Posts Tagged ‘Bach’

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Back with Beowulf

Sunday, October 9th, 2022

A few weeks back, I had an exchange with my Lakeland colleague Natalie Hopper after reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf over the summer. I immediately thought, “hey, this would make a good blog post,” after not posting anything since March. So I jumped over to the old website, and quickly discovered that there was A Problem, and I was unable to log in. Fast forward eight crazy weeks of teaching and parenting, and I was able to get things worked out with my hosting service, so now I give you my take on Beowulf, translation, transcription, and arranging.

In music, we have something similar to translation, namely arranging or transcribing music originally for one ensemble to be playable by a different ensemble, say, taking a piece written for organ and turning into something for concert band. It’s been done throughout the ages, by just about everyone: Bach reworked his own music, along with music by people like Vivaldi, into new combinations, and Beethoven actually paid a good number of his bills during the economic inflation of the Napoleonic Wars with arrangements of all sorts of folksongs. If you’re learning to orchestrate, making arrangements and transcriptions is a time-honored way of doing it. Some of the first orchestra music I ever had performed was an assignment for an undergraduate class to arrange a Bach keyboard fugue for the students we had available in the class.

I actually came to composition through arranging and transcribing other people’s music, mostly for the students I was teaching when I was a K-12 teacher… the list of composers I’ve arranged is long and distinguished, and includes the Gypsy Kings, K.C. and JoJo, the Beatles, Bach (of course), the Moody Blues, Dave Brubeck, Debussy, Schubert. I lived in Macon, Georgia for a while, and I knew the personnel manager with the Macon Symphony Orchestra, which led to doing some arranging for them, including a whole evening of Otis Redding songs for rock band and orchestra, with Otis Redding’s grandson as the vocalist. That one paid for Becky’s and my honeymoon. By that point, I had also started composing: it isn’t a big stretch from having to come up with an intro, an outro, or a transition, to writing a piece “based on” an existing tune, to just writing a whole new “freely composed” piece. 

I completely get Heaney’s moment of discovering one little nugget and then working out the rest: that’s pretty much my experience much of the time. “Oh, this line would be great for clarinet,” or “I can hear this combination here in the accompaniment.” Then, there’s a certain about of just workmanship that happens, what my dad’s woodcarving teacher used to call “moving wood.” Inevitably, there are the places where things don’t quite line up, and you have to get clever and creative. Music notation software makes the process so much more bearable… I don’t think I would be a composer if I had to do everything by hand.

I guess another equivalent in writing would be rehashing old stories. I took a creative writing course in college, and the prof had us take one of the stories we admired from our anthology and type a few pages into the computer just to see how it looked… many of my classmates realized that their writing was far too small compared to that year’s Best American Short Stories (especially the frat boy who wrote a four-page ripoff of Reservoir Dogs). He also had us attempt a style copy: mine was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We were on quarters, so all this, plus writing our stories, plus critiquing our classmates’ work fit into 10 weeks!

I had a big arranging moment this summer: The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed my arrangement of Florence Price’s Adoration, which was originally for organ. This is the composer equivalent to starting for the Guardians (having an original work performed by them would be like starting for the Yankees or Red Sox). At any rate, it’s The Show. A conductor I’ve worked with (as arranger and composer) hired me to create two versions of the piece during the lockdown: one for ten musicians, and another for small orchestra. Then, he was named the Cincinnati Symphony’s diversity fellow, and he called me up for a third, new arrangement, “worthy of the Cincinnati Symphony.” I was able to write for a larger orchestra (really, I could have gone as big as I wanted, but I fit my requirements to the other music on the concert) and also write with a full-time professional group in mind. It was actually quite a lot of pressure to make sure absolutely everything was right—there’s no time to figure out how to fix something that isn’t working, because rehearsal on this relatively simple piece consisted of a couple of run-throughs in the two days before the concert: that’s all they needed, and their time is collectively worth about $1000 a minute. This is an extremely savvy group who has played everything​ worth playing, along with tons of arrangements for pops concerts: they would know immediately if I had screwed up or if I was worth their time, and not just by the sound, but by the look of the printed parts I was providing. So that’s how I spent my Spring Break last year.

In June, the kids and I drove down to Cincinnati to hear the thing: because of copyright laws and union rules, I wouldn’t be getting a copy of the recording (this annoys the crap out of composers, but it’s for everyone’s own good). So we had to be there, and they did comp our tickets. This wasn’t a subscription concert—it was at a great big megachurch in the suburbs as part of the orchestra’s community outreach program. The results of my work and the CSO’s playing were splendid: all the effects I had hoped for were there, and they all made sense, and I think I did justice to the composer’s intentions (Florence Price’s story is heartbreaking, as shouldn’t be a surprise for an African-American woman who died in the 1950s). My kids were amazed, and they proceeded to tell everyone around us that I was behind that music. Overall a good weekend. Since then, I’ve sold that sheet music three times, which is selling like hotcakes for me, to orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Mankato, Minnesota—another conductor has picked up the piece and programmed it this fall, and I hope Antoine finds space to use it again.

