… though I wish people made a better effort to smile back in the day.

Rachmaninoff and a Dog (senar.ru)

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, cover art

The other day, I listened to a Naxos recording of Ravel’s entire Daphnis et Chloé ballet for the first time (Ravel also arranged two smaller orchestral suites of the work) and realized that McNeely derived parts of his own score from this piece. The one passage that caught my attention opens Part II of the ballet—a scene that depicts a camp of pirates cavorting at night in a savage, sabbath-like dance.

Ravel, Daphnis et Chloe

Joel McNeely, Shadows of the Empire

The familiarity was enough to make me immediately drop whatever it was that I was doing and fire off a Google search for “joel mcneely daphnis”, which turned up a forum thread in which one user points out that McNeely derived his music for Shadows of the Empire from two works: Ravel’s ballet and another, The Quest, by British composer William Walton.

I’m going to explore the Walton suggestion a little bit more, but I’m more curious to know whether there exists any verbal or written acknowledgment from McNeely (EDIT: some does exist in an interview). I mean, presumably, this kind of creative “borrowing” happens all the time, but artists don’t always call attention to their sources of inspiration unless prompted. In fact, the aforementioned forum user speaks to the matter as if McNeely stole the material from Ravel. I’d have to give this Walton ballet a listen to verify that claim.

Rachmaninoff, The Rock (opening)

It’s magical, isn’t it?  I’m really at a loss to describe it any other way.  It’s as if you’re standing atop a cliff overlooking the ocean, peering into a mass of storm clouds brewing off in the distance, when suddenly out of the corner of your eye you catch a glimpse of sunlight starting to filter its way down through a small gap in the clouds.  Horn II, entering on middle C, captures that initial feeling of wonder and bewilderment.  When Horn I echoes an octave higher, the feeling is similar, but carries with it the excitement of a warranted suspicion or curiosity.

Rachmaninoff, The Rock (opening)

The excerpt is from the opening of Rachmaninoff‘s fantasia for orchestra, The Rock, Op. 7.  The lower strings (omitted in the image) and bassoons suggest E major as the home key, so C-natural (or enharmonically, B-sharp) is our raised fifth.  The flute too follows the contours of an E major scale, but picks up a B-sharp/C-natural or two along the way.

Perhaps the effectiveness of the raised fifth lies in the fact that it forms an augmented triad sitting squarely between the tonic and its relative minor.  In the above passage for instance, the tremolo in the violins below the flute line oscillates steadily between B-natural and C-sharp, necessarily visiting C-natural along the way, and as a result, creating a conflation of E major and C-sharp minor over the course of the phrase.  Actually a pretty common pattern in tonal music.

Raising the dominant pitch or lowering the sixth, almost surreptitiously like this, is a device that shows up pretty often in modern film music too, in order to achieve an effect similar to what I tried to describe with my terrible sunlight-through-the-clouds metaphor.  At the very end of John Powell‘s score to X-Men: The Last Stand, a trombone can be heard voicing an F-natural just as the rest of the orchestra settles into an A major chord.  Listen for it at around 0:18-0:21, just before the suspended cymbal washes over everything (might be loud if you had your speakers turned up for The Rock).

John Powell, X-Men: The Last Stand (end credits)

As a result of mulling over this idea in my head, I’m starting to hear it more and more in a lot of other pieces: Rachmaninoff’s Spring cantata and John Knowles Paine’s overture to As You Like It, to name a few.  I’d like to revisit those pieces in this context some time later.  To be clear though, there’s a difference between overtly stating an augmented triad and just subtly sneaking in a raised fifth here and there.  The former can be a discrete, indispensable stage in a harmonic progression; the latter is more of a musical device for adding or enhancing color.

Rachmaninoff, Concertos 1 and 4 (Original Versions)

Rachmaninoff notably revised his Second Piano Sonata (1913) in 1931, excising some fragments and condensing others significantly, but he left the general scheme of the work and its thematic material mostly intact.  With the Second Symphony, he merely recommended, at least to my knowledge, several cuts and optional repeats.

