Posts Tagged ‘Jean Sibelius’

The Symphony: Influences (2)

Sunday, October 5th, 2025

I’m in the midst of a series of posts about my Symphony in G, “Doxology,” in the lead up to its premiere by the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on November 9, 2025 at 4pm. Information on that concert here. Additionally, I will be giving a pre-concert talk at 6:30pm on Thursday, November 6 at the Willoughby Hills Branch of the Willoughby-Eastlake Public Library. Pre-registration is encouraged, but not required, and all in attendance will receive a free ticket to the concert. I’m also planning to give a more in-depth talk at Lakeland Community College sometime the week before the concert, focusing more on the writing process and my approach to this form. Watch for details!

I had a lot to say about the influences on my Symphony in G, “Doxology” in my previous post, leading me to realize that it really needed to be two posts–I’ve been thinking about the genre of the symphony for a long time, and I have Ideas.

Phillip Glass: Low Symphony

I discovered this piece, my first encounter with Glass’ music, at Mediaplay, a big box record and video store that had a location on West Broad Street in Columbus across from the now-demolished Westland Mall. I think it was the first record store I had been to with listening stations, and I slipped on headphones to hear this music around 1993, when the first recording of the piece by Dennis Russell Davies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic was new. I think I probably borrowed the CD from the public library, but ended up returning to Mediaplay to buy it.

Later renamed as Glass’ Symphony No. 1, Low proved to be the first in an epic and, at the time, surprising love affair with the genre for its composer. The first of three symphonies “from the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno,” it gave me the idea that the symphonic form could rewrite and retell an existing piece of music. Glass was in his late 50s at the time, so I suppose I’ve beaten him to the punch, but of course, I didn’t take time to write Einstein on the Beach or collaborate with Twyla Tharp, either.

Low was very slick and cool, a meeting point aesthetically between Vangelis, Mannheim Steamroller, and the radio show Music From the Hearts of Space, and the kind of concert music that I was more specifically interested in.

In outsourcing a fair amount of his melodic work to Bowie and Eno, Glass was also able to focus on form and structure, which, in the end, I think has always been the focus of his minimalism. I’m not a minimalist myself, but like anyone of my generation, I can’t help but be influenced by it. The “maximalist minimalism” implied by much of Glass’ work draws in the listener who is accustomed to the world of popular and film music–including me–in a way that many concert hall composers might consider: consonance, clarity of form, tunefulness, and rhythmic energy are not pandering or retrogressive.

I also just have always liked this piece: it’s striking, and energetic in the way that was really appealing to a high school composer who loved marching band and jazz ensemble and rock’n’roll.

Witold Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 3

As an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, I spent a lot of time during my first two years ensconced in the listening lab in the Gorno Music Library, where the staff would pull your selection and pipe it into headphones in a carrell. I remember having seen a list of orchestral excerpts for a flute audition that mentioned Lutoslawski’s Third, and added it to my list to check out. I didn’t really know anything about the composer, but I found the work in the online catalog (in those days, through an old green-text terminal) and got myself set up. From the first four notes–staccato, forte trumpets and trombones–I knew there was something to consider here. Across the hall, in the stacks, I was able to check out the score. It was my first experience with both the cutaway score layout and with Lutoslawski’s controlled aleatory.

To me, the notation was strikingly intuitive. I’ve used the cutaway score design only once: in my work It Is Enough for clarinet quartet and eight trombones, which is in many ways inspired by Lutoslawski’s approach. I’ve always considered It Is Enough to be a successful experiment. Composed during my graduate studies at Ohio State with Jan Radzynski, I was anticipating my work later with electronic music and wanted to think outside the grid of staves and barlines of the full score. The cutaway score is difficult to create, though, in my chosen notation program, Sibelius (although, not so much difficult as time-consuming). It requires lots of staff type changes and close attention to subverting the details of layout that Sibelius is carefully programmed to make easier for a traditional score.

It Is Enough also makes use of the controlled aleatory technique, which I’ve always liked, but again, have only used infrequently. I love the idea that some textures are complex enough that a little chaos is baked in, and trying to hardwire them is in a sense futile. There’s a trust for the musicians that should exist between composer and performer that the technique requires be made explicit–that things will happen when they make sense, and this isn’t always predictable in a rigid sort of way.

