Archive for August, 2009

Mahler, Symphony No. 1, 4th movement

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

When I was in high school, WOSU-FM, the classical radio station in Columbus, used to broadcast symphony orchestra concerts on weeknight evenings.  One night, slaving away on homework, I heard an incredible sound pouring forth from the speakers of my radio.  I hadn’t realized that such music was possible, and I wasn’t sure what to think.  It was unfamiliar to me, and I remember trying to puzzle out who the composer might be.  After a thunderous ending, applause erupted, and the announcer explained than Daniel Barenboim had led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.  I had heard the music I now write about.

As an experiment, largely hypothetical, I trolled some orchestra websites to see whether, in the next  year or so, I would be able to see in concert, in America, the Mahler symphonies I have yet to hear in live performance, the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth (the answer, financial considerations aside, would appear to be “no”).  What I did find was that the First Symphony is by far the most commonly performed of Mahler’s work in this country.

Why might this be?  Its size, perhaps.  It is Mahler that still fits the second half of a program rather than taking an entire concert by itself.  It requires no voices, yet still has the grand sonorities and climatic utterances that thrill audiences.  It is, in a way, Mahler without the difficulties of Mahler.  Orchestras that would never consider the Sixth or the Seventh happily program the First.

To the movement at hand.  I have a feeling that the opening sonorities–a cymbal crash, followed by a diminished seventh chord scored piercingly in the winds, with a low bang in the timpani and strings–has been shocking audience members out of their slow-movement-reveries since the premiere.  The upper strings answer with a rhythmically treacherous lick from high to low and back, so that the brass can introduce a motive that appears throughout the movement, answered duly by sinister descending chromatic triplets.  Two more times, taking longer each time, the upper strings give this cadenza-like material, each time becoming more winded.  It is the bass solo from Beethoven’s Ninth gone horribly wrong, or inverted.  My Forms students could cite this as an example of phrase extension by interpolation.  The final violin soliloquy overlaps the winds’ chromatic motives and leads to the countermelody at rehearsal 6, the entrance of the main theme for this movement (do-re-fa-sol).

Despite the sprawling, multi-faceted nature of this movement, like any good Austro-German composer, Mahler is sparing in his use of motivic material.  The other important motives in the material introduced in this (for Bernstein) twenty-minute span are all derived from the theme at rehearsal 6, either by inversion or by multiple transformations.  At rehersal 8, where Bernstein slows the tempo despite no indication for it, we reach a developmental section (rehearsal 9 instructs “zuruckhalten” or roughly, “ritard,” however).

The music so far has been in the rather remote key of F minor; Mahler touched on this key in earlier movements, but never dignifying it with a key signature.  This third-relationship between keys is something to look for in Mahler’s subsequent work.  The inclusion of “Blumine,” by the way, brings yet another key center to the piece (C major).  Perhaps we see another possible reason for its eventual omission.

The melody at rehersal 11 is related to the rehearsal 6 motive by inversion (although not precise).  Measure 149 begins a fascinating transitional section–as though the movement has run out of steam, but for a few last gasps.  One wonders more about Mahler’s program for this piece.  We relax into the still-more-remote key of D-flat major.  A brilliant orchestrational moment at rehearsal 17 sees the oboe taking over the melody from the strings, which step into the middleground, only to step back a few measures later.  The handoff here is sublime.

Rehearsal 18-19 is a study in effective string doubling, with the violas saving the day (with this and another passage down the road, I think the violas here demonstrate their usefulness and become the orchestrational heroes of the piece).

At rehearsal 21, Mahler begins to bring back large swathes of material from the first movement, beginning with the spooky chromatic melody from rehearsal 3 in that movement.  Almost a third of this movement is material recalled from the first movement, making this piece cyclical in a way that dwarves the use of motto themes by Berlioz and Tchaikovsky.  Over the next few decades, some last movements become recapitulations in their own right–the first examples I can think of are Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Orff’s Carmina Burana.  In both these cases, the first movement isn’t merely repeated, but augmented, and it seems possible that this movement was the inspiration.

