Clyne: rewind

because i will have to start writing pretty regular program notes and studying a large variety of scores, i've decided to revive this beginning with the notes that i had to write for the upcoming concert. this is a piece that was written in 2005 by mead composer-in-residence at chicago symphony.



there is a video on the cso website in which clyne talks about the composition of this piece, but i can't get it to load under any circumstances.

this is actually a pretty cool short piece in which she is inspired by both visual imagery and dance choreography. the key image is that of an analog video tape being quickly rewound, with “fleeting moments of skipping, freezing, and warping.” she also drew a lot of inspiration from the dance choreography of her friend kitty mcnamee, whom she admires for its use of gestures which repeatedly appear throughout a piece to “build and bind its narrative structure.”
the overall sound is a pretty cool sense of electronic tension which you're hit with almost immediately. a dramatic sustained note opens the piece, colored by lurching crescendi and diminuendi. strings enter with agitated sixteenths that are accented in unexpected places, creating a tautness that repeatedly but unpredictably grows and explodes. there's that stringy, noisy sense that you get when you listen to lots of electronics.
clyne also employs a number of different techniques to recall "warping and skipping": a high whining pitch is supplied by bowed crotales (small brass disks usually struck with a mallet); brass and strings are instructed to “bend” pitches and perform slow glissandi over many bars. in the cso video, she mentions that the gesture she credits as the “kernel” for the entire piece is the piano's cluster chords, which the player is instructed to play by striking the keyboard with their entire forearm (a gesture she remembers performing in frustration during the composition process before she realized she could actually use it).

there is one part close to the end which is at about half tempo and involves some string solos. suggestions on what this part represents? maybe the rewind mechanism is stalling but continuing to try to rewind.

the part which brings the piece to a literal level (and also into clyne's specialty of electronic music) is the last thirty seconds: as most of the orchestra falls silent, a short, pre-recorded segment of the piece is played in high-speed reverse for the final thirty seconds. so i think in most score/part sets for this a pre-recorded CD is included with the high quality .aiff file. we've put this on an ipod, which will be piped over the auditorium sound system. the "press play" instruction is given to the second percussion player, so it's actually controlled from within the ensemble. the writing around the entrance is such that the recording emerges from the texture, so i think in the case of slight delays in the playback or whatever it won't matter quite so much, and the file is merely played straight until the huge chord at the end which just cuts everything off.

Humperdinck: Overture to Hansel und Gretel

if you have never heard of this guy, his first name is engelbert. engelbert humperdinck.

this was an opera written in about 1893, receiving its first performance under the baton of none other than richard strauss. humperdinck wrote a number of operas, almost all based on fairy tales. this is by far the most successful and well remembered (in fact, i really can't off the top of my head think of any other compositions by him =/) he did most of his writing for vocal works, both solo and choral. his operatic writing was a nice counterpart to the seriousness and darkness of contemporary Wagner, though a lot of their musical vocabulary is very similar.

the overture doesn't really relate as tightly to the characters in the opera as wagner's do, but everyone knows the story of hansel and gretel anyway so i'll avoid recapping here. the overture does deal with a sort of mood setting for the opera, evoking both a dreamy idyllic atmosphere as well as a middle section of slightly more ominous music perhaps referring to the kids' encounter with the witch. the whole overture, though, definitely maintains a playful, light and catchy tone.

the opening chorale is a really fantastic one - so simple, C major, basic harmonic progressions, but phenomenal in its effect. the music here is also the basis for the more famous "prayer and dream" section in the opera itself.
the development of the material sounds a lot like brahms to me. lush strings, sustained wind solos, and a gentle swell into a rephrase by the oboe and supporting winds.
the trumpet enters with a sprightly motif at 2:50 accompanied by sharp pizzs from the strings, waking the music up and spurring it to a more flowing tempo. the rest of the brass take up this motif until we sense a proverbial curtain raise. (even a pause for applause.)
at 3:38 the strings come with their pastoral melody, the third theme to come in. the counterpart/second theme to this is the wind dance at 4:11, and this material is based to some degree on the trumpet fanfare.

the development begins at about 4:50. we have a return of every theme so far, from the horn chorale to the sprightly winds, and this is taken on a journey through several keys as well as an accelerando. the part with all the string arpeggios is especially fun.

