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

For some of the composers we've covered here, it is truly baffling that they aren't better known. These are the symphonists whose works are accessible, profound, perhaps even popular at the time of their premieres, but for some whim of concert programming, didn't quite make it into the canon.

Then there are those for whom obscurity--however undeserved--is not a surprise. Such is the case with the Basque composer Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (1806-1826), whose marginal status today is the result of a convergence of sorry circumstances: a brief life, a small output, and a musically non-mainstream nationality.

Arriaga's composing career was stunted because of his incredibly short lifespan. He died from tuberculosis 10 days before reaching his 20th birthday, although his teacher, the eminent François-Joseph Fétis, held that Arriaga's work ethic led him to counterpoint-exercise himself to death.[1] Arriaga developed into an extraordinary musical prodigy at the prodding of his organist father. At thirteen he penned his one and only opera, with an in-vogue Turkish abduction plot, Los Esclavos Felices (The Happy Slaves). Yet he was so shy that at its premiere in his hometown of Bilbao, he hid away until tremendous applause at its conclusion drew him out. He moved to Paris at age 15 to study at the Paris Conservatoire. His truncated tenure was highly productive, for what it's worth. He wrote arias, fugues, a cantata and Stabat Mater, three string quartets--works that stunned Fétis as well as the extremely difficult-to please head professor Luigi Cherubini. And a single Symphony in D.

After his death, Arriaga's relatives promoted an image of Arriaga as the "Spanish Mozart" (or indeed, given his birthplace in Bilbao, the "Basque Mozart" for members of Basque nationalist movements). The comparison is not just apt, it's spooky. Arriaga was born exactly 50 years (to the hour!) after the birth of W. A. Mozart. Like his predecessor/past-soul incarnation, Arriaga wrote in a mostly Viennese classical style, which was still the dominant popular and academic idiom of his day. He had a remarkable melodic verve and mastery of counterpoint, but died before these skills solidified into something truly revolutionary. Perhaps his failure to even glance the surface of the canon owes to the lack of overt "Spanishisms" in his music. Spain since Domenico Scarlatti had more or less slipped off the radar of mainstream European concert composition, and despite his promise, Arriaga neither established a national school of Spanish music at home, nor did he introduce a curious "ethnic" flavor that would have entranced central European audiences. No castanets, no jota rhythms. Though a few commentators have discerned vague "Latin flavor" in his melodic writing, Arriaga was a cosmopolitan composer at heart rather than a purveyor of local color.

The Symphony in D was written during Arriaga's time at the Conservatoire, and was probably performed there once. (At least the composer would have been able to hear his orchestral masterpiece, provided he wasn't still so shy to avoid the premiere.) It is a smoothly conceived and executed work, displaying more than just facility, but a real fluency with Classical symphonic form. The first movement is a churning allegro in D-minor, but it starts off with a lengthy slow introduction in the parallel key of D-major.[2] Things pick up with the entrance of the movement's Sturm-und-Drang exposition, full of dissonant thunderclaps and angsty string palpitations. Especially skillful is the motivic consistency; parts of the main theme and its transition are incorporated into the second subject in the relative major F. Here is a fairly substantial portion of the expo, leading halfway through the second theme. Listen for the 4 eighth-note rhythmic motif ba-ba-ba-BUM, where that last BUM always lands on a note much lower than the first.

[All excerpts come from the Concerto Koln Cappricio recording]

The symphony's slow second movement is based around a pair of unhurried themes framed once again within a sonata structure. The second of these is particularly beautiful, a lyrical melody one might easily mistake for Mozart (on a good day). Next up, a minuet+trio movement (no shock there), although the minuet is so jagged and full of tutti-alternating-with-concertino scoring that whatever gentility the dance might originally have boasted is surely purged here. The cheeky syncopation of the opening, combined with the extreme economy of melodic materials (scarcely more than arpeggios in 2-voice imitation) leaves a distinct and welcome Haydnesque taste.



