Unsung Symphonies

In Memory of James Yannatos: Symphony No. 5, "Son et Lumière"

2011-10-28T16:15:00.034-04:00

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.

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 the Harvard Crimson obit for a sense of the impact his whopping 45-year tenure had on them.)

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 Symphony No. 5, "Sons et Lumière" (1991), whose name, as he said, comes from the sound and light shows he would have witnessed in France — one of his many stops as a student before landing at Harvard.

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 Notre Dame 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 these program notes), "The title alludes to past as well as to present events in which the political face of Europe and Africa is changing."

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.

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 has even been called 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:

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 here 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 here if you need a refresher).

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, Sheldon Cooper, 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.

Yannatos also offered 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:

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 Unsung Symphonies 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?).

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 son et lumière outside Harvard's Memorial Hall (home of Sanders Theatre), with Dr. Y's Symphony No. 5 as the soundtrack.

— Matthew Mugmon

Innocuous as a Film Score: Williams' Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion

2011-10-19T17:36:00.007-04:00

On October 25th, roughly two months before the movie is released in American theaters, John Williams' soundtrack for Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin 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 here). 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 Catch Me If You Can and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, particularly the manic "Knight Bus" cue from the latter (listen here).

Where does this hyperventilating style spring from? The answer lies in a concert work Williams composed in 1968, his Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion. 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 Giannini's 3rd Symphony.

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.[1]

The second of these symphonic efforts[2] , the Sinfonietta, was written free of a commission, but was picked up by the Eastman Wind Ensemble for performance in 1970, under the baton of Donald Hunsberger. 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.[3] 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 Sinfonietta's was thanks to Hunsberger's MCA series, placed on an 1972 LP where it was paired with Penderecki's Pittsburgh Overture and Mayazumi's Music with Sculpture. The recording, though re-issued in Japan in the late 90s, is now virtually unobtainable, and the clips I present below are from an admittedly low-quality bootleg.[4]

The Sinfonietta 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' Sinfonietta is short--but hardly unprecedentedly so--hosting 3 movements instead of the usual four and lasting just short of 17 minutes.

Critics were of mixed opinion on whether Williams lived up, or down, to the diminutive title. One reviewer for High Fidelity Musical 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."[5] A critic for Gramophone 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."[6] The Gramophone critic shared with a less kind reviewer from The Music Journal a certain anxiety with Williams' status as jazz and film composer rather than classical artist: "Competently scored, appropriately laced with modernisms, it proceeds as innocuously as a film score--a medium, incidentally, at which Mr. Williams is said to excel."[7]

That last review smacks of irony in more ways than need to be tackled here. The Sinfonietta 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 Close Encounters, but by and large it is more Miraculous Mandarin than friendly alien.

First Four Measures of Second Subject, Sinfonietta Mvt. 1

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)

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 "Klangfarbenmelodie." 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).

The Sinfonietta'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 6 Pieces for Orchestra. Here is the tail end of the oboe trio, leading into the rumination on that jazz chord.

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 Third Stream jazz: a style invented by Gunther Schuller that attempted to blend classical forces and forms with jazz sensibilities.[8]

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.[9] 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.

Having lain dormant for decades, this final movement of the Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion served as a fount for some of the most memorable movie music 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.

---Frank Lehman

---------------
1.In 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 utilize music from his film scores (with one exception, his Elegy for Cello and Orchestra.). Williams routinely downplays the importance of these pieces, claiming they are 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.
2. 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.
3. A terrific source for information on the development of the American wind ensemble is the volume The Wind Ensemble and its Repertoire, edited by Frank J. Cippola and Donald Hunsberger himself.

4. 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 Nostalgic Jazz Odyssey (1971-72) and premiered alongside new works by Howard Hanson. The second was an all-Williams Eastman Philharmonia concert in 2001 initiated by Hunsberger.

5. High Fidelity Musical America, Vol. 22/1, 1972.

6. Gramophone, Vol. 50/1, 1972.

7. The Music Journal, Vol. 30, 1972.

8. 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."

9. 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!

The Basque Mozart Effect: Arriaga's First (and Only) Symphony

2011-09-29T17:54:00.005-04:00

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.

Then there are those for whom obscurity--however undeserved--is not a surprise. Such is the case with the Basque composer Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (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.

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 François-Joseph Fétis, 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, Los Esclavos Felices (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.

After his death, Arriaga's relatives promoted an image of Arriaga as the "Spanish Mozart" (or indeed, given his birthplace in Bilbao, 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 jota 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.

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 Sturm-und-Drang 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.

[All excerpts come from the Concerto Koln Cappricio recording]

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.

Arriaga leaves the most impressive display of his burgeoning compositional talent to the last movement's Allegro con moto, 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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Harmonic Reduction of Transition in Exposition and Recap of Arriaga Symphony in D, Mvt. 4

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 sung symphonists.

---Frank Lehman

[1]. Recounted in Barbara Rosen's Arriaga, the Forgotten Genius: The Short Life of a Basque Composer. (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.
[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).
[3]. Cited in Rosen, 50.
[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)

Milhaud's Symphony No. 1: "Choose Your Own Subtitle"

2011-08-16T22:35:00.000-04:00

Unsung Symphonies is happy to welcome Louis Epstein, 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!

Legion are the symphonies whose legacies depend, in part, on epic and provocative subtitles: “Farewell,” “Eroica,” “Titan,” "Apocalyptic" to name but a few. Darius Milhaud’s Symphony No. 1 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.

I. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “Post-Neoclassical”

Milhaud, along with Stravinsky, was one of the major practitioners of the neoclassical 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[1] 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.

The symphony’s neoclassical veneer persists through the first movement with but a few scratches. By the opening of the fourth movement, 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.

Yet following this moment, Milhaud turns his back on overwrought emotion, investing in sincerity and reduced orchestral forces once again.

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:

II. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “Deliverance”

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^th anniversary.[2] 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.

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.

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.

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.[3] 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.

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.

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 . . .

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 is about the war!) Consistent with Milhaud’s general compositional facility, he finished the work in short order on December 19^th, 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.

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.

This admission brings me to my final subtitle proposal.

III. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “American”

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. Pace Milhaud, I would argue that his first “American” music dates from the late 1910s and early 1920s, when he became fascinated by Harlem jazz.[4]. 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^th century. A particularly representative moment comes in the middle of the first movement:

The third movement seems to constitute the greatest nod to Americana, with its omnipresent blue notes, “Summertime”-like languor, and emphasis on wind timbres.

Ultimately it’s less important that the piece sound 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.

***

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 Eroica 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 "Post-neoclassical," "Deliverance," "American" - or would you choose something entirely different?

--Louis Epstein

1. Recapitulations are only nominally related to expositions; themes come in Mozartian groups rather than Beethovenian oppositions. See Roger Nichols, Liner Notes to Michel Plasson recording.
2. Stock also commissioned Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, Miaskovsky's Symphony No. 21, Harris's American Creed, Kodály's Concerto for Orchestra, Glière's Fête ferganaise Overture, Casella's Symphony No. 3, and Walton's Scapino Overture – plenty of fodder for future Unsung Symphonies posts! See http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/8_about/History_-_Rosenthal_archives/Frederick_Stock.pdf
3. 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).
4. In fact, 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

What The Parasitic Hymenopter Tells Me: Aho's "Insect Symphony"

2011-07-21T16:43:00.004-04:00

Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's Seventh Symphony (Hyönteisinfonia, "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."

[All excerpts come from Osmo Vänskä's recording on the BIS label]

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, Hyönteiselämää ("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 Pictures from an Insect's Life 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?

The two other competitors in this festival were Paavo Heininen and Einojuhani Rautavaara, and the prize went to the former for his opera Veitsi (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: Henze's Fourth, derived from his König Hirsch; and Rautavaara's Sixth, derived from his Vincent -- 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!)[1]. You can hear the composer's own words on the process by following this link to YouTube.

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.[2] 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."[3] 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."

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!

Rather than attempt to capture or mimic the multitude of sounds that come from the insect world (try this instead), 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.[4]

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.

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.

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.

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 ephemera.

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.[5] 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.

--Frank Lehman

[1]. http://www.fimic.fi/fimic/fimic.nsf/0/2C843D39DEF5E5C6C2257666002EB7BB?opendocument
[2]. See Kimmo Korhonen Inventing Finnish Music (2007, 156-160) for a nice contextualization of Aho in the vibrant Finish musical scene.
[3]. Kalevi Aho 1998 (From liner notes to BIS-CD-936)
[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.
[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).

Ghost in the Machine: Leonardo Balada's 'Steel Symphony'

2011-06-14T17:56:00.012-04:00

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 futurism, composers like George Antheil (in the Ballet mécanique) brazenly built the sounds of machines into their works.

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 Grove article on futurism) that movements like serialism and minimalism are related to the futurists' fascination with machines.

But some music of the later twentieth century is cut directly from the same cloth as pieces like the Ballet mécanique or Arthur Honegger's train-inspired Pacific 231. 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.

Balada, born in Spain, composed several symphonies 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 Steel Symphony 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.

The symphony begins like Weigl's Fifth, 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:

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:

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:

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:

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 getting bleak. 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:

But I don't think futurism itself is dead. It's just taken on new forms. As this clip reveals, there's hope yet for the connection between music and machines.

— Matthew Mugmon

Shredding Sequences: Glazunov's Fifth

2011-05-04T15:17:00.006-04:00

Alexander Glazunov (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 (of course). 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.

Glazunov completed his Fifth Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 55 "Heroic" in 1895. His own personal voice was well-established by this point - a synthesis of nationalistic and cosmopolitan influences, Tchaikovsky minus the pathos, Kuchka 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 Symphony in Eb).[1] 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 Brilliant Classics set:

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).

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)

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:

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 Tristan und Isolde. (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).

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. [2]

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.

Enjoy!

--Frank Lehman

----
1: Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Volume 1 (205-222)
2: 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 orchestrational discretion.

The Opera that Never Was: Busoni's Piano Concerto

2011-04-17T00:53:00.021-04:00

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?

The answer: Ferrucio Busoni's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Men's Choir, op. 39 (1904) by Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924). Don't let the name fool you. It's really a symphony and an opera rolled into one.

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:

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.)

One more thing: Busoni's concerto also has cool artwork (the print on the score is by Heinrich Vogeler).

