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Home , Claude Debussy, Dichotomie, Helix (composition), La mer (Debussy), Leila Josefowicz, Orango (Shostakovich)

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Thursday, March 229999,, at 8:00 FriFriFridayFri dayday,, March 303030,30 , at 222:002:00:00:00 Saturday, March 313131,31 , at 8:00

EsaEsa----PekkaPekka Salonen Conductor Leila Josefowicz

Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta I. Andante tranquillo II. Allegro III. Adagio IV. Allegro molto

Intermission

Salonen Violin I. Mirage II. Pulse I III. Pulse II IV. Adieu First Philadelphia Orchestra performances

Debussy I. From Dawn to Midday at Sea II. Play of the Waves III. Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea

This program runs approximately 1 hour, 55 minutes. Conductor and composer EsaEsa----PekkaPekka Salonen has been principal conductor and artistic advisor of the in London since 2008 and artistic director of the Baltic Sea Festival since 2003. He became conductor laureate of the in 2009, following 17 years at its helm as music director. In the 2011-12 season Mr. Salonen leads the Philharmonia in performances of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle as part of the “Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Béla Bartók” project, launched in January 2011. This season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Mr. Salonen conducted the world premiere of the recently-discovered Shostakovich Orango.

As a composer Mr. Salonen has completed commissions for the Finnish Radio , Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the North German Radio Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Présences Festival in , and a concerto dedicated to, and premiered by, Yefim Bronfman. Mr. Salonen’s , written for and premiered by Leila Josefowicz in 2009, received the 2012 Grawemeyer Award. His music is published exclusively by Chester Music.

Recordings of Mr. Salonen’s works include releases on Sony and Deutsche Grammophon, as well as a Grammy-nominated CD of the and his works and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Yefim Bronfman. Mr. Salonen’s other recordings include several discs with the Philharmonia Orchestra on the Signum label, a DVD of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de loin (with the Finnish National Opera), and a Grammy-nominated recording of Stravinsky’s with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. He has also recorded for the Sony Classical label.

Recipient of honorary doctorates from the Sibelius Academy in Finland, the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, the University of Southern California, and the Royal College of Music in London, Mr. Salonen was named Musical America ’s “Musician of the Year” in 2006. In 1998 the French government awarded him the rank of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was also elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Mr. Salonen made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1986.

During the 2011-12 season, violinist Leila JosefowiczJosefowicz appears with the Boston and San Francisco playing Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto under the baton of the composer and returns to the Toronto, National, Atlanta, and Indianapolis symphonies, as well as to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. She is also The Philadelphia Orchestra's 2011-12 artist-in-residence and will be participating in subscription, Neighborhood, and Family concerts. Equally active internationally, her recent and upcoming engagements in Europe include appearances with the Royal , Leipzig Gewandhaus, Finnish Radio, and Philharmonia ; the London, Munich, and Czech philharmonics; and the London Symphony.

Ms. Josefowicz's debut recording in 1994 for Philips Classics was awarded a Diapason d'Or. Subsequent releases on that label include Solo, a disc of unaccompanied violin works, which also won a Diapason d'Or, and several other recital and concerto discs. Her other recordings include 's , which received a 2004 Grammy nomination, for Nonesuch; a recital disc and Shostakovich’s Violin and Concerto No. 1 with the City of Birmingham Symphony, which received a 2007 ECHO Award, both for Warner Classics; and a live recording of ’s Violin Concerto conducted by the composer at the BBC Proms for Deutsche Grammophon. Her most recent recording is of Mr. Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur with the composer conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic for DG Concerts released on iTunes.

A recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, as well as a 2007 United States Artists Cummings Fellowship, Ms. Josefowicz was born in Ontario and moved with her family to Los Angeles at an early age. Her family discovered that she had perfect pitch when she went to the piano and played the exact pitch of the vacuum cleaner. While growing up, her favorite sport was tetherball, which she played with boxing gloves on her hands to protect her fingers. At the age of 13 her entire family moved to Philadelphia so that she could study at the Curtis Institute of Music, from which she graduated; her teachers there included and Jascha Brodsky. She currently performs on a 1724 Guarnieri del Gesù violin. Ms. Josefowicz made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1992.

