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Tag Archives: Mahler

Jimi Hendrix in London

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Books, Other Artists, World View

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Alan Douglas, Albert King, bass guitar, Beethoven, Billy Cox, blues, Bob Dylan, Cafe Wha?, chalk, Chas Chandler, Cockney, Cream, dance, Ed Vulliamy, Eddie Kramer, electric guitar, Electric Ladyland, Engelbert Humperdinck, Eric Clapton, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, flamenco, Geordie, Georgie Fame, Greenwich Village, guitar, Handel, Howlin’ Wolf, Isle of Wight, Isley Brothers, jazz, Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi: All Is by My Side, Jimmy Page, John Cale, John Coltrane, Karl Höfner GmbH & Co. KG, Kathy Etchingham, Keith Altham, keyboard, Killing Floor, Little Richard, London, London Evening Standard, Mahler, Mick Eve, Monika Dannemann, Mozart, Muddy Waters, New Musical Express, New York, Notting Hill, Pan American World Airways, Paris, Patti Smith, Paul Gilroy, Peter Neal, psychedelic rock, radio, Regent Street Polytechnic, rock and roll, Roger Mayer, saxophone, science fiction, Seattle, soundscape, Steve Winwood, Stratocaster, Tappy Wright, The Animals, The Guardian, The Wind Cries Mary, Tony Garland, Velvet Underground, Walker Brothers, waltz, wine

Jimi Hendrix in 1967

Jimi Hendrix in 1967

Mick Eve, sax player for Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, was mooching around the musical instrument shops in London’s Denmark Street as one did in 1966. His friend Chas Chandler, whom Mick had known as bassist for the Animals but who had recently returned from a talent-fishing trip to America, ran out of a guitar store and said excitedly in broad Geordie: “Mick, Mick! You got to come and hear this bloke play; I found him in New York!”

“I don’t need to go into the shop, Chas,” replied Mick in droll Cockney, “I can hear ’im from ’ere,” which he certainly could – a restlessly remarkable, eerily savage sound emanating from within. This was the afternoon of 22 September 1966, Jimi Hendrix’s first full day in England.

Eve’s is one of the many stories not included in the biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, narrating the life of unarguably the greatest guitarist and blues magician of all time, as he left New York for London.

Hendrix had arrived aboard a Pan Am flight, little known in his own country and a stranger to London. He had been born of Native and African-American blood in Seattle to a poor father who cared moderately for his son and a mother whom he adored but barely knew, and who died when Jimi was fifteen.

He had joined the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to avoid a jail sentence for car theft (under a judge’s ruling) but hated the army immediately. A regimental report read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations.” It is important, says Paul Gilroy, a historian of black culture, to see Hendrix as an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace.

Reared on Muddy Waters and Albert King, music was Hendrix’s love and after teaming up with army colleague Billy Cox on bass, he played for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers before venturing out on his own.

Hendrix collected a small coterie of dazzled admirers in New York, among them John Cale of the Velvet Underground who, after playing a concert with Patti Smith in Paris last week, recalled going down into a dive bar in Sullivan Street to see Hendrix play during the mid-60s. “There was this fella heckling him all the way through, giving him gyp until Hendrix said, ‘I see we’ve got Polly Parrot in the house tonight.’ He got no trouble after that.”

Hendrix also amazed Chandler at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village one night, enough to fly him to London where the hunger for blues was inexplicably greater than in America. “Black American music got nowhere near white AM radio,” says the man who met Hendrix at Heathrow, Tony Garland, who would manage Hendrix’s British company, Anim. “And Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

One of them was Eric Clapton of Cream, who invited Hendrix to sit in on a performance of Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor at Regent Street Polytechnic, but who afterwards told Chandler irritably: “You never told me he was that fucking good.”

In London, Hendrix with his band Experience forged a new soundscape, stretching the blues to some outer limit of expression, ethereal but fearsome, lyrical but dangerous, sublime but ruthless. And yet, he wrote: “I don’t want anyone to stick a psychedelic label round my neck. Sooner Bach or Beethoven.”

This was not serendipitous, nor was it as effortlessly “natural,” as Hendrix himself often suggested, or even pure genius: Hendrix had found an alchemist with sound in the unlikely form of a sonic wave engineer in the service of the Ministry of Defense, Roger Mayer.

Mayer was an inventor of electronic musical devices, including the Octavia guitar effect which created a “doubling” echo. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page,” Mayer recalls at his home in Surrey, “but he said it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met: ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’”

Mayer left the Admiralty and thus began a partnership that changed the sound of sound. “And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who had been a roadie but joined the management team, “these were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic but stretched to the fucking limit.”

Mayer is fascinating on the science of the sound: “When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form. . . . The input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive . . . if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples. It depends how you throw the stone, or the wind.”

Casting this magic around working men’s clubs in the north of England, and opening for the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, Hendrix forged his furrow with what Gilroy calls “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.”

“He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way,” says Keith Altham, a reporter for the New Musical Express, who became a kind of embedded Hendrix correspondent. “And Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi, and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.”

Mozart, Handel, Bach, Mahler: influences which Hendrix listed in a collection of writings recently assembled by his friends Alan Douglas and Peter Neal to create the nearest we have to an autobiography. And appositely so, for Hendrix’s address in London, which he called “the only home I ever had,” with the only woman he ever really loved, was the same at which George Frederick Handel had resided in another era: 22 Brook St, London W1.

On the night he arrived in England, Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham, his match and lover. Her recollections are priceless: she remembers Hendrix buying music by Handel and jamming along with his guitar on the sofa. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious,” she said over dinner in London a few years ago accompanied by her husband, an Australian GP. “And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason.”

“I remember very well [Jimi] sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street; sometimes he would play a riff for hours until he had it just right. Then he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he’d got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Except perhaps Kathy too: Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary, her middle name, when she had stormed out after an argument.

Hendrix returned to America to record Electric Ladyland, during the making of which producer Eddie Kramer remembers “his wonderful, swaying dance coming off the keyboards [played by Steve Winwood], in a waltz with the guitar.” Hendrix then gave the name “Electric Ladyland” to his grand studio project in New York. And any suggestion that he had some kind of “death wish” is given the lie by his own written intentions to record there “something else – like with Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco.”

Patti Smith remembers the opening party in summer 1970, from which Hendrix himself took a break to join her on the steps outside. “He was so full of ideas,” Smith recalls, “the different sounds he was going to create in this studio – wider landscapes, experiments with musicians, new soundscapes. All he had to do was to get over to England, play the [Isle of Wight] festival, and get back to work.”

Hendrix never made it back to work. He died in the street on which I was born: Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. I’d moved a block away by the time I picked up the Evening Standard on the way home from school on 18 September 1970, flabbergasted by the news. The front-page picture showed Hendrix playing at that Isle of Wight festival less than three weeks beforehand. I’d been there; his searing cry against war, Machine Gun, was still ringing in my ears.

Back home, I changed into all white and waited for cover of darkness to go round to 22 Lansdowne Crescent, where Hendrix had died in the basement, swallowing vomit after a night out with wine, amphetamines and a German girl called Monika.

There was no one there. I took a piece of chalk out of my pocket, scrawled “Kiss the sky, Jimi” on the pavement and crossed the road to ponder the gravity of the moment and place. A man emerged and washed away my scanty tribute with a mop.

Ed Vulliamy – The Guardian

The Walk to Fisterra

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Works, Films, Music Education, Other Artists, Video Recordings

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5.1 surround sound, acoustics, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Appalachian Trail, Barcelona, BIS, cello, Crouching Tiger Concerto, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Dane Johansen, El Camino de Santiago, Elliott Carter, Escher String Quartet, Fairbanks, Fisterra, Greg Stepanich, Joel Krosnick, Kickstarter, luthier, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Musilia, New York, Pablo Casals, Palm Beach ArtsPaper, Paris Conservatoire, Santiago de Compostela, Stefan Valcuha, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Swedish, Tan Dun, The Cleveland Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, The Walk to Fisterra, Vasque, video, violin, violoncello

Fisterra, the "End of the World"

The end of the earth

One of Dane Johansen’s paternal ancestors helped oversee the transition of Alaska from czarist Russia to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and having grown up in Fairbanks as a sixth-generation resident of the Last Frontier, Johansen has been looking for a way to marry his love and knowledge of the outdoors with his career as a cellist.

He appears to have found it. This week, Johansen sets out on the Camino de Santiago, the six-hundred-mile trail in northern Spain traveled for centuries by pilgrims heading to city of Santiago de Compostela, and a road which was used for millennia before that as a path to the Fisterra peninsula, which ancient humans thought of as the literal end of the earth.

But he isn’t going as a religious pilgrim, nor is he in it just for the exercise. He’ll be bringing his cello with him – in a special extra-light, carbon-fiber case – as he walks the trail, and will stop in thirty-six churches along the way for the chief purpose of his walk: performing the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) of J. S. Bach, probably the nearest thing cellists have to a sacred text.

By the end of his trip, called “The Walk to Fisterra,” at the end of June, he’ll have played each of the suites eighteen times, in the home country of Pablo Casals, the cellist who rediscovered these great three-hundred-year-old pieces in a Barcelona music shop more than a century ago and did more than anyone else to establish them in their proper place as bulwarks of the literature.

“For all cellists, the Bach cello suites are sort of a lifelong quest, or at least for any cellist who chooses to take that path. When I play Bach’s music, it’s definitely the closest I get musically to some kind of meditation or prayer-like state,” Johansen said, speaking from his home in New York. “It’s such a personal thing, playing Bach’s music. Developing an interpretation is something that happens really slowly and very naturally, because you just play them and play them and play them, and they reveal more and more of their secrets to you.”

Johansen’s trip is about sixty-five percent funded on Kickstarter (the deadline is the thirteenth), and Johansen is still working to raise more money for the expedition. He’ll be accompanied by six other people – a producer, production assistant, two videographers and two audio engineers – who will be filming his journey and recording the music for future release as a documentary and a record.

“We’ve planned thirty-six concerts along the way, and they will all be recorded in 5.1 surround sound. And we’re hoping that the recording will help listeners experience the spaces as well,” he said. “If you’re listening to the recording later, you’ll feel as though you’re in that particular venue. And with the film aspect of this project, when you hear this music in the film, you’ll be looking at the space that you’re hearing, and so you’ll kind of be transported there visually and sonically.”

Johansen, the son of a civil engineer and a violin teacher, studied in his high school and undergraduate years at The Cleveland Institute of Music, following that with a year and a half at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, and finally getting his master’s and a performer’s certificate at The Juilliard School, where he now teaches as an assistant to the eminent American cellist Joel Krosnick and in the school’s pre-college division.

Johansen is also the cellist in the young Escher String Quartet, which will be releasing discs this year of the complete Mendelssohn quartets (on BIS, the Swedish label), and the four quartets of the Mahler acolyte Alexander von Zemlinsky (on Naxos).

On his own, Johansen performed Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto for his Lincoln Center debut in 2008, and in 2011, gave the New York premiere of the Crouching Tiger Concerto compiled by Chinese composer Tan Dun from his score for the 2000 Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In addition to his global appearances with the Escher String Quartet, he has performed in elite series such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Marlboro Music Festival of Vermont.

Johansen said he first came up with the idea for the walk in 2008, thinking he would walk the trail with his cello by himself. He had gotten the inspiration from a composer friend who had walked the Appalachian Trail and had written a good deal of music while on the journey.

But the Appalachian Trail is largely wilderness, and while that was fine for the solitary occupation of composing, Johansen wanted to make a Bach journey on a more populated route. Taking the Camino de Santiago not only puts him in the same steps as the pilgrims who began using it in earnest in the early twelfth century, it also allows him to reach out to any number of contemporaries who happen to be there, and not only the young musicians from four Spanish conservatories with whom he’ll be doing some educational outreach on the trip.

“Everybody who walks the Camino walks that route with their own story and for their own reasons,” said Johansen, who will turn thirty in June while he’s on the road. “And I think that this music will help elevate their experience. Whatever their reason for walking the Camino, I think that there will be people sharing that experience with me that will be happier for the music, and who will enjoy their experience more for the music,” he said.

Johansen, who has been breaking in his Vasque hiking boots for the past few weeks, will be staying each night of the six-week journey in one of the many refugios on the path, though he added that some members of the production team may have to stay elsewhere from time to time for technical duties such as data downloads. His cello case, made by Germany’s Musilia, is a special reflective white to keep the heat to a minimum for his custom cello, built for him in 2011 by the New York-based luthier Stefan Valcuha.