I think the main reason I didn’t pursue this language more fully is that there is a certain impracticality to it: it requires a confidence on the part of the performer that, in my work with student and community musicians, isn’t always available. I should perhaps return to it and trust my musicians with more.

The second movement of my symphony uses more non-conventional sounds than the rest of the work, including a passage of controlled aleatory in the strings: just two gestures, but I think a significant moment. In his Third Symphony, Lutoslawksi uses the technique liberally, but certainly not exclusively, and to great effect, and in combination with unmeasured stretches.

There is also a philosophical gauntlet thrown down here. Lutoslawski’s Second Symphony is a sprawling work for chorus and orchestra, so large and complex that the score is in separate volumes for the two required conductors. The composer seems to have changed his mind about this: while the Third lasts a half hour, Lutoslawski makes clear that it is meant to be a unified whole. He is not the first to attempt the one-movement symphony, but he states in his liner note that the four-movement plan–he singles out Brahms specifically–is too much for the mind to bear in a single sitting; that a single movement with a single meaning is in some way superior to four movements with four meanings. I don’t know that I would take this as an absolute, or even that I would agree with his interpretation of Brahms and musical (or other) meaning, but it does support my thinking that part of the symphonic concept is that the entire work needs to hold together in some way: more integrated than a suite.

All my years of thinking about writing a symphony, I have always cast about for designs and methods of making it cohesive and orderly. In this case, I’ve fallen to some of the tried-and-true approaches that Lutoslawski eschews, but my desire for unity is partly due to Lutoslawski’s call to rein in ambition. Unlike Mahler, this symphony does not–cannot–try to contain the world.

Antonin Dvorak, Symphony No. 9

I first encountered this work in a serious way in my junior year of high school, when I wanted a recording of Sibelius’ Second Symphony (see below), and purchased a CD that contained Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducting both that work and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Being a completist, and not having a lot of money for new CDs, I listened repeatedly to both pieces. While Sibelius always holds pride of place for me, I got to know the New World as well, and it certainly had an influence on my thinking. Dvorak’s use of orchestral color, of cyclic approaches, and of course his astounding melodic gifts were both inspiring and daunting. I’ve since heard the work in performance several times, although never played or conducted it (I played second trombone for Dvorak’s 8th in my one-term stint in the Ohio State University Symphony Orchestra, and I’ve conducted several of his Slavonic Dances with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, along with some other of his works). It’s also been present in my teaching: when I taught middle school general music, I would spend an entire class period listening to the work, with a set of cue cards to help the students follow along; it’s also featured in my current music appreciation class, alongside Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony as we consider music and identity: two composers telling turn-of-the-century America what it’s music should sound like (with America resoundingly finding its own direction).

If my idea was to write an American symphony, or the Great American Symphony, Dvorak seems to point that direction (as a non-American, of course, he couldn’t do it himself). I don’t know exactly what might be “American” about my piece, except that it has no other possible identity. Most of these influences are not American, and I have spent much of my musical career thinking about non-American music, looking in from the outside, perhaps as Dvorak did as well.

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

Now, to the piece that started it all. In 1992, I auditioned for the Ohio Music Educators Association South-Central Regional Orchestra and got in. I had played in our school orchestra the year before and enjoyed the experience, so a weekend of playing that music seemed fun. I got in. The rehearsals and concert were at Gahanna Lincoln High School, and the clinician was Dr. Emily Freeman Brown, orchestra director from Bowling Green State University. We played a number of pieces I still consider dear to me: a Dvorak Slavonic Dance, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld Overture, Morton Gould’s American Salute, and the second movement of Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2. A (not-so) surprising number of these have made it onto Lakeland Civic Orchestra concerts over the last thirteen years (we will be playing the Gould again in April).

But our concert closer was the piece that really hit home: the last movement of Sibelius’ Second Symphony.

