UPDATE: The original link seems to have gone astray so I can't embed, but this link should take you to the clip:
THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Beatles' Vocal Tracks
One measure of just how important the Beatles were is the amount of material that is available. We have the big Anthology and associated CDs of early and alternate versions of a lot of songs. We have books on their equipment and even one that recounts what they did every single day they were together as a group. But today I ran across something particularly interesting: a clip of just the vocal tracks of the side two medley from Abbey Road.
UPDATE: The original link seems to have gone astray so I can't embed, but this link should take you to the clip:
UPDATE: The original link seems to have gone astray so I can't embed, but this link should take you to the clip:
Musicianship
What is musicianship and where do you learn it? According to many universities it consists in the skills developed in ear training courses. Musicianship is the ability to hear music and take it down in dictation. It is the ability to sing written melodies at sight. It is the ability to read an orchestral score and play a version of it on piano at sight. That sort of thing.
Those are certainly things that are important to a musician and they are easily taught and tested, but is that what we first thing of when we talk about "musicianship"? What are we referring to when we call someone "musical"?
I think that the core meaning of the words "musical" and "musicianship" is actually something much more subtle and difficult to both teach and test, which is why it is not explicitly listed in the curriculum. Musicianship, beyond the basic abilities I mention above, is the ability to play expressively, to evoke musical expression. This is, after all, the real goal of all musical performance--to reach the audience somehow, to affect them, to move them. Music is wonderful at expressing, well, musical moods. I hesitate to say "emotion" because I don't think music really communicates garden-variety emotions.
But it most certainly does express something. Schoenberg says in his book Fundamentals of Musical Composition that "The concept that music expresses something is generally accepted. However, chess does not tell stories. Mathematics does not evoke emotions. Similarly, from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics, music does not express the extra-musical." [p. 93] But it does express the musical!
My mother always used to say that classical music evoked for her images of waterfalls and forests. I think that she was just trying to translate musical expression into verbal language. I regard music and language as two expressive mediums that each have their characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Music can't say "meet you at 3pm for a coffee" and language can't say:
What I think we are really thinking of when we speak of musicianship and musicality is that subtle ability to make a musical phrase come alive. True, you need a fund of technical ability and all those other musical skills, but all that is merely a prerequisite to playing musically. Notice that abbreviation in the musical example above: espress. That stands for "espressivo", asking the player to play with expression. It is really impossible to put in words what that means, but it involves connecting the notes in a vocal manner, shaping the line with dynamics (perhaps a bit louder in the middle), maybe even pushing ahead a bit and tapering off towards the end. Treating this phrase as a kind of living thing.
Where is this learned? The answer is mostly in private lessons. If you have a teacher that really knows his or her stuff, then they will be talking about this all the time: shape that phrase, listen to where it is going, look how the music is building to a climax, what is the mood or atmosphere here? And so on. When you have all the music before you, then you can use language to point out things here and there. But a lot of the instruction might be things that would look odd written down. You can teach about rhythm by singing it: da da da DUM, illustrating all sorts of things with your voice, or with gestures. It can be interesting to look at videos of a masterclass.
Just for fun, here is a brief excerpt from a masterclass conducted by guitarist John Williams in Australia. When he gets hold of the guitar and starts demonstrating some alternative ways of transcribing some chords (the piece, Torre Bermeja by Albéniz, is originally for piano) this is a beautiful example of what I was just talking about. There are a few muttered phrases: "like this" or "maybe in first inversion", but mostly it is musical illustrations, i.e. without any words. This can be very confusing if you are not a guitarist (or pianist, or whatever) or not intimately familiar with the piece! But this is how one teaches musicality: with a host of musical not verbal, examples.
Now let's end with John Williams playing all of Torre Bermeja. What a wonderful, effortless technique he has!
Those are certainly things that are important to a musician and they are easily taught and tested, but is that what we first thing of when we talk about "musicianship"? What are we referring to when we call someone "musical"?
I think that the core meaning of the words "musical" and "musicianship" is actually something much more subtle and difficult to both teach and test, which is why it is not explicitly listed in the curriculum. Musicianship, beyond the basic abilities I mention above, is the ability to play expressively, to evoke musical expression. This is, after all, the real goal of all musical performance--to reach the audience somehow, to affect them, to move them. Music is wonderful at expressing, well, musical moods. I hesitate to say "emotion" because I don't think music really communicates garden-variety emotions.