If those alterations were deemed revisions, his changes to the fourth concerto in 1928 and finally in 1941 should be considered almost a complete rewrite.  In fact, the finale was mostly rewritten, borrowing little from the original score and giving way to a much simpler form.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a passage in the second subject of the final movement (1941 version) with a horn solo.  I was surprised to find this passage entirely absent in the original, 1926 version.

Second subject from finale (1926)

Second subject from finale (1941)

In its place, the piano takes center stage with a familiar Dies Irae-inspired melody spelled out in thick, stepwise chords. The key of D-flat is still strongly suggested, but the horn is gone—which makes me sad—and there aren’t any voices in the orchestra that assume its role from the 1941 version, with either a soloistic line or pentatonic character.  Instead, a solo trumpet and a choir of woodwinds chime in intermittently with supporting, motivic pronouncements.

Following the second subject, a clarinet solo, entirely nonexistent in the 1941 version, marks the transition into the next set of themes.  In fact, there are several places where Rachmaninoff has written solos into the manuscript score for instruments other than piano but has omitted them in the final version.

Clarinet solo from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4

This is all small change though.  The most drastic difference in the manuscript version of the finale is the return of the second subject, adding at least two more minutes of music to the piece.  For me, this restatement of some of the earlier themes rounds out the structure of the movement and I think results in a greater sense of resolution for listeners who, consciously or not, expect a sonata or rondo-like pattern.

It’s clear from looking at each work that exists as an original-revised pair that Rachmaninoff strove for greater economy in his music as he grew older.  All his revised works are considerably shorter in length and got this way mostly through a paring down and simplification of the more complex passages.  My feeling is that his revised editions are furnished with more “natural” harmonic progressions and are condensed in the very spots where he had at first been the most verbose musically.

Rachmaninoff at the piano (senar.ru)

And although he wasn’t necessarily enthusiastic about his first attempts, we as his audience receive works like this with fresh ears.  I don’t think it makes sense to value one version objectively over the other, and I think most people would have a hard time making that kind of decision anyway when these two versions are, chiefly as works of art, so thoroughly constructed.  The two are just telling snapshots of the same man at two different points in time.

Unfortunately, that man was met with cold criticism for both versions of the piece. Following a New York performance of the first version on March 22, 1927, the music critic Pitts Sanborn wrote:

The concerto in question is an interminable, loosely knit hodgepodge of this and that, all the way from Liszt to Puccini, from Chopin to Tchaikovsky.  Even Mendelssohn enjoys a passing compliment.  The orchestra scoring has the richness of nougat and the piano part glitters with innumerable stock tricks and figurations.  As music it is now weepily sentimental, now of an elfin prettiness, now swelling towards bombast in a fluent orotundity.

Such as it is, I rather enjoy the richness of nougat.

Source: Bertensson, Sergei & Jay Leyda. Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music. Indiana University Press. 2001.

I don’t think I can easily describe what’s in my tastes, but in general, most of the songs I like capitalize on the ever-popular I-V-vi-IV or i-VI-III-VII chord progressions somewhere in the chorus or refrain (e.g. Lifehouse‘s Halfway Gone, Taylor Swift‘s Love Story, Lady Gaga‘s Poker Face).  Actually, the refrain in Replay uses the latter chord progression too, but I just can’t stand that part where he makes baby sounds and starts talking about his iPod.  Anyway, the point is: we’ve got a lot of songs on the radio, and they’re all winning hearts with some of the same, tried-and-true musical constructs.

Not one to be caught going with the flow though, Britney occasionally throws a few little curveballs into the mix to give her songs an exotic or oddball quality.  In If U Seek Amy, she sticks a B-flat into the tail end of the refrain, lowering the second scale degree a half-step and thereby giving the phrase a Phrygian-like modal inflection.

Refrain from If U Seek Amy (Britney Spears)

From its beginning, the song clearly establishes A minor as the home key, though we don’t actually hear a B-natural until right before the refrain is first sung.  As if to draw more attention to themselves too, the B-natural and B-flat both appear in a conspicuous rhythmic context: a three-against-two hemiola (i.e. three quarter notes overlaid on the third and fourth beats of the last measure, as depicted above).

