-major. True, that latter chord is transitional in character, leading to further semitonal droops all the way to Gb (bIV?!). But it remains an astonishingly bold musical shift to the single most remote key out there (Ab in the key of D is...bV?). The surprises continue, when Gb is reinterpreted as F# and climbs *back up* to Ab (now heard as G#), which settles on A major as the proper dominant that clinches theme number two.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Arriaga6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
For the analysis-oriented of you, here is a little reduction of the process as it occurs in both sections, lined up to show the similarities and divergences in strategy.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gR0RCFtmRf4/TopP8FCOBKI/AAAAAAAACkE/H4O79_e6v1w/s1600/Arriaga.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="273" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gR0RCFtmRf4/TopP8FCOBKI/AAAAAAAACkE/H4O79_e6v1w/s400/Arriaga.bmp" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Harmonic Reduction of Transition in Exposition and Recap of Arriaga Symphony in D, Mvt. 4</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Arriaga's symphony, despite these dazzling flourishes, is ultimately a rather conventional animal. Yet we must remember it was written while he was still a composer in training. Indeed, if his life were not cut so short, Juan Arriaga may well have become one of continental Europe's most widely <i>sung</i> symphonists.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: right;">---Frank Lehman</div><br />
[1]. Recounted in Barbara Rosen's <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=lqg-SWeaMtQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=arriaga+forgotten&hl=en&ei=sO6ETubxIIHG0AGJo-DPDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Arriaga, the Forgotten Genius: The Short Life of a Basque Composer.</a></i> (17-18). Rosen's slim volume is an invaluable source for information on Arriaga, not just biographical, but with regard to his place in music history and the gradual attempts to revive his music.<br />
[2]. Frankly, I feel the intro is the weakest part of the work; Arriaga basically lifts his beginning from the slow opening of Beethoven's 2nd symphony (by accident or more likely, star-struck imitation, I'd wager).<br />
[3]. Cited in Rosen, 50.<br />
[4]. That transition is achieved in part through a hearty "three-blind mice" figure for low strings that Rosen hears as a distant premonintion of Dvorak's 9th symphony, 4th mvt-- and it's hard not to hear it that way once attuned. (Rosen, ibid)Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-14036617142858665342011-08-16T22:35:00.000-04:002013-01-25T09:45:48.405-05:00Milhaud's Symphony No. 1: "Choose Your Own Subtitle"<div style="text-align: left;"><br />
Unsung Symphonies is happy to welcome <a href="http://harvard.academia.edu/LouisEpstein">Louis Epstein</a>, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Harvard University. Louis is writing a dissertation on funding for music composition in interwar France and has been promising to redress our shameful lack of Gallic symphonies over here for quite some time. It's worth the wait, as Louis's comprehensive take on Milhaud's First Symphony speaks to many of the problems at stake in 20th Century symphony composition (and reception) that we're constantly negotiating here at our blog!<br />
<hr /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7QreK_LAEW0/Tkr3dTFohNI/AAAAAAAACaQ/7JhdjIKvHcw/s1600/Milhaud.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7QreK_LAEW0/Tkr3dTFohNI/AAAAAAAACaQ/7JhdjIKvHcw/s320/Milhaud.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="253" /></a></div><br />
Legion are the symphonies whose legacies depend, in part, on epic and provocative subtitles: “Farewell,” “Eroica,” “Titan,” "<a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/10/weigls-sixth-apocalyptic_25.html">Apocalyptic</a>" to name but a few. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Milhaud">Darius Milhaud</a>’s <b>Symphony No. 1</b> bears no such subtitle – one possible reason for its relative obscurity to date – but I hope to change that now. As I reinvent the historiographical legacy of Symphony No. 1, I’ll audition three possible subtitles, each one more epic and provocative than the last.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow; font-size: large;">I. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: <i>“Post-Neoclassical”</i></span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: yellow; font-size: large;"><i><br />
</i></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">Milhaud, along with Stravinsky, was one of the major practitioners of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism_(music)">neoclassical </a>aesthetic in music in the 1920s and 1930s. Eschewing huge ensembles, overwrought sentimentality, and “German” heaviness, Milhaud’s first attempts in the “symphonic” genre were his Six Petites Symphonies, which were really chamber works whose titles implied rejection, rather than embrace, of the symphonic ideal. To a certain extent, Symphony No. 1 continues in this vein by problematizing sonata form<b>[1]</b> and frequently employing chamber ensembles within the orchestra. The opening of the symphony is its most concentrated neoclassical moment: the winds carry the accessible theme, accompanied by pizzicato strings whose primary purpose seems to be staying out of the way.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;">The symphony’s neoclassical veneer persists through the first movement with but a few scratches. By the opening of the <i>fourth movement</i>, however, Milhaud’s exposed, tormented spirit is on display with a heavily orchestrated theme at odds with the typical neoclassical (read: “French” or “Stravinskian” ) priority of emotional detachment.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><o:p></o:p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;">Yet following this moment, Milhaud turns his back on overwrought emotion, investing in sincerity and reduced orchestral forces once again. <o:p></o:p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><o:p></o:p></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;">Moments like these make Milhaud’s Symphony No. 1 an excellent candidate for the moniker “Post-neoclassical.” Unlike Stravinsky, Milhaud seems content to harness neoclassicism selectively, diverging from the aesthetic when needed to achieve contrast, or to heighten emotion, or to give all members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (the commissioning body) something to play. And the most evidently post-neoclassical move of all – writing a program symphony! – inspires my next proposed subtitle:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: large;">II. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “<i>Deliverance</i>”</span></b></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div></div></div><div style="text-align: left;">To Milhaud, his wife, and their son, this symphony was a ticket out of the crumbling French republic at the beginning of the Second World War, delivering the family from (certain) evil and (likely) death. Frederick Stock (conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) commissioned the symphony from Milhaud in mid-1939 to celebrate the organization’s 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary.[<b>2</b>] When the Germans invaded France, capturing Paris and forcing the capitulation of Mar'echal Petain, the Milhaud family fled, crossing the border into Spain and from there Portugal. Milhaud used newspaper articles and correspondence with his manager to prove that he had composed a symphony for an American orchestra and was expected to attend its premiere, and this was enough to earn him a coveted visa. The family exited Europe through Lisbon, arriving in New York on July 15, 1940.<o:p></o:p></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">The context of the war emerges audibly – even programmatically – throughout Milhaud’s symphony. The end of the otherwise serene first movement tempers its innocent, pastoral topic with rumblings of something dark in the cellos and bass clarinet. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;">The second movement opens with a fulfillment of that sinister promise. After the first presentation of a violent, angular theme, Milhaud offsets it against itself by half a measure, marking with a very real displacement the confusion and despair of wartime. It's worth comparing several recordings to see how this effect can be exploited. The first is Michel Plasson’s 1992 performance with the Toulon Symphony, which softens the drama of this moment through technical polish.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">In the second, Leopold Stokowski’s 1943 performance with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the manic tempo accentuates the uncertainty of Milhaud’s melody - appropriate for a wartime recording.<b>[3] </b><o:p></o:p>If you learned about this Milhaud symphony through Stokowski’s recording, you would be forgiven for immediately associating it with World War II - this performance drips with violence and pathos.<br />
<br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
</div></div><div style="text-align: left;">Following the pastoral first movement, the martial second movement easily might evoke the trampling of the folk by an invading force. The languorous and melancholy third movement suggests dejection, resignation, and calm uncertainty. We've already heard the beginning of the fourth movement, a musical representation of servitude if ever there were one. Following this theme, though, another emerges - a peppy sea-shanty in the winds.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/8.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Near the end of the movement, the two themes compete for preeminence. In the battle between Germanic heaviness and an Anglo-Saxon-influenced folk tune, only one can survive . . .<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;">
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/9.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
</div></div><div style="text-align: left;">To find out which theme wins, you'll have to take a listen on your own (or just think about who won the Second World War). Then again, there's a strong chance that this theme - and the whole symphony - isn't about the war at all. The dates of the symphony tell the story. In his autobiography, Milhaud reports that due to illness and writer’s block, he didn’t start composing until after war had broken out, in November 1939. (So it <i>is</i> about the war!) Consistent with Milhaud’s general compositional facility, he finished the work in short order on December 19<sup>th</sup>, 1939, meaning he wrote the entire thing during the so-called “dr^ole de guerre” in France, before the German invasion, and well before Milhaud knew he would need to flee the country. So a program that traces the various stages of the war – calm, defeat, desolation, ending with a battle between servitude and liberty – seems historically inaccurate, even if it does make for a nice story. <o:p></o:p></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Still, there’s no denying that Symphony No. 1 deserves the subtitle “Deliverance.” For one thing, the work undoubtedly saved Milhaud and his family. And even if its content couldn’t possibly comment on the war at hand, there’s no reason it can’t make more of a universal claim - maybe something timeless about good vs. evil. This, too, is a projection not easily born out by the historical record, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.<o:p></o:p></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">This admission brings me to my final subtitle proposal.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-size: large;"><b>III. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “<i>American</i>”</b><o:p></o:p></span></div></div></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Yes, Milhaud was born in France and spent his entire life a French citizen. Yes, this piece was composed entirely in France. Yet what could be more American than a classic immigration tale in which an upstanding individual flees persecution only to make a major contribution to the culture of his adopted land? Milhaud even considered Symphony No. 1 to be his first “Opus Americanum,” his first work (of many) to be premiered, printed, and promoted in the United States. <i>Pace</i> Milhaud, I would argue that his first “American” music dates from the late 1910s and early 1920s, when he became fascinated by Harlem jazz.[<b>4</b>]. And Milhaud didn’t merely essentialize “America” as a one-trick, jazzy pony. His particular brands of polytonality, syncopation, orchestration, and interest in rural musics all constitute affinities between his work and canonical “American” modernist music of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century. A particularly representative moment comes in the middle of the first movement:<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/10.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
The third movement seems to constitute the greatest nod to Americana, with its omnipresent blue notes, “Summertime”-like languor, and emphasis on wind timbres.</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253047/Unsung%20Symphonies%20Clips/7.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><o:p></o:p></div></div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Ultimately it’s less important that the piece <i>sound</i> American (since we still don’t really know what “America” sounds like) than it is that the piece and its composer stake out a clearly defined place in American musical culture. With a commission and premiere by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and an early second performance by Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Mihaud's musical style clearly appealed to American tastes. Through his many years of teaching at Mills College, his numerous commissions by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a surprising number of other American orchestras (San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans, and more!), Milhaud’s music did more than interlope on American musical life – his work helped define it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;">***</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">My subtitles for Milhaud's First Symphony highlight how reception can color our perception of a piece, and they point to an age-old dispute about the nature of "programmatic" music. (Does the <i>Eroica</i> sound heroic if we don't know the title?) In truth, one could audition any number of subtitles for any symphony - but only time will reveal which subtitle proves most apt. For Milhaud's Symphony No. 1, will it be "<i>Post-neoclassical</i>," "<i>Deliverance</i>," "<i>American</i>" - or would you choose something entirely different?</div></div></div><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: right;">--Louis Epstein</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>1.</b> Recapitulations are only nominally related to expositions; themes come in Mozartian groups rather than Beethovenian oppositions. See Roger Nichols, Liner Notes to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Symphonies-1-2-Milhaud/dp/B00000E534">Michel Plasson recording</a>.<br />
<b>2. </b>Stock also commissioned Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, Miaskovsky's Symphony No. 21, Harris's <i>American Creed</i>, Kodály's Concerto for Orchestra, Glière's <i>Fête ferganaise Overture</i>, Casella's Symphony No. 3, and Walton's Scapino Overture – plenty of fodder for future Unsung Symphonies posts! See <a href="http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/8_about/History_-_Rosenthal_archives/Frederick_Stock.pdf">http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/8_about/History_-_Rosenthal_archives/Frederick_Stock.pdf</a><br />
<b>3.</b> It’s worth noting that the second recording can be found on the same album as two other Stokowski wartime performances, one of Hovhaness’s Symphony No. 1 “Exile” (see what I mean about epic subtitles?) and Copland’s Symphony No. 2 “Short” (not so epic).<br />
<b>4. </b>In fact,<b> </b>Milhaud’s efforts at incorporating elements of jazz into art music predate those of Copland, Virgil Thomson, and other American composers who knew his music</div></div>Louishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02437025140224943078noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-31125034866168389812011-07-21T16:43:00.004-04:002013-01-25T09:49:49.227-05:00What The Parasitic Hymenopter Tells Me: Aho's "Insect Symphony"<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WCALnjO_0nQ/TiiKwqv5lXI/AAAAAAAACPg/WOei85KKnAc/s1600/KaleviAho.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="215" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WCALnjO_0nQ/TiiKwqv5lXI/AAAAAAAACPg/WOei85KKnAc/s320/KaleviAho.jpg" width="320" /></a>Finnish composer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevi_Aho">Kalevi Aho</a>'s <b>Seventh Symphony</b> (<i>Hyönteisinfonia</i>, "Insect Symphony") may be the most high-minded work ever to depict the trials and travails of the dung beetle. The fourth movement, with the charming subtitle "The Dung Beetles (Grief over the Stolen Ball of Dung)", is an exercise in the effortful accumulation of orchestral volume and energy -- the ever-rising tessitura and chromatic scales turning over themselves bring to mind the adjective "rolling."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Aho1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
[All excerpts come from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aho-Symphonies-Nos-2-7/dp/B00000G5QD">Osmo Vänskä's recording on the BIS label</a>]<br />
<br />
For what purpose is this energy expended, and what forces are behind the theft of its product? The answer lies in the source material for this symphony. In 1987, Aho (1949-) submitted his second opera, <i>Hyönteiselämää </i>("Insect's Life") to a competition put on by the Savonlinna Opera Festival that would reward the winner with a performance to mark the 350th anniversary of the host town. Aho's submission was an adaptation of the popular post-war Czech play<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_from_the_Insects%27_Life"> Pictures from an Insect's Life</a></i> by Karel and Joseph Čapek. It is an at times viciously satirical piece of theater in which a drunken vagrant projects anthropomorphized traits onto the various insect species he encounters, and inserts himself into their petty lives. The dung beetles are portrayed as greedily industrious (spending their lives accumulating hard-earned "capital" in the form of...you know what) and easily devastated by the theft of the material fruits of their labor. Kind of gives "Sisyphean" a different aroma, doesn't it?<br />
<br />
The two other competitors in this festival were Paavo Heininen and Einojuhani Rautavaara, and the prize went to the former for his opera <i>Veitsi </i>(The Knife). Determined not to let his material from his insectoid opera go to waste, Aho turned to compositional tactic we've seen before from frustrated opera composers: turn it into a symphony! We've already featured two Unsung Symphonies that originate this way: <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2009/12/symphonic-stag-party-henzes-symphony-no.html">Henze's Fourth</a>, derived from his <i>König Hirsch</i>;<i> </i>and <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2009/12/symphonic-stag-party-henzes-symphony-no.html">Rautavaara's Sixth</a>, derived from his <i>Vincent </i>-- which, you guessed it, was the other losing entry from the Savonlinna competition! But don't worry, both Aho and Rautavaara's operas went on to have very successful premiers after the fact (why, the Insect Symphony had its Japanese premier in 2009!)[<b>1</b>]. You can hear the composer's own words on the process by <a href="http://own%20words%20on%20the%20process/">following this link</a> to YouTube.<br />
<br />
Aho is one of the shining lights of Finland's post-Sibelius musical efflorescence. A student of Rautavaara, Aho has surpassed his mentor in symphonic output, 15 to the grand old man's 8. The first six establish the musical landscape Aho feels comfortable inhabiting, alternatively neo-Classical (with a penchant for fugues and distorted familiar forms) and rigorously modernist.[<b>2</b>] The cross-pollination of these idioms naturally suggests a post-modern outlook, but Aho is no slavish practitioner of any "ism". Indeed, that high-mindedness I mentioned in relation to the dung beetle episode is emblematic of the Insect Symphony as a whole -- it is both the product of and a sly criticism of post-modernism (perhaps a redundant claim for a post-modern work!). Aho, in his commentary on the symphony, emphasizes the flagrant stylistic and tonal (in emotional, not musical terms) discontinuities between its six movements, each of which sounds like a direct repudiation of the one that preceded it, but in his words "nowhere do we find a unifying synthesis of all the extremely disparate material that has been presented."[<b>3</b>] Stylistic allusions and disruptive "pseudo-quotations" run rampant, but at the same time there is a carefully managed emotional arc. Individual movements are cohesive (leading some to deem it more of a suite than a symphony) while at the same time only really resonating in relation to the work as a whole. In Aho's words, "The movements support each other because of their underlying opposite natures, and they cannot be performed in any other order. The symphony...accords with Mahler's conviction that the symphony must be like the world; it must contain everything."<br />
<br />
Gustav Mahler probably didn't have bug larvae in mind when he made that all-encompassing claim for the genre, but considering the millions upon millions of species of insects that dwarf humankind in variety and biomass on this planet, perhaps Aho has it right. An accurate symphonic portrait of the world damn well better feature our six-legged overlords prominently!<br />
<br />
Rather than attempt to capture or mimic the multitude of sounds that come from the insect world (<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10661663">try this instead</a>), Aho extracts human-like character traits and renders them with orchestral magic. The symphony's first movement, "The Tramp, the Parasitic Hymenopter and its Larva," introduces us to the character of the drunken vagrant who hallucinates the personalities of the rest of the proceedings. With tuba and muted brass melodies tottering and tripping over themselves, we can glean how Aho adapted vocal lines from the source opera.[<b>4</b>]<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Aho2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
You need only hear the first second of the next movement to understand what Aho meant by the "opposite natures" of these musical portraits. "Foxtrot and Tango of the Butterflies" introduces a wildly syncopated (and tonal!) dance set, with alto sax, trombone, and clarinet piping weirdly "off" two-step tunes. The scene from Čapek's play with the butterflies is like a soap-opera involving unrequited romance and lover's recriminations. Aho's dense overscoring and chromatic skids and slips lends the movement a dizzy energy redolent of Ravel's similar choreographic disassembly in "La Valse." One isn't left with a particular desire to spend an evening with these social butterflies.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Aho3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
The Dung Beetle's ordeal comes on the heels of this manic dance scene, and is followed (should I say "negated") by a diaphanous scherzo depicting "The Grasshoppers." These sprightly creatures are depicted with quicksilver chord progressions garbed in flitting orchestral colors. Despite its surface impatience, there is more wholesale melodic repetition in this movement than elsewhere -- we get to know and love this light motif for the nervous creatures quite well by movement's end.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Aho4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br />
</span><br />
The symphony's concluding two movements are its most substantial. Number five gives us a glimpse into the musical culture of the insect world's implacable colonists -- "The Working Music of the Ants and War Marches I and II." The ceaselessly regular procession witnesses the orchestra carting away major seconds with grim determination towards an unknown goal. Streams of these intervals converge into a massive onslaught as the movement progresses, and Aho unleashes some particularly extravagant percussion instruments to keep the ants in line. By the time the it reaches a grotesque and Shostakovich-esque parody of a pompous military march, it seems Aho has in his sights an indictment of fascistic militarism, or at least, a bad experience involving fire ants.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Aho5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
