The Schubert Moment
- by Nils Henrik Asheim
BACKGROUND
This project is about the Dances for piano by Franz Schubert, examining a method of re-composing them for ensemble.
It is a slow project evolving over a few years. For the time being, I am not sure when it will be finished. This report describes the project until the work-in-progress concert April 14, 2015.
The project can be seen as a sequel to my dual Chopin Mazurka project:
"Mazurka - remaking Chopin" (2010, with Gjertruds Gypsy Orchestra)
"Mazurka - researching Chopin" (2013, solo on square piano)
Both in the Chopin and the Schubert project, I am exploring the classical material and stretching its boundaries by trying new combinations of instruments, seeing it in the light of other musical styles, playing the original versions on period piano and trying to learn from that.
In order to understand Franz Schubert's music, I find it very relevant to approach the Dances. The Dances are short - many of them just 16 bars and less than one minute in duration. Within them, in an embryo form, we find ideas that are further elaborated in the Lieder, Sonatas and Symphonies. Another interesting point is that through the Dances, Schubert's link to popular music becomes clear.
INTERPRETATION AND RE-COMPOSITION
Normally, as a composer, I write in my own style. As an interpreter (organ and piano), I perform in some other composer's style. But, I also feel a need to cross these borders and navigate within music as a wide, open field.
Re-composition is also a kind of interpretation: in one style, finding traces of another one - in old music, seeing possibilities of new music - in one instrument, hearing the hint of a different instrument. Bringing out these elements and giving them space is interpretation, in an extended but valid sense.
In a way, we go back to the composer's moment of writing the piece, when there is an urge to create and there are still open ends, before the music is defined by conventions.
As a performing composer, inclined to creating new music, I am continuously working to understand my own position in relation to old music. I advocate multiple readings of music, which can lead to multiple interpretations, also to re-composition.
PREPARATIONS
The first step of the Schubert Moment project was to study the dances on the piano, in order to acquire a deeper knowledge of the material. The next step was to make demo recordings of a selection of dances on a period instrument. This was done on Oct.12, 2012, following a CD recording session of Chopin Mazurkas, on the Collard & Collard square piano of Ulefos Hovedgaard in Telemark.
Next, I was invited by Håkon Austbø to his project "The Reflective Musician", to participate with my Schubert project in its current phase. The first stage of the collaboration was a presentation and conversation at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH) on Sept.18, 2013.
My presentation started at some distance from the topics of interpretation and performance practice - by focusing on how Schubert's music is used in movies. I showed excerpts from 2 films, "Barry Lyndon" by Stanley Kubrick (music: Andante con moto from Trio in E flat major, D 929) and "Waltz with Bashir" by Ari Folman (music: Andantino from Sonata in A major D 959)
Both musical examples use the pedal point in an inner voice, that together with an ostinato creates Schubert's characteristical static feeling - and the expectation of a harmonic turn that I described as "waiting for the Schubert moment".
From here we proceeded to a selection of Schubert dances, commenting on specific "Schubert features" that I nicknamed as:
The Horizon - The instrument - The scream - Footsteps and dance steps - The mirror and the glance - The annoying, insisting - The rhytmical person - The circle - The short chain - The speaking voice - Possible escapes - Leaps - Cordiality.
To be invited to present the project at this early stage was most useful. By that time, all I had done was the solo demo recordings. I had actually not very much of an idea about how my re-compositions were going to take shape, not even which kind of ensemble to work with. To reflect around specific features of the material together with Håkon Austbø and the audience at NMH was a very good start.
THE PROCESS - A WORK IN PROGRESS
I collaborated with Jan Martin Smørdal, who was my producer for "Mazurka - remaking Chopin", on the selection of musicians for the Schubert Moment. We followed these criteria: - string instruments should dominate, especially plucked strings. A maximum of variation should exist within this. Some of the musicians should have folk music competence, some improvisation competence, some historical instrument competence.
