Light and Dark, Dark and Light

 Byron Challoner

Assignment Three: Art and Assessment

Fall 2016

WRIT340/Arts and Humanities

Section # 65250 / Murray

                                                            Dark and Light, Light and Dark

The composer Alfred Schnittke lived and worked in the USSR during the period following Stalin’s death known as the “thaw”, carrying forward the musical traditions of his predecessors while under official sanction by authorities (Ivashkin, p. 75).  It was in these circumstances that he composed music of great originality and emotional power; through harmonic tension, or dissonance, he creates an atmosphere of dread and despair.  Through harmonic resolution, or consonance, he paints glimmering rays of light and hope.  His ingenious and unique musical language uses extreme ratios of these elements – the dark (dissonance) to the light (consonance) and the light to the dark.  Or perhaps, it is the light (dissonance) to the dark (consonance), and the dark (consonance) to the light (dissonance)? The overwhelming presence of one tone works to accentuate the sparse presence of the other.  His works for strings exhibit almost total darkness with hardly any light, while his sacred choral works shimmer brilliantly like the sun with only a few patches of dark.  Through brilliant use of these extreme contrasts, Schnittke achieves a highly evocative range of emotional expression from crushing despair to religious ecstasy.  Music of this kind of power certainly deserves every bit as much prominence in Western concert halls, recognition for its influence on other composers, and appreciation of its importance to musical history as the music of his predecessors such as Bach, Mozart, and Shostakovich, and his contemporaries such as Morten Lauridsen, Arvo Pärt, and Eric Whitacre.

An excellent introduction to the power of Schnittke’s string language is his Concerto Grosso n. 1 (TheWells, “Concerto”).  The first movement begins with an unusual instrument called a prepared piano--an ordinary piano with various items (usually coins) placed between the strings to create an unusual sound.  In this case, it sounds almost like a distant gong, perhaps there to announce the entrance of the strings about a minute later.  The strings play one dissonant interval after another, slowly and forcefully building an atmosphere of tension and unease.  An apocalyptic landscape is painted by the strings as they begin moan in agony, growing more and more violent and loud--the accompanying artwork for the music link is an excellent choice for capturing the character of this piece.  Directly after the conclusion of the first movement, the second movement (4:58-9:23) takes off with a surprisingly consonant and beautiful Baroque-style theme that soon curves into itself, followed by even more dissonance and dread.  Interspersed between the dark folds of this movement are only the faintest and most desperate glimmers of hope in the form of harmonic consonance, and it ends with a violent crash.  The third movement (9:24-16:17) is a slow grind as layers upon layers of strange dissonance rise from the depths to the surface, building into a crescendo of anarchy that explodes into the fourth movement (16:18-18:49) which is itself a grisly display of virtuosity by two soloists.  The fifth movement (18:50-25:57) is arguably the highlight of the piece, as fully consonant arpeggiated chords in the harpsichord accompany a sorrowfully beautiful theme in the strings.  The sense of madness is magnified by a kind of schizophrenic tango placed in the middle of the movement.  The climax of the work is when the fifth movement’s theme crashes into a reprise of the prepared piano opening, leading to the sixth and final movement (25:58-28:20) where the whole work slowly dies away like a slain monster in its death throes.  The brilliance of the work is that the brief flashes of optimism and hope only to make the despair seem even more crushing.  Quite paradoxically, Schnittke also uses this style to greatly accentuate brief moments of consonance and beauty – in other words, the tide of darkness only makes the bright seem brighter.  In his Piano Quintet (belana000, “Quintet”), the writing is mostly atonal and dissonant in sound, which is appropriate for a work lamenting and grieving for his recently deceased mother.  It is only in the fifth and final movement that we hear something clearly consonant and transparently bright.  A lovely piano ostinato, or repeated figure, appears (20:27).  Only in the final few bars of the movement is the ostinato allowed to shine on its own.  This magical moment is reminiscent of the pure and childlike joy in Schnittke’s mystical contemporary, Arvo Pärt’s, “Spiegel im Spiegel” (playingmusic, “Spiegel”).  The angelic ostinato theme of the movement is left in peace by the strings to softly wander away, giving the impression of a soul at last ascending joyously into heaven (23:15).  With the same harmonic ratio (although different tone), we are being dragged into the dark with Concerto Grosso n. 1, or we are being carried into the light in the Piano Quintet.

