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.

Pigments of the Imagination: Bliss' Colour Symphony

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"

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"

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.