Composers adapted quickly to the new conditions, new paymasters and new tastes of the second half of the eighteenth century. While Handel – whose statue greeted visitors to the Vauxhall Gardens until they closed in 1839 – felt able to submit his London theatre audiences to three hours of religious parable and uplifting spiritual instruction, as he did in his Old Testament oratorios, just twenty years later this would have been utterly out of place. Hoping to seduce an audience, his successor composers dropped the rigorous moralising and, wherever expedient, God. And this change of attitude and mood is audible in the musical style of the period, particularly within the harmony that supported melody.
Composers of J. S. Bach’s generation, as well as glorying in the satisfying chemistry generated by sequences of chords, loved to suspend notes over unfamiliar territory, to mix up chords unpredictably, to dice with dissonance, to play aural tricks on the listener. They used harmony as an additional layer of subtlety and effect, even by using discords to intensify the meaning of texts conveying suffering, loss or anguish.
By contrast, the pain suggested by dissonance – the clashing of adjacent notes – is almost entirely absent from music written between 1750 and 1800. What’s more, even very skilled composers decided there were really far too many chords available and that they needed far fewer for their purposes. Bach’s and Handel’s rich palette of chords was stripped back to just a handful. This may not be strange to modern ears – after all, dissonance is almost totally absent from the popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, too, even if there is plenty of it in ‘classical’ music of the same period. Modern listeners, on the whole, also seek pleasure rather than pain from music, and even the most aggressive of the early punk bands of the 1970s, while yelling angrily over deliberately distorted guitar, bass and drums, were nevertheless adhering to a basic diet of three or four uncomplicated chords and a melody that fitted with them harmoniously. The Sex Pistols’ songs are no more discordant than, say, ‘Lovely yet ungrateful swain’, a Vauxhall Gardens song of Johann Christian Bach.
Indeed, so refined is the music of this period, the era of elegance, that music written for modern-day commercials or film and TV scores often deliberately recalls the style of Mozart and Haydn to convey stability, comfort, class and contentment. Stevie Wonder borrowed this same, stately style in his 1976 masterpiece Songs in the Key of Life, to evoke, satirically, an idyll of charming, happy, village life as he sang of the desperation of the African-American underclass in ‘Village Ghetto Land’.
Composers of the mid- to late-eighteenth century limited themselves to a small choice of chords partly as a reaction to the harmonic style of their predecessors, but also to emphasise the primacy of the melody. The tune, they felt, should glide unencumbered across the aural landscape, without the listener being too distracted by chordal complexities lurking beneath it. There are three chords in the slimmed-down list that were used obsessively, because they were the three that most brought out the sense of ‘home’ in the sound, reinforcing the melody’s typical journey away from home and back again. Vast swathes of the music written in the sixty or so years after 1750 slavishly hung on these three master chords – the same three, as it happens, that dominate rock and roll and its various twentieth-century offspring. Just as the period’s architects designed buildings from the same limited collection of motifs and shapes, Haydn and his contemporaries were designing music from a similarly limited catalogue.
The three chords in question can be expressed as the numbers I, IV and V because they are the triads that belong to the first, fourth and fifth notes of the major or minor scale. Thus, in C major, they are the C, F and G triads. In G major, they are G, C and D, and so on. These three chords for every key-family can also be described as ‘tonic’, ‘sub-dominant’ and ‘dominant’, terms whose etymology I am not going to elaborate on because they are among the most misleading and ill-conceived of all music’s bad terminology. It suffices to know that they appear time and time again across the centuries. But why?
The reason is that, as we saw as part of ‘musical gravity’ in the last chapter, these three harmonic centres are the most inherently powerful. They are created from the most ‘natural’ ratios, even taking into account the distorting fix of Equal Temperament. They are music’s primary colours.
Two pieces from the era in question – one from 1762 and the other from 1808 – demonstrate the ubiquity of the I, IV and V chords. The first excerpt is from an opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, by Bavarian composer Christoph Gluck, a composer credited with having ‘reformed’ opera by insisting on more natural storytelling, less showing off from the singers and more natural acting, all improvements he had picked up from watching the actor David Garrick in London. Gluck was also music teacher to the Archduchess Maria Johanna, later to be Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, a keen and able musician, and by the 1750s was working in Vienna, where Orfeo ed Euridice had its first performance. Orfeo has a dance interlude that later came to be called ‘The Dance of the Blessed Spirits’. It is a charming, gentle tune that appeals precisely because of its simplicity. Looking at its score we could give each of these three governing chords a colour code: the ‘home’ chord that begins and ends the piece is chord I. (We are in the key of F, so it is the triad of F.) Whenever this chord I is the basis of the harmony (and tune) I have shaded the score light grey. Light grey is pretty powerful but there are still some areas of the map not yet conquered by its empire. Our next important chord is chord IV which I have marked with a dotted line. Now there is not a great deal of unoccupied territory left, but there is still room for chord V which I have marked with a grey line.
So between them, our three chords are all-conquering. There is hardly anything left for all the chords that aren’t part of this mighty triumvirate.
