Saturday 5 December 2015

Illustration:  The final movement of R. V. Williams' 6th symphony displayed as an audio file.

Composer's toolbox: shades of grey.

In photography, painting, and other visual arts, middle gray or middle grey is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale.
Wikipedia

For composers contrast is the life blood of their music, there is no difficulty in pairing musical devices and articulations, f and p, staccato and legato, tranquillo and furioso.  Going back many years to listening to Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony for the first time I remember thinking about the contrasts as the music played, when I heard the third movement pizzicato opening I was captivated by the pp sound and then stunned by the changes of texture that follow all preparing for the even greater surprise with the full orchestral opening of the fourth movement. 
There is a satisfaction in contrast, and in extremes.  It doesn't surprise me that in modern art we have a blank, white canvas and a black canvas;
Robert Rauschenberg:

Ad Renhardt

I am not going to enter the discussion on the shades of black, having had several lengthy discussions on tone in weaving with Mrs. H, but to say the matter is complex is an understatement. The artist Gerhard Richter helped clarify the direction of the discussion between my wife and myself before completing this blog, he writes:

‘Grey is the epitome of non-statement…it does not trigger off feelings or associations, it is actually neither visible nor invisible... Like no other colour it is suitable for illustrating ‘nothing’.

To avoid getting into cyclic arguments about tone and colour it may be more useful to use the term intensity, there is for example a probably that some agreement can be found in the idea that music can ‘sparkle’, a feature which can be related to the intensity of sound and touch; the delicate use of a triangle or staccato arpeggio as in Holst's "Mercury"

and Liszt's “Les jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este”.


With ‘grey’ we are discussing a midpoint of emotions, black and white becomes the ultimate contrast, like the chessboard a venue for drama conflict, war, grey is nihilism and loss. On Adobe Photoshop software there is a tool to work with contrast, and anybody who has played with this feature knows that life can be drained out of an image by its use. Black and white photography has the power to raise a portrait of a person to high art because it plays on shadows, heightens lines and emphasises pattern, so releasing the tension between the two extremes would be counter-intuitive, (and for that reason a challenge).

In the musical world the reduction of contrast also decreases the emotive impact of the composition, but wasn’t emotive impact was the concern of the 19th century? When Satie decided to write music that negated tensions and contrasts there was a full red-blooded rebellion, and this is one reason why many regard him as the father of the avant-garde. 

Let us examine the associations with grey; indecision, a psychological state of numbness, loss, inactivity, there are two outstanding reasons in the 20th century why such psychological states should interest the musician and artist, wars. R. V. Williams presents us with a succession of symphonies that deal with contrast, viz. peace and war, rural and urban, tension and relaxation.  In the last movement of the sixth symphony R.V. W. produces music that takes us to a barren place, the grey mid-ground with which this article is concerned.  The theme could be examined in a number of ways, I hear it as being built from an oscillation of E minor and F minor 7, the music is locked into the swaying motion between the chords and never escapes.  Entrances of voices are controlled so that the music is near seamless and the contrapuntal nature of the music only enhances that characteristic. 

There are changes; in nine and a half minutes of music one would expect that.  The brass at figure 4 plays with the two chord idea moving from F7 to E9 producing a texture that wouldn’t be out of place in previous symphonies, but here context is all, and it produces little more than a glimpse of an outline in a dense fog.  Other notable orchestral colours are the string tremolos and harp harmonics at fig. 8 and towards the close of the movement the bass clarinet almost offers a respite particularly as it progresses through string oscillations to the oboe solo, but there is no break in the spell.  The music closes on two chords with A’, D’, G moving to B, E, G (in effect E flat major to E minor and not in root position).  An oscillation like this could go on forever; it is a written “fade out”.  

The musical concept is not difficult to understand and David Cox’s description in The Symphony that it is “one of strangest journeys ever undertaken in music” is justifiable but needs taking with a pinch of salt. I find the comparison he makes between this movement and Holst’s “Saturn” more puzzling, there is a periodic phrasing in Saturn that puts the two movements poles apart, perhaps it is the oscillating chords that makes a connection between the two in his mind.
The opening movement of Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste” makes for a far better comparison in all respects, counterpoint, the merging of orchestral colour, the dynamic range is of course wider as may be seen from the audio clipping shown below.  To play both movements side by side is a revelation and shows two great minds exploring a similar musical preoccupation.



To conclude this short exploration of grey I have to refer to the landscape I grew up in here in Wales, one might consider it to be a land of green and brown, but in reality the castles, the slate, the sea and very often the skies are grey, perhaps that is why I appreciate landscapes which feature the alteration of fine detail.

1 comment:

  1. I remember vividly listening to the first performance of this symphony on the radio (or wireless as they called it then) and as a teenager it made a deep impression on me. You say in your comment made on your facebook entry just now that apparently RVW had difficulty in persuading the orchestra to play it as he wanted it - completely flat, and it needs to be in order to make its impact. I also remember that at that time I had access to a church organ, and I found that one could get a reasonable approximation to this flatness on the organ - no p's, no f's. Just notes. On a DAW, of course, the flat sound is the easiest to attain but usually not wanted, so that I have to spend time articulating what I write to bring it to life. Without that, the sound is either flat or wooden (interesting distinction there). But I must try entering a page from RVW,s last movement into the computer, as see exactly how it sounds.

    Dr. Williams ( I note that you omit the Vaughan,which I have always assumed was a publicity man's idea) wrote his symphony round about 1946, and like a lot of critics at the time I have always assumed that it his response to the atom bomb. I think he denied it himself, but one shouldnt take too much notice of that.

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