Nicholas Maw: Odyssey

Kenneth Gloag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429620935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book was originally published in 2008. Nicholas Maw's Odyssey is a landmark in contemporary music; at approximately 90 minutes it is one of the longest continuous examples of music written for full-orchestra and received a first, truncated, performance at the 1987 BBC Proms. It took Maw many years to complete and was later recorded to great acclaim by Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

In his examination of Odyssey, Kenneth Gloag provides a detailed discussion of Maw's musical identity and reputation as a contemporary composer in relation to romanticism, modernism and postmodernism, taking into consideration his break-through work Scenes and Arias (1962) and the subsequent progression to Odyssey. The book investigates issues of time and narrative crucial to the generation of the work's remarkable length, and considers the relationship between the sectionalization of the score and prevailing sense of unity in the music.

Situating Odyssey in larger historical and critical frameworks, Gloag evaluates the initial reception of the work and reflects on Maw's music composed after Odyssey.

1

Between Romanticism and Modernism

Kenneth Gloag

Introduction

The title of this chapter is appropriated from Carl Dahlhaus, who did so much to explain the musics of both romanticism and modernism. In the collection of essays that are covered by this title (Dahlhaus 1989), Dahlhaus looks at various different musics from both romanticism and modernism, and considers the relationships between the two. Specific territory covered by Dahlhaus in that book includes compositional issues - ‘the musical idea’, ‘musical prose’, ‘endless melody’ and ‘expanded tonality’ - that reflect the romanticism of Wagner and the modernism of Schoenberg. However, although some of these issues will appear in this book, my appropriation of Dahlhaus’s title looks in a rather different direction. I use this title not to consider some historical, compositional and/or stylistic transition, but to identify the sustained balance between the two concepts. In effect the objectives of this process revolve around the situating of a contemporary musical practice that clearly cannot belong to either romanticism or modernism in a chronological sense, but that displays reflections and traces of the historical, stylistic and ideological images of both. This contemporary practice will ultimately seek to explore the space between these two powerful constructions but from a perspective shaped by a certain distance and detachment.

Nicholas Maw’s musical languages and stylistic positions are situated within a precarious yet constructive balance between the imperatives of modernism and the memories of romanticism, with the ability to look simultaneously in both directions reflecting the wider critical and cultural landscape of postmodernism within which Maw as a contemporary composer lives and works. This chapter will use this location as a background to an understanding of his music in general, mapping out a context for Odyssey and, without suggesting the possibility of a postmodern analysis of the work, constructing a frame within which the work can be seen and heard.¹

Modernism

Modernism formed the defining background and context for much of the twentieth century. It was active in the formation of new musical contexts and languages, and also exerted an influence on the reception and interpretation of music. While any historical epoch thinks of itself as ‘modem’, modernism extended this awareness to reveal a more self-conscious desire for the ‘new’, projecting an image of progress and defining itself as a condition of difference from the past. In terms of music, the radical innovations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky in the early years of the twentieth century provided a musical representation of the ability of modernism to realize its desire for difference and to construct an identity that could represent itself as ‘new’. But, in retrospect, modernism also contained its own historicizing pressures which manifested themselves through musical factors such as Stravinsky’s appropriation of folk materials and, more notably in this context, Schoenberg’s reinterpretation of Brahms and Wagner as precedents for his own compositional innovations, a move that reflects a concern for continuity with the past and therefore dramatizes the interrelationships between romanticism and modernism. This historically and stylistically revisionist gesture is captured most vividly in Schoenberg’s essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, which he wrote in 1947 (Schoenberg 1975, pp. 398-^41). In this essay Schoenberg sought to ‘prove that Brahms, the classicist, the academician, was a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive’ (Ibid., p. 401). In making this claim, which is accurate in terms of the innovative nature of Brahms’s technical procedures, Schoenberg seeks to collapse the binary opposition provided by the very different musics of Wagner and Brahms, and resolve this critical tension through positioning his own music in relation to both, situating his own modernism as the historically inevitable convergence of these two powerful currents of romanticism.

The reference to Schoenberg and his relationship to past musics will provide some initial insights that can be appropriated for an understanding of Maw’s musical language and stylistic position. The expressive intensity of much of Maw’s music, along with its projection of an extended, expansive sense of melodic gesture, suggests a certain parallel with the soundworld that shaped Schoenberg as a composer. Maw, unlike some composers, has not consistently looked to the written word as a medium of expression and articulation; he seems to save music for these purposes. However, in 1976 he published a review of Charles Rosen’s book on Schoenberg in Tempo. This review forms one of Maw’s few public statements on the work of other composers and, given the references to Schoenberg outlined above, it requires further consideration.