I went to college at the University of Cincinnati, and my trombone teacher was the principal trombonist for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (he’s long-retired now). I’ve probably heard that orchestra in concert more times than any other, so their sound and their approach is basically what I hear when I compose or play trombone. It awes me to think that something I arranged is now in their library, waiting for the next time they need it. I haven’t seen my royalty statement for it yet, but I think it will probably be a chunk…

So, I guess I’m back now.

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Well-Tempered Summer

Saturday, August 31st, 2013

With only teaching one class during the Summer term, it made sense to find a project, so I brought home two scores–Beethoven’s string quartets, and book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  I barely cracked the Beethoven–that may be next summer’s project–but playing through Bach has been good for my limited piano chops and, as always, a glimpse at the mind of one of the greatest composers who has ever lived.

I bought my first copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier as an undergraduate, after discovering the recordings of Glenn Gould and the c-minor Prelude and Fugue in our music history anthology.  I played from it now and again, but couldn’t really make my fingers work from it; in orchestration class, I scored the D-major fugue as my final project.  Then, after graduation, my copy disappeared, probably mistakenly picked up by a young piano student (taking lessons from my roommate) on her way out the door.  May she get as much from it as I have.

I purchased another copy around 2000, but never did much with it until I took advanced 18th-century counterpoint from Jan Radzynski as a doctoral student.  The subject of the course was fugue, so we duly studied many of the expositions.  At my first college position, in Oklahoma, I taught Form and Analysis, so I conducted in-depth analyses of the pieces found in that course’s anthology, and worked up the F-major fugue to an acceptable level.  I’ve also done an analysis of the e-minor fugue for this blog.

This summer, though, I’ve kept my score for WTC I on the piano rack continuously, picking through the pieces as they caught my fancy and generally enjoying Bach’s mastery of the form.  Some notable observations:

The c-minor fugue was really the one that started my interest in this collection back in about 1995, and I don’t know if it’s anthologized so often because it’s near the front of the volume, or because it’s just about perfect.

The c#-major prelude caught my fingers this summer–I wish I had the skills to play it well or the time to learn it passably.

The two five-voice fugues–c# minor and bb minor–are sprawling examples of the ricercar, and stunning in their effectiveness.  The c#-minor double fugue is particularly amazing.

I hated the D-major fugue when it was assigned to me in orchestration class and I really listened to it for the first time, but I came to love it, and for all its strangeness, I still do.  A fugue as the first part of a French overture…

The d-minor prelude is the kind of moto perpetuo that attracts so many of us to Bach in the first place–wondrous arpeggios against a simple bass.

The d-minor fugue is everything the one in c minor is, but features the subject in inversion and a real answer.  Genius!

The irony of the E-flat major set is that the prelude takes much longer than the fugue to play…

The e-flat-minor fugue has it all–inversion, stretto, augmentation–in the ricercar manner.

The E-major prelude has a wonderful lyricism mixed with surprising chromatic movements as punctuation, and ends without a perfect authentic cadence.

The F-major set is bright and sparkling, with a stretto-obsessed canzona-type fugue.

My copious notes on the F#-major fugue date from from graduate school, and Dr. Radzynski chose wisely.

For such a key as G major, Bach chooses a fugue subject that allows a pianist to be brilliant in that comfortable key.

The g-minor pieces are wondrous, and a joy to play, as are those in A-flat major.

The g#-minor fugue is in a daunting key, but well worth the effort, as Bach makes very interesting use of countersubject technique.

The subject of the A-major fugue is daring–only the best pianist can make it work when it’s surrounded by other voices.

I discovered the a-minor prelude last winter, and wish I would have known it sooner.  A little masterpiece, and the same is true of the fugue.

The Bb-major prelude is the perfect antidote to the long the fugue which precedes it, with its stile brise approach.  The repetition in the subject of its own fugue is infectious!

The b-minor prelude was clearly meant to be a trio sonata movement.  I may have to set it for brass trio…

The book ends with a fugue in b-minor that is almost a summation of all that has come before.

I don’t need to recommend this work, of course, but I do so anyway.  It is critical for a composer to have analysis projects of this sort–they are composition lessons with our greatest predecessors, and none of those more deserves our attention than J.S. Bach.

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The Middle

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

My last post described some things that I learned from another art form, woodcarving, through my father and his teacher, Spirit Williams.  Here’s another in the same vein, purely by chance, mind you.

I firmly believe that other art forms have a great deal to tell us about composing, which means that if I have a chance to chat up an artist during a plane ride, I’m going to take it. Last Spring, I met Kiersi Burkhart on a plane from somewhere to somewhere (I think it involved Denver, a city where I one day hope to see more than the airport and the hotel where the airline sends me when my flight is screwed up). She writes young adult novels, and also a blog. This post showed up the other day, about how to help the middle of a novel.   Her five suggestions have me thinking about the middle of pieces, so here are my thoughts about Kiersi’s thoughts and how they might relate to composing.

