The Five and the One: Balance between Voices in Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor

A  remarkably accomplished string quartet, not simply for its high technical polish and refined tone, but more importantly for the searching musical insights it brings.”
  —  John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 23-AUG-2002.

T his piece was a great discovery for me. It helped me to realize that my piano playing style and my personality match well with chamber music. I believe the Franck was my finest performance during the [2001 Van Cliburn] Competition.”
  —  Stanislav Ioudenitch.

Looking forward to the Borromeo Quartet performance this Friday (25-JAN-2008) in Kansas City, I check out their program and revisit scores for the works they will play. One of them will be César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor, a “big”, atmospheric piece.

• Nicholas Kitchen, Violin
  
• Kristopher Tong, Violin
  
• Mai Motobuchi, Viola
  
• Yeesun Kim, Cello
  
• Stanislav Ioudenitch, Piano (guest)

Piano Quintet in F Minor
• I: Molto Moderato Quasi Lento, Allegro 16:00 – 17:00
  
• II: Lento, Con Molto Sentimento 10:30 – 12:00
  
• III: Allegro Non Troppo, Ma Con Fucco 9:20 – 10:00

T he instrumental work was seen [in the 19th Century] as a wordless oration, and its form was viewed not so much as a harmonic or thematic plan but as an ordered succession of thoughts.”
  —  Mark Bonds, p. 53.

The piano part in this Quintet is virtuosic, magisterial, symphonic. In fact, that may be the biggest risk—the fact that the piano part is so “big”. The quartet may play beautifully and cohesively, but the pianist must fully “belong”. This is a chamber music piece. It ought not to come off as a mini ensemble piano concerto. Nobody is ‘accompaniment’. And it’s not a ‘pianist vs. quartet’ duet.

So the real unifying factor has got to be pianist Ioudenitch. Not ‘in charge’, but genuinely ‘unifying’. The opening Molto Moderato is simultaneously tender, muscular, edgy—moderato but almost anxiously hurried—with minimal good-natured geniality: urgent.

The Borromeos—known for their full tone—deliver phrasings that are abundant with feeling, and their sound production has a characteristic lyrical fullness. But, playing with Iodenitch, they are under-stated, more subdued as they merge their playing. There is a wonderfully hushed quality in this Molto Moderato.

And, true to the ma con fucco indication, the Allegro is brisk, lively and light, well-accented, almost hard-driven. Despite the fact that they do not regularly play together, the Borromeos and Ioudenitch manage to achieve what, to paraphrase David Rounds, is clearly ‘The Five and The One.’

Each movement in the Quintet evolves from a single idea, and these ideas clearly connect as a series of narrative episodes. Like a protagonist in a drama, each idea goes on its ‘journey’ through a series of contrasting psychological states hoping for resolution or fulfillment. Inter-connections and inter-movement references are beautifully rendered by the Borromeos. An extended passage, or even a single texture recalled from an earlier moment triggers our memory and builds up a multi-dimensional awareness. All this makes the work feel “Big”.

Ioudenitch’s interplay with the wonderful Borromeos is marvelous. How hard should the players try to minimize ‘inhomogeneity’ between the strings? In my view, not much. It’s routine to have a novel where each character is fully-developed and yet there are leading roles and supporting roles. And so, too, in a piece like this. It’s unreasonable to insist on absolute parity when the expressive/narrative content of the work doesn’t exhibit parity and when the composer didn’t intend it. The ‘characters’ in the 5 parts here are so disparate as to argue against attempting to enforce ‘equality’.

In other words, this is not the same inter-voice dynamic as in a Piano Trio or Piano Quartet. Obviously, the five voices have to cooperate. But the texture is more complex and could get muddy if they do not really, really cooperate and anticipate each other’s phrasing. There are thematic processes that operate on a larger scale. This is not a ‘subject/answer’ or ‘tell-and-ask’ rhetoric, as Peter Smith and others have explored in Brahms, say (Music Analysis 2001;20:193-236). There’s less predictability in individual voice-leading. There are more inter-voice constraints than in a quartet.


