Posts Tagged ‘Chopin’

A student’s question

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

I’ve been teaching composition to a very talented young man, Cooper Wood for not quite two years now.  This week he discovered Varese, and emailed me with a question:  

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to 20th century composers recently because I want to liberate myself from composing invariably in a tonal idiom. I’ve been listening to Antheil, Cowell, Varesé, and Hovannes [sic]. I love the sound all of them have, but every time I try to compose non tonally I get stuck and fall back on tonalism. When and how did you sort of break free from tonalism and started relying on other parameters of music to compose?

Here’s my response:

Boy, this is a big question.

We’ve never really talked about how I got going in composition. My junior year of high school, I had a free period and didn’t want to take a study hall, so my guidance counselor suggested our school’s gifted and talented program, in which about twenty of us pursued our own interests and passions, with a teacher to facilitate things (and make sure we actually did something). The year before, I had taken a class in computer graphics and sound in which we learned Encore, an early notation program, so I had developed a taste for moving notes around. Based on that, I decided that my “thing” would be composition, and I now had a class period every day to devote to it. I didn’t really know where to start, and I didn’t have very much guidance, which in some ways was a blessing, because I had to figure things out on my own. Up until this point, I loved doing music, was excited about it, and even thought of myself as rather good at it, but I had never thought of making it a profession before, and I wasn’t even taking private trombone lessons. That year, I worked through a part-writing book, practiced a lot of trombone, listened to a ton of music (the public library let you check out four CDs every week, and I had my driver’s license by that point, so I could get there when I wanted to go; they had a great selection of classical music, including a good amount of the cool late-minimalist stuff that was coming out in the 80s and 90s).

There was one other composer in the class, Renee Goubeaux, who was later my first girlfriend, and is now a cellist in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.  We sort of spurred each other on, sharing stuff with each other and talking about pieces we wanted to write.  I had done a lot of reading, and was starting to put sounds with what I had read.  I tried to write a few pieces–I was interested in writing band music, canons, modal things that incorporated serial transformations.  We performed a couple of pieces as part of the performances that the class would put on.

The next year, my senior year, I did more of the same, culminating with my senior thesis, a concerto for trombone and string orchestra.  I played in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra that year, and auditioned for colleges as a trombone performance and music education major.  I thought that perhaps composition would have some place in what I was doing in college, but I didn’t feel like I had been doing it long enough to make it my main focus.  I did take some private lessons as an undergrad with Wes Flinn, who is now on faculty at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and with Joel Hoffmann, who is still at CCM.  I immensely enjoyed taking orchestration and studying counterpoint in my theory classes, but I still didn’t consider myself a composer.

Despite all the listening I had done, I still didn’t understand that a composer didn’t have to be someone who wrote pretty melodies–I thought there had to be a catchy tune, somehow.  It didn’t seem to occur to me that what I was hearing in, say, Philip Glass, wasn’t about tune at all–it just sounded good.  In those pre-Internet days, scores were hard to come by, and I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to go looking for them, either.  So I spent years thinking of myself as an arranger, or as someone with an interest in composition but not doing much composing.

I’ve also realized that I never really was a “tonal” composer, in that I never took the time to really absorb the language to tonal music and let that be my pure expression.  Perhaps this is my background as a trombonist instead of a pianist, or just listening to years of rock music (my other favorite music), and then being dumped into the world of wind ensemble literature in college (although we played Persichetti in high school, too).  I have a real ear for orchestration and a strong rhythmic understanding of things (we’ve discussed this), but I’m not a tonal harmonic composer in my heart of hearts.

I also am not a part of what used to be called the “avant-garde,” and what these days we refer to as “new complexity.”  I don’t compose tonally, but I don’t compose in such a way as to be deliberately ground-breaking or difficult all the time.  I want to compose music that expresses what I want to express while also being something people want to hear and perform.  Sometimes I’m successful in this, sometimes not.

So–as much as I’ve been exposing you to post-tonal methods, techniques, materials, and repertoire, if you are, in your heart-of-hearts, a “tonal” composer, you need to write that way.  Study the rest, because it may come in handy someday.  What I’ve been trying to get you away from isn’t “tonal” composition, but writing that is merely a copy of historical styles.  There are reasons to write like Chopin or Mozart, but it’s difficult to be taken seriously in 2014 if that’s all you do (in fact, I’ve found it useful to engage in style copies at several different points in my career).

