8 Form, Program and Movements

This entry serves as a formal experiment, a juxtaposition of two 'themes' in order to discuss a recurrent development in various histories: Romanticism. Established forms eventually run out of material, wherein artists must find ways to create new material. Unlike the Baroque, which relishes the complications within a system to produce delightful developments, the Romantic reconstructs the preceding system through studied understanding and reapplication towards something bigger than itself.

⁰ If one has an hour, I would recommend listening to the piece itself. At the very least, listen as you read.

Hector Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie fantastique famously formalizes program music: the literary augmentation of an otherwise aural tradition. In the piece, Berlioz tells the personal tale of an artist who, amidst the torments of love, falls into a deep opium stupor.¹ His hallucinations, plagued by sightings of his amorous fixation, provide the basis of the musical experience. To elucidate this story, Berlioz wrote and rewrote an accompanying program to tell the tale the music could not on its own. After all, Berlioz composed a symphony, not an opera. Although it stands as solely a symphony, its artistic intention remains incomplete without its crucial narrative background. This opposition — between its Classical form and Modern program — point to its historic success and its contemporaneous uproar. Once its new way of thinking became understood, however, composers emulated it, and audiences learned how to appreciate it.

¹ The narrative derives from numerous sources, all which help Berlioz channel his own love for Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. Berlioz also wrote Roméo et Juliette, a dramatic symphony that starred his future first wife.

Similarly, in the early 1960s Boston underwent a major urban redevelopment effort that included a competition for a new city hall. As part of a grander vision of change, the building needed to be a monument for civic progress: radical and reverent. Entrants received complete specifications of the building's programmatic necessities, and finalists produced drawing sets more akin to construction documents than a proposal in order to keep the meddlesome hands of bureaucracy at bay. Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles won the competition with their floating concrete courtyard building. Architects and some Bostonians have declared it a masterpiece while others have derided it as a monstrosity.² Boston City Hall takes the vocabulary of the Modern Movement and classifies it to create elements of style; it brings Modern forms into a Classical composition.

² Michael Kubo, Chris Grimley and Mark Pasnik thoroughly examine and compellingly rebrand Brutalist architecture in their Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (New York: Monacelli Press, 2015). Much of my background information on Boston's Brutalist buildings comes from their lectures, which I received both before and while (full disclosure) I worked at their practice, OverUnder.

At the time of Symphonie fantastique's debut, the symphony had long established itself as a musical form.³ Parisian concert-goers at Berlioz's fantastical premiere were not only confronted with a novel text accompaniment, but were faced with atypical structures over five movements.⁵ The first movement perverts the typical two-themed approach in favor of an idée fixe. This motif — a representation of the love whom the artist laments — develops from a first theme into the whole first movement, and glimpses of it recur across the otherwise independent later movements. Within the expanded structure of the Classical symphony, Berlioz finds room to tell a story that the form had never told before: a deeply personal tale that goes beyond the music itself. Its lax classicality permits it to remain organized and understood despite its early incarnation of orchestrated individualism.

³ Inadvertently codified through the practices of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and the likes, the symphony proceeds: I. a movement in sonata allegro form;⁴ in no particular order, II. a slower movement, and III. a minuet or scherzo; IV. a grand rondo finale.

⁴ The sonata allegro form introduces a first theme before transitioning to a second theme. This two-part exposition typically repeats, and the piece enters the development where the composer plays with the two themes. After a sufficient journey through the possibilities of the two themes, the piece recapitulates the two themes. This whole structure may be preceded by an introduction or concluded with a coda, which as appendages have no strict rules. None of this is dogma; it is just how the composers of the Classical era knew how to compose, and also how this entry goes.

⁵ Berlioz's odd movements include a waltz (which despite being in 3/4 time is neither a minuet nor a scherzo) and a march. But Berlioz burgeoned his work further with a motley assembly of over thirty instruments and a robust string section. For reference, Mozart typically scored his pieces for under ten instruments and a more modest string section.

