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Begin the Ohio Period

Monday, September 10th, 2012

I’m not a huge fan of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, unlike a certain friend of mine who claims to listen to Pierrot Lunaire to relax.  Don’t get me wrong–it’s great music, just not for every day.

What I love about Schoenberg is that his music kept changing throughout his career, with the biggest change of all being the one that happened with his move to America in 1933.  At this moment, Schoenberg backed away from the “pure” 12-tone works of the ’20s and early ’30s and started to compose in a more eclectic, less dogmatic way.  These late works aren’t his best-known, but some of them are wonderful–the Theme and Variations, Op. 43, for example.  It was as though after moving away from Vienna, ending up in Los Angeles, Schoenberg could no longer be everything he had been and had to be what he would be next.

This summer, I finished the last piece of my “Oklahoma” period–my Suite for String Orchestra, which will have multiple performances over the next nine months.  Reflecting, I’ve written some good music over the last five years–several pieces that I am really proud of and that have gotten some favorable attention: Starry Wanderers, South Africa, Ode, and Moriarty’s Necktie have all had performances in multiple states and get me to thinking that I just might be a good composer when I think about them.  My Piano Sonata is also slated for second and third performances this fall, and my concerto for clarinet and band Daytime Drama is slated for a premiere in November.  It’s been a good five years.

The Oklahoma pieces are, by-and-large, practically conceived–shortly after arriving in Oklahoma, I decided that I wouldn’t write anything without a commission or at least a promise of a performance.  I’m starting to feel able to make more out of less–creating a piece using developmental techniques rather than stringing together sections of music based on different material–Moriarty’s Necktie feels like a leap forward in that respect.  My study of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and Mahler’s symphonies a few years ago helped me see this–as a theory teacher, I am often inspired by my teaching, but we don’t always spend a great deal of time on large-scale works.  I’ve become less of a vocal composer than I used to think I was–and I’m coming to terms with that, in a way.  I don’t think I’ll ever be a songsmith of the likes of Ned Rorem or Roger Quilter, but again, if the right levels of interest come along, that’s fine.  Except for a little bit of fiddling with Pure Data, I haven’t done any electronic music since leaving Ohio State in 2007, and I have to say that I don’t miss it.

In Oklahoma, my music became more focused, more diatonic, more image-driven.  I saw things and places that were inspiring, and I became a father.  There was longing, and there was hardship–as though, like Schoenberg, I was an exile, but like Schoenberg, who played tennis with Gershwin and ran into Stravinsky at the market, there were times of living, as well.

So, what will the Ohio period bring?  I hope to have time now to focus on the post-compositional phases of each piece–publication, promotion, building the brand, as it were.  For me, this is not the fun part.  I spent last weekend composing a new work for clarinet and percussion for Jenny Laubenthal in a white heat, and it was a great time.  I had been thinking about the piece for a month, and it was pure joy to see it come together.  I want to make a sincere effort to get behind my works and send it out to the world more often.  Moriarty’s Necktie is headed to a conference and two awards juries–big awards, the Ostwald and Beeler Prizes, that would put me on the map in a very significant way.  There need to be more subsequent performances, more publications.  I want to be less distracted by other projects.  It was great to write a book in 2010-2011, but it was enormously consuming.  I’m glad to be able to say that I did it, but if I do it again, I need a better reason than “It will look good on my CV.”

I’ve been exploring quintuplous meter, and I’m not sure where it’s going to go, or what the potential for it really is.  But, just as a composer can’t write everything in 6/8, not every piece will be in quintuplous meter.  So far it has been sections of pieces, or short pieces within larger groupings.  What would it mean to have an entire symphonic movement in quintuplous meter?

I’ve taken on the orchestra position here at Lakeland, and I one day hope to write for orchestra again.  Mahler became a great orchestral composer by being a great orchestral conductor.  I have the benefit of being able to learn from Mahler’s scores and recordings, of course, but it’s good to be back in an environment where I will see those instruments on a regular basis!  Will there be orchestra music?  This has always been a question for me.  I have a love-hate relationship with the wind ensemble–bands commission and play my music, but they aren’t orchestras.  There is possibly a piano concerto in my future… would it be too much to hope for a symphony?

It will be interesting to read this post again in five years, to see what has actually happened in this part of my life–until then, Keep Fighting Mediocrity!

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Mahler, Symphony No. 4, 4th movement

Monday, March 1st, 2010

First, some business.  Since Mahler’s Fifth has five movements, the two-weeks-per-movement plan of the last two months won’t work.  Since I, and many of my readers (I assume there are readers…) have Spring Break in March, the right move seems to be to spend 10 days on each of the first three movments, then fifteen days on the other two.  Three movements in March, two in April, with one day left (although I confess to not thinking about this project every day, so that isn’t entirely accurate).  Keep up with me!

To the music.  This movement is a lovely song setting.  In my reference recording, by Bernstein with Vienna, Bernstein took the indication that the voice be as child-like as possible to the extreme of assigning the part to a boy soprano.  There is an innocence gained through this, one that Bernstein used in his own Chichester Psalms to great effect.  The first time I heard this piece in performance, the Cincinnati Symphony used a grown woman rather than a child, and I don’t remember it as being any less effective.

