Iconography of Theophanes the Greek (Symphony No. 1)

Iconography, in its technical sense as sacred art, is not an act of individual creativity or personal self-expression. The iconographer must follow established forms and conventions in order for the work to function as an icon. Iconographers are not called upon to contribute their own original ideas and innovations to the iconography, but neither are they mere copyists, servile laborers reproducing simulacra. Rather, iconographers must enter into the life of the tradition, and in so doing, by seeking merely to participate, not to disrupt, they enrich it. The icons themselves are representational, but not in a literal visual sense—perspective, space, and time in Orthodox Christian iconography operate according to a logic foreign to Renaissance technique. Iconography seeks to convey profound religious truths through the unlikely media of line, shape, and color. To reflect the truth of the persons and events depicted, icons depict them in a highly stylized and symbolic manner—the significance of the icon’s subject cannot be captured by mere objective representation. In their own way, symphonies attempt something similar. They have established forms and conventions, a prominent place in a ritualistic social context, and a robust expressive tradition of topics and techniques. Originality is greatly prized, but complete originality, if it were even possible, would be incomprehensible. The best symphonies are those firmly anchored within the symphonic tradition. And at their finest, symphonies, like icons, seek to represent some inarticulable human truth through a completely different medium. Iconography uses paint to challenge our narrow one-dimensional linear view of time; symphonies do the same by using time itself as the canvas. This dissertation is a study in symphonic poetics using Orthodox iconography as its starting-point metaphor. This symphony can be divided into three large sections following a very traditional symphonic logic: an opening sonata form with introduction, a slow middle theme and variations, and an allegro finale in a loose sonata form with coda. Each of these three sections is composed of five movements. Ten of these are associated with icons painted by (or associated with) Theophanes the Greek, a fourteenth-century Byzantine iconographer who worked mostly in Russia. The visual and symbolic connections between these icons help to create a network of associations within the symphony, and these extra-musical influences can be found also in the music. The poetics of symphonic composition reflected in this work are fundamentally organicist: this work is essentially tonal, and the motivic seeds from which the entire symphony grows appear within the opening few bars—a symmetrical figure that expands into a perfect fifth played first by the violas and horns, and a descending step introduced by the clarinets. I take the position that the essential characteristic of symphonic poetics is to be found in the intersection of melodic/harmonic motion with thematic development, all unfolding according to a profound logic that creates an inner connection between all the work’s motives. The symphony may pass like a river through diverse thematic landscapes, but every point along the way will result naturally from the motion of the unfolding harmonies. Meter, motive, phrase, and tonality are thus essential to symphonic poetics. A symphony is the sounding-together of a thousand pieces effecting a single journey, a thousand texts composed into a single movement—ein Satz. All is motion, and like a river flows into the everlasting sea, so a symphony likewise flows.