Posts Tagged ‘coda’

Mahler, Symphony No. 7, movement 5

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

I used this movement the other day with my freshmen to explain one of the ways that musicians determine tempo–the tempo of the opening is determined by the ability of the timpanist to play clearly the first two measures.  Since the standard timpani technique doesn’t involve the double-bounce stroke, there is a fairly finite speed at which the timpani solo here can be played.

Less literally, I’ve been trying to determine if the title means “Rondo as Finale” or “Rondo, then Finale.”  There is a reasonably clear seven-part rondo structure that dissolves into a long coda.  The first version of the refrain begins in m. 7, with a theme in the brass which includes some daring trumpet writing–D6, approached by a slur of a sixth.  A tricky proposition, and this perhaps accounts for the doubling of this line by the clarinets and oboes.  This refrain appears in C major, in contrast to the E minor of the opening six bars.

The strings take over the texture in m. 27, with a dotted rhythm that will reappear later in the piece, and not just in the refrain.  Measure 31 is the final new material of this section, repeated half notes which will prove prominent later on as well.  The remainder of the refrain is devoted to restatement of material so far, and to a fanfare which leads to the tonic chord in m. 51.  There is then a direct modulation to a chromatic mediant–A-flat major, which is the key for the first episode.

The first episode begins with a rising eighth-note figure and a change in tempo.  The material here is reminiscent of Mahler’s more folk-influenced material.  Rather than a “round dance,” we have a much squarer dance that begins hesitantly in the woodwinds, and is answered with the melody in the cello (m. 56ff).  Unlike most classical rondos, this episode is not harmonically closed, and works its way back to the second refrain, visiting C major (m. 79), then to D major, in alternating sections of 3/2 and 2/2.  Beginning at m. 116 (Pesante), the music moves back toward C major by common chord modulation, to prepare the second refrain.

Beginning in m. 120, the second refrain continues until m. 152, making it a somewhat truncated version of this material.  The transition to the second episode is more or less monophonic, following a cadence on C major.  The second episode begins in m. 153 in A minor.  Oddly, it begins with melodic material from the first episode, in the violas in m. 154.  This material based on the earlier section continues until m. 186, when the strings enter with a unison figure reminiscent of some of the “Turkish” music of Mozart.  Three measures later (m. 189), the brass reenter with the chorale which signalled the retransition to the refrain.  Here, however, while much of the transitional material returns, it leads not to the refrain in C major, but to further music in a developmental mode (this is the appropriate place for a development section in a sonata-rondo).  Some lovely music for string quintet in A major follows at m. 220.  An interjection in Db major (m. 241), seems to move even further from a return to the refrain.  This is followed by another unison passage for the strings, alternating between 2/2 and 3/2.

Beginning in m. 268, a version of the refrain melody, reworked for 3/2, appears in the brass in the opening key.  From this point forward, there are several possible candidates for the refrain, but none is explicit.  Perhaps the most convincing is the chorale for the brasses beginning in m. 360.  This is followed by the unison string material from m. 241 (m. 368), only a half-step higher in the key of Bb.

The remainder of the movement is suggestive of coda material, and as usualy for Mahler, builds to the end.  Some interesting moments include a whole-tone passage leading to a cadence on Db major in m. 506.  A final appearance of the refrain chorale appears in m. 539, this time for the full brass section and accompanied by the timpani solo from the opening of the movement.  Measure 568 is a brilliant section for winds and percussion that is reminiscent of English change-ringing.  The last cadence of the piece occurs in m. 580, from which a run of sixteenth notes leads to the end of the piece.

On to the Eighth Symphony, then.  September will be for the sacred-themed first movement, and October will have the profane second movement.  See you there!

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Mahler, Symphony No. 5, fifth movement

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

This movement has gone, over the last weeks, from being a piece that I’ve long admired to something of an analytic enigma.  Simply put, I am at odds to determine whether this “Rondo-Finale” is best considered as a rondo, a sonata-allegro or a fugue.

