Posts Tagged ‘Wagner’

Mahler, Symphony No. 6, movement 4

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I will be the first to admit that I have not done my homework to the extent I would ideally like to over the past two weeks.  Perhaps I should have allotted more time to the 822 measures of this movement, but truthfully other things have got in the way.  To allow myself an extension would simply impinge on the three remaining pieces, and since by the time I am ready to write the next blog entry, we will also be on the cusp of moving, it seems better to summarize my observations and move forward today.

With this movement, it seems very difficult to get past Mahler’s symbolism–the hammer blows, the major-minor motive and the rest.  Tony Duggan, in his excellent summary of recent recordings of this piece, deals with some of the many performance issues, such as the ordering of the movements (which differs from my edition, the Dover miniature score and from many recent recordings), and the precise number of hammer blows (Mahler’s final decision appears to have been two, while my score, a reprint of the 1906 Nachfolger edition, calls for three).  He also suggests that this piece is the most classically ordered of all of Mahler’s symphonies, and I find myself tending to agree with that statement.

In an interesting way, the two hammer blows that Mahler retained seem to delineate the exposition, development and recapitulation of a sonata-allegro form, with the third (missing) blow indicating the coda.

Mahler opens this movement with an interesting texture and harmony–a German augmented-sixth chord that resolves deceptively to the tonic in m. 9, the first appearance of the major-minor motive in this movement.  The motive is presented as it appeared in the first movement, in the brass, and accompanied by timpani and drums, but with the strings offering a countermelody that contains material of motivic importance for the rest of the movement.

In m. 16, a tuba solo introduces further new material, including an octave leap.  Throughout this symphony, the octave leap has been an important element, and part of the cohesiveness of the work as a whole is Mahler’s use of the octave (and sometimes larger intervals) to create a sense of drama and pathos.  Rodney Winther teaches that small intervals build tension, while large intervals build drama, and Mahler employs both, but the drama of this movement is the aspect that wins out, I think.

The tuba solo is accompanied by a descending chromatic bass, which is highly typical of Mahler.  In mm. 19 and 22, the clarinets and horns have an interesting effect that I typically associate more with later composers, such as Stravinsky.  The clarinets articulate the beginning of a phrase, but the horns sustain the final note, as though the echo has a different timbre than the initial attack.  In the end, it is this sort of synthesis and blending that makes for fantastic orchestral writing, and Mahler is transcending the German orchestrational style in this instance.  A comparison with the scoring techniques used by composers of a generation earlier–Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner–reveals a much more conservative approach, with much greater use of simple block and mixed scoring techniques.  Composers of the same generation and younger, however, start to show this sort of adventurous approach to orchestration–Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, for example.  Strauss would seem to be the first of these new orchestrators to achieve notoriety–before Mahler, perhaps?

I don’t often wish that I were a trumpet player, but m. 46 has an absolutely fantastic line that makes me a little bit envious.  This is followed by another typical descent to the cadence, as the music shifts to C-minor in m. 49 for a chorale setting, first in a very dark woodwind and horn timbre, then in a lighter timbre that uses the middle, relaxed registor of the horns.  Again, Mahler is being expository here, and this material reappears later in the movement in a drastically transformed body.

From this point, the tempo and scoring become faster and fuller, and by m. 114, the written tempo is Allegro energico, the tempo of the first movement.  The martial, mechanistic feel of that movement is carried forward here in a section that, if not quotation, is at least style-copy.

In m. 182, marked pesante, the low brass state a theme that begins with a decsending octave, here on A.  This theme reappears after both of the hammer blows, and as the dark coda, which would have followed the third hammer blow in Mahler’s sometime plan for this movment. 

Measure 228 sees the harmony move from D major to D minor, with both the descending octave idea and a texture that is reminiscent of the material in the first few measures of this movement.  This portion of the piece is developmental in nature, and as it builds to the first hammer blow (m. 336) the music becomes more an more rhythmically compelx, particularly around m. 290, where Mahler juxtaposes several divisions of the beat as the music leads to a cadence in G major in m. 296.

A trend that I have detected in Mahler’s work is a growing concern with counterpoint.  Almost nowhere in this movement does Mahler use a simple “melody with accompaniment” texture.  Whether imitation or inversion or augmentation, Mahler seems to have come to a more “crafty” approach to his art.  At the same time, Mahler’s counterpoint does not adhere strictly to the traditional “rules,” and dissonance is often freely introduced without preparation.   For an example of this tendency, see mm. 302ff, wherein a two-measure motive is passed around imitatively, often with strikingly dissonant results.

