This week’s theme is…Triple Compound Toe Tappers! 4/4 time is so prevalent in music of all styles that it has a nickname, “common time”. If you say “common time” to a musician, you can bet they will understand that you intend each measure to have four beats, and each beat to divide in half. Given its nickname, you may sometimes find a letter “C” written at the beginning of a musical score to indicate this. There is another meter that I am tempted to nickname “rare time” and may start representing it with a letter “R”. It is compound triple, meaning there are three beats per measure and each beat is divided into 3. Always written with a 9 on top of the time signature, the super lilty compound triple, like a waltz within a waltz, is, in my experience, the rarest of all of the meter types. But there’s enough notable examples to fill a week with great music, so enjoy!
Triple Compound Toe Tappers, Day 4 – Symphony No. 6 in A major, movement III Scherzo by Anton Bruckner
In Aesop’s fable The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse the country mouse invites his cosmopolitan friend to visit and dine in his simple home. The city mouse, wishing to return the favor, and also probably to show his friend the comforts and luxuries of the good life, reciprocates the favor, inviting the bumpkin to a fine dining experience in his dazzling home. No sooner have they tucked into their “jellies and cakes” than they are alarmed by the sound of prowling dogs outside. The country mouse, understandably shaken, expresses his concern. Even as the city mouse prepares to write it off, the dogs in question burst into their quarters and threaten their lives. The moral of Aesop’s tale is summarized as “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.”
Are you a city mouse or a country mouse? There are, of course gradations between the two and beyond. One could be a small town mouse, a minor metropolis mouse, a megalopolis mouse. And regardless of preference, there is a tendency for rising artists to migrate from the country to the city, settling into their roles as public performers and creators within the highly nourishing global network of business, commerce and power which tends to buzz through the hubs of major urban centers. This was true of classical musicians as well. Handel is a great example, drawn from his sleepy little provincial German town to the commercial center of London (see this post). Vienna, the cultural capital of the Austrian Empire, was a major hub, drawing musicians to her for more than a century, and what a century it was! Mozart was drawn to Vienna, as was Beethoven. So was Brahms, and Mahler, and Richard Strauss (the other Strausses were there already, as was Schubert, and the composers of the “Second Viennese School” see this post). Britten almost went there (see this post).
Haydn was something of a country mouse, spending most of his time working steadily at the rural estate of his aristocratic patron, but he made it to some major metropolitan centers toward the end of his life, most notably London (see this post) and Vienna as well. Haydn may have been a country mouse, but he was pretty comfortable in town. There is another country mouse he never quite seemed to be. His biography suggests that he would have preferred beans and bacon in peace, but he was almost drawn by the gravity of musical Vienna against his will. The great Austrian country mouse of musical romanticism is Anton Bruckner. He ended up working, successfully and influentially so, in Vienna, eventually assuming a very public role as professor of harmony at Vienna’s prestigious conservatory and having his monumental symphonies played by orchestras throughout the Western world during his lifetime, but may very well have been more comfortable with a humble, work-a-day post as a church organist in his native rural province, rather like Bach.
Bruckner was not so provincial, and he traveled more widely than Bach. He traveled to Munich and Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s operas. He went to Paris and London to display his virtuosity at the organ. He went to Leipzig when his symphonies were played by the Gewandhaus Orchestra. And he went to Vienna, the city where he was to spend the last three decades of his life, however well his homespun manner was suited for the place. Bruckner first went to Vienna in order to apply for study with the phenomenal harmony professor Simon Sechter, who had recently assumed a teaching post at the Vienna Conservatory. Sechter accepted the 31 year old Bruckner without reservation after perusing some of his polyphonic choral music and his tutelage lasted for 6 years. The majority of the process was via correspondence, with Bruckner sending his completed exercises to Sechter and appearing once per year in Vienna for intense examinations. This time was one of the busiest of Bruckner’s life, with him perfecting his organ technique, playing for and largely managing operations of a church, teaching piano pupils, and singing in choirs. He devoted 7 hours per day to Sechter’s exercises, relieved only by the teacher’s stipulation that his students write no other music during their study with him.
After finishing his study with Sechter, Bruckner studied orchestration with another musician, Otto Kitzler, for a couple of years. It was shortly after this that he learned of Sechter’s death. He also learned that he was on the minds of many decision makers as his natural successor, and so he somewhat reluctantly settled in Vienna to take this post. He would stay in Vienna for the rest of his life, first teaching at the Vienna Conservatory, and then Vienna University. During this time he also spent considerable time writing the nine magnificent and distinctive symphonies for which he is primarily known today.
Even as Bruckner became assimilated into the culture of Vienna, many of his provincial mannerisms and tendencies remained. He wore hand-made and ill-fitting clothing. He actually tipped Hans Richter, who conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony. He stopped in the middle of his harmony lectures to drop to his knees and pray whenever he heard the tolling of nearby church bells. And for as long as he lived he was ever proposing marriage to teenage girls, most of whom he hardly knew, with the goal of securing a virginal wife in the interest of maintaining purity. Bruckner’s religious sensibilities ensured his excessive humility, and he remained deferential to authority figures wherever he encountered them in spite of his considerable gifts, often unambiguously acknowledged by many of those very figures.
Along with this deference came a vulnerability to criticism, but this was countered by a dogged, even naive, persistence. While his early symphonies met with bafflement and harsh judgement on the part of critics in conservative, Brahmsian Vienna, he kept writing them, almost out of a sense of sacred mission. It was his Seventh Symphony of the early 1880s that brought him his first great success as it premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. There is no composer of Romantic symphonies whose mold is more formulaic. All of Bruckner’s symphonies can be described in terms of the plan of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (see this post), sans chorus. Broad opening movement, sublimely lyrical slow movement, fiery scherzo, meandering and awe-inspiring finale. Bruckner’s symphonies all work according to this general plan, filling it with a Schubertian melodic grace, a Wagnerian scale of orchestration, and a clarity, nobility, and heavenly yearning that is all Bruckner’s own. Here is the scherzo from the Sixth Symphony, the one just before his greatest success, propelled by a relentless triple compound meter:
Had the country mouse Bruckner possessed more confidence, perhaps he could have stood up for himself and his magnificent symphonies as he made his way in Vienna. But it is up to posterity to celebrate for him. Bruckner probably would have been happy to dine on beans and bacon, but fortunately he ventured into the larger world of jellies, fine cakes and ale, leaving an impressive legacy that could only have been accomplished there, even if he had to deal with prowling dogs. His provincial ways, while building an excessively meek exterior, were also able to help Bruckner develop an impressively constant internal conviction, and it is this that we hear in his symphonic legacy.
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