Johansen said the origin of the Bach suites themselves are as shrouded in mystery as the pre-pilgrimage Camino. Most scholars believe the music to have been written before 1720, but the original manuscript is lost, and while the first five suites were written for the cello, the sixth one was written for a related five-string instrument of uncertain specificity. That doesn’t change the power of the music, which Johansen says he never tires of.

“When people ask me what my desert island book of music would be, it’s always the Bach suites because I never get tired of them,” he said. “I play them every day – not all of them every day – but I play Bach’s music every day, and I never get sick of it.”

His current favorite of the suites is the fifth one (BWV 1011), and he says the sarabandes of each of the suites are their spiritual centers.

“What he’s writing is at once really complex but also very simple . . . I like to try to figure out what was the idea that Bach was playing with in this movement. It seems to me that most of the movements have kind of a central concept that he must have been playing with. It could be something as simple as up and down, or stop and start, or push and pull.

“So I like to approach them in that way: What could he have been thinking with this material? What is this about?” he said. “I really don’t try to make them my own, because just by playing them, they’re my own . . . Every time I play them, I experience them as a new thing, like it’s the first time, and that’s something really special, something I don’t experience with any other composer or any other canon of music.”

Bringing something of that artistic journey to a completely new audience is vital not only for the Camino walk, but for being a performer in general, he said.

“I think as an artist when you’re taking on any kind of project, you have to make sure that your focus is outward, and that you’re trying to do something good for the world with your project,” Johansen said. “It’s ridiculous to say that an artistic project is not about the artist, because it’s impossible. You’re not going to have a meaningful product, or a meaningful experience, if someone hasn’t invested all of themselves.

“But the focus of all that energy can’t be inward. It has to be outward, and for me, that’s sharing this music with as many people as I can.”

Greg Stepanich – Palm Beach ArtsPaper

Bach Psychology

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Films, Other Artists, Video Recordings

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Alzheimer's disease, Archiv Produktion, aria, Bach: The Learned Musician, Beethoven, Brahms, British Broadcasting Corporation, Busoni, cantata, Cantata Pilgrimage, cantor, Caravaggio, CD, Chaconne in D minor, Charles Ives, Chopin, Christoph Wolff, computer, concerto, counterpoint, dance, Davitt Moroney, deafness, dynamics, Eisenach, emotions, English Baroque Soloists, Eric Siblin, First World War, Freud, fugue, Giulio Cesare, Glenn Gould, Handel, Hannibal Lecter, harmony, hermeneutics, Holy Roman Empire, Johan Huizinga, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, John Butt, John Eliot Gardiner, Joseph Kerman, Kapellmeister, Leipzig, Leopold Stokowski, liturgical year, Los Angeles Review of Books, Magnificat, Mahler, Martin Geck, Martin Luther, Masaaki Suzuki, Mass in B minor, Mendelssohn, mental health, metaphysics, Michael Markham, Modernism, Mondrian, Monteverdi Choir, Mozart, Music in the Castle of Heaven, Nadia Boulanger, National Geographic Magazine, NBC Radio Orchestra, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Oedipus, Ohrdruf, opera, Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique, Otto Klemperer, Palestrina, Passacaglia in C minor, passion, Paul Elie, performance practice, Peter Williams, Philippe Herreweghe, psychology, Pythagoras, Rachmaninoff, radio, Reinventing Bach, Rembrandt, rhythm, Richard Taruskin, Robert L. Marshall, Romanticism, rubato, Schumann, Second World War, serialism, Sharbat Gula, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sodom, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Steve McCurry, Stravinsky, Susan McClary, tautology, Telemann, tempo, The Silence of the Lambs, Thirty Years War, Thuringia, timbre, tone color, transcription, Trinity Sunday, vibrato, Vivaldi, Wagner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, YouTube

PsychologycropThere is an unofficial marker in the timeline of canonical classical music. It falls around 1800, during Beethoven’s lifetime, separating composers for whom biography matters to non-academic listeners from those for whom it doesn’t. It is assumed the listener needs to know about the lives of post-1800 composers: about the onset of Beethoven’s deafness and resulting feelings of alienation in order to understand the storming anger in his music, about Chopin’s sense of exile in order to properly feel the longing expressed in his, about Schumann’s struggles with mental illness in order to properly feel the spasms between passion and introversion in his, about Mahler’s faith and disillusionment in order to feel the weight of existential crisis in his. It grows out of our desire to find personal meaning in art, to find some message encoded in all those notes. We need to believe we know what our composers were about before we can trust that we’re receiving their ideas properly. To get it wrong is somehow to do them an injustice. It certainly simplifies the process of listening. We know, with Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Mahler, what sort of mood we are supposed to be in even before the music begins to play. But it also simplifies and often distorts the historical record, reducing the complicated lives of our heroes to a series of mythological icons. Elsewhere in this publication [Los Angeles Review of Books], I’ve wondered if this is a problem worth worrying over: “A thousand battalions of Mozart scholars cannot erase the image of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. But should they try?” With the publication of John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, a new quasi-biography of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), we’re situated comfortably on the other side of the 1800 line, back during the musical “Baroque” where we have a chance to see the problem at its thorniest, focusing on the composer who proves its most difficult test case.

For today’s classical music audiences one of the most problematic aspects of music before circa 1800 is answering the simple question “why did they make this piece of music I’m about to listen to?” The answers, for Beethoven and all composers succeeding him are comfortably familiar: Music is testimony of the self or the world of the self. It is done for Art (capital A), for the Inner Spirit, for the memory of the persecuted, to expose the existential anxiety of it all, etc. The early Romantics reached back a little bit and quickly salvaged Mozart (who, after all, should have lived to see 1800) by projecting testimony back onto him – of Oedipal strife and a difficult personality – fairy tales that still make up his mythic badge (“drunken child savant”), providing a framework for listeners to have satisfying emotional experiences when listening to him. But further beyond the wall mythology gets more difficult. As entertaining as Vivaldi’s music is, and as intense as his life may have been, who seeks out his music to experience the artistic integrity of his personal testimony? No one cares what Palestrina’s relationship with his father was like, or whether or not Handel believed in authoritarian order when he wrote Giulio Cesare. So much of the daily reality surrounding the music of the more distant past gives us less heartfelt, less Romantic, less personally-resonant answers to the question “why do it?” (for the King, for the paycheck, for the Pope’s pleasure cruise) that the profundity of the music can seem to suffer for its lack of subjective, creative angst that we seem to crave and they perhaps did not.

Thus much pre-1800 music is today relieved of being much more than “mood” music. Our approach to the music of the Renaissance, for instance, often becomes caught in a circular logic that keeps us at a distance. It is beautiful, yes? It is expressive, yes? And so what does it express? Beauty. And why is it beautiful? Because it is so expressive. But what does it express? . . . and on and on. The music of the Baroque, on the other hand, often represents extreme emotional states. It is not, however, the conduit of the composer’s own feelings, but of the “official” emotional posture required for whatever event, patron, institution or (for the opera) story they were writing. Emotional states, during the enlightenment, were just another natural phenomenon to be illustrated and represented, like winds or water or birdsong. As Joseph Kerman put it “Baroque composers depict the passions. Romantic composers express them.” The idea of personal expression had to wait for a few big cultural rifts. First, the freeing of composers from the Ancien Régime system of patrons and institutions, making them independent artists following no one’s taste but their own or their public’s. Second, the Napoleonic cult of the individual commanding that the artist, no less than the philosopher, look inward. As Johann Gottlieb Fichte pitched the new Romantic creed in 1792: “Turn your gaze away from all around you, and inwards on to yourself.” Once again, Mozart and Beethoven were the earliest prototypes of the new musical artist who would not or could not submit to the whims of church or aristocratic patronage and who instead struck out on their own, misfits, outlaws, non-conformists misunderstood by their era. This is all as much mythology as history, a plotline we internalized so long ago it will likely never be shaken.

And so biography for Pre-Romantic composers has often seemed superfluous to the experience of listening – merely academic, and usually pretty hopeless. Among the pre-1800 masters, Bach biography in particular is a prickly and thankless calling. It requires one to fuss endlessly over minor details, or at least to pretend to. It entails teasing phantom details from in-between precious few lines of actual primary sources, most of which are notoriously dull and legalistic. It requires you to do this while knowing that these same precious few, dull, legalistic sources have already been pored over by dozens of prior adherents to produce dozens of contradictory hagiographies and incompatible mythologies leaving us little more than a name-symbol accompanied by a jumble of tepid modifiers. To Christoph Wolff‘s recent Bach: The Learned Musician, we can add a few more alternately dismissed or embraced by Gardiner: the “exemplary Teuton,” the “working-class hero-craftsman,” the “bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister,” the “incorrigible cantor.” If none of these monikers sounds terribly appealing or particularly dramatic to you, as opposed to say, Beethoven: The Stormy Napoleonic Revolutionary, or Mahler: The Disillusioned Neurotic Spiritualist, then you are starting already to see another problem with Bach biography. When you combine the stubborn refusal of the historical record to yield much of anything tantalizing, the expectation that none of it makes it into his music anyway, and the cowing complexity of that music, the end result is not a familiar emotional character-type but a cold distance, a sense that he and his world are unreachable and irrelevant to the listening experience. Yet Bach receives more biographical attention than any composer before Mozart and remains his chief rival for sheer quantity. Unlike the other canonic masters, the popularity of Bach studies shows no sign of letting up. The early twenty-first century has already seen more attempts to figure him out, of both the strict academic variety (along with Christoph Wolf’s biography, there are substantial essays and monograms by Robert L. Marshall, Peter Williams, and John Butt) and user-friendly “crossover” variety (Davitt Moroney, Martin Geck, Paul Elie, Eric Siblin) than any of the other candidates, including those like Mozart and Beethoven whose source material is richer in detail and drama. This mania for redundant parsing of the same scant material remains an unusual situation. Understanding it is key to figuring out what, if anything, Gardiner’s attempt has to offer.

His goal, on one hand, is humanization, to bring Bach closer to us. And, having throughout his life as a conductor absorbed any and all research on his favorite composer, he acknowledges many of the problems:

Even to his most ardent admirers Bach can seem a little remote at times: his genius as a musician – widely acknowledged – is just too far out of reach for most of us to comprehend. But that he was a very human human being comes across in all sorts of ways: not so much from the bric-à-brac of personal evidence such as family letters and first-hand descriptions, which are few and far between, but from chinks in his musical armour-plating, moments when we glimpse the vulnerability of an ordinary person struggling with an ordinary person’s doubts, worries and perplexities.

The anxiously modified tautology “he was a very human human being . . . ” gives you some sense of what Gardiner fears he is up against. More than any other composer, Bach illustrates the problem of articulating the emotional mechanisms of music. There is a long tradition of disappointing hermeneutics lurking there. The mainstream of Bach reception has been characterized by a frustrating poetic reticence, a dissonance between strong claims that his music is emotive and deeply moving coupled with a refusal or inability to identify the source of that emotion in terms other than its exhaustiveness or its impressive contrapuntal achievement. The poetic potential of his music is usually tied to its stylistic breadth and technical complexity, an exercise in the monumental and the logical, which impresses only insofar as it remains aloof from emotional particularity. That distance has proven useful. The vagueness of those powerful emotions everyone claims to feel, their being tied to something so seemingly unnameable, has allowed each generation to remake Bach in whatever image suits them. It is, in other words, what makes possible that most ubiquitous and banal claim about Bach’s music: that it is “Universal.” That cardinal cliché is difficult for any biographer of a “great” to avoid, and Gardiner is no exception, finding in Bach’s sacred music, “a universal message of hope that can touch anybody regardless of culture, religious denomination or musical knowledge.”

Such platitudes, of course, tell us nothing except how easy it has been to renew Bach’s music decade by decade. As anyone surveying the last hundred years will realize, and as Paul Elie pointed out last year in his Reinventing Bach, the twentieth century belonged to the miraculous Leipzig cantor. While other composers had their moments, and the center of the concert hall canon might seem to tilt every so often between earlier and later Romantics, by the beginning of the twentieth century it had been decided that Bach would always stand as the monad, the font, the Grossvater of us all. The image of Bach as prototype has been a cultural obsession since the 1830s when the Romantics first rediscovered his great settings of The Passion of Christ. That revival, beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) in 1829, the first time it had been heard since Bach’s own lifetime, succeeded in doing two things for Mendelssohn’s generation: it extended the German canon back a century, proving that “deep” music had always been a Teutonic thing, and it made a literal merger between Art and Religion for a generation that increasingly saw the concert hall as a site for their most spiritual and philosophical experiences.

