Posts Tagged ‘Symphony No. 1’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?