Mastery of strings and ingenuity in their use has come to define a lineage of great composers from Beethoven to Shostakovich.  Ivan Moody, in describing Schnittke’s Piano Quintet, writes that “…Schnittke relies heavily on the emotive, associative power of the strings.  Such is his mastery that this never seems an unsatisfactory dependence…” (p. 4).  Schnittke’s use of dissonant strings to emotionally accentuate darkness results in him painting many “shades” of black.  Schnittke’s string quartets are an exposition of his emotional language with strings at its most bare – his first quartet is dissonant, tense, austere, and bleak (Molinari, “String”).  It is so dissonant that the sound came across as aleatory (random) and atonal (dissonant) on a first listen.  Later I could identify a faint tonal center.  This style was not bold in the West at the time, but it went completely against what was acceptable in Soviet Russia (Brodsky, “String Quartet No. 1”).  Given his circumstances, it is intriguing that Schnittke was bold enough to take dissonance further than almost anyone, anywhere, at any time.  His Viola Concerto consists of an apocalyptic struggle of soloist against orchestra, and the soloist does not survive (adagio, “Viola”).  It contains only a few moments of consonance, with most of those in a minor and not major mode.  And again, this is precisely what makes these moments so powerful.  The fast, arpeggiated strings of the allegro molto second movement (4:24-16:15) are strongly evocative of a chase, inflicting terror on the listener.  This composition is a complete exposition of the darkest musical hues and shapes of the viola, the deeper and richer cousin to the violin in the string family, and is certainly one of the finest examples of its form in music history (McBurney, “Viola”).  Another ghost story told by Schnittke’s strings is the Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (TheWellesz, “concerto per pianoforte e archi”).  In this case, the strings are often the brazen misplaced optimists, singing major triads in the middle of tone clusters being banged out on the piano (4:40).  Surrounded by darkness, whatever major tonalities the strings decide to fashion are ephemeral and become corrupted by the piano.

After hearing these examples of Schnittke’s music, one might feel that this evocative music is well placed in a scene from a horror film, and they would be quite right.  Schnittke himself was a prolific film score composer, writing soundtracks for nearly 70 films.  Because he was sanctioned by the Composer’s union, writing scores for films was the only way he could make a living while honing his style (Ivashkin, p. 104-106).  Referring back to Ivan Moody, after looking at the emotive power of Schnittke’s strings, film scores are an avenue for investigating his music’s associative power (Moody, 4), a quality that fits together snugly with the visual arts, and has lent itself quite well to accompanying film.  The Russian film “Agoniya (1975)” directed by Elem Klimov is a visceral expose about the infamous Russian anti-hero Rasputin (“Agoniya”), and the accompanying soundtrack by Schnittke is well-suited to such a subject matter (Wellsz, “Agony”).  The recent movie “The Lobster (2015)” is about a dystopian future where being a couple is mandatory and uses both Schnittke’s Piano Quintet and his String Quartet No. 2 to accentuate the bizarre and uneasy settings of the film (“The Lobster”).

While Schnittke’s secular music is full of horror and dread and is downright spooky, his sacred choral works occupy the other side of his musical universe, being thoroughly tonal and consonant (full of light) and formal in construction, and the dissonances (darknesses) always resolve to triadic conclusions.  But just as before, the factor that makes them even more special is the presence of sporadic, highly intense harmonic dissonances (darknesses) that elevate a positive experience to a transcendent and religious one.  In his “3 Sacred Hymns – Lord’s Prayer”, the work begins on an Eb Major chord and ends on an Eb Major chord – planting itself firmly in the key of Eb Major (VitalyGR, “3 Sacred Hymns”).  Despite liturgical music being banned by the authorities, Schnittke (himself a late convert to Christianity) deliberately draws from the Russian Orthodox Church choral tradition where triadic and tonal works are appropriate, as well as long chant-like unison melodies (Moody, p. 10).  His use of dynamics is especially skillful and gratifying in conveying the message of the text, such as how the music builds and crescendos through “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever” into the “amen” (3:24-4:24).  The penultimate chord in the “amen” cadence in measure 43 deserves a careful examination as it contains the notes G, B, F, and Ab.  Because it voice-leads into the final Eb chord, it must be functioning as a kind of dominant chord.  But it is not a traditional dominant chord, or it would spell Bb, D, F, Ab.

