No! Dumbo! Don't go into the light!!!
In keeping with our habit of presenting famous romantic artworks to accompany our Romantic music, above we have Gustave Dore's 1867 illustration, The White Rose, for Canto 31 of Dante's Divine Comedy:
IN fashion, as a snow white rose, lay then
Before my view the saintly multitude,
Which in His own blood Christ espoused. Meanwhile,
That other host, that soar aloft to gaze
And celebrate His glory, whom they love,
Hover’d around; and, like a troop of bees,
Amid the vernal sweets alighting now,
Now, clustering, where their fragrant labour glows,
Flew downward to the mighty flower, or rose
From the redundant petals, streaming back
Unto the steadfast dwelling of their joy [...]
Fascinating, eh? Yes, I took my meds today, really! But we're here today for Brahms' Symphony #4 in E minor, the first movement, and we will get to it, but we might have to take a circuitous route. (ha ha)
I hate writing these composer bios, probably because I've read so many crappy biographies in program notes that they bore me to death and serve as more of a distraction from the music, which is what counts. Ah, but this is the business we have chosen.
Most composers have a nice one-line summary of their life and personality. For Brahms, the usual drivel is that he was "The Defender of Tradition." Here's Rhapsody.com's blurb on Brahms. Note the way they describe him in the context of Wagner:
While his contemporary Richard Wagner symbolized the progressive dissonances of one German school, Brahms represented the link to tradition. In many ways his music was a culmination of all traditional classical music that came before him, particularly the early Romantics such as Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann -- the latter helped spark Brahms' career with his favorable words. Brahms' style may have been conservative, but the detail and beauty of his output was extraordinary...
In fact, at the time of Brahms' greatest output, there was a great schism developing in music, with Brahms and Wagner as the most identifiable symbols of the divide.
The nineteenth century saw the passing of the patronage system and the growth of a middle class market for classical music. Publications arose to discuss the changes in musical style and aesthetics that were taking place during the Romantic era. As any experienced blogger would expect, editorial positions differed, and factions developed that favored one critic or musician over another critic or musician.
One of the most successful of these publications was Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a magazine started by Robert Schumann -- yes, that Schumann, the one whose Piano Concerto we covered a couple of months ago. It became a sounding board for arguments about the direction of Romanticism, often with articles written under pseudonyms by one musician attacking another musician.
Oh! And you thought DailyKos was too divisive? This is the way of the world!
The faction growing up around Wagner, however, was more than just an aesthetic tea party; it was more of a right-wing German nationalist anti-semitic proto-fascist tea party, one that would have some negative germinal effects on later German political history. Wagner and composers in his clique were seen as harbingers of a new music, while those that still honored the past, and this was most definitely Brahms, were portrayed as anti-Wagner, anti-progress, anti-Germany. After one of Wagner's anti-semitic diatribes attacking Mendelssohn, who was a dear friend of both Schumann and Brahms, the schism metastasized into new, even less civil, competing publications.
I wouldn't waste your time with any of this but for the fact that it will be unavoidable that we bring some of this back up when we cover Wagner, some weeks from now, and for understanding a lot of the crap written about Brahms music. For instance, in researching Brahms' Fourth for this diary, I read the Boston Symphony Orchestra program notes, which described a wonderful fiction in which the sad minor key melodies of the Fourth were prompted by Brahms' prophetic foresight that Wagner was leading Germany down the path to German Nazi-ism.
... eh, it appears I can't cut and paste from the BSO PDF file. http://www.bso.org/...
Well, no, I seriously doubt any of that was the creative source of the Fourth. The lesson to learn here is: program notes for even the best orchestras are usually just bullshit.
So let me, Dumbo, the guy who never took Music Theory in college, now offer you my own bullshit on the Brahms' Fourth. Let's go back to Brahms, the Defender of Tradition, Brahms, the first great composer and musicologist, Brahms, the rediscoverer of Baroque and Renaissance masters of music. Let's look at the Fourth through that filter, instead, and connect it back to Johann Sebastian Bach, with a minor side excursion through The Eagles and Europop.
