Edmund Campion
Hold that Thought
Edmund J. Campion was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1957and lives in Berkeley, California. He composed Hold That Thought for the symphony orchestra of the University of California, Berkeley, and its director David Milnes, who conducted the premiere with the Guanajuato Symphony Orchestra in 2005. The score calls for six first violins, six second violins, four violas, six cellos, double bass, and synthesizer. Duration is about 10 minutes.

Hold That Thought (2004) is scored for string orchestra and real-time computer generated electronics. While explorations in electronic music have been going on for over a century, relatively little repertoire has been developed in the area of orchestra combined with electronics. It has always been difficult to conceive of a proper role for computer generated sound within the orchestra and even more difficult to imagine a performance practice for electronics that mirrors the high standards of musical engagement expected of the orchestral musician. 

Today’s technology offers a new chance to merge electronic sound with acoustic sound. In Hold That Thought, a keyboardist controls a real-time, computer-based synthesis engine designed by Professor David Wessel at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, UC Berkeley. The synthesis engine generates sound based on analytical models closely linked to the physics of string instruments. The goal is to create a fusion of elements between the two distinct worlds, sound from loudspeakers, and sound from the acoustic instruments. The purpose is to expand the sonic possibility and expressive potential of the ensemble—an idea fundamental to the historical development of the orchestra from Haydn to Mahler.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major for Horn and Orchestra, K. 417
Joannes Chrisostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began to call himself Wolfgango Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756 and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He apparently completed this horn concerto on May27, 1783, but we know nothing of its performance history. In addition to the solo horn, the score calls for oboes and horns in pairs, and an ad lib. bassoon, plus strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.

Mozart wrote all of his horn concertos for one extraordinary player, Joseph Leutgeb, who became first horn in the orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1770, when Wolfgang was fourteen. Leutgeb himself was about twenty-five then, and already remarkable for his technical skill on the instrument. Perhaps one sign of his virtuosity is the fact that he traveled to Paris soon after his Salzburg appointment, where he played in several performances with the Concert Spirituel, which included horn concertos that he himself had composed. It was very unlikely for “mere” orchestra players in service to a patron to travel on their own, so we can perhaps assume that the Archbishop allowed him to go to Paris because of the credit that would redound to him from having so wonderful a player in his service.

Leutgeb demonstrated in Paris his great skill with the new technique of “hand-stopping” the horn. Indeed, he was the first hornist there to play a concerto using this technique. Hand-stopping offered a way of playing more pitches than the natural instrument could sound by lip-blowing alone. The insertion of the right hand into the bell of the instrument lowered the pitch slightly. A skilled player could adjust certain pitches that were not naturally in tune because of the nature of the overtone series that produced the instrument’s sound, and could also play pitches that were not otherwise available at all in that day of valveless natural horns. The press responded to his playing with enthusiasm: he could make his horn “sing an adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting, and accurate voice.”

In 1777 Leutgeb moved to Vienna, apparently because he had inherited a cheese shop there. And it was in Vienna that Mozart continued their close friendship until his death. We know that Wolfgang composed the horn concertos K. 417, 447, and 495 for Leutgeb, as well as a number of smaller pieces and works that survive in fragments.

Oddly enough, we know nothing about first performances of any of them, which is surprising in view of the player’s renown and the fact that Mozart was also enjoying substantial success during the period in which they were composed. The second concerto’s original manuscript bears the joking inscription, “Wolfgang Amadé Mozart took pity on Leutgeb, donkey, ox, and simpleton, at Vienna 27 May 1783.”

For all of his wonderful originality, Mozart was never above learning from others. As a boy, of course, he had been a great sponge, soaking up musical experiences from all of his travels and transmuting them into something wonderfully personal. But even as an adult he studied and listened to other music, often taking from it lessons that he applied in his own pieces. In the case of the horn concertos, he seems to have studied the works of Antonio Rosetti (1750-1792), taking it as a model in terms of the proportions of the movements, the divisions between solo and tutti passages, and the lavish application of stopped tones in the solo part.