Since that moment, Bach has been the official center of gravity that binds together the musical universe. It’s not an empty honorific. “In Bach,” according to Mahler, “the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.” For Brahms his music represented “a whole world of the deepest thought and most powerful feeling.” The nineteenth century turned his off-putting complexity and biographical distance into a mechanism for confronting the sublime, that ultimate proof of Romantic ideals. Whether it was the tangle of a solo keyboard fugue, or the glacial face of the opening chorus in the St. John Passion (BWV 245), his music was a test, a mountain to be climbed so that one might, with pain and awe, glimpse and reach out to touch the highest possible points mortally attainable.

By the third decade of the twentieth century, the sublime had met up with the mass market mechanisms of radio and recording. His most famous works were packaged for maximum virtual mountaineering, the keyboard works played in lush, gargantuan transcriptions by the likes of Rachmaninoff and Busoni or clothed in the grandest garb of all, the oversized Wagnerian symphony orchestra. If the mountaintop is too far away, and too steep a climb, then the NBC Radio Orchestra would snip off the peak and send it to your living room where it would still seem plenty big. The transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski of works like the Chaconne (BWV 1004) for solo violin or the  Passacaglia and Fugue (BWV 582) for organ were gorgeous, plodding wooly-mammoths that marked a moment of maximal popularization for Bach: Gothic Bach, Unfathomable Bach. This was the Bach world that John Eliot Gardiner was born into and would eventually help to replace.

His career as a conductor of the Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique falls squarely into a newer phase of Bach reception, an epochal shift in what Bach symbolized and eventually what he sounded like. This new Bach, the Bach that has reigned in the cultural imagination for the last seventy-five years, which musicologist Susan McClary has dubbed “Pythagorean” Bach, emerged as part of the stark turn away from Romanticism following World War I. The modernist rejection of “subjectivity” and personal psychological confessionals in art led to something of a downfall for Wagner, Mahler, and most of the great nineteenth-century Romantics. But the disillusioned post-war avant-garde found intellectual solace in the alienating distance between Bach and the human. Unlike Wagner, and Beethoven, and Schumann, Bach was untainted by personal psychology and corruptible human desire. He again benefited from having no historical personality, seeming to float above it all in a positivistic paradise where music and number intersected free of the original sin of emotion. His difficult and seemingly flawless counterpoint could serve as a crucible for what mattered in the years of Modernist formalism: Truth, objectivity, incorruptible processual integrity. The chores of complicated composing rules seemed to the modernists the best protection from backsliding into old bad (read: Romantic) habits. For Stravinsky, Bach’s fugues were “a pure form in which the music means nothing outside of itself.” Even as multiple generations or artists turned for comfort to the play of abstract forms, Bach managed to remain the center of the musical universe.

Even the radical post-World War II composers of total serialism, chance music, and computer music could not fault the pristine precision of his counterpoint. Gothic Bach had given way to Harmony-of-the-Spheres Bach, a different kind of metaphysics, but one no less rooted in the sublime – The Mathematical Sublime. Think no further than the close bond between Bach and Glenn Gould, that next great mythic icon of modernist detachment. To twist Gardiner’s tautology, Gould was one of the least human human beings to have ever been. Like everyone else, he found himself in Bach, imagining him as an artist “withdrawing from the pragmatic concerns of music-making into an idealized world of uncompromised invention.” This, of course, is precisely what Gould did in 1964 when he retired from live performance to concentrate his efforts exclusively within the precision-bubble of the recording studio, freed from the concert hall and its stink of the human and the social. Gould, too, is now central to our mythology of artist types and, in the popular imagination, Bach has remained the music for that type: esoterics and ascetics and Beautiful Minds. It is the music to which Hannibal Lecter plans his meticulous escape in The Silence of the Lambs. It is the music obsessively plinked out by the father of Allison Janney’s character on The West Wing, of course a mathematician, of course seeking structure through the spreading disorder and isolation of Alzheimer’s Disease. Music, Math, and Discipline. Clarity, Structure, and Complexity.

It is necessary to revisit Bach’s complicated reception history because it is out of all of this that Gardiner hopes to bring back to human form his “very human human being.” It is a tall order, and a motivation one may not immediately trust considering how much Gardiner’s own recordings have helped to solidify the modernist view. As he relates it in Music in the Castle of Heaven, he experienced that version of Bach early on in his studies with Nadia Boulanger who preached the Stravinskyan catechism of discipline and order: “She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws.” His own recordings, part of the wave of “historically informed” interpretations using original instruments and claiming to resurrect the performing styles of Bach’s own era, have come to define the sound of Bach for the current generation of listeners. Those initial claims to “authentic reconstruction” have long been put aside, and we have (most of us) come to admit that we like this sound not for its historical authenticity but for how well it matches up with our own Mondrian-esque view of Bach: sleekness, clarity, momentum, almost superhuman precision (with Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir often at tempos that take the breath right out any mere humans foolish enough to try and sing along). Gardiner’s interpretations are only the most successful of an entire generation of conductors (along with those of Sigiswald Kuijken, Phillipe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Masaaki Suzuki among others) whose sound lays bare the abstract lines in Bach’s counterpoint by eliminating all of the distractions of older, Romantic performing styles: too much vibrato, too much rubato, too much dynamic swelling, not to mention too many performers. It would be impossible to overestimate how important Gardiner’s recorded legacy is to contemporary Bach reception. As novel and shocking as his recordings may have seemed to my own teachers who grew up on Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler, I am just young enough that his 1990 Mass in B minor (BWV 232) recording on Archiv was the first I heard, as was his St. Matthew Passion, and most revelatory to me, his recording of Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243a). Today, for my students, Gardiner’s Bach is “normal” Bach, and those earlier conductors seem shocking, impossibly foreign, as from a lost and bizarre era.

The book, then, surprises. Given this reputation for clarity and precision, it is surprising that Gardiner’s inner dialog with the composer is such a humanely messy concoction of the spiritual and the psychological. One wonders if the motivation for the book is not to provide something of a correction to his own public reception. That a great performer may look back on his career and fear that everyone has missed his point all along must be daunting. Though one suspects that the thirty-year-old Gardiner, caught up in the heady days when the “authentic performance movement” was laying siege to record labels, might have written a different book. Much of Gardiner’s current view seems to have been born of the extraordinary project he undertook in 2000, dubbed the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. While hardly as austere an experience as the name implies (it was backed by a major record label and documented by a BBC camera crew), it was still a powerful testament to our continuing Bach obsession – a full year spent living life as an itinerant cantor, moving from one church to another throughout Europe, preparing and rehearsing two complete, often unfamiliar, Bach cantatas each week along with a number of other Bach monuments, some two hundred total pieces of difficult music all conforming to the liturgical calendar that was the composer’s own constantly ticking task master. That intensity of focus, of having one’s international conducting career turned for a year into the comparably claustrophobic vocation of Lutheran cantor, in short the pretense of “walking in the composer’s shoes,” seems to have shaken loose a lot in Gardiner. He speaks of it like an evangelist bringing back answers from the desert:

Following Bach’s seasonal and cyclical arrangement of cantatas for an entire year provided us with a graphic musical image of the revolving wheel of time to which we are all bound . . . solving the enigma of how this music brimming over with vigour and fantasy could have emerged from beneath the wig of that impassive-looking cantor . . .

The punishing pace of creativity and the picturesque settings seem to have provoked a sort of vision quest, part time-travel fantasy and part genuine insight into how distant a figure as Bach might actually be. It is no surprise, then, that the most satisfying sections of the book are those where Gardiner lets us into that inner dialog by reconstructing his thoughts during moments when he is swimming in the music during rehearsal or performance. Some of this talk is very much in line with the Pythagorean orthodoxy:

to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it – connected to the motor and dance rhythms of the music, caught up in the sequential harmony and the intricate contrapuntal web of sounds, their spatial relations, the kaleidoscopic colour-changes of voices and instruments . . . the way it exposes to you its brilliant colour spectrum, its sharpness of contour, its harmonic depth, and the essential fluidity of its movement and underlying rhythm.

So far so Gould: sequences, spatial relations, colors, contours, lines. But as the book progresses, Gardiner reveals another layer of his current thinking about the composer, through both his perspectives on those same dull primary sources, which unfortunately he chooses to revisit in great detail, and through his favorite individual passages of the cantatas and Passions, which happily he does in just as much detail. The biographical half of the book shines in those sections when he imaginatively recreates the feel of the places Bach lived, penning him in a much smaller and uglier world than one might wish to imagine. Gardiner’s biographical Bach is impressively small: not a German but a Thuringian, not part of a Lutheran community but part of a family-clan, not a citizen of the Enlightenment but an overworked and alternately obsequious and litigious crank mired in the petty squabbles of provincial town life. Remote from the big thinking that usually makes up the intellectual context of Baroque studies, Bach’s world as presented by Gardiner is decidedly un-sublime. While far too conjectural in its details to be taken as an authoritative biography, it is a welcome antidote to the sweeping historical movements which usually serve as the “context” of important artist’s lives: The Enlightenment, The Baroque, The Holy Roman Empire. Bach’s world is too small for such big frames. Gardiner usefully reminds us that it is entirely possible to live “in the Enlightenment” without knowing it or showing many signs of it. It is a common sense point that some academic writers of epistemological “top-down” history might heed more often.

With a Huizinga-esque flair, Gardiner depicts Bach’s milieu in terms calculated to pull him off the mountaintop of “pure music.” From the rough and tactless scrounging required of preceding generations of the great “Bach Clan” to survive the gray landscape of the Thirty Years War (“the malaise which through most of the previous century had blighted the struggles of their parents’ and grandparents”), to Bach’s own dingy coming of age in the brutish boy’s schools of Eisenach and Ohrdruf with their Caravaggiesque gangs of knife-wielding ruffians (“brawls . . . [that] . . . developed unchecked while the burghers stood by, impotently wringing their hands . . . [over the] territorial division of the town between these embryonic Jets and Sharks or Mods and Rockers”), all the way to the petty arguments that made up much of his life in a Leipzig run by “a formidable alliance of secular and religious powers whose methods of subjugating employees had been honed over time and who were expert at making life difficult . . .,” Gardiner shows a consistent flair for the drab and depressing.

As in Huizinga’s history writing, the rough detail in this portrait of a querulous, often petty cantor and his dour world is meant to shock and alienate the reader. In breaking the composer out of his abstract cocoon, Gardiner also manages to break down the stereotype of the detached ascetic inhabiting a world of pure intellect. But that distance, once achieved, and the reader’s predictable recoil from the grubby reality offered up, is actually just a step toward Gardiner’s next goal, to locate in Bach some basis for a tragic persona that can serve as a framework for reading his works psychologically and autobiographically. The goal is not without merit. For listeners, it promises a renewed emotional resonance between we moderns and Bach’s sacred music that goes beyond the old saws of purity or complexity. The tactics, however, are predictable and problematic. To pull Bach, and only Bach, across the 1800 wall and into the world of authentic testimony, Gardiner needs to pick and choose when to allow him to be a very human human being living in his very small human world, and when to allow him the luxury of transcending that world in order to communicate his “universal” message. It is a difficult needle to thread.

The Bach that emerges is heavily marked by that rougher, darker setting. But the resulting scars are arranged into a familiar pattern, that of the romantic outsider. He is orphaned, death-obsessed, outlaw, non-conformist, a sullen misfit. He is “battle scarred” from disputes with both civic and court authorities, scars that include the memory of imprisonment and the threat of destitution. He rejected the career path of his more successful contemporaries toward the soulless but profitable theater music of larger urban centers out of pure artistic integrity (“not from any Lutheran prudery but simply because the music he heard there left him cold”). Instead he propagated “mutant” musical forms that were largely misunderstood by his own audiences and bosses. He is set upon by smaller musical minds who question his lack of a university education. Thus even Bach, the supreme technician (and posthumous terrorizer of conservatory students the world over), is able to fill the Romantic role of the unschooled, or at least un-institutionalized, outsider. He stands alone as a complex psychological figure among a collection of shallow and imperious straw men: despots, bureaucrats, venal patrons, abusive pedagogues, jealous academics, frivolous popular composers (Telemann serves as the main foil here), and audiences craving easy delights. Bach alone is allowed the luxury of introspection and depth because Bach alone is tasked with having something important to say to us directly. The personal flaws of this “imperfect man” selected for our inspection are consistently of the anti-hero variety. He is, in short, every bit the visionary and martyr we’ve come to expect from artistic hagiography. The process is completed when Gardiner makes the final turn so familiar to us from our side of the 1800 wall, revealing that the ultimate primary source for Bach’s biography is the testimony of “the music itself.”

