Rehearsal Update:
Monday was our third-to-last rehearsal, and things are going well. Over the last two weeks, I’ve chosen two movements to rehearse and two to run-through: I firmly believe that a once-a-week group like ours needs to play most of the notes at every rehearsal whenever possible. The first movement is by far the toughest, and for us would be a challenging piece if it weren’t followed by four more. I feel like the fourth movement has gotten short shrift: maybe it can get a little love in our last two rehearsals… but we also have other priorities to get ready for the concert, so time will be of the essence.
I also came to the realization that we will likely need to run if not the whole piece, large swathes of it in our warm-up rehearsal on the day of. This is a little daunting, as endurance for all of us is a concern. Hopefully those who need to can mark a little.
The Not Influences?
Looking over my two posts on the influences on my symphony, I noticed some prominent names and pieces left off. That’s not to say that these composers and works haven’t been important to me at some point in the past, or that they didn’t influence me subconsciously, but they didn’t come to mind when I made my list the first time.
Haydn and Mozart
I mean, sure, the symphony as a genre exists in large part because these two got ahold of it and began to write pieces (sometimes) that would transcend mere entertainment. But were they at the forefront of my mind during this process? No. That said, the first time I tried to analyze an entire symphony movement, it was the first movement of Mozart’s 40th (and it was mostly Roman numeral analysis, which probably missed the point entirely). Haydn is even less on my radar, although his 88th symphony has long been my go-to “listen to a whole symphony” in music appreciation class (although, to be fair, I haven’t done that activity in few years). This was less because I was inspired by the piece than because it was part of the textbook I was using two textbooks ago (I still haven’t found a music appreciation book that I’m completely satisfied with, which could be the subject of a different post).
It’s hard to find anything to argue about with the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, but any message they hope to communicate doesn’t seem to come through. It may be the historical distance, which in turn is a philosophical distance.
Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies are absolute warhorses, and of course I’m familiar with them. Tchaikovsky’s Fourth was one of the first orchestral scores I ever studied beyond excerpts in orchestration books, back in high school when I was writing my first orchestral piece, the trombone concerto with string orchestra that was my senior thesis (interesting story that one). His Fifth was one of the first symphonies I got to play, during my year in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra, and the Sixth… well, I have yet to dig into the Sixth. I also conducted Tchaikovsky’s Second with Lakeland back in 2017, although we ended up cutting the scherzo, because the piece was just too much to squeeze into the rehearsal time for one of our spring semester concerts–I learned from that experience and programmed my symphony in the fall, when we have only one on-campus concert and so more rehearsal to devote to it.
I certainly could have listed Tchaikovsky among my influences, most evident in parts of the last movement that may seem to borrow in approach from the last movement of the Fifth, but his work was simply not at the front of my mind as I worked. Where Copland’s Third was a “time to beat,” that simply wasn’t the case here.
Bruckner
My first encounter with Bruckner was in recordings from the public library as a high school student, particularly a sprawling performance of the Eighth Symphony that stretched across two CDs. I remember playing the finale before school one morning, and having those pounding rhythms following me around from class to class all day. In college, I had to prepare the Fourth for ensemble auditions one year, but other than transcriptions of the Adagio of the Seventh, I’ve never performed Bruckner’s music. I first heard his work live in a performance of the Seventh by the Cincinnati Symphony which also happened to be my brother’s first non-young-people’s orchestra concert. His response was, “It was awesome, but I had no idea it would be so long.” For a time in my mid-20s, I was most enamored with Bruckner’s Fifth, and in my early 30s made a transcription for concert band of his motet Locus Iste that worked musically, but had to abandon the composer’s dynamic plan.
Which about sums it up. Like Tchaikovsky, there is probably some un-spoken influence on my work, but no conscious imitation or inspiration. I didn’t imitate Bruckner’s scoring (soooo much tremolo strings!) or his grandiose architecture (the cliche of the cathedral should go here), but the spinning out of the melody in the first movement of my symphony has something Brucknerian about it.
