Brahms, The Postmodern.

‘There is no doubt that [He] believed in working out the ideas... Hard labor is to a trained mind, no torture, but rather a pleasure... If a mathematician’s or a chess player’s mind can perform such miracles of the brain, why should a musician’s mind not be able to do it?... A craftsman likes to be conscious of what he produces; he is proud of the ability of his hands, of the flexibility of his mind, of his subtle sense of balance, of his never-failing logic, of the multitude of variations, and last but not least of the profundity of his idea and his capacity of penetrating to the most remote consequences of [that] idea... His influence has already produced a further development of the musical language toward an unrestricted, though well-balanced presentation of musical ideas. But, curiously, the merits of his achievements will shine brighter when more and more are incorporated into the dramatic technique... It seems – if this is not wishful thinking – that some progress has already been made in this direction, some progress in the direction toward an unrestricted musical language which was inaugurated by [him](Schoenberg, 2014:108-11).’

The above account describes the closing analysis of what the author considers the prophetic prototype composer of the modernist musical aesthetic. One could be easily forgiven if by reading this passage -with its allusions to mathematics, intellectual adroitness, its positivistic euphemisms and hopeful futuristic expectations- that the author was speaking of no other than Arnold Schoenberg, who Anthropologist Georgina Born described as the central figure around which an impetus for musical modernism rose to the hegemonic supremacy for the European and American schools of academic composition that proceeded the second World War(Born, 1995: 53). But these astutely articulated words belong to Schoenberg himself; Of whom they describe is none other than that great romantic, that outcast beneath the shadow of the progressive Wagner, the erroneously classified classicist himself, Johannes Brahms.

Although this should not come as much surprise. Schoenberg found in Brahms the idea of a permuting cell that could replicate itself while simultaneously generating new material in transpositions, inversions, retrogrades, and retrograde inversions(the stuff of serialist procedures, and of course the parlance of the fugue). Indeed Brahms’ writing was entirely daring in all of the Western canon, in which the transpositions that he employed utilized contrapuntal procedures in remarkably complex ways. These intervalic considerations engendered a harmonic outgrowth that proved increasingly enigmatic from the taxonomic deciphering employed by the Roman Numeral system .

1 The diminished 7ths resolving to D and C major triads are non-functional and can be more easily understood as arising from the dialogue of invertible counterpoint at the octave. Nonetheless, Brahms introduces the A minor triad in measure 22 without preparation(from the enharmonically equivalent leading tone 7th of both A minor and C major), but with an Fs appoggiatura tone in the melody. When Brahms transfers the appoggiatura into the bass at measure 23, he sets up a predominant half-diminished 7th chord; The ear expects the Dominant 7th on E, which Brahms evades for one more measure before successfully resolving back to the a minor.1

So profound was the affluence of this axiom on modernist theory that Alan Forte, the founder of Pitch-Class Set Theory, offered no apologies or explanations when he applied PC-set theory to Brahms’ String Quartet in C minor Op. 51, no 1. To be sure, the only explanation he did offer in his introduction to ‘Motivic Design and Structural Levels in the First Movement of Brahms’ String Quartet in C Minor’ was that Schenkerian principles were inadequate for the analysis of Brahms, despite the fact that Schenker was a Brahmsian acolyte of note. Forte concludes, ‘It is not difficult to ascertain the reason for this: Brahms’ music, even when ostensibly simple, is full of complications and projects unusual structures which have no counterparts in the music of the Classical masters generally regarded as his model repertory(Forte, 1983: 471).’

Even more curious, the American composer Ludmila Ulehla, writing as late as 1994 in her text ‘Contemporary Harmony’ devotes the opening chapter to comparing classical forms, structures, and triadic functions with Brahms’ irregularities, higher-ordering of chordal structures, root-relationships and break from process of his predecessors; Brahms and Brahms alone. She places Brahms as the first in a line of modernists, stating ‘A new attitude of rhythmical design began to take shape in the melodies of Brahms... Today’s concepts of elastic, irregular rhythmic lengths is strongly influenced by the subtle departure from the powerful symmetrical shapes found in [his] works(Ulehla, 1994: 5). She ends her seminal treatise with the Twelve-Tone system, and notes the strong reliance that Schoenberg places on Classical idioms. Ironically, while we recognize the Gavottes, Musettes, Ricercars and Sonatas of the Second Viennese School as being part of the modernist’s progression toward totality, we, for the most part, reject Brahms entrance at the door of modernism on the same grounds of semblance to the classical forefathers, despite the tragically obvious fact that he was, indeed, the mason who laid the arch of that gate, brick by reverent brick.