Note the fantastic dovetailing at rehearsal 24.  This is the kind of technique that makes this piece treacherous for the less-experienced player.

At rehearsal 26, the music presents a tiny chorale for trumpets and trombones in C major, and then continues in C major.  This chorale returns on two other occasions, more forcefully each time, and also moving the music into D major, the key of the symphony. 

Between the second and third “attempts” to bring the movement to an end, another large chunk of the first movement reappears–the portion that leads to the climax of that movement.  Perhaps the most memorable moment in the first movement is the tutti fanfare, and that is what is brought back here.  Instead of the rousing horn melody from the first movement, we are given the brass chorale, fully-voiced and leading us to the home stretch.  The music stays firmly in D major this time, and we are brought to the triumpant conclusion.  Compositionally, there is more repetition here than I would consider appropriate, but it has been, afterall, nearly an hour since we started into Mahler’s paracosm.

Strangely enough, while as a teenaged I at first was thrilled by the bigness of this ending, I now find the little moments most fascinating–I leave you with two of them.  The measure before rehearsal 40 gives us a preview of coming attractions–a string moment that sounds like it stepped out of Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  Then, before rehearsal 45, the violas, my heroes for this movement, lead a transition to the final energetic music that is just perfect.

So–on to another, much bigger piece this month.  I am gratified that I have demonstrated that I can pull ideas and compositional techniques from a piece on this scale.  With one exception, they only get bigger from here, but I entreat all of you to come with me on this trip.  Now, for two months of the Second, beginning, as Mahler said, with the Titan’s funeral march.

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A break from Mahler

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

A break from Mahler, just to say a few words about my own work right now.  And before I do that, I’d like to link to John Mackey’s blog entry about writing for band vs. writing for orchestra.  I don’t agree with everything, but if composition doesn’t work out for John (and it seems  to be working out nicely), he probably can fall back on humor.  At any rate, his entry “Even Tanglewood Has a Band” is wonderfully entertaining.  I’m still not sure where I land on the issue he discusses, but it was good for a laugh.

It’s been a busy few days in my composition world.  Tuesday night was the second band rehearsal for my new band-with-chorus piece, “Progress Through Knowledge.”  I haven’t rehearsed one of my band pieces from scratch in a very long time, but this one seems to be going well.  I’m happy for the opportunity to make the little changes in scoring that I knew would be necessary.  Helping this piece be born looks to be a real pleasure.  Since many of our band students are also in the choir, there will be the inevitable conversation I have to have with Joel Garber, our new choir director, about how we will share these students.  It will help greatly that our numbers are up this year in both band and choir at OPSU.  (Recession or not, we have more students and more returning students university-wide than we’ve had in twelve years.  Sweet!)

Meanwhile, while I’m taking one of my pieces very much in hand as the premiere approaches, another is getting set for a performance this weekend in a city I’ve never visited, by performers I’ve never met, for a concert I can’t attend.  This is a first experience for me.  I wrote “Passacaglia” for flute and cello on August 2 during New Music Hartford’s 60/60 Composition Contest.  My piece was selected for a premiere on Sunday, August 30 in Hartford, Connecticut.  I’m disappointed that I can’t get there, and it feels strange to have completely “let go” of one of my children.  I’ve made myself available to the performers, so if they need advice, they can call or email, but I’m not sure the piece will require that.

Last of all is the exciting collaboration I’ve started with Dr. Sara Richter, dean of liberal arts here.  She’s written a wonderful one-act play about “Black Sunday,” Palm Sunday 1935, which here in the Panhandle saw the worst dust storm of the Dust Bowl years.  I’m working on incidental music, a first for me (although I made attempts at it during my “juvenilia” era).  I’ve decided to write the piece for piano, percussion and clarinet.  More on which later, but so far it seems to be going well.  The premiere will be during Guymon’s commemoration of Black Sunday this Spring, and will be the first piece of mine to be performed outside an academic setting in Oklahoma.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 1, “Blumine”

Monday, August 24th, 2009

As a working composer, I am always very interested in false starts, incomplete pieces, works which composers abandon at any stage of composition, even after performance.  The process of composition is just as important to me as the product.  It is only fitting, then, that I at least take a peak at the “missing” movement, titled “Blumine,” from Mahler’s first symphony.