Chosen musicians:
Anders Erik Røine (langeleik, jewish harp, mandola, fiddle)
Reidar Edvardsen (guitar, mandoline)
Inga Grytås Byrkjeland (cello, bass gamba)
Øyvind Skarbø (percussion)
Nils Henrik Asheim (piano)
The configuration of instruments would change from one dance to another. Every dance should have its own "sound".
Through 4 workshops in spring 2015 the material was tried out and rehearsed. Soundfiles of the demo recordings were made available for the musicians. Then, recordings from the rehearsals were edited and used as memory aid and guidelines.
I had fruitful discussions with the musicians on which dance would suit which instrument.
To rehearse with one of the musicians not reading music, depending on learning everything by memory, was a very useful and interesting experience.
A score was written, more and more complete through the workshop period. The last version was printed on April 8, 6 days before the concert.
At the concert April 14, 2015, a 30 minutes programme was performed as a part of The Reflective Musician Festival.
EVALUATION AND CONTINUATION
The feedback from the audience of the concert was very good. Some commented that this was a surprisingly meditative and even impressionistic version of Schubert. This can partly be explained by the distance between public and musicians in the Lindeman Hall. The project was rehearsed in a small studio, and not really adapted to a large stage. Much of the detail work deserves to be audible to the public, with a clear "presence", instead of being blurred in a cloud of sound.
Myself I am satisfied with all the basic ideas, but I think there is a lot of work to do in making them sound more precise. There is a looseness about the whole playing style that I actually aim for, but this has to be counterweighed by some very precise elements.
The element of dance is probably the element that really needs to be worked on. The rhytmical side of ensemble playing, when it comes to uneven 3/4 meter, rubato, feeling and groove and plain synchronicity - needs a lot of work.
Obviously this is a challenge that is likely to appear when one gathers a heterogeneous group like this, with musicians of different genres. I feel the ensemble never got to the point where all five of us felt a common energy.
I look forward to continue working on the project. The final programme should be approximately 60 minutes.
There is an idea that the ensemble should be slightly changed and expanded. I think the foremost aim is an album recording. A live project is second priority. The timeframe is not decided, and the financial frame is also not in place.
THE ARTISTIC METHOD
Further in this report, I will use the term "translation" instead of re-composition. A translator has to convey a message, but in this some subjective choices have to be made. First I try to submerge in the original composition, analyzing it using my stylistical knowledge of Schubert. Then, i make my subjective choice about the "main message" of each dance.
Often this will be a feature that I miss in solo piano renderings. I can go so far as to think that Schubert wanted something more than what he wrote. Maybe this is an illusion, but for me, a productive one at least. Any work of art has this intentional side that is not entirely congruent with the resulting manifestation.
Hence the need to explore that potential - by orchestrating the music for an ensemble, using various compositional tools to bring out the message. Some times these chosen features will point out of Schubert's style but still carry some "Schubert Vision". I'm not too afraid of losing the structure of the original Schubert composition on my way, as long as this vision is there.
My main technique, after having analyzed a piece, is to deconstruct it and treating some of the main elements independently. The best explanation on this is seen below, where I go through every piece with colors showing the material and how it is translated.
To mention some techniques:
- Time/layer manipulations: time stretching, overlapping of harmonies, looping, fragmentation, densification etc.
- Motivic characters: choosing instruments and playing techniques that highlight the chosen "main message" of each piece. Typically a solo instrument will define the character: a jewish harp, a guitar, a langeleik, a fiddle, a bass gamba.
- General characters: there are some common colors I want to represent the whole project, like the plucked strings, certain use of high-pitched "disturbing" elements, rotating wheel elements and finally some kind of patina, weariness, sometimes verging on dirtyness and noise.
- Cherishing Schubert - the cordiality, sweetness, warmth (Herzlichkeit), by instrumentation and elaboration of the harmonic arrangement.
- Looking for different musicianships: By including musicians with folk music and free-improvisation background as well as classical musicians, I like to explore how different grasps on phrasing, timing etc, can contribute to the music. The dance band way of playing is a feature that could be interesting to explore in the next version of the project.
- Exaggeration (which I believe applies to all the categories)
DISCLAIMER
The demo recordings by myself on square piano and Graff piano are made for the project, relatively quickly, and not meant to meet the artistic quality level of a commercial release.