Therefore, it might strike us as entirely bizarre that Brahms has become such a prominent emblem of the HIP movement. In many ways he represents the era that HIP retracts against. As John Butt describes it, ‘[HIP] has been a decidedly anti-modernist movement, searching for the pre-modern and rejecting many of the ‘advances’ of nineteenth-century instrumental technology(Butt, 2002: Loc 1826).’Brahms was at the center of that nineteenth-century instrumental technology, making incredible demands on his orchestra. It would take American audiences three decades to approach the music without confusion(Ledbetter, 2010). Brahms inspired in his musical progeny the very condition that Historically Informed Performance abhorred.

On the other hand, the clarity and pompous weight of Brahms’ balanced textures are irremediably destroyed by the forces of the modern orchestra employed by Strauss, Mahler, and Stravinsky, despite the acute, and overlapping historical proximity of these latter composers to Brahms. In this regard, Brahms might be considered the last of a particular era, while simultaneously being the first of the new epoch.

What makes this baleful predicament even more exacerbated is that this great repertory of music is now framed within the postmodern dialogue, and as an acting agent upon the cultural and emotional meaning of such music, the postmodern understanding sanitizes the very sense of a chronology or binary condition; past and present. As Taruskin sardonically posits, ‘Do we really want to talk about ‘authenticity’ any more? I had hoped a consensus was forming that to use the word in connection with the performance of music – and especially to define a particular style, manner, or philosophy of performance- is neither description nor critique, but commercial propaganda, the stock-in-trade of press agents and promoters(Taruskin, 1995: 90).’

All of this embedded irony and antinomy make Brahms the quintessential subject to define(or destroy) the boundaries of the HIP movement. Of course, one of the ironies embedded within the HIP movement itself is its rejection of futurism, despite the fact that its survival is dependent on the same technologies that it rejects. According to Butt, ‘[T]he development of reproductive sound technology has itself enabled HIP to enjoy immense success broadening access to forgotten repertories and allowing unstable or nearly unplayable instruments to be heard to their best(Butt, 2002: Loc 1826).’ I might add that the proliferation of information afforded by the internet, and social media access has allowed performers, instrument makers, conductors, composers, and theorists to form a conglomerate of expertise that would be virtually impossible if a sort-of HIP movement was attempted before the twentieth-century. Furthermore, we might extrapolate that the ‘nearly unplayable instruments’ are able to be ‘heard to their best’ -in a recording studio rather than in a concert hall- would suggest that new technical parameters have developed, making historical performance an irrefutable modern exercise. That is to say that even the modern built replications of the old instruments have different usages. The old instruments attempted to be something suitable to contemporary composition and their composers wrote to take advantage of their construction; The artists who yielded them sought new sounds and enjoyed new techniques that were built upon a long tradition of training. By contrast, the replicated instruments attempt to be something suitable to the antiquated practice of historical composition as it was at one time; The artists who yield them seek old sounds and erode techniques to censor technical development to a synchronic moment of history. The conductors of HIP similarly attempt to possess the conservative restraints on the mind of a progressive during a particular culturally historic moment. This amounts to little more than preparing a performance based on guessing, estimation, and parody.

HIP is hopelessly lost in its own cyclical abeyance of historicity. By the same token, it is the only attempt at historical accuracy that we may possess. It is therefore important to remember that as we explore Brahms within the confines of Historical Performance, Modernism and Postmodernism, it is Brahms – and here I mean the enterprise of the conductor, the artists, and the cultural reaction of the audience to the composer- who will just as equally influence the way that these categories are defined and employed as these categories themselves attempt to define Brahms.

As our case sample we will examine Sir Roger Norrington’s complete cycle of Brahms’ Symphonies with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR released as a complete cycle in 2011 on the Hänssler label. In a project that began in 2005, Norrington attempted the cycle for the second time, stating that he wished to get back to ‘the sound world of Brahms’ time’ by ‘applying historical values to historical orchestral playing.’ More to the point, Norrington’s original cycle used period instruments, where this new recording does not(MacDonald, 2012). Nonetheless, he remains true to his convictions about the Frenchified vibrato, and the romantic traditions of articulations and bowing. However, he doubles the forces of the orchestra. Despite this augmentation Norrington withdraws the orchestra, reducing it by half where the clearly delicate dialogues, extraordinary lyricism, the rapturous interplay of contrapuntal lines and rhythms, and the articulated demarcations of formal entries and exits -all of which lay in the ubiquitous genius of these exiting-romantic masterpieces- would be swallowed in the thick, sluggish sewage of a ponderous modern string section.

