"Song of Ice and Snow" in classical music

The beautiful Beijing Winter Olympics have come to an end, but the dream of ice and snow continues.

Since the beginning of literature and art, human beings have never been tired of singing and depicting ice and snow. If the direct lyricism of words and sentences and the image of the picture are more close to the daily experience, then there is a kind of technical magic when music conveys this image with invisible brush and ink.

Piano in the Snow (Spain) Salvador Dalí

When it comes to instrumental music in Western classical music, people often think of its difficulty, abstraction and introspection, but in fact, the exquisite art of this musical combination also has its outstanding power in depicting scenes. Using the sound of the piano to dye the image of the sparkling crystal and spread the sound line into an endless scene is not an easy task for composers, but the masters can produce many masterpieces, both in the form of sound and allegorical.

Impressionist music was created almost exclusively to depict the light and color of objects. Its representative, Claude Debussy, has a brilliant song of snow, the fourth song of the piano suite "Children's Garden", "Snowflakes Flying". The first and last two sections of the song are run through a uniform jumping sound, as if the snow is falling endlessly; the ambiguous tone reveals a faint melancholy, like a child whose entertainment is hindered and leaning on the window to look up at the dim clouds. Just as Impressionist painting did not pay attention to clear lines, this song did not have a melody that was easy to remember, and the whole was ethereal and hazy, but this ethereal and hazy could become the deepest memory of the listener.

The snow was thick, and the adults had to carry their tools to shovel the roads in the cold. The piano masterpiece corresponding to this scene is "Chasse-neige", the last of Liszt's Twelve Super-Elyudes. This song has a dual nature of technology and performance. From the point of view of the etude, it is written specifically for the training and display of vibrato, and the player who has no deep skills is doomed to be difficult to control; and from the imagery indicated by the title, the endless and dense vibrato is like a very cold wind, coupled with a lonely and stiff melody, the listener can imagine what kind of snow and what kind of labor it is.

Russian composers have an innate affection for ice and snow imagery, and their expansive tunes are always reminiscent of silver-clad fields and forests, so much so that we can't necessarily tell from the text whether a work is related to ice and snow. However, as far as the real "depiction" is concerned, it is still necessary to give an example according to the title. Tchaikovsky's First Symphony, titled "Winter's Dream," points to this theme. The most scenic features of the song are the first two movements: "The Dream of a Winter Journey" and "The Land of Gloom". Here, the listener can follow the author's carriage with imagination to drive through the snow-covered Russian land, lingering in the wonderland of cold and poetry. Tchaikovsky also has a masterpiece that is extremely figurative and more famous about snowscapes, that is, November of the piano suite "Four Seasons": "Troika". The short song consists of two elements: a lyrical "folk song" and a dynamic depiction of a troika; and the end of the piece is an interweaving of the two. In order to depict the carriage, the author deliberately simulated the bell on the carriage with a small second-degree leaning tone, and then used a rapid jagged sound pattern to write the galloping shape of the carriage on the snow field vividly, making people listen as if they were in the present.

The climate in Northern Europe is not necessarily colder than in Russia, but the nature of Nordic composers has a different kind of coldness. The symphonic poem "Tapiola" is the finale of the Finnish musician Sibelius, which Arun Ridley describes in The Philosophy of Music as "perhaps one of the most chilly and desolate pieces ever made" and that it "creates an unprecedented cold musical effect with a fairly standard orchestra.". This chilly effect is first directly related to the acoustic characteristics of the work, such as the somber tune, the gray harmony, the solemn rhythm, etc., on the other hand, it is inseparable from the suggestive role of the mythological background. In Norse mythology, the god of the forest is named Tapio, and the territory he governs is called Tapiola. "There is a dark stretch of forest in the north, which contains the mystery of the ancient in the original dream. This is a verse that Sibelius excerpted from the Finnish national epic Kalevara to annotate The Tabiola. Understanding the mythological layer, what we can appreciate from the music is not only the cold and bone-deep feeling, but also the irresistible magic in the depths of nature, the invincible divine power.

If you want to talk about the amount of ice and snow and the coolness of the cold, no place can compare with the Antarctic continent. Classical music that uses it as a depiction also exists, namely the Antarctic Symphony by the British composer Vaughan Williams. The song's creation dates back to Robert Scott's expedition to Antarctica. In 1910, the ambitious British officer led a second expedition to this mysterious and dangerous continent, but unfortunately came to his own tragic end in the process of sprinting to the South Pole with the Norwegian expedition. In 1948, this widely celebrated heroic deed was made into the film Scott of Antarctica, for which Vaughn Williams was invited to compose the soundtrack. In the years that followed, the background music, which was combined with the picture, was refined by the composer as new material to form his symphony No. 7, entitled "Antarctica".

This is a magnificent symphonic masterpiece with deep meaning and a great sense of picture. In terms of compilation, the author added instruments such as the bell, vibrato, and organ to the "standard" of orchestral music to add a strange color to the sound, and for the same purpose, she also used female soloists, choruses, and wind machines. The female voice only appears in the first two movements, and there are no lyrics at all, which makes the music shrouded in a mysterious atmosphere. This technique was used by the author's close friend Holst in the final movement of the Planet Suite, Neptune - The Mysterious Messenger, to depict the mysterious fantasy of the farthest planet known to mankind at that time. The wind sounder, an onomatopoeia originally used on the theatrical stage to mimic the howling of strong winds, was first successfully combined with a symphony orchestra in the "Tempest" passage of Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, setting off that Nietzschean passion. In the Antarctic Symphony, the same sound effect vividly presents the harshness of the polar region, making the audience tremble with the violent and deadly cold wind as if they are there, and also moved by the birth and death of the extreme challengers.

From drifting snow to polar storms, this is the vastness of ice and snow imagery in classical music. There are also many masterpieces in this themed series (such as "Ice Skating Round Dance", Vivaldi's "Winter" of "Four Seasons", etc.); if you expand the topic to vocal music, there are more masterpieces worth mentioning.

(Original title: "Song of Ice and Snow" in Classical Music)

Source: Beijing Evening News Author: Qian Hao

Process Editor: u029

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