Brutalism derives from the French béton brut: raw concrete. The building's brutality emerges not from oppression; it traverses brutality to express its heroic undertaking. Brutalism desires to leaven Modernism's free facade with raw material and Romantic individuality, to convey its complexities through a limited but legible vocabulary.⁶ Unlike the industrial aspirations of, for example, Le Corbusier, whose architectures used free form as an open vessel for any number of contents, Boston City Hall's specific interiors dictate the cast facade. Rather tha accept all programs with a universal vocabulary, Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles assemble a bespoke structure with an ornate set of programmed blocks. Elongated dentils march across stacked entablatures to spell out the monotonous civic office space they contain.^A Large blocks of various shapes protrude from the rhythmically restrained mass to announce the mayor's office, legislative assembly hall and other programmatic anomalies. Despite its irregularity, Boston City Hall balances into a monolithic entity through its structured systems.

⁶ I have often compared Brutalist architecture to Kanye West's 2008 808s & Heartbreak. Both implement elements (materials and sounds) that are strikingly cold in order to convey more directly their message. They abandon traditional aesthetic values (in minimalist modernism and hip hop) in favor of a toolkit that provides a form of expression that is more direct. There is less showmanship, less form for the sake of form, so as to allow the content to become the form. But we have enough pieces of music for one entry already.

^A

The ubiquitous rhythm of the bureacracy within. Photo by author.

^B

The rhythm falls around programmatic expressions and a central courtyard. Photo by author.

Where Symphonie fantastique expands into virgin domains to generate new beyond the old, Boston City Hall returns to abandoned classical grounds to make the 'new' no longer old. The heroic Boston City Hall formalizes the renegade thoughts of an aging Modern Movement with the steadied hand of the classical. As Berlioz strove to humanize the order of the Classical era, Boston City Hall wishes to humanize the new order of the Modern Movement. A practiced hand drew through each intersection of program to create the formal perturbations of City Hall — all so that it could be cast in concrete with proportion, order and style.^C Each move made, however complex its end result, stems from basic forms. The overall structure — an inverted building suspended in the air — forbids any direct comparison to ancient typologies, but amalgamations of their imprints appear: a Greek colonnade here, an Aztec-cum-Art-Deco geometry there. The building maintains a modern trajectory in its monolithic structure and lack of superficial ornamentation, but its ordered approach and stylistic elements revert to classical structuring. New ideas return to old methods, romanticize them and progress. Berlioz found novelty by keeping old methods to convey new romantic fixations. Both return from a pendular peak with zeal. Assured of a functional system, Berlioz and Brutalism push boundaries to begin the recreation of the system. For Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles, classical methods had become so disused their reintroduction proved novel within the new systems of the 20th century. Without dismissing the notion that form follows function, Boston City Hall recalls the significance and signification of Neoclassical architectures in its composed construction. Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles presaged the full reversion, but as with Berlioz's program towards a more modern (but not quite Modern), non-Classical music, such transitions take time — though it does seem like less every time it gets closer. This Romantic whimsy, like all romances, lets audiences enjoy the moment for what it is.

^C

An atrium over the central public gathering space. Photo by author.

Programming diluted the purity of classical music. Over the course of the 19th century, classical music would discover new forms through the creation of scenes in sound alone. Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Camille Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals go beyond Berlioz's programmatic footsteps by abandoning the symphonic structure in favor of forms attuned to the tale. Finally, the program becomes music when the 20th century presents Arnold Schoenberg. Berlioz used text to reflect the sentiments of his symphony; Schoenberg writes a set of rules. His twelve-tone system derives music entirely from a prewritten text. Music transitions from being programmed (given meaning) to being programmed (derived algorithmically). The embellished, composed structures of the Classical era are long gone; the Modern Movement creates new, rational structures.

Brutalism uses styled structure not as a 'design crutch' (as 19th-century eclectics stand accused), but as an organizational tool used to create legible monuments. Classical structures exist to resolve common issues; they are functions. By returning to this long-shunned order, Boston City Hall — though its lack of embellishments resemble the industrial aesthetic of the Modern Movement — aspires to Acropolis-esque monumentality. This restitution of classical structuring marks an evolution, a progression through retrogression, a combination of traditional and modern. The end product declares legibility and restraint alongside starkness and monomania.^D On the eve of Postmodernism, Boston City Hall presages the curation of influences that will define the next generation. In itself, it elaborates a small portion of a much larger shift.

^D

Unexpected spaces populate the moments between rhythms and expressions. Photo by author.