Overview

When, like me, you spent fifteen years working yourself up to write one symphony, there is always the worry that you'll never get your head round a second. In writing a piece exploring classicism, however, i'd deliberately narrowed the mission statement, allowing for later expositions and territory; when the alternative route may have been to put everything I had into a Symphony No. 1, making a Symphony No. 2 a mere weak sequel. In truth, though, I was still dabbling in the shallow end of creative endeavour, carefully avoiding the 'mighty' statement and the great horizons of Western concert music, and, particularly in my orchestrations, playing stylistically safe. The result was as an encouragement; like the child who discovers he can after all ride a bike; like a batsman who discovers Jeff Thomson is playable if he concentrates and watches the ball; like a marathon runner who knows he's already halfway; attempting the symphonic form for the second time seemed quite doable once I got into it.

Rather than producing some grand all-encompassing piece, I merely ratcheted up the cerebral processes of the first symphony, while moving the aesthetic base from classicism to romanticism. During the early nineteenth century that symphonic forms expanded, some would say distended until the super-symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler. 'Classicism' and 'romanticism' are not words i'm comfortable with; this fact was to form part of the debate. Indeed most of the basic tenets of modern musicology leave me as irritated as they leave you uninformed. To be accurate, classicism and romanticism are words of shameless hindsight. The musicians of the eighteenth century weren't aping some model from Plato: they were writing rooted in the same sense of modernity we take for granted. Similarly, the musical dramatists of the nineteenth century were contemporary artists, not emulators of some model cloned from Byron and Percy Shelley and set to the tune of laudanum. Too often, labels for historical periods have become an excuse for a complete misunderstanding of our cultural past. Just as morality is spoon-fed to unlucky children in tales of tooth fairies and the baby Jesus; so art is freeze-dried in period plastic packets, leaving any genuine analysis short of even the most fundamental precepts. I took the arbitrary dialectic of classicism and romanticism, in order to highlight the similarities rather than the pat contrasts of potted history.i think what I was after was a 'grand' symphony, whether classicist or romanticist, and I was quite prepared to try a few different doors in the search.

For those lucky enough never to have read one of the standard works in musicology, i'd better outline the classical/romantic hypothesis. Classicism (as given to music written between 1750 to around 1820), we are told, with its roots in an adoration of ancient Greek aesthetics, deals in pure structures based around carefully arched melodies and a mathematically precise set of key relations. The emphasis is on poise, balance, proportion, with emotional evocation delicately measured. So-called 'romantic' music (from c.1820-90) on the other hand, wears its heart on its sleeve and throws reserve to the winds in an attempt at direct emotional impact. Beethoven sits between the two, thoroughly schooled in classical technique while using many of the devices of the romanticists, such as chromaticism (ie. changing key a lot), orchestral textures and colours, large, organic, inherently disproportionate structures, and the dramatic use of a huge range of different rhythms and dynamics. Of course, 'schools' of composers rarely saw themselves as such at the time. In truth, almost every composer of the last 500 years wrote only one sort of music: the 'contemporary' music of his time, judging himself by the same lines of honesty and originality as the 'contemporary' musicians of our time. In truth, the minuscule changes we see in our own culture are left unmeasured in most histories of music. Mozart only lived from 1756 to 1791, but in that short time he would have witnessed several dozen changes in style, fashion, taste and the technical virtuosity of developing instruments, not to mention the French revolution and the founding of the USA. Yet many musicologists invariably see his work as a tube of toothpaste: continually homogenous; squeeze the end and the same stuff comes out, same colour, same width, same minty taste. The reality is far more complex, from the early works influenced heavily by his own father as well as Haydn. The variety in his string quartets from the divertimenti to the eventual high art form. The wit of the operas; the shock-horror of 'Don Giovanni'; the groundbreaking incorporation of Eastern European string technique in the later symphonies. In our culture we got from fatty Bill Haley in his Billy Bunter suit to U2's moody whining in a similar period of time. What would we call this present period where we to sweepingly generalise a la musicology? 'Neo-tonality'? 'Post-negroid'? 'Copulationism', maybe? The fact is you can't stick John Lee Hooker, both Lloyd-Webbers, Nyman and Lydon in the same pigeon-hole however crass and sweeping your categorisation. And we shouldn't want to.

