Friday, April 4, 2008

Listening Journal No. 3a

Walton’s Façade: An Entertainment

William Walton (1902-1983) was a British composer and conductor, who was mostly self-taught as a composer. His compositional training was mainly limited to the scores available to him at the local library, where he gravitated primarily to works by Stravinsky, Debussy and Sibelius. Walton befriended and moved in with Sacheverell, Osbert and Edith Sitwell (three important literary figures in England). It was through the Sitwells that Walton began to obtain fame as a composer. Edith Sitwell was a well-known English poet, who had an interest in the association between music and poetry.
Walton’s Façade was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell. The piece was Façade was originally a set of poems by Edith, that Walton then set for the very peculiar ensemble, similar to Schonberg‘s Pierrot Lunaire. Both pieces have a flute, clarinet, percussion and cello, yet instead of a violin and piano, Walton opted for trumpet and alto saxophone. The most notable difference comes in the use of the vocalist. Schonberg made use of a vocalist using Sprechstimme, and conversely, Walton decided to use two speakers (typically, the speaker parts are performed by one male and one female). Although, he does not use Sprechstimme, Walton achieved a wide variety of spoken vocal timbres based on rhythmic speed, simple inflections, and just by using two different speakers. The piece was performed behind a curtain with the speakers projecting through mega-phones, and it centered around the idea of having the speakers simulate the rhythms of the instrumental ensemble.
This piece has obvious influences of jazz music and none of the twenty-two movements are longer than four minutes (with the whole piece lasting just shy of 40 minutes). Each movement has its own very distinct character, reflecting greatly upon the text used. Walton, like Schönberg in Pierrot Lunaire, hardly used the full ensemble in any of the movements. By fragmenting the ensemble like this, Walton allowed himself potential for greater contrast between his movements (which greatly supplements the speakers’ timbre changes).
Because of these short, jazz-inspired, multi-character pieces, Walton was labeled an avant-garde composer at its premiere in 1923. But judging by his latter output, Walton does not seem to have become the extreme avant-garde composer he was originally thought to be. His Symphony No. 1, for example, is much less humorous and fanciful than Façade, yet there still are hints of his more playful side within it. For the most part, though, his Symphony is relatively conservative compared to Façade, which was written almost thirteen years earlier. Walton’s notoriety seems to have disappeared in between these two pieces, leaving a much more toned-down version of Walton’s original style.
Walton’s Façade seemed to be a piece strictly for entertainment purposes, in fact it is subtitled “An Entertainment.” This idea probably accounts to the playfulness of the piece and its constantly shifting timbres and styles. Edith Sitwell named some of her poems things like: Hornpipe, Tango, Tarantella, Country Dance, Polka, and Fox-Trot (all of which were very commonplace compositional forms and styles). By using these ideas, Walton could connect with the audience in a deeper and much more meaningful way in these short movements by exploring (and expanding upon) the forms and styles of these genres. The movements’ titles and Walton’s incorporation of their stylistic nature into the movements, the piece could help the audience understand Walton’s stylistic language and compositional process quickly.
To use a term I heard in lessons once, this piece seems to be an exercise in “short-attention span theater.” The only continuity between the movements seems to be instrumentation and author of the text. Any continuity of musical thought seems completely absent. The piece as a structural whole tends to work only because each movement is so short and has the same author. With the constantly shifting musical styles, textures and ideas, one tends to lose track of the piece as a whole and begins to look at the work more as twenty-two separate pieces that happen to be lumped together.
But all the previous observations are based on aural information only. Had I had a score present, connections between the movements would (or perhaps would not) become more apparent. Walton seems to have constructed twenty-two well developed pieces and put them together in a “song-cycle” of sorts. It fits the song cycle genre due to it is all poetry of Edith Sitwell and music by Walton. From an orchestrational viewpoint this piece has much to offer, in terms of how Walton achieved the variety of timbres within the piece. Seeing as a piece like this was being written during the same time as Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, it was quite a remarkable achievement in the forward-progression of composition. As far as its inclusion in the Canon is concerned, I believe that this piece offers an interesting look into the development of the song-cycle and its progression in the twentieth century. It is definitely on par with Pierrot Lunaire as a great example of a non-traditional song cycle and for that reason it should be included in the Canon.

