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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, Movements 3 & 4

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

It’s been a busy time here, but I’m squeezing my thoughts on these pieces in so that I can keep on schedule.

Third movement–The name of the game here is “hypermeter,” in this case, every bar of music feeling like a beat in its own right.  The meter is 3/8, but Mahler could have written in 12/8, and the piece would have made (mostly) perfect sense.

And that “mostly” is the rub.  Because while the hypermeter generally dominates the piece and is fairly strict much of the time, there are places where Mahler steps out of the mold.  If he had chosen 12/8, in other words, there would be a few loose measures in 6/8 or 9/8 scattered through the piece.  These hypermetrical shifts tend to occur at boundary points within the piece, and are slightly more prevalent at the beginning of the movement than in the end.

The first six measures suggest, to me, a complete hyperbar, drawn out for dramatic effect.  After two “correct” hyperbars, Mahler introduces a moto perpetuo-type theme in the violins.  This is echoed in the clarinets in a six-measure hyperbar, clearly a “correct” bar with a two measure extension.  The flutes take this up for four bars, following which, at rehearsal 29, Mahler gives a two-bar “make-up” by restating some of the introductory material, and in m. 33, the initial theme returns.  In this section, uneven hyperbars seem to appear just before the return of the moto perpetuo theme. 

Measure 98 begins a long (seven measures) hyperbar, and is also a modulatory passage, albeit a strange one, to F major.  The modulation is effected by descending chromatic scales in major thirds, but is accompanied by bass notes Gb and B, suggesting a key quite remote from the goal.  Mahler approaches the F major (local) tonic again in a strange way prior to m. 125, falling to it from an A minor chord.  This is presumably because F is not the ultimate goal, only a way-station.

The use at m. 68 and m. 149 of lines that appear to quote the second movement of Mahler’s First Symphony is notable.

As we proceed through the movement, Mahler passes through Eb, then D, often repeating material heard before, usually fleshed out with countermelodies.  At m. 257, the descent ends, and Mahler moves the tonal center up to E major.  There is great music here, but not time enough to discuss it in full.  The scoring is flawless, and often seems to reinforce the hypermetrical concept of the piece.  It is difficult to understand how Mahler was able to work so masterfully with the orchestra in an age before recording, but I suppose that countless hours on the podium had acquainted him with the sounds implied by a score.

Toward the end of this movement, the hypermeter seems to become more strict, i.e., there are fewer exceptions to the rule of four-bar hyperbars.  In the final 200 bars, there is only one shift of hypermeter.

Fourth movement–Just a few observations.  In many ways, this brief setting speaks for itself.  Would it have been more appropriate to partner this movement with the last movement?  Perhaps.

The brass chorale beginning in measure 3 is stunning.  I’m fairly sure that the bassoon and contrabassoon, however, would not be able to play a true pianissimo there, although they are scored in powerful ranges.  The low Db in the contrabassoon in m. 13 is a positively religious effect that I will be listening for from now on.

My Theory III students will be studying the enharmonicism found at rehearsal 1.  The key of the pieces is Db major, and to avoid a key signature of eight flats, Mahler chooses to write in C# minor.  As far as I can telll, this is the key reason for enharmonic writing–mere convenience.  There is no surprise in this chord progression–it moves precisely as it would if the key had remained Db major.

At rehearsal 3, the music moves to the other obvious choice for a contrasting minor key.  In fact, as the relative minor, Bb minor is a more likely candidate than C# minor.  The shift, acknowledged in the key signature, to A major is a bit trickier… Bb minor would be enharmonic to A# minor, which would have a relative major of C#.  The dominant of C# is F#.  The relative major of F# minor is A.   Mahler employs a monophonic technique in the solo violin part rather than try to navigate this convoluted path in such a short movement.  He returns to Db major through C# major in a convenient enharmonic move.

My thoughts on the giant, transcendant final movement will appear at the end of the month.

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Mahler Symphony No. 2, 2nd movement

Monday, October 5th, 2009

This is one of those pieces that makes my Schenkerian training pop back up… I’m not certain, but this movement seems to be a very nice example of a 5-line.  Any thoughts?  Whether this is true or not, sol plays a conspicuous role in the melodic and harmonic structure of the piece, either as pedal point through much of the movement, or as a very important point of repose for the melody.  I often find that, when in the midst of a melody, sol is easier to find than do, and many portions of this movement seem to hang around sol in a way that allows the music to spin around and around that note.

