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Music open thread: Music in D major [1]
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Date: 2023-08-21
Next up on my survey of music along the circle of fifths, D major. I’m looking for undeservedly obscure music, maybe because the composer is a woman, or black, for example. Of course even for the dead white men who have music in the core repertoire it happens that only a few of their pieces are frequently played and the rest are completely ignored.
For example, the Zampa Overture by Ferdinand Hérold is quite popular. But the rest of the opera, as far as I can tell, is almost completely forgotten. The complete score is available on IMSLP, but good luck finding any recording of the opera beyond the overture.
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The Vincent Safranek arrangement for military band is in B-flat major and the one by Meyrelles is in E-flat major. Here’s the United States Marine Band with the Safranek arrangement. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who prefers one arrangement to the other strictly only because of the key substituted for D major — though I suppose D major is not entirely bad for wind band.
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Cécile Chaminade is known mostly for her solo piano pieces, which account for the vast majority of her 171 opus numbers. How she came to write the Flute Concertino, Opus 107, is the stuff of legends. Here’s 15-year-old Sonia Ruiz on flute, in a recording made by her proud father.
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Originally, I had placed in here a recording by Hayley Miller on flute. It’s a good performance, but I wasn’t sure I had cued it up to skip the conductor’s mildly annoying prologue about the legend behind the music.
It seems all woodwind instruments, or at least the ones that are not transposing instruments (flute, oboe, bassoon), are based on D.
Buy an Irish tin whistle at a music store, it’s probably in D, in which case you’ll see the fingering chart calls for half-covered holes only for the C-sharp leading tone, or maybe no holes covered at all. I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly, but I am fairly certain the other notes of the D major scale have no half-covered holes.
The notes with half-covered holes then correspond to notes using side keys on instruments like the flute and the oboe. I’m not sure if the old clarinet in D had side keys or any keys at all. As for the suitability of D major for the bassoon, we might need a whole article just about that.
Even the old valveless trumpet was very well-suited to D major, with both Michael Haydn and Leopold Mozart writing trumpet concerti in that key.
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The key of D major is also very good for the violin. With its open strings being G, D, A and E, a D major tonic chord can be rendered very robustly as a triple stop with open D and A and a finger on the E string to add a whole tone for the F-sharp.
However, there is the disadvantage that the easiest way to V7 chord as a quadruple stop puts the G as the open G, which is the lowest note of the violin, and the F-sharp that you want to resolve to that G to is just below the instrument’s range.
It seems a lot of composers who wrote only one violin concerto chose to write it in D major. Beethoven and Brahms readily come to mind. And Florence Price, perhaps not intending to write a second violin concerto, wrote her Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major (no key is given in the title of her next violin concerto).
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And you might notice that in her first concerto, Price alludes to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, which is also in D major.
In Tchaikovsky’s own String Quartet No. 1 in D major there is, towards the end, a mood similar to that of his concerto.
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Maybe Johan Svendsen is the whitest composer I could have picked for this thread. I do think I heard his Symphony No. 1 in D major on WCPE online once, and that’s what prompted me to get a recording of it conducted by Neeme Järvi (not with the Detroit Symphony, though).
And I do remember the name Svendsen coming up on the old WQRS, but not for this symphony. I just can’t remember what was the Svendsen piece the old WQRS played every week, but whatever it was it didn’t make me think much of the composer. Just one listen to his First Symphony, though, and I was impressed, and eager to hear more of his music.
Carl Nielsen was also impressed by Svendsen’s First.
A few decades prior, Georges Bizet was very impressed by the Symphony No. 1 in D major by Charles Gounod. See if you can spot a musical idea Bizet copied from Gounod. The sound quality’s a little dry, but the performance is energetic enough.
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For a long time I was under the impression that the song “Good Morning to You” is in D major. Refashioned as “Happy Birthday to You,” it can of course be sung in any key, or atonally the way I sing it.
What’s this I hear about German being an ugly language? Here’s Elisabeth Kulman singing “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld.”
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That beautiful song is the second of the Lieder by Gustav Mahler, who considered himself thrice homeless, as a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany and a Jew throughout the world. His music was banned by the Reichsmusikkammer, realizing Adolf Hitler’s directives from his ugly speeches… oh, that’s why German is considered to be an ugly language.
As a teenager, I came to really like Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major. It might be most famous for taking the song “Frère Jacques” and putting it in a minor key. I find his quotation of his own song “Ging heut’” much more interesting, though.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to appreciate Leopold Mozart and his contemporaries a lot more. I wanted to include Mozart’s Symphony in D major, Eisen D6, but couldn’t find a good YouTube video of it.
Of course “Eisen D6” is not very memorable. A nickname would help. I suggest “La Veneziana,” in reference to a Symphony in D major by Antonio Salieri, sometimes presented as an overture. Not that Leopold Mozart would appreciate that, as he blamed the Italian for blockading his son’s career.
As I’ve said before, Salieri was mostly unaware of the rivalry. While his actual music is never simplistic, it is also never more difficult than it needs to be. If you teach a high school orchestra and you’re looking for a nice piece in D major that is reasonably easy and pleasantly melodious, please consider “La Veneziana” by Salieri.
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Salieri also wrote a longer Symphony in D major, “Giorno Onomastico,” which might be a little more challenging for a high school orchestra program mostly because it requires fuller woodwind and brass sections. Even in college orchestras the brass players can be notorious rehearsal absentees.
However, the minuet of the “Giorno Onomastico” can be successfully excerpted for a smaller ensemble and refashioned as “Military Minuet in D major” (I have no idea what key P. D. Q. Bach’s Minuet Militaire is in, but I do recommend it, quite hilarious). The symphony’s finale rambles a bit aimlessly, which is very unusual for Salieri, though it might have been an important precedent for the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.
Joseph Haydn, who outlived Mozart and his son, wrote several symphonies in D major, and more than a hundred total. But aside from the ones with nicknames, they’re all pretty much obscure. So I’m grateful to the Haydn 2032 project for recording a lot of these and posting them on YouTube. Here’s Symphony No. 70 in D major:
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Lastly, as a sort of encore, the third of Clara Schumann’s Pièces fugitives, an Andante espressivo in D major.
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The open thread question: What’s your favorite music in D major?
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