With that fifth movement, Aho's Seventh symphony turns a corner -- in his words "Satire and comedy eventually give way to tragedy; the sensitivity and beauty of the ending are also combined with feelings of profound loneliness and alienation." And so we are provided the final portrait, "The Dayflies and Lullaby for the Dead Lullabies." Unvarnished triads and sweet textures are the norm now, and the lullaby, scored for two violins congenitally joined at the major third, sounds like an artificially-honeyed Richard Strauss confection. But there is deep pathos here too. Dayflies (a.k.a. mayflies) spend at most a day or two of their lives in their adult forms (some last barely 30 minutes) before expiring, hopefully having successfully mated during their brief taste of life. A shockingly brutal climax in the middle of this sweet movement gives way to an extended elegy for these entomological <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfly">ephemera</a>.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Aho6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
Considering their momentary lives, I find it poignant that Aho allots such a lengthy and slow meditation for the mayflies' expiry. The cello eulogy is one of the most haunting endings to a symphony I've heard from the 20th century.[<b>5</b>] It is a devastating conclusion to a work that up to this point has held the listener at arms' length with its sense of musical travesty and play. All traces of the symphony's satirical venom is drained by this stage. Perhaps this is the critique of post-modernism Aho speaks of -- to be able to wring the deepest pathos from the death of a mayfly.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">--Frank Lehman</div><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div>[1]. <a href="http://www.fimic.fi/fimic/fimic.nsf/0/2C843D39DEF5E5C6C2257666002EB7BB?opendocument">http://www.fimic.fi/fimic/fimic.nsf/0/2C843D39DEF5E5C6C2257666002EB7BB?opendocument</a><br />
[2]. See Kimmo Korhonen Inventing Finnish Music (2007, 156-160) for a nice contextualization of Aho in the vibrant Finish musical scene.<br />
[3]. Kalevi Aho 1998 (From liner notes to BIS-CD-936)<br />
[4]. Your guess is as good as mine as to the role played in all this by the "parasitic hymenopter", hymenoptera being the order that includes termites, bees, and ants.<br />
[5]. There may be an element of Mahler 9 or Tchaikovsky 6 in this depressive ending, but what I hear most resoundingly is the strange and beautiful conclusion to Rautavaara's 5th (perhaps his boldest and most punch-to-the-gut powerful symphony).Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-22382285202318155272011-06-14T17:56:00.012-04:002013-01-25T09:51:17.985-05:00Ghost in the Machine: Leonardo Balada's 'Steel Symphony'<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nY4ac4uIaK4/TfpxqQX8mhI/AAAAAAAAGb8/8hBBnXs4ayQ/s1600/PittsburghSteelers.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nY4ac4uIaK4/TfpxqQX8mhI/AAAAAAAAGb8/8hBBnXs4ayQ/s200/PittsburghSteelers.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5618928455861967378" /></a><br />The wistful, lovely sounds of modern machinery have long fascinated composers. Especially in the 1920s, the clanging of factories and the rumblings of engines permeated musical scores. Inspired by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Noises">futurism</a>, composers like George Antheil (in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Vn_65yBD4"><i>Ballet mécanique</i></a>) brazenly built the sounds of machines into their works.<br /><br />While this excitement about mechanical sounds has certainly suffused music of the later twentieth-century, it has gone far beyond simply imitating and reveling in modern noise. You could argue (as Flora Dennis and Jonathan Powell have in their <a href="http://www.grovemusic.org"><i>Grove</i></a> article on futurism) that movements like serialism and minimalism are related to the futurists' fascination with machines. <br /><br />But some music of the later twentieth century is cut directly from the same cloth as pieces like the <i>Ballet mécanique</i> or Arthur Honegger's train-inspired <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfysyex_DAk"><i>Pacific 231</i></a>. Enter Leonardo Balada (1933-), who was born after the 1920s musical tech-craze but produced at least one symphony that could have fit right into that movement.<br /><br />Balada, born in Spain, composed <a href="http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/balada/compositions_for_orchestra.htm">several symphonies</a> and has taught at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pa, since 1970. So it's fitting that he'd make one of those symphonies intimately linked to the industrial landscape of his American town. The <i>Steel Symphony</i> was premiered by Donald Johanos and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1973. And as the composer acknowledged in the liner notes for Lorin Maazel's 1986 recording with the same group (heard in the clips here), he used the sounds of local steel mills for inspiration.<br /><br />The symphony begins like <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/10/weigls-sixth-apocalyptic_25.html">Weigl's Fifth</a>, with the sounds of an orchestra tuning. Perhaps that was the easiest way to suggest the beginning of the workday in a steel mill, the tools literally tuning up for a day's work:<br /><br /><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Balada1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br /><br />Soon, a blanket of ominous sounds covers the listener. Layers of pedal points, striking intervals, and ghostly, sliding strings make this clip sound more like a march of war than a day at the factory:<br /><br /><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Balada2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br /><br />Clearer rhythms and tunes do show up in this symphony — eventually. The regular pulsing of a machine nearly becomes an all-out dance before it's rudely interrupted (by the foreman?), and one of Balada's favorite devices, the frantic scurrying of strings, takes over:<br /><br /><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Balada3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br /><br />Overall, the form of this one-movement work alternates between the dance-like, mechanical passages and broader, more rhapsodic, unpredictable, and pedal-point heavy ones, like this:<br /><br /><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Balada4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br /><br />Balada's Steel Symphony came toward the end, rather than the beginning, of an industry's heyday. Back in the 1920s, machines were exciting — even though the First World War taught everyone how harmful they could be. In the early 1970s, when Balada wrote his Steel Symphony, though, the prospects for steel in Pittsburgh — whether Balada knew it or not — were <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=P_cJ5z_e9IsC&pg=PA73&dq=%22steel+industry+in+decline%22&hl=en&ei=GGP6TbavDarm0QGwjd3fAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22steel%20industry%20in%20decline%22&f=false">getting bleak</a>. So Balada's symphony gives us something of a look back. In his liner notes for the Maazel recording, David Wright suggested that the timpani heartbeat-like rhythm at the end is an "unabashed tribute to the symbiosis of human and machine." But we could instead hear the fading of that heartbeat rhythm as a prediction of the death of a big part of a city's identity, or as a musical depiction of an industry's last gasp:<br /><br /><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Balada5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br /><br />But I don't think futurism itself is dead. It's just taken on new forms. As <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1qPZAG1YaI">this clip</a> reveals, there's hope yet for the connection between music and machines.<br /><br /><div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div>Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-38255108706203163772011-05-04T15:17:00.006-04:002013-01-25T09:52:16.080-05:00Shredding Sequences: Glazunov's Fifth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G2WVczImbtY/TcGlmgcY7hI/AAAAAAAAA34/Wyh5YY262FI/s1600/GlazSilly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G2WVczImbtY/TcGlmgcY7hI/AAAAAAAAA34/Wyh5YY262FI/s1600/GlazSilly.jpg" /></a></div><b>Alexander Glazunov</b> (1865-1936) is one of those figures in music history with the misfortune of holding onto one style while living across the great divide that separates 19th Century Romanticism and 20th Century Modernism. A composer of prodigious technical skill and legendary musical memory, he is best known today for his violin concerto and ballet music, though judging by recording releases, his symphonies are also beginning to get a well-deserved second look. He rode the wave of Russian romantic nationalism initiated by Balakirev, exceeding his older models Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in symphonic output with 8 completed symphonies and a ninth left incomplete at his death (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_ninth">of course</a>). A glittering orchestrator, nimble contrapuntalist, and harmonic wizard, Glazunov nevertheless had little taste for the musical revolutions well underway by the time he accepted the directorship of the St. Petersberg Conservatory in 1905. The majority of his large-scale compositions were finished before 1910, and his historical import in the 20th century resides in his influential if conservative tenure at the conservatory, where he ardently supported newcomers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich if never quite comprehending the direction they were taking Russian music.<br />
<br />
Glazunov completed his <b>Fifth Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 55 "Heroic" </b>in 1895. His own personal voice was well-established by this point - a synthesis of nationalistic and cosmopolitan influences, Tchaikovsky minus the pathos, <i>Kuchka </i>minus the parallel 5ths. This work, according to musicologist Richard Taruskin, had an out-sized influence on the first opus of one Igor Stravinsky (his skillful but hardly earth-shattering <i>Symphony in Eb</i>).[<b>1</b>] The connection to subsequent work from a later composer (however much a stylistic dead-end) is the more fitting given the eclectic influences from earlier composers readily audible in Glazunov's Fifth. He rolls out the first movement's maetoso's broad introductory theme like a Wagnerian leitmotif, sounding more Rhein-maiden than Volga-boatman. The performance here is Valeri Polyansky with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, from a great <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glazunov-Symphonies-Complete-Cantatas-Concerto/dp/B0011367P2">Brilliant Classics set</a>:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Glaz1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"></span>This theme, along with many of Glazunov's harmonic twists throughout the movement, recalls Wagner quite a bit. Like basically every other composer from the last quarter of the 19th Century, he selectively infused his works with elements dutifully gleaned from the German composer, even though his own aesthetic temperament certainly did not line up with Wagner's. Following a lengthy slow intro, the first movement's sonata form gets underway with a first subject that speeds up and lyricizes that opening theme. The more dance-like second subject is a close relative to the first, and during the dramatic development section it becomes hard to tease apart which is guiding the way (especially given Glazunov's penchant for sounding them at the same time in invertible counterpoint).<br />
<br />
If Wagner looms heavily over the first movement, then it is Mendelssohn dancing lightly that we hear when we move on to the second movement's Scherzo. The fleet-footed wind writing has Mendelssohn's elfin prints all over it, but the music is most appealing in how Glazunov's Russian rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities pucker the overall sound. (We can also hear the first of several, typically very innocuous motivic references to the first movement)<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Glaz2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
A different world entirely is presented by the Andante third movement. Two minutes of searching harmonies come before anything resembling a full theme is established:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Glaz3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
These lush and dark progressions set a scene of nocturnal romance, but one continually threatened by outside forces. More than any specific musical similiarity, this tone of forbidden ardor is why I think some commentators have linked it with <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>. (The menacing, chromatic brass chorales that deter the lush harmonies at intervals contribute to the effect as well. But don't worry, the affair ends happily, in a radiant Eb-major, flanked on both ends by major third relations).<br />
<div><br />
</div>The final movement's vigorous and rhythmically jolting Allegro is pure Glazunov, seven minutes of sustained orchestral fireworks in a somewhat loose rondo structure, with 3 or 4 themes ripping past each other in quick succession. In it he manages to combine two of my favorite 19th century stylistic hallmarks -- beefy pedal points and head-scratching chromatic sequences. The second main thematic area combines both. It starts off with a threatening theme over Eb/D# pedal with a suggestion of 3+3+2 metrical subdivision. This gives way to a brief melancholic melody, still churning with unrest thanks to a constantly throbbing bass line. This is interrupted by the threatening theme once again, rearing its head in a more aggressive guise. The far-out sequence that concludes the section goes on for a bewilderingly long time, but still manages, in my professional opinion, to rock. [<b>2</b>]<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Glaz4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
Heck, here's the whole final movement, performed by the USSR State Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov. He breathes more fire into the finale, although there are some pretty weird tempi choices.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3rb355Hcsv4?rel=0" width="425"></iframe><br />
<br />
Enjoy!<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">--Frank Lehman</div>----<br />
<b>1</b>: Taruskin, <u>Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Volume 1</u> (205-222)<br />
<b>2</b>: Part of the ass-kicking nature of this sequence owes to the way Glazunov mixes major and minor third progressions, all the while navigating downwards by semitone -- this manages to make a progression that at its core might sound like a lessening of intensity, and increase or decrease its tension at Glazunov's <i>orchestrational</i> discretion.Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-50532600558173957272011-04-17T00:53:00.021-04:002013-09-02T19:12:42.819-04:00The Opera that Never Was: Busoni's Piano Concerto<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SVlSAXRUOQw/TaxmY5AUs9I/AAAAAAAAGZo/8nqNgmhpp4Y/s1600/Busoni-Ferruccio-08.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5596961014719755218" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SVlSAXRUOQw/TaxmY5AUs9I/AAAAAAAAGZo/8nqNgmhpp4Y/s200/Busoni-Ferruccio-08.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 145px;" /></a><br />
Today's Unsung Symphonies riddle: What looks like a piano concerto, smells like a piano concerto, and sounds like a piano concerto, but isn't a piano concerto?<br />
<br />
The answer: Ferrucio Busoni's <b>Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Men's Choir, op. 39 (1904)</b> by Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924). Don't let the name fool you. It's really a symphony and an opera rolled into one. <br />
<br />
I'm exaggerating, of course. This early work by the Italian pianist and composer does lots of things you'd expect out of a concerto. When I see that genre designation, I tell myself that I'll hear a short-ish symphony that highlights one or more solo instruments. Like a good concerto, Busoni's work does feature the requisite interplay between soloist and orchestra. With passages like this one at the end of the fourth movement (recordings here by John Ogden, the John Alldis Choir, Daniell Revenaugh, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra), we can easily hear it as a showpiece for a virtuosic pianist:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
But a few surface elements make it a little harder to pin down this work. For starters, it has five big movements — a bit unusual for concertos, but not for symphonies. And that fifth movement, as you might have guessed from the work's title, is a stirring number for chorus and orchestra. Again, a bit unusual for concertos, but not for symphonies. Oh, and the whole thing lasts about 80 minutes, significantly outdoing one close runner-up as a symphonic concerto, Johannes' Brahms four-movement Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat. (The underrated Wilhelm Furtwängler also wrote a long piano concerto, but it apparently only has three movements.)<br />
<br />
One more thing: Busoni's concerto also has cool <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_pLGoosPhI5A/S8STAQr72LI/AAAAAAAABSI/8etQLPn32lI/s1600/Busoni+Op.+39.jpg">artwork</a> (the print on the score is by Heinrich Vogeler).<br />
<br />
As it happens, Busoni's (not) piano concerto didn't even start out as a (not) piano concerto, but rather, as a (not) opera. Busoni wrote that he was planning a "<i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i>" — a "total artwork" — "with acting, music, dance, magic" on Adam Oehlenschlaeger's <i>Aladdin</i>. What actually popped out was this dazzling five-movement colossus of a concerto. The most overt reference to his original project was the choral fifth movement, and the whole concerto has been said to contain his ideas from the planned work and another operatic false start, <i>Sigune</i>.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=5053260055817395727#MAGIC"><sup>1</sup></a> <br />
<br />
But the links to opera run much deeper. The musicologist Antony Beaumont wrote that the concerto's "inherent theatricality and its monumental proportions indicate that this is a veritable <i>Bühenweihfestspiel</i> [stage-dedication festival-play] of a concerto," and he pointed to its original seven-movement plan, in which the original third movement was a "Recitativo stromentale".<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=5053260055817395727#BEAUMONT"><sup>2</sup></a> In light of this potential link to Wagner's <i>Parsifal</i>, it's not surprising that Busoni called Wagner "a contemptible, little Saxon, with boring music and some strokes of genius,"<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=5053260055817395727#WAGNER"><sup>3</sup></a> because it tells us he was thinking a lot about Uncle Richard. Wagner in particular (as you might have noticed in the harmonies above), and operatic gestures in general, infuse this piano concerto.<br />
<br />
Like any good narrative work, the work brings us in mid-action. A lilting string passage in the first movement, "Prologo e Introito," might as well have been going on for ages before we hear it: <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
(This sounds a lot like the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSc0fz1WjQ">start of Schumann's Second Symphony</a>, but without the trumpet to tell us immediately that this is a beginning.)<br />
<br />
While in a concerto we might expect the movements to end with a bang, here (except for the final one) they tend to fade out ominously, which tells us to anticipate something new right away. Here's how the otherwise rowdy second movement, "Pezzo giocoso," ends (and note how the final chord seems to show up out of nowhere):<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Just as Busoni hoped for his big <i>Aladdin</i> musical, the movements are loaded with what might be heard as snippets of songs, dances, and maybe even magic. The long, slow third movement, "Piezzo serioso," is this concerto's emotional center of gravity, and the persistent timpani at the end — like gunshots in the distance — could accompany a nightmare scene:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio> <br />
<br />
This clip from the first movement, in which the solo oboe takes up that opening lilting melody, might well work with a scene of spells and charms:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
And this passage toward the end of the scherzo-like fourth movement "All'Italiana," sounds like a zany recomposition of the mega-endings of many 19th-century Italian operas — or maybe it's closer in spirit to a Chopin <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAON3kXjEDQ#t=00m06s">Tarantella</a>. Here you'll notice more ominous timpani and the fact that all this wackiness leads into the cadenza you already heard, above: <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
In these clips, we've heard the piano here and there, but what does it really <i>do</i> in this work? Unlike in a "real" concerto, strict exchange between piano and orchestra doesn't really hold this piece together. A dramaturgical sensibility actually seems to be what drives it forward. The piano part participates in, rather than defines, the piece's structure. And this makes the piano more of a character in a drama than a convenient carrier of information about the piece's supposed genre. (Busoni apparently thought of this piece as a "Symphonie italienne."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=5053260055817395727#SYMPH"><sup>4</sup></a>)<br />
<br />
In the fifth movement, the piano recedes. It's is just another instrument in the orchestra, the scenery for a cosmic opening. Before the chorus enters with the stunning "Hymn to Allah," the rising string figures herald the text's advice to "Lift up your hearts to the power eternal."<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Busoni7.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
(Busoni might not admit it, but this sounds like it could fit pretty well at the end of <i>Parsifal</i>.)<br />
<br />
The piano does rear its head throughout the movement, and particularly toward the end, with the same big arpeggios it started with when it first appeared in the first movement — one of the ways this whole work maintains some structural coherence. (Themes appear and get manipulated from movement to movement, and for more on that, as well as the origins of some of them, see Beaumont's introduction to this piece in <i>Busoni the Composer</i>.)<br />
<br />
No matter how much I enjoyed Busoni's piano concerto, one thing is for sure: when it comes to musical treatments of <i>Aladdin</i>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqGTb4ZFAS8">Peabo and Regina</a> have already said it all.<br />
<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="" name="MAGIC">1.</a> From a letter to Egon Petri, quoted in Antony Beaumont, "Preface," in Ferrucio Busoni, <i>Concerto für Klavier und Orchester mit Männerchor, op. 39</i> (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1994) 166.<br />
<a href="" name="BEAUMONT">2.</a> Ibid.<br />
<a href="" name="WAGNER">3.</a> Ferrucio Busoni, <i>Selected Letters</i>, trans. and ed. Antony Beaumont (New York: Columbia University press, 1987) 166.<br />
<a href="" name="SYMPH">4.</a> Beaumont, <i>Busoni the Composer</i> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 74.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-12686275854614717022011-03-27T16:51:00.015-04:002013-01-25T09:54:32.406-05:00Atonal Accessibility? - Perle's Sinfonietta II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MUJZtk6elCQ/TY-jNQmCyiI/AAAAAAAAAvM/62IP19ey96A/s1600/Perle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MUJZtk6elCQ/TY-jNQmCyiI/AAAAAAAAAvM/62IP19ey96A/s200/Perle.jpg" width="155" /></a></div>Although we've dealt with very few hardcore atonal works here at <b><i>Unsung Symphonies</i></b> so far, there does exist a (somewhat sporadic) thread of symphony writing among composers of a...less-than-tonal persuasion. The founding trinity of mainstream atonality, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, all composed multi-movement orchestral works -- some symphs in all but name (Berg's <i>3 Orchestral Pieces</i>), others in barely anything <i>other</i> than name (Webern's <i>Symphony Op. 21</i>). I venture that their ambivalence towards the genre stems from conflicting urges for 1) non-repetition and the abandonment of set forms and 2) a certain penchant for familiar containers with a lot of cultural cachet to ground their experimental impulses.<br />