Like the symphony, this movement begins in G major.  The form is basically strophic, and this means that there is a great deal of repetition both in the solo part and the accompaniment.  The introduction is very typical of the German lied in that it simply presents a melodic idea (in the clarinet) that is repeated as interlude and which also accompanies the solo part as a countermelody.  Like the third movement, Mahler’s harmonic language is centered around functional phrases rather than the long pedal points of some of his earlier work.  In this last Wunderhorn symphony, Mahler chooses to end with a movement that seems to suggest an earlier world.

Measure 36 and the following measures are the first appearance of material that three times will close the song sections.  Each time it ends on a different chord, but segues into material from the opening of the first movement–a somewhat unexpected tying together that brings the somewhat disparate expressions of the piece full circle.

In comparison to Mahler’s purely instrumental compositions, and especially, for example, the finale of the Second Symphony, this song setting is relatively simple, but therein lies its beauty and its charm.  Mahler’s previous use of children’s voices (again, not what is strictly called for here despite Mahler’s note about the soloist’s vocal quality) in the fifth movement of the Third Symphony is much more complex in texture and orchestration than this light, clear movement.

Only one aspect of the movement is really troubling to me, and that is Mahler’s decision to end it in a remote key–E major.  When the symphony so far has been very centered on the home key, G major, it seems very strange indeed that Mahler would end the piece elsewhere.  I have spent some time thinking of reasons for this decision, and the best I can come up with is that lowering the tonal center by a minor third has the effect of a relaxation, a release of tension in some way.  While so many popular songs in our era feature a modulation up to ramp up excitement, Mahler’s downward shift of key center may have the opposite effect.  It may also suggest that the piece, a setting of a poem depicting the heavenly life, is not really finished, just as the eternal life discussed has no end.

One strays from a purely compositional analysis here–into a realm of symbolism and implied extra-musical meaning that I have largely avoided here, but as the only vocal movement of the piece, it seems to cry out for this type of discussion.

What does one take, then, from this symphony, so unlike Mahler in so many ways?  Mahler’s compositonal technique is relatively unchanged from the previous two works–not for nothing are they grouped together.  Instead of the enormous orchestras with chorus, though, Mahler steps away, conforming to a standard symphonic plan in four movements for the first time since the First Symphony (and even that piece was not originally so).   Mahler is not the only composer to step back from gigantism–one thinks of Tchaikovsky following the bloated 1812 with the sublime Serenade in C, and of Liszt’s later works in comparison with the enormous symphonies of his middle years.  At any rate, Mahler’s orchestra is still very large by Mozart’s standards, and there are moments in the piece that are very reminiscent of the big moments in the other symphonies.  It is completely possible that my conceit of the Fourth as the “little one” is only the result of my own instrument being left out!  But there is none of the darkness here that one associates with the low brass in the earlier symphonies–the tuba of the First’s funeral march, or the trombone of the Third’s opening movement.  They simply aren’t necessary.

Onward, then, to the Fifth, a favorite of mine since I first encoutered it up close as an undergraduate!

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Mahler–Symphony No. 3, 1st mvt.

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

I’m finding myself behind schedule on this piece, but it’s also the end of the semester, so hopefully I will be able to catch up on this piece.

This movement comprises Part I, and roughly half of the total piece.  Lutoslawski commented that there was a tendency of Romantic symphonists to overwhelm the listener with multiple significant statements–a justification for his own later symphonies, perhaps, which are signle movement works.  As in the first movements of his previous two symphonies, Mahler presents us with a “big idea” that could almost stand on its own.  And yet, unlike in previous outings, the overall tonality of the movement is incomplete.  It is literally impossible for this movement to be taken as a complete piece in the harmonic language of the late 19th century, and strange indeed for a piece to end other than where it began.  Despite its weight, despite its musical significance, this movement is incomplete on its own.

Where Mahler’s first two symphonies begin by developing motives, the Third begins with a theme–a wonderfully memorable one scored for eight horns.  What is interesting about this opening is that the theme is stated and then left completely until a later portion of the piece.  The theme is followed by relatively unrelated material that unfolds slowly over the next 200 bars.  This very clear initial statement followed by a “putting together” of new material is somewhat unique.

This part of the movement is very static from a harmonic sense–the music is centered on D minor and A minor chords, and much of the music is about gettingb to A–from a half-step above and a half-step below.  Perhaps for Mahler’s narrative tonal design, it is necessary to firmly establish the home key to make clear that the ending is not in the home key.  The sheer length of the movement may be a reason for this.

Measure 99 has a temporary change to Bb minor–a mere half-step from A minor.  If A minor is expected, we are denied this, as within a few measures we return to D-minor.  Measure 132 introduces new material which will later be expanded.  Mahler’s use of the chromatic mediant relation is striking and clearly divides this music from the rest of the piece.

D-minor returns in m. 164 with what I, as a trombone player, of necessity considered to be the most significant portion of the piece.  The only earlier trombone solo I am aware of that is this expansive and which is more important is the middle movement (“Funeral Oration”) of Berlioz’ Symphonie funebre et triomphale.  The trombone writing also bears a certain resemblance to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture.  However, this project has given me a new perspective–most of the material of the solo has been introduced previously in the horns. 

Finally, more than 200 measures into the piece, Mahler begins to head toward a new key area–m. 225 has the return of the chromatic mediant material, leading us to a presentation of thematic material in Db major.  Another ten measures sees the music in C major with the first appearance with music in the strings that continuously is  transitional music–mm. 239-273. 

