Season Finale.
Sunday, April 25, 2027, 3:00 pm
Arizona Philharmonic
Peter Bay, conductor
Laura Arganbright, oboe
Printable PDF of these notes · All program notes this season · All Season 9 concerts
The Arizona Philharmonic’s April program opens with a work by Peter Schickele, best known as the composer of very funny works credited to his alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. In his 1994 work Thurber’s Dogs, Schickele wrote music inspired by the dog cartoons of American humorist James Thurber. We then feature Arizona Philharmonic principal oboist and Arizona native Laura Arganbright, in the romantic Oboe Concerto in D minor by Marie Clémence de Grandval. Next is a popular piece by Peter Maxwell Davies, his Farewell to Stromness, a work whose lovely folklike character seems to contrast with its origins in a bitter environmental protest piece. We close with the Symphony No. 1 of Beethoven, a work in which the composer looks back to the works of Mozart and Haydn, but also signals some of the innovations to come in his own later symphonies.
Peter Schickele
Thurber’s Dogs (1994)
I. A Litter of Perfectly Healthy Puppies Raised on Fried Pancakes
II. Dog and Butterfly
III. He Goes with His Owner into Bars
IV. Dog Asleep
V. Dog at His Master’s Grave
VI. Hunting Hounds
The story
The late Peter Schickele (1935-2024) was born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in Washington, DC, and Fargo (near Hoople), North Dakota. Schickele was best known through his compositional alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach, music which is hilarious on many levels: it works just fine as pure pie-in-the-face comedy, but it is also obvious that Schickele had a deep understanding of the 18th- and 19th-century forms and styles he was poking fun at. Beginning in 1992, he hosted the public radio show Schickele Mix—a radio “music appreciation” show in the grand old tradition of Deems Taylor, Karl Haas, and others, but unlike most similar programs, his was wonderfully eclectic, and totally lacking in pretension and pomposity. Unfortunately, the least well-known side of Schickele’s career is the concert music he published under his own name.
His Thurber’s Dogs was written in 1994 for a commission by the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio; it celebrates the centennial of the birth of Columbus native James Thurber. Schickele provided the following description:
There are so many loud, in-your-face stand-up comics around these days, that the humor of James Thurber, E. B. White and their contemporaries seems positively genteel. But what saves Thurber’s (and Garrison Keillor’s) output from being hopelessly sentimental is a streak of nastiness that makes ignoring the nasty side of human beings impossible. I have long been a fan of Thurber’s prose and drawings, so I eagerly accepted a commission to write a piece having some connection with his work. When the idea of basing the composition on the essays he wrote about dogs was suggested, I liked it immediately, but as I read them (Thurber collected all of his dog material into one volume), my musical juices were more stirred by the drawings. So I selected six of them and made up simple titles for the uncaptioned ones (all but the first and third of the suite).
Thurber’s work was lively, but not gaudy, vernacular, but not gross, and I hope that’s true of my pieces as well. I certainly feel a kinship with his world: Fargo, North Dakota may be hundreds of miles from Columbus, Ohio, but there are certain things about midwestern cities that seem to be constant (although Thurber seems to have run into more eccentrics than I did, that’s for sure).
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
Schickele’s description continues with the movements themselves:
After a brief fanfare, the first movement [A Litter of Perfectly Healthy Puppies Raised on Fried Pancakes] presents six distinct musical ideas and then throws them all together, which is, I suppose, what a canine mother does when she creates a family. Long after I completed the work, I went back, and looked at the drawing again, and noticed that it depicts five puppies, not six. Oh well—so much for program music.
In the third movement [He Goes with His Owner into Bars], I again used the technique of creating an orchestral refrain made up of several distinct thematic ideas or textures (a technique I probably picked up from Bach and Messiaen)—textures that are then treated separately before being recombined—but here the image in my mind was of a big, teeming, friendly bar. The West End Bar, at Broadway and 115th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was such a bar during my student days at Juilliard (which I attended in the pre-Lincoln Center days, when it was a few blocks from Columbia), and probably still is. You walk into a bar like that, and there are all sorts of little plays going on: noisy plays, quiet plays, bravura plays, desperate plays, loquacious plays, terse plays, comedies, tragedies. There are five plays going on in the orchestral refrain heard soon after the movement begins. After the refrain is taken apart and put back together, the piece degenerates into a rowdy drinking song.
