Brahms and Webern and Passacaglias! Oh My!

Anton Webern

Johannes Brahms

November 7th, 2015 8 pm.

OKLAHOMA CITY UNIVERSITY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA--PETREE
free and open to the public!
     Listening for intertwining lines of music is going to be a big factor in understanding what is going on in the music on Oklahoma City University's second concert of the season which will be held on Saturday, November 7, 2015 in Petree Recital Hall inside the Wanda L. Bass School of Music on the Oklahoma City University Campus at 8 pm.  Orchestral music can be quite entrancing, particularly when it is written by master composers such as Johannes Brahms and Anton Webern.  There will be program notes tonight at the concert so I don't want to steal the annotator's thunder by writing TOO much about the history behind the actual pieces on the concert, but I do think some things are worth mentioning. You will hear Johannes Brahms's Fourth Symphony and Anton Webern's Passacaglia for Orchestra, Opus 1.  Most people understand that a symphony usually has four movements and that often there will be certain musical thoughts and ideas that link those four movements into one complete thought in one way or another.  The word Passacaglia, however, is somewhat more mystifying and so it might prove helpful to know that this is a name for a seventeenth-century dance that is in triple meter that has a distinctive feature.  Passacaglia's were a dance that included a continuously repeated bass line throughout the work. Usually the higher-sounding voices in the composition show off the composer's ingenuity and creativity by displaying how many different melodies he can weave in and around and through that continuously repeated bass line.  In one sense the listener isn't supposed to fixate just on the bass line, the listener is instead supposed to be mesmerized by all the amazing ways the composer can make the same bass pattern performed over and over again sound completely different each time it returns. 

     What is remarkable about tonight's concert is that the musical form of a Passacaglia unites both pieces on the program.  Webern's Passacaglia starts so quietly that you might think of it as a musical whisper.  Instead of being just a bass line, the beginning of this work is written for flute, harp, violas and cellos and all of the instruments are told to play as quietly as possible.  The whole work is shaped like an arch that speeds up and grows louder until a middle point and then calms and relaxes back to conclude as it began, into a whispering silence.  You hear the repeated eighth note bass pattern twenty three times, but it often completely disappears into the orchestral sound.  You might ask yourself how Brahms's symphony could be related to a passacaglia. Barely 20 years separate these two works, Webern wrote his Passacaglia in 1908 and Brahms wrote his symphony in 1885.  Webern undoubtedly knew Brahms's work because the two composers lived in the same city, Vienna, and Brahms's music was quite famous when Webern was growing up.  How could Brahms have influenced Webern?  Well, you see, Brahms was an avid music historian.  He loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and he was very intrigued with the idea of incorporating ancient styles and forms into his own compositions.  One way he decided to do this was to use the theme from Bach's Cantata No. 150 as the bass line of the passacaglia he implants into the final movement of his Fourth Symphony.  As you listen to this final movement, you'll hear that theme repeated over and over something like thirty separate times.  The ever changing, intertwining upper lines that are performed above that bass line drives forward with a sense of gradually accumulating power until when your ears arrive at the concluding pages of the Symphony every single moment seems to be relentlessly charged with defiance and bristling with a magnificent, culminating, dramatic intensity.  Both passacaglias should be exceptional tonight, come and hear how two master composers take the same general idea and make two totally different yet equally fascinating works come to life!