Arriaga leaves the most impressive display of his burgeoning compositional talent to the last movement's Allegro con moto, where we are returned to the tempestuous mood of the opening. True, the throbbing accompaniment and troubled but energetic theme are heavily reminiscent of Mozart's 40th Symphony. But perhaps the commentator Alan Pedigo isn't totally off-base in claiming that the movement is "flavored with variations of the rhyhtm and melody of the Fandango and Andalucia."[3] The off-beat chords in the woodwinds anticipate more violent bursts when the first theme concludes and heads into the second theme area. We have, then, another rather dangerous dance.[4]



The development is short but in its way substantial, and at one point just happens to launch into a fuguetto based on the second subject. Where lapsing effortlessly and unexpectedly into fugue was a mark of Beethoven's late style, for young Arriaga it seems motivated by a combination of showing-off and free wheeling joy in counterpoint that Fetis so admired.



The modified transition section of the recapitulation is the most remarkable portion of the symphony. To understand what's happening here, we need to return to the exposition, and inspect the way Arriaga gets from the D-minor of the first subject to F-major of the second. The strategy there is already a little odd, as it involves a passage that very quickly takes us to a chromatic destination (C-minor) as part of a sequence falling in major seconds. The ultimate goal is the pitch Bb, which acts as the seventh of a downward arpeggiating C-dominant for F-major.



The question Arriaga must have posed himself is "how do I change this transition in the recap so that I end up *back* in D?" His answer is to re-position that chromatic event so that it affects A rather than the tonic D. The result is a shocking motion from A-major to Ab-major. True, that latter chord is transitional in character, leading to further semitonal droops all the way to Gb (bIV?!). But it remains an astonishingly bold musical shift to the single most remote key out there (Ab in the key of D is...bV?). The surprises continue, when Gb is reinterpreted as F# and climbs *back up* to Ab (now heard as G#), which settles on A major as the proper dominant that clinches theme number two.



For the analysis-oriented of you, here is a little reduction of the process as it occurs in both sections, lined up to show the similarities and divergences in strategy.

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

Arriaga's symphony, despite these dazzling flourishes, is ultimately a rather conventional animal. Yet we must remember it was written while he was still a composer in training. Indeed, if his life were not cut so short, Juan Arriaga may well have become one of continental Europe's most widely sung symphonists.

---Frank Lehman

[1]. Recounted in Barbara Rosen's Arriaga, the Forgotten Genius: The Short Life of a Basque Composer. (17-18). Rosen's slim volume is an invaluable source for information on Arriaga, not just biographical, but with regard to his place in music history and the gradual attempts to revive his music.
[2]. Frankly, I feel the intro is the weakest part of the work; Arriaga basically lifts his beginning from the slow opening of Beethoven's 2nd symphony (by accident or more likely, star-struck imitation, I'd wager).
[3]. Cited in Rosen, 50.
[4]. That transition is achieved in part through a hearty "three-blind mice" figure for low strings that Rosen hears as a distant premonintion of Dvorak's 9th symphony, 4th mvt-- and it's hard not to hear it that way once attuned. (Rosen, ibid)

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

Unsung Symphonies is happy to welcome Louis Epstein, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Harvard University. Louis is writing a dissertation on funding for music composition in interwar France and has been promising to redress our shameful lack of Gallic symphonies over here for quite some time. It's worth the wait, as Louis's comprehensive take on Milhaud's First Symphony speaks to many of the problems at stake in 20th Century symphony composition (and reception) that we're constantly negotiating here at our blog!

---

Legion are the symphonies whose legacies depend, in part, on epic and provocative subtitles: “Farewell,” “Eroica,” “Titan,” "Apocalyptic" to name but a few. Darius Milhaud’s Symphony No. 1 bears no such subtitle – one possible reason for its relative obscurity to date – but I hope to change that now. As I reinvent the historiographical legacy of Symphony No. 1, I’ll audition three possible subtitles, each one more epic and provocative than the last.

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

Milhaud, along with Stravinsky, was one of the major practitioners of the neoclassical aesthetic in music in the 1920s and 1930s. Eschewing huge ensembles, overwrought sentimentality, and “German” heaviness, Milhaud’s first attempts in the “symphonic” genre were his Six Petites Symphonies, which were really chamber works whose titles implied rejection, rather than embrace, of the symphonic ideal. To a certain extent, Symphony No. 1 continues in this vein by problematizing sonata form[1] and frequently employing chamber ensembles within the orchestra. The opening of the symphony is its most concentrated neoclassical moment: the winds carry the accessible theme, accompanied by pizzicato strings whose primary purpose seems to be staying out of the way.