The string writing is absolute genius–my orchestration students will be studying this piece when next I teach the class.  The main landler theme is somewhat more functional in nature than much of Mahler’s writing–we usually see him building themes around a single chord.  The effect in mm. 13ff of the sustained notes helps to unfuld the theme in a very important way–it keeps it from being a mere parallel period in structure.

The change of key signature at m.39 to five sharps is a mere convenience.  Mahler means us to understand the same tonal center, but the opposite mode… A-flat major becomes G-sharp minor.  The minor-key sections are centered on long dominant pedals–more sol in the piece.  The real breaks in this emphasis on the dominant come at a very charismatic theme in the winds which is also the basis for what little developmental writing we find in this movement.

Then back to the landler of the opening, with Eb/D# as a pivot note between the two modes.  A slight variation on the opening section, but nearly identical in form.  The real meat of this movement seems to lie in the minor-key, compound meter sections of the five-part form.

Mahler seems to make a habit of drifting between major and minor triads built on the same note–here, and in the first movement, and as a motive throughout the Sixth Symphony (looking ahead to next summer).   We see this rarely in earlier composers–although I confess with not being as familiar with Lizst and Wagner as Mahler probably was. 

The second compound meter section, beginning at m. 133 is the least harmonically static music of the movement, briefly visiting B major and F# major, with even a sequence (related to Classical developmental-core technique?) a-building at m. 153ff.  I talked to my students in Forms and Analysis class today about the dangers of always seeing what we want to see in a piece… am I doing that here?

The final section, a wonderful pizzicato version of the opening landler.  Is Mahler charming us, or contrasting the pastoral mood here with a more menacing idea in the minor key sections?  Again, I can’t get over the string writing in this piece… it’s like a primer on how to write charming string textures, both with divisi and without. 

If the piece is a Schenkerian 5-line, it seems to me to descend only on the last two chords–meaning that the piece doesn’t have a coda in a traditional sense.  Yet the entire last page, from m. 285, seems to have an “after-the-ending” function.  Schenker, of course, found Mahler to be decadent, and probably would have dismissed his music out of his anti-Semitism as mere aping of earlier Austro-German greatness.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Schedule for the rest of this piece–3rd and 4th movements until October 20, 5th movement until the 31st.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, First Movement

Monday, September 14th, 2009

To the next piece, then.

In some ways, the Second feels much more like Mahler than the First–a focus more on motive than on theme, on counterpoint over homophony.  As well as Mahler seems to have opened up a world in the “Titan,” in “Resurrection,” we begin in that world, as though we have lived there all along.  Where the First grew slowly out of stillness, the Second begins on the dominant pitch as well, but begins with an agitated, urgent feeling–brought on by tremolo in the strings instead of harmonics.  Instead of the gently half-floating, half-falling fourths-based line in long notes, we here get an ascending, scale based line in short note values that propels us forward into the first movement.  We are in the thick of the piece before we realize it. 

This outburst in the low strings has something in common with much of the material of the movement–it acts like many a Bach fugal subject in that it outlines an octave which will later be filled by the voice in which it appears.   Again, as in Bach, the motive undergoes a type of fortspinnung, or spinning-out.  In general, a very different treatment than much of the material in the First symphony.

Beginning in bar 18, the woodwinds enter with another octave-filling melody, this also exposing the half-plus-dotted-quarter-plus-eighth rhythm that dominates much of the melodic material of the movement. 

At the first climax of the movement, bar 38-41, we see the third crucial motive of this movement, a contrapuntal device, if such can be a motive.  Two scales are placed in contrary motion.  To any student of tonal theory or 16th-century counterpoint, this compositional device may seem completely obvious–or simply correct writing–but compared to the language of the First Symphony, Mahler’s emphasis on scalar contrary motion is a defining characteristic.  The extensive use of pedal point in the earlier work is replaced here generally by a greater contrapuntal awareness and specifically by this device.

Rehearsal 3 has the music in B major, by direct modulation, with yet another octave-filling melody.  I have been pressuring myself to be more sparing–nay, frugal–with motivic and thematic material, where Mahler seems profligate in his introduction of new themes.  However, they are often at least partly related to each other, and, additionally, to craft a movement lasting nearly half an hour (in my Bernstein-NY Phil recording), much raw material is required. 