FRAMING THE PROGRAM

In a rare appearance with The Philadelphia Orchestra this week, composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leads works by two 20th-century composers whose music he has long championed and that frame a performance of his own recent Violin Concerto, written for soloist Leila Josefowicz.

Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, composed in the summer of 1936 when the 55- year-old Béla Bartók was at the height of his powers, displays an astonishing range of techniques and moods while facing the challenge of using an orchestra without brass and woodwind instruments. One of the ways Bartók ingeniously expands the possible effects is by dividing the strings into two large groups positioned opposite one another and that engage in antiphonal interplay.

Maestro Salonen began writing his Violin Concerto in 2008 at a crucial juncture in his life and career: the conclusion of a 17-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the celebration of his 50th birthday (an occasion he wryly notes “brutally wipes out any hallucinations of still being young”). Over the course of its four movements the Concerto shifts “from the virtuosic and flashy to the aggressive and brutal, from the meditative and static to the nostalgic and autumnal.”

Composers tend not much to like labels and it is perhaps understandable that Debussy rejected the term “” when it was first applied to his works. Yet equally understandable is why critics and listeners would make connections between his music and currents in French painting of his time. La Mer, subtitled “symphonic sketches,” shows his marvelous ability to evoke scenes associated with the sea.

Parallel Events Debussy La Mer Music Strauss Salome Literature Wharton House of Mirth Art Picasso Two Youths History Einstein formulates Theory of Relativity

1936 Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta Music Barber Symphony No. 1 Literature Mitchell Gone with the Wind Art Mondrian Composition in Red and Blue History Spanish Civil War begins

Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

Béla Bartók Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania), March 25, 1881 Died in New York City, September 26, 1945

In the summer of 1936 the 55-year-old Béla Bartók, having by then achieved considerable international fame, tackled a formidable array of compositional challenges in his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, a work of astonishing synthesis, organicism, and technical brilliance. The synthesis is to be found in Bartók’s ability to integrate his profound knowledge of the Western musical tradition, immediately evident in the that opens the piece, with his path-breaking research of folk music, particularly that of his native Hungary. The organicism of the Music for Strings comes from the way in which a four-movement piece grows out of, and is also unified by, the melody that begins the work.

A Mature Masterpiece Paul Sacher commissioned the Music for Strings for the 10th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, which premiered the work on January 21, 1937. During the rehearsal process, Bartók reported to his wife:

Contrary to my expectations, things are going rather nicely, almost perfectly well. We’ve rehearsed a lot and been very thorough (they’ve supposedly devoted 25 rehearsals to this work in total); the conductor and orchestra have all worked with me showing the greatest affection and devotion; they claim to be very enthusiastic about the work (I am too!). A couple of spots sound more beautiful and startling than I had imagined. There are some very unusual sounds in it!

Unlike Bartók’s other most famous orchestral work, his Concerto for Orchestra (1943), which gives many instrumentalists a chance to shine, the orchestral means are much more limited in the Music for Strings. Aside from the full string orchestra, which is divided into two equal groups on either side of the conductor with the basses in the back, is a battery of percussion instruments, as well as piano, harp, and celesta in the middle. The celesta is a —it looks like a miniature upright piano—invented in the mid-. (Tchaikovsky was the first famous composer to use it, in The Nutcracker. ) Its hammers hit not tightly wound strings, as they do in a piano, but rather metal plates, producing a bright, tingling sound.

A Closer Look Bartók began his First (1908-9) with a slow fugue— successive entries of each of the string instruments in complex imitation. This was a clear homage to Beethoven, who started his Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, the same way. Bartók returned to the idea in the Music for Strings, but took it to a greater extreme by making the entire movement (AndanteAndante tranquillotranquillo) a slowly unfolding exploration of the opening theme; he recycles elements of the same melody in the following three movements as well. Muted (both groups, seated on both sides of the conductor) begin by stating the fugal “subject,” a serpentine melody that slithers up and then back down. The range from highest note to lowest is extremely limited, with most pitches next to one another. The melody is chromatic, not diatonic, meaning that if it were played on the piano in C major it would use both white and black keys, not just the white ones. “Chromatic” derives from the Greek word for color, and this movement, even though primarily for strings, is nonetheless particularly colorful because of the inflections of the melodies.