The programmatic aspects of the other movements are all quite obvious. I should say, however, that as I was working on the last movement [Hunting Hounds], I found myself thinking as much about the fox as about the hunting hounds. This coupled with the fact that I recently acquired a recording of background music from the old movie serials I used to go to as a kid, probably accounts for the quite ungentlemanly, almost lurid quality of the chase music.
Marie Clémence de Grandval
Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7 (1877), orchestrated by Lajos Lencsés
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andantino con moto
III. Final: Moderato maestoso
Laura Arganbright, oboe
The story
Marie Clémence de Grandval (1828-1907) was among the finest French composers of the later 19th century. Born into a prominent and wealthy family, she later married into the nobility, becoming the Vicomtesse de Grandval. As a girl, she studied composition with Friedrich Flotow, and piano with Frédéric Chopin, later working with Camille Saint-Saëns. Her wealth and social status were a kind of double-edged sword: she could freely compose throughout her life without the need to make a living with music, but because it was considered improper for an upper-class woman to work professionally as a composer, she was obliged to publish many works under pseudonyms. In 1881, Grandval was awarded the very first Prix Rossini with her librettist Paul Collin, for their oratorio La fille de Jaïre. (This triennial prize was established by the French Academy of Fine Arts to honor particularly promising vocal pieces.) She composed at least seven operas, five of them staged during her lifetime.
She completed her Oboe Concerto in D minor, Op. 7 on July 16, 1877, signing it with a dedication “to my friend, Georges Gillet.” Gillet (1854-1920) was already one of the leading oboists in France and, eventually, oboe teacher at the Paris Conservatory—Grandval’s concerto is the earliest of several works written for him. Though when it was first performed remains a mystery, it was published a few years later, and Gillet’s esteem for the piece is clear in the fact that it was used in 1892 and 1900 as the contest piece for the Conservatory’s oboe premier prix.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
The opening movement (Allegro moderato) begins with a pair of forceful statements from the orchestra, answered much more lightly by the soloist. After a stormy transition, the oboe introduces a more expressive idea, based upon the main theme. The interaction between the soloist and orchestra in a brief development section is playful rather than intense. After a reprise of the opening music, the oboe’s second theme suddenly veers off into a short, lyrical passage prior to a short coda. The playful mood continues in the Andantino con moto, which opens with a pair of light puckish themes. There is a melancholy, minor section in the middle, but just when things seem to be building towards something tragic, a long trill from the oboe steers the movement back to the original mood. The third movement (Final: Moderato maestoso) begins with a mischievous passage from the orchestra, leading to a graceful main theme from the oboe; the repeats of this idea tie this Rondo-form movement together. A passage marked “with determination” opens the first contrasting idea, with teasing interchanges between soloist and orchestra. Things turn briefly tragic, with flashy lines for the soloist, before the oboe coaxes the mood back for another new idea marked “very sweetly.” There is an extended transition section which impishly hints at the main theme before it makes one last appearance. In the coda, the oboe soloist gets a chance at some flashy virtuoso fireworks.
