Best & Worst Endings in Classical Music

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello my name is David Bruce one of the questions I often come back to as a composer is to do with endings how do you make an ending feel convincing and satisfying without being overly predictable and obvious because expectations are a big part of the build up to an end and it's easy for even a great composer to get them wrong here for example is the end of Tchaikovsky's piano trio in a minor you can hear that it sounds like we're approaching the end you can hear the music's galloping ahead reaching a peak of intensity the music seems to be arriving at home straight but believe it or not we're still four minutes from the end at this point intensity is one of the ways we can signal the ending in fact any kind of extreme gives us a signal as listeners that the end is approaching simply because it's obvious there's nowhere else to go you can't get more intense so we must be near the end or the opposite can't fade and calm down anymore so it must be near the end but you can overplay that if you keep that intensity going on too much well you risk just becoming someone loud and annoying [Music] but maybe this is just one of those things that people have different reactions to maybe for some of you this is one of the best most exciting most dramatic endings ever I wouldn't be at all surprised it is a matter of taste but general tastes do seem to have changed over time if you look at how a composers have ended their pieces over the years an interesting pattern starts to emerge let's just do a fairly random sample of orchestral pieces starting in the Baroque era [Music] initially endings are firm but fairly low-key and a little later here's Hyden doing a nice simple five to one chord perfect cadence gradually things start to become more intense and already by the time of Beethoven that perfect cadence sometimes feels like it's being fairly hammered to death [Music] don't get me wrong I'm not counting that as one of the failed endings in the context of the whole piece it feels great and very satisfying but you can already see how a more cynically minded person might start to feel that this was going over the top but it didn't stop there and throughout the 19th century the trend for those endings was just to get longer more bombastic and more dramatic now the start of the 20th century I work like scriabin x' poem of ecstasy ends like this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] well it's hard to take that any further I mean what you're gonna do hold the final chord for like five minutes so I think it's no surprise that around this time you start to see those more cynical or ironic voices appearing his Erik's a tease ending to his piano piece embryo and accession deliberately mocking that Beethoven and that's quite a good joke ending to a little six-minute piano piece around the same time composer started to explore softer endings and I talked about the use of the fade-out ending a bit in my video on silence but several composers also seem to have struggled with the current state of expectation particularly if they were trying to end in a more upbeat tempo they were kind of caught between the desire to rush towards an exciting culmination and the awareness that to end triumphantly with a big bang was now a bit passe here's the original ending to Bartok's concerto for orchestra it seems almost apologetic sort of ending with a bit of a bang but without really having his heart in it [Music] and it was only after pressure from the conductor ku Savitsky who conducted the premiere the Bartok rewrote it and added a more definitive sounding ending which is the only one that ever gets played today [Music] Stravinsky - we wrote the ending of petrushka although in this case the new concert indeed was added some 30 years later and it's actually almost never played but you can see why he attempted it after a final section which builds up tremendously the final pages of the score just kind of underwhelming the fizzle out and you're left with this feeling of is that it but it's interesting that despite that ending petrushka still remains a really good piece and a very popular one my wife always jokes to me that you just need to make sure the beginning and the end of a piece are good because no one remembers the middle but here is a surprising proof that a piece can be a success even if the ending fails and I think actually that's true of all of the examples of bad endings I'm using here obviously there are thousands of pieces that suck generally and therefore have sucky endings but any examples I'm including here are really from composers and pieces that are generally amazing and something has just gone wrong with the ending for one reason or another which is interesting in itself to see how even when you have masterful levels of skill you can still misjudge something so the problem more recent composers have Hardware these confident endings has really continued to this day the fade-out or the decay is a sort of easier route to avoid ridicule and it's far more commonly used amongst composers I would say it also perhaps charms better with the general aesthetic over the past hundred years which has tended to shun optimism and positivity it takes unique characters like say Oliver you're messy and too brave the full-on and crushing ending [Applause] [Music] there are a couple of new alternatives which have appeared one is the cute ending which I have to admit is one I use myself quite a lot so things build up and then it just diverts at the last moment to something unexpectedly less dramatic so I did this for example in my piece side-chaining the rhythm and the momentum pushes forward and then at the last minute you're left with four soloists just gently plucking away and another new example is one that's also common in popular music the mid flow cutoff where the music just suddenly stops here you can hear for example at the end of Liberty's piano concerto so chop and it stops dead now both of these are ways of mitigating the sense of obvious to get from more traditional endings although when they're done well they both still work as endings because other aspects of the piece have reached a sense of culmination so let's just think about what those are what things need to conclude to give you a strong sense of an ending now I think a few of the examples I'll give here are the opposite of fails there are actually really good endings but I think we need to study them in order to get a true understanding of how to produce really brilliantly bad ending so the first one is harmony here's the beautifully simple Prelude in C major from the well-tempered clavier by Bach the piece is really just a bunch of arpeggios throughout so it's a great piece to look at harmony as there's almost nothing else here the closing bars when you listen to them by themselves don't seem like much they seem almost weak in the way the cadence of the G to the C is muted by that held C in the bass but I would say the real end to the piece starts a lot earlier right back sort of halfway through the whole piece so remember we're aiming for the five one perfect Kaden's g2c and you can see that mark is a bit of a tease because already here he teases the G itself first playing a chord with f-sharp in the bass and then one with a flat in the bass before finally landing on that G and the g10 stays all the way through