Measure 273 also finally has the return of the opening theme–transformed into a major mode (F major).  The composer and conductor in me has to snicker at the notation Mahler gives to the first violins in m. 276, which has three anacrusis eighth notes.  Mahler feels the need to write “Keine Triole,” “no triplets.”  In conducting rehearsals, I have often had to clarify what should be obvious from the notation–if three eighth notes are preceded by an eighth note in common time, they are almost certainly not triplets.  But who did Mahler imagine was going to play his music?

Measure 302ff has an interesting orchestral effect–trumpets echoed by woodwinds.

Measure 330 has a change to D major, but the harmony is a long pedal point on A until 351.  A return of the march theme, and then a climactic passage that ends in measure 369 with another key signature change (although the key is G major (or G minor) despite the indication of one flat).  The brightness of the march leads us to a darker place–leading back to the more sublime, more subtle music that appeared just after the opening.

The solo trombone reappears in measure 423, this time in F major instead of D minor.  I always used to practice this solo more delicately than the first, with more lyrical qualities.  It is as though it lies between the frenetic celebration of the martial music and the dark brooding of much of the other material.

There is a fantastic transformation of the initial theme in solo clarinet and bassoon in mm. 478–barely recognizable yet completely familiar; such is the power of developmental technique.  The chromatic mediant material returns in m. 482–this time sequenced so that the resulting key is Gb major for a wodnerful duet between horn and violin–what composer would have considered such a thing?

Measrue 514, still in Gb major has a restatement of the march theme over a subtle scrim effect in violins and harp more French than German.  This leads to material in Bb minor. 

Measure 530 sees the transitional material from earlier in the strings now become developmental in nature.  Mahler builds to a return of the march theme, but with additional counterpoint.  The march transforms from the glorious music of earlier to some sort of nightmare version, swinging through Eb minor and C major to land on Db major.  The march fades into the distance, and the percussion battery retransitions to the opening material at m. 643.

I’ve been teaching Forms and Analysis this semester, and one thing I’ve emphasized to my students is that a restatement of earlier material is rarely verbatim, and is usually truncated in some way.  The same is true here.  While Mahler opens with the same music, he cuts about 100 bars to bring back the solo trombone at measure 681.

This third solo is a combination of material from the first and second solos.  Measure 708 is indicative of Mahler’s frequent decision to score the low register thickly.  This is something I avoid in my own writing–I’ve read the orchestration texts too closely, perhaps, because Mahler’s scoring is very effective.  I resolve to attempt something like this in my next large-ensemble piece.

The solo section ends with a direct modulation to C minor, with material related to the earlier transitional passage.  The march music returns in F major and a repeat and elaboration of earlier material.  A succession of 6-3 chords, first in D-flat major, then in G-flat major, pulls back to F major in measure 867–the transitional material now becomes the coda.

Any piece of this size–nearly 40 minutes and 900 measures of music–has to have an internal structure that is coherent but not repetitive.  Mahler’s approach is to continuously develop a few basic themes and pieces of material.  This is not, of course, unique to Mahler–only a few composers have eschewed repetition to the extent that Schoenberg did in Erwartung.   There is a balance between harmonic stasis and harmonic progression, and of course the large orchestra provides a highly varied timbral pallette.

As a composer, I must now ask myself whether I am capable of the same sustained kind of writing, abandoning, as I usually do, Mahler’s use of a basically functionally tonal idiom.  The truth is that I don’t know–studying Mahler is a way to at least see how it can be done, but my longest single movement is about twelve minutes.  This is the challenge that lies before me.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, 5th movement

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Well… two symphonies down, seven to go (unless I decide to add Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony… still open for discussion).  Schedule for Symphony No. 3 will be as below:

  • First movement–November 1-15
  • Second movement–November 16-25
  • Third movement–November 25-December 5
  • Fourth movement–December 5-12
  • Fifth movement–Decmeber 12-19
  • Sixth movement–Decemeber 20-31

The Third is a larger piece still than the Second, and we’re coming up on some busy weeks, so we’ll see what actually happens.

To the question at hand, though:

It has been very difficult for me to examine the last movement of this piece objectively, because in listening to it, one is constantly overwhelmed by the grandeur and majesty of the piece.  I feel compelled to compare this movement to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The similarities are quite striking, beginning with the opening of each piece, in both cases a titanic explosion of sound, making full use of the instrumental forces available to the respective composers.  As is beginning to become clear, a trick Mahler uses is to bring back opening material verbatim after a fairly significant development.  This is in evidence here as well, as this material will return, albeit in a slightly different form, more on which later.

One of the salient features of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth is the catalog or audition section, in which moments from each of the preceding movements are incorporated between recitative-like material from the double basses.  Mahler does not exactly parallel this, but there is material that resembles much of what has come before.  Indeed, a chorale from the opening movement reappears in a meaningful way, and much of the material of the symphony thus far seems to be related to the “Aufersteh’n” melody that forms the spiritual and musical heart of this finale, much as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” melody is the core of his piece.  Almost immediately after the opening statement, at m. 31, a bass line appears in the cellos and basses that cannot help but recall the scherzo’s moto perpetuo.

As sprawling as this piece is, there is also a tightness to the writing that is integral to its holding together and ability to hold the listener’s attention.  Nearly every theme begins or ends with a rising fifth or a falling fourth, or incorporates this interval significantly.  The two chorale tunes–the “Aufersteh’n” melody and the tune introduced in the first movement–have head motives that are related by inversion.

