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Music open thread: Music in C major [1]
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Date: 2023-07-03
Now I’m at the halfway point of my survey of music along the circle of fifths, using the major and minor keys to organize my search 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. I’m also looking at obscure music by the dead white men acknowledged as great composers, whose oeuvre has so much more to offer than what is usually played in concerts and on the radio.
I’m sure Maria Anna Mozart wrote a few pieces in C major. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that anything she wrote survived. Leopold Mozart was okay with his child prodigy daughter composing and performing. But once she was of marriageable age, her primary duty to her family was to marry well.
There was less pressure on Abraham Mendelssohn’s daughter to marry well than there was on Leopold Mozart’s daughter. Although Fanny Mendelssohn was not completely discouraged from musical composition once she was of marrying age, she was not really encouraged all that much either.
More of Fanny Mendelssohn’s music has survived than of Maria Anna Mozart’s, including an Overture in C major.
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In a way, C major is the default key. Start a new file in a music notation program like MakeMusic Finale or Avid Sibelius and it’s probably in C major. Or in a new file “wizard” template you probably have to add flats or sharps if you want a major key other than C major (since major is the default modality).
And even for the notation of transposing instruments, C major is the default key. The saxophones, for example, at least the ones in common use today, are all transposing instruments pitched in either B-flat or E-flat. So, a composition in B-flat major with a full saxophone section would have some of the saxophones notated in C major and the others notated in G major.
Since at least the time of Joseph Haydn, C major has been a festive key. Back then, C major was the most favorable key for trumpets and timpani. With his brother Michael we see that most of his symphonies with trumpets and timpani are in C major. Joseph’s No. 98 in B-flat major is assumed to be the first symphony in B-flat major ever written with timpani, but Michael’s No. 36 in B-flat major, Perger 28, was written a few years earlier.
All of Joseph Haydn’s symphonies for London include trumpets and timpani, but the association of C major with festive music continued to Beethoven’s time.
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In 1786, Antonio Salieri was put in a competition against Leopold Mozart’s son. Salieri was to write an Italian operetta about an impressario having to put on an operetta in four days, and Leopold Mozart’s son was to write a Schauspiel about a Schauspieldirektor having to put on a Schauspiel in four days.
Unofficially at the time, Salieri won with Prima la musica e poi la parole. But these days we think Wolfgang Amadeus should have won with Der Schauspieldirektor, K. 486, because our tastes are more sophisticated.
So sophisticated our tastes are, in fact, that we know Salieri was an inferior composer without actually listening to anything he actually wrote. Because if we actually listen to something he wrote (and not something written by a film composer to attribute to him) and find ourselves actually enjoying his music, that would mean we’re not more sophisticated than his contemporary audiences.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt did a recording with excerpts from both Prima la musica and Schauspieldirektor. Harnoncourt wanted the same winner as Leopold Mozart. But for me, at least, Harnoncourt’s recording has prompted me to seek out, listen to and enjoy three different full productions of Prima la musica, and none of Schauspieldirektor.
Salieri starts Prima la musica with a rousing C major overture that points forward to Beethoven.
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Here’s a YouTube video with the a production by a Venetian opera company. The overture is not as strong as in the Harnoncourt recording, but overall it’s still a winning production.
Salieri also wrote a very interesting Organ Concerto in C major, which quite oddly has trumpets and timpani but no horns.
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Bugle calls are generally notated using only a small set of pitches: middle C, the G a fifth above that, and in the next higher octave C, E and G.
The first of Muzio Clementi’s Opus 36 sonatinas reminds me of a bugle call. Do you hear it?
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If you don’t hear the bugle call, you will hear it in my unsubtle orchestration from my album Video Game Vivaldi, Volume 2.
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Like Bruckner with D minor, the composer Jean Sibelius naturally gravitated to C major. Two of his seven symphonies are in C major (No. 3 and No. 7), and the rest also show a tendency to go to C major, as Robert Layton explains in A Guide to the Symphony.
Even so, C major was still very important to Bruckner. His Mass in E minor and his Mass in F minor each begin with a Kyrie in the declared key, but the Gloria and Credo, instead of going to the respective parallel major like the Mass in D minor, are both instead primarily in C major.
This might not necessarily be because he thought of C major as more suitable than E major or F major to set the words “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” “In gloria Dei Patris,” “Credo in unum Deum” and “et vitam venturi sæculi,” but rather because he wanted to save those keys for the Agnus Dei.
And let’s not forget that his Psalm 150 and Te Deum are both also in C major. However, that’s a very superficial reason as to why the Te Deum is not a suitable finale to his Symphony No. 9 in D minor.
Rather it’s that the Te Deum as finale does not refer back to anything that has specifically happened in the Ninth Symphony thus far, like the menacingly destabilizing effect of E-flat from very early on in the symphony.
In a C major context, E-flat shades the music to C minor. But in a D minor context, E-flat can make for a grinding, agonizing dissonance, and that contributes to the apocalyptic feel of Bruckner’s Ninth. That sort of conflict is absent from the Te Deum.
Bruckner himself made this desperate suggestion of the Te Deum as finale for his Ninth Symphony, but he also worked very hard to complete the real finale, and he actually almost did.
Chords rooted on the flat supertonic are not always used to create dissonance, sometimes they’re used to give the music an interesting shade without destabilizing the primary tonality.
If I may make a quick “Neapolitan” digression, in the open thread about D-flat major I forgot to mention Nikolai Myaskovksy’s beautiful Symphony No. 25 in D-flat major. The most available recording is on the Naxos label, with Dmitry Yablonsky conducting the Moscow Philharmonic, derided by the always arrogant critic David Hurwitz as just an “effort.” Though he’s probably right that the less readily available Svetlanov recording is better, since, at least for Shostakovich, Svetlanov’s interpretations have always seemed correct to me.
There are some prominent Neapolitan chords in the Symphony in C major by Paul Dukas if I recall correctly. I think I checked the score out from the library but have not had time to go through it anew. Here’s Guillermo Villareal conducting the State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra.
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The sound quality’s a little lacking, but it’s a winning performance. Then to E minor for the Andante:
And back to C major for the finale.
What about American composers? George Whitefield Chadwick’s Symphony No. 1, Opus 5, is, as so many composers’ first symphonies, in C major. But, alas, there are no recordings of it.
For some reason, I assumed that Semper Fidelis by John Phillip Sousa is in some flat key, like B-flat major or E-flat major. It’s actually in C major, a fitting conclusion to this presentation of C major music.
Have a happy Independence Day.
The open thread question: what is your favorite music in C major?
Note to self: later watch Ryan Leach’s video “How to Turn C major into Anime Harmony.”
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