Celebrating Zwilich’s First Symphony

Mayday! May Day. May 1^st. As good a day as any to celebrate beginnings.

Here’s a question for you: What does it mean to write a first symphony? Perhaps for Beethoven it meant self-assertion, a way of setting himself apart from his classical forebears. Perhaps for Brahms it meant living in a world after Beethoven and composing in the company of his by turns inspiring and oppressive ghost. Perhaps for Mahler it meant showing that the symphony had a place in an age of Wagner and Strauss, that it had sufficient epic pull in a concert culture of program music. Perhaps for Bruckner it meant a path toward the divine. Perhaps for Prokofiev and Shostakovich it meant something about returning to the classical origins of the form, reminding a twentieth-century audience that symphonies didn’t have to be hour-long plummetings into the pool of Weltschmerz, although they knew plenty about that. And after the wars? And in the U.S.? Perhaps it came to mean something like. . .self-assertion, at individual and national levels, or living in a world after. . .well, after lots of things—a world of post-ness—or a claim that a first symphony could possess epic pull or was a path to the divine or that it could still manage classical deftness. In fact, it gradually came to mean all those things and more: an overburdened opportunity, and so very irresistible for it, even in a post-symphonic age. I caught the symphonic bug early myself and attempted a three-movement Symphony No. 1, not that anything particularly useful came of it except perhaps an appreciation for composers who could manage it better than I. And it so happens that two fellow San Antonio composers are even now laboring away at symphonies (Brian Bondari, and James Syler, on his second).

(Nexus entry.)

The album I listened to for this entry contains a Symphony No. 1, of course, a work that scored the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Some of the aims of this particular first symphony are probably similar to those proposed above. Possessed of an immense lyrical wealth akin to late Mahler or Berg or the agonizing side of Shostakovich, it has about it the atmosphere of the epic. At the same time it’s three relatively brief movements taken together clock in at a modest seventeen to eighteen minutes, terser even than most of Papa Haydn’s. The composer (still living) was, as the awarding of the Pulitzer indicates, an American, and here’s where things get more interesting. Does it sound like the great American symphony, and if so, how?

I heard Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s First Symphony long ago as an undergraduate but then hadn’t heard it in the intervening (ahem) years until I recently pulled it from the shelf of the listening library in order to revisit what I understood as an important American work in the genre. Zwilich [pronounced ZWILL-ik] was, after all, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music, a mighty accomplishment in the early 1980s, which, although it was post-many things, was also pre-many others. I speculate that the prize committee heard in Zwilich’s First something that did sound American to them, not in a flag-waving sense but in a finger-on-the-pulse one, and that they also understood that the composer’s accomplishment represented an important part of the American story, as indeed it did and does.

But the thing that strikes me so powerfully as I return to this symphony is how skillfully Zwilich makes a Euro-American hybrid. I hear the aching strings of Mahler and Berg—she was a violinist first, and it shows—but the texture is far leaner, clear and direct, even Coplandesque at times, primed for effective communication with a larger, American public. In the liner notes for the album, Zwilich explains that she had “long been interested in the elaboration of large-scale works from the initial material.” That might sound like a Schoenbergian way of talking about what happens in symphonic space, but when you listen to the opening of the First Symphony, you hear a major third once, then a second time, then a third time, and that repetition establishes the rising motive that becomes a theme. This strategy—the straightforward communication through repetition of a simple initial idea, a germ, that will give rise to the rest—is more appropriate to Beethoven’s Fifth than to most works with such notable modernist credentials. Mass communication of classical music, like Texaco sponsoring broadcasts from the Met from 1931 to 2003, sounds pretty American, doesn’t it?

The opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, isn’t it?

But more is needed to make that communication work than the repetition of an ascending major third, however beautifully varied or artfully orchestrated. And Zwilich does give more. The central developmental section of the first movement doesn’t sound like but is informed by melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and orchestrational logic reminiscent of the action-oriented music of late-1970s and early-1980s big-budget Hollywood film scores. More specifically, I hear the development section as a cousin of John Williams’s score for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). There’s probably more to say about specific connections between film scores and (latent) narrativity in Zwilich’s symphony. Richard Dyer writes in the liner notes that, despite the fact that the composer usually waits for commissions, she began her First Symphony before she had one, and that the “first fifteen bars,” from which “everything in the work arises,” she felt “compelled to write.” Who knows what lies behind this, what it was that compelled her? But the lyrical language of the work, which moves between anguish and repose, opens the door to the narrative imagination. We needn’t walk through. It’s easy enough to accept Zwilich’s work as “absolute music,” and my suggestion about a certain affinity with contemporaneous film scores is about the materials of music: notes, rhythms, and textures. Moreover, these notes, rhythms, and textures link what was going on in the classical season of orchestras in the late 1970s and 1980s and what was going on (or starting to go on) in the pops season. Finger on the pulse indeed.