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 "Gesamtkunstwerk" — a "total artwork" — "with acting, music, dance, magic" on Adam Oehlenschlaeger's Aladdin. 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, Sigune.¹

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 Bühenweihfestspiel [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".² In light of this potential link to Wagner's Parsifal, it's not surprising that Busoni called Wagner "a contemptible, little Saxon, with boring music and some strokes of genius,"³ 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.

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:

(This sounds a lot like the start of Schumann's Second Symphony, but without the trumpet to tell us immediately that this is a beginning.)

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):

Just as Busoni hoped for his big Aladdin 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:

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:

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 Tarantella. Here you'll notice more ominous timpani and the fact that all this wackiness leads into the cadenza you already heard, above:

In these clips, we've heard the piano here and there, but what does it really do 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."⁴)

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."

(Busoni might not admit it, but this sounds like it could fit pretty well at the end of Parsifal.)

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 Busoni the Composer.)

No matter how much I enjoyed Busoni's piano concerto, one thing is for sure: when it comes to musical treatments of Aladdin, Peabo and Regina have already said it all.

— Matthew Mugmon

---
1. From a letter to Egon Petri, quoted in Antony Beaumont, "Preface," in Ferrucio Busoni, Concerto für Klavier und Orchester mit Männerchor, op. 39 (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1994) 166.
2. Ibid.
3. Ferrucio Busoni, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Antony Beaumont (New York: Columbia University press, 1987) 166.
4. Beaumont, Busoni the Composer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 74.

Atonal Accessibility? - Perle's Sinfonietta II

2011-03-27T16:51:00.015-04:00

Although we've dealt with very few hardcore atonal works here at Unsung Symphonies 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 3 Orchestral Pieces), others in barely anything other than name (Webern's Symphony Op. 21). 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.

One composer who felt this atonal ambivalence with special acuteness was the American George Perle (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 12-Tone Method (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 musical 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.[1] 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 accessibility.

Someone suspicious of atonality and its reputation of ugliness and difficulty would do well to give Perle's Sinfonietta II 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.[2] 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 "Les Six": "Nothing is trite; nothing is a rerun; nothing panders to popular taste."

Like the duration (a fleeting 16 minutes), the orchestra of Perle's Sinfonietta II 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 Scherzo I and Scherzo II, 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!

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:

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.

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?!:

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.

The heart of this short work is the second movement, "Chorales and Diversions." Hearing it on Pandora (on my Nørgård channel, no less) first made me interested in Perle's Sinfonietta, 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:

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:

"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 listen to my music are amazed by how accessible they find it." [3]

--Frank Lehman

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1: 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.
2: Reviews excerpted at GeorgePerle.net (not surprising that they are so positive!)
3: Quoted in For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening (Steinberg and Rothe, 147)

The next Eroica? Tan Dun's Internet Symphony No. 1

2011-03-07T23:11:00.005-05:00

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.)

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 Internet Symphony No. 1: Eroica (2008), Beethoven is — so the composer claimed — not an overwhelming presence to be feared or matched, but rather, a "mentor" to be loved. (Thanks, by the way, to the folks at Amusicology for the tip to investigate this symphony.) But I don't buy the "mentor" line.

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 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.

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 Charlie Sheen's Korner). 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.

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.

(Note: I suggest opening this clip 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.

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 earn 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

— Matthew Mugmon

Tcherepnin Station: Symphony No. 1 in E

2011-03-04T23:48:00.000-05:00

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.

If you've heard of Tcherepnin, it's likely through his piano works, which every kid loves to play — including this kid. 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 was my most rebellious act. And I probably had to do Beethoven that year, anyway.)

But it was Tcherepnin's Symphony No. 1 in E that made his listeners antsy. In Paris, on October 29, 1927, the percussion-only second movement was apparently too much for the audience.¹ 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.

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 "Interpoint" 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 between 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:

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:

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.)

The next intrapuntal duet is for clarinet and timpani:

The third (and most haunting) is for violin and double bass.

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 Tempo 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:

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."² 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:

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."³ What do you Tcherepnin-aficionados think?

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. 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 Tempo 158 (Sept. 1986) 23-31.
2. Ibid.
3. "Alexander Tcherepnin: A Short Autobiography," Tempo 130 (Spring 1979) 16.

Pigments of the Imagination: Bliss' Colour Symphony

2011-02-18T17:10:00.015-05:00

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 four temperaments, or characters from Superman, or types of insects (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.

The Colour Symphony of British composer Sir Arthur Bliss (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. Prometheus, Poem of Fire) 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.

The long-lived composer penned his Color Symphony 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[1], and enjoying several good recordings -- the one used here is a vigorous interpretation by Vernon Handley with the Ulster Orchestra (1987).

There is something to the Colour Symphony 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.[2] (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.[3]

The first movement of Bliss's technicolor dream coat-of-arms is Purple, 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. Purple gets underway with a stately harmonic ostinato in B-minor(ish), over which increasingly thick orchestration bears the first of these themes.

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.[4]

Red 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. Red's 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

Bliss' Blue 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:

The young Bliss concludes it all with a show-stopping portrait of Green, 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 Green 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.

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.

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 Purple, 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 Colour Symphony is nonetheless tight, bright, and memorable. Color me satisfied.

Frank Lehman

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[1] Aside, perhaps for some of the film scores he wrote for British interwar cinema.

[2] In this regard, it is like Holsts' The Planets Suite, where the seemingly straightforward movement names allude to mystical astrological associations rather than astronomical features.

[3] Alas, Bliss did not take the opportunity to translate their respective hardnesses on the Mohs scale into metronome markings or difficulty levels.

[4] A simultaneous "verticalized"presentation of the movement's first ostinto chords, in fact.

The Ogress of War: Leifs' "Saga Symphony"

2011-01-28T13:28:00.021-05:00

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: Detifoss (Europe's largest waterfall), Geysir (the eponymous spouting hot spring), Hafís (drift ice), and Hekla (a volcano that makes Eyafjallajökull look like a puffy pastry). Hekla has the oft-touted distinction of being the "loudest piece of classical music ever written," which you can judge for yourself with this youtube link.[1]

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 Osmo Vanska's conducting).

The largest work purely for orchestra he wrote, the Saga Symphony 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 monumentality and Nordic hero valorization. However, his favor dried up, due in part to his Jewish ties, but also from suffocating distaste for modernism in fascist Germany.[2]

The Sagas of the Icelanders 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 Faust Symphony (the first, and from his account revelatory, orchestral work he heard live), Leifs casts each of the Saga Symphony's five movements as a character portrait. As in the Faust Symphony, Leifs' movements distill personality traits more than they track specific narrative developments. In fact, symphonic development is also downplayed (which is not the case in Liszt) in favor of great floes of harmonically static material. This is not to say uneventful, however!

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.

What stands out is the propensity for tutti thwacks 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 rímur, which is heavily and complexly accented. The irregular accenting can be heard in Leifs' earlier, directly rímur-inspired Icelandic Folk Dances (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 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.)

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 rímur-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 tvísöngur. 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.

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.

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. 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!)

--Frank Lehman

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[1]: Just so that you don't think it's all eruptions, here is a bit of Leifs at his most austerely beautiful.
[2]: 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."Quoted in Bergendal, New Music in Iceland (1987, 47).

Pushing the Envelope: Blitzstein's "Airborne"

2011-01-10T16:06:00.031-05:00

I'm a sucker for aeronautics.

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 took across the sound barrier 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, Joe and Brian Hackett.

Yeager, Armstrong, and the Hackett brothers all pushed the outside of the envelope, taking their craft(s) to the limit and just a bit beyond. With his Airborne Symphony (1943-6), the American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905-64) seems to have done something similar to the symphonic envelope.

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 The Cradle Will Rock — 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 Airborne, for which he wrote both the music and text. When the manuscript was lost, Blitzstein rewrote it on Leonard Bernstein's urging.¹

The Airborne 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.²) 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).

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,"³ 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:

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.⁴ 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 Tuskegee Airmen.) Here's how the "Ballad of History and Mythology" starts, and at the end of the excerpt, note the return of the "Airborne" theme:

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:

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.

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 flight is now a full-fledged theory of fight.

Things lighten up in the final movement, with the jocular "Ballad of Hurry-Up" and its catchy (though not as catchy as the Village People) 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 wait to take off.

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.

(By the way, Emily is a great musical name, as these Zombies and Art Brut classics demonstrate.)

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.

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 Wings reruns on USA.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. From Steve Ledbetter's liner notes to the BMG Classics release of the recording on CD, as Leonard Bernstein—The Early Years III, 5-6.
2. Ledbetter, 6.
3. Blitzstein used this term because "nearly all his lines are couched in the imperative mood." From Leonard Lehrman, Marc Blitzstein: a Bio-Bibliography, 366.
4. Lehrman, 366.

Symphonic Stag Party - Henze's Symphony No. 4

2010-12-17T09:22:00.004-05:00

Unsung Symphonies is thrilled to welcome Emily Richmond Pollock, 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 The Big Lebowski.

It’s fitting that a post about Hans Werner Henze’s Symphony No. 4 would appear on a blog called Unsung Symphonies, because this is a piece that has literally been “un-sung.” In 1962, six years after the disastrous premiere of his opera König Hirsch (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.¹ It was that cut material that became his Fourth Symphony, with the vocal parts submerged and incorporated into the orchestral texture.

The symphony’s single continuous movement camouflages a formal scheme that was unusually “instrumental” within the opera, where sections were named Introduzione e Sonata, Varizioni, Capriccio, and Ricercar. 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.

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.² 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.

A short passage from near the beginning of both the scene and the symphony helps to illustrate Henze’s general approach.³ 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.

Opera:

Symphony:

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.⁴ 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.

Opera:

Symphony:

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.⁵ But wow, the Berlin Philharmonic can really 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.

Opera:

Symphony:

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.⁶ 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.

Opera:

Symphony:

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 “they got the electronic studios and the late-night programmes, I got the symphony concerts and opera houses.”⁷ Perhaps for Henze, then, these two monumental genres were actually close kin.

So is Henze’s Fourth an operatic symphony, or is König Hirsch a symphonic opera?

(Both!)