That trombone concerto back in 1994 was an attempt to be tonal.  I didn’t follow the “rules” very well, and as satisfying as it was to write that piece, it wasn’t very successful from a musical standpoint.  The very next piece I wrote, a song cycle, worries much less about keys and more about rhythm and the flow of melody–it was my first vocal piece, setting some of my favorite poems from high school English class.

In some ways, the important thing is to keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.  If I push you on to certain things, it’s because I think it’s my job as your teacher to try to help you get into a college program, and that means we have a hard deadline about twenty-eight months from now.  Your personal style–tonal or not–will develop as long as you keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.

I hope this helps!

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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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Functional Harmony

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I have a little series of little tonal pieces that I write for use in second and third semester theory.  I got going on them because we don’t have a very large library here at OPSU, at least in the area of scores, and I needed pieces I could throw on the exam or midterm without worrying that students had seen them in piano class.  In the end, it was just easier to write something new, and it has turned out to be more fun.  It really gives me a chance stretch my chops a little bit and write in the style of Mozart or Chopin.  Here’s the latest… it took about a half-hour to write from start to finish, and the point was to provide a piece that included a sequence and all the types of non-chord tones we studied this semester but that didn’t involve secondary functions and other third-semester stuff.

The latest in a series of Itty Bitty Pieces.

The latest in my series of Itty Bitty pieces, a chance for me to practice writing tonal music.

My wife enjoys these pieces greatly, because they sound pretty and they don’t last very long, so I always make sure to play them for her, just to let her know that I can write such things.  The question has come up, now and then, as to why I don’t write such music all the time.  I mean… it’s pleasant, it’s easy to listen to, it has the potential to be quite meaningful.

The problem isn’t this music–the problem is me.  I could write lovely sonatinas and waltzes and scherzos and all the other wonderful music that Mozart and Schubert and Chopin gave us.  I might even find the work rewarding.  Over the last few years, I’ve discovered that melody isn’t really the challenge I once thought it was.  I used to think, back in my high school days, that a great melody was the key to writing great music, and I had this inferiority complex about it, because I wasn’t just brimming with melodic inspiration.  If I actually thought of a melody, I would rush to find staff paper to write it down–even getting out of bed in the middle of the night because I was afraid to lose it.

It’s not about melody, folks.  It’s about harmony.  Most melodies are fairly boring without their underlying harmony, and functional harmony has proved fascinating to our culture in a way that we are still trying to deal with.

Then there are the harmonic composers out there.  Some of my composition students over the years have got some theory knowledge in them and are set to invent the next “Tristan” chord.  “What do you think about this chord right here?” they say to me.  “It’s a blah-bitty-blah-blah-blah with an F# in the bass… isn’t it amazing?”  As I listen to them, all I can think is… it’s not about harmony either.

It’s about rhythm.  I’m prepping to teach Music Fundamentals over the summer, and as I’m rereading Duckworth’s book, I notice that he agonizes over a definition for rhythm.  I still like the definition I used to use when I taught sixth-grade general music–rhythm is “the interaction of musical events with the basic pulse.”  I’d like to know what Duckworth thinks about that.

I’ve long viewed myself as basically a rhythmic composer, feeling that the other musical elements follow.  A piece that works, to me, works first on a rhythmic level, not melodic or harmonic, and I rarely encounter problems with a composition that can’t be solved rhythmically.  For me, rhythm is what makes a piece work.

Which is why I can’t write functional harmony and consider it to be my authentic voice.  I need harmony to be subservient to rhythm, not at best an equal partner as it is in Chopin or Mozart.  I don’t know if it is my training as a bandsman, by immersion in popular styles like jazz and rock for so many years or just the way music seems to work to me.  I enjoy music with shifting meters, metric modulation, syncopation, assymetrical meters and all the rest.  I don’t reject harmony completely, but I can’t carry on writing I-IV-V-I and thinking that I’m doing something authentic–I would always be channeling some other composer, and usually doing it badly.  I think of one of my favorite songwriters, Billy Joel, who wrote a set of Fantasies and Delusions in a more or less classical styles.  Nice, entertaining little pieces, but not as good as their models.

That said, I’m glad that I can write my Itty Bitty pieces, or a jazz tune, or arrange horn parts for a rock band.  That stuff is just as important to what I do, as it turns out.  We live in this world of tonal, often functional music.  When I compose, it isn’t meant to be background for shopping at the Gap–it’s meant to be something people sit quietly and contemplate.  It’s meant to help me reach out to the rest of humanity, first through collaboration with other musicians and artists, and then by speaking to an audience.