1. Raise the stakes. This “tip” gets thrown around a lot, and for a long time I wasn’t really sure how one could implement such broad-sided advice.

The easiest way I’ve found is to first work out what your characters’ goals are (both small and large), and then determine: what are the consequences of your characters not achieving those goals? Now make them even more dire. Life and death. Death and destruction. Whatever you can do to make the repercussions of your characters’ not achieving their goals worse, do it.

I think the best way to raise the stakes in a musical composition is to move beyond your starting material in some way.  I’m not suggesting that you string together theme after theme after theme (although it worked occasionally for Mozart), but if you’ve focused on one melodic idea up until this point, say, a third of the way in to the composition, it’s time for some contrast.  This new material should relate to earlier portions of the piece in some way–a similar harmonic framework, or a motivic relationship–but there is a need for variety as well.

Another way to raise the stakes might be to employ a change in texture–if things have been very homophonic up to now, it’s time for some counterpoint; if you’ve been writing lots of interwoven lines, it’s time to pare the texture down.  All kinds of great things can happen in the middle of pieces–the classical approach to creating a movement has a middle that is much more loosely-constructed than the beginning, and even in the middle of a Bach fugue, we can go long stretches without either a cadence or the fugal subject, just riffing on little ideas that have come up.  Speaking of riffing, think of the structure of a bebop jazz performance, with its tightly-constructed presentations of the head at the beginning and end and the loosely-constructed solos in the middle.

2. Lower the low points. The best part of middles is when it seems all hope is lost–that there is no possible way your character can achieve his purpose.

Remember in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo gets trapped in carbonite? Even worse, he’s shipped off with a bounty hunter to see Jabba the Hut, and our heroes are too busy trying to save Luke to chase him down.

At this moment in the story, we (the audience) feel somewhat defeated, like there’s no possible way Han can be rescued from his terrible fate. And in Return of the Jedi, this situation only gets worse when Leia is enslaved by Jabba.

Find that low point in your story (make one, if it’s not there already) and then make it worse. While you’re beating your hero into the ground, beat harder. Did something go wrong in his heist plan? Find three other things to go wrong, too. And it’ll be really satisfying to your audience when your clever protagonist manages to worm her way out of this ridiculous bind.

I think what Kiersi is getting at here is dramatic tension–the middle is the place where we really aren’t sure how things are going to work out, and as such, it has the possibility of being the most exciting part of a piece of music.  Certainly, as a composer, I often view my pieces this way when they are in process: there comes a point when I know what the rest of the piece is going to look like, and I know that I will be able to finish it.  Composing the middle, though, can be frustrating for exactly that reason–I don’t know how I’m going to get out of the situation in which I’ve placed myself.  There’s a famous moment in the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica where the texture devolves into these dissonant, repeated chords, as though Beethoven threw up his hands, smacked the piano keyboard, and wrote down the results.  Beethoven takes this almost-mistake and slowly winds his way out, with a diminuendo and resolutions of dissonant notes that leads back to the main theme–the beginning of the ending.  In my own Piano Sonata, about three-quarters of the way through, the relatively-complex rhythms and texture dissolve into a single line, notated in stemless noteheads, a moment of repose for performer and audience, and a summation of what has come so far in the piece, and preparation for some of the breathless material that lies ahead in the push to the climax.

3. Up the conflict. Are your characters friends, lovers, or comrades in arms? Are they getting along, smooching, snuggling and heisting in perfect harmony?

This is the primary way in which I find middles sag: the character relationships stale. Either they are at peace with one another for too long, or they’re at odds without any moments of relief.

Cause some conflict. Stir up some drama. But be wary of falling into common conflict traps: misunderstandings that would be easy to resolve, unlikely coincidences, or blowing up a small issue into a big one (this is my biggest complaint with romantic sub-plots).

Use inherent character flaws to guide your conflicts. Is one of your characters prideful? Have that pride lead her to hurt the other character in a way that seems irreparable.

Again, we have to turn to Beethoven, who can’t seem to write a middle section of a symphony movement without a fugato (and who was imitated by countless others).  As Kiersi mentions, though, it’s easy to fall into some common traps, and fugato is one of them (why does Brahms turn every movement of Ein Deutsches Requiem into a fugue?  I submit that it may have been youthful inexperience).  Unless your piece has been somewhat contrapuntal up to now, throwing a fugue in seems kind of desperate (Berlioz writes scathingly about this practice in his orchestration treatise).  But the beauty of fugue is that it does have that “cool” factor, and it’s critical to find something to do with your materials that propels the piece forward.  Look for the same kinds of rhythmic intensification that fugue can provide–change the position of motives within the bar, let them happen sooner, and closer together.  Foil the listener’s expectations about when things will happen: sooner (more drama), later (more tension).

