Posts Tagged ‘Mozart’

A student’s question

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

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

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

Here’s my response:

Boy, this is a big question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope this helps!

The Middle

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

My last post described some things that I learned from another art form, woodcarving, through my father and his teacher, Spirit Williams.  Here’s another in the same vein, purely by chance, mind you.

I firmly believe that other art forms have a great deal to tell us about composing, which means that if I have a chance to chat up an artist during a plane ride, I’m going to take it. Last Spring, I met Kiersi Burkhart on a plane from somewhere to somewhere (I think it involved Denver, a city where I one day hope to see more than the airport and the hotel where the airline sends me when my flight is screwed up). She writes young adult novels, and also a blog. This post showed up the other day, about how to help the middle of a novel.   Her five suggestions have me thinking about the middle of pieces, so here are my thoughts about Kiersi’s thoughts and how they might relate to composing.

1. Raise the stakes. This “tip” gets thrown around a lot, and for a long time I wasn’t really sure how one could implement such broad-sided advice.

The easiest way I’ve found is to first work out what your characters’ goals are (both small and large), and then determine: what are the consequences of your characters not achieving those goals? Now make them even more dire. Life and death. Death and destruction. Whatever you can do to make the repercussions of your characters’ not achieving their goals worse, do it.

I think the best way to raise the stakes in a musical composition is to move beyond your starting material in some way.  I’m not suggesting that you string together theme after theme after theme (although it worked occasionally for Mozart), but if you’ve focused on one melodic idea up until this point, say, a third of the way in to the composition, it’s time for some contrast.  This new material should relate to earlier portions of the piece in some way–a similar harmonic framework, or a motivic relationship–but there is a need for variety as well.

Another way to raise the stakes might be to employ a change in texture–if things have been very homophonic up to now, it’s time for some counterpoint; if you’ve been writing lots of interwoven lines, it’s time to pare the texture down.  All kinds of great things can happen in the middle of pieces–the classical approach to creating a movement has a middle that is much more loosely-constructed than the beginning, and even in the middle of a Bach fugue, we can go long stretches without either a cadence or the fugal subject, just riffing on little ideas that have come up.  Speaking of riffing, think of the structure of a bebop jazz performance, with its tightly-constructed presentations of the head at the beginning and end and the loosely-constructed solos in the middle.

2. Lower the low points. The best part of middles is when it seems all hope is lost–that there is no possible way your character can achieve his purpose.

Remember in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo gets trapped in carbonite? Even worse, he’s shipped off with a bounty hunter to see Jabba the Hut, and our heroes are too busy trying to save Luke to chase him down.

At this moment in the story, we (the audience) feel somewhat defeated, like there’s no possible way Han can be rescued from his terrible fate. And in Return of the Jedi, this situation only gets worse when Leia is enslaved by Jabba.

Find that low point in your story (make one, if it’s not there already) and then make it worse. While you’re beating your hero into the ground, beat harder. Did something go wrong in his heist plan? Find three other things to go wrong, too. And it’ll be really satisfying to your audience when your clever protagonist manages to worm her way out of this ridiculous bind.

I think what Kiersi is getting at here is dramatic tension–the middle is the place where we really aren’t sure how things are going to work out, and as such, it has the possibility of being the most exciting part of a piece of music.  Certainly, as a composer, I often view my pieces this way when they are in process: there comes a point when I know what the rest of the piece is going to look like, and I know that I will be able to finish it.  Composing the middle, though, can be frustrating for exactly that reason–I don’t know how I’m going to get out of the situation in which I’ve placed myself.  There’s a famous moment in the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica where the texture devolves into these dissonant, repeated chords, as though Beethoven threw up his hands, smacked the piano keyboard, and wrote down the results.  Beethoven takes this almost-mistake and slowly winds his way out, with a diminuendo and resolutions of dissonant notes that leads back to the main theme–the beginning of the ending.  In my own Piano Sonata, about three-quarters of the way through, the relatively-complex rhythms and texture dissolve into a single line, notated in stemless noteheads, a moment of repose for performer and audience, and a summation of what has come so far in the piece, and preparation for some of the breathless material that lies ahead in the push to the climax.