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Opus 109

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Back to the schedule at last–it’s the last day of the month, and I’ve actually been around this sonata enough for a change.  May and June should be better, since the semester is ending.

After the massivness of “Hammerklavier’s” approach, this little gem in E major just blows me away.  It strikes me that what Beethoven is really doing in the first two movements is preludizing, and that the meat of this sonata is in the set of variations of the last movement.

I will have to dig deeper some day and do some research on the first movement, because there are aspects of it that suggest to me that it is also a variation on the theme from the last movement.  Beethoven isn’t the only composer to have put variations before theme, but I’m not aware of an earlier instance.  This movment is related formally to the second variation (Leggieramente) in the last movement, although the first movment features an additional reprise of the opening material.  The textures of the opening sections also seem to parallel each other.  As a non-pianist, I find myself thinking linearly in much of my instrumental writing, while Beethoven (and other great composers for the piano) are able to draw melody from texture in ways that I often don’t initially perceive by a glance at the score.  This is really the point of this survey of Beethoven’s piano sonatas–to help me understand the approach to composition of a man with whom I believe I share some stylistic traits, but whose life as a musician was completely different than mine.  Another way I heard the first movement is an an extended cadenza or fantasia, much like the beginning of the Choral Fantasy.  This only extends as far as the character of the piece, of course, because a true fantasia would probably not bear so much repetition.

The second movement, Prestissimo, brings to mind some of Beethoven’s bagatelles in both character and design.  I’m thinking particularly of the Opus 119 set in this instance.  It also has the feel of a prelude, and I’m beginning to wonder if this sonata isn’t purely a set of preludes.  More on that in the third movement.

I’m always a little taken aback when I see the title “variations,” because it inevitably brings to mind lightweight, virtuosic pieces by Rossini or Weber for clarinet.  The variation form is, of course, much richer than this, and I wouldn’t trade Bach’s Goldberg Variations for anything.  Beethoven’s Diabelli set is a close second, and he certainly knew what he was doing in this form.  I have also used variation form on occasion, and my first published piece, due out this summer, is a set of Variations on a French Carol for concert band.

I’ve decided that this set of variations–masterful, of course–continues the series of preludes in this sonata.  I’m thinking of the preludes of Bach or Chopin, which explore a texture to its fullest degree.  Some of these variations have very clear parallels in the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Theme–a homophonic chorale, in binary form, with an augmented-sixth chord placed ahead of the half-cadence.

Variation 1–a slow waltz or landler?  If the tempo marking were removed, it could look like Chopin.

Variation 2–I’ve mentioned the similarities to the first movement.

Variation 3–Ingenious use of invertible counterpoint… he only had to write half the variation.  In this sense, some similarities to WTC I, C# major prelude.  The texture is related to that of WTC 1, D major prelude.

Variation 4–This sort of counterpoint is almost a cliche of Bach’s style, but WTC 1, Eb major and A minor preludes come the closest, with G# minor not far behind.  One of my teachers, Gregory Proctor, mentioned Beethoven’s habit of opening a window, harmonically, letting the listener peek through it, and then abruptly drawing the curtains.  This happens at the end of the first section of this variation, where the German augmented-sixth chord is spelled enharmonically to resolve to F-major instead of to the expected dominant-seventh on B, but is immediately snapped back to the home key.  Beethoven is playing with equal temperament here in a way that Mozart or Haydn would never have dreamed of.

Variation V–I’ve studied the book by Beethoven’s counterpoint teacher, Albrechtsberger, and it’s clear that quite a bit rubbed off on his pupil.  This variation begins with a fantastic little canon in four parts, with entrances at the second.  The parts don’t all continue, but the effect is quite fun.    Again, Beethoven opens the window to F-major, but only lets us look out for a moment.  Bach’s Goldberg Variations make use of canon, so why should Beethoven not do the same?  There are similarities here to WTC 1, B-minor prelude in texture and form.

Variation VI–I am completely in awe of the compositional prowess on display here.  There is no parallel to this in Bach that I am aware of, but the idea of creating a sort of accelerando and building the tension through faster and faster note values is so simple as to be genius.  Absolutely fantastic.  Bringing the theme back at the end is a clear homage to the Goldberg Variations, in my opinion.

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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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