With the material exposed, at rehearsal 4, we have a return to the opening of the piece, but, curiously, without the very first C-B-C-D-Eb.  Rather, we hear the second “lick,” following which Mahler gets more quickly to business.  The end of a group of themes, then, now followed by a transition?  Or the repeat of an “exposition?”  A major question, since I am teaching Forms and Analysis this semester, is how well, if at all, Mahler conforms to the classical forms, sonata-allegro, in particular.  I have long felt that sonata-allegro form is but one way to achieve  the exposition-development-recapitulation plan of a musical composition; for the untrained listener, the satisfaction lies less in the return of the tonic than in the restatement of the beginning in some way; a melodic affirmation that the piece has come full circle.

At m. 97, the basses give an ostinato motive that bears striking resemblance to a similar moment in the First (the first movement).  While that melody had a rising contour, this one falls.  Mahler characterized this movement as being a funeral march for the hero of the “Titan,” and here is a very specific link between the two. 

A few measures earlier is the motive of the scales by contrary motion, appearing here in a transitional passage, but more often used in the run-up to a climactic moment.  The hero descends to the grave, and ascends to heaven simultaneously.  As Oscar Hammerstein wrote, “passions that thrill…are the passions that kill.”  Schopenauer, Wagner, Mahler, and fifty years later, Broadway.

Rehearsal 8, measure 129, gives a subsidiary motive, again filling an octave, but, rarely for this piece, from the top down instead of from the bottom up.   It feels a borrowing from Wagner’s Ring.  It creates a particularly Wagnerian moment later in the piece (before rehearsal 23, in a “recapitultion” or coda–I’m not sure which). 

The first (and only) time I heard this piece in concert, I was startled by Mahler’s use of doubled English horn and bass clarinet (m. 151ff), and have since stolen that scoring in my own piece for orchestra, Five Rhythmic Etudes.  What I did not remember is the return of the same material for trumpet and trombone, (mm. 262ff).  Again, one is struck by repetition.  A few years later, Schoenberg would attempt to banish repetition from his work, and we have been living to an extent under this stricture ever since (his one-act opera Erwartung contains almost no motivic repetition in more than forty-five minutes of music).  Is a large-scale work such as this dependent on repetition to be successful?  It is everywhere–on the beat level, the measure level, the phrase level and the sectional level, both exact and varied.

On a related matter, I’m fascinated by Mahler’s “preview technique.”  In the First Symphony, a large swath of the first movement reappears in the finale.  I’m fairly sure that the first movement is not previewing the last movement.  But in m. 270 of the present movement, the horns give a chorale melody that reappears nearly half an hour later in the finale.  It leads here to one of the very characteristic (in both rhythm and melody) themes of the first movement, where in the finale, it leads to the key melody of that movement.  This is not simply a compositional technique–mark that there is none of the craft here of a Bach contrapunctus–but rather a psychological device and a feeling of having been given a taste of things to come, a look into the ultimate direction of the piece, and since the subject of the first movement is death, and the subject of the last is, unabashedly, resurrection, we are here meant to understand that even in death there is life.

Measure 329 sees a final eruption of the opening material–more fully-scored, more determined than ever.  This leads to what feels like a recapitulation, and the major-key theme–first heard at rehearsal 3 in E major, now in A major (the key relation hearkens to sonata-allegro)–almost evaporates into the end of the movement.   Beginning in measure 384, Mahler introduces a shifting major-minor feeling that brings to mind the key motive of the Sixth Symphony–the instrumental piece most associated with death in Mahler’s catalog.  The piece could have ended with a whimper on a major note, but this rocking back and forth allows the funeral march to fade into the distance.  Are we left standing at the hero’s grave?  The music unravels amid reminders of the material it was made of, last tastes of the world we knew.

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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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Symphony No. 1, 2nd movement

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I’ve long felt that a hallmark of the German symphonic tradition, beginning with Haydn and Mozart, is a degree of equality between the wind and string sections of the orchestra.  I cannot imagine writing an orchestral piece of any size that doesn’t exploit this split of the orchestra into two relatively equal (in terms of power) groupings.  It isn’t that Austro-German composers never use mixed scoring, it’s just that they seem to prefer block approaches.  This is quite apparent in in Mahler’s second movement here, which fills the role of the scherzo and trio.