4. Comic relief. I might be the only writer with this particular problem, but I have a hunch that I’m not. Why so serious? If things are getting intense in your middle–as it probably should–be cognizant of how your reader is feeling. In the middle of drama and conflict, give your reader the occasional break.

The break doesn’t always have to be comic. Let your characters have moments of tenderness or insight into one another. In a romance, let passion momentarily override conflict (leading to more conflict, of course). In a thriller, let your protagonist feel victory–short-lived victory. A good middle is a combination of low and high points, leading up to your dramatic finale.

This can be hard to remember, but great music can be funny, not just serious.  Whether it’s Bach’s quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations with its use of street songs (not funny to us, but probably hysterical to Bach), or the trio of the Scherzo in Persichetti’s Symphony for Band, where a little group of instruments, pulled along by a muted trombone, plays a little march that sounds like it would go with a Dr. Seuss story, there is humor in good music.  A composer is a human being, and being human means being both tragic and comic.  Some composers do this better than others: think of the burlesque version of the march from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony that shows up in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.  I’m sure that Shostakovich laughed the first time he heard it, because his own music is filled with irony and parody as well.

That said, it’s easier to plant comic relief in a dramatic work–the Papageno subplot in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, for example, and of course the dark humor of the graveyard scene in Hamlet that adds levity while staying on topic–the downstairs view of the goings on at Elsinor, perhaps.  Kiersi also suggests that intimate moments in the middle provide a break–it works in music, too, as in the piano-cello duet in the second movement of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1–intimate not only in texture but in meaning as well.

5. Escalate tension. A good climax is the tip of the highest peak of your story arc. Leading up to that peak are your second, third, and fourth-highest peaks.

I suggest doing this with “post-outlining”: now that you know all the plot points of your story (all the “ups” and “downs,”) organize them in order of severity. Your lowest lows and your highest highs should come near the end, leading up to your finale.

This is especially important when revealing important plot information. You don’t want to save all of your high-value cards and staggering reveals for the very end; drop some of your big bombs (but not your biggest bomb) during that sagging middle section, then escalate leading up to that super mondo finale–and hopefully leave your readers panting.

This suggestion may or may not apply to a given situation–sometimes the beginning of the end of a piece of music is a moment where tension is released–the recapitulation of a sonata-form movement, for example, or the beginning of the “Simple Gifts” variations in Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  The ending of a piece is inevitable once it begins, and layering coda upon coda (in the way Tchaikovsky does in his Fifth Symphony, for example) doesn’t move the beginning of the ending anywhere closer to being the middle.  In good music there is a crucial difference between music of the beginning, music of the middle, and music of the end.  Some great middle moments, though–the trombone chorale in the last movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony comes to mind–are the last moment of calm, an eye in the hurricane.  The birdsong section of the slow movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony is a change of character that builds into a critical statement of the motto theme of the symphony before the return of the main theme for the movement.  It would behoove all of us to study the Romanza movements that Mozart frequently uses in his later piano concerti–the quick middle Sturm und Drang sections like the one in K.466 are the uber-middle–the middle part of the middle movement of the three-movement structure.  The formal considerations of music are somewhat different than those of the novel, of course, because of the way that repetition is a critical component of good composition, but the dramatic concerns are similar.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is said to have said what every composer (and author) knows: something to the effect that starting a piece is easy, but getting to the end is hard.  This is the difference between being a tunesmith and being a composer:  a song is all theme, but a composer has to be able to take themes (or the equivalent) and connect them in meaningful ways, constructing the musical equivalent of a novel.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 6, third movement

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Eric Knechtges, a colleague at Northern Kentucky University, recently sent out a survery to university composers.  One of the questions was,  “3) Any advice for potential composition students concerning the college application process, and/or constructing a portfolio?”

Here’s my answer:

In our portfolios, I like to see three compositions which demonstrate the student’s stylistic preferences, ability to pursue a project to completion, and interest in various media.  In general, it is not necessary to include a large-ensemble piece, especially if performance recordings are available of smaller-scale works.  MIDI realizations can do more harm than good.  I would rather hear or see short-to-medium length pieces that demonstrate technical mastery of compositional skills such as motivic development, phrase and phrase group organization, variation technique, harmonic and rhythmic coherence and ability to pursue an idea to its conclusion in a fully-formed piece (with beginning, middle and end).  Submitted scores should have a professional appearance, with attention to the details and standard practices of manuscript or digital score preparation–dynamics, tempi, articulation.  There should be a clear sense that I am not looking at a “first draft,” and that significant effort has been put into revision and the “polishing” phase of work.

Perhaps these are merely my personal prejudices (particularly about making a score look good), but some of these traits are evident to me in the great music of the past.  One of these, motivic development, is the main idea behind the third movement of Mahler’s Sixth, and I want to explore that today.