— Emily Richmond Pollock

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1. The major secondary work on the opera, and on the Symphony by extension, is the monograph by Klaus Oehl, Die Oper König Hirsch (1953–55) von Hans Werner Henze (Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag, 2003). See in particular p. 245-277 and 304-313.
2. The sound examples in this post come from a radio broadcast of the full version of König Hirsch at the Staatstheater Stuttgart in May 1985, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and from a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic in April 1964, conducted by the composer (Deutsche Grammophon 449 861-2).
3. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 13-20 (from “Introduzione” section); Symphony: m. 13-20
4. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 27-45 (from “Capriccio” section); Symphony: m. 232-251.
5. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 1-19 (from “Variazioni” section); Symphony: m. 155-173.
6. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 162-193 (from “Ricercar” section); Symphony: m. 426-459.
7. Henze, “German Music in the 1940s and 1950s” in Music and Politics, tr. Peter Labanyi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 47.

Rued Awakening - Langgaard's 4th "Fall of the Leaf"

2010-12-04T21:39:00.389-05:00

In 1948, the the Danish composer Rued Langgaard penned perhaps the snarkiest work for large orchestra and chorus in our fair history of western music. Bearing the title/lyrics "Carl Nielsen, our great composer" 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.[1]

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, Carl Nielsen. 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.

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 (No. 11, "Ixion," an intensely weird 6 minutes), from luscious romanticism (No. 3 "The Flush of Youth - Melodia," basically a piano concerto), to apocalypticicsm (No. 6 "Heaven-Rending"), and eventually neo-classicism tinted by absurdism (No. 13, "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 Symphony No. 4 in Eb-minor "Løvfald" ("Autumn," or literally, "Fall of Leaves"), written in 1916.

This one of Langgaard's works best represented on disc (at least 5 recordings). I use clips from the glorious Thomas Dausgaard complete set of symphonies, as definitive as you can get.[2]

In terms of structure and subject matter, a correlate for Rued Langgaard's 4th is Richard Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie (1915). Both are single-movement tone poems in all but name (TPIABN...yikes), both heavy on the musical mimickry of nature sounds.[3] Instead of representing a particular location as in Alpensinfonie, Langgaard depicts a time of year, a rather turbulent autumn. He has an even shorter thematic attention span than Strauss in this work -- Løvfald'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.

I. Rustle of the Forest -- II. Glimpse of Sun -- IV. Thunderstorm -- VII. Autumnal -- VIII. Tired -- IX. Despair! -- XII. Sunday Bells -- XIII. At an end.

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.

Right from the start, Langgaard defies symphonic logic, with a gestural hammer-stroke more reminiscent of an ending 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.

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:

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.

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.

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 Saturn).

It's not just the pictorialism or the way-too-soon minimalism that isn't symphonic 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.[4] In this symphonic amble, it becomes increasingly clear that Langgaard follows no trail map.

-----------
In the late 1960's, after his death to obscurity in 1952, Langgaard finally began to accumulate some recognition. This came particularly from his Music of the Spheres, 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 Atmospheres. (Per Nørgård, who we've already met, delightfully describes his role in the discovery here). Perhaps this composer, for whom enduring neglect was practically a bodily function, 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 establishment deemed he should have been.

--Frank Lehman

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[1]: This, and many other anecdotes, interviews, and reference material can be obtained at the terrific website of the Langgaard Foundation.
[2]: Neeme Järvi's recording is also excellent, though for the most emphatic (and uneven) treatment, try out Ilya Stupel's account.
[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.
[4]: Full disclosure: there is a transient patch of whole-tone material in section IX., but it's not a "precursor" in any meaningful sense

Shadow Symphonies - The Truth Behind Beethoven's Masterworks

2010-11-30T18:00:00.011-05:00

Unsung Symphonies is thrilled to welcome its second guest post, this time from NYU Music Professor Michael Beckerman. 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.

It was the two studies in Science and Nature 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.

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.

Mitchell Bochermann
Global University Site 34
Dneiper Smelting Plant
Russian Federation

You're so 'romántica' - Chavez's Symphony No. 4

2010-11-18T16:13:00.014-05:00

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 Symphony No. 4 — Sinfonía Romántica (1953) I explore here. But I'm just following in the footsteps of Leonard Bernstein, the great composer and conductor and even better expert at keeping a perfect crease.

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.

But Bernstein was more likely than Walter to program Chavez during any 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."¹

I don't know if there's anything "recognizably Mexican" in the Sinfonía Romántica 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 Sinfonía India (1935-6). In a fascinating set of pre-concert lecture notes from 1960, Bernstein seemed to define Chavez's Mexicanness in the Romántica 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).

Chavez doesn't start his Sinfonía Romántica 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 Enrique Bátiz and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra), 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:

And perhaps this more flowing line is where the olive oil-like passion comes in:

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:

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):

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.

(And with that appearance, all you Méhul fans can credit yet another symphony to the cyclic tradition your favorite composer supposedly invented.)

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:

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.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. Copland, Our New Music (1941) 205.

Slow, Sad, and Beautiful

2010-11-12T11:30:00.011-05:00

Sad news to report -- Henryk Górecki, the Polish composer whose Second Symphony "Copernican" we've already written up, has passed away at 76 after a fight with prolonged illness. You can read more here, here, and here.

Górecki deserves a special tribute here, as somehow, against all odds, his Third Symphony "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, spawning 12+ rerecordings (!) and 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. Hearing past the hype is not something we're used to asking at this blog (symphonic hype? we wish), but Górecki's Third really deserves to be heard with fresh, attentive ears.

Heartbreakingly, Gorecki never completed his Fourth Symphony, a work that was scheduled for first performance earlier this year by the London Phil, only to be cancelled because of his illness. Given that Górecki's compositional output slowed to a minuscule dribble in his later years, the importance of this work will be all the greater - that is if it eventually is completed by someone else and premieres posthumously (rest assured, we will cover it).

So many of 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 Third. 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 Upshaw's vocals on a 14th Century Polish Marian lament "O my son, beloved and chosen, Share your wounds with your mother..."

The "Lost" Romantic: Méhul's Fourth

2010-11-09T17:53:00.026-05:00

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, Étienne Méhul (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 opéras-comique with his then-inescapable historico-mythical stage works. In them, one might be struck by stylistic traits 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 "reminiscence 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 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.

Seeking to branch out into new sound worlds, 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 Méhul's plunge into the genre would not have been expressly discouraged, he was swimming against the tide. 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 Fétis. The former dismissed the symphonies as musical "ephemera" while the latter sneered that they were "dry and pretentious" attempts at ersatz Haydn. (Quoted in Schwartz, 1987, 92).

Noting a debt to the Germans is indeed warranted, but the negative assessment is not. Cherubini and Fétis's vituperation seems to have been the determining factor against the dissemination of Méhul's symphonies, overcoming the sporadic revivals of his music in the 19th Century. (Schumann, after Mendelssohn performed the First Symphony, was guardedly impressed). "Stick to opera!", it seems, was the judgment history placed on Méhul. Correspondingly, the idea that there was an influential French symphonist before Berlioz sputtered and languished until very recently.(1)

In 1979, while researching Berlioz, musicologist David Charlton discovered to his astonishment the orchestral part manuscripts for the 3rd and 4th symphonies of Méhul, whose full scores had long gone missing (the 5th remains incomplete, possibly never finished). His editorial reconstructions were published in 1982 in a full volume of Méhul symphonies, and a CD recording from Nimbus Records 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 Méhul's Fourth Symphony in E Major (1810)! The work will "premier" at a concert with the Orchestra of the Enlightenment, alongside other music of Parisian vintage from Cherubini, Berlioz, and Mozart (Symphony No. 31). An article in the Telegraph by Richard Savill boldly announces to the world the importance of this event: "Lost Étienne Méhul symphony set for London premiere."

While articles trumpeting the arrival of "new" or "discovered" Classical works often are guilty of some sensationalist imprecision, Savill's article rightly points out some of the remarkable features of the Fourth Symphony. Foremost of these is the allegedly prescient use of "cyclic form," 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 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 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.(2)

The cyclic linkage in Méhul's Fourth occurs between the 1st Movement'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.

In the 4th movement, 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

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.

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 3rd movement, 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).

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.(3)

We await the U.K. premier of the Fourth -- 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.

--Frank Lehman

1. Charlton's editions with commentary of the First Symphony and 3rd through 5th provided a great deal of the background for this post.

2. Early precedents of course exist (Matt 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 Méhul's 4th but basically unheard in France for several more decades)

3. Examples culled, of course, from his operas -- I found no evidence that Berlioz ever heard any of Méhul's symphonies.

Halloween Hangover - Sorabji's 1st Organ Symphony

2010-10-31T23:57:00.026-04:00

Last night, while you were walking around your neighborhood in your "scary" costume, eating Twix,¹ and generally having a good time, I was doing Halloween for real.

It was party time for you, but I spent nearly two hours listening to frightening organ music. And I lived to tell the tale.

That two-hour chunk of organ music was actually all one piece — Khaikosru Sorabji's Organ Symphony No. 1 (1924). I came across the English² composer's name last year because of a somewhat snarky article he wrote in 1928 in The Musical Times urging more performances of Mahler's music.

So I figured that Sorabji was OK with long symphonies. What I didn't quite expect before I looked at the timings on Kevin Bowyer's apparently rare recording 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.³ 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 strikingly realistic digital version of "Jumi," which will have to tide you over until some orchestra actually decides to play it.)

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 Zaireeka, 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.

If Sorabji was half Flaming Lips, he was also half XTC. That excellent group stopped playing live in 1982 because of Andy Partridge's stage fright. Maybe Andy took a cue from Sorabji, who stopped performing on the piano in 1936 for similar reasons.⁴

Back to fright night,⁵ 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):

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):

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:

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:

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:

The main point here is that I survived Halloween night without any Bach Toccata-related nightmares. 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.

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.⁶ Now do yourself a favor and check out the modern Sorabji, XTC's Andy Partridge, in a rare live performance of one of the greatest songs ever.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. They're all Twix. It was a setup.
2. According to Paul Rapoport in Grove, Sorabji — whose mother was Spanish-Sicilian and father was Parsi — didn't care for the "English" label.
3. So say Allistair Hinton's liner notes to the recording.
4. See Grove and Chalkhills for this striking connection.
5. Yama Hama!
6. Text adapted from Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outer Space, but applicable to nearly any situation involving scary stuff.

Paradise Regained - Weigl's Fifth "Apocalyptic"

2010-10-25T10:39:00.058-04:00

This should sound like a gutsy way to start a symphony even to the most jaded listeners among you:

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 Varèse's Tuning Up (1947) 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. 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.

