In my review of music on the circle of fifths, I now come to the bright key of A major. In this study, I hope to uncover excellent music that has been overlooked for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual musical qualities of the composition, such as the composer being a woman.
I first turned to Clara Schumann, she liked A minor and so did her husband, but I don’t see 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 in between there is a small piece in G major and a small piece in A major, entitled “A love sonnet.”
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a half-black Briton named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, became extremely popular in England with his music for Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Now he occasionally reminisces at Black History Month concerts.
The Little Suite was published in 1911. He is thought to have written it that year or the year before, we are 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 is Susan Merdinger conducting The Sheridan Solisti Chamber Orchestra in a rendition of “sonnet d’amour,” which can only seem too slow compared to Paul Freeman’s with the Chicago Symphony (this clocks in at just a few seconds over three minutes).
For the complete suite played by a different ensemble, follow this link.
Back in 2008 I wrote a strange and boring string quartet that I described as being in A minor. There was a student in a master’s program in composition called “Kevin” who saw it and spoke highly of it.
It confirmed my fear that this was not music that people would want to listen to, even graduate students in the composition program. I probably won’t delete any of the files, but I really don’t need to, no one will ever bother to play it in concert or even read it. Well, it’s not that bad, it can 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 perform. The original premiere quartet in 2009 played the opening Allegro spiritoso to something similar ♩ = 100, which is too slow.
I blamed external factors beyond the musicians’ control, such as the whole uncertainty of whether the concert would even take place. This did put a big strain on the rehearsal schedule, but it doesn’t fully explain why they played it at a tempo much slower than the word “spiritoso” suggests, when they played the rest of the piece at tempos much more in line with what i expected.
I later got feedback that they thinned out some of the quad stops, but that didn’t seem to help that much. This year I asked Rita Torrance and her quartet to record this piece, just the opening Allegro spiritoso.
She said, quite rightly, that my tempo marking of ♩ = 150 was too fast. Then how about ♩ = 125? She did a brilliant job and I realized that in a few places I just hadn’t calculated the relationship between quadruple stops and tempo.
I have slightly revised this piece for Rita Torrance by thinning out some of the quadruple stops, but now I have no way to compare how the original musicians handled this particular task. And maybe I’ll redo the piece again, but unlike Anton Bruckner, I’m unlikely to come up with something that’s clearly related to the original, but also wildly and hilariously different.
Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 in A major, partly performed by Wilhelm Jahn and later entirely by Gustav Mahler, also challenged its original performers. Quadruple stops were not the problem, Bruckner almost never used them (although well-meaning interlopers inserted a few into some inauthentic versions of his symphonies).
Rather, the problem was the rhythm. Jan omitted the opening Majestoso and the finale, thereby circumventing some dilemmas for the conductor, such as this rather typical passage in rehearsal letter A, very near the beginning:
How should the conductor conduct the violins playing triplet quarter notes in the marked bar while conducting the violas, cellos, and basses playing triplet eighth notes in that same bar?
Violas and cellos playing these double As and E stops are no problem. Each player simply parks a major second on the G- and D-strings of their instrument, and the bow does the work of articulating the rhythm.
Bruckner wisely omits the E from the bass part, because although the open A and the stopped E are easy to pick up, it is the A that needs the extra low-register support, not the E. Indeed, we can delete all the double stops and this music it would still be too difficult for a public orchestra, mainly because of the rhythm.
Not that community orchestras care too much about Bruckner, or at all, anyway. It really calls for a professional orchestra like the BBC Philharmonic, conducted here by Juanjo Mena.
lol They clap after every move.
I wanted to include a performance led by a female conductor, Simone Young, but the video I found on YouTube may not be properly licensed. I am providing a link, but I make no promises if 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 non-authentic 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 didn’t feel the need to improve it? Even in the second version of the Eighth Symphony, the deviations from the original version hardly met the criticism of his contemporaries.
Bruckner revised when he knew he could do better, and that just wasn’t the case with the Sixth Symphony. With the Sixth, then, the problem for musicians is not 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 newer and more accurate Cohrs edition was made by the Youth Orchestra of Upper Austria, and they manage to achieve a total length of about ten minutes longer than most recordings.
I find it difficult 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 liked, unlike his Symphony No. 3 in G minor, or indeed any of Bruckner’s symphonies. I read somewhere that Roussel’s Fourth is an example of “everything sensible in French music”. I urge you to look for this music on your favorite music streaming service.
Bruckner is said to have been greatly inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He certainly also knew Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, and proof of this is his own Sixth in the same key.
Beethoven’s Seventh Movement is today better known for his Allegretto in A minor. Here is a performance of the entire symphony conducted by Andres Orozco-Estrada.
Perhaps Bruckner fell asleep one night thinking about the pounding rhythm of the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh and woke up the next morning with an idea of how to begin his Sixth Symphony. Restrained 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.” The progression of this symphony from A major to A minor informs a similar progression from A major to A minor in my String Quartet.
I’m not embedding Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s excellent performance, but rather linking to it, just because it can be confusing to have two embedded videos of the same conductor with the same orchestra almost back-to-back.
Looking further into Clara Schumann’s Soirées Musicales, I notice that the opening toccatina in A minor has a large central section in A major that is notated with an explicit pitch change of three sharps and exits with three naturals.
The question in the open thread: What is your favorite music in A major?
