Hmm. I wrote a lot of words about me, and not many about Shostakovich, which you can read below—highlight the white text—if you're curious. But this is a thread about favourite Shostakovich works, not things you dislike about Shostakovich works, so I should probably not be dominating the discussion here. I would appreciate any discussion people may wish to have about music they do enjoy and what makes them enjoy it. Constantly going on about the opposite (in between bouts of nerding out about music theory) just serves to make me look like a crazy old cat lady shaking her fist at all these damn kids on her lawn. Which is somewhat misleading. I'm not that old.
Every composer has their formulae, and they can be used more or less effectively. I think I'm always looking for such patterns and trying to figure out how they work—just a brain thing I guess. The music of Mozart, for instance, is also quite formulaic, and phrases and passagework and themes could easily be transferred between his less inspired works with no loss of coherence, but he can and does use those formulae quite effectively. I don't think any sane person would doubt that Mozart is a great composer.
Your comparison to film and programme music is spot on I think—I would also add the 5th, 10th and 12th symphonies and some of the quartets. That sort of overt expressiveness/unsubtlety/whatever one wishes to call it is definitely the thing that makes his music so readily accessible and also made him so good at writing backdrops for film, ballet and so forth. I don't think there is such a great difference between e.g. the 7th symphony and the 7th quartet, for instance, in that regard—the symphony may have an epic tragic-heroic quality, whereas the string quartet has more of a nocturnal chill-wind quality, but they both have these sorts of hermeneutical qualities that an average listener can identify with ease, something that can't be said of e.g. Webern's equally expressive but more ambiguous and introverted Pieces for Orchestra Op. 10. At the same time, he's clearly trying to write non-programmatic, abstract music which works on multiple levels—this sort of programmatic appeal to the "average listener" and then deeper musical substance for the connoisseurs. Or at least, we are trying to find deeper musical substance in his works, whether or not he actually intended for it to be there. And for me... I'm not sure. I think he often falls short.
This is an extreme example of the sort of composition practices I'm talking about, but here's a pdf score of Shostakovich's 8th quartet
http://classic-online.ru/uploads/000_notes/800/753.pdf
Just looking through the score you notice that it's pretty empty. Some pages could at first glance be mistaken for something out of Ustvolskaya or Feldman. Now consider my feeling that he writes filler in order to get to the "good bits", in light of the fact that in this particular score, those "good bits" are all quotations (usually from his own music but also including at least one folk song). Look at what's in between those quotations: quite a lot of his DSCH-motive, which is fine since it's the unifying motive of the work and it's no worse than what one sees in Beethoven or Franck. But very little else. This is extremely simple music; not only in terms of structure but also in terms of content. There is rarely more than one thing happening at a time. Apart from the quotations there is only one theme and it never sees any counter-melodies or development, just restatement in different forms (with a march rhythm, with a waltz rhythm, in a fugato...). When not breaking out in these fugatos the texture is almost always a single line with chordal accompaniment. There is very little rhythmic variety—the fourth movement takes this to an extreme with long stretches containing little more than dotted minims. Et cetera.
Obviously, (a) this is an extreme example, (b) the work is programmatic (inspired by the composer's own feelings of depression and guilt) and through the means described depicts that programme very effectively, (c) it was written in three days in a flash of inspiration, and thus not revised and tinkered with much at all as compared to e.g. his following quartet which was completely rewritten at least twice.
Yet another reason I bring this quartet up is that for many listeners it is the high point of the greatest quartet cycle of the 20th century. I don't think the 8th is exceptional among the quartets except for its extremism—simple, yet effective and skillful (quasi-)programme music I think can describe all of the Shostakovich quartets except possibly the first two. ("Quasi-" because while there is usually no programme as such, the film-music-style topoi allow the music to be easily interpreted in a hermeneutic fashion; Shostakovich himself was the first to do this, initially supplying a "war symphony" style programme for the Third Quartet as an afterthought, before withdrawing it. Later on they become somewhat less accessible, though no more complex.) They are not music with many layers of expression or conflict, and not music that poses a lot of questions—e.g. in Beethoven we might question why he chose to follow the Heiliger Dankgesang with the Alla marcia, or how seriously we are intended to take the ending of Op. 95, or what happened to the discarded movements of Op. 127 etc; the only real question of that kind we ever encounter in Shostakovich is whether a work is supposed to be politically dissident or not and the answers to that usually say more about the respondent than Shostakovich's music itself. There may be a sort of emotional/intellectual thing going on—for me, the music doesn't have enough intellectual interest to sustain its emotional content.
Full disclosure: I find most "epic", "filmic" music—Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Rakhmaninov, Richard Strauss, John Adams, John Williams, etc—not to my taste so it's not necessarily just a DSCH thing. However, at least in some of those cases I can sort of understand why people get engrossed in and obsessed with particular composers; for instance a Bruckner symphony builds its epic scale and spiritual journeys on musical bedrock that's very substantial and solid. There's presumably a lot to discover on repeated listenings and the music never seems like it's aimed at the lowest common denominator. And I do like Brahms and Dvořák and Ravel and so on.