<br />
One composer who felt this atonal ambivalence with special acuteness was the American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Perle">George Perle</a> (1915-2009). Enraptured with the wide open possibilities of Viennese atonality from an early age, Perle nevertheless felt Schoenberg left behind an unfinished project. Perle believed that Schoenberg's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique">12-Tone Method</a> (also known as serialism) was a partial and unsatisfactory way for dealing with these new resources. As prominent a music theorist as he was a composer, Perle set out to discover a more <i>musical</i> basis for picking this note over that. In a series of influential books and articles, he ended up formulating what he called "Twelve Tone Tonality," a system that allowed for many of the gestures of traditional music -- cadences, "mode" and "keys", and most importantly a real sense of directed chord progression -- without any of the trappings of tonal pitch selection or syntax.[<b>1</b>] Perle wrote the majority of his own music according to this system. But rather than existing simply to validate his music theoretically, Perle's special brand of "Tonality" was deeply committed to <i>accessibility</i>.<br />
<br />
Someone suspicious of atonality and its reputation of ugliness and difficulty would do well to give Perle's <b>Sinfonietta II</b> a listen. He composed this in the fall of 1990 during his three year tenure as the San Francisco Symphony's composer-in-residence. It was performed in February of the next year under the baton of Herbert Blomstedt. Newspaper reviews were quite lavish with their praise, and especially quick to emphasize how enjoyable, or in the words of Sacramento Bee reviewer William Glackin, how "happy" a work it was.[<b>2</b>] The San Francisco Examiner called the Sinfonietta "disarmingly communicative" (expecting something else?), while the San Jose Mercury News basically dubbed Perle the spiritual successor of France's "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_six"><i>Les Six</i></a>": "Nothing is trite; nothing is a rerun; nothing panders to popular taste."<br />
<br />
Like the duration (a fleeting 16 minutes), the orchestra of Perle's <b>Sinfonietta II</b> is quite small, save for the percussion section, which keeps its four performers busy with thirteen colorful instruments in strategic reserve. The outer movements, labelled <i>Scherzo I</i> and <i>Scherzo II</i>, are siblings in terms of structure and ethos, both playful romps with a clear ABA form. Orchestration is usually tidy and open, the opposite of Berg and Schoenberg's dense-thicket approach, closer in spirit to Webern's crystal lattices. But that's basically where the Webern similarities end, because Perle projects a sense of fun and extroversion completely alien to that more rarefied style. Melodies and motifs crop up repeatedly, meaning that Perle keeps the listener from worrying about where they are in the piece. The attention span of these ideas is quite short, leading to a manic, scurrying quality that persists throughout -- at several times, especially in the second Scherzo, there is a strong suggestion of cartoon music!<br />
<br />
The first Scherzo sets off with a handful of tricks: first a climb up an arpeggiated diminished seventh (I mean, err, presentation of the interval-3 cycle mode-1...), then a harmonized flute phrase, a pair of cello interrogations followed by more arpeggios, and a set of strident but not-too-dissonant string chords:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/PerleScherzo1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
The harmonic materials, the play of rhythms, and the quickly alternating orchestral colors are characteristic of the whole movement. The B-section "trio" introduces a nervous triplet pattern for strings, over which the flute and piccolo rush in a panic, soothed and egged on at intervals by vibraphone and brass whole-tone arpeggios.<br />
<br />
To me, the second Scherzo is the funnier of the two. There is right off the bat a strong contrast between annoyed insistence (the strings' upward bounding, dissonant theme) and mellow sheepishness (the wind and pizzicato answers). After each urgent string statement, a corresponding gesture of deflation seems to follow. Particularly striking are the unvarnished clarinet major thirds and the short passages of honest-to-goodness jazz scoring for brass and percussion -- what better way to puncture an insecure atonal phrase's sense of angsty importance?!:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/PerleScherzo2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
I have no doubt this work's pitch design is rigorously organized, but the impression is the exact opposite of what you'd expect coming from a theorist of 12-tone quasi-mathematical structure: this is academic atonality, thoroughly defanged.<br />
<br />
The heart of this short work is the second movement, "Chorales and Diversions." Hearing it on Pandora (on m<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">y <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/08/master-of-infinite-series-nrgards.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">Nørgård</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"> </span></a>chan</span>nel, no less) first made me interested in Perle's <i>Sinfonietta,</i> and it is the movement I find myself returning to the most. A rondo in form, the movement sandwiches some eerie passages of rather Bergian sound between statements of a lyrical chorale melody, given almost exclusively to a solo bucket-muted bass trombone. The theme respires in and out like a Bach chorale glimpsed in the dusk, and is harmonized homophonically with some truly lush lower string writing. Here is the entire first section of this nocturnal movement:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/PerleChorale1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
George Perle may be the only composer of resolutely "atonal" music for whom I've noticed the label "conservative" repeatedly applied. Sometimes this is in reference to his choice of musical forms. But elsewhere it seems "conservative" is the only word we have for composers who attempt to eschew abstraction for its own sake, and instead choose to ground their music in a consistent and accessible system like traditional tonality. Ultimately, it's as unsatisfyingly simplistic a label as would be "progressive." Better to take Perle at his own word: <br />
<br />
"There's this mystique that there's an elite of specialists for whom contemporary music is written. I don't write up or down to anyone. I'm just doing what composers have always done. Some people have written about me as though I were a composer of inaccessible music. But my experience has been that people who <i>listen</i> to my music are amazed by how accessible they find it." [<b>3</b>]<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">--Frank Lehman</div>-------<br />
<b>1</b>: The foundations of Perle's theory are two interlocking organizational parameters. The first is the inversional array, which relates notes of the chromatic scale to stable pitch axes (often about a tritone) - this hinge is his equivalent to "key." The second is the interval cycle, which selects a number of pitches based on some symmetrical partition of the scale, such as minor thirds or major seconds - this furnishes the sense of "mode." Both are prominent aspects of the styles of not just Berg and co., but of Bartok, Debussy, and even composers further back into the 19th Century. In compositional practice (and Perle's analyses) the interactions of these two factors can become exceedingly complex, but the important point is that they help produce points of reference and stability that keep the listener from ever becoming too lost.<br />
<b>2</b>: Reviews excerpted at <a href="http://www.georgeperle.net/cat.html">GeorgePerle.net</a> (not surprising that they are so positive!)<br />
<b>3</b>: Quoted in <i>For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening</i> (Steinberg and Rothe, 147)<br />
<div><br />
</div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-15810185584395907672011-03-07T23:11:00.005-05:002011-05-04T23:47:58.685-04:00The next Eroica? Tan Dun's Internet Symphony No. 1<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KD6-T53vLUU/TXWsmMmDlFI/AAAAAAAAGIk/-rcYWaPLtTM/s1600/BeethovenYoutube.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5581557085411447890" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KD6-T53vLUU/TXWsmMmDlFI/AAAAAAAAGIk/-rcYWaPLtTM/s200/BeethovenYoutube.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 150px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 200px;" /></a><br />
For the last 180 years, it's been tough for symphony composers to get out from under Beethoven's shadow. We've dealt with lots of symphonies on this blog that seem to go beyond anything Beethoven could have ever even dreamed of doing. (If you don't believe it, check them out on the right.)<br />
<br />
Rather than express fearful anxiety about Beethoven's domination of the symphony as a genre, the Chinese-born composer Tan Dun did something remarkable: he took Beethoven to task. In Dun's <b>Internet Symphony No. 1: Eroica (2008)</b>, Beethoven is — <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w47v5Nl5g7Q#t=01m56s">so the composer claimed</a> — not an overwhelming presence to be feared or matched, but rather, a "mentor" to be loved. (Thanks, by the way, to the folks at <a href="http://www.amusicology.com/">Amusicology</a> for the tip to investigate this symphony.) But I don't buy the "mentor" line. <br />
<br />
Before I continue, I should say that it's difficult — and maybe misguided — to discuss this composition without doing so in terms of its history as a Google/YouTube commission. But I'm going to do it anyway, because learning to appreciate it as a work of art that could one day stand somewhat apart from its gimmicky genesis is the only way it will possibly outlast Google or YouTube as anything more than an oddity. You can read elsewhere about how this piece came about and how its real <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC4FAyg64OI%3E" premiere=""></a> was apparently on YouTube (a delightfully awkward video made up of auditions, some of which probably shouldn't be there). Here, we're going to ignore some of the contexts and look instead at how the piece is put together.<br />
<br />
The symphony's roughly four-minute length is itself a nod to new technology, since four minutes is about as long as most people are willing to commit to any particular YouTube clip in the first place (unless it's an episode of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvrUinVe2B8">Charlie Sheen's Korner</a>). In this way, the new Eroica really is a digital symphony, best consumed on a laptop or an iPad in between brushing your teeth and taking out your contacts.<br />
<br />
Just as Beethoven's symphonies have so often been read as battles and struggles, one way to understand Dun's Eroica is as a battle with Beethoven, a struggle to move the symphony, as a genre, once and for all past the big symphonikahuna and into the digital age. Dun combines elements of Beethoven's music (including literal quotations, as we'll see) with such un-Beethovenian innovations as car parts for percussion.<br />
<br />
(Note: I suggest opening <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w47v5Nl5g7Q#t=02m38s">this clip</a> in another tab and following along with the timestamps here.) The mysterious opening (2:38) screams struggle. Sudden crashes create a sense that we might be in for a long journey from darkness to light, Beethoven style.<br />
<br />
But the sudden appearance of a majestic brass chorale-like theme (3:14) is a smack in the face of Beethovenian organicism and order. At first, it doesn't seem to make any sense. You have to <i>earn</i> climaxes like these, and they usually show up at the end; they don't just pop up out of nowhere less than a minute into a symphony. Perhaps Dun is telling us that in a post-Beethoven, YouTube world of digital shorts, you don't have to earn these climaxes at all. The tune itself is nice, but the harp doubling the brass is a little awkward.<br />
<br />
After hearing the theme again in the cellos, and finished by the horns, we encounter what I'll call the "Beethoven section" (4:23). Here, an intense galloping rhythm, played by the whole orchestra, envelops some of the same sounds from the startling introduction, along with some new ones. We soon learn why we're in triple meter, because at 4:51, we hear the waltzy opening theme of the Eroica (soon violently interrupted by the "new" sounds). Perhaps this is the final degradation of Beethoven's symphony before the YouTube age begins.<br />
<br />
At 5:54, we suddenly get the original march-like chorale-like tune but with the less dignified galloping melody weighing it down somewhat. The almost corny cymbal crashes (6:07 and 6:13) seem to tell us that Beethoven and his original Eroica have been defeated by this whirlwind version of the symphony's most memorable theme. The world has left the original Eroica behind. <br />
<br />
But the noisy coda (6:55) lasts just a little longer than you'd expect, and its refusal to end is delightfully surprising, and probably the best moment in the whole work. Notice the relentless, continual cadencing, almost as if Dun is hammering away at the nails on Beethoven's coffin. Beethoven's Eroica has already been defeated, but Dun and the YouTube Orchestra are just making sure.<br />
<br />
Despite its unevenness, I really enjoyed Dun's first Internet Symphony, especially its cinematic effects and the contrast between big, brassy sounds and interesting percussive hubbub. And maybe the piece is a crucial step in the evolution of the symphony. Now that the oppressive weight of Beethoven is off our shoulders in the world of the digital symphony, it's time for someone to write Internet Symphony No. 2: Charlie Sheen vs. Mark Zuckerberg.<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div>Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-37718026802977073212011-03-04T23:48:00.000-05:002013-01-25T09:56:04.587-05:00Tcherepnin Station: Symphony No. 1 in E<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TU2ZpgNbYyI/AAAAAAAAGIU/SLREnvXAxaM/s1600/alexander_tcherepnin.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570277252427113250" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TU2ZpgNbYyI/AAAAAAAAGIU/SLREnvXAxaM/s200/alexander_tcherepnin.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 121px;" /></a><br />
In 1927, the Russian-born Alexander Tcherepnin (son of the composer Nikolai) joined an elite group of musical minds — including such greats as Richard Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Igor Stravinsky, and Guns and Roses: his music caused a riot.<br />
<br />
If you've heard of Tcherepnin, it's likely through his piano works, which every kid loves to play — including <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXQImIPjyUU">this kid.</a> Long ago, I remember performing that Op. 5 No. 1 bagatelle, reveling in the dissonance and thinking I was a rebellious teen for choosing Tcherepnin over Beethoven. (Sadly, playing Tcherepnin probably <i>was</i> my most rebellious act. And I probably had to do Beethoven that year, anyway.) <br />
<br />
But it was Tcherepnin's <b>Symphony No. 1 in E</b> that made his listeners antsy. In Paris, on October 29, 1927, the percussion-only second movement was apparently too much for the audience.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=3771802680297707321#RIOT"><sup>1</sup></a> Tcherepnin would go on to write three more symphonies, but he must have needed a break after his first one — the Second was composed in 1945 and was first heard in 1951, in Chicago. As far as I know, the Chicago audience remained calm throughout that concert.<br />
<br />
Although I didn't scream and yell when I first heard Tcherepnin's First the other day, I'll admit that the composer's concept of <a href="http://www.tcherepnin.com/alex/basic_elem2.htm">"Interpoint"</a> threw me off a little (he capitalized it, but from now on, I won't). It's a kind of interaction between voices or lines that calls attention to the spaces <i>between</i> the notes, rather than the way notes sound at the same time. Breaks in one instrument's lines are highlighted because another voice actively fills in those breaks. Sometimes, this creates a pointillistic effect that breaks down our sense of each line as continuous. Here's an extended intrapuntal section among strings and various winds from the first movement:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
This episode, which leads to movement's climax, can be heard as the logical extension of something else Tcherepnin does in the symphony — the trading of motifs from instrument to instrument that Tcherepnin sets up early in the first movement. Here, the voices seem more coordinated and thus less "intrapuntal," but interpoint is just one step away:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
What has been pointed to as perhaps a more classic kind of interpoint, and less pointillistic than the example in the first movement, comes in the third movement, which is built on three duets. The first, here, is for horn and trumpet. (If you're into Medieval music and you hear something that sounds like hocketing, you're on the right track — they've been described as related.)<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The next intrapuntal duet is for clarinet and timpani:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The third (and most haunting) is for violin and double bass.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
At the end of the movement, these intrapuntal duets are themselves blended. (For a detailed discussion of how this all works in this excerpt, see Nicolas Slonimsky's "Alexander Tcherepnin Septuagenarian," in <i>Tempo</i> 87 (Winter 1968-9) 20-1.) I'm willing to buy that there is some order here, but on just a few listens, three combined intrapuntal duets sound a little out-of-control to me. Judge for yourself:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
It apparently wasn't the interpoint, but the percussion-only second movement that made its first audience uncomfortable. It has been described as a recomposition of the first movement without pitches, a "skilful, purely rhythmic version of the themes from the first movement."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=3771802680297707321#RHYTHMIC"><sup>2</sup></a> Since he kept it very short, at under three minutes, Tcherepnin might have known an all-percussion movement was a risky move. Today, this sounds pretty tame, and I couldn't help but think the movement could have been longer. Here's a clip:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Tcherepnin7.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Interpoint is a good starting place, but there's much else to discover — melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically — in this rich work. (Including in the fourth movement, which I found the most satisfying.) But we'll let Tcherepnin himself send us off for more listens. Looking back on this symphony in 1964, Tcherepnin clearly thought it was something special. He considered it well ahead of its time and pointed to "serial thematic construction," "medieval Polyphonic artifices," the "bird-calls used as motifs" and a "desire to get away from conventional pitch": "All of this happened before the birth of dodecaphonic music, before Messiaen's looking to bird-calls for thematic materials, before the esoteric use of rhythmic patterns by many a Western composer, and long before the liberation of music from conventional pitch that became dear to post-Second World War composers."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=3771802680297707321#TCHEREPNIN"><sup>3</sup></a> What do you Tcherepnin-aficionados think?<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=3771802680297707321" name="RIOT">1.</a> From the liner notes by Julius Wender, of the Tcherepnin symphonies and conertos recording by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra with Lan Shui and Noriko Ogawa, p. 9. Also see Enrique Alberto Arias, "The Symphonies of Alexander Tcherepnin," in <i>Tempo</i> 158 (Sept. 1986) 23-31.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=3771802680297707321" name="RHYTHMIC">2.</a> Ibid.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=3771802680297707321" name="TCHEREPNIN">3.</a> "Alexander Tcherepnin: A Short Autobiography," <i>Tempo</i> 130 (Spring 1979) 16.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-13431302554898713742011-02-18T17:10:00.015-05:002013-01-25T11:26:41.616-05:00Pigments of the Imagination: Bliss' Colour Symphony<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-doIloj--pUM/TV63Gqtqc8I/AAAAAAAAAUM/xeXIrNVQ6Xw/s1600/ArthurBliss+Color.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-doIloj--pUM/TV63Gqtqc8I/AAAAAAAAAUM/xeXIrNVQ6Xw/s200/ArthurBliss+Color.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>It's a fine line between inspired conceit and pure gimmick, one which many of the symphonists we've already introduced seem to straddle in their extra-musically inspired works. But it's a worthy risk -- why deny ourselves the fun of a multi-movement work based on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._2_(Nielsen)">four temperaments</a>, or characters from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_Symphony">Superman</a>, or types of <a href="http://www.classicalarchives.com/work/409472.html">insects</a> (all candidates for future entries here!). Between the accessibility offered by such programmatic hooks, and the ingenuity required for a composer to translate concepts/objects into musical prose, these high-concept symphonies can be quite well-calculated to produce something rather essential: listener pleasure.<br />
<br />
The <b><i>Colour Symphony</i> </b>of British composer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Bliss">Sir Arthur Bliss </a>(1891 - 1975) is assuredly one such highly enjoyable work. Each of the four movements is named after a particular hue, going from purple to red, blue, and finally green. This is the most explicit assignment of colors to compositional units I know of, beating out the synaeth-stravaganza that is Scriabin's 5th (a.k.a. <i>Prometheus, Poem of Fire</i>) by not requiring any special AV equipment to get its visual point across. Now, what's being evoked in Bliss's work is not as simple as one particular light wavelength followed by another, however, but we'll get to that in a moment.<br />
<br />
The long-lived composer penned his <i>Color Symphony</i> in 1922, quite early in his career, at the urging of mentor Edward Elgar. Its premier (Bliss conducting) garnered a lukewarm reception (inadequate rehearsal, that old scapegoat, was to blame, opined Bliss), and the elder Elgar apparently felt it a little too modern for his Edwardian tastes. But some reviews were extremely positive, and Bliss didn't give up on this avowedly vernal work in his creative development, subjecting it to minor revisions in 1932. Since then it has enjoyed a good deal of popularity in Britain and the U.S., amounting to probably Bliss's best known work[<b>1</b>], and enjoying several good recordings -- the one used here is a vigorous interpretation by <a href="http://[1]/">Vernon Handley with the Ulster Orchestra</a> (1987).<br />
<br />
There is something to the <b><i>Colour Symphony</i> </b>that is, if not quite misleading, then a little more complicated that its title and simple movement names imply. Bliss, flailing for inspiration after Elgar's entreaty, happened upon a book on heraldic imagery and withit the work's inspiration. It is the historical uses and associations of heraldic tinctures, not simply the "feel" of one hue or another, that determines the sound of each movement.[<b>2</b>] (It also accounts for the negligence of orange and yellow, which were quite uncommon in this context). The use of color in coats of arms and badges is a dauntingly complex topic, and Bliss helps us out by providing descriptions of these chromatic connotations for each movement in a set of liner notes he wrote for an 1956 Decca recording. While the types of associations are very broad, ranging from emotions to seasons, one thing common is that each color has a particular precious stone: amethyst for purple, ruby for red, sapphire for blue, and (shock) emerald for green.[<b>3</b>]<br />
