Gustav Dore's Enigma
I love this drawing. I was waiting for some opportunity to use it, and I guess now is as good a time as any, this week being our finale of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, certainly a serious and grim piece of Romantic music, contemporary with Dore's art.
Before we get started, though, I want to quickly share something Wonderwhy found and posted in the comments two weeks ago. It's an amazing piece of Russian Orthodox sacred music by Tchaikovsky that I had never heard. If they performed this in Russian Orthodox churches every week, I'd change religions.
And here we are in the final stretch. This will be the last of four weeks of Tchaikovsky, and the week that we finish an entire symphony together.
(More after the bump...)
When I drafted my description of this diary series for Meteor Blades' new FAQ, I wrote that this was basically a Music Appreciation 101 class for Kossacks. That's why, at times, things that seem obvious have been exhaustively explained. It's also why I wanted to focus on Tchaikovsky, because besides being the most Romantic of the Romantic composers, and thus a good example to analyze, his music also forms a rite of passage for many people new to classical music, a gateway to bigger and better, more hallucinogenic and addictive drugs. I know we have some seriously addicted users in our reading audience who want to leap ahead; I thank you for hanging in there, though, for the people who are new to this, and I know we have such people reading this, who have never had that quaking experience of listening to Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, the whole thing, with a sherpa-guide to hold their hand. It can be quite the epiphany. It was for me, some thirty years ago.
e·piph·a·ny
/ɪˈpɪfəni/ Show Spelled[ih-pif-uh-nee] Show IPA
–noun, plural -nies.
1.
( initial capital letter ) a Christian festival, observed on January 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi; Twelfth-day.
2.
an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.
3.
a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
4.
a literary work or section of a work presenting, usually symbolically, such a moment of revelation and insight.
Baby's First Epiphany
I've also seen epiphany described as an "insight," but I am alaways more interested in the understanding of something that seems to be outside our experience. What was your first epiphany? Maybe you can't remember it. I suppose we all may have the same one. We are born into the world, everything a blur of unfocused noises and colors and things that hurt and don't hurt. And in the midst of this storm of incomprehensible sensations, too many to catalog and categorize, one of them, a nipple against your mouth for the first time, makes you think, "Okay, wait a minute back up, this part is important somehow, we should focus here." That was probably the most important event in your understanding of your birthday, that whole being born thang being past history and irrelevant.
And so we go through our whole life ignoring most of the things we see and hear, until something happens and our heads whip around and we go, "Whoa, was that a nipple? I thought I saw a nipple."
More Music, Less Nipple
So what is it about music, then, that let's it provide an epiphany of any kind to anybody? Oh, that's a plum philosophical question, isn't it? Consider that an open question, one we'd all like to figure out an answer to. I've been tossing that one back and forth in my mind for most of my life.
Last February, Andrew Sullivan ran a series of posts about composer David Cope's efforts to create a composing program, EMMY, a program that composes original music. According to the article about Cope by Ryan Blitstein:
[...]Cope’s earliest memory is looking up at the underside of a grand piano as his mother played. He began lessons at the age of 2, eventually picking up the cello and a range of other instruments, even building a few himself. The Cope family often played "the game" — his mother would put on a classical record, and the children would try to divine the period, the style, the composer and the name of works they’d read about but hadn’t heard. The music of masters like Rachmaninov and Stravinsky instilled in him a sense of awe and wonder.
Nothing, though, affected Cope like Tchaikovsky‘s Romeo and Juliet, which he first heard around age 12. Its unconventional chord changes and awesome Sturm und Drang sound gave him goose bumps. From then on, he had only one goal: writing a piece that some day, somewhere, would move some child the same way Tchaikovsky moved him. "That, just simply, was the orgasm of my life," Cope says.
He begged his parents to pay for the score, brought it home and translated it to piano; he studied intensely and bought theory books, divining, scientifically, what made it work. It was then he knew he had to become a composer...
For Cope, Romeo and Juliet was a musical epiphany, his Kenya AA Mbwinjeru.
Andrew Sullivan posted my email comments to him about Cope's AI music, an excerpt here:
...Cope is playing an interesting game here. He feigns exasperation over the conflict that knowing his music is computer-generated creates in people, and their unwillingness to judge it on the same basis as music they believe human-composed. But I think it's the reaction of these people that is most interesting, not the music itself. I don't condemn them, nor feel his exasperation. His real work of art here is in provoking this conflict, much more so than even the wonderful job he has done in algorithmically analyzing music.
I've wondered myself, too many times to count, why it is that this or that piece of music stirs me so much. I think, I'm being communicated with by a deep soul. Here is Mozart or Mahler or Beethoven speaking to me in a voice that I recognize, and it seems so clear that it must have some meaning. But if it is only notes, then there may not really be anything profound there at all, only my own projections. That's a very lonely thought.
Haven't you ever tried to share a piece of music with someone and felt frustrated by the experience? I have. I've given away CDs and dragged people to concerts, given little parlor lectures explaining how sonata form works, tried to transfer my enthusiasm about particular works to people so they would hear something the way I heard it. And yet, they usually don't. How can they react this way when I feel like I'm in the presence of God just listening to this music? And the answer is, the music itself is wonderful, but the feelings that I experience ARE my own projections. Most people may hear something sad and sweet when they listen to Mozart's Sinfonia K.364 second movement (youtube it) but they can't possibly hear it the way I hear it. We are trapped in our own private bubbles projecting feelings and meanings onto patterns of notes and sounds that remind us of things, that trigger feelings.
