Shostakovich: Symphony No. 1

A commentor mentioned the other day that he didn't know the Shostakovich symphonies nearly as well as the string quartets. My experience was different as I did a graduate seminar in the symphonies and only much later got to know the string quartets. I did a series of posts on the quartets, starting here. But I haven't paid the same attention to the symphonies apart from this brief post. So I propose to do a post on each of the fifteen symphonies.

Shostakovich, age 19

We sometimes forget that Shostakovich was close to being a child prodigy. His Symphony No. 1 was written when he was merely nineteen years old and is very much part of the standard symphonic repertoire. There are very few symphonies written by someone so young of which this could be said. Beethoven's first symphony, for example, dates from when he was thirty years old. Mind you, Mozart's first symphony, K. 16 in E flat major, dates from 1764 when he was all of eight years old. However, it is certainly not standard orchestral repertoire, only appearing in integral recordings of all Mozart's symphonies.

Young Shostakovich, "Mitya" as he was called, attended the Petrograd Conservatory beginning in 1919. First, something about names: Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1906, went to the conservatory in Petrograd and spent much of his career in Leningrad. But these are all the same place! In 1914 the name was changed to Petrograd and in 1924, around the time of the composition of Shostakovich's first symphony, changed again to Leningrad. In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was changed back to St. Petersburg.

At the conservatory he was both a piano major, giving many performances of virtuoso repertoire, and a composition major. At fifteen, Shostakovich performed the "Hammerklavier" sonata of Beethoven, an extremely challenging work. At the time Alexander Glazunov, the composer, was head of the conservatory and a great supporter of Mitya. His composition teacher was Maximilian Steinberg, son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov, who gave him a thorough grounding in harmony and a sense of aesthetic taste. In January of 1924 he began an assignment for Steinberg's class: the composition of a symphony. On seeing the first sketches for the scherzo, Steinberg was very critical, calling it 'grotesque'. After some starts and stops, the finale giving him particular trouble, the symphony was completed in April of 1925 and given its premiere a little over a year later by the Leningrad Philharmonic. There are four movements, the scherzo coming second:

1. Allegretto - Allegro non troppo
2. Allegro - meno mosso - Allegro - meno mosso
3. Lento - Largo - Lento (attaca)
4. Allegro molto - Lento - Allegro molto - Meno mosso - Allegro molto - Molto meno mosso - Adagio

Though the first movement is in conventional sonata form, it has a bit of the air of the vaudeville and theatre music that Shostakovich was playing to accompany silent films--something he was driven to to contribute to family after the death of his father a few years before. The second movement is the scherzo, possibly based on the one he was previously criticized for. The slow third movement begins with a solo for oboe and features a quote from Wagner's Sigfried. The last movement, written in one furious week, features a tympani solo and may show some influence of Stravinsky's Petrushka in the fact that the symphony has a piano part and also in its sometimes satirical tone.

The premiere of the symphony, in May 1926, was a huge success and a great beginning to his career. This premiere was followed a year later by a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic and a year after that by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Let me hasten to say that both of these highly-esteemed orchestras were not in the habit of performing music written by conservatory students from the Soviet Union! Shostakovich, in this precocious work, had captured some of the spirit of the times. The first and second themes of the first movement are a cheeky march and a teasing waltz and the finale mocks the pathos of the slow movement. Perhaps his experience as a silent-film accompanist shows in the quick 'cuts' between sections and in the tendency to expressive extremes. Now let's listen to the piece:

Carter, Henze, Barzun

Elliot Carter

I learn this morning that Elliot Carter just passed away. Here is the obituary in the Guardian. Carter, along with composers like Pierre Boulez and Brian Ferneyhough, was a pinnacle in the long trend in music towards maximalization of complexity. A major breakthrough for Carter was the premiere of his Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras in 1961. Here is the first part:

At the time fierce battles were being waged for and against music like this. Benjamin Britten, who wrote more traditionally, had talked about the role of the composer:

I do not write for posterity--in any case, the outlook for that is somewhat uncertain. I write music, now, in Aldeburgh, for people living there, and further afield, indeed for anyone who cares to play it or listen to it. But my music now has its roots in where I live and work.