<br />
The first movement of Bliss's technicolor dream coat-of-arms is <i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Purple</span></b></i>, which signifies "Pageantry, Royalty, and Death." Yes, that last one sticks out a bit, but there is a clever way in which Bliss realizes all three. The movement is cut as an ABCCBA form, with each facet bearing a theme of processive and gently regal character - certainly the most Elgarian of the four. Bliss's take on this prolonged fade-in fade-out is to liken it to "the audience as onlooker watching the approach and later seeing the disappearance" of a procession. <i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Purple </span></b></i>gets underway with a stately harmonic ostinato in B-minor(ish), over which increasingly thick orchestration bears the first of these themes.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Bliss1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
From this, Bliss's harmonic language seems of a kind with the British-modalist cum French Impressionist idiom you also find in Vaughan Williams or Bax. But there is an inclination for densely woven counterpoint and orchestral stratification -- sometimes over-complex -- that has more Stravinsky to it than English pastoral music. That carefully dropped word "death" is audible not just in the movement's overall fading procession, but its final chord, an inverted, unresolved B-minor with superimposed G-major scored low and held long.[<b>4</b>]<br />
<br />
<i style="color: red; font-weight: bold;">Red </i>comes next, with its suggestion of "rubies, wine, revelry, furnaces, courage, and magic." You wouldn't be wrong if those descriptors suggested to you a faster, more brash pace. Bliss has picked his color ordering based on the usual progression of symphony movements, from a broad 1st (purple majesty), an excitable scherzo for 2 (red passion!), and the expected slow movement and exciting summatory finale to follow. <i style="color: red; font-weight: bold;">Red's </i>blistering scherzo theme flanks two trios, the first a courteous dance in D-major and 6/8, the second more like a hybrid of a fanfare and an impatient reel. The return to the scherzo theme is marked by considerably more dissonance, and concludes with a burst of fireworks based on the second trio theme<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Bliss2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">Bliss' <i style="color: blue; font-weight: bold;">Blue </i>has the performance instruction "gently flowing," and it might not surprise that a watery consistency pervades the movement. Besides "deep water," the chromatic characterization includes "skies, loyalty, and melancholy." There are some liquid solos for winds and violin here, unpredictable arabesques skimming above string chords that, in their rhythm evoke "lapping water against a moored boat or stone pier." Also present is a preference for minor 7th and 9th chords, very "bluesy" sonorities that are neatly integrated with Bliss's more pastoral sense of melody. Towards the end of the movement, those tints come together for the symphony's moment of most glistening azure:</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Bliss3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">The young Bliss concludes it all with a show-stopping portrait of <i style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: lime;">Green</span></i>, and while his description picks out "spring," "hope," and "joy," it is "youth" above all that seems native to this movement. It is an extremely ambitious movement -- a double fugue for orchestra with cyclic shades and programmatic justification. It would be a compositional "folly of youth" if not pulled off right, but Bliss's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: lime;">Green </span></i>is ultimately quite exhilarating, if a little exhausting. Fugue subject number 1 is a thing of juts and unpolished angles (emeralds in the rough?), and its surprising that Bliss make it cohere without its veering into atonality.</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Bliss4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">Subject 2 is puckish in comparison, a constantly cascading theme in a hazardous irregular meters (7/8 to 3/4 to 5/8), given to the solo winds that Bliss has been treating generously throughout the symphony. Both themes meet towards the end, though the sprightly 2 stands little chance of holding its own against number 1 in heavy stretto for lower brass. </div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Bliss5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">Much clamor follows, but Bliss insists on a clear, optimistic ending and it all ends with a blast of a B-major added 6th chord. Dissonant, like the "death" sonority that ended <i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Purple</span></b></i>, yes, but in a celebratory way. Despite a certain greenness to Bliss's idea for the work -- which at its worst results in the forgivable sin of over-exuberance -- the <i>Colour Symphony</i> is nonetheless tight, bright, and memorable. Color me satisfied.</div><div style="text-align: right;">Frank Lehman</div>---------<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">[1] Aside, perhaps for some of the film scores he wrote for British interwar cinema. </div><div>[2] In this regard, it is like Holsts' <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Planets Suite</i>, where the seemingly straightforward movement names allude to mystical astrological associations rather than astronomical features.</div><div>[3] Alas, Bliss did not take the opportunity to translate their respective hardnesses on the Mohs scale into metronome markings or difficulty levels.</div><div>[4] A simultaneous "verticalized"presentation of the movement's first ostinto chords, in fact. </div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-16317731489354957272011-01-28T13:28:00.021-05:002013-01-25T11:28:00.709-05:00The Ogress of War: Leifs' "Saga Symphony"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Jon%20Leifs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Jon%20Leifs.jpg" /></a>There is to Jón Leifs' music a ruggedness, sometimes verging on brutality, impossible not to link with the scarred and hostile land the composer called home: Iceland. Virtually his entire oeuvre is inspired directly or indirectly by his homeland -- not uncommon for composers from historically "unheard" nations but rarely to the degree Leifs strove for. His most representative works are the orchestral pictures of famous Icelandic geological highlights: <i>Detifoss </i>(Europe's largest waterfall), <i>Geysir </i>(the eponymous spouting hot spring), <i>Hafís </i>(drift ice), and <i>Hekla </i>(a volcano that makes Eyafjallajökull look like a puffy pastry). <i>Hekla </i>has the oft-touted distinction of being the "loudest piece of classical music ever written," which you can judge for yourself with this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3gWZE-AZ5s">youtube link</a>.[<b>1</b>]</div><br />
Leifs (1899 - 1968) was the first and probably still most prominent of professional Icelandic composers. Prominent - but not exactly the founder of a national school in the same manner as Bartok or Sibelius. For his style was so idiosyncratic as to border on inimitable, and many of his pieces were so gargantuan that performance venues in Iceland's nascent classical performance scene were out of the question, leaving his largest works unrecorded, and in some cases unperformed in his lifetime. Corrected now by the labels BIS's diligent release of his catalog and performance by the world-class Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the majority of Leifs' music can now be heard in all its tectonic glory (excerpts here from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/J%C3%B3n-Leifs-Saga-Symphony/dp/B0000016MO">Osmo Vanska's conducting)</a>.<br />
<br />
The largest work purely for orchestra he wrote, the <i style="font-weight: bold;">Saga Symphony</i> Op. 26 (1942) is one of Leifs' many pieces inspired by Icelandic lore. It was written while he was living precariously in Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife and children, but was not performed until 1950, six years after the Leifs were lucky enough to flee. Leifs enjoyed some initial success in Nazi musical culture, perhaps unsurprising given the shared bent for<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjHJUrHE3v0&NR=1"> monumentality and Nordic hero valorization</a>. However, his favor dried up, due in part to his Jewish ties, but also from suffocating distaste for modernism in fascist Germany.[<b>2</b>]<br />
<br />
The<a href="http://www.sagadb.org/"> Sagas of the Icelanders</a> are a collection of prose accounts of prominent families - their battles, feuds, climbs and descents from power -- mostly written in the 12th century and recounting events of the 10th and 11th, during the earlier days of Viking settlement of Iceland. Taking a cue from Liszt's <i>Faust Symphony</i> (the first, and from his account revelatory, orchestral work he heard live), Leifs casts each of the <i>Saga Symphony</i>'s five movements as a character portrait. As in the <i>Faust Symphony</i>, Leifs' movements distill personality traits more than they track specific narrative developments. In fact, symphonic development is also downplayed (which is <i>not</i> the case in Liszt) in favor of great floes of harmonically static material. This is not to say uneventful, however!<br />
<br />
The first movement, which depicts the personality of the warrior Skarphedinn, gives a good idea of Leifs' musical tendencies. Skarphedinn is a hot-headed and acid-tongued hero from Njál's saga, the kind of personage who never makes a threat he can't back up with deadly force. Leifs' portraiture renders this propensity for violence with shocking orchestral hacks and hews, as if the conductor's baton were replaced by Skarphedinn's neck-seeking axe, daintily named "the ogress of war." Here is a representative passage from the middle of the long (16:30 minute) movement, including some marginally varied material from the symphony's first pages.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Skarpheden.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
What stands out is the propensity for tutti <i>thwacks</i> from the orchestra, heard routinely but with high metrical unpredictability. This is an outgrowth of Leifs' lifelong interest, both compositionally and ethnomusicologically, with a style of Icelandic folksong called <i>rímur</i>, which is heavily and complexly accented. The irregular accenting can be heard in Leifs' earlier, directly <i>rímur</i>-inspired <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aFwwoat5L8" style="line-height: 18px;"> Icelandic Folk Dances</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"> (op. 11). But in his mature style these have been thoroughly internalized, even "abstracted," so that they serve here as a kind of percussive manifestation of Skarphedinn's ferocity. In fact, having such</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"> long passages of relative silence interspersed by unheralded orchestral blasts makes for an oddly flat affect, despite the violence; this is what you get with accents without a determinable tactus. Yet it also seems apposite to Skarphedinn's portrayal, who like many of the Saga characters, is psychologically opaque by today's literary standards. (Interestingly, Leifs suggested this movement came closest to being a self portrait. Yikes.)<br />
<br />
The next movement portrays Gudrun Osvifrsdottir, of the sprawling Saga of the Laxardals. In a literary culture full of strong-willed women, she is perhaps the most powerful and complex, at turns blood-thirsty and pious, and a fount of snappy one-liners. Leifs begins her portrait with quieter hues, suggesting this will serve formally as the work's slow movement. But while more graceful in places than other movements, Gudrun's characterization is no shrinking adagio. The </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i>r</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i>ímur</i>-beats are still palpable, along with other bold techniques in Leifs' arsenal: block-chord progressions by thirds and (especially) tritones; massed octave melodies; and an emphasis on perfect fifths derived from another Icelandic tradition, two-part songs known as <i>tv</i></span><span style="line-height: 18px;"><i>ís<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">ö</span>ngur</i>. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">While Leifs' neo-primitive idiom is often labelled as being predominantly homophonic and counterpoint-averse, there is actually a fair amount of contrapuntal layering happening here. Though more often than not it's interrupted by some accent-eruption or the like. Here is a passage, again from the middle of movement, showing Gudrun's commanding disposition.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Gudrun.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">The following three movements use similar techniques in evoking their respective characters. The third is most scherzo-like, portraying the comic braggart Björn who shows up towards the end of Njal's saga. This is the most whole-tone scale heavy movement (which in one motivic form offers a slight - very slight - aspect of cyclicality to the symphony). One can hear Björn here as he and his vengeance party travels through the Orkneys and Wales, making short work of those who stand in their way.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Bjorn.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"> <br />
The next movement captures the anti-hero Grettir and his confrontation with the revenant Glamr, whom he bests in combat (only to succumb to Glamr's malediction to be an outlaw for his whole life). The movement is the spookiest of the lot, with extremely long passages of a sustained pitch (D) interrupted by increasingly frequent percussive jolts of terror. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">The final movement takes on Tormod Kolbrunarskald of the Foster Brother's Saga. Tormod is the image of the classic warrior poet; mortally wounded in battle, he has the gumption to yank the killing arrow from his heart and compose a lovely poem before expiring. Leifs lends him the most orchestrally swollen treatment -- in addition to a truly gigantic percussion arsenal (which, among other things hosts three differently tuned anvils, two differently sized stones, whip (!), and three shields of iron, leather, and wood), Leifs calls for six Bronze Age (and thus anachronistic) horns! Heed, then, the call of the Viking horn! (just try not to go deaf or induce palpitations in the process!)</span><br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Kolbrunarskald.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">--Frank Lehman</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">---<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> [1]: Just so that you don't think it's all eruptions, here is a bit of Leifs <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcM9eSclq2A">at his most austerely beautiful</a>.<br />
[2]: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> And in case you thought there might be a connection in manner and subject-matter with another Nordic-preoccupied composer, Leifs loathed Wagner's influence and attested that much of his music was "a protest against Wagner, who had misunderstood the essence and artistic tradition of the North in such a detestable manner."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Quoted in Bergendal, New Music in Iceland (1987, 47).</span></span>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-60284869601048895542011-01-10T16:06:00.031-05:002013-01-25T11:29:15.632-05:00Pushing the Envelope: Blitzstein's "Airborne"<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TSyF1ZErUFI/AAAAAAAAGHk/Jq4Ry7E9TlY/s1600/blitzstein.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5560966792205783122" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TSyF1ZErUFI/AAAAAAAAGHk/Jq4Ry7E9TlY/s200/blitzstein.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 152px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 200px;" /></a><br />
I'm a sucker for aeronautics.<br />
<br />
Over winter break, I spent some time at both the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. I looked up at the very X-1 that Chuck Yeager <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE2t6Sg_H74#t=04m20s">took across the sound barrier</a> in 1947. I stood underneath a real Saturn V rocket — the same kind that propelled Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969. And I thought about my favorite pilots, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_%28NBC%29">Joe and Brian Hackett</a>.<br />
<br />
Yeager, Armstrong, and the Hackett brothers all <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=h10V8jGmgn8C&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=pushing+the+outside+of+the+envelope+right+stuff&source=bl&ots=8Rti21bTjZ&sig=ZWE7bYhD-m3GiUvewr4sXECoFiA&hl=en&ei=rogsTfqBCsSAlAf3h43cCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">pushed the outside of the envelope</a>, taking their craft(s) to the limit and just a bit beyond. With his <b>Airborne Symphony</b> (1943-6), the American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905-64) seems to have done something similar to the symphonic envelope.<br />
<br />
Our first unsung symphony of the new year stands out not just because it's actually very sung (and spoken, with a prominent narrator). It also contains choral outbursts, scary instrumental interludes, bizarre marches, and love songs. And the Airborne is the only symphony we've dealt with so far that's specifically about flight — both the history (and future) of human flight and the experiences of war pilots. The composer of <i>The Cradle Will Rock</i> — already well-versed in writing politically-charged music — knew something about all this. He served with the Air Force in London during WWII and got time off to produce the <i>Airborne</i>, for which he wrote both the music and text. When the manuscript was lost, Blitzstein rewrote it on Leonard Bernstein's urging.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=6028486960104889554#LINER"><sup>1</sup></a><br />
<br />
The <i>Airborne</i> officially has three movements, but each movement is broken up into several discrete numbers — our first clue that this is as much a mini three-act-musical play as a symphony. (Howard Clurman used the apt adjective "Broadway" to describe this piece.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=6028486960104889554#CLURMAN"><sup>2</sup></a>) The first movement covers humanity's long-held dreams of flying; the second reveals the dangers; and the third draws a middle ground (or airspace).<br />
<br />
The symphony begins with a heroic horn gesture that hints at the majesty of reaching the sky and ushers in the "Theory of Flight." (That theory is delineated by the "monitor,"<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=6028486960104889554#MONITOR"><sup>3</sup></a> or narrator — here, Robert Shaw, in this recording with Leonard Bernstein and the New York City Symphony Orchestra from 1946, featuring tenor Charles Holland and baritone Walter Scheff). The rising major second on "airborne" in the chorus is based on that opening horn motif — just without the middle note. Here's how the symphony opens:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
In the "Ballad of History and Mythology," Blitzstein then takes us from ancient Mesopotamia through the 19th century. It's a laundry list of air-travel misadventures that Blitzstein wrote, he said, "for a negro voice" — Charles Holland in this recording — "because of what it might lend to the quality of" the number.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=6028486960104889554#VOICE"><sup>4</sup></a> Blitzstein's casting choice, and the blues-tinged melody, creates some distance between the white pilots whom the symphony's narrative privileges (and indeed whom the whole mainstream history of aviation privileges) and the black "character" who here is used just to set the stage. (Later, in the third movement's "Ballad of the Bombardier, we learn about a "white-faced nineteen-year-old" — certainly not one of the <a href="http://www.tuskegeeairmen.org/">Tuskegee Airmen</a>.) Here's how the "Ballad of History and Mythology" starts, and at the end of the excerpt, note the return of the "Airborne" theme:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
We then land at Kitty Hawk for the Wright Brothers 1903 flight. The big first movement concludes with a soaring, mostly triumphant choral outburst of "Men are airborne!", whose tune plays on the opening's major-second twist. But an ominous dissonance strikes before the final chord, signaling that what lies ahead in the sky isn't all fun and games:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The second movement jolts us to reality and to the German side during WWII, as a chorus shouts robotically and joylessly about the joys of supporting Hitler. This grotesque march may have gotten a laugh, but to me, it seems just terrifying enough not to be funny. <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>><br />
<br />
But what follows is truly terrifying — a three-minute instrumental bombing of allied cities. (We know this because of the list of towns that follows, in the moving "Ballad of the Cities.") The theory of <i>flight</i> is now a full-fledged theory of <i>fight</i>.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Things lighten up in the final movement, with the jocular "Ballad of Hurry-Up" and its catchy (though not as catchy as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InBXu-iY7cw#t=01m02s">the Village People</a>) refrain "In the Air Force." The song pokes fun at how missions apparently begin in a hurry and then get delayed or canceled as pilots <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veDcp3wB3JA">wait to take off</a>. <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
That song would fit perfectly on Broadway, as would the "Ballad of the Bombardier" that follows. Here, a baritone, over a light wind accompaniment, tells of that nineteen-year-old soldier writing home to his Emily. As the soldier's voice takes over, the switch from winds to piano accompaniment brings us painfully but sweetly into the realm of the intimately personal. It's a rare moment of introspection in this rather outgoing symphony.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Airborne7.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
(By the way, Emily is a great musical name, as these <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elbJ4hy5C7A">Zombies</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvA0UBesfbY">Art Brut</a> classics demonstrate.)<br />
<br />
A frantic "Chorus of the Rendezvous" returns us abruptly to the world of planes and guns and bombs. And the final number, about an "Open Sky," offers a new theory of flight that can never really come true. The chorus calls for the world to "Free the air for the Airborne," but the narrator cautions, "Not without warning!" Which really means not at all.<br />
<br />
Blitzstein chose his subject well — human beings love flying and they love war. All this symphony needs is a 21st-century update, or a sequel, to navigate it to the standard repertory. Meanwhile, I'll settle for <i>Wings</i> reruns on USA.<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="" name="LINER">1.</a> From Steve Ledbetter's liner notes to the BMG Classics release of the recording on CD, as <i>Leonard Bernstein—The Early Years III</i>, 5-6.<br />
<a href="" name="CLURMAN">2.</a> Ledbetter, 6.<br />
<a href="" name="MONITOR">3.</a> Blitzstein used this term because "nearly all his lines are couched in the imperative mood." From <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=9KP3BtcfyIQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Leonard Lehrman, <i>Marc Blitzstein: a Bio-Bibliography</i></a>, 366.<br />
<a href="" name="VOICE">4.</a> Lehrman, 366.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-8781229067815521382010-12-17T09:22:00.004-05:002013-01-25T11:30:56.102-05:00Symphonic Stag Party - Henze's Symphony No. 4<i>Unsung Symphonies</i> is thrilled to welcome <a href="mailto:emilyrichmond@berkeley.edu">Emily Richmond Pollock</a>, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is writing a dissertation on opera in West Germany from 1945-1965. We let her contribute even though she's never watched all of <i>The Big Lebowski</i>.<br />