6:05 is a grand arrival of sorts, with all the themes finally coming out in full, particularly the strings. the swing is broad, childish, almost exaggerated. the strings get busier themes over a constantly rising and falling swell of brass.

finally we cadence in a shining C major, and we have a return of the chorale. these chord changes at this section are particularly beautiful and even unexpected.

some pretty light music for today. stay posted, i think some dvorak on the way.

Wagner: Overture to Tannhäuser, WWV 70

ughhhhhh i have to do double entries for like a week before i catch up.

ok, here is tannhäuser overture (pronounced TAN-hoy-sehr), the opera of which was written by wagner in 1842-43. it was significantly amended through 1846-47 after its initial lukewarm reception, and then again for a Paris performance in 1861. the "paris version" is closest, i think, to the one that gets performed today. by this point he had just done tristan and isolde and was looking to do a big coming out party in paris that would include tristan and lohengrin. unfortunately tannhauser caused the strongest reactions and didn't last long in paris.


i have to conduct this in a week and half OMG.


i will avoid going through too much of an opera synopsis since this is just the overture. but this being wagner, it's impossible to go through the components of the piece without telling you what they relate to in the opera's scheme, so briefly, the story is about tannhauser (heinrich), a man who disappears from his original life in favor of love from venus and her unearthly pleasures. after staying there for a long time he manages to escape the spell by declaring his salvation lies in mother mary, and he is allowed to return to his home. his love elisabeth has been living in seclusion, but once she hears that tannhauser has returned, looks forward to hearing the song contest of men seeking her love. during the contest tannhauser hotbloodedly reveals his belief in the sensual pleasures due to his journey to see venus, and is threatened by the other men. elisabeth protects him, but he has to make a pilgrimage to seek forgiveness. the third act starts some undefined stretch of time later, during which elisabeth has been seeking news of tannhauser in vain. he finally returns in rags having given up his quest for absolution, saying that the pope's staff would sooner sprout leaves than he be forgiven. tannhauser is about to give everything up and return to venus, but then notices a funeral procession which happens to be carrying elisabeth. he rushes to her and throws himself over her dead body just as he receives the news that the pope's staff has sprouted leaves.

the overture is written in a sort of mirror/sonata form.
we open with a chorale which includes bassoons, clarinets, and of course horns. this is the "pilgrim's chorus," which occurs in his journey with the pilgrims. wagner writes "nicht schleppend, gehended Bewegung" which means not dragging; continually flowing. this grows into a massive brassy triumphant song.
at 5:16 we hit a brisker tempo and duple meter, beginning with an ascending diminished motif that is introduced by the violas. this is music from the venusburg, venus's mountain (literally). it is the setting of the entire first act which tannhauser spends lounging in her embrace. this section is written in B major, the dominant key (original is in E major). the music is sprightly and suspenseful (literally as well... lots of suspensions :P) he indicates to hold off getting too energetic, because he wants a big build up into the next section.
6:45 is where a new motif comes in; this is the "ode to venus," which tannhauser sings in hotblooded passion after hearing what he feels is a load of crap about love being pure and undisturbed. march-like and triumphant. wagner writes "nicht eilen. breit" which just means unhurried and broad. this theme is woven back into venusburg motifs which dissipate into the next section.
at about 8:00 we hit a very slow middle section, the interlude which is actually more music from the venusburg; violins are divided into 8 parts, and there is a mysterious floating clarinet solo above the texture. here he indicates "ruhig," calm and quiet. 
and now we start progressing backwards through the sections; we have the return of brisker venusburg music which leads us through several weird chromatic shifts until we get back to the ode to venus, which is now in the correct key of e major. from here it's basically a straight shot and accelerando towards the super brassy end.


as with basically all of wagner, super cheesy and still super fun.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture, Op. 36

i know i'm not really doing much off the beaten path. after all youtube is flooded with high school orchestra recordings of this piece complete with comments of how this is their favorite piece EVER. it clearly requires little introduction. but i will branch out into a more diverse set of pieces after i have gotten into the swing of things. and anyway, this very fun piece deserves a bit more than mindless adulation.

this was written from 1887 to 1888, directly after he wrote capriccio espagnole, 1887 (op. 34), and scheherazade, 1888 (op. 35). right afterwards he basically stop writing orchestral works and focused entirely on opera. i think these three have proven more enduring than his operas, though.
this overture is a concert overture - no big opera or play attached to it - and is subtitled overture on liturgical themes. it's immediately clear why.