But it most certainly does express something. Schoenberg says in his book Fundamentals of Musical Composition that "The concept that music expresses something is generally accepted. However, chess does not tell stories. Mathematics does not evoke emotions. Similarly, from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics, music does not express the extra-musical." [p. 93] But it does express the musical!
My mother always used to say that classical music evoked for her images of waterfalls and forests. I think that she was just trying to translate musical expression into verbal language. I regard music and language as two expressive mediums that each have their characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Music can't say "meet you at 3pm for a coffee" and language can't say:
What I think we are really thinking of when we speak of musicianship and musicality is that subtle ability to make a musical phrase come alive. True, you need a fund of technical ability and all those other musical skills, but all that is merely a prerequisite to playing musically. Notice that abbreviation in the musical example above: espress. That stands for "espressivo", asking the player to play with expression. It is really impossible to put in words what that means, but it involves connecting the notes in a vocal manner, shaping the line with dynamics (perhaps a bit louder in the middle), maybe even pushing ahead a bit and tapering off towards the end. Treating this phrase as a kind of living thing.
Where is this learned? The answer is mostly in private lessons. If you have a teacher that really knows his or her stuff, then they will be talking about this all the time: shape that phrase, listen to where it is going, look how the music is building to a climax, what is the mood or atmosphere here? And so on. When you have all the music before you, then you can use language to point out things here and there. But a lot of the instruction might be things that would look odd written down. You can teach about rhythm by singing it: da da da DUM, illustrating all sorts of things with your voice, or with gestures. It can be interesting to look at videos of a masterclass.
Just for fun, here is a brief excerpt from a masterclass conducted by guitarist John Williams in Australia. When he gets hold of the guitar and starts demonstrating some alternative ways of transcribing some chords (the piece, Torre Bermeja by Albéniz, is originally for piano) this is a beautiful example of what I was just talking about. There are a few muttered phrases: "like this" or "maybe in first inversion", but mostly it is musical illustrations, i.e. without any words. This can be very confusing if you are not a guitarist (or pianist, or whatever) or not intimately familiar with the piece! But this is how one teaches musicality: with a host of musical not verbal, examples.
Now let's end with John Williams playing all of Torre Bermeja. What a wonderful, effortless technique he has!
Shostakovich: Trio in E minor, third movement
One of the things that Shostakovich is famous for is his use of the passacaglia form. As Wikipedia tells us this originated in 17th century Spain (on the guitar as a matter of fact) as a simple chord progression used to accompany, as the name tells us, a procession down the street. It soon became a favorite of Baroque composers in the form of a set of variations over a repeated bass line or chord progression.
There are a number of famous passacaglias by Shostakovich, who tended to use it to create powerful laments. This one is an expressive duet for the violin and cello over a set of chords in the piano that repeat six times. Here is that progression:
This progression outlines two tetrachords (groups of four notes). The first is in the tonic key of B flat minor and has the notes B flat, F, G natural and A natural. The A natural would normally lead us back to the tonic B flat, but Shostakovich follows it with a second tetrachord F#, G natural, A natural, B natural which suggests a modal E minor, the key of the first movement and the work as a whole.
Incidentally, the B natural that the progression ends on is in a Neapolitan relationship with the tonic: a semitone higher (which we would easily see if it were spelled C flat). Where else have we seen a Neapolitan relationship? Oh yes, in the second movement scherzo where the contrasting middle section was in G major, a Neapolitan relation to the tonic F# major. A very famous use of this kind of relationship is in the transition from the first to the second movement of Beethoven's late C# minor quartet. The first movement is in C# minor and the second in D major, the Neapolitan.
Here is the melody as it first appears in the violin. It is quite a long one, 45 seconds long, so requires three lines:
Some features: it begins with an upbeat fifth to tonic leap, just as the scherzo did. From there it mostly moves by step and features a mournful turn figure that comes three times. The movement unfolds with variations on this melody in both violin and cello and ends with a B natural pedal and outlining the chord of E minor.
Let's listen to that performance by Argerich, Kremer and Maisky:
There are a number of famous passacaglias by Shostakovich, who tended to use it to create powerful laments. This one is an expressive duet for the violin and cello over a set of chords in the piano that repeat six times. Here is that progression:
This progression outlines two tetrachords (groups of four notes). The first is in the tonic key of B flat minor and has the notes B flat, F, G natural and A natural. The A natural would normally lead us back to the tonic B flat, but Shostakovich follows it with a second tetrachord F#, G natural, A natural, B natural which suggests a modal E minor, the key of the first movement and the work as a whole.