Anyway, the modern Phrygian mode is not so different from the natural minor (Aeolian) mode, as it differs only in the aforementioned second scale degree. And so it’s not completely jarring when at the end of this descending line one hears a pitch that does not belong to the tonic key.  It’s like in the song 3, when Britney sings an A-natural instead of an A-flat (the third scale degree) to put the phrase momentarily in a major mode.  The effect is mysterious.  Furtive.  Teasing.  Britney.

There are moments of shining glory in every instrument’s orchestral repertoire, and the horn is no exception.  Actually, the most famous passages for horn and those that are arguably the most difficult and fun to play were written by Germans, but this one deserves at least an honorable mention.

Horns in F, Dvorak's Symphony No. 8

Sure, the first four bars aren’t too exciting (actually they are), but that’s because Dvorak is getting ready to kill you.  In the sixth measure.  Death by horn trill.  Honestly, when else do you get to trill on a double forzando?  And twice?  Maybe in something by John Williams, but that’s because John Williams writes for TIE Fighters and Jedi Knights.  This is primal fury in a 19th century symphony.

Underneath this blaring figure, the strings and everyone else are frantically making all sorts of noise too (e.g. sixteenth note runs in the firsts, more trills in the clarinets, oboes, and bassoons), but nothing you’d ever be able to hear over this totally fantastic elephant wail.

I thought I had a recording of this piece from several years ago, starring yours truly, where I sound more like a donkey than an elephant, but I can’t find it.  So here’s a fragment from a recording by the slightly more reputable Vienna Philharmonic with Myung-Whun Chung.

Horn Awesomeness in Dvorak’s 8th Symphony

Our good friend Dmitri wrote a bunch of brooding, controversial symphonies, but in this concerto, there is a nice slice of his more cheerful side, as can be found too in the Festive Overture and ninth symphony.  Actually, the Andante movement is reminiscent of a Romantic adagio, but the rest of the work is a sprightly spattering of thematic variations and fingering exercises—the latter conceived as a joke for the composer’s son.  Honestly though, how fun is this melody?

Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 2, Opening theme

What a curious concerto.

This photo of Sibelius makes me happy

But not everyone particularly cared for the piano, it seems.  Despite having written a few character pieces for it, Jean Sibelius will go on record as one of those composers who may have employed it entirely out of convenience.

I dislike the piano: it is an unsatisfactory, ungrateful instrument, an instrument for which only one composer, Chopin, has succeeded in writing perfectly, and of which only two others, Debussy and Schumann, have had an intimate understanding.

I always feel that statements as pointed and cold as this need to be taken with a grain of salt; could someone really harbor so much resentment about one of the most versatile musical instruments of them all?  In fact, maybe so.  The man is remembered for his accomplishments in genres without piano.  Seven grand symphonies.  Fervently nationalistic tone poems.  A violin concerto with one of the most haunting opening melodies I’ve ever heard.

At least we get a sense from this statement that Sibelius believed the piano to have merits within reach of the talents of other composers.  I think most people would cite Chopin as the composer who excelled most in the domain of the 88; it’s comforting to know that Sibelius, a man who didn’t even like the instrument, was sympathetic to this belief as well.

Source: Goulding, Phil. Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1000 Greatest Works. Random House.

Rachmaninoff started the 4th concerto in his New York apartment

The attacca entrance into the finale from the Largo movement is probably the most unsettling part of the piece.  Although the orchestration is thin and delicate in this section, with individual voices appearing to chime in intermittently, it is chromatic, rhythmically irregular, and harmonically ambiguous.  The inconstant articulations and nimble runs in the piano solo give the impression of a race lacking direction.

But Rachmaninoff is always going somewhere, always building towards something, even in moments of chaos like this.  Very briefly, the music settles into G-flat major—the first suggestion we get of any tonal center. This is soon followed by the same material in E and a series of thick piano chords, moving in incremental progression towards a new tonal center.  Upon finally arriving at the key of D-flat major, we are treated to an interlude that is conspicuously uncomplicated for the twenty minutes of music that came before it.  The piano, plainly establishing the new key, clears a path for this simple melody in the horn:

Horn solo from Rachmaninoff's 4th

And again, moments later, with slight alteration:

Horn solo from Rachmaninoff's 4th, cont'd.