The score: There are changes made in the last rehearsals that are not written out.
Open fields in the score: These are often filled with improvisation, especially in the percussion part, where little is written.
The ensemble sound examples: These are from the concert recording that also is enclosed as video [from April 14, NMH]. Because of the large stage and the acoustics, the ensemble did not have the best listening situation, and the performance is therefore not optimal.
The numbering of the dances: Schubert published them in collections called Deutsche Tänze, Valses Sentimentales, Walzer etc. In this project they are just referred to by their Deutsch-Verzeichnis numbers - and by nicknames we gave them ourselves for practical use during rehearsing.
PIECE BY PIECE SURVEY
In the order they appear on the concert video from April 14, 2015.
For every score excerpt there is a corresponding sound example.
The energy of the hand.
Hammering the repeated chords on 8notes yields a physical movement, a shaking of the wrist. This, as well as hitting the chord on 1st bar of next measure (ex 1, red marks) requires a well-planned jump, an acrobatic move. The energy necessary for these two interconnected movements of the hand is a driving force of this piece.
Listen to 2 pianists using this movement for different purposes:
In our translation, we choose the hammer before the elegance. The throwing energy is transformed into the noises of percussion instruments, to the spanish rasguado style of guitar playing, where the strings are hit rather than plucked, the ponticello of guitar and mandola, the col legno of the cello and also the cello's throwing use of the bow (jeté). (ex 2, red marks).
The harmony is based on I-V patterns (ex 1, green marks), also underlined by the melody. We transform this feature to a cluster by overlapping the I and V functions in one chord (ex 2, green marks)
Speaking of noises: Schubert builds up a movement of climbing to the top note (last bar of A), (ex 1, blue marks) with healthy banality, that we adopt and translate to noise, in high-pitched piano clusters (ex 2, blue marks). The translations of the idea of noise culminate at the improvised section at the end of the piece. (Actually this was planned as an introduction to the piece, later moved to the coda). Noise and rhythm combine to a new expression of energy. The musicians operate at individual tempi. This section is improvised, based on the "hammer motive" and the idea of noise.
In the whole project we are working on separating key elements of the piece from each other and developing them independently.
In this piece, rhythm is distilled to noises, harmony is distilled to repeated tonic/dominant loops, (ex 4, green marks) and compressed (tightened and overlapped).
The B part gives, for a while, the weight to the dominant. (ex 1, letter B). In our translation we prolongate and use the opportunity to underline its potential for tension. In Schubert, the V chord has the accent/tension and the I chord has the resolution and is light. We underline this by holding The V-chord for 4 bars and the I-chord just for 1 bar (ex.3).
The messenger introduced as an improvising fiddle player.
We asked our fiddle player to choose one dance that suited his third instrument (he also plays the langeleik, jewish harp and mandola). There seems to be more than one match: The pedal notes in the piano left hand correspond to the idea of open strings. The pendulum movement in narrow intervals (Ex 5, red mark) create an insisting, conjuring character when played on the fiddle.
This is maybe more of a song than a dance. The octaviation of the melody as well as the parallel thirds (Ex 1, blue mark) remind of group folk singing. We evoked, at a moment, the sound of a rural congregation singing a slow hymn, in an humble, introvert way.
Dissonance is present in the piece. The pedal point on B makes all the A# notes in the melody more expressive. And there is the 1st beat of bar 2, the expressive peak, as in an italian aria. (Ex 1, green mark)
This is taken out of time and stacked in a simultaneous but broken dissonant chord in the piano (Ex 2, green mark) The old piano has a special ability to hammer out a dissonant note.
The appogiatura/double-attack (ex 8, red marks): The need to create an obstacle to yourself, and maybe the sign of a piece nested inside the piece. It also gives weight to the 3rd beat of the measure, like a special dance step. It is translated to piano and bass drum (ex 9, red marks) and helped by the ties in piano and gamba, avoiding to accentuate the first beat of the measure. This could be elaborated and improved in our next version.