Peter Maxwell Davies
Farewell to Stromness (1980), arranged for string orchestra by Rosemary Furniss
The story
Sometimes musical protests have actual impact in the real world. The Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, are known for their craggy beauty. In the 1970s, geologists discovered uranium ore, the raw material of the concentrate called yellow cake, near the Orkney town of Stromness. (Stromness, with a population of about 1,700 making it the second largest town in Orkney, had been founded as a Viking anchorage over 1000 years ago.) When the South of Scotland Electricity Board, then a state-owned utility, applied to drill test boreholes near the town, Orcadians (Orkney residents), fearing an environmental disaster, protested strongly. One of them was leading British composer, Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016), who lived in Orkney from 1971 until his death. His response was the Yellow Cake Revue, a bitterly satirical set of songs and recitations performed in Stromness. Farewell to Stromness was originally written as one of a pair of piano interludes in the revue, but it quickly became one of Davies’s most popular works—though its simple folk-inspired style was hardly typical for the composer, who is primarily known for musically and intellectually challenging orchestral and theater pieces. At least partly because of the notoriety of Farewell to Stromness, and the near-unanimous objections of Orcadians and scientists, the mining plan was scrapped soon afterwards. The string orchestra version heard here, arranged by Rosemary Furniss, was first played at the blessing of the marriage of Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and Camilla Parker Bowles at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in April 2005.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
Farewell to Stromness proceeds in three parts. The wistful and folklike main theme is Davies’s own, but it seems to channel the strathspey, a moderate-tempo dance common to Scottish and Orcadian folk music. The theme, with its distinctive “Scotch snap” rhythms, is heard first in a solo violin above a simple repeating bassline, and then in a version for full strings. There is a more somber middle section, followed by a return of the main idea.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800)
I. Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
II. Andante cantabile con moto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
IV. Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace
The story
The early career of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) seems to have been a time of systematically mastering successive genres, starting from the small and working towards the large. While he was still a teenager in Bonn, he produced mostly small-scale Lieder, piano pieces, and chamber works. By the time he published his Op. 1 piano trios (1795) and Op. 2 piano sonatas (1796), he was a young composer who had already made the Viennese public sit up and take notice. These early works are thoroughly classical in character, very much in the style of Mozart and Haydn—it is obvious that the younger composer had carefully studied the works of his great Viennese predecessors and adopted many of their techniques. The Op. 2 sonatas are, in fact, dedicated to Haydn, with whom Beethoven had started composition lessons in 1792. During the late 1790s, Beethoven began to forge a more personal style and turned his attention to larger genres: the string quartet, the concerto, and, finally, to the symphony.
After nearly fifty years of evolution, the symphony was by then the premier form of instrumental composition—the true test of a Viennese composer’s powers. Beethoven seems to have been in no hurry to pick up this challenge. He had completed most of a four-movement symphony in C Major during 1795-96 but eventually shelved this work and never finished it. Just why Beethoven failed in this first effort remains something of a mystery, but it may be that he still lacked confidence in his ability to pull off this largest of forms. He did not complete a symphony until 1800, with the Symphony No. 1. He seems to have completed the score in a matter of months during the winter of 1799-1800, but sketches for some of the symphony’s material date from as early as 1795. It was performed for the first time at an Akademie at the Burgtheater on April 2, 1800—a concert arranged for Beethoven’s benefit. In addition to the new symphony, this program included a symphony by Mozart, numbers from Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, and piano improvisations. The only newspaper critic to comment on this event, the Vienna correspondent of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, praised the Septet, but complained about the heavy use of wind instruments in the symphony.
Three days before the concert, on Thursday, April 22 (time TBA), Peter Bay teaches a free OLLI class at Yavapai College. The class is open to the public, with registration through OLLI; details at AZPhil.org.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
Compared to the eight symphonies that followed, the Symphony No. 1 is a fundamentally conservative and cautious work, but still one that shows great individuality. Beethoven’s model was the symphonic style of his occasional teacher, Haydn, and in fact the Symphony No. 1 seems to have particularly close ties to one of Haydn’s “London” symphonies, the Symphony No. 97 of 1792, also in C Major. The opening movement begins in truly Haydnesque fashion, with a slow introduction (Adagio molto) that takes its own good time working its way towards the key of C Major. When the body of the movement begins (Allegro con brio), strings introduce the main theme, a fanfare-style figure. The second theme is a graceful little idea that falls from the flute to the strings. The brief development section—a miniature by Beethoven’s later standards—concentrates entirely on the main theme. The recapitulation restates the opening themes in a more forceful way, introducing a few slight variations. The movement ends with a brief, crisp coda.
The second movement (Andante cantabile con moto) is also set in sonata form. If the first movement seems to pay tribute to Haydn, this lilting movement reflects the spirit of Mozart. The opening theme is presented in fugal fashion by the strings, and a secondary theme—really a skeletal outline of the first—is also introduced by the strings. At the end of the exposition, the timpani plays a dotted rhythm below a triplet line in the flute and first violins. Almost immediately in the development section, this dotted rhythm is picked up by the entire string section, and it stays in the background while Beethoven works with the other material. The recapitulation brings back the opening material in slightly varied form.
