Musical angst

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And you're right about Stravinsky, too - I hadn't noticed his name included in the OP.

In fact - Berlioz? There are instances when he portrays dread ... but expressing it? His sense of irony precludes this, doesn't it?

[Richard Barrett]

Tom Service, in his description of the 5th in a Guardian Article stated: They're notes that are so familiar that we don't even hear them properly today.

As so often: who is this "we"? Some of "us" - not the "professionals", I hasten to add - are quite capable of hearing all kinds of ambiguities in the opening of that symphony. It's the complexity and inexpressibility (in words) of its poetic impact that makes it so compelling across the centuries. You can project any emotional response of your own on to it without any of them being wrong or precisely right. When music is deeply affecting, that happens through the activation of something within the listener(s), not because of some substance poured into it by the composer which the listener then imbibes.

[Petrushka]

I was using the "feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general" sense, as used in the link Dave gave in #3..

If you want a musical portrayal of a 'feeling of deep anxiety or dread' then Shostakovich has many examples, but especially in the first movement of the 11th Symphony. The same feeling is there in Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, too. The OP asked for an English equivalent and I'd say it's there in RVW 6 and in much of Malcolm Arnold, particularly the 9th Symphony.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If you want a musical portrayal of a 'feeling of deep anxiety or dread'

I'm not sure that I do, Pet - I get enough of that at home! I'd agree that the sustained subduedness (?!) in the opening pages of the Shostakovich 11th, and Bluebeard is there, and creates an sense of anticipation ("this is going to change - but when?") akin to foreboding - and at the start of Debussy's Pelleas & Melisande, and in many passages of Tapiola, too. It's a similar use of suspense to create heightened foreboding that Hitchcock used in many of his films (helped by Hermann's Music): a man walking around a building isn't particularly interesting - but the use of familiar imagery and unfamiliar camera angles to set up the feeling of something rather unpleasant behind one of the doors (but which one?) creates the tension.

The OP asked for an English equivalent and I'd say it's there in RVW 6 and in much of Malcolm Arnold, particularly the 9th Symphony.

I'd say that, too.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But, on reflection, perhaps that isn't how I'd normally explain "angst" - I probably think of something more "Expressionistic", such as the Funeral March from Webern's Op 6 Orchestral Pieces, or Lulu .... or the opening of the Finale of RVW's London Symphony; the cry of despair has to be there, too, not just the "dread"?

[vinteuil]

.

And Stravinsky? Even less, surely. "I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence."

... many thanks for that Stravinsky quote - it's nice to find so clearly expressed what has long been my inarticulate thinking on the subject!

.

[ahinton]

Richard is right to commend calling into question what's meant by "angst", especially in this context; his examples of Pettersson and Schönberg's Erwartung seem to be to be very much in tune with what I imagine most people would think of as "angst" in music, even though Schönberg enters this world from time to time whereas Pettersson does so with considerable frequency. I've never been taken with Stravinsky's famous observation about "expression" in music, preferring the claim from whoever it was that said that "music can express everything but name nothing", which seems to allow more room for the obvious fact that no two listeners will respond identically to any music.

Examples of "angst" in Elgar? Perhaps the third movements of his second and third symphonies as well as those mentioned above although it's not something that I would be especially minded to associate with Elgar's work. As to other English examples, RVW symphonies 6 & 9, Arnold symphonies 7 & 9 (and passages elsewhere in his later symphonies, parts of Simpson's 9th and Rubbra's first symphonies and Brian's first two? I'm sure that there must be others but I'll leave that to others to identify...

[MrGongGong]

Quite possibly the only life-forms who now really hear the ambiguities in the opening of Beethoven's 1808 symphony are infants or extra-terrestrials

REALLY ? I think you might find that there are millions of people for whom this has no familiarity whatsoever

As so often: who is this "we"? Some of "us" - not the "professionals", I hasten to add - are quite capable of hearing all kinds of ambiguities in the opening of that symphony. It's the complexity and inexpressibility (in words) of its poetic impact that makes it so compelling across the centuries. You can project any emotional response of your own on to it without any of them being wrong or precisely right. When music is deeply affecting, that happens through the activation of something within the listener(s), not because of some substance poured into it by the composer which the listener then imbibes.