The first presentation of the melody (A major), after a rollicking string introduction, is in the winds accompanied by strings.  After a transition, the melody appears a second time in the strings, with the winds as accompaniment.  A second theme then, first in the dominant (E major), then in D major.  The infamous Mahler instruction, “Schalltrichter auf!” makes its appearance.  It makes the oboes and clarinets raucous, and the horns, although stopped (gestopft) more cutting. 

In m. 56 we see a two-sixteenths-eighth rhythm against triplets–again, the roughness that results is part of the charm of this movement.

Rehearsal 11, m. 108 brings the scherzo back to the original key with an interesting “winding down” effect, as though Mahler were imitating a wind-up record player, though I wonder if he had heard such a thing.  Direct repetition, with slight changes in scoring, and then we come to the Trio, in F major, by a common tone modulation (do in A becomes mi in F).

The trio theme is derived from the scherzo theme.  Again, the wonderful economy of material we heard in the first movement.  Then through G major to C major, and a second common-tone modulation to return to the home key (mi in C becomes sol in A). 

The return of the trio material demonstrates, I think, Mahler’s reason for using seven horns in this piece.  If strings and woodwinds constitute two roughly equal groupings, seven horns bring into the realm of possibility a third group, and we see it here at rehearsal 26, where the scherzo melody returns in the horns instead of the woodwinds.  This recapitulation is dominated by the massed horn sound that creates thrilling moments whenever it appears.

The heavy brass is still not used in an independent way, as a massed choir, but does provide a fourth group that could balance the other three; later composers (led by Mahler) would find that percussion could provide a fifth such group.

As is typical of the late Romantics, the return of the Scherzo is shorter than its first appearance, but more intense, mostly through scoring.

What can this movement tell us about larger forms?  It is one of the shortest in Mahler’s symphonies, and built mostly through repetition of swathes of material, not through development–on the whole, quite typical of the designs of minuets, and later scherzi, in German music.  The transition back to the tonic in the first scherzo is wonderful–we can all learn from its simplicity, its humor, its effectiveness.  Building a form not through outright repetition but by changing scoring is a useful device, one I have used.

The introduction of the horns as a “third section” is intriguing as well.  I find that I tend more toward block scoring than mixed in my own writing as well, but it seems more appropriate in the context of this dance movement than it did in the first movement, which is much more developmental in nature.  Does anyone know if Mahler is the first composer to call for massed horns in a symphony?  We see eight horns (if you include the Wagner tubas) in Wagner, of course… but in symphonic writing?

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From Beethoven to Mahler

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

It’s the new fiscal year in many states, as I was reminded on NPR this morning.  It’s a big day for me in my intellectual life, too.  I have completed my survey of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and have moved on to the nine Mahler Symphonies.  Hopefully, at least a few people will be taking this journey with me, one symphony every two months, from now until the end of 2010.  I’m writing these entries on my blog, www.martiandances.com/blog, but I’ve also fed the blog to Facebook, where it will appear as a “Note.”  Feel free to comment on either location, although since I’m in charge of the blog, and Facebook is in charge of Facebook…

I dropped my wife off at the airport today, which meant a two-hour drive home from Amarillo by myself.  As I pulled out of town, I dropped my reference recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (Bernstein with Amsterdam) into the CD player, and I got to thinking about some of the differences between Beethoven and Mahler.

Of course, there is more than half a century between Beethoven’s last sonata (Op. 111 from 1822) and Mahler’s first complete symphony (finished in 1888).  In that period are Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn (and his Bach revival), Smetana and the first round of nationalists, Liszt, most of Brahms and (the big one, at least in my received wisdom) Wagner.  I think it might be safe to say that for Mahler, the two most influential figures are Beethoven, the first composer for whom a symphony was always a major artistic statement, and Wagner.

Charles Rosen suggests that the Classical style was informed, at its root, by the dramatic and comic developments in operatic music.  It seems quite possible to me that for Mahler, who earned his daily bread conducting opera, not symphonic music, that we must look in many ways to the developments in opera by Weber (whose final opera Die Feen (or is it Der Drei Pintos?  help!) Mahler attemped to complete) and Wagner (whose operas Mahler helped to introduce in Vienna and which he guarded jealously from his assistant conductors throughout his career).