Maw begins his discussion with some observations on Schoenberg’s now notorious claims about serialism and the supremacy of German music. He also comments on Schoenberg’s relationship to a social and political context, and reflects on the nature of harmony, outlining the importance, for himself and others, of Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Maw’s focus on this work, through his engagement with Rosen, gives, without suggesting that it forms a conscious precedent, an indication of Maw’s relationship to an expressionistic soundworld. For Rosen, and others, Erwartung contains a unique synthesis of structure and expression:

The intense relentless expressivity of each moment in a work like Erwartung is a formal device as well as an extra-musical significance.

There is, in short, no definable difference between the emotional significance of a chord and the formal relationship of the chord to the other notes in the work of music. The ambigious nightmare symbolism of Erwartung is as much a form of expression as its dissonant harmonic structure: the dissonance and the symbolism are related (indeed, often identical), and it is a mistake to think that one means or signifies the other. (Rosen 1976, p. 26)

Maw echoes Rosen’s account of Erwartung, and goes on to view this work as an effective departure from expressionism:

in Erwartung and other works of the same period Schoenberg has gone beyond expressionism and entered the realm of surrealism. Futhermore, he has found the means of articulating it in purely musical terms - an almost unimaginable feat. (Maw 1976, p. 5)

For Maw, the dramatic intensity of a work such as Erwartung is generated by and through a musical language (‘in purely musical terms’). While he himself had not, or would not, compose a work that reflected the ‘surrealism’ of Erwartung, nor will we find an explicit and direct influence of this work in his own music, this statement of a musical articulation of a certain expressionist/post-expressionist aura would remain a crucial aspect, in conjunction with other strong currents, of Maw’s musical language and aesthetic position. This music will continue to be driven by expressive gesture and the intensity of textural contrast, both of which combine to construct a certain, at times distant, relationship to Schoenberg’s expressionism.

This musical language is formed upon an individual orientation towards tonality, a suggestion that continues through reference to Erwartung: ‘The distortion of a suppressed tonal background expressed largely through harmonic means is, I believe, one of the principal reasons for Erwartungs subliminal fascination’ (Ibid.). While the explication of a ‘suppressed tonal background’ for Erwartung would require careful analytical scrutiny and theoretical reflection, the most immediately relevant part of Maw’s statement is the reference to tonality and harmony, a reference that indicates an awareness of Schoenberg’s compositional practice and theoretical perspective.²

Tonality need not mean the common practice of the classical period. Indeed, the term seems to mean different things to different composers, including Maw and Schoenberg. Dahlhaus, in Between Romanticism and Modernism, discusses ‘expanded tonality’, a term coined by Schoenberg and used in relation to the expanded harmonic vocabulary of the late romanticism of Wagner:

If the term ‘expanded tonality’ is given its full value, one of its postulates is that, far from being disrupted or suspended by the Wagnerian procedure of modulation towards some tonally remote region, the listener’s awareness of the tonality is actually strenthened by it. For if the formal or syntactical association, the music’s inner coherence, is not to become unrecognizable, the listener’s tonal awareness is tested and compelled to perceive the tonal relationship of even the remotest excursion. (Dahlhaus 1989, pp.65-66)

For Dahlhaus, the expansion of tonality through extended and heightened chromaticism reinforces, not displaces, tonality. This suggests a new level of complexity in terms of harmonic vocabulary, one that presented new problems of identification and interpretation. Clearly, as romanticism collapsed into modernism, even an extended version of tonality was no longer feasible, and the already-implied atonality of Schoenberg and others came to be definitive of the period. However, while Schoenberg became an atonal composer, he remained a theorist of tonality. This double perspective, perhaps double bind, between modernism and tradition, present and past, came to encapsulate the underlying tensions of modernism. To cling to tonality as a compositional practice and aesthetic position was to project an anachronistic and unrealizable relationship to tradition, and the view of tonality as a common language had long disappeared into history, a process Maw was, in retrospect, highly aware of: ‘I think probably all twentieth-century composers have to define their relationship to tonality: since about 1914 it’s been impossible just to accept tonality as the effective language’ (in Griffiths 1985, p. 169). But it is noticeable that Maw, while acknowledging that it was no longer possible to accept the status of tonality as an ‘effective language’, claims that all composers of the twentieth century must still define a relationship to it. This is a claim that immediately distances Maw from many powerful trends in contemporary music, which had effected the removal of tonality, or derivations of it, from the musical and cultural spectrum. For some composers any relationship to tonality is one of rejection, while for others it will be a relationship of accommodation. However, between the poles of rejection and accommodation there are a number of other possibilities, including the fluctuation and mediation between the two. Another possibility is the redefinition of tonality in the light of the composer’s own needs and experiences. For Maw:

The term ‘tonality’ is bandied around as if it were a fixed definable object:

I don’t think that’s the case at all ... My version of tonality is of course not tonality in the old sense at all: it’s much more loosely defined. Sometimes, for example, my music could be said to be not in a key but on a key, or at least on a triadic area ... I don’t consider this a system but a language. (Ibid., pp. 169-70)