<hr /><br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TQpBAbHkZzI/AAAAAAAAGHA/vmuLqu9LvkY/s1600/Hans.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551320966222866226" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TQpBAbHkZzI/AAAAAAAAGHA/vmuLqu9LvkY/s200/Hans.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 118px;" /></a>It’s fitting that a post about Hans Werner Henze’s <b>Symphony No. 4</b> would appear on a blog called <i><a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/">Unsung Symphonies</a></i>, because this is a piece that has literally been “un-sung.” In 1962, six years after the disastrous premiere of his opera <i>König Hirsch</i> (a third of the piece was cut), Henze returned to the opera to create his own “authorized” shortened version, which threw out the original half-hour Finale of Act II.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#FINALE"><sup>1</sup></a> It was that cut material that became his Fourth Symphony, with the vocal parts submerged and incorporated into the orchestral texture.<br />
<br />
The symphony’s single continuous movement camouflages a formal scheme that was unusually “instrumental” within the opera, where sections were named <i>Introduzione e Sonata</i>, <i>Varizioni</i>, <i>Capriccio</i>, and <i>Ricercar</i>. In the symphony, these section headings were standardized to Prelude and Sonata, Variations, Scherzo and Trio, and Rondo. These instrumental pretensions (paging Alban Berg!) result in a tidy relationship between musical structure and dramatic sense in the scene, which depicts a year in the life of the title character, the King Stag – bound to the forest as an animal, his human soul continues to make him yearn for the city. The connection between the cycle of seasons in a year (conveyed in the opera by changes of lighting) and the classical, four-movement, ostensibly “cyclical” symphony, becomes almost too programmatic and “on the nose” once it is transposed from the opera stage into the concert hall.<br />
<br />
The orchestrational aspects of the transposition from one musical medium to another, however, are executed with subtlety and panache. For one thing, it’s appealing to be able to hear what the opera sounds like without voices – and it’s not just the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance that makes the texture feel all of a sudden more like an integrated contrapuntal whole.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#BERLIN"><sup>2</sup></a> In an opera, orchestration often takes a back seat to vocalism, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that the people in the pit are more than “mere” accompanists. In the symphony, though, the vocal lines become part of a crowd, coming in and out of relief with much more flexibility than is usually possible within the standard hierarchy between orchestra and vocal soloists.<br />
<br />
A short passage from near the beginning of both the scene and the symphony helps to illustrate Henze’s general approach.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#APPROACH"><sup>3</sup></a> The King’s two angular interjections (“Wald, hör’ mich an!” and “Öffne dich und laß mich ein!”) become solo calls in the cellos and the trombone, respectively. Henze keeps the lines in the tenor range, but uses different instrumental colors, which blurs any fixed identity between the original character and the melodic lines in the symphony. Meanwhile, the ensemble of Forest Spirits that answers the King is subsumed into the string section, allowing the rustling woodwinds to come through in a way they never did in the original.<br />
<br />
Opera:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/OperaSection1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Symphony:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/SymphonyMovement1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Henze had a different strategy in mind when he orchestrated one of the King’s virtuosic solo passages from the third section: the tenor solo is set exclusively for the trumpet, which of course stands out starkly from the rest of the orchestra – maybe even more so than the original singer’s voice.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#VOICE"><sup>4</sup></a> In addition, instead of the brass section’s entrance drowning out the vocalist (as it nearly does in the opera), it complements the sound of the trumpet, so the whole group can really go for it, instead of struggling to stay under the soloist. I would guess that that the firmer identity between the vocal solo and the single instrument in this section is related to the opera passage’s more “arioso” register and more closed form; by contrast, Example 1’s dialogic context meant that the King’s lines were less strongly “set off” from the surrounding material.<br />
<br />
Opera:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/OperaSection3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Symphony:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/SymphonyMovement3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
It’s probably apparent by now that Henze’s orchestration in the opera is generally quite lush; in some cases, the extensive doublings between the instruments and the voices mean that hardly anything changes between the opera and the symphony – the voices are merely strained out.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#OUT"><sup>5</sup></a> But wow, the Berlin Philharmonic can <i>really</i> play (yes, yes, Captain Obvious) – what is pretty enough in the opera takes on shades of poignancy and even contrapuntal brilliance when it is slowed down a little, executed by amazing musicians, and allowed to breathe, the way a symphonic slow movement traditionally begs to be played.<br />
<br />
Opera:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/OperaSection2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Symphony:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/SymphonyMovement2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
And what of the sections that in the original had separated out the orchestra from the voices? A slow, unapologetically consonant passage toward the end of the scene features the Forest Spirits in a breathtaking a cappella hush, alternating with equally “choral” answers from the strings or woodwinds.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#WOODWINDS"><sup>6</sup></a> The idea of alternating orchestrations of chorale textures gets taken one level higher in the symphonic version, which casts the voices sometimes as groups of solo woodwinds, sometimes as solo strings, sometimes (when unison in the original) as celesta or harp. In both versions, it’s a beautiful passage that stops time and positively shimmers.<br />
<br />
Opera:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/OperaSection4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Symphony:<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/SymphonyMovement4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Aside from these “devocalizations,” Henze didn’t do much to transform the piece from its operatic context to its symphonic form. This might seem like cheating – how symphonic can a symphony be if it comes right out of one of the most blatantly operatic operas of the post-war period? But this generic fuzziness is exactly the issue that this piece can illuminate so usefully. We use words like “operatic” and “symphonic” as if those words have stable meanings, but how often do we think about what those labels really stand for? Henze has commented ironically on the “division of labor” between him and the composers of the Darmstadt school, where “<i>they</i> got the electronic studios and the late-night programmes, I got the symphony concerts and opera houses.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138#HOUSES"><sup>7</sup></a> Perhaps for Henze, then, these two monumental genres were actually close kin.<br />
<br />
So is Henze’s <b>Fourth </b>an operatic symphony, or is <i>König Hirsch</i> a symphonic opera?<br />
<br />
(Both!)<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Emily Richmond Pollock</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="FINALE">1.</a> The major secondary work on the opera, and on the Symphony by extension, is the monograph by Klaus Oehl, <i>Die Oper</i> König Hirsch <i>(1953–55) von Hans Werner Henze</i> (Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag, 2003). See in particular p. 245-277 and 304-313.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="BERLIN">2.</a> The sound examples in this post come from a <a href="http://store.operapassion.com/cd6742.html">radio broadcast</a> of the full version of <i>König Hirsch</i> at the Staatstheater Stuttgart in May 1985, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and from a <a href="http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/cat/single?PRODUCT_NR=4498612">live performance</a> by the Berlin Philharmonic in April 1964, conducted by the composer (Deutsche Grammophon 449 861-2).<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="APPROACH">3.</a> Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 13-20 (from “Introduzione” section); Symphony: m. 13-20<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="VOICE">4.</a> Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 27-45 (from “Capriccio” section); Symphony: m. 232-251.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="OUT">5.</a> Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 1-19 (from “Variazioni” section); Symphony: m. 155-173.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="WOODWINDS">6.</a> Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 162-193 (from “Ricercar” section); Symphony: m. 426-459.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=878122906781552138" name="HOUSES">7.</a> Henze, “German Music in the 1940s and 1950s” in Music and Politics, tr. Peter Labanyi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 47.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-54940836634191559302010-12-04T21:39:00.389-05:002013-01-25T11:32:25.264-05:00Rued Awakening - Langgaard's 4th "Fall of the Leaf"<div style="text-align: right;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TPu10CkynUI/AAAAAAAAAJI/0Q_vouZUNV8/s1600/Langgaard+Lovfald.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TPu10CkynUI/AAAAAAAAAJI/0Q_vouZUNV8/s200/Langgaard+Lovfald.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>In 1948, the the Danish composer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rued_Langgaard">Rued Langgaard</a> penned perhaps the snarkiest work for large orchestra and chorus in our fair history of western music. Bearing the title/lyrics "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhR-iLqzgo8">Carl Nielsen, our great composer</a>" and the performance indication of "play with all one's might," this essay in musical bitterness is a mere 32 measures. But if played according to Langgaard's instruction "to be repeated for all eternity," the piece should wrap around itself in unceasing, pointless indignation. Despite a dedication to "the world of music in Denmark," it understandably did not premiere during Langgaard's lifetime.[<b>1</b>]<br />
<br />
This is not the product of a composer who felt he was treated fairly by the musical institutions of his time. Immensely prolific, with over 400 staggeringly varied works to his name (including 16 symphonies), Langgaard suffered much of his life under the shadow of Denmark's symphonic paladin, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Nielsen">Carl Nielsen</a>. Nielsen embodied Denmark's triumphant late arrival to the European orchestral scene; today we regard him highly for developing innovative, rigorous compositional procedures that fell outside the German/French mainstream. In his own time, Nielsen wielded great sway over the direction of Danish aesthetics, and pointed them decidedly away from the style of his contemporary symphonist. Langgaard underwent a prolonged disillusionment with this "vulgar" music, increasingly re/denouncing Nielsen's brand of modernism and veering instead into his own odd brew of late Romantic and pastiche Classical styles. His music disregarded, the eccentric composer was forced into virtual exile from the country's center of musical culture, Copenhagen.<br />
<br />
It will be hard to encapsulate Langgaard the symphonist to one entry. His symphonies range from the gargantuan (the hour long "Pastoral of the Rocks," written at the age of 18) to the vanishingly small (<b><i>No. 11</i></b>, "Ixion," an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDCTrYu37lg&playnext=1&list=PL317DA1D725DFABAE&index=10">intensely weird 6 minutes</a>), from luscious romanticism (<i><b>No. 3</b></i> "The Flush of Youth - Melodia," basically a piano concerto), to apocalypticicsm (<b><i>No. 6</i></b> "Heaven-Rending"), and eventually neo-classicism tinted by absurdism (<b><i>No. 13</i></b>, "Belief in Wonders"). Running threads include programmaticism, nature worship, and a mystical bent. Perhaps in the future we'll bring in more of these, but I concentrate here on a symphony that nicely encapsulates what sets him so starkly against his peers as a symphonist (particularly the teleologically-driven Neilsen) -- Langgaard's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Langgaard-Symphonies-4-5-6/dp/B000000APJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291564533&sr=8-1"><b><i>Symphony </i></b><i><b>No. 4 in Eb-minor</b></i><b> </b>"<i>Løvfald</i>"</a> ("Autumn," or literally, "Fall of Leaves"), written in 1916.<br />
<br />
This one of Langgaard's works best represented on disc (at least 5 recordings). I use clips from the glorious <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Langgaard-Symphonies/dp/B001MUJSF0">Thomas Dausgaard complete set</a> of symphonies, as definitive as you can get.[<b>2</b>]<br />
<br />
In terms of structure and subject matter, a correlate for Rued Langgaard's <b><i>4th</i></b> is Richard Strauss' <i>Eine Alpensinfonie </i>(1915). Both are single-movement tone poems in all but name (TPIABN...yikes), both heavy on the musical mimickry of nature sounds.[<b>3</b>] Instead of representing a particular location as in <i>Alpensinfonie</i>, Langgaard depicts a time of year, a rather turbulent autumn. He has an even shorter thematic attention span than Strauss in this work -- <i>Løvfald</i>'s twenty four minute duration is segmented into 13 sections, the longest not even 3 1/2 minutes. There is generally no real attempt to mask the episodic basis of the work, and what results is an almost Brucknerian feel of reaching the end of a thought (prematurely, sometimes), pausing, and resuming with new material. Many sections bear descriptive titles, and the overall progression of titled movements is below, charting an eventful fall day.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">I. Rustle of the Forest -- II. Glimpse of Sun -- IV. Thunderstorm -- VII. Autumnal -- VIII. Tired -- IX. Despair! -- XII. Sunday Bells -- XIII. At an end.</div><br />
Parsing Langgaard's forms can be extremely frustrating. Just as you think a sonata juxtaposition of contrasting themes seems to emerge, or a recapitulatory function, or a sense of developing variation, he does a 180 and ventures in an entirely different direction. As a result of this unpredictability, the Fourth Symphony is rich with ideas but not easy to summarize.<br />
<br />
Right from the start, Langgaard defies symphonic logic, with a gestural hammer-stroke more reminiscent of an <i>ending</i> than a beginning (he also ends the work with this same Eb-minor crash). The emphatic opening indicates this is going to be no leisurely stroll, but a wind-battered slog.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Langgaard1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
A network of themes forms much of the tissue of "Løvfald." Most notable is a melodic pattern (Cb - A - Bb) heard first in "I. Rustle of the Forest." It's sounded in the most tumultuous contexts, and transmutes later in the piece to a pure harmonic progression (eb: bVI6 - bii - V6 - i). The following example, from the beginning of section "IX. Sempre con moto," shows the transformation in action:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Langgaard2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Stormy material like this counters more pastoral themes interspersed throughout. These include a dorian melody for "II. Glimpse of Sun," a modal phrase that dominates the latter stages of symphony, and an effusive string line for the "III. Allegrando" section. Here is that extroverted tune, serving as a (very tenuous) contrasting theme to the Eb-minor material from earlier.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Langgaard3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The most dramatic Langgaard-180 occurs halfway through the piece, when all orchestral activity empties out save a soft string cluster and a lethargic oboe melody. Here's the ending of section "VIII. Tired," concluding with a typically Langgaardian not-quite-right chord progression for muted strings.<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Langgaard4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
In a hard to quantify way, this Shepherd's tune has ramifications for the rest of the symphony. There follow nods to thematic retreat (in section IX), straining apotheosis (XI), and crashing defeat (XIII). The oddest is section "XII. Sunday Bells," in which Langgaard grinds the symphony's forward momentum to a halt -- instead of an expected climax, he presents 30 seconds of church bell sounds clanging away, a sound produced by overlapping whole-tone dyads (in in a similar manner to Holst's <i>Saturn</i>).<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Langgaard5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
It's not just the pictorialism or the way-too-soon minimalism that isn't <i>symphonic </i>in any traditional sense, it's the manner in which it just inserts itself into the piece, the utter disassociation from the other thematic or vaguely teleological things happening elsewhere.[<b>4</b>] In this symphonic amble, it becomes increasingly clear that Langgaard follows no trail map.<br />
<br />
<center>-----------</center><br />
In the late 1960's, after his death to obscurity in 1952, Langgaard finally began to accumulate some recognition. This came particularly from his <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Langgaard-Music-Spheres-Four-Pictures/dp/B000000B0N">Music of the Spheres</a></i></b>, a perplexing work that engages the revelatory and apocalyptic strains found throughout his oeuvre. Ligeti is said to have been astonished at the sight of the piece's score, which anticipated by half a century the orchestral colors of his own sonorist <i>Atmospheres</i>. (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Per Nørgård, who we've <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/08/master-of-infinite-series-nrgards.html">already met</a>, delightfully describes his role in the discovery <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OX_4cJyhgI">here</a>). Perhaps this composer, for whom enduring neglect was practically a bodily function, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">was not such a bitter reactionary after all. Maybe we should treat Rued Langgaard rather as chronologically misplaced prophet, writing either too early or too late, but not when the </span>establishment deemed he should have been.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">--Frank Lehman</div>---<br />
[1]: This, and many other anecdotes, interviews, and reference material can be obtained at the terrific website of the <a href="http://www.langgaard.dk/indexe.htm">Langgaard Foundation</a>.<br />
[2]: Neeme <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Järvi's recording is also excellent, though for the most emphatic (and uneven) treatment, try out <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Symphony-Interdikt-Helteodod-Rued-Langgaard/dp/B000027GJ3/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1291565117&sr=1-6">Ilya Stupel's</a> account.</span></em></span><br />
[3]: I haven't ascertained whether the Strauss work was heard by Langgaard by the time of his composition of Løvfald, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some influence.<br />
[4]: Full disclosure: there is a transient patch of whole-tone material in section IX., but it's not a "precursor" in any meaningful senseFrank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-84836509043526458842010-11-30T18:00:00.011-05:002010-12-17T09:54:12.602-05:00Shadow Symphonies - The Truth Behind Beethoven's Masterworks<i>Unsung Symphonies</i> is thrilled to welcome its second guest post, this time from NYU Music Professor <a href="http://music.as.nyu.edu/object/michaelbeckerman.html">Michael Beckerman</a>. Professor Beckerman was kind enough to pass on to us a report he received from a Russian correspondent, Mitchell Bochermann, on the history of "side listening," which we reproduce below. Bochermann recently completed a monograph on the psychohistory of the "Love Story" theme and its use in skating competitions. We hope you enjoy his research and can report on some shadow symphonies of your own.<br />
<hr /><br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TPWDHm3XZ3I/AAAAAAAAGG0/3QvM-rVdvqQ/s1600/Pitt.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545482682891724658" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TPWDHm3XZ3I/AAAAAAAAGG0/3QvM-rVdvqQ/s200/Pitt.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 114px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 200px;" /></a> It was the two studies in <i>Science</i> and <i>Nature</i> that got things going. A group of Princeton scientists, all musical amateurs, claimed to find a group of shadow symphonies embedded within Beethoven’s works. Dr. Frieheer McGeer, formerly engaged with the mysterious collapse of honeybee hives throughout northwestern Europe, struck first with the following prescient comment: “If you listen in just the right way, you can hear fragments of two different symphonies within Beethoven’s Pastoral. I call these PSA and PSB and they refer to Pastoral shadows A and B.“ PSA A, according to McGeer (but later disputed in a randomized trial by Pollack and Jaystore) was actually the torso of a late Vanhal work, a programmatic overture known as “The Ambassador;” McGeer was able to tentatively (and surprisingly) identify PSB as an early Schubert piano sonatina, previously unknown. When McGeer and his other colleagues such as Ama Ada Unguent first advanced the principle of side listening it was not accepted by the majority of scholars as it is today. Using a little-known (and less well understood) homily taken from a late period lecture of Derrida now titled “The Gain and the Glance,” McGeer/Unguent theorized the existence of sonic shadows. Claiming that the ear could do precisely what the eye accomplishes in reading the so-called “Magic Eye” images, they first encountered a high level of derision, as had the Magic Eye inventors. But while the Magic Eye hid images of a mostly banal type—a chicken holding an Albanian flag or the word “Hola,”—the symphonies of Beethoven, and also several by Haydn, Mendelssohn and Brahms were discovered to hold smaller masterpieces within. And just as the validity of the Magic Eye could be proven by the agreement about what was being seen, listeners, at least most of them, rapidly became able to hear these shadow symphonies.<br />
<br />
A personal favorite of mine is B4C4B (Brahms Fourth Symphony Chaconne Fourth Variant, B section) which contains the entire slowed down version of a Dittersdorf development section, though which one is not precisely clear. It was recently discovered that Mendelssohn “Italian” shares its Pilgrim’s March with a Czech Christmas Pastoral by Mrozek. The Mendelssohn/Mrozek is, as has been shown, the only example of a shadow symphony that contains vocal parts. Mrozek’s work was originally thought to be by Georg Zrunek, the pen name of Adam Vaclav Strcprst.<br />
<br />
Mitchell Bochermann<br />
Global University Site 34<br />
Dneiper Smelting Plant<br />
Russian FederationMugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-67840146516555197952010-11-18T16:13:00.014-05:002013-01-25T11:38:13.796-05:00You're so 'romántica' - Chavez's Symphony No. 4<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TOXYCyc9VMI/AAAAAAAAGGc/AgrWWQAms8Y/s1600/3c03962r.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5541072458963834050" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TOXYCyc9VMI/AAAAAAAAGGc/AgrWWQAms8Y/s200/3c03962r.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 182px;" /></a><br />