The symphony’s neoclassical veneer persists through the first movement with but a few scratches. By the opening of the fourth movement, however, Milhaud’s exposed, tormented spirit is on display with a heavily orchestrated theme at odds with the typical neoclassical (read: “French” or “Stravinskian” ) priority of emotional detachment.

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

Moments like these make Milhaud’s Symphony No. 1 an excellent candidate for the moniker “Post-neoclassical.” Unlike Stravinsky, Milhaud seems content to harness neoclassicism selectively, diverging from the aesthetic when needed to achieve contrast, or to heighten emotion, or to give all members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (the commissioning body) something to play. And the most evidently post-neoclassical move of all – writing a program symphony! – inspires my next proposed subtitle:

II. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “Deliverance”

To Milhaud, his wife, and their son, this symphony was a ticket out of the crumbling French republic at the beginning of the Second World War, delivering the family from (certain) evil and (likely) death. Frederick Stock (conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) commissioned the symphony from Milhaud in mid-1939 to celebrate the organization’s 50^th anniversary.[2] When the Germans invaded France, capturing Paris and forcing the capitulation of Mar'echal Petain, the Milhaud family fled, crossing the border into Spain and from there Portugal. Milhaud used newspaper articles and correspondence with his manager to prove that he had composed a symphony for an American orchestra and was expected to attend its premiere, and this was enough to earn him a coveted visa. The family exited Europe through Lisbon, arriving in New York on July 15, 1940.

The context of the war emerges audibly – even programmatically – throughout Milhaud’s symphony. The end of the otherwise serene first movement tempers its innocent, pastoral topic with rumblings of something dark in the cellos and bass clarinet.

The second movement opens with a fulfillment of that sinister promise. After the first presentation of a violent, angular theme, Milhaud offsets it against itself by half a measure, marking with a very real displacement the confusion and despair of wartime. It's worth comparing several recordings to see how this effect can be exploited. The first is Michel Plasson’s 1992 performance with the Toulon Symphony, which softens the drama of this moment through technical polish.

In the second, Leopold Stokowski’s 1943 performance with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the manic tempo accentuates the uncertainty of Milhaud’s melody - appropriate for a wartime recording.[3] If you learned about this Milhaud symphony through Stokowski’s recording, you would be forgiven for immediately associating it with World War II - this performance drips with violence and pathos.

Following the pastoral first movement, the martial second movement easily might evoke the trampling of the folk by an invading force. The languorous and melancholy third movement suggests dejection, resignation, and calm uncertainty. We've already heard the beginning of the fourth movement, a musical representation of servitude if ever there were one. Following this theme, though, another emerges - a peppy sea-shanty in the winds.

Near the end of the movement, the two themes compete for preeminence. In the battle between Germanic heaviness and an Anglo-Saxon-influenced folk tune, only one can survive . . .

To find out which theme wins, you'll have to take a listen on your own (or just think about who won the Second World War). Then again, there's a strong chance that this theme - and the whole symphony - isn't about the war at all. The dates of the symphony tell the story. In his autobiography, Milhaud reports that due to illness and writer’s block, he didn’t start composing until after war had broken out, in November 1939. (So it is about the war!) Consistent with Milhaud’s general compositional facility, he finished the work in short order on December 19^th, 1939, meaning he wrote the entire thing during the so-called “dr^ole de guerre” in France, before the German invasion, and well before Milhaud knew he would need to flee the country.  So a program that traces the various stages of the war – calm, defeat, desolation, ending with a battle between servitude and liberty – seems historically inaccurate, even if it does make for a nice story.

Still, there’s no denying that Symphony No. 1 deserves the subtitle “Deliverance.” For one thing, the work undoubtedly saved Milhaud and his family. And even if its content couldn’t possibly comment on the war at hand, there’s no reason it can’t make more of a universal claim - maybe something timeless about good vs. evil. This, too, is a projection not easily born out by the historical record, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

This admission brings me to my final subtitle proposal.