True to Classical symphonic form, the third movement is a Menuetto (Allegro molto e vivace), although Beethoven’s energetic and brilliant writing seems to point towards the scherzo movements of his later symphonies, rather than the courtly minuets of Haydn and Mozart. The opening panel of this movement consists of two repeated sections, ending with a distinctive off-beat passage. The central trio, also in two repeated sections, contrasts a placid woodwind figure with quick string lines. The movement ends with a repeat of the opening music.
The finale begins with a comical little introduction (Adagio), in which the violins begin to build a G Major scale, adding an additional note to the top of each little phrase. Just when it becomes apparent that the key is not G, but C, the tempo quickens abruptly (Allegro molto e vivace) and the violins stumble, as if by accident, on the main theme. This dancelike melody may have been one of the first parts of the Symphony No. 1 to be composed: it appears in a counterpoint exercise that Beethoven wrote for his teacher Albrechtsberger in 1795. The movement is set in sonata form, although, as in some Haydn finales, Beethoven introduces elements of rondo form as well. Both main themes are fast and lively, and the entire exposition acts like a perpetual motion machine. If anything about the Symphony No. 1 reveals what was to come in Beethoven’s later symphonies, it is the intense fugal development section of this movement. The opening scale passage of the first theme pervades this section, as Beethoven weaves counterpoint from the remaining material. Only after the recapitulation, and at the beginning of the coda, does the furious forward motion of this movement stop for a moment. We hear two briefly-held chords—as if the orchestra was taking a combined breath before launching into the closing measures.
Program
Peter Schickele 🇺🇸
Thurber’s Dogs (1994)
I. A Litter of Perfectly Healthy Puppies Raised on Fried Pancakes
II. Dog and Butterfly
III. He Goes with His Owner into Bars
IV. Dog Asleep
V. Dog at His Master’s Grave
VI. Hunting Hounds
Marie Clémence de Grandval 🇫🇷
Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7 (1877), orchestrated by Lajos Lencsés
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andantino con moto
III. Final: Moderato maestoso
Laura Arganbright, oboe
Intermission
Peter Maxwell Davies 🇬🇧
Farewell to Stromness (1980), arranged by Rosemary Furniss
Ludwig van Beethoven 🇩🇪
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800)
I. Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
II. Andante cantabile con moto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
IV. Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace
Biographies
Laura Arganbright, oboe
Dr. Laura Arganbright is the principal oboist of both the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra and the Arizona Philharmonic. A versatile performer, she has played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pacific Symphony, Modesto Symphony, and Jacaranda Music, among others. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Bakersfield Symphony in Oscar Navarro’s Legacy, with Arizona Philharmonic in Marcello’s Concerto in D minor, and in the world premiere of Viet Cuong’s Extra(ordinarily) Fancy.
A dedicated educator, Laura is the Oboe Teaching Artist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s YOLA program and has worked with The Harmony Project and USC’s Thornton Community Engagement Program. She maintains a competitive private studio and is active in reed-making pedagogy, having coached reed-making for oboe majors at USC.
Laura holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Southern California, where she was honored with the Brandon Mehrle Service Award. She studied with Joel Timm, Marion Kuszyk, and Lot Demeyer, and earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Arizona State University under Martin Schuring.
Peter Bay, conductor
Peter Bay became Music Director and Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra in 1998, Conductor of the Arizona Philharmonic in 2018, and Resident Conductor of the PianoTexas Festival in Ft. Worth in 2026.
Maestro Bay has appeared with over eighty different orchestras including the National, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Baltimore, New Jersey, North Carolina, San Antonio, Tucson, West Virginia, Colorado, Hawaii, Sarasota, Fort Worth, Bochum (Germany), Carinthian (Austria), Lithuanian National, and Ecuador National Symphonies, the Minnesota and Algarve (Portugal) Orchestras, the Louisiana, Buffalo, Rhode Island and Boca del Rio (Mexico) Philharmonics, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Eastman (Postcard from Morocco) and Aspen (The Ballad of Baby Doe) Opera Theaters, and the Theater Chamber Players of the Kennedy Center. Summer music festival appearances have included Aspen and Music in the Mountains (CO), Grant Park and Ravinia (IL), Round Top (TX), OK Mozart (OK), Mostly Modern (NY), Bowdoin (ME), and Skaneateles (NY). In June 2018 he led fully staged performances of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass as part of the Bernstein100Austin celebration.