The other strings imitate the ’s lead, first , then , with these higher and lower instruments alternating back and forth around the anchoring violas in the middle. Because Bartók has divided the string orchestra into two groups, twice as many entrances are possible and produce striking antiphonal effects. The strings build in volume and density before percussion instruments enter to mark the movement’s climax; at this point as well the strings take off the mutes and produce a fuller, more resonant tone. Bartók now inverts the fugal subject—turns it upside down: What previously had crept up now creeps down and vice versa. Indeed, at one moment Bartók has both versions happening simultaneously, both the original contour of the theme and its inversion. At this same point the celesta makes its first appearance with glittering arpeggiated chords. What Bartók slowly built up from the unaccompanied violas beginning on the pitch A, winds down eventually to the violins playing that same note to conclude.

The following Allegro is a lively contrast, prepared by the slow opening movement. (The entire four-movement piece might be considered two slow/fast pairs, each one of roughly equal length.) The rhythmic profile may remind one of Stravinsky and the percussion instruments, piano, harp, and celesta all become more prominent. A single pitch, F, repeated on the begins the AdagioAdagio,,,, an atmospheric movement that many commentators describe as nocturnal. Bartók uses his beloved arch form (ABCBA) with a cascading harp, piano, and celesta passage in the middle. The xylophone also closes the movement. The final Allegro molto is a dance-like movement that most obviously projects a folk character. Unlike the chromaticism of the first movement, this one is primarily diatonic, with clear and simple tunes that build to a mighty conclusion.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

The Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta was composed in 1936.

Leonard Bernstein conducted the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the work, in December 1948. Since then the piece has been performed only six times: in November 1961 with William Smith; in November 1963 with Werner Torkanowsky; in November 1978 with ; in November 1983 with Riccardo Muti; in November 1989 with Muti; and in October 2002 with Christoph von Dohnányi.

The Orchestra recorded the work in 1978 for RCA with Ormandy.

Bartók’s score calls for , , , snare drum, tam-tam, drum, xylophone, harp, celesta, piano, and strings.

The Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta runs approximately 30 minutes in performance. Violin Concerto

EsaEsa----PekkaPekka Salonen Born in Helsinki, June 30, 1958 Now living in London

Esa-Pekka Salonen is now regarded as one of the finest conductors of his generation, but he first thought his career path would be as a composer. He was a horn student at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki while studying composition privately with Einojuhani Rautavaara; later he studied in Siena with Franco Donatoni, and in Milan with Niccolò Castiglioni. Salonen enjoyed some success as a director of new music ensembles, a role he assumed primarily so he could oversee performances of his own works. But in 1983, after filling in on very short notice for a London performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony, Salonen’s career as a world-class conductor was assured. Still, in the rare and brief periods of free time between conducting engagements, he returned to composing.

Even as a conductor, though, Salonen has long been a champion of contemporary music. In collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he served as music director from 1992 to 2009, his concert programming and recordings show clearly where his musical tastes lie. Modernists such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lutosławski, Ligeti, Adams, and Messiaen are favorites, and he has also worked extensively with contemporaneous Nordic composers including Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg, and Anders Hilborg.

A Return to Melody Salonen took a year’s leave of absence from the Philharmonic in 2000 to concentrate specifically on composition. The time in Los Angeles had helped him break free from the rather strict of his earlier compositions, and he felt emboldened to revisit melody, harmony, and pulse. He reflected, “Only after a couple of years here did I begin to see that the European canon I blindly accepted was not the only truth. Over here, I was able to think about this rule that forbids melody. It's madness. Madness!” Salonen’s compositional style is therefore somewhat eclectic, drawing from elements as diverse as neo-romanticism, serialism, minimalism, and the music of Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Berio.