I’m particularly interested in how Mahler creates the scale of these works.  As a composer, I don’t feel confident about writing long movements, and I want to develop this ability.  Some observations based on my re-hearing of the “Titan:”

  • Mahler sometimes employs sectional forms, which allows (nay, demands) the repetition of vast swathes of music.  The second and third movements of the present piece are indicative of this.
  • Where Beethoven is more prone to repetition (and sequential writing) on the motivic level, Mahler seems more likely to repeat thematically.  Again, repeating long(er) passages is the result.  By comparison, my music repeats much less frequently than either of these two composers, although much more often than, say, Schoenberg in his Erwartung period.  The trick isn’t repetition–it is meaningful repetition.
  • In general, Mahler’s music is much more melody-driven than Beethoven’s (and mine).  This will be an excellent study for me, as it will give me a chance to see whether in the face of additional evidence I still truly believe that rhythm is of greater importance than melody or harmony.
  • It would be apples and oranges to compare the orchestration of Beethoven’s piano sonatas to Mahler’s symphonies.  That said, even over the noise from the “loud” pavement on US 287, I have begun to make notes of effects I want to look at more closely.  We are so fortunate to have recordings right at our fingertips… I heard a string passage this afternoon that I can’t wait to dig into, and the beginning of the fourth movement is a perfect illustration of when and why to use unmeasured tremolo in the strings.
  • Again… loud pavement makes for bad listening, but are Mahler’s harmonies in this piece a great deal simpler than Beethoven’s?  This is why I’m doing this project.  As many times as I’ve listened to this piece, I haven’t even begun to hear it.

I want to throw a question out there that was inspired by a liner note I once read about this piece:  Is Mahler, in writing this symphony, actually using collage (or even pastiche) techniques?  Many of the melodies (especially in the first movement) are derived from Mahler’s earlier works (particularly, Des Knabben Wunderhorn).  Other melodies are folk tunes, and still others bear resemblances to canonical works.  Is Mahler’s intent to somehow document a sonic realm of the imagination?  Is this a viable way to understand this piece?

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Opus 110

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Here’s the May 2009 installment of my series of posts on the Beethoven Piano Sonatas.  This month is Sonata No. 31 in A-flat, Op. 110–next month will be the last month in the cycle, which means I will need a new analysis project–let me know if you want to start one with me and dialog on the compositional aspects of pieces from the standard repertoire.  I could, of course, spend another few years going back over the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, but there is so much great music out there that I’ve never even touched, that I feel like it would be better for me to move on.  So… I haven’t decided on my next project yet, but I do have some ideas… if one or more people were interested in working through some pieces with me, I would let them have some input in the decision.  I’ve considered the Mahler symphonies, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Beethoven’s string quartets, Chopin’s Preludes… let me know what you think!

On to the piece:  A study in contrast this one, and highly indicative of the “official” traits of Beethoven’s late style as it has been taught to me.  I’ll dive right in.

The first movement, if not in textbook sonata form, at least seems to reference it.  I’m not Donald Tovey, who looked for sonata form in every piece he ever analyzed (the last movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet is a Rondo with sonata aspects, not a straight sonata-allegro), but it seems reasonable to assert that Beethoven is working with thematic groups and a strong sense of motivic unity.  His use of core technique is somewhat fascinating, as it is built on a descending thirds sequence instead of the usual stepwise sequence.  I’m puzzled by the modulation to E major in what corresponds to the recapitulation.  This isn’t Beethoven opening up a window to another tonal world but rather knocking out a wall–a very unexpected place, although it makes sense that something different needs to happen where the exposition modulated to E-flat (the modulatory technique to E is an enharmonic respelling of a borrowed chord… IV becomes iv, which is vi in the new key; Beethoven gets out of that key by a fascinating use of common-tone technique and sequence).

To understand Beethoven’s use of sequence is often to gain understanding of his medium-scale structure (and in some cases, large scale, as in the “Spring” Sonata).  In Las Cruces last week, I spoke with Fred Bugbee about NMSU’s music theory track, and eventually the conversation came around to sequences.  One reason I’ve decided to part company with my current theory textbook, Kotska & Payne’s Tonal Harmony is that their treatment of sequences simply lacks body.  The new generation of theory textbooks is much more realistic about the use of sequence in tonal music, and, truthfully, it was teaching from Clendinning & Marvin’s The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis that really got across how important sequence is.  My study of Beethoven has only reinforced that.