Peter is the primary conductor for Ballet Austin. For Austin Opera he has conducted A Streetcar Named Desire, La Traviata, Turandot, The Marriage of Figaro, and La Bohème.
Other positions held by Bay have included Music Director of the Erie Philharmonic, Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, Breckenridge Music Festival (CO), Britt Festival Orchestra (OR), Bravo! Big Sky Classical Festival (MT), Hot Springs Music Festival (AR), and posts with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Richmond Symphony. Bay and the ASO with pianist Anton Nel released a critically acclaimed Bridge CD of Edward Burlingame Hill’s music. With the Richmond Symphony he recorded the U.S. premiere of Britten’s The Sword in the Stone for Opus One Records, and with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra Voices, featuring the percussion ensemble NEXUS. He is conductor for Christopher Cross’ Secret Ladder album and Hanan Townshend’s soundtrack to the 2016 movie The Vessel.
In 1994, he was one of two conductors selected to participate in the Leonard Bernstein American Conductors Program. He was the first prize winner of the 1980 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Young Conductors Competition and a prize winner of the 1987 Leopold Stokowski Competition sponsored by the American Symphony Orchestra. In July 2012 and January 2020, he appeared in Solo Symphony, a choreographic work created for him by Allison Orr of Forklift Danceworks, and was inducted into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame in May 2016.
Musicians
The orchestra roster will be added closer to the concert.
Glossary
Terms as they come up in these notes, in plain words, with where you will meet them on this program.
- Adagio, Adagio molto
- Slow; very slow. The Beethoven’s first movement opens with an Adagio molto introduction, and its finale with a few bars of Adagio.
- Akademie
- In Beethoven’s Vienna, a concert a musician put on for his own benefit, choosing the program and keeping the receipts. The First Symphony had its premiere at one.
- Allegro, Allegro moderato, Allegro con brio, Allegro molto e vivace
- Italian tempo words: fast; moderately fast; fast, with spirit; very fast and lively. The Grandval opens Allegro moderato; the Beethoven’s first movement is Allegro con brio once its introduction is over, and its last two movements are Allegro molto e vivace.
- Andante cantabile con moto
- At a walking pace, in a singing manner, moving along. The Beethoven’s second movement.
- Andantino con moto
- Andantino is a gentle walking pace; con moto adds “with motion.” The Grandval’s second movement.
- Bassline
- The lowest part in the music, the foundation the harmony stands on. Farewell to Stromness rests on a simple repeating one.
- Coda
- The closing section of a movement, after its main business is done. The Grandval’s finale saves its fireworks for the coda; Beethoven ends his first movement with a brief, crisp one.
- Concertmaster
- The first violinist, who leads the violins and, after the conductor, the orchestra. The first name in the roster.
- Concerto
- A work for a soloist with orchestra, usually in three movements. The Grandval.
- Counterpoint
- Two or more melodies sounding at once, each making sense on its own. Beethoven studied it with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, and his finale’s development is woven from it.
- Development
- The middle part of a movement in sonata form, where the themes laid out in the exposition are broken apart, combined and taken through new keys. The Grandval’s first movement has a brief, playful one; Beethoven’s finale an intense one.
- Dotted rhythm
- A long note followed by a short one, the long note stretched by half its value, which gives a jaunty snap. The timpani play one at the end of the exposition in Beethoven’s second movement.
- Exposition
- The opening section of a sonata-form movement, where the main themes are first laid out.
- Fanfare
- A short, bright flourish, traditionally for trumpets. Thurber’s Dogs opens with one, and the main theme of Beethoven’s first movement is a fanfare-style figure.
- Fugue, fugal
- A fugue is built on one theme that enters in each voice in turn and is combined with itself by the rules of counterpoint; fugal describes writing in that manner inside another kind of movement. The strings open Beethoven’s second movement in fugal fashion, and his finale’s development is fugal.
- Genre
- A kind of piece: song, sonata, string quartet, concerto, symphony. The notes follow the young Beethoven through them, from small to large.
- Interlude
- A short piece played between the main numbers of a show. Farewell to Stromness was one of two piano interludes in The Yellow Cake Revue.