Mahler
I admire Mahler; I appreciate him; I struggle to understand his work; but I am not a “Mahler nut.” I’ve spent time with his music, but only once as a performer: when I led the Lakeland Civic Orchestra in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. As a trombonist, I wrestled with the solo from the Third Symphony, and studied the Fifth Symphony in preparation for auditions. The symphonies do not reward the casual sort of listening that I did as a beginning classical music fan: lots of listening to CDs while I did homework, or catching things on the radio in the car. Despite my best efforts, I have yet to hear the Eighth or Ninth in concert, but my checklist is otherwise complete, at least for the completed works. I also wrote a paper on the Tenth and its process of completion after the composer’s death that was, for me at least, enlightening about the process of writing pieces: Mahler’s short-score to full-score approach is essentially my own. Then, of course, in the early days of this blog, I worked my way through the nine completed symphonies, analyzing them for form and orchestration, and writing about them movement by movement. This was a follow-up to a similar project for Beethoven’s piano sonatas that I settled on as a project that would be a bridge between graduate school and whatever would come next: if I had ended up working at Starbucks, I would at least have a reason to keep my head in music.
But direct influence of Mahler on my work? Perhaps in the finale, when I bring in the flugelhorn, and certainly there has to be some connection between my sense of orchestration and Mahler’s. And then, the significance of the chorale–the basis for the entire piece, the masked versions of it that appear from time to time, and complete statement of it. In the second movement, there is the self-quotation that we find so often in Mahler as well. But again, my goal wasn’t the same as Mahler’s: he means the symphony to contain the world, and I don’t see that as a meaningful or even possible outcome. There is a statement in my piece, but it doesn’t wrap around all of existence.
Shostakovich
My first encounter with Shostakovich was, as is so often the case, with his Fifth, famously played ridiculously fast by Leonard Bernstein to fit onto an LP. Next came the Seventh, with its paralyzingly long march, and luckily, when I heard Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra for the first time, I got the joke. Then, in the summer before college, I got to know the First as I prepared for seating auditions. The Cincinnati Symphony played Shostakovich well and often when I was there–the Fifth, the Sixth, the Eighth–but he wasn’t a regular in Columbus when I lived there, and I’ve only heard the Eighth here in Cleveland. Has he perhaps fallen out of favor in this country?
That said, the influence of Shostakovich in my music is fairly clear even if I didn’t specifically have his work in mind as I wrote. But, there is a scale in his music that I don’t come to, and of course, like Mahler, I have much less of the tension of being an outsider or a dissident in my life and thus in my work. I want to make a statement, but I don’t intend to shock or to hide my intentions. To the extent that there is a hidden idea, it is more like Elgar’s Enigma: can the listener find the chorale that they know is supposed to be there (or, for the listener who doesn’t know the idea behind the work coming in, would it be evident and would the statement of the chorale seem inevitable)?
Maslanka
Other than conducting Rollo Takes a Walk many years ago as a band director, I have very little experience of the music of David Maslanka, something I mean to rectify. Maslanka was mostly a band composer, and mostly wrote pieces that require a strong college-level band or wind ensemble. I listened to the retirement concert of Dr. Mallory Thompson last year. I never worked closely with Dr. Thompson, but she spent a year at CCM when I was there, and I played in Michael Colgrass’ Winds of Nagual under her baton, which was a formative experience in important ways. Dr. Thompson had a strong connection with Maslanka’s music, and included the Fourth Symphony in her final concert as director of bands at Northwestern University. I enjoyed listening to the piece, and was then surprised to hear “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow” in a complete statement, right in the middle. I wasn’t stealing Maslanka’s idea–but I knew that I couldn’t possibly be the first person to incorporate “my hymn” into a larger instrumental piece. That said, I think it works pretty well.
Come to the concert on November 9, and see how you think my approach stands up.