Every composer has their formulae, and they can be used more or less effectively. I think I'm always looking for such patterns and trying to figure out how they work—just a brain thing I guess. The music of Mozart, for instance, is also quite formulaic, and phrases and passagework and themes could easily be transferred between his less inspired works with no loss of coherence, but he can and does use those formulae quite effectively. I don't think any sane person would doubt that Mozart is a great composer.
Your comparison to film and programme music is spot on I think—I would also add the 5th, 10th and 12th symphonies and some of the quartets. That sort of overt expressiveness/unsubtlety/whatever one wishes to call it is definitely the thing that makes his music so readily accessible and also made him so good at writing backdrops for film, ballet and so forth. I don't think there is such a great difference between e.g. the 7th symphony and the 7th quartet, for instance, in that regard—the symphony may have an epic tragic-heroic quality, whereas the string quartet has more of a nocturnal chill-wind quality, but they both have these sorts of hermeneutical qualities that an average listener can identify with ease, something that can't be said of e.g. Webern's equally expressive but more ambiguous and introverted Pieces for Orchestra Op. 10. At the same time, he's clearly trying to write non-programmatic, abstract music which works on multiple levels—this sort of programmatic appeal to the "average listener" and then deeper musical substance for the connoisseurs. Or at least, we are trying to find deeper musical substance in his works, whether or not he actually intended for it to be there. And for me... I'm not sure. I think he often falls short.
This is an extreme example of the sort of composition practices I'm talking about, but here's a pdf score of Shostakovich's 8th quartet
http://classic-online.ru/uploads/000_notes/800/753.pdf
Just looking through the score you notice that it's pretty empty. Some pages could at first glance be mistaken for something out of Ustvolskaya or Feldman. Now consider my feeling that he writes filler in order to get to the "good bits", in light of the fact that in this particular score, those "good bits" are all quotations (usually from his own music but also including at least one folk song). Look at what's in between those quotations: quite a lot of his DSCH-motive, which is fine since it's the unifying motive of the work and it's no worse than what one sees in Beethoven or Franck. But very little else. This is extremely simple music; not only in terms of structure but also in terms of content. There is rarely more than one thing happening at a time. Apart from the quotations there is only one theme and it never sees any counter-melodies or development, just restatement in different forms (with a march rhythm, with a waltz rhythm, in a fugato...). When not breaking out in these fugatos the texture is almost always a single line with chordal accompaniment. There is very little rhythmic variety—the fourth movement takes this to an extreme with long stretches containing little more than dotted minims. Et cetera.
Obviously, (a) this is an extreme example, (b) the work is programmatic (inspired by the composer's own feelings of depression and guilt) and through the means described depicts that programme very effectively, (c) it was written in three days in a flash of inspiration, and thus not revised and tinkered with much at all as compared to e.g. his following quartet which was completely rewritten at least twice.
Yet another reason I bring this quartet up is that for many listeners it is the high point of the greatest quartet cycle of the 20th century. I don't think the 8th is exceptional among the quartets except for its extremism—simple, yet effective and skillful (quasi-)programme music I think can describe all of the Shostakovich quartets except possibly the first two. ("Quasi-" because while there is usually no programme as such, the film-music-style topoi allow the music to be easily interpreted in a hermeneutic fashion; Shostakovich himself was the first to do this, initially supplying a "war symphony" style programme for the Third Quartet as an afterthought, before withdrawing it. Later on they become somewhat less accessible, though no more complex.) They are not music with many layers of expression or conflict, and not music that poses a lot of questions—e.g. in Beethoven we might question why he chose to follow the Heiliger Dankgesang with the Alla marcia, or how seriously we are intended to take the ending of Op. 95, or what happened to the discarded movements of Op. 127 etc; the only real question of that kind we ever encounter in Shostakovich is whether a work is supposed to be politically dissident or not and the answers to that usually say more about the respondent than Shostakovich's music itself. There may be a sort of emotional/intellectual thing going on—for me, the music doesn't have enough intellectual interest to sustain its emotional content.
Full disclosure: I find most "epic", "filmic" music—Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Rakhmaninov, Richard Strauss, John Adams, John Williams, etc—not to my taste so it's not necessarily just a DSCH thing. However, at least in some of those cases I can sort of understand why people get engrossed in and obsessed with particular composers; for instance a Bruckner symphony builds its epic scale and spiritual journeys on musical bedrock that's very substantial and solid. There's presumably a lot to discover on repeated listenings and the music never seems like it's aimed at the lowest common denominator. And I do like Brahms and Dvořák and Ravel and so on.
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