Innocuous as a Film Score: Williams' Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion

On October 25th, roughly two months before the movie is released in American theaters, John Williams' soundtrack for Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin will hit European shelves--thus ending a three year score drought from the 79 year old composer and sending starved aficionados into a frenzy. Short clips from the score have been steadily appearing on the internet, and one in particular--track 1 "The Adventures of Tintin," set to accompany the film's stylized main credits--quickly caught my attention. (Listen to sneak-peak here). Scored for chamber forces (clarinets and saxes, accordion, upright bass, harpsichord, muted brass, drum-set) and composed in a sprightly quasi-jazz idiom, it is sprinkled with synchronized fragments of themes and a walking bass through-line. Though vastly unlike the boisterous style Williams is best known for, it is an immediately familiar sound to anyone familiar with certain cues from Catch Me If You Can and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, particularly the manic "Knight Bus" cue from the latter (listen here).

Where does this hyperventilating style spring from? The answer lies in a concert work Williams composed in 1968, his Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion. The piece is worth examining not only for its place in Williams' oeuvre, but the way in which it was part of an important development in American music mid 20th century -- the birth and ascendancy of the modern wind ensemble, a creature we have already encountered in Giannini's 3rd Symphony.

The genesis of John Towner Williams (1932-) as today's preeminent film composer was surprisingly eclectic; after a stint arranging for the US Airforce band during the Korean War, Williams went on to study classical piano at Julliard while playing jazz piano in nightclubs. He made the fateful hop to the West Coast in the following year, studying composition at UCLA and playing piano for film studio orchestras. He would progressively graduate to arranging, then composing TV and film scores. Williams, of course, was not (and still is not) primarily known for his concert music, but over the course of his six decade career he has produced an impressive body of "art music," mostly for large orchestra. This includes 11 fine concerti, the most recent of which (oboe) premiered this spring with the Boston Pops, and two symphonic works.[1] 

The second of these symphonic efforts[2] , the Sinfonietta, was written free of a commission, but was picked up by the Eastman Wind Ensemble for performance in 1970, under the baton of Donald Hunsberger. Hunsberger inherited the position of conducting the EWE from its founder, Frederick Fennell, who essentially invented our modern notion of the wind ensemble as distinct from the military band. In the EWE, the obligatory doublings and arrangements common in earlier music for winds were replaced with single performers per part, an emphasis on extended technique, and original commissions from leading art music composers.[3] Hunsberger continued Fennell's legacy, particularly by issuing a series of printed scores with MCA Music and starting a recording series with the same label of new wind works with the EWE. The one single recording of the Sinfonietta's was thanks to Hunsberger's MCA series, placed on an 1972 LP where it was paired with Penderecki's Pittsburgh Overture and Mayazumi's Music with Sculpture. The recording, though re-issued in Japan in the late 90s, is now virtually unobtainable, and the clips I present below are from an admittedly low-quality bootleg.[4]

The Sinfonietta is a short but demanding work. Williams' early concert style can best be described as "dissonant," and here we find almost nothing of the catchy themes or rich harmonies that typify the composer's more public sonic persona. Instead, we get unvarnished atonality, couched not even in the triadic deformations and octatonic scales of his later aggressive concert works. The title "Sinfonietta" would seem to entail a smaller duration and scale than a full blown symphony (it is a descriptor adopted by many 20th century composers, most notably Janacek and Prokofiev), though it also serves as an escape clause from the rigor and importance ascribed to its parent genre. Williams' Sinfonietta is short--but hardly unprecedentedly so--hosting 3 movements instead of the usual four and lasting just short of 17 minutes.

