Through the Darkness
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

It is common -- if somewhat curious, when one thinks about it -- for musicians to use the language of visual experience when talking about their art. In particular, they often invoke shades of light and darkness to convey some aspect of sound. An oboist is said to have an unusually bright tone, for example, whereas a violist’s might be described, not unflatteringly, as dark or dusky.

We also attribute darkness or light to certain pieces of music. Indeed, there exists a longstanding compositional tradition of equating low-register sounds, soft dynamics, and minor-key harmonies with darkness and, high or rising pitch, increased volume, and major tonality with brightness. This tradition enabled Handel to suggest, in the oratorio Israel in Egypt, the biblical plague of darkness; Haydn to “depict” in sound God’s decree that there be light in his oratorio The Creation; and many composers to convey sunrises, nightfall, or other aspects of light in their operas and other works.

Apart from portraying actual scenes of darkness or light, composers have used these musical conventions to suggest varying degrees of spiritual gloom or luminosity. A celebrated instance occurs with the transition to the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. There, a somber figure circling in the violins over a dull drone harmony slowly rises in pitch and volume until, with a thrilling crescendo, the music bursts into radiant C-major exultation, woodwinds and brass joining to create a blaze of sonic triumph. 

Beethoven’s famous symphony helped establish the notion that music can serve as a beacon, guiding both its creator and listeners through personal trials, through dark nights of the soul, so to speak. This idea has been an important part of our collective understanding of what art can be and do, and it has influenced many musicians and their work. Indeed, all three of the compositions that form this concert’s program were created in, or as a response to, some crisis or tragedy. Although they do so in different ways, each of these pieces confronts spiritual darkness and finds its way through to brightness -- to solace or catharsis, perhaps even to joy.

Kingdom Come, the title of the first composition we hear, is a phrase laden with ambiguity. On one hand, it connotes a paradise beyond this world, a heaven in which worldly strife is resolved and divine rule prevails. (The plea “Thy kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer obviously implies this meaning.) On the other, a longstanding popular use suggests death and destruction, as in the expression “blown to kingdom come.” Clearly, these different meanings stand in strong opposition to each other, and the resulting semantic tension gives the phrase much of its character and potency.

It is quite possible -- perhaps, even, unavoidable -- to read both senses of “kingdom come” into the work of that name by the American composer Ingram Marshall. The piece is a reaction to the war that devastated Bosnia during the 1990s, a war in which religious strife played a central role in turning a once peaceful multiethnic society into a charnel house. That conflict, and the well-documented horrors it inflicted on so many innocent civilians, has elicited responses from many artists working in varied media. But for Marshall, the Bosnian tragedy acquired a personal dimension beyond the outrage and dismay felt by so many observers. On May 1, 1994, the composer’s brother-in-law, Francis Tomasic, who was covering the war as a journalist, was killed by a mine near the town of Mostar. Kingdom Come is dedicated to his memory.

Marshall, who frequently incorporates recorded sound into his compositions and often carries a small tape recorder on his journeys, had traveled in the former Yugoslavia during the 1980s. One Sunday in 1985, he made audio recordings of singing in both a Catholic church and the main Serbian Orthodox church in the city of Dubrovnik. More than a decade later, a commission from the New York-based American Composers Orchestra prompted Marshall to return to these sounds, which he used, together with an old ethnographic record of a Bosnian Muslim gusle singer, as the basis of a piece for recorded sounds and orchestra.

Kingdom Come begins with a succession of minor-key chords, each beginning in the low strings and rising to the upper range of the violins. (The composer acknowledges that this scoring is indebted to “the magical sonority” of Jean Sibelius’s tone poem The Swan of Tuonela -- a work, we might note, with strong intimations of death.) This initial passage gives way to another, elegiac in character, whose music gradually descends in pitch to the bottom of the orchestra’s range. At the end of this descent, the Catholic choir Marshall recorded in Dubrovnik is heard, but altered by slowing the speed of the tape so that it sounds, in the composer’s words, “rather like a jet engine roaring at low rev.” Recorded singing from the several sources used in the piece sounds in turn throughout the remainder of the composition, the orchestra accompanying with phrases and instrumental textures that seem alternately mournful, comforting, angry, and martial. Toward the end, the composer recalls the orchestral music of the opening, and in the final moments, singing from all three recorded sources is heard together for the first and only time.

Although it is not uncommon for composers to respond in their work to war or other kinds of external strife, musicians also are moved by inner crises, by difficulties in their personal circumstances or within their own psyches. Jean Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony was written during a particularly trying period of its author’s life. When the composer began forming ideas for this piece, in the autumn of 1909, he was beset by troubles. A year earlier doctors had discovered a malignant tumor in his throat. Although an operation removed it, his surgeon gave a cautious prognosis. For several years Sibelius worried that his time might be short. (Ironically, he lived nearly half a century longer, into his nineties.) Moreover, he had to give up cigars, a pleasure he had enjoyed greatly for years. He also decided to abandon alcohol, another favorite amenity, which he found stimulated his imagination but often left him too debilitated to work. Never drawn to asceticism, Sibelius now found that condition thrust upon him.

There were other worries. The composer was deeply in debt, and although the Finnish government had granted him an annual stipend in recognition of his importance to the artistic life of his country, it was not nearly enough to meet his living expenses. During the year 1910, as he tried to sustain work on his new symphony, Sibelius frequently had to leave composing and deal with his creditors. He also took to writing smaller pieces in hopes of earning some quick remuneration.

Were all this not sufficiently depressing, Sibelius increasingly felt alienated from new musical trends, especially those emerging from Germany. Music by the young Arnold Schoenberg, recommended to him by the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni, left him cold, and other exponents of the nascent modernity proved little more appealing. This sense of estrangement from the musical vanguard fueled a growing resentment at what Sibelius believed was a general lack of appreciation for his work and his relegation to the status of regional composer. “No one, no one at all discusses me,” he complained in his diary. “I’m completely out of the picture.”

In light of these worries and complaints, it is hardly surprising that the Fourth Symphony endured an arduous creation. From the beginning, Sibelius saw it as the start of a new direction for his work. “I am intentionally burning my boats,” he proclaimed to his diary as he began writing the work in earnest, in January 1910: “Holding high the banner of real art.” But by spring his optimism had waned. “Again in the deepest depression,” reads a diary entry of April 21. In early August Sibelius was still wrestling with the central development passage of the first movement. Two weeks later he crossed out all he had written of it and started over. Diary entries for the following months give expressions of elation alternating with doubt and dejection.

Sibelius struggled with the composition throughout 1910 and into the first months of 1911. He finished the work just in time for its inclusion on a concert of his music in Helsinki in April of that year. The symphony evidently puzzled listeners and critics. “Everything seems strange,” one reviewer wrote. “Curious, transparent figures float here and there, speaking to us in a language whose meaning we cannot grasp. Posterity must decide whether the composer has overstepped the boundaries dictated by sound, natural musicianship.”

Posterity has decided that the Fourth Symphony is a masterpiece. Although its four-movement outline implies a classical symphonic plan, the music with which Sibelius fills that familiar mold is as original as any he wrote. It is also perhaps the most interior, the most subjective. Throughout the composition, we encounter striking melodic gestures, unexpected turns of harmony, and highly evocative textures, none sounding like the thoughts of any other composer. There are powerful orchestral statements, but also passages with the delicacy of chamber music. Although the composition can be analyzed in terms of symphonic form and the evolution of its thematic materials, it more readily gives the impression of unfolding according to its own logic and impulses. Much of the music seems dark, strange, disquieted.