3. Up the conflict. Are your characters friends, lovers, or comrades in arms? Are they getting along, smooching, snuggling and heisting in perfect harmony?

This is the primary way in which I find middles sag: the character relationships stale. Either they are at peace with one another for too long, or they’re at odds without any moments of relief.

Cause some conflict. Stir up some drama. But be wary of falling into common conflict traps: misunderstandings that would be easy to resolve, unlikely coincidences, or blowing up a small issue into a big one (this is my biggest complaint with romantic sub-plots).

Use inherent character flaws to guide your conflicts. Is one of your characters prideful? Have that pride lead her to hurt the other character in a way that seems irreparable.

Again, we have to turn to Beethoven, who can’t seem to write a middle section of a symphony movement without a fugato (and who was imitated by countless others).  As Kiersi mentions, though, it’s easy to fall into some common traps, and fugato is one of them (why does Brahms turn every movement of Ein Deutsches Requiem into a fugue?  I submit that it may have been youthful inexperience).  Unless your piece has been somewhat contrapuntal up to now, throwing a fugue in seems kind of desperate (Berlioz writes scathingly about this practice in his orchestration treatise).  But the beauty of fugue is that it does have that “cool” factor, and it’s critical to find something to do with your materials that propels the piece forward.  Look for the same kinds of rhythmic intensification that fugue can provide–change the position of motives within the bar, let them happen sooner, and closer together.  Foil the listener’s expectations about when things will happen: sooner (more drama), later (more tension).

4. Comic relief. I might be the only writer with this particular problem, but I have a hunch that I’m not. Why so serious? If things are getting intense in your middle–as it probably should–be cognizant of how your reader is feeling. In the middle of drama and conflict, give your reader the occasional break.

The break doesn’t always have to be comic. Let your characters have moments of tenderness or insight into one another. In a romance, let passion momentarily override conflict (leading to more conflict, of course). In a thriller, let your protagonist feel victory–short-lived victory. A good middle is a combination of low and high points, leading up to your dramatic finale.

This can be hard to remember, but great music can be funny, not just serious.  Whether it’s Bach’s quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations with its use of street songs (not funny to us, but probably hysterical to Bach), or the trio of the Scherzo in Persichetti’s Symphony for Band, where a little group of instruments, pulled along by a muted trombone, plays a little march that sounds like it would go with a Dr. Seuss story, there is humor in good music.  A composer is a human being, and being human means being both tragic and comic.  Some composers do this better than others: think of the burlesque version of the march from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony that shows up in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.  I’m sure that Shostakovich laughed the first time he heard it, because his own music is filled with irony and parody as well.

That said, it’s easier to plant comic relief in a dramatic work–the Papageno subplot in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, for example, and of course the dark humor of the graveyard scene in Hamlet that adds levity while staying on topic–the downstairs view of the goings on at Elsinor, perhaps.  Kiersi also suggests that intimate moments in the middle provide a break–it works in music, too, as in the piano-cello duet in the second movement of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1–intimate not only in texture but in meaning as well.

5. Escalate tension. A good climax is the tip of the highest peak of your story arc. Leading up to that peak are your second, third, and fourth-highest peaks.

I suggest doing this with “post-outlining”: now that you know all the plot points of your story (all the “ups” and “downs,”) organize them in order of severity. Your lowest lows and your highest highs should come near the end, leading up to your finale.

This is especially important when revealing important plot information. You don’t want to save all of your high-value cards and staggering reveals for the very end; drop some of your big bombs (but not your biggest bomb) during that sagging middle section, then escalate leading up to that super mondo finale–and hopefully leave your readers panting.