The music gives us shafts of insight into the harrowing experiences he must have suffered as an orphan, as a lone teenager, and as a grieving husband and father. They show us his fierce dislike of hypocrisy and his impatience with falsification of any sort; but they also reveal the profound sympathy he felt towards those who grieve or suffer in one way or another, or who struggle with their consciences.

Much of this is merely an extension of the call made over ten years ago by Robert L. Marshall for bolder attempts at Bach Biography. There is much resonance between Gardiner’s portrait of Bach and Marshall’s suggested method, to extend back to Bach the posthumous Freudian couch sessions practiced so provocatively (and questionably) by Maynard Solomon in his biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Both Marshall and Gardiner fixate on Bach’s experience of loss. Marshall goes so far as to posit that an obsession with death and human frailty, not to mention a deep attraction to Lutheran orthodoxy, might be explained as a retreat from the anxiety of being twice orphaned, first by parental death, and then by brotherly abandonment. It is a method that requires inflating poorly documented, sometimes partially guessed, bits of biographical detail with intense emotional consequences. Gardiner’s musical analyses flow freely from this font. Simply put, Bach’s personal experience of loss, coupled with his fervent immersion in Lutheran doctrine, led him to a uniquely honest understanding of shame, of temptation, and of the desire for redemption. Such themes, of course, never go out of fashion and were staples as well of Baroque opera and of the sacred works of Vivaldi, Telemann, and scores of other composers. But Gardiner singles out Bach for an “authentic” religious conviction in contrast to the shallowness of his more theatrical contemporaries. To revisit and rewrite Kerman’s formula, “Baroque composers depict the passions . . . except for Bach, who expresses them.” One of us after all. This coupled with Bach’s unmatched willingness to forgo the beautiful and the pleasurable in favor of uncomfortable moments of pain, rage, and revulsion separates him from those others. At its best such diagnoses invest old music with a new and contemporary psychological power, a process that leaves one conflicted, offending the historian while stirring the concertgoer. Being both myself, I’ve long since learned to stop worrying and enjoy the resulting neurotics made out of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ives, et al., and so I am fully prepared to do the same for Bach. But we should never forget who the patient on the couch really is.

Gardiner’s task is made easier by the predictability of the resulting trope. We all know the artist type that we expect to be born of such angst. The gateway from slim source material to mythological archetype is a bit like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station. It will always be there for you if you run confidently enough at it. In Music in the Castle of Heaven, this dimension of testimonial expressivity remains Bach’s special prerogative among Baroque composers, a special status essential to the book’s final and most substantial argument, that among the music of that entire era Bach’s sacred vocal works are uniquely relevant to our modern condition.

Gardiner provides us two different vantage points on Bach’s testaments. Based on his experience during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, he is the perfect guide to walk us through a diachronic survey of an entire year’s cycle. It is an ambitious analysis offering glimpses of a composer responding to the challenge of producing a new sacred composition every week – a complex of moving Rembrandtian musical portraits of humans in distress. For a few cantatas and for the two extant Passion settings he gives us extreme close-ups, visiting with each movement and scene at a level of detail that allows us to luxuriate in the conductor’s vision of his newer darker Bach. His reading of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) demonstrates the surprising zeal of a twenty-two-year-old’s commitment to Lutheran eschatology. The text and governing melody, harshly ritualistic and tribal, are by Luther himself.

No innocence could be found.
Thus it was that Death came so soon
And seized power over us –
Held us captive in his kingdom,
Alleluia!

Bach’s musical setting weeps, wails, and roars with striking realism even as it astounds in its intricate textures. The result is a grim reminder of how effective Luther’s language and Bach’s music can be at bringing abstract theological concerns down into the world of everyday mortality:

Timeframes overlap here: first that of pre-regenerate man, then those of the Thuringians of both Luther’s and Bach’s day, scarred by their regular brushes with pestilential death.

Gardiner uncovers (or injects) much that is new and worth the reader’s time. The St. John and St. Matthew Passion settings get particularly engaging analysis, fitting to their position in Gardiner’s view as the greatest example of music’s ability to mimic tragedy and to force passive listeners into a recognition of their culpability in the world they inhabit:

[they] . . . animate the conventions of tragic myth and tragic conduct . . . leading his listeners to confront their mortality and compelling them to witness things from which they would normally avert their eyes.

These close readings have a lot to offer. They are rich in technical detail for those that want that in a music book, and bold in their emotional lunges for those who will skip past the shop talk of rhythms and counterpoints. But Gardiner’s hope is for more than mere compellingness. It is for relevance. His book is a failure if it cannot frame Bach’s Passions as something more than historical artifacts of a proto-enlightenment. That is the reason he doesn’t go too far into that world before pulling up. Others have already delved farther into what Gardiner almost sheepishly calls “the delicate issue of religious belief,” questioning the ability of today’s audiences to connect to a music so deeply rooted in convictions that many of us do not share or may even outright reject. Richard Taruskin offers that if one digs far enough into the real historical Bach, one finds a worldview worth truly recoiling from, a world of enforced consensus, absolutist ideology, anti-individualism, misogyny, and small-minded bigotry: “pre-Enlightened – and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened–temper. . . . Such music was a medium of truth, not beauty, and the truth it served – Luther’s truth – was often bitter. . . . Even when Bach is not expressing actively anti-Enlightenment sentiments . . . his settings are pervaded with a general antihumanism.” This, according to Taruskin, is why “only a handful of Bach’s cantatas can be said to have really joined the modern performance repertory, and a thoroughly unrepresentative handful at that.”

Gardiner offers us some relief from that “abandon ship” position, coaxing us to dip a toe into real history, just enough to give us something more real than Pythagorean Bach or Mountaintop Bach, just enough to darken the mood a bit for audiences who like their music pathological but not demagogic. History, in Music in Castle of Heaven, is in the service of contemporary experience. It must bend to achieve Gardiner’s goal, which is to convince us that Bach’s sacred vocal music remains socially relevant. It contains, after all, vivid and relatable depictions of very human human beings at their most pathetic, guilty, ashamed, supplicating, desperate. Gardiner believes above all else that exposure to these works is good for us in a way that even Bach’s own instrumental music cannot match. Simply put, it fosters empathy:

although Bach is habitually required to deal with such towering universal themes as eternity, sin and death, he shows he is also interested in the flickers of doubt and the daily tribulations of every individual, recognising that small lives do not seem small to the people who live them.

The extent of this belief is on stark display on the CD covers to the recordings that coincide with the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Released by Gardiner’s own label, each CD features a photograph by Steve McCurry, best known for National Geographic’s famous cover photo of twelve-year-old Sharbat Gula. The CD covers all attempt to repeat the power of that iconic image, a single person staring directly at the camera and thus, challengingly, into the eyes of the listener/holder of the CD. What changes from photo to photo is ethnicity, gender, traditional clothing or makeup. Like Gula, known across America and Europe not by her name but by a reductive formula – “The Afghan Girl” – (direct object + ethnicity + gender = human), the people in the photographs are all easily reduced to interchangeable symbols of exoticness. They are ethnically and geographically diverse, with the notable absence being the white European or American that one might presume is Gardiner’s expected Bach CD purchaser. If their ethnicity does not establish their “otherness,” then their indigenous dress, makeup, or ceremonial posture certainly does – a cascade of very human humans, all very different than you. Shuffle the deck of humanity and buy the complete box set! It is easy to read this exercise as naively exploitative orientalism. But I am willing to give Gardiner the benefit of an earnest belief that these images press the same issue as the music, asking us to confront the ultimate test of empathy – distance. It is easy to feel for the person near you, or the person who most resembles you. The consequences of their suffering are clearer and closer. The true test is how compelled one is to act on behalf of someone far away, who does not resemble you, and who you will never meet. It is a bold and clumsy attempt to make a strong claim that Bach’s sacred music has powerful work to do still today, the highest order of work, of making the world a better place all the way from the private to the global:

for beleaguered humanity at all times and in all places – from instances of false accusation in private or domestic life to the outrages under regimes of torture.

Music in the Castle of Heaven seems meant to complete a triad: striking musical performances, provocative visual imagery, and now a book-length exploration of these works, step by step, psychological trauma by trauma. But this brings us back to where this essay began, prompting the question of why it requires so many pages of biographical backup? Why the need to establish that the message we receive from this astounding music is rooted in Bach’s own psyche and endorsed by his own intentions? Twenty years ago, during the great “authentic performance” debates, this same question was asked of performers like Gardiner who claimed “historical verisimilitude” as a justification for their new performance style rather than simply admitting that they played the way they wanted to because they (and we) liked the sound. Gardiner’s own rhetoric was called into question back then as an example of the poietic fallacy, the idea that the only, or most valid, meaning of a musical work is one derived from the composer’s own thought process. It is a habit that leads us to credit our own feelings to someone else – someone whose mind we cannot hope to read, but whose authority we crave – the composer or author as lawgiver. The debate is long settled so far as performance is concerned, and performers in the new style have (mostly) accepted that, as Taruskin sneakily commended them, “being the true voice of one’s time is . . . roughly forty thousand times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history.” But reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, it seems as if Gardiner, the author, learned nothing from the trials of Gardiner, the performer, or at least thought he might slip old habits by in another form.

Take for a final example his readings of Cantatas 178, 179, and 135, the texts of which center on spiritual hypocrisy (from BWV 178: “wicked men . . . conceiving their artful plots with the serpent’s guile” and from BWV 179: “Likeness of false hypocrites, We could Sodom’s apples call them, Who, with rot though they be filled, On the outside brightly glisten.”). The music is filled with strident, heavily articulated orchestral slicing, fiery long-winded chewing-outs for melodies, and unexpected harmonic thunderclaps. For Gardiner, the one thing that is missing is personal testimony:

such sustained defiance that one asks whether there is a submerged story here – of Bach operating in a hostile environment. How much more satisfying, then, for him to channel all that frustration and vituperative energy into his music. . . . This is superb, angry music executed with a palpable fury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors. One can picture the city elders, sitting in the best pews, listening to these post-Trinitarian harangues, registering their intent and starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable as these shockingly direct words – and Bach’s still more strident and abrasive music – hit home.

Perhaps. Certainly the notion reinforces Gardiner’s own Bach mythology, Bach again as prototype, this time of the outsider anti-hero – proto-Beethoven. It is attractive. But whatever satisfying defiance this music parallels in modern listeners – anger at hypocritical corporate double-speak or outraged moralizing at ignorant power-wielding political hacks – is both self-evident in the sound and already built in to our cultural moment. It does not require the backing of Bach’s imaginary diary or visions of puffed-up Leipzig burghers.

In the end, the book is an argument for these difficult works to be kept alive, sprinkled with a fear that in our age of spiritual skepticism, and our new $.99/track digital music marketplace, Bach’s shorter instrumental works (and heaven forbid Vivaldi’s brilliant and breezily accessible concerti and arias) may be better built to thrive. But the case for relevance, and the call to keep the cantatas from fading, will be made between Bach’s music, his performers, and us. The answer to the question “why should we listen to this?” does not have to coincide with the answer to the question “why did he write it?”

If one has any doubts, look around at how many different Bachs are coexisting today, when more than a century of shifting performance styles and emotional perspectives are all streaming together on Youtube: Romantic Bach, Modern Bach, Gothic Bach, Pythagorean Bach, ascetic Bach, Lutheran Bach, audacious virtuoso Bach. You can choose whichever you’d like today, and a different one tomorrow. They all once claimed to be “the real” Bach – proof of how the process of reception is the history that matters. Just be aware, when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, that John Eliot Gardiner’s tragic orphan-empath is only one Bach among those many. No more or less accurate to the “true” past, but perhaps more prepared to survive the immediate future.

