Among music’s incredible powers is the ability to encapsulate a moment, or a feeling, and preserve it until the next hearing, whereupon it is released like the smell of mothballs from an old dresser, to use an unpleasant metaphor for a pleasant experience.
Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for strings is a 15-minute piece that has done just that in my experience. I first began listening to it intently in a very particular, and emotionally laden part of my life. The attitudes, and even the nostalgia of that time, were firmly imprinted into the tumultuous music, and when it happened to come up in a shuffled playlist months later, I was vividly transported back to the places and the thoughts that were baked by osmosis into Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro.
Edward Elgar’s music is hopelessly English. Most are introduced to his genius through the sliver of his Pomp and Circumstance March that is played at graduations, and maybe the moving and mysterious Enigma Variations, that served as my introduction to his music. He straddles the accessible and the cerebral–he offers something for everyone. Of all the pieces that are and may be featured on this blog, if I had to insist that a person listen to only one, it would be this piece. It’s delicious, and at 15 minutes, the price is right.
I would recommend to any reader that they give this piece a chance. Just this week, make it the sound track to your life. It is impossibly joyful and inconsolable. See how long it takes before it makes you cry.
The piece opens with a jarring, unanimous g minor chord (the type that the kids might call a power chord) across the string ensemble, followed by a dangerous sounding, descending, oscillating motion, and then what I have heard cleverly described as a “hemiola infused” passage leading into a violin solo.
With ethereal qualities, the violins restate the jagged opening phrase, but with a different characteristic. The four soloists–the piece was written to model a concerto grosso from the baroque period–lead the string orchestra into a viola solo, of all things. Marked by warm, delightful lower strings, this softer section leaves the listener barely prepared for the coarse recapitulation of the opening section, with the violent tremolo in the lower strings, that leads into the beautiful second theme.
Initially cautiously hopeful, the arresting second theme quickly melts into a much more melancholy melody. This abruptly terminates into an exclamation, followed by intimidating and aggressive new material, that somehow makes it back to the opening theme, again restated so it takes a discerning ear to recognize.
More beautiful material segues into the sharp toccata. Listen for the violent descending scales in the cellos and basses that somehow harmonically work. Listen also for the intense polyphonic interplay between upper and lower strings, with impossibly organic rhythms that somehow end together.
Here I will cease to narrate. In writing what I have written so far, I am reminded why I started this blog in the first place. So much can be expressed in language–it is absurdly powerful. And yet it finds itself utterly at a loss when attempting to convey the profundities of this music.
I cannot help but imagine that a casual reader who may not personally know me (or perhaps even someone who does in fact know me) will begin to classify me as either a hippie, or a philosopher (or a hippie philosopher). I have sunk to the low of copping out with, “Words are just such poor vessels for the astounding penetration of my thoughts.” Prose as purple as that above rivals even Irene Iddesleigh. My attempts to explain with language what about this music gives me goosebumps, conjures memories, makes me cry, as evidenced above, have ended with exceptionally comical disaster.
Just listen to it, please, so I can cease making a fool of myself.
Featured image: solar system.nasa.gov
All the Feels 