In his essay, The Sound Orchestras Make -dealing largely with the topic of vibrato-, Norrington offers convincing reasons as to why, as postmodern audience members, we should be motivated to employ what he considers the standard anatomy of orchestral sound prior to the ‘Hollywoodizing’ of the modernist orchestra from the 1930’s onward(Norrington, 2004: 4). Considerations such as transparent textures which allow the ear entry into the amalgamation of complex, interlocking sounds based on the interaction of overtones and the unification of sound; ‘You don’t find flutes and first violins vibrating while clarinets are not. Big tunes for cellos and horns are unified in sound, rather than confused by their different tone qualities(4).’ Said simply, orchestral doubling becomes a true homology of sound craft. Perhaps nuanced and more curious is that composers in the now Post-postmodern aesthetic2 are concerned with these same parameters, only a century later, and not merely as a matter of taste or interpretation, but integrated objects written into the functional

I argue for the Post-postmodern aesthetic in a separate essay ‘The Post-postmodern Aesthetic in Western Art Music As understood through a historical look through the culture and politics of the early 2000s, the post-postmodern concert hall, and the three violin concertos of Birtwistle, Adès, and Norris.’ In it, I address the curious nature of the new aesthetic shifts that take place on the culture, since the world-changing events revolving around the terrorist attacks on September 11th. One of which is that there is a return to tonal expansion(although in a highly expanded and novel way) by composers that stands strictly outside both Modernism and Postmodernism respectively.score. For instance, Kaija Saariaho, in her 1990 score à la Fumée for Orchestra instructs the horns to play Senza vibrato and gradually shift to Molto vibrato. Underneath, her string section(not pictured here) plays normal vibrato shifting to Sul Ponticello.

So prevalent is the distinctions of vibrato in her score that it is designated, beforehand, in the performance notes with abbreviations. 30 years on, however, it is now a standardized practice found in a myriad of scores including Unsuk Chin, Michael Norris, Kate Soper, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Thomas Adés, to name only a few. What needs to be taken into consideration about its use now is this; Norrington claims that he is employing an antiquarian mode of style to produce an authenticate Romantic hearing of the piece. Yet he is utilizing techniques that are found more readily in the scores of composers to which he is a contemporary, and thus we see the curious dilemma of whether Norrington is applying history to Brahms, or is he simply applying the progressiveness of Brahms, as exemplified in current aesthetic discoveries to history. But while Brahms may be categorized as an artifact of Romantic sentiment, it is at best, problematic to assume that Brahms ‘the progressive’ was happy to congeal with that serendipitous taxonomy. He was most certainly critical about the reception and execution of his own work. Schoenberg describes him as ‘surrounding himself with a protective wall of stiffness as a defense against certain types of people.’ Of musicians and music lovers, he was particularly annoyed.

When a well-intentioned music acquaintance, unable to find any critical compliment toward development nor the novelty of the harmonic language, expressed a simple enthusiasm about finding some resemblance between Brahms’ First Piano Sonata and the Hammerklavier, Brahms shouted him down, ‘Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel(Schoenberg, 2014: 58)!3’ The bewilderment was not impenetrable to even the most high-minded musicians of Brahms day. Sketches for a first symphony were rejected by long-term collaborator and conductor, Joseph Joachim due to the difficulty of the interpretation(MacDonald, 1999: Loc 3323).It is of course, widely known that the violin virtuoso and contemporary of Brahms’ time, Henryk Wieniawski, called Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, outright ‘unplayable.’ We have already discussed the difficulty with which audiences grappled toward Brahms’ North American premiere. Indeed, even in the distinguished intellectual circle of a young Richard Strauss, Max Bruch, and Hans Von Bülow, there was a self-acknowledged perplexity with Brahms. They expressed a need for multiple hearings, and understood that despite being well versed toward modern music, found Brahms’ musical output ‘strangely neglected(Gray, 1978: 231-56).’ As Peter Gray describes it:

‘It is apparent then, that difficulty did not preclude esteem. But with Brahms it was esteem chilled by a sense of duty. Most of his contemporaries ingested Brahms like some nutritious but unpalatable diet.’