And the unfolding of the separate voices/characters is idiosyncratic—characteristic of Franck, even if not necessarily characteristic of the period or the quintet form or sonata form. We have ‘hybrid phrases’ where Franck creates ‘antecedent’ and ‘consequent’ phrases—creates the ‘consequent’ of one (sub-) phrase by transposing an initial tonic-oriented antecedent statement of a thematic idea into the dominant key. This is especially notable when the minor dominant is tonicised. In an alternative approach, Franck adjusts intervals within the repetition (consequent) so that the restatement centers on the dominant but remains within the tonic key. Material that unfolds within the tonespace of the 1-5 fifth is ‘answered’ by a repetition that falls within the 5-1 fourth. This alternative approach ‘recontextualizes’ the idea of an ‘answer’.

In fact, if Franck had used a formal ‘subject/answer’ or ‘tell-and-ask’ type of rhetoric, it would have lent a sort of ‘instability’ to the piece. It would have been somwhat of an anacrusis—an under-stressing or ambiguity of authority, before (and in between) the more forceful statements.

It’s a complex phenomenon and it involves the musical and social coordination of the group, an agreed sense of leadership, and the group members’ individual and collaborative construction of meaning through verbal discussions and shared reflections on the playing. Group identity is shaped by individual players’ self-identities and vice-versa (Rounds 1999; Stubley, 1992) and a piano quintet is no exception. We have both musical and social coordination between musicians here (Davidson & Good, 2002; Ginsborg, Chaffin, & Nicholson, 2006; Williamon & Davidson, 2002; Young & Colman, 1979).

Dahlhaus at Technische Universitat Berlin (1991, p. 255) discussed rhetorical coherence in terms of ‘architectonic form’—a balance between phrases, periods, and sets of periods—each rhetorical unit counterbalanced by one or more other metrical/rhetorical units at every level in the piece. He contrasted this with ‘logical form’ (form based soley on ‘motivic connections’) which holds a movement together ‘from within’. This Franck Quintet seems clearly ‘architectonic’ according to Dahlhaus’ definitions. Big and satisfying!

T his music is rich in atmosphere and tenderness. There are so many colors and such a wide range of emotions, it makes it hard to breathe! When all the proportions are right during the performance, it connects us with the composer’s soul. That’s an unbelievable experience for the performer and the audience.”
  —  Stanislav Ioudenitch.

    [40-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, mm. 1-10, Schubert Ensemble, 1.1MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, “A”, Schubert Ensemble, 1.6MB MP3]

    [30-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, “B”, Schubert Ensemble, 0.9MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, César Franck, Piano Quintet, Molto Moderato, “C”, Schubert Ensemble, 1.3MB MP3]

• Borromeo String Quartet website
  
• Ysaye Quartet with Pascal Rogé. Franck Piano Quintet. (Ysaye, 2007.)
  
• Schubert Ensemble with Simon Blendis. Franck Piano Quintet. (ASV, 2006.)
  
• Spiegel Quartet with Jan Michiels. Franck Piano Quintet. (MD&G, 2006.)
  
• Quatuor Ludwig with Michael Levinas. Franck Piano Quintet. (Naxos, 1998.)
  
• Almen B, Pearsall E, eds. Approaches to Meaning in Music. Indiana Univ, 2006.
  
• Bonds M. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of Oration. Cambridge Univ, 1991.
  
• Dahlhaus C. Nineteenth-Century Music. Univ California, 1991, p. 255.
  
• Dahlhaus C. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century. Univ California, 1989.
  
• Davidson J, Good J. Social and musical co-ordination between members of a string quartet: An exploratory study. Psychol Music 2002;30:186-201.
  
• Dreyfus L. Bach and the Patterns of Invention. Harvard Univ, 1996.
  
• Eich K. Die Kammermusik Von Cesar Franck. Barenreiter, 2002.
  
• Ginsborg J, Chaffin R, Nicholson G. (2006). Shared performance cues in singing and conducting: A content analysis of talk during practice. Psychol Music 2006; 34:167-94.
  
• Gritten A. Music and Gesture. Ashgate, 2006.
  
• Hefling S, ed. Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music. Schirmer, 1998.
  
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• McKenna P, Maister D. First Among Equals. Free Press, 2002.
  
• Reynolds C. Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music. Harvard Univ, 2003.
  
• Rounds D. The Four and the One: In Praise of String Quartets. Lost Coast, 1999.
  
