During this pandemic, as many concerts have been canceled or postponed, some musicians have declared that the new normal after the pandemic should embrace a greater diversity of composers, performers and concertgoers. I suspect some people will need reminders.
We don’t want classical music to go back to normal in the sense of its diversity problem. Despite the broad repertoire that’s available, many soloists, orchestras and other ensembles limit themselves to a few great hits of the acknowledged great, dead white male composers.
Even within the oeuvre of the acknowledged great, dead white male composers, if we look beyond their greatest hits, we’re sure to discover that we generally only hear a small selection of what they wrote.
And even that’s limited to the music they wrote in keys that are closer to C major on the circle of fifths than to F-sharp/G-flat major (though some non-white composers might feel their music is consigned to obscurity no matter what key they write it in).
Take for example, Johannes Brahms, the third greatest of the dead white male composers in the estimation of many. You’ve probably heard the Academic Festival Overture, some if not all of the Hungarian Dances, the Symphony No. 1 in C minor, the Haydn Variations. Very nice compositions all.
Have you ever heard his Fugue in A-flat minor? I hadn’t either before researching this article.
The 7-flat key signature is hardly the weirdest thing about this piece. The time signature is the common time symbol twice. For lack of a better name, I’m calling that “double common time.”
At least two arrangers have arranged this piece, and both of them have chosen to transpose to A minor and change the time signature to 8/4 or to “single” common time. In A minor, the B-double-flats in the fugue subject become the more manageable B-flats.
I’ve decided to do an orchestration, and I don’t think I’ll use the original time signature either. However, I think I’ll use B-flat minor with a B-flat major key signature.
The “WoO” means “Werke ohne Opuszahl,” work without opus number. From the time of Beethoven to the time of Brahms and a little bit beyond, opus numbers were assigned by publishers. So Opus 1 was a composer’s first published composition, Opus 2 his second, Opus 3 his third, and so on and so forth.
There were women composers who published back then, not many; Clara Schumann got up to at least Opus 21. What some might consider her best piece, her Sonata in G minor, was not published in her lifetime, though the Scherzo of that one “escaped” to her Quatre Pièces fugitives, Opus 15.
Perhaps the most famous musical composition in the repertoire is Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” which may or may not have had a lot of personal meaning to the composer. But to his contemporaries, it was just a bagatelle in A minor, a trifle.
The bagatelle remained unpublished for forty years after Beethoven’s death, and is sometimes referred as WoO 59. Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and Brahms’s Fugue in A-flat minor are polar opposites in popularity, and their keys are almost polar opposites on the circle of fifths (which I’ll explain in another post).
Beethoven’s Opus 59 consists of three string quartets dedicated to Count Razumowski, the Russian ambassador to Vienna, in the keys of F major, E minor and C major, respectively (the keys announced in the titles having one flat, one sharp and zero flats or sharps, respectively). But nothing from that set is as popular today as the WoO 59, that trifle in A minor.
Aside from Brahms’s Fugue in A-flat minor, my search for pieces in A-flat minor is coming up quite dry. I might have to expand this to include G-sharp minor. Wait...
Isn’t the organ solo from Leoš Janáček’s Mša Glagolskaja supposed to be in A-flat minor?
Well, the score (at least in the edition that I looked at) has it notated without a key signature and a lot of incidental sharps at the beginning. The piece does quite clearly end dominant to tonic in A-flat minor, but that’s more apparent to the ear than to the eye (because the dominant chord omits the E-flat, and some of the other notes are spelled more for ease of sight-reading than ease of analysis).
Hmm, two pieces in A-flat minor, both of them for organ solo. This suggests the key is completely unsuitable for ensemble music.
Although Bach wrote music in C-sharp major (seven sharps), such as in the Well-Tempered Clavier, it seems he never used A-flat minor, preferring instead the enharmonic equivalent G-sharp minor. In Brahms’s case, the B-double-flat in the very first bar might sit more nicely as an A-natural in a G-sharp minor context.