(Nexus exit.)

As always, there’s so very much to say. A work like Zwilich’s First Symphony deserves lengthier exposition, a rich and nuanced reading: it is a worthy and wonderful work, and important since Zwilich has to date written four other symphonies. Go listen to it if you haven’t, or listen to it again if you’ve forgotten it. But this album contains two other fine works as well—Prologue and Variations (1984) and Celebration (1984)—all played admirably by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra under John Nelson. Celebration particularly fascinated me on this listening, unmistakably evoking the opening of Mahler’s First Symphony and anticipating the Tarantella movement of Corigliano’s First Symphony. If neither of those works seem particularly celebratory in those places, then you’ll understand something of my fascination with the rhetorical riddle of Zwilich’s title. And discovering for the first time or rediscovering something fascinating is well worth celebrating.

Forever Unfinished: Ives’s Fourth Symphony

“This was like a first shot of heroin to me. I became hooked thoroughly on Ives.” So said John McClure (1929-2014), famed producer of some of the great Stravinsky and Bernstein albums for Columbia Records, about his experience of hearing the Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” each of the movements of which connects to the American transcendentalists: I. “Emerson”; II. “Hawthorne”; III. “The Alcotts”; IV. “Thoreau.” I had a similar reaction to Ives, though I can’t remember if the first piece of his I heard was Three Places in New England, The Unanswered Question, or the Second Piano Sonata, because once I had encountered the first, I sought out the others in quick succession. I do remember, though, that the first time I heard Ives’s Concord Sonata, my experience was, bizarrely, not that Ives’s was quoting someone else, but that someone else was quoting Ives. At the risk of being self-indulgent, I’ll take the trouble to explain.

It happened that, in the late 1980s, when I regularly fired up the Walkman to ease the passage of homework that didn’t particularly compel me (Shame!), I would often pop in a cassette of Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s 1986 album The Way It Is. 81PMp5uth2L._SX425_.jpg The second track, “Every Little Kiss,” opens with Hornsby’s piano solo—hardly a surprise, as that was sort of how he carved out his unconventional place in the popiverse of the Reagan years. Through repeated background listening I memorized “every little” nuance of that opening solo.

¡¡EnTeR tHe UnIvErSiTy YeArS!!. . .when I encountered Ives, as described above, and was stunned to discover that Hornsby’s opening solo was lifted straight from the opening of “The Alcotts.” Hornsby has never made any secret of liking Ives, so I think this gesture is a straightforward homage to an important musical influence and not an attempt to communicate anything connected with the household that gave the world Louisa May Alcott. Nevertheless, so fascinated was I by this connection, and by the phenomenon of initially encountering Ives’s music as something someone else had quoted instead of as a compendium of quotes itself—and the opening of “The Alcotts” is itself a compendium of quotes, as I would later learn from J. Peter Burkholder’s All Made of Tunes (Yale Univ. Press, 1995)—that I quoted the opening of “Every Little Kiss”/“The Alcotts” in a piece I wrote at university, “Job Work,” a setting of a poem by James Whitcomb Riley for tenor and chamber winds. (Here’s the really self-indulgent part—sorry.) I used the quote for Riley’s lines “And shout in glee such a symphony/That the whole world understands.” The opening of “The Alcotts” is a sly re-harmonization of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, so by using the Ives-via-Hornsby quote for this line, I think I must have been saying something about how the quotation and re-quotation of Beethoven points to a “symphony that the whole world understands.” But the more interesting point to me now is that my recognition of the phenomenon of quotation sparked further quotation, a compositional quirk I’ve never really been able to shake.

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It was illuminating, therefore, to sit next to a (ahem) certain Ives scholar at the last American Musicological Society meeting in Rochester, and to briefly discuss, while we were waiting for Susan McClary’s talk to get underway, quotation in Ives. I said something about how different an experience Ives must be for students now, many of whom don’t know any of the tunes that Ives quotes. (Lots of people have said this; I was just being banal.) The Ives scholar pleasantly but firmly made the point that identifying a particular tune was not necessary for an enjoyment of Ives’s music—that, in fact, perceiving the quotation of style was sufficient, an argument he had been making for a very long time and one that he continued to promote through publication and, I’m happy to say, in casual conversation.