Flashing further back a year, when I took British Literature for a semester, I remember jumping ahead to the science fiction stories in our anthology, which included Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” which mentioned “the score to Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony” among the artifacts left by a dying humanity to be found by future visitors to Earth. I didn’t know Sibelius’ music at all in 1991, but I imagined what it might be like.

A year later, in that one-weekend orchestra, I found out that my imagination had been satisfyingly close to reality, and I was intrigued and gratified.

We didn’t play the complete movement: we started at the recapitulation, which was enough for the limited rehearsal time and a suitable end to the concert, and more than enough to snare the attention of a trombonist in the process of discovering that classical music just might be the thing he chose to pursue for a long time. The chorale in the coda was my first first-hand experience with what the trombone could be to the rest of the orchestra, and I was hooked. When the cassette containing the recording of the concert arrived in the mail a few weeks later, I wore it out.

It was around this time that I began my semiweekly visits to the Upper Arlington Public Library to get four CDs of classical music at a time, but I didn’t think to look for Sibelius Second. It wasn’t until a few months later, in the desperate moments after a breakup (my first) that I thought to head to a record score and buy a recording for myself. I didn’t know what to pick up, or what the differences might be between different recordings, and knowing myself, I probably decided based on price: a re-release of Paul Paray’s 1959 recording of the piece on Mercury with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, paired with the recording that would become my introduction to Dvorak’s New World (see above). Hearing the whole piece–even the whole last movement–was a revelation. If the music had been on an LP, I would have worn it out over the next year.

For a couple of years, Sibelius’ Second was around: Peter Stafford Wilson led us in the whole piece on the last concert I played with the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra in 1994, and in the summer of 1995, I played the last movement again when I was at Brevard Music Center. I got to know the work more intimately then, but not being an orchestral trombonist (not for lack of trying), I didn’t come back to it. I don’t think I’ve actually ever heard it performed live, either. Maybe it has a “youth orchestra” stigma, or maybe audiences have tired of it, though I can’t imagine why.

I actually heard most of Sibelius’ Second today on the radio–I parked in the driveway for a moment to hear the end. It’s wonderfully familiar: I don’t listen to it often, but I think about it, and keep the score on my piano. From the repeated notes in the strings that begin the first movement, gradually becoming more complex and turning into a theme, through to the obsessive ostinato that bursts into triumph in the finale, this is a piece that couldn’t not be an influence on my own symphonic writing. Today in the car, I heard just how much Sibelius is in my solution to the symphony problem, and I’m not ashamed or sorry for it, because to me Sibelius’ various solutions to that problem will always have a certain rightness.

I leave my influences here, then. I could probably find others (Hanson’s Second? Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements) or dive into influences from other genres (Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra? Holst’s The Planets?). Fascinatingly, there are the notable omissions, Mahler, whom I have studied intensely, being right at the top of that list. I leave them for another consideration, though.

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The Symphony: Influences (1)

Saturday, September 13th, 2025

This post is one of a series explaining and exploring the process and documenting the premiere of my Symphony in G, “Doxology.” My influences have been many and wide-ranging, so there will be two posts about them.

No creative work springs ex nihilo from a human mind, and for thirty-odd years, since my days exploring classical music four CDs at a time from the public library, I have been thinking about the genre of the symphony, listening to its most famous examples (and some less-famous), talking about it with people interested and not, and pondering what my contribution to the genre might be.

To say that I, like Newton, have stood on the shoulders of giants is an understatement, and while this new work is in many ways the finest I have been able to make in the times and circumstances I have lived, there are also many works that it fails to compare to. I don’t know that I can say that this is a work, or that I am a composer, that pushes the art form forward: it pushes my art forward in important ways, but I don’t expect to be included in future music appreciation courses.

Nonetheless, the symphonist must decide just what a symphony is, and what it means to write one. My solution is certainly not the only answer, or necessarily a correct answer in everyone’s eyes. It is, of course, shaped by my decades of listening, analysis, and conducting, and often by the music that I considered during the six years my symphony was a work-in-progress.

What follows, then, is a shortlist of symphonies–and symphonists–that were in my mind before and during those years. The creative DNA of my symphony can be found in these works.