Back to romanticism. Key to the concept, ie. key to only some of the music, is the ideal of the hero. Here you can insert a certain portrait of Hector Berlioz in wild-haired Byronic pose. In the later work of Beethoven the hero idea mutates from a rather naive hymn of praise to Citizen Bonaparte into a glorification of society, the brotherhood of mankind living in virtuous freedom. Much 19th century concert music is drama, following a formula not dissimilar to the Hollywood movie, presenting conflict and its resolution. But this is far from the essence of romanticism in music: a certain communicable spirit which, pure as music, is impossible to define verbally. What links Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky isn't a range of techniques: they all used different ones, Berlioz with his use of depiction, Liszt experimenting with the mutation of leitmotif, Tchaikovsky merely writing down a good tune until he could think of a better one. But that certain voice still comes through: in the grammatical sense, a certain tense and person; in the filmic, a certain light and camera-angle. We can say they were all attempting the same task: the realisation of complex emotions and ideas within a context that entertains in itself. This is what we are all after, from JS Bach and Monteverdi, to the Darkness and Evelyn Glennie, this is the raison d'etre de la musique. Consequently, the 'romantic' period in music must be extended, not just to encompass Sergeis Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) and Prokoffieff (1891-1953), but also to the current generation of film composers, not to mention Barry Manilow and Matt Monroe.

In my own 'romantic' symphony I wanted to achieve several things: a new angle on the 'good tune' and 'chromatic' harmony; an emulation of 19th century orchestration; a re-interpretation of notions of conflict and resolution; and that essence, that contextual voice, I hear in every symphony from Mozart's 'Jupiter', through Bruckner, Sibelius, even late Shostakovich and much of Britten. I knew it wasn't a technical question, this shift from the classical stereotype of pretty architecture to the romantic stereotype of the emotional journey. I use much the same orchestra as in my first symphony, adding only trombones and a solitary cymbal, though obviously should resources allow there'd be two players to each wind part. In creating the music I put on a novellist's hat rather than my usual mathemtician's headgear. Journey means story. Story means hero. Hero means heroine, bad guy, a punch-up/car chase, maybe a sub-plot about Columbian drug-dealers inexplicably led by Charles Dance in bota and Eton tie; hey, I should e-mail this to Speilberg; i'm seeing Brad Pitt as me and Julia Roberts as a mermaid whose wrong half is a fish. In a philosophical sense, I also wanted to socialise the model, theme as standing for a notional people, conflict as interpreted as the toil inherent in wage-slavery; a re-examination perhaps of Beethoven's setting of Schiller, towards a new model of liberty and freedom.

Schiller's famous 'An die Freude' ('Ode to Joy') had already been watered down by the time Beethoven set it to music in the 1820s. It had initially been called 'An die Freiheit' ('Ode to Freedom') and had contained the line: "and beggars shall be royal brothers", a mite risque for 1785, when such events were more plausible than today. In my post-Marxist, hopefully forward-thinking social model, freedom defines itself readily as freedom from work: a removal of the shackles of capitalist production, partly through improved technology, but mainly through the realisation that a comfortable life is there for all mankind for half the pain, once we've cured the inherent greed of the privileged few. Although, I wasn't about to depict a revolution in orchestral form, at least not this time; I kept things simple, clearly discernible to any listener, I would at least hope.

First movement: passacaglia; allegro

It is a tendency of mine to take established rules and then subvert them as a means to greater understanding. The first movement of a romantic symphony should be dramatic and visceral rather than architectural. Had I embraced the Byronic zeitgeist, this piece would be packed with disjointed incident. Instead, albeit perversely, I decided to use not one architectural structure, but two: both sonata form and passacaglia. A 'passacaglia' in its previous incarnation the chaconne, was a staple of music way back into the mists before the Baroque. Essentially it consists of an extended phrase in the bass which repeats itself over and over as variations occur over the top. Strictly speaking, and passacaglia is a strict structure, just about every jazz or blues performance is organised along similar lines, using a harmonic chord sequence rather than a fixed bass-line. The self-imposed challenge was two-fold: how to spout romantic drama in something of an organisational strait-jacket, and; how to achieve variety without the key relations necessary for sonata form, given the restrictions of a fixed bass. The answer was to employ what I would call 'un-tonality', ie. music where tonality isn't fixed but given all the flexibility our contemporary aesthetic will allow. As it turned out both sonata subjects are in a firm A minor; but the passage linking the two employs sufficient 'un-tonality' and the two subjects contrasting enough that I consider the sonata form rules to be bent, not broken. The recurrence in the recapitulation again in A minor, I decided to vary by removing the linking passage altogether, with the second subject full tutti. The passacaglia bass-line is 20 bars long. The whole movement, allowing for the upbeat bars is 402 bars long, ie. the bass-line occurs 20 times from start to finish.