This suggestion may or may not apply to a given situation–sometimes the beginning of the end of a piece of music is a moment where tension is released–the recapitulation of a sonata-form movement, for example, or the beginning of the “Simple Gifts” variations in Copland’s Appalachian Spring.  The ending of a piece is inevitable once it begins, and layering coda upon coda (in the way Tchaikovsky does in his Fifth Symphony, for example) doesn’t move the beginning of the ending anywhere closer to being the middle.  In good music there is a crucial difference between music of the beginning, music of the middle, and music of the end.  Some great middle moments, though–the trombone chorale in the last movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony comes to mind–are the last moment of calm, an eye in the hurricane.  The birdsong section of the slow movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony is a change of character that builds into a critical statement of the motto theme of the symphony before the return of the main theme for the movement.  It would behoove all of us to study the Romanza movements that Mozart frequently uses in his later piano concerti–the quick middle Sturm und Drang sections like the one in K.466 are the uber-middle–the middle part of the middle movement of the three-movement structure.  The formal considerations of music are somewhat different than those of the novel, of course, because of the way that repetition is a critical component of good composition, but the dramatic concerns are similar.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is said to have said what every composer (and author) knows: something to the effect that starting a piece is easy, but getting to the end is hard.  This is the difference between being a tunesmith and being a composer:  a song is all theme, but a composer has to be able to take themes (or the equivalent) and connect them in meaningful ways, constructing the musical equivalent of a novel.

Band Music You Should Know

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

This is a one-off post for my students who may be pondering what to do with their Concert Band-free weeks that are coming up after tonight’s concert.  Why not make a Winter Break resolution to seek out and listen to some of the best band music ever written.  Here are twenty-five pieces to get you started:

1.  British Classics:

  • Gustav Holst:  First Suite in Eb and Second Suite in F for military band
  • Gustav Holst:  Hammersmith
  • Ralph Vaughan Williams:  Toccata Marziale (we’re playing this one next semester)
  • Ralph Vaughan Williams: English Folk Song Suite
  • Gordon Jacob: William Byrd Suite

2.  Absolute Must-Hears:

  • Percy Aldridge Grainger:  Lincolnshire Posy
  • Karel Husa:  Music for Prague 1968
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:  Serenade No. 10, K. 361/370a, “Gran Partita”
  • Aaron Copland:  Emblems
  • Alfred Reed:  Russian Christmas Music

3.  Symphonies for Band

  • Paul Hindemith, Symphony in Bb
  • Vincent Persichetti, Symphony No. 6
  • Vittorio Giannini, Symphony No. 4
  • Alan Hovhaness, Symphony No. 4
  • Morton Gould, West Point Symphony

4.  The Last Thirty Years

  • Michael Colgrass, Winds of Nagual
  • David Maslanka, A Child’s Garden of Dreams
  • Ron Nelson, Passacaglia (Homage on BACH)
  • Mark Camphouse, Watchman Tell Us of the Night
  • Joseph Schwantner, …and the mountains rising nowhere

5.  Great Transcriptions

  • Dmitri Shostakovich (Hunsberger), Festive Overture
  • Leonard Bernstein (Grundman), Overture to Candide
  • Richard Wagner (Caillet), Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral
  • Charles Ives (Thurston), “The Alcotts” from the Concord Sonata
  • Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Hindsley), Scheherezade

This will get you started, anyway.  Mahler this weekend.

Mahler, Symphony No. 9, first movement

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Of the nine Mahler symphonies, the Ninth is probably the one I come to with the least familiarity.  I’ve never seen it in concert, and I’ve never had reason before to really listen to it.  It is, I’m finding, a very different animal than what comes before, although in many ways, it is a culmination of some trends that really began with the Seventh symphony.

Like the Seventh, there is significantly less clarity of formal structure as motive becomes more and more important.  I’m reminded of Schoenberg’s assertion that motive is what composition really is about—creating a motive and then following its logical developments until a composition is worked out.  Only a few years after Mahler’s Ninth, we begin to encounter works like Schoenberg’s Pierrot, in which motive becomes the music, comprising melody, harmony and rhythm, or Erwartung, which takes a very different motivic approach, giving only exposition, never repetition over the course of a one-act opera.  Only fifteen years after Mahler’s death, Schoenberg devised dodecaphony, which was yet another effort to allow motive to determine all aspects of musical content.

