CHARRIS EFTHIMIOU

A COMPUTER-ASSISTED ANALYSIS OF RECORDINGS OF MUSICAL WORKS EXPRESSING THUNDERSTORMS WITH THE TARGET OF SYSTEMATIZING THE USAGE OF THIS WEATHER PHENOMENON SINCE THE 18TH CENTURY

CHARRIS EFTHIMIOU

University of Music and Performing Arts Graz Austria charis.ef@gmail.com

During the last 300 years there were several composers who expressed thunderstorms with music. From Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1723), Haydn’s Symphony No. 8 (1761) and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (1808), Rossini’s Overture William Tel, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830), to Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (1915) and Henze’s Symphony No. 6, thunderstorms found their place in the musical repertory.

The aim of this paper is to systematize the expression of thunderstorms with music. To do so, several available recordings of the abovementioned musical works will be analyzed and compared with each other. This computer-assisted comparative study tries to reveal long-term tendencies and similarities between recordings of the present as compared to those before the Second World War. The following aspects are presented in detail: general tempo, tempo changes within the musical phrase with thunderstorms, dynamics, a spectral analysis of the relationship between the different groups of the orchestra, and the tone-color features of the specific instruments participating in those musical phrases.

Furthermore, the computer-assisted analysis (computer programs used: Sonic Visualizer and Sonic Lineup) aims to answer the following questions: Can we systematize the usage of this weather phenomenon in the first place, or are there no clear long-term tendencies? How do conductors interpret thunderstorms? How does one conductor distinguish themselves from another in terms of performing those thunderstorms? Do they possess individual characteristics? Does a conductor (for example, Karajan) interpret the same musical phase in a similar way over the decades, or not?

Keywords: thunderstorms, instrumentation, music recordings, sonic visualizer.

Charris Efthimiou was born in 1978 in Greece. He has a Master’s in Composition and Music Theory from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) and a PhD in Mozart’s Symphonies. Since 2012 he has been a senior lecturer at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz on music history and music theory. Since 2019 he has been a postdoc senior scientist at KUG. He has written monographs on Metallica’s riffs and Mozart’s symphonies and publications on the symphonic works of W. A. Mozart (Mozart-Jahrbuch 2016), J. Sibelius (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), J. Myslivecek, L. Sorkocevic, R. Wagner, J. M. Krauss, A. Rolla, A. Honegger, L. Janacek, J. S. Mayr, the trio sonatas of J. L. Krebs, and heavy metal.