The second movement, Allegro molto is diminutive in proportion, but as will all Beethoven’s scherzi, I am amazed at the sheer craft involved.  Every time I make the mistake of listening to a Classical or Romantic scherzo as merely a light, intermezzo sort of movement, I tend to realize that I’m not doing it justice.  With some composers, it’s an easier mistake to make than with others.  Much of Mendelssohn’s genius seems to lie in his scherzi, for example, while Dvorak has a tendency to revert to folk dances.  Nearly every time I look closely at a scherzo, however, I see a level of compositional craft that equals the outer movements.  It is as though composers were freed from the strictures of sonata-allegro or rondo (although most rondos have wonderfully original moments) and could pull out the tricks they worked on as students–canon, invertible counterpoint, rhythmic surprises, and the works.  What fun!  Beethoven doesn’t use contrapuntal tricks, but in this tiny scherzo, he gives us the most rhythmically ingenious and formally cogent plan of the piece.  Why should this tiny movement have a coda when the first movement has none?  I suspect it is more necessary here because we have heard the A-section twice, and the listener needs to have a fuller sense of closure than a simple cadence.

I could puzzle over the last movement for quite some time.  Here is Beethoven’s late-style interest in counterpoint (the fugue, complete with a second exposition in inversion), side-by-side with harmonic innovation (a common-tone diminished-seventh chord with a modulating function), and a confusion about rhythm and key signatures that simply doesn’t make sense at this point.  To wit:  for much of the piece, the key is A-flat minor, at least until the start of the fugue, but the expected seven-flat key signature never appears.  Instead, the movement begins in B-flat minor, shifts to E major and then is written in E-flat minor.  Are these key signatures simply flags of convenience?  At the same time, Beethoven indicates “Recitative,” and breaks out of the signified meter (common time).  How free is this meter?  And how, precisely, is the performer to understand the subsequent barlines?  The “Klagender Gesang” in 12/16 meter is another puzzling aspect–it is almost as though Beethoven is writing a fantasia, a written-out improvisation, at the end of which he launches into the fantastic three-voice fugue. 

Then this full-bodied G minor and G major review of earlier material–the “Klagender Gesang” in G-minor paralleling the A-flat minor section and the fugue (in inversion) in G-major (although we get only an exposition and a long episode).  At last, the retuirn (recapitulation?) of the fugue subject in the original key–part recapitulation, part coda, really. 

One more Beethoven sonata–I look forward to Ludwig’s valedictory effort in the genre.

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Opus 79

Monday, October 27th, 2008

This month, I actually had more of a chance to dig in to the sonata I’ve assigned myself.  I’m finding that the more I can do at the piano with each piece, the more I get to it… of course, we also had fall break, but the trend doesn’t bode well for Opus 106, which will be coming up in short order–March of next year.  Honestly, “Hammerklavier” has been looming on the horizon since the start of this project, but that was sort of the point all along.  I will not avoid the piece just because it is hard.

Back to the topic at hand, though, Opus 79.  What a little gem!  When I teach Forms next fall, we will be interested in this little piece.  Again, I should be reading Beethoven’s biographies along with this project, but it’s very interesting to me that just when much of his music was getting bigger he came up with these two littler sonatas.  Market forces, perhaps?

The first movement starts with a theme that feels like a rondo theme in a way, but the movement has nothing to do with that form.  If each of these sonatas is a different experiment, perhaps that is the idea in this one.  Not that it falls into the category of “sonata-rondo” like, say, the finale of the Schumann piano quintet, but more and more Beethoven seems to be trying to break out of the mold of the sonata, of writing music by formula.  I’ve always been taught that this was what Romantic composition was, but to see it in action is another thing entirely.  I think back–two years ago now!–to the Opus 2 sonatas that seem so much more “by the book,” as though Beethoven had read Caplin’s (amazing) book on Classical form.  At any rate, even though this piece is relatively small, it isn’t the same composer as those littler pieces.

The slow movement is fun, because I can nearly play it!  Again, one that will come up in Forms next year, because it is a wonderful example of a ternary form that also displays interesting motion (within the A sections) to the III chord in minor.

Then the real rondo–those triplets against the eighth-two-sixteenths are unforgettable, and I can again only admire the pianists who pull them off so smoothly.  I’ve been practicing that rhythm all month, and I hear it, but the hands don’t seem interested in playing it.  Too bad.