In the early nineteenth century, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was nearly forgotten. His musical style had gone out of fashion generations earlier. It took a revival concert in 1729, led by future Brahms best friend Felix Mendelssohn, to bring Bach's music back to the attention of a European public that had forgotten about him. Even during his own time, Bach was never the most popular of the Baroque composers, his music being so terribly dense, complicated and intellectual compared to the easier music of his more popular contemporaries like Handel. Mendelssohn was astute enough to recognize a treasure trove of great, unappreciated music at a time when the world was finally ready to appreciate it.
The musical element of the Baroque style that Bach raised to new levels was counterpoint, the overlaying of two or more distinct "voices" (not necessarily human) overlapping each other in a harmonically effective way, rather than just clobbering each other senseless. His melodies were extremely chromatic (full of sharps and flats). His harmonies were extremely bold, but he achieved this while staying loyal to the rules of the game, unlike the harmonies of the late Romantics like Wagner.
Here's the first movement of one of my favorite Bach works, the Brandenburg Concerto #5 in D Major.
I'm not sure what would be the greater sin: giving short-schrift to the Brandenburg #5 to explain Brahms' Fourth, or giving short-schrift to Brahms to explain Bach. With all the wonderful things we can point out in this work, I'm really only posting it so I can point out one of Bach's harmonic idiosyncracies, his use of the Circle of Fifths.
Listen at about the 3:30 to 4:00 points on the clip above. There are other points in this work, and most of Bach's work, where he goes off on a tangent with a series of fifth or fourth modulations, but this one is beautifully over the top.
(And God forbid I should forget to mention the long, beautiful harpsichord solo. What an amazing piece of music.)
So, okay, what is a fifth? What is a fourth? What is a Circle of Fifths?
In musical terminology, an interval is the separation between two white key notes. For instance, the interval from Do to Re is a second. The interval from Re to Mi is a second. The interval of a fifth then, is four notes up, like Do and Sol.
The fifth is the most harmonically strong interval in all music. In my diary on The Physics of Music, Donald Duck helped me explain the mathematical relationship that enforces this: Sol vibrates at 3/2 the frequency of Do. That's the lowest common denominator you can get. Three vibrations of a Sol note occur for every two Do notes. You can't count them fast enough, but your ear does, somehow, magically, and music couldn't possibly work without that.
The Pythagoreans, that weird little ancient Greek cult devoted to mathematics, worked out that just using fifth relationships for notes, going up by a fifth repeatedly you eventually generate all twelve notes of the scale, black and white. Without getting technical, there are some faults with that, which we won't bother with. I just want a good excuse to show you the Circle of Fifths graphic.
I actually have a huge choice of graphics for the Circle of Fifths. Just do a Google Image Search:
Very beautiful and trippy. They almost look like they were gathered from astrological charts or tarot card readings or psych rehab paintings or CIA MK Ultra experiments.
There are so many pretty Circle of Fifths graphics to choose from, I don't need to make my own, certainly, but what the hell. I present to you Dumbo's own official Circle of Fifths graphic.
No! Dumbo! Don't go into the Circle of Fifths!!!
It's 4:36pm. What are the odds I'll finish this diary on time? Getting slimmer, because I insist on going into the Circle of Fifths! And I'm getting a soda first.
Scary looking piece of shit, isn't it? I can understand if you avert your eyes.
The Circle of Fifths is more than just a cool graphic and a nice Pythagorean source of dinner conversation. It helps magnify certain harmonic relationships, in particular, the chord progressions that Bach loved to use. Bach was a Circle junkie. Most of his works, including the Fifth Brandenburg, and very, very visibly in that section starting at 3:30, include Circle of Fifths progressions.
These types of harmonic progressions aren't Bach's alone. They are in all kinds of music, including pop music. Here's one of my favorite examples of that, the Eagles' song Hotel California. Oh, what a lot of fun to play that on guitar.
That's a very nice example because it goes through more than one or two links on the circle. Interesting comments about it from another blog:
Let's start by looking at that chord sequence for the verses, and which is also used in the introduction and guitar solo sections. It's unmistakeable, one of the first things many new guitarists learn; so what's the secret?
