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SAM’S PICKS: THIS SEASON’S REVOLUTIONARY COMPOSERS
BY SAM LOECK, PRINCIPAL BASS
The history of music is a long succession of game changers. Innovative composers have pushed the boundaries for hundreds of years and fostered the constant evolution of the art, all the way from Palestrina and Bach to Schoenberg and Boulez. Largely, it’s music by these revolutionary composers that has survived and is still performed in concert halls today; for every Mozart, Schubert, or Strauss, there were hundreds of common, conventional composers whose music was quickly forgotten after their 15 minutes of fame. Now I’m going to put on my music-history cap and nerd out about a few revolutionary composers whose music we’re performing this Season at the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra: Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, and Benjamin Britten.
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GUSTAV MAHLER
Gustav Mahler (1860 to 1911) bridged two very different musical worlds. He was one of the last great AustroGerman composers of the 19th century, with contemporaries such as Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. In sharp contrast, 20th century Modernist composers Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern are among Mahler’s immediate successors. In many ways, Mahler’s symphonic writing stays true to the conventions established by his predecessors, while also pushing boundaries and taking the symphony to wild new extremes. In his Symphony No. 2, the first movement is written in “sonata form.” Listen to any symphony of Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, and you’ll find this traditional structure, but Mahler makes it nearly unrecognizable through dense orchestration, unexpected tonal centres, and general buildup of, well, everything. For example, a complete Mozart symphony might be about 25 minutes; in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the first movement alone is longer than this. In addition to length, Mahler took the symphony to new extremes in terms of the size of the orchestra required, which is partially due to the volume/fullness of sound, but also to the density of his writing. To illustrate, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 is comprised of 14 unique parts played throughout the orchestra, while Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 has 30. In Mahler’s own words, “The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.” True enough — Mahler looked beyond the traditional orchestra for his symphonic writing, using everything from cow-bells and bird calls to the music of street musicians and country dances.
Hear Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on 22 + 23 November 2019. IGOR STRAVINSKY
Igor Stravinsky (1882 to 1971) achieved fame as a composer with his three ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. In The Firebird he looked back to the music of Romantic Russian composers Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (of whom Stravinsky was a pupil), keeping with the traditional styles in his treatment of melodic content and harmony. Petrushka, in the words of music historian Richard Taruskin, is where “Stravinsky at last became Stravinsky.” The music makes significant use of Russian folk melodies, and Stravinsky approaches the avant-garde with his exploration of polytonality (clashing, dissonant harmonies played simultaneously) and atypical, everchanging time signatures. The Rite of Spring, a radically progressive work that caused a near-riot at its premiere, is now considered one of the 20th century’s most influential works. Stravinsky’s influence on future composers is largely in terms of his distinct rhythmic drive, which often pushes rhythms past bar lines and altogether obscures conventional organization with successive changes of meter. In Stravinsky the rhythmic structure of music became much more fluid and was treated as a medium of expression as much as melody and harmony.
Hear Stravinsky’s Petrushka on 28 + 29 February 2020. BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Benjamin Britten (1913 to 1976) lived and worked in a musical landscape defined by Modernism. While his contemporaries experimented with atonal, serial, and minimal music, Britten expressed his mission as a composer in simpler terms: “pleasing people today as seriously as I can.” Early in his life, Britten developed a reverence for the great masters, specifically writing of the significant influence he found in Mahler. As a neo-Romantic composer, Britten achieved a balancing act, taking the musical language of previous generations to a modern place with more colour and personal struggle, while avoiding the hypermodern, avant-garde styles of the composers of his time. Britten’s Violin Concerto, though one of his lesserknown works, is a great example of this balancing act. Throughout, the concerto is undoubtedly tonal, featuring virtuosic and lyrical passages easily reminiscent of one of the major Romantic violin concertos; however, there’s always a disoriented, laboured feeling. Here and there he gives us a particularly crunchy harmony, the orchestral accompaniment seems to be in rhythmic conflict with the soloist, or a melodic passage meanders to a place you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Britten’s legacy is as a progressive conservative — he found a way to write innovative, unique, and accessible works using the musical language of his predecessors.