When I’m teaching basic composition to my students, I always stress economy of material, because emphasizing a single motive or a small group of motives throughout a piece builds unity while also providing opportunities for variety.  Unity is essential because it makes the piece sound like itself and not like a string of melodies or harmonies.  Variety, however, is very important in most styles, because very few listeners want to hear a great deal of exact repetition.

Mahler has set this movement in the key of E-flat major, a key that is somewhat removed from the symphony’s key of A minor.  On closer inspection, though, it is the relative major of the parallel minor of the relative major of the home key (a minor to C major to C minor to E-flat major), so there is a relation here, although it’s somewhat tenuous.

The music begins with a theme, stated in the violins, that introduces much of the material with which Mahler concerns himself throughout the movement.  As Russell Mikkelson frequently states, composers are like bad poker players, because they show you their cards at the beginning of each hand.  In addition to the head-motive of this theme, with its distinctive sol-mi-sol rising and falling sixth, there are motives in the second half of the first full measure (motive a, four eighth-notes, descending by third, then by seconds) and the second half of measure 3 (motive b, a written-out “turn”).  In measure 8, the oboe presents a final important motive, motive c, a figure which alternatively rises falls and rises, with sixteenth-notes on the second half of each beat to give the impression of hesitancy.

The a motive reappears in the violin melody in m. 13, first implying a IV triad, then a borrowed iv on its repetition.  Immediately thereafter, the c motive appears in the violins and woodwinds, again as part of the melody.  In m. 16, the a motive reverses its earlier trick, outlining iv and then IV (the entire passage is constructed over a tonic pedal point).   Measures 20-27 present a fascinating woodwind accompaniment texture, based on the c motive and its inversion.  The melody is assigned to the English horn, and begins in m. 22 with an inversion of the head-motive of the first theme–a falling and rising fifth instead of the sixth from before.  The key of g minor is suggested here, but it does not last, with a return to E-flat major in the next section of music, beginning in m. 28 with a horn melody that incorporates all the important motive material so far.  In m. 31, Mahler extends the dissonant Db5 in the solo horn by two beats, requiring a 2/4 bar (m. 34) to put the next cadence on the downbeat.

There follows a chromatic passage (mm. 36-41) that appears to lead toward C major, but then at the last moment returns to E-flat.  The next passage is based solely on the motives (a and c) from the first theme, with the c motive dominating the music in mm. 42-52, with a making its appearances in mm. 45-46, again highlighting an alternating major-minor chord.  While the overt major-triad-turning-minor motive that has characterized the previous movements of the symphony does not appear in this third movement, there seem to be more sublte, buried echoes of it in this particular use of the a motive, which occurs several times.

Measures 53-56 present a fascinating common-tone modulation, where the pitch G changes from mi in E-flat major to me in E minor.  First the c motive and then the a motive introduce the “second theme,” this time in the horn.  As this theme dissolves (it never really becomes a full-fledged theme, but its certainly too long to be simply a motive), Mahler begins to expand upon the a motive–first in the clarinets by inversion and rhythmic displacement, then in the bass instruments by expanding the third into a fourth, allowing two repetitions of the motive to cover an octave (in m. 65).  In mm. 68-70, a chromatic sequence that maintains the contour of the a motive is heard against the c motive (modified) in the trumpet and oboe.

In mm. 76-77, an almost Baroque-sounding descending-fifths sequence appears–extremely familiar in Common Practice styles, but realtively rare in Mahler, who simply doesn’t seem to have harmonic rhythms that move this quickly.  In the following measure (m. 78) is an early appearance (although not the first, but the first significant one) of the a motive transformed by both retrograde motion (the third at the end instead of the beginning) and the displacement of the third note up an octave, putting dramatic leaps of a seventh and a tenth into the texture.  The c and then the a motives pull the music to the next key, E major, at m. 84.

A note to my students, a spectacular example of the technique known as “horn fifths” appears in m. 85, introducing a trumpet melody that relies on the c motive.  It seems that the tendency is for the c motive to be spun out into some variation of the a motive at many points in this piece, such as in mm. 89-92.  In mm. 95-99, the c motive, and then the a motive create a monophonic modulation (based on the diminished seventh chord) to return to the main theme and the home key.

Measure 100 and the following passage suggest a recapitulation, but Mahler has other plans in mind.  The last chord in m. 114 acts as an augmented sixth chord which points to C major (an interesting use of the augmented sixth to point to a tonic function instead of the dominant, in this case to a key a minor third below the original key).  All three motives (a, b and c) appear in this C-major section, which ends in an unprepared modulation to A major  (mm. 124-145, again, down a minor third).  In this section, Mahler employs the a motive in the bass with the c motive in the horns against a violin melody that reaches higher and higher, to a C#7.  In m. 137, A major turns to A minor, without a key signature, as the oboe gives the “second theme” material. 