Despite not being recognizable as a cadence chord, it sounds perfectly placed in this work.  It functions like an even grittier, more dissonant dominant chord on the account of the minor second between G and Ab, with an even greater sense of resolution when the final chord is reached.  The logic of the voice-leading is that G holds over, B falls to Bb, F falls to Eb, and Ab falls to G.  There is certain ingenuity this chord, in that every concluding note is reached by step motion.  For centuries, the fifth note (Bb) simply carried over from the dominant to the final chord in a standard authentic cadence.  There is no note in a dominant chord that resolves to Bb because it is already present as the root - the chord is built on the fifth note of the Eb major scale (Bb).  In this oddball chord, the sixth of the dominant (G) is present and holds over to the final chord where it becomes a repetition of the third.  In a way, it is a variation on the dominant chord that has been the foundation of tonal harmony for half a millennium.  This musical sun is accentuated by a musical sunspot.

Offbeat cadences of this type become a harmonic motif for Schnittke in his other choral works, such as in his great Choir Concerto (VitalyGR, “Choir Concerto”).  Ivan Moody writes, “It is not overstating the case to say that Schnittke has, in Concerto for Chorus, given the 20th century one of its most significant choral works.  The range and depth of the music is something that can be obtained only by a composer with a genuine mastery of the voices” (p. 10).  One factor demonstrating the mastery inherent in this work is the use of incredible vertical dissonances, quite sparsely, to accentuate the overall consonance of the work.  The presence of these dissonances is something highly original and remarkable in a choral work, as they are not a part of any church’s choral tradition, and yet Schnittke had not only the understanding that they are within the grasp of choral technique, but also the gall to include them in a sacred work.  American composers like Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen became famous for “light dissonances” or “textual density” in their choral works composed later on in the 20th century, and after discovering Schnittke’s music it’s hard to find them as the only composers with the originality to incorporate startling dissonance.  Eric Whitacre has acknowledged some of his influences, including Arvo Pärt (Larsen, p. 23) who was a contemporary of Schnittke and part of the Soviet avant-garde.  It is likely both composers (who are wildly more popular than Schnittke) were directly inspired by him--but even if they weren’t, his music still made theirs possible.

In movement one of the Choir Concerto (VitalyGR, “O Master of All Living Things”) in measure 104 (7:54), we are greeted with a harmony constructed on the following notes: D, Eb, F, G, Ab, and C – a real mouthful.  The analysis of the harmony shows that it is actually a kind of jazz chord – a dm7 b5 b9 (d-minor seven, flat five, flat nine), and resolves to an open d-minor harmony.  In this case, the effect doesn’t seem to be moving the piece forward, but rather greatly intensifying a quiet passage prior to a great crescendo.  In measure 173 (12:50) we find E, G#, B, D, F#, A – another jazz harmony – this time, an E13 chord, the very limit of tertian harmony!  It shimmers only in a brief passing role on the way to a crescendo.  In measure 189 (14:17), we find F, Ab, Cb, Eb, Gb, Bb, which is an fm11 b5 b9 chord (f-minor eleven flat-five, flat-nine).  The choir builds up to the chord, then hovers on it, again anticipating a huge crescendo.  In the fourth movement (VitalyGR, “Complete This Work Which I Began”), at the culmination of the work, again we see Schnittke’s signature of a gritty dominant chord.  The choir once again builds to the “a-men” cadence (~3:25-6:06) and a penultimate chord forms around the “a-“ component of the text.  We find the notes C#, D, E, G, and F#, compared once again to an ordinary dominant in the key of D Major, A, C#, E, G.  The chord is perhaps best analyzed as a c#dim b9 add11 (c-sharp diminished, flat-nine, add 11).  This chord is similar to the ‘dominant’ chord from the end of “Lord’s Prayer”, in that we have the third (F#) present in the dominant chord which creates a half-step between F# and G amplifying the dissonance and carrying over.  But then we find something truly astonishing.  The presence of the root (D) of the tonic chord in any chord trying to function as a dominant chord goes against all conventional logic, as dominant chords are supposed to represent tension in music and the tonic chord is supposed to represent resolution.  They exist at opposite emotional poles and theoretical functions.  But Schnittke somehow realized that doing so would lead to yet another tone holding over, as well as yet another half-step between C# and D, adding an anticipatory effect as well as even more crunchiness.  Apparently, polar opposites can mix, and this amen cadence demonstrates how – while we experience incredible tension at this climactic point before tonic chord, in a precognizant way we somehow sense that we have already arrived.  Because the whole movement feels like one big phrase and the “amens” go on for another two minutes, perhaps this ‘dominant’ chord is really the tonic, and all it was doing was shedding its dissonance.