until the final Losey hits a few bars from the end and all the time-bar finds different chords to play above that low G it even hits the C major chord but in an unstable second inversion chord with the G at the bottom when the C in the base does finally arrive Barca chooses is a bit more it's an unstable c7 chord which then moves through F over C and g7 over C before finally finally reaching the full C major chord in the last bar so this is a way of ending in which yes we can feel the end coming but not in any annoying or obvious way it's rather that the Harmony starts pulling us there long before the final bars making us yearn for that final resolution it makes the end itself very very satisfying and the journey towards that end really engrossing another aspect that needs to come to some kind of conclusion for a piece to end satisfactorily is the way it handles themes and ideas now not all pieces have real themes that Bach Prelude didn't but if you do use themes recognizable memorable material there are various ways you can use them to bring around a sense of conclusion one of the most common is simply setting out an initial idea moving away from it and then coming back to it this is the traditional approach in a huge amount of classical music particularly the famous Sonata form and I guess you could say that returning back and repeating ideas heard at the start of a piece gives it a sense of stability of coming back home so it makes it feel like a reasonable way to end here's the opening of revels Godot this little idea is repeated almost immediately to set it in our memory and then it disappears in revels textures of watery arpeggios it returns accompanied by a low pedal note about two thirds through [Music] and this to me immediately gives a strong sense of we're returning home now so notice that both bark and Ravel have these held bass notes often over a second inversion chord which seems to slow the music down as a further preparation for the ending so it seems on the whole we have to give several simultaneous feelings of an ending for a piece to really successfully feel like it's ending if you think of the simplest pop song you'll have the conclusion of the cycle of verse and chorus but you'll also have the sense of emotional climax in the final verse and it's the two of those together that provide the final sense of closure and the longer the piece I think the more of these things need to come together the harmony needs to start feeling like it's heading towards a conclusion from quite some way off and in some way the motives need to feel like they've reached their own culmination and then that sense of momentum should also reach its peak in some form so all of these have to come together to create that really strong final sense of closure but then they also have to do battle with the complex cultural expectations not seem too obvious too mysterious too predictable or too unpredictable in short it's tricky to get an ending right two of my favorite endings for example are Sibelius is fifth and seventh symphonies both of which have really unique and strange endings which to me at least work really well but which I struggle to fully explain v ends uniquely with a series of chords punctured by long silences [Music] maybe it's a sort of variant of that cute ending and the seventh seems to kind of ooze into its final tonic [Music] now I've noticed John Adams mimicking a Sibelius ending a few times like here for example at the end of his opera the flowering tree [Music] now as you've already seen on this channel I am a fan of John Adams is music but I do find he struggles to convince me sometimes when it comes to his endings I think generally it's pretty bad form to criticize another living artist so I'm worried about saying this but I'm saying this in the context of having just made three videos all about Adams and I've also just described petrushka one of my all-time favorite pieces as having a bad ending so I hope the criticism is understood in that context and in fact I'm not alone in this feeling there was actually an academic paper all about the trouble of endings in Adams his early work which basically says that the processes he sets up don't have inevitable endings built into them so the work is bound to stop somewhat inconclusively I think that's a pretty good summary so here's his fairly recent orchestral piece sitting or now in many ways it's very exciting ending certainly one of the loudest and there's a real sense of peak in terms of energy and momentum and yet exciting as it is it still clearly feels like we're on a journey there's no sense of arrival or even approaching arrival so when the ending comes suddenly it feels rather like Bartok's original ending it's a bit of a letdown in terms of its suddenness and I suppose that's what I find so frustrating but also so interesting about all of these not quite perfect endings you feel that so much is right you can just feel that one piece that's missing that's preventing it from being a fully satisfying ending that you're longing for again maybe you disagree you do let me know in the comments but just one final thought I want to leave you with is to do with the assumption I've maintained throughout all of these examples that assumption is that a piece intends to take a listener on a journey that has a beginning middle and an end perhaps music doesn't have to be like that perhaps you could just tune into a series of moments this is something Stockhausen thought about when he invented what he called moment form but it's also probably true of music where active attentive listening is not required music intended to put you in a more trance-like or meditative state I find this whole concept very interesting but I find it impossible to write anything like that myself because part of the excitement the game of music for me is dealing with expectation and memory and balancing the web of interrelated sensations and emotions that music evokes over time and trying to achieve an overall effect that just leaves you fulfilled and satisfied and as we've seen it's a pretty challenging area to get right and just like a brain scientist can learn a lot from a small brain injury in an otherwise healthy patient so I think we can learn a lot from endings that don't quite work in pieces by otherwise first-rate composers so to all of you failed endings out there I salute you so a massive thank you to everyone who supports me on patreon you help keep this channel going if you want to sign up for that there's a link below and don't forget to subscribe and you can also follow me on Instagram and Twitter thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 425,448

Keywords: classical music, endings, best and worst, top 10

Id: D7FTB95uccM

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

best ending is still Ives 2nd symphony

[u/evaned]

I watched this a couple days ago and I still have to stop myself from cracking up at any thought of the end of that Erik Satie piece. Which I now think of at the end of many classical pieces.

[u/scrumptiouscakes]

"I think you overestimate our dear Viennese, my friend. You know you didn't even give them a good bang at the end of songs, to let them know when to clap?"

[u/champflame]

I know it might seem cliche, but the ending of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is amazing. It's an amazing piece all around, but the cadenza at the end is just something else.