I’ve thought about that conservation frequently in the intervening months, wondering if my knowledge of, say, classical repertory and hymn tunes, makes Ives fascinating to me because of my familiarity with specific pieces or because of the concomitant familiarity with certain styles. The answer isn’t an either/or. Yes, it does mean something to identify specific quotes in Ives; it enriches the listening experience significantly. But suddenly I catch myself and wonder if what it enriches is the process of reflecting on the listening experience, and if, during the experience of listening itself, style “leads” and specificity of quotation is less significant. To identify a specific quotation is to stand outside the experience of listening, to a certain extent. (If all you’re thinking about during “Ice Ice Baby” is “Under Pressure,” you’re not in the musical moment, right?) The frequency of quotation in Ives’s music, taken with listeners’ varying abilities to identify specific pieces, would seem to suggest that the experience of listening to his music is a dance between in and out, between riding along on a current of style and considering a concatenation of distinct phenomena from a distance. This inside/outside dance that potentially characterizes listening to Ives can be initially disorienting, confusing, but it can also be terrifically exciting, because you’re not sure what the composer is asking of you. Are you in or are you out, and where should you be? There’s something about it that feels like our experience of music as an entire field; Ives seems to me always to be asking his listeners to tie the experience of a specific work to a larger conception of the messy way in which music permeates our lives. He’s after a kind of honesty that breaks down the wall between concert experiences, private musical moments, and walking around in public environments. It’s the American experimental road that leads to John Cage: a proposal for perpetual conceptual revolution that accepts all experience as fundamentally musical.

Nexus entry.

How delighted I was to encounter on YouTube a documentary and full performance of the 1965 première of Ives’s Fourth Symphony by the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton (principally) of Leopold Stokowski. The film was shot for National Education Television, which would later morph into PBS, and includes interviews with John McClure (from which the gem that opened this entry), charmingly dotty podium remarks by Stokowski, and some artful shots of the orchestra tackling what was clearly a dauntingly complicated work for them.

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But the recording I listened to for this entry was the 1974 recording of the Fourth Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under José Serebrier, who was one of the assistant conductors for the televised première under Stokowski. The atmosphere of quotation begetting quotation that Ives inspires seems echoed, therefore, in the link between the NET film and the LPO recording. This quality is brought out in Serebrier’s extensive program notes, which often reference the 1965 première. In the spirit of Ives, I can’t resist a quotation: “I shall never forget that winter morning at Carnegie Hall, when Stokowski had scheduled the first rehearsal of the Ives Fourth. He stared at the music for a long time, then at the orchestra. I had never seen the score, and my heart stopped when he turned to me and said, ‘Maestro, please come and conduct this last movement. I want to hear it.’ After it was all over, my arms and legs still shaking, I complained that I was sightreading. Stokowski’s reply was, ‘So was the orchestra!’” If they were sightreading on that first day, one of the remarkable things about the première was it was especially well prepared: Stokowski asked for (and got) a number of extra rehearsals, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. (See the NET documentary at 7:55 for Stokowski’s explanation, delightfully redolent of the absent-minded professor.) But Serebrier’s recording brought with it almost an additional decade of opportunity to live with the work’s challenges and possibilities, and so it inevitably sounds more refined.

Still, it is a revelation to listen to Serebrier’s recording while following along with the 2011 Charles Ives Society Critical Edition of the score, with each movement edited by a different scholar from the variety of sometimes conflicting sources. (This extraordinary publication includes a CD-ROM with scans of all of Ives’s manuscript material for the work.) Looking at Wayne D. Shirley’s edition of the fourth movement, for example, shows how much either was excised from or never incorporated into the edition prepared by the staff of the Fleischer Music Collection, used for the 1965 première and the 1974 recording; following the course of almost any single part reveals that much more is possible than got realized under Stokowski or Serebrier. And, well, who can blame them? Ives asks for an entirely different ensemble for each of his four movements, pushing past Richard Strauss into a kind of proto-Gruppen orchestral environment, particularly in the finale. All this in a work of the 1910s and ‘20s. Not that Ives would have recognized the finale in the 2011 Critical Edition as his, per se. As William Brooks brilliantly proposes in the preface to the edition, in the face of the impossibility of creating a single definitive edition of the finale from a multiplicity of sources, “The workable anarchy of Ives’s music is better manifested in his manuscripts than in publications; and it is the manuscripts which you [Who, me?!?!]—through whom Ives’s music sounds—can and should enter. There can be no Ives urtext, no approved edition. In the re-formed world universal access to the manuscripts will bring into being an ever-expanding sphere of visions, performances—‘editions,’ if you will—all shaped for particular times, places, circumstances. I look forward to your contributions.” This quote resonated powerfully with me as I sat there in the stunned aftermath of the last movement, thinking about the beauty of what I heard and the promise of what I didn’t hear but could almost imagine. (More of it is present in other more recent recordings, incidentally.) Could there ever be enough instruments, enough parts to satisfy Ives’s all-encompassing vision? Could there ever be enough refracted and refracting quotations to answer the call? Brooks says no, but he looks forward to a Borges-like infinite gallery of responses. How wonderful to imagine that in writing about it we come to constitute a version of the work.

