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Music open thread: Music in D minor [1]

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Date: 2022-11-15

A failed attempt at a stretto in D minor. The parallel octaves are made worse as parallel unisons, but worse are the parallel fourths in the previous measure.

Although the novel coronavirus is still around, music is getting back to normal. String quartet concerts could continue if the musicians and the attendees would mask up, but what about woodwinds and brass?

I suppose it’s possible to play a wind instrument while wearing a mask, but that probably defeats the purpose of wearing a mask. There was a fear, maybe justified, maybe not, that low brass instruments were particularly dangerous for live concerts.

Back in 2018, in what feels like another lifetime, I wrote a Fugue in D minor for Oboe and Tuba. I got some people interested in the piece, but by the time the lockdown started, I hadn’t been able to get a performance scheduled. And then with the lockdown, I thought it would never happen.

However, surely there were musicians who play oboe and musicians who play tuba who wouldn’t give up their instruments regardless of their worries about the coronavirus, musicians who would keep practicing in private.

And with all those Zoom meetings going on, it occurred to me that I could use Zoom or a similar program for a performance of my piece. Videoconferencing solves the problem of getting an oboist and a tubist together without worrying about passing germs around, and maybe it also helps with the problem of balance between the two instruments.

There were other delays and dead ends I won’t bother you with, before the performance finally happened last month. Here are Mirian La Redonda on oboe and Franklin Monger on tuba playing my fugue. And also many thanks to recording engineer Andres Rodriguez, who helped this sound way better than it would have on an actual Zoom call.

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I acknowledge this is a difficult piece. Hearing key clicks in this recording really brought it home. Listening to a computer rendering you really have no idea, the computer can render unrealistic stuff, like a chromatically agile trombone. It’s always a thrill to hear my music played by real players, and more so when they play it as well as these two.

A long time ago, reading here on Daily Kos about how poor Rudy Giuliani still hadn’t been paid by Trump for his services (probably still hasn’t), I wrote in a comment “Concerto in C major for Tiny Violin and Orchestra.”

Is the orchestra also supposed to be tiny? I’m not sure and no one said anything about that aspect of the concept. But there was second-guessing on my choice of key. One person replied saying the concerto should be in D minor, and another one concurred, quoting Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel about how D minor is the saddest key of all.

Is it? Is D minor really the saddest key of all? Looking at Antonio Vivaldi’s “La Estravaganza,” the Concerto in G minor strikes me as the saddest, while the one in D minor does start out weepy but is overall more heroic and indomitable, inextinguishable, like Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, also in D minor (though progressing towards A major).

The Concerto in G minor would not be out of place on the soundtrack for an episode of The Good Wife. The Concerto in D minor, not so much. I would embed a video if I could find one I like. Even composers as popular as Vivaldi have lots of ignored music.

Or look at Anton Bruckner, he wrote eleven symphonies, three of them in D minor, and they’re quite different in character, though that might have to do more with when he wrote them: No. 0 in 1869, No. 3 mostly in the early 1870s, and No. 9 in the 1890s.

Bruckner was no spring chicken when he wrote his Symphony No. 0 in D minor, but he was still at the beginning of his symphonic career. Looking back on it later in life, he decided it wasn’t as good as he knew he could make it, and rather than revise it he declared it invalid, but did not destroy the score. Eventually it became known as the Zeroeth.

Here’s the Osaka Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Kitajenko playing the Scherzo of Bruckner’s Zeroeth, which is in D minor with a Trio in G major.

And here’s a link to a performance of the whole symphony by Musica Nova Arizona conducted by Warren Cohen. This is the Arizona premiere of this Bruckner symphony. It lasts 41 minutes, which is short compared to Bruckner’s later symphonies, and the orchestra seems kind of small for Bruckner, but it works.

Then again, there are one or two passages that seem a little too difficult for Musica Nova Arizona, with the violins not quite together. Even so, I prefer this performance to the awfully sluggish Tintner recording with the far more polished National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.

One of the criticisms against the Zeroeth Symphony is that it has no theme, it’s just a bunch of figurations waiting for a theme to show up. “Chugga-chugga-chug, chugga-chugga-chug,” is how music critic David Hurwitz dismisses it. Even if you think that criticism holds any water, it certainly doesn’t when it comes to Bruckner’s Third Symphony.

The strings start out much like in the Zeroeth, but in the Third, the first trumpet sounds a mysterious theme that you can just tell will become very important later on. Here it is, from the manuscript (trumpet in D, so transpose up a whole tone).

Robert Simpson criticized the Third for several structural problems. But it is a favorite of Bruckner fans, and the one time Simpson quoted Bruckner, in his own Ninth Symphony, was to quote Bruckner’s Third (but not the theme shown above).

Here’s the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by guest conductor Kent Nagano. The performance runs almost an hour, but it doesn’t feel long, at least not to me.

There isn’t much sadness in this music. Sure there is a very plaintive flute solo about 20 minutes in (depending on the performance tempi), but this is followed by the whole orchestra sounding defiant. Things look bad, but we’re not giving up.

When the trumpet theme comes back at the end, transfigured to D major, it’s not really a surprise. If Tchaikovsky had had the privilege of hearing Bruckner’s Third in concert, he would have seen that shift to the major coming from a mile away.

