Editing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (section)

===Compositional style===
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|filename=Tschikovsky Op 40.ogg|title=Valse in F-sharp minor|description=From ''Twelve Pieces for piano'', Op. 40, No. 9, a digital recording by [[Kevin MacLeod]]
|filename2=Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - romeo and juliet- overture-fantasy.ogg|title2=Romeo and Juliet Overture|description2=Performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra
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 | title3       = 1812 Overture
 | description3 = Performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra
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====Melody====
American music critic and journalist [[Harold C. Schonberg]] wrote of Tchaikovsky's "sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of [[melody]]", a feature that has ensured his music's continued success with audiences.<ref name="schonberg366">Schonberg, 366.</ref> Tchaikovsky's complete range of melodic styles was as wide as that of his compositions. Sometimes he used Western-style melodies, sometimes original melodies written in the style of Russian folk song; sometimes he used actual folk songs.<ref name="brown_ng18628"/> According to ''The New Grove'', Tchaikovsky's melodic gift could also become his worst enemy in two ways.

The first challenge arose from his ethnic heritage. Unlike Western themes, the melodies that Russian composers wrote tended to be self-contained: they functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition rather than one of progress and ongoing development. On a technical level, it made [[modulating]] to a new key to introduce a contrasting second theme exceedingly difficult, as this was literally a foreign concept that did not exist in Russian music.<ref name="brown_final424">Brown, ''The Final Years'', 424.</ref>

The second way melody worked against Tchaikovsky was a challenge that he shared with the majority of Romantic-age composers. They did not write in the regular, symmetrical melodic shapes that worked well with [[sonata form]], such as those favored by Classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven; rather, the themes favored by Romantics were complete and independent in themselves.<ref>Cooper, 26.</ref> This completeness hindered their use as structural elements in combination with one another. This challenge was why the Romantics "were never natural symphonists".<ref>Cooper, 24.</ref> All a composer like Tchaikovsky could do with them was to essentially repeat them, even when he modified them to generate tension, maintain interest, and satisfy listeners.<ref>Warrack, ''Symphonies'', 8–9.</ref>

====Harmony====
Harmony could be a potential trap for Tchaikovsky, according to Brown, since Russian creativity tended to focus on inertia and self-enclosed tableaux, while Western harmony worked against this to propel the music onward and, on a larger scale, shape it.<ref>Brown, ''The Final Years'', 422, 432–434.</ref> [[modulation (music)|Modulation]], the shifting from one key to another, was a driving principle in both harmony and [[sonata form]], the primary Western large-scale [[musical form|musical structure]] since the middle of the 18th century. Modulation maintained harmonic interest over an extended time scale, provided a clear contrast between musical themes, and showed how those themes were related to each other.<ref>Roberts, ''New Grove (1980)'', 12:454.</ref>

One point in Tchaikovsky's favor was "a flair for harmony" that "astonished" Rudolph Kündinger, Tchaikovsky's music tutor during his time at the School of Jurisprudence.<ref>As quoted in Polyansky, ''Eyes'', 18.</ref> Added to what he learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory studies, this talent allowed Tchaikovsky to employ a varied range of harmony in his music, from the Western harmonic and textural practices of his first two string quartets to the use of the [[whole-tone scale]] in the center of the finale of the Second Symphony, a practice more typically used by The Five.<ref name="brown_ng18628" />

====Rhythm====
[[Rhythm]]ically, Tchaikovsky sometimes experimented with unusual [[Metre (music)|meters]]. More often, he used a firm, regular meter, a practice that served him well in dance music. At times, his rhythms became pronounced enough to become the main expressive agent of the music. They also became a means, found typically in Russian folk music, of simulating movement or progression in large-scale symphonic movements—a "synthetic propulsion", as Brown phrases it, which substituted for the momentum that would be created in strict sonata form by the interaction of melodic or motivic elements. This interaction generally does not take place in Russian music.<ref>Brown, ''New Grove'' vol. 18, p. 628; ''Final Years'', 424.</ref> (For more on this, please see [[#Repetition|Repetition]] below.)

====Structure====
Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form. Its principle of organic growth through the interplay of musical themes was alien to Russian practice.<ref name="brown_final424"/> The traditional argument that Tchaikovsky seemed unable to develop themes in this manner fails to consider this point; it also discounts the possibility that Tchaikovsky might have intended the development passages in his large-scale works to act as "enforced hiatuses" to build tension, rather than grow organically as smoothly progressive musical arguments.<ref>Zajaczkowski, 25</ref>

According to Brown and musicologists [[Hans Keller]] and [[Daniel Zhitomirsky]], Tchaikovsky found his solution to large-scale structure while composing the Fourth Symphony. He essentially sidestepped thematic interaction and kept sonata form only as an "outline", as Zhitomirsky phrases it.<ref name="zhitomirsky102">Zhitomirsky, 102.</ref> Within this outline, the focus centered on periodic alternation and juxtaposition. Tchaikovsky placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between [[Theme (music)|musical themes]], [[Key (music)|keys]], and harmonies.<ref>Brown, ''The Final Years'', 426; Keller, 347.</ref> This process, according to Brown and Keller, builds momentum<ref name="brown_final426">Brown, ''The Final Years'', 426.</ref> and adds intense drama.<ref>Keller, 346–47.</ref> While the result, [[John Warrack|Warrack]] charges, is still "an ingenious episodic treatment of two tunes rather than a symphonic development of them" in the Germanic sense,<ref>Warrack, ''Symphonies'', 11.</ref> Brown counters that it took the listener of the period "through a succession of often highly charged sections which ''added up'' to a radically new kind of symphonic experience" (italics Brown), one that functioned not on the basis of summation, as Austro-German symphonies did, but on one of accumulation.<ref name="brown_final426"/>