First, to the title, if that can be a clue for the analyst.  Does “Rondo-Finale” suggest “rondo-as-finale” or “rondo-then-finale?”  My hearing suggests that there is indeed a rondo here, and that it is followed by a lengthy coda, so that the second possibility seems stronger.  In this case, the coda could perhaps begin in m. 581, at a key change to A-flat major, far-removed from the home key of D major.  The melodic and motivic material is related to the rondo theme (mm. 24-55), but this late harmonic move away from the home key suggests a coda.

The music up to this point is highly suggestive of rondo technique, specifically of five-part rondo with its three statements of the rondo theme with interspersed refrains.  The second refrain (beginning in m. 167, the “C” of “ABACA”) is the longest, and is heavily reliant on developmental techniques, especially exploration of remote key areas and contrapuntal recombination of motivic material.

It is, however, the first refrain (beginning at m. 56, the “B” section) that is most striking.  It suggests a four-part fugal exposition, first with a running eighth-note subject, then with various countersubjects introduced over the eighty bars of this section before the return of the rondo theme.  The second refrain can then be cast as a continuation of the fugue.  At m. 273, the original fugue subject appears in counterpoint with one of the countersubjects.  This countersubject becomes the second subject of a double fugue that dominates much of the rest of the second refrain (development).  Contrapuntal technique abounds, with the inversion of the second subject appearing in the violins at m. 457.

The final entrance of the rondo theme appears in a highly modified form at m. 497, leading not back to the beginning, then, but toward the “finale” section of the movement.

There are also intimations here of sonata-allegro, or at least something along the lines of a hybrid sonata-rondo, as found in another wonderfully contrapuntal work, the finale of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44.  The first rondo and first refrain would correspond to a sonata exposition, the second rondo and second refrain to the development, and the last refrain and “finale” to the recapitulation and coda.

It is a fascinating feature of this movement that it not only is a highly compelling piece of music, but that it also embodies these three formal procedures .

A final issue with this symphony is its harmonic plan.  The home keys of the five movements are, in order, C-sharp minor, A minor, D major, F major and D major.  Mahler uses this narrative tonality in other places.  If Mahler had in mind a major-key finale to a minor-key symphony, in the manner of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, perhaps he felt that the technical challenges involved in C-sharp major might be too much for his orchestra, given the already stiff demands of the music.  At any rate, it is also simply possible that Mahler is moving away from the single-key concept of a symphony.  The five movements appear appear to be held together from a motivic standpoint, rather than from harmonic consistency, but in a traditional sense, they are no more related than a suite of pieces extracted from an opera or ballet.  It is a testament to Mahler’s compositional technique that the piece feels completely unified without sharing a common key center.

Now on to the Sixth–four large movements, so two weeks each.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 5, first movement

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

What a piece!  Like the last movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, I find it difficult to think analytically about music of such moving emotion.  There are some questions I would love to be able to ask the composer, though.  What sort of funeral march is this?  For such grandiose, powerful music, who could possibly have died?  And then, as a funeral march, is it really effective?  True, there are no moments of levity, and I detect no hint of satire anywhere in the movement, but how can the solemnity of death be reconciled with what is, in a strange way, celebratory music?  Such questions are, of course, primarily aesthetic in nature, and I can’t answer them without living in Mahler’s time, and perhaps in Mahler’s life.  Throughout my study of Mahler’s music, I have striven to examine the music for its compositional attributes, and taken the music at face value, but such music as this cannot help but raise serious extra-musical questions.  I’ve been reading David Huron’s book Sweet Anticipation, in which he gives a valuable sentiment.  To paraphrase:  “Even if we are one day able to understand music, it will never cease to be beautiful.”

How many times did I hear this opening trumpet solo through practice room walls as an undergraduate?  My trombone teacher, Tony Chipurn, used to joke about the first round of trumpet auditions for the Cincinnati Symphony:  “ta-ta-ta–taaa,” “Thank you!”  But this music is no joke, not for even a moment, and this trumpet solo announces the key, the mood, the meter and the basic rhythm of the composition, all with just a few notes.  Those first four notes are that important, and a fine performance gives them direction.  It must not only state the notes, but provide the impetus for the rest of the symphony. 