Bruckner was greatly influenced by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Hearing that work live in concert in Bruckner’s day must have been a big event. It was also a big event for me back in 1993 when I heard it live in concert by the Detroit Symphony.

But then, one or two years later, they played it again. Then it felt like it was getting played every season. It was no longer all that special. More recently, and rather egregiously, the Detroit Medical Orchestra played it, that was for the conductor’s ego more than anything else.

Oh yeah, look at me, I’ve conducted Beethoven’s Ninth. Who cares that there’s other music the amateur musicians of that orchestra would have enjoyed more. Writing music for amateurs is difficult, and some “great” composers, including a rough contemporary of Beethoven’s, have failed at it. But Beethoven wasn’t thinking about amateurs when he wrote his Ninth.

I like Beethoven’s Ninth, but come on, he wrote so much else. Though oddly enough, not much else in D minor. Doing a text search on his opus list, you will find only one other D minor composition, his Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor. Yuval Salomon with the finale.

So yeah, there’s melancholy there, but it’s not the primary emotion. Beethoven wrote this around the time he wrote his desperate Heiligenstadt testament, which some have read as evidence of suicidal ideation on Beethoven’s part.

Likewise in Beethoven’s Ninth, D minor is about struggling against bad circumstances, not wallowing in self-pity.

In Bruckner’s Ninth there’s no optimism, not in the first movement, not in the Scherzo and barely in the Adagio. It is only in the finale, which Bruckner almost completed but his surviving contemporaries suppressed, that a genuine glimmer of hope appears.

The mood of a musical composition is determined not only by its principal key, but also by how that key interacts with other keys, as well as many other factors.

In Bruckner’s Third, E-flat major is a key of respite from the Sturm und Drang of D minor, and of regeneration. But in Bruckner’s Ninth, E-flat major causes conflict with D minor, as grinding dissonances that manifest themselves from close to the beginning all the way to a terrifying point in the Adagio.

But after that frightening moment, Bruckner finds solace and repose in E (natural) major. However, for Bruckner, there’s only one correct key in which to end a minor key symphony, and the supertonic major is not it. Bruckner worked on the finale until the day he died, and he almost completed it, leaving it in a state that it only needed obvious but minor tweaks.

But oops, we neglected to secure the poor old man’s estate after he died and a bunch of souvenir hunters stole pages from the emerging manuscript of the finale. What do we do? Easy, we just say that he didn’t actually complete it, he just left some undecipherable sketches and we have to accept the Ninth Symphony as “complete in its incompleteness.”

That lie to cover up the executor’s negligence solidified into the dogma that Bruckner’s Ninth was incomplete and incompletable. But the truth is that even despite all the stolen pages, the Ninth can be reconstructed with only slightly more editorial intervention than we tolerate for just about any other score whose composer is no longer around to answer our questions.

Look for example at Michael Haydn’s Symphony No. 29 in D minor, Perger 20. Musicologists believe that he intended for it to have trumpets and timpani, but, to my knowledge, no timpani part has ever been found. A fairly convincing timpani part can be deduced from the trumpet parts, though maybe that’s not quite what this South Korean orchestra did:

And whoa, clarinet? Interesting.

Any time you read the editor’s foreword to an edition of a piece by Michael Haydn, you will likely see a quote from Leopold Mozart that Michael Haydn considered continuo (e.g., harpsichord) playing figured bass to be absolutely essential even for his “most fully-instrumented” compositions.

I had hoped to include something by Leopold Mozart on here, but I guess he’ll have to wait until I get to G major or D major. Leopold Mozart’s son, though, did write a few significant pieces in D minor, such as the K. 421 Quartet.

The Menuetto of the K. 421 is in D minor with a Trio in D major that has a very nice tune. I discovered in a string quartet practice that it’s a melody that’s been used in one of the Suzuki books.

So for Leopold Mozart’s son, D minor is indeed a key of sadness, with an element of struggle only occasionally present.

Figured bass tends to be very sparse in Vivaldi first editions. Today’s musicians want a lot more detail, or even a figured bass realization. And then no one complains “but that’s not what he wrote!”

Part of the reason I’ve been doing this series going around the circle of fifths is to highlight music by women and others who are not considered to belong to the pantheon of the great composers for reasons other than musical merit. You know, like race or gender.

If you see the name “Schumann” in gold letters at a concert hall, it’s probably referring to Robert Schumann. His wife, Clara Schumann, was a great pianist and a great composer in her own right. But her only orchestral composition is her Piano Concerto in A minor, whereas her husband has four symphonies and other music to his name.

I think it would help if there were orchestral arrangements of Clara Schumann’s piano music. I actually did an orchestration of her Scherzo in D minor, but a performance will sadly have to wait way longer than my oboe and tuba fugue. For now, let’s hear the original instrumentation.

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For a long time, Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor was my favorite of his symphonies. The 1841 version is quite interesting, as a matter of fact, as is Mahler’s reorchestration. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major more and more.

Florence Price also wrote a Symphony No. 4 in D minor, which I’ve only heard in a recording by the Fort Smith Symphony conducted by John Jeter on Naxos. It hasn’t yet made as much of an impression on me as her No. 1 in E minor.

And that reminds me of Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6 in D minor, which is too pure and ascetic to be sad.

The open thread question: What is your favorite music in D minor?

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