BEETHOVEN & BLUE JEANS – PRODIGY POWER



Philip Glass
b. 1937

Philip Glass
From the Opera Akhnaten: Funeral of Amenhotep III

Philip Glass is probably the most frequently performed living classical composer. His innovative – and once controversial – style has even produced crossover success on the pop charts. Glass composes in two different media: for his Philip Glass Ensemble, made up of electronic and electronically amplified instruments, and the Mabou Mines Theater Company; and for conventional classical instruments and genres, including to date nearly a dozen operas, over twenty film scores, eight symphonies, five string quartets and concertos for various instruments and instrument combinations. He has produced film scores, ballets and music for TV and theater. Glass’s unique approach to film can be seen in his, “Musical Mirrors” for the Glass Ensemble, that integrates electronic instruments and live singers into the classic films of Jean Cocteau, such as Beauty and the Beast (1946).

Glass was born in Baltimore, beginning violin and flute lessons before age ten and composing at age twelve. After his second year in high school he was accepted for early admission at the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy, continuing his music studies in his off hours. After graduation at 19 he entered Juilliard, and in the mid-1960s studied in Paris for two years with Nadia Boulanger – one of the most influential mentors to a slew of twentieth-century composers. While in France, Glass earned money transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian classical music into Western notation. Shankar’s music so affected him that he traveled and studied in India, applying some of the musical ideas and techniques of the Indian raga to his own music. Glass also was influenced by the maqâm, the North African system of modal improvisation, which he had learned during a visit to Morocco. From these two traditions, he developed a deep appreciation the hypnotic effects of repetition and how to obtain a maximum effect with a minimum of means.

Glass composed the opera Akhnaten in 1983. It is the third in a trilogy of operas about men who changed the world in which they lived through the power of their ideas. The others were Einstein on the Beach (Science) and Satyagraha, about Gandhi (Politics). Akhnaten's subject is religion. The Pharaoh Akhnaten was the first monotheist in recorded story, and his substitution of a one-god religion for the multi-god worship in use when he came to power was responsible for his violent overthrow. The opera describes the rise, reign, and fall of Akhnaten in a series of tableaus.

The Funeral is from Act I, Scene 1, the funerary procession of Akhnaten’s father, the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. It was the first music from the opera heard by the public, as a dance choreographed in 1983 by Jerome Robbins, a year before the opera was seen. It was originally scored for synthesizer, percussion and soprano.

While many people associate Minimalism with continual repetition, its novelty is in the audible dialectic between stasis and change. The repeated rhythmic and melodic cells, or patterns, combine and recombine gradually with an effect not unlike an artist’s adding drops of a new color to an existing one to arrive at something essentially different from both in hue, saturation and mood. The organic and hypnotic affect of Minimalism caught the imagination of both classical and popular musicians and their audiences. Repetitive tape loops commonly used by Minimalist composers are the basic underpinnings of much rock music and virtually all hip-hop. These same features – both electronic and live – were among the musical styles that steered the course of twentieth-century “classical music” away from the grip of Serialism.

In the following example, you can clearly hear how changes occur one element at a time: first the change in rhythm; then addition of a four-note motive (which persists throughout the entire piece); then breaking up of the motive into smaller note values.



Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15

The Piano Concerto No. 1 is among the works the young Beethoven composed after he had moved in 1792 from his native Bonn to Vienna. Like Mozart when he left Salzburg, also for Vienna, Beethoven had outgrown the musical establishment of his patron in Bonn, the elector Maximilian Franz. He came to the Imperial capital to study composition with Franz Joseph Haydn. At the end of 1793 Haydn wrote to the elector on his student’s behalf for an advance in salary, enclosing five compositions “of my dear pupil Beethoven,” who he predicted would “in time fill the position of one of Europe’s greatest composers.” The parsimonious elector was unimpressed.

Nevertheless, Beethoven quickly acquired a glowing reputation as both a pianist and composer. He had come already provided with important aristocratic connections that greased the way into the highest social circles, where noblemen were in competition with each other for the best in-house musical establishment. The period between 1792 and 1795 was probably the happiest in the composer’s life. Signs of his deafness had not yet appeared, and his passionate nature – even affability – signaled a young lion, rather than the irascible, slovenly and sickly misanthrope of his middle and later years.

Originally composed in 1795, revised in 1798 and again before publication in 1800, this concerto is actually not the first Beethoven wrote, although it was the first to be published. What is known today as No. 2 preceded it by a year. A much earlier concerto in E flat Major, WoO 4, was composed in 1784 when Beethoven was 14 years old but was not published in its entirety until 1890.

Beethoven himself was the pianist at the premiere of the original version of this Concerto in Vienna in 1795, but the manuscript was barely finished before the concert. His close friend, the physician Franz Wegeler, described the scene: “Beethoven did not write the rondo... till the afternoon of the day before the concert...Four copyists sat in the room outside, and he gave them the pages one by one as they were finished.”