Measure 62 sees the first entrance of these two chorales in this movement.  They are not in their final form, as though they await perfection, or, perhaps, they are in a state of pre-development.  Mahler hints at this material and dances around it before a full presentation of it (mm. 62-96 are parallel to the more solidified and then more triumphant presentation of the same material beginning with the trombone chorale in m. 143).

This is another Mahler trick–transforming material through orchestration.  I continue to marvel at the masterful approach to orchestration in this piece–the doubling, the clear string writing, the use of just the right parts of a massive orchestra.  It is even as though Mahler knew that certain principal players would be tired in certain places, and allocated parts accordingly to have fresh performers available (this happens frequently in the brass).

The above-mentioned chorale at mm. 143ff is probably the first passage that pricked my ears many years ago.  Trombones, tuba and contrabassoon, and later the rest of the brass, present both chorale tunes.  The first is in Db major, and the second moves from Db major to C major, the overall key of the movement (like Beethoven’s Fifth, although the key of the piece is C minor, the last movement is in the major mode).  Instead of being blended with other ideas, the chorale tunes are finally exposed, naked, without distractions, and we are forced to consider the basic material of the movement–or even of the symphony–in isolation.  If it is true, as Russel Mikkelson has commented, that composers are bad poker players, here is Mahler’s tell, and he shows us all the cards.

The following sections relate to Beethoven’s Ninth in that they are variations on the “Aufersteh’n” chorale.  Measure 220 begins a march-like section.  A difference from Beethoven, though, is there is no hint of parody, as in the Turkish march found most of the way through the last movement of the Ninth.  This music builds to m. 310. 

Again, a reference to martial music–instead of Beethoven’s Janissary orchestra, we have essentially an offstage banda.  Mahler, the opera conductor, seems to have borrowed this from Italian opera… anyone aware of any evidence for this?  And the percussion is essentially Janissary percussion.

Measure 380 sees another theme–only appears once in the piece, but is highly memorable, and then the opening material returns, but this time in 2/2 instead of 3/8 (with some parts in 2/4).  The music quiets itself to a return of what had been a short horn solo before–now a longer, more extensive passage that alternates offstage fanfares  with birdsong material.  The music is now centered on C#/Db.  Mahler frequently seems to make this harmonic move.

At m. 472, the “Aufersteh’n” chorale makes its fourth appearance, as the full chorus enters for the first time.  For the first time, the chorale is complete–the material on the text “Unsterblich Leben” is new to the listener.  Measure 493 is a parallel passage to earlier music–a total of three times these two passages have been paired.

What follows is a cantata, a meditation on death and resurrection.  It is, as I mentioned above, difficult to put into words.  “Bereite dich zu leben!”–Prepare yourself to live.  “Sterben werd’ ich, um to leben!”–I shall die so as to live!  The sentiment is matched in beauty by the music.  A favorite moment of mine is the entrance of the organ at m. 712 (I don’t think I’m alone in this).

In the end, the music is transcendant.  I was discussing Orff’s Carmina Burana with a student a few days ago.  There is wonderful music in that piece, and its popularity is deserved, but it pales in comparison to Mahler’s work.  In a hundred years, which will survive?  I think Mahler appeals to the human need to believe that there is more than this world, that there is something better than earthly struggles.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, Movements 3 & 4

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

It’s been a busy time here, but I’m squeezing my thoughts on these pieces in so that I can keep on schedule.

Third movement–The name of the game here is “hypermeter,” in this case, every bar of music feeling like a beat in its own right.  The meter is 3/8, but Mahler could have written in 12/8, and the piece would have made (mostly) perfect sense.

And that “mostly” is the rub.  Because while the hypermeter generally dominates the piece and is fairly strict much of the time, there are places where Mahler steps out of the mold.  If he had chosen 12/8, in other words, there would be a few loose measures in 6/8 or 9/8 scattered through the piece.  These hypermetrical shifts tend to occur at boundary points within the piece, and are slightly more prevalent at the beginning of the movement than in the end.

The first six measures suggest, to me, a complete hyperbar, drawn out for dramatic effect.  After two “correct” hyperbars, Mahler introduces a moto perpetuo-type theme in the violins.  This is echoed in the clarinets in a six-measure hyperbar, clearly a “correct” bar with a two measure extension.  The flutes take this up for four bars, following which, at rehearsal 29, Mahler gives a two-bar “make-up” by restating some of the introductory material, and in m. 33, the initial theme returns.  In this section, uneven hyperbars seem to appear just before the return of the moto perpetuo theme. 

Measure 98 begins a long (seven measures) hyperbar, and is also a modulatory passage, albeit a strange one, to F major.  The modulation is effected by descending chromatic scales in major thirds, but is accompanied by bass notes Gb and B, suggesting a key quite remote from the goal.  Mahler approaches the F major (local) tonic again in a strange way prior to m. 125, falling to it from an A minor chord.  This is presumably because F is not the ultimate goal, only a way-station.

The use at m. 68 and m. 149 of lines that appear to quote the second movement of Mahler’s First Symphony is notable.

As we proceed through the movement, Mahler passes through Eb, then D, often repeating material heard before, usually fleshed out with countermelodies.  At m. 257, the descent ends, and Mahler moves the tonal center up to E major.  There is great music here, but not time enough to discuss it in full.  The scoring is flawless, and often seems to reinforce the hypermetrical concept of the piece.  It is difficult to understand how Mahler was able to work so masterfully with the orchestra in an age before recording, but I suppose that countless hours on the podium had acquainted him with the sounds implied by a score.

