Brahms Intermezzo 117.2
When I first saw the sheet music for today’s piece, I was a bit boggled. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a piece that sounded less like it looked! You might figure it for some sort of virtuosic toccata thing, all flash and texture, but no, it is slow, minimal melody with a lush, dark accompaniment.
The notation makes a little more sense if you think of Bach’s preludes. Do I grow predictable claiming everything is full of Bach? Very well, I grow predictable. This one is full of Bach: the layering; the figuration built out of a series of surprising chord changes, and the sense of counterpoint hidden in those changes; the walks around the circle of fifths.
Really, I don’t know how the twentieth century managed to stay so obsessed for so long with the idea of newness at all costs; all that paranoia about being derivative was really overblown, and I hope we’re growing out of it. The best art, it seems to me, always derives from the past, and escapes imitation through synthesis, not through obsessive novelty. More on that train of thought some other time.
Learning this, I felt like Brahms was searching in some of the same places I am in my own music: the piece is perpetually ambiguous and unresolved, yet within that ambiguity is a deep sense of order, an abundance of logical patterns. It’s a powerful tension, simultaneous ambiguity and order. The effect is strongly emotional, but it’s hard to name exactly what the emotion is. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (one with no right answer)!
Johannes Brahms
Intermezzo Op 117 No 2
Download (5:19 / 6.1 M)
This is the second in a set of three pieces, the first of which was the first piece I posted in this blog. I don’t play the third yet, though I certainly mean to in the future — it is also a marvelous piece, and the three together are one of my favorite sets.
Thanks, Paul, for the beautiful music and the insightful commentary. I was particularly drawn in by your third paragraph.
My initial reaction was, “right on, man.” Then for some reason my mind saw an analogy between progress in art, and progress in science, and my reaction tempered a bit. I was thinking of scientific progress through reductionism vs. through revolution. As I understand it people who think about such things have observed that most work and progress in science is made by carefully building upon previous work findings, in slow plodding steps. But then everyone once in a great while a fantastic new insight is made that departs completely (or nearly so) from previous thinking and starts a whole new path for countless others to plod for years to come.
I though of this when I read, “The best art…always derives from the past, and escapes imitation through synthesis.” I was left wondering if this isn’t a generalization of how 99% of progress is made in art, reserving the possibility that 1% of the time progress can truly be revolutionary?
That idea was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which remains somewhat controversial (and which I really ought to read sometime!).
I don’t know about science, but in music, it’s hard for me to think of a pre-20th-century composer we consider “revolutionary” who pathologically avoided the past.