On the other side, attacking Britten and praising Carter, was Stravinsky (or his ghost-writer, Robert Craft) who sneered at Britten, saying "nothing fails like success". Carter's music, on the other hand, was guaranteed to be historically important because it was revolutionary. Almost impossible to play, with a new metronome mark every measure, harmonically inscrutable and so complex that only a small circle of the enlightened could even hope to understand it, it was music whose role was the very opposite of Britten's: nothing succeeds like failure (to communicate)!

UPPERDATE: Stravinsky and a young Elliot Carter in conversation:

Hans Werner Henze

Just over a week ago, on October 27, Hans Werner Henze passed away. His sense of the role of the composer was quite similar to Britten's and he was, like Britten, an important opera composer. Early on he was part of the post-WWII avant-garde in Germany, sitting alongside Boulez and Bruno Maderna teaching the composition class at Darmstadt in 1955. But Henze became an apostate of the church of the avant-garde, later writing that:

Thanks to the initiative of Boulez and Stockhausen [Webern's aesthetic] had become institutionalized as official musical thinking whose maxims the body of lesser mortals now had to put into practice with religious devotion, esprit de corps and slavish obedience...

 Henze lived most of his life in Italy, where he found the climate, especially politically, more to his taste. He was a radical egalitarian in some ways, both appreciating the music of the Rolling Stones and writing in an unashamedly tonal style. He was also sympathetic to leftist causes and had attitudes towards the composer's role that foreshadow post-modernism.

Henze wrote quite a bit for guitar, some early Tientos and a later, larger set of pieces based on Shakespeare characters. He also wrote a kind of chamber opera called El Cimmaron for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion based on the autobiography of a Cuban slave. I got to know this piece quite well as I participated in the Montréal premiere and the West Coast premiere in both Vancouver and Victoria. Here is a photo of one of those rehearsals:

Alas, I no longer have recordings of my performances, but here is the beginning of the second half in a performance in Florence in 1990:

As you can see and hear, all the musicians play percussion instruments. The flute also plays mouth organ and the guitarist mbira or thumb piano.

UPDATE: Henze's Symphony No. 8, might be more representative of his style (or styles):

Jacques Barzun

On October 25, just two days before Henze, Jacques Barzun passed away. Here is his obituary. He was an astonishingly learnéd man, writing nearly forty books on history and culture. He had a particular attraction to music and wrote an excellent book on Berlioz, Berlioz and the Romantic Century. Unlike most writers on music who are not themselves professional musicians or musicologists, Barzun had a specialist's understanding of music, but could write for the lay reader. If you wanted to get a better understanding of the civilization of the West and where it is at present, you could do no better than to read his remarkable book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Heck, if you are only going to read one book this year, make it that one! It was published in 2000 when Barzun was ninety-four years old. In honor of him, let's listen to some of his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz. Here is Berlioz' eccentric 'concerto' for viola and orchestra, Harold en Italie:

Musical Form, Part 2

Yesterday I put up a post about musical form that mostly talked about how melody can be used to structure a piece. This merely scratched the surface, of course as there are many, many ways that I didn't mention such as the way a melody can be transformed in the course of a piece so that it not only provides a unifying element, but also helps to push the piece forward. The 19th century particularly explored this idea.