As his tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was winding down, Salonen began work on a Violin Concerto for Leila Josefowicz, an artist widely known for her enthusiastic advocacy of contemporary music. Initial work on the Concerto also happened to coincide with the composer’s 50th birthday in June 2008, a landmark anniversary that (as Salonen wryly noted) “brutally wipes out any hallucinations of still being young.” With his impending departure from Los Angeles, a milestone birthday, and a conscious decision to spend more time pursuing composition, Salonen began to feel that a “seismic shift” was occurring in his life, and that while this Concerto was in part a “portrait” of Josefowicz, it was also turning into a summation of his own artistic path.

Although it was intended to be premiered with the Chicago Symphony in early 2009, Salonen’s Violin Concerto was first performed in April that year in Los Angeles. At that performance, the finale (titled Adieu) seemed symbolic, as the premiere coincided with the final days of his 17-year association with the Philharmonic. Salonen and Josefowicz have performed the work together regularly since that time, and a commercial recording is planned for release in May 2012. In November 2011 Salonen’s Violin Concerto won for its composer the 2012 Grawemeyer Award, one of the most prestigious international awards for contemporary composition.

—Luke Howard

The composer has written the following on his Violin Concerto.

I wrote my Violin Concerto between June 2008 and March 2009. Nine months, the length of human gestation, a beautiful coincidence.

I decided to cover as wide a range of expression as I could imagine over the four movements of the Concerto: from the virtuosic and flashy to the aggressive and brutal, from the meditative and static to the nostalgic and autumnal. Leila Josefowicz turned out to be a fantastic partner in this process. She knows no limits, she knows no fear, and she was constantly encouraging me to go to places I was not sure I would dare to go. As a result of that process, this Concerto is as much a portrait of her as it is my more private narrative, a kind of summary of my experiences as a musician and a human being at the watershed age of 50.

Movement II:: Mirage The violin starts alone, as if the music had been going on for some time already. Very light bell-like sounds comment on the virtuosic line here and there. Suddenly we zoom in to maximum magnification: The open strings of the violin continue their resonance, but amplified; the light playfulness has been replaced by an extreme close-up of the strings, now played by the cellos and basses; the sound is dark and resonant.

Zoom out again, and back in after a while. The third close-up leads into a . The solo violin is playing an embellished melodic line that leads into some impossibly fast music. I zoom out once again at the very end, this time straight up in the air. The violin follows. Finally all movement stops on the note D, which leads to …

Movement IIII:: Pulse I All is quiet, static. I imagined a room, silent: All you can hear is the heartbeat of the person next to you in bed, sound asleep. You cannot sleep, but there is no , just some gentle, diffuse thoughts on your mind. Finally the first rays of the sun can be seen through the curtains, here represented by the flutes.

Movement IIIIII:: Pulse II The pulse is no longer a heartbeat. This music is bizarre and urban, heavily leaning towards popular culture with traces of (synthetic) folk music. The violin is pushed to its very limits physically. Something very Californian in all this. Hooray for freedom of expression. And thank you, guys!

Movement IVIV:: Adieu This is not a specific farewell to anything in particular. It is more related to the very basic process of nature, of something coming to an end and something new being born out of the old. Of course this music has a strong element of nostalgia, and some of the short outbursts of the full orchestra are almost violent, but I tried to illuminate the harmony from within. Not with big gestures, but with light.

When I had written the very last chord of the piece I felt confused: Why does the last chord—and only that—sound completely different from all other harmony of the piece? As if it belonged to a different composition.

Now I believe I have the answer. That chord is a beginning of something new.

Salonen composed his Violin Concerto from 2008 to 2009.

These are the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the work.

The score calls for three flutes (II doubling , III doubling piccolo), two , English horn, two , bass , , two , , two horns, two , two , timpani, percussion (bass drum, drum set, , log drum, , tom-toms, tuned , ), harp, celesta, and strings in addition to the solo violin.