This is the beginning of Karl Weigl's Fifth Symphony "The Apocalyptic" (1945), from a movement dubbed "Evocation." 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. In the long competition of composers striving to out-inchoate each other's openings, Weigl's is the logical extreme; to my knowledge, no such an audacious version of the ex nihlo archetype had been attempted prior to this 1945 work. It is the more surprising because Weigl was no avant-garde 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, the opening of the "Apocalyptic" is a weirdly one-off event.

The great expanse of the rest of the "Evocation" movement presents a dense network of sonata themes. Some 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):

Others are broad, even benedictory like this secondary theme:

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.

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 offshoot of atonality had broken off. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna 1881, 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 "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.

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 Second Symphony 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 the 19th century symphonist's shadow. Here is a sample of the only slightly updated Brucknerisms, swelling climaxes and all.

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."

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.

****

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 BIS recording of this work because of the extravagant cover art. 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. Only one other Karl Weigl symphony has been recorded, the Sixth, by the same forces.

--Frank Lehman

Impossible Symphony - Kastner's "Les Cris de Paris"

2010-10-18T18:15:00.026-04:00

Unsung Symphonies is proud to announce its first guest post, from Harvard Professor of Music Alex Rehding! 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!

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

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.

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 livre-partition or “book-score.” The livres-partitions 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.

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.

It seems that in the intervening one hundred and twenty years the performance situation did not change much—until last year, when the Ensemble Clément Jannequin recorded a version of Kastner’s Grande symphonie humoristique vocale et instrumentale Les Cris de Paris (1857), which Spitta considered to be Kastner’s most successful work.

What the Ensemble Jannequin produces, to say it upfront, has fairly little to do with Kastner’s partition—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.

The livre to which Les cris de Paris forms the partition, 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 cris de Paris are all so surprisingly musical, rhythmic and diatonic, a ready answer can be found in the partition, which weaves all these different sound snippets into a dense symphonic web of motivic relations.

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 relationship of Kastner’s work to an irrevocable 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.

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 Clément Jannequin’s famous sixteenth-century chanson “Les cris de Paris.” (In his livre, Kastner criticized Jannequin for his insufficiently “scientific” approach to his material, which sacrificed authenticity in the service of following the rules of counterpoint.)

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.

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.

--Alex Rehding

No strings attached - Giannini's Third, for Wind Band

2010-10-09T16:33:00.030-04:00

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.

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.¹ 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 fluid turns in the violin that start “Night on Bald Mountain,” it’s hard to get used to choppy clarinets handling the same passage, as interesting as it might sound.

But it also works the other way around. Compare the prim and proper lyrical theme in the orchestral re-arrangement of “Stars and Stripes Forever” with the much more boisterous —and, I think, appropriately march-like — original version for wind band (recording quality strategically chosen to play up contrast).

Anyway, around the time of our trips to the Capitol, my dad mentioned Vittorio Giannini’s Symphony No. 3 (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.

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.’” ²

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 Mercury Living Presence recording, 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.

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.

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):

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:

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:

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 here for some collected snapshots from the actual program booklet, which my dad generously scanned for use here. Zoom in on the tubas.

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!

— Matthew Mugmon

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1.“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!
2.From the liner notes to the Mercury Living Presence recording by A. Clyde Roller and the Eastman Wind Ensemble.

Neo-Romantic Minority Report - Hanson's 6th

2010-09-29T13:55:00.035-04:00

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 MMMBop. That means Wahoo Nebraska's own Howard Hanson (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 Piston. 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.

If I were asked to sum up the idea of Neo-Romanticism in music for someone, I'd probably hand them a recording of Hanson's symphonies (perhaps this one) and then something rather different from roughly the same time (perhaps this one!). 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). His most famous work, the Second Symphony "Romantic" 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."¹

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 to hell with the canon! So let's take a nice, unabashed neo-Romantic bubble bath.

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 Symphony No. 6 (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 pioneer in the realm of advanced music theory for atonal music! More than a decade before Allen Forte's The Structure of Atonal Music, Hanson published his Harmonic Materials of Modern Music, 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.

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 perfect fifth/fourth (C-G), one minor third (A-C), and one major second (G-A). Hanson labels this group pns (no, not that). Descriptions for bigger groups can get a lot more complicated (the major scale, for example, is an inelegant p⁶m³n4⁴s⁵d²t...), but the basic idea of capturing interval distribution is the same, and is a huge conceptual step towards modern atonal music theory.

But he didn't write atonal music.

At all.

Can this weird facility with atonal pitch sets be reconciled with his consistently conservative harmonic idiom? I think it is in the Sixth Symphony. Hanson attested that the work was based entirely on the opening idea, the pitches C-G-A (pns strikes back).²This 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 pns, still pretty tonal sounding.

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.

Hanson alternates between slow/emotional and fast/demonic moods from movement to movement. Though C-G-A does not literally appear at every point, pns or some slight variation or derivation of it ostensibly does, resulting in an breathtakingly tight, integrated work. 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 (pns x2!) in a case of motivic shrinkage, soon to be incorporated into a playful, slightly malevolent scherzo.

A totally different mood is created in the third movement. Here the composer lets a lush adagio develop out of that little interval configuration. Vintage Hanson neo-romanticism, but with a formalist twist!

I was introduced to the sixth movement finale prior to my exposure to the whole symphony -- it's the first track on this -pretty awesome- CD. This is rollicking chase-scene music³, barreling down a track laid by a rotated, transposed pns (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 pns (I think it'd be called p¹mnsd²), it's something of the symphony's defiant minority opinion. Yet pns 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.

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 heavy, tasting more like a well thought out menu of little dishes that together make for a satisfying meal.

Frank Lehman

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1. Quoted in Liner notes to Delos Box Set of Hanson Symphonies, DE 3150 1990.

2. In his book Howard Hanson in Theory and Practice (Praeger, 2004), Allen Laurence Cohen analyzes Hanson's music according to the composer's own theoretical ideas.

There is a lengthy discussion of the 6th Symphony within for the curious.

3. Compare the movement's beginning to this chase scene at 5:50. Also, sort of, this. Hanson's effect on certain film composers is considerable.

Odds & Ends

2010-09-26T17:35:00.011-04:00

A few small updates before our next Unsung Symphonies spotlighted work.

*In the short time we've been up, we've apparently inspired another music blog! Check out Jake's smooth atonal sound blog over at Wordpress. His first entry is The Dead Symphony, or, the Orchestral Tribute to the Grateful Dead. He takes Matt's post on Lee Johnson's work as a jumping off point for some probing insights into the issues facing a composer/arranger who wishes to capture the spirit of non-classical music in an orchestral, through-composed medium. He's also got an enthusiastic entry up on Kaija Saariaho, a must-read for anyone interested in the possibilities of orchestral color and form in the 21st century. Saariaho, as far as I'm aware, hasn't tackled the genre of the symphony (yet) -- our blog's definite loss! But until she does, we still have plenty of great, unjustly obscure Finnish symphony composers other than Sibelius to introduce here. We look forward to seeing where Jake, our comrade-in-Lebowski-references, takes his blog, so swing by smooth atonal sound today!

*Head on over to Classical Music Library, whose biweekly free recording is an unsung symphony for sure, Sir Hubert Parry's Third Symphony in C! A vigorous, enjoyable work, with a surprisingly haunting slow movement. Give it a listen and see if you think it is deserving of the moniker "English Symphony."

*So you wanna be Beethoven? Interested in writing the Great 21st Century Symphony? Wikihow, that indispensable web resource for completely non-authoritative advice on everything from the life-changing to the unimaginably banal, has just what you need: How to write a symphony! But, heed the wiki authors' warning: "Writing music can be very time consuming. It can often be very frustrating as well." We offer a warning as well -- if you're truly in the process of composing a symphony, you'll probably find the above internet advice about as useful as this.

*Stay tuned for a new entry this week from Frank on Howard Hanson's Sixth!

Bagpipes Gone Wild? - Malipiero's 11th

2010-09-19T01:58:00.013-04:00

My students are wading their way through Monteverdi’s Orfeo over the next few weeks. So I thought I’d look at some music by the 20th-century composer who helped make Monteverdi famous today: Gian Francesco Malipiero. This Italian modernist finished his last symphony, the very short Symphony No. 11, “Delle Cornamuse,” when he was 87, in 1969 (and as John C. G. Waterhouse pointed out in the liner notes to the recording by Antonio de Almeida and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, it's actually his 17th, since Malipiero didn’t number all his symphonies). If you’re counting (unlike Malipiero), that’s 41 years ago, four years before Malipiero died (1973), 66 years after his edition of Orfeo appeared (1923), and 362 years after the premiere of Orfeo in Mantua (1607).

Why did I just throw a bunch of random-looking numbers at you, one after the other? Well, it’s to show you one way of hearing a Malipiero symphony, though perhaps not the most helpful way. Malipiero reportedly said (and here I’m quoting Waterhouse’s article in Grove Music Online) that “the Italian symphony [not Mendelssohn's] is a free kind of poem in several parts which follow one another capriciously, obeying only those mysterious laws that instinct recognizes.” For Malipiero, is that proclamation of randomness an artistic manifesto or a thin cover-up? If it’s a real statement of creative intention, then as listeners, we don’t need to go far beyond Waterhouse’s own seemingly apt observation (from the liner notes) that the 11th symphony is a “game of contrasted timbres and textures.” Waterhouse also made note of the way three instruments meant to evoke the sounds of bagpipes (or cornamuse) — bassoon, English horn, and oboe — have a “capricious interaction with other, sometimes unusually-chosen timbres (e.g. that of the celesta).”

If we accept Malipiero’s near brush-off of the “Italian symphony” (or are we actually dealing with a Scottish symphony?) as not really a "symphony" at all, we might end up agreeing with Waterhouse’s comments (in Grove) on Malipiero’s symphonies in general — works Waterhouse considered almost “anti-symphonic” with their “unpredictable incidents and juxtapositions.” But what if there’s something deeply ordered about Malipiero’s symphonies that even the composer doesn’t want us to discover (or that he didn’t know about)?

