jwilzewske: grieg

Codified by 1840, the [sonata] form was now no longer a free development of stylistic principles, but an attempt to reach greatness by imitation of classical models. The results, at their best, aspire toward a classical ideal that had become unpopular by the mid-nineteenth century.”
— Charles Rosen, p. 394.

S onata norms remained in place as ‘regulative’ ideas throughout the 19th Century, even as the who sonata genre, with its various options, was continuously updated, altered, and further personalized with unforeseen accretions, startling innovations, and radical deformations... The ‘de-energizing transition’ and suppression of the medial caesura in, say, Schubert or Brahms, surely emerged from the precedents of the ‘blocked medial caesura’ coupled with ‘expanded caesura-fill’ in Haydn and Mozart.”
— James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy.

S aturday’s performance in the Harriman-Jewell Series will be given by Joshua Bell (Violin) and Sam Haywood (Piano).

Brahms: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in A major, Op. 100
Schubert: Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major, D 934, Op. 159
Grieg: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major, Op. 13

T hese works are ones of tremendous lyricism, and showcase the narrativity of song and dance for creative structure. In fact, the pieces are unusual as sonatas go—unusual for the egalitarian ways that the violin part and the piano part interact with each other. It is not a one-sided virtuoso violinistic ego trip. For example, in the second movement of Grieg’s violin sonata Op.13 we have the secondary theme introduced by the piano without the violin! There is an innovative parity between the parts’ roles that's unusual—dance-like, ballade-like, Nordic.

T here is a manneristic thread that runs through the Op. 13 sonata, maybe deriving from Grieg’s Norwegian nationalism?

B ut in each of these three pieces we have structures of contrast, varied repetition, and symmetry-making and symmetry-breaking—specific patterns can be found in the arrangement of the lines. Between the piano and the violin we have “melodico-textural” networks of iterated phrases that embody the unfolding of stories.

F or Grieg ... the variation form may have been tied to the idea of strophic repetitions in a folk song. But in Grieg’s Ballade the variations make such a dramatic progression that one wonders whether to understand the work as a new venture ... in suggesting both the form of the song and the progression of the story.”
— James Parakilas, p. 159.

T rends in sonata procedure in the Romantic period are either (1) elaboration of sonata form beyond the 17th Century norms, or (2) exploration of tonal designs, both within sections and across entire movements. As noted by Carissa Reddick (link below), both of these Romantic trends result in “fusion” of forms, which occurs when a single section of music simultaneously fulfills more than one formal function. The breach of norms gives those sections innovative functions and powers, and often thwarts listeners’ expectations. The innovative tonal designs transgress the boundaries between the sonata’s formal divisions or thematic rotations (exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda), creating rotational overlaps.

I n Grieg’s Sonata, Op. 13, there are fusions of Transition and Re-transition within the Primary theme, fusion of Recapitulation and Development functions within the Transition [i, mm. 256-271; iii, mm. 86-98], fusion of the Development within the Secondary theme [i, mm. 169-183] and a variety of other novel maneuvers. In addition there are what Reddick terms ‘Multiply-Rotational Development Divisions’ and ‘Half-Rotational and Non-Rotational Development Divisions’ [iii, mm. 105-124; iii, mm. 273-305].

S o, composers active in the Romantic era took sonata form as a point of departure only, co-opted it as a vehicle for Romantic politics, and plied it with Romantic harmonies. The result is a progressive ‘dialogic form,’ in which a sonata was no longer the conservative, status-quo-reinforcing thing it used to be but instead became a ‘process’ in an open-ended dialogue [Hepokoski & Darcy, p. 10], among performers who may, as in this case, regard each other as equals.

R eddick’s taxonomy of rotations (half-rotations, double-rotations, triple-half-rotations, episodic reversals and flips) evokes something of the imagery of balletic movements (échappé sauté or jeté entrelacé) or diving figures (612B / armstand forward somersault pike).

P erfect, it seems to me, for the physicality of Bell and Haywood, whose refined kinesthetic sense can reach artistic heights visually as well as musically. Looking forward to Saturday night’s performance.

DSM: My friend, RMC, died—testicular cancer, 20 kg metastatic mass in his abdomen; died in the operating room while the surgeons were trying to remove it. I’d visited him 2 days before the operation, at his home. He’d just come from a visit with his oncologist, and he had a very clear notion of the risk he was facing. In fact, the oncologist had tried to dissuade RMC from going forward with the surgery. But RMC was adamant. He didn’t want to acquiesce to that fate, simply letting the tumor eat him alive over a period of several months. He wanted to fight it. And now he’s gone, 33 years old, a dear friend of mine and a coworker for 6 years . . .

CMT: I’m sorry for your loss.

DSM: Know any good Requiems I could put in the CD player? What’s good for farewells? I’m craving very, very sad pieces of chamber music right now.