Back in 2006, I made a New Year’s resolution to write a new fugue every day. It didn’t have to be perfect, but even without an expectation of high quality, it proved to be too much for me to do in addition to being a full-time college student.
I think it was by April of that year that I had written one fugue each in each major key with sharps. A couple of them had turned out pretty good, I think. I particularly liked the one I wrote in C-sharp major, and I orchestrated it.
For the orchestra, I figured D major would be a more sympathetic key for the musicians than C-sharp major. I will delve into the reason for that another time. But even so, I knew I would have a frustratingly difficult time finding an orchestra to even just read the damn thing through.
A wind band, though, I might just be able to pull that off. For the university wind band, I figured E-flat major would be a good key. But this guy in the band told me that it would work in D-flat major. I wish I had stuck to my initial choice of E-flat major.
The band read through it in common time instead of cut time and still had a hard time with it. A couple of weeks later they gave me another reading, still not in cut time, but much better. Another member of the band told me the piece was difficult. I believe that in E-flat major her assessment would have been quite the opposite.
Something like four years ago I decided to continue the fugue project, this time focusing on the fugues in minor keys with flats. I wrote a fugue in A-flat minor, and I liked it very much. I was completely unaware of the Brahms fugue as I wrote mine.
These fugues I’m writing are not explicitly for organ, so I feel free to use odd clefs. The time signature for my A-flat minor fugue is 9/8, which might seem odd. It’s unavailable in Finale Notepad. But it is available in the full program (as for “double common time,” I believe it’s possible in full Finale, but I have no idea how to actually put it into a score).
Unlike Brahms, I have no use for double flats in my fugue. I start off with a fugue subject that adheres to the key signature except for a natural for the leading tone. Then when it goes to E-flat minor, naturals are needed for D. And then back to A-flat minor:
Even the shortest composition should at least hint at other keys. My fugue in A-flat minor passes through G minor, in a passage with a lot of awkward accidentals. Fortunately, the natural-sharp combination is no longer considered necessary in these situations.
After a little bit of harmonic wandering, a stretto does not quite re-establish A-flat minor:
So I had to write a coda to hammer out A-flat major.
Next I wrote a passacaglia in A-flat minor to precede the fugue. And then I decided to arrange that passacaglia and fugue as a Concerto in A-flat minor for Celesta and Orchestra. I wrote that whole thing with an A-flat major key signature. Even so, I’ve been advised I should transpose the piece to just about any other key.
Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, this music will only be played in a computer-driven performance, though there is the upside that the computer won’t complain about the key.
It’s on my album Video Game Vivaldi. The album’s overpriced on Amazon, because you can get albums on Amazon by actual orchestras for a lot less than my album (e.g., the Prague Chamber Orchestra).
It’s also available on Spotify, though I suppose I’d have to get a thousand streams before I would see even a halfpenny. Like Fux wrote in Gradus ad Parnassus, you don’t study counterpoint for the fame or the money.
The easiest way to hear my Celesta Concerto is through YouTube. Here’s the passacaglia:
And here’s the fugue:
Hope you enjoy it.
I care about tonality because melodies and harmonies are what got me interested in music in the first place. I suppose I could write some incoherent atonal noises and it would technically be quite original, at least in the mathematical sense. But it would sound exactly like all the other original music being written today.
No thanks, I’d much rather run the risk of unintentional plagiarism. Sometimes the copies become more famous than the originals, e.g., Gounod’s Symphony No. 1 in D major and Bizet’s Symphony in C major, or that Dvořák piece with the melody that Elgar unconsciously lifted for his Pomp and Circumstance march.
I recently recovered an old hard drive of mine, with a lot of different files on it, including several music MP3s. I thought I had some music by Charles Wuorinen on it. No, I didn’t, it doesn’t have anything by Wuorinen. No big loss there. But hey, it has Michael Haydn’s Symphony No. 2 in C major. And for that I am glad.
The open thread question: what are some musical compositions in A-flat minor besides the ones I’ve mentioned here?