The Concerto runs approximately 30 minutes in performance. La Mer

Claude Debussy Born in St. GermainGermain----enenenen----Laye,Laye, August 22, 1862 Died in Paris, March 25, 1918

In a letter to André Messager dated September 12, 1903, announced, “I am working on three symphonic sketches entitled: 1. ‘Calm Sea around the Sanguinaires Islands’; 2. ‘Play of the Waves’; 3. ‘The Wind Makes the Sea Dance’; the whole to be titled La Mer .” In a rare burst of autobiography, he then confided, “You’re unaware, maybe, that I was intended for the noble career of a sailor and have only deviated from that path thanks to the quirks of fate. Even so, I have retained a sincere devotion to the sea.” Debussy points out to Messager the irony that he is working on his musical seascape in landlocked Burgundy, but declares, “I have innumerable memories, and those, in my view, are worth more than a reality which, charming as it may be, tends to weigh too heavily on the imagination.”

The Advancing Tide But the quirks of fate, of which Debussy wrote so lightly in 1903, lead him back to the sea over and over again in the two years that elapsed between this letter and the premiere of La Mer on October 15, 1905, performed in Paris by the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by . It was a twist of fate that Debussy finished correcting the proofs of his symphonic sketches by the sea while staying at the Grand Hotel in the quirky British resort of . The otherwise ironical composer had washed up on the Atlantic shores of this little town swept away by that most oceanic of emotions: love.

What did the concierge at the Grand Hotel think of the curious French couple staying there during July and August of 1905? The other guests, who were probably too British and well- bred to have initiated a conversation, must have been intrigued by the saturnine Frenchman with the protruding forehead, who spoke no English and, indeed, rarely said a word even in his native tongue. But what of the woman with him, speaking fluent English with an enchanting accent, charming, vivacious, and clearly pregnant? Surely represented to the hotel management as Debussy’s wife, she was in reality , née Moyse, a socialite and gifted singer who had left her wealthy husband for an impecunious composer. Her husband, Sigismund, who had tolerated with indulgent good humor her earlier affair with the discreet Gabriel Fauré, assumed that she would return to him after her passion for Debussy cooled. But Emma never looked back: She bore Debussy a daughter, Claude- Emma, nicknamed “Chou-Chou” by her adoring father, who was born some two weeks after the first performance of La Mer.

In the scandal that followed their elopement, especially after Debussy’s unsophisticated first wife made an ineffectual attempt at suicide, he lost many friends—but not the loyal Messager. In consequence of her adultery, Emma lost a lavish inheritance from her wealthy uncle, thus condemning her reticent husband to seek lucrative but agonizing public appearances as a and conductor. They finally married in 1908, enjoying their life together until he died of cancer on March 25, 1918, as German artillery bombarded Paris; despite the acute danger, Emma refused to leave her husband’s side.

“Symphonic Sketches” During his lifetime and after, critics labeled Debussy as an “Impressionist,” associating him with the then-radical but now beloved painters Monet and Renoir. Debussy protested that he was not merely an Impressionist but a symbolist like , whose play Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) he had transformed into an opera, or his friend Pierre Louÿs, whose poems he set in the voluptuous song cycle de Bilitis (1898). Despite the suggestive titles of his pieces, Debussy was at least as much a “literary” a composer as he was a “visual” one. By insisting that his publisher, Jacques Durand, place a stylized picture of a wave by the great Japanese artist on the cover of La Mer, Debussy indicated implicitly that his score was not merely a seascape painted rapidly from prosaic reality nor a pantheistic rhapsody, but rather an evocation of those elemental forces that the sea itself symbolizes: birth (in French, the word for the sea, mer, is a homonym for the word for mother, mère ); desire (waves endlessly lapping the shore, forever unsatisfied); love (all-enveloping emotion in which the lover is completely submerged); and, of course, death (dissolution into eternity).

Furthermore, as was evinced in his choice of a Japanese print for the score’s cover, Debussy went to considerable trouble to differentiate his work from the aesthetics of the Impressionist painters. Although its subtitle has puzzled critics over the years, Debussy knew exactly what he was doing when he called La Mer a series of “symphonic sketches.” “Symphonic” because of the sophistication of the processes involved in generating the musical materials, but the word “sketches” is not used in the sense of something rapidly executed or unfinished, but rather to denote a clearly delineated line drawing, nothing remotely “Impressionistic.”