Michael Markham – Los Angeles Review of Books

A Petition from Weimar

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, World View

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Bach House Weimar, Bach in Weimar, Bachfest Weimar, Brahms, Brandenburg Concertos, cantata, car park, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Wolff, Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, cornerstone, Freud, Günter Blobel, Gerhart Hauptman, Gustav Stresemann, harpsichord, heritage protection, Hotel Zum Erbprinzen, Ibsen, John Coetzee, Konrad Adenauer, Leipzig, Liszt, Ludwig I, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Monika Grütters, Myriam Eichberger, Napoleon, Nobel, organ, Paganini, rally, Thuringia, Tolstoi, UNESCO, violin, Wagner, Weimar, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Proposed site of the Bach House Weimar

Proposed site of the Bach House Weimar

Dear Madame Federal Government Commissioner Grütters,

Up to the present day, the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach has not received the appropriate acclaim within the cosmos of great spirits that frequented the European Cultural City of Weimar.

This fixed star in the world cultural sky lived and worked for ten years in Weimar. Here, at the Weimar Market Square, principal parts of his oeuvre were composed: a large part of Bach’s organ works, over thirty cantatas, parts of the Brandenburg Concertos [BWV 1046-51] as well as numerous solo works for violin and harpsichord including the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue [BWV 903]. This is where the two most famous Bach sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel were born. According to the renowned Bach researcher Prof. Dr. Christoph Wolff, “after Leipzig, Weimar must be considered the second most important place in the composer’s life and work.”

The foundations of his home and the original Renaissance vaulted cellar have been preserved underground and placed under heritage protection – but are yet still inaccessible. This is the only at least partially existing and, among all the Bach cities, the only location proven by records to have been a place where Johann Sebastian Bach composed and lived that has survived to the present day. In the former Bach House – as of 1805 part of the Hotel Zum Erbprinzen – musical celebrities such as Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler and Niccolo Paganini, but also the intellectuals Leo Tolstoi, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann and Sigmund Freud and the politicians Napoleon Bonaparte, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Gustav Stresemann, Konrad Adenauer as well as over one hundred additional well-known European figures lodged and/or gathered here.

In the meantime, for the past twenty-four years, this location – in the center of the World Culture City of Weimar and in the midst of UNESCO World Heritage – has been being used as a car park.

In the year 2006, the association Bach in Weimar was founded, and with prominent supporters that include two Nobel Prize-winners, it pursues the objective of building a musical Bach meeting-place above with preserved vaulted cellar and foundations of the residence: a “Bach House Weimar.”

So far, however, the realization has been stifled by the passive resistance of the property owners and the lack of active support by the City of Weimar and the Free State of Thuringia. In spite of many discussions with the responsible parties, there has been no concrete change to the location so far. That is why we are using all democratic means to progress this important project after years of stagnation and hope to be successful.

The area necessary for a Bach House would encompass only 15% of the 2,200m² of the car park lot. The financing has been largely secured, thanks to financially strong supporters. Even though we respect the justified economic interests of the owners in respect to this central location, we are no longer able or willing to accept the stagnation of this unique location that has now gone on for over twenty years.

Therefore, we have two urgent requests:

1.
Please act in our interest!

Please actively engage your efforts to encourage the owners to effectively discuss the realization of a Bach House Weimar with the Bach in Weimar Association and its supporters. The objective of the discussions should be to agree on the basis to allow a (partial) sale of the property, a lease, a building lease, etc. in the near future and to realize development perspectives. That is the prerequisite necessary to begin concrete planning and subsequently make it possible to build the Bach House Weimar at this location – on a small part of the lot. Of course this could also be harmoniously integrated into a complete building project on the property or into a re-constructed Hotel Zum Erbprinzen.

With the authority of your office, communicate your wish to have this renowned place adequately reconstructed, as the City Council’s resolution has already stated.

Remind the owner of his responsibility and please support us in convincing him of the reasonableness of Article 14 GG (Constitutional Law of the Federal Republic of Germany): “Property is a commitment. Its use is to serve the good of the general public.”

2.
We cordially invite you to Weimar:

The Bach City of Weimar will be the focal point of international public cultural interest on the occasion of this year’s Bachfest Weimar from 30 April until 4 May 2014. The occasion is the three-hundredth birthday of Johann Sebastian’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. He was born right here, in the Bach House in Weimar. As it happens now, day after day, tourists from all over the world will then also stand in front of the wall and the car park at the Weimar Market Square and ask the astonished question: “Why isn’t the Bach House here?”

We will use this historical occasion to resolve the stagnating situation after so many years.

By progressing the Bach House project at this time, we have the chance to help the Cultural Capital City become more attractive and gain worldwide attention – not lastly in the context of the Thuringian Theme Year “UNESCO World Heritage” in 2014.

Come to the Bachfest Weimar in May 2014 to lay the “idealized cornerstone” for this singular cultural project and during a special event or rally and give your guarantee to the attending guests that you will actively support this important matter of national and international cultural interest.

We look forward to welcoming you here.

Sincerely,

Prof. Myriam Eichberger, Chairwoman Bach in Weimar e.V.

and Patrons of the Bach House Weimar:
Prof. Dr. Günter Blobel, New York (USA) – Nobel Prize-Winner Medicine
John Coetzee, Adelaide (Australia) – Nobel Prize-Winner Literature

– Bach House Weimar

Deconstructing the Genius of Bach

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Music Education, Organology, Other Artists

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MonumentcropTo deconstruct the genius of Bach, to fathom how the cold math of line plotted against line, note riding against note, voices knitted into voices, can translate into sounds often held up as the very pinnacle of Western music, to explain the whole history of a composer who the history books insist “invented” musical grammar but whose reputation evaporated from view for a hundred years after his death in 1750 – the name “Bach” meaning a famous teacher and organist to most people living in the early 1800s – to view Bach not through the prism of our twenty-first century minds, where we might mistakenly assume that the lifestyle, function and expectations of a composer were the same as today, but to place Bach in the right historical context, could take some kind of genius in itself.

Or perhaps not. Wrapped up in the mystery of Johann Sebastian Bach is his very familiarity. Once you’ve internalized the lessons of harmony and counterpoint that Bach formalized in the near-200 chorale harmonizations he wrote throughout his life and in works like the The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) – the so-called forty-eight; two books each made up from a prelude and fugue in all twenty-four major and minor keys – practically every note he composed can be slotted neatly into his rational and consistent system. Familiarity is bred from an early age. Every night my two- year old son goes to bed, his music-box offers two choices: sounds of nature or Bach, the inference being that at some deep human level they have become interchangeable. And if, one day, my son goes to music college, those same Bachian principles of harmony and counterpoint will be hardwired into his consciousness like, at primary school, the alphabet, or the reliable simplicity that one plus one is always going to equal two.

Theoretically interpreting and making sense of Bach ought to be as straightforward and user-friendly as assembling an IKEA bookcase: begin with the component parts, follow the manual, and you can’t go far wrong. And a door opens on perhaps Bach’s most profound enigma. Musicians can actively hear the harmonic processes of Bach clearly and unambiguously functioning in front of their ears – unlike Haydn, Beethoven or Bruckner there are no blots from the blue. These harmonic patterns are deeply woven inside our cultural DNA. Where would the Scherzo from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, The Kinks’ Village Green, the forward-thinking jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, or The Beach Boys’ Lady Lynda have been without Bach? And yet it’s entirely possible to play all the notes devotedly and still get the music wrong. There’s a part of Bach we can’t have. One plus one might always make two, but Bach’s music is interested in the mysteries of why.

The leading British conductor and Bach scholar Christopher Hogwood, who in 1973 founded the Academy of Ancient Music with its mission to play Baroque music on period instruments, tells me that he’s puzzled by students coming his way who, for instance, play minuets every day of their lives without knowing how to dance a minuet. “That doesn’t mean they don’t play a charming minuet,” he says, “but trying to make sense of Bach without knowing what was in his world is a compromise. I understand that students who practice their instruments for eight hours a day are unlikely to want to go to the library to learn about eighteenth century theology. But there’s no point in playing a chorale prelude without knowing the chorale. And if you know the chorale you might as well know the words that were sung to the chorale; and then you might as well know a little bit about eighteenth-century theology, Lutherism and Calvinism, and you’ll be a little closer to what was in Bach’s world.”

And Hogwood is keen to press another distinction about the distance between then and now which knocks back on the sort of compositional material Bach generated and worked with. Interpreters take note. “All music then was contemporary music,” he explains. “You wrote to be played tomorrow and you forgot about it the day after. It was very immediate and if there was no performance, or the opportunity suddenly collapsed, you simply stopped writing. People didn’t want to hear something that was a year old, certainly not ten years old, and never a century old. Composers were workers, employed on the same terms as the cook, or the coachman, or the gardener. You didn’t always require to know the name of the gardener, but if you became a well-known gardener people might come to look at your garden in the same way people came to Venice to hear Vivaldi. But very few people came to hear Bach. He never got a top job and was isolated – and knew it.”

Hogwood talks about the pressure on Bach to crank out a fresh cantata every Sunday. And with his wife and sons lined up to copy parts and fill out Bach’s harmonies – applying those forever internally consistent harmonic procedures – the sheer industry of his art becomes clear. The bottom drawer was regularly and unapologetically plundered. Up against an impossible deadline? The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048), with added chorus, becomes that Sunday’s cantata. (“You don’t have any sense that a chorus is ‘missing’,” Hogwood muses, “but Bach certainly had a sense that one could be added.”) Practicality, recycling, the brutal craft of needing to have his cantata ready each Sunday was everything.

Which means Bach needed his material to be bulletproof; self-generative processes, like canons and fugues, once triggered, had to slot together and move forward with the architectural logic of a subway map. No time for unpicking, correcting or finessing. Bach was a servant writing music for the greater glory of God. Move forwards a century and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is a dialogue with the divine, albeit an essentially God-fearing one. Beethoven’s great works – the Symphony no. 5 in C minor, the Violin Concerto in D Major, his Opus 111 Piano Sonata in C minor – are dialogues with a world that has Beethoven and his obsessions at its center. The techniques of harmony and counterpoint he inherited from Bach are re-sculpted, re-constituted, thought through afresh. Each piece requires a new solution, part musical and part philosophical, that could not be turned around on weekly cycle. Which doesn’t mean Beethoven couldn’t have worked under pressure. But he opted not to – patronage had switched from the church to wealthy individuals and secular organizations. Beethoven was no servant; he was an “artist” in a sense Bach would not have understood.

The modern construct supposes that Bach himself was divine, which on some level may or may not be true, but it’s not an idea that would have pleased him. His work was an attempt to deal with, give voice to, offer some humble explanation for, worlds beyond this one. The personalities and experiences of Beethoven and Mahler understandably became part of the story: the frustrations of a deaf composer, the terror of heart disease makes good copy. But Bach as physical, living presence was unimportant to the notes he put on the page. A cool, emotionally objectifying distance exists between Bach and his material; beauty and emotional resonance, rather like in the music of Varèse or Xenakis, is found in the high-intelligent design of structure, proportion and inner-order.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), a sequence of thirty variations on the bass line of an aria, written near the end of his life in 1741, has been endlessly analyzed, line by line, note by note, voice by voice, as music object, mathematical phenomenon and cultural icon. The work that haunted the eternally haunted Glenn Gould and bookended his recording career – cue Romanticized, rock-star idolatry – has also been reversed-engineered by musicologists with the plucky determination of scientists trying to whistleblow the formula for Coca-Cola. Bach’s proportional arithmetic, apparently, proves an irresistible draw. Certain features reoccur, structural markers in time. Every third variation is a canon, and each canon progressively imitates at a step further along the scale. The surrounding variations alternate between generic forms – dances, arias, a fughetta and at the mid-point a stately French Overture – and quick, freer form variations. How deeply performers need to grasp these underpinning numerical relationships is an ongoing point of discussion.

Christopher Hogwood is surprisingly phlegmatic. “What’s helpful to a student composer might not be helpful to a player,” he counters as I express some half-baked opinion that he must devote lots of time to counting bars. “You can’t play proportionally, you play what’s in front of you. In music, some mathematical things fall out by default – the Goldberg theme is in a regular number of bars, every variation is the same number of bars, and a mathematical matrix is imposed. More complicated relationships I suspect, yes, were artificial constructs. A number system is a tremendous aid to composers who don’t want to spoil the form of something; artists and architects rely on golden means and Fibonacci series calculations, and composers are no different . . . apart from in one way. Pure proportion with nothing else would be a dull piece of music. You don’t “see” a fugue in one moment, like a painting or a building; music is temporal. It’s pleasing to realize something so well proportioned that it is aesthetically a work of art. But if a piece were to overshoot the Fibonacci series by one bar I’m not certain that would worry most people.”