Critics were of mixed opinion on whether Williams lived up, or down, to the diminutive title. One reviewer for High Fidelity Musical America claimed it "is too modestly titled; it is a real symphony in size and scope -- rather Hindemithian, but full of life and juice on its own."[5] A critic for Gramophone magazine was more mixed in praise, calling it "straightforward" and "well laid out," and that "there are some nice ideas, and some banal ones, but only in the first movement are they clinched by the overall form they give rise to."[6] The Gramophone critic shared with a less kind reviewer from The Music Journal a certain anxiety with Williams' status as jazz and film composer rather than classical artist: "Competently scored, appropriately laced with modernisms, it proceeds as innocuously as a film score--a medium, incidentally, at which Mr. Williams is said to excel."[7]


That last review smacks of irony in more ways than need to be tackled here. The Sinfonietta may be many things, but innocuous it certainly is not--and its vast bulk is far too strident to work as effective underscore. The opening movement is motivated largely by the clash of two loud, querulous themes. The first consists of widely spaced, homophonically moving chords for woodwinds, slowly ascending by semitone (in the first appearance, mm. 1-9, that upwards progress is deceptively small, a minor third from G5 to B5). The second theme is introduced at m. 27, something akin to a fugue subject,  although it is not privy to a standard fugue exposition (entries are loosely on A, B, Eb, and C). There is a whiff of something cinematically familiar to this theme, perhaps the "Conversation" from Close Encounters, but by and large it is more Miraculous Mandarin than friendly alien.

First Four Measures of Second Subject, Sinfonietta Mvt. 1 

The two themes contrapuntally collide for the first time at m. 56, and as soon as the brass takes up the second melody, a stretto quickly makes the already dense texture even more hazardous to navigate aurally. There is no doubt that Williams is capable of wringing a big "orchestral" sound from the wind ensemble at moments like this (both themes join at 0:25)


The first movement's middle section is more sparsely orchestrated, with small motivic cells being traded between instruments in a manner similar to early attempts at "Klangfarbenmelodie." However, these independent ideas begin to coalesce into firmer lines in 8ves. Once amassed, the woodwinds once again confront the stern fugue theme, now barely able to resist buckling under the pressure of the low brass. A final pronouncement of the initial homophonic theme brings the movement to an arch-like conclusion, only to disintegrate with an eerie sustained wind chord at its close. (for the truly curious, a 6z-16, which contains two semitone clusters a fifth apart).

The Sinfonietta's slow second movement is a procession of sorts, with quiet and steady pulse from timpani and pitched percussion undergirding its duration. The first 24 measures feature a dissonant conversation between three oboes, with (once again extremely loose) fugal introductions for all three. This yields to a lushly scored chord constructed mostly out of sus2 dyads, a jazz-cum-Ligeti sonority of the sort Williams would later claim was inspired by the ensemble scoring of jazz great Claude Thornhill. This passage is comparatively short-lived, however, and soon the drive of the opening procession returns with a vengeance, cresting with a gigantic climax chord similar to the culmination of the fourth of Webern's 6 Pieces for Orchestra. Here is the tail end of the oboe trio, leading into the rumination on that jazz chord.


And so we arrive at the final "Allegro Molto" movement -- and it is here we discover the original source for the "Knight Bus" style introduced at the beginning. Where a jazz mindset may have provided one or two complex chords in previous movements, here it dominates; a sense of rhapsodic group improvisation pervades, and represents the first of several real contributions Williams would make to Third Stream jazz: a style invented by Gunther Schuller that attempted to blend classical forces and forms with jazz sensibilities.[8]

Following a cacophonous opening, Williams thins the texture down to percussion, solo winds, and a very busy contrabass part. Playing solo or with their 2 other basses, the perfomer runs through a constant stream of 8th notes roving in scalar figurations -- an atonal walking bass, in other words. The material placed above this motor rhythm ranges from quirky to ominous. One can easily discern the seeds for various special effects of the "Knight Bus" cue here, from the off-kilter piano/vibes melody presented in major ninths to the car-horn imitations.[9] A recollection of that noisy opening "restarts" the walking bass, which collapses under the pressure of heavier brass lines, and it is not long before the whole movement slams into a wall of a pyramid chord and goes silent. Since, short of convincing an orchestra to play the whole piece, it is unlikely you can hear this work independently, here is the entire last movement.