Incidentally, the B natural that the progression ends on is in a Neapolitan relationship with the tonic: a semitone higher (which we would easily see if it were spelled C flat). Where else have we seen a Neapolitan relationship? Oh yes, in the second movement scherzo where the contrasting middle section was in G major, a Neapolitan relation to the tonic F# major. A very famous use of this kind of relationship is in the transition from the first to the second movement of Beethoven's late C# minor quartet. The first movement is in C# minor and the second in D major, the Neapolitan.
Here is the melody as it first appears in the violin. It is quite a long one, 45 seconds long, so requires three lines:
Some features: it begins with an upbeat fifth to tonic leap, just as the scherzo did. From there it mostly moves by step and features a mournful turn figure that comes three times. The movement unfolds with variations on this melody in both violin and cello and ends with a B natural pedal and outlining the chord of E minor.
Let's listen to that performance by Argerich, Kremer and Maisky:
Friday, September 20, 2013
Where Did I Learn All This Stuff?
I don't know for sure, of course, but it occurs to me that some readers might be asking themselves "where did he learn all this stuff?" My knowledge of music is hardly comprehensive (I know almost nothing about middle-period Britney Spears' harmonic practice, for example) and it is not nearly as profound as it could be. But over the course of some forty-six years as a professional musician, I have picked up quite a lot. Where and how?
As far as formal study goes, that only began when I was twenty and entered the University of Victoria as an undergraduate, first in music education and then in the School of Music. But before that I had spent some years playing bass and electric guitar in a rock band and a year or so playing acoustic guitar and singing as a 'folk' musician à la Bob Dylan. I had then taken up the classical guitar and taught myself to read music so I could learn to play Bach on guitar. In undergraduate history and theory courses at the University of Victoria and later at McGill University, I did pick up the basics of harmony and theory--but not counterpoint as I managed to miss that year when I transferred schools. In between, I spent a year in Spain in total dedication to mastering the technique of the classical guitar. The final stage of my formal training came decades later when I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology where I completed all the seminars for a doctorate, though not the dissertation. It was then that I did the first and only counterpoint course I have ever taken: the advanced seminar in fugue, the most advanced counterpoint course offered. I also did seminars in things like "non-classical theme types", comedy in opera, Shostakovich symphonies, DuFay, paleography and so on.
But, oddly, all this formal training left me with huge gaps in my knowledge of the basic repertoire. In eight years at university I don't recall once studying a Beethoven piano sonata or string quartet. I do recall doing the Fifth Symphony, very briefly, in first year history survey, but the most exposure I had to that piece was when I taught it to a very large class of non-music majors. The only time I was exposed to species counterpoint was again when I taught it in a basic theory class.
Where did I learn about those things I now consider core? I taught myself. I would guesstimate that only about 15% or 20% of my musical knowledge actually came from classes. My knowledge of repertoire comes largely from my own listening and study. No-one took me through all the Beethoven quartets. You would think, as they are pretty much the most profound music ever written, that every music school worth its salt would be offering a comprehensive course on them quite often. But no, I don't think that is the case. I don't have the time to search through all the course offerings of every school, but this is more typical of the kind of seminar we are offered instead of the Beethoven quartets:
So when do you get to know the repertoire? Theoretically that happens in all those undergraduate courses labelled "chamber music literature" etc. But there is never enough time. You skim, you browse and you skip over the surface. I recall studying ONE Haydn quartet in my undergraduate years.
What a university education gives you is basically an introduction to music. From then on, you are on your own. I never had the least exposure to the Shostakovich string quartets at university--never heard one note. What I did several years ago was buy the Emerson box of them and listen to one quartet every morning until I got them in my ears. Then I started looking at the scores. After several years, I am still getting to know them!
As far as formal study goes, that only began when I was twenty and entered the University of Victoria as an undergraduate, first in music education and then in the School of Music. But before that I had spent some years playing bass and electric guitar in a rock band and a year or so playing acoustic guitar and singing as a 'folk' musician à la Bob Dylan. I had then taken up the classical guitar and taught myself to read music so I could learn to play Bach on guitar. In undergraduate history and theory courses at the University of Victoria and later at McGill University, I did pick up the basics of harmony and theory--but not counterpoint as I managed to miss that year when I transferred schools. In between, I spent a year in Spain in total dedication to mastering the technique of the classical guitar. The final stage of my formal training came decades later when I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology where I completed all the seminars for a doctorate, though not the dissertation. It was then that I did the first and only counterpoint course I have ever taken: the advanced seminar in fugue, the most advanced counterpoint course offered. I also did seminars in things like "non-classical theme types", comedy in opera, Shostakovich symphonies, DuFay, paleography and so on.
