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

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

The Opera that Never Was: Busoni's Piano Concerto

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

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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.

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

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

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.

Pushing the Envelope: Blitzstein's "Airborne"

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.

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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.

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

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.

Halloween Hangover - Sorabji's 1st Organ Symphony

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.

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

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.

Bagpipes Gone Wild? - Malipiero's 11th

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.

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

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 enthusiasm¹, 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.

Fun with Scales: Furtwängler's Second Symphony

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.

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

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