Toward the end of this movement, the hypermeter seems to become more strict, i.e., there are fewer exceptions to the rule of four-bar hyperbars.  In the final 200 bars, there is only one shift of hypermeter.

Fourth movement–Just a few observations.  In many ways, this brief setting speaks for itself.  Would it have been more appropriate to partner this movement with the last movement?  Perhaps.

The brass chorale beginning in measure 3 is stunning.  I’m fairly sure that the bassoon and contrabassoon, however, would not be able to play a true pianissimo there, although they are scored in powerful ranges.  The low Db in the contrabassoon in m. 13 is a positively religious effect that I will be listening for from now on.

My Theory III students will be studying the enharmonicism found at rehearsal 1.  The key of the pieces is Db major, and to avoid a key signature of eight flats, Mahler chooses to write in C# minor.  As far as I can telll, this is the key reason for enharmonic writing–mere convenience.  There is no surprise in this chord progression–it moves precisely as it would if the key had remained Db major.

At rehearsal 3, the music moves to the other obvious choice for a contrasting minor key.  In fact, as the relative minor, Bb minor is a more likely candidate than C# minor.  The shift, acknowledged in the key signature, to A major is a bit trickier… Bb minor would be enharmonic to A# minor, which would have a relative major of C#.  The dominant of C# is F#.  The relative major of F# minor is A.   Mahler employs a monophonic technique in the solo violin part rather than try to navigate this convoluted path in such a short movement.  He returns to Db major through C# major in a convenient enharmonic move.

My thoughts on the giant, transcendant final movement will appear at the end of the month.

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Mahler Symphony No. 2, 2nd movement

Monday, October 5th, 2009

This is one of those pieces that makes my Schenkerian training pop back up… I’m not certain, but this movement seems to be a very nice example of a 5-line.  Any thoughts?  Whether this is true or not, sol plays a conspicuous role in the melodic and harmonic structure of the piece, either as pedal point through much of the movement, or as a very important point of repose for the melody.  I often find that, when in the midst of a melody, sol is easier to find than do, and many portions of this movement seem to hang around sol in a way that allows the music to spin around and around that note.

The string writing is absolute genius–my orchestration students will be studying this piece when next I teach the class.  The main landler theme is somewhat more functional in nature than much of Mahler’s writing–we usually see him building themes around a single chord.  The effect in mm. 13ff of the sustained notes helps to unfuld the theme in a very important way–it keeps it from being a mere parallel period in structure.

The change of key signature at m.39 to five sharps is a mere convenience.  Mahler means us to understand the same tonal center, but the opposite mode… A-flat major becomes G-sharp minor.  The minor-key sections are centered on long dominant pedals–more sol in the piece.  The real breaks in this emphasis on the dominant come at a very charismatic theme in the winds which is also the basis for what little developmental writing we find in this movement.

Then back to the landler of the opening, with Eb/D# as a pivot note between the two modes.  A slight variation on the opening section, but nearly identical in form.  The real meat of this movement seems to lie in the minor-key, compound meter sections of the five-part form.

Mahler seems to make a habit of drifting between major and minor triads built on the same note–here, and in the first movement, and as a motive throughout the Sixth Symphony (looking ahead to next summer).   We see this rarely in earlier composers–although I confess with not being as familiar with Lizst and Wagner as Mahler probably was. 

The second compound meter section, beginning at m. 133 is the least harmonically static music of the movement, briefly visiting B major and F# major, with even a sequence (related to Classical developmental-core technique?) a-building at m. 153ff.  I talked to my students in Forms and Analysis class today about the dangers of always seeing what we want to see in a piece… am I doing that here?

The final section, a wonderful pizzicato version of the opening landler.  Is Mahler charming us, or contrasting the pastoral mood here with a more menacing idea in the minor key sections?  Again, I can’t get over the string writing in this piece… it’s like a primer on how to write charming string textures, both with divisi and without. 

If the piece is a Schenkerian 5-line, it seems to me to descend only on the last two chords–meaning that the piece doesn’t have a coda in a traditional sense.  Yet the entire last page, from m. 285, seems to have an “after-the-ending” function.  Schenker, of course, found Mahler to be decadent, and probably would have dismissed his music out of his anti-Semitism as mere aping of earlier Austro-German greatness.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Schedule for the rest of this piece–3rd and 4th movements until October 20, 5th movement until the 31st.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 2, First Movement

Monday, September 14th, 2009

To the next piece, then.

In some ways, the Second feels much more like Mahler than the First–a focus more on motive than on theme, on counterpoint over homophony.  As well as Mahler seems to have opened up a world in the “Titan,” in “Resurrection,” we begin in that world, as though we have lived there all along.  Where the First grew slowly out of stillness, the Second begins on the dominant pitch as well, but begins with an agitated, urgent feeling–brought on by tremolo in the strings instead of harmonics.  Instead of the gently half-floating, half-falling fourths-based line in long notes, we here get an ascending, scale based line in short note values that propels us forward into the first movement.  We are in the thick of the piece before we realize it. 

This outburst in the low strings has something in common with much of the material of the movement–it acts like many a Bach fugal subject in that it outlines an octave which will later be filled by the voice in which it appears.   Again, as in Bach, the motive undergoes a type of fortspinnung, or spinning-out.  In general, a very different treatment than much of the material in the First symphony.