The symphony begins with a build-up of the “bagpipe” sonority. First we hear some noodling in the bassoon, which is then joined by an English horn and an oboe. Strings and a french horn rudely interrupt, but the bagpipers return for a good stretch up through the first minute:

I guess this sounds like a bagpipe, but to me, these instruments produce a sound that resembles birdsong, with their shifty rhythms and the disjunct melodies that just barely lack tonal focus. But these so-called bagpiping moments do serve as a kind of timbral ritornello¹ throughout the symphony, and the second movement begins and closes with extended bagpiping sessions that frame mysterious, ethereal passages like this one (add some cowbell and it sounds like Mahler’s 6th):

In the third, scherzo-like movement, we have to wait — perhaps significantly — a full minute before hearing the bagpipers, which are called in by the xylophone and celesta — and here, the bagpipers never quite assert themselves, as they are overshadowed by celesta and flute and quickly fade into the strings. Toward the end of the movement, our trio returns, but the strings win out:

By the fourth movement, it seems the bagpipers have disappeared completely — the french horn begins what could be heard as a (triumphant?) ascending motive that the piano and strings mimic:

But with under a minute to go, the french horn signals the resurgence of the bagpipers. The weight lent by the french horn suggests the bagpipers are a more serious bunch than we may have thought:

What strikes me most about that passage is just how lazy the bagpipers’ noodling seems to be compared to the determined ascent of the other instruments. But perhaps this laziness is deceptive. At the end of the symphony, the bagpipers seem to get the last laugh. The last melodic turn they offer is a reduced preview of the wild ascent that follows it, suggesting that the final orchestral rush may be heard as an extension of the apparently innocent bagpiping:

So in Malipiero’s 11th, we could hear the bagpipe entries as randomly chosen for maximum surface effect — a “game,” as Waterhouse called it. Or we could hear them as carefully-constructed pillars in a dramatic, symphonic whole — setting the scene in the first movement, prominent but slowly receding in the second, almost in the background in the third, and reemerging at the close of the work. Whatever we choose, one thing is for sure — Malipiero lived for a really, really long time.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. Waterhouse’s labeling of the bagpipers as a “concertante group” gave me this idea.

Vincentiana - Three and a Half Van Gogh Symphonies

2010-09-12T11:45:00.063-04:00

Today, three (and a half) symphonies for the price of one. One from Finn, Einojuhani Rautavaara, another from an American, Gloria Coates, and a half from Henri Dutilleux, a Frenchman. On the face of it, these are some pretty strange bedfellows (all they seem to share at first is being fairly prominent living composers), so the fact that each has a symphonic work inspired by the art and life of Vincent Van Gogh is probably coincidental. But a happy coincidence for Unsung Symphonies, since we can see how composers of very different temperaments engage similar(ish) subject matter.

One technique that Rautavaara and Coates (not so much Dutilleux) frequently use is the blurring of a clear melody with lots of surface dissonance, setting it against other layers of unrelated, constantly fluctuating material. The results can vary from a quiet shimmer that leaves the underlying melody undisturbed to a tune whose outline is nearly erased by a dense haze of other activity. Boundaries blurred, shapes distorted, surfaces and backgrounds always squirming -- we could just as well be talking about Van Gogh's painting technique as modern musical procedures here.

Rautavaara's Sixth Symphony: "Vincentiana" (1992) draws a considerable amount of its material from the composer's opera Vincent (1990), a heavily symbolic, non-linear collage of the life and mind of Van Gogh with libretto penned (like all of Rautavaara's 8 operas) by the composer. The symphony is divided into the traditional four movements (like all of Rautavaara's 8 symphonies, save the strange Fifth), each one with a subtitle alluding to an image or idea from the opera. This is the only of his symphonies to feature electronics, which are most prominent at the edges of movements, the orchestra typically filling up the space in between. Meandering quasi-tonal rhapsodies (that as a Rautavaara listener, you either come to love or hate) are freely mixed with passages of extreme atonal/12-tone violence throughout the work, though some of those rows also contribute to the consonant triadic material as well, a Rautavaarian trick.

Among the highlights of the symphony is the combination of synthesizers and orchestral effects that kick off the work's first movement "Starry Night," a delirious waltz that seems to detonate towards the end of the third movement "Saint-Rémy" (Van Gogh's late life sanitarium), and exultant finale for the last movement "Apotheosis." The second movement, "The Crows," features a haunted refrain, ostensibly drawn from the opera's second act, where Van Gogh, in the company of Gauguin and his brother Theo, experiences a vision of fields "heaving, breaking in waves...writhing like big animals in their death-throes." Squint your ears for the almost inaudible string-section fuzz that blows over the slow chordal theme.

This slight blur becomes an impenetrable smear with the tail end of the Sanitarium waltz, which buckles, then gives way to a blast of electronics and wind-mouthpieces, transmuting some nagging chorus of physicians and art critics into a murder of displeased corvids.

Things do come together in the final "Apotheosis," which stems from music written for Vincent's final, triumphal/suicidal paean to light: "The day of the sun! And he who dies today shall never disappear, but will join those who once had the courage to go on and live!" Even here, Rautavaara's characteristically dense orchestration creates a blurry sort of sensory overload.

Even more prolific a living symphonist than Rautavaara is Gloria Coates, an American ex-pat composer living in Germany who has 15 symphonies under her belt. Prior to her Seventh, they had non-symphonic titles, and were only dubbed "symphony no. x" substantially after the fact; eventually, Coates seems to have overcome her own discomfort with attaching what she calls such "a little name" to her earlier orchestral essays. Coates' style is intense and difficult, highly dissonant and devoid of much anything that could be called ingratiating. But her music is also clear and tightly balanced. A hallmark is the highly expressive, almost compulsive use of glissandi in all corners of her works.

Her 9th Symphony, "The Quinces Quandary" (1992-93) is a sonic expansion of a work for chamber orchestra from the same year, "Homage to Van Gogh." Both are inspired by Van Gogh's late painting "The Quinces," created in the last year of his life. As far as I can tell the two pieces are the same but for thinner orchestration in the former, although the CPO Recording of the work, which is clearly for huge orchestra, labels the track "Homage." Nevertheless, I present this clip, which conveys a representative sample of this imposing 23 minute work - one of the huge waves of glissandi - with the assumption that it is the symphony we're hearing (it sure sounds like a massive orchestra).

Coates' glissandi are apt metaphors for Van Gogh's late style. Her unending stream of sliding notes, restless and defiant of the boundaries of discrete pitch (and those of discrete event as well) are quite intentional musical analogues of the pulsating, unstable motion that undermines any "still life" in "The Quinces." The piece's continuous form is hard to pin down; this owes partly to Coates choice to eschew a prefabricated musical container, using the visual experience of gradually exploring the painting, allowing one's eye to train from one corner of the frame to the other, to guide her own pen.

Like Rautavaara's Vincentiana, the Quinces does manage to fasten onto something something comparatively solid and "thematic" at its conclusion, a stony dirge of brass chords (by far the most tonal thing heard yet) jutting against the ever-present glissandi.

The "Quandary" in the title alludes to something deeper, and more troubling, than a simple visual puzzle raised by the painting. While it was possible to take aesthetic-mystical flight in Rautavaara's Sixth, Coates' The Quinces Quandary allows no escape from the gloomy isolation of Van Gogh's world. If these are musically-represented decorative fruits, they are the most despondent fruits to ever grace a kitchen table. Take that oranges and pears!

Staring at the painting, Coates claims "I felt something of his own fears and disappointments...and the quinces were beginning to move, one was already falling."¹ The psychological aspect of Van Gogh's inner world Coates draws, orchestrally, from his "Quinces" is of withdrawal, despair, entrapment -- shades of the painter's mental illness, in other words. Her style is not a sunny one, and this is a work of frightening darkness. In her words, "If you only give the lighter side of yourself, that's not a symphony..." ²

One last Van Gogh work. Although not a symphony in name, and not really even a symphony-in-all-but-name, I'd be remiss if I left out Dutilleux's Timbres, Espace, Mouvement (1978), whose subtitle "Starry Night" betrays inspiration again from that most famous of Van Gogh's paintings. Timbres, like most of Dutilleux's small output, is music honed to an almost ridiculous polish, with every pitch, every orchestral pairing bearing the imprint of a calculating perfectionist. You really can't go wrong with Dutilleux and this piece is a little marvel.

***Update 10/18/2010***

After printing this, I discovered yet another Van Gogh inspired symphony, the 6th Symphony of Russian composer Alla Pavlova. Highly accessible, and perhaps a little trite, Pavlova's 6th exists in a kind of halfway point between lyrical neo-Romantic chromaticism and repetitive minimalist figurations. Much of Pavlova's sixth symphony seems geared towards an ever spinning cycle of dark, twisting modulations based on unusual triad relationships. Her orchestration is clear (featuring some viscous solo violin writing) but somewhat unvaried -- certainly, she resists the temptation to make experimental *timbre* the key in representing Van Gogh musically.

-Frank Lehman

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1. Quoted in CPO Liner Notes

2. Quoted from "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim," Interview and Feature with Gloria Coates by Kyle Gann, New York Times Apr 25/1999.

Symphonies from the Closet: Lee Johnson's Ode to the Grateful Dead

2010-09-06T10:44:00.023-04:00

As Sting kicks off the European leg of his Symphonicities tour, it’s the right time to look back on some recent examples of rock turned into Western art music.

Composers and arrangers working with rock songs have two choices: either fearlessly turn those songs, with unbridled enthusiasm ¹, into something that takes maximum advantage of the possibilities of the new ensemble, or play it safe and make the new ensemble sound as much as possible like a rock band. This is my main problem with what I’ve seen of Symphonicities on Youtube. Of course, I love it because it’s Sting. But for the most part, it’s some Sting songs with orchestral filler.² I don’t need to pay $500 to see Sting and a symphony orchestra do Sting’s music when I can just pay $500 to see Sting and his band do practically the same thing.³

Here’s another example: compare two string quartet pieces based on songs by the perpetually-relevant band Radiohead, both recorded by the Vitamin Quartet. In their 2009 version of the most recent Radiohead album, In Rainbows, the Vitamins add their fair share of outside percussion. And who can blame them — the opening of “15 Step” is tough to recreate on four string instruments. But on “Idioteque” from their Enigmatic — The String Quartet Tribute To Radiohead, the quartet dispensed entirely with Radiohead’s intense percussive underpinning.⁴ I lean toward their "Idioteque" cover — after all, if I’m buying a string quartet album, it should essentially be a string quartet album. Right?