Brahms

The four symphonies of Johannes Brahms loom large over any latter-day symphonist, or should. In the early days of this blog, I spent eighteen months working through Mahler’s nine numbered symphonies, and while I learned a great deal from the experience, Brahms’ works have been and remain more foundational. As sprawling and wonderful as Mahler’s works are, they aren’t on this list of significant influences, and I will have to think more about why that is: I suspect it is because of their deeply personal language that demands public expression of what for me is a more private experience.

Brahms’ First Symphony was one of the first symphonies that I played, with Peter Wilson and the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra. The trombone part is crucial, but limited to the final movement, but even so, I relished exploring this work–when we began it, I hadn’t even realized that Brahms wrote symphonies, only that he was The Lullaby Guy. I’ve always felt a kinship with Brahms’ process of this piece, which gestated over a long time–decades–as the composer worried about how he would stack up to what came before.

In preparation for that youth orchestra audition, I purchased a CD reissue of George Szell’s 1966 recording of Brahms’ First with the Cleveland Orchestra. I first heard it live in 1993 in Youth Orchestra rehearsal and the same year as an audience member at a concert of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra: I remember Alessandro Sicilliani’s shockingly fast opening tempo in the first movement, which was unconventional, but I rather liked it.

Later, Brahms’ Second Symphony was the audition repertoire for my first year of college, and I discovered its finale, one of my favorite symphonic movements. The Third and Fourth are just as wonderful in their own ways, as well. I often tell my music appreciation students to take a rainy afternoon and listen to all four Brahms symphonies and know that they will have spent their time wisely.

Beethoven

Like Brahms, I too have had to consider the legacy of Beethoven as I have considered the symphony. As a trombonist, I’m sidelined from six of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, but as a conductor, I have been able to lead the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in four of them: the Fifth, Eighth, First, and Second. I’m not completely sure which of the bunch I heard first in performance–I think it was probably the Fourth and the Seventh with the Dresden Staatskapelle, on tour in Columbus under Giuseppe Sinopoli in 1993 or 1994. By that point, I had become obsessed with Toscanini’s renderings of the cycle with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which to this day are my go-to recordings, in the rerelease by RCA Victor on CD. I remember a few weeks in the winter of my first year of college when I would slip up to my dorm room after lunch for a daily dose of Beethoven. I would put one of those five CDs in my player and hear a movement or so.

My symphony, of course, takes the four-movement plan that Beethoven (mostly) followed. He didn’t invent that plan, but the influence of his works makes anything else seem a little bit suspect (although the symphony-in-one-movement has enormous appeal for me as well). Like Brahms, the centrality of motivic development–and the ability to leave that technique aside at times–is important in my work. I often turn to George Grove’s book on Beethoven’s symphonies, and I remember my first reading of it realizing that Beethoven’s obsession with fugato technique was perhaps not to my liking: I once used it quite a bit in my work, but it came to seem obvious.

And then there’s that First Symphony, the harbinger of great things to come. Grove points out that, while it is good enough, if it were from the pen of a composer who didn’t go on to bigger and better things, it would be completely forgotten. We only know it because it’s by Beethoven. But in 2006, when I was thirty, I made one of my more serious abortive attempts at writing a symphony because that’s how old Beethoven was when he wrote his first–I figured it might be time, but, of course, it wasn’t.

Aaron Copland: Symphony No. 3

On the day I finished creating the instrumental parts for my symphony, July 4, 2025, Becky and I got in the car to pick up Noah and Melia from church camp. The local classical radio station, WCLV, was playing American music as befit the day, and the second movement of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony came on. I said to Becky that this was music that I had considered a “mark to beat” as I composed, and if any one composition deserves that distinction, it is this. My professional bio for a long time said that I wanted to compose the Great American Symphony, but with his Third, Copland beat me to it by seventy-five years. The recording you’ll find in my collection is on a 1996 Chandos disc featuring Neeme Jarvi leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra–an ensemble that looms large in my understanding of the symphony. I first heard the piece live in a 2013 performance by Marin Alsop with the Cleveland Orchestra. Copland’s Third is broad, accessible, and unapologetic. It articulates and sums up, to me, much of what audiences have come to love about its composer’s music: lyricism, thrilling scoring, rhythmic vitality. I admire the work’s honesty and its direct appeal. As I wrote a piece about faith, based on a call to praise that is also a statement of faith, Copland’s Third stood as a model for the kind of community truth-telling and celebration that the Doxology also represents. The Fanfare for the Common Man, the basis for the fourth movement of Copland’s piece, appears in a guise and fashion that in some ways supersedes the original–although that piece has been a personal touchstone longer than I have been interested in the form of the symphony as well. My own quotation of Old Hundredth in the fourth movement of my symphony, while different in execution, is inspired by Copland’s self-quotation.

