Vaughan Williams's Veranda

Started by karlhenning, April 12, 2007, 06:03:44 AM

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lukeottevanger

Oh absolutely! And he turns the 'folk music style' into a style with its own moral tone, so that when we hear the (original) 'folk tune' in the first movement of the 6th it affects us as more than 'a good tune' but as a positive or natural force.

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: Mark G. Simon on August 30, 2008, 09:24:04 AM
But it's just got to be some kind of English or Scottish folk song. Is this the theme with the syncopation in the first bar? (sol-la---do-re---mi----sol) The 5th-8th bars of it sound like "Loch Lomond". A lot of themes in this movement sound like folk songs.

I was not so much thinking of that theme (with its 'Scotch snap' and whose 5th-8th bars do indeed sound like "Loch Lomond" speeded up!), but that car-honking motif with the percussion (bass drum + cymbals).
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

M forever

Quote from: drogulus on August 30, 2008, 06:56:24 AM
I don't think Gershwin is right. The London Symphony premiered in 1914, An American in Paris in 1928.

I wasn't talking about the London Symphony (which I only heard once a long time ago, incidentally, in London, and which I might listen to next - I like London, have been there many times and actually lived there for a few months at on point).

Quote from: drogulus on August 30, 2008, 06:56:24 AM
(and certainly not with Mahler or Strauss, who by comparison compose like schoolboys eager to please their instructor)

That's a surprisingly silly comparison. I usually avoid these comparisons anyway since I don't see much point in it, although it is sometimes interesting to compare how different composers work with similar material or ideas. If you have to make that comparison, what you said really doesn't make sense since in their time, both Mahler and Strauss (pre-WWI) were much more innovative than VW appears to me to have been (I don't know enough of the music yet to have a more pronounced opinion about that, obviously), and, this is easily overlooked because they are so immensely popular composers today, also much more controversial and much less compromising. In fact, when I listen to this piece (VW's 6th) what kind of puts me off is a sense of complacency that the music has for me, not self-confidence with itself after having gone through a long process of refinement and self-criticism, but simply lack of critical review. It sounds to me as if he simply put everything in that he came up with and didn't even bother much to look into how some of the material (like the tatata in the second movement) could have been developed or employed more effectively.

M forever

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 29, 2008, 11:08:45 PM
I find it very doubtful he knew very much Janáček, FWIW.

I think it's very obvious that he knew the Sinfonietta, if you listen carefully to the first movement (e.g. about 1'30 into it, but also in other places). It's also obvious that he knew Bartók well (see the epilogue of the 6th symphony). And that's basically OK, all composers work from what has been before them, process it and make the material their own and (hopefully) original musical language. In this piece though I simply had the déjà-vu (or rather déjà-ecouté) way too much for comfort. Rather like with the other well known Williams.
I think I will listen to the London Symphony next. There is a download of that symphony with Boult on amazon, and since Boult is said to embody the authentic style of performance, I can also look for that elusive "idiom" there, I guess.

I would be interested to have some more feedback about that Previn recording of the 6th that I listened to. My feeling is that whatever its coherence (or lack thereof) is, my feeling is that material can be presented in a more compelling and coherent way than Previn did.

lukeottevanger

Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 01:09:49 PM
I wasn't talking about the London Symphony (which I only heard once a long time ago, incidentally, in London, and which I might listen to next - I like London, have been there many times and actually lived there for a few months at on point).

No, I didn't think you were talking about the London Symphony! It confused me a little when Ernie brought that up.... To clarify, my own comments on your Gershwin comparison therefore still stand, FWIW.

Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 01:09:49 PM
That's a surprisingly silly comparison. I usually avoid these comparisons anyway since I don't see much point in it, although it is sometimes interesting to compare how different composers work with similar material or ideas. If you have to make that comparison, what you said really doesn't make sense since in their time, both Mahler and Strauss (pre-WWI) were much more innovative than VW appears to me to have been (I don't know enough of the music yet to have a more pronounced opinion about that, obviously), and, this is easily overlooked because they are so immensely popular composers today, also much more controversial and much less compromising.