The inviting gesture (ex 8, blue mark) evokes a yodling figure. It is translated to jewish harp (ex 9, blue mark)
There is a legato stepwise harmonic/melodic tension through the theme, especially strong in the first cell (ex 8, green mark). We try to emphasize this by adding legato cello with double stops. (ex 9, green mark).
Note: The piece is transposed down to G major to suit the guitar sound and open strings configuration.
The double dissonance on the first beat, with accent (ex 10, red mark) is repeated 2 bars later, confirmed. It translates into the glissandi of langeleik and mandoline, played with metal pieces for the slide effect. Also with the high, plaintive cello note, played with the noisy, scraping quality of the C-string. (ex 11, red mark).
The monotonous, sleepwalking bass (ex 10, blue mark) translates into piano left hand with uneven speed, (ex 11, blue mark) like something suspended and slowly turning back and forth in the wind.
The falling thirds like a soft beam of light (ex 10, green mark), create a slow, gradual projection of chords, in our translation separated in figures with distance between them.
In this translation, the elements of the piece are detached from each other and mounted loosely as parallel layers.
The transition to major key (ex 10, orange mark) is announced by stopping the left-hand movement for two measures. A shift of landscape which we translate into a shift to lighter sonority: higher pitch in langeleik, mandoline and cello harmonics (ex 12, orange marks).
Schubert's turn between minor and major key can be understood as ambiguity. We choose to project this by mixing in the minor third in our major part (ex 12, green marks)
The basic small bending figures of the melody (ex 13, red mark) inspired us to find this quality in the jewish harp. A bit of tolerance is needed to permit the "wrong notes". The written B on the first beat will sound like C sharp (ex 14, red mark).
Harmonic center notes that move as little as possible: The A in the middle voice (Ex 13, green marks). It is translated into D as pedal note (Ex 14, green marks), later A is added. In order to focus on these points (melody & pedal notes) we strip the harmony, introducing it gradually as single notes in the guitar.
The rhythmical figure on the 3rd beat, actually an upbeat to the upbeat (ex 13, blue mark), is an element that can be used both to accumulate tension through the phrase, and to derive the attention (a "piece in the piece"). This is something we could elaborate in the next version. For now (in addition to being present in the melody) it is detached and presented in the piano, adding some bottom-heaviness as a new way to emphasize the pedal note. (ex 15, blue marks).
"THE WAVE" D 783.7
Sound 15 - Played by Marcia Hadjimarkos on fortepiano
The instruction says: "With dampers up", which only is possible to take literally on a period instrument, with its short resonance. The result sounds much like a harp.
This feature, together with the back-and-forth waving pattern of the two-bar periods (ex 16, yellow marks) and the generous waving shapes of the melodic & left-hand cells (blue marks) inspired us to cultivate the wave idea. Our translation becomes a totally new piece where the waving movements are time-stretched and delayed through the sequence of instruments (ex 16, blue and green marks).
The accents on the intensified Bb7 chord (ex 15, red marks), especially those on the second beat, should be noted. To us they represent a wish to transcend the piano, a maximum of densification which we translate into a compact web of tremolos from which the descending line (ex 17, orange marks) slowly is detached. (ex 17, red and orange marks)
Later, towards the end of the piece, the wave idea is distilled to mere rattling noises.
The rhytmical person. So many of the Schubert Sonatas start with an emblematic rhytmic figure, stating a character, an individuality separating/defining itself from the surroundings (Ex 18, red mark).
Wilhelm Backhaus plays the first beat of measure 4 (green mark) as an accent. Lili Kraus, on the contrary, makes an anti-accent already from the start, her way of differentiating the 2nd against the 1st beat is striking): the dominant chord of the 4th measure functions as a gate to a new character? And in the light character of the following measures, Kraus makes every group of 2x8notes+4note slightly different - again: character, the rhythmical person.
Our translation: For the first character we use heavy piano bass, cello bass, drums. For the second: Mandoline, Mandola, piano arpeggio and the cello harmonics.