But not all bands are equal, and what makes the music of the Grateful Dead easier to classicalize than either Sting (aside from Sting’s humongous ego) or Radiohead (aside from the fact that they already seem to be in the classical canon) is the flexible nature of the Dead’s songs as texts. You probably wouldn’t bother turning a single Dead album into a “string quartet tribute” because those songs exist less in fixed album form than in thousands of bootleg tapes and millions of faded memories. The best classical version of the Dead, perhaps, is something that approaches the feel of a live Dead show.

In his Symphony No. 6 (“Dead Symphony”) (2007), Lee Johnson seems to have succeeded in creating just that. This symphony does have 12 movements (let’s call them “tracks” like the Deadheads do, and as they appear on the version recorded by the Russian National Orchestra), not unlike a rock album. And you’d be forgiven for thinking of it more as a concept album for orchestra — perhaps the “Orchestra Tribute to the Grateful Dead” — than as a symphony (not that we’re challenging the composer’s label). But the Dead Symphony works precisely because Johnson doesn’t care about reproducing the sound world of the Grateful Dead.

A “Dead Overture” and the “Dead Finale” bookend orchestral re-imaginings of 10 Dead songs, and it’s these opening and closing pillars that make the Dead Symphony cohere. The overture is no Broadway introduction — it (along with the Finale) is made up of riffs on “Finiculi, Finicula,” a nod to Dead fans who know that the band used to play around with this song in their shows. By starting this way, Johnson accomplishes two things. First, he gives a knowing nod to the Deadheads, assuring them that this might be like a live Dead show, no matter how refined and polished some of it might sound.⁵ And second, he orders the Symphony-heads to relax and enjoy the orchestral version of a live Dead show, no matter how friendly and poppy some of it might sound.

As for the songs (or “movements,” or “tracks”) themselves, Johnson gives each its own flare, and he doesn’t seem bound by any preconceived ideas about the moods of songs. Instead, he lets these songs develop into their own statements, revealing new connections along the way. The all-string 8th movement, “If I Had the World to Give,” for instance, reminded me more of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” than the Dead original:

Throughout this symphony, the ponderous, unnervingly solemn movements far outweigh the light ones, which surprised me for a reworking of such a zany, whimsical band’s material. A sense of foreboding underlines even the most seemingly quirky moments, like in this example from the end of movement 9, “Stella Blue."

On the other hand, movement 6, “Sugar Magnolia,” is a playful piece just for winds, and a nice mid-symphony break from all the heaviness. As one of the perkier Dead songs incorporated into the symphony, this treatment seems to make sense. Now, that could have worked just as well with the 10th movement, “Bird Song” — but there, Johnson instead highlights uncommon sounds, including a muted trumpet, to create something of a jam for orchestra. "Bird Song" is the movement that most closely approaches what I think the Dead would have sounded like if they'd been handed a bunch of orchestral instruments:

Otherwise, I’ll leave it to the Deadheads to comment on track sequencing and all the hidden references I definitely missed.

One final thought: could Johnson have gone further? For one of these rock-turned-classical albums to work, it probably does need to be divided, like the Dead Symphony, into several songs/movements, with one song highlighted per movement. Violating the integrity of the “track,” no matter how flexible it is, would probably alienate the fans of the group who would buy that album and expect to hear their songs in full (I am surprised, though, that in this symphony, some of the movements don’t fade into each other, like Dead songs often did during live concerts). Personally, I’d like the next rock-inspired symphony to explode the traditional pop-album structure. That’s why, while you’re listening to the Dead Symphony, I’ll be working on my own four-movement Symphony No. 1 — Sting vs. Radiohead: Celebrity Deathmatch.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. Caution: this could lead to Billy Mumphrey's downfall.
2. This review in Variety sums up the issue well.
3. But I would gladly do either anyway.
4. In the version on their Kid A tribute, the Vitamin Quartet used strings to create an impression of those drums, but they didn't go as far as they later would on "15 steps."
5. A post I saw on the Dead’s official Web site points up the Deadheads’ fanatical hunger for live renditions of their favorite music. After the announcement of the world premiere, with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, in 2008, one fan asked if taping was allowed — a tradition at Dead shows, but certainly not at the Meyerhoff.

Swedish Sea Squalls: Atterberg's 3rd "West Coast Pictures"

2010-08-30T10:00:00.044-04:00

No musical landscape artist worth his salt leaves the subject of the ocean unpainted for too long. The orchestra is typically the preferred pallete, and for a perhaps unsurprising share of composers, the symphony the ideal canvas. Most famous is Vaughan Williams' First, though Debussy's 3-movement La Mer may supersede this if we grant the three movement cyclic work the status of symphony-in-all-but-name (SIABN). Less known sea-symphonies by generally familiar composers include Rubenstein's Second, Hanson's Seventh, and Afvén's Fourth. Trailing in their wake is a flotilla of others of geometrically increasing obscurity, if certainly not (blog rallying cry!) quality. (Nystroem? Gilson? Flagello?!)

Kurt Atterberg's Third Symphony, "Västkustbilder" (West Coast Pictures), stands out among the esoterica as a particularly unrestrained portrait of maritime scenes, and the Rasilainen conducted CPO recording does it full justice. Atterberg is the latest of Sweden's ample share of late Romantics (a little less than a generation younger than predecessors Peterson-Berger, Aflvén, and Stenhammar), composing music of swelling grandiosity well into the 1950s. Atterberg wrote nine symphonies in all (and #9 is choral, naturally), uneven in seriousness but consistently pleasurable and well-wrought. From the rare person who's heard all nine, the Third is frequently ranked as his finest foray into the genre. Indeed, Atterberg's compositional predilections -- loose forms, shades of Swedish folk music, sweeping melodies, and eager tone-painting -- meet in happy confluence in this oceanic essay.

Likely inspired by the scenery of Stockevik, a tiny town on the west shore of the island Skaftolandet, the symphony was written over the course of three years and completed in 1916. Like some other famous symphonies whose outward projection of unity belies a more cobbled compositional process (cough Berlioz), Atterberg's Third emerged from what was conceived of as a group of standalone tone poems concerning impressions of the sea. A fleeting hint of cyclical recall of the first movement's opening in the subsequent two does manage to pay lip-service to overall cohesion, but the logic across (and within) movements is clearly pictorial and cumulative rather than strictly "symphonic." Critics seemed enthused regardless, a German reviewer praising "West Coast Pictures" as "perhaps the best that has been composed up until now apart from Richard Strauss's orchestral works."

From their sibilant titles, each of the three movements is meant to evoke a different nautical scene, "Sun Smoke," "Storm," and "Summer Night." The "Sun Smoke" portrait features the gentle undulations of a modal figure (the scantily recurring cyclic motif) that steers the orchestra through tranquil waters. I hear glimmers of Debussy, and pre-glimmers of Puccini's Il Tabarro in this opening.

"Sun Smoke" Opening

The requisite "Storm" that follows is surprisingly tuneful for an orchestral gale, a battery of sturm+drang topics stitched onto generally four-square melodies. Despite its pictorial aptness (there is no shortage of wave-crashes!), I find this storm the symphony's relative weak link -- Atterberg's melodic tendencies get slightly in the way here, depriving the movement of the potential ferocity that his orchestrational imagination might have been otherwise capable of. (You have to wait to his wonderfully strange Ninth to hear Atterberg really synthesize his tuneful and destructive sides -- for a rendering of Ragnarök, appropriately!).

"Storm" Theme

Atterberg's Third turns out to be one of those symphonies that saves its best for the end, and then heaps it on in generous proportions. The "Summer Night" is the work's end-weighted glory, a movement as long as the first two combined and containing the most compelling material. It blithely forgets the tensions of preceding tempest; Atterberg's description of the movement implies that for the rest of the symphony, we've sailed into untroubled seas, a vision of the "peculiar peace of the inner fjord, while the sea roars outside but its raging can hardly be heard."

The 18 minutes of "Summer Night" consist of a succession of episodes, alternatively placid and ecstatic, in a extremely loose rondo form. A few minutes in comes what I feel to be the symphony's most impressive section, a theme of an albatross-like wingspan. This type of long-breathed melody soaring above an active but contrapuntally simple accompaniment is, for those who like their classical music juicy and romantic, one of Atterberg's most attractive specialties.

Albatross Theme

More melodic episodes drift in and out. A brief scherzo is embedded within the center of the movement (a strategy employed in his Second Symphony as well), serving to introduce a turn motif that figures into the coda, as well as picking up the tempo for the more blustery restatement of the albatross theme (it's undoubtedly high-tide now!). Moving into "Summer Night's" final pages, Atterberg deems even the gracious albatross theme too dark, building up the pieces of a broad new subject that will dominate the score's elated coda.

"Summer's Night" Finale Build-Up (a tad of Howard Shore in there, anyone?):

The sounding of all bells, whistles, and fanfares at conclusion leaves a taste of almost Tchaikovskian triumphalism behind -- though by this point, you're either so swept up by Atterberg's swooning extroversion, or have long since stopped listening, to be bothered by such relinquishment of symphonic decorum.

-Frank Lehman

Fun with Scales: Furtwängler's Second Symphony

2010-08-21T23:03:00.023-04:00

It’s Wilhelm Furtwängler-bashing season on the Internet. Around a week ago, Alex Ross nominated a disc of the German musician’s piano quintet as one of the worst recordings in history. Ross called it “an immensely earnest mishmash of Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, and Reger, full of unmemorable ideas developed at unrelenting length.” Pitting Furtwängler’s composing life against what most people love Furtwängler for (his performing), Ross offered up a clip of Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic in the Coriolan Overture — “in the interest of equal time.”

Wouldn’t it have been fairer to choose a few minutes of one of Furtwängler’s own pieces to balance out the supposedly awful piano quintet? Or was Wilhelm just that uninteresting as a composer? I’ll admit that until this month, whenever I heard Furtwängler’s name, I thought not of composing but rather about two other things: conducting and Nazi Germany.¹ Much has been written about the German musician’s complex relationship with the Third Reich and his position as the regime’s favored orchestral leader. Though the debate about his politics rages on, Furtwängler’s status as one of the 20th century’s greatest conductors is firm and secure. But the maestro’s own music doesn’t get much respect.