Hugh Wood articulates the most valid juxtaposition of Brahms musical portrait -of which I wish to elucidate- succinctly when he says that we must ‘remind ourselves that Brahms was himself modern, difficult and not accepted, found rebarbative and newfangled and impossible, long before he became stuffy, backward-looking, [and] old fashioned(Wood, 1999: Loc 5422).’

Despite this ostensibly difficult placement of Brahms within his own culture, Norrington is convinced that the conventions of the orchestra in the nineteenth-century stand as the most suitable application of method to his work. We may begin to see why this is highly suspect. Indeed, Brahms is beginning to resemble what Charles Jencks describes as the preeminent element of postmodern aesthetic, double-coding(Jencks, 1987:31-58), which stated simply combines historical allegory with contemporary presentation. Indeed, Norrington’s conscious and deliberate effort to control the vibrato in the mid 2000’s, places him some 15 years behind the Post-postmodernists school that exploited the same deliberate effort to control the vibrato4 for the same reasons that Norrington expresses in his essay; clarity, texture, transparency, unity. That is to say that here, Norrington’s discovery of orchestral ‘taste’ from over a century ago is also the same ‘taste’ developed and proliferated in concert halls 15 years ago.

All of this casts doubt on the historical accuracy aimed on the ‘values of historical orchestral playing’ voiced by Norrington. However, it comes with an additional and potentially exciting caveat. As a modernist, can the music of Brahms reject the historical parameters of his culture? At the most basic level, no, because Brahms is entirely indebted to the classical masters before him. His music is framed by his musical ancestors; To suggest so would be to willingly blind ourselves to history. However that is not to say that he considered his music to be representative of his own era, the aesthetic choices, or the tastes of the musical societies that flanked him. Indeed, it is not difficult to apprehend that Brahms’ music is an abstraction of earlier music -that there is a love for it- and yet it is entirely bold in its experimentation of harmony, form, technique and orchestration, in the same way that the minuet developed -by the nineteenth century- into the scherzo’s penned by composers such as Chopin; an impossible dance form, meant for the psychological choreography of the intellect, not for feet in the courts of the bourgeois. If this is true, then it is to say that Brahms music exists abstractly ‘back then’ and hypothetically ‘soon’, grounded only in its insistence of the perennial stasis of the present. In other words, Brahms is postmodern.

The bewildering complexity of such a conclusion is that Norrington could do little to recreate the perfect condition for a Brahms performance (as Brahms may have meant it) by merely confining his orchestra to the historical unpreparedness that past orchestras, conductors and audiences had toward Brahms’ music during the nineteenth-century. That makes the music of Brahms the music of today.

Nonetheless, Norrington is correct in his recognition of such historical methods to provide clarity, texture, transparency and unity. But this is the recognition of a spice rack, so to speak, not the discovery of some lost recipe. It flavors the music rather than defines it.

Take the opening of the gargantuan Symphony no 1. Norrington’s considerations in regards to the vibrato produces a flaccid entry of what should be a slow and dreadful swell to the half cadence at measure 9. The trills that articulate the dominant b13 chord are the culmination of a pressure building up against a valve ready to burst. Furthermore the pedal C is doubled by a consistent timpani roll(starting at the restatement of the theme), while the Cs’s that project from the fundamental tone cause an acoustic perturbation in the overtone series. While we do get the clarity of an equal-tempered chromatic expansion in the strings, that is hardly the point. Here, Norrington is working against artistic imagination. Nothing at all about this passage suggests that a flattened melodic sound expands our understanding of musical parameters; Indeed, it sounds anything but Romantic. It is true that no vibrato helps to articulate the 16th note motive of an octave drop and ascension by fifth which becomes a liquidated fragmentation leading to the cadence, and so perhaps a case might be made here, but a string player would have little time to employ vibrato on these runs naturally. Therefore, even when vibrato is asked for, the clarity of the motive -due to no vibrato- is a built in, fail-safe mechanism organically linked to the physiology of the human apparatus. What is strange then, is that in measure 29 the oboe solo -presumably with respect to the espressivo marking- employs a succulent vibrato of depth and beauty. It is exquisite and of expertly delicate control. But the flute entry, who echos the opening motive at the octave, responds to the oboe in a flat tone, perhaps to show unity to the string line? The effect is jarring. However, the cellos then repeat the entire oboe phrase; flat as well. But here Norrington’s hunch of the clarity and balance of flat tone transparency is unequivocally correct. Still, here the ear struggles to confirm which instrumental line is loyal in unity and texture to the other.