Andrzej Panufnik: Sinfonia Votiva (Symphony No. 8)

Back when I was an avid purchaser of CDs through the mail via the BMG Record Club, a recording of Roger Sessions’ Concerto for Orchestra caught my eye, and on the same disc was this symphony by a Polish composer I had never heard of. I can’t say that I was particularly struck by the music or that it became something I listened to regularly, or that I was inspired to listen to the rest of Panufnik’s oeuvre. But something that did stick with me was the diagram plotting out the entire structure of the 22-minute work, included in the liner notes (and pictured in the video linked above). I was a graduate student in composition at the time, and I was struggling with how to develop larger forms. As tempting as it was to sit down at the computer and begin putting notes in to the score, I was coming to see that, as with writing words, pre-writing is an essential part of composition. Fifteen and twenty years later, I would develop my own diagrams for my Symphony in G, and take a single page–in this case, an existing hymn–as my overarching structure.

The result is, I think, as with Panufnik, a work that balances expression with structure, which is something that I find particularly symphonic. While some composers aspire to formal or structural freedom, and many listeners claim to relish it, the truth is that the vast majority of successful works are built around relatively simple approaches and structures. I’ve referred elsewhere in this blog to my favor for Nico Muhly’s “one-page sketch” for a work, and now I realize that Panufnik’s work led me to this idea several years earlier than Muhly’s music even appeared on my radar (I completed graduate school around the time Muhly started to develop an international reputation).

I’m also intrigued that the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned this work for its centennial in 1982. I’ve always had an interest in these big anniversary celebrations, both because I was born in the midst of one (the United States Bicentennial) and, musically, because I attended the premieres of many of the fanfares written for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for their centennial in 1994-1995. I love the idea of marking these milestones, especially with music. I wrote my own piece, The Lovely Soul of Lakeland, for the Lakeland Civic Orchestra to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of our sponsoring institution, Lakeland Community College in 2017, and I can only hope that I will be around for the 100th birthday of the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in the late 2030s.

Alan Hovhaness: Symphony No. 2, Op. 132, “Mysterious Mountain”

I first encountered the music of Alan Hovhaness driving myself home from high school one afternoon, when WOSU (89.7FM) would usually play a symphonic work during the 3pm hour. The choice that day was Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 50, “Mt. St. Helens,” and as I drove, the still, quiet second movement, describing Spirit Lake before the eruption gave way to the final movement, “Volcano,” with its two sharp bass drum strokes exploding into chaos. I was fascinated by the topic of this symphony: although I was young, I was fascinated by the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens that inspired Hovhaness when it happened, which led to my parents subscribing to National Geographic, whose 1981 issue with the volcano on the cover I thoroughly wore out. This was the 1993 recording by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony.

I explored Hovhaness and his music more deeply through the 1990s and into the 2000s. In college, I studied his Symphony No. 4, written for winds, and looked into his other band music while also keeping an eye out for those elusive recordings–there are many released originally on LP that hadn’t been re-released on CD, and many works that have never been recorded at all from this prolific composer. When I was a high school band director, I programmed The Prayer of St. Gregory the year Hovhaness died, 2000. My first suite for string orchestra was an homage to three composers whose music was an inspiration to me in my early years: in between movements celebrating Philip Glass and Jean Sibelius is a Meditation in Memoriam Maestro Hovhaness. I haven’t had a chance to return to his music as a conductor, but if I did, it would likely be his Symphony No. 2.

