WINGATE: SYMPHONY NO. 2
“Kleetüden - Variationen für Orchester nach Paul Klee”
(or ‘Klee-tudes’ - Variations for Orchestra after Paul Klee)

Notes on the movements:

1. Wingate’s Kleetüden Symphony begins with the artist’s name strikingly spelled out in a descending harp flourish, and immediately we are awash in a Gothic splendor of Paul Klee theme statements, aggregated in vertiginous columns like a sonic cathedral. This Movement of the Vaulted Chambers further accentuates the main theme’s presence by limiting the whole movement to using only the six nonduplicated pitches contained in the theme. These tones constitute what may be called the symphony’s Paul Klee hexachord, or the serialist DNA for the entire orchestral organism ahead, and perhaps the de facto ‘theme’ of this grand set of theme and variations. Here, the initial saturated expression of thematic material dips, soars, and echoes through its variegated orchestration, before coming to a quiet close with a chord representing a phantom Paul Klee signature.

2. The second movement is a study in Klangfarbenmelodie, where the musical line is split among many instruments, causing a textural schizophrenia. Klee’s Fear of Becoming Double musically becomes the fear of two instruments playing at the same time, as the melody is nervously tossed to and fro to avoid doubling. And when we actually do hear a chord of quiet dissonance, this only adds to the menace of this unnerving ‘doubleness’.
 
3. Klee’s magnificent rendering of an abstract concept – Eros – occupies the symphony’s third movement, in which the strata-like colours of the painting are musically rendered as ascending layers of sound, with the pitches of the theme being stacked on top of one another all the way from the double basses to the climax in the piccolo. Following Klee’s mysterious black arrows, the music ascends the darkness until no more ascension is sonically possible. 
 
4. The fourth movement imagines Klee’s famous ‘Twittering Machine’ as an animated avian fugue for flutes and piccolo. The wind-up mechanism is set in motion by pizzicato chords in the strings, derived from the hexachord in rotational array. And while the fugue itself flutters chaotically through thematic permutations, the harp calmly and repeatedly spells out the artist’s musical name.
 
5. The fifth movement inverts the 8-note theme and quietly develops it in the guise of an introspective solo for the orchestra’s cello section. The troubled yet enigmatic expression of Klee’s Scholar tells more in its simple lines than any plaintive cello lines could ever hope to convey, causing this musical portrait to finally withdraw from the symphony in a gesture of delicate melancholy.
 
6. The theme of psychological anxiety continues with Klee’s deceptively simple drawing Flight from Oneself (First State), which in this sixth movement takes the guise of a furious duet between the first and second violin sections. The piece is like a round, with only one musical line, designed to fit together with itself in the manner of Telemann’s Canonic Sonatas. The virtuosic scales flee up and down the pitches of the Paul Klee hexachord until the two ‘selves’ ultimately catch up to one another at the final note.
 
7. Klee’s splendid proscenium landscape Hermitage here sees the eight pitches of the theme used as a succession of major or minor triads (E minor, C# major, A minor, C minor, etc.), chromatically modulating their way through the seventh movement under its ambiguous black sun. Theme variants in the woodwinds meander through this magical blue forest above a restless harp guiding the way.
 
8. The eighth movement creates a heroic statement in the brass by simply playing the Paul Klee theme in reverse, and twisting it into a billowing fanfare for the human intellect. Soon the proper theme is heard in lower registers with a tinge of skepticism, but this is washed away by a flurry of trills accompanying a very late-Romantic-esque rendering of the reversed theme. Soon the fanfare begins to build again, only to be silenced by the titular Death to the Idea, ending the variation abruptly.
 
9. The Twins of the ninth movement promenade together in an étude of secundal harmony. All aspects of the texture are based on seconds and inverted seconds (i.e. sevenths), even the movement’s central modulation. The oboe and English horn crisscross each other’s paths while stating the theme in a Geminian march of intwined intimacy.