I wound up with today's symphony for the same predictable one-word reason I wind up with a lot of symphonies: Mahler. On the surface, there's very little that links Gustav Mahler and Carlos Chavez (1899-1978), the Mexican composer whose <b>Symphony No. 4 — <i>Sinfonía Romántica</i> (1953)</b> I explore here. But I'm just following in the footsteps of Leonard Bernstein, the great composer and conductor and even better <a href="http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheDoll.htm">expert at keeping a perfect crease</a>. <br />
<br />
In a concert during the New York Philharmonic's 1960 Mahler festival, Bernstein paired up this Chavez symphony with a selection of Mahler songs. Then, as today, conductors more often linked Mahler with other German-speaking composers than with Mexican modernists. In the 1950s, one of Bernstein's predecessors at the NY Phil, Bruno Walter, played a similar set of Mahler songs alongside works by Beethoven and Mozart. <br />
<br />
But Bernstein was more likely than Walter to program Chavez during <i>any</i> concert, let alone during a Mahler festival. One of the many reasons for this was certainly Bernstein's interest in and awareness of new American music, broadly construed. Another may well have been the fact Bernstein and Chavez shared a close, influential friend in the outspoken American composer Aaron Copland. Copland wrote admiringly of Chavez's music; in 1941, Copland said that Chavez "succeeded in creating a music that not only is his own but is recognizably Mexican."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=6784014651655519795#MEXICAN"><sup>1</sup></a><br />
<br />
I don't know if there's anything "recognizably Mexican" in the <i>Sinfonía Romántica</i> in particular. (It's worth noting, perhaps, that the piece was a Louisville Symphony Orchestra commission.) But we do know that Chavez was a key musical figure in Mexico — not just as a composer of seven symphonies, a number of ballets, chamber pieces, and other works, but also as a journalist and a leader of major Mexican musical institutions. And I've heard that Chavez was interested in Native American music; themes have been identified in Chavez's other works, including his Symphony No. 2, the <i>Sinfonía India</i> (1935-6). In a fascinating set of <a href="http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=lbcoll&fileName=lbtep/0312/0312.db&recNum=1&itemLink=D?lbcoll:1:./temp/~ammem_VE7s::">pre-concert lecture notes from 1960</a>, Bernstein seemed to define Chavez's Mexicanness in the <i>Romántica</i> in terms of stereotypes — as a blend of Indian austerity (and here Bernstein mentioned Aztec idols) with Latin passion (and here Bernstein crossed out a passage about Spanish olive oil).<br />
<br />
Chavez doesn't start his <i>Sinfonía Romántica</i> with anything Latin, Indian, Mexican, or American. Rather, the English horn presents a puzzling, tonally ambiguous melody that will resurface throughout the symphony. Across this clip (recording by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chavez-Sinfonia-Antigona-Romantica-sym/dp/B000S58QG2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290126381&sr=8-1">Enrique Bátiz and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra</a>), but especially with the repeated short-long-long trumpet figure toward the end, I do sense the kind of starkness to which Bernstein may have been referring:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Chavez1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio> <br />
<br />
And perhaps this more flowing line is where the olive oil-like passion comes in:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Chavez2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio> <br />
<br />
But if there's anything really "romántica" about Chavez's fourth, it's probably the second movement. The first violins languidly offer the same melody the English horns started the whole symphony with, but they use it to kick off a luscious, polyphonic rhapsody for all the strings:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Chavez3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
And this movement is all about soaring strings. For a few minutes I thought I was listening to Bruckner (thanks to the sequences and warm blankets of brass) or Mahler (because of the big leaps, high-register reaches and appoggiaturas):<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Chavez4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio> <br />
<br />
But the return of woodwinds and of more complex textures jolts us back to reality at the beginning of the third movement. Our original English horn theme gets a new context, appearing here on the heels of the last movement's more playful main theme. <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Chavez5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio> <br />
<br />
(And with that appearance, all you <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/11/lost-romantic-mehuls-fourth.html">Méhul</a> fans can credit yet another symphony to the cyclic tradition your favorite composer supposedly invented.)<br />
<br />
Overall, the third movement brings the symphony an appropriately light, celebratory ending. It nicely contrasts with both the solemnity of the first movement and the emotional fervency of the second. But the mysterious concluding sonority creates a slightly unsettling final sensation after all the partying:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Chavez6.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio> <br />
<br />
I don't know if that's a "romantic" ending to a "romantic" symphony, but it does make me crave olive oil. But I always crave olive oil, so you be the judge.<br />
<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=6784014651655519795" name="MEXICAN">1.</a> Copland, <i>Our New Music</i> (1941) 205.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-55811886791284323012010-11-12T11:30:00.011-05:002011-01-31T20:03:27.438-05:00Slow, Sad, and Beautiful<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TN1rTpomFaI/AAAAAAAAAIM/LakouR0RRtE/s1600/Gorecki.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TN1rTpomFaI/AAAAAAAAAIM/LakouR0RRtE/s320/Gorecki.jpg" width="224" /></a>Sad news to report -- Henryk <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Górecki, the Polish composer whose </span><b style="font-family: arial;"><i>Second Symphony</i></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> "Copernican" <a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/08/hey-copernicus-goreckis-second-symphony.html">we've already written up,</a> has passed away at 76 after a fight with prolonged illness. You can read more </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11741555" style="font-family: arial;">here</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">, </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/12/polish-composer-henryk-gorecki-dies" style="font-family: arial;">here</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">, and </span><a href="http://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/henryk-mikolaj-gorecki-1933-2010/" style="font-family: arial;">here</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> Górecki deserves a special tribute here, as somehow, against all odds, his </span><b style="font-family: arial;"><i>Third Symphony</i></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> "Sorrowful Songs" (1976) managed to defy the "Unsung" assumption for late 20th Century Symphonies -- the 1992 Elektra-Nonesuch recording with soprano Dawn Upshaw sold an unprecedented number of copies for a contemporary classical work, <a href="http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/VEPM/gorecki/gor-wrks.html#op36">spawning 12+ rerecordings</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">(!) and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">angering critics who mistook the symphony's glacial floes of grief and memory for simple monotony. All this popularity perplexed the supremely modest composer, of course. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Hearing past the hype is not something we're used to asking at this blog (symphonic hype? we wish), but <i style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">Górecki's </span>Third </i>really deserves to be heard with fresh, attentive ears.<br />
<br />
Heartbreakingly, Gorecki never completed his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Fourth Symphony</i>, a work that was scheduled for <a href="http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_news.php?id=1413">first performance</a> earlier this year by the London Phil, only to be cancelled because of his illness. Given that </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Górecki's</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> compositional output slowed to a minuscule dribble in his later years, the importance of this work </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">will be all the greater - that is if it eventually is completed by someone else and premieres posthumously (rest assured, we will cover it).<br />
<br />
So many of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Górecki's compositions are laments that it is almost impossible to single out a particular work to leave you with. So we'll go with the obvious choice and offer his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Third</i>. Here is the gargantuan aeolian canon based a hybrid of two Polish songs, "Oto Jesus umiera" and "Niechaj bendzie pochwalony" that grows to such an agonized climax before giving way to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg20lWx7mR8&feature=related">Upshaw's vocals</a> on a 14th Century Polish Marian lament "O my son, beloved and chosen, Share your wounds with your mother..."<br />
<br />
<object height="193" width="300"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eUd7KyRck1U?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eUd7KyRck1U?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="300" height="193"></embed></object></span>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-57449293385030046942010-11-09T17:53:00.026-05:002013-01-25T11:39:20.142-05:00The "Lost" Romantic: Méhul's Fourth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Mehul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Mehul.jpg" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Today we discuss a composer from the turn of the 19th Century whose four symphonies had until relatively recently fallen off the face of the (musical) Earth. During the Revolutionary Period, <em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_M%C3%A9hul">Étienne Méhul </a>(1763-1817) was regarded as one of France's most popular and innovative composers of opera, labeled a "Romantic" in the rather early year of 1793. He was responsible for a 1790s golden age for </em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><i style="font-style: italic;">opéras-comique</i> with his then-inescapable historico-mythical stage works</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;">. In them, one might be struck by stylistic traits </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;">not usually found until the much later works of Richard Wagner (or at least Carl Maria von Weber): jolting modulations, a hefty orchestral role, and a thorough use of "</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;">reminiscence</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"> motifs" -- themes linked with important ideas that recur at various stages in the work. The commanding stature of his serious operas, along with a steady production of patriotic marches and choruses, led to a friendship with Napoleon himself, who commissioned works from </span><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;">Méhul directly. Though the popularity of his stage works waned somewhat with changes in taste after 1800, they were nonetheless highly praised by a generation of later composers, particularly Berlioz. </em></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Seeking to branch out into new sound worlds, </span></span><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul set about writing a cycle of five symphonies during the Imperial Era, which otherwise boasted no significant new such works from any French composer. Orchestral culture in Paris deemed symphonies the proper province of the Germans, so that while </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul's plunge into the genre would not have been expressly discouraged, he was swimming against the tide. </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Completed between 1808 and 1811, these five symphonies received quite positive reviews, but it seems that their place in posterity was damned by the barbs hurled by two influential critics, Cherubini and <em style="font-style: normal;">Fétis. The former dismissed the symphonies as musical "ephemera" while the latter sneered that they were "dry and pretentious" attempts at ersatz Haydn.<b> </b>(Quoted in Schwartz, 1987, 92).</em></span></em><br />
<em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></em></em></div><div style="text-align: left;"><em style="line-height: 14px;"><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Noting a debt to the Germans is indeed warranted, b</span></span></em></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">ut the negative assessment is not. Cherubini and </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Fétis's</span></em></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> vituperation seems to have been the determining factor against the dissemination of </span></em></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul's symphonies, overcoming the </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">sporadic revivals of </span></em></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">his music in the 19th Century. (Schumann, after Mendelssohn performed the First Symphony, was guardedly impressed). </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Stick to opera!", it seems, was the judgment history placed on </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul. </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Correspondingly, the idea that there was an influential French symphonist before Berlioz sputtered and languished until very recently.<b>(1)</b></span></em><br />
<em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></em></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In 1979, while researching Berlioz, musicologist David Charlton discovered to his astonishment the orchestral part manuscripts for the 3rd and 4th symphonies of </span></em></span><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul, whose full scores had long gone missing </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(the 5th remains incomplete, possibly never finished). His editorial reconstructions were published in 1982 in a full volume of </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul symphonies, and a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mehul-Complete-Symphonies-Etienne-Nicolas/dp/B0000037CW">CD recording from Nimbus Records</a> came out seven years later with all four performed by Michel Swierczweski and the Orchestra of the Gulbenkian Foundation. Now, we seem to be witnessing an upswing in the reception of this composer, as tonight (Nov 9, 2010), the world will witness the first British performance ever of </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul's <b>Fourth Symphony in E Major </b>(1810)<b>!</b></span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The work will "premier" at a concert </span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">with the <a href="http://www.oae.co.uk/">Orchestra of the Enlightenment</a>, alongside other music of Parisian vintage from Cherubini, Berlioz, and Mozart (Symphony No. 31). An </span></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">article in the Telegraph by Richard Savill boldly announces to the world the importance of this event: "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/8115804/Lost-tienne-Mehul-symphony-set-for-London-premiere.html">Lost </a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/8115804/Lost-tienne-Mehul-symphony-set-for-London-premiere.html">Étienne Méhul symphony set for London premiere</a>."</em></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="font-style: normal;"></em></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> While articles trumpeting the arrival of "new" or "discovered" Classical works often are guilty of some sensationalist imprecision, Savill's article rightly points out <em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;">some of the remarkable features of the Fourth Symphony. Foremost of these is the allegedly prescient use of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_form">cyclic form</a>," usually defined as the integration of thematic ideas across multiple movements. Journalists and musicologists alike salivate at the prospect of locating a "precedent" for some later widespread practice, and </em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;">Méhul, that consummate weaver of reminiscence motifs, seems like a prime candidate for such. (and, it should be said, attendant reevaluation in history textbooks, all of which I surveyed bear scant or no mention of Méhul at all). Remarkably, the cyclical principle did not become widespread practice until quite far </em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;">into the 19th Century; symphonic movements even after Berlioz's generally held their movements at arms length, thematically speaking. What has always seemed to me an obvious idea -- perhaps being raised on Dvorak's 9th will do that to you -- took an exceedingly long time to become stylistic norm.(<b>2</b>)<br />
<br />
The cyclic linkage in </em><span style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Méhul's </span><b>Fourth<i> </i></b></span><span style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">occurs between the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojWZkawlKvs">1st Movement'</a>s slow introduction and a leg of the 4th spasmodic Allegro theme. Beginning the 1st is a stately harmonic progression that sculpts out E-major in no big hurry.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Mehul%201.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_4SmP6xSs">4th movement</a>, we hear that progression and its melodic outline sped up and decorated by a swift bum-bada-bum-bum rhythm (at the very end of the clip) that courses through the entire movement -- easily the best of the four in my estimation</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Mehul%202.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> Certainly a clever incorporation, but not exactly the overthrowing of all symphonic shackles Savill's article makes it out to be. Frankly, I find the more compelling "cyclical" element to be the reuse of an adventurous sequence (for which Méhul had a decided knack) from 1st Movement's first subject. In the 4th movement, it comes fast on the heels of the example above, adding yet more nervous energy. It's a more abstract kind of connection than we're used to in thematic recollections, and it suggests tighter formal control than I think Méhul's critics were willing to grant him. For convenience's sake, I've merged the two instances of the sequence into one example.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Mehul%203.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> There are smaller hints of recall between the two outer movements, but I feel like this connection above all "makes" the boundlessly energetic 4th movement, as if we were hearing 1st on speed. The inner movements don't participate in this game, but have remarkable components as well. The <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrtAml37brM&feature=related">3rd movement</a>, totally rewritten after some critiques of the original (apparently over-contrapuntal) is a Haydnesque minuet, managing even in its stripped-down veneer to sound arch, even a bit tipsy at moments. The 2nd movement Andante is, to my ears, without precedent in terms of symphonic orchestration, consisting for 58 measures of nothing but an intensely lyrical (aria-like?) cello melody supported by bass pizzicato. And yes, that's the NPR motif appearing briefly in its second sentence (around :52).</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Mehul%204.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> One of the greatest pleasures of this symphony is hearing how that initially spare type of orchestration is fleshed out as the movement progresses, as you can begin to hear at the end of the above clip. It is clear why Berlioz would cite Méhul again and again in his instrumentation treatise as a surpassingly sensitive and experimental worker of the orchestra.(<b>3</b>)</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> We await the U.K. premier of the </span><b>Fourth </b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">-- ultimately it is up to the public to judge whether Méhul's symphonic oeuvre is, like Charlton says, a seismic jolt of unheard masterpieces or just another historical curiosity. To those willing to probe a little beyond the headlines, however, one will discover a wily and resourceful composer, having absorbed everything Haydn through Beethoven could teach at that moment and pushing his own limits as a composer of opera.</span><br />
</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">--Frank Lehman</span></em></em></em></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></em></em></em></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">1. </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Charlton's editions with commentary of the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=iTcWlTDTR0EC&pg=PT19&dq=mehul+symphony+charlton&hl=en&ei=U8rZTP_NG4a8lQeV98jvCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=mehul%20symphony%20charlton&f=false">First Symphony</a> and <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=vjJYAAAAMAAJ&dq=charlton+three+symphonies&hl=en&ei=48rZTOuEFoWBlAe036CeCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA">3rd through 5th</a> provided a great deal of the background for this post.</span></em></em></em></span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">2. </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Early precedents of course exist (<b><a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192">Matt</a> </b></span></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">brings up Haydn's Symphony No. 31 "Horn Signal" as one of the first, and of course we have Beethoven's 5th, written a little earlier than </span></em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul's 4th but basically unheard in France for several more decades)</span></em></span></em></em></em></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">3. </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">E</span></span><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">xamples culled, of course, from his operas -- I found no evidence that Berlioz ever heard any of </span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Méhul's symphonies</span></em><em style="font-style: normal; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></em></em></em></span></div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-90042749159851793432010-10-31T23:57:00.026-04:002013-01-25T11:40:38.215-05:00Halloween Hangover - Sorabji's 1st Organ Symphony<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TM7RO5JCZoI/AAAAAAAAGGA/BVH7WIb-YCg/s1600/sorabji.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5534591045872019074" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TM7RO5JCZoI/AAAAAAAAGGA/BVH7WIb-YCg/s200/sorabji.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 142px;" /></a><br />
Last night, while you were walking around your neighborhood in your "scary" costume, eating <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHbYOwkJPpA">Twix</a>,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343#TWIX"><sup>1</sup></a> and generally having a good time, I was doing Halloween for real. <br />
<br />
It was party time for you, but I spent nearly two hours listening to frightening organ music. And I lived to tell the tale.<br />
<br />
That two-hour chunk of organ music was actually all one piece — <b>Khaikosru Sorabji's Organ Symphony No. 1 (1924)</b>. I came across the English<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343#ENGLISH"><sup>2</sup></a> composer's name last year because of a somewhat snarky article he wrote in 1928 in <a href="http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mtpl"><i>The Musical Times</i></a> urging more performances of Mahler's music. <br />
<br />
