Vaughan Williams's Veranda

[Sean]

drogulus

About Haitinks famous Sinfonia recording: It a very good interpretation, but it's too rushed in parts of the first and last movements. In both cases the main theme is treated just a little bit lightly, and some of the grandeur and foreboding, if I may play along here, is understated in comparison to Boult I and II. I would not stretch these themes out to the extent Previn does, though. It's not a major point IMO, since the import of the music comes through. Perhaps here is a sign of the "unidiomatic".

Yes that's how I see Haitink generally, and you've only got to hear the man speak to confirm that his personality is all bevelled edges, not ruthlessness; he can find a very strong sense of line though.

M

But then, according to you, most Englishmen are philosophically and sexually repressed and totally rotten anyway, so what do you care?

Well no I don't much care about England, and I don't even live there anymore, I'm well into a two year contract in S.Korea. But its artists can find a certain distanced luminosity, as in VW or Bax etc, peering through the English fogs over the land.

English culture though is indeed the antithesis of art, being strongly empirical and pragmatic, incredulous toward the theoretical, the metaphysical, the aesthetic etc. Maybe you've heard that ludicrous trash from the BBCSO at the Proms London concerts lately, for instance, just playing to the gallery and appealing to infantile excitably bouncy rhythms and parochial, cluelessly showy notions of what music is.

[Sean]

drogulus by the way I remember on my RCA LP, I think it was, there was a reciter for the short poetic introductions to the five movements.

Previn really gets into the soul of those wide leaps and icy otherworldliness.

[Christo]

That makes a serial monologue in five parts. Add to that the likely probability that Scarpia is one and the same person, and we're confronted here with one huge monologue in two persons and too many parts.

Byzantine theologians actually coined a term for it (that is quoted below by Auden in its Anglicised form): perichoresis.  0:)

[Dundonnell]

Mention of the Byzantines reminds me of the Hesychasts-those Greek monks who believed that by a prolonged period of ascetic contemplation(which appeared to involve a very extended period of navel-gazing!) they would eventually be able to detach themselves from all other reality and be able to see the light. Not any old light either-but the divine and uncreated light of God.

[Sergeant Rock]

I just listened to the Antarctica Symphony today again and I swear I can't remember hearing the wind machine. Is it played with the chorus?

Greg, if you're listening to Previn, you'll hear it prominently for the first time in the first movement at 4:45.

Sarge

[Christo]

Mention of the Byzantines reminds me of the Hesychasts-those Greek monks who believed that by a prolonged period of ascetic contemplation(which appeared to involve a very extended period of navel-gazing!) they would eventually be able to detach themselves from all other reality and be able to see the light. Not any old light either-but the divine and uncreated light of God.

Interesting.  And reminiscent of one of the constant elements in the ascetic variant of mysticism of all times and many traditions/religions. Indeed, not so common in the Western tradition (church), but one that connects the Greeks with the Orient and as far as Buddhism at least. (When entering the Greek world, I always immediately start to become aware of these more oriental and timeless religious elements, as in the Islamic world and farther on (but I myself never travelled further East than the Middle-East).

Back to RVW: his Flos Campi, though primarily about erotic love, reaches beyond too and ends in a more mystic vein with hints of a spiritual `fulfillment', imo.

[lukeottevanger]

In Paul Hillier's book on Arvo Part there is an extensive discussion on Hesychasm and Part-as-Hesychast. Just FWIW

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

the 9th Symphony 

Listened to it today. It has some haunting and arresting and memorable moments, for sure. But overall, I just cannot "get" this piece.

I don't have similar problems with any of the other symphonies - they may be good or great or just OK, but I never feel lost while listening to them. Nor do I ask myself "what is he [VW] trying to do here?" Only with the 9th is this an issue.

So to you Vee Dubya fans - what do you think this symphony is "about"? What is ol' "Rafe" trying to say here? And does he put forth his particular vision successfully, or does he fail (thereby explaining why this sym. causes me to scratch my head)? How do you evaluate this strange melancholy piece?

