page_title: Symphonies by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
section_title: Juxtaposition
hierarchical_section_title: Symphonies by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky / Juxtaposition
caption_attribution_description: English: Sequence ascending by step, diatonic. Semitones marked. Created by Hyacinth (talk) 01:14, 16 August 2009 using Sibelius 5.
context_page_description: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form, the primary Western principle for building large-scale musical structures since the middle of the 19th century. Traditional Russian treatment of melody, harmony and structure actually worked against sonata form's modus operandi of movement, growth and development. Russian music—the Russian creative mentality as a whole, in fact—functioned on the principle of stasis. Russian novels, plays and operas were written as collections of self-contained tableaux, with the plots proceeding from one set-piece to the next. Russian folk music operated along the same lines, with songs comprised as a series of self-contained melodic units repeated continually. Compared to this mindset, the precepts of sonata form probably seemed as alien as if they had arrived from the moon.
  Sonata form also was not designed to accommodate the emotionally charged statements that Tchaikovsky wanted to make. In this, he was far from alone—it was a major preoccupation of the Romantic age, to the point that the validity of the symphony was questioned seriously and alternatives to it were actually devised.
context_section_description: Two breakthroughs which, according to Brown, Austrian musicologist Hans Keller, Dutch musicologist Francis Maes and Soviet musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky, came to Tchaikovsky while composing his Fourth Symphony, worked hand-in-hand in giving him a workable solution to building large-scale forms. The first answer was essentially to sidestep thematic interaction and keep sonata form only as an "outline," as Zhitomirsky phrases it, containing two contrasting themes. Within this outline, the focus now centered on periodic alternation and juxtaposition. Instead of offering what Brown calls "a rich and well-ordered argument," Tchaikovsky integrates what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys and harmonies by placing blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another. These blocks, Zhitomirsky explains, are demarcated by their distinct contrast in musical material and "by the fact that each theme [used in them] usually constitutes an independent and structurally complete episode." The block containing the main theme, Zhitomirsky writes, alternates with the one containing the second theme. The former, he continues, is "steadily enlivened in reiteration" by what Warrack calls "ostinato figures, dramatic pedal–points, sequences that screw anticipation to a fever pitch with each new step, all expressed in frenzied rhythmic activity." The result of this enlivening, Zhitomirsky says, is "that the very contrast of the two blocks is consistently sharpened."
  An important part of this process, Keller states, is that "thematic and harmonic contrasts" are "not allowed to coincide." Mozart, he writes, evidently preceded Tchaikovsky in this tactic of modulatory delay and may have helped give Tchaikovsky the impetus in attempting it himself, although Tchaikovsky develops this form of contrast "on an unprecedented scale." Keller offers the second theme in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony as an example of how this process works. In sonata form, he writes, the first subject enters in the tonic and the second subject follows in a contrasting but related key harmonically. Tension occurs when the music (and the listener with it) is pulled away from the tonic. Tchaikovsky "not only increases the contrasts between the themes on the one hand and the keys on the other," but ups the ante by introducing his second theme in a key unrelated to the first theme and delaying the transition to the expected key. In the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, Tchaikovsky introduces the second theme in A-flat minor. Since the symphony is written in the key of F minor, the second theme should go either to the relative major (A-flat major) or the dominant (C minor). By the time Tchaikovsky establishes the relative major, this theme has finished playing. Thus, Keller says, "the thematic second subject precedes the harmonic second subject" (italics Keller).
  This process, according to Brown and Keller, builds momentum and adds intense drama. While the result, Warrack charges, is still "an ingenious episodic treatment of two tunes rather than a symphonic development of them" in the Germanic sense, Brown counters that it took the listener of the period "through a succession of often highly charged sections which added up to a radically new kind of symphonic experience" (italics Brown), one that functioned not on the basis of summation, as Austro-German symphonies did, but on one of accumulation.
  Within this overall concept of juxtaposition, Tchaikovsky employed his second solution. While Maes calls this answer a "structure" and Zhitomirsky an "independent and structurally complete episode," it could actually be described as a system in which melody, harmony, rhythm and tone color become interrelated elements functioning together like the working parts of a clock, each part moving independently but also as part of an overall action serving one purpose. With a clock, that purpose is indicating the time. With a symphony of the kind Tchaikovsky strove to craft, that purpose is two–fold: to resolve the overall tonal
caption: Sequence ascending by step About this soundPlay (help·info). Note that there are only four segments, continuously higher, and that the segments continue by the same distance (seconds: C-D, D-E, etc.).
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