Block 3 audio transcript Hello and welcome to Block 3 of A342, Central questions in the study of music. I m Robert Samuels and with me today are Helen Coffey Hello. and Ben Winters. Hello. And all three of us are authors for this last block of the module. Now Block 3 is called The History of Music, and in the block we re going to be exploring genres, works and styles of western art music from round about the eighteenth century, right up to the present day. Now, one of the best ways of starting to think your way into how music has changed over time during history, and indeed one of the best ways of thinking about one of those key questions thatweaskinthismodule, How does music mean?, is to look at something which music has tried to portray many times and in different ways, over that historical period. So, today we re going to be talking about musical storms and tempests. Now these have been depicted in music many times, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in fact earlier, right up to music being written today. But we start in this block with the eighteenth century, and so I m going to ask Helen, can you tell us a bit about how eighteenth-century musical storms get depicted? Well, one of the most familiar musical representations of a storm from the eighteenth century is of course the final movement of the violin concerto Summer, andthat s one of the four concertos in Vivaldi s The Four Seasons. The Four Seasons arefouroftwelveviolin concertos in Vivaldi s Opus8,whichwasfirst published in 1725. But of course The Four Seasons are not the only instrumental works by Vivaldi where he paints a picture in sound. He gave many of his concertos descriptive titles, and many other composers in the eighteenth century wrote music on themes such as the seasons, or on storms. In Vivaldi s first edition of The Four Seasons he included four sonnets, one for each season, which outline the events of each concerto. 1
The sonnet for Summer describes the thunder, the lightning and the hailstones of the storm that destroy the crops in the fields, and this is clearly conveyed through Vivaldi s music in its minor key, the rapid notes in the principal violin, as well as the frequent use of the full orchestra throughout the movement. Yet despite the clear musical representation of a storm here, like all of the concertos in The Four Seasons, Summer s whole narrative still fits in the typical forms of the early eighteenth century. The concerto has three contrasting movements fast, slow, fast and the first movement makes clear use of ritornello form, where the full orchestra plays a refrain in contrast with virtuosic solo passages. So that s musical storms in the eighteenth century. Robert, what happens in the nineteenth century? Well in the nineteenth century storms get even more popular as musical subjects. Now, there are quite a few reasons for that and I think one of them is just a simple love of drama and excitement, and after all, storms actually become very popular in opera in particular. Verdi s Otello, for instance, begins with a storm. But there s something more profound at work in this as well. It s not just this love of excitement. Artworks in the nineteenth century are often about how the individual human subject relates to other people and to the world about them. It comes out of the eighteenth-century belief that music and other arts too can portray feelings. But one difference here is that, whereas in the eighteenth century by and large the human is observing the world around and they re able to understand it, maybe even to control it, in the nineteenth century the natural world becomes something vast, overwhelming, sometimes terrifying. The feeling of being overwhelmed by something which is vaster and bigger than you are is called, by the people who write about the history of music in the time, the sublime. That s the feeling that you are very small, the world is exceedingly vast. Now I suppose that in music one of the best ways of portraying sublime through music is exactly through storms and tempests. You get storms in visual art as well and paintings and so on. 2
You also get many mighty mountains and vast rolling oceans, in visual art. But there again, mountains are much harder to depict in music than storms are, and I suppose that s one reason why musical storms are so popular. Now one real-life storm that allegedly found its way into a musical work happened in 1838 in Majorca. Chopin was living there at the time with George Sand, the French female writer, and George Sand and her son were caught in a tremendous rainstorm one day. And the way that Sand tells the story, or at least the way she wrote it down some years later, was that when she got back to the villa where they were living, Chopin had been convinced that she and the boy must both have died in the storm and the result was one of his piano preludes. It s rather an odd story, actually, given that George Sand also says that Chopin was dreaming of himself being dead whilst they were out, and that he also claimed that he couldn t hear the rain on the roof anyway, and hadn t noticed the storm. But anyway, the idea that one of those piano preludes arose out of these experiences really caught on. Nobody is actually quite sure exactly which prelude was meant. Their friend Liszt thought it was one in B minor, but most people today prefer the one that s in D flat major. That s certainly got a persistent rhythm in the outer sections, and a very stormy and troubled middle section. Anyway, the point is that we re not really talking about how music actually depicts what a storm really sounds like, it s more that music is depicting how you might feel if you were caught in one, especially in this case if you were caught in the middle of an overwhelming storm that makes you fear for your very life. 3
Well I said that storms and mountains and oceans are all popular ways of depicting the sublime in the nineteenth century, and I suppose the most famous musical storm of all in the period actually gets a mountain as well, because it happens on top of a mountain, right at the beginning of Act 3 of Wagner s opera The Valkyrie. The music in question is the famous Ride of The Valkyries. This is the second opera in his four-opera cycle, the Ring cycle. Now the Valkyries in question are immortal female beings who come on horseback to take the souls of the dead heroes back to Valhalla, after they had been slain in battle. The music s a fantastic storm of course. That marvellous and famous theme on the brass instruments, surrounded by swirling trills, tremolos on the strings, and tremolos and swirls on the woodwind as well. It works particularly well when it s actuallydoneonstagewithflying horses, I have to say. And as usual with nineteenth-century musical storms, the music s doing more than just trying to sound like a storm. The storm stands for vast forces. They dwarf the human characters in the opera. So the sublime merges into the world of gods, heroes and fate, which Wagner is depicting across all four of his operas. Now in fact Wagner actually opens the first act of the very same opera with another storm, because it s not after all about the weather, it s about the whole history of mankind. Well, storms were popular in the nineteenth century. They stay popular right through the twentieth century, and right up to the present day. So Ben, can you tell us a bit more about how twentieth-century music takes on this wonderful topic? Yes, well you can certainly hear an example of a twentieth-century storm sequence in Sibelius s incidental music for Shakespeare s playthe Tempest. 4
This was written in 1925 and first performed for a production in Copenhagen in 1926. But Sibelius also prepared a couple of orchestral suites which you can often hear performed in the concert hall. In the play version, the storm is the very first music we hear and it was designed to replace the opening scene s dialogue, which describes the storm Prospero conjures to shipwreck his brother, Antonio. It was so evocative that William Walton later used it as the basis for a storm scene in his music to the film Stolen Life. You can certainly hear in Sibelius s storm the rising and falling waves, and the sound of the wind. In other words, it s very descriptive. But there s also something in some of the woodwind and brass lines expressing that beautiful but terrifying power of nature familiar from the nineteenth century, the sublime. It s particularly interesting as a storm though, because Sibelius seems to use many of the harmonic and temporal experiments of the twentieth century to create the effect. The harmonic language isbasedonthetwoversionsofthewhole-tone scale, a scale that was heard in some Russian music of the nineteenth century, but became more widely used in the twentieth, along with other types of unusual scale, of course. It means Sibelius ends up using all twelve chromatic pitches in his music. In addition to that though, like many examples of Sibelius s orchestral music, the storm music from The Tempest seems to play with our experience of time, as is also the case with parts of Messiaen s Quartet for the End of Time, which dates from some twenty years later. The music appears to be dynamic on the surface, it spirals and swirls in an apparently organic fashion, and yet the underlying harmony doesn t really seem to go anywhere at all. It all sounds rather static, rather as if we re caught up in the middle of the storm itself. Thanks Ben and thanks Helen, because that s given us a real insight into this topic which has come up again and again and, well, all of us really hope you enjoy studying Block 3. We hope that this introduction has given you a way in to the history of music. Goodbye. 5