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.

-----------
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

---
[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

Master of the Infinite Series - Nørgård’s Second Symphony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Woodwind Stream:

[Score Example: Measure 60]

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

Brass Fanfare:


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

— Frank Lehman

---

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

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