this is a reasonable recording by stokowski. there is one other decent one by maazel/cleveland, but i thought the stokowski a bit more interesting. there seem to be few professional recordings on youtube - the only other complete one i could find was by hollreiser/vpo, but the pitch on this recording is so high it basically just sounds like it's in the wrong key. there's also half of one by markevitch.

rimsky very much enjoyed playing around with liturgical themes and church tunes. in this piece he explicitly states that he was trying to explore both the pagan and religious aspects of the easter holiday. to that effect he actually puts in several bible verses into the score itself, and the main themes here are ostensibly church hymns, most prominently the paschal vigil (i tried to find a vid of this but only got crappy home vids, so this is the theme that the trombones give in the very beginning) and the angel cried, which is what the solo cello gives at 0:50. but there are tons more scattered around. see if you can pick out the lines that are hymns as you listen to the piece, but rimsky himself wrote a pretty comprehensive program note in his own autobiography, the excerpt which you can find here.
the cool thing about incorporating church hymns into music is that there are amazing ways of harmonizing them. especially for russian liturgical chants (or any chants really), all you are given is basically one unison line, and there are any number of ways to accompany this. what comes out can be purely major or minor, or, as rimsky ended up with sometimes in this work, modal. this flexibility goes for the rhythm too. usually with few rhythm markings, you can kind of stretch them to fit basically any meter. for example, the first theme, marked "lento mystico," is actually written in 5/2, though it's rather hard to tell from listening. it's not really important, as with chants, to stress strong and weak beats - this is more or less just for the sake of the notation. it's only after the first violin solo that we get something easier to nod our heads to.
apparently the violin solo, which crops up first at 0:29 and then again at 1:22 or so with the flute instead, is supposed to represent light from the sepulchre.
rimsky basically repeats himself twice in the first section, but he redoes the orchestration completely so that it still sounds fresh. the second time the original trombone theme comes back, it's maestoso, and written with reinforcement by a full string complement, which makes me hear, basically, an organ playing with several more stops pulled out.

we don't reach the "meat" of the piece until the allegro agitato at 3:52. here we get fast paced colorful writing - what everyone loves best about rimsky - with some occasional interludes for the violin solo theme to come back, and a more stretchy hymn (5:27). more grand entrances and even bells at the end are added for a huge climax at the end.
pretty much it's pure fun from the agitato until the end. but as one listens to this piece it's worth noting that even with the regular foot tapping rhythm, rimsky doesn't force these meter-less liturgical melodies into even, symmetric phrases. it makes this piece exotic and fun. not to mention all the fun off beat accents and syncopations. a good example is the slow hymn interlude. the chord at 5:37 would be longer in a less inventive person's piece.
the other thing one has to note is the saturation of pentatonic scale. they basically comprise the entirety of all the string parts (which are the busiest thing ever, but fortunately also the funnest thing to play).

ok, have fun.

von Suppe: Light Cavalry Overture

bet you heard this all the time and actually have no idea whom it's by!! and reading the name won't really ring a bell either. at least, that was my reaction when i first played this piece. i was like, why is this so familiar if i don't even recognize the composer's name. but this contains some of the most recognizable cartoon music ever! see the second section, about 2 and half minutes in. can you see the cartoon horses?


so, Franz von Suppe  (whose name the announcer at the performance i participated in managed to mispronounce as franz von SOUP, and forever now i will read his name wrong in my head when i see it) was an austrian light opera composer who lived from 1819 to 1895. he wrote four dozen operettas, which is impressive, but most have fallen to the wayside. anyway during his life he also sang as a tenor and had a reasonably successful career writing music for productions done in vienna. light cavalry was written in 1866 and is one of only two overtures (the other being poet and peasant) which have survived the ages.

this overture is basically a mirror form. you've got a brass fanfare section, then the fun galloping section, which both come back at the end. sandwiched in the middle is a very fun melodramatic cello melody.
it's a very military-inspired little operetta, but i'm sure you don't need me to tell you that.