Bars 2-22 form an introduction. Full orchestra, full with drama; the work announces itself. The first subject appears from bars 23-42 in clarinets and lower strings, taken up by the oboes. Bars 43-102 comprise the linking passage, as trombones rise and fall before the timps rush in like drunken fools. A short interjection from the woodwinds up to bar 122 leads to the plaintive second subject in the strings. The development starts on bar 162, figures borrowed from the first theme bundling into a climax at bar 202. A counter-theme in the horns is taken up generally by the brass, and extended by the strings from bar 246. Full orchestra take the theme up 'stretto' (ie. twice the speed) and the crescendo builds to the start of the recapitulation at bar 283. The first subject is taken up by the lower strings in a mock counterpoint. The rest of the orchestra joins and the music builds, leading straight to the reiteration of the second subject at bar 363. The movement ends with a brief but impassioned coda.

I'd hoped to capture the sense of statement in the symphonic language, aimed for a profoundness in simplicity. The first subject in scampering semiquavers could belong to any time or musical place since Vivaldi. The heightened emotion of the second subject employing the romantic melancholy of a newer age, tears of modernity we barely have time for as we work to live. The passacaglia, ever repeating, is modern life itself, the daily, weekly, more often than not annual procession of water-treading torpor, swimming even in our sleep. The bass-line impels, like a good blues, the drama is inherent in the rhythm. The coda, a mere twenty bars, retains the simplicity: much of it consists of just one note. I figure a first movement can only succeed if it leaves you wanting more; and fails if it leaves you wanting a cup of tea already.At the same time, almost as a by-product of creative endeavour, I hope i've opened up the question of whether key modulation is truly the corner-stone of sonata form; or merely a vestigial hangover from the simpler binary forms of the baroque. A movement in which all the major subjects are in the tonic, ie. home key, should lack something, or turn out to be tedious, or in some other sense transgress the taste of the educated listener. I would submit that it doesn't: that rhythmic impetus and sufficient chromatic colouration make the supposedly indispensable sonata key relations just another formal optional extra. The test is in that most important aspect of any music: the noise it makes. Putting aside structure, tonality, harmonic construction and the other necessary means to construction, we must always bear in mind: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Second movement: scherzo alla Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky excelled in his ballet music. Something about the dainty powder-puff world of pas de deux lent his imagination some fairy wings. Maybe it was those trousers the guys wear that allow you to see whether or not they are circumcised at twenty paces. Tchaikovsky the victim, the gay man in distinctly straight times is an overplayed hand thesedays. At the same time, the truth about homosexuality (many still deny Tchaikovsky was) is still largely unwritten as the tale of bigotry and persecution it must have been for centuries. We live in a world which is still fundamentally racist and sexist, nevermind what we might call the lesser prejudices against, say, disability or sexual preference. Indeed I prefer to adopt Tchaikovsky for my own favourite good cause, that of the mentally ill, since i'm convinced from just a little biography that he was not alone among composers in being singularly highly-strung. Bruckner, i've been told, was a number-obsessive, a life-bendingly bad one, borne of living in a mind-bendingly ordered monastery until he was thirty-two. Wagner, to my mind, is the classic psychotic egomaniac, shouting his head off, the archetypal big-head, with an unfulfillable sexual drive that was as predatory as it was ill-judged. Tchaikovsky himself was an effete, in a society not particularly designed for effetes. Touring exhausted him. Performing made him ill. Conducting made him worse. His heightened sensibilities made the grime of real life repelling. His sexual differences just one part, maybe even a resultant part, of the alienation he felt from normal unfeeling folk. His death is still a mystery. He is said to have died from cholera from a dodgey glass of water. Some say idiotic accident. Others say particularly half-arsed suicide. I think it was an early advertisement for Perrier that went tragically wrong.In considering his contribution to musical romanticism, you need to take into account the vast range of symphonic gimmicks in every Hollywood film score, most of which he coined. For many people, 'romantic' music means Tchaikovsky, however snooty musicologists are about him. i've heard him dismissed as a mere tune-smith by people who never wrote a decent tune in their lives. i've heard him criticised for his structural limitations, when his real problem was finding a structure in which he could fit all the lovely tunes. This brings us back to ballet music: inherently episodic; often with a range of characters to evoke. My musical comment on him, this scherzo, is no emulation. More, an evocation. I don't pretend to have his subtlety in orchestration, nor anything like his melodic gift; but I felt I could capture something of the spirit, the delicate melancholy, the bitter-sweet, that characterises his contributions to the musical horizon.

