Pop Criticism

One of the blogs that I look at from time to time because it usually has interesting stuff that I would never run across myself is Ghost of a Flea. He has some posts up that do some of that comparing different versions thingy that I do from time to time. Here is the song he is talking about, which is a pretty good song:

Start here, but you have to read the several posts below as well. I wish he had a permalink to the whole set of posts, but he doesn't. He offers this very wise observation:

What non-writers don't know is that it is much easier to write in a formal style than an informal style and much easier to write something long and complicated than to write something short and simple. Writing pop songs might be the best example; like playing bass, it's easy to do badly but very difficult to do well.

Yep. Here are the related posts, or you can find the first one in the blog and scroll down.

This is a pop song of utter simplicity, that shows how good pop music can be. I think classical composers have pretty much forgotten how to do this (except for the minimalist guys, but they are pretty maximal these days). But there was a time, when a classical composer was not afraid to do a song this simple:

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B minor Symphonies

Richard Taruskin's five-volume history of music, the Oxford History of Western Music, keeps giving me ideas for posts. In discussing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony he mentions the very few other symphonies in this key. Let's have a look at them.

You would think that there would be scads of symphonies in this key, only two sharps away from A minor, but no. The only previous one by a major composer is one of a group of six written by C. P. E. Bach in 1773 for Baron van Swieten. It is in three movements, Allegretto, Larghetto and Presto. It is not a lengthy work and is for strings alone.

The decade of the 1770s was noted for its "storm and stress" mood in music. The symphony had traditionally been rather a cheerful, convivial kind of music. But composers soon started to use the resources of the orchestra to paint some darker moods. Still, until the 19th century, symphonies in minor keys are relatively rare. Mozart's 40th Symphony in G minor stands out for that reason. In 1772 Joseph Haydn wrote a symphony in B major and cast the second movement in B minor. The work is scored for two oboes, bassoon, two horns and strings. Here is the whole symphony. The second movement, Poco Adagio starts just after the five minute mark. It is in the style of a siciliana.

Given that fairly modest background to the idea of a symphony in B minor, Schubert's Unfinished stands out even more strongly. Every composer, at least in those days, probably had a few unfinished symphonies in his drawer. When you start to compose quite often the music just doesn't unfold as it should, or you get side-tracked into some dull ideas or just lose your way. So there they sit, sketches of potential works. Schubert had a few unfinished symphonies of his own. But The Unfinished is a bit different. There is a manuscript full score of the first two movements, two pages of a Scherzo, a piano sketch of the rest of the Scherzo and that's it. The nickname "Unfinished" may be just that, a nickname for a piece that Schubert decided was complete after just two movements. It was written in 1822, before the "Great C Major" that I discussed in these two posts. Like a number of Schubert's larger works it was never performed during his life. The Unfinished wasn't even published until 1866!

The symphony begins with a mysterious "preface theme" in the low strings. In the score it is phrased in two-measure groups, but it is just as easily heard as 2 + 3 + 3 as I have bracketed it in the example below. Here is the opening group of themes from the first movement:

Click to enlarge

Despite the fact that the nearest model for Schubert in the symphony genre was Beethoven, and despite the fact that Beethoven did use "preface themes" (usually to replace a slow introduction), this sounds nothing like Beethoven. That opening theme in the bass is very mysterious. You could say, "yes, but Beethoven had a very mysterious beginning to his 9th Symphony in D minor, did he not?" Yep, but the 9th Symphony of Beethoven was written in 1824, two years after this one! This symphony, apart from being in a very unusual key, has also very unusual themes. The texture here, with the strings accompanying the winds in the third theme above, owes little to Mozart and Beethoven, but we find it in Rossini, in the overture to the Barber of Seville, for example. Now let's listen to the music. Here is the whole Unfinished with the score:

There is just a touch of the operatic in the first movement, especially in the forzando chords in the full orchestra that from time to time punctuate the texture, followed by suspenseful pizzicati. Twice we return to that bass "preface theme" and each time it seems more ominous. What Schubert is doing here is inventing how to create romantic subjectivity in music. This was first done in the smaller forms, the songs and impromptus heard in the salons where Schubert achieved his success. Now he is moving it to the larger concert hall. He had no immediate influence because no-one heard this music until the second half of the century, but when they did, it made a huge impact on the romantic symphonists like Brahms and even Mahler.

There was one other symphonist who felt the impact of the Unfinished and that was Tchaikovsky whose 6th symphony is not only in B minor, but also ends with a slow movement! Here it is:

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Music in the 19th Century: The Romantic Trance

One of the greatest innovations in 19th century music was a kind of musical trance that took the listener inside themselves. The means to achieve this were various and included instrumental color and orchestration, rhythmic techniques, melodic techniques, but most of all, harmony. Perhaps the earliest extensive use of 'romantic' harmony was by Franz Schubert, whose song, the Elfking, we looked at a few days ago. The basic principle of harmonic organization in music up to this point was to start on the tonic chord, go to the dominant and then, in the second half of the piece, return from the dominant to the tonic, often visiting a remote harmony en route. There are thousands of Baroque and Classical period pieces that use this format. What the early romantics did was to intensify the 'feeling' aspect of music so that it gave the listener the experience of inwardness, of plunging beneath the surface into inner depths. One of their methods was by intensifying the harmony. The vehicle for this kind of experience was the salon concert in which both Chopin and Schubert were the masters. Listeners to this kind of performance experienced a kind of shared solitude and this was captured rather well in a famous painting by Josef Danhauser called Liszt at the Piano:

Liszt is, of course, seated at the piano and the two figures immediately behind him, leaning towards one another, are the composers Berlioz and Rossini. The bust sitting on the piano that Liszt is gazing at is Beethoven who still looms over music. One of the most important precedents for the romantic trance in music is found in the Cavatina movement from Beethoven's String Quartet, op 130. Here is that movement:

The crucial moment comes 3:57 into the movement when a new texture begins with triplet E flats in the three lower instruments. When the first violin enters a moment later with a new melody it is not in triplets so it is at odds rhythmically with the others. Beethoven marks this "Beklemmt", meaning "suppressed" or "agonized". But the most interesting thing for our purposes is that while the movement is in E flat, this passage is in the flat submediant, C flat. Those E flats in the accompaniment are the third of a C flat harmony. The flat submediant, or in less technical language, a triad built on the flattened sixth note of the scale, will be the romantic harmony par excellence, the harmony that signals the trance-state, the descending beneath the surface of feeling.