Having lain dormant for decades, this final movement of the Sinfonietta for Winds and Percussion served as a fount for some of the most memorable movie music of the last decade. While it seems unlikely Williams will ever return to the genre of the symphony again, we should take comfort in knowing that in film music--and indeed in all music--no good idea, however obscure, ever lacks for a creative application in some surprising form.

---Frank Lehman

---------------
1.In this way Williams is part of the same tradition of film composers contributing to the concert hall as Korngold, Rózsa, Previn, and Herrmann, although none of his concert works directly utilize music from his film scores (with one exception, his Elegy for Cello and Orchestra.). Williams routinely downplays the importance of these pieces, claiming they are exercises of personal compositional growth and/or gracious "offerings" to performers with whom he has established a personal relationship; nevertheless, several are works of substance and deserve to be evaluated as "serious" contributions to orchestral literature.
2. His first symphony (1966), written at the prodding of his then mentor Bernard Herrmann, was premiered in America and then Europe, both times under the baton of his friend Andre Previn, in 1968 and 72 respectively. Williams, unsatisfied with the proportions of the piece, reworked it in the 1980s, but a performance of the revised symphony never materialized despited being programmed in 1987.
3. A terrific source for information on the development of the American wind ensemble is the volume The Wind Ensemble and its Repertoire, edited by Frank J. Cippola and Donald Hunsberger himself.

4.  Williams was to benefit twice more from his association with the EWE and Hunsberger. First with a commission to celebrate the school's 50th Anniversary that became his Nostalgic Jazz Odyssey (1971-72) and premiered alongside new works by Howard Hanson. The second was an all-Williams Eastman Philharmonia concert in 2001 initiated by Hunsberger.

5. High Fidelity Musical America, Vol. 22/1, 1972.

6. Gramophone, Vol. 50/1, 1972.

7. The Music Journal, Vol. 30, 1972.

8.  An excellent treatment of Williams' links to that style can be found in Greg Akkerman's 2004 dissertation, "An Original Composition in a Postmodern Confulent Style for Orchestra and An Analysis of Escapades for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra by John Williams." 

9. Even a respite at measure 67 (1:47) seems to have a correlate in a portion of the "Bus" cue where the bus interior squeezes down to fit through narrow spaces!

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)

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).

Shredding Sequences: Glazunov's Fifth

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) is one of those figures in music history with the misfortune of holding onto one style while living across the great divide that separates 19th Century Romanticism and 20th Century Modernism. A composer of prodigious technical skill and legendary musical memory, he is best known today for his violin concerto and ballet music, though judging by recording releases, his symphonies are also beginning to get a well-deserved second look. He rode the wave of Russian romantic nationalism initiated by Balakirev, exceeding his older models Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in symphonic output with 8 completed symphonies and a ninth left incomplete at his death (of course). A glittering orchestrator, nimble contrapuntalist, and harmonic wizard, Glazunov nevertheless had little taste for the musical revolutions well underway by the time he accepted the directorship of the St. Petersberg Conservatory in 1905. The majority of his large-scale compositions were finished before 1910, and his historical import in the 20th century resides in his influential if conservative tenure at the conservatory, where he ardently supported newcomers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich if never quite comprehending the direction they were taking Russian music.

Glazunov completed his Fifth Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 55 "Heroic" in 1895. His own personal voice was well-established by this point - a synthesis of nationalistic and cosmopolitan influences, Tchaikovsky minus the pathos, Kuchka minus the parallel 5ths. This work, according to musicologist Richard Taruskin, had an out-sized influence on the first opus of one Igor Stravinsky (his skillful but hardly earth-shattering Symphony in Eb).[1] The connection to subsequent work from a later composer (however much a stylistic dead-end) is the more fitting given the eclectic influences from earlier composers readily audible in Glazunov's Fifth. He rolls out the first movement's maetoso's broad introductory theme like a Wagnerian leitmotif, sounding more Rhein-maiden than Volga-boatman. The performance here is Valeri Polyansky with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, from a great Brilliant Classics set:



This theme, along with many of Glazunov's harmonic twists throughout the movement, recalls Wagner quite a bit. Like basically every other composer from the last quarter of the 19th Century, he selectively infused his works with elements dutifully gleaned from the German composer, even though his own aesthetic temperament certainly did not line up with Wagner's. Following a lengthy slow intro, the first movement's sonata form gets underway with a first subject that speeds up and lyricizes that opening theme. The more dance-like second subject is a close relative to the first, and during the dramatic development section it becomes hard to tease apart which is guiding the way (especially given Glazunov's penchant for sounding them at the same time in invertible counterpoint).