Schumann: Manfred Overture, Op. 115

here is the overture from schumann's incidental music to manfred, written in 1849, today one of schumann's most performed works.
byron wrote his poem/drama manfred in 1816-1817, and it subsequently received tons of translations and ended up rather popular in germany (and elsewhere). it's the story of a guy named manfred who is guilty for an undisclosed reason regarding the death of his wife astarte. he summons spirits to try to forget, but they can't help him, so he goes on his merry way flaunting a lot of religious authority, ultimately killing himself and in so doing refusing to submit to the higher powers.

schumann began writing a libretto for an incidental music suite in july 1848, began writing actual music in october, and had finished the overture by the end of the month. the overture was premiered before the rest of the music and generally got better response (then as now).
juuuust to give you an idea of what both the poem and the music were generally like, goethe defended his distaste of the writing by saying that the "gloomy intensity of a boundless, profound despair" was tiresome. the mildly hypochondriac mood of the whole piece was considered overwrought and outdated.

three strong recordings.
this piece has had a lot of musicological analyses done on it which try to tie it to robert schumann's mental/creative decline. for example: the tempo is marked "rasch" (rushed), and this can be seen programmatically - the insistent and pervasive syncopation from the very beginning (you might not know it from listening, but the three initial chords are syncopated) destabilize it. this of course can be related to the plot of the piece - those opening chords are representative of manfred's crime, his spiritual struggle, or his guilt - but historians have pointed to the prevalence of aggressive syncopation, triplets, and three against two as indicators of schumann's tumultuous mental state. at any rate, this isn't a concert overture like the hebrides, but more of a character piece for what's to come, so i think it's alright to take a more programmatic view.

the overture begins with a slow introduction, then speeds up to a sonata-form allegro. in nature it's been compared with some wagner, berlioz, and liszt (and i happen to think the motif at 4:00 sounds really wagnerian), but thematically it has been called the older relative of lots of brahms (check out the syncopation around 3:20).
three wind/brass chords propel the piece into a development at 4:26. there is a recap that is more or less normal, but then the ending is subdued, and doesn't provide a conclusion but leads elsewhere. if you take it as a part of the whole, then maybe it leads to manfred sitting in his study, the opening of the play. but if you take it as a sort of microcosm of the entire work/story, it's a darker-toned implication about the ending of the actual story (the actual incidental music ends in e major requiem, implying a redeemed manfred - this overture, if you read it this way, doesn't whitewash his death).

there's a little cell of material which comes around every once in a while, starting with D-C#-G# (falling, quarter notes) around 2:39. clara schumann called this "astarte's theme," noting how it resurfaces every once in a while as a sort of second theme, then is quickly lost, dissipating almost immediately. you might see this as part of the story itself, and manfred's quest after her, in his guilt.

ok, dark work today. stay tuned for something happier tomorrow!

Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave), Op. 26

this piece and its genesis are readily findable on the internet, so i will just do something abbreviated here. to be honest this post is definitely just about my personal enjoyment of this piece, which is one of my favorite short orchestral pieces of all time.

the title of "overture" is kind of misleading, as there is no opera or play to follow it. it's just 10 minutes of "mood-setting" music - an early form of program music which lacks plot, but delves deeply into setting.

mendelssohn had a pretty charmed life - he wrote this in 1830, during travels to england and scotland. he was barely 20 at the time and had already gained fame by conducting a performance of bach's st. matthew passion, and for these few years he basically just traveled all over europe.
this is dedicated to king william iv of prussia. he also conceived bits of the scottish symphony during this trip, but that work took much longer to mature - that would turn out to be his third symphony and didn't get completed until 1842, becoming his op. 56.

here is a pretty awesome furtwangler recording. for some reason it took me a little while to wade through the recordings that are unlabeled and simply come with pretty pictures of said cave, and i almost thought youtube lacked any legitimate recordings of the piece, so i'll post a bunch here for easier access.

but actually these recordings all sound sort of similar to me: this music is so simple, so well-distributed, that it more or less plays itself. this recording is actually pretty idiosyncratic mostly because of the tempi he takes, which are really extreme (the last minute and half are at a blistering speed, while the stretch just before that is really, really slow).

toscanini gets kind of a reedy sound - a lot of modern recordings get a huge wash of sound from the strings, which lends itself well to the swelling seas, but the slides and thinness in this orchestra give a sense of clarity.
ok, and just because this is a cool recording:

video of casals. it has his characteristic unbalanced tempo but he really knows how to extract some conviction from the strings.

any number of the rest of the recordings that come up first on youtube when you type in hebrides will offer you more "standard" takes.

the piece has two motifs. the first is the very opening, which he came up with the day before his visit to the actual cave, and he included this in a letter to his sister fanny:

it is undulating, floats on top of the murmuring sixteenth notes of the strings. the second begins at 1:41 in the furtwangler recording. it's sweeter, in d major, and a bit wistful, swelling up and then receding, like the minor melody.
notice how tension is always built up by the moving sixteenths - you only become conscious of it at certain moments when it bursts into focus, for example around 2:35 with the ascending chromatic bass line, which provides some excellent impetus for the orchestra with its repeated notes.
the other thing to notice is the repeated wind and brass fanfare like figures - tattoos of sixteenths and dotted rhythms.
my favorite moment is 5:16 when the theme from the beginning is transformed into muted staccato notes for the strings. the key changes here are really leading, and the rhythm is compelling when articulated in a way that is completely different from the main melody.
ok, just enjoy this awesome piece. i have to put this in though, which i found courtesy of wikipedia:

see you tomorrow.

