It learns to add that dissonance, a little rubato to stretch it out, or the call of a horn, and voilà, you’ve got longing.” You teach this rule to the program, which will go on to analyze the scores of any music that is considered soul-stirring, and it will find patterns. A solo violin, or maybe a clarinet, a French horn. “I’m guessing a minor key, dissonance of two notes, followed by resolution. “But how was this ‘longing’ portrayed in the music?” the man persisted. Next to it, the Howell seemed like just a clever, agreeable arrangements of notes.”Īcross the room, she saw Anders, smiling, engrossed in what the beautiful woman across from him was saying. “I preferred the Sibelius,” she told the man.
It had made her throat contract, her eyes sting. But the horns’ mournful call, the way they sustained one of their notes against the melody, clinging, holding on, had been the most vivid aural depiction of love, fealty and longing she’d ever heard. It was the Sibelius, however, that had stirred her with its rich textures and sonorities and, paradoxically, its simplicity. The Bach had been lovely and precise, like music meets mathematics. The Emily Howell composition had pleasantly surprised her, a flood of arpeggiated piano notes hovering around a melodic theme, like something Chopin or Scriabin might have composed. “We compared it to two other excerpts, traditional compositions.” “So, you listened to some of the music?” the man asked. (Hint: Emily Howell is not a female composer but a computer program that composes original classical music.) At a party she’s attending, she mentions to a group that she’d recently analyzed a classical music excerpt by Emily Howell in a college aesthetics class. I’m going to use the words of my character, Rebecca, from Outside the Limelight to describe it, because she does a better job with it than I. And now, at its peak, comes the melody, slow and majestic, instantly timeless and memorable. It becomes propulsive and spirited, with plenty of crashing cymbals and an increase in speed and intensity from the entire orchestra. The middle part of Finlandia calls in strings and woodwinds, a gentler but no less affecting sound, before the piece really ramps into high gear. The first part delivers a brooding fanfare of horns, rumbling timpani, depicting menace, oppression that, indeed, was part of Finland’s history, through occupations by Sweden and then Russia, into the early 20th century.
Coming in at eight-ish minutes (can be up to nine), it’s short. And no piece conjures a sense of Finnish national pride more so than Sibelius’ Finlandia, a patriotic tone-poem, the seventh of seven tableaux written in 1899 and revised a year later. No surprise, perhaps, as both hail from Finland and both have captured, in the music, the nuance, proud spirit and dignity of this Nordic country. Particularly impressive are Vänskä’s Sibelius interpretations. Vänskä, music director of the Minnesota Orchestra-they of the Great Lockout of 2012-14 infamy-literally staked his position on turning said orchestra into one of the country’s finest, resigning in protest in the later months of the lockout, only to be rehired the following April (good call), where he now continues, with the Minnesota Orchestra, to excel and produce world-class music.
The main draw was the Sibelius Violin Concerto, gracefully and sensitively rendered by Latvian violinist Baiba Skride, with Finnish guest conductor Osmö Vänskä leading the orchestra. Jean Sibelius’ tone-poem, Finlandia, wasn’t supposed to be the program headliner one recent Saturday night at the San Francisco Symphony.
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