If Wagner looms heavily over the first movement, then it is Mendelssohn dancing lightly that we hear when we move on to the second movement's Scherzo. The fleet-footed wind writing has Mendelssohn's elfin prints all over it, but the music is most appealing in how Glazunov's Russian rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities pucker the overall sound. (We can also hear the first of several, typically very innocuous motivic references to the first movement)



A different world entirely is presented by the Andante third movement. Two minutes of searching  harmonies come before anything resembling a full theme is established:



These lush and dark progressions set a scene of nocturnal romance, but one continually threatened by outside forces. More than any specific musical similiarity, this tone of forbidden ardor is why I think some commentators have linked it with Tristan und Isolde. (The menacing, chromatic brass chorales that deter the lush harmonies at intervals contribute to the effect as well. But don't worry, the affair ends happily, in a radiant Eb-major, flanked on both ends by major third relations).

The final movement's vigorous and rhythmically jolting Allegro is pure Glazunov, seven minutes of sustained orchestral fireworks in a somewhat loose rondo structure, with 3 or 4 themes ripping past each other in quick succession. In it he manages to combine two of my favorite 19th century stylistic hallmarks -- beefy pedal points and head-scratching chromatic sequences. The second main thematic area combines both. It starts off with a threatening theme over Eb/D# pedal with a suggestion of 3+3+2 metrical subdivision. This gives way to a brief melancholic melody, still churning with unrest thanks to a constantly throbbing bass line. This is interrupted by the threatening theme once again, rearing its head in a more aggressive guise. The far-out sequence that concludes the section goes on for a bewilderingly long time, but still manages, in my professional opinion, to rock. [2]



Heck, here's the whole final movement, performed by the USSR State Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov. He breathes more fire into the finale, although there are some pretty weird tempi choices.




Enjoy!

--Frank Lehman

----
1: Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Volume 1 (205-222)
2: Part of the ass-kicking nature of this sequence owes to the way Glazunov mixes major and minor third progressions, all the while navigating downwards by semitone -- this manages to make a progression that at its core might sound like a lessening of intensity, and increase or decrease its tension at Glazunov's orchestrational discretion.

Atonal Accessibility? - Perle's Sinfonietta II

Although we've dealt with very few hardcore atonal works here at Unsung Symphonies so far, there does exist a (somewhat sporadic) thread of symphony writing among composers of a...less-than-tonal persuasion. The founding trinity of mainstream atonality, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, all composed multi-movement orchestral works -- some symphs in all but name (Berg's 3 Orchestral Pieces), others in barely anything other than name (Webern's Symphony Op. 21). I venture that their ambivalence towards the genre stems from conflicting urges for 1) non-repetition and the abandonment of set forms and 2) a certain penchant for familiar containers with a lot of cultural cachet to ground their experimental impulses.

One composer who felt this atonal ambivalence with special acuteness was the American George Perle (1915-2009). Enraptured with the wide open possibilities of Viennese atonality from an early age, Perle nevertheless felt Schoenberg left behind an unfinished project. Perle believed that Schoenberg's 12-Tone Method (also known as serialism) was a partial and unsatisfactory way for dealing with these new resources. As prominent a music theorist as he was a composer, Perle set out to discover a more musical basis for picking this note over that. In a series of influential books and articles, he ended up formulating what he called "Twelve Tone Tonality," a system that allowed for many of the gestures of traditional music -- cadences, "mode" and "keys", and most importantly a real sense of directed chord progression -- without any of the trappings of tonal pitch selection or syntax.[1] Perle wrote the majority of his own music according to this system. But rather than existing simply to validate his music theoretically, Perle's special brand of "Tonality" was deeply committed to accessibility.

