Posts Tagged ‘funeral march’

Mahler, Symphony No. 7, movement 1

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I’ve done the listening and score study this time around, but I simply am short on time this morning, so here are my big ideas, and I will leave the close reading for another time.

How long can one go as a composer before beginning to sound like oneself?  I find the opening of this movement to be similar in mood and material to parts of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony.  Mahler has been Mahler from the beginning, of course.  There are always Mahlerisms, and I have been seeking them out through the course of this exercise, but self-quotation is another matter entirely.  And again, this is not the outright recycling that composers have frequently used when time or energy ran short.  In some ways, this is the third symphony in a row that has begun with music that seems to resemble a funeral march.

A harmonic analysis reveals many “wrong way” progressions–I teach my theory students to favor the falling fifth, falling third and rising second root motions, but Mahler frequently moves in the opposite direction.  From a harmonic standpoint, sequential patterns are important here.  There are many instances of slow harmonic rhythm (and pedal point) punctuated by sequences that change chords twice in each bar.  The pedal point tendency is not new, but this use of sequence happens to an extent that seems relatively unique to this movement.

Mahler’s melodic material is highly cohesive–as usual, there is a great deal of motivic development.  At the same time, Mahler very rarely uses “simple” melody-with-accompaniment textures in this movement, which is something of a contrast with the Sixth Symphony.  Even in expository passages, melody is almost always combined with another melody, and in developmental sections, it is difficult to know what the main melodic idea is at some points.

Scoring is drastically different from the two previous pieces.  Mahler had been tending to a mixed scoring, with blending of instrumental colors, and, especially in the Sixth Symphony, most of the orchestra playing a good deal of the time.  Here, instruments seem more likely to play as sections without reinforcement from other sections, although there is still a good deal of flutes-doubling-violins to add penetration to their high register.  Instead of the eight horns customary to Mahler, there are only four, plus a tenorhorn in Bb (my assumption is that this is something like the British bore baritone I remember from my brass band days).  Color has become more of a concern for Mahler.  If memory serves from some undergraduate research into Mahler’s compositional practices, it was around this time that he rejected the piano reduction as a first draft, worried that it made his music too pianistic.  Instead, he began to work with a short score of four to five staves.  I have found this technique to be extremely helpful in creating band and orchestra pieces.

In some ways there is also a variation technique at work here.  Material presented as a funeral march reappears as a strange, wobbly dance, and then again as a triumphal fanfare.  Mahler never explicitly wrote a “theme and variations,” but he certainly appears capable of employing that strategy.

Onward then–I refer myself to my copy of the score.

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.

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.