When we compare this to Robin Ticciati’s recording with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Norrington’s bluff is called. Ticciati’s opening is strong, forceful and overpowering (as the score cries out to be). When the flute responds to the oboe in Ticciati’s recording it retains the vibrato and thus the unity of the line. To be sure, two bassoons hum, one at the lower range, and one in a decidedly more nasally, but not pinched, register; both on G(2 and 3). Horns in C play just above it on G4 and D4, respectively. The oboe rests on C5, dissonant to the structure, but adhering to a quintal, ‘open fifth’ structure. When the appoggiatura tone resolves to a Bn, a perfectly balanced G major chord projects a spectral unity locking in all of the overtones. Notice that in every voice, a projected G5 is at least hinted at, presciently, through increasing partials of the overtone series and thus a reinforced preparation is laid out for the flute entry. As soon as the oboe rests on the Bn, the flute seems to appear from within the timbral perfume wafting in the lingering sonority of the major triad. To play this flute solo flat is to interpret it entirely wrong. Even so, Ticciati’s interpretation would be better served by Norrington’s clarity in the cello passage at measure 33. Whether this is authentic to convention, or simply rightfully observed is an attenuated claim. It seems, however, hardly plausible as the result of simply obeying a historic orchestral convention.

In measure 13 of the Andante sostenuto movement, Norrington interprets the espressivo between Cs descending into Fs as a portamento. The woodwinds are coming out of an exhalation phrase5 and theenchanted sigh of the first violins grows out of the p dynamic marking. The effect is gorgeously flirtatious. John Eliot Gardiner’s 2008 recording of Brahms 1, with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique simply swallows this ostensibly deliberate feature of the composer’s writing. To unify the homogeny of the melodic line, the first violins play the repeated fragment from measure 9 into measure 13 exploiting the timbral quality of the D string, which adds a particular warmth to the lyricism.

Symphony No. 2 showcases Norrington’s approach to Brahms’ woodwind writing. Norrington writes, ‘In the brass and woodwind ensemble writing, one immediately notes the blend of the different instruments. They do not merge into a homogeneous sound – a synthetic sound where all lose some of their individual character- but retain their individual timbre and identity to a much greater extent than in some modern performances(Norrington, 1999: Loc 4757).’

What Norrington is referring to is the mixture and cancellation of overtones that is produced by doublings. There is little doubt when we examine the meticulous care given between the writing of the horns in D and that of the bassoons, that Brahms is fully cognizant of the novel timbral qualities that he is suggesting. These are not simply the reinforcement of a harmonic sonority for purposes of strength. Indeed, the writing suggests the opposite: A fragile, delicate kindling of warmth floating upon gentle waves of sustained strings underneath. And here again, Norrington is to be congratulated for the restriction of string vibrato during this passage. What Norrington does not articulate, but becomes painfully obvious upon acknowledgement, is how progressive this approach to the orchestration is. We expect this type of ‘synthetic sound’ from the Russians of this era, but not in Germany in the 1870s where orchestration was largely determined around issues of dominance and weakening of textures. We see in Brahms one of the first Western composers to begin to think in a more 3-dimensional sound- space in regards to orchestration. While Wagner is often cited as being a revolutionary in orchestration, I would argue that Wagner’s contributions were to instrumentation and technique more than they were to combinatorial permutations and blending. That is to say, with Wagner instruments lay on top of each other. In Brahms, they are translucent. Norrington notes Brahms uncanny understanding of the horn due to his own father being a horn player(Loc 4676). Brahms utilizes the horn as a gateway between brass and woodwinds, and Figure 4 is explicit in its graphical representation mapping horns to bassoons, bassoons to clarinets and flutes, and back to horns. That being said, Norrington’s essay is riddled with references to Brahms as a ‘poor orchestrator’, to which Norrington apologetically attempts to salvage the composers reputation by employing nineteenth-century orchestral practices. Of course, what Norrington says and what he does are entirely separate notions.