There is, then, a tautness to Mahler’s Ninth that was missing from the Eighth.  The Eighth was motivically conceived, of course, but also had such a sprawling nature, such a blend of instruments, voices and text that it was probably impossible for Mahler to focus on the motivic aspects of the composition.  A text that expresses what the last scene of Faust tries to express cannot be contained in just a few motivic ideas, as Mahler correctly divined.  Both are great works, and thrilling in their way, but I remain skeptical as to whether the Eighth is really a Symphony in more than name.

If I might dwell, then, before entering into specifics, upon what actually makes a symphony.  Chuck Berry sang:

I got no kicks against modern jazz, /Unless they try to play it too darn fast, /And change the rhythm of the melody, /Until it sounds just like a symphony.

 Of course, Berry didn’t mean an actual symphony, but rather the technically driven, studied approach that jazz was coming to acquire in his era—the era of Miles Davis and other practitioners of “Cool Jazz”—in juxtaposition to the raw, often deliberately unschooled approach to rock’n’roll of his day.  But what does it mean to sound “just like a symphony?” 

When I first encountered Robert Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, I found myself wondering why he didn’t just write a slow movement and have a “complete” symphony, since I was by that time aware that a symphony had four movements in a certain order.  But then composers such as Schumann, Sibelius and Barber also felt able to compose single-movement symphonies, and history turns out to be replete with examples of symphonies that lack a fourth movement or have “extra” movements.  In the end, what is the symphonic concept?  What makes a composition for orchestra (or for band, as the ever-insistent voice of Rodney Winther reminds me) into a symphony?   Some aspects I think are important:

  • Instrumental.  This is probably a basic requirement, and it doesn’t omit all non-symphonies, although it does omit, or threaten to omit, many pieces with the title “Symphony.”  Is Beethoven’s Ninth, with its choral finale a symphony by this definition?  There is great music in its first three movements, but these act as prelude, really, to the cantata that is the last movement.  I’m not certain that a piece with voices can truly be a symphony, but I know that they aren’t required.  In fact, they sometimes undermine the symphonic ideal, at least to my thinking.  The fact remains that as much as we are musical beings, we are also verbal beings, and the marriage of text to music is always an uneven match.  Text, if we understand the language, wears the pants, so to speak, and will almost always compete successfully for the attention of most listeners.  Even the most vapid lyrics seem to win this contest.  Thus, to me, the symphonic concept is inherently instrumental.
  • Relative equality of parts.  As a trombonist, I have rested through much more symphonic music than I have played, of course, but Brahms’ First would not be complete without the trombone chorale in the fourth movement.  In that sense, the trombones are equal in importance to the other instruments, and no part can be disposed with.  That chorale could have been played by horns or bassoons, but not without a change in color and thus in character.  The appearance of a color that has been held in reserve through the first three movements is a profound and noble moment, and as the saying goes, there are no small parts, only small actors.  However, in a concerto, one part is inherently more important than all the others, and in works titled Concerto for Orchestra, or similar names, it is again the virtuosity of the players that is on display rather than the composer’s ability to make a profound statement.  Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra is not a symphony because, although I think there are messages about life in it, it is mostly about the ability of players to perform music written idiomatically for their instruments.
  • Plumbing the depths.  As Libby Larsen said, composition is about telling someone else through music what it is like to be alive.  Just as large-scale formats in other arts—mural, novel, film—put on display the understanding of the auteur of the human condition, the symphony tells us about human experience from the point of view of the composer, and, in the best moments, from the point of view of the musicians who perform the piece.  Is this present in the earliest pieces called “symphony?”  Perhaps, but it is difficult to know at 200 years’ remove.  Certainly in Mozart’s later symphonies and Haydn’s later symphonies, we get a glimpse of this, and of course it is Beethoven who forced composers to rethink the symphonic concept.  The Soviet Nicholas Miaskovsky composed over a thousand numbered symphonies—he was less writing about his life than writing for it, though, and one must wonder whether such pieces should be considered “symphonic” in their conception.  Again, it is not a difficult thing to write four movements in a symphonic pattern, particularly in a Common Practice style, but to pour one’s heart and soul and communicate to all who can play or listen on a meaningful level is a much greater challenge.  We mustn’t discount happiness and cheerfulness, though.  While there is pain and struggle and anguish in the world, a great symphony can also be filled with light—Sibelius’ Fifth, perhaps, or Dvorak’s Eighth, or much of Mendelssohn.  If one actually is happy, and filled with joy, it is probably one’s artistic duty to compose music that recognizes the value of this, an idea almost forgotten in our world of desires and causes and political statements.
  • Internal unity.  Simply writing four pieces on a related concept or program does not a symphony make.  No one would confuse Holst’s Suites for Military Band for symphonies despite their musical worthiness.  In the Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz wisely fuses the five movements through internal self-reference—the idée fixe.   With no knowledge of the program, these five pieces would seem to hang together, as do the movements in Mahler’s symphonies, because in the best symphonic writing, the number of movements is, in the end, less crucial than the way those movements are connected.  Schumann recognized this and did not try to claim the Overture, Scherzo and Finale as a symphony.  The movements of a symphony must follow one another without apology and without explanation.  They must be inevitable.  They must be as different speakers making the same point, “good-cop, bad-cop,” as it were.  Composers use harmony, melody, motive, scoring—all the tools at their disposal—to achieve this.  The sonic world of Brahms’ Second Symphony cannot be confused with that of the Third, and Mahler’s world in the Seventh Symphony is a distinctly different one from the Ninth.
  • Commitment to purpose and purposeful excellence.  A true symphony is a serious, heartfelt gesture intended to be the best work of a mature composer, written without constraints of mediocre performers and looking to the future.  It is likely to be experimental in some regard, although the experimentation is less likely to be in the realm of compositional or instrumental technique than in the realm of expressive capacity.  Just as a good pianist will test and probe the potential of an unfamiliar instrument, a true symphonic composer attempts to determine just how her ideas about existence can best be communicated through sound.  A symphony is not a one-off, but rather the core of an artist’s musical expression.  Yes, at the age of 34, I have still not written a symphony, for many reasons, but I feel that I must first master certain aspects of compositional technique, some of which are approached through this study.  A symphony should lie at the core of my oeuvre in retrospect, and given my social milieu, the opportunities that have and may come my way and my personal style, I may not be a symphonist, or there may be in the end only one symphony in me—perhaps a better situation, as how can one write such a summative piece twice?!

And now, 1500 words into this post, I have not even made a single specific reference to the piece at hand—if this were an assignment in one of my classes, I would fail myself!  But the assignment I’ve given myself is to figure out how to grow as a composer:   I hope to one day be a symphonist, or at least write large-scale music, which I have determined are not necessarily the same thing.  I am learning what I need to learn from Mahler, and my listening and score-study project is yielding fruit, if in unexpected ways.  My score is filled with notes on Mahler’s work, and I refer myself to it for future reference, but why shouldn’t this summative work, written by a man at the peak of his personal powers of musical technique and expression, elicit from me a summative sort of response, albeit slightly early?  If you’re dying for specifics, check out the strange interlude of regular formal rhythm—four-bar phrases—that begin in m. 148 and precede and follow an otherwise nearly complete lack of regularity in this regard.  Also, Mahler’s layering approach to this movement reminds me of some of Sibelius’ music—I don’t know whether there was cross-fertilization there.

Onward!  Keep fighting mediocrity!

Mahler, Symphony No. 7, movement 5

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahler, Symphony No. 6, 2nd movement

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I keep thinking of non-Mahler topics I would like to tackle here, but things have been busy.  I have some time over the next few weeks, so perhaps they will pop up, but for now, here are some observations on the Scherzo from the Sixth Symphony.

The  first time I ever heard this piece, in April 1995, as performed by the Cincinnati Symphony, I heard the Scherzo as a sort of reimagining of the first movement.  I feel less and less that this is true, but the opening bars of each bear a striking similarity with their pedal A and melodic figures that rise toward the meat of the piece–a Schenkerian inital ascent, as it were.