Partly owing to the melodic and structural intricacies involved in this accumulation and partly due to the composer's nature, Tchaikovsky's music became intensely expressive.<ref>Brown, ''New Grove'' vol. 18, p. 628; Keller, 346–347; Maes, 161.</ref> This intensity was entirely new to Russian music and prompted some Russians to place Tchaikovsky's name alongside that of Dostoevsky.<ref>Volkov, 115</ref> German musicologist [[Hermann Kretzschmar]] credits Tchaikovsky in his later symphonies with offering "full images of life, developed freely, sometimes even dramatically, around psychological contrasts ... This music has the mark of the truly lived and felt experience".<ref>As quoted in Botstein, 101.</ref> [[Leon Botstein]], in elaborating on this comment, suggests that listening to Tchaikovsky's music "became a psychological mirror connected to everyday experience, one that reflected on the dynamic nature of the listener's own emotional self". This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".<ref name="Botstein, 101">Botstein, 101.</ref>

====Repetition====
[[File:Sequence ascending from C tonal.png|thumb|Sequence ascending by step {{Audio|Sequence ascending from C tonal.mid|Play}} with four continuously higher segments that continue by the same distance (seconds: C–D, D–E, etc.)]]
As mentioned above, repetition was a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music, just as it is an integral part of Russian music.<ref>Warrack, ''Symphonies'', 9. Also see Brown, ''The Final Years'', 422–423.</ref> His use of [[Sequence (music)|sequences]] within melodies ([[repetition (music)|repeating]] a tune at a higher or lower [[pitch (music)|pitch]] in the same voice)<ref>Benward & Saker, 111–112.</ref> could go on for extreme length.<ref name="brown_ng18628"/> The problem with repetition is that, over a period of time, the melody being repeated remains static, even when there is a surface level of rhythmic activity added to it.<ref>Brown, ''The Final Years'', 423–424; Warrack, ''Symphonies'', 9.</ref> Tchaikovsky kept the musical conversation flowing by treating melody, tonality, rhythm and sound color as one integrated unit, rather than as separate elements.<ref name="Maes161">Maes, 161.</ref>

By making subtle but noticeable changes in the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to another key, changing the melody itself or varying the instruments playing it, Tchaikovsky could keep a listener's interest from flagging. By extending the number of repetitions, he could increase the musical and dramatic tension of a passage, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", as Brown phrases it, controlling when the peak and release of that tension would take place.<ref>Brown, ''New Grove'' vol. 18, p. 628. Also see Bostrick, 105.</ref> Musicologist [[Martin Cooper (musicologist)|Martin Cooper]] calls this practice a subtle form of unifying a piece of music and adds that Tchaikovsky brought it to a high point of refinement.<ref>Cooper, 32.</ref> (For more on this practice, see the next section.)

====Orchestration====
{{listen|type=music|image=none|help=no|filename=Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies (ISRC USUAN1100270).oga|title=Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy|description="Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from ''[[The Nutcracker]]'' makes extensive use of the then newly invented and very rare [[celesta]].}}
Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on [[orchestration]] for musical effects.<ref>Holoman, ''New Grove'' (2001), 12:413.</ref> Tchaikovsky, however, became noted for the "sensual opulence" and "voluptuous timbrel virtuosity" of his orchestration.<ref>Maes, 73; Taruskin, ''Grove Opera'', 4:669.</ref> Like Glinka, Tchaikovsky tended toward bright primary [[timbre|colors]] and sharply delineated contrasts of [[texture (music)|texture]].<ref>Brown, ''New Grove''vol. 18, p. 628; Hopkins, ''New Grove (1980)'', 13:698.</ref> However, beginning with the [[Symphony No. 3 (Tchaikovsky)|Third Symphony]], Tchaikovsky experimented with an increased range of timbres.<ref>Maes, 78.</ref> Tchaikovsky's scoring was noted and admired by some of his peers. Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority".<ref>As quoted in Taruskin, ''Stravinsky'', 206.</ref> This sonority, musicologist [[Richard Taruskin]] pointed out, is essentially Germanic in effect. Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously (a practice called [[Voicing (music)#Doubling|doubling]]) and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".<ref>Taruskin, ''Stravinsky'', 206</ref>

====Pastiche (Passé-ism)====
In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the ''Variations on a Rococo Theme'', Tchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European [[pastiche]]. Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation in the ballet ''The Sleeping Beauty'' and the opera ''The Queen of Spades''. This practice, which Alexandre Benois calls "passé-ism", lends an air of timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present.<ref>Volkov, 124.</ref> On a practical level, Tchaikovsky was drawn to past styles because he felt he might find the solution to certain structural problems within them. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. (In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to [[Igor Stravinsky]], who turned to [[Neoclassicism (music)|Neoclassicism]] partly as a form of compositional self-discovery.) Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance.<ref>Brown, ''New Grove'' vol. 18, pp. 613, 615.</ref>