He reflects, ‘[T]he aims are always the same: to bring the music to life; not as ‘early music’ but as good music played properly... I have used all the available resources to seek to get as close as possible to the music as conceived and first experienced(Loc 4542).’ So if Norrington is not concerned with early music as much as he is with music played properly, why is he insisting that the proper framing of Brahms is a one-size-fits-all, historical approach to the orchestra, where conventions such as vibrato, are sometimes wildly successful, while other times entirely an utter interpretive failure. Furthermore, by admitting to using ‘all available resources’, it can be naturally assumed that this would include that good common sense acts the arbiter, rightfully discerning various modes of historical context -and as postmodernism already insists- only applies it where appropriate and discarded where not. Finally, and most telling, Norrington’s statement ‘as close as possible to the music as conceived and first experienced’ can only retain the same goal in mind if it is suggested that Brahms was writing conventional music for a conventional orchestra who could apply parody and tradition to Brahms’ conventionally conceived works. However, as my own argument has hitherto contended, if Brahms truly is the progressive futurist, then the first experience of Brahms’ music would stand in stark contrast to what Brahms conceived, and is thus to be considered the worst source of interpretive inspiration. We must only look to the confusion of the American premieres for validation.

Take Symphony no. 3, which has to be the most egregious mutilation in the Norrington set. The first 20 bars is surely to be one of the most triumphantly exuberant passages in Western orchestral writing. Yet with Norrington’s calculated adherence to antiquarian authenticity, it sounds only authentic as a
documentation of a youth orchestra running through a first rehearsal . The articulations are all sluggish and placed in proximity around a metronome beat. It has that sense of dragging -yet to be placed proudly on its own feet-, that first rehearsals emit as a performance.

The conflict of rhythms between the portato in the strings and woodwinds comes off as the incoherent cackling of drunkards pouring into the streets from some backwater village pub. Perhaps only sardonically may one draw a correlation between Norrington’s effect here in Brahms and the alcoholism that a youthful Sibelius struggled with as he wrote a strikingly similar opening to his second Symphony in D major less than twenty years later. No doubt Brahms was his influence. Again, here we might extrapolate the modernism of Brahms in the deliberate string technique employed. Although I do not mean to demean youth orchestras. Simply that youthful musicians will often be confronting Brahms for the first time in their life, where as a seasoned orchestral player may be engaged in a first rehearsal, but the music is already subsumed into the recesses of the players cognitive vaults.

Wagner used this technique to dramatic effect in the overture to Tannhäuser 40 years earlier, its adoption into the abstract symphonic tradition of the concert hall is poignantly fresh and effective.

Compare it with Gardiner’s recording which uses period instruments, and one wonders how Norrington seemed to get it so wrong in this interpretation. Gardiner fully engages in the breathtaking power of a gusty harmonic force blowing us toward measure 35, where, the contrast stated by the entry of the woodwind trio conjures images of an exiting descent from the Alps toward the outskirts of some Bavarian village while the hearths illuminating the warped-glass windows in the crimson glow of a winter’s twilight flicker at a distance.

If the first movement is the opening of our village scene, the second movement is the quintessential sleepy lullaby of folksong. The children are tucked under the Austrian heirloom quilts, while fathers smoke long-pipes and wax philosophical before the embers of a rapturous mantle, stoking coals and imbibing in heavy mead. Norrington nails this Germanic tale with calm and delicate reserve. The third movement takes us to the edge of the village; to some ancient forrest, filled with specters and myths during the onset of a gentle snow in the silent dark at the strike of midnight. Here I am only minimally unconvinced by Norrington, largely because of his adherence to a strict tempo that can leave that metaphysical waltz -that must have surely inspired Mahler’s Second- un-capitilized. However, that is not nearly enough to deter us from the truly transcendent reading that Norrington gives us. So transparent are the whimsical strands of accompaniment in the strings that it is impossible to hear this movement the same way again. It is a transformative moment for Brahms performance.



One can sense that gentle snow graphically represented in Figure 8 by the interplay of the strings, and Norrington executes its heterogeneity in a nuanced and powerfully understated way. Both Gardiner and Ticciati’s readings can not touch Norrington in this regard. Notwithstanding, I do prefer both conductors elastic phrasing to Norrington’s.

