PART I
The "minorness" of Rachmaninoff's
aesthetics and where (not) to
look for its origins
1. Structural principle and gesture
2. Old and New in Rachmaninoff's
Manuscript
3. Hypertrophy-but not in interpretation
4. Appassionato vs sostenuto
5. Feel-and what to do with it
6. How the “very old composer”
Rachmaninov teaches new things
PART II
Approaching the second
half of the motto
look at the old as the
new and the new as the old
1. Structural principle and gesture
What impresses first in Rachmaninoff's music is the strong emotional, gestural and affective information, based on his conservative aesthetics. However, it is important that in the perception of the composition one does not remain on the surface. For just as powerful as affect is Rachmaninoff's invented structural principle, which he observes and develops in the composition with a calculated and absolutely cool discretion. This balance - that affect does not fall victim to principle, and, on the contrary, retains a strong expressive gesture despite the crystalline adherence to principle - is one of the most important moments of his music.
Rachmaninoff invents a motif, a sub-motif, which carries significant emotional
information (rhetorical figure, etc.), but he invents it in such a way that it is at the same time a structural element, that "microbe" which, by its movement, causes the emergence of new and new relationships, has a great variety of forms and possibilities. Moreover, he is directly obsessed with the ideal of homogeneity of the musical material and so he creates from this one sub-motive all the layers, all the functional layers. Such a unity of material is strikingly noticeable, for example, in the Second Piano Sonata, where all the layers through all the movements of the piece are built up from a single cell referred to in the sonata's introduction. It is a fascinating moment: a maximally minimalist motif in a maximally multilayered texture. The motif is based on the movement of the second. His extensive use of the second is probably related to Rachmaninoff's preference of the multidimensionality of the musical fabric. The malleability and indefinability of the movement of the second allows him to change the world with a single shift, creating a multitude of combinations of voices and harmonic modifications as he constantly moves on sensitive notes.
From the opening, seemingly mere gestural stroke, the collapse of the sound mass into the depths of the bass registers, the material of the whole piece is consistently and rigorously built up - the main theme as well as the contrasting theme, the accompanying figures, partner voices, the filler musical material, the various types of background... everything is sculpted in one piece.
See example no. 1: Rachmaninoff - Sonata no. 2, op. 36, 1st movement
See example no. 2: Rachmaninoff – Sonata no. 2, op. 36, 1st movement
See example no. 3: Rachmaninoff – Sonata no. 2, op. 36, 1st movement
When a performer notices this and applies this insight to his performance approach - placing the same motif in ever-changing contexts and different expressions, the impression of the piece, the impression of its value (!) is dramatically different. Suddenly, apart from the superficial and worn-out sentimentality, and apart from admiration for the pianist's fingers, we watch with admiration Rachmaninoff's modern compositional construction. The harmonic pulse in Rachmaninoff is often - and in the second Sonata especially - based on the pulse between the indifference of the diminished seventh chord and the infinite number of forms that arise from chromatic shifts within it. Hindemith, in his characterization and classification of chords, says that a diminished seventh chord is a chord in which no central tone can be identified. And it is the diminished seventh chord that has no central tone, because it is made up of four sensitive tones, two combined tritones, two tritone axes: g/b-flat/c-sharp/e, is g/c-sharp and b-flat/e, and therefore the diminished seventh chord is a colourless harmonic plasma that animates itself in the surrounding possible formations created by chromatic motion and is coloured by the displacement of one of its tones into another chord that already has its central tone, already has a tonal value.
The diminished and diminished minor seventh chord is thus the distributor, the ideal centre of harmonic collisions, because it just directs, it is pure directionality without tonal coherence. It is like mercury running away on four sensitive tones that give no peace, its mission is - to disappear. For Rachmaninoff, this is the ideal starting point. The interpenetration of seconds by the indifferent structure of the diminished seventh chords allows him great differentiation, an infinite universe of concrete chords, concrete relations, which have their own colouring, their own value, and can enter into relationships.
Rachmaninoff's works are brilliant precisely because of the unity between the gestural and the structural. The principle works here on two levels, both as rhetoric and as structure. The distilled Rachmaninovian principle is extremely speculative: there are hints of polymetry, multiplicity of movements in given schemes, great richness of emergent relations, cellularity with a multiplicity of forms. We could look for third relationships, altered chords, classical cadences, everything could be found here, but it is pushed far, far away by this "cellular" method and the intrinsic hidden polymetry into the realm of some kind of supraor super-harmony, or meta-harmony, meta-tonality. There is a kind of meta-tonal principle at work here, much more revolutionary than form, than the gesture of composition, and in an ingenious way connected with the gesture of composition.
If we perceive only a shell of conservative, sentimental expressiveness and do not
perceive this second moment, the most valuable thing is lost. Emotion is not lost, it always comes out, it is determined by the principle of macro-contrast and the evidentiality of emotional indices.