But, oddly, all this formal training left me with huge gaps in my knowledge of the basic repertoire. In eight years at university I don't recall once studying a Beethoven piano sonata or string quartet. I do recall doing the Fifth Symphony, very briefly, in first year history survey, but the most exposure I had to that piece was when I taught it to a very large class of non-music majors. The only time I was exposed to species counterpoint was again when I taught it in a basic theory class.
Where did I learn about those things I now consider core? I taught myself. I would guesstimate that only about 15% or 20% of my musical knowledge actually came from classes. My knowledge of repertoire comes largely from my own listening and study. No-one took me through all the Beethoven quartets. You would think, as they are pretty much the most profound music ever written, that every music school worth its salt would be offering a comprehensive course on them quite often. But no, I don't think that is the case. I don't have the time to search through all the course offerings of every school, but this is more typical of the kind of seminar we are offered instead of the Beethoven quartets:
Oh yes, very, uh, stylish. This looks more promising:The Socio-Cultural Study of MusicThis seminar series is designed to introduce students to the socio-cultural study of music, with a focus on the work of Professor Georgina Born. The seminars introduce a series of innovative approaches to how we can understand and study contemporary musics, although the ideas are relevant also to historical musicology: the seminars are therefore broadly methodological. The nearest discipline to the space the seminars will occupy is ethnomusicology. However Born’s work is not ethnomusicological as that is broadly understood: it uses the method of ethnography, but it does not focus primarily on non-western musics but on contemporary musics of the developed world, so that a better disciplinary designation for this course is a combined anthropology/sociology of music. Moreover, while the majority of Born’s work has been on music, she has researched and written about a range of areas of cultural production and creative cultural practices including television, digital technologies and new media, and art-science: the seminars therefore also place research on music in this wider context.Students are required to read and be prepared to discuss set texts by Born and key related texts, including such figures as Bourdieu, Foucault, Ihde, Feld, Goehr, Bohlman and DeLanda, as well as the work of several McGill professors with whom Born’s work is in dialogue: Prof. David Brackett, Prof. Jonathan Sterne and Prof. Will Straw. Each week Prof. Born will introduce or speak to the key questions and readings at issue; two students will also present summaries and discussions of readings as agreed beforehand. The allocation of student presentations will happen in the first weeks of the seminar and all students are required to present. Final mark for the course will be based on the in-class presentations and a final paper of 10-15 pages. Further details will be given at the start of term.
Multiple Perspectives on the Analysis of Instrumental Works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert: Case StudiesMusical compositions are literally “com-posed” by a multitude of parameters, such as form, rhythm, melody, dynamics, voice-leading, topoi, schemata, harmony, etc. In order to grasp the complexity of musical works, the analyst is compelled to understand both the individual characteristics in their own right and their mutual and multifaceted interrelatedness. This seminar begins, by way of an elaborated example, with a multiple-perspective analysis of Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata (op. 32/ nr. 1) (motivic, form-functional, hypermetrical, hermeneutic, etc.). The aim of the seminar is to discuss and evaluate the different approaches and to apply multiple analytical approaches to other key works from the classical and early-romantic repertoire. Special attention will be given to the question of how far these different parameters contribute to the creation of musical form. Requirements of this course include (a) weekly assignments (readings and/or analysis preparation) (b) a one-hour class presentation in which a group of related compositions is presented (“a mini corpus-based study”), and (c) a paper in which this presentation is written out and further elaborated.