In the original 1889 symphony, “Blumine” was the second of five movements, with a programmatic scheme.  By the time of the original 1899 publication, Mahler had dropped the program of the symphony, and with it, this movement.  The score ended up in the hands of one of Mahler’s pupils, and came to light in the 1950s.  It was subsequently published and recorded in the late 1960s.  Since then,  most performances and recordings have kept to the four-movement plan which seems to have been Mahler’s final intention, but “Blumine” occasionally pops up.

As a composer, I must ask myself why an entire completed and performed movement was deleted from this piece.  Compositionally, the piece works.  It is beautiful, well-scored, unambiguous and basically successful.  As always, Mahler’s use of the orchestra, while not as adventurous as in the other movements of the symphony, is flawless.  From this composer, I would expect nothing less.  But Gustav Mahler was his own worst critic, and frequently made extensive revisions during rehearsals and after the premieres of his symphonies (his Tenth symphony was probably left incomplete because of the time spent on a major revision of the Third Symphony).  It is believed that many works by Mahler simply have not come down to us because the composer destroyed them, guarding his legacy carefully, perhaps.

So why would Mahler have excised “Blumine?”  One flaw of the piece is that it is somewhat limited thematically, and feels at times more like a strophic song than a symphonic movement.  I have been discovering that Mahler’s use of repetition is a key to understanding his ability to build large forms, and here the repetition is not unwelcome–the piece works–but it is somewhat unabated.  There is a single theme, based on a single motive.  There is some development, but it is not extensive.

A second reason that suggests itself is that it just doesn’t seem to adhere to the composer’s style as expressed in the other movements.  This piece is very clearly an intermezzo, standing between the more significant first movement and the more forceful Landler that would become the second movement.  Mahler’s middle movements are rarely the sort of fluffy, friendly pieces that we see in “Blumine.”  Where is the angst, the drive, the seriousness?  In addition to the dramatic suggestions, the style simply seems dated.  It is more like Berlioz than Mahler.  Perhaps Mahler came to realize that the symphony became too disparate in sentiment with the inclusion of “Blumine,” and when it came time for publication, it seemed best to leave the piece behind.  The Wikipedia article on this piece suggests that it existed before the rest of the symphony as incidental music for a play unrelated.  While Mahler may have had good feelings for the piece, it lacks the passion, the irony, the dramatic import of the rest of the piece, and even seems mispaced harmonically (C-major, where the other movements are in D-minor or D-major).

An interesting diversion, to be certain.  Score and recordings are readily available (I found a good recording on the Naxos Music Library), and any serious Mahler fan should check them out.

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Mahler: Symphony No. 1, third movement

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Mahler’s original title for this movement (before he dropped the programmatic titles in favor of tempo descriptions) was “Funeral March After Caillot,” in apparent reference to a satirical painting of a hunter being brought out of the woods on a funeral beir by forest animals.   Does anyone have an image of this painting?  Apparently it was reproduced quite frequently in 19th-century Europe.

To the music, and what I’ve been able to pull from it.  The name of the game in this movement is pedal point, along with the use of very slow harmonic rhythm in general.  There are only a few phrases in the entire ten minute duration that act as functional harmony.

The most famous aspect of this piece is the 4-part canon on a melody that most American’s would think of as Frere Jacques in a minor key; Mahler probably knew it as Bruder Martin, a mere translation (I’ll never forget Mrs. Worth teaching us the German words in third grade general music).  Although the can0nic technique is obvious, Mahler never treats it the way most young composers (including myself at one point with a different melody in the same key) would if they were writing such a piece.  The bassoon doesn’t wait on the bass to present the entire melody, instead jumping in two measures early.  After two measures of bassoons, the ‘celli enter, just after the bass finishes, but it is then another four bars before the third part, the tuba, enters.  This is a skillful use of canonic technique that seems to underscore the surreal nature of the movement–a children’s song turned into a dirge, the hunter borne by the hunted.