But I'm not going to talk about melody today, instead, I'm going to merely scratch the surface of how harmony is used in musical form. Everyone knows what you mean when you use the word melody but harmony is a word with complex meanings. Like 'melody', it comes from the ancient Greek: ἁρμονία (harmonía) which meant joining or fitting together. We use it in a very general way to mean the vertical aspect of music: everything relating to notes sounding together. But there are more specific meanings as well. If you take a course in university in the music department called "harmony" it is going to be about the system of tonal 'grammar' that was used in Western music between 1600 and 1900. This system looked at different chords as being functional, i.e. they were part of a web of tension and release that was used to structure the flow of music. For example, a lot of recent music is based on drones, long-held notes and chords, and for that reason is not 'harmony' in the strict sense as there is no harmonic function. Here is a recent song by Paul Simon that is almost completely without harmonic function. The verses are all one unchanging riff and, therefore, harmony. The contrasting chorus mainly contrasts by dropping the riff and there is a hint, no more, of a harmonic change. But it is minimal. A theorist would say that moving to neighboring harmonies and then back is actually just extending the tonic.

To see how harmony works you could do no better than to look at some music by J. S. Bach who is admired as being probably the greatest master of harmony. Here is a very simple piece by him, the first minuet from the Partita No. 3 for solo violin. Just click to enlarge.

This piece is in E major, which means, in terms of functional harmony, that it is going to begin with an E major harmony and end with one. Later on Beethoven created quite a stir when he began pieces with something other than the tonic--usually the dominant. Ah yes, 'tonic'. The tonic chord or harmony is the one built on the key note, in this case E. By "built on" I am referring to how chords are constructed. You build a chord by taking every other note in the scale. For example, the E major scale goes E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D# and E. A tonic harmony, starting with E, would be E, G# and B. Every other note. Simple. Here is the E major scale and three important harmonies derived from it: the tonic, on the keynote, the subdominant, on the 4th note, A, and the dominant, on the 5th note, B:

The basic layout of this minuet and virtually every other dance movement from the Baroque era is Tonic -- Dominant -- Tonic. But there are thousands of ways of going from tonic to dominant and back! One more thing before we go to the piece: as you will realize if you look back at that scale, you can build a chord on every note of the scale. The three chords I picked out and labelled, tonic, subdominant and dominant, are the main members of little families of chords. I say that because every chord has related chords that it shares notes with. The closest relationship is when two notes are shared. For example, the tonic, E, G# and B, shares two notes with the mediant: G#, B and D#. These two chords are related. Similarly, the subdominant, A, C# and E, shares two notes with the submediant, C#, E and G#. Mediant and submediant are labels for other notes of the scale. You want the whole list? OK:

1. tonic
2. supertonic
3. mediant
4. subdominant
5. dominant
6. submediant
7. leading tone

All right, now let's look at the beginning of the minuet. Click to enlarge:

The first two measures are just as Bach wrote them. The next two are my simplification of the first two showing just the harmonies. It starts with the tonic, of course, and the next chord is the dominant. Actually, just part of the dominant, without the lowest note. Then we get that lowest note, B, but over it is a G# so what that harmony actually is, is the mediant. Then the next measure is the submediant. Yes, lots of stuff in just a couple of measures. I won't go through every measure because I just want to give you a taste of how harmony works. But to round things off, let's look at the ending. Click to enlarge:

The supertonic is part of the subdominant 'family' as it shares two notes and the mediant is part of the tonic 'family'. So the basic harmony of the last two measures is subdominant, tonic, dominant, tonic. Bach uses other family members to make it more interesting and smooth the movement of the voices. Now let's listen to the whole piece. Here is Arthur Grumiaux playing both minuets (they usually come in pairs).

The minuet we have been looking at is less than a minute of music without the repeats! But in that minute Bach has a wide range of harmonies, all carefully calibrated to move us toward the dominant, which is where the first half ends, and then move us back to the tonic. This is one way of using harmony to structure musical form. From about 1600 to 1900, this was the predominant way of putting a piece of music together.

Desert Island Discs?

This used to be a frequent device in music journalism: write a column about which LPs you just had to have if you were stranded on a desert island. Do people still do it? I bet not!

Technology has changed the way we look at a lot of things, including music. The oldest form of recording that I have personally owned is the 78, a big, clunky, heavy piece of vinyl that was replaced by the 45 for singles and the 33⅓ for long play recordings, known as the "LP". Here is an article about this technology. There seems to be a bit of a revival of the LP and some people have always argued that an LP through a suitable system, is far superior to any of the digital formats. But my point here is just that LPs and the systems required to play them are heavy and cumbersome.