No sooner has the key been established than the rest of the brass and the strings come in with a contrasting harmony.  The trumpet has named the key as c-sharp minor, but the enormous chord in measure 13 is A major, opening the world of this music up.  The double-dotted rhythms in the trumpet are, again, crucial to the expression, and Mahler makes persistent use of dotted and double-dotted rhythms throughout this movement; it is these rhythms that give this funeral march its character, whether as the trumpet’s double-dotted solo rhythms, the strings’ later use of dotted-quarter plus eighth-note rhythms to present both primary and secondary melodic material or the underlying martial rhythm, seen for example in measures 14-16 in the strings and winds.

The dotted rhythm introduces the primary march theme at the anacrusis to m. 35.  This melody is introduced by violins and celli in unison–in a relatively weak register for the violins, but in a more lyrical register for the celli.  In m. 43, the theme is developed, with the second violins, and then the violas, joining the first violins.

At m. 61, the original trumpet solo returns, at the original pitch, but harmonized instead in the key of F-sharp minor, and harmonized instead of alone.  Instead of the parallel chord of D major, as would be expected from the opening passage, the goal of this passage is the tonic chord of the movement, C-sharp minor.  This allows a return of the first-theme material at measure 89, now harmonized by a countermelody based on the same dotted-rhythm material as nearly every other utterance in the symphony so far.

Mahler is nothing if not consistent.  After a modulatory passage that brings the music to Ab major, the dominant, a secondary theme enters at m. 121.   Based on the dotted-rhythm motive of the primary theme, this presentation in thirds is highly reminiscent of material from the third movement of the First Symphony, the contrasting theme of that funeral march.  How funeral-march-like is this piece after all?  Much of the resemblance and mood breaks down in this section, which leads into a developmental section, introduced by the trumpet solo material.

This development section, beginning in earnest at m. 155, is centered around a rhythmic motive that is a transformation of the dotted-note motive that formed the core of the melodic material up to this point.  This consists of a half-note tied to the first-note of a quarter-note triplet, followed by the other two notes of that triplet.   This cell is the basis of nearly every important melodic motive for the next hundred bars.

At measure 233, the trumpet solo returns, bringing back the material from the exposition.  Measure 278ff has a fascinating melodic treatment–beginning in solo trumpet and solo viola, and over the next few bars, adding instruments to become a near-tutti texture in bar 286, at which point, the texture thins to solo clarinet, oboe and flute.  As expected in a classic sonata-allegro, the second theme now returns in the tonic key (m. 295).  In teaching third-year Analysis, I emphasize the importance of understanding the modifications composers make to their transitions to reconcile the two competing key areas.  Here, Mahler significantly shortens the transition to allow the secondary theme to reappear in the tonic key rather than moving to the dominant.  The music is in D-flat major, an enharmonic spelling of the parallel major that allows the second theme to remain in its original mode.

In measure 316, the timpani enter with a reminder of the opening trumpet solo, moving to a secondary developmental section, placed interestingly late in the game, almost 4/5 of the way through the movement.  In this A-minor section, the dotted-note motive of the exposition and the triplet figure of the development are combined in a sequential passage that leads to a final climactic chord at m. 369.  At this point, the music now must descend from E-major, the dominant of this second development section, to G-sharp major, the dominant of the piece.  It reaches its goal not through functional phrasing, but through a typically Mahlerian chromatic descent, with a deceptive goal at m. 393, when coloristic chords seem to imply another move away from C-sharp, but land on F-sharp, explaining to the ear that this has all been coda material.  Mahler has placed developmental material in the coda, following in the footsteps of Beethoven. 

The coda itself is given a coda, featuring the return of the solo trumpet material from the opening.  Instead of the entire melody, we are merely reminded of it.  The movement ends with a flute flourish–a rare moment highlighting this instrument among the Mahler symphonies so far–followed by a menacing pizzicato in the low strings.

Where does this movement fall in relation to the opening movements of the four previous symphonies?  The First Symphony began with what seemed like the beginning of the world ex nihilo.  The Second has its own funeral march.  The Third Symphony’s enormous opening movement (“Part One”) dwarfs the rest of the piece, despite Mahler’s best efforts.  The Fourth Symphony opens with music that is tautly related to the rest of the piece.  But here, in the Fifth Symphony, is music that draws in the listener to the point that it simply doesn’t feel as long as its fifteen-minute duration.  This is, afterall, the goal of any composer– the suspension or at least the reordering of time.  A great composition, like a great movie, feels like an otherworldly experience while keeping the audience’s attention.  In this movement, Mahler has done this successfully.

