Listening Logs Wind Ensemble
Brahms Reading and Listening:
DUE FRIDAY, 10/30
Please click on the link to access the listening. Type in the user name and password given in class: http://naxosmusiclibrary.com/home.asp When logged in, please select "playlists" at the top scroll bar, click on the "Kennedy Middle School" folder on the left and select "Wind Ensemble Winter Concert."
ACADEMIC FESTIVAL OVERTURE
From the Los Angeles Philharmonic Program Notes:
Composed: 1880
Length: c. 10 minutes
Orchestration: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, triangle), and strings
Johannes Brahms never went to college. When he was 20, however, he had the opportunity to indulge in the perks of student life for several weeks, without having to do a stitch of academic work. This serendipitous state of affairs resulted after he got “laid off” while on tour with the flamboyant 25-year-old Hungarian violinist, Eduard Reményi. Early in July of 1853, Reményi and Brahms were guests at the home of Franz Liszt during an extended stopover in Weimar. Reményi worshipped at the shrine of Liszt, but Brahms wanted nothing to do with their host’s artistic goals and the “New German School.” Incensed that his reticent accompanist wasn’t according the great master proper respect, Reményi sent Brahms on his way.
A few weeks earlier, at the end of May, Reményi had introduced Brahms to violinist-composer Joseph Joachim during a concert stop in Hanover. Foreseeing a personality clash between the ill-matched duo, Joachim had invited Brahms – if the opportunity arose – to join him at Göttingen, where he would be taking some summer courses in philosophy and history at the local university. For two glorious months that summer, Brahms hung out with Joachim and his circle, enjoying reading, debates, pleasant walks, beer-drinking sessions and song fests at the local beer-halls, and general student camaraderie. By doing a recital with Joachim, he raised enough money to finance a long-held dream to take a walking tour of the Rhineland. Thus, the young composer packed his knapsack and bid peripheral university life adieu.
Brahms’ next brush with academe occurred 23 years later, in 1876. Cambridge University offered him an honorary Doctorate in Music, which required his presence at the ceremony – but Brahms had a paralyzing distaste for sea travel. Then, he learned that Londoners were hatching lavish plans to celebrate his sojourn in England. Harboring an innate horror of fuss and lionization, and unwilling to face the Channel crossing, the composer stayed home and relinquished the honor.
It was in 1879 that the University of Breslau conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Brahms was flattered and sent a postcard of thanks to the faculty. However, a subsequent letter from his friend Bernhard Scholz, Director of Music in Breslau, made it clear that the university expected him to express his gratitude in musical form. While vacationing at Bad Ischl during the summer of 1880, Brahms penned his musical “thank you” – the Academic Festival Overture.
With a masterful balance of serious and light-hearted elements, the emphasis is on the “festival” rather than the “academic” in an overture that brims with an irrepressible sense of fun. The work also sports the most extravagant orchestral forces the composer ever employed. Brahms himself described the piece as “a very boisterous potpourri of student songs.” Indeed, excerpts from four student beer-hall tunes play a significant role in the orchestral texture in what is, perhaps, a fond backward look to the carefree summer days of 1853.
A hushed, but urgent statement launches the Overture, followed by a dramatic succession of contrasting ideas and dynamics. The principal idea here is an adaptation of the Rakóczy March, a favorite tune with the composer since his youth. Following a soft drumroll, three trumpets then present the first of the traditional students’ songs: “Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus” (We have built a stately house). Its roots lie in a Thuringian folk song, which had been transformed into a defiant protest song in the East German town of Jena when the students’ association there was disbanded in 1819. After Brahms develops and mixes this song with the earlier Rakóczy adaptation, the melody of “Der Landesvater” (The father of our country) appears in a sweeping, lyrical rendition introduced by violins and violas.
The tempo shifts to animato for the freshman’s song known as The Fox-Ride (“Was komm dort von der Höh’ ” – What comes from afar). Bassoons, accompanied by off-the-beat violas and cellos, add a touch of humor that must have raised a faculty eyebrow or two at the premiere. Not forgetting to stir in his original material, Brahms then plays the three student songs off one another in a light-handed development. For the grand finale, a rambunctious version of the imposing “Gaudeamus igitur” (Therefore, let us be merry) makes a joyful noise and provides a rousing conclusion with its blazing brass and full orchestral forces.
The Overture has been one of Brahms’ most often played works ever since the composer himself conducted the premiere in Breslau on January 4, 1881.
Biography on Brahms:
From Encyclopedia Britannica:
Johannes Brahms, (born May 7, 1833, Hamburg [Germany]—died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria]), German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral compositions, and more than 200 (lieder) songs. Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. He can be viewed as the protagonist of the Classical tradition of Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in a period when the standards of this tradition were being questioned or overturned by the Romantics.