Bizet: Prelude to Carmen

i can't find an opus number for almost anything bizet wrote: apparently all of his stuff was catalogued by a guy named winton dean, an english musicologist born 1916. so all his stuff mostly just has WD numbers, and this is WD31, composed in 1873-4 on commission by the opera-comique in paris. the first run didn't go so well, and it wouldn't begin gaining real popularity, starting in vienna, until just a few months after his death in 1875. it took almost 8 years for it to come back to paris.

this whole opera is full of memorable tunes, a lot of which make an appearance in the prelude. in fact there isn't really any "form" to this overture except the prominence of said tunes. the overture's theme, is a jolly, festive, whirling dance in two, notable for its vibrant percussion and excitement-building trills. it's interspersed with a f-sharp major section that has a softer, lilting melody (which doesn't last long - too much celebration going on).
next is everyone's favorite melody of course - the toreador's song, sung by escamillo later on. the theme returns and brings that to an affirmative close.
this is as far as the recording above goes, which is really a good one - kind of dry acoustics but i like how the direction builds through all the repeated sixteenths and the clarity of the whole instrumentation, which sometimes gets to be a problem (i won't post levine's version here because i think it's really over-muscled. his orchestra is gigantic btw, for some reason this didn't seem to be as much of a problem in the mozart in the previous entry, but i really think they are being overzealous in the carmen recording).

here's mehta doing all of what is technically in the prelude. there's a sultry theme that enters, heralding a darker undertone. lots of harmonic minor and dramatic bass-instrument thumps. and then the prelude ends on a huge diminished 7th chord, and... the opera begins!

see you tomorrow.

Mozart: Overture to Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K. 620

OK, as i've been promising for a few days, some Mozart!

composed in 1791, and unique because it's one of the only works Mozart composed to german text. the libretto was written by emanuel schikaneder. it was his last really major work, produced in vienna.

i don't really want to focus on plot synopsis, so we'll just dive right in to the actual overture.

levine has near perfected the art of opera, and is one of the most consistent big name maestros for the form today. this is a rather beefy version. he also looks incurably goofy (i cannot be the only one who wants to laugh when i see the cue right before the first note), but it cannot be disputed he gets the job done.

the first few chords are always done differently. the pickup is actually written as a sixteenth, but they're usually so heavy that they sound like something different. in any case: these chords are like a foundation - they set up a "realm," both tonal and emotional, within which the opera resides: graceful yet grand, dramatic and delicate. or as dale put it more poetically, "it's like describing eden." and indeed the whole overture of an opera is all about setting up a musical stage. the rest of the overture uses mainly just one brisk theme of eighths and sixteenths, which is developed in a fugal form. a brief middle section begins with a sort of reprise of the opening chords in the dominant major, B flat. a minor section which develops the sole theme with more fugal interplay gets furious and dramatic but remains light. a truly mozartean ring around the circle of fifths leads us to a fake recap which dissolves into a series of descending scales, and then back to the theme for the real recap.

notice the fantastic brass fanfares in the coda ;)

just for reference, you can also check out the muti/vpo one - i won't host it here because i think it's quite similar to the levine, except perhaps a bit more delicate and "classy." it is nice because you can see the orchestra for most of it, ionno about that bg picture though :D

here's something very different.

a perfect example of what i was talking about with the opening sixteenth notes. abbado decides to take them pretty much in time, and doesn't stretch the half notes *or* the fermatas. the opening is muuuch brisker than you hear normally, and the overall sound is thinner - almost as if he's trying to go for a period feel with the modern orchestra. lots of decay on longer notes, super short chords, and generally everyone is playing quite light even for this overture. it's also quite a bit faster, clocking in at over half a minute shorter than levine or muti (in a 7 minute piece, nontrivial). i enjoy this though. very unsentimental, but classy.