III. Milhaud Symphony No. 1: “American”

Yes, Milhaud was born in France and spent his entire life a French citizen. Yes, this piece was composed entirely in France. Yet what could be more American than a classic immigration tale in which an upstanding individual flees persecution only to make a major contribution to the culture of his adopted land? Milhaud even considered Symphony No. 1 to be his first “Opus Americanum,” his first work (of many) to be premiered, printed, and promoted in the United States. Pace Milhaud, I would argue that his first “American” music dates from the late 1910s and early 1920s, when he became fascinated by Harlem jazz.[4]. And Milhaud didn’t merely essentialize “America” as a one-trick, jazzy pony. His particular brands of polytonality, syncopation, orchestration, and interest in rural musics all constitute affinities between his work and canonical “American” modernist music of the early 20^th century. A particularly representative moment comes in the middle of the first movement:

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

Ultimately it’s less important that the piece sound American (since we still don’t really know what “America” sounds like) than it is that the piece and its composer stake out a clearly defined place in American musical culture. With a commission and premiere by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and an early second performance by Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Mihaud's musical style clearly appealed to American tastes. Through his many years of teaching at Mills College, his numerous commissions by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a surprising number of other American orchestras (San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans, and more!), Milhaud’s music did more than interlope on American musical life – his work helped define it.

***

My subtitles for Milhaud's First Symphony highlight how reception can color our perception of a piece, and they point to an age-old dispute about the nature of "programmatic" music. (Does the Eroica sound heroic if we don't know the title?) In truth, one could audition any number of subtitles for any symphony - but only time will reveal which subtitle proves most apt. For Milhaud's Symphony No. 1, will it be "Post-neoclassical," "Deliverance," "American" - or would you choose something entirely different?

--Louis Epstein

1. Recapitulations are only nominally related to expositions; themes come in Mozartian groups rather than Beethovenian oppositions. See Roger Nichols, Liner Notes to Michel Plasson recording.
2. Stock also commissioned Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, Miaskovsky's Symphony No. 21, Harris's American Creed, Kodály's Concerto for Orchestra, Glière's Fête ferganaise Overture, Casella's Symphony No. 3, and Walton's Scapino Overture – plenty of fodder for future Unsung Symphonies posts! See http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/8_about/History_-_Rosenthal_archives/Frederick_Stock.pdf
3. It’s worth noting that the second recording can be found on the same album as two other Stokowski wartime performances, one of Hovhaness’s Symphony No. 1 “Exile” (see what I mean about epic subtitles?) and Copland’s Symphony No. 2 “Short” (not so epic).
4. In fact, Milhaud’s efforts at incorporating elements of jazz into art music predate those of Copland, Virgil Thomson, and other American composers who knew his music

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

Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's Seventh Symphony  (Hyönteisinfonia, "Insect Symphony") may be the most high-minded work ever to depict the trials and travails of the dung beetle. The fourth movement, with the charming subtitle "The Dung Beetles (Grief over the Stolen Ball of Dung)", is an exercise in the effortful accumulation of orchestral volume and energy -- the ever-rising tessitura and chromatic scales turning over themselves bring to mind the adjective "rolling."

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

For what purpose is this energy expended, and what forces are behind the theft of its product? The answer lies in the source material for this symphony. In 1987, Aho (1949-) submitted his second opera, Hyönteiselämää ("Insect's Life") to a competition put on by the Savonlinna Opera Festival that would reward the winner with a performance to mark the 350th anniversary of the host town. Aho's submission was an adaptation of the popular post-war Czech play Pictures from an Insect's Life by Karel and Joseph Čapek. It is an at times viciously satirical piece of theater in which a drunken vagrant projects anthropomorphized traits onto the various insect species he encounters, and inserts himself into their petty lives. The dung beetles are portrayed as greedily industrious (spending their lives accumulating hard-earned "capital" in the form of...you know what) and easily devastated by the theft of the material fruits of their labor. Kind of gives "Sisyphean" a different aroma, doesn't it?

The two other competitors in this festival were Paavo Heininen and Einojuhani Rautavaara, and the prize went to the former for his opera Veitsi (The Knife). Determined not to let his material from his insectoid opera go to waste, Aho turned to compositional tactic we've seen before from frustrated opera composers: turn it into a symphony! We've already featured two Unsung Symphonies that originate this way: Henze's Fourth, derived from his König Hirsch; and Rautavaara's Sixth, derived from his Vincent -- which, you guessed it, was the other losing entry from the Savonlinna competition! But don't worry, both Aho and Rautavaara's operas went on to have very successful premiers after the fact (why, the Insect Symphony had its Japanese premier in 2009!)[1]. You can hear the composer's own words on the process by following this link to YouTube.