A Closer Look Writing shortly after the premiere of La Mer, the critic noted, “in each of these three episodes … [Debussy] has been able to create enduringly all the glimmerings and shifting shadows, caresses and murmurs, gentle sweetness and fiery anger, seductive charm and sudden gravity contained in those waves which Aeschylus praised for their ‘smile without number.’” The slow, tenebrous, and mysterious opening of the first “sketch,” which Debussy ultimately called From DDDawnDawn to Midday atatat SSSea,Sea, contains all of the thematic motifs that will pervade the rest of the entire score, just as in a Beethovenian symphony. The resemblance to the German symphonic tradition essentially ends there, however, for only the most evanescent lineaments of , with its contrasting themes and development section, can be discerned flickering behind Debussy’s complex formal design. There is no formal section devoted exclusively to development in La Mer because Debussy develops incessantly from the very first notes. The second of the “sketches,” Play of the WavesWaves,,,, is constructed from tiny mosaic-like thematic and harmonic fragments, a process that anticipates the extraordinary subtlety of Debussy’s last completed orchestral score, (1912-13), in which the “games” are more explicitly erotic. The final “sketch,” Dialogue ofofof the WWindind and the SSSeaSeaeaea,,,, begins in storm and, rising to grandeur, concludes with an orgasmic burst of enveloping, oceanic rapture.

—Byron Adams

La Mer was composed from 1903 to 1905.

Carl Pohlig conducted the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of La Mer, in January 1911. The most recent subscription performances were under the direction of Charles Dutoit in April 2010. In between the work has been heard numerous times, with such conductors as , , Artur Rodzinski, , , Charles Munch, , , Christoph Eschenbach, and .

The Philadelphians have recorded the work four times: in 1942 for RCA with ; in 1959 for CBS with Eugene Ormandy; in 1971 for RCA with Ormandy; and in 1993 for EMI with Riccardo Muti.

Debussy scored the work for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two , three trombones, , timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, tam-tam, and triangle), two harps, celesta, and strings.

Performance time is approximately 25 minutes.

Program notes © 2012. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, and/or Luke Howard.

GENERAL TERMS Arpeggio: A broken chord (with notes played in succession instead of together) Chord: The simultaneous sounding of three or more tones Chromatic: Relating to tones foreign to a given key (scale) or chord Coda: A concluding section or passage added in order to confirm the impression of finality Counterpoint: A term that describes the combination of simultaneously sounding musical lines Development: See sonata form Diatonic: Melody or harmony drawn primarily from the tones of the major or minor scale Dissonance: A combination of two or more tones requiring resolution Fugue: A piece of music in which a short melody is stated by one voice and then imitated by the other voices in succession, reappearing throughout the entire piece in all the voices at different places Legato: Smooth, even, without any break between notes Meter: The symmetrical grouping of musical rhythms Minuet: A dance in triple time commonly used up to the beginning of the 19th century as the lightest movement of a symphony Mode: Any of certain fixed of the diatonic tones of an octave, as the major and minor scales of Western music Recitative: Declamatory singing, free in and rhythm Rondo: A form frequently used in symphonies and for the final movement. It consists of a main section that alternates with a variety of contrasting sections (A-B-A-C-A etc.). Scale: The series of tones which form (a) any major or minor key or (b) the chromatic scale of successive semi-tonic steps : Literally “a joke.” Usually the third movement of symphonies and quartets that was introduced by Beethoven to replace the minuet. The scherzo is followed by a gentler section called a trio, after which the scherzo is repeated. Its characteristics are a rapid tempo in triple time, vigorous rhythm, and humorous contrasts. Serialism: Music constructed according to the principle pioneered by Schoenberg in the early 1920s, whereby the 12 notes of the scale are arranged in a particular order, forming a series of pitches that serves as the basis of the composition and a source from which the musical material is derived Sonata form: The form in which the first movements (and sometimes others) of symphonies are usually cast. The sections are exposition, development, and recapitulation, the last sometimes followed by a coda. The exposition is the introduction of the musical ideas, which are then “developed.” In the recapitulation, the exposition is repeated with modifications.

THE SPEED OF MUSIC (Tempo) Adagio: Leisurely, slow Allegro: Bright, fast Andante: Walking speed Tranquillo: Quiet, peaceful, soft

TEMPO MODIFIERS Molto: Very