Listening to the Seasons

As I look out of the window above my desk while writing this, all is white. The seasons seem to change abruptly where I live. Not for the first time recently, winter has held back until the celebrations of Christmas are over and we’ve all returned to work. Then it has arrived with quite a show: a colossal dumping of snow. 

I have never been able to divorce the extremity of weather from the extremity of music. A heavy snowfall does something to all our senses, particularly those of sight and sound. The whiteness brings a strange new light to complete darkness; the muffling acoustic effect of piles of powder brings added importance to everything we hear.

One winter, when I lived in London, a heavy snowfall meant there was no traffic up the hill to my apartment. I knew it would be a long walk. On my iPod, I selected Schoenberg’s Gürrelieder – for no other reason than I wanted to listen to it. Since then, I have never been able to hear that work’s glistening opening without being taken back to a steep inner London hill emptied of traffic, entirely white and completely silent. In my mind, I can picture the street lamps illuminating the falling snowflakes. 

Back then, it felt as though Schoenberg had written that extraordinary musical awakening that is the opening of Gürrelieder just for this occasion. He hadn’t, of course. But part of me will always retain the idea that he did. I can’t hear it any other way – not instinctively, anyway. 

Naturally, there are other sounds that come to mind amid the coldest days of the year. The voice of Matti Salminen will always transport me to deep, brutal Helsinki winters; I used to trudge the streets, the sound of his basso profundo in my ears but effectively wrapping my body like a fur coat. 

Back in my student days I developed a fascination for Purcell’s semi-opera King Arthur, whose famous ‘frost scene’, in which the character of the ‘cold genius’ defrosts himself in music, seemed both ridiculously literal and brilliantly suggestive – as it does, in fact, in this staging by Sven-Eric Bechtolf.   

Is there anything particularly wintry, really, about Tchaikovsky’s first symphony Winter Daydreams, other than the title? I always associated the first movement’s slow-burn – its sense of taking a while to get itself going, to move out of the cool unisons of its opening bars – with the paralyzing effect of freezing weather (and getting out of bed in the mornings in January).

Seasons of the Mind 

Whether or not their changes are highly pronounced, the seasons seem to have the same effect on us as music does. They don’t just alter the temperature of our bodies and what we dress them in; they have a profound effect on our state of mind. 

Music imitates nature, not just in its harboring of mathematics and physics but in its driving of the emotions through certain contrasting states. Music can bring us the cycles of birth and death, celebration and sorrow, energy and repose that the seasons enact. But music does so in microcosm, frequently over the course of an hour or less.

Composers have long been conscious of this – since Vivaldi, sure, but probably before him too. They have tried to approximate the look and feel of weather, like the ice-cold landscape I am looking out on now. But they have also tried to approximate the psychic and emotional characteristics that weather induces inside the mind – rather like the feelings of coziness, promise, purity and closeness to the loved-ones downstairs that I’m feeling right now.

It would have been possible to write this article without referring to Vivaldi. But it would also have been a little posturing and pointless. Vivaldi did what I’m writing about with a pioneering brilliance. Even in the picture book I read with my kids – where you press a button for 30 seconds of music from the Four Seasons – I feel that peculiar sense of claustrophobic tension that comes with a blisteringly hot summer day before a storm. 

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons manages to look under the bonnet of weather conditions and sense what they might mean to us emotionally. These days, we’re more likely to look at weather as part of a broader and potentially more concerning set of global developments. This is a theme that has emerged, unsurprisingly, in contemporary music and orchestral programming. 

Or was it always there? Haydn’s The Seasons is an ultimately hopeful oratorio that nonetheless depicts man’s struggle with nature and his complicated relationship with it, both spiritual and economical. There is plenty in Sibelius’s music – notably his tone poems Tapiola and The Oceanides – that suggest nature turning on humanity in the form of brutal forest winds and sea storms. Both works can, of course, be just as easily interpreted as reflecting the weather systems of the mind. 

It’s easy to get fixated on winter; it’s an obvious attraction for composers, to conjure up freezing landscapes and raging storms. More difficult, perhaps, is the depiction of sticky, sultry heat – the sort that is conjured up at the start of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess and of the second suite to Ravel’s ballet Daphnis & Chloe. In both cases, the music isn’t just about heat: it’s about ripeness and anticipation – the imminent arrival of a ‘moment’ when anything might be possible; the tantalizing promise of summer. 

Tchaikovsky went a step further when he wrote his piano cycle titled The Seasons. It should really be called The Months, as it consists of twelve movements each of which depicts a month of the year in Tchaikovsky’s Russia. The pieces were originally published in a monthly magazine and Tchaikovsky wrote them in real-time, submitting each one at the end of the month in question. That gives the work a certain authenticity, especially coming from a part of the world in which the seasons really can appear to change from month to month. 

Beyond Weather 

I’ve been talking about a ‘collective’ experience of the seasons, but in reality we all experience the seasons differently depending on where on the earth’s latitude we sit. Plenty in Los Angeles don’t ever need an umbrella or a warm coat.   

Astor Piazzolla hit upon this when he saluted Vivaldi with his own Four Seasons of Buenos Aires – the title suggesting that the seasons mean something different to Argentineans than to Venetians. There’s never snow in sub-tropical Buenos Aires; winters are comparatively mild, a relief from humid summers. In this performance, Piazzolla’s seasons are performed, helpfully, next to Vivaldi’s. 

In Buenos Aires, spring and autumn are transitional seasons; there is little sense of the pivotal significance we attach to them in Europe. But what do we actually attach to those seasons? Autumn is a season of almost pure aesthetics – the season to which it’s most easy to append colours and shades. Otto Respighi caught something of the season’s ambiguous beauty in his work Poema Autunnale for violin and orchestra, written in the mountains of Cavalese in the Val di Fiemme. 

But Respighi’s work, as beautiful and deserving of more performances as it is, remains an outlier. It’s spring, not autumn that has delivered the most abundant harvest of stand-alone musical masterpieces. 

Those spring-themed works by Schumann, Copland, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Bridge, Britten, Delius and Steven Stucky are about more than a shift in the season (though if they do reference a shift in season at all, it tends to be about the darkness-to-light journey out of winter).

The sense, more, seems to be one of energy from opportunity – of the fire of creativity, the power of renewal, the bracing vigour of light or the pagan impulse of ‘all things fierce and fleet that roar and range’ (to quote Swinburne’s poem Atalanta in Calydon, the inspiration for Arnold Bax’s expressionistic symphony written in 1913, Spring Fire). 

In Bax’s piece, spring seems to sate the fundamental human need for abandon, celebration and industry after a period of semi-hibernation. As I write, I know this is the coming reward for the deep Scandinavian winter – an explosion of openness and creativity, literal as well as cultural. 

But that doesn’t have to manifest itself in music specifically attached to spring. I have a friend who, when asked, said the most ‘spring-like’ music she could think of was Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. I’ve long thought that Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 describes, in an uncannily accurate way, the sense of a spring awakening. 

You could justifiably say that almost all of Mendelssohn is music about spring. Bax wrote that Spring Fire presented a picture of ‘the whole of nature participating in a careless and restless riot of youth and sunlight’ – a more pastoral, harmless vision of the pagan rituals of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, perhaps. 

Apparently, we need music to catalyze our transforming emotions and physicality in spring –one reason the illustrious music festivals in Prague and Salzburg have become firm favourites. We can try and conceive the essence of spring with the help of music that can be played at any time; or we can use the particular atmosphere of spring to help amplify and make sense of music’s power and depth of meaning. Perhaps that is what I am optimistically doing right now, as I look out onto the frozen whiteness of winter.