Nexus exit.

I think that the idea of being unfinished, as with my entry on Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, needed to inhabit the center of this one, and that other conceptions I initially had for it—that I should mention links between Three Places in New England and the first, second, and fourth movements of the Fourth Symphony, or that I should write about “place” and the slow third movement, which has to me more than a touch of the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth–simply must wait. There’s great and perhaps infinite promise, after all, in what’s left unfinished.

Unfinishment: (In)completing Mahler’s (In)completion

(Nexus entry.)

From the opening bar of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, we are plunged into a memory space populated by ghosts of the Prelude from Parsifal, the Prelude from Tristan, and the final movement of Mahler’s own Ninth Symphony. In fact, the opening of Mahler’s Tenth feels like a renewal of the conversation that Mahler had with himself in the Ninth. Like Hermann Hesse or William Faulkner or Terry Gilliam, there were certain topics that Mahler, once he had introduced them, simply couldn’t let go.

Of course it’s possible, however unlikely, that Mahler’s Tenth wouldn’t seem this way if the composer had finished the symphony himself. For over fifty years the world only had the colossus of an opening movement and the featherweight sidekick of a third movement, a self-effacing Allegretto with the bizarre appellation “Purgatorio.” Then Deryck Cooke (1919-76), who never finished his own planned study of Wagner’s Ring (mentioned in my last entry), made a performing version of all five movements of Mahler’s Tenth, which premièred in 1964 and was published in 1976. Other performing versions have been made, but Cooke’s is distinguished by being the first and having more than one famous name attached to it. Brothers David and Colin Matthews both helped revise Cooke’s orchestration to achieve something approaching a Mahlerian sound. R-3485643-1332258657.jpeg.jpg The recording I was listening to, incidentally, was of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Mark Wigglesworth, which accompanied the August 1994 issue of BBC Music. In some ways it makes a great deal of sense to listen to this live performance, as the 1964 concert that brought the fully realized Tenth to the world was part of that season’s Proms.

The three movements that Cooke’s completion introduced to that 1964 audience (II, IV, and V) make for a fascinatingly symmetrical form in performance: around 23 minutes for the first and last movements, around 11.5 for the second and fourth, and a four-minute middle movement. Mahler clearly intended this symmetry. The outer movements are slow and share with the last movement of the Ninth an autumnal atmosphere that ranges from desolation and despair to searing pain—including the most dissonant sonority Mahler ever wrote, out of which blazes a solo trumpet, which is then submerged again in a “poisoned” chord—to visions of paradise and achievement of rest. The second and fourth are scherzos, similar to the placement of the Nachtmusik movements in the Seventh Symphony. But unlike the Nachtmusik movements of the Seventh, which are clearly differentiated, the scherzos and slow movements of the Tenth, respectively, feel like siblings, so that the interrupted kinesis of the first scherzo is picked up again in the second, and the solemnity and scope of the first movement are picked up again in the fifth. The sense that any Mahlerite has from the first note of the Tenth—that this symphony is a return, after an “interruption” between symphonies, to the essence of the Mahlerian conversation—is mirrored in the finale’s “return” to the first movement’s manner, after the interruption of three movements, and in the fourth movement’s return to the scherzo language of the second movement after the interruption of “Purgatorio.”

In a symphony that blends Mahlerian tropes with extraordinary surprises, one of the things that surprises me most is the language of constant interruption that Mahler cultivates in the scherzos. Motives are cut short; phrases are arrested; cadences are unfulfilled. Mahler has created a style in which a sentence almost never ends; instead, it gets turned into another sentence, which itself does not end. There’s logic to this—a way of the music—but the logic is one of incompletion. What Mahler does with form at the largest scale, he also does with material at a local scale: incompletion has become a sort of aesthetic, made poignant because of the unfinished state in which the composer left the symphony.

What does incompletion mean? Is it a sign for nervous anxiety, the impossibility of positive action in the symbol-laden decaying world of fin-de-siècle Europe? I think people often feel compelled to read Mahler like that, to look for ways that the music expresses the extraordinary emotional contours of its creator’s thinking in a Freud-filled, angst-bedeviled prewar context. But I confess that as I was listening to the scherzos of the Tenth this week, thinking about the aesthetic of incompletion that they embody, I perceived not a neurotic rhetorical hyperactivity but an achievement of rhetorical emptiness. One can only follow so many changes of mood before the rapid-fire volte-face of happy face-sad face-happy face-sad face—emoticons spinning in a slot machine—loses its precision and ceases to mean in conventional rhetorical ways. It feels to me as if in these two scherzos Mahler is unhooking mode and gesture from rhetorical function. He seems to be trading in musical twists and turns shorn of their communicative inheritance, a world powerfully close to Schoenberg’s where musical extremes need not signify emotional ones. I increasingly hear the two scherzos of the Tenth Symphony as a kind of kinetic workshop, a place where the composer was thinking, through music, about where music was going.