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Mahler–Symphony No. 3, 6th movement

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Less than a week behind schedule now–I’ve been listening and studying the score, but to decide to sit down at the computer and type a bunch of words that maybe no one will ever read takes some fortitude.  Mahler’s 4th Symphony will follow, about two weeks on each movement through January and February.  I’m starting to think about what project will follow this one at the end of the year–let me know if you have ideas.

This movement conjours lots of memories, partly because in college we (that is, my brass player friends and I) were all crazy about it.  I’m hearing it with very different ears now than I had then.  All brass players who want to be more than just brass players have to work through their “louder, higher, longer” phase, and on the other side of that, I can say that I’m not as taken with this movement as I used to be.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve since read Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, in which the book ends (spoiler alert) with the protagonist’s funeral, which service is ended with this very movement.  Is this choice on Roth’s part meant to be ironic?  Who would actually play this entire movement for a church full of mourners?  The Bernstein recording lasts nearly 40 minutes, which I think may be a little bit drawn out.  I’m curious to know what Mahler’s tempi were in this case.

I’ve decided that this piece is musically meaningful because of several features, both internally and in relation to the rest of the piece.  In the overall structure of the piece, it is as much coda as it is finale.  Mahler is continuously bringing in plagal material–the subdominants and supertonics that have always signified the end of a tonal composition.  Just as Handel’s “Hallelujah” Chorus ends its portion of Messiah, this harmonic emphasis serves to signify that this enormous composition, this epic journey, is coming to a close.  This movement, like the epilogue to an expansive novel, celebrates what has come.  Ironically enough, there is no return of earlier thematic material or even the slightest reference to the other movements.  There is only pure, beautiful, very tonal music.

The internal structure of this movement is interesting, but not particularly surprising.  It seems to be cast in  rondo form, like many of the last movements of many Austro-German symphonies from Mozart on.  The refrain consists of the chorale that thrilled my friends and me back in college–the first forty measures, complete with their own coda (the long tonic pedal beginning in m. 29).

Measure 41, with its key change, presents for the first time a kind of transitional material, or perhaps it represents the first episode.  The music settles not in the written key of F# minor but in C# minor in measure 51.  The material that follows suggests F major, allowing the minor subdominant (g minor) of the home key to make an appearance that brings back D major, in a way, at m. 92.  Even though the tonic chord fails to appear, it is clear that the music is in D major from the presence of the dominant and by the return of the sequential theme from the refrain.  The refrain itself returns in m. 108.

As is typical of rondo form, the second appearance of the refrain is shortened–a mere reminder of the dominating material of the piece.  Measure 132 is the start of the second episode–after transitional material similar to that which appeared before the first episode, and beginning with material that is similar to m. 51ff, but which is now developmental in nature.  The sequential motive from the refrain and the do-sol-le-sol motive of the transitional material provide the fodder for this developmental section, which continues until measure 214, when the chorale theme begins to reappear.  We are back in the home key, but not yet truly home. 

The fullest tutti of the movement so far is in m. 220, and revealingly is a chord of undoubtedly plagal function–a minor subdominant, which further reinforces the coda-ness of this movement. 

The final refrain begins in m. 252 with the chorale theme in the brass.  Despite appearing over a dominant pedal instead of a full harmonization, it is clear that we have arrived at the end of the piece, and the basic structure of the refrain is intact.  From this point forward, any digression from tonic must inevitably lead back. 

The coda to this entire coda movement begins in m. 300, and from here the music speaks for itself.

This is the most extensive, most complex composition I have ever attempted to pull apart like this, and I am frankly still puzzled by it.  It is in many ways almost too large to understand in its entirety–while a painting can always be viewed from afar, I find it difficult to “step back” from this piece.  In many ways, too, it is a prototype for what is to come, for after the relative respite of the Fourth these next two months, the remaining pieces only get more difficult and more expansive in their scope, and four of them lack the tool of a song text to fall back upon.  I should be in awe, and a little bit intimidated, because this is the musical equivalent of hiking the Appalachain Trail.

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