A slightly less abrupt key change leads to C-sharp minor in m. 146, as the full orchestra begins to enter with with climactic material based on the a motive (at first, to m. 156 or so), then on a chromatic version of the c  motive, this time in eighth notes instead of the alternating eighth-sixteenth-sixteenth-rest pattern.  By m. 160, the music has abated, leaving music in B major based on the b motive, followed by the c motive to set up an entrance of the a motive on the Neapolitan chord (C major, m. 164).  The major-minor motive is impled by the a motive in mm. 167-8, again extending the phrase by two beats, which are then rectified by the other 2/4 bar in the movement, m. 171.

The a motive takes over the texture in m. 173, as the music returns to E-flat.  Then in m. 176, the descending fifths sequence appears in a moment that is reminiscent of nearly every Hollywood love theme.  A note on the scoring here–one of the interlocking voices here is given to the 1st and 2nd violins, and the other to the violas with the oboes and clarinets, and the effect is very strong (of course, it seems to require seven woodwinds to allow the violas to balance.

The remainder of the movement is coda material, dependent mostly on the a motive and some of its modifications.  Mahler’s use of dynamics in m. 188 allows an effective color change, and there is an itneresting use of rhythmic augmentation of the a motive (with octave displacement, and modified to suggest harmonic closure) in the flute in m. 196ff.  Overall, the tautness of this piece seems to outdo everything Mahler has presented so far.  Despite the sprawling length and scoring of this symphony, the motivic clarity allows it to be highly managable in a way that hasn’t always been the case in these works.

On, then, to the highly-charged, tense finale.  I hope to be able to concentrate on aspects of compositional structure rather than any supposed autobiographical content (a study of how much of this is authentic and how much simply mythological would be very interesting; one day, I hope to tackle Henri-Louis de la Grange’s massive biography of Mahler.  Until then, my biographical understanding of these pieces comes largely from Kurt Blaukopf’s shorter work).

A final note, I’ve recently become aware of a similar project to my own, done much better, I must say, and by a composer of vastly greater experience than myself.  Anyone reading this blog should head over to YouTube to see Don Freund’s videos analyzing Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  Great stuff!

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Playing my own music

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Over the last eight days, I’ve played my own music in three different venues in three cities here in Oklahoma.  I played my trombone-with-electronics piece Let Everything That Has Breath Praise the Lord here in Guymon at a concert at my church.  Then on Friday, I premiered part of my unaccompanied trombone piece Twenty Views of the Trombone on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  Then, last night, Becky and I went to Norman, Oklahoma so that I could play both pieces as a featured composer at a Salon Concert of the Oklahoma Composers Association.  All the performances went well, and they bring me to a topic I’ve, understandably, been thinking about lately, and that is the need for a composer to write music for him- or herself to perform, and to perform it.

A Beethoven or a Gershwin could, of course, at the drop of a hat, find a piano and regale those assembled with any number of their original works; Schubert wrote for himself, and composers like Bach and Haydn had jobs that required them to compose, rehearse and lead their newest pieces in quick succession. 

No one can be as passionate a performer of a new piece than its composer, and there’s no better way to show how a new piece should be played.   If my ideal is to write with a performer in mind, then writing for myself is the closest relationship I can have with a performer. 

From a practical standpoint, playing my own music means that I can “take the show on the road” very easily–in my case, with only my trombone and perhaps a mute or the CD of the accompaniment.

While I avoided writing for the trombone for a while–I didn’t just want to be a trombone composer, and there were other media to explore–it will always be the instrument I understand best.  I love to play the trombone, and it will, hopefully, always be my primary instrument, even if I don’t get nearly the amount of practice I would like.   It only seems natural that I would combine my compositional and performing personae.

I would urge all composers to consider this avenue–and I intend to keep exploring it myself.

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Bach, WTC I, Fugue in E minor

Friday, November 20th, 2009

This post is for a friend of mine, who is trying to perfect the art of wooing women using his music theory and analysis skills. In the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac, however, he needs a little assistance. But at least he doesn’t have a big nose.

My comments refer to the Kalmus edition of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, edited by Carl Czerny.  Not the best edition ever, but fairly readable, as they don’t try to cram too much onto a page like some older editions.  I trust it fairly implicitly.

This is the only two-voice fugue in either book of the WTC.  The structure is more reminiscent of a two-part invention than a fugue, but the line between these is somewhat blurry.  The subject has a strange chromatic feel to it following the rising arpeggio that forms the head motive.  It modulates–once the subject has been played, the music is not in the same key it was when the subject began–the subject always ends on v of the key in which it began.  The first entry of the subject takes the piece from E minor to B minor (note D natural, not D sharp on the downbeat of measure 3).  The answer begins immediately, as expected.  This is a real answer, with the exception of the last note–where the subject always ends with a descending whole-step, the answer always ends with a descending half-step, meaning that after the answer, we may remain in the same key.  The half-step allows the subject to end on V (of the answer) rather than some temporary i.  Measures 1-4 are the first exposition.  A final feature of note is the material beginning on beat 2 of m. 3 in the soprano voice, which represents recurring contrapuntal material and accompanies every subsequent entry of either subject or answer.