Aho is one of the shining lights of Finland's post-Sibelius musical efflorescence. A student of Rautavaara, Aho has surpassed his mentor in symphonic output, 15 to the grand old man's 8. The first six establish the musical landscape Aho feels comfortable inhabiting, alternatively neo-Classical (with a penchant for fugues and distorted familiar forms) and rigorously modernist.[2] The cross-pollination of these idioms naturally suggests a post-modern outlook, but Aho is no slavish practitioner of any "ism". Indeed, that high-mindedness I mentioned in relation to the dung beetle episode is emblematic of the Insect Symphony as a whole -- it is both the product of and a sly criticism of post-modernism (perhaps a redundant claim for a post-modern work!). Aho, in his commentary on the symphony, emphasizes the flagrant stylistic and tonal (in emotional, not musical terms) discontinuities between its six movements, each of which sounds like a direct repudiation of the one that preceded it, but in his words "nowhere do we find a unifying synthesis of all the extremely disparate material that has been presented."[3] Stylistic allusions and disruptive "pseudo-quotations" run rampant, but at the same time there is a carefully managed emotional arc. Individual movements are cohesive (leading some to deem it more of a suite than a symphony) while at the same time only really resonating in relation to the work as a whole. In Aho's words, "The movements support each other because of their underlying opposite natures, and they cannot be performed in any other order. The symphony...accords with Mahler's conviction that the symphony must be like the world; it must contain everything."

Gustav Mahler probably didn't have bug larvae in mind when he made that all-encompassing claim for the genre, but considering the millions upon millions of species of insects that dwarf humankind in variety and biomass on this planet, perhaps Aho has it right. An accurate symphonic portrait of the world damn well better feature our six-legged overlords prominently!

Rather than attempt to capture or mimic the multitude of sounds that come from the insect world (try this instead), Aho extracts human-like character traits and renders them with orchestral magic. The symphony's first movement, "The Tramp, the Parasitic Hymenopter and its Larva," introduces us to the character of the drunken vagrant who hallucinates the personalities of the rest of the proceedings. With tuba and muted brass melodies tottering and tripping over themselves, we can glean how Aho adapted vocal lines from the source opera.[4]



You need only hear the first second of the next movement to understand what Aho meant by the "opposite natures" of these musical portraits. "Foxtrot and Tango of the Butterflies" introduces a wildly syncopated (and tonal!) dance set, with alto sax, trombone, and clarinet piping weirdly "off" two-step tunes. The scene from Čapek's play with the butterflies is like a soap-opera involving unrequited romance and lover's recriminations.  Aho's dense overscoring and chromatic skids and slips lends the movement a dizzy energy redolent of Ravel's similar choreographic disassembly in "La Valse." One isn't left with a particular desire to spend an evening with these social butterflies.



The Dung Beetle's ordeal comes on the heels of this manic dance scene, and is followed (should I say "negated") by a diaphanous scherzo depicting "The Grasshoppers." These sprightly creatures are depicted with quicksilver chord progressions garbed in flitting orchestral colors. Despite its surface impatience, there is more wholesale melodic repetition in this movement than elsewhere -- we get to know and love this light motif for the nervous creatures quite well by movement's end.




The symphony's concluding two movements are its most substantial. Number five gives us a glimpse into the musical culture of the insect world's implacable colonists -- "The Working Music of the Ants and War Marches I and II." The ceaselessly regular procession witnesses the orchestra carting away major seconds with grim determination towards an unknown goal. Streams of these intervals converge into a massive onslaught as the movement progresses, and Aho unleashes some particularly extravagant percussion instruments to keep the ants in line. By the time the it reaches a grotesque and Shostakovich-esque parody of a pompous military march, it seems Aho has in his sights an indictment of fascistic militarism, or at least, a bad experience involving fire ants.



With that fifth movement, Aho's Seventh symphony turns a corner -- in his words "Satire and comedy eventually give way to tragedy; the sensitivity and beauty of the ending are also combined with feelings of profound loneliness and alienation." And so we are provided the final portrait, "The Dayflies and Lullaby for the Dead Lullabies." Unvarnished triads and sweet textures are the norm now, and the lullaby, scored for two violins congenitally joined at the major third, sounds like an artificially-honeyed Richard Strauss confection. But there is deep pathos here too. Dayflies (a.k.a. mayflies) spend at most a day or two of their lives in their adult forms (some last barely 30 minutes) before expiring, hopefully having successfully mated during their brief taste of life. A shockingly brutal climax in the middle of this sweet movement gives way to an extended elegy for these entomological ephemera.



