Babbling brooks, bird calls, and an electrifying thunderstorm

When in 1924 Ottorino Respighi specified a 78 RPM phonograph record to play a nightingale song in Pines of Rome, it was considered quite the cutting-edge use of modern technology in the concert hall. That’s small potatoes compared to Tan Dun’s Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds, which calls upon the musicians to use their smartphones to play recordings of bird songs on traditional Chinese instruments. 

“What is the secret of nature? Maybe only the wind and birds know…” writes Tan Dun in his program note for his 2015 composition, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the National Youth Orchestra’s tour of China. Tan Dun, born in Hunan province but living in America since 1986, has made a specialty of the fusion of Chinese and Western music. Influenced by composers such as John Cage, Meredith Monk, and Steve Reich, he has been indefatigable in his exploration of alternate instruments and sound sources for his instrumental music, which spans a wide spectrum of genres including symphonies, concertos, chamber and solo music, and film music such as his Academy Award winning score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

 “In the beginning, when human beings were first inventing music, we always looked for a way to talk to nature, to communicate with the birds and wind,” writes Tan Dun. “It has always been a burning passion of mine to decode the countless patterns of the sounds and colors found in nature. . . .In fact, the way birds fly, the way the wind blows, the way waves ripple…everything in nature has already provided me with answers. With melody, rhythm and color, I structured the sounds in a passacaglia.” 

 Which requires a bit of clarification. A passacaglia is a piece of music constructed on a cyclically repeating pattern, or ostinato. A favored method of structuring music during the Baroque era, it is found in such composers as Henry Purcell, Antonio Vivaldi, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Its cyclical nature can be extraordinarily effective, as listeners recognize each turn of the wheel, as it were, as the music progresses. “Through nine evolving repetitions of the eight-bar patterns, the piece builds to a climax that is suddenly interrupted by the orchestra members chanting,” writes Tan Dun. And they don’t only chant: they snap their singers, whistle, and stamp their feet in what becomes an exuberant all-stops-out celebration. It ends with a giant outburst from all concerned, which Tan Dun describes as “that of the Phoenix, the dream of a future world.” 

© Scott Foglesong

Nostalgic longing permeates The Lark Ascending. Not a cozy nostalgia that looks back to a rose-tinted past, but rather a spiritual fervor for an idyllic paradise, expressed as the song of a soaring skylark and, on the earth below, human life – a poignant metaphor for our collective yearning for transcendence. “For singing till his heaven fills, ‘Tis love of earth that he instils,” reads George Meredith’s poem “The Lark Ascending,” in which Vaughan Williams found his inspiration for a tone poem that inevitably ranks at or near first place in polls of audiences’ favorite pieces. 

 The composition of The Lark Ascending flanks the period of the First World War, and so the work can be heard as both an allegorical salve for wartime horrors and an homage to a vanishing rural England. Three protagonists populate its entrancing soundscape. The first is the Earth itself, the foundation of all, represented by slowly-moving blocks of chords and gentle melodies, mostly in the strings. The second is us, humanity: we are portrayed mostly by wind instruments that play folksong-like melodies in the Aeolian mode, an antique scale typical of early English folk music. (‘Greensleeves’ is a good example.) 

 And then the lark itself, the English skylark that once sang at dusk to the Earth and people below, its voice gradually stilled by the industrialization that destroyed its habitats. It is the solo violin, given to ecstatic fantasias that gradually rise to the highest registers of the instrument, mostly cast in the ancient five-tone, or pentatonic mode. Mystic and primeval, it is the timeless song of the skylark that speaks to us of an eternal world beyond our limited, earthbound ken. 

 In our time, efforts in conservation and habitat restoration have resulted in the skylark’s gradual return to the skies, its song raining gently down over the English countryside at twilight. 

© Scott Foglesong

Nature, and regular contact with the great outdoors, was as essential to Beethoven as food and water. He really could not function without his regular wanderings throughout the countryside around Vienna, and he spent his summers well away from the city, composing largely in his head during nearly endless walks around the Austrian fields and forests. Thus it follows that his one and only programmatic symphony would revel in the “pastoral” style of the 18th century, an idiom that featured bagpipe drones, country dances, and even the occasional meteorological phenomenon such as a rainstorm. (Antonio Vivaldi’s The Seasons provides another familiar example of the pastoral, as does also Arcangelo Corelli’s beloved “Christmas” concerto.)  

 Beethoven’s Sixth was introduced to the world on a maiden voyage so pestered as to have scuttled a lesser work. The date was December 22, 1808. The venue was Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. The concert was a mess. Most of Vienna’s best musicians were working across town at a birthday bash for Joseph Haydn, leaving Beethoven with a B-list orchestra that struggled to get through a daunting program on a single rehearsal. The last-minute substitute soprano bungled her aria. Beethoven’s contradictory cues caused a major pile-up during the concluding Choral Fantasy. The theater’s heating system was on the fritz. The dismal (and frigid) evening dragged on for a good four hours. Some stalwart fans shivered through to the end, but most folks slipped out early. 

 And yet the music introduced on that elephantine scramble of a concert featured some of Beethoven’s noblest inspirations: the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Choral Fantasy, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the first Vienna hearings of the aria Ah, perfido! together with three sections of the Mass in C. Beethoven even threw in one of his legendary improvisations.  

 The “Pastoral” opened the evening. Alone among Beethoven’s nine symphonies, it’s overtly programmatic – i.e., it is specifically about something, although in no way does it stoop to telling a story per se. That would have been considered bad taste. Beethoven, who is reported to have claimed that “all painting in instrumental music, if pushed too far, is a failure,” referred to the Sixth as a “Sinfonia caracteristica or a recollection of country life.” 

 Scruples about tone painting notwithstanding, Beethoven gave each of the five movements its own title. The first might be said to reflect his own frame of mind when embarking on his summer tours: Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country, its underlying bagpipe drone and gently rustic melody ambling about in a downright leisurely manner, surprising and atypical in a composer usually associated with terseness and economy of means.  

 The Scene by the Brook is almost Schubertian in its sweetness and serenity, as burbling string figures underlay little tunes – it seems wrong to call them themes – that could be whistled or hummed.  A Merry Gathering of Country Folk is, as the title might suggest, a village dance with everybody having a fine old time without regard to stuffy propriety. The gathering is interrupted, but not quashed, by just about the best Thunderstorm in the orchestral literature. But it’s just a summer storm, all bluster and braggadocio, and the concluding Shepherd’s Song – Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm arises in its aftermath, its pastoral melody in a sweetly rocking rhythm, the whole culminating in a radiant burst of joyful thanksgiving. 

© Scott Foglesong