The predominance of these three chords was no passing fad. Our second comparison piece, Beethoven’s fifth symphony, completed and first performed in 1808, nearly half a century after Gluck’s Orfeo opera, sounds bigger in every respect, more ambitious and more dramatic, yet it nevertheless shows how dependent he is on those three chords. The opening of the symphony’s final movement is entirely harmonised by chords I, IV and V, and indeed the first chord we hear that isn’t one of those three is in the thirty-sixth bar, roughly forty-eight seconds into the piece.
To be fair to Beethoven, who elsewhere was delving into a far greater palette of chords by 1808, he was obliged to stick to those simple chords if he wanted to have brass instruments (horns, trombones, trumpets) and timpani (kettle drums), because these latter were only able to play a very limited number of notes that belonged to the ‘home’ chords. By the time he wrote his hefty ninth symphony, completed in 1824, technology in the form of pistons and valves had come to the rescue and provided brass instruments with a much fuller menu of notes and available keys.
But limiting themselves to a small number of chords did not mean that the composers of the second half of the eighteenth century wrote simple music. Beneath the surface of the music of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and their contemporaries lies an infrastructure every bit as sophisticated as the sacred geometry and sense of divine proportion revered by one of the most influential European movements of the age: the Freemasons. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that a large number of late-eighteenth-century composers were themselves Freemasons: Christoph Gluck was a member of the Parisian Masonic lodge Saint-Jean d’Écosse du Contrat Social, Haydn of the Viennese lodge Zur wahren Eintracht (True Unity or Concord), and Mozart joined Zur Wohltätigkeit (Beneficence) in 1784 and also attended meetings of Zur wahren Eintracht. Other notable eighteenth-century Masonic musicians included Frederick the Great of Prussia, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Hummel, Ignaz Pleyel and, in England, Johann Christian Bach, Thomas Arne, William Boyce, the Thomas Linleys (father and son) and Samuel Wesley.
Composers of the period were as fond of order and formal infrastructure as their architect contemporaries, but with no way of resurrecting the lost music of the A
ncient World they had to invent their own ways of building grand, formal structures into the foundations of their pieces. Rather than simply producing nice but random tunes with accompaniment, they framed them according to an underlying logic: every piece they composed was constructed with the help of what amounted to musical maps. An opera, naturally, could follow the route set by its story. A sacred choral work could navigate through the religious texts and order of service as ordained by the Church. (The Catholic and Lutheran mass, or Eucharist, for example, had a strict order of movements whose duration and scale was dictated by the step-by-step progress towards the congregation taking communion.) A song was servant to its lyric.
In the previous two centuries, most if not all instrumental music was either specifically for dancing or had its origin in some form of dance music, but as composers developed greater ambitions for instrumental music – for it to be listened to without dancing – they needed alternative ways of determining structure, pace, duration or changes of mood. Instrumental pieces lacking the purpose of dance to guide them were potentially formless and anarchic without some kind of map, and in an age of order and decorum, where the hierarchies of society were rigidly observed – at least until various revolutions sparked off – formless music was anathema. So it became imperative to establish design templates for instrumental music, even if the template was hidden beneath the surface of the music.
The building of these musical maps had its most sophisticated manifestation in the growth and popularity of the symphony, but the form that underpins every symphony composed between around 1750 and 1900 actually has a name inherited from a smaller-scale instrumental work: ‘Sonata Form’. I must confess I find Sonata Form a numbingly tedious subject and am not going to dwell on it. Suffice to say that its rules – state your theme, elaborate on it, state your second theme, elaborate on it, change key, elaborate more, return to where you started but in a new key-family (mostly, quelle surprise, IV or V) – were taught to every budding composer of the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as if set in stone, so it is hardly a shock to discover it was where they all tended to start their careers. It is still a significant component in the teaching of undergraduate composition.
For most modern-day music lovers, music is something mysterious, unpredictable, sensual and, above all, emotional. Some people even put music on a par with a religious experience, tapping into some other-worldly part of their conscious or unconscious existence. This is utterly different from the way craftsmen like Haydn saw their art. Haydn’s aim was the manufacturing of beauty and elegance in the material world; he was conscious that what he was doing was artifice, not a divine intervention. In order to create pleasing after-dinner entertainment for the guests of his royal employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy he was going to have to find a way of making melody and harmony appear flawlessly proportioned, to harness nature’s wild features and tame it into man-made perfection. These delightfully proportioned amusements would therefore need all the help they could get from formal blueprints like Sonata Form, and from musical versions of the balanced layouts of Capability Brown’s gardens, or Robert Adam’s buildings.
Haydn didn’t invent the symphony. He didn’t even conceive its classic shape of four movements – quite fast, slow, gentle dance in triple time, faster than before – a shape that composers were still loosely following even at the beginning of the twentieth century. But what he did do was perfect the obsession of the next two centuries: taking a small tune and manipulating it in lots of ways in order to make a unified, more substantial framework out of it.