Beginning in bar 18, the woodwinds enter with another octave-filling melody, this also exposing the half-plus-dotted-quarter-plus-eighth rhythm that dominates much of the melodic material of the movement. 

At the first climax of the movement, bar 38-41, we see the third crucial motive of this movement, a contrapuntal device, if such can be a motive.  Two scales are placed in contrary motion.  To any student of tonal theory or 16th-century counterpoint, this compositional device may seem completely obvious–or simply correct writing–but compared to the language of the First Symphony, Mahler’s emphasis on scalar contrary motion is a defining characteristic.  The extensive use of pedal point in the earlier work is replaced here generally by a greater contrapuntal awareness and specifically by this device.

Rehearsal 3 has the music in B major, by direct modulation, with yet another octave-filling melody.  I have been pressuring myself to be more sparing–nay, frugal–with motivic and thematic material, where Mahler seems profligate in his introduction of new themes.  However, they are often at least partly related to each other, and, additionally, to craft a movement lasting nearly half an hour (in my Bernstein-NY Phil recording), much raw material is required. 

With the material exposed, at rehearsal 4, we have a return to the opening of the piece, but, curiously, without the very first C-B-C-D-Eb.  Rather, we hear the second “lick,” following which Mahler gets more quickly to business.  The end of a group of themes, then, now followed by a transition?  Or the repeat of an “exposition?”  A major question, since I am teaching Forms and Analysis this semester, is how well, if at all, Mahler conforms to the classical forms, sonata-allegro, in particular.  I have long felt that sonata-allegro form is but one way to achieve  the exposition-development-recapitulation plan of a musical composition; for the untrained listener, the satisfaction lies less in the return of the tonic than in the restatement of the beginning in some way; a melodic affirmation that the piece has come full circle.

At m. 97, the basses give an ostinato motive that bears striking resemblance to a similar moment in the First (the first movement).  While that melody had a rising contour, this one falls.  Mahler characterized this movement as being a funeral march for the hero of the “Titan,” and here is a very specific link between the two. 

A few measures earlier is the motive of the scales by contrary motion, appearing here in a transitional passage, but more often used in the run-up to a climactic moment.  The hero descends to the grave, and ascends to heaven simultaneously.  As Oscar Hammerstein wrote, “passions that thrill…are the passions that kill.”  Schopenauer, Wagner, Mahler, and fifty years later, Broadway.

Rehearsal 8, measure 129, gives a subsidiary motive, again filling an octave, but, rarely for this piece, from the top down instead of from the bottom up.   It feels a borrowing from Wagner’s Ring.  It creates a particularly Wagnerian moment later in the piece (before rehearsal 23, in a “recapitultion” or coda–I’m not sure which). 

The first (and only) time I heard this piece in concert, I was startled by Mahler’s use of doubled English horn and bass clarinet (m. 151ff), and have since stolen that scoring in my own piece for orchestra, Five Rhythmic Etudes.  What I did not remember is the return of the same material for trumpet and trombone, (mm. 262ff).  Again, one is struck by repetition.  A few years later, Schoenberg would attempt to banish repetition from his work, and we have been living to an extent under this stricture ever since (his one-act opera Erwartung contains almost no motivic repetition in more than forty-five minutes of music).  Is a large-scale work such as this dependent on repetition to be successful?  It is everywhere–on the beat level, the measure level, the phrase level and the sectional level, both exact and varied.

On a related matter, I’m fascinated by Mahler’s “preview technique.”  In the First Symphony, a large swath of the first movement reappears in the finale.  I’m fairly sure that the first movement is not previewing the last movement.  But in m. 270 of the present movement, the horns give a chorale melody that reappears nearly half an hour later in the finale.  It leads here to one of the very characteristic (in both rhythm and melody) themes of the first movement, where in the finale, it leads to the key melody of that movement.  This is not simply a compositional technique–mark that there is none of the craft here of a Bach contrapunctus–but rather a psychological device and a feeling of having been given a taste of things to come, a look into the ultimate direction of the piece, and since the subject of the first movement is death, and the subject of the last is, unabashedly, resurrection, we are here meant to understand that even in death there is life.

Measure 329 sees a final eruption of the opening material–more fully-scored, more determined than ever.  This leads to what feels like a recapitulation, and the major-key theme–first heard at rehearsal 3 in E major, now in A major (the key relation hearkens to sonata-allegro)–almost evaporates into the end of the movement.   Beginning in measure 384, Mahler introduces a shifting major-minor feeling that brings to mind the key motive of the Sixth Symphony–the instrumental piece most associated with death in Mahler’s catalog.  The piece could have ended with a whimper on a major note, but this rocking back and forth allows the funeral march to fade into the distance.  Are we left standing at the hero’s grave?  The music unravels amid reminders of the material it was made of, last tastes of the world we knew.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 1, 4th movement

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

When I was in high school, WOSU-FM, the classical radio station in Columbus, used to broadcast symphony orchestra concerts on weeknight evenings.  One night, slaving away on homework, I heard an incredible sound pouring forth from the speakers of my radio.  I hadn’t realized that such music was possible, and I wasn’t sure what to think.  It was unfamiliar to me, and I remember trying to puzzle out who the composer might be.  After a thunderous ending, applause erupted, and the announcer explained than Daniel Barenboim had led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.  I had heard the music I now write about.

