Brahms Piano Trio No. 1

Throughout the Adagio movement of Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, we are presented with several different juxtaposing textures, each offering a new perspective with its experience. The dialectic forces of this movement could also be found within layers of Image A. The antiphony at the onset and again in later references can be heard as soft (in a texture sense), open, and even vague in its harmonic and rhythmic structure. The instructed una corda gives an airy and empty quality to the piano’s timbre then, the entrance of the strings functions as a focusing energy, very clearly showing us the pulse and tonic. The tone of the string is itself more vivid and precise than a piano being played una corda. The chorale in the piano serves …show more content…
Within the focused area, there are two areas of differing color and energy though they are separated by a hazy and meandering line. These distinct sides also both contain small bits of the opposite side, in color and texture, that essentially make up the entire image. Although a lot of each side can be seen in the other, it is still apparent at first glance the opposing, or perhaps simply coexisting sides. For Brahms, these malleable forces are epitomized by the A chorale prelude section and the B rhythmically denser section. Perhaps these forces are the transcendent and the immanent, spirituality and realism, or divine and secular. Though, these duos all hold up, I believe the foremost former to be the most inclusive and therefore most accurate of the dialecticisms. The antiphonal nature of the A section is fairly blatant in its imitation of call-and-response technique often used in religious prayer, with one body preaching ideas, maybe Godly, to another body that interprets and redistributes the message under a new light. The piano chorale could even represent Jesus and the strings his followers. At the start of the B section, we are greeted with a much more forward-moving rhythmically stable accompaniment and cello melody which is easy to hear and sing along to, as opposed to …show more content…
It comes back in many forms, including the start of the B section in measure 33 and again in measure 69 as flowing sextuplets. The shared aspects of these two sections exhibit a unity of the material in the piece and possibly a greater cosmic unity, represented by God to some. The continued referential material with which Brahms makes melodic motives more complex and recontextualizes its contents was coined “developing variations” by Schoenberg and, even though it has the air of a teleological philosophy, I believe this concept to be phenomenological. Rather than considering each consecutive iteration of the tetrachord to be a development or even an evolution, understanding these new versions as having a commensal relationship to the source material is more truthful. Much like a scaffolding, the later restatements of the tetrachord use the previous materials in different ways than the original structure but, does not damage the original structure. Instead, they simply coexist, one organism benefitting off of the materials of the other without any degradation to the source. Commensalism, as it is called in biology, is that idea and it is also shown quite apparently in Image A, as well, with the new green moss growing on the remaining wood