Considering their momentary lives, I find it poignant that Aho allots such a lengthy and slow meditation for the mayflies' expiry. The cello eulogy is one of the most haunting endings to a symphony I've heard from the 20th century.[5] It is a devastating conclusion to a work that up to this point has held the listener at arms' length with its sense of musical travesty and play. All traces of the symphony's satirical venom is drained by this stage.  Perhaps this is the critique of post-modernism Aho speaks of -- to be able to wring the deepest pathos from the death of a mayfly.

--Frank Lehman

[1]. http://www.fimic.fi/fimic/fimic.nsf/0/2C843D39DEF5E5C6C2257666002EB7BB?opendocument
[2]. See Kimmo Korhonen Inventing Finnish Music (2007, 156-160) for a nice contextualization of Aho in the vibrant Finish musical scene.
[3]. Kalevi Aho 1998 (From liner notes to BIS-CD-936)
[4].  Your guess is as good as mine as to the role played in all this by the "parasitic hymenopter", hymenoptera being the order that includes termites, bees, and ants.
[5]. There may be an element of Mahler 9 or Tchaikovsky 6 in this depressive ending, but what I hear most resoundingly is the strange and beautiful conclusion to Rautavaara's 5th (perhaps his boldest and most punch-to-the-gut powerful symphony).

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

The wistful, lovely sounds of modern machinery have long fascinated composers. Especially in the 1920s, the clanging of factories and the rumblings of engines permeated musical scores. Inspired by futurism, composers like George Antheil (in the Ballet mécanique) brazenly built the sounds of machines into their works.

While this excitement about mechanical sounds has certainly suffused music of the later twentieth-century, it has gone far beyond simply imitating and reveling in modern noise. You could argue (as Flora Dennis and Jonathan Powell have in their Grove article on futurism) that movements like serialism and minimalism are related to the futurists' fascination with machines.

But some music of the later twentieth century is cut directly from the same cloth as pieces like the Ballet mécanique or Arthur Honegger's train-inspired Pacific 231. Enter Leonardo Balada (1933-), who was born after the 1920s musical tech-craze but produced at least one symphony that could have fit right into that movement.

Balada, born in Spain, composed several symphonies and has taught at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pa, since 1970. So it's fitting that he'd make one of those symphonies intimately linked to the industrial landscape of his American town. The Steel Symphony was premiered by Donald Johanos and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1973. And as the composer acknowledged in the liner notes for Lorin Maazel's 1986 recording with the same group (heard in the clips here), he used the sounds of local steel mills for inspiration.

The symphony begins like Weigl's Fifth, with the sounds of an orchestra tuning. Perhaps that was the easiest way to suggest the beginning of the workday in a steel mill, the tools literally tuning up for a day's work:



Soon, a blanket of ominous sounds covers the listener. Layers of pedal points, striking intervals, and ghostly, sliding strings make this clip sound more like a march of war than a day at the factory:



Clearer rhythms and tunes do show up in this symphony — eventually. The regular pulsing of a machine nearly becomes an all-out dance before it's rudely interrupted (by the foreman?), and one of Balada's favorite devices, the frantic scurrying of strings, takes over:



Overall, the form of this one-movement work alternates between the dance-like, mechanical passages and broader, more rhapsodic, unpredictable, and pedal-point heavy ones, like this:



Balada's Steel Symphony came toward the end, rather than the beginning, of an industry's heyday. Back in the 1920s, machines were exciting — even though the First World War taught everyone how harmful they could be. In the early 1970s, when Balada wrote his Steel Symphony, though, the prospects for steel in Pittsburgh — whether Balada knew it or not — were getting bleak. So Balada's symphony gives us something of a look back. In his liner notes for the Maazel recording, David Wright suggested that the timpani heartbeat-like rhythm at the end is an "unabashed tribute to the symbiosis of human and machine." But we could instead hear the fading of that heartbeat rhythm as a prediction of the death of a big part of a city's identity, or as a musical depiction of an industry's last gasp:



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

— Matthew Mugmon