Whether you care for the dissonance and jazzy undertones of this piece, there is at least this one, shining moment of clarity.  It is pure and simple in both structure and purpose.  It consists almost entirely of quarter notes and half notes; it starts with a five-to-one pick-up; it is arch-like in shape; and it ends on the tonic.  And as if simplicity in this form wasn’t enough, Rachmaninoff constructs this horn call using only the pentatonic scale—one of the most commonly occurring musical scales, and one with a significant place in the musical past of almost every culture in the world.  It is a scale that is distinctly human.

For the duration of this passage and the Dies Irae-like melody that follows it, Rachmaninoff manages to suspend all musical unrest.  He reverts to a sound that is both familiar and sincere, demonstrating that beauty need not derive from embellishment and complexity. In these few, short moments, with horn and piano in hushed dialogue, I am, as the listener, washed over with an overwhelming sense of resolution.

For me, this section of the concerto, which juxtaposes a palette of daring, new sounds with a humble nod to something more traditional, reveals the composer’s lifelong nostalgia.  He was likely looking back to the music of his youth, but he also longed for his home in Russia, where, as an exile, he was no longer welcome.

Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev (*)

According to the surviving press material that relates the outcome of this concert, Rachmaninoff’s playing was not well received.  As professional and musically gifted as the man was, his performance was apparently starved of the nuances that contemporary “Scriabinites” cherished in these pieces.  And in fact, Rachmaninoff continued to endure criticism for his treatment of the late composer’s works as the season unfolded and as more critics throughout Russia were introduced to his interpretation.  (If only we had such an opportunity.)

Prokofiev’s opinion went on record too, fortunately, and is less critical.  In his account, he acknowledges the uproar of the press and the unmistakable novelty of Rachmaninoff’s performance, but voices no immediate protests of his own.

I tried to suggest an objective point of view: though we were accustomed to the composer’s interpretation, perhaps there are other ways of playing this work.

His coolheaded open-mindedness wouldn’t appease the older composer-pianist though, and what Prokofiev describes next is a first look at the unpleasant relationship they would share for the rest of their lives.

Entering the artists’ room, I continued my thought as I spoke to Rachmaninoff: “And yet, Sergei Vasilyevich, you played very well.”  Rachmaninoff smiled acidly—”And you probably thought I’d play badly?” and he turned away to someone else.  This put an end to our good relations.  Some part in this was certainly contributed by Rachmaninoff’s rejection of my music, and the irritation it provoked in him.

And so, as history would have it, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev would never really hit it off.  I’d like to think that, as two of the most successful artists of their time, they at least shared a mutual respect for each other’s talent, but that probably wouldn’t have really mattered even if it were true.  After the First World War, the two of them would advance their careers in music quite independently of each other, despite both of them leaving for the United States at around the same time.

Moscow (lucie@Flickr)

Before leaving Russia, however, the gods again arranged for these two men to be present together in a concert setting in Moscow.  Rachmaninoff, together with his friend and fellow composer Medtner, attended a performance of Prokofiev’s chamber works.  Prokofiev’s recollection of the evening confirms Rachmaninoff’s generally mysterious and subdued demeanor:

Among those invited were Rachmaninoff and Medtner.  Through the concert Medtner fumed and fussed, “If that’s music, I’m no musician.”  Rachmaninoff, though, sat like a stone idol, and the Moscow audience, that usually received me well, was confused as it watched its hero’s reaction to my music.

How lucky we are to have such sensationalism on record.  Actually, while these anecdotes mostly recount unpleasantness, there is another (a letter to a Moscow magazine) in which Prokofiev respectfully acknowledges Rachmaninoff’s success in the concert hall. Still, there’s no denying the bad blood between these two; in a later discourse on his taste in music, Prokofiev dismissed the subject with the following:

Rachmaninoff—well, I’d rather say nothing about him.  The truth is we hated each other’s guts!

All of this leaves me wondering whether it was Prokofiev the man or specifically his music that bothered Rachmaninoff so much.  Either way, there isn’t much you can do, in general, to reconcile artistic differences.  Prokofiev and others were on a path to a new kind of sound, and Rachmaninoff would simply have no part in it.

Source: Bertensson & Leyda. Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music. Indiana University Press. Amazon.

(*) Photographs copyright of their respective owners.