As an experiment, largely hypothetical, I trolled some orchestra websites to see whether, in the next  year or so, I would be able to see in concert, in America, the Mahler symphonies I have yet to hear in live performance, the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth (the answer, financial considerations aside, would appear to be “no”).  What I did find was that the First Symphony is by far the most commonly performed of Mahler’s work in this country.

Why might this be?  Its size, perhaps.  It is Mahler that still fits the second half of a program rather than taking an entire concert by itself.  It requires no voices, yet still has the grand sonorities and climatic utterances that thrill audiences.  It is, in a way, Mahler without the difficulties of Mahler.  Orchestras that would never consider the Sixth or the Seventh happily program the First.

To the movement at hand.  I have a feeling that the opening sonorities–a cymbal crash, followed by a diminished seventh chord scored piercingly in the winds, with a low bang in the timpani and strings–has been shocking audience members out of their slow-movement-reveries since the premiere.  The upper strings answer with a rhythmically treacherous lick from high to low and back, so that the brass can introduce a motive that appears throughout the movement, answered duly by sinister descending chromatic triplets.  Two more times, taking longer each time, the upper strings give this cadenza-like material, each time becoming more winded.  It is the bass solo from Beethoven’s Ninth gone horribly wrong, or inverted.  My Forms students could cite this as an example of phrase extension by interpolation.  The final violin soliloquy overlaps the winds’ chromatic motives and leads to the countermelody at rehearsal 6, the entrance of the main theme for this movement (do-re-fa-sol).

Despite the sprawling, multi-faceted nature of this movement, like any good Austro-German composer, Mahler is sparing in his use of motivic material.  The other important motives in the material introduced in this (for Bernstein) twenty-minute span are all derived from the theme at rehearsal 6, either by inversion or by multiple transformations.  At rehersal 8, where Bernstein slows the tempo despite no indication for it, we reach a developmental section (rehearsal 9 instructs “zuruckhalten” or roughly, “ritard,” however).

The music so far has been in the rather remote key of F minor; Mahler touched on this key in earlier movements, but never dignifying it with a key signature.  This third-relationship between keys is something to look for in Mahler’s subsequent work.  The inclusion of “Blumine,” by the way, brings yet another key center to the piece (C major).  Perhaps we see another possible reason for its eventual omission.

The melody at rehersal 11 is related to the rehearsal 6 motive by inversion (although not precise).  Measure 149 begins a fascinating transitional section–as though the movement has run out of steam, but for a few last gasps.  One wonders more about Mahler’s program for this piece.  We relax into the still-more-remote key of D-flat major.  A brilliant orchestrational moment at rehearsal 17 sees the oboe taking over the melody from the strings, which step into the middleground, only to step back a few measures later.  The handoff here is sublime.

Rehearsal 18-19 is a study in effective string doubling, with the violas saving the day (with this and another passage down the road, I think the violas here demonstrate their usefulness and become the orchestrational heroes of the piece).

At rehearsal 21, Mahler begins to bring back large swathes of material from the first movement, beginning with the spooky chromatic melody from rehearsal 3 in that movement.  Almost a third of this movement is material recalled from the first movement, making this piece cyclical in a way that dwarves the use of motto themes by Berlioz and Tchaikovsky.  Over the next few decades, some last movements become recapitulations in their own right–the first examples I can think of are Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Orff’s Carmina Burana.  In both these cases, the first movement isn’t merely repeated, but augmented, and it seems possible that this movement was the inspiration.

Note the fantastic dovetailing at rehearsal 24.  This is the kind of technique that makes this piece treacherous for the less-experienced player.

At rehearsal 26, the music presents a tiny chorale for trumpets and trombones in C major, and then continues in C major.  This chorale returns on two other occasions, more forcefully each time, and also moving the music into D major, the key of the symphony. 

Between the second and third “attempts” to bring the movement to an end, another large chunk of the first movement reappears–the portion that leads to the climax of that movement.  Perhaps the most memorable moment in the first movement is the tutti fanfare, and that is what is brought back here.  Instead of the rousing horn melody from the first movement, we are given the brass chorale, fully-voiced and leading us to the home stretch.  The music stays firmly in D major this time, and we are brought to the triumpant conclusion.  Compositionally, there is more repetition here than I would consider appropriate, but it has been, afterall, nearly an hour since we started into Mahler’s paracosm.

Strangely enough, while as a teenaged I at first was thrilled by the bigness of this ending, I now find the little moments most fascinating–I leave you with two of them.  The measure before rehearsal 40 gives us a preview of coming attractions–a string moment that sounds like it stepped out of Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  Then, before rehearsal 45, the violas, my heroes for this movement, lead a transition to the final energetic music that is just perfect.

So–on to another, much bigger piece this month.  I am gratified that I have demonstrated that I can pull ideas and compositional techniques from a piece on this scale.  With one exception, they only get bigger from here, but I entreat all of you to come with me on this trip.  Now, for two months of the Second, beginning, as Mahler said, with the Titan’s funeral march.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 1, “Blumine”

Monday, August 24th, 2009

As a working composer, I am always very interested in false starts, incomplete pieces, works which composers abandon at any stage of composition, even after performance.  The process of composition is just as important to me as the product.  It is only fitting, then, that I at least take a peak at the “missing” movement, titled “Blumine,” from Mahler’s first symphony.