So I figured that Sorabji was OK with long symphonies. What I didn't quite expect before I looked at the timings on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Organ-Symphony-1-Sorabji/dp/B000003X01">Kevin Bowyer's apparently rare recording</a> was a scarily long third movement that alone spans 47 minutes. But at 2 hours total, this symphony is actually a baby. Though I know little about Sorabji's other two organ symphonies, apparently they're both much longer.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343#LONGER"><sup>3</sup></a> What's more, Sorabji's actual (orchestral, not organ) Symphony No. 3 ("Jumi") makes Mahler's Ninth look like a piano miniature. In "Jumi," the third movement alone lasts 2 hours. (So if you have a minute, check out the set of about 8 billion Youtube clips of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26BNRW1k_lU">strikingly realistic digital version</a> of "Jumi," which will have to tide you over until some orchestra actually decides to play it.)<br />
<br />
All this makes perfect sense if you remember that Sorabji (1892-1988) was really a rock star ahead of his time. Approaching "Jumi" or the Organ Symphony No. 1 isn't so daunting if you treat it like the Flaming Lips' legendary <a href="http://janecek.com/zaireeka.html"><i>Zaireeka</i></a>, the album you're supposed to listen to on four different stereos simultaneously (and the only CD I know of with instructions for proper use). My brief experience with the blend of towering chords and labyrinthine polyphony in the Organ Symphony suggests that next time, I might want to bring some friends over (on some night besides Halloween), lie down, and just let the music wash over everyone in the room. <br />
<br />
If Sorabji was half Flaming Lips, he was also half <a href="http://chalkhills.org/who.html">XTC</a>. That excellent group stopped playing live in 1982 because of Andy Partridge's <a href="http://chalkhills.org/articles/Spin9901.html">stage fright</a>. Maybe Andy took a cue from Sorabji, who stopped performing on the piano in 1936 for similar reasons.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343#PIANO"><sup>4</sup></a> <br />
<br />
Back to fright night,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343#FRIGHT"><sup>5</sup></a> and on to the Organ Symphony. All it demands are a really good organist and an organ with 4-5 manuals, or keyboards (in other words, a really big organ). The first movement is a passacaglia with a perfectly reasonable 81 variations. Here's the bass ostinato on which it's built (on the organ, the feet play it on the pedals):<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Sorabji1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
This tune does show up again toward the close of both the second and third movements, giving this long symphony a (slightly) cyclical feel. You should be able to detect the first half of the theme here, toward the end of the fugal second movement (the only time I found it in this movement):<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Sorabji5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
Back in the first movement, though, that tune lurches in rhythmic disjunction with the other voices. This conflict heightens its already haunting quality and, on Halloween, can make you feel like Zombies are closing in on you from different directions. Here are the first four variations, and I hope you can pick out the ominous bass figure each time:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Sorabji2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
These kinds of textures dominate the symphony. So the opposite kind — enormous blocks of notes hurled at the listener — actually provides some stability. Here's a clip from near the beginning of the third movement, where a long, soft, chromatic chordal passage builds to a polyphonic frenzy that contains that same kind of rhythmic discord:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Sorabji3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
What I found most surprising about this symphony on my first listen was that the extra-long third movement — the least clear in form — was actually the easiest to follow. The frequent pauses gave me both a chance to catch my breath and a sense that I was following a series of narrative episodes rather than an intellectual unfolding. If I were scoring a silent horror film, I'd probably go straight to this third movement and choose a passage like this one:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Sorabji4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
The main point here is that I survived Halloween night without any <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur_s-Pqj94Y">Bach Toccata-related nightmares</a>. This is remarkable, because Bach is a big part of this symphony, and of that last clip in particular — and not just because of the instrument or the counterpoint. What you might not realize about that last passage, about 40 minutes into the movement and serving as a kind of overall climax, is that Sorabji gives us the famous B-A-C-H (Bb, A, C, B) figure in those wild block chords you just heard. It happens seven times, an ostinato that trumps the first movement's passacaglia foundation. Sorabji even wrote "BACH" in the score. Every single time. Irony or not, it's pretty intense hearing the pedal part trying to get its groove back underneath that weight of the great German master.<br />
<br />
You made it this far, which means your heart can stand the shocking facts about (and sounds of) Sorabji's Organ Symphony No. 1. And remember, my friend: future events, including actual performances of Sorabji's symphonies, will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you're listening to Sorabji, and that's why you're here at Unsung Symphonies.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343#WOOD"><sup>6</sup></a> Now do yourself a favor and check out the modern Sorabji, XTC's Andy Partridge, in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J5GVVz0gjA">a rare live performance of one of the greatest songs ever</a>.<br />
<br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343" name="TWIX">1.</a> They're all Twix. It was a setup.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343" name="ENGLISH">2.</a> According to Paul Rapoport in <a href="http://www.grovemusic.com/">Grove</a>, Sorabji — whose mother was Spanish-Sicilian and father was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsi">Parsi</a> — didn't care for the "English" label.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343" name="LONGER">3.</a> So say Allistair Hinton's liner notes to the recording.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343" name="PIANO">4.</a> See <a href="http://www.grovemusic.com/">Grove</a> and <a href="http://chalkhills.org/who.html">Chalkhills</a> for this striking connection.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343" name="FRIGHT">5.</a> Yama Hama!<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=9004274915985179343" nae="WOOD">6.</a> Text adapted from Ed Wood, <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBi14L7jHLM">Plan 9 From Outer Space</a></i>, but applicable to nearly any situation involving scary stuff.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-49280682903064882102010-10-25T10:39:00.058-04:002013-01-25T11:42:02.348-05:00Paradise Regained - Weigl's Fifth "Apocalyptic"<div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">This should sound like a gutsy way to start a symphony even to the most jaded listeners among you:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Weigl%201.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">In performance, the effect will be even more striking. This work begins with the filing of orchestral musicians into the concert hall, warming up their instruments like normal. This isn't a transcribed preamble to a concert like Edgard </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Varèse's <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5gZ2-RgrU">Tuning Up</a></i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5gZ2-RgrU"> (1947)</a> but genuine, if highly predictable, span of "chance" music. As the buzz of non-music suffuses the hall, the conductor takes the stage and instructs a quartet of low brass players, positioned oddly on a raised platform, to sound a theme. Their sharply-etched annunciation stands in starkest relief against the disorderly backdrop. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">The brass quorum call thus issued, the warming up musicians fall in line, proposing a handful of mysterious motifs that will soon coalesce into this symphony's main thematic subject.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0000ee; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5532030057812444162" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TMW4BxKxxAI/AAAAAAAAAHo/FBUSdOmOx0A/s320/Weigl.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 213px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">This is the beginning of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Weigl">Karl Weigl</a>'s <b><i>Fifth Symphony</i></b> "<i><b>The Apocalyptic</b>" </i></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> (1945), from a movement dubbed "Evocation." </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> It's a rhetorically direct strategy, to wring order out of a swarming musical chaos, routine since Beethoven's 9th first premiered in 1824. The outlines of the brass melody are also familiar, the downward agglomeration of perfect intervals resembling Beethoven and perhaps even more, the grand columns that buttress Anton Bruckner's symphonies. I</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">n the long competition of composers striving to out-inchoate each other's openings, Weigl's is the logical extreme; to my</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> knowledge, no such an</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> audacious version of the <i>ex nihlo</i> archetype had been attempted prior to this 1945 work. It is the more surprising because Weigl was no <i>avant-garde</i> composer, and this is no experimental symphony. Nothing remotely as strange occurs for the duration of the long (50 minute) symphony. For all its potency in establishing the mood of this work, t</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">he opening of the "Apocalyptic" is a weirdly one-off event.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">The great expanse of the rest of the "Evocation" movement presents a dense network of sonata themes. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">S</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">ome are knotted in the vein of early Schoenberg, like this the first subject proper, straining the ears with its tangle of counterpoint and hovering tonality (listen to the progressive enchroachment of the brass summons):</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Weigl%202.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Others are broad, even benedictory like this secondary theme:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Weigl%203.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">In full Brucknerian fashion, there's a false climax at the end of (what seems to be) the development section, evoking the life out of that introductory brass theme. This is not music that minces its words.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Weigl%204.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Karl Weigl is not a household name for the same reasons that Zemlinsky, Schreker, von Schillings, and Schmidt are not. While an inventive and prolific composer, his music continued up the late-romantic branch of Mahler and Strauss long after the history-hogging </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">offshoot of atonality had broken off. B</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">orn into an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna 1881,</span></span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Weigl was situated at the absolute center of Viennese musical culture for several decades. He studied with the luminaries Fuchs, Adler, and Zemlinsky, participating with the latter in his progressive "</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Society of Creative Musicians" along with Schoenberg and Webern -- pals until their musical paths diverged so radically. He went on to become Mahler's right hand man at the Vienna opera, acting as vocal coach and rehearsal conductor. Weigl garnered prestigious positions and critical praise for his music through the 20s. But the rise of the Nazi party dragged this prominent composer's reputation down considerably. With Hitler's annexation of Austria, the Jewish socialist managed to emigrate to the United States like so many other German composers. Adjustment to American life was difficult, but he eventually secured teaching posts at various schools of music on the East Coast. But deprived of the renown as a composer he enjoyed in Europe, he was forced to retreat into composition without performance.<br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;">Weigl wrote his Fifth Symphony at the conclusion of World War II. It is dedicated to "the people of the United Nations" and bears the inscription "to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt" -- a gesture identical to that of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (a former student) in his dedication to the F-sharp Symphony (1952). The timing and appellation "Apocalyptic" suggests that this is a war work; Weigl, an ardent pacifist, conceived of his </span></span><i style="font-family: arial; font-size: small; line-height: 14px;">Second Symphony </i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;">as a response to the Great War. But there is little external evidence indicating what exactly Weigl meant in programmatic terms. I suspect he was making a nod towards Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, sometimes also referred to as "Apocalyptic," for the spirit of Bruckner infuses much of this work, particularly the massive 3rd Movement Adagio "Paradise Lost." Unquestionably the heart of the symphony, it is its most bald-faced musical anachronism, gorgeous but seemingly immobilized under </span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">the 19th century symphonist's shadow. Here is a sample of the only slightly updated Brucknerisms, swelling climaxes and all. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Weigl%205.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Paradise for Weigl, it would seem, is a Bruckner slow movement in double variation form. (When it comes to direct references, which are numerous, I hear more of Bruckner's 7th "Lyric" symphony than the 8th). Against the dominance of Viennese atonality that Weigl could never accept, the power of such sweet tonality was indeed "lost."</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; line-height: 14px;">The "Apocalyptic's" second and fourth movements are most literally eschatological. The second, titled "The Dance around the Golden Calf," is a sardonic, very Mahlerian scherzo with certain modal touches that Llyod Moore (author of the one recording's liner notes) hears as distinctly "Jewish." (So who exactly is the target of sardonic energy here?). The fourth movement, "The Four Horsemen," is eventful but not necessarily the fire-and-brimstone you'd expect from the title. Rather, elements of previous movements (particularly "Paradise") clash against the backdrop of a semi-serious march themes. You'll be hard pressed to locate Famine, War, Death, or Pestilence individually here, or even a clear-cut sense of victory or defeat. The ending, a sudden blast of celebratory bells, sounds perfunctory and pessimistic. All of this is quite a contrast to the work's unearthly opening sounds. It is a gesture which, for all the symphony's beauty and teeth-gnashing, Weigl never feels the need to corroborate.</span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">****</span></span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Weigl never survived to hear the eventual premiere of this work at the hands of Leopold Stokowski in 1968, although it was highly praised when finally heard. I freely admit I only picked up the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Karl-Weigl-Apocalyptic-Intermezzo-Sanderling/dp/B000068R14/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1288027166&sr=8-2">BIS recording of this work because of the extravagant cover art</a>. Thomas Sanderling's conducting of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin is stellar, especially for such a red giant of a work, but without other recordings, I am in no position to say if it's truly definitive.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"> Only one other Karl Weigl symphony has been recorded, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Karl-Weigl-Symphony-No-Vienna/dp/B000DZV8FI/ref=pd_sim_m_2">the Sixth</a>, by the same forces.</span></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">--Frank Lehman</span></span></div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-52710038230626444582010-10-18T18:15:00.026-04:002013-01-25T11:42:59.061-05:00Impossible Symphony - Kastner's "Les Cris de Paris"<div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Unsung Symphonies is proud to announce its first guest post, from Harvard Professor of Music </span></span><a href="http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/faculty/arehding.html"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Alex Rehding</span></span></b></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">! In addition to his wide-ranging work in music theory, the history of ideas, and aesthetics, Alex is always on the lookout for new obscure works. In today's post, he explores a genuinely "unsung" symphony, a work from the composer J.G Kastner that has not been performed before, and for certain reasons may never be!</span></span></div><div><hr /></div><div><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TL3qtIdMppI/AAAAAAAAAHU/IM8r0-Y9fAU/s320/Smaller+Still.jpg" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529833978565797522" border="0" /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The name of J. G. Kastner (1810-1867) hardly counts as a household name in the symphonic repertoire. This is, at least in part, because everything about him evades</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> easy categorization: Kastner was always exceptionally good at crossing boundaries. As a musician born and raised in Alsace—a region located on the border between France and Germany that had been in constant territorial dispute for the last one thousand years—this must have come quite naturally to him. Born Johann Georg Kastner, he soon became Jean Georges after he moved to Paris in 1835 to study at the famous Conservatoire. Much of what we know about Kastner nowadays stems from the three-volume biography that his widow commissioned after Kastner’s untimely death. The German-language biographer, Hermann Ludwig, was eager to tie Kastner more firmly to a Germanic sphere of influence and its more prestigious symphonic tradition. As a result, the image we have of Kastner—such as it is—is furrowed by the same kind of rifts as his native Alsace.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This year marks Kastner’s 200th birthday on March 9. This joyous event was, arguably, somewhat overshadowed by his contemporaries Chopin and Schumann. Kastner has suffered from being not-quite-a-scholar and not-quite-a-composer. He earned his place in music history primarily with a hybrid genre called </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">livre-partition</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> or “book-score.” The </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">livres-partitions</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> collect information on a given musical topic— dances of death, the sirens, army songs, the city cries of Paris, and others—in the form of a learned (but rarely scholarly) treatise, and then top it off with an original composition on the topic of the treatise. The compositions that conclude Kastner’s learned works are often called “symphony.” This title may seem misleading, given that most of these works include vocal parts, but in fact they follow in the French tradition of symphonic works, of which Berlioz is the most famous representative, which not only include instrumental music but also vocal forces, including choruses and dramatic scenes.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">In 1888 the German musicologist Philipp Spitta pointed out, in a review of Ludwig’s biography, that none of Kastner’s compositions had ever been performed. Spitta noted that Kastner seems surprisingly unconcerned about this circumstance, and speculated that perhaps regular concert audiences are not even right for his music: the compositions are firmly bound to the intellectual and physical context from which they stem, and readers who will have the stamina to plow through an entire treatise, Spitta surmised, will have the required musical literacy as well to work through the score.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It seems that in the intervening one hundred and twenty years the performance situation did not change much—until last year, when the </span></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lecrit-cri-Renaissance-Century-Songs/dp/B001OBV9Z4/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1287511494&sr=1-11"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Ensemble Clément Jannequin recorded a version</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> of Kastner’s </span></span><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Grande symphonie humoristique vocale et instrumentale Les Cris de Paris</span></span></i></b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> (1857), which Spitta considered to be Kastner’s most successful work.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">What the Ensemble Jannequin produces, to say it upfront, has fairly little to do with Kastner’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">partition</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">—it is an eight-minute excerpt of sections from the substantial symphony, adapted for the forces the vocal ensemble normally operates with: they replace Kastner’s extravagant orchestral forces with piano, organ, and lute sounds. The excerpts they put together focus on the humorous episode of the “dormeur” (sleeper) and his lovely serenade, which is repeatedly disturbed by the rude shouts of the market vendors.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/KASTNER1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">livre </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">to which </span></span><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Les cris de Paris</span></span></i></b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> forms the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">partition</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, is a study—we might almost want to call it a musical ethnography—of the street cries of market vendors of Paris in a by-gone age. Kastner tirelessly collected, transcribed, notated, and classified the hundreds of calls that made up the soundscape of urban Paris and that were fast disappearing in the course of the industrialization. If any reader wonders why the</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> cris de Paris </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">are all so surprisingly musical, rhythmic and diatonic, a ready answer can be found in the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">partition</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, which weaves all these different sound snippets into a dense symphonic web of motivic relations.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The whole project is carried by a prominent sense of nostalgia, and was eagerly studied by French musicians of subsequent generations. It is not for nothing that the first vocal entry we hear in this recording is “Restez, ô mes songes fidèles” (stay, my faithful dreams). The Ensemble Jannequin subtly underlines the melancholy </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">relationship of Kastner’s work to an irrevocable</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">age by adopting archaic, though historically accurate, French pronunciation in their performance, which by the nineteenth century was outmoded—pronouncing, for instance, “trois” and “noix” with a nasal diphthong.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Kastner%202.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The dense and virtuosic polyphonic texture here suggests a closer relationship with operatic stretti than with symphonic genres. The Ensemble Jannequin is primarily interested Kastner’s work in so far as it creates a link to </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Clément </span></span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Janequin"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Jannequin’s</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> famous sixteenth-century chanson “</span></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHTKU6jcdi4"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Les cris de Paris</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">.” (In his </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">livre</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, Kastner criticized Jannequin for his insufficiently “scientific” approach to his material, which sacrificed authenticity in the service of following the rules of counterpoint.)</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Kastner%203.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The boisterous and rambunctious excerpts that the Ensemble Jannequin singles out, however, do not necessarily convey the impression that the symphony as a whole would make. Despite the “humoristique” overtones of the whole symphony, the score ends with a tender (and extremely quiet) chorus, which completes a whole day of noises in the cityscape of Paris.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It is worth studying the score as a whole—not only for the virtuosic web of market calls that Kastner weaves into his music, but also for the progressive instrumental effects that Kastner employs, including harp harmonics, and the sheer profligate orchestral forces that Kastner’s boundless imagination conjures up (including a march that requires forty different brass instruments). In the end, one can only agree with Spitta, that this is a music for which performance is secondary. It revels, more than anything else, in its status beyond boundaries as an impossible symphony.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">--Alex Rehding</span></span></div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-46376385058207191072010-10-09T16:33:00.030-04:002013-01-25T11:44:00.632-05:00No strings attached - Giannini's Third, for Wind Band<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TLDYr8ZC65I/AAAAAAAAGFk/vN00C9aC07k/s1600/giannini1.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526154992240749458" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8pJb1FDRZJ0/TLDYr8ZC65I/AAAAAAAAGFk/vN00C9aC07k/s200/giannini1.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 200px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 146px;" /></a>It was my dad’s birthday this past Monday. And as I think about everything he’s taught me over the years, one stands out in particular: orchestral music sounds pretty good when you leave out most of the orchestra. <br />