The first episode lasts from m. 5 to m. 10, and consists of a descending-fifths sequence, with Bach’s very typical alternation of material between hands, until m. 10, when the sequence breaks down in order to tonicize the next key area, G major.  Between measures 10 and 11, there is almost a cadence–we are denied the stereotypical Baroque cadential 6-4 pattern, but harmonically, most of the pieces are there.  In particular, the last beat of measure 10 is very typical of the approach to a cadence, but the next passage begins on a first inversion chord (because the subject begins on the root of the chord and enters in the soprano). 

The second exposition lasts from m. 11 to m. 14 and presents subject and answer in G major, with both accompanied by the countersubject introduced in mm. 3-4.  This is an excellent example of Bachian use of invertible counterpoint, as the countersubject “works” either above or below the subject or answer.

Measures 15-19 constitute the second episode, again, a falling-fifths sequence until m. 19, which introduces the dominant of the next key area.  Measure 19 is also notable for the use of both hands in octaves, a practice not often seen in Bach.  Bach again uses inversion in this episode–note the alternating first-inversion and root position chords.

The third exposition is in measures 20-23.  This is the first time that the subject and answer have switch places, so that the subject appears in the bass and the answer appears in the soprano.  This exposition is in the key of a minor.  Because the subject always moves to v, the answer is in e minor, ending on V (B major).

The third episode lasts from measure 24 to measure 29.  The first four of these bars are measures 5-9 in inversion, another example of invertible counterpoint.  Like the first episode, they constitute a descending-fifths sequence.  The parallel construction would seem to suggest that C major be the next key area, but this is prevented by a minor change in m. 29.  Between the second and third sixteenth-note of the run in thirds here (inversion of the run in sixths from m. 10), Bach leaps up by a fourth instead of a third, then continues a step higher to tonicize D minor instead of C major.  Like its counterpart, m. 29 is almost a cadence.

D minor is not a closely-related key to E minor, and our arrival here requires explanation; D major or C major would be more harmonically typical.  I would suggest that, given the tight construction of this piece, Bach wished to continue in this manner.  If Bach had continued to C major, as the parallel construction would suggest, he would have found himself nearing the end of the fugue in a poor situation.  To continue the parallelism from C major, would require a move to D minor (following pattern of the second and third expositions in G major and A minor, respectively).  He finds himself moving further and further from home, when it is now necessary to head back toward the tonic.  Thus, C major was not an acceptable choice for the next exposition, as it leads away from rather than back to the home key.  D major, on the other hand, would require an answer in A major, similarly leading away from the home key.  However, since the subject modulates to its own v, a subject in D minor leads to an answer in A minor, the iv chord of the piece.  Thus, by stepping out of the key, Bach brings us back to the key.  This odd entrance of the subject (m. 30) is necessitated by the modulating properties of the subject itself, and the exposition leaves us in a very good position to end the piece.

The final episode, mm. 34-38, is an inverted version of mm. 15-19, complete with the hands in octaves (m. 38).

In m. 39, Bach uses the head motive and the characteristic “bariolage” section of the subject to suggest stretto.  Since neither the subject nor the medium of two-voice fugue are really well-suited to stretto, he reverts to the format of the two-part invention and merely reminds us of the subject.  The only true cadence in the piece occurs in the last measure.

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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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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 111

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Here it is… the last one. 

Two big, beefy substantial movements.  Lutoslawski justified writing one-movement symphonies by saying that Brahms’ and Beethovens’ symphonies tended toward two big-idea statements per piece, presumably the first and last movements, although it is often possible that Beethoven is trying for three or four (perhaps in the Eroica).  It would be impossible to accuse Beethoven of overreaching his grasp in this case.  The two movements are well-balanced–a muscular, decisive sonata-allegro paired with an expansive set of variations. 

First things first–the proportions of the first movement are not especially large or striking–in my (G.Schirmer) edition, the development section scarcely lasts a page.  Once again, Beethoven is not the composer of long, overwhelming development sections the way we were all taught.  A glance at the score suggests that the proportional model for sonata-allegro is largely intact.   Why do we teach undergraduates that Beethoven’s development sections are overgrown?  My experience with the piano sonatas suggests that they are not.  On the other hand, motivic development technique often appears in unexpected places–codas, transitional sections, and within themes–places that in Haydn or Mozart would be simple or sequential repetition in Beethoven are more fully ornamented.  An example is the second theme of this movement.