I’ve talked with some people in person about what set of pieces to tackle next.  Mariah Carrel-Coons, our accompanist at OPSU, jokingly suggested the Scarlatti sonatas.  More within my reach perhaps, as a pianist, but not quite what I had in mind.  Several pieces have suggested themselves to me.  The Mahler symphonies would be a heck of a trip, and I could spend two months on each, doing analysis in my spare time, as usual.  If I were to continue with Beethoven, the quartets would be the next logical direction–a section of his work largely unfamiliar to me, and a direction I would like to take as a composer.  The options are plentiful–the Ligeti Etudes for piano have been calling to me; I could take a tour through the Preludes of Chopin or Debussy, with a little less time for each piece.  Any suggestions?

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Playing and Listening–More to Bob

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

This is a partial response to Bob Specter’s response to my response… well… anyway.  It’s been a mildly busy week (that’s my story) and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit and think about something that stuck in my brain about Bob’s last posting.  Don’t go looking for it–I’ll just quote it:

“2) Having grown up playing an instrument in an orchestra and brass ensembles, I feel that by immersing my entire focus into my past [sic; “part” (?)] and how it facilitates the “piece”, that takes all the energy I have. It is interesting to talk to people about the Canadian Brass performance of the Barber Adagio, and not have them have a clue how hard breath control can be. Now I see that as technique, not as the musical plumbing (open sevenths, etc.), and I wonder if someone who focuses on the musical plumbing loses the ability to appreciate the variances in the performance (and performers).”

Over the last year, my opportunities to perform have dwindled significantly, while the amount of time I spend thinking about the theory of music has grown to encompass most of my working time.  On top of that, the playing I’ve done has largely been in popular styles where the “text” of the music (i.e., the written score) isn’t taken as seriously as in, say, a Mahler symphony. 

The results have been interesting.  I am “hearing” like never before, either from lack of preparation time (come in on Sunday morning, read the charts in rehearsal, go to Sunday school, go back and play the service, hoping I remember the key change after the third verse) or from being immersed in styles where “note” is less important than “feeling.”  I am literally living and breathing music theory most of the time, and it is showing in my performance–what is improvisation other than simply living and breathing music theory?

So the “plumbing” isn’t a way to deal with music that circumvents or minimizes some aspect of the musical experience.  On the contrary–once one “groks” the plumbing, it ceases to be something that one thinks about and the effect is the same, except that it now becomes possible to label and explain the plumbing to others in a more efficient way.  We could do without it–simply talk about “that moment that happens at 2:43 on track 17 in the recording by George Solti,” and this works for people who are very involved with a few pieces or for a group of people who are discussing a single, communally-understood work.  But for full-time musicians, who must often absorb a great deal of music in ridiculously short periods of time, there must be some way to generalize, to categorize, to compare and contrast the great moments in Mahler with the great moments in Messiaen, and compare them both to the somewhat cruddy moments in certain Broadway-style musicals.  The difference is similar to the way a person like myself deals with a computer  and the way a professional computer person deals with it–I can’t talk to an IT professional about computers for very long because I don’t even know the jargon; the IT guy, on the other hand, lives and breathes the stuff.

In my freshman theory classes, someone always brings up the complaint that analyzing a piece of music takes all of the “magic” (by which I think they mean “emotional impact”) out of the piece.  It is true, that I now find that I must on occasion force myself to step back and notice the beauty as well as the plumbing (of course, sometimes the beauty is in the plumbing, as with Webern or Babbitt).  For this reason, after we finish an analysis in theory class, I try to take another minute and have the class listen again to what we’ve been studying.  I imagine that visual artists and natural historians must do the same thing from time to time–after studying the way Seurat uses points of color to make other colors in Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, it is imperative that we step back and let the beauty of the scene again wash over us.

On Sunday, we have a fantastic group of musicians coming to OPSU: the Harrington String Quartet.  Since I organized the concert, I know the program in advance, and I have already been listening to the music they will be playing.  I’ve thought about the music, and I’ve written the program note.  I’ve been looking forward to this concert all summer, and it’s going to be fantastic.  I’ve been pushing it on the students, of course, but it won’t matter if I’m the only one there on Sunday–I will enjoy it.  And I think, based on what Bob has written, that I am going to make this one of those “step back” moments and just soak up the music.

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Response to Bob Specter

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Thanks for reading, Bob.