               Hugh Collins Rice wrote skeptically of Schnittke’s music, “Structures are often the most basic of designs, thematic techniques appear unsophisticated (transformations, canons, simple heterophonic devices). Climaxes are achieved by extravagant instrumental gestures, long pedal points are used to unify paragraphs ... and serial devices amount to the simplest chromatic formations….” (p. 12).  All these points describe the composer’s music, but they miss a very important point.  These tools of the composer, like his brilliant use of contrasting light and dark in the context of extreme harmonic consonance or dissonance, are means to the end of emotional expression and the evocation of images, words, and ideas that take us to another world.  If the goal of good music is to move our feelings, or move us somewhere new, in ways we never have been before, then Schnittke offers the wandering, contemporary musical pilgrim a place to rest for a good long while.

                                                                          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Ivashkin, A. Alfred Schnittke. London, 1996.

“Concerto Grosso n. 1 (1976/1977).” YouTube, uploaded by TheWelleszCompany, 27 Jan 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Xehs1rHfM

“Alfred Schnittke - Piano Quintet (w/ score) (1976).” YouTube, uploaded by belanna000, 28 June 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td-cUkR1Tu8

“Arvo Pärt- Spiegel im Spiegel.” YouTube, uploaded by playingmusiconmars, 2 June 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc

Moody, Ivan. “The Music of Alfred Schnittke.” Tempo, no. 168, 1989, pp. 4-11.

“String Quartet No. 1: 1. Sonata”, YouTube, uploaded by Molinari Quartet – Topic, 29 June 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbfLhwM2L_s

Brodsky, Seth. “Alfred Schnittke: String Quartet No.1” AllMusic.com, http://www.allmusic.com/composition/string-quartet-no-1-mc0002384753 Accessed 4 Nov. 2016

“Schnittke ; Viola Concerto / Yuri Bashmet(va),Valery Gergiev ; Rotterdam Philharmonic 1993.” YouTube, uploaded by adagio fukax2, 5 Oct. 2015 https://youtu.be/OAY6NO_iNvA

McBurney, George. “Viola Concerto (1985)”. AmericanSymphonyOrchestra.com. http://americansymphony.org/viola-concerto-1985/ Accessed 4 Nov. 2016

“Alfred Schnittke: Concerto per pianoforte e archi (1979).” YouTube, uploaded by TheWellszCompany, 27 Jan. 2011 https://youtu.be/5vyCc_jFidw

“Agoniya (Rasputin).” internetMovieDatabase.com.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081991/ Accessed 4 Nov. 2016

“The Lobster (2015) Soundtracks.” internetMovieDatabse.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3464902/soundtrack Accessed 4 Nov. 2016

“Schnittke – 3 Sacred Hymns 3 – Lord’s Prayer.” YouTube, uploaded by VitalyGR, 24 June 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Hq6F77n80

Larsen, Andrew. “Textual Density in the Choral Music of Eric Whitacre.” Choral Journal, vol. 49, no. 6, 2006, pp. 22-23.

“Schnittke - Choir Concerto 1 - O Master of all Living Things.” YouTube, uploaded by VitalyGR, 25 June 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGc-Tu_1yGw

“Schnittke - Choir Concerto 4 - Complete This Work Which I Began.” YouTube, uploaded by VitalyGR 25 June 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykuF8h7sFwI

Rice, Hugh Collins.  “Further Thoughts on Schnittke.” Tempo, new series, no. 168, 1989, pp. 12-14.