A note on the bass solo–perhaps a bassist can clue us in–is Mahler’s bowing (one bow per measure) the accepted bowing for performance?  It doesn’t seem to be what the bassist on my recording (Bernstein with Amsterdam) is doing…

This d-minor section gives us about two minutes on basically one chord.  The interest lies in the clear use of canon, and perhaps in Mahler’s deviation from a completely strict manner of bringing the voices in.  Note the very interesting doubling of horns and harp from m. 29.

More surrealism follows–Mit Parodie–as a klezmer band interrupts the funeral march, in a different key.  The effect is nearly Ivesian, and has antecedents in opera at least back to Mozart (the party scene in Don Giovanni).  We are meant to feel the same sort of rustic or amateurish (in the modern denigrating sense) notion as Mahler gives us in the second movement, and it is interesting to note the hypermetrical shift at measure 50, where a melody that began with the measure now begins in the middle of the measure.  

After this interlude, the canon theme returns (m. 71), but not in its entirety.  This sumary technique is something to look for as we progress through Mahler’s works.  It brings coherence and clarity to the formal structure, along with a sense of closure, but does not overburden the piece in the way that a complete repeat would. 

At more or less the half-way point of the movement, then, comes a contrasting section in G major.  The material has motivic similarities to the first theme, and a very pastoral, blissful feel, all over a G-major pedal point (is pedal point a cue for pastoral settings in other music?).  The music suggests not merely simplicity now, but an idyllic, serene moment.  There is wonderful scoring here–notice the switch from muted 2nd violins to unmuted 1sts at measure 101, for example.  A very telling timbral change at the highlight of a line.

Mahler’s counterpoint is very interesting.  Voices involved in counterpoint are rarely as independent as one would find in a more deliberately contrapuntal texture (a fugato section in a Beethoven development, perhaps).  An example is m. 95, where the violins and oboe engage in a sort of heterophony, and the more complex violin parts reinforce the main melody in the oboe.

This section ends with a fantastic transition to G-minor that darkens the mood.  (A great effect with horns, harp, pizzicato bass and pp percussion in mm. 109-110, by the way).  Instead of returning to D-minor by the same common-tone modulation, we get a direct remote modulation to E-flat minor, and again a summary of the opening section (the initial two minutes of canon is here compressed to about a minute).

Measures 135-137 are an orchestration lesson in themselves.  While the first violins play a line col legno that modulates down a half-step to the home key, the woodwinds (and stopped horns) double that line in an intriguing pontilistic texture.  I need a trumpet player to enlighten me on how you would deal with the instruction gestopft, however… simply use a mute?  Very intersting measures.

As the music accelerates, we get a final complete presentation of the Bruder Martin theme in bassoons, horns and harp.  This is partnered with another klezmer melody.  The D pedal point that begins here is maintained for the remainder of the movement, with the exception of a single measure of F-major (m. 145).  My theory students should take note–the III here is not a functional chord, but a neighbor to the i on either side.  Again, Mahler is not adhering to what we would expect him to do with the theme, for the sake of taste (break up the monotony a little) and mood (the absurdity is heightened). 

One final orchestrational gem–in m. 158, the countermelody to Bruder Martin, begins in the bassoon only to be tantalizingly torn apart two measures later.

A brief note–through Interlibrary Loan, I was able to get my hands on the score to the “lost” movement, Blumine.  This movement deserves a look, if only to figure out why Mahler might have discarded it after two performances.  As my doctoral research dealt with a similar situation, I have an interest in Mahler’s reasoning here.  Look for a post on Blumine in the next few days.  Then, on to the Finale!

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