This ‘version’ of tonality becomes a highly individual one, defined by the immediate contexts of the music, with Maw’s reference to language reflecting the composer’s own idiolect and not that of a shared vocabulary. It will also provide a valuable reference point for Odyssey, within which recognizable pitch centres and triadic shapes will appear, even if it seems impossible to describe it, or any part of it, as ⁴on a key’. But Maw’s language articulates a music that always suggests at least the possibility of a tonality as a musical representation of the past. As Arnold Whittall, writing in 1973, perceptively anticipated: ⁴ As a lyrical as well as a thematic composer - and currently by far the best tenant of that rich middle ground between Britten and Tippett - Maw’s work will probably always set up subtle associations with the music of the tonal past’ (Whittall 1973, p. 33). The musics of Britten and Tippett may not always suggest themselves as reference points for Maw’s music, and they articulate a marked difference from the Schoenbergian references outlined above, but both, in different ways, reflected the presence of the past. In the music of Britten this reflection often took the form of triadic gestures, while Tippett’s music, in contrast, looked directly to the historical framework of genre. The proposed ‘subtle associations with the music of the tonal past’ will be explored in more detail in Chapter 2, with works as diverse as the Essay for Organ, Scenes and Arias and Life Studies, among others, all carrying and articulating, in different ways, these ‘subtle associations’.

The emergence of a postwar avant-garde, defined by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, and which has become synonymous with the Darmstadt school, heightened many of the defining characteristics of modernism. Innovation was now all, with the search for the ‘new’ constructed as an ideologically driven, all-encompassing desire for progress and difference through a systematized musical language. It therefore appeared to propose a conscious repudiation of the past that was in itself also critical of the retrospective reflections of previous versions of modernism.

This high modernism in many ways dominated the musical landscape and created a shadow for young composers such as Maw, with his early works of the 1950s embracing a ‘post-Webern serialism’ (Bum 2001, p. 163). It became a new orthodoxy against which other composers were compared, but it was also a moment that contained its own historicizing pressures and tendencies. These were explored by Theodor Adorno in his essay ‘The Aging of the New Music’, written in 1955 (Adorno 2002). For Adorno, the avant-garde aspirations for a ‘new music’ had not been fulfilled, and the music was now losing its ‘critical impluse’. This ageing process shifted the focus back to the early achievements of modernism: One could hardly claim that the creations of the mid-twentieth century are superior to Pierrot Lunaire, Erwartung, Wozzeck, the lyrics of Webern or the early outbursts of Stravinsky and Bartok’ (Ibid., p. 182). While it is hard to imagine Adorno being sympathetic to the music of Maw - in fact he would probably condemn it to the ‘detestable ideal of a moderate modernism ... fostering on both sides problematic compromise solutions between tradition and the new’ (Ibid., p. 197) - it is notable that he articulates a basic nostalgia for modernism in its earlier manifestation, a moment that will be seen to form part of the historical location that Maw will look towards as a residual source of musical materials and inspiration.

But the avant-garde, and its own historicization through the ageing process, also became something the young composer could intentionally and constructively react against. As Maw later recalled: ‘The particular style that prevailed when I was beginning in the 1950s - the Darmstadt version of the post-Viennese school - was one that rejected too much of the past for my temperament’ (in Griffiths 1985, p. 170). In this statement Maw not only signals his rejection of the avant-garde spirit of the 1950s, but also emphasizes how important the musical past was for him, something that will be seen as a defining presence throughout his career. While this positive response to the past may share something with Schoenberg’s relationship to the music of Brahms, it suggests a more transparent parallel with Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. The Stravinskian version of modernism, dismissed by Adorno as ‘restorative’, utilized a notion of pitch organization through referential centres and processes of convergence towards them which are not that theoretically distant from Maw’s views on tonality as outlined above. Neoclassicism also suggested that the past was now available to be revisited by the composer as a matter of choice, a process that negated the progressive ideologies of modernism from within, and refocused and repositioned the concept of a musical tradition as defined by and through past musics. Maw summarizes his own individual relationship to the past:

I put down my roots in the place where I felt they needed to be put down: in the music of before the First World War. Nevertheless, I think it’s quite clear in my music of the 1960s that it was written against the background of recent developments. I think what I did was like what Stravinsky did - though less consciously than he did it - when in his so-called ‘neo classical’ works he put down roots at particular points in musical history, enabling him to renew his language. Stravinsky realized that in the twentieth century the whole of musical history is available to us; we can hear it all in extraordinary profusion. We can plug in anywhere we like in order to nourish our own mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Between Romanticism and Modernism
• 2 Towards Odyssey
• 3 The Music
• 4 The Melodic Source
• 5 The Harmonic Dimension
• 6 Time and Narrative
• 7 Reception
• 8 After Odyssey
• References
• Index