Aims and achievements
Brahms’s music complemented and counteracted the rapid growth of Romantic individualism in the second half of the 19th century. He was a traditionalist in the sense that he greatly revered the subtlety and power of movement displayed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with an added influence from Franz Schubert. The Romantic composers’ preoccupation with the emotional moment had created new harmonic vistas, but it had two inescapable consequences. First, it had produced a tendency toward rhapsody that often resulted in a lack of structure. Second, it had slowed down the processes of music, so that Wagner had been able to discover a means of writing music that moved as slowly as his often-argumentative stage action. Many composers were thus decreasingly concerned to preserve the skill of taut, brilliant, and dramatic symphonic development that had so eminently distinguished the masters at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in Beethoven’s chamber music and symphonies.
Brahms was acutely conscious of this loss, repudiated it, and set himself to compensate for it in order to keep alive a force he felt strongly was far from spent. But Brahms was desirous not of reproducing old styles but of infusing the language of his own time with constructive power. Thus his musical language actually bears little resemblance to Beethoven’s or even Schubert’s; harmonically it was much influenced by Schumann and even to some extent by Wagner. It is Brahms’s supple and masterful control of rhythm and movement that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. It is often supposed that his sense of movement was slower than that of his most admired predecessor, Beethoven, but Brahms was always able to vary the pace of his musical thought in a startling manner, often tightening and speeding it without a change of tempo. It is a question of subtlety in command of tonality, harmony, and rhythm, and no 19th-century composer after Beethoven is able to surpass him in this respect. At all periods in Brahms’s work one finds a great variety of expression—from the subtly humorous to the tragic—but his larger works show an increasing mastery of movement and an ever-greater economy and concentration. Ultimately, Brahms’s power of movement stems partly from a source that may seem paradoxical. He was the most deeply versed of Classical composers in the music of the distant past, and he took the lessons he learned from the polyphonic school of the 16th century and applied them to the forms and the instrumental and vocal resources of his own time. Thus it was by way of a new approach to texture, drawn from very old models, that he revitalized a 19th-century rhythmic language that had been in danger of expiring from textural and harmonic stagnation.
In his orchestral works Brahms displays an unmistakable and highly distinctive deployment of tone colour, especially in his use of woodwind and brass instruments and in his string writing, but the important thing about it is that colour is deployed, rather than laid on for its own sake. A close relationship between orchestration and architecture dominates these works, with the orchestration contributing as much to the tonal colouring as do the harmonies and tonalities and the changing nature of the themes. As in the concerti of Mozart and Beethoven, such an attitude to orchestration proves in Brahms to be peculiarly adapted to the more subtle aspects of the relation between orchestra and soloist. The Classical concerto had achieved in Mozart’s mature works for piano and orchestra an unsurpassable degree of organization, and Beethoven had further extended the genre’s scale of design and range of expression. The higher subtleties of such works inevitably escaped many subsequent composers; Felix Mendelssohn had “abolished” the opening orchestral tutti, or ritornello, and had been followed in this regard by many other lesser composers. Brahms saw that this was essentially debilitating and set himself to recover the depth and grandeur of the concerto idea. Like Mozart and Beethoven, he realized that the long introductory passage of the orchestra, far from being superfluous, was the means of sharpening and deepening the complex relationship of orchestra to solo, especially when the time came for recapitulation, where an entirely new and often revelatory distribution of themes, keys, instrumentation, and tensions was possible. Many of Brahms’s contemporaries thought him reactionary on this account, but the result is that Brahms’s concerti have withstood wear and tear far better than many works thought in their day to outshine them.
At the other end of the scale, Brahms was a masterly miniaturist, not only in many of his fine and varied songs but also in his terse, cunningly wrought, intensely personal late piano works. As a song composer, he ranged from the complex and highly organized to the extremely simple, strophic type; his melodic invention is always original and direct, while the accompaniments are deeply evocative without ever being merely picturesque. The late piano music, usually of small dimension but wide implication, is generally expressive of a profound isolation of mind and heart and is therefore not readily approachable, while its apparent overall tone and mood may seem to the superficial ear monotonous. But each individual piece has a quiet and intense quality of its own that renders the occasional outburst of angry passion the more potent; the internal economy and subtlety of these works is extraordinary.
Brahms’s musical range is finally attested by his choral music. His choral writing combines the commonsense solidity of Handel’s with a contrapuntal skill worthy of Bach—yet it achieves total independence. A German Requiem, one of the choral masterpieces of its period, shows all his characteristics in this field together with an ability to integrate solo and tutti with the same kind of subtlety as in the concerti. The spaciousness and grandeur of this work’s lines and the power of its construction place Brahms’s underlying melancholy within the scope of a large, objective, nonreligious humane vision. Thus he is distinct from the self-regarding Romantic; his essential quality is perhaps stoicism.