In comparison, the digital formats, starting with the CD, are lots more portable. A hundred CDs are much easier to transport than a hundred LPs. Then there was the huge revolution of the iPod that enabled you to take thousands of songs along with you in your pocket. So when you go to that desert island, you can take everything with you.

There is a kind of subtext to this story though. Whereas the 78 was not great fidelity-wise, the 33⅓ LP, with a good sound system (turntable, amp, speakers) was, as long as you took care of it. The huge advantage of the CD, from a product point of view, was that you could sell everyone the same music all over again and that CDs tended to make inexpensive sound systems sound better because they had a crisper, more defined sound. To audiophiles, with really good sound systems, the early CDs just sounded harsh and cold. But they weren't buying nearly as many CDs as the masses, so who cares?

Here is an interesting discussion of formats and quality by someone who knows the technology well. He says:

Audio fidelity is a cultural issue
Is it, perhaps even, genre-specific? You don’t get too many people blasting Rachmaninov or Ornette Coleman out of their mobile phone on the back of the bus, and nor are many hi-fi buffs serious collectors of Dubstep.

 My position on this is a little eccentric. As a performer, I regard all recordings as both a boon and as unfortunate. Some of the essence of music is always lost as soon as you record it--no matter how good the quality. Music coming out of a speaker or earphone is not quite music. Music to me is what happens when I play, or someone else plays or sings. A recording is a bit like a postcard: it resembles the beach in Rio de Janeiro, but it's not the same!

But back to my main point, and I do have one. With the development of recorded formats that can contain huge amounts of music in a few ounces of plastic you can put in your pocket, the idea of "desert island" discs might seem meaningless. But I think that it just enables us to understand the real point of the metaphor. If you could only have five discs, which five would they be?

In other words, the point of the metaphor is to goad you to make an aesthetic judgement. What music is crucial for you to listen to, and what music is just filler and fluff? Does the existence of the iPod mean that we never have to think about this? Will we just shuffle-play our way through life?

You see, I think not. In the post I just put up, about musical form, I found myself choosing examples the same or similar to ones I have chosen before. This is not, or I hope not, just because I just can't think of other ones. I think it rather reflects that fact that some music is absolutely fundamental. If you are talking about literature, then Ezra Pound may have been correct in saying that there were only a few books you had to read. But you had to know them very well. His candidates were the Bible, Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. That's it. But, of course, you could spend your whole life reading them.

Have we, at least when it comes to music, forgotten this way of thinking? Well, lots have, certainly. And it is doubtful if the educational systems we have now are doing very much to compensate, even University departments of music.

So if I were to make a list like Ezra Pound's for music, what would it be? Not too difficult, I think:

• J. S. Bach (especially the Art of Fugue, the Well-Tempered Clavier and the cantatas and oratorios)
• Beethoven (especially the piano sonatas, the symphonies and the string quartets)
• Shostakovich (especially the symphonies and string quartets)
• Mozart (especially the concertos, operas and symphonies)

Anything past that would be a huge, ferocious debate. And right now, probably most people would disagree with my inclusion of Shostakovich. But given time, they'll come round. Now let's listen to one of those Mozart piano concertos:

What is Musical Form?

Over a year ago I wrote a post on Form in Music that inspired some brilliant comments about the role of rhythm in jazz. It also inspired an email from a friend who said he didn't understand any of it! That post was intended to be the first of several on musical form, but I didn't follow up. My learned anonymous commentor made some excellent points and it is well worth going back and reading the whole post and the comments.