10. Over a disquieting Klee chord in the upper strings, burbling woodwind theme statements emerge from the subdued palette of the artist’s Strange Garden. This tenth movement seems to grow not just plants, but also disquieting botanical beings, who reveal themselves in theme snippets before the burgeoning accelerates in layered woodwind trills, culminating in the quiet outburst of a single sprout. 
 
11. A bass clarinet solo traces the inner life of Klee’s Old Man Counting along the thematic lines of a Stravinskian rotational array for this eleventh movement. The glee with which he counts on his fingers becomes quietly ecstatic in the brisk second section. Additionally there is extra counting embedded in the piece’s notation and not seen by anyone but the soloist, who must play a series of rhythmic tuplets made of gently ascending numerals.
 
12. For the Fatal Bassoon Solo of the twelfth movement, we firmly enter the realm of pastiche with a mini concerto for bassoon and strings in the style of the eighteenth century. But the ominous birds loitering in Klee‘s picture become stylistically-inappropriate piccolo notes, eventually playing the entire theme discordantly and portentously. Meanwhile the theme is also transformed into key areas for the concertino proper, causing many gratuitous key changes. The contrabassoon eventually joins the solo line surreptitiously to extend it into the depths of absurdity, and a brief cadenza punctuated by menacing woodwinds leads quickly to the end, when death comes to all with a stroke of the bass drum.
 
13. Klee’s intricate and cryptic Clock Plants in this thirteenth movement are tended by the horn section, playing a serene chorale cultivated from hexachordal materials. But quietly asynchronous interruptions by the harp with its scattered theme statements in thorny contrast, seem to be controlling the flow of the piece’s peculiar chronobiology. Yet as Klee’s Uhrpflanzen meaningfully conflate the man-made and natural worlds, so too do the expansive horn appoggiaturas blur the edges between delay and ultimate resolution.
 
14. Klee’s marvelously synesthetic painting Fugue in Red necessarily demands the creation of an actual fugue for any symphonic response. Scored for dusky strings to match its black and crimson mood, the fugue of the fourteenth movement was freely composed, but structured with each successive fugue statement in a key derived from the eight notes of the Paul Klee theme. Elaborate counterpoint blurs the texture in the manner of the abstract floating shapes in the picture, and orchestral bells duly spell out the artist’s name, with a quick artist’s signature by the violas in the penultimate bar.
 
15. Klee‘s aqueous chandeliers in his drawing known as Rain, consist here of theme statements of different transpositions falling together from the sky in a scintillating chorus of flutes and harp, while the pizzicato strings suggest his dripping geometries, also via theme statements. The fleeting shower dribbles lightly to a close with a Klee chord transposed up a semitone.
 
16. In the sixteenth movement, Klee’s iconic Kettledrummer, wielding a single eye and appendages like arms fused with percussion mallets, plays a quiet theme statement on his invisible drums amidst a woodwind choir intoning the portents of the painting’s red cloud. Soon the strings ascend amorphous towers of sound in complicated divisi, apparently searching the innermost reaches, but then retreat to let his quiet drums beat and roll another theme statement amidst the cloud’s trembling remnants. 
 
17. Wistful appoggiaturas abound in the tender choir of upper strings which incarnate this Fragment of Eden – idyllic, and presumed lost. In this seventeenth movement, the theme is heard in reverse, amidst all the most tonal possibilities of the Klee hexachord, and the fragment soon ends with gently dissonant regret on an unresolved seventh chord.

18. In With the Two Lost Ones of the eighteenth movement (‘lost’ being perhaps literal, perhaps psychological), the painting’s two tiny figures take the form of unassertive clarinets, who traverse their immense wilderness of thick, bold forms as it assaults them with overwhelming orchestral tuttis. Hesitantly stating the theme both backwards and forwards simultaneously, these lost ones apparently survive their ordeal, but end the movement with an untriumphant duet, no stronger for their experience. 
 
19. Klee’s Suffering Fruit, a sight at first both absurd and surprisingly poignant, occupies the symphony’s nineteenth movement as an unaccompanied English horn solo. Using the instrument’s low E as a kind of pedal point and reluctant tonal center emphasizing the first note of the theme, the melody outlines this fruit’s undisclosed suffering and ends with a quick flourish of a reversed artist’s signature in the last eight notes.
 
