34. Hymn to the Sun

Dissonance as melody is the hallmark of Rimsky-Korsakov's Hymn to the Sun. This isn't my first time playing chromatic passages, but this is definitely the first text in which it was the focus instead of a mere path connecting two harmonic passages. Memorisation? Not likely, though I think it would be possible. I tried memorizing this first section on my first real day of playing it, and it was working out almost as well as any other session, albeit with my having to deal with unintuitive relationships between successive pitches and not really being able to use that as a mnemonic device. I bet it's a good song for developing aural skills: intervals and such.

A friend telephoned while I sight-read (for the second or third time) an especially atonal portion of this text, much like the one pictured right. I was never so happy to be interrupted in my life. (Actually, I'm overstating it. I was actually thinking: please, let me just get through this phrase...) But I wasn't very motivated to return to it. At the end of the call, I thought, Tomorrow.... I'm still waiting for tomorrow, 48 hrs later. This section is indeed dissonant, but I was exaggerating when I called it atonal. It's actually quite harmonic in a weirdly dissonant way. The harmonies are themselves climbing by semitones, so its got a strange slithery feel to it, like the creepy / creeping motion of a serpent.

The text pictured left occurs at the point at which the chromatic section of the song's opening leads into a harmonic section. Notice how the melodic voice splits in two halfway through the bar. That split occurs at the moment of transition between introduction and harmonic development. I think. The song develops a key signature somewhere around here, too. It begins in C, though as a chromatic passage, C was just convenient for the sake of notation. It was in all keys or no key at all, which amounts to the same thing. It switches to A major at the beginning of the fifth bar. Below (left) is an excerpt of the harmonic section. Looks normal, don't it?

I didn't really try to play those sextets to the right as fast as they should be played, but I noted them, and it's cool that they're there. Below that is a return to chromaticism, but these come as grace notes: 12 of them shared between the hands. I'd just seen a passage like this in Hungarian Rhapsodie 2 in which there were 14 notes shared between hands, so this wasn't too surprising. Liszt's beats this in length; this beats Liszt's in sheer weirdness. I guess you can't have it all...

The song ends harmonically: with two A major chords executed an octave apart. It's a pretty satisfying conclusion, and unexpected, considering how the song started out. Finishing this song meant I'd finished the book! I was pretty excited and noted the time: 14:01 PDT on Friday, 13th of March 2015. I was pretty pumped. Of course, I still needed to play it a few more times, as I noted above, but all in all, I'd played my way through Rimsky-Korsakov and made history for myself all in an afternoon. Pretty cool!

Alan Chan's rendition