Like the 'atonal v tonal' debate, I think the 'innovative v non-innovative' debate is somewhat misleading. I'd say that VW is, in his own terms and in his own context, every bit as innovative and uncompromising as Mahler and Strauss. Certainly there was no-one like him before; it's a quiet revolution that he initiated but a real one. His innovations show themselves in less obvious ways than those which go into the grand Hegelian narrative of classical music - no enormous contributions to the art of orchestration, no increase in density or complexity of rhythm or harmony. They are subtle, but they are very powerful.

Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 01:09:49 PM
In fact, when I listen to this piece (VW's 6th) what kind of puts me off is a sense of complacency that the music has for me, not self-confidence with itself after having gone through a long process of refinement and self-criticism, but simply lack of critical review. It sounds to me as if he simply put everything in that he came up with and didn't even bother much to look into how some of the material (like the tatata in the second movement) could have been developed or employed more effectively.

I've got the highest respect for your listening skills which far surpass mine in most ways - but I can't see how that rapped-out rhythm could be used more effectively than it is. It doesn't need to be developed or extended, beyond the increase in dynamic intensity that we find - its insistence and threatening banality seem to me to be the whole point, and VW has found a wonderful musical image here.

lukeottevanger

#645
Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 01:22:06 PM
I think it's very obvious that he knew the Sinfonietta, if you listen carefully to the first movement (e.g. about 1'30 into it, but also in other places). It's also obvious that he knew Bartók well (see the epilogue of the 6th symphony). And that's basically OK, all composers work from what has been before them, process it and make the material their own and (hopefully) original musical language. In this piece though I simply had the déjà-vu (or rather déjà-ecouté) way too much for comfort. Rather like with the other well known Williams.

It is very possible that he heard the Sinfonietta (though not much else), but I can't for the life of me hear a trace of it in the 6th, nor anywhere else in VW. (In fact, there are very few composers in which I can hear the influence of Janacek). At about 1'30 into my recording is a passage which reminds me of Holst, specifically The Planets - and there is a piece which VW certainly did know inside and out (including writing analyses of it). But this only sprang into my mind because I was intently listening to see if I could trace-the-influence at this point. Just listening to the music on its own merits, not trying to spot the source, all I've ever heard is pure VW!

That's not to say that VW didn't draw from elsewhere - Elgar and Parry, the English Renaissance school, Holst, Ravel at times - but that by his maturity he had developed one of the most personal, individual voices in music, one which other, later composers took a great deal from.


J.Z. Herrenberg

When RVW's Fourth Symphony was played in Amsterdam in the 1980s, the reviewer of a local newspaper was amazed that a theme from the first movement seemed to presage Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra by a decade...

It's tempting to try to 'place' an unknown (to you) composer by comparing him to other, sometimes more internationally famous, ones. But, as Luke says, Vaughan Williams is utterly individual, once you know him. Of course he has been influenced (what artist hasn't?), but his processes and procedures are his own, and the 'virgin' listener must try to judge those on their own merits.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

M forever

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 30, 2008, 01:38:21 PM
His innovations show themselves in less obvious ways than those which go into the grand Hegelian narrative of classical music - no enormous contributions to the art of orchestration, no increase in density or complexity of rhythm or harmony. They are subtle, but they are very powerful.

Please explain further.

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 30, 2008, 01:38:21 PM
I've got the highest respect for your listening skills which far surpass mine in most ways - but I can't see how that rapped-out rhythm could be used more effectively than it is. It doesn't need to be developed or extended, beyond the increase in dynamic intensity that we find - its insistence and threatening banality seem to me to be the whole point, and VW has found a wonderful musical image here.

I will get back to that later after I have listened to it some more. Right now, I am listening to Boult's recording of the Tallis Fantasia (which came with the London Symphony).