• Scher S, ed. Music and Text. Cambridge Univ, 1992.
  
• Schoenberg A. Fundamentals of Musical Composition. Faber & Faber, 1982, pp. 20-22.
  
• Spitzer M. Music As Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style. Indiana Univ, 2006.
  
• Stock K, ed. Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
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• Tarasti E. Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music. de Gruyter, 1995.
  
• Williamon A, Davidson J. Exploring co-performer communication. Musicae Scientiae 2002; 6:53-72.
  
• Young V, Colman A. Some psychological processes in string quartets. Psychol Music 1979; 7:12-6.
  
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Yotcheva, Franck, Musical Quotation, Minimalism and MIR?

A  n assumption that Minimalism and Baroque are both basically musics of tightly patterned cyclic repetition ... led the director of the Eos Ensemble to
devise a concert program under the rubric ‘Perceptible Processes: Minimalism and the Baroque.’ Scheffer’s belief in his ear’s ability to forge trans-historical links is absolute: ‘Think of the Bach Suites for solo cello and their long series of arpeggios through the circle of fifths. They are at once expansive in time and rigid in gesture. Now think of Philip Glass, of ecstatic arpeggios and simple harmonic changes, and you may begin to hear a great unison sounding throughout the history of music.’ ... ‘Bach the humble craftsman’ is, of course, no more historical a reading than ‘Bach the protominimalist.’ But it does move us from the domain of technique to the domain of music’s societal function. Perhaps the link between Minimalist and Baroque [or Romantic] music is not
how they are produced, but how they are consumed.”
  —  Robert Fink, p.171-2.

Vélitchka Yotcheva’s new recording of Franck’s ‘Sonate en la majeur pour violon avec piano’ FWV 8 (1886) on XXI-21 Records is wonderful—and it contains some novel and convincing interpretations. (Patrice Laré’s piano playing on this disc is admirable as well.) Yotcheva, founder of Trio Rachmaninoff, performs regularly in Canada, Russia, Bulgaria, France and the U.S. Her exuberant style epitomizes the Russian school of cello playing, which she comes by naturally (via her training at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, with Marina Tchaikovskaya and later Valentin Feigin and Alexandre Korchagin). She completed her doctorate in 2000 at the University of Montreal, with Yuli Turovsky.

Franck wrote this sonata as a wedding gift for his fellow Belgian, the violinist Eugene Ysaÿe, who gave the premiere in Brussels in November 1886. This cello sonata is an arrangement of the violin version, made shortly after Franck’s death. Franck is usually thought of in terms of harmonic textures and compositional idioms more complex and multi-dimensional than those of other Romantics. One of Franck’s snarkier students (Debussy) termed him a chromatic ‘modulating machine’ (‘Une machine à moduler! La theme, c'est comme la confiture, moins on en a, plus on l'étale. À chaque jour suffit sa peine! Il a une araignée au plafond! Chantez à l'âne, il vous fera des pets! Grosse Corvette, petite cervelle!’), and over the years that characterization has somewhat ‘stuck’. But from Yotcheva we hear new possibilities in this sonata, with more emphasis on its cyclical structures. Her articulations reveal a new logical sense of Franck’s modulations and rhythmic patterns—reveal how simplistic attempts to pigeon-hole Franck’s compositional style do him (and us) great disservice.

Themes from one movement in this sonata are transformed and used over subsequent movements. The whole thing devolves from the opening of the first movement. In a manner that anticipates 20th Century minimalism, every new theme in this sonata turns out to be a subtle variation on a previous theme. For example, the piano’s chords at the beginning of the Allegretto introduce a theme that the cello takes up, and this becomes a recurring motif throughout the whole sonata. The mood changes completely at the passionato second movement, but the original theme reappears here, too, as it does again in the Recitativo–Fantasia movement. The finale is a canon in octaves, with one voice following the other at the interval of a measure, but it, too, is derived from the sonata’s opening theme.

B  ach and Mozart were [‘summational’ artists] dealing with known vocabularies and an accepted body of aesthetic principles.”
  —  Gene Lees, The Will to Swing, p. 192.