And what does this mean for the diminutive “Purgatorio,” a movement that spends a good deal of time spinning its wheels, like Gretchen am Spinnrade, with an empty oscillating figure underlying more conventional statements of melody? This is clearly Mahler’s Lieder style, and arguably it’s a more specific reference than that, but it’s so strange to hear this between the boldly fragmentary, proto-modernist scherzos, a leaky skiff bobbing along between Scylla and Charybdis. (Romantic metaphor-of-the-day award winner). I place the blame for this ridiculous metaphor squarely on Mahler. 61uYgohaXCL._SX337_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg He’s the one, after all, who called his middle movement “Purgatorio,” suggesting the epic scope of Dante’s Divine Comedy and practically begging a listener to look for an Inferno and a Paradisio. Or is it really the middle three movements that function collectively as a kinetic purgatory—a waiting place, an interruption—foil to the first movement’s hell and last movement’s paradise? Music musics, ultimately, and any narrative parallel fails to fully accommodate those qualities that make the music so extraordinary.

One of the extraordinary features of Mahler’s Tenth, the narrative significance of which is elusive, is the final movement’s shape, which begins and ends with expansive tempos and features a central Allegro moderato. This shape echoes the rhythmic profile of the entire symphony, an echo enriched and complicated by the resurfacing of motives from earlier movements in the finale. There can be no question of the “validity” of a narrative reading here; Mahler brewed up such a complicated potion that one must simply accept that multiple readings, resonances, visions and revisions abound. Mahler has created a space constituted of reflections and refractions, making the nature of any one fragment difficult to pin down.

I’ll mention just one more such feature, which seems more powerful to me the more I hear this symphony. One of the principal motives of the last movement is a trumpet figure, another in a long line of funereal brass motives whipped up by Mahler. 800px-Richard_Strauss-Woche,_festival_poster,_1910_by_Ludwig_Hohlwein.jpg But this one bears a striking resemblance, I think, to the motive from Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905) that Lawrence Gilman called the ¡¡¡EnTiCeMeNt!!! motive in his 1907 guide to the opera. In isolation, the connection would perhaps merit little attention, but taken with the bass drum hits that open Mahler’s finale and the return of the “poisoned” chord, both of which have parallels in Strauss’s score, I cannot resist the comparison. (It’s the bass drums, remember, that crush Salome with their shields [or something like that], and who can forget the “poisoned” chord when Salome kisses the forbidden fruit, the severed head of Jochanaan?) When Mahler was sketching his Tenth the music of Strauss’s operatic success de scandale was all the rage, and Mahler certainly knew the score well. What’s Mahler doing here? Perhaps he’s contemplating, through music, another recent development in music, in just the same way that the internal scherzos reflect a kind of Schoenbergian shearing of aspects of signification from musical gesture. If Mahler is thinking about Strauss in the finale of his Tenth, the music is too potent, too evocative and immediate not to spark narrative dimensions. What forbidden fruit has Mahler’s symphonic protagonist tasted to be crushed in this way? Whatever it was, Mahler himself didn’t live to taste it. In listening to the last movement, we hear Mahler from beyond the grave, expressing things he did not have the time to express.

(Nexus ex. . .

Symphonic Island-Hopping: Kiwi Edition

For the last entry I listened to Spanish composer Tomás Marco’s Symphony No. 5, inspired by (and with individual movements named after) the Canary Islands. So I couldn’t resist when I came across a CD of Christopher Blake’s music with a featured work called Symphony – The Islands. Blake (b. 1949) is a dyed-in-the-wool Kiwi: born in Christchurch, educated at Canterbury University, and now Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. And the “islands” referenced in the title of his 1996 symphony are those that comprise his own country, which makes Blake’s symphony notably different from Marco’s. Blake’s symphony is about home.

But Symphony – The Islands is about something else as well. Cast in three movements, it takes its title and a good deal of inspiration from three sonnets by New Zealand poet Charles Brasch (1909-73). The poems are printed in full in the liner notes, and emblazoned across the album art as an epigraph is this quote from the second of them, from which Blake says the music takes its “mood of restlessness”: “Always, in these islands, meeting and parting/Shake us, making tremulous the salt-rimmed air.”

Nexus entry.

I can’t stop thinking about Debussy’s “sea symphony,” La mer (1905), and not because Blake’s work sounds anything like it. In fact, Symphony – The Islands doesn’t remind me of the sound of Debussy or of early twentieth-century French music at all. That, though, is almost the point. Debussy is writing a sea symphony from the perspective of the water; Blake is writing an island symphony from the perspective of the land. Water is present in both, but Blake gives the motion, the “restlessness” of water, something substantial to push against. Another obvious comparison is Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (1909), which shares with Blake’s piece a grounding in poetry that uses seascapes as a kind of mechanism for the visionary. But Blake doesn’t sound much like Vaughan Williams either, and he sounds even less like the Vaughan Williams of A Sea Symphony, only most obviously because Blake’s isn’t a choral symphony.