I first heard “Mysterious Mountain” in the 1990s, on a concert with the Cincinnati Symphony. It didn’t make the same immediate impression that “Mt. St. Helens” made–it’s just a different kind of piece, and really, more in line with the composer’s personality. On repeated listening, my esteem for the work grew, and I now think it one of the finest American symphonies. I admire its sincerity, its craft, and its succinctness.

There is the first group of my symphonic influences. Look for a second post shortly, along with more updates on the rehearsal process in the run-up to the premiere of my Symphony in G, “Doxology” with the Lakeland Civic Orchestra on Sunday, November 9 at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio. Information and tickets here.

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Film Scoring, Self-Taught

Monday, January 21st, 2013

It’s important to try new things, and I was inspired by BJ Brooks’ presentation of his silent film scores at the SCI Region VI Conference back in October.  Now that I’m conducting the Lakeland Civic Orchestra, and I can pick our repertoire, I have the chance to try my own hand at such a thing.  The orchestra at West Texas A&M, where BJ works, has been presenting silent movies with BJ’s scores every other year for the last few years, and they’ve been doing feature-length films, which is an exciting proposition.  I decided for Lakeland’s first effort to choose a shorter film (more on the difficulties of that later), but even at 13 minutes, this will be the longest single movement I’ve written for orchestra.  The film is Georges Melies’ Le Voyage Dans la Lune, from 1902, a somewhat groundbreaking piece from a groundbreaking era in cinema.

If you watch the film, you can see that Melies is operating in an era when the technology of film was brand new.  Many of the things that we take for granted about cinematography aren’t present–the movie is shot as though the action were happening on a stage, and the camera were an audience member, with no close-ups, no pans, no framing shots… some of the things that make film what we think of it today.  What is present, though, is the magic of cinema, which is not surprising, since Melies started out as an illusionist of note before switching to film.  Particularly fascinating are his special effects, which are somewhat crude, but surprisingly effective.

Composing to this has been interesting–I’ve completed the piece in short score, and will be orchestrating over the next couple of weeks.  I’m not the first to score the film–there is a score by George Antheil, and at least one uploaded to archive.org.  I made the decision early on to stick to sounds that could have been a part of the musical sound of 1902, so my score has references to Debussy, Elgar and Strauss, although not specifically.  The tricky part has been making things fit–identifying the places where the music needs to change, and making the notes change at the same time.  This is my first film score, unless you count my entry a few years back for the TCM Young Composers Competition.  Since then, Sibelius has added the ability to sync a score with a video, which has been invaluable–both in finding “hit points” and in seeing how my ideas fit the action on screen.

The style that’s coming out is different from how I usually write, which is somewhat intentional.  I’ve ended up with more repetition, and a great deal more of a “tonal” style than I’ve customarily used; in some ways, this is some of the most predictable music I’ve written.  Part of this is a decision to use the sounds typical of 1902, and part of this is knowing that I’m dealing with an orchestra and audience who aren’t expecting dissonant, angular music that might have been my first choice.

The sense of time in the music is intriguing as well.  Watching the movie with no sound, alone, as I have several times, is somewhat difficult.  A few weeks back, some of the orchestra members and I watched it together, again with no sound, and the experience was more rewarding.  But–now that I have a draft score to add to the film (which I now know very well, of course), the story seems to come to life–it will be incredible to see and hear it with live instruments!  The dimension that the music adds to the film is even more important than the “dimension” that 3-D aims to add.  Thirteen minutes that seemed to positively crawl by in silence are enlivened by the music in a way that explains why, as Richard Taruskin writes, “the movies were never silent.”

The other challenge has been dealing with the inherent flaws in Melies’ narrative–events are repeated (the moon landing, the celebration at the end), and the pre-launch events dominate the structure in a way that is somewhat unfortunate.  Melies was dealing with this brand-new idea–telling a story in moving images–so it’s not surprising that his early work moves somewhat creakily, but making my music work with this narrative has been tricky in the sense that some things go longer than I would like them to, while others peter out just as they are getting going in the score, but there are no more images for them.  Melies was really making science-fiction, which, for a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars, is exciting–he made this movie at the same time that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were inventing the literary genre.