[lukeottevanger]

No time to answer your question as it deserves but it should be said - your reaction to the piece chimes with that of many others, and in particular the first critics to hear the piece, who were in general rather underwhelmed and disapointed. But subsequent listenings turned things around - from being seen as a symphony whose main interest was that it was one of those legendary ninths which directly preceded the composer's death, it began to be seen as one of his most profound and searching utterances.

Put more briefly, if any work was required to go alongside the dictionary definition of 'grower', it's this one. It's a work which almost always gives up its secrets slowly, but surely. Keep on at it!

[Mark G. Simon]

They say modern music should be challenging. Well here it is, RVW's 9th, a challenging work if there ever was one.

[drogulus]

     

Put more briefly, if any work was required to go alongside the dictionary definition of 'grower', it's this one. It's a work which almost always gives up its secrets slowly, but surely. Keep on at it!

    This was my reaction when I first heard the 9th. At the time I knew the 4th through the 8th symphonies fairly well, and I had some trouble at first, but over time I began to hear some connections with these earlier works, the strongest being with the 6th. I've grown to like it, but it's still an enigmatic piece, and it seems it was intended to be.

[M forever]

That makes a serial monologue in five parts.

That's because each reply is to a different person. If you want true serial monologues which cover entire pages, look for the latest posts of your compatriot Harry.

That makes a serial monologue in five parts. Add to that the likely probability that Scarpia is one and the same person, and we're confronted here with one huge monologue in two persons and too many parts.

Byzantine theologians actually coined a term for it (that is quoted below by Auden in its Anglicised form): perichoresis.  0:)

Cool word. I had to look that up. Knowing rare words doesn't necessarily indicate intelligent understanding of them though, as your example clearly shows. How likely is it that I and Scarpia are the same person when I say that he lost the argument with Mr O...
You aren't too bright, are you?

[M forever]

Question: does the wind machine also occur in the film music to "Scott of the Antarctic"? I mean, an actual wind machine in the music track, not "wind effects" in the movie which I am sure there are many. Or is it used only in the symphony?

[eyeresist]

God, I tried to move on but couldn't let this one go...

the idea that he of all composers would have been deaf to the symbolism of the wind blowing through the emptiness ditto.

The wind machine evokes the wind, but when you assert that the wind machine is symbolic of something, or that it definitively contains a specific meaning, you are presuming to speak for the composer, which you don't have the right to do. Absent the composer's explanation, all you can do is report your interpretation, which in this case contains a hefty amount of interpolation.

And you still haven't addressed the issue of redundancy. There is a wind machine, and there is a chorus imitating the wind? Why both? There is no convincing answer; the composer made a mistake.

[Sean]

I've just listened to the first movement of the Proms performance of #7 and the BBCSO are making their usual rough-edged indulgent mess of things, blurring beautiful textures, selling the music and just turning everything into a slab of Elgar blazing away foolishly at the slightest provocation, showing little sense of any inherent merit or spirit in the work. Martin Brabbins has never shown much ability as a conductor and I'm going to have to turn it off right now.

[M forever]

I am not sure the chorus is imitating the wind. Maybe it is, but in a more symbolic way than just imitating the sound of the wind. I listened to this piece three times in the meantime, (2x Boult, 1x Handley), and I have to say I find it more appealing (at least immediately appealing) than the other symphonies I heard so far. It is perhaps a more "graphic" or "evocative" piece, but I also find the way motifs and phrase developments are handled more convincing coherent. I also find the music very athmospheric.

I haven't read any analyses or descriptions of the music, so I don't know how much of it is directly from the film, if the musical elements occur in a "chronological" order etc. My impression is that it is not really a symphonic retelling of the story of Scott and his one-way trip to the end of the world, but more a reflection on that subject in general, the encounter between man and nature on a very intense (and, ultimately, lethal) level. I think the music reflects mostly the various experiences and feelings triggered by encountering nature on a vast scale (kind of like La Mer, although there are certainly elements of tonepainting, is more a reflection of the nature of the sea as we percieve it).