I’m stepping up to the ledge of an entire category of environmental music here, as well as a rich cache of ecomusicology. The recent thought-provoking volume The Sea in the British Musical Imagination, edited by Eric Saylor and Christopher Scheer, leaps to mind, as does an excellent paper given by Karen Olson (at the most recent AMS conference in Rochester) on two pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies tied to “his” islands, the Orkneys. What I mean to say is that the musical trope-iverse of “island music” and “sea music” inevitably intersect, but they’re not the same. Teasing out the differences at a larger level would be, I imagine, a worthy pursuit.

But to the music at hand. . .

Blake’s first movement, “Recitative and Appassionata,” opens with an almost imperceptible throbbing that slowly grows—it really seems as if we are getting closer to it. When the cello recitative begins, it feels as if an entirely different character has been introduced or, rather, that a character has been introduced. “Recitative,” after all, means that a character is singing, and since Blake has told us all about the centrality of Brasch’s poetry to his symphonic conception, the instrumental recitative stands in for the poetic voice, and by extension for our human voice. Then what was that growing throbbing? I think Blake is asking his listener to perceive more in it than accompaniment. Its relative stasis, its rhythmic permanence suggests the natural world of rocks and waves, the land and sea against which the poet writes the story of his own recitative-like perception.

This kind of conceptual polyphony between the human and the environmental is, I think, one of the most compelling aspects of Symphony – The Islands. It occurs again in the slow second movement, “Gongs, Echoes and Chants,” where an opening subterranean pedal is answered by shimmering ascents. In the words of Brasch’s middle sonnet, “Divided and perplexed the sea is waiting,/Birds and fishes visit us and disappear.” And then, the human element appears. Blake calls it a “chant” in his movement title, but it sounds more like a hymn played out in atmospheric strings. I hear in it an echo of the end of the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. When a descending trumpet figure cuts through the hymn texture, at first it feels like a response to Charles Ives’s Unanswered Question, in which the strings’ slow-moving hymn is cut through by the questioning trumpet. But there’s more to Blake’s trumpet than a dissonant question; as other instruments take up the figure, it reveals itself not as a human but as avian. To wit, the call of the godwit, as Brasch’s poem verifies: “from their haunted bay/The godwits vanish toward another summer.” And now we arrive at the doorstep of Messiaen, who uses birdsong to suggest the voice of the divine. By the end of the movement Blake synthesizes some of these varying elements—the primal throbbing of natural forces, the shimmering ascents of fishes and birds, the hymning of humanity—but the synthesis doesn’t achieve apotheosis. Instead, and as Brasch writes, “None knows where he will lie down at night.”

This sentiment is carried over into the third movement, “And None Knows. . .,” which gives much of its bulk to “rapid string and wind figurations” and “an energetic fast dance” before an extensive coda that returns to the stasis of the natural world and the “human voices” of earlier movements. The coda is calculatedly inconclusive, the relationship between the natural world and human presence unclear, the future of that pact unknown. Or, as Brasch’s third sonnet has it, “The stones are bare for us to write upon.”

Nexus exit.

The CD is rounded out with three “tone poems,” each about ten minutes, which Blake explains in the liner notes “are conceived as a group and share similarities in style, sentiment, and technique.” Two are elegiac—We All Fall Down (1996), an “extended threnody. . .which remembers the children of the wars of our time,” and Echelles de Glace (1992), commissioned by the Wellington Youth Orchestra in memory of their former member David Heymann, who died while climbing the Matterhorn. The first belongs to a growing body of late twentieth-century works in memoriam for which Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976) is perhaps an ultimate stylistic model. R-898934-1241102979.jpeg.jpg The second, while fulfilling its memorial function admirably, also references a special kind of twentieth-century orchestral writing that I think owes a considerable debt to nature documentaries. The final work on the album is also the most recent: The Furnace of Pihanga (1999), inspired by a Maori story about the contest of mountain gods “for the love of the beautiful Pihanga.” There’s a sensitive timbral imagination on display here, and it’s a pleasure to hear Blake tell the story described in his liner notes through the orchestral medium.

When a Symphony is Like an Archipelago: Marco’s Symphony No. 5

The symphony is dead. Long live the symphony.

Last night I had the local classical radio station on in the car, and they started playing Brahms’s Second Symphony. Brahms is not my ¡FaVoRiTe! symphonist, and the Second isn’t my ¡FaVoRiTe! Brahms symphony, and yet. . . And yet. . .

