There are, it seems to this viewer, as many ways of making musical preparation for such orchestral events as there are musicians. Violinists are fine-tuning their instruments; many of them dance their fingers rapidly across wooden neck boards, rehearsing that difficult passage in the allegro or that five-measure solo transition in the andante. Beneath bright stage lights, brass-blowers sit together in the back row busily manipulating key-stops on gleaming metal; in the middle of this instrumental world oboes, clarinetists and bassoonists blow into their various tubed configurations with steadily progressing precision. Over in the back corner, percussionists tap, turn and tinker on this, that or the other big drum or little sound-making something-or-other. Polished wooden basso fiddle bodies shine under the lights; soldierly stand-up stringists stand beside them thumping and thinking very hard about that bottom line in the booming rondo or overture that is yet to come. The flutists' silvery cylinders glint with theatrical brilliance as their masters breathe virtuosity into them. A lovely harpist plucks perfectly strung-up sounds.
Observed all at thece same time, the assembling orchestra appears to be a cacophony of disparate confusion. But as the moment of musical inception draws near, a subtle decreasing of the noise begins to take hold; the senseless soundings wane. A violinist stands, setting his bow to the instrument; then from somewhere inside the collection of sound-contraptions, a solitary musical oboe tone rises above it all, commanding the vacant air with a single, sustained A note. Immediately, as if they were waiting for some specific sound leadership, all the other members respond with their uniquely-voiced A-notes. As the volume of their first unison builds, harmonic thirds, fifths and octaves high and low emerge through the thick air of audience anticipation.
For only a brief moment this preparatory approach to harmony is heard. Then silence.
From behind the side-curtain, the bringer of Symphony walks into the midst of what had been quasi-musical confusion.
He is smiling. So are most of the audience. The thousand-or-so seated congregants express, with applause, their approval of what is about to happen, implying also with their enthused ovation polite appreciation of what has happened in this large hall many times before.
A symphony. Tonight. March, 2016.
A moment later, in the midst of breathless silence, the Conductor raises his arms, lifting the baton high. Then abruptly he lowers them. And the chaos of sounds that had dominated the stage only a few minutes before has been instantaneously transformed into music, coordinated and arranged in order to express thoughts or feelings about the world.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the music composed for such an event as this was not the same as it is today. Mozart's skill, for instance, plucked melodies out of thin genius-air and worked them into intricately woven musical masterpieces that beat through the air with perfect precision, like a clock on a Vienna tower.
In the 1700's Mozart wrote music for an emperor. Emperors and empires imposed a certain kind of order on the world. Mozart's music expressed that order in an exquisite way. His music was precision and perfection manifested in orchestral form.
A few decades later, Beethoven came along and rearranged all that preposterous musical order, catapulting thunderous innovations into it. Orchestral music, having found intricate construction in the hands of Bach, Vivaldi, Handel and others, had found its fullest precision under Mozart's imaginative mastery.
But when the European world was shaken to its roots by the American revolution, French revolution, Napoleonic bluster and God-only-knows what other political and military juggernauts that were rolling like thunder across the civilized world at that time, a new kind of music was called for. A music that expressed not order, but disruption and passion.
And so there was Beethoven. The first eight explosive notes of his 5th symphony blew a hole in the old order and proclaimed a jousting field of new ideas, new forms of government, and new music. It was a revolutionary age. Even Mozart could get lost in the cataclysm.
Great Music captures the spirit of the times in which it is composed; it captures that spirit and interprets it as audible, lyrical art.
Last night, we were in Charlotte listening to the Charlotte Symphony perform Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3 in A minor. This interesting piece of music was, to my ear, a musical experiment. While a few of Rachmaninoff's piano concertos are widely acknowledged as masterful expressions of his musical romanticism, this third symphony communicates a timely, profound disturbance, more-so, I think, than compositional perfection. Sergei Rachmaninoff the early-20th century Russian composed in it 1936.
I call it an experiment because it seems to be a series of dynamic, instrumentally dissonant thrusts; they mount up in rhythmically disparate crescendos, but never fully resolve in a way that I can thematically identify. In my ear, it is a tensioned symphony in search of a theme. In search of, perhaps, a melody.
So I was trying to explain to my wife as we left why there's no way Rachmaninoff could have absolved his musical angst in 1936 by resolving it inappropriately with a catchy melody.
He was living, for crying out loud, in Stalinist Russia; and not only that, half a continent away Hitler's Third Reich was assembling, under the radar of the Versailles treaty, a massive wehrmacht war machine. In a few years the whole damn world, or half of it anyway, would erupt up in full-blown war. The only order that was emerging in 1936 was the construction of destructive war machines.
It was no time to celebrate an inharmonious world with pleasantries such as harmony and melody.
Here's a YouTube of the Russian Novosibirsk Philharmonic performing the piece:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h44ZGVe4zCQ
Perhaps my cynical assessment of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3 is shaded by my own artful projections. A few years ago, I wrote and published a novel, Smoke, which is all about the year 1937. That writing project was also an experiment, albeit a literary one, in telling the story about a young American who might have sojourned through Europe during that same time of imminent disaster foreshadowing World War II.
Smoke
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