What I want to do here is restart the discussion by looking at form from an entirely different angle. In the previous post I talked about the basic structure of songs as that is something many people are familiar with. Today I want to take a different tack. There are three fundamental aspects of music: melody, harmony and rhythm. Every piece of music is a structure in which any one, two or all three are present--even John Cage's 4'33 which has a structure consisting only of rhythm, i.e. time. The form of a piece of music, that is, the articulation of it in time, is created by using any one, two, or all three of these aspects. That is so abstract that you are probably either scratching your head or rolling your eyes! Let me make it more concrete.

Let us imagine a simple musical context: a drumming circle. In Montréal when I lived there a group of drummers used to meet on Sunday afternoons in the park and drum together. Someone would start a simple beat then others would add various subdivisions and syncopations of the beat until a satisfactorily dense texture was created. This might go on until everyone was tired of it and then stop. Or, if it started to flag, someone might try and start an entirely new pulse, thereby launching a new section. If this just goes on until it peters out, then you have the form A (the first beat) followed by B (the second beat). If everyone then went back to the first beat then the form would be ABA. This is the very simplest musical form. Do something, then do something else, and if you are clever, then you return to the first thing again.

But the very first kinds of written down music in the West are both more complex than this but also even simpler. One of the earliest kinds of music in the West consisted of singing the psalms. Singing made the text a more sacred utterance. One person would first sing a few notes to establish the pitch, this is an "intonation", then the rest join in on a "reciting tone", just a repeated note. This reciting tone can go on as long as needed for the text. It can be punctuated if needed to indicate a division in the text. This punctuation was called a "fluxus". Then you return to the reciting tone. To end, there is another few notes that fall in pitch, called a "cadence" which means falling or "cadere" in Latin. Don't mix this up with the cadence in common practice harmony, which refers to a structure of two or more harmonies.

I suppose that what I have just described is very roughly ABA, but it is really a kind of musical prose, where the form is very loose and while originally there is just enough melody to encourage people to sing a text, the tendency over time is to add more and more decoration. Here is an example of this kind of psalm setting, one of the early favorite texts "Justus ut palma" from Psalm 91:

This kind of form is so loose that it is almost impossible to describe. A lot of music composition consists in giving form to what was originally formless. So a meandering melody like this, only organized in terms of a reciting tone and a final tone, composers are going to replace with a melody with a clearer structure. I'm not going to work my way through music history here, instead, I'm just going to jump to a different kind of melody that is very organized. Here is the original subject from the Art of Fugue that Bach will transform in various ways:

This subject is both very simple and highly organized. It is the very opposite of the loose, meandering kind of melody found in Gregorian Chant. The first two measures state the tonic harmony, D minor, as simply as possible. Then the next measure states the dominant harmony. The last measure allows for ambiguity as it can be harmonized in different ways, but it returns to the tonic at the beginning of measure five. Notice that there are two measures of arpeggiation followed by two measures of a scale. Notice also that the rhythm speeds up over the four measures. This extremely simple, highly organized theme will serve as the material with which Bach will construct a whole series of fugues, fourteen in all, and four canons. Here is a performance of the first fugue, which uses the theme exactly as I have given it above:

You will notice that as each voice enters, it does so with the same theme. This is one way of structuring a piece of music with melody. Though, of course, as soon as you have more than one voice, then the harmonic structure becomes hugely important as well. But let's leave that aside for the moment and just note how this simple melody ties the whole piece together. You can look at the structure of fugues in various ways, but the most salient aspect is that theme: it is what generates the structure, that is, the form.

In a more mechanical way, the contemporary composer Steve Reich has done something very similar: use a single theme to generate the structure of a piece. He does it by creating a short theme for piano and then, with two pianos playing that theme together, one "slides" ahead rhythmically bit by bit, a process he calls "phasing". Here is what that sounds like:

UPDATE: Here is a complete version of the piece:

In between the basic subdivisions, i.e. when the notes don't "line up", there is considerable rhythmic tension that is released when the two pianos slip back into alignment,  though, a different alignment! The piece ends when the whole set of alignments has been traversed and the two pianos are back in the original relationship.

What is interesting about this is that he uses only a simple rhythmic device to generate the whole piece from that original theme.