It tends to be easy to beat up on composers who are actually more famous for their performing. It’s as if you can only be really good at one of the two activities, and once you choose conducting, you might as well not bother writing your own stuff.² And there may be a few other factors working against our estimation of Furtwängler as a composer. For a guy with a shady political past, perhaps it’s easier to like him for the way he reproduces others’ music than for how he creates his own. Listening to Furtwängler’s own music might bring us uncomfortably close to a possible Nazi sympathizer. On the other hand, when we hear him only as a conductor, we’re kept at a safe distance, since we’re really just listening to Beethoven, Brahms, or Bruckner.

And Furtwängler’s music may be useless for music historians who want to demonstrate “progress” in music in the 20th century. As far as I know, he didn’t experiment with atonality, serialism, or electronics. If something sounds like it could have been written in the 19th century, then that’s already a big strike against talking about it as part of the mid-20th. In other words, it has to do something new or it’s not worth taking seriously.

So I felt a little rebellious when I decided to make his Symphony No. 2 (1944-5) one of our first 20th-century Unsung Symphonies. It could be his best-known work. Indeed, it has a flashy 2002 recording with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and I was able to find a score in Harvard’s music library. Someone out there thinks Furtwängler's music is worth hearing.

My own investigation of this hour-and-a-half long, four-movement behemoth for large orchestra suggests that Furtwängler could compose. What held this piece together for me was one simple tension, but one that went a long way — a tension between ascending and descending scalar motion. By the fifth measure, Furtwängler effectively introduces this tension, which drives the entire work. He begins with a mysterious, disjointed bassoon figure (joined by clarinets) against which the violins introduce the scale as the main musical tissue:

For one play on that idea, in a transitional section a bit later, note how Furtwängler gradually tears apart a smooth, five-note stepwise ascent. It starts in the oboe, then becomes an arpeggio in the flutes, and, finally, a fragmented, plucked passage in the violin:

Furtwängler does the reverse in the third movement, where a forceful drop in thirds in the strings is tightened into a stepwise descent in the clarinet, and then turns into a similar reach for the heavens in the violin. The horns and flutes also join in the fun. And because Furtwängler has conditioned us so well to listen for scales, the upward leap at the end of the ascending figure comes as a nice surprise:

As the fourth movement begins, bassoons firmly announce our central descent/ascent tension over a pedal in the double bass and cello, as if to say, in a primal way, that despite the jagged melody they played at the beginning the first movement, these instruments have finally come into line. When the trumpet completes its ascending line, the sonority it lands on is downright scary:

For my final example of Furtwängler’s play on the basic descending scale, I’d like to offer up some evidence that Furtwängler was more of a Mahlerian than he is sometimes given credit for. First, Furtwängler, midway through the fourth movement:

Compare to Mahler's Second Symphony, First Movement (Ricardo Chailly, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra):

Furtwängler's Second Symphony is chock full of this kind of manipulation of basic scalar motion. It’s certainly not the only thing going on here, but Furtwängler seems to have found a key to keeping listeners’ attention: hammer home something very simple, like an ascending or descending set of notes, and manipulate it in different ways. So next time you want to relax and listen to Bruckner's Seventh, check this one out instead.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. OK, sometimes I also think of the Lawn Wranglers.
2. See this Norman Lebrecht article, where Gustav Mahler, Pierre Boulez, and Leonard Bernstein are seen as the only famous conductors who could also compose. Even if that's true, I don't know that composing and conducting need to be pitted against each other like that. They seem like two tough activities that require a lot of expertise. It's also surprising when a great composer also turns out to be a superstar insurance agent or something.

Hey, Copernicus!: Górecki's Symphony No. 2

2010-08-18T16:27:00.054-04:00

To most classical listeners, Polish composer Henryk Górecki (pronounced Gore-ett-ski) is known only as a symphonist. The phenomenal success (at least as far as classical records go) of his Third Symphony "Sorrowful Songs" in the early nineties probably disqualifies that from treatment here at Unsung Symphonies.¹ However, the huge exposure of the Third seems to have out-shined his first two symphonic efforts right out of visibility. This is a shame, because a fuller appreciation of Górecki's skills as a composer is only possible once we yank our ears away from the passionate monotony of the well-known Third and concentrate on the less trendy stuff.

Perhaps in the future we'll look at the jagged essay in atonal effects that is the Symphony No. 1, but today I'm concentrating on his next foray, the Symphony No. 2 Kopernikowska ("Copernican"). The symphony was a commission by the Polish-American Kościuszko Foundation as a commemoration of the 500th birth-iversary of Poland's greatest astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, dismantler of the centuries old geocentric model of the cosmos. Copernicus' heliocentric theory, of course, wasn't exactly warmly received by the Catholic Church, challenging as it did centuries-held dogma.

Now, you may have heard Górecki lumped in the category of "Holy/Spiritual/Sacred Minimalists," a vague descriptor he shares with Pärt and Tavener. We don't need to fuss about the accuracy of this category; suffice it to say Górecki's music tends to be extremely gradual, and extremely Christianity-oriented. And for the composer, Copernicus represents a problem. Relinquishing a geocentric view of the universe knocked humanity down a couple existential pegs. How then, would this extraordinarily devout composer approach the task of commemorating what Górecki described as, in some ways, "not an optimistic discovery"?

In this Second Symphony, Górecki cobbled together bits of several written passages, including two psalms and a line from Copernicus' own writings to serve as a choral text. In typical Górecki style, these words are drawn out over immense (galactic?!) spans of musical time. Here is the Latin and a translation.²

Deus, qui fecit caelum et terram. Qui fecit luminaria magna... Solem in potestatem diei. Lunam et stellas in potestatem noctis. Quid autem caelo pulcrius, nempe quod continet pulcra omnia?

(God, who created the heaven and the earth, who made the great lights, the sun for the power of day, the moon and stars for the power of night. What, indeed, is more beautiful than heaven, which truly contains all beautiful things?)

These words are set within two movements, the first screamingly dissonant, the second calm and reflective. The majority of the first movement's 17 minutes is actually purely orchestral. The opening doesn't suggest it will be a pretty affair:

Symphony No. 2 Mvt I. Beginning

Gargantuan slabs of whole-tone dissonance grind up against each other, these chords set in an elliptical orbit around the melodic note E. Against this elemental harshness, a passage of relative calm (if not consonance) is introduced. Tell me this doesn't sound like another, equally cosmic sound-effect:

Symphony No. 2 Mvt I. Middle

Compare with Beam me Up! (both, as it turns out, rely on high, tightly packed clusters of whole-tone related pitches)

Returning from that final frontier, Górecki intensifies the orchestral stridency, recalling the dissonant sound slabs as well as swarms of chattering brass that wouldn't sound out of place accompanying the sentinels in The Matrix. At the end of the movement, the chorus enters the fray, chanting "Deus, qui fecit caelum et terram" to the ~~tune~~ banshee-wail from the beginning. If this is a vision of the cosmos, it is a downright cataclysmic one.

Thank heavens for the second movement. The hellish tone is immediately reversed, with luminous pentatonic (and increasingly diatonic, downright friendly) chords providing the ground over which a solo baritone steadily reaches higher in his range. He is joined by a female soprano (now it's beginning to sound like his Third Symphony a lot), and together they continue their ascent across several haunting mini-climaxes.

The most remarkable moment comes when when the full chorus enters for the last time (come to think of it, they only sang together for about a minute before this, talk about a boring job!). In radiant 4-part modal harmony, they sing the tune to a 13th century Polish antiphon "Laude digne prole," to set the words of Copernicus "What, indeed, is more beautiful than heaven...?" The idiom is new to the piece, unashamed in its archaism.

(I feel like it's a spoiler to post a clip of the final legs of the symphony, since so much of its effect owes to a long investment of time with the rest of the work. But hey, this is the internet, and we ain't got all day.)

Symphony No. 2 Mvt II. Choral Exit

The symphony winds down with a very long (5 minute!) coda. You can hear the whole conclusion on youtube here. Essentially only two things happen. First, orchestral layers, and correspondingly volume, are continually added to a consonant cluster chord, swelling in luminosity like an indistinct nebula coalescing into a gleaming star. Then, that beacon collapses into a first inversion Ab-chord and slowly fades back into nothingness.

¹Unsung in the figurative sense of course. Górecki's Third is one long, unadorned song on Polish texts of mourning after another.

²Thanks to Kassandra Conley for the translation.

³No, but really, this kind of selective excerpting totally violates the spirit of a slow-burn piece like this, and I urge you to listen to the whole thing!

-Frank Lehman

Master of the Infinite Series - Nørgård’s Second Symphony

2010-08-14T11:02:00.050-04:00

Per Nørgård (1932-) has been Denmark’s leading modernist composer since the 1960s. His fertile musical imagination has led to the creation of seven symphonies over the course of fifty years, the most recent premiering as recently as 2006. Nørgård's music is rigorously constructed but surprisingly approachable, in some cases even ecstatically enjoyable.

Among the deeds Nørgård (pronounced "Ner-gore") is known for is the planning of large scale compositions around the same principles that would eventually be formalized in the idea of the “fractal” was even coined. The key to his prescient anticipation of fractals is his use of a specific music-composition device that he (and he alone) invented. Since 1959, a great deal of Nørgård's music has been based on what he called the “infinite series.” (alternatively "infinity series"). His Second Symphony, a one movement work lasting about one half hour, is among his first and most rigorous applications of this tool. Here’s how it works:

Nørgård’s infinite series is actually an integer sequence produced by a relatively simple algorithm that “unpacks” a single musical interval. A single interval is all you need to generate an unstoppable Nørgård sequence. Say you want to begin a piece with the melody G - A. Let’s assume just white notes (diatonic) are in use. From this melody, Nørgård would extract an essential piece of info, the ascending +1 “go up by one” interval between G and A. Then, he composes out that interval, using its inverted form as instructions on what the next pitch shall be: go -1 away from G. Thus, the 3rd note in the sequence is 1 below G, or F. He does the same for A, only with the original interval, so that the 4th note in the series is +1 from A, or B. We’ve got a nice little tune, already fanning away from G! The instructions we’re following are essentially: take each new interval that appears in the sequence starting at the front, and go that far (in inversion) from the second to last note in sequence, and then go that far (uninverted) from the last note in the sequence.

Infinity Series Algorithm for Initial Interval +1 (white-note) step. Click to expand.