Inspired by the accent on the high C chord (ex 18, blue mark) we create a repeated false start, which is at the same time a compressed version of the first three bars (ex 18 & 19, violet line) . We orchestrate the "rhythmical person" with percussion and drum-like clusters on the piano (ex 19, red marks). Inspired by Kraus, we see the yellow chord as the start of the next phrase. (ex 18 & 19, yellow marks)
The B part makes a turn with dominant-tonic on the sub-subdominant (d minor) (Ex 18, orange lines) before confirming its tonic in C again. This little pleasant detour inspired us to a little joke (detour in the detour), by dividing the ensemble in a call-response way and shortening the periods tossing them around a bit randomly (ex 20, orange marks & numbers).
For the ending, we leave Schubert's context for another one, taking the red idea one step further, to industrial noise, and mounting the yellow element on top, disjoining the tempo (ex 20, red & yellow marks).
Several features of this piece make us think of a mirror. The I-V mirrored by V-I (ex 21, blue marks). The undulating shape of the melody (green marks). At the barline after bar 5, there is a kind of transforming mirror, an immediate key change that turns the character to its opposite image. (red mark). This again is mirrored in the second system - when the red barline marks the return to the original character.
We examine the harmonical mirror by playing it without melody first, and by stretching it in time. (Ex 22, blue marks) When the melody enters, there is space between the beats to let the melody and the mirror appear separately. The yellow note (B flat in the original, B natural in our translation) is the one that unifies both sides of the mirror.
The mirror is not only description of a harmonic/structural device. It is also a metaphor for the secret glance, the fear of looking into the real, the possibility of disguising.
The characters on either side of the mirror are explored. The sorrowful "blue" character is presented in nakedness. The warmer "red" character is clothed by surrounding voices, quasi canon, that join in a small mirror-room of similar movements (ex 23, red, violet & green marks).
Kraus shows one example of playing this piece with a gently forward swirling movement but still not hastily. Liv Glaser plays more romantically, interpreting the great expressivity in the series of appoggiaturas, on the first beat of every second measure.
We, on our hand, wanted to emphasize both the seemingly innocent music-box character of the motive (ex 24, blue mark), and the architecture that creates the timeless line across the whole, that is the falling line of the appoggiaturas (ex 24, green and orange lines). Notice that the theme starts on the subdominant. The falling line starts from here and floats slowly down to the tonic through an 8-bar phrase that is repeated, retaking its energy when starting from the top again. A perpetuum mobile-movement.
The music-box character is evoked by using handbells and high-pitched string instruments (langeleik, mandoline) and by replacing the left-hand waltz bass by simpler figures. First they appear in the open strings of langeleik, later expanded on the piano, as larger figures with an impression to revolve around the central A (Ex 25, blue line).
The falling line moves so slowly that it could be said to be a kind of pedal point. It appears (ex 25, green line) in many instruments, but in the cello we let it hang a bit, delayed, to expand the feeling of space and horizon.
The next section is dedicated to C sharp and seems not to want to let go of it. The periods are expanded from 2 to 3 bars, with a bit of asymmetric rhythm to create the effect of holding something. The piece later ends on this C sharp plane.
Grinberg plays the piece like a sorrowful chorale, evenly and with a singing tone. Asheim plays more rethorically, emphasizing the dance steps evoked by the two-bar phrase.
In our translation we started from the basic, continuous rhythm (red marks), that eventually took the place from the original idea of dance steps. The rhythm adopted the character of a marche funèbre in 3/4 meter, which we gave to the bass drum. The accents (green marks) of Schubert inspired low piano clusters and hits on the guitar strings. The melody itself (blue marks) is prepared as fragments and finally played in the low octave on a bass gamba, which seems not entirely out of place, as this motive already appears in the bass line in Schubert (ex 27, blue mark).
On several levels of this piece, there are wheel-like patterns that create an easy-going atmosphere, a character that also is enhanced by the folksong/guitar-like harmony. The latter inspired us to start our translation as a folksong group, with instruments joining gradually in the simple playing of chords. Later on, the music will change keys at odd times, to create lightness and to give the idea that the music lives its own life and could carry on in other dimensions.