I love this form. I love the experience of listening to a symphony. Live. On recording. I love talking about them, reading about them, thinking about them. I love studying scores of them, and, as a composer, from time to time I repress the urge to write one. Or at least to start writing one. I happen to think—and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who does—that the symphony is one of the ¡gReAt IdEaS oF hUmAnKiNd!, in the way that Peter Watson places the invention of opera between chapters called “Capitalism, Humanism, Individualism” and “The Mental Horizon of Christopher Columbus.” <1> And so hearing Brahms Second at the end of a long day was my own little piece of heaven.

For the last entry two entries I’ve been listening to “island music”: the first, steel band music from Trinidad; the second, works by Tania León that are profoundly informed by Cuban culture. This week I encountered two symphonies that were new for me: Spanish composer Tomás Marco’s Symphony No. 4 “Espacio Quebrado” and Symphony No. 5 “Modelos de Universo.” But the one I found most fascinating is also “island music,” in a sense.

Nexus entry.

Marco’s Fifth Symphony has seven movements, each of which is named after one of the seven main Canary Islands: I. Achinech (Tenerife), II. Ferro (Hierro), III. Avaria (La Palma), IV. Maxorata (Fuerteventura), V. Tyteroygatra (Lanzarote), VI. Amilgua (Gomera), VII. Tamarán (Gran Canaria). (As an aside, I’ll admit that one of the reasons I was drawn to the piece is because in the last few years I’ve read a fair amount about the connection between San Antonio and the Canary Islands.)

Things get a bit more complicated here. In extensive program notes, Marco (b. 1942) explains that the symphony was commissioned by the Festival of the Canaries and that he wanted, therefore, to create an homage to the islands, which he claims to know “inside out (better than the natives, I expect),” as a kind of testament “to their progressive destruction.” Despite the titling of movements, though, the composer had “no desire to commit the tactlessness of appropriating Canarian folklore. . .an easy, opportunist way out, as well as being a sort of profanity, that would have harmed both the folklore and the symphony itself.”

Instead, Marco wanted to create a “universal work for the Canaries that would carry their name across the wide world every time it was performed.” <2> (This makes me think of the Dalai Lama approving the recording and distribution of Tibetan Buddhist rituals with the idea that every time one pressed play, the prayer was renewed, like a disembodied prayer wheel.) And how does a composer make a symphony universal, other than by omitting any direct reference to music and folklore of the Canary Isalnds? Marco attempts this by tying his work to others in the symphonic tradition. He references the famous opening motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra repeatedly. Arguably, that’s a different kind of opportunism; at the very least, it’s the ¡MoSt ObViOuS wAy! of involving an audience in a conversation about the music, through the music.

Marco also explains that there are “hidden references to various well-known Fifth Symphonies” elsewhere, especially in the transitions. But three other “non-Fifth” symphonies occur to me as models of Marco’s symphonic universe. One is Mahler’s Third, a six-movement work with titles that most often point to the natural world as inspiration. Another is Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Sinfonie (1948), with which Marco’s Fifth Symphony shares an unorthodox number of movements, many featuring titles that point to a personal cache of complicated referents. A third is Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1969), the symphony after symphonies have died, which famously uses the scherzo from Mahler’s Second (1894) as a “vessel” into which many text and musical quotations are poured.

Berio’s scherzo movement, with its apparently self-defeating environment of hyper-quotation, might seem the most apt comparison, especially when Marco writes something like, “Once creative innocence has been irrevocably lost, one has no choice but to be ironic about one’s own creation.” MV5BMmNlYzRiNDctZWNhMi00MzI4LThkZTctMTUzMmZkMmFmNThmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzkwMjQ5NzM@._V1_UX182_CR0,0,182,268_AL_.jpg In other words, it’s difficult to hear Also sprach, especially after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Beethoven’s Fifth and not roll your eyes. But when ironic experience is repeated so often, it loses its ironic edge, becomes instead simply an environment. That environment is a palimpsest, endlessly written over, just as Marco’s movement titles have traditional island names and parenthetical “colonized” names, just as the symphony as a genre is a model that is written over again and again. What is left is a place of depth, a place where unfathomable things have happened and are recovered only partially, through a veil of imperfect memory, Marco Polo repeatedly trying to describe the glories of Venice for a mesmerized Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Nexus exit.

Ultimately, in his Fifth Symphony Marco claims to have given the listener “seven formal models,” inspired by various theories of the universe, “translated into seven abstract and exclusively music movements,” the “techniques of construction” for which the composer does “not want to tire the reader by describing.” No matter. On the island of symphonies, there’s enough to hear without all that.

References

<1> Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (HarperCollins, 2005).