What is really interesting about the first section of the Scherzo is that it seems to be related to a device that Mozart and Hadyn used from time to time in their menuetto movements–the spot that later composers used for the Scherzo.  In a few of their minuets, Mozart and Hadyn employ a strict canonic construction, and if Mahler’s use of canon isn’t strict, it is at least suggested–very clearly in places like mm. 7-9, in which motives are repeated directly, and in Mahler’s use of invertible counterpoint.  It is, really, the same old trick that Zarlino teaches–using invertible counterpoint, write two sections of music at the same time.  Again, Mahler isn’t strict, but his motivic choices allow him to layer and relayer his material.

Orchestrationally, there is a great deal of sort of “standard” writing, with mixed scoring that is effective, but not particularly colorful.  Lutoslawski, with his single movement symphonic plans, criticized the Romantic composers for making two large statements in their symphonies–typically the first and last movements.  He had Brahms in mind, but surely Mahler is no less guilty, if not more so.  In the Sixth, the last movement is by far the most significant, with the first movement probably next so, if not least for beign the most memorable.  Where, then, does that leave this piece, the middle child?

In constructing a piece of this length, is it possible to fully engage the audience for the complete duration of the symphony?  It is difficult to imagine the audience not becoming slightly fidgety at some point.   In Shakespeare, there is frequently a pause in the dramatic arc at the beginning of the last act–some ceremony, or comic relief.  In the same way, Mahler has moments of intense drama that are contrasted with moments of thoughtfulness and repose–even, moments that are simply “vamp” that have us waiting patiently for a scene change or to let us relax.  Is it lazy to think of Mahler in this way?  He was a man, not a god.

This movement spends a great deal of time on the subdominant of its various keys, for example, in m. 44ff.  There is also a fair amount of sequential motion, although generally up or down by second.  This aids in getting to more remote keys, as at m. 62, which sees a modulation to C-minor.

The concept of key is beginning to feel a little stretched in some places, as in the long “D-major” section beginning in m. 273, which never arrives at a tonic chord (although, characteristically for this movement, it lands on the subdominant in m. 299).  At the same time, there are more meter changes in this movement than in any of Mahler’s work so far.  While the outer sections are somewhat canonic in structure, the frequent meter changes disrupt this by throwing a simple-meter wrench into a compound-meter machine.

The major-minor motto of this piece makes its appearance at some of the crucial formal junctures, but most importantly in the coda, beginning at m. 419.  The harmony moves down by step, with AM-am, GM-gm, FM-fm in the trumpets and flutes.  The motto returns again in A, and is repeated several times against motivic material from this movement. 

Berlioz and Tchaikovsky brought such motives into their symphonic writing; in a way, Mahler’s concept of the symphony owes a great deal to Symphonie Fantastique.  Mahler has been self-referential before, but this is the first instance of a “motto” in any of his symphonies, and so there can be little wonder about the attachment of such importance to it by musicologists.  As a composer, though, I am more interested in the musical effect–what does the listener with no knowledge of Mahler’s biography or any explicit or implicit “program” to the symphony make of this device?  It is a unifying element, certainly, but its application seems slightly ham-handed at times.  The motive itself, as I mentioned in my previous post, is clear and direct, and distinctly unconventional–a relatively rare occurence in tonal music.  Could Mahler have dealt with it in a way that is not so obvious?

Another month with this symphony, then, so another month to ponder such questions.

Mahler, Symphony No. 5, movement 4

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

This Adagietto captures, to my hearing, a version of Mozart’s Romanza design, appearing, for example, in that composer’s Concerto, K. 466 (D-minor).  Here is Mahler at his most reflective, most concentrated, with each note seemingly imbued with meaning.

Again, I’m somewhat confused by Mahler’s labelling of this symphony in C-sharp minor, as only the first movement is in that key.  This movement is in F major.  The Romanza plan calls for a basically ternary structure, with the outer sections being closely related to each other in the home key and a faster middle section in a contrasting key.  In this case, the sections divide at measures 39 and 72, with the middle section in G-flat major, the lowered second scale-degree.