Mozart was certainly aware of the fact that his soloist would need points at which to rest, both to catch his breath and to relax his lip muscles, which produce the tone in his instrument. The play between orchestra and soloist is as rich here as it is in some of the piano concertos that he was starting to turn out in such abundance. At the same time, the movement is very compact. A horn soloist does not have the stamina of a pianist—the lips wear out faster than the fingers— and the composer knows his physical limitations, even as he makes extensive demands on his technique and musicianship. The orchestra’s opening ritornello provides a brief summary of a sonata form concerto exposition in just twenty-four measures. The soloist is allowed to extend the first subject and decorates the violins’ simpler line with leaps, “sighs,” and runs. The development of the thematic material moves through rather surprising keys, which required the soloist to be fully confident in his right hand technique to get the chromatic stopped notes in tune, while they lend a wonderful poetic quality to the passage. A series of modulations brings us back to the home key, where the orchestra leads the way in bringing back the opening material (again giving the soloist’s lips a brief rest.. For the rest, the horn and the orchestra are closely integrated in reinterpreting what we have heard.

The slow movement, in B-flat, has a gentle 3/8 lilt unfolding a dialogue between the first violins and the solo horn.

The finales of the horn concertos are all in 6/8 time, and this gives Mozart the opportunity to evoke the horn as an outdoor instrument for signaling, whether it is the call of the posthorn in his carriage, bringing the mail from one end of the empire to the other, or the vigorous calls of the hunt. The first tune returns several times as a rondo, alternating with other melodies that hint at the world of folk music but make demands far beyond the ability of a rustic huntsman to sound. Thus the concerto comes to its joyous end in the healthy open air.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Opus 64
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He began his Fifth Symphony in May 1888 and completed it on August 26. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St. Petersburg on November 26, 1888. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, three timpani, and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes.

By 1888, when Tchaikovsky composed the Fifth Symphony, he was far from being the hypersensitive artist—virtually a neurotic cripple—of popular accounts. To be sure, he had gone through a major emotional crisis ten years earlier, brought on by his ill-advised, catastrophic marriage (undertaken partly in an attempt to “overcome” his homosexuality) and a series of artistic setbacks. His own brother Modest described the Tchaikovsky of 1878 as “nervous and misanthropic,” but declared that he “seemed a new man” by 1885. The masterly achievement of the Fourth Symphony (premiered in 1878) had marked the end of the real crisis. In the decade that followed, Tchaikovsky had composed the violin concerto, the three orchestral suites, Manfred, four operas, his piano trio, and much else—hardly a sign of inability to deal with life’s pressures!

The decision to write a symphony again after ten years was an overt expression of his willingness to tackle once more the largest and most demanding musical form of his day. He began the symphony in May 1888; by the beginning of July he had finished the draft and started the orchestration, completing the full score on August 17. The premiere, which took place in St. Petersburg that November, was a success, though critics questioned whether the Fifth Symphony was of the same caliber as the Second and Fourth.

In March 1889 Tchaikovsky went to Hamburg for the German premiere. There he found Brahms staying in the same hotel and was gratified to learn that the German composer had remained an extra day in Hamburg just to hear the first rehearsal of his new work. The two composers had lunch after the rehearsal “and quite a few drinks,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest. “Neither he nor the players liked the Finale, which I also think rather horrible.” But this negative mood was soon dispelled. A week later the composer wrote, “The players by degrees came to appreciate the symphony more and more, and at the last rehearsal they gave me an ovation. The concert was also a success. Best of all—I have stopped disliking the symphony.” Later he wrote even more positively, “I have started to love it again.”

Certainly audiences have loved the symphony for nearly a century for its warmth, its color, its rich fund of melody. Tchaikovsky always wrote music with “heart,” music with an underlying emotional significance, though he was wary of revealing that meaning publicly, preferring to let the listener seek it personally. Before starting in on the composition, he planned a rough program for the first movement—but, characteristically, he kept these notes entirely private, so that the music might make its own case. Still his first ideas are highly suggestive:

Introduction. Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro (I) Murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against xxx. (II) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith???

