A while back, I promised to write a post on Bruckner, and here it is (finally).

After re-listening to most of his symphonies, one of the qualities that I found most apparent in the music is the fact that it is seldom easy to pinpoint the thematic relationships between the sections, even though there's no doubt that they do exist. Let me put it another way: I had a composition teacher once who liked to differentiate between music that is "agglutinative" (in the sense of something that is glued together) versus the more desirable "integrative" (in which the ideas seem to emanate naturally one from the other). Bruckner's music is certainly of the latter type, but work is required on the part of the listener to hear the precise manners in which the musical materials are related. Personally, I enjoy this type of listening, and one of the great challenges in regard to 19th century classical music is trying to find exactly how the obvious and the unexpected (i.e. the qualities mentioned in Ezra Pound's dictum on the nature of art) blend together in complex, large-scale structures. Here are the links to the second movement of Symphony No. 1 with which to give it a try: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsEofrBCTc0&NR=1 (part one) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVB5_9YBBRc&feature=related (part two).