Someone suspicious of atonality and its reputation of ugliness and difficulty would do well to give Perle's Sinfonietta II a listen. He composed this in the fall of 1990 during his three year tenure as the San Francisco Symphony's composer-in-residence. It was performed in February of the next year under the baton of Herbert Blomstedt. Newspaper reviews were quite lavish with their praise, and especially quick to emphasize how enjoyable, or in the words of Sacramento Bee reviewer William Glackin, how "happy" a work it was.[2] The San Francisco Examiner called the Sinfonietta "disarmingly communicative" (expecting something else?), while the San Jose Mercury News basically dubbed Perle the spiritual successor of France's "Les Six": "Nothing is trite; nothing is a rerun; nothing panders to popular taste."

Like the duration (a fleeting 16 minutes), the orchestra of Perle's Sinfonietta II is quite small, save for the percussion section, which keeps its four performers busy with thirteen colorful instruments in strategic reserve. The outer movements, labelled Scherzo I and Scherzo II, are siblings in terms of structure and ethos, both playful romps with a clear ABA form. Orchestration is usually tidy and open, the opposite of Berg and Schoenberg's dense-thicket approach, closer in spirit to Webern's crystal lattices. But that's basically where the Webern similarities end, because Perle projects a sense of fun and extroversion completely alien to that more rarefied style. Melodies and motifs crop up repeatedly, meaning that Perle keeps the listener from worrying about where they are in the piece. The attention span of these ideas is quite short, leading to a manic, scurrying quality that persists throughout -- at several times, especially in the second Scherzo, there is a strong suggestion of cartoon music!

The first Scherzo sets off with a handful of tricks: first a climb up an arpeggiated diminished seventh (I mean, err, presentation of the interval-3 cycle mode-1...), then a harmonized flute phrase, a pair of cello interrogations followed by more arpeggios, and a set of strident but not-too-dissonant string chords:



The harmonic materials, the play of rhythms, and the quickly alternating orchestral colors are characteristic of the whole movement. The B-section "trio" introduces a nervous triplet pattern for strings, over which the flute and piccolo rush in a panic, soothed and egged on at intervals by vibraphone and brass whole-tone arpeggios.

To me, the second Scherzo is the funnier of the two. There is right off the bat a strong contrast between annoyed insistence (the strings' upward bounding, dissonant theme) and mellow sheepishness (the wind and pizzicato answers). After each urgent string statement, a corresponding gesture of deflation seems to follow. Particularly striking are the unvarnished clarinet major thirds and the short passages of honest-to-goodness jazz scoring for brass and percussion -- what better way to puncture an insecure atonal phrase's sense of angsty importance?!:



I have no doubt this work's pitch design is rigorously organized, but the impression is the exact opposite of what you'd expect coming from a theorist of 12-tone quasi-mathematical structure: this is academic atonality, thoroughly defanged.

The heart of this short work is the second movement, "Chorales and Diversions." Hearing it on Pandora (on my Nørgård channel, no less) first made me interested in Perle's Sinfonietta, and it is the movement I find myself returning to the most. A rondo in form, the movement sandwiches some eerie passages of rather Bergian sound between statements of a lyrical chorale melody, given almost exclusively to a solo bucket-muted bass trombone. The theme respires in and out like a Bach chorale glimpsed in the dusk, and is harmonized homophonically with some truly lush lower string writing. Here is the entire first section of this nocturnal movement:



George Perle may be the only composer of resolutely "atonal" music for whom I've noticed the label "conservative" repeatedly applied. Sometimes this is in reference to his choice of musical forms. But elsewhere it seems "conservative" is the only word we have for composers who attempt to eschew abstraction for its own sake, and instead choose to ground their music in a consistent and accessible system like traditional tonality. Ultimately, it's as unsatisfyingly simplistic a label as would be "progressive." Better to take Perle at his own word:

"There's this mystique that there's an elite of specialists for whom contemporary music is written. I don't write up or down to anyone. I'm just doing what composers have always done. Some people have written about me as though I were a composer of inaccessible music. But my experience has been that people who listen to my music are amazed by how accessible they find it." [3]

--Frank Lehman

-------
1: The foundations of Perle's theory are two interlocking organizational parameters. The first is the inversional array, which relates notes of the chromatic scale to stable pitch axes (often about a tritone) - this hinge is his equivalent to "key." The second is the interval cycle, which selects a number of pitches based on some symmetrical partition of the scale, such as minor thirds or major seconds - this furnishes the sense of "mode." Both are prominent aspects of the styles of not just Berg and co., but of Bartok, Debussy, and even composers further back into the 19th Century. In compositional practice (and Perle's analyses) the interactions of these two factors can become exceedingly complex, but the important point is that they help produce points of reference and stability that keep the listener from ever becoming too lost.
2: Reviews excerpted at GeorgePerle.net (not surprising that they are so positive!)
3: Quoted in For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening (Steinberg and Rothe, 147)

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

---
[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).

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

The "Lost" Romantic: Méhul's Fourth

Today we discuss a composer from the turn of the 19th Century whose four symphonies had until relatively recently fallen off the face of the (musical) Earth. During the Revolutionary Period, Étienne Méhul (1763-1817) was regarded as one of France's most popular and innovative composers of opera, labeled a "Romantic" in the rather early year of 1793. He was responsible for a 1790s golden age for opéras-comique with his then-inescapable historico-mythical stage works. In them, one might be struck by stylistic traits not usually found until the much later works of Richard Wagner (or at least Carl Maria von Weber): jolting modulations, a hefty orchestral role, and a thorough use of "reminiscence motifs" -- themes linked with important ideas that recur at various stages in the work. The commanding stature of his serious operas, along with a steady production of patriotic marches and choruses, led to a friendship with Napoleon himself, who commissioned works from Méhul directly. Though the popularity of his stage works waned somewhat with changes in taste after 1800, they were nonetheless highly praised by a generation of later composers, particularly Berlioz. 

Seeking to branch out into new sound worlds, Méhul set about writing a cycle of five symphonies during the Imperial Era, which otherwise boasted no significant new such works from any French composer. Orchestral culture in Paris deemed symphonies the proper province of the Germans, so that while Méhul's plunge into the genre would not have been expressly discouraged, he was swimming against the tide. Completed between 1808 and 1811, these five symphonies received quite positive reviews, but it seems that their place in posterity was damned by the barbs hurled by two influential critics, Cherubini and Fétis. The former dismissed the symphonies as musical "ephemera" while the latter sneered that they were "dry and pretentious" attempts at ersatz Haydn. (Quoted in Schwartz, 1987, 92).

Noting a debt to the Germans is indeed warranted, but the negative assessment is not. Cherubini and Fétis's vituperation seems to have been the determining factor against the dissemination of Méhul's symphonies, overcoming the sporadic revivals of his music in the 19th Century. (Schumann, after Mendelssohn performed the First Symphony, was guardedly impressed). "Stick to opera!", it seems, was the judgment history placed on Méhul. Correspondingly, the idea that there was an influential French symphonist before Berlioz sputtered and languished until very recently.(1)

In 1979, while researching Berlioz, musicologist David Charlton discovered to his astonishment the orchestral part manuscripts for the 3rd and 4th symphonies of Méhul, whose full scores had long gone missing (the 5th remains incomplete, possibly never finished). His editorial reconstructions were published in 1982 in a full volume of Méhul symphonies, and a CD recording from Nimbus Records came out seven years later with all four performed by Michel Swierczweski and the Orchestra of the Gulbenkian Foundation. Now, we seem to be witnessing an upswing in the  reception of this composer, as tonight (Nov 9, 2010), the world will witness the first British performance ever of Méhul's Fourth Symphony in E Major (1810)! The work will "premier" at a concert with the Orchestra of the Enlightenment, alongside other music of Parisian vintage from Cherubini, Berlioz, and Mozart (Symphony No. 31). An article in the Telegraph by Richard Savill boldly announces to the world the importance of this event: "Lost Étienne Méhul symphony set for London premiere."