- Key, major and minor
- The home note and scale a piece is built around. Major tends to sound bright and minor darker. The Grandval is in D minor, the Beethoven in C major; the Beethoven’s slow introduction takes its time arriving in C, and its finale’s introduction seems to be in G until it turns out to be C.
- Lieder
- German for “songs”: art songs for voice and piano. Among the first things the teenage Beethoven wrote in Bonn.
- A courtly dance in three beats, and by Haydn’s day the usual third movement of a symphony; the trio is its contrasting middle section, after which the minuet returns. Beethoven’s Menuetto is too fast to dance to and points toward the scherzo.
- Movement
- A self-contained section of a larger work, with its own tempo and character. Thurber’s Dogs has six, the Grandval three, the Beethoven four.
- Oboe
- A woodwind instrument sounded by a double reed, two thin blades of cane vibrating against each other. Oboists make and adjust their own reeds, and Laura Arganbright teaches reed-making.
- Opus, Op
- Latin for “work”: a number given to a composer’s pieces, usually in order of publication. Grandval’s concerto is Op. 7, Beethoven’s symphony Op. 21; the notes also mention his Op. 1 trios, Op. 2 sonatas and Op. 20 Septet.
- Orchestration
- Deciding which instruments play what. This performance uses Lajos Lencsés’s orchestration of the Grandval.
- Perpetual motion
- Music that runs in a steady stream of quick notes with hardly a pause. The exposition of Beethoven’s finale.
- Premier prix
- French for “first prize,” awarded at the Paris Conservatoire’s year-end competition, where every student on an instrument played the same set piece. Grandval’s concerto was that piece for oboists in 1892 and 1900.
- Principal
- The player who leads a section and takes its solos. Laura Arganbright is the Arizona Philharmonic’s principal oboe.
- Program music
- Music that depicts a story, scene or picture. Schickele’s six drawings set to music, with his joke about counting puppies.
- Recapitulation
- The section of a sonata-form movement where the opening themes return, usually in the home key, after the development.
- Refrain
- A passage that keeps coming back. Schickele builds his third movement around an orchestral refrain of five overlapping ideas, like five little plays going on in one bar.
- Revue
- A stage show of songs, sketches and short numbers, often satirical. Davies’s Yellow Cake Revue protested the uranium plan.
- Rondo
- A form in which a main tune keeps returning between contrasting episodes, often used for finales. The Grandval’s finale; Beethoven’s finale borrows some of its habits.
- Scherzo
- Italian for “joke”: a fast, playful movement that took the minuet’s place in Beethoven’s later symphonies.
- Scotch snap
- A short accented note followed by a longer one, a rhythm typical of Scottish music. It gives Farewell to Stromness its Scottish accent.
- Septet
- A piece for seven players. Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, shared the program at the First Symphony’s premiere.
- Slow introduction
- A slow opening passage before the fast main body of a movement, a habit of Haydn’s. Beethoven’s first movement has one, and his finale a comic miniature version.
- Sonata form
- The usual plan for a symphony’s first movement, and often for others: an exposition lays out the themes, a development works them over, a recapitulation brings them back. Three of the Beethoven’s four movements use it.
- Strathspey
- A Scottish dance in a moderate four beats to the bar, known for the Scotch snap.
- String orchestra
- An orchestra of strings alone: violins, violas, cellos and basses. Farewell to Stromness is heard in Rosemary Furniss’s arrangement for one.
- Suite
- A set of short pieces meant to be played together. Thurber’s Dogs is a suite of six.
- Symphony
- A large work for orchestra alone, usually in four movements.
- Theme
- A tune or idea a movement is built from.
- Timpani
- Kettledrums, tuned to definite notes. They play the dotted rhythm in Beethoven’s second movement.
- Trill
- A rapid alternation between two neighboring notes. A long oboe trill turns the Grandval’s slow movement back from the brink.
- Triplet
- Three notes played in the time of two. The flute and first violins play a triplet line in Beethoven’s second movement.
- Virtuoso
- A performer of dazzling technique, or music written to show it off. The Grandval’s coda.
- Winds, woodwinds
- Flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; in Beethoven’s day “winds” often took in the horns too. The review of the First Symphony’s premiere complained that he used them too much.