M forever

Quote from: Jezetha on August 30, 2008, 02:01:15 PM
It's tempting to try to 'place' an unknown (to you) composer by comparing him to other, sometimes more internationally famous, ones. But, as Luke says, Vaughan Williams is utterly individual, once you know him. Of course he has been influenced (what artist hasn't?), but his processes and procedures are his own, and the 'virgin' listener must try to judge those on their own merits.

Please read my posts before replying to them! The dscussion makes more sense that way.

Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 01:09:49 PM
That's a surprisingly silly comparison. I usually avoid these comparisons anyway since I don't see much point in it, although it is sometimes interesting to compare how different composers work with similar material or ideas.

Although in this particular case, it is very hard to avoid that because a lot of the material is more than just "influenced".

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 30, 2008, 01:48:16 PM
It is very possible that he heard the Sinfonietta (though not much else), but I can't for the life of me hear a trace of it in the 6th, nor anywhere else in VW. (In fact, there are very few composers in which I can hear the influence of Janacek). At about 1'30 into my recording is a passage which reminds me of Holst

My timing was wrong. Listen to the violin ostinati a little earlier, beginning at around 1'00.

lukeottevanger

#649
Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 02:13:27 PM
Although in this particular case, it is very hard to avoid that because a lot of the material is more than just "influenced".

Personally, as I said, I think it extremely doubtful that the VW 6 is influenced at all in the ways you say - VW was a mature composer with a well-established language of his own by this point, a language in which he thought fluently. In any case, no other commentators who've spent a lifetime with this music seem to have noticed the influences of other composers that you found so obvious on just one listen (I've just read through a few analyses of the piece to make sure; one mentions the obvious 'grotesque stylizations of pop music' later in the music, but I don't think that's the same as saying it is influenced by American in Paris!). However, maybe VW was so influenced, it is possible. Now, though, based on that one listen, you're all of a sudden implying that VW has lifted material (with the dark phrase 'more than just "influenced" '). Why the sudden up-grade of the charge sheet? Having listened to this piece only once (or even having listened to it many times) I don't think making such definitive statements is anything more than provocative.

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 02:13:27 PM
Please read my posts before replying to them!

I never react to what I haven't read.

The idea that Vaughan Williams 'liked' Nielsen (unknown outside Denmark at the time) is the very understandable reaction of someone trying to place a new phenomenon. You know your Nielsen and you hear a similarity. Well, sometimes it's just a case of an affinity. Nothing more. This dangerous jumping to conclusions is what I criticized, perhaps less clearly, when I wrote "It's tempting to try to 'place' an unknown (to you) composer by comparing him to other, sometimes more internationally famous, ones". That's all.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

lukeottevanger

That Janacek influence you sense at 1'00 - I assume you mean it is similar to the violin figure which comes at the start of the Sinfonietta's 5th movement. The figure itself, though, as used by VW, clearly derives from the movement's opening cascade of notes, curtailed and turned into a nagging, negative ostinato such as this work is filled with. Nothing more sinister than that, though. It's such a simple figure, too - a three-note descending pattern, repeating. You find it in the same form in Mozart's G major Quartet K 387 too, for example (same notation as in Janacek - VW's notation is different from either IIRC). And, no, I don't think Janacek lifted it from Mozart either.  ;D

drogulus



    The point of comparing RVW to Mahler and Strauss was about how easy it was to understand how things fit together. Because these composers are architectural in a quite familiar way I never feel lost listening to them. It doesn't mean they are lesser composers. You could put this negatively and say that RVW didn't learn his lessons, but that would lose an essential point, that his divergence was highly successful with a discerning audience, though it's taken time for him to assume the high place he holds today.

     I probably shouldn't have made it sound like I was demeaning those composers, because I admire them greatly. But I think my point is correct. If you understand their music it's because it has a very familiar form. RVW sounds completely different in this respect.

     
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lukeottevanger

Ernie's correct about this, I think. VW's music is completely different in this respect. Formally speaking, his symphonism is not like Mahler's. But that is because he thoroughly understood what he was doing, and knew that the roots of his style implied formal structures unlike Germanic models. Which is really what all the below is about, too:

Quote from: M forever on August 30, 2008, 02:06:28 PM
Please explain further.