I find myself shorter on time than on ideas about this piece–again, I refer myself to my notes on it.  The last three canonical symphonies remain–I am undecided about the Tenth, Das Lied von der Erde or some of the other pieces I might work with.  The Seventh, Eighth and Ninth are enormous compositions with which I am somewhat less familiar with than the first six symphonies, and come December, I will have to see where my thinking about Mahler lies.  If I have learned what I need to from this master, I may move on (to what, I am not certain).

Schedule for the Seventh will be as follows:

  • July 1-12: Movement 1
  • July 13-24: Movement 2
  • July 25-August 5: Movement 3
  • August 6-17:  Movement 4
  • August 18-31:  Movement 5

Hope to have you with me!

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Mahler, Symphony No. 6, first movement

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Part of the problem in thinking about this piece will prove to be cutting through what I think of as the “mythology–” a tragic piece responding to tragedy, with hammer blows, and fate-motives–and getting to what makes it, in the end, a magnificently effective musical statement.

The truth is that none of the extramusical meaning means a thing if the piece isn’t well-crafted and well-executed.  Fortunately for us, Mahler was not only pouring his soul into the piece, but he was using his mind as a composer at the peak of his creative powers.

I must begin with some thoughts about scoring, because this orchestra is simply enormous.  I remember being a college student and seeing the Cincinnati Symphony fill its stage to near capacity for this piece, and it seemed as though not a single musician more could have been on the platform.  One of my music history teachers, John Trout, taught that Mahler’s orchestra was of that size not for the sake of power, but to allow a greater number of combinations of instruments, and to illustrate this, he used an example from the Kindertotenlieder, the work Mahler finished just before the Sixth.  Indeed, in that vocal texture, Mahler did score delicately, but he also didn’t score for an orchestra of the size found in the Sixth.  As much as Mahler’s scoring is at times delicate, always well-conceived and above all masterful, I think, in this movement at least, it is about power.  Sixteen brass have the effect at times of a slap in the face, particularly when the trumpet in F is near the top of its range. 

Most of the mood of this first movement is simply menacing, and it is cast in one of Mahler’s strictest sonata-allegro forms, with no slow introduction as in the opening movement of the First.  To my hearing, the secondary theme begins in the pick-ups to m. 77, with the key change to F major, a closely-related key to the home key, a-minor.  The exposition is repeated, with the development section clearly beginning in m. 128.  The recapitulation begins in m. 291, with the return of the main theme in A major and the secondary theme at m. 357 in D major–keeping the same relative harmonic distance of “adding a flat” but not the same key relationship.  A coda begins at m. 379, in precisely the place that it “ought” to begin in a sonata model.

Mahler has not, up to this time, been an especially strict follower of the classical forms, and I have to wonder what caused him to begin to be so now.  In reading program notes and musicological discussions of this piece, I have never read that, in addition to hiding autobiographical information and working through his not-inconsiderable angst in this piece, Mahler also adheres as close as can be expected to a formal model that had largely passed by the wayside (although Beethoven was always close to Mahler’s mind, and to the minds of his contemporaries).  This is Mahler’s first all-instrumental four-movement symphony (the First was originally in five movements), and as arch-Romantic as its expression seems, at the same time, its conception, at least in this first movement, is as meta-Classical as Brahms or Mendelssohn.

With the formal overview covered, then, here are some spots I find to be of interest.

The main theme, beginning in m. 6 has a highly characteristic octave jump that creates from the first moments of the piece a lurching, yet strangely deliberate quality.  This octave motive, though, is only part of Mahler’s material.  In m. 8, the violins have the first appearance of a developmentally supple fragment that will appear again and again through the movement, most interestingly in inversion as the head motive of the secondary theme. 

Dotted rhythms are crucial to this piece–they are propulsive, pulling the ear constantly forward, but with each iteration giving a sense of pause before the “late” second note.  Almost every measure of the main theme includes them, with the exception of those measures in which the melody dissolves into running 16ths (as in mm. 11-12). 

In a technique again typical of the Classical sonata-allegro, the transitional material begins with a modified version of the main theme in m. 25.  This time, the octave leap is down, not up.   A sequence in m. 31 over an insistent pedal A starts to open up the harmonic realm, until the main theme returns in m. 43 over a chromatic descent from A to E, the goal of this section.

