Devin Patrick Hughes: Volume 2 – 100 Minute Playlist of Symphonic Music

Symphonic music, both new and old, can stir our souls in ways that I believe no other music is capable. One of the most exciting aspects of orchestral music is that it was not created in a vacuum. Composers like Beethoven and Dvořák were common folks who worked their butts off and reacted to the events, culture, and dilemmas of their times by creating art that would continue to influence societies and stir our souls centuries after their deaths. In our times composers like Caroline Shaw and Mason Bates reflect and reimagine life today, where we are, and where we’re going with their musical visions.

In the second installment of 100 Minutes of Symphonic Music, I wanted to share some aspects of this amazing repertoire we call symphonic (formerly “classical”) music that can enrich our spirit, uplift our souls, and bring relevance and purpose to our lives.

Mason Bates: Warehouse Medicine from the B-Sides

Mason Bates merges techno and electronica with the orchestra more seamlessly than any other contemporary composer. During Warehouse Medicine (the fifth movement of the B-Sides), titled after the DJ/dance scene of Detroit, the sounds are so well integrated that it’s sometimes unclear where orchestral instruments end and electronica begins. Bates marvelously brings the symphonic orchestra into the nightclub with reckless abandon.

Beethoven Symphony no. 7

Perhaps one of the greatest symphonies and an audience favorite, the Seventh Symphony, or the Apotheosis of the Dance, as Richard Wagner called it, has some of the greatest hits and tunes that a symphony can pack. More interesting for the listener might be the accounts we have of the premiere in 1813. 

The Seventh Symphony shared the program with the composer’s Wellington’s Victory, full of canons and other artillery (Beethoven’s version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture) and was performed at a benefit concert for wounded Austrian soldiers fighting Napoleon. The famous second movement Allegretto (heard in the King’s Speech) was applauded and encored multiple times at the premiere. Remember this was an early 1800s audience’s only way of hearing music again: keep clapping until the orchestra repeats!

Since Beethoven was quite deaf at this time, as he conducted he became separated from the orchestra by a number of bars, leaving the orchestra to fend for themselves until things got back on track. Louis Spohr, an esteemed composer in his own right, and concertmaster for the evening, recounted Beethoven’s antics on the podium: “as a sforzando occurred, he tore his arms with a great vehemence asunder… at the entrance of a forte he jumped in the air.”

Beethoven took a few tricks of the trade from Papa Haydn. Musical humor is quite rampant in the Seventh Symphony. For example, key in on the repeating E’s exchanged between competing violins and winds in the introduction to movement one. The inverted (turned upside down) A-minor chord opening the second movement comes out of nowhere, and many more musical surprises that I’ll let you discover. Anytime you find yourself chuckling out loud, Beethoven probably meant for that to happen. However not everyone agreed the new symphony was an entertaining success. The famous composer Carl Maria von Weber is said to have pronounced Beethoven “fit for a madhouse.”

Dvořák Symphony no. 9 “From the New World”

When Dvořák came to America in the 1890s at the behest of musical entrepreneur Jeanette Thurber, his task was to create a novel American school of composition distinct from its Eurocentric roots. It’s ironic that the American musical establishment of the late 1800s turned to one of the most famous European composers to create its own identity. 

Nevertheless, Thurber couldn’t have chosen someone more worthy for the task than Antonín Dvořák. Dvořák proclaimed the future of music in America lies at the heart of the African-American spiritual and Native American dance, and combined melodies of the new world with his own more familiar Bohemian flavors to create the Symphony in E minor. 

Aside from featuring some excitingly memorable tunes, including Goin’ Home, the Jaws theme, and Sweet Chariot, the music is dramatic and captivating in scope. The inner movements feature music inspired by Hiawatha, the founder of the Iroquois nation, out of which Dvořák planned to craft a future opera. The mood of the symphony ranges from chamber like intimacy to battalion-like and brassy Dvořák, who like Mozart, was an opera composer at heart, and is able to draw in the listener as a symphonic story teller, bring characters to life in color, and foretell a previously undiscovered new world. 

Caroline Shaw: Entr’acte 

Trained as a violinist and also singer, composer Caroline Shaw has made a symphonic splash over the past decade, becoming the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music with Partita for 8 Voices.

I love how Shaw presents Entr’acte as an effective deconstruction of the old minuet and trio form, which was a way to combine two contrasting dances, and evolved into the third movement in symphonies by composers like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Dissecting older forms to create something previously unfathomed, novel, and monumental in its risk and scope is certainly Caroline Shaw’s forte. 

If you look at the minuet and trio as a complete movement, it usually is played in this order: 1) minuet, 2) trio, 3) repeat minuet. Sometimes the listener can get discombobulated and lost during the middle trio section, until the minuet returns and reasserts itself. In the case of Entr’acte, this pitfall is taken to the extreme, where the trio quickly metamorphosizes into something unrecognizable, upon magically repairing itself before our eyes.

According to Shaw, “Entr’acte was written after hearing Haydn’s Quartet Op. 77 No. 2 — with a spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.” It is Shaw’s music that takes us on this exotic and unexpected journey. 

The mission of conductor and music director Devin Patrick Hughes is to uplift the human spirit through the orchestra, and share the relevance of symphonic music in our modern lives. Devin resides in Colorado, where he conducts the Boulder Symphony and Arapahoe Philharmonic and hosts the podcast One Symphony. 

Photos below of Bates, Dvorak, Beethoven, Shaw, Hughes