Mahler’s melodic material in the first section is centered around two ideas, a three eighth-note anacrusis followed by a retardation.  At times, the anacrusis motive is augmented to three quarter-notes, as in the first celli in m. 10.  This second appearance of the theme leads to A minor in m. 19, which then pulls back to F major.  From here, the music builds to a climax on the dominant in m. 30.  The next few measures are “after-the-ending” music for the first section.

The middle section of this Romanza begins with the tempo indication “Fliessender,” in F major.  The introduction of E-flat starts to suggest that F is now the dominant instead of the tonic, and a deceptive resolution in m. 46 establishes the next key of G-flat major.  Where the first theme was centered on the tonic pitch, this second thematic material tends to descend from the dominant in something of an inversion of the original motive.  The register of the melody rises throughout this section, until a written key change to E major in m. 60.  This would appear to be a transposition of convenience, as it lasts only three measures before D major appears in m. 63.  D major is never fully established as the tonic, but the entire nine measures in this key are given over to a long dominant chord.  Instead of D major, the music shifts down another step to give C, the first note of the piece, and the dominant of the home key. 

In m. 72, the original music returns, giving the second “A” section of the Romanza form.  Mahler states this section in abridged form, with only one appearance of the first section theme and no modulation to A minor.  Measure 87 is roughly parallel to measure 23, but the approach to the dominant relies on V/V instead of the Neapolitan, and the climax of the movement in m. 95 employs the highest register of the violin.  I feel that the moment to which the movement has been building comes very late in the overall structure.  An obvious comparison is Samuel Barber’s Adagio (in its various incarnations), which seems to me to have a more proportional denouement.  This is not to say that Mahler’s music is ineffective in any way, but it is intriguing to see to very different approaches to much the same musical idea.

The fortissimo lasts until m. 100, whereupon a final suspension brings the music to the expected tonic chord, strangely, strangely voiced without the middle strings (although in a wondrously sonorous open voicing that would get a good mark from me on on orchestration assignment).

What then is the compositional lesson one can take from this movement?  I hope that I can learn from Mahler’s approach to tension and release, to slow unfolding, to harmonic variety within tonal coherence.

This leaves the rest of the month for the final movement.  I’ve given myself a little extra time, as my wife and I are anticipating the birth of our son–if my posts become less frequent, that may be the reason, but I’m going to try to keep to my schedule.

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.

Mahler–Symphony No. 3, 6th movement

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahler, Symphony No. 3, Movement 3

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Getting behind means I keep this one short–three more movements to hit by the first of the year, so a few questions for further thought.

The posthorn solo is, of course, the prominent aspect of this movement, although there is enough music here for a symphony in its own right.  Some questions–what is the significance of the most prominent musical element in a texture being placed off-stage–in a position of drastically reduced promienence?  Is the posthorn solo, with interjections from the orchestra, meant in someway to balance the trombone solo in the first movement?

A big question about the overall structure of the piece–do the two parts of this symphony balance each other?  Do five smaller movements hold their own against the enormous first movement?

Can Mahler’s style be addressed using schemata in the same way that, say, the Viennese Classical style can be?  Possible schemata–the alternation between major and minor chord qualities, found here, for example, in mm.57-58 on the small scale, and on a larger scale in the entire first section, alternating between C major and C minor.  Mahler also has a very typical cadence–for example, mm. 338-339.  Can these types of cliches be as important as those found in Haydn and Mozart?

As always, fascinating orchestration:  mm. 358ff, 437ff, especially.  I have come to feel that a hallmark of the Austrian symphonic tradition–from Mozart on–is the interplay between strings and winds, and Mahler is no exception so far, especially in interior movements.  Motivic material is frequently given to these two groups alternately in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and here in Mahler as well, although Mahler now begins to separate the woodwinds and brass (especially the horns, now in an expanded section).  I’ve commented on this before.

So–short but sweet tonight.  With luck, the rest of the symphony will follow in the next two weeks.