<2> Tomás Marco, Sinfonia No. 5 “Modelos de Universo ‘88/89”; Sinfonia No. 4 “Espacio Quebrado ’87,” liner notes by Harry Halbreich with program notes by Tomás Marco Indigéna, aurophon AU 31812, 1991, compact disc.

More to Three Ds than Death: Honegger’s Fifth Symphony

Contributed by Dr. Ken Metz, Professor of Music (University of the Incarnate Word)

51-5xVSwtbL._SY355_.jpg Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) suffered a health crisis in 1947 and did not live too many years beyond that, but he had one more symphony in him. Symphony No. 5 (1950) is subtitled “Di tre re,” with re referring to the note D, which ends every movement. Does this D, with its association with Requiem settings, point to death? Probably so, but to my ears this three-movement work (played here by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under Charles Dutoit) also evokes devotion, delight, and defiance, three D-words I’d like to add to describe aspects of the symphony. I hear the first movement as devotion to Honegger’s art and faith. Yes, there is some very sour dissonance in the chorale-like first theme, but the landing places are typically rich extended chords that possess a soaring devotional quality. The climactic trumpet part sounds at once like a plaintive cry to God and a declaration of faith. The second movement is scherzo-like and comparable, in a way, to the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, revealing a sense of humor about the human condition. The adagio sections in the movement offer a contrast, perhaps the promise of a soothing afterlife. The third movement is the boldest, and I hear in it a striving for strength, a will to persevere despite any obstacle. I want to cheer the piece on as it raucously unfolds, anchored by assertive brass statements. I don’t feel despair (another D word). I think Honegger knew that music had more to offer and that he had more to leave behind.

Into the Dim Periphery: Hanson’s Fourth

In the last entry Howard Hanson was sitting in the audience—one of many notable musical figures—in the Kennedy White House in 1961 for the “return concert” of Pablo Casals.

This got me thinking about Hanson (1896-1981), one of those figures hovering at the dim periphery of my consciousness as the teacher of my own first composition teacher, Martin Mailman (1932-2000). So I picked a disc—a CD this time—of Hanson’s Second and Fourth Symphonies, along with his Elegy, Op. 44, played by the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra under David Montgomery and released in 1997 on the Arte Nova label.

If anyone has heard a Hanson symphony these days, it’s probably the Second (“Romantic”), which has many attractive qualities to recommend it: the proposal of an American answer to the epic challenge of first-movement form; generous and heartfelt lyricism in the slow second movement; a third movement that seems to me to point toward the film scores of John Williams. (“Did you hear that?! That’s Star Wars!!” I yelled to no one in particular.) But I was more fascinated by a piece on the disc that I’d never heard, the Symphony No. 4, Op. 34 “Requiem.” For what it’s worth, the piece won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1944. It also belongs to an important micro-genre of twentieth-century orchestral music: the war symphony. With a subtitle like “Requiem,” I can’t imagine anyone hearing the work in 1944 wouldn’t have thought of “precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.”

It’s curious, then, that Hanson’s dedication reads, “in memory of my beloved father,” and listening to the work reveals that Hanson mostly eschews the sound and the fury of a world at war in favor of, yes, a more personal and modest grief, a suggestion of ritual (through recourse to lyrical lines that suggest Gregorian chant), and a certain ambiguity about consolation. The closing bars of the fourth movement, where Hanson separates the funereal intonement of the lower strings and timpani from the ethereal upper strings, creating a tonal, timbral, and material gulf between mourning “here on earth” and the accomplishment of “paradise,” is particularly powerful.

Nexus entry.

But another reason for my fascination has to do with another war symphony, Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20 (1940). Okay, here it is. Britten’s movements: I. Lacrymosa, II. Dies irae, III. Requiem aeternam. Hanson’s movements: I. Kyrie, II. Requiescat, III. Dies irae, IV. Lux aeterna. And Britten’s dedication, whatever the origins of the piece, is “to the memory of my parents.” Britten’s work was given its première in Carnegie Hall in 1941 by the New York Philharmonic under John Barbirolli, but it was soon thereafter performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky, who was so impressed that he engineered the commission of—well, let’s just say it—Peter Grimes. And finally, at least for now, Koussevitzky was a champion of Howard Hanson’s music, and it’s to the conductor’s memory that the composer dedicated his Elegy, Op. 44 (the last work on this disc). A more serious comparison of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and Hanson’s Symphony No. 4 “Requiem” would seem to be in order.

Nexus exit.

At the national conference of the American Musicological Society this November (musicology alert!), I attended a concert of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra at Kodak Hall, Eastman Theatre. How many times, I wonder, was Hanson in that hall? How many times did he hear his own music played there? And how many times was my own teacher there? Both places and pieces can remind us of relationships, but they do so in different ways. When I press play, Hanson sings his song again, because I’m listening.