The stately opening chords of my scherzo echo the bass-line of the previous movement, but the music winds up gently, like a music-box with the introduction of the main theme played by the oboes at bar 24. The theme is a lilting folk-tune, original as far as I know, almost a waltz, playing around with F sharp minor, A minor and D major without really leaving E minor. This becomes more aggressive, taken up by the brass and builds from bar 61 to a descending crescendo at bar 67, echoing one of the more oft-slagged portions of Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture'. Then we have an angry section, less waltz than limping march, percussive thuds until a new theme in the violins at bar 81. The brass interrupt, and the full orchestra joins in a swirling figure at bar 108 which descends into what I like to call 'chord clusters' from bar 117. Obviously this is stylistically several hundred miles from Tchaikovsky, or rather a hundred and fifty years since Tchaikovsky, and that's as well. A clarinet solo, though, at bar 127 tries to evoke a similar solo from the finale of his 5th symphony; and this is followed by some canonic string writing from bar 141, with the obligatory French horn obligato, deliberately slight. This is the heart of the piece: passion through simple harmony; romanticism in a basic rising scale. The opening theme returns at bar 172 and we are back from the edge into ordinary melancholy. The coda rises to F sharp minor and then fades away, halting, hesitant.

Third movement: adagio Hinduissimo

Here we are at the main point of the symphony; and the issue on which this symphony does or does not endure in the broader horizons of space and time. As I alluded earlier, the very essence of tonal music (that is, music based on tunes and harmonies) is tension and resolution. Tension created by 'dissonance' (or what we perceive as wrong notes) followed by the resolution of 'consonance' (ie. the right notes for the given key). Wagner thought he'd invented something new by stringing together dissonances (or is it 'dissonii') in what the parlance of the time called "a tune without end". In fact, all he'd come up with was a recipe for incredibly boring music, no matter how loudly you played it; and we all discovered you cannot write great long prose merely by leaving out all the full stops. Schoenberg and his advocates eventually broke down the gravitational field of tonality, asserting each note had equal value and there was no key. Generations since have produced varied 'atonal' efforts. Some (the worst efforts are not worth comment, but i'd cite Maxwell Davies' '8 Songs For A Mad King') have so much tension that just sitting there listening to them is like having your teeth pulled. Others (Glass, Taverner, Paart) have so much resolution they line the seats with drawing pins just to keep you awake. A hundred years of trying things the other way has done nothing to remove this essential polarity. Listening to music is a journey, a voyage through time. The early notes set a scene, and the rest must develop, whether logically or scatologically, and without tension and resolution your sea has no waves, your sail has no wind, and you won't travel anywhere. Music can do without it, plenty of successful music does; but we're not in some idealised post-structuralist future where art can ignore its own history.

My discourse here concerns a more precise sociological model: in which tension is 'work' or wage-slavery, and; 'resolution' is freedom from work, or all our many unsuccessful attempts at 'relaxation'. Of course, a smelly bath doesn't really do it. Frying on a crowded beach, gut-full with lager, doesn't really do it either. In fact, I would quite casually submit that not one of us will 'relax' sufficiently until wage-slavery is abolished forever. i'm told two paracetamol can help.

The Hindus have several words for it. They take pride in an inner tranquillity, when they're not picking fights with Pakistan. There is a sense of self-centredness, of balance; echoed by John Lennon's affirmation that "nothing's gonna change my world". The Sikhs use the word 'saat' in their basic greeting. Of course, Buddhism strives for inner tranquillity too, and here we can see its limit: it's all very well being tranquil when a bunch of Chinese soldiers are eradicating your indigenous culture. And so the work goes on for all of us. My symphonic resolution (here at least) is not some final summation, some inspired better place to be; but a mere spare moment grabbed in amongst all the tension, a resting-place, no more no less.