[LMcD]

REALLY ? I think you might find that there are millions of people for whom this has no familiarity whatsoever

What about the 1st movement of Walton's 1st symphony?

[Quarky]

REALLY ? I think you might find that there are millions of people for whom this has no familiarity whatsoever

Don't really understand your comment. Obviously there are millions if not billions having no familiarity at all with the 5th. Or is it that millions have no difficulty in overcoming the "over-familiarity" issue?

Anyhow, they were Tom Service's words from a Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/music/to...ce#maincontent

This article was clearly aimed at the average Guardian reader, not music professionals. I quoted it because it seemed apt to my situation, not having listened to Beethoven for a long time.

Tom Service's thoughts are fine in print; it's just when he broadcasts the same over the radio that I find them difficult to swallow!

But Tom may not have been entirely correct in his quote from Hoffman. What Hoffman actually said in respect of the 5th was: Nothing could be simpler
than the two-measure main idea of the first Allegro, which, in unison at first, does not even define the key for the listener. The character of apprehensive, restless longing
contained in this movement is made even plainer by the melodious subsidiary theme. https://www.cengage.com/music/book_c...W_Hoffmann.pdf

[LMcD]

Don't really understand your comment. Obviously there are millions if not billions having no familiarity at all with the 5th. Or is it that millions have no difficulty in overcoming the "over-familiarity" issue?

Anyhow, they were Tom Service's words from a Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/music/to...ce#maincontent

This article was clearly aimed at the average Guardian reader, not musical professionals. I quoted it because it seemed apt to my situation, not having listened to Beethoven for a long time.

Tom Service's thoughts are fine in print; it's just when he broadcasts the same over the radio that I find it difficult to swallow!

I very often find them difficult to hear, let alone swallow.

[jayne lee wilson]

Angst is self-evidently in the ear, mind and heart of the beholder....a species of dread, of the present or the imminent, a yearning after the unreachable....
It can flash across the music as the briefest visitation, or saturate entire movements, or rest with you, uneasily, as a final mood....
You may feel it as a pent-up energy, longing for release...

For me the VW 3rd is shot through with it, and the Romanza of his 5th, never mind the more obvious examples.
What about "postwar", the 21st C?

Birtwistle (titles like Nights Black Bird give you a good hint...), Max Davies (especially the 60s masterpieces like Worldes Blis and the 2nd Taverner Fantasia....
Alistair Hinton's String Quintet...
Robert Simpson, Colin Matthews (Cortège etc)....David Matthews 2nd and 6th Symphonies....

Just to name the better known....

***
I feel it keenly myself, frequently, but especially in early January.... then Spring arrives as the absolution, the beneficence, the Balm of the Gods....

[Richard Barrett]

....David Matthews 2nd and 6th Symphonies....

Even thinking about them fills me with dread!

[Serial_Apologist]

What Hoffman actually said in respect of the 5th was: Nothing could be simpler
than the two-measure main idea of the first Allegro, which, in unison at first, does not even define the key for the listener. The character of apprehensive, restless longing
contained in this movement is made even plainer by the melodious subsidiary theme. https://www.cengage.com/music/book_c...W_Hoffmann.pdf

For me, in his "absolute" (ie wordless) music Beethoven transcribes vocal utterance more explicitly than almost any other classical composer I can think of, with the exception of Janacek. That opening four-note statement of the Fifth Symphony says to me: "Listen to me!". It then goes on to hammer home the point he wishes to make, whatever general point that is - Beethoven seems damn certain he is right about it, and is in no state of anxiety; then comes that second subject, in which he seems to be rolling back a bit on that opening assertion, as if to say, in that eight-note melodic phrase, "Well let's say I didn't mean that". Then of course he has third thoughts, questioning his own questioning in terms of the four-note motif, and taking most of the remainder of the movement - and returning to it subsequently, having taken time out for the slow movement.