Schubert extended this technique with his Impromptu in E flat, op 90, no 2:

Like the Beethoven example, this is also in E flat major. But Schubert goes Beethoven one better: instead of just going to the flat submediant (C flat major), Schubert goes instead to the minor flat submediant, C flat minor. But to avoid writing an immense number of flats, he notates it instead as B minor, the enharmonic equivalent. (Two notes or harmonies are said to be "enharmonically equivalent" when the notations result in the same sound. For example, C flat and B have the same sound even though they are written differently. It is the same thing as writing the word 'fish' with 'ph' instead of 'f': 'phish'.) In the Impromptu the move to B minor, prepared with a G flat harmony, equivalent to F sharp, occurs at the 1:16 mark. Another characteristic romantic harmony that Schubert uses is at the 0:23 mark when he moves from E flat major to E flat minor.

This piece, like most heard during Schubert's short lifetime, was performed at Viennese salon concerts called, in honor of Schubert, "Schubertiads".

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Music in the 19th Century: Franz Schubert and "Der Erlkönig"

I've talked about how the 19th century saw many different movements in music, not just romanticism. But romanticism was most certainly an important and powerful trend. The earliest important composer in this area was Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828) who died tragically young at age thirty-one. Despite this, he wrote a huge amount of music in all the important genres. About two-thirds of his compositions were songs of which he wrote 630! This is representative of a significant shift from the big public genres to more private, domestic, music-making. During his short life, Schubert was primarily known for his music for piano, piano duet and his songs, all of which were performed in intimate salon settings. This is introspective music, exploring different kinds of consciousness than the symphony or opera. One of Schubert's most powerful songs, Der Erlkönig, was written in 1815 when he was only eighteen years old. The text is by Goethe. Here it is in a literal translation:

Who rides, so late, through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.
He has the boy well in his arm
He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.

"My son, why do you hide your face so anxiously?"
"Father, do you not see the Elfking?
The Elfking with crown and tail?"
"My son, it's a wisp of fog."

"You dear child, come, go with me!
Very lovely games I'll play with you;
Some colourful flowers are on the beach,
My mother has some golden robes."

"My father, my father, and don't you hear
What the Elfking quietly promises me?"
"Be calm, stay calm, my child;
The wind is rustling through withered leaves."

"Do you want to come with me, pretty boy?
My daughters shall wait on you finely;
My daughters will lead the nightly dance,
And rock and dance and sing you to sleep."

"My father, my father, and don't you see there
The Elfking's daughters in the gloomy place?"
"My son, my son, I see it clearly:
There shimmer the old willows so grey."

"I love you, your beautiful form entices me;
And if you're not willing, then I will use force."
"My father, my father, he's grabbing me now!
The Elfking has done me some harm!"

It horrifies the father; he swiftly rides on,
He holds the moaning child in his arms,
Reaches the farm with trouble and hardship;
In his arms, the child was dead.

There are four 'characters' in the poem: the narrator, the son, the father and the Elfking. Well, actually five as the horse both father and son are riding on is represented in the galloping triplets in the piano! The father and the son see different realities: the son, the Elfking and his daughters, but the father just wisps of fog. Here is an extraordinary performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, perhaps the greatest lieder (German word for 'songs' which signifies this kind of musical genre) singer of all time:

Notice how he changes vocal color and expression for each 'character'. The music changes mode from minor to major for the lines sung by the Elfking, which accords well with the singer's eerie smile during this part of the song. The tonal scheme of the song is also brilliantly fashioned, but we will get involved with Schubert's harmonic innovations in another post. For now, just enjoy the remarkably achievement of this song: the representation of subtle states of consciousness in music. For this is the very starting point of Romanticism.

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Reconsidering Schubert

Readers of this blog know that I am not shy about expressing opinions and evaluations. Indeed, I think that is my job as a blogger! I have had readers email me complaining that I have been too even-handed and saying they relied on my judgement. Very flattering! But I think that one's views must be earned. In other words, just throwing out scattered, subjective impressions with no reasoning behind them is not valuable. In fact, that is what I see an awful lot of 'critics' doing, especially those in popular culture. One of the ways that you earn your way to an evaluation is by listening objectively and by being prepared to change your opinion when necessary.

That being said, I confess that in recent years I have been unresponsive to a lot of chamber music by Schubert. Those interminable quartets and quintets just seemed to me to meander on aimlessly. An early course I took on romantic music disposed me a bit to this view because one of the points made in the course was that the weak genre in the Romantic Period was chamber music, which usually fell far short of their extraordinary achievements in orchestral music, piano music and opera. I still think this is true. But on stumbling on a post on Jessica Duchen's blog, I am re-thinking Schubert's chamber music a bit. This is a lovely movement:

But I remain unrepentantly unsympathetic to Schumann's chamber music. Well, actually, to most of his attempts to write longer movements. The absolute genius that he shows in the shorter forms, in the lieder and piano music, seems to desert him when he tries to write a quartet or symphony. I talk at length about Schumann in this post and this post.

But I'm going to listen a lot more to Schubert's chamber music from now on.

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