First, remember that I don't claim that VW made enormous advances for the general state of future music.  I'm not going to make extravagant claims that he invented x or was the first to do y, where x and y are major features of music after him - but then, not many composers did. VW's discoveries are small-scale, but profound, and influenced the generation of British composers who followed him - in fact, they made this music possible. The following is an attempt to explain something of what I mean, but, as you can see, it's wordy. The trouble with these subtle innovations is that they don't fit into easy definitions! I quickly stop saying what VW's contribution was, and then go on to expound upon the hows and whys. But then I expect you appreciate more rather than less.

IMO perhaps the most important thing VW did was to understand the aesthetic or metaphysical implications of modality, and therefore how it could be integrated into (for instance) symphonic structures. In the finest VW modality isn't decorative, or a surface harmonic feature - it becomes structural in the deepest sense. It and its implications are thoroughly understood. The book by Mellers which I mentioned has a great deal to say on this issue, which helped me to realise quite how profoundly 'right' VW's treatment of modality, diatonicism and chromaticism is - but I have no idea how conscious VW was of the sort of things Mellers postulates. Possibly a great deal; possible not at all.

Mellers links the modality of the English Renaissance (c.f. the Tallis portions of the Tallis Fantasia) and of English folk music (c.f the solo viola tune that unfolds in the centre of the Tallis Fantasia) to the world of those pre-Enlightenment, pre-Enclosure times: the lack of sharpened leading notes etc leads to a floating music, a music in which the functional, time-directed progress from Chord A to Chord B of diatonicism is on the contrary left unemphasized. Modality, being thus relatively non-directional, is not ideally suited to the teleology of the traditional symphony. Which is why, I suppose, modality in most pre-VW symphonies is decorative rather than operational at a deeper level.

Mellers views VW as a 'double man', one caught between various postions - urban+rural, Christian+agnostic etc. - and this duality is clear in the way 'timeless' modality confronts 'teleological' diatonicism, most obviously in the sweet-painful clash of the false relation. As you know, traditional harmony explains this as a clash between two forms of a note - say, C and C# - when two lines following the rules of voice-leading but moving in contrary directions happen to contradict each other. Mellers, though, takes this a step further - the pain of the false relation derives from this metaphysical clash of types: the ancient and freely-floating (rural...) and the modern and directed (urban...)

Well, you might think that's all a load of crap, and you may be right, though I think it (as Mellers writes about it, anyway) is one of the most penetrating bits of music writing I've read. And of course, as I said, VW may have thought no such thing anyway - if you don't agree, try not to tar him with the brush you want to apply to Mellers! But the point is that VW's music does operate with this kind of thing, this duality between modality and diatonicism, with all that entails, in the background. His 5th symphony - the echt-VW symphony, IMO - is a beautiful example. We had a great discussion of it starting here on an old VW thread - read on a page or two to read more about Mellers' theory. I managed to describe it a bit more lucidly back then! In any case, what I said about the 5th symphony then was the following - I didn't play up the modality issue back then particularly because I wasn't having this discussion with you!:

Quotethis is precisely where the Fifth scores so heavily - paradise isn't reached until the end; and the gorgeousness of earlier moments is never fully stable until then. The first movement has this undertow of conflict - seen right at the opening between pure D major (the horns) and the modal implications of the underlying C; the whole movement is nagged at by this modal and chromatic ambiguity, like a Blakean worm in the rose - the development section is haunted by those baleful semitonal incantations which expand into a battering figure. The movement ends with the same C/D ambiguity it started with. Classic stuff, the sonata principle used as a vehicle for a clash of tonalities but also tonal types, the whole thing suggesting VWs perpetual concern with 'paradise' and 'fallen man'. The scherzo has similar concerns, I think, almost like a kind of perverted version of the first movement, whirring along at breakneck pace with increasing metrical complexity and conflict, eventually reaching those vicious, cruel brass outbursts. It is in the ritualistic third movement that things finally take a positive turn, but this movement needs to go through a tense fire at its heart before it can reach the balm of the coda. Full-on diatonic tonality is only reached in the last movement - paradise attained! - reaching real radiance in the polyphony of the coda.