By Beethoven’s own admission, the First Concerto still reflects the styles of Mozart and Haydn much more than his own. It begins with a lengthy and formal orchestral opening, ceremonial in style, after which the soloist makes his entry in a classic double exposition.

The piano, however, enters with a new theme that harmonizes with the main theme instead of eactly repeating it.

The second theme is presented differently in the first and second expositions.

The interplay between the two is strongly reminiscent of the Mozart concerti, in which the orchestra provides quiet background accompaniment for the soloist when both play together. This lighter accompaniment was, of course, acoustically necessary since the pianos of the time lacked the power of those even in the first part of the nineteenth century.

The slow movement, again, harks back to the Mozart model. Even the themes are Mozartean.

If in the first movement soloist and orchestra are partners, in the second it is the piano that dominates and develops and embellishes the themes, often aided by the clarinet, its special orchestral partner throughout this movement, in a chamber music-like interplay.

The rhythmic and sparkling rondo finale is a true orchestral romp, in which the soloist and orchestra try to outdo one another. Beethoven handles the rondo in a regular manner as a refrain between contrasting episodes of new thematic material.

A note about the cadenza to the first movement: Only incomplete fragments remain of the cadenza that Beethoven used at the premiere. By 1809, the composer’s hearing loss prevented him from performing in public, and he wrote three new cadenzas of differing lengths and difficulty for pianists of varying abilities.

In the years 1798 to 1809, the piano underwent a rapid development, not in small part as a result of Beethoven’s demands and specifications. While the concerto was written for a piano of five octaves, like Mozart’s, by the time Beethoven composed the cadenzas in 1809, he was writing for a piano of 5 1/2 octaves and commensurate power and sound to match. Consequently, a piano corresponding to Beethoven’s 1798 instrument for which the concerto was written, would not be able to play the 1809 cadenzas he wrote for it.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 in c Minor, Op. 67

The four most clichéd notes in classical music were once the most revolutionary. For the first time a rhythm, rather than a melody, became the main subject of a sonata form movement – and not just a first theme to be stated and picked up again for a while in development and recapitulation. Beethoven wove the rhythm as an organic whole into the entire fabric of the first movement, first as a repeated demand, then expanded into a genuine melodic theme, as a throbbing accompaniment in bass and timpani for the second theme, all the way to the final cadence.

A symphonic structure this original did not come easily, especially to a composer who lacked the ever-ready genius of a Mozart, Bach or Haydn to produce on demand. A collection of the composer's sketchbooks bear witness to the lengthy and often painful gestation of some of his greatest music. The Fifth Symphony took four years to complete between 1804 and 1808. But Beethoven had to eat too, and during those four years he also produced the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three String Quartets Op.59, the Mass in C and the Violin Concerto.

Although Beethoven had already been at work on what was to become the Fifth Symphony, he composed the Fourth in fairly short order in 1806 when Count Franz von Oppersdorff commissioned him to write a symphony. Oppersdorff eventually paid the 500 florins agreed upon for the work and in 1807 commissioned another one with a down payment of 200 florins. Beethoven notified Oppersdorff in March 1808 that the Symphony was ready and that he should send the remaining 300 florins. But the Count sent only another installment of 150 florins and by November Beethoven, in one of his less than ethical moves, apparently felt justified in selling the score to the publisher Gottfried Härtel. Upon finally paying in full, Oppersdorff received a copy.

The Symphony No. 5 was premiered at one of those monster concerts common in the nineteenth century that included premieres of the Sixth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the aria "Ah! Perfido, the Choral Fantasy and several movements of the Mass in C. One can only imagine the bewilderment of the audience on their first encounter in a single evening with the "Pastoral" and the Fifth.

Because the Fifth Symphony is so familiar it is difficult to think of it as innovative, but it was not only the integration four-note rhythmic motif into the first movement that was new. It is the fact that this little rhythm becomes the motto that unifies the entire symphony.

In the first movement, the principal theme hammers away at the rhythm in almost every measure. Then, the second theme, which should provide a significant contrast, starts off with the motto in the solo horn, only afterwards becoming somewhat more gentle and legato – although that, too begins to ramp up the emotional tension as it continues.

The second movement, marked Andante con moto, involves its own kind of innovation. It is made up of two short juxtaposed, contrasting themes, the first in dotted rhythm,

the second a slow almost military theme in the brass. Beethoven produces from the two themes a double set of variations. And it should be noted that the second theme contains within it in augmentation the germinal four-note rhythm of the first movement.

After what has been called a "ghostly" opening of the scherzo, Beethoven takes up the motto again prominently in the horns, and it is this segment of the third movement that he chooses to repeat in the finale.

Symphony No. 5 has frequently been referred to as a struggle from darkness to light, but it is a commonplace that has palpable grounding in truth. Not only does the symphony begin in c minor and end in C major, but there is also the magnificent transition between the third and fourth movements, a kind of breaking through of sunlight clouds with violins stammering over throbbing timpani towards a cadence.

The eruption through to the triumphant finale paved the way for the symphonic writing of the future, including Beethoven's own Ninth.