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

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).

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

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.

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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