But Beethoven wouldn't have been thinking in English now, would he! Richard is of course right - Beethoven offers one a multitude of possible options for deciding what he "really means".

While Ahinton has cited examples of what I would have thought of as passages of anxiety in music, my view would probably be that they don't express themselves primarily through melodic utterance, but, rather, epigrammatically, sudden gnawing sensations of chill that won't easily go away; and this is why those who owed or owe so much to Expressionism put them across most powerfully. I think there are many passages of Bartok besides "Bluebeard" that evoke that mood - the slow second and related fourth movements of the Fifth Quartet with that three note motif "Da DAHHH da" enswirled in agitation, the slow movement of the Divertimento, the climaxes of the first and third movement of the Concerto for Orchestra. Bartok seems to have been particularly good at expressing that sense of anxiety one sees in those eyes in many of the photographs taken of him throughout his life; he seems to have bequeathed methodologies to the Polish modernists of the late 1950s and 60s, adapting quite traditional means to drastic ends, uses of fugato, clustered sonorities that tighten, tremolando strings etc. How about Penderecki?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

the two-measure main idea of the first Allegro, which, in unison at first, does not even define the key for the listener.

I didn't know that Hoffmann had said that - but it touches on something that's interested me since I first prepared the work for a group of "A"-level Music Students 30-odd years ago: why don't I hear those opening bars in Eb Major? I think it's clear that Beethoven wanted to present a similar sort of Tonal ambiguity that he'd also explored at the start of the First Symphony (which elusively defines the home key of C major, by initially avoiding it) and of the Third (where the C# during the opening tonic Eb major harmony gives a fleeting sense of a sustained dominant 7th chord in Ab major, only to whip it away immediately). In any other context, the opening bars of the Fifth would sound like an incomplete Ic - V - I cadence in Eb major, and I'm pretty sure that he wanted his attentive listeners to feel this tonal ambiguity at the start (I made an arrangement of the opening bars in Eb major with a Schubertesque right-hand accompaniment to make the tonal ambiguity clearer).

But, try as I might, I cannot "map" Eb major onto the opening gesture - the work has become so well-known, with the subsequent, very clearly c minor, Music so imprinted on my memory that I cannot hear the tonal ambiguity, even though I'm conscious of its (probably) intended presence. It's like Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde - Stevenson intended the story to be a "mystery" - what is the relationship between the (apparently) two men; what is Hyde's hold over Jeckyll - solved only in the final pages. But. of course, the story has entered into the culture so solidly, that it's become a "horror/sci-fi" story - the solution known even to children who've never read the book, nor seen a film adaptation. There is no mystery any more: I cannot "un-remember" the solution of the mystery as I read the earlier chapters - and I never have been able to. (There a similar case with Dracula, which starts with a chapter which reads like a travel story - the nature of Dracula is revealed as a surprise to its first readers; a surprise that cannot be for modern readers, because images of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee have become a fixed feature of the culture.)

So far, so agreeing with Tom Service. But I don't think (of course, I cannot know this) I would ever have shared Hoffmann's feeling of "apprehensive, restless longing", even if by some freak of fate I had never heard the work before ... I ... erm ... heard it for the first time (clumsy: if I'd heard it for the very first time in my 20s is the sort of thing I mean) - any more than the opening of the First or Third Symphonies, with their similar playing with Tonal ambiguity, evoke such feelings. The second group melody doesn't feel at all "apprehensive" to me - it is the momentary period of respite that makes the return of the "driven" Music all the more effective - as well as making clear how the Symphony will ultimately tidy up the Tonal ambivalence of the opening.