The premiere is in April, and rehearsals start in five weeks, giving me time to finish the scoring and get the parts to the concertmaster, if I work hard.  Look for more as it progresses.

I’ve also spent some time over the last few days helping Daniel Perttu with his new trombone sonata, which has been interesting.  It’s been interesting to consider someone else’s ideas about my own instrument (it’s almost been an education in Dan’s instrument, the bassoon, because I feel like much of what he’s written for the trombone would work better on bassoon). It leads me to wonder about how I know what I know about “how” to write for an instrument, and how best to communicate that.  Certainly part of my training as a music education major has been useful here–the chance to take “methods” classes and get to play every instrument, even if only a few notes, makes writing for that instrument a different experience.  This is why I required two instrumental methods classes when I wrote the composition degree plan at OPSU, and I would push for the same thing again if I had the chance (now that I’m at a two-year school, I don’t think it makes much sense to be thinking about an Associate of Arts in Music Composition).  I recall an incident in Jean Sibelius’ biography where he spent an afternoon with an excellent English horn player–I don’t recall whether that correlated with his composition of The Swan of Tuonela.  It’s too bad that he didn’t write any film music.

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Mahler–Symphony No. 4, mvt. 3

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Since I’m a trombone player by training, and this is the only Mahler symphony that doesn’t include my instrument, I have always felt that Mahler’s Fourth was the “little” Mahler symphony, the runt of the litter.  If any of the music disproves that, it would be this movement.  There is a lightness to this music that doesn’t require three trombones and a tuba, or an entire regiment of percussionists.

After the second movment’s digression to the key of C minor, this movement is firmly rooted in the key of the symphony.  The narrative tonal scheme from the Third Symphony has been abandoned, and the piece opens in an explicit G major, with some wonderful string writing.  My Instrumentation students would do well to study how the cello is often the preferred melodic instrument in lines that would be perfectly playable by the viola.  The lower instrument simply has greater resonance and by placing the melody on the higher-pitched strings, Mahler achieves greater expressive power.  I am frustrated by most orchestration texts that include several pages of paean to the violin and then give shorter shrift to the viola, but there is something to it, I’m afraid.

Mahler has structured this opening section in very clear phrases with very clear cadences, which is not always his habit.  In m. 37, after an imperfect authentic cadence on the home key, there is a long extension and transition to the next key.  Mahler signals that the section is nearly over in the same way that Bach often did, by introducing the subdominant.  In this instance, it sounds oddly fresh, even though every first-year music theory student knows that the subdominant (or IV chord) is not at all a rare bird.  It’s just that Mahler has done an effective job of holding it in reserve and now (m. 47), lands on it in a significant way.

The transitional passage that follows is masterful.  The pizzicato bass line from the first few measures gives continuity while the horns and oboe sound the notes that pivot us into the new key, e minor.  Mahler’s use of musical material is tightly controlled–even though he introduces new themes here, they are built over a structure that is related to the accompaniment of the G-major section.    One also can’t help but admire the way that, for Mahler, the orchestra itself is an instrument, rather than being a collection of instruments.  A great example is the dovetailing of the melody in m. 66 from oboe to the first violins.  Those three overlapping notes allow a smooth transition of timbre–more like a pianist coloring notes by managing flow of wrist and hand than an organist pulling stops.  Throughout this passage, the oboe and violins seem to be doing this trading off–the effect is like an impossible instrument.

One instrument that is used sparingly in this movement is the bass clarinet.  I’m intrigued by Mahler’s approach to this instrument in all of his music, but in a twenty-minute movement (by Bernstein’s baton), there are barely ten notes, all within the texture.  Mahler calls for the third clarinetist to “double” on bass, but many of the changes seem very quick for that.

The e-minor moment doesn’t last long–it is developmental in nature and doesn’t have the cleanly defined phrase structure of the G-major section, and in fact shortly (by measure 91) lands on a pedal D to prepare for the G-major material which follows.  The sense of contrast, though, in tempo, scoring, tonality and formal construction is crucial to building a movement of this size and scope. 

