Vocalise, by Sergei Rachmaninov

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It is only recently that I became familiar with this piece by Rachmaninov (Rachmaninoff): it is a song without words for soprano, I believe originally written for Soprano and Piano, the last of a set of 14 Romantic Songs (or romances), but subsequently transcribed for voice and orchestra.  Here it is, so that you can know what I'm talking about:



If you would like to hear the piece in a form closer to how it was originally intended to sound, let me find you a link to a clip on YouTube ... here is Kiri Te Kanawa singing it.  The voice can be a little distracting, so here is an orchestral performance, conducted by the Korean Chung Myung-Whun (brother of the well-known violinist).  (Incidentally, this is a beautiful performance that does the piece justice, without a lot of self-conscious self-promotion.)

It is amazing at many levels, but on the face of it, it is not very hard to appreciate.  The structure is easy to describe: it has two broad sections, and they are usually described by symbols such as A and B, which are simply names.  Section A is repeated, and then B is played twice, and then there is a really lovely ending, which we can call C.  This structure is called binary form, generally speaking.  [The whole piece is then AABBC.]

Part A, which itself is in two parts, is the most characteristic section, and most likely to be remembered at a first hearing.  It comes to rest in the middle, then continues with a little more agitation, to end with a sort of question, or at least a complaint.  (I know that sounds a little peculiar for something to say about a musical piece.)

Part B takes off, elaborating on the complaint, expressing increasingly great agitation and frustration, and ends with the principal voice coming to a halt, as if it has reached the end of its energy.  (This brings us to the whole issue of musical rhetoric, which is an idea that derives from the word rhetoric as applied to public speaking or polemic writing.  In that context, the word means the techniques of presenting ideas with a view to persuasion.  In music it has a slightly different meaning, which is a little vague; it seems to me that musical rhetoric has to do with repeated phrases, to express a sort of insistence.  The connection is that of course in speeches, repetition is used to emphasize points, and is merely a particular device in a much wider spectrum of devices available in written and spoken language, as opposed to music.)

Part C, the ending (called a coda, which simply means tail) continues almost seamlessly with the ending thought of Part B, with another, contrasting voice reminding us of the opening melody, while the main voice bestirs itself to provide a countermelody, and the two tunes come to a close, with which the piece ends.

(In one of the descriptions of the piece, someone has suggested that the whole piece is nostalgia for the homeland of Rachmaninov, namely Russia.  This is possible, but it might also be pure conjecture.  Music written in the latter half of the 19th, and the early 20th centuries often had these inspirations, which were sometimes stated by the composer, but most often not.  If it is true, it certainly provides a plausible explanation for the development of the piece: sweet thoughts of the homeland come to the exile, and gradually turn to frustration and bitterness, but then pleasant memories return to moderate the bitterness, and provide comfort.)

An interesting feature of the piece is that it is a highly individual melody over a chordal accompaniment; this sort of music is called homophonic, a main melody, and harmonic accompaniment.  But the accompaniment often has counter-melodies; in fact the counter-melodies almost characterize the piece.  You can almost hear the piano accompaniment of the original version in the repeated chords, with a very rhythmically interesting bass line that is highly syncopated, that is, it often comes in off the beat.  The pianist would normally play the bass note, and then use the left hand to play all sorts of other stuff, until another bass notes is played, followed by more chords, chords, chords.  If you look for other versions of Vocalise on YouTube, you hear numerous recordings of amateur instrumentalists, performing it with a piano.  It's one of those tunes that everyone would love to learn and play.

The harmony, too, is fascinating.  There are several instances of what is called the Pathetic Cadence, a melody and underlying chords that are very recognizable:



The key (pitch level) might not be the same, but the chords should sound familiar.  (I should have used the same key as the piece, I suppose ...)

Furthermore, Rachmaninov has his parts creep about in semitones, so that the chords they make aren't traditional chords, but are the distant descendants of the chromatic harmonies of Wagner, which in turn are distant descendants of chromatic harmonies and melodies of Mozart.  The general principle of chromatic harmony is that when a note is altered by making it a sharp (or even a double-sharp), as we find here, it wants to keep moving upwards to the next higher note, and notes altered by lowering them, that is, making them Flats, want to keep going downwards.  But here we have notes that are flattened, but keep coming back up, and notes sharpened, that keep going down.  The meandering chromatic notes feel both restless and slightly threatening, but never so threatening that we feel frightened, but only unsettled.

[Added later:

With classical harmony, it is possible for most musicians to get a sense of the piece and where it's going, at each point, enough to cobble together the tune and the accompaniment by ear, as it is called.  This was not the case with Vocalise when I entered it into the editor; I simply entered it in, observing bits of the harmonic detail in passing, without it making much sense to me.  This morning, however, I was able to play bits of it at the piano, so I have a very slight idea of what it is trying to do.

It struck me that the composer has deliberately written a piece that struggles to go from one harmonic center to another, but is thwarted from doing so.  It is very clever, compositionally, and this sense of pleading in the melody is very clear, as if the voice is pleading with captors to be permitted to do something; it isn't clear exactly what: take care of a sick child, be allowed to visit a grave; who knows?  This is the essence of romance: to portray a feeling that seems to be clear, but whose details are open to some degree of interpretation.  It is entirely possible that Rachmaninov was representing emotions that were indeed inspired by his exile (I don't know enough of his life story to be able to speak about what sort of exile that might have been), but that he was portraying a range of feelings, a lot broader than those brought on by exile.  Who knows?  Perhaps exile is the worst feeling a Russian can experience.]

Some of the chromatic countermelodies were considered so important by Rachmaninov that he had them doubled in octaves; in the orchestral score, for instance, you'll hear violins and cellos going parallel.  Now Italian opera composers often had violins and cellos going furiously in octaves, to underline the highly romantic melodies that they wrote, or plain old melodies that they wanted romanticized further, to suggest high drama.  Here, too, Rachmaninov wants to underscore the drama of the mood, but at a slightly more intimate level.  The melody, for all its expressiveness, is not a big bold melody, but rather an introspective one.  Kiri Te Kanawa makes it sound big and bold, but one gets the feeling that the melody resents being presented in such an extrovert romantic manner.

Finally, this piece, which is on the face of it a homophonic composition (melody + chords) has so much inner melody in it, that I thought it might be illuminating to transcribe it as a chamber piece.  So the performance is for solo violin, viola, cello, and two flutes, and chorus double-basses.  I would have used a single double-bass, but they have rather rough tone, and the double-bass section sounds smoother.  The counterpoint does sound a lot more transparent in this presentation.

Enjoy!

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