Music is like a Rorschach test, although a somewhat more reliable, perhaps, in that we assume the composer wanted to convey something that we might have picked up. Cope's programs have no assumption of such intent. That creates a problem for us. And when that music sounds just like something we are used to thinking of as the voice of God, wooWEE, it's cognitive dissonance salad time. You have to give Cope credit for this, whether you care for his music or not...
Isn't it remarkable that you or I or Cope feel anything at all listening to Tchaikovsky? How is it that something so abstract as dots on paper translated into sound vibrations can penetrate your otherwise impermeable and permanent personal bubble?
Tchaikovsky's Symphony #6 in B minor, "Pathetique", fourth movement. The Leningrad Philharmonic, conducted by Evgeny Mravinsky (1960).
Exposition - First theme (0:00 to 2:17)
The strings introduce the tragic sounding B minor first theme. It has an inhaling/exhaling sound to it. When it repeats, there is an upward rush of the strings as if they are inhaling air, just in order to exhale them again in a sigh. I don't want to go too overboard with the visual metaphors here. It does seem to be the intent. At 1:09 it repeats, but doesn't finish; the strings trail off and a bassoon, the deepest of the woodwinds, finishes the melody, descending downwards, downwards.
Exposition - Second theme (2:17 to 4:20)
It's a little difficult to hear in this particular recording, but as the first theme ends and the second is about to begin, you should hear a pulsing heart beat-like sound from a horn. We should remember hearing something like this at the end of Romeo and Juliet a couple of weeks ago. Over this, the strings introduce the contrasting second theme in the relative major key [Opus 4 diary] of D major. Soft at first, it has a bit more life to it and flows better. It repeats (at 2:53), louder now, but notice the horn accompanying the strings, at 3:02, raspy and becoming more insistent, a source of conflict.
At 3:14, the strings step things upward an octave and repeat the theme yet again, louder and with more orchestra, working towards the first climax. It repeats a last time, and at 4:00, it climaxes with three stunning C major chords. In a disjointed pause after this, the orchestra regroups and comes back to B minor, setting us up for the recap.
Please note what I said last week: Tchaikovsky likes to put the real climax at the end of the first theme in the recap. He will do that here as well.
There is no development.
Recapitulation - First theme (4:46)
Back in B minor now, the first them returns, starting with more passion, but as last time it began to trail off, passing from the violins to the bassoon, taking it deeper and deeper, this time that job falls to the tuba, the deepest brass instrument of the orchestra. Deeper and deeper it goes, until it reaches an incredibly agonizing dissonant chord (a suspended chord?) at 5:30 -- the most heartbreaking tuba solo in symphonic music. It's difficult to listen to without cringing.
At 5:41, the strings make an effort to restate the first theme one last time, and it feels like an effort. At 6:00, (and this is where Mravinsky really shows himself to be a great conductor), the violins emerge again, swelling out of almost inaudible softness and begin their ascent, the volume swelling. They reach their shrill peak at 6:22, and then as they begin to decline again, they cross paths with the brass, who, led by trombones and trumpets and drums, begin their own climactic ascent to the dominant chord, F# minor. This is Thaikovsky's climax.
As it fades away, at 6:42, amidst the rumbling of the drums, the strings try one last time to resume the first theme, but they fail. They try again, they fail again, losing steam, five times, each time weaker, until it is reduced to just two weak notes, and then, an eerie calm. (And this, too, is where good conducting shows itself).
At 7:24, a trombone and tuba make a dirge-like final statement on the preceding. A sort of epitaph for the symphony.
Recapitulation - Second theme (8:04)
The second theme is back, but not in D major, but back in B minor, the home key of the symphony. And the translation from major to minor has had a ghastly effect on it. The lower strings make deep moaning sounds in the accompaniment. As the violins trail off, it is soon only the basses, and then they too gradually trail off and completely fade away in mist.
And how strange it is to end a symphony with a fade-away. Was there anybody who ever did that before the Pathetique? Imagine how shocked the first audiences must have been by the enormous pessimism of such a thing, especially after the upbeat and "triumphant" third movement.
Jawohl, Mein Dumbo!
So has your appetite for Tchaikovsky been sated, yet? If not, may I suggest you hear the same movement, now, conducted by the greatest conductor of the Third Reich, Wilhelm Furtwangler, in a 1951 performance in Cairo, so beautiful, and yet so badly recorded, that I agonized over whether to use it rather than Mravinsky, above. The extraordinary use of dynamics in a Romantic symphony like the Pathetique gives great license to conductors to interpret the music in unique or eccentric ways.
NEXT WEEK: Not sure yet. I'm leaning towards some kind of chamber music, either Smetana String Quartet #1, or Schubert C Major Quintet. But it's more likely I'll indulge in a bit of music philosophy on the subject of Narrative in Music. We also need to have a little lecture diary on musical modes to set us up for some fancy things to come.