musicians of old

Chapter 757 "Untitled" (Part )
The triplet motive repeats like a funeral march.

The introduction of the trumpet solo is desolate and lonely, like a widow huddled in the twilight, or a sigh hidden in the rain and fog.

It is also like a person who is looking at himself in the shadow and smiling silently towards his homeland in the sky.

"#do-#do-#do-/mi——"

"#do-#do-#do-/mi——"

“#do-mi-#sol-/#do——————”

Fanning keeps pushing the beat of the trumpet forward until the full orchestra bursts into action, starting with the last two notes of the introduction, F sharp and A.

"boom!!!"

The funeral triplet pace is replaced by the background band, the intensity weakens to a much lower level, and the bass strings play out a long line of black tragic theme.

Although there is no title to highlight it, the earthly material of this tragic song still comes from one of the poems in the folk poetry collection "The Magic Trumpet of a Young Man" - "The Drummer Boy".

The poem and tune depict an executed soldier and require no metaphor; it is the explicit, literal sound of death.

It seems to have autobiographical elements.

In the development, Fanning also treated it into two sets of opposing components, one with an overall line pointing upwards and the other pointing downwards. If the former is a desolate song, the theme of the latter half is more inclined to the inner fear and loneliness.

And the trumpet at the beginning also began its real and painful struggle in this.

It was as if he was trapped in layers of heavy curtains, trying his best to push them apart in order to get even a chance to breathe.

The eternal, inexpressible lamentation which is the essence and keynote of human sorrow is heard continually by the hearers, and continues even when all appearances are silent.

"#do-#do-#do-/#do——"

"#do-#do-#do-/#do——"

The lonely song of the prelude begins again.

But this time, the whole world suddenly fell at the end of the tone, plunging into an even more wild and chaotic distortion!

Especially from bar 155, the trumpet here has turned into a hoarse wail in the extremely high range!
“BOOM!!!——”

Suddenly a bolt of lightning burst out in the night sky, and Fanning's baton split the oppressive veil of fog, throwing a drop of rain high into the sky.

During this round of progression, the violin part experienced a wild run from eighth notes to triplets and then to higher eighth notes, reaching its climax with the intensity of fff on the high note D in bar 220!
"The energy of title music has exploded unreservedly in Tristan and Isolde. There is no more material left here, so he can only choose another untitled path. This should be the choice he had planned long ago! Even his most proud choral work has been shelved. He resolutely used untitled pure instrumental music as the last blow, trying to seek some kind of identity or even transcendence with the process of the "torch bearer" climbing to the top in the era of classical music. It is an extremely arrogant, extremely dangerous, and uncompromising ambition!"

The music critics and audiences from all walks of life present were all moved when the music developed to such a wonderful level!
Or, here's a more sinister way of describing it.

This time, Fanning did not reject "writing music with titles", but reversed the relationship, "generating titles with music"!
"No music is so abstract, and no music is so concrete! Because, whether it is the irregular and purposeless cycle in his musical structure, or the unstoppable and unstoppable emotions expressed in his conducting techniques, as well as various motives, moods, and continuous eternal progressions, they are all the artist's description of the world he lives in!"

He succeeded. At least judging from the beginning, he did succeed.

Each listener can create their own title based on their own spirituality to summarize anything that touches them!
Everything here is filled with a depressing and inconsolable atmosphere of sadness from beginning to end.

The brass section musicians seemed to have put in a lot of active resistance along the way, but they completely lost their strength at the last moment.

In the finale, the triple-note funeral motive reappears.

The band soon fell into silence, and the sounds of the muted wind instruments and horns gradually faded away in time and space.

The solo flute, which serves only as an echo in the valley, plays the final broken #c minor triad with extremely light force.

"Boom." The sound of a double bass plucked ended.

Seems very prophetic.

The atmosphere of this first movement is, to some extent, even better than "today's reality".

Will there be a respite?
The audience speculated so, but at this moment, they saw Fanning's wrist suddenly snapped like a dead branch.

The bass player's bow is lifted off the string at the same time.

It was the taut silence between the clouds and the earth before the storm.

The next moment, the violent prelude in A minor suddenly burst out, like lightning piercing through the dark clouds!
The second movement is “as fierce as a storm, and even more fierce”!
The bass strings screamed in pain, and the brass and percussion instruments responded with crazy and angry gestures!
The audience realized belatedly that the form of the first movement was actually "very problematic" and that reading the whole piece was just a "prelude to death"!
It's just an introduction!

The real sonata form begins here!
He seemed to have finally entered a normal creative process, but the extreme tonal freedom, various motive deformations, and the abnormal position of the second movement have actually completely subverted the traditional structure.

The theme's alternating narrow and steep intervals and spasmodic rhythm are enough to make people breathless. Later, the woodwind group played a elegiac melody in the sub-theme, which was marked as "returning to the speed of the funeral march", forming the echo structure of death again!
Heart-breaking, irrational despair, once triggered, irreversible.

In the silence, the cello played a mournful solo, with the faint accompaniment of the timpani behind it.

This is the development section, and the entry of the secondary theme into E flat minor is a sign - although strictly speaking, everything is dark and gloomy, and there is no clear boundary.

Klagend's instructions reappeared, and all hope seemed lost.

The "Leandra" dance motive that Fanning is familiar to the audience appears here in a dismembered state. The sustained sounds of the double bass and tuba surge like underground magma. Everything is deviating from the aesthetic paradigm of the classical sonata. All emotional conflicts are presented in a darker and more terrifying form. The order of traditional modes and counterpoint has been repeatedly pushed to the brink of collapse!
"'As violent as a storm'? A storm?"

Sitting in the front seats, Maestro Nyman and Maestro Schillings, who had finished their afternoon performance, stared at the figure on the podium and muttered to themselves.

“The storm here is not a metaphor of nature, but an acoustic projection of spiritual implosion! Gillespie’s heroic struggle has become history. Here, there are only the screams and cries of people in industrial society who are thrown into the gap between rationality and nothingness!”

Before the recapitulation and at the end, a chorus-like material appears, which is abruptly interrupted twice.

When it was interrupted for the first time at bar 316, not many people paid attention. But the second interruption at bar 464 finally attracted many people's attention.

Even some people with sharp eyes were triggered by the memory that left a direct impression at first - there seemed to be such a chorus material in the first movement "Funeral March", which rose from the gloomy C sharp minor of the first movement for just five or six bars, giving a hint of the bright D major tonality!
With such a painful and depressing beginning and development, could it be a foreshadowing or a clue to the final tone?
The main plot of the entire untitled symphony seems to have begun to emerge: the transition between life and death, the struggle between light and darkness!