20. The twentieth movement is a perpetual motion étude for the orchestra’s cello section, who play a busy canonic duet throughout this Outing of the Menagerie. Various other instruments interject charming and boisterous theme-based utterances during this zoölogical promenade, some forwards, some backwards. The breathless cello lines are actually a series of endlessly transposed theme statements, and the musical creatures around them continue to bellow and stomp all the way to the movement’s final, Klee-theme-based chord.

21. Klee’s late period Girl in Mourning, looking off distractedly in her archaic setting, becomes in this twenty-first movement a musical meditation on the complexities of loss. A pair of hushed horns quietly share a persistent drone, creating a tonic center from which the English horn and cellos explore melodies troubled by the dissonant intervals of the hexachord. The basses gently descend beneath the proceedings, and the harp brings forth a low and obscure artist’s signature before the drones, and the movement itself, at last die away.
 
22. The twenty-second movement sees Klee’s magnificent Black Prince glaring from the gloom, as low strings and brass portray a dark and driving inner portrait of a ruler’s conquests. Perhaps he surveys the fiery fields of battle after night has fallen, while relentless ostinati drive a series of theme-based chord progressions festooned with bellicose clarinets. Exciting virtuosic timpani playing is also heard throughout, requiring the choreography of two players, and ultimately having the last word in this brisk musical disquisition on sovereignty.

23. Klee’s stunning landscape The Firmament Above the Temple sits as the symphony’s twenty-third movement, with quiet violins ascending the heavens in a series of inverted pedal points, actually a partial theme statement. A trio consisting of high harp and low contrabassoons make their way through the theme as well, blurring the identities of the dark celestial geometries with the luminous architecture below. An artist’s signature in the low harp occurs beneath a breathtaking high B in the violins to conclude the variation.
 
24. A duet between the viola section and the piccolo portrays Klee‘s famous Cat and Bird for the twenty-fourth movement. Accidentally penetrating the nature of desire itself in the guise of a childlike composition, the theme material nevertheless bends frustratingly toward simplicity, deferring weighty matters to the silence between the notes.
 
25. The music for Klee’s delightfully abstract Anatomy of Aphrodite might almost be described as cubist, in that the theme statements multiply from each other in a quasi-fractal manner, often sounding multiple tonal perspectives at once. Vivid contrasts in orchestration keep the cascading lines from disintegrating altogether, and gentle timpani solos seem to reign in the picture’s wayward body parts.
 
26. The twenty-sixth movement takes as its subject a primordial battle of mythic beings rendered almost like cave art, for which the music slithers between the low strings and a prickly percussion array. The Snake Goddess and Her Foe, transcending the trite dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, face each other in the fullness of their archetypal natures. The low chords of their dance, burdened with closely-spaced dissonance from the Klee hexachord, progress in serpentine coils until the final, movement-concluding strike. 
 
27. The Symphony’s finale is based on one of Klee’s largest paintings, Ad Parnassum, a titular reference to both the mythical Mount Parnassus (home of the Muses, whereby we get the word ‘music’), and to the famous 1725 counterpoint textbook by Johann Joseph Fux, whose pages instructed no less than Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Klee’s magnificent canvas shines through this unabashedly Romantic movement, filled with the retrograde theme and its uplifting octave-leap gesture, first in the horns with glinting woodwind embellishments and low-string footings, then in ebullient fanfares and orchestral tuttis. The bubbling woodwinds of the central section pay musical homage to the painting’s reputation as a masterpiece of pointillism. But after a sudden turn to an episode of tenebrous and tempestuous ascent, followed by a quiet moment just before attaining the Parnassian summit, there opens up a blazing vista over the landscape of the whole of Klee’s incomparable artistic achievement. The symphony’s final moments summon the piccolo and cellos for two last theme flourishes before crashing to a conclusion amidst frenzied hexachordal scales and vibrant Klee chords.