I have to admire Beethoven’s approach to the start of the Allegro con brio.  It is almost as though it takes three (or more) attempts to get the theme going, and the full theme doesn’t appear until after a fairly extended attempt.   There is wonderful invertible counterpoint in the transitional thematic area, and the ubiquitous fugato in the development.  Beethoven struggled in his counterpoint lessons with Albrechtsberger, but they seem to have paid off in the end, as his command of these devices is perfect.  I taught 16th-century counterpoint last semester, and we didn’t make it to invertible counterpoint.  I think that the next time around, I will take the option in our textbook (Peter Schubert’s Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style) to introduce it from the beginning, because of its power as a developmental tool in any style.

Stylistically, I’m a bit at odds with this movement–it doesn’t reek of Beethoven’s “late” style in the way that other pieces do.  Admittedly, I haven’t read up on current musicological ideas about this piece, but it seems as though it would fit fairly well with the Waldstein, and lacks the scope of Hammerklavier.  Note–this in no way detracts from my astonishment with this piece and my awe at its compositional greatness.

The theme and variations is masterful as well, despite some very interesting notational choices.  The tone called for by the first few notes is wonderfully dark and rich.  Finally, Beethoven has stopped writing full triads in the bass staff, an activity I am constantly telling my students to avoid.  The more open chord positions he chooses in the theme are dark but not muddy.  Has this composer finally come to terms with the more resonant instruments that were starting to become available to him?  What does it mean that, despite his deafness, he was able to figure this out?  More importantly, what does it tell the contemporary composer who must assimilate much greater and more frequent changes in technology that Beethoven could have imagined?

There is a wonderful sort of rhythmic accelerando amongst these variations.  The theme gives a basic compound-triple approach with homophonic chords.   Variation 1 now has an event on every division of the beat, and events are happening (roughly) two to three times as often.  Variation 2 is simply not in the correct meter.  6/16 implies two beats to the measure, and there are clearly three.  3/8 would make sense, if it weren’t for the marked metric modulation (eighth=dotted eighth) and/or the alternating 16th-32nd-note pattern that makes up the highest rhythmic level (highest in the Schenkerian sense of “most-complex”).  What appear as accompanying 16ths or eighths should be dotted notes… or the alternating 16th-32nd patterns should be under sextuplets… or the patterns should be dotted-32nd-64th!  What a mess!  I can only assume that in later editions to which I don’t have access, some wise editor has made a decision that clears this up.  On my reference recording, Ashkenazy plays the first and second options, at least to my ear.  The editors of my edition, Hans von Bulow and Sigmund Lebert chose to only comment on the situation rather than rectify it.

In variation 3 is another meter signature that would make my students cringe–12/32, again, not reflective of the triple-meter feel of the music.  What a mess, but the musical intent is clear enough.  The final four measures of this variation are wonderful.

In my own work, I need to accomplish what Beethoven does in the fourth and fifth variations–that is, build larger sections of single textures.  I feel like I accomplished this in several recent pieces, notably in South Africa.  It is, again, the old adage I’ve often told myself of letting the music breathe.  I have great admiration for my friend David Morneau and his cultivation of the miniature, especially in his project 60×365, but I feel that I need to cultivate a different approach.  Yes, brevity is the soul of wit, but our world is deprived of the long view, the long term and patience to understand them.  Film may be our best hope–I know so few people who really listen to music, but nearly all Americans shell out for multi-hour long movies.  All the same, music that is longer than three minutes and that doesn’t make its meaning purely through language is, I am discovering now more than ever, my big project for the time being.  As a composer, I need to be able to write a single movement that lasts 20 minutes while still saying something.  I don’t know where the commission, or even the performers will come from for this, because for the time being I’m not in the class of composers who get that type of work.  When I entered graduate school in 2004, I was writing movements of one-to-two minutes’ length on a regular basis, and a five-minute one-movement instrumental piece was a stretch.  I discovered the tactic of creating larger pieces by writing transitions–my Martian Dances is a fantastic example of this, and my Homo sapiens trombonensis has a fantastia-like form that is exciting, but lacks rigor and cohesiveness.  Nothing ever comes back.  I learned how to let a piece breathe and expand to its true length rather than simply become a rush of ideas.  Beethoven’s sonatas–indeed, the sonata principle–require that I build on this even more.  I need, simply, the right commission now, because a twenty-minute unaccompanied trombone piece just doesn’t seem like a good idea.  A string quartet, or a piano sonata.  My latest completed piece, my Piano Trio that I just shipped off to its commissioner, runs almost ten minutes in a single movement.  I’m getting there… I’m getting there.

I began my journey through Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in November 2006 as a way to start a project that looked beyong the end of my graduate work, and I feel that I have done myself a great service–so much so that July 2009 marks the beginning of a new project on the Mahler symphonies.  I kicked around some different possibilities–Bach, Chopin, a single large work like the St. Matthew Passion or a Mozart opera, but it seems that Mahler is calling to me the most, so it will be half of a Mahler symphony each month until the end of 2010 (yes, I may decide to include other Mahler such as the 10th symphony or Das Lied von der Erde, but I’ll think about that later).   Please feel free to join me on that trip.

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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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