An Exemplary Marriage

While we've (mostly) been an admirer of John Adams as a composer for some time now, it's only recently we've become familiar with and come to admire him as a writer as well, courtesy of his fairly new blog, Hell Mouth.

In several previous S&F posts, we've made clear our antagonism toward those who insist on writing about music in a relentlessly technical manner in critical pieces intended for general consumption, not only because it smacks of grandstanding, but because it ill-serves an understanding of the music except for a specialist audience. As we've written previously (here):

Notwithstanding my criticism, even excoriation, of "hardcore technical" analysis in such critical writing ... and my praise for "impressionistic" analysis ..., I agree there's room for both methods, and that a marriage of the two is desirable when handled in such a way as to serve a better understanding of the music under discussion rather than as things in themselves. It's just as egregious an error to wax over-the-top poetic in "impressionistic" analysis as it is to discourse in academic detail and at academic length in "hardcore technical" analysis of a piece of music, or to take the position, as did one academic musicologist, that the only way to analyze a piece of music is by means of "the dispassionate, the unbiased, the scientific, the musicological way."

And what exactly do I mean when I say that "a marriage of the two is desirable when handled in such a way as to serve a better understanding of the music under discussion"? I mean that only when the "hardcore technical" is used to provide clarifying or illuminating concrete example of an "impressionistic" point made in general critical writing on music (as opposed to, say, critical writing for use in music theory courses or other specialist venues) is it being used as it ought to be used, and that its use in any other capacity in such critical writing is decidedly out of place, and hugely counterproductive.

Given our clear antagonism toward technical critical writing about music for non-specialist audiences, why, then, did we find this by Mr. Adams on Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony so utterly engaging? Because it's an exemplary instance of that marriage we spoke of above.

Until I got serious and really learned the piece last year, I could at best say I “recognized” Sibelius Six but never had a handle on it. It is among the most elusive pieces ever written. Much is made of its Dorian modality, and some writers correctly point out the dubious habit of saying the work is “in D minor”, when at best we ought to say, as Lou Harrison did of one of his symphonies, that it is “on D” rather than “in D”.

But what no one I know has ever mentioned is how critical another chord is in this symphony — the half-diminished seventh (i.e. your fabled “Tristan chord”). It’s the composer’s special way of integrating the melancholy, resigned purity of the Dorian mode with the more emotionally dangerous and mercurial half-diminished chord that gives all late works of Sibelius their eerie moodiness. That is the case with the Seventh Symphony....

Arvo Pärt makes use of similar melancholy-saturated minor modes, but it’s Sibelius’s peculiar genius of mixing his with the more chromatically ambiguous diminished triads that makes his music both more evocative and less expressively monochrome.

The Sixth Symphony opens with a simple, sustained counterpoint for strings alone. The first notes are played by the second violins in divisi, marked mezzo forte. That dynamic itself presages the many interpretive problems lying ahead. It would be easier if it were pianissimo or forte — no problem there. But MEZZO forte is so…blegh! What does he mean? And so much of the following music lies in that “mezzo” zone, including the tempi. The first movement is “Allegro molto moderato,” (or “lively but only VERY moderately so). Many of the markings in this symphony are “poco,” or “moderato,” or “mezzo” this or “mezzo” that. The feeling is not unlike visiting a home where everyone talks in a grave, hushed whisper.

It's been a half-century since we left conservatory where we "studied" harmony (the scare quotes because we mostly spent our classroom time there playing cut-throat Monopoly at the local cafeteria which was our hangout), and what we learned has grown severely arthritic due a half-century of disuse, but, still, we understood fully the sense of what Mr. Adams wrote, and, further, imagine it would be understood by any regular concertgoer or devoted classical music listener whether he'd studied music formally or not.

But perhaps we imagine too much. RTWT here, and see what you think.