The jazz pianist, free improviser, composer and onetime classical organist, Oxford-based Alexander Hawkins – who earlier this year premiered a major Bach-inspired commission for jazz musicians on BBC Radio 3, One Tree Found – is clearly more entranced, perhaps even slightly spooked, by the symbolism of Bach’s numerology than Hogwood. As we sit down with the score of the Goldberg Variations, Hawkins turns human calculator. “I’ve always liked,” he reflects, “that the second book begins with a French Overture. It’s nicely perverse having an overture in the middle. And it subtly breaks the regularity of Bach’s maths. This is piece that isn’t sixty-four, or thirty-two, bars long. How long is it? With the repeats it comes out at ninety-five bars – nine plus five equals fourteen; BACH – B is two, A is one, C is three, H is eight, add those numbers together and it comes to fourteen. Bach has embedded his own musical signature into the middle of the mathematical architecture, surely no coincidence.”

By extension, Hawkins tells me, the number five (one plus four) always has significance in Bach, while the number three invariably symbolizes the holy trinity. But Hawkins and Hogwood are in agreement about a wider point: these numerical markers are buried way too deep for performers to communicate their specifics to audiences. “As a performer,” Hawkins says, “you treat the Goldberg Variations with care because you admire the craft and realize things happens for a reason. The maths works on so many levels, but at the same time, the piece wears the arithmetic very lightly. You never listen with the mathematics at the forefront of your mind.” Hogwood draws an analogy with Schoenberg’s serialism. “If it helps a performer to trace the tone rows through a piece of Schoenberg, or reach an understanding of how the maths operates in the Goldbergs then, fine, analyze away. But those relationships will not be audible, and your audience is only interested in what is audible.”

Hawkins’ One Tree Found makes you take notice, quenches your thirsty ears, via its thoughtful riffing off Bach’s palette of techniques and its refusal to go for the easy option – hello Jacques Loussier – of aping Bach’s style. Here’s a performer who has arrived at an understanding of how Bach operated by filtering his fingerprint techniques through other preoccupations. The first section of Hawkins’ piece revisits the idea of canons, but working with improvising musicians required a shift of focus.

“I’m interested in giving musicians leeway,” he elucidates. “There would have been no point in writing a canonic piece – and telling everyone in the program note, hey, my piece is about Pi – if no one could hear Pi. And I asked myself what exactly is the essential idea of a canon? The first time I felt a sense of wonder about canons was in my teens when I played the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her (BWV 769) and realized, despite everything I’d been taught about parallel and consecutive fourths and fifths being an absolute no-no, here was Bach – Bach! – writing canons at the fourth and fifth and it sounded beautiful. The essential feature of a canon is that material occurs consecutively, out of phase. And in my piece the musicians can move through the material I give them as they wish, improvising their entries. The basic melodic modules are arranged additively (1; 1+2; 2+3+4; 3+4+5+6) and effectively you hear canons both vertically and horizontally, because your ear never quite knows where you are in the process.”

Gottfried Reiche, Bach's trumpeter

Gottfried Reiche, Bach’s trumpeter

Hawkins projects Bach into the future as a creative going concern; Hogwood tries to strip away layers of accumulated misunderstandings and outmoded ways-of-doing to reach an historically-informed view of how Bach can be played most authentically today, while a musician like the natural trumpet specialist Jonathan Freeman-Attwood has toiled at the coalfield of hard, exploratory, instrumental trial-and-error. Top of the agenda when I meet Freeman-Attwood is Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 in F Major (BWV 1047) with its fleet, chromatically devil-may-dare, trumpet writing designed with a clarino trumpeter in mind – a trumpeter who found, lipped and tongued notes without the safety net of valves or holes.

Valve technology would not evolve for another century and Freeman-Attwood continues to be pulled towards what he terms “the raw Pythagorean science” of making music through what amounts to a four-foot length of metal. “The perpetual conflict between pragmatism and idealism is a composer’s lot,” he says, “and we know that Bach regularly wrote music that was too difficult for the forces he had. At times he must have said this makes absolute sense compositionally; I am going to take this fugue to this place, knowing full well that a couple of top trebles aren’t going to be around next Sunday.”

There’s more than a suggestion, Freeman-Attwood says, that the Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 concertante group might originally have consisted of violin, recorder, oboe – and horn rather than trumpet. “The trumpet part was so high, much higher than anything else he’d written for the instrument. Bach never wrote a trumpet part in F [the pitch of the horn] in any other context. It could well have been played an octave lower during Bach’s time. Having said that, some of the concertante dialogues don’t make as much sense without the crystalline spacing of the solo quartet with the trumpet in the stratosphere.”

And the spur to write – or recycle – the Brandenburg Concerto no 2 for trumpet must have coincided with Bach encountering a top-notch clarino virtuoso? “That’s difficult to say. Trumpeters usually had some sort of municipal role, playing fanfares in court and the like, and the good ones were selected to play concert music. What is key, and actually creates the difference in sound in the second Brandenburg Concerto between the modern and old trumpet, comes down to the mouthpiece they used – a considerably larger mouthpiece than today. Their approach to articulation and strength must have been formidable because, today, if we feel a little insecure about high notes we put in a mouthpiece that is slightly shallower, which means you can hit the high notes a little bit easier. In Bach’s day trumpeters must have had something in their diet, or perhaps a special technique, because they played high notes with these huge mouthpieces. We don’t know who Bach had in mind for the second Brandenburg Concerto; but he must have had considerable chops.”

Then we dive into the score, Freeman-Attwood pointing to notes that natural trumpeters would have needed to lip down, plucking notes out of the chromatic ether. The effect, he says, of hearing a natural trumpet play the second Brandenburg Concerto rather than a piccolo trumpet – the modern day alternative – is that you hear a “clucking” rather than a “symphonic” attack. The sound is more coppery than brassy. “Bach is so ingenious that all the notes he uses are in the harmonic series. And here – look! He even dares to go into a minor key. There’s one other piece, by Biber, that has a natural trumpet play in a minor key.”

As a writer whose usual terrain is New Music and jazz, I feel strangely at home discussing a composer who pursues instruments to the very limits of their capability. As we’re wrapping up, Freeman-Attwood discusses the insolvable balance problems that inevitably exist between trumpet, oboe, violin and recorder; Christopher Hogwood goes even further. “It contains some grand music but it’s a failure; I defy you to hear the recorder part when the other three instruments are playing. It looks good on paper but, short of close miking every instrument and falsifying the balance, it’s impossible to bring off in a concert hall.”

And now that we know the world – from macrophage blood cells, to our genetic code, to fractal geometry – is constructed from systems evenly balanced between the rational and chaotic, the science and the acoustics and the intelligent design of Bach has become part of a wider argument. Published in 1979, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by the American mathematician and computer scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter refracted Bach’s techniques through the maths of Kurt Gödel and the optical illusion art of MC Escher. “Every aspect of thinking,” Hofstadter writes, “can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level is governed by simple, even formal, rules. . . . The image is that of a formal system underlying an ‘informal system’ – a system which can make puns, discover number patterns, forget names, make awful blunders in chess and so forth.” Meanwhile, another scientist, Albert Einstein, left the world in doubt about where he stood in regards to Bach.“I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach.”

Philip Clark – Limelight Magazine

Chris Thile Records Bach

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Films, Other Artists

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ThilebachcropChris Thile has never been shy about genre-hopping. In his early twenties, singing and playing with the band Nickel Creek, the mandolin virtuoso covered songs by slacker-rock heroes Pavement, picking along with a fiddler and a guitarist. And a year ago, he was onstage with his band at Bonnaroo, the Tennessee summer music festival, working the crowd with acoustic string-band covers of rock songs by The Cars, Radiohead and others.

Now, he’s trying to get the same fans just as excited about classical music. For his latest record, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas Vol. 1, Mr. Thile, 32, has taken an approach of unadorned simplicity: It is just him, alone in a room with his mandolin, playing three suites – sixteen tracks in all – of works written for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, the master composer of late-Baroque church music.

Mr. Thile argues that the same crowds that headbang to Radiohead anthems should be just as able to get psyched for Bach or Mahler.

“The great musics of the world are great for very similar structural reasons: good melody, good harmony, and a balance of feminine and masculine energy. What makes one type of music classical and one bluegrass and one folk – these things aren’t what’s important,” he said at a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “My thesis statement would be – Bach didn’t write Baroque music. He wrote great music.”

At times, Mr. Thile’s new record has the same technical “wow factor” as his work with his band, Punch Brothers. On the Presto from Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor (BWV 1001) for example, Mr. Thile’s fingers trace Bach’s elegant melody lines and near-nonstop arpeggios at an off-to-the-races tempo, up and down the neck of his instrument – not unlike a bluegrass fiddle tune.

At other points, such as the Allemanda from the Partita No. 1 in B minor (BWV 1002), Mr. Thile plays in a purely Baroque vernacular, shedding any trace of bluegrass and making his mandolin sound stately and delicate, not unlike the lutes played by Bach’s Renaissance forebears.

Born in Oceanside, California in 1981, Mr. Thile grew up in Southern California listening to folk music on the local public-radio station and hearing live bluegrass bands at a pizza shop in nearby Carlsbad. He first picked up a mandolin – the eight-stringed instrument that most fans of traditional country music remember best in the hands of bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe – when he was five years old. His piano-tuner father and his mother were “folkies,” he said, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Shallenberg, was an avant-garde composer who taught music at the University of Illinois and Indiana University.

At age fourteen, Mr. Thile’s family moved to southwestern Kentucky – within a few hours’ drive from both the birthplace of bluegrass music and the cradle of pop country music, Nashville – after his father got a job at Murray State University. Mr. Thile would later attend Murray State for three semesters.

Nickel Creek, Mr. Thile’s first band, won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2003 for their Alison Krauss-produced album, This Side, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and later went gold. Mr. Thile founded his current band, Punch Brothers, in 2006 to help him record one of his own compositions, and the core of the band later backed him on his solo album How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. The group gelled around a style that recalled “new grass” of the 1970s and 1980s, which incorporated jazz and rock into the traditional string-band style, and has recorded three albums and sold more than 200,000 albums, according to its label, Nonesuch Records.

Mr. Thile moved to New York eight years ago, and has over the years added vocals and instrumental parts to records by Top 40 country singers including Eric Church, Keith Urban, and his friend Dierks Bentley.

Last year, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship – commonly known as the “genius grant” – and in 2011 made a richly composed fusion record with a classical-bluegrass supergroup headed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, all while keeping up a punishing tour schedule with Punch Brothers and other groups. He and Punch Brothers were recently tapped to sing and play on the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, a forthcoming film by Joel and Ethan Coen, which follows a week in the life of a fictional folk singer in early-1960s Greenwich Village.

“He’s one of those people where, there’s nothing that he becomes interested in that he doesn’t go all the way in,” said Mr. Ma, the multiple-Grammy-winning cellist who has recorded and toured with Mr. Thile. “When he’s playing Bach, it’s with the utmost understanding of the human condition. He responds to the nature of the instrument, and he becomes the content. He’s organically attuned to the music.”

There is some precedent for bluegrass pickers dabbling in classical music – banjoist Bela Fleck recorded an album of the works of Bach, Debussy, Chopin and others in 2001. Mr. Ma has collaborated with classical bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O’Connor on several classical-folk fusion records.

But few bluegrass musicians have embraced classical music so thoroughly: Mr. Thile in 2009 premiered his first concerto for mandolin and orchestra, and Punch Brothers have taken to playing the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048) at concerts, interspersed amid the band’s usual melodic, progressive bluegrass songs. “You should just watch people flip!” Mr. Thile says. “I’m not saying you’ve got to like, jump up and down and scream during a Bach performance,” he says, before noting that “the classical music hall was like that, two hundred years ago, you know. You have reports of people, you know, whooping and hollering and demanding encore performances of things. . . . They were riotous!”

This month, Mr. Thile is touring with Mr. Ma, Mr. Meyer, Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddler Stuart Duncan and singer Aoife O’Donovan in support of their 2011 album The Goat Rodeo Sessions, followed by an international solo tour, on which he will play cuts from the Bach record, starting in early October.

In November, Nonesuch will release the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, on which Mr. Thile with his Punch Brothers bandmates Chris Eldridge and Gabe Witcher, as well as Justin Timberlake and Mumford & Sons‘ Marcus Mumford.