Measures 97-99 again show a transition in melodic responsbility that struck me first as an interesting heterophonic approach to changing orchestral color, but on closer inspection reveal that Mahler is using canonic technique, a relatively rare tool for him and for his era.

The next G-major section, beginning in m. 107, is, according to Mahler’s score, a variation.  It is developmental in nature, but also shares constructive elements with the first section in that it is composed of discrete phrases with clear cadences.  Mahler indicates a faster tempo, and so we move quickly through this section, which isn’t as developmental as it might be–perhaps because there is more of a tonal plan reminiscent of rondo form, where the tonic key returns several times rather than a rounded binary in which the tonic is always the goal of the music.  Strangely enough, the tonic is not the ultimate goal!

Orchestrationally, mm. 179-191 are fascinating.  A trio between oboe, English horn (another instrument used sparingly here in this movement) and horn moves between key centers, implying (but not comfirming) g-minor.  A fantastic color follows this trio as four flutes in their weakest register take on the melody for a moment before passing it on to the cellos, reinforcing the crucial intervals.

A conductor from years ago used to state that small intervals create tension, but large intervals create drama.  To that, I would add another function, suggested in Peter Schubert’s book on 16th-century counterpoint–a leap establishes a musical space which steps must then fill in.  In this instance (mm. 188-190), the flutes emphasize these space-defining leaps and the cellos fill them in without assistance.

The goal of this transition has been C-sharp-minor, and on arriving there, Mahler writes a passage that could have come directly from the music of Jean Sibelius–mm. 195 to 200–but immediately after, he is back to Mahler.   C-sharp-minor morphs to one of Mahler’s major-minor moments in mm. 214-221, this time on F-sharp.  This would seem to be yet another common-tone modulation, as the ambiguity of chord quality allows the pitch F-sharp to become the aural focus.  Mahler takes advantage of this by shifting F-sharps role from fa to ti, and making it the leading-tone of the home key, G major.

Here begins a truly fascinating passage from a compositional standpoint.  To be successful, any slow movement must build to some sort of climax that instead of quiet and mediative is full-bodied, energetic and provides the necessary contrast to make a complete statement.  For Mozart, the technique was often the Romanza structure, as in the D-minor Piano Concerto or the Grand Partita serenade.  For Beethoven and Brahms, the technique is often rhythmic diminution combined with fugato, as in the Eroica symphony or the Brahms’ Second Symphony. 

Mahler approaches this moment through the dance, by reference to folk and popular idioms.  A 3/4 version of the opening theme morphs into a landler in m. 237.  This landler becomes a polka in m. 263, barely before we have understood the first dance.  Very quickly, this polka comes off the rails with the instruction to bump the tempo up another notch in m. 278, where the dance seems to lose control completely. 

Measure 283 is a return to the opening material, and this section would seem to suggest a calm recapitulation that will cadence nicely in the home key, buy Mahler has two more surpises in store.

The first is an ending to this abbreviated G-major section (suggestive again of rondo form) that moves toward a tonic note of E, just as it did the first time.  The music should be wrapping up, but clearly Mahler is on his way out again.  Instead of e-minor, however, in m. 315 there is an explosion in E-major, the fullest, strongest texture of the symphony so far.  The brass are in full force, and take the lead.  G-major to E-major is a remote modulation, and the E-major section leads (with a note from the bass clarinet darkening the texture wonderfully in mm. 330-331) to C major, the subdominant.  

From here, it should be a quick move to a cadence on the home key.  The dominant, D, appears, but when the music moves to G major, in m. 340, we realize that D isn’t the dominant, but a temporary tonic.  G feels like a subdominant, then, which means that the movement can’t be over.  Over the last few bars, though, there is no move to a dominant-seventh on D and G-major has appeared for the last time in this movment.  Mahler ends the movement on a dominant chord, a half cadence.  A peek ahead to the last movement reveals that it, too, is in G-major and begins on the tonic chord.  The last two movements are, thus, inseparable.  The third movement is incomplete without the fourth, and the fourth movement has a twenty-minute introduction.

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