This diagram shows the process for two iterations, the first (+1 interval) and the second (+2), producing six notes from the original two. As you get further into the sequence, the new intervals get increasingly far away from the pitches they are “producing” at the other end. This is not a barrier to understanding, however; no one expects you to hear how specific notes are being chosen, because the effect is one of carefully tuned chaos – totally dependent on the initial condition (the +1 interval), seemingly random but thoroughly determined.¹

Continue generating the melody,² and you’ll begin seeing notes slightly further away from the starting point. But not by much – a fairly (statistically) tight grip around the starting range is always retained, and big leaps tend to be followed by leaps in the opposite direction. The resulting succession of pitches is what mathematicians call non-monotonic. No, they’re not referring to its lack of a clearly defined central pitch! Rather, it’s the tendency to avoid continuous motion in the same direction; the iterative process Nørgård uses produces unstable melodies, constantly flopping up and down, locally unpredictable but globally secure.

Pick any sample slice of this pitch sequence and it’ll likely look pretty similar to any other given slice. But in order to take advantage of the more rarefied property of self-similarity, these resemblances must show up on multiple levels. Cue Nørgård’s truly recursive compositional process in the Second Symphony.

The clearest fractal property at work in this piece is the use of a single G-to-A-flat based infinite series at several time-scales. The strict sequential orderings of pitches can be difficult to discern aurally, but you can easily tell that there are multiple orchestral strata doing different but related things. At measure 60, the orchestra splits into three streams. Woodwinds trade sprightly runs in constant eighth notes, buzzing in the vicinity of G. Brass operate at a more leisurely pace, generally 4x slower (half-notes), while the entire string section explores pyramidal figures at a *much* slower rate – roughly one change every 30 measures, or 1/120th the speed of the metronomic winds. Around halfway through the piece, these three main temporal roles suddenly begin alternating, shifting between players.

Sounds good in theory, but how does it all come out sounding? At times, Nørgård’s procedures produce truly dazzling passages. Here’s a clip (and, for the curious/masochistic, a score excerpt) of the initiation of the woodwind stream. The recording is from Segerstam's glittering performance with the Danish National Symphony orchestra.

Woodwind Stream:

[Score Example: Measure 60]

A great deal of the symphony sounds like this, with some stratum chugging away at their 8th-note pitch sequence while the rest of the orchestra slowly shifts in hue. Because pitch, as determined by the sequence, is usually so tightly wound around a certain range, our attention drifts to other matters, especially tone color, and Nørgård’s imagination for orchestral combinations is impressive. There are no catchy themes, but little shards of melodies do phase in and out of focus, and various ideas do come back. One is the throbbing unison pulses from brass at several form defining moments, celebrating the arrival at an important member of the infinite series with bizarre fanfare.

Brass Fanfare:

This is the kind of piece you can only write once, and Nørgård’s subsequent output, while equally ingenuous, tends to treat his infinite series less as the structuring principle as here, and more as a jumping off point. Which is not to say his Second Symphony isn’t successful. There is a hypnotic quality to this music quite unlike anything from the minimalists. And a sense of yawning expanse that pushes beyond much of the “sonorist” work from the 60s. Whether he beat chaos-theorists to the punch with his unpredictable, recursive music or not, Per Nørgård certainly created the bar and then raised it ridiculously high for anyone wishing to write a “fractal symphony.”

— Frank Lehman

1. This pretty extraordinary website has tons info on (and can play back!) any integer sequence you can dream up, including several from and inspired by Nørgård. For example the following functions specify the "infinite series" sequence beginning with 0-1: [pitch(starting place) = 0 ; pitch (2n places) = - pitch(n places ; pitch (2n + 1 places) = pitch(n places) + 1]

2. A “fun” exercise, if you’d like to try yourself. Check with the website above to see if you’re right, or consult Kullberg, “Beyond Infinity” in The Music of Per Nørgård in Fourteen Interpretive Essays.

Mark it 3, Walter: Piston's First Pulitzer Winner

2010-08-10T08:34:00.011-04:00

Why not start this New England-based blog off with a local hero? A hero, at least, according to the Pulitzer Prize Board. In 1948, Maine-born Harvard professor Walter Piston (1894-1976) joined a small and distinguished group of composers — including Aaron Copland and Charles Ives — when he took home the Pulitzer for his Symphony No. 3, the subject of today's post. (Piston won again for his 7th, in 1961.) This Koussevitzky Music Foundation commission had its premiere on January 9, 1948, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Seems like a good start, right?

Despite its auspicious first year, this piece doesn't seem to have held audiences over the last 60 years the same way as, say, Copland's Appalachian Spring, which nabbed the Pulitzer just three years earlier, in 1945. And given Piston's career at Harvard, maybe it's fitting that the only CD recording I could find of this work was by James Yannatos and the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, made in 1999. (We also have a 1954 recording on vinyl by Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra.)

For now, let's skip straight to the feverish second movement, where Piston loves to pass jumpy, brief melodic and rhythmic figures from instrument to instrument. Detached articulation and frequent, unpredictable rests give much of this movement a prickly, spiky feel — but this all slows, and fades, to a middle section that is almost shockingly warm and welcoming, given what's come before. In fact, it's so nice, with its harp and bass clarinet accompaniments, that it almost doesn't fit. (The first and third movements also have some of these lyrical moments, but nothing quite stops the show like this.) The flute fires off the tune-bomb we've all been waiting at least 10 minutes for, and then some other instruments get a chance to play around with it before the flute returns. Have a listen:

2nd movement, leading into the lyrical episode:

The prickliness, though, takes over again. In the rousing fourth movement, the spiky staccatos from the second movement return, and overall, it's a bit more stately and, on the surface, resolute (and certainly more tonally grounded) than that other fast movement. But there's something missing. In his recent book The Great American Symphony, Nicholas Tawa calls this movement "carefree and frolicsome." I didn't find it to be that, exactly. I actually found it to be pretty unsettling. Piston really hits you over the head with the last chord. It's a bit too obvious and forced for me think of this movement as "carefree," and that may be the point. The relentless ending (with its abrupt final sonority, complete with clipped cymbal crash) might be meant to contrast with the much nobler close of the symphony's first movement. That movement's climax actually felt, to me, like the end of a complete journey, finishing as it does with a thrilling build in texture, an almost sudden purge of chromaticism to land on a solid C-major, and a nice final swell. The closure there seems a bit more earned. Compare the movement conclusions and tell me what you think satisfies you more as an ending:

End of 4th movement:

End of 1st movement:

Piston's Third was my real first foray into this composer's music, but I preferred those moments when he allowed a solo instrument to sing for more than a few seconds before letting it get washed away in a sea of competing sounds. It seems, though, that I could be falling into an old trap of Piston criticism. Some think that the price Piston paid for his highly skilled and learned compositional approach is that his music lacks good old-fashioned soul — he was a "craftsman" but, perhaps, not a true artist. A 1958 review of the Hanson recording of this symphony, published in Gramophone, sums up that view: "There is something altogether too rational about Piston's music, and, in the last resort, too little inspired." I don't agree with the dichotomy there — I think logical music can be profoundly moving — but as I explore more Piston, I wonder if my desire for more time with really catchy tunes means I'm just not Piston's target audience. Or maybe I'm listening to the wrong symphony. What do Pistonites out there think about Walter and this highly decorated work?

— Matthew Mugmon

The Symphony Abides

2010-08-09T21:23:00.022-04:00

There are a lot of symphonies out there. And the big guys — Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Dvorak, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, and Shostakovich — weren’t the only ones cranking them out. Yet our experiences of the symphony in the concert hall and on recordings tend to arrive courtesy of the names above, with a dutiful smattering of a few others for variety now and then. As it turns out, there are many, many more. In our blog, Unsung Symphonies, we look at some of the most fascinating, challenging, and (let's be upfront about this) just plain weird music to come from 20th-century symphonists with decidedly non-household names (at least, as symphonists).

There is no single story to tell about the development of the symphony after 1900. In the 20th century, as the looming shadow of a certain composer of THE NINE began to retreat, we lost something of the clear thread that wound through our understanding of the 19th century’s treatment of the genre. (Say what you will about Beethovenian anxiety of influence — at least it was an ethos).

Instead, we found a huge explosion of new ideas and issues for composers to grapple with — atonality, electronics, non-Western musics, to name just a few. For some, the 20th century mandated symphonies be written as white hot responses to turbulent times. Others rejected this fire, preferring theirs to be cold glasses of water. Some overthrew the prescriptions handed down by generations before, compressing, expanding, rotating, twisting the very stuff of symphonic tissue into exciting, unfamiliar shapes and sounds. A few avoided the term “symphony” all together, but they don’t fool us!

The idea behind Unsung Symphonies is to highlight some symphonies that we don't know that well, or at all — and that we hope are new to you, too — in an effort to develop new narratives and make sense of the symphonic deluge of the last hundred or so years. Every week, we'll take on one symphony. As this blog develops, we may include timely themes, paired works, spotlights on national traditions, and interactive features. Who knows — maybe we'll even write a symphony.

At this early stage, for something to qualify as a “symphony,” it really only needs to have “symphony” (or its non-English equivalent) in the title (except when it doesn’t). We’re generally focusing on symphonies that were composed in the 20th century, but that won't prevent us from jumping back to Georges Onslow ¹ every once in a while. And by "unsung," we mean those that don't seem to sit atop the orchestral canon. We will try hard to avoid the tendency to describe things new to our ears entirely in terms of similarities to, or influence by, better known works or composers. And if you've heard of one symphony or know it well, that doesn't make it "unsung" — it just means you’d better help educate everyone in the comments. As we like to say, one listener’s Beethoven is another’s Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin. Conversely, if you don’t find your favorite obscurantist symphoniker featured in a post, fret not — we are open to suggestions and would be thrilled to discover new works from you, our reader (we’re looking at you, Axel Ejnar Hakon Børresen Society.)

Your symphonic reality tour guides are Matthew Mugmon and Frank Lehman.² Both are Ph.D. students at Harvard working on their dissertations. Matt’s a Mahler guy, and his thesis looks at the transmission of ideas about Mahler’s music in France and the United States. Frank gives film music some much deserved theoretical attention in his thesis about tonality and transformation in Hollywood scores. Both are big into Seinfeld and The Big Lebowski, and they reserve the right to pepper their posts with references.

— Matt and Frank

1. "The French Beethoven."
2. Disclaimer: The last thing these guys are qualified to give a tour of is reality.