An illustrated atlas of composers · Bach to the presentWestern art music from Bach to the present, with historical recordings and the scores. The chapters cover how the harmony works, where the forms came from, what each composer took from the others, and the paintings and poems connected with the music.
The Concert Hall plays historical and openly licensed recordings, from plainchant to Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, in the order the composers were born. Short notes appear as the music reaches them, and where a score is available, the page moves with the sound. Each of the evenings below can also be played straight through without choosing individual pieces.
Each composer has a chapter. It gives the life, in the composer’s own words where they survive; what the music is made of; the works to start with; short examples to play; and the paintings and poems associated with the music. Every piece in the Hall has a page of its own, with all its recordings and all its notes.
The chapters overlap, as the periods of music do. In 1909 Rachmaninoff wrote his Third Piano Concerto for his first American tour, and Schoenberg wrote his Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, which have no home key. The Web of Influence and the Map follow the connections between composers, such as a copied score, a borrowed tune or two composers in the same city in the same year.
Where a story is legend, the text says whose legend it is. The sources are given on every page.
Each plays straight through in the Concert Hall, with the notes and, where available, the score, and stops at the end.
Bach to Ravel in seventy minutes
Bach’s aria, a Vivaldi spring and Handel’s chorus come first, followed by the opening movements of two symphonies, a Viennese winter song, a Chopin nocturne and Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The last piece is built on a single drum rhythm, played 169 times.
From Satie’s Gymnopédies to The Rite of Spring
The evening covers twenty-five years in Paris. It includes the first Gymnopédie, which Satie wrote in Montmartre, Debussy accompanying Mary Garden, the flute that opens the Faune, Ravel’s harp, the drowned cathedral, and two Stravinsky ballets that the Ballets Russes brought to Paris.
A hundred and twenty years of music in one city
Haydn’s surprise, Mozart’s G minor, the symphony Schubert never finished, the hurdy-gurdy man at the end of Winterreise, Brahms in C minor, Mahler’s Adagietto, and Schoenberg’s night walk and his step into “the air of another planet”.
Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Elgar, Ravel and Stravinsky performing their own music
Every recording here has the composer at the piano or on the podium, from Grieg in Paris in 1903 to Stravinsky in 1960. Each plays at his own tempos and departs from his own written markings where he chooses.
Slow music for late evening
Bach’s alto aria after Peter’s denial, the slow movement of Mozart’s last concerto, the adagio of Schubert’s Quintet, a Chopin nocturne, Schumann’s Träumerei, Debussy’s Clair de lune, the last page of Fauré’s Requiem and Mahler’s Adagietto.
Grieg to Elgar, 1903–1928
Musicians playing and singing into a recording horn, and from 1925 into a microphone. Grieg, Caruso, Nikisch’s Berlin Philharmonic, Paderewski, Chaliapin, de Pachmann, and Elgar conducting his own march.
Rossini to Puccini
The evening includes Figaro’s entrance in Seville; the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, which Toscanini conducted when Verdi was buried in 1901; the Habanera and the Toreador Song from Carmen; the clown’s aria associated with Caruso; and Tosca’s prayer. The orchestra plays Rossini’s overture and Wagner’s Valkyries on its own.
Dvořák in New York to Copland’s Lincoln
Dvořák wrote his Largo in New York in 1893 and told American composers to turn to their own folk songs. The evening continues with three American composers: Ives’s music on the Alcotts’ house in Concord; Gershwin’s Rhapsody in the 1924 recording by Gershwin and Paul Whiteman’s band; and Copland’s fanfare and his portrait of Lincoln, with Carl Sandburg reading Lincoln’s words.
A medieval funeral chant and its later uses
Gregorian chant · Berlioz · Liszt · Verdi · RachmaninoffOpen the journey
From Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony to Mahler’s Ninth
Haydn · Mozart · Beethoven · Brahms · Bruckner · Tchaikovsky · MahlerOpen the journey
From Satie’s first Gymnopédie to The Rite of Spring
Satie · Debussy · Ravel · StravinskyOpen the journey
Russian scores and American recordings
RachmaninoffOpen the journey
Performers on record: acoustic horn and microphone
Leoncavallo · Beethoven · Chopin · Rachmaninoff · Rimsky-KorsakovOpen the journey
Mahler, Schoenberg and the Vienna Secession
Mahler · SchoenbergOpen the journeyEach chapter opens with a painting from its own years and an account of the changes in harmony, in form and in the instruments themselves.
A harpsichordist reads a bass line and supplies the chords while a singer tells the story above it. In Vivaldi’s concertos the solo violin breaks away from the orchestra; in Bach’s fugues a tune enters in one voice after another.
A melody’s first phrase stops on an unsettled chord, and its answer comes to rest in the home key. Haydn could place a joke at the expected ending, and Mozart gave the piano a singing part among the orchestral winds. In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, three trombones enter for the first time in the last movement.
In Schubert’s Erlkönig, one singer takes the parts of a father and his terrified child while the piano plays the horse’s gallop throughout. In Berlioz’s orchestral writing a melody carries a story and returns in a grotesque version. In her piano cycle, Fanny Hensel wrote a piece for each month of the year.
In Strauss’s orchestra a solo cello plays Don Quixote, who rides at a flock of sheep he mistakes for an army. Mahler writes for eight horns and a children’s chorus, and for a brass solo played offstage.
A single flute opens Debussy’s Faune; a bell tolls through Ravel’s Le Gibet. Fauré’s songs and Satie’s slow piano dances belong to the same years, and two rival harp manufacturers commissioned new works.
Schoenberg took a soprano beyond the home key; Stravinsky had one repeated chord accented at unexpected moments. Bartók brought village songs home on phonograph cylinders, and Ives set a trumpet’s question over quiet strings. Between the wars, new music acquired its own concert societies and radio orchestras. In 1933 Schoenberg had to leave Germany.
Two pianists repeat a phrase until one moves ahead of the other. A boy’s recorded voice is multiplied through loudspeakers. After 1945 composers worked in the studio as well as at the piano and on manuscript paper. Britten set an opera in a Suffolk fishing village; Saariaho derived chords from the changing sound of a cello. In 1997 Adès wrote a piece in which a symphony orchestra plays the rhythms of a rave.
Every composer in the atlas on one axis. Bach died the year Haydn turned eighteen; Brahms heard the thirty-year-old Mahler conduct Don Giovanni in Budapest in 1890 and praised it; Rachmaninoff outlived Ravel and Mahler and died two years before Bartók.
Guido of Arezzo took a book of chants to Rome and taught a pope to sing a tune he had never heard. Six centuries later, Monteverdi gave Orpheus a song to charm the keeper of the underworld. In the centuries between, musicians learned to write rhythm down, to set a second voice against a melody and to write a bass line that left room for a player’s invention.
From the monochord to figured bassIn a Bach fugue a second voice enters while the first continues. In Ravel’s Boléro the same tune changes in character when the clarinet takes it over from the flute. Eighteen lessons examine details of this kind, using passages from real scores and short, playable examples.
Lessons from species counterpoint to spectralism