In m. 53, the running 16th notes come apart into trill gestrues in the woodwinds and low strings.  The scoring is compelling, particularly the last statement of this idea in m. 56 by the contrabassoon in its low register with the basses.  Here is a deviation from the Classical model–at this point, the secondary theme should enter in the dominant, but Mahler instead returns to the tonic to give the first appearance of a motive that he has used before, but will take on paramount importance in this symphony–the major triad changing to a minor triad on the same root.  In this first instance, mm. 59 and 60, it appears in the trumpets and oboes (note the intriguing use of dynamics here), in the home key, A.  It is followed by a transitional passage that does lead to the second theme, in the key of F, which is reached by a deceptive resolution of the dominant in m. 77.

Before continuing on, I must consider this changing chord-quality motive.  A change from a major to a minor chord is rarely part of the “textbook” tonal vocabulary.  It would tend to suggest a passing tone, often from IV to iv to I (la-le-sol is the specific voicing I have in mind).  A more likely event might be a diatonic minor triad becoming a secondary dominant chord, as, for example, i to V/IV, but this is the retrograde of what Mahler is giving us.  Does this fall under the rubric of “coloristic chord succession” from the Kotska-Payne textbook, where those authors throw up their hands, as if to say, “Sometimes composers just write what sounds good!”  The other usage of this sort of succession that comes to mind is in the Italian madrigalists, particularly Gesualdo, in which this sort of motive becomes a means for expressing a text.  As a motive, then, it has the advantage of being unfamiliar enough to the listener that it doesn’t simply blend into the texture.

The secondary theme is derived from the first theme–its head motive is a reworking of the material found in m. 8.  This motivic tautness is a characteristic that I greatly admire in all of Mahler’s music–while his work may seem sprawling, there is an underlying unity that justifies its dimensions, and Mahler truly does not overstay his welcome.  I don’t consider myself to have a great attention span, particularly for the spoken word, but, truthfully, sometimes for musical utterance as well.  Mahler holds my attention, not through variety but through unity.

I find it interesting that at the beginning of the first ending (m. 121), Mahler returns to A minor in a retrograde fashion from the way he got there–moving from F down to E, and thence to A in the bass.  This would not be a completely tonal solution but for the fact that the F is not the root of the chord here.

Again, Mahler’s development section is tightly conceived, even if it ranges widely from a harmonic standpoint.  Measure  149 sees the main theme in e minor, which moves quickly back to the home key in m. 156.  One of my favorite melodic moments in the piece happens at m. 163, when a very strident, almost Tchaikovskian melody appears in the violins and high woodwinds.  It is, of course, derived from the main theme.

Measure 180 has a typically Mahlerian descent in the bass to a new key–now D minor.  This means of modulating is typical of Mahler,  and I believe he may have borrowed it from Wagner; more research is needed on this point. 

Measure 201 begins a slow section that is a point of repose (almost relief) within this massive movement.  Although the Seventh Symphony has a more pastoral character, Mahler uses cowbells for the first time in this section, with an interesting notational solution instead of the standard roll notation that he might have borrowed from the snare drum.

With that, I must close–I’ve far exceeded the time I allotted myself this morning, and other duties beckon.  I refer myself to my notes in the score.

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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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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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From Beethoven to Mahler

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

It’s the new fiscal year in many states, as I was reminded on NPR this morning.  It’s a big day for me in my intellectual life, too.  I have completed my survey of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and have moved on to the nine Mahler Symphonies.  Hopefully, at least a few people will be taking this journey with me, one symphony every two months, from now until the end of 2010.  I’m writing these entries on my blog, www.martiandances.com/blog, but I’ve also fed the blog to Facebook, where it will appear as a “Note.”  Feel free to comment on either location, although since I’m in charge of the blog, and Facebook is in charge of Facebook…

I dropped my wife off at the airport today, which meant a two-hour drive home from Amarillo by myself.  As I pulled out of town, I dropped my reference recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (Bernstein with Amsterdam) into the CD player, and I got to thinking about some of the differences between Beethoven and Mahler.

Of course, there is more than half a century between Beethoven’s last sonata (Op. 111 from 1822) and Mahler’s first complete symphony (finished in 1888).  In that period are Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn (and his Bach revival), Smetana and the first round of nationalists, Liszt, most of Brahms and (the big one, at least in my received wisdom) Wagner.  I think it might be safe to say that for Mahler, the two most influential figures are Beethoven, the first composer for whom a symphony was always a major artistic statement, and Wagner.