In that context, I find the use of the wind machine very well judged and, in those moments, hauntingly expressive. Most of the music played by the orchestra seems to me to reflect those internal feelings stirred by the natural forces, with some direct observations of mesmerizing natural sights and events playing into it. The chorus comes from a sphere in-between man and nature, but is still closer to man's feelings triggered by than a simple depiction of nature. The female voice sounds to me like a supernatural apparition, like a spirit which appears, hailing us, as we approach the threshold to death (and it's up to one's own preferences whether one wants to see this as as an actual supernatural apparition or as a hallucination of the dying human spirit).
Then the wind machine, with it's sound completely devoid of human (or supernatural) elements sweeps away and puts out the last remaining faint light of remaining human spirit, and perfectly ends this transition from personal emotional experiences to slowly being taken over by the force of nature and being drawn into the realm of death and nothingness.

Of course, I am not saying that this passage is a tonepoem-like depiction of such an event, to me it sounds like that, but from an absolutely musical point of view, the transition between these elements, whatever one might want to see them as, is very impressive and evocative.

I am also wondering of the passage in the middle movement when the organ comes in occurs in the film music. Does it have something to do with the event of death, too? The section is marked by a stroke on the tam-tam, which in many instances in music has depicted the moment of death. With the organ passage with its markedly sacred character, tis sounds like a "death and transfiguration" passage. Not in the sense of mimicking the Strauss piece, where the transfiguration is depicted in a very different way, but in a general sense.

In this piece, I also hear a lot of influences, but in"degrees which I would call just that, influences, such as run through all music and which reflect stylistic echoes, not stylistic imitations. I hear some strong Debussy echoes, transmitted through Holst, and of course, elements of the "supernatural", "transcendent", and "mystical" as reflected in The Planets' Saturn and Neptune. But again, I hear these as processed influences, not stylistic borrowing.

My only "problem" is with the epilog which I somehow find does not do what came before full justice, and the end sounds just a little too much like Daphnis et Chloé to me, even though the "temperature" is significantly lower and the colors, approproately, bleaker.

[eyeresist]

I'm glad you've found some Vaughan Williams you like, M. Regarding the correspondence of the music with the events of the film, I've largely ignored this, as I don't want to fall into the trap of regarding this as a program work rather than a symphony. I've read that the second movement includes music originally associated with penguins and whales; the organ entry is often called the "ice fall" scene, so presumably it originally accompanied an avalanche or a fall down a crevasse. Following as it does a passage of "struggle" it does seem to represent some sort of implacable opposition, but not sure it was supposed to have a sacred connotation. I agree that the vocal soloist part seems to indicate some sort of presence, a spirit mourning the hopeless fate of man. I am glad that in your mention of the wind machine you are discussing your own reactions and not laying down the law.

[M forever]

I don't think the vocal solist "spirit" or "apparition" or whatever is mourning anybody or anything. It sounds too removed, too disembodied to me, perhaps disinterested "the fate of man", really more like a luring spitit, an icy "siren", so to speak. In any case, it leaves a strong impression as a musical element, and the way VW treats these musical elements and the transitional layering from emotive music to disembodied voices to empty nature sounds - in other words, before, we heard what the experience of nature triggered in the human psyche, and then gradually, what we hear becomes more removed from "reality", and once it is gone, all that is left is the naked, soulless reality, but without the human description of it overlaid.

[eyeresist]

(Maybe I should just clarify here that I don't simply think the wind sound should be omitted - in the places where it is used, I always think silence would be more effective.)

[M forever]

The wind is the layer and in some moments, the transition between music and silence in a musical concept where you have several layers of material from internally subjective to externally subjective to objective to silence. What on earth is so freaking difficult to understand about that?