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Music open thread: Music in A major [1]

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Date: 2024-03-18  

On my survey of music along the circle of fifths I now come to the bright key of A major. In this survey, I’m hoping to uncover some excellent music that is ignored for reasons having nothing to do with the actual musical merit of the composition, such as the composer being a woman.

First I turned to Clara Schumann, she did like A minor, as did her husband, but I’m not seeing much in A major from either of them. And then in one of my iTunes playlists I noticed Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Petite Suite de Concert, Opus 77.

The suite actually begins and ends in C major, but sandwiched in between those is a little piece in G major and a little piece in A major titled “Un sonnet d'amour.”

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a half black British man named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, became extremely popular in England for his music for Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Now he’s occasionally remembered at Black History Month concerts.

The Petite Suite was published in 1911. It’s believed that he either wrote it that year or the previous year, we’re not sure. Was Coleridge only the second black composer to publish music in England? The first was Ignatius Sancho, who died long before Coleridge was born.

Here’s Susan Merdinger conducting the Sheridan Solisti Chamber Orchestra in a performance of the “sonnet d’amour” that might seem way too slow only in comparison to Paul Freeman’s with the Chicago Sinfonietta (that one clocks in at just a few seconds over three minutes).

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For the full suite played by a different ensemble, follow this link.

Back in 2008, I wrote a weird and dull string quartet that I billed as being in A minor. There was this student in the master’s degree program for composition, call him “Kevin,” who saw it and spoke very approvingly of it.

That confirmed my fear that it was not really music any people would care to listen to, not even master’s degree students in the composition program. I probably won’t delete any of the files, but I really don’t need to, no one's ever going to bother to put it on a concert or even to do a read-through. Well, it’s not as bad as all that, it might be a good source of ideas for better compositions.

I followed that with a String Quartet in A major which, unlike the one Kevin liked, I really wanted to put on a concert. The original premiering quartet in 2009 played the opening Allegro spiritoso at something like ♩ = 100, which is way too slow.

I blamed external factors outside of the musicians’ control, such as all the uncertainty as to whether the concert would even take place. That did put a major crimp on the rehearsal schedule, but it doesn’t fully explain why they played it at a tempo way slower than the word “spiritoso” would suggest, when they did play the rest of the piece at tempi much more in line with what I expected.

Later I got the feedback that they had thinned out some of the quadruple stops, but that doesn’t seem to have helped as much. This year I asked Rita Torrens and her quartet to record this piece, just the opening Allegro spiritoso.

She said, quite rightly, that my tempo marking of ♩ = 150 was way too fast. So how about ♩ = 125, then? She did a brilliant job, and I realized that in several spots I had simply miscalculated the relationship between quadruple stops and the tempo.

I did revise this piece slightly for Rita Torrens, thinning out some of the quadruple stops, but I have no way now of comparing how the original musicians went about that particular task. And maybe I will revise the piece again, but unlike Anton Bruckner, I’m unlikely to come up with something that is clearly related to the original but also wildly and entertainingly divergent.

Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 in A major, partially premiered by Wilhelm Jahn and later fully premiered by Gustav Mahler, was also challenging to its original performers. Quadruple stops weren’t the problem, Bruckner hardly ever used those (though well-meaning meddlers did insert a few into some inauthentic versions of his symphonies).

Rather, the problem was rhythm. Jahn omitted the opening Majestoso and the finale, thus bypassing some dilemmas for the conductor, like this quite typical passage at rehearsal letter A very close to the beginning:

In this excerpt from the score of Bruckner’s Sixth, I neglected to highlight the second violins in the second measure of the excerpt.

How is the conductor supposed to guide the violins playing triplet quarter notes in the highlighted bar while also guiding the violas, cellos and basses playing triplet eighth notes in that same bar?

The violas and cellos playing those double stop As and Es present no problem. Each player simply parks a major second on his or her instrument’s G- and D-strings and the bow does the work of articulating the rhythm.

Bruckner wisely omits the E from the basses’ part, because even though the open A and stopped E are easy to finger, it is the A that needs the extra low register support, not the E. Really, we could delete all the double stops and this music would still be too difficult for a community orchestra, mainly because of the rhythm.

Not that community orchestras are too interested in Bruckner anyway, or at all. It really does require a professional orchestra like the BBC Philharmonic, conducted here by Juanjo Mena.

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Huh. They’re clapping after each movement.

I wanted to include a performance led by a woman conductor, Simone Young, but the video I found on YouTube might not be properly licensed. I provide a link, but I make no promises as to whether it will still be available by the time you read this.

Orchestral musicians sometimes joke that Bruckner was so lacking in confidence that he made hundreds of versions of each of his symphonies. Obviously hyperbole, even if we figure in the inauthentic versions. The “worst” case is the Third Symphony, which has something like three or four authentic versions.

Looking at the Sixth Symphony, however, we find that Bruckner revised it… zero times. The least popular of his “mature” works and he felt no need to improve it? Even with the second version of the Eighth Symphony, the deviations from the original version can hardly be said to address the criticisms of his contemporaries.

Bruckner revised when he knew he could do better, and that just wasn’t the case with the Sixth Symphony. Then with the Sixth, the issue for the musicians is not one of which version to play but which edition to use: the Haas edition or the Nowak edition?

Oddly enough, the only recording so far of the more recent and more accurate Cohrs edition was made by the Upper Austrian Youth Orchestra, and they manage to clock in a total duration of roughly ten more minutes than most recordings.

I find it hard to explain why Albert Roussel’s Symphony No. 4 in A major is not better known. I couldn’t find a video of it that I like, unlike with his Symphony No. 3 in G minor, or really any of Bruckner’s symphonies. I read somewhere that Roussel’s Fourth exemplifies “everything that is sane in French music.” I urge you to look this music up in your favorite music streaming service.

Bruckner is said to have been very much inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Surely he also knew Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major, and the evidence of that is his own Sixth in the same key.

Beethoven’s Seventh is today better known for its A minor Allegretto. Here’s a performance of the whole symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

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Maybe Bruckner went to sleep one night thinking about the stamping rhythm of the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh and woke up the next morning with the idea of how to begin his Sixth Symphony. Reticent and cautious at first, but definitely heroic.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A major, »die Italienische«. That symphony’s progression from A major to A minor informed the similar progression from A major to A minor in my string quartet.

I don’t embed Andrés Orozco-Estrada‘s excellent performance, but rather link to it instead, only because it might be confusing to have two embedded videos of the same conductor with the same orchestra almost one right after the other.

Upon further inspection of Clara Schumann’s Soirées musicales, I notice that the opening toccatina in A minor has a major central section in A major that is notated with an explicit key change to three sharps, and exited with three naturals.

The open thread question: What is your favorite music in A major?

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