A  composer’s choice of time signature is an essential element of the compositional process. When Franck chose to use the 9/8 time signature in this sonata, he did so under the influence of the notational and temporal conventions he had inherited from composers before him. But he also adapted it to his own purposes, with some new compositional procedures to create novel expressive effects, including projection of affect and emotion. Franck’s characteristic harmonic language (such as his iambic melodic rhythms in this sonata) is an example of this. Take a look at what we find by running some match-by-incipit queries in ThemeFinder, a joint music information retrieval (MIR) project of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) at Stanford University and the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory (CSML) at the Ohio State University.

I t is a mistake to consider this meter (9/8) as a 3/4 meter whose beats consist of triplets. He who has only moderate command of performance knows that triplets in 3/4 meter are played differently from eighths in 9/8 meter. The former are played very lightly and without the slightest pressure on the last note, but the latter heavier and with some weight on the last note…if the two meters were not distinguished by special qualities, all gigues in 6/8 could also be written in 2/4; 12/8 would be a C meter. How senseless this is can easily be discovered by anyone who rewrites, for example, a gigue in 12/8 or 6/8 meter in C or 2/4 meter.”
  —  Johann Kirnberger, p. 396.

The opening phrase of the last movement in this sonata is surely original. But in its development, when it strays from the major into the minor, does it sound like Schumann’s Arabesque? Was Franck hoping to draw upon his audience’s likely familiarity with the Schumann Arabesque? Was he hoping to increase his ‘page rank’ by referencing the Schumann Arabesque?






Or, instead, ought Franck to have expressly avoided developing his idea in A major the way that he did, lest he evoke an arm’s-length resemblance to Schumann?

No. This sonata is genuinely Franck through and through and not plausibly a ‘borrowing’, regardless of any coincidental resemblance. Should van Gogh have refrained from painting yellow flowers, in deference to other painters who’d chosen yellow flowers as a motif previously? Of course not. Brent Smith, writing in Music & Letters in 1931 (12:71-7), felt that two or more composers might naturally be inspired by the same subject, and that similar motifs might be expected to arise independently. In works that are minimalistic—or in performances like Yotcheva’s that enable us to uniquely detect minimalistic tendencies in works where we’d never noticed them before—such similarities are surprisingly common.


Of course, ‘musical similarity’ metrics are a hot topic in music information retrieval (MIR). It’s notoriously hard to measure musical similarity in a fair and robust way, or to compare the classification accuracy of different MIR systems and MIR software algorithms. The best that can be done is to assemble panels of musicians who represent a range of musical expertise and points of view, and ask them to classify pieces according to a set of standardized attributes, as to whether pairs of pieces are ‘like’ each other—create a gold-standard reference database of pieces of expert-consensus similarity. Then do Cohen kappa, Kendall tau, Cronbach alpha, and other statistical tests to see how much concordance or disagreement there may be between different MIR systems being compared. Look at ‘false-discovery rate’ (FDR), as a genomics software package would do. Look at false-hits and false-misses. Statistical sensitivity and specificity.

Text IR has an easier time compared to MIR insofar as there is—at least at a basic (‘dictionary’) level—a high degree of agreement about the meanings of individual words, despite the obvious problems caused by ambiguities, mis-spellings, contextual alterations of meaning and all the other things that make human language such a rich means of communication. But music has no semantic unit which corresponds in any useful way to a word, and certainly no agreed vocabulary or ontology of ‘meaning’. While it’s possible to decouple the individual ‘atomic’ elements that make up a musical work, none of those elements ‘makes sense’ on its own. The sense of each derives from the relations to the other elements around it, plus ‘summational’ references to other works before it. Yotcheva manages to create an astonishing new ‘sense’ of the elements in this Franck sonata. You think you know this sonata? You may want to listen to Yotcheva and think again. Deeply moving, original!

T his blog is, admittedly, an atypical classical music site. CMT’s not a tlog, and it’s not a splog. I’m grateful for the people I’ve been messaging with here ... and for those who share these interests, including seemingly-bizarre conjunctions (like performance practice, composition methods, musicology, computer science (MIR), musical genres (Baroque, Romantic, Minimalist), musical borrowing, sociology of Web 2.0 cross-links, and search-engine idiosyncrasies—as in this post). I wonder whether Debussy might’ve had Asperger’s or Tourette’s? ... Happy Holidays! Peace!”
  —  DSM.

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