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Music open thread: Music in A minor [1]

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Date: 2023-05-22

Sketch for a sarabande in A minor.

I’m continuing my survey of music along the circle of fifths, looking for music by composers who are obscure and neglected for reasons having nothing to do with actual musical merit. Women composers, black composers and such. Also, obscure music by the dead white men acknowledged as great composers, whose oeuvre has so much more to offer than what is usually played.

I read somewhere that Alicia Keys’s 16-track album Songs in the Key of A minor actually only has two songs in A minor. The key doesn’t matter much if I’m only listening, and not at all if I’m not really paying attention.

It does matter if I want to sing those songs, accompanying myself on the piano. The key signature for A minor is zero flats, zero sharps. However, without modulating to or even suggesting other keys, it is often necessary to add sharps for F-sharp and G-sharp, according to the melodic and harmonic versions of the scale.

An illustration of the A minor scale: melodic ascending, then melodic descending, and lastly harmonic.

Given how rusty I’m at the piano, I certainly appreciate these black key notes which help orient me as to where to put my fingers on the keyboard. The G-sharps in particular I find helpful. You know the skit in which Victor Borge starts playing at the piano and then his assistant has to move him like four or five notes over? That’s often me by mistake what he did as comedy.

Alicia Keys is an R & B and soul superstar who is also a classically trained pianist. In her studies I’m sure she came across Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A minor, WoO 59 much better known as “Für Elise.”

It’s Beethoven’s most famous composition in that key, but there’s not much to choose from among his larger scale compositions: he wrote no symphonies in A minor (though the famous Allegretto of his Symphony No. 7 in A major is in A minor), no piano sonatas in A minor, and of the string quartets, there’s only Opus 132, the next to last he wrote.

Maybe you’ve heard that Beethoven’s late quartets are these lofty things that you have to study quite carefully to even begin to understand. I don’t know, I find them quite accessible.

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I’m curious to ask Alicia Keys if she studied the music of Clara Schumann, who, like her famous husband, Robert, seemed to really like A minor. Each wrote a Piano Concerto in A minor, hers was published as her Opus 7, his as his Opus 54.

Here’s her concerto with Michal Tal on piano, Keren Kagarlitsky conducting the Israel Camerata Jerusalem Orchestra.

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You can find a much wider selection of videos of Robert’s concerto on YouTube than you can of Clara’s. For the middle movement, Robert goes to F major, which is probably the same key I would choose. But Clara chooses to go to A-flat major. Be sure to listen to the beautiful cello solo.

Right before the concerto, Clara Schumann published her Soirées musicales, a suite that starts with a toccatina in A minor and ends with a polonaise also in A minor. The best performance I’ve heard so far is by Jozef de Beenhouwer, he makes the tricky toccatina sound quite effortless. However, JingCi Liu comes close.

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EDIT: I originally had put in a performance by Sinae Lee, who plays the toccatina a million times better than I could, but not as well as Liu or Beenhouwer. However, you might still like her interpretation better past the toccatina.

Tchaikovsky is considered by many to be the greatest Russian composer of all time. But his mentor, Anton Rubinstein, would also be revered as a great Russian composer if he wasn’t Jewish.

Rubinstein‘s Symphony No. 6 in A minor was a revelation to me the first time I heard it, even though I had already been impressed by his Symphony No. 4 in D minor. Like so much else Rubinstein wrote, it doesn’t look all that impressive on paper. But then again, neither does Beethoven’s Fifth.

Anton Bruckner never chose A minor as the main key for a mass or a symphony. However, for both the Scherzo of his Symphony No. 6 in A major and the Scherzo of his Symphony No. 7 in E major, he chose A minor.

Somehow I’ve written two symphonies in A minor. The first one was an incoherent mess: if you listen to a 1- or 2-minute excerpt of it by itself you might like it, but the whole thing just doesn’t fit together. I wouldn’t even dare call it a suite.

And also, at least for the first movement exposition and recapitulation, it was like I was trying to transpose C minor material into a key it didn’t want to go into.

So the second time I wrote a symphony in A minor, I strove for it to write something more unified and better suited to A minor. I’ve despaired of getting a real orchestra to play it, and I decided it wouldn’t be too out of place in my album Video Game Vivaldi, Volume 2. It’s on YouTube, Amazon and Spotify. Here’s an excerpt of it:

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I don’t remember the context by which I meant to include a video of Colette Maze, 100-years-old at the time, playing a Mazurka by Chopin.

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The open thread question: what is your favorite music in A minor?

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