Your Mahler addiction is long-known, certainly understandable and more-or-less incurable.  Typically, on the first day of music theory class, I reiterate to my students (I say “re”-iterate, because they should have heard it somewhere before) that music is perceived and understood by humans in three basic ways (perhaps more, but three that we can really agree on).  All humans (hopefully) experience music on an emotional level–emotion really is what keeps us coming back to it, having arguments about it, flipping the CD back to that same track again and again (the last movement of Mahler 2, right?).  I think that anyone except the most profoundly mentally handicapped person feels music on an emotional level; not being able to perceive music emotionally is, to me, a profound mental handicap.

Then there is a physical understanding of music.  This is perhaps best expressed in dance, at least in its pure state, but without a physical understanding of music, it would be impossible to play an instrument, or sing with a group of people.  Musicians and non-musicians alike spend years trying to master the physical implications of music, from marching in step, to dancing at your own wedding, to performing a concerto or an aria at Carnegie Hall.

Then there is the way to understand music that people with university degrees in music tend to emphasize, and around which our system of music education is (supposedly) constructed–the intellectual approach.  This approach begins when we stop just reading music and begin to look for the very abstract patterns in the sound and in the notation and vocabulart that describes it–key signatures, open sevenths, sonata form, fugal expositions and the rest.

Of course these approaches overlap, and there is much gross oversimplification in my three ways to understand music.  It ignores cultural considerations like the social function of music and economic considerations like the profit motive.  But I would argue that most performers and listeners actively engage one of these three modes when dealing with a piece of music.

In teaching music theory, I occasionally hear from students that pulling a piece of music apart to see what makes it tick–identifying all the Roman numerals–takes all the fun out of it.  This, of course, isn’t the point.  We teach music theory because after a certain point, if we are to talk about, think about and delve deeply into music, we must establish a common vocabulary, and we must understand what makes Beethoven different from Mahler or Marenzio or Mendelssohn.  All four of these composers may make us feel the same way (or not), on the emotional and physical level, but intellectually, they have great differences–a fact which is obvious from even the first hearing of their music.

So–to address your question–how is the listener (or performer) who is not trained in the intellectual understanding of music deal with the technological changes being wrought on the musical world by mp3s, easy access to recording technology and the rest?

First, this is only the next step in an experiment we have been running since the development of the phonograph and grammophone.  What happens when average people gain steadily more and more access to higher- and higher-quality recorded music?  Where even five years ago most of us were at the mercy of the record companies, the Internet has made such a deluge of music available to us (both free and for a price, both legal and pirated) that no one can possibly hear it all, let alone become an expert.  It has gotten to the point where I feel, as someone with a doctorate in music, that I can’t even scratch the surface of what is out there.  My solution has been, mostly, to hide behind a “canon” of western music, and to dig deeply into that music, while hearing whatever contemporary music I can.  All the music in the world is there, but that doesn’t make Beethoven or Mahler any less great.

Second, my hope is that the availability of home recording, and access to the Internet, can do what it seems to be doing–making the means of production available to many more.  It has always been difficult to make a living from music, but few people actually stop playing music because of that.  It just becomes their hobby.  I know many medical doctors, lawyers, executives and the rest who are fine musicians–one of the best violinists I know is an optometrist–but not everyone can have that career in music.  The beauty is that there is still plenty to be had from music when it is an avocation.  More and more people seem to be realizing this, and are learning guitar, singing in their church choir, or dusting off that old saxophone and joining a community band.

Third, a certain number of people will never go toward the intellectual undertstanding of music needed to read notation or master an instrument (these are not mutually inclusive, of course).  They will continue to be surrounded by music–this apparently doesn’t bother most people the way it bothers me, perhaps because they don’t think about all the music they hear.  I, on the other hand, can’t ignore the canned music in the airport, the mall, the restaurant… my intellectual training won’t let me.  Those who merely “appreciate” music will be able to do as they have always done, only now with more choices than ever.  With a little luck, the difference will be like broadcast TV of the 1970s when compared to cable or satellite TV of the mid-2000s.  While I hate to admit it, I think TV has actually gotten better–more varied, more nuanced, perhaps even smarter.

While the record “industry” seems to be in trouble (probably just being superseded the way the sheet music industry was to a large extent after 1930 or so; I would expect that commercial recordings will always be there in some form), I think the real endangered species is silence.  Look at the money people pay for quiet cars and noise-cancelling headphones:  someone or something is always imposing on the ear.   Does that answer the question?

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