The most relaxing structure I could think of was a palindrome, not especially overused in music, since nothing could hit you on the way back that you hadn't already come to terms with on the way out. I also took the view that a single note, in this case a low B in the strings, round which all the harmony was based, would create the fewest diversions to the desired state of mind. I see the shape of the movement as that of an open book, with each page as a mirror of the other; and a join, a spine at the centre bar 40. Woodwind phrases lead to woodwind phrases. A gentle ensemble swell leads to a gentle ensemble diminuendo; a major seventh chord, not as Webernian semitone tension, but as a Debussy cloud, hovering in stasis. The music dies away, but it may as well float on forever, a drifting boat; a gently flickering pyre on the Ganges.

Fourth movement: symphony on a note row

If the third movement is a mirror of itself, an ink-blot landscape; then the fourth movement is a mirror of the entire symphony, a microcosm, a scale model. The early symphonies had three movements: fast, slow, fast. Then a fourth was added: the minuet; which became the minuet and trio; which became the scherzo. Four movements became pretty much the standard for everyone since Beethoven. Plenty of composers, though, experimented with five. It makes sense, five movements, particularly given the symphony's roots as a suite of dances. What should the extra movement be, though? Another scherzo? An interlude? Berlioz tried adding a march, but then Berlioz was up for trying anything. Tchaikovsky echoed Berlioz when he put a march before his final slow movement in his 'Pathetique'. Janacek's 'Sinfonietta' has seven movements linked by a recurring theme, a sort of moody fanfare. I went for a completely novel structure: a symphony within a symphony, a Russian doll within a doll. I took the proportions of the larger symphony and miniaturised them to create a piece, part scherzo, part differential calculus: the dy/dx of the form itself.

A note row is a device introduced by Schoenberg and Webern to replace the accepted key, melody and harmony. The idea is: instead of a tune you have a pre-arranged order in which the notes will appear, and the first note isn't heard again until you've played all the other notes in a fixed arbitrary series. Later composers, particularly since 1945, adopted this method and it became known as 'serialism'. The move was revolutionary, essentially replacing the eight-note scale of a given key with the full twelve-note chromatic scale you get from abandoning key altogether. Some composers took things to an obsessive degree, using the pre-arranged series for rhythms, textures, dynamics, creating music that was more mathematical (and fundamentally less musical) as the years went by. I resolved my own twelve-note music would try to retain the aesthetic of old-fashioned tonality, but with a serialist twist.

A four bar slow introduction gives way to the first section, with the tune in the violins. The exposition starts in a sort of F and ends in a sort of C, repeats, and is all done by bar 25. A development section starts in the flutes, answered by a deliberately difficult clarinet solo. A recapitulation section from bar 39 ends in a sort of F, our fake tonic key, at bar 47. A limping, loping 5/4 comprises a minuet section, with a trio in the brass at bar 62, building in block chords before the minuet reprise. The slow section from bar 83 has an ABA structure, and is followed by a section from bar 114 in which the microcosm is miniaturised still further, as each portion of symphonic form passes in the glimpse of an ear, to mix body-part metaphors for a moment. A symphony, in essence at least, that lasts a mere forty bars. The strings take up the semblance of melody once more the movement closes with a terse finale, pre-empting the finale which follows.

Fifth movement: presto; finale

The movement opens with a broad, ascending crescendo, which culminates in the main theme with the full orchestra at bar 50, in A minor. This theme represents work, an evocation of labour as the most basic conflict. This gives way to a brass chorale section at bar 65, accompanied by rising winds. The strings take up the chorale theme at bar 77. At bar 91, the full brass play the chorale, now slowed a little for grandeur. Woodwinds answer each other from bar 106, but the pace is unhalting. Work never ceases. A rapid, repeating figure starting in the bassoons is taken up by the full orchestra until at bar 130, a fanfare is heard. A new tune in the trombones is introduced at bar 140, and the music builds gradually. The earlier woodwind motif is used first by brass, then by the full orchestra, now in G major; but where one might expect the golden glow of expectant triumph, we instead get the classic minor key anti-climax of the romantic symphonic idiom, diving down the registers, like Petyor Tchaikovsky stomping off to his room for a sulk. The woodwind theme tries again, but this time the main thememreturns at bar 221, answered again by the chorale at bar 235, first in brass and then in strings, before the main theme returns with one last yelp, as the symphony closes in an emphatic A minor.

---

Front Page