Haydn had learnt about the symphony from pioneers like Wenzel Birck, Georg Wagenseil and Johann Stamitz, all now virtually unknown. Stamitz, who was born 120 kilometres from Prague and baptised Jan Stamic, has probably the greatest claim to being the inventor of the symphony as we know it, though posterity has largely forgotten him nonetheless. Stamic worked at the Court of the Elector Palatine in Mannheim, Germany, where he changed his name to Stamitz, and where he had access to an orchestra that was famous throughout Europe for both the unusual skill of its players and its incredible size, by the standards of the 1750s. Stamitz’s Mannheim orchestra had twenty violins, four violas, four cellos, two bass violones (the predecessor of the double-bass), two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons and four horns, as well as two clarinets (much to Mozart’s envy, when he visited in 1777, the latter being a relatively new instrument at this time). This tally of instruments, occasionally beefed up by timpani and trumpets, was the template for the classical orchestra as used by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and their contemporaries.
Stamitz’s music is at best agreeable, but he does demonstrate an important first step in the process of creating proportion from basic melodies. His mini-tunes, once stated, are immediately repeated. Whatever the peculiarities of the first mini-tune, an audible sense of ‘rightness’ emerges through the repetition. It is the musical equivalent of dropping a random blob of ink on a piece of paper: by folding the paper and creating a symmetrical double, a pleasing shape is suddenly formed. Almost everything Stamitz does is provided with a response of the same length and shape. Though it is repetitious and – I am afraid to say – increasingly annoying to listen to, this technique soon accustoms our ears to expect equal weight in a tune’s two halves. This melodic symmetry had not been a noticeable feature of the more onward-flowing, unpredictable tunes of Bach and Handel, whose phrases were so often guided by the metre of the words they set. From Stamitz and Bach’s sons onwards, though, symmetry became paramount – much as it was for late-eighteenth-century buildings.
Haydn took the Mannheim-style orchestra and the idea of proportion and balance, and went one crucial step further. His balancing phrase was not typically identical but slightly different in character, creating a symmetry without simply repeating itself. While a Stamitz mini-tune might be made up of a handful of notes, Haydn extended the phrase, testing the short-term memory of his listener, then coaxed a slightly altered or ornamented second phrase from it. The second halves of his melodic ideas may have been the same length as the first but then they might, for instance, mirror or invert the direction of travel, or continue the journey to a different resting place. A tune that gradually snaked upwards in its first half might gradually snake downwards in its second. A tune that moved from chord-base I to chord-base V in its first half would travel back from V to I in its second. Thus, out of his small but well-proportioned phrases, he cleverly constructed larger units that smoothly transformed into longer and longer chains, every part of the chain fitting neatly into the overall shape as if mathematically calculated (which they were not). Haydn taught the world, apparently effortlessly, how to organise and develop melody in such a way that a piece of fifteen or twenty minutes would sound unified.
Haydn was so adept at sculpting a tune from small beginnings that the younger Mozart and Beethoven simply copied the technique in their own way. Indeed, ‘developing’ tunes like this soon became essential for composers of orchestral music. Deconstructing and manipulating tunes, passing them between the instruments, wandering off into new key-families in search of fresh colours, and so on was what nearly all composers between 1770 and 1900 did when they wrote symphonies, with a few notable exceptions.
This was the point of a symphony; it was like an essay, or a detailed, blow-by-blow experiment. A song could simply be a nice meandering tune, plain and simple. An opera was a series of songs, linked by a plot. But symphonies were supposed to be explorations, journeys to find out what would happen if you took a clutch of short melodic ideas and elaborated on them.
The odd thing about the symphony as it blossomed in Haydn’s, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s time is that it doesn’t have any direct parallels in any other artistic field. Poems of the period were either descriptions of objects, plants, weather conditions, geographical features or emotional states, or they followed a narrative. William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, for instance, pu
blished in 1798, included Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’, both of which attached reflections on emotional states to journeys. The eighteenth century had seen the development of the novel, extended prose fiction, in which unfolding stories acted as structures to allow the exploration of a range of themes and philosophies, from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796) and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). Meandering, non-narrative prose or poetry, like musical symphonies, would not find their literary equivalents until James Joyce’s Ulysses or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, both published in 1922. Likewise, extended dance forms such as ballet didn’t become separated from storylines until the mid-twentieth century. Paintings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are still entirely figurative; Kandinsky’s first abstract painting did not emerge until 1910.
But the symphony is a peculiar thing: sixty musicians simultaneously interpreting instructions given them by one person with no narrative, no plot and no literal meaning, nor, until Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony of 1808, a description of anything. Even after the Pastoral symphony, in the mid-nineteenth-century ‘symphonic poems’ of Liszt, for example, a listener who had not been forewarned by the concert programme what was being portrayed in the music could never have guessed simply by listening to it. The symphony form’s four loosely related seven- or eight-minute sections of instrumental music at slightly different speeds, created solely for the cerebral fun of it, is a strange and unique cultural activity in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Being at odds with the other arts was not the only aspect of the symphony that dislocated music from its time. Haydn’s and Mozart’s obedient following of their favourite symphonic formula – Sonata Form – could not have come at a more disobedient junction in social and political history.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 14