“Chris is a leading edge of a generational shift,” said T Bone Burnett, a legendary music producer who has made records with a wide array of pop and Americana acts, including Counting Crows, Elton John, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson. Mr. Burnett first heard of Punch Brothers from a mutual friend and asked them to be a part of a benefit-concert series that he organized in New York and Boston in 2010. From there, the band worked with Mr. Burnett, well-known for his work curating music for Hollywood films, on the The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond. It was Mr. Burnett who asked Mr. Thile’s band to play on the Coen Brothers’ film soundtrack, which he is producing.

Separately, Mr. Thile is searching for a home to buy in New York City with his girlfriend, the television actress Claire Coffee, and practicing on a 1924 Gibson F5 mandolin, designed by legendary instrument-maker Lloyd Loar, an heirloom instrument that he bought last year using some of the $500,000 grant he won as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s genius award (Mr. Thile declined to say how much he paid for the instrument, but original Loar mandolins can cost up to $250,000). He says that these days, money is flush enough that he doesn’t take studio work unless it is for friends.

“They’re all passion projects for me. . . . It hasn’t always been that way. When someone came at me with a high number it used to be very hard to say no,” Mr. Thile says. “Now I can’t even believe I’m in the position I’m in.”

Robbie Whelan – The Wall Street Journal

Beyond Definition and Beyond Compare

01 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, World View

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Royal Albert Hall

Royal Albert Hall

To appreciate some kinds of music, you have to be in the right mood. Adolescent angst is handy for Mahler’s vast, self-regarding symphonic canvases. A sense of adventure and a dose of hallucinogens are helpful when embarking on one of Scriabin’s mystical flights of fancy. Self-pity is apt for Sinatra’s None but the Lonely Heart. But there are some composers who are so immense and all-encompassing that they sweep “mood” away, the way a March wind sweeps away winter’s dead leaves. And of those composers, J.  S. Bach is the one who is truly infallible. On Easter Monday, the Royal Albert Hall hosts an extraordinary nine-hour celebration of his music, led by the musician for whom Bach means more than anything, John Eliot Gardiner.

There’ll be organ music on the Albert’s Hall’s stupendous instrument, played by John Butt. Three starry soloists will play music for solo cello, violin and harpsichord. And crowning everything will be Bach’s sacred music, played by Eliot Gardiner’s own Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, culminating in the great Mass in B minor (BWV 232). All this forms the climax of the BBC’s Baroque season and will be broadcast live on Radio 3.

But is Bach a Baroque composer at all?

Many people feel he floats outside history altogether. That’s why listening to Bach confers a mysterious sense of coming home, as if he’s both the origin and the center of classical music. All the great composers who come after him acknowledge that, even if they go through a stage of rebelling against him. Stravinsky is a case in point. When he was a young man, he said sniffily, “Bach is always compared to a cathedral, but there are many free spirits outside the cathedral.” Decades later, he repented.

In any case, the “timeless” Bach was in many ways a man of his time. He was conventionally pious, had the same smattering of Latin and rhetoric, the same loyalty to family and community, as all his neighbors. Look at the well-known portrait of Bach, and what you see is the face of a determined, hard-working German burgher, not some mystical dreamer. He liked a drink and a pipe, was prickly about his status, and didn’t suffer fools gladly. He once flung an insult at a bassoonist who’d let him down in a performance. The incensed “nanny-goat bassoonist” later met Bach in the street and gave him a slap. Bach drew his dagger, and the two “tumbled about” in front of some gleeful students.

That’s not the only evidence of Bach’s quick temper. As for Bach’s music, it shows a deep reverence to his German forebears, but he wasn’t immune to changing fashions. When galant gracefulness came in, in the 1740s, he showed he could be as galant as anyone. And he was alert to the virtues of other nation’s traditions. While some German composers scorned the graceful, ornamented style of French keyboard music, Bach loved it, and according to one of his sons played it “fleetingly and with much art.” He was keen on the Italian concerto style, which courses through his own Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51), and can even be heard in his sacred music.

So this most German of composers turns out to be the most universal. It’s a paradox, one of several that keep Bach familiar and yet mysterious. Here’s another. Bach is often praised for being the most abstract of composers. Such pieces as the Musical Offering (BWV 1079) are like geometry in sound. They unfold in calm, beautiful lucidity, aloof from human concerns.

Yet Bach is also the most sensuous of composers. He relished the sound of instruments. As Stravinsky put it: “You can smell the resin in his violins, taste the reeds in his oboes.” The joy of the Suite in D Major (BWV 1012) for solo cello arises from the physical pleasure of crossing the strings with the bow, and the ringing sound of the open D string. Many of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) are born out of the sheer fun of crossing hands at speed.

Fun isn’t a word that normally springs to mind when thinking of Bach, the great “lawgiver” of music. In fact his name is a byword for all the difficulties and constraints of technical rules in classical music. Generations of music students have struggled to harmonize a chorale or compose a fugue “in the style of Bach,” and yet, the composer often broke the rules himself. Some of his pieces are wild and willfully eccentric, such as the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor (BWV 903), or the cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde (BWV 54), which actually begins with a dissonance – something unheard-of at that time. In Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major (BWV 1050) the harpsichordist, who for most of the piece fulfills the role of a modest “filler-in,” suddenly takes off in an extravagant solo. At that moment the solo keyboard concerto is born before our ears.

Strangest of all is the piece where Bach seems to invoke “law” at its most rigid, The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080). As he piles up the fugue melody in ever more complex ways, the harmony often buckles under the strain. Underlying all these tensions in Bach is the fundamental paradox about him. Bach is often thought of as suffocatingly pious. I remember my university professor grumbling that “Bach is always on his knees.” Well, it’s true that he felt the reality of sin and the pains of this life, in ways that we find hard to empathize with. There are pieces in his output which express a dignified anguish at those things and resignation to God’s mercy.

We’ll hear those moods next Monday, but we’ll also hear something else: joy at divine providence, expressed in a way that partakes of everyday joy in life. Bach’s sacred music dances as it praises, and if we can’t join in the praising, we can certainly join in the dancing. So next Monday, forget the vile weather and post-Budget blues.

Come home to Bach.

Ivan Hewett – The Telegraph

Rewriting Bach, As Bach Rewrote Others

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works

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Gustav Mahler in 1907

Gustav Mahler in 1907

When Gustav Mahler arrived in New York in the winter of 1907-8 to take up his post as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, he came as the champion of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and other immense masterworks, and as the composer of equally monumental symphonies.

It must have seemed somewhat incongruous, therefore, to those attending the New York Philharmonic Society concert of 10 November 1909, to see Mahler, by then the conductor of that orchestra as well, tuck his baton under his arm (as an eyewitness reported), sit down at a harpsichord and lead a performance of orchestral-suite music by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Mahler had assembled the score himself, taking music from Bach’s Orchestral Suites in B minor (BWV 1067) and D Major (BWV 1068), and producing a symphonylike arrangement of four movements. The fact that the new suite began in B minor (with the Overture from BWV 1067) and ended in D Major (with the Gavottes I and II from BWV 1068) might have violated Baroque convention, but it was fully in line with Mahler’s personal enthusiasm for ascending, minor-to-major key schemes, seen, for example, in the Resurrection Symphony of 1895 (which climbs from C minor to E flat Major). Like many other nineteenth and twentieth-century composers, Mahler did not hesitate to put his own stamp on Bach’s music when bringing it to performance.

Mahler’s admiration for Bach was intense and of long standing. According to his wife, Alma, the only scores he allowed in the summer house where he composed were the works of Bach. And in 1901 he confessed to Natalie Bauer-Lechner: ”It can hardly be expressed, what I learn more and more from Bach (admittedly as a child sitting at his feet), for my innate method of writing is Bach-like. If only I had time to immerse myself completely in this highest school!”

To this he added: ”I will dedicate my later days to him, when I am my own man.” In America, freed from the constraints of the Court Opera in Vienna and aware of his own fragile health, Mahler seems to have believed that the moment to express his passion for Bach publicly had arrived.

In making his suite arrangement, Mahler was following a path taken by many other musicians who were equally driven to update or improve Bach’s scores. Indeed, one can trace this path back to the composer’s own family: soon after Bach’s death, his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, revamped many of the cantata scores for performances in Halle, adding, for instance, trumpet and timpani parts and a Latin text to two movements the cantata Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (BWV 80). The brass parts were so attractive that they were printed with the work in the complete Bach Edition of the nineteenth century and are still included in many performances today.

The second-eldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, took great pains to preserve and champion his father’s music. Yet in 1786, when he paid homage to the Mass in B minor (BWV 232)  by giving the premiere of the Credo section at a benefit concert in Hamburg, he did not balk at updating the work by adding an instrumental introduction of his own composition and by changing the instrumentation in a number of movements. Around the same time, Mozart arranged preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) for string ensemble, for performances at Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s famous ”Bach salons” in Vienna.

In 1802 the early Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel seems to have sounded the alarm for restraint, noting that the unaccompanied violin Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001-6), for example, were so perfect and complete in themselves that ”a second instrument was neither necessary nor possible.”

Mendelssohn and Schumann clearly thought otherwise. Mendelssohn wrote a piano accompaniment for the Chaconne of the Partita in D minor (BWV 1004) for a Leipzig Gewandhaus performance with the violinist Ferdinand David in 1841, and Schumann wrote piano accompaniments for all six of the unaccompanied violin works, and for the unaccompanied cello suites as well. Schumann remarked that Mendelssohn’s piano accompaniment of the D minor Chaconne sounded so fresh and convincing that ”the old, immortal cantor seemed to have a hand in the performance himself.”

Since then, there has been no turning back. Liszt, Brahms, Busoni and Reger rushed in to fashion piano transcriptions of organ and instrumental works. Raff, Elgar, Schoenberg, Holst, Respighi, Webern, Stokowski, Stravinsky and Honegger tried their hands at large-scale orchestrations. Others augmented Bach’s counterpoint with newly composed parts: Moscheles wrote melodic cello lines for Well-Tempered Clavier preludes, Reger added pedal lines to the Fifteen Inventions (BWV 772-86) to produce organ trios, and Gounod placed a soprano melody over the C Major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier to create his kitsch classic Ave Maria, Mélodie Religieuse.

And this is to say nothing of the electronic transformations of Wendy Carlos, the vocal renditions of the Swingle Singers and Bobby McFerrin, or the jazz interpretations of Jacques Loussier and Dave Brubeck. The list of Bach arrangements is lengthy indeed, and in the less dogmatic atmosphere of the post-”original forces” age, it appears to be getting longer. (Witness Ton Koopman’s recent reconstruction of the lost St. Mark Passion [BWV 247].)

What is it about Bach’s music that makes it such prime material for rearrangement? Why don’t we have a host of Mozart transcriptions or Brahms reorchestrations?

Part of the explanation can be found in Baroque musical practices, and in Bach’s compositional methods in particular. During the Baroque there was a strong tradition of musical borrowing, of using existing music as the basis for improvisation or new composition. A contemporary tells us that when Bach sat down at the keyboard, he would ”set his powers of imagination in motion” by playing something by another composer. Handel could scarcely pick up a pen without quoting someone else’s themes. Telemann liked to use the works of others, too.

In his youth, Bach reworked music by the day’s leading composers: Johann Adam Reincken (the Hamburg dean of German organists), Giovanni Legrenzi (the Venetian master of progressive trio sonatas) and Arcangelo Corelli (the Venetian codifier of the Baroque concerto). By fashioning fugues and keyboard transcriptions from their music, Bach acquainted himself with current styles and forms while finding his own artistic voice.

Later, as an established organ virtuoso at the Weimar court, Bach turned once again to keyboard arrangements, transcribing dozens of fashionable instrumental concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann, Benedetto Marcello and others. Here he appears to have competed with his cousin and colleague Johann Gottfried Walther to create keyboard transcriptions that captured the colors and contrasts of the Baroque instrumental ensemble.

When Bach became St. Thomas Cantor and town music director in Leipzig in 1723, he found himself under tremendous pressure to produce new works on a weekly basis, first for Lutheran church services and then for concerts of the university collegium musicum. During the initial years, he composed an extraordinary amount of music.

But he also began to recycle earlier pieces on a vast scale, arranging the music in brilliantly imaginative ways. New texts were inserted for old, outdated scorings were modernized, and instrumental concertos were transformed almost beyond recognition into cantata sinfonias, choruses and arias.