There is a lot more to say about how musical form can be created, but I'll save it for next time!

Villa-Lobos and Pujol: Two Kinds of Prelude

Last week, as an introduction to my recordings of the preludes by Máximo Diego Pujol, I did a post called "The Latin American Prelude and Some History". Now I would like to do a postlude because there are some interesting differences between Villa-Lobos' handling of the prelude and Pujol's.

Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote five (or maybe six?) preludes in 1940. Some of them at least were played by Segovia, even though he was not the dedicatee as he was in much of the music by Ponce, Rodrigo and Moreno Torroba. Villa-Lobos dedicated his preludes for guitar to "Mindinha" or Arminda Neves d'Almeida who was Villa-Lobos' companion from 1936 until his death in 1959. The first prelude, in E minor, was a Segovia favorite.

I doubt anyone could handle that cello-like melody in the bass in the first part as lyrically as Segovia. For absolute rhythmic accuracy one would look elsewhere, to John Williams, for example, but the tone-color and vibrato of Segovia was really remarkable. This prelude is in arch-form: ABCBA. The prelude no. 2 I have put up before, but here is another performance:

It is surprisingly hard to find good performances of this prelude, but Pepe Romero, whom one does not usually think of as a Villa-Lobos interpreter, does an amazing job. That arpeggio in the middle is very difficult to master because the right hand fingering is awkward. The other problem is that the shifting makes it hard to avoid squeaking. But you would never even know these were problems listening to Pepe! The form of this prelude is a straightforward ABA with the middle section quicker.

The Prelude No. 3 is a favorite with students because it is technically a bit easier than the others. It is an hommage to Bach, mostly shown in the descending compound melody of the second part. A compound melody, one of Bach's specialties, is created by making one melodic line suggest two. Here, a high note is interspersed with a descending scale, which sounds like one melody turning into two. The form of this prelude is ABAB. John Williams has always played this prelude with particular intensity:

The Prelude No. 4 is another one with slow outer sections and a quick arpeggio in the middle. It is Villa-Lobos' hommage to the music and culture of the natives of Brazil. Here is a performance by Julian Bream (or you could go listen to mine here):

The Prelude No. 5 is a waltz in the form ABCA. It is in the style of the popular music of Brazilian society at the time: light, charming music.

Villa-Lobos had a great advantage over most composers for guitar: he was a guitarist, though a composer first. Segovia has made criticisms of the way Villa-Lobos wrote for guitar and there is no denying that many pieces pose unusual technical problems. Only very accomplished guitarists can solve them all. But the music is still idiomatic for guitar and the brilliant use it makes of the sonorities of the instrument is one reason these preludes are so popular. There is real originality here too, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic, but at the same time the music is never too far from its roots.

Pujol is a guitarist first, I suspect, and a composer second. His preludes are perfectly idiomatic for guitar with none of those awkwardnesses we find in Villa-Lobos. He never writes an awkward arpeggio, though the left hand does have to stretch a bit here and there. Though warmly expressive, Pujol's preludes are never as original as Villa-Lobos' and never get far enough from their roots in the tango! They are not quite as easy to play as they sound, as many student guitarists have discovered, but they are beautiful pieces for guitar that will charm the audience even though they may not have as much substance as the preludes by Villa-Lobos.

Townsend: Cinco Preludios by Pujol, No. 5

This is the last of Máximo Diego Pujol's five preludes for guitar. The quickest of the set, it is a candombe, the quicker variety of tango showing African influences in the rhythmic syncopations of the chords near the beginning and the repeated notes in the return to the A section after the slow middle section. It also ends with some percussion: tapping on the guitar. Here is the recording with the usual photos: the composer, first page of the score, tango dancers and myself.

Unfortunately I don't have recordings by myself of most of the Villa-Lobos preludes, just No. 4, which I have already posted here. They would have been useful in doing a comparison of the preludes by Pujol with the ones by Villa-Lobos. I will do that comparison, but I will save it for another post.