by Julia Grella O’Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

If you attended the Philharmonic’s opening night in September, you’ve had direct experience with the pastoral aesthetic in music. Beethoven exemplified this aesthetic with his idealized portrayal of rural life in Symphony No. 6, the “Pastoral,” using instruments like woodwinds and musical motifs like drones and compound meter to evoke the sounds of nature and of humans interacting with it. The pastoral aesthetic points to a particular place, the countryside, and calls forth not only a longing for it, but also a sense of goodness and purpose in being rooted in the land. Tonight’s concert explores the pastoral sensibility even further, adding another dimension: that of time. Time is a central concern of the pastoral, conjuring cultural memories of a lost golden age, and tonight’s music probes notions of time both earthly and eternal.

The very title of Hilary Purrington’s piece “Threshold” suggests a liminal, in-between relationship to both time and space. Purrington exploits the full palette of orchestral colors, instrument by instrument, like a pointillist painter with a canvas. She punctuates her atmospheric soundscape with bursts of brass and glissando strings, underpinned by a ceaseless ostinato, creating a sonic world in which time feels both flexible and unstoppable. As listeners, we stand at the threshold of this acoustic borderland, waiting expectantly to cross from the perpetual rhythm of the waking world to the moment of weightlessness when its demands are stilled.

 Mendelssohn’s concert overture “The Hebrides” (Fingal’s Cave) is at once the musical picture of an ancient place – a famous sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa in the Hebrides, an archipelago off the western coast of Scotland that Mendelssohn visited on an 1829 trip to Great Britain – and an endeavor to fix the place in memory so that it transcends time. Departing from Beethoven’s musical mimesis of nature, Mendelssohn makes no attempt at aesthetic literalness. Rather than imitating the wild sounds of the North Atlantic crashing over rock, he limns the lines of his own subjective perception. “The Hebrides” is the embodiment of Romanticism, privileging the subjective experience of the composer over the the material world with which he is engaged, calling forth stark and moving scenes of a place that Mendelssohn dubbed “the Lonely Isle,” while at the same time suggesting the mediating warmth of his own human presence there. It serves thus as a kind of sonic analogue to the Romantic poetry of the era, like William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” in which the poet recalls coming upon “a crowd,/a host of golden daffodils.” The sight of the flowers imprints itself in his memory so that 
 

. . . oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

It is not nature here that is the subject of art: it is the inner life of the artist, to which nature has imparted some instruction or meaning. Mendelssohn’s overture is a musical attempt to transcend the specificity of time and place in the natural world with personal memory, which, paradoxically, lifts them out of the particular and into the realm of the universal.

In terms of clock time alone, Purrington’s and Mendelssohn’s pieces are dwarfed by Bruckner’s great Symphony No. 6 in A Major, an extended meditation on and synthesis of symphonic form as received from composers like Beethoven. Bruckner had a foot in each of the parallel worlds of church and concert music; for ten years the organist and choirmaster of St. Florian Monastery in Upper Austria, he moved to the capital in 1868 to teach harmony and counterpoint at the University of Vienna. Bruckner retained many sacred musical techniques in his symphonies, including the creation of an impression of timelessness through long drawn-out rhythmic ostinatos, adagio movements of the utmost slowness, and a gradual building up of emotional weight by the repetition of melodic themes. The allegory of artist-as-hero heard in Beethoven’s symphonies is gone, as is the trope of artist-as-perceiver heard in Mendelssohn’s. The subject matter is now music itself.

The great length and monumental structure of the Symphony No. 6 evoke the image of a towering Gothic cathedral in sound. As the twentieth-century English critic and Bruckner-booster Deryck Cooke notes, the composer’s stance is “medieval; indeed the mentality of the Austrian Catholic peasantry, which Bruckner to a very large extent retained, was essentially a survival from the Middle Ages.” Bruckner eschews standard symphonic form, in which the music’s forward motion derives from harmonic progression, grounding his musical meaning instead in the cyclical transformation of melodic content. In this respect, his work is more akin to the operas of Wagner than the symphonies of Beethoven. And there is a sense of return in the Symphony No. 6, with the themes of the first movement transfigured to their highest culmination in the last, a gesture emblematic of pastoral time, which is cyclic and static rather than linear and progressive. 

At its heart, the pastoral is an epic of return – a traveling back to the lost golden age, an eternal homecoming. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” We invite you tonight to allow the vast unfolding of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, in which the historical past informs the present and lost time is regained, to transport you to a place of freedom beyond time and place.