We can find here some hint as to the composer’s ideas, his emotional condition, at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony. The mysterious “xxx” probably refers to the same thing usually discussed in his diary as “Z” or “That”—namely his homosexuality (if revealed publicly, this could have been embarrassing, or worse, for the composer). The program for the first movement and the music of the symphony as a whole suggest a somewhat philosophical acceptance of his nature, coming by the finale to the realization of some peace of mind.

The first movement opens with a motto theme that might be identified with “Providence,” if only because it is somewhat less assertive than the “Fate” theme of the Fourth Symphony. The motto features a dotted rhythmic figure in the clarinet, supported by harmonies suggesting gentle resignation. This idea recurs, in some form or other, in each of the symphony’s four movements. The somber tread of this introduction yields to a syncopated little tune in the clarinets and bassoons, answered by variants of the same material and sudden fortissimo outbursts. At a moment of sudden quiet, a new theme rises expressively in the strings (with a delicate answer in the woodwinds), to be repeated with the instrumentation reversed. Using Tchaikovsky’s preliminary plan as a guide, we might identify the “murmurs,” the “reproaches,” the” embrace of faith” in the various sections; but though Tchaikovsky insisted on the expressive character of his work, it is equally misleading to try to read too much beyond a certain emotional quality into a movement or a phrase. What, for instance, of the intense soaring theme that is yet to come? After these themes have been developed and restated, the movement dies away in a subdued march, still retaining a degree of tension as it fades away into silence.

The second movement contains one of the most famous instrumental solos ever written, an ardent song for the horn, with an important pendant for oboe. The opening is marked by emotional intensity, calling for subtle adjustments to the tempo every few measures. The contrasting middle section seems more objective at first, but it soon builds to a feverish climax dramatically interrupted by the motto theme blared out by the full orchestra. The strings softly sing the horn’s melody with the oboe’s gentle countermelody. Gradually this theme builds to another climax and seems to be dying away, when the motto theme bursts in again, pounding all to silence and allowing only a few broken phrases, devoid of energy, to bring the movement to a close. By this point, the motto suggests more precisely “Fate” than “Providence.”

Traditionally the third movement of a symphony is in some sort of dance meter, usually in triple time, but few composers have written a full-scale waltz at this point, and even fewer have managed one of such grace and breadth. A gossamer thread of staccato sixteenth-note figures runs through the middle section deftly supported by the remainder of the orchestra. Its momentum carries it on as an accompanying figure under the first return of the waltz theme in the oboes. The full waltz is heard again (in new scoring), only to be undercut at the end by a hushed reminder of the motto theme in clarinets and bassoons.

Tchaikovsky was at best ambivalent about his finale, and others have pointed out its prime weakness: we have heard the motto theme throughout the symphony: Having just heard a reminder of it, understated and threatening, at the end of the waltz movement, we suddenly encounter the motto at the opening of the finale firmly in E major, as if the earlier minor mode had simply been an accident. There is no hard-won battle of major over minor here, as in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (the evident model for this symphony). The victory seems too easily won. Fortunately, the motto and its development soon give way to the main formal structure of the movement (sonata form again), with a vigorous E-minor chordal theme in the strings and a broader melody in the woodwinds.

Following the recapitulation, the rhythm of the motto builds a massive climax and a grand pause. Now the motto appears in a grand apotheosis of marching chords and swirling woodwind figures with a rich counterpoint in the brass instruments. A presto section is built of thematic materials from earlier in the finale, while the last strain of the coda is a new statement of what had been a nervously syncopated little tune early in the first movement, now ringing out with the most glorious assurance as a majestic trumpet fanfare in the major key—a triumph of sorts, if only by overstatement. The doubts and tensions of the earlier movements have been overcome by putting on a bold front, and there is no question that it has all been bravely done.

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