Listening Journal No. 3

Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony

Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was an Austrian composer, conductor and teacher, who tended to be associated within many prominent music circles. Through these networks, Zemlinsky met Arnold Schonberg and Gustav Mahler. These two composers promoted Zemlinsky’s music, and Mahler even conducted the premiere of Zemlinsky’s opera Es war einmal. Zemlinsky had a notable impact upon Schonberg’s pupil, Alban Berg, who dedicated his Lyric Suite to Zemlinsky. Berg also used quotes from Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony in his tribute. Even though he had this impact upon the younger composer, Zemlinsky never used atonal or 12-tone techniques in his compositions. Zemlinsky’s relationship with Mahler bears a striking resemblance to that of Hans von Bulow and Richard Wagner. Zemlinsky and Bulow both fell in love with women who eventually left them for their idols. In 1900, Zemlinsky fell in love with Alma Schindler. Alma left Zemlinsky and married Mahler in 1902. Despite this heartbreak, Zemlinsky and Mahler still supported each other’s music.
Written in 1922, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony is a seven-movement work written for solo soprano, solo baritone and orchestra. The text is a German translation of poems by the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. (The Bengalis are a community that lives in Bangladesh and India). Zemlinsky, when presenting it to his publisher, likened it to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Prior to the Lyric Symphony, Zemlinsky wrote three other symphonies, none of which incorporated voices.
Zemlinsky’s used his vocal soloists as soloists, never pairing them together. They both have their own individual movements, and the movements tend to alternate back and forth between the two singers. Zemlinsky carefully crafted the vocal lines to accentuate the natural inflections of the German language, to the point where (if I understood German better) the text is easily intelligible through the music.
Upon a first hearing of this piece, I was reminded of two diverse pieces: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade. The association between this work and the Sea Symphony seems fairly straight-forward. Both works have a very similar instrumentation (with one notable difference being Vaughan Williams’s inclusion of a choir). Both emphasize the vocal soloists using the orchestra mainly as an accompaniment and for dramatic effects. The borderline bombastic brass opening of the first movement in the Lyric Symphony seems to share many qualities with the opening of the Sea Symphony. Both utilized a dotted rhythm with a very secco, march-like quality in execution. Similar to the Sea Symphony, the Lyric Symphony seems to incorporate aspects of tonality without utilizing a completely functional tonal system. Given that the Lyric Symphony was written between 13 and 19 years after the Sea Symphony, it is possible that Zemlinsky heard Vaughan Williams’s piece and incorporated a similar sound into his work.
The second immediate connection that I made was to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade. The correlation here is a bit more obscure. I think the relationship I heard between the two is a shared focus on the orchestration. Rimsky-Korsakov was a master of orchestrating sounds, and examples of his focus on timbre are apparent throughout his works. It is also clear that Zemlinsky, in the Lyric Symphony, focused a lot of energy on his orchestration. The third movement clearly demonstrates Zemlinsky’s control over the orchestra, and his understanding of the instruments’ capabilities. One example of this facility is a well-crafted trade-off of the melody from the baritone soloist to a solo horn in F. This trade is made seamless by Zemlinsky’s scoring of the accompaniment in the string section, which is continually playing throughout this movement. By retaining a common accompaniment, Zemlinsky effectively transferred the melodic material between parts without disrupting the flow.
It is interesting that Zemlinsky compared this piece to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Mahler’s work is quite similar in instrumentation (substituting a tenor for the baritone), and there are moments where Zemlinsky’s piece seems to resemble Mahler’s. Each piece broke the standardized four-movement symphonic form (Mahler had six; Zemlinsky seven). Both pieces had a deep, personal connection to their creators. Mahler had just lost his daughter and was diagnosed with a heart condition. The text of the Lyric Symphony tells of a love affair from origin to termination (which calls to mind Zemlinsky’s lost of Alma). But Zemlinsky did not garter much success, in his lifetime, with this piece. At this point, the German Expressionism, Neo-Classicism, the French movement of Les Six, and other composers (such as Hindemith) began to dominated the modern music scene. Zemlinsky’s late romantic style had all but faded from the modern composition arena.
It would be very interesting to compare, on a much deeper level, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade, and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony to find what Alban Berg found so influential within Zemlinsky’s work that inspired the Lyric Suite.
This work of Zemlinsky’s should be heard and played much more often, than it is presently. Although, in recent years, the Lyric Symphony has gained much more attention and has begun to receive many recordings and performances. It is Zemlinsky’s best known work and a great example of another composer pursuing the Late Romantic Tradition without entering the realm of atonality. But because of this refusal to look forward, as well as backwards, Zemlinsky was writing music in the 1930s and 1940s that people were no longer interested in hearing from modern composers. It should be included within the Canon, though, as the best representation of the composer who influenced many future composers and who worked in a fading traditional style during the outpouring of styles in the early twentieth century.