In Symphony no 4, Norrington is firing on all cylinders. Each of his claims with regard to historical orchestral considerations -clarity, texture, transparency and unity- are backed up by the reading of the opening movement of the fourth. Whether that is Norrington’s own meticulous control of the orchestra, or whether the symphony simply lends itself to these considerations are debatable. I would like to believe that there is simply a perfect marriage between conductor and score. No detail is left out, no dynamic outside the parameters of which it is implied, the harmony is liquified and translucent, and the articulations from the cascading gestures of strings falling through the motivic cells that comprise the themes are subtle yet pronounced. This is a definitive fourth.

The sheer scope of this reading does not diminish in subsequent movements. The Andante moderato sounds every much the regal Nachtmusik it should be. The Allegro giocoso is energetic and buoyant, the Allegro energico e passionato, biting and foreboding. The set ends on an extremely gracious, and, proverbial high note.

My conclusion then, is that it seems to be primarily a handicap to read Brahms as a classicist. Adopting an informed procedure where it may illuminate some aspect of the score should always be viewed as advantageous, but this is hardly the radical axiom of historical assignment. What becomes more confusing about hinging this historicism on a few verities of musicianship is that Norrington ends his essay with the statement, ‘In conclusion, the use of historical resources does not solve performance problems(Norrington, 1999: Loc 4906).’ I must wonder why he would want to bind himself to them as an agent of HIP, then. Furthermore, he states, ‘[I]n the time of Brahms... there was no such thing as ‘interpretation.’ One just played the music as well as one could(Loc 4783.)’ Therefore, Norrington admits he is firmly rooted in a postmodern tradition simply by devoting the resources to interpret these works ‘correctly’ whatever that should mean. This is more accurately, the tradition that Frederic Jameson calls ‘periodizing’:

‘In periodizing a phenomenon... we have to complicate the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles. It is necessary to distinguish between the gradual setting in place of the various(often unrelated) preconditions for the new structure and the “moment” (not exactly chronological) when they all jell and combine into a functional system(Jameson, 1992: Loc 580).’

When we think about how fashion from the 1960’s became an observable and important part of 1990s fashion, we are witnessing the complications of periodizing that Jameson articulates. They belong to both and reference each other; Oddly, they become dependent upon one another. This complication of a model seems to fit Norrington’s confusion placed upon Brahms music by wanting it to be confined to a particular time and place, where as Brahms conceived it not to and Norrington’s new discovery of old techniques confirms that it will not be; Norrington’s cycle belongs to the mid 2000s HIP movement, not to the era of Brahms. Norrington imprisons these symphonies in the past, where Brahms projects them into the future. Brahms music can bear the same sentiment of Gandalf’s correction when he rebuked Frodo, ‘A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.’ In the same manner, the best way to frame a performance of the music of Brahms is neither in the past, nor in the future, but precisely when it is performed. In this way, Brahms stands as one of the first composers aware of a postmodern aesthetic, despite his inability to adequately comprehend our current summation of that term. Richard Taruskin transmits an anecdotal parable detailing a conversation between Brahms and Mahler about the future of music.

‘Brahms began discoursing, as usual, on the decline and fall of music, but Mahler suddenly took his arm and, pointing down to the river they were passing with his other hand, exclaimed, “Just look, doctor, just look!” “What is it?” Brahms asked. “Don’t you see, there goes the last wave!” It was a good symbol for the eternal movement in life and in art, which knows of no cessation. But I seem to remember that it was Brahms who had the last word, thus; “That is all very fine, but perhaps what matters most is whether the wave goes out to sea or into a swamp(Taruskin, 2010: Loc 65884).’

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If this depiction relates nothing else, it is that Brahms understood the eternity of his own music. His concern was that it would find itself headed to new shores, appreciated by new exotic conventions, where life and culture was bustling and vibrant; He wrote it with a future audience in mind, utilizing techniques that, during his time, were not fully understood, developed or subsumed. He feared that his would find itself lodged in the muck of some swamp, unable to be appreciated nor of any useful purpose until discovered by some expedition and examined as an artifact of history. The HIP movement is the very lens which examines his music in this category of a museum piece; a musical species contained to a killing jar for the shelf of the colonial anthropologist. Surely Brahms would be horrified by this ‘achievement.’ It is with that perspective that I might dare to take Schoenberg’s bestowal of modernism one step further, from Brahms the progressive, to Brahms the postmodern.

Bibliography

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