Charles Rosen suggests that the Classical style was informed, at its root, by the dramatic and comic developments in operatic music.  It seems quite possible to me that for Mahler, who earned his daily bread conducting opera, not symphonic music, that we must look in many ways to the developments in opera by Weber (whose final opera Die Feen (or is it Der Drei Pintos?  help!) Mahler attemped to complete) and Wagner (whose operas Mahler helped to introduce in Vienna and which he guarded jealously from his assistant conductors throughout his career).

I’m particularly interested in how Mahler creates the scale of these works.  As a composer, I don’t feel confident about writing long movements, and I want to develop this ability.  Some observations based on my re-hearing of the “Titan:”

  • Mahler sometimes employs sectional forms, which allows (nay, demands) the repetition of vast swathes of music.  The second and third movements of the present piece are indicative of this.
  • Where Beethoven is more prone to repetition (and sequential writing) on the motivic level, Mahler seems more likely to repeat thematically.  Again, repeating long(er) passages is the result.  By comparison, my music repeats much less frequently than either of these two composers, although much more often than, say, Schoenberg in his Erwartung period.  The trick isn’t repetition–it is meaningful repetition.
  • In general, Mahler’s music is much more melody-driven than Beethoven’s (and mine).  This will be an excellent study for me, as it will give me a chance to see whether in the face of additional evidence I still truly believe that rhythm is of greater importance than melody or harmony.
  • It would be apples and oranges to compare the orchestration of Beethoven’s piano sonatas to Mahler’s symphonies.  That said, even over the noise from the “loud” pavement on US 287, I have begun to make notes of effects I want to look at more closely.  We are so fortunate to have recordings right at our fingertips… I heard a string passage this afternoon that I can’t wait to dig into, and the beginning of the fourth movement is a perfect illustration of when and why to use unmeasured tremolo in the strings.
  • Again… loud pavement makes for bad listening, but are Mahler’s harmonies in this piece a great deal simpler than Beethoven’s?  This is why I’m doing this project.  As many times as I’ve listened to this piece, I haven’t even begun to hear it.

I want to throw a question out there that was inspired by a liner note I once read about this piece:  Is Mahler, in writing this symphony, actually using collage (or even pastiche) techniques?  Many of the melodies (especially in the first movement) are derived from Mahler’s earlier works (particularly, Des Knabben Wunderhorn).  Other melodies are folk tunes, and still others bear resemblances to canonical works.  Is Mahler’s intent to somehow document a sonic realm of the imagination?  Is this a viable way to understand this piece?

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Opus 81a

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Once again, the month is nearly over, and I haven’t dug into this piece nearly the way I would have liked to.  All the same… some thoughts.

Did Wagner get the idea of leitmotiv from Beethoven, or was it simply in the air?  I’m no musicologist, so someone will have to answer the question for me.  Beethoven’s Lebewohl motive in the first movement is a prototypical–just as the entire Ring cycle comes out of the descending Eb major triad, Beethoven chooses mi-re-do… what else for a Classical composer who knows that the music will end up there at some point anyway.  Yes, I still think Beethoven is a classical composer, despite the steady appearance of more and more Romantic-era traits.

Compare the two sonata forms in this piece to those in Brahms’ Op. 1.  Brahms and Beethoven are using the same harmonic concepts for the most part, but Beethoven thinks in motivic terms, while Brahms is very clearly writing themes most of the time.  Beethoven is creating an organic, living piece of music in the only way he really knows how; Brahms has chosen sonata form from several other possibilities and is putting things where they are supposed to be.

In the first movment, we seem for once to have an instance where the development section is extended, but on second inspection, the exposition and the development are in roughly equal proportions–if the repeat sign on the exposition is observed.  The form is well-balanced, too, with the inclusion of the opening Adagio.

The second movement is loads of fun–harmonically evasive, and brooding in character.  Is it a developmental core without an exposition or recapitulation?  Is there any way to see the complete sonata as one large sonata form?  There might be a paper in that.

I’m absolutely in love with the two places in the last movement (one in the exposition and one in the recapitulation) where Beethoven uses triads with roots a minor second apart.  Gb and F the first time, Cb and Bb the second time.  Both times, the passage ends with a rarity that I just taught last week in Sophomore Theory–an augmented-sixth chord that resolves to a tone that is not the root of its triad (the third in this case).  If any of my students are reading this… hint, hint… finals are coming up!  Not only that, an enharmonic passage right at the beginning of the development.  Why play in Cb when you can play in B?

On a somewhat-related note… I had time this morning to compose, and the piano piece is ready for the computer.

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