Keeping Score, The Making of a Performance, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony

No.4:
1. The message of classical music is nothing less than: How is Life?
2. Every musician's message and mission is to play in a way that says: This is how life feels.
3. Music is first made in any society for the purpose of accompanying life.
4. Classical music concentrates the experience of life into notes and symbols that are music's
written language.
5. The composers speak to us about their experience of life through their music.
6. You think you know the piece, then one little detail can lead you to a concept that's completely
new.
7. In this symphony, the most important movement is the first, it's almost as long as all the other
movements put together.
8. Tchaikovsky’s understanding of music’s primal mood, makes his work incredibly emotional: the
fourth symphony is full of drama and passion and despair.
9. A Fanfare is a kind of call, played on the brass instruments.
10. Tchaikovsky leads off his symphony with one of those primal moods of music, a Fanfare.
11. The Fanfare at the beginning of this piece represents fate; it's strong, aggressive, heavy,
sustained.
12. The next primal mood of music in the first movement is a waltz, Tchaikovsky says; in a
movement of a waltz(But not the happy waltz we are expecting). He does this to create a lonely,
dispossessed, alienated feeling. We hear the sigh in this waltz section.
13. Tchaikovsky says that the waltz in the first movement came to him in a dream.
14. The climax of the first movement depends on the power of the timpani.
15. Tchaikovsky is able to understand the exact nature of a experience and amazingly he is able to
put it into notes.
16. Tchaikovsky’s music is a symbol of love and passion, of what it feels like to be human.
17. This symphony is about a certain moment in Tchaikovsky’s life, about his terror of being found
out that he is gay and he can't hide it, that his marriage has failed, about the shame of it.
18. In the second movement Tchaikovsky takes us from the frenzy drama of the first movement to a
more reflective place, a kinda pastoral scene.
19. Tchaikovsky wrists for the solo winds as if they were singers.
20. One of the most important qualities of Tchaikovsky’s music is its songfulness.
21. The singing of the folk songs and religious songs is an essential part of Russian musical
experience, and Tchaikovsky wants to write tunes in a way that will evoke the folk tradition.
22. Tchaikovsky’s music is a mirror of the Russian soul, his own feeling towards Russia.
23. In the third movement, Tchaikovsky explores the realm of playfulness.
24. The third movement is called: Scherzo Ostinato Pizzicato.
25. The Piccolo solo in the third movement is one of the hardest solos in the repertoire, the Piccolo
player has to play 21 notes in 3 seconds.
26. The Bass players have to play 97 notes Pizzicato in the third movement.
27. In the last movement of this symphony, the percussion takes center stage.
28. The fourth movement is the wildest of them all, it's like an out of control march.
29. Classical music examins every possible emotion with greater fidelity than any other music there
is.