But at the end of the day, I suspect you will have a lot of familiarity with the complexities of this abstract approach and not know the Beethoven quartets very well at all. This is a more typical kind of course:
The thing to realize is that if you are NOT working at this level of complex abstraction they will not give you the doctorate and you won't get the job. Sometimes there are interesting insights that can come out of this kind of course. But the focus is really on the elaborate methodology and not on a comprehensive sense of the important repertoire. A typical professor would far rather interrogate the concept of "important repertoire" than actually know it.Music and Politics: Analytical Case Studies from the Eighteenth through Twenty-First CenturiesHow does music convey political meaning? How does a political message manifest itself in the compositional procedures themselves? What are the mechanisms by which a work is politicized beyond composer intent? Can music be apolitical? This seminar will address these questions in selected works from the eighteenth century to the present through score analysis, study of the sketches and writings of composers, as well as by examining the aesthetic contexts and reception histories of the works. Scores to be analyzed include excerpts from The Beggar’s Opera, Un ballo in maschera (Act III), Die Meistersinger (Acts II and III), The Threepenny Opera, Eisler’s Gegen den Krieg, Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero, Boulez’s Structure Ia, Maderna’s Composizione in tre tempi, Nono’s Intolleranza, Adam’s On the Transmigration of Souls, as well as from works chosen by the seminar participants. Course requirements include weekly assigned readings and listening, two in-class presentations, a midterm essay, and a final paper.
So when do you get to know the repertoire? Theoretically that happens in all those undergraduate courses labelled "chamber music literature" etc. But there is never enough time. You skim, you browse and you skip over the surface. I recall studying ONE Haydn quartet in my undergraduate years.
What a university education gives you is basically an introduction to music. From then on, you are on your own. I never had the least exposure to the Shostakovich string quartets at university--never heard one note. What I did several years ago was buy the Emerson box of them and listen to one quartet every morning until I got them in my ears. Then I started looking at the scores. After several years, I am still getting to know them!
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Shostakovich: Trio in E minor: 2nd movement
Continuing the series of posts on Shostakovich's Trio, op, 67, we take up the second movement. This is a short movement, a scherzo in Beethovenesque style. The key is mostly F# major with a section in the Neapolitan, G major. Rhythmically it is not as inventive as Beethoven often was in his trios, but Shostakovich makes up for that with the acerbic harmonies and wayward melodic inflections.
Let's start with an excellent performance by Argerich, Kremer and Maisky:
This is a fairly short movement, just over three minutes. Just because scherzos are quick doesn't mean they have to be brief--there are lots of examples by Beethoven that are twice as long as this. Where this music departs significantly from the Beethoven model is that while 18th and 19th century scherzos had a great deal of repetition, this one does not. Themes are repeated, of course, but they are being continually transformed. Here is that opening theme in the violin:
Very classical in its adherence to outlining triads. The opening leap of a fourth followed by a fifth is probably a bit inelegant for Haydn or even Beethoven, but the rest is rather traditional in character. The piano accompanies this with harmonies that quickly wander from traditional norms, however. The opening tonic is followed by a Neapolitan, then a G# major harmony! Rhythmically the typical kinds of patterns one would find in a 3/4 scherzo all seem just a bit "off" as witnessed by this maniacal little passage for the cello. The frenetic character is only heightened by its being in a very high register:
Instead of a contrasting trio in perhaps the dominant as would be found in a Beethoven scherzo, we have a waltz-like section in G major, the key of the Neapolitan. Here is how it starts:
And the continuation with a theme in the cello:
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| Click to enlarge |
A couple of things to notice about the style: the accompaniment is quite conventional, but the the cello manages to wander into G minor briefly, which gives an uneasy feeling to the passage. Shostakovich had a particular gift for both using traditional forms and harmonies, but at the same time subverting them in subtle and unsubtle ways.
After this contrasting section, the piece returns to the key and themes of the beginning, but in varied form. For example, the repeat of the opening begins with the same music, but this time the theme is in the piano, accompanied by the strings:
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| Click to enlarge |
(It is an exact repeat, I just left off the upbeat melody note because it was in the previous line.)
Another thing to notice about the movement is how terribly Russian it is in its wild, heavy, and slightly drunken mood. This is achieved by a hundred little details: the sometimes clumsy phrases (intentionally so, of course) that just seem to land slightly off-balance, the odd spacings, the strange twists of the melody and the woozy glissandi.
Let's listen to the movement again. Here is a slightly brisker performance by the Mosa Trio from the Netherlands:
New Series on the Symphony
Last year Tom Service at the Guardian did an excellent series of fifty articles on contemporary composers. He is just starting a similarly ambitious series on the symphony. He writes well and knows quite a lot about his subject, both refreshingly rare qualities among journalists. So I recommend following his weekly articles. I will be and from time to time I'm sure I will post some comments.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Shostakovich: Trio in E minor, 1st movement
The Wikipedia article on this trio is very rudimentary, but has the basic information. You probably shouldn't put too much credence in the comments on the structure. For example, the comment on the first movement says it is "highly dissonant" which it certainly is not. I often wonder when people use technical musical terms like "dissonant" or "legato" if they actually know what the words mean, or if they just think they are a sort of metaphor for "good" or "groovy".