<br />
When I was growing up, every so often over the summer we’d head down to D.C. from the Maryland suburbs and sit on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to hear service bands perform pieces composed for wind band.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=4637638505820719107#WIND"><sup>1</sup></a> And just as often, or maybe even more often, we’d hear wind band arrangements of orchestral classics. For these latter pieces, I occasionally thought something was missing. Once you’re used to the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYPFwEbC91k&feature=related">fluid turns in the violin</a> that start “Night on Bald Mountain,” it’s hard to get used to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqWIGJaujKg">choppy clarinets handling the same passage</a>, as interesting as it might sound.<br />
<br />
But it also works the other way around. Compare the prim and proper lyrical theme in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqh4hksjAdA#t=01m03s">orchestral re-arrangement</a> of “Stars and Stripes Forever” with the much more boisterous —and, I think, appropriately march-like — <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpr5lYMz7LE#t=01m22s">original version for wind band</a> (recording quality strategically chosen to play up contrast).<br />
<br />
Anyway, around the time of our trips to the Capitol, my dad mentioned Vittorio Giannini’s <b>Symphony No. 3</b> (1958) and his own experience playing the tuba part with the All-Maryland High School Band at the Baltimore Civic Center in 1965. Giannini’s Third is the composer’s only symphony to be composed for wind band, and it appears to be the most famous of the Philadelphia-born composer’s five symphonies. Maybe its status as a symphony specifically for wind band helped give it a cultural lifeline, a unique and enduring avenue into a particular repertory. A number of symphonies were composed for this kind of group, but there are, of course, many more for standard orchestra. That may mean that a brand new symphony has an easier time competing to survive if it’s specifically for wind band. Call it natural symphonic selection. <br />
<br />
Here’s how this particular symphony came about: The Duke University Band asked Giannini to write something, and according to the composer, “I can give no other reason for choosing to write a Symphony to fulfill this commission than that I ‘felt like it,’ and the thought of doing it interested me a great deal.” That’s a good enough reason, and Giannini reported that when asked how it feels to compose for wind band (and not for orchestra, chamber groups, or voice), he “can only answer, ‘There is no difference. The band is simply another medium for which I try to make music.’” <a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=4637638505820719107#LINER"><sup>2</sup></a><br />
<br />
Add to that the fact that there’s nothing really puzzling, shocking, or experimental about Giannini’s Third (except maybe that it’s for wind band but isn’t otherwise strange), and you have a vivacious work that wind bands can really use to please crowds and that also carries the dignity and historical weight associated with the name “symphony”. Giannini seemed to want us to hear this composition as a straightforward wind-band play on a classical symphony. It has four movements, in the standard order of fast-slow-fast-fast. In the liner notes to the <a href="http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=4208">Mercury Living Presence recording</a>, he even diagrammed the structure, specifically calling the first and last movements sonata forms. The second is looser, and the third is a scherzo. In other words, Giannini didn’t use the unusual medium as an excuse to do something wild and crazy. And he wanted us to know it.<br />
<br />
This might explain why, at times, the Third sounds like a wind band transcription of a symphony for orchestra — and it suggests to me, at least, that Giannini really conceived this symphony as an orchestral piece. When I hear the second theme of the first movement, I wonder if I ought to be hearing soaring strings instead of massed winds. This shouldn't surprise us — Giannini himself was a violinist. The part I’m talking about is in the following clip, after the hymn-like trombone passage and solo clarinet response. <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Giannini1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
On the other hand, in the finale, the second theme is a solid march, and I think strings would detract from it (here it is the second time we hear it, toward the very end of the movement):<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Giannini2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
In the second movement, Giannini sensitively blends and contrasts the available wind band timbres. It, too, has its “orchestral” moments, but my favorite parts are when solo instruments play off each other, as in this lullaby-like moment for flute and clarinets:<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Giannini3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
In the third movement (the scherzo), Giannini gives us some nice range and timbre contrasts (piccolo, flute, and snare vs. bass clarinets, bassoons, and sax) around an undulating clarinet figure — and toward the end of this clip, the brass work their way into the texture: <br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Giannini4.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<br />
My dad didn’t know the piece before playing both the first and fourth movements in Baltimore in 1965, but it led him to buy a recording of the whole thing (the same one, with A. Clyde Roller and the Eastman Wind Ensemble, from which the above clips are drawn). As my dad recalled this week, “I thought it was great to be picked for the All-State band. All the band members traveled from all over the state to perform in Baltimore, which, to me at 17, was pretty far from home (Hillcrest Heights in the D.C. suburbs). They paired us up so that two students spent a night living with a family the day before the concert, which was given as part of the Maryland State Teachers' Association yearly meeting.” Click <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Giannini2.jpg">here</a> for some collected snapshots from the actual program booklet, which my dad generously scanned for use here. Zoom in on the tubas.<br />
<br />
So, as a special treat, here’s the recording of the entire fourth movement — my favorite in this symphony — from that exact 1965 Baltimore Civic Center Concert, featuring my father, Marc Mugmon, on tuba. It was conducted by Richard Higgins, who headed both the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Peabody Wind Ensemble. Enjoy!<br />
<br />
<audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1253307/Giannini5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio><br />
<div align="RIGHT">— Matthew Mugmon</div><br />
---<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=4637638505820719107" name="WIND">1.</a>“Wind Band” might not be the preferred nomenclature. "Band," “Symphonic Winds,” “Symphonic Band,” “Concert Band,” “Military Band,” or “Wind Ensemble,” please. Wind chimes don't count — serenity now!<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6464483192473464743&postID=4637638505820719107" name="LINER">2.</a>From the liner notes to the Mercury Living Presence recording by A. Clyde Roller and the Eastman Wind Ensemble.Mugshothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04118832685122190192noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6464483192473464743.post-57621062688625492712010-09-29T13:55:00.035-04:002013-01-25T11:45:12.049-05:00Neo-Romantic Minority Report - Hanson's 6th<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TKOnhamU7tI/AAAAAAAAAGs/OzsKJbXwwq4/s1600/Hanson+Chase.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522441760603958994" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_aG_chgX_CmI/TKOnhamU7tI/AAAAAAAAAGs/OzsKJbXwwq4/s400/Hanson+Chase.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 195px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 256px;" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Middle America has given us two great musical Hansons. We're still waiting for a symphony to come from the Oklahoma-born Hanson clan who left us </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://mediaelites.com/files/2010/04/hanson.jpg">MMMBop</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">. That means Wahoo Nebraska's own </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hanson"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Howard Hanson</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> (1896-1981) gets the spotlight to himself today. Hanson was a major figure in the institutional history of American music, a member of the generation that included Copland, Sessions, and Wally </span></span><a href="http://unsungsymphonies.blogspot.com/2010/08/mark-it-3-walter-pistons-first-pulitzer.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Piston</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">. His 40 year (!) tenure as director of the Eastman School of Music and his co-founding/presidency of the National Association of Schools of Music testify to his reputation for life-long advocacy for composers, conductors, and performers. He's not called the "Dean of American Music" for nothing.</span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">If I were asked to sum up the idea of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Neo-Romanticism</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> in music for someone, I'd probably hand them a recording of Hanson's symphonies (</span></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6abSJnTwg&feature=related"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">perhaps this one</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">) and then something rather different from roughly the same time (</span></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsYUKm7Fm_M"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">perhaps this one</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">!). The allegiance to tonality, the eschewing of bizarre or overtly novel orchestral effects, the generally harmonious and positive outlook on humanity -- it's all there! Reactionary is an ugly word, but it does capture the conscious rebellion Hanson undertook against the serial/neo-classical establishment in his own music (not in his teaching, however). </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">His most famous work, the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._2_(Hanson)">Second Symphony "Romantic"</a><span class="Apple-style-span"> was written, he attests, as "a genuine expression of romanticism and a protest against the growing Schoenbergianism of the time -- the cold music -- and I wanted to write something that was warm and young, vigorous and youthful."</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>1</sup></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup></sup></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Hanson was a conservative, no doubt, politically as well as musically. That's basically a death knell for one's hopes of entering the ~Classical Canon~. Well, our blog's motto is </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">to hell with the canon!</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> So let's take a nice, unabashed neo-Romantic bubble bath.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Actually, the member of Hanson's cycle of seven symphonies I've chosen to discuss is not his most sentimental, consonant, or accessible. In fact, the </span></span><b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Music-Howard-Hanson-Vol-1/dp/B000005Z2R/ref=sr_1_4?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285786274&sr=8-4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Symphony No. 6</span></span></a></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> (1967) contains passages that commentators point out as being uncharacteristically dissonant or "demonic." I believe this may be the best manifestation of a certain tension I've always felt about Hanson the composer and Hanson the thinker. For this peddler of symphonic romanticism that would make Rachmaninoff blush was also an indisputable </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i>pioneer</i></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i> </i><span class="Apple-style-span">in the realm of advanced music theory for atonal music! More than a decade before Allen Forte's </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">The Structure of Atonal Music</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">, Hanson published his </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Harmonic Materials of Modern Music</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">, a textbook that lays out a system for describing (and exercises for composing with) any combination of chromatic pitches. His system is idiosyncratic but thorough, introducing many of the concepts that were supposedly "big finds" in Fortean set-theory. On a couple of occasions, I've noted severe condescension towards Hanson's system from music theorists who deride it for not being as "systematic" or versed in mathematical set theory as Forte's. I think this is outrageously unfair towards Hanson (who was, after-all, neither career mathematician or music theorist) and his innovative theory.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Hanson's basic idea is to represent the interval content of a group of pitches by listing off the occurrences of (inversionally equivalent) intervals within it. For example, the succession of C to G to A has one </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">p</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">erfect fifth/fourth (C-G), one mi</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">n</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">or third (A-C), and one major </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">s</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">econd (G-A). Hanson labels this group </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">pns</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"> (no, not </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_nervous_system"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">that</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">). Descriptions for bigger groups can get a lot more complicated (the major scale, for example, is an inelegan</span>t p<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>6</sup></span>m</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>3</sup></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">n4</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>4</sup></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">s</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>5</sup></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">d</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>2</sup></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">t<span class="Apple-style-span">...), but the basic idea of capturing interval distribution is the same, and is a huge conceptual step towards </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_vector"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">modern atonal music theory</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">But he didn't write atonal music. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">At all.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Can this weird facility with atonal pitch sets be reconciled with his consistently conservative harmonic idiom? I think it is in the Sixth Symphony. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Hanson attested that the work was based entirely on the opening idea, the pitches C-G-A (</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">pns </span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">strikes back).</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>2 </sup></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">This is not a particularly dissonant idea, but it can be manipulated in a number of ways similar to what atonal composers were doing mid-century. For example, one can invert (or, "involute" as Hanson would say) it, preserving the intervals in mirror image form. C-G-A, flipped around C, becomes C-F-Eb. Still <b>pns</b>, still pretty tonal sounding.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">That flip is the very first thing to happen in the symphony. Winds in octaves state C-G-A-F-Eb, and the phrase is completed by a timpani+tuba strike on C. A little conversation subsequently grows out of the motif, and this sort of tentative dialog within orchestral choirs is typical of the whole first movement.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><audio controls>
<source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Hanson1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Hanson alternates between slow/emotional and fast/demonic moods from movement to movement. Though C-G-A does not literally appear at every point, <b>pns</b> or some slight variation or derivation of it ostensibly does, resulting in an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DoARSlv-HU">breathtakingly</a> tight, integrated work. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">Case in point the second "Allegro scherzando" movement -- two snares introduce a driving triplet rhythm that persists to the end. Winds enter, stating C-G-A-Eb-F (<b>pns</b> x2!) in a case of motivic shrinkage, soon to be incorporated into a playful, slightly malevolent scherzo.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Hanson2.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">A totally different mood is created in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TEm-v5jLPI">third movement</a>. Here the composer lets a lush adagio develop out of that little interval configuration. Vintage Hanson neo-romanticism, but with a formalist twist!</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Hanson3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">I was introduced to the sixth movement finale prior to my exposure to the whole symphony -- it's the first track on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Orchestral-Music-Shostakovich-Schulhoff-Philharmonic/dp/B002KLRV1I">this -pretty awesome- CD</a>. This is rollicking chase-scene music<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>3</sup></span></span>, barreling down a track laid by a rotated, transposed <b>pns</b> (C-Eb-Bb) ostinato. Near its conclusion, you can hear a slightly more lyrical idea played by the brass (an octave leap from Bb followed by a stepwise descent) -- this is the last, cumulative appearance of a secondary theme that makes its first appearance towards the end of the second movement. Unrelated to <b>pns</b> (I think it'd be called p</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>1</sup></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">mnsd</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><sup>2</sup></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">), it's something of the symphony's defiant minority opinion. Yet <b>pns</b> is ultimately in charge here, and the whole work concludes on a blast of the initial C-G-A-F-Eb-C. Heck, here's the whole Earquakin' movement.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><source src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352944/Hanson%204.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">I think the symphony should serve as a reminder that sophistication of composition or theory does not need to equal "difficult" or "abstract" music. If this work is successful, it is because Hanson is able to translate a tiny mote of musical data into a succession of vividly different symphonic moods. Their brevity insures that the Sixth Symphony is never heard to be <i>heavy</i>, tasting more like a well thought out menu of little dishes that together make for a satisfying meal.</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Frank Lehman</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;">---</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">1. Quoted in Liner notes to Delos Box Set of Hanson Symphonies, DE 3150 1990.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">2. In his book </span><i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=6AAKBSlQAxMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hanson+howard&hl=en&ei=kaWjTIqBLcGqlAenoMj4BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Howard Hanson in Theory and Practice</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (Praeger, 2004), </span></span></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Allen Laurence Cohen analyzes Hanson's music according to the composer's own theoretical ideas. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There is a lengthy discussion of the 6th Symphony within for the curious. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">3. Compare the movement's beginning to this </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGyb65Y9-_Y"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">chase scene at 5:50</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. Also, sort of, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kE7iNxQO6Y"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">this</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. Hanson's effect on certain film composers is considerable.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: small;"> </span></div>Frank Lehmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12932507223420413511noreply@blogger.com4