CMT: Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor? Shostakovich’s 15th; Duruflé’s Requiem; Silvestrov’s Requiem for Larissa? Mozart’s unfinished Requiem in D minor? Among Romantic Era composers who composed Requiems, you could do some Hector Berlioz, Anton Bruckner, Carl Czerny, Gaetano Donizetti, Antonín Dvořák, Charles Gounod, Max Reger, Camille Saint-Saëns, Robert Schumann, Franz von Suppé, and Richard Wetz. They all wrote requiems. And Edvard Grieg’s ‘Sorgemarsj over Rikad Nordraak’ is, I think, acoustically ‘sparse’ enough to be suitable for your remembrance of RMC.

And, among 20th Century composers, you have Vyacheslav Artyomov, Alfred Desenclos, Herbert Howells—his ‘Master Tallis’s Testament’ is atmospheric and well-matched to the spirit of a brave RMC who refused to give up. Or, what about Cyrillus Kreek, György Ligeti, or Meredith Monk? Their elegiac compositions might be a good fit. Or Knut Nystedt’s ‘Pia Memoria’? How about Krzysztof Penderecki, or Terry Riley’s ‘Requiem for Adam’? Or the Finns! Einojuhani Rautavaara—the Lacrimosa movement of his ‘Requiem in Our Time’? Or Erkki-Sven Tüür’s ‘Elegy for String Quartet’?

DSM: Those are all good choices. Schnittke’s Requiem is too angst-filled and thematically explicit. Stravinsky’s, too. The ones you named are good, though.

CMT: Some elegiac pieces are too large and grand. Not intimate enough—many choral pieces are like that. After all, we’re considering who the person was, and how wide or narrow was the scope of the lives that the person touched.

DSM: And some elegiac pieces are quite appropriate for a person of advanced age, but don’t fit at all with a young or middle-aged person or a child. Brahms’s Requiem is beautiful, but it doesn’t match the personality of my friend.

CMT: Schnittke’s Requiem is sufficiently abstract to be a match for your friend, but it’s too thematic and punitive. Same with the Stravinsky. Your friend was a software developer? What about Jesper Kyd—Denmark-born composer of soundtracks for computer games and films. He’s composed several Requiem pieces—in fact, some of them are embedded in the games. Techno-atmospheric requiems!

DSM: ‘Winter Night’ on his Hitman Contracts soundtrack; or ‘Meditation of the Oracle’ on his soundtrack for Spellborn; or even his ‘Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’. Kyd’s writing is not so much ‘thematic’ as it is ‘ambient’. There’s a minimalism that’s consistent with his nominal purpose of composing music for a computer game. But it’s a minimalism that’s open-ended—it can propel introspection and reflection, a focused expectancy. Yes, Kyd’s writing is in a vein that my friend RMC would’ve liked, particularly the railing against the absurdity and waste of a life cut short.

CMT: But I suppose Kyd’s music is far darker and moodier than would be healthy. Rich and very dark. You oughtn’t to stay immersed in it too long . . .

DSM: Well, healthy is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say what I need, or what music’s helpful or appropriate, or how long grieving should continue? If I were on a pure diet of Kyd six months from now, or even two weeks from now, that would be unhealthy. You know, the Mourners’ Kaddish is said as part of the Jewish mourning rituals, and, when people speak of ‘saying Kaddish’, it means performing the rituals of mourning, broadly construed. The opening words of the prayer are inspired by Ezekiel 38:23, a vision of God despairing of the nations, a cosmic despair—and God extemporizes a response. With regard to RMC, his loss may be a modest human one, but for those of us who were good friends of RMC, it feels pretty cosmic right now. And we must just extemporize a response that seems right, each one of us, day by day.

CMT: Jesper Kyd’s music creates the atmosphere within the games, and it dynamically changes to fit the players’ extemporaneous action—adding suspense and tension, punctuated with resolution and denouement as events unfold/conclude. Instead of live musicians, he primarily uses GIGAstudio™ Virtual Instruments—understandable, I suppose, because, in Kyd’s game soundtracks, the musical score is non-deterministic—its aleatory varies depending on how the gamer plays the level. The gamer can play the same level repeatedly without ever hearing the same music score twice. But it’s precisely that aleatoric quality that seems very appropriate to your friend RMC’s approach to life, even up to the very brave, defiant end. Kyd’s requiems could be fitting way to remember a software developer, filled with run-time indirection and stochastic flow-of-control branching. Ditch the game imagery, though; keep just Kyd’s music.

The connection is a kind of ‘valediction’: RMC’s life and his writing code, becoming clearer and clearer as a person in the wake of an anticipated, imminent departure. Maybe best if the music is accompanied by reading a poem in suitably gruff Gaelic accent, like RMC’s—say, from the traditional ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, in which sailors drown in a storm.

O , our Scots nobles wer richt laith -
To weet their cork-heild schoone;
Bot lang owre a’ the play wer play’d,
Their hats, they swam aboone.”

CMT: Right. Rather than speculating on what the sailors’ thoughts might have been as they died, the verse merely has their hats on the sea’s cruel surface. While the pathos is there, the image isn’t a sentimental or maudlin one. Sort of like RMC . . .

jwilzewske

Friday, January 21, 2011

Bell & Haywood: Balletics of Romantic Sonatas

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Remembrance: Retrieving the Right Requiem