By the 1730’s, reworking old music had become a compositional way of life for Bach. The St. Mark Passion, the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248) and the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 870-93) appear to have been produced largely through the recycling of existing material. The same is true of the harpsichord concertos, the four short Masses (BWV 233-6) and the Mass in B minor. Bach also arranged music by Palestrina, Caldara, Pergolesi and others, adding new touches and bringing the scores into line with his own style.

For many Baroque composers, revamping existing scores was a practical expediency. For Bach, it became a high art, an opportunity to enhance his own music and that of others, and carry it to a loftier level of perfection. Since absolute perfection could not be achieved by mortal man, the improvement of musical works was a never-ending process.

When Mozart and Brahms completed a piece, they closed the book and moved on to another project. For Bach, composition was a continuing affair, even with seemingly finished works. Hence, the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) were augmented with a set of Fourteen Canons (BWV 1087), the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her (BWV 769) were given a new organizational scheme, and The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) was expanded beyond its original design.

The transcendent values of Bach’s music – its melodic beauty, its contrapuntal strength, its rhythmic vitality, its harmonic profundity – speak across time, in a universal language, to a multitude of composers. But it is the embracing, inspiring open-endedness of his works that seems to move others to roll up their sleeves and try to carry Bach’s efforts farther.

It was in this spirit that Mahler appears to have approached his Bach orchestral-suite arrangement. He preserved the general text of Bach’s score, limiting his changes to the addition of dynamic markings, slurs and tempo gradations. He also shortened the value of detached notes here and there, to ensure uniform articulations.

In forte passages, he reinforced the solo flute with supplementary flutes and a clarinet, to produce a sufficient tutti in Carnegie Hall. (As it happens, Bach once did a similar thing: in the instrumental march of the cantata Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten (BWV 207), a movement apparently used for a student processional in a large space, he asked that the parts be reinforced by as many as seven players.)

But Mahler also embellished Bach’s music with the addition of two written-out continuo parts, one for harpsichord, the other for organ. In the published score of 1910, he stated that the printed parts should be ”regarded as a sketch, which should bear . . . the characteristics of a free improvisation.” Mahler revived the suite arrangement several times with the Philharmonic, and Alma tells us that he altered the harpsichord accompaniment each time, ”according to his fancy.”

In the published version, we see that Mahler treats the harpsichord not as a steadily chordal instrument, in a Baroque way, but rather as a first-chair instrument that emerges here and there to add special splashes of orchestral color. This imparts a distinctly Mahleresque touch to the score.

Bach’s colleague Johann Mattheson seems to have had such accretions in mind when he advised composers that it was perfectly permissible to borrow someone else’s music, as long as it was returned with interest.

George B. Stauffer – The New York Times

Christmas and Puerile Pollies

23 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Films, World View

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Canberra, Christmas, Guy Noble, Harry Jenkins, John Howard, Kim Beazley, Limelight, Mahler, national anthem, Paul Keating, The Well-Tempered Clavier

Polliescrop copyBack at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I presented the Breakfast program on ABC Classic FM, we used to begin each session with the music of J. S. Bach. Our listeners cited it as a civilizing influence, and indeed the order and essential decency of Bach’s music made it a great way to start the day. There are a few other places that could do with the odd Prelude and Fugue (BWV 846-893) in the morning.

Let’s start with Federal Parliament.

There is a cacophony in the [Australian] national capital. Our political discourse is like some horrible contemporary work of crashing and snarls, shouting and cat calls; verbal abuse that wouldn’t be tolerated in a school debating competition, yet is witnessed every week in Canberra. We’re not anywhere near the amazing riots and brawls seen in the Taiwanese and Korean parliaments, with shoes flying through the air and elected representatives choking each other, but it will only be a matter of time before the Member for Warringah leaps across the chamber in his bike shorts and has to be restrained by the Treasurer. I blame both sides – and I fear for the Speaker’s health. Harry Jenkins looks like prime cardiac arrest material as he attempts to regulate the nasty kindergarten that is Parliament. One day he might snap and turn into another dirtier Harry, waving six guns from the Speaker’s Chair – “go ahead, make my day!” I wouldn’t blame him.

It wasn’t always thus. I remember going to have a look at Question Time during the Howard government. John Howard and the then Leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley walked into the chamber chatting, they stopped in front of the despatch boxes, finished their conversation with a laugh, then Howard thumped Beazley on the back and they went to their positions. The debate after was fierce, but at no point was it truly nasty. Even Keating at his most vitriolic delivered his barbs with a smile, with some sort of wit, not to mention knowledge of Mahler. But the leaders today have lost any sense of manners, decorum or indeed humor. It’s like cowering as a child in your bedroom, listening to your parents shouting in the kitchen.

A pity there isn’t a House of Representatives Chamber Orchestra playing the Air on a G String (BWV 1068) in the background. Bach’s music always gives a sense of the bigger picture, and I fear perspective is what we’ve lost in the day-to-day minutiae of political battle. An example – my daughter’s recent school concert began with the national anthem, not only verse one but the little-sung verse two. For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share. The words stuck in my throat. It was one day after the non-vote on the Government’s offshore immigration processing bill. What a joke. We are a lucky country that has swapped the sheep’s back for the iron ore bucket, skirted the worst of the financial crisis, is the envy of the developed world, has low unemployment, low government debt, a national health care system, a compassionate welfare system, food in abundance, democracy, the rule of law, and nine professional orchestras. Yet many of us are grumpy, stressed, and convinced that the sky is about to fall.

The coming holiday season brings two wonderful gifts: time to spend with family and a complete shutdown of the banal tittle-tattle that masquerades as political discourse in this country. Let’s put on a CD of Bach Preludes and Fugues and be thankful for both. Merry Christmas.

Guy Noble – Limelight Magazine

Interview with Zachary Carrettin: “Bach, the Passionate”

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Festival Events, Interviews, Music Education, World View

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Edward McCue (EM) Zachary, how are Rick Erickson and you interpreting this year’s Boulder Bach Festival theme, “Bach, the Passionate?”

Zachary Carrettin (ZC) As a theme, “Bach, the Passionate” manages to embrace both of the largest programs of our new season. The Chamber Concerts this month will feature Italian-influenced concertos and how Bach adapted the passionate Italian style of writing and playing, especially in the case of the violin as a virtuoso instrument. In contrast, “Bach, the Passionate” also celebrates our Festival Week performances of his St. John Passion (BWV 245). In that great work we will hear Bach’s religious fervor relating the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ. These two very different kinds of passion will result in dramatically different listening experiences that both reveal Bach at his very best.

When considering Bach’s concertos, I think that it’s important to understand that he recognized clear distinctions between French tastes and Italian tastes, the two prevailing national styles of instrumental writing of the time, and that the Germans, by and large, were known as being expert at both styles of playing. Major orchestras, such as the one at the Electoral Court in Dresden, featured principal players who had studied with the great masters in Italy and France. At least one contemporary critic claimed that the Dresden orchestra played French music better than the French and Italian music better than the Italians

I think that the degree of difference between the stylistic approaches of the French and Italians can be best understood by examining what a Frenchman wrote after traveling to Venice to hear Vivaldi and his orchestra: “Vivaldi wretched with passion in a disgusting display of indiscipline,” and it was in fact this “disgusting display of indiscipline” that was eventually exported throughout Europe. Today we might characterize this emotional style as being “unabashed Romanticism.”

We use many different terms in our attempt to describe the French and Italian styles during the Baroque period. In an interview that Christopher Hogwood, the music director of the Academy of Ancient Music in London, held with Baroque violinist and historian Jaap Schröder, Schröder demonstrated how a violinist would bow a French minuet as opposed to bowing an Italian minuet.

Schröder noted that, in the French minuet, there are repeated lifts and retakes of the bow. The note is played, and then the bow is lifted in the air, resulting in a mannered performance that emphasizes the strong beat versus the weak beat.

Schröder’s example of playing an Italian minuet leaves the bow on the string and simply bows down-up down-up as it comes. With this sort of bowing, the strong beat often occurs on the up bow stroke, which violates what the French were going for, that is, an emphasis on the strong beat brought about by gravity. By simply playing through the line without lifting the bow, the Italians, especially in the north, adopted a less mannered, more sustained approach to playing that was much like singing.

Thus, to a French musician, it might have seemed that the Italians were not very proficient in the art of bowing, but, to the initiate, it was obvious that the Italians were going for a longer line and a more legato, more fluid, more cantilena approach to bowing.

Now, with this explanation of some aspects of the Italian style, we can begin to consider the details of Vivaldi’s world. An ordained Catholic priest, Vivaldi was a composer of sacred music and a music educator at the orphanage attached to the Church of the Pietà in Venice. A true showman, Vivaldi was fond of flipping around his red curls and really playing in a virtuoso style. Thus, a severely intellectual or refined performance of a Vivaldi concerto cannot accurately portray his ethos.

However, in spite of their cultural differences, Vivaldi’s concertos influenced the Lutheran Bach more than any other concerto composer, more than Handel, more than Corelli, and certainly more than the countless other Italians, such as Albinoni. Bach was greatly influenced by Vivaldi’s concertos even though there is no evidence that Bach ever met Vivaldi or heard him play. Vivaldi’s reputation somehow succeeded in making its way to Bach, as did those aspects of his performance style that demanded that a concerto to be played in a very dramatic and spontaneous manner.

If you look at Vivaldi’s compositions, as compared to Bach’s, Vivaldi’s are indeed more simple, and I’ve encountered a number of theory professors who have disregarded him as a composer, claiming that “he wrote the same concerto five hundred times.” I think, though, that those particular theorists are missing out on the important fact that it’s the performer who brings Vivaldi’s concertos to life. Vivaldi wrote his concertos in such a way that they are quite extraordinary when placed the hands of gifted interpreters. With Vivaldi, we very much have a marriage of the performer and composer. In Vivaldi’s case, the composer invites the performer to say as much in the performance as the composer did in the writing of the piece.

EM So how does understanding Vivaldi change the way that we approach the works of Bach?

ZC Bach was a different composer, a more complete composer than Vivaldi. One can really disrupt the genius of Bach if one adds too much of oneself to Bach. On the other hand, I think that there is still adequate room for a lot of flair and extroversion in Bach’s concerto writing.

You can see that, especially in slow movements, for example, in the Concerto for Violin in A minor (BWV 1041), but also in the Brandenburg Concertos. Think of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major (BWV 1050), where the violin, flute and harpsichord are featured as solo instruments. The middle movement, entitled affettuoso, is a gorgeous cantabile in a minor key that is totally heart-felt; however Bach assigns fragments of each phrase to each of the three instruments, never allowing a single instrument to play a complete statement. By doing so he almost forces to the musicians be a little bit more reserved and coherent, as opposed to the andante of the Concerto for Violin in A minor. There Bach has fluid, floridly ornamented lines cascading and spanning the entire range of the instrument’s extensive tessitura. This example of Bach’s creative genius is very much like the singing of an aria and, in that respect, is very much like Vivaldi’s writing for the violin.

EM We know that Bach heard an orchestra playing in the French style while he was living in Lüneburg, but did Bach ever come into contact with an entire orchestra of Italians?

ZC I don’t know about the personnel in Bach’s orchestras, yet I doubt that he had many Italian musicians working for him. I do know that Bach was limited in his resources and that not all of Bach’s musicians had mastered their instruments at the highest level. He often had to deal with disparities in technical levels and experience, which is probably why the instrumentation of the cantatas vary so greatly from week to week. When he had the good fortune to meet extraordinary talents, such as when a couple of excellent oboists visited Leipzig, he took the opportunity to feature those forces in the church service on the next available Sunday or feast day.

Antonio Vivaldi

In Vivaldi’s case, however, the composer had a consistent group of accomplished musicians available to him at all times. I think Vivaldi wrote something like thirty-nine bassoon concertos, evidence that he had more than a couple of good violinists readily at his disposal. Vivaldi really had such a strong base of musicians in his conservatory that he was encouraged to write many concertos for two, three and even four solo instruments. In contrast, while in Leipzig, Bach had to write concertos for himself and settle for an orchestra of town musicians and students who were, for the most part, unqualified to perform as soloists in their own right.

EM During Bach’s lifetime, Handel, in London, was deeply immersed in the world of Italian opera. Is that why, when we hear Handel, we know we’re not hearing Bach?

ZC When we hear any of Handel’s solo lines for an instrument, we are struck by the fact that that gorgeous melody could just as well have been sung by a great operatic soprano. That’s not