Well, now, this deep connection between the behaviour of notes and of voice-leading and the aesthetics underpinning the music is truly rare, I think. A composer who is able to understand the full implications, structural and aesthetic, of the harmony and modality he uses, whether consciously or subconsciously, has discovered something of value, and I think this is perhaps VW's main 'discovery', if you like. Certainly, as I said, it's impossible to imagine so much later British music without this discovery. Along with a host of smaller figures, Tippett, to speak of a major figure, is a true inheritor of this aspect of VW's writing.

M forever

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 30, 2008, 02:43:23 PM
Now, though, based on that one listen, you're all of a sudden implying that VW has lifted material (with the dark phrase 'more than just "influenced" '). Why the sudden up-grade of the charge sheet?

I said more than just influenced, not lifted. Please don't twist my words. There are some very extended passages which really sound a lot like other composers to me - like the first minute, that sounds totally like Nielsen (but not quite as densely musical, more all over the place). The last movement sounds too much like Bartók for comfort. If the writing was more to the point, it would strike me as less driectly "influenced", but on the whole, this sounds more like someone who is an avid collector of interesting musical material than a really original composer.

M forever

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 30, 2008, 03:20:57 PM
Well, you might think that's all a load of crap, and you may be right

I actually thik that's quite interesting, and something to think about. It will definitely be a while anyway before I form more of an actual own opinion than these first impressions I shared here.

drogulus



    I was cruising around the web looking for something about In the Fen Country, which I was listening to the other night. I had the idea that this early work (1904) represented some kind of transition. It seems that in this work RVW sticks basically to a single mode, whereas he subsequently became "multimodal". That interests me, because like everyone who studies this composer, I wonder why he sounds different. It may be because there are rules for changing keys, but no set rules for the kinds of modal changes that RVW uses. Every trip is a new one compared to the long history of tonal development. This would account for the unfinished or poorly developed impression that his music leaves, sometimes even for those who love the music. He doesn't have the history of Western music backing him up to anything like the extent of....you know. ;) My other favorite composers.  :D
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vandermolen

#657
The BBC televised the Proms Concert anniversary tribute last night. I just caught Symphony 9. It may be available on their podplayer (or whatever it's called for a week)

As for Symphony No 6, Michael Kennedy speculates that it might be a tribute to Holst. Certainly, there are echoes of Holst's Egdon Heath and Saturn and Neptune from The Planets. I've always wondered if VW heard Honegger's Liturgique Symphony, which is a stormy contemporaneous work which also ends with a hushed epilogue (although the VW is much bleaker, without a redemptive bird song at the end), Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem and the Moeran Symphony have also been cited as possible influences. In VW's own works, there are echoes of No 6 in the earlier String Quartet No 2, Job, the Piano Concerto and some of the Film Music (ie "Dead Man's Kit" from Story of a Flemish Farm.) None of this is to take away the striking originality of Symphony 6.

An interesting book on VW is "Vaughan Williams in Perspective" (ed. Lewis Foreman) and there is a good chapter called "Vaughan Williams as a writer on Music" in a book called "Romanticism and Melody" by George Colerick, a book which I'd strongly recommend (it's in paperback). The Collected Letters of VW have just been published, but it's an (£90) expensive hardback. I got it with a big reduction through the VW Society, so, if anyone wants me to look anything up in it I will be happy to do so.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: vandermolen on August 30, 2008, 11:05:02 PM
The BBC televised the Proms Concert anniversary tribute last night. I just caught Symphony 9. It may be available on their podplayer (or whatever it's called for a week)

But only for UK residents.  :'(
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

vandermolen

Quote from: Jezetha on August 30, 2008, 11:12:01 PM
But only for UK residents.  :'(

Yes, sorry about that Johan, but I did a DVD copy of Symphony No 9. If you want a copy let me know.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).