In the original 1889 symphony, “Blumine” was the second of five movements, with a programmatic scheme.  By the time of the original 1899 publication, Mahler had dropped the program of the symphony, and with it, this movement.  The score ended up in the hands of one of Mahler’s pupils, and came to light in the 1950s.  It was subsequently published and recorded in the late 1960s.  Since then,  most performances and recordings have kept to the four-movement plan which seems to have been Mahler’s final intention, but “Blumine” occasionally pops up.

As a composer, I must ask myself why an entire completed and performed movement was deleted from this piece.  Compositionally, the piece works.  It is beautiful, well-scored, unambiguous and basically successful.  As always, Mahler’s use of the orchestra, while not as adventurous as in the other movements of the symphony, is flawless.  From this composer, I would expect nothing less.  But Gustav Mahler was his own worst critic, and frequently made extensive revisions during rehearsals and after the premieres of his symphonies (his Tenth symphony was probably left incomplete because of the time spent on a major revision of the Third Symphony).  It is believed that many works by Mahler simply have not come down to us because the composer destroyed them, guarding his legacy carefully, perhaps.

So why would Mahler have excised “Blumine?”  One flaw of the piece is that it is somewhat limited thematically, and feels at times more like a strophic song than a symphonic movement.  I have been discovering that Mahler’s use of repetition is a key to understanding his ability to build large forms, and here the repetition is not unwelcome–the piece works–but it is somewhat unabated.  There is a single theme, based on a single motive.  There is some development, but it is not extensive.

A second reason that suggests itself is that it just doesn’t seem to adhere to the composer’s style as expressed in the other movements.  This piece is very clearly an intermezzo, standing between the more significant first movement and the more forceful Landler that would become the second movement.  Mahler’s middle movements are rarely the sort of fluffy, friendly pieces that we see in “Blumine.”  Where is the angst, the drive, the seriousness?  In addition to the dramatic suggestions, the style simply seems dated.  It is more like Berlioz than Mahler.  Perhaps Mahler came to realize that the symphony became too disparate in sentiment with the inclusion of “Blumine,” and when it came time for publication, it seemed best to leave the piece behind.  The Wikipedia article on this piece suggests that it existed before the rest of the symphony as incidental music for a play unrelated.  While Mahler may have had good feelings for the piece, it lacks the passion, the irony, the dramatic import of the rest of the piece, and even seems mispaced harmonically (C-major, where the other movements are in D-minor or D-major).

An interesting diversion, to be certain.  Score and recordings are readily available (I found a good recording on the Naxos Music Library), and any serious Mahler fan should check them out.

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Symphony No. 1, 2nd movement

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I’ve long felt that a hallmark of the German symphonic tradition, beginning with Haydn and Mozart, is a degree of equality between the wind and string sections of the orchestra.  I cannot imagine writing an orchestral piece of any size that doesn’t exploit this split of the orchestra into two relatively equal (in terms of power) groupings.  It isn’t that Austro-German composers never use mixed scoring, it’s just that they seem to prefer block approaches.  This is quite apparent in in Mahler’s second movement here, which fills the role of the scherzo and trio.

The first presentation of the melody (A major), after a rollicking string introduction, is in the winds accompanied by strings.  After a transition, the melody appears a second time in the strings, with the winds as accompaniment.  A second theme then, first in the dominant (E major), then in D major.  The infamous Mahler instruction, “Schalltrichter auf!” makes its appearance.  It makes the oboes and clarinets raucous, and the horns, although stopped (gestopft) more cutting. 

In m. 56 we see a two-sixteenths-eighth rhythm against triplets–again, the roughness that results is part of the charm of this movement.

Rehearsal 11, m. 108 brings the scherzo back to the original key with an interesting “winding down” effect, as though Mahler were imitating a wind-up record player, though I wonder if he had heard such a thing.  Direct repetition, with slight changes in scoring, and then we come to the Trio, in F major, by a common tone modulation (do in A becomes mi in F).

The trio theme is derived from the scherzo theme.  Again, the wonderful economy of material we heard in the first movement.  Then through G major to C major, and a second common-tone modulation to return to the home key (mi in C becomes sol in A). 

The return of the trio material demonstrates, I think, Mahler’s reason for using seven horns in this piece.  If strings and woodwinds constitute two roughly equal groupings, seven horns bring into the realm of possibility a third group, and we see it here at rehearsal 26, where the scherzo melody returns in the horns instead of the woodwinds.  This recapitulation is dominated by the massed horn sound that creates thrilling moments whenever it appears.

The heavy brass is still not used in an independent way, as a massed choir, but does provide a fourth group that could balance the other three; later composers (led by Mahler) would find that percussion could provide a fifth such group.

As is typical of the late Romantics, the return of the Scherzo is shorter than its first appearance, but more intense, mostly through scoring.

What can this movement tell us about larger forms?  It is one of the shortest in Mahler’s symphonies, and built mostly through repetition of swathes of material, not through development–on the whole, quite typical of the designs of minuets, and later scherzi, in German music.  The transition back to the tonic in the first scherzo is wonderful–we can all learn from its simplicity, its humor, its effectiveness.  Building a form not through outright repetition but by changing scoring is a useful device, one I have used.

The introduction of the horns as a “third section” is intriguing as well.  I find that I tend more toward block scoring than mixed in my own writing as well, but it seems more appropriate in the context of this dance movement than it did in the first movement, which is much more developmental in nature.  Does anyone know if Mahler is the first composer to call for massed horns in a symphony?  We see eight horns (if you include the Wagner tubas) in Wagner, of course… but in symphonic writing?

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