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Music open thread: Music in B minor [1]
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Date: 2023-08-14
Next up on my survey of music along the circle of fifths, B minor. I’m looking for music that is undeservedly obscure for some reason or another. Could be because the composer is black, or a woman. Or it could be because the composer is one of those dead white men acknowledged as great composers, but, aside from his greatest hits, most of his music is obscure.
The first piece to come to mind for B minor might be Bach’s Mass in B minor, which at two hours is a little hard to justify for liturgical use. Even Bruckner’s longest mass runs a couple of minutes shy of one hour.
Next, you might think of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, the one in B minor. It’s special for being in B minor but it’s not special for being unfinished, because Schubert actually left half a dozen symphonies short of complete in different ways, most of them in D major, the relative major to B minor.
Some commentators read into these B minor compositions a quiet resignation and acceptance of fate. There’s something very melancholy about B minor, much more so than, say, the often combative C minor. Teresa Carreño’s String Quartet in B minor is a good example of this.
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We might conclude that for Clara Schumann B minor was spooky, if we only look at her spine-chilling “Ballet des Revenants,” the fourth of her Quattre Pièces caractéristiques.
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However, she also wrote a Romance in B minor, played here by Cristiana Achim, quite a contrast.
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You might or might not know that Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture is in B minor. I wouldn’t consider this spooky, but the mood is not too far removed from that of Schumann’s “Ballet des Revenants.”
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And here’s a performance by the Marine Chamber Orchestra conducted by Captain Ryan J. Nowlin. So it’s probably in the original key. Though I suppose if it was the Marine Band maybe they wouldn’t balk at playing it in B minor, which would be C-sharp minor for the B-flat instruments.
Though the arranger might decide to maybe move it to C minor anyway (so D minor for the B-flat instruments). After all, you don’t want to limit your arrangements to only the very best bands. Or at least I wouldn’t. Or maybe I would, I’ll let you judge later.
In that particular concert, the Marine Chamber Orchestra continue with something or other in E-flat major by Leopold Mozart’s son. I think that it would be much less jarring to continue with Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor instead.
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Legend has it that Brahms, who did write two piano concerti and violin concerto, had thought about writing a cello concerto but never did. So when he heard Dvořák’s, the older composer reportedly said if he had known he would have written one like that. I think the story’s true, Brahms strikes me as someone who didn’t really care about originality for its own sake, like too many of today’s composers.
Among symphonies, the most famous in B minor might be Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74, the “Pathétique” (Патетическая). Its most memorable moment to me, however, is the rather triumphant Allegro molto vivace in G major, which is so undeniably powerful that even listeners familiar with the work clap right after it in concert, despite knowing there’s still the finale left to play.
As I don’t have perfect pitch, I can’t tell that the Allegro molto vivace is not in B major without looking at the score. Though I should know that the key of B major, with its five sharps, is not a favorable key for orchestral music — you have to put the B-flat instruments in C-sharp major (seven sharps) or D-flat major (five flats), which the musicians won’t like any better. At least we have the clarinets in A, which we would write in the more manageable D major.
But there are other clues in the Tchaikovsky Sixth that there’s more to come after the Allegro molto vivace, sort of like how the scherzo coda in D major in the 1876 version of Bruckner’s Third, despite how triumphant it is, does not register as the end of the whole symphony.
With Tchaikovsky, the effect of G major before the finale in B minor is a sharp contrast, whereas with Bruckner the effect of the D major coda for the scherzo is somewhat anticlimactic, because D major will be reached again after some more struggle in D minor.
The finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth has a very clear example that Tchaikovsky intended his first violins and second violins to be seated on opposite sides of the conductor. It begins with a stereo effect that is almost entirely lost when both violin sections are placed to the conductor’s left.
The second violins are second not because they’re somehow not as good as the firsts (a popular misconception) but because they generally play the second highest note in a chord whereas the first violins generally play the very highest note.
There are plenty of examples of this in Vivaldi: the first violins play a melody, the second violins support with parallel thirds right below. But there are also examples in Vivaldi of the first and second violins “crossing” each other several times in the span of a few bars. And that’s what happens at the beginning of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth.
Notice also the crossings between the violas and the cellos (notated in tenor clef for all but the last two bars of this excerpt).
Peter Schickele quite memorably lampoons the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth in his “Unbegun” Symphony. Schickele had some old friends who referred to his symphony as “The Pathetic” on account of its quotation of the Tchaikovsky Sixth. “Well, I’ve got new friends now, and we’re calling the ‘Unbegun’ Symphony,” Schickele explains on the CD.
Quiet resignation is not a mood Beethoven expressed very often. The Bagatelle in B minor, Opus 126, No. 4, is fierce but also layered, and looks ahead to Vagn Holmboe in the 20th century. And, being for piano, Beethoven could contrast the fierce B minor music with sweet B major music but without concern about orchestral musicians complaining about the key.
This bagatelle impressed me very much and I decided I had to orchestrate it. If played by a real orchestra, my orchestration would either be tremendously thrilling or disappointingly muddy. Hope this computer rendering is more towards the former than the latter.
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Quiet resignation is not the prevailing mood in Kalliwoda’s Symphony No. 5 in B minor either. The opening horn call is defiant, as you can hear in the recording by the Neue Orchester provided to YouTube by Naxos (that one’s only the first movement, there might be a YouTube video of the whole thing but I’m not sure it’s properly licensed), and the finale does not go down without a fight.
Kurt Atterberg’s Symphony No. 1 in B minor is more lyrical, but hardly more resigned than Kalliwoda’s Fifth. Definitely worth checking out. Paderewski’s Symphony in B minor, “Polonia,” concludes triumphantly, and it has its interesting moments, but it’s too long for how little happens in its total duration.
The open thread question: What’s your favorite music in B minor?
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