Guess what? What holds Hotel California together harmonically is only one of the oldest tricks in the book, and one that JS Bach used countless times to great effect: the Circle of Fifths. The idea is simple: the roots of the chords follow a sequence of rising perfect fifths (i.e. an interval of seven semitones). So the roots of the first six chords are: B, F sharp, A, E and G. (If you want to try this in your own songwriting, the device also works very nicely in the opposite direction.) The last two chords break the circle of fifths, but bring us neatly back to the dominant chord, which, as always, has a strong gravitational pull back to the start of the sequence.
You'll hear the same chords in Brahms' Fourth, and that was the point of all this. Brahms' Fourth was a clear homage to older forms of music. The final movement, in particular, which we aren't going to hear today, is a Passacaglia, a musical form beloved by Bach that fell out of style after the Baroque Era; Brahms' tried to breathe some new life into it by giving an old form a modern treatment. Likewise, the first movement, too, has echoes of Bach, and you can hear it in the harmonies, in fact, the same chord progressions as Hotel California, although you might not recognize it right away.
You might need to turn up your volume for this one. The recording levels are a bit low. And you also might want to crank up your bass a little. Brahms without bass just isn't right. You need to hear the crazy stuff that goes on in the lower strings. (Counterpoint, remember?)
Brahms Symphony #4 in E minor -- First movement
Performed by The Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting.
First clip of two.
[It's 5:03 and I'm running a little late, so I'm going to post the diary now and then update it with the analysis below.
Exposition: First theme
The very beautiful, wistful, maybe melancholic first theme is introduced. It has a rhythm of short-long, short-long. At the 0:08 mark, Brahms uses a brief Circle of Fifths motif: C G B-flat F. After the first performance of the main melody, it is repeated with variations, ornamentation woven into it, the harmony staying the same.
At 1:20 we begin the move to B minor.
Exposition: Second theme
At 1:33, we migrate to B minor, the dominant of E minor. The second group of themes begin with a new tango-ish melody. I didn't analyze the chords here, but they sound familiar.
At 2:28 we change to B major, with a new melody, VERY sweet and comforting, a strong contrast to the sorrow of the beginning and the tragic harshness of this movement.
Exposition: Codetta
At 3:10 the Codetta begins with a new rhythm which I'll call "heroic" just to have something to call it and identify how it's used later. We've heard now
Development (4:05)
The development begins with the same first theme, back in E minor. In fact, you might think it was going to repeat the exposition here. But at 4:22, it takes its own detour, going to G minor, the first of many key changes.
And here at (4:43 to 5:12) come the Circle of Fifths progression, going really nuts with it, very Bach-ish
At 5:50, the "heroic" motif (or so I named it), returns, but in a minor key, more serious than its first appearance. A few more modulations follow, with short-long motif, and then we come to a VERY STRANGE LULL... Which begins in the second clip
Second clip of two, Brahms Symphony #4 first movement
And now, this lull, this very strange lull, with the first four notes of the main theme played by the woodwinds, with an odd, circulating sound in the background. What is this? It's the end of the development, and a very interesting and even creepy way of returning us to E minor for the recap.
Recapitulation: first theme (0:10)
Same as before but shorter, without the extra variations.
Recapitulation: second theme (1:17)
The tango theme, now in E minor (because this is the recap) returns. At 2;37, the sweet lyrical theme returns, but in E major. And at 3:19, the heroic theme returns, now in E major.
But things take a dark turn now. At 4:22, CRUNCH! The E major heroic theme that before provided us a nice upbeat codetta now becomes unstable, leaves E major, and as the rest of the orchestra joins in, the tension rises, the speed accelerates. We are now in the
CODA (4:22)
And we end this movement, back in E minor, but with a certain element of hysteria and tragedy not present at the beginning, which was wistful, melancholic perhaps, but not as pained as this.
And that is the end of the first movement. The rest of the symphony is on Youtube, of course.
NEXT WEEK: Next week, is going to be about harmony as it existed up until the time of Wagner and Debussy, to help get us ready for new games with more advanced music to come in future diaries. And we'll have plenty of pretty youtubes!