Let's have a listen to the first movement. Here is an excellent recording by Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich made in 1959. The first movement goes to the 7:38 mark:
Here is a site where you can download a pdf of the score. The first movement begins with a fugal texture, but with the cello stating the theme in extremely high harmonics:
Then the violin comes in with the theme as the cello continues:
When the piano enters with the theme it is in the low bass in octaves:
As you can see, this is not dissonant, far less dissonant than late 19th century music! The cello statement of the theme is on A or rather the Aeolian mode. When the violin enters, though following the same basic intervals, it is in G major. Then the entry of the piano is in Phrygian mode on B. Though the texture is that of a fugue with the three instruments each stating the theme, harmonically this is very unlike a traditional fugue in which the voices would typically enter on the tonic, dominant and then tonic again. Here they enter on A, G and B with a modal structure.
The fugal opening serves as an introduction to a movement in sonata form, moderato, that begins just after the 3 minute mark in the clip above. This begins in E minor with the piano stating another version of that opening fugue theme. At the 5 minute mark a new section begins, marked Poco più mosso with a new theme in G major:
You might notice that even though the details of the harmony are not traditional (there are cross-relations between F sharp and F natural, for example, at the beginning) the broad outlines are what you would expect: a movement in E minor is quite likely to have a second theme in G major in the Classical period. Of course there are some strange twists and modulations--just before this section is a brief passage in E flat and E flat minor that would not be found in a Classical piece.
After the stating of these two themes, the exposition of a sonata form, there is a development section:
And recapitulation of both themes. Here is the beginning of the recapitulation of the opening E minor theme:
What is different about the way Shostakovich handles Classical forms is in the details: the avoidance of standard cadences, odd modulations and melodic inflections and most of all, the mood or atmosphere which he creates with these details.
As an example of how he might alter a cadence, here is how the first movement ends:
There are some elements of a typical cadence: the D sharp leading tone in the bass which together with the B and F sharp in the upper voices gives a full dominant triad. But no seventh and traditionally, an authentic cadence requires the dominant to be in root position, not first inversion. But then the D sharp is contradicted by a D natural in the next measure and the tonic chord is rendered rather doleful by the reiterated F natural decoration for four measures! The E minor cadence is essentially combined with a Phrygian cadence.
Let's listen to this first movement again in a different performance. Here is the trio of Piano: Martha Argerich, Violin: Gidon Kremer, Violoncello: Mischa Maisky:
Let's have a listen to the first movement. Here is an excellent recording by Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich made in 1959. The first movement goes to the 7:38 mark:
Here is a site where you can download a pdf of the score. The first movement begins with a fugal texture, but with the cello stating the theme in extremely high harmonics:
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Then the violin comes in with the theme as the cello continues:
 |
| Click to enlarge |
When the piano enters with the theme it is in the low bass in octaves:
As you can see, this is not dissonant, far less dissonant than late 19th century music! The cello statement of the theme is on A or rather the Aeolian mode. When the violin enters, though following the same basic intervals, it is in G major. Then the entry of the piano is in Phrygian mode on B. Though the texture is that of a fugue with the three instruments each stating the theme, harmonically this is very unlike a traditional fugue in which the voices would typically enter on the tonic, dominant and then tonic again. Here they enter on A, G and B with a modal structure.
The fugal opening serves as an introduction to a movement in sonata form, moderato, that begins just after the 3 minute mark in the clip above. This begins in E minor with the piano stating another version of that opening fugue theme. At the 5 minute mark a new section begins, marked Poco più mosso with a new theme in G major:
After the stating of these two themes, the exposition of a sonata form, there is a development section:
And recapitulation of both themes. Here is the beginning of the recapitulation of the opening E minor theme:
As an example of how he might alter a cadence, here is how the first movement ends:
There are some elements of a typical cadence: the D sharp leading tone in the bass which together with the B and F sharp in the upper voices gives a full dominant triad. But no seventh and traditionally, an authentic cadence requires the dominant to be in root position, not first inversion. But then the D sharp is contradicted by a D natural in the next measure and the tonic chord is rendered rather doleful by the reiterated F natural decoration for four measures! The E minor cadence is essentially combined with a Phrygian cadence.
Let's listen to this first movement again in a different performance. Here is the trio of Piano: Martha Argerich, Violin: Gidon Kremer, Violoncello: Mischa Maisky:
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