While articles trumpeting the arrival of "new" or "discovered" Classical works often are guilty of some sensationalist imprecision, Savill's article rightly points out some of the remarkable features of the Fourth Symphony. Foremost of these is the allegedly prescient use of "cyclic form," usually defined as the integration of thematic ideas across multiple movements. Journalists and musicologists alike salivate at the prospect of locating a "precedent" for some later widespread practice, and Méhul, that consummate weaver of reminiscence motifs, seems like a prime candidate for such. (and, it should be said, attendant reevaluation in history textbooks, all of which I surveyed bear scant or no mention of Méhul at all). Remarkably, the cyclical principle did not become widespread practice until quite far into the 19th Century; symphonic movements even after Berlioz's generally held their movements at arms length, thematically speaking. What has always seemed to me an obvious idea -- perhaps being raised on Dvorak's 9th will do that to you -- took an exceedingly long time to become stylistic norm.(2)

The cyclic linkage in Méhul's Fourth occurs between the 1st Movement's slow introduction and a leg of the 4th spasmodic Allegro theme. Beginning the 1st is a stately harmonic progression that sculpts out E-major in no big hurry.



In the 4th movement, we hear that progression and its melodic outline sped up and decorated by a swift bum-bada-bum-bum rhythm (at the very end of the clip) that courses through the entire movement -- easily the best of the four in my estimation



Certainly a clever incorporation, but not exactly the overthrowing of all symphonic shackles Savill's article makes it out to be. Frankly, I find the more compelling "cyclical" element to be the reuse of an adventurous sequence (for which Méhul had a decided knack) from 1st Movement's first subject. In the 4th movement, it comes fast on the heels of the example above, adding yet more nervous energy. It's a more abstract kind of connection than we're used to in thematic recollections, and it suggests tighter formal control than I think Méhul's critics were willing to grant him. For convenience's sake, I've merged the two instances of the sequence into one example.



There are smaller hints of recall between the two outer movements, but I feel like this connection above all "makes" the boundlessly energetic 4th movement, as if we were hearing 1st on speed. The inner movements don't participate in this game, but have remarkable components as well. The 3rd movement, totally rewritten after some critiques of the original (apparently over-contrapuntal) is a Haydnesque minuet, managing even in its stripped-down veneer to sound arch, even a bit tipsy at moments. The 2nd movement Andante is, to my ears, without precedent in terms of symphonic orchestration, consisting for 58 measures of nothing but an intensely lyrical (aria-like?) cello melody supported by bass pizzicato. And yes, that's the NPR motif appearing briefly in its second sentence (around :52).



One of the greatest pleasures of this symphony is hearing how that initially spare type of orchestration is fleshed out  as the movement progresses, as you can begin to hear at the end of the above clip. It is clear why Berlioz would cite Méhul again and again in his instrumentation treatise as a surpassingly sensitive and experimental worker of the orchestra.(3)

We await the U.K. premier of the Fourth -- ultimately it is up to the public to judge whether Méhul's symphonic oeuvre is, like Charlton says, a seismic jolt of unheard masterpieces or just another historical curiosity. To those willing to probe a little beyond the headlines, however, one will discover a wily and resourceful composer, having absorbed everything Haydn through Beethoven could teach at that moment and pushing his own limits as a composer of opera.

--Frank Lehman

1. Charlton's editions with commentary of the First Symphony and 3rd through 5th provided a great deal of the background for this post.

2. Early precedents of course exist (Matt brings up Haydn's Symphony No. 31 "Horn Signal" as one of the first, and of course we have Beethoven's 5th, written a little earlier than Méhul's 4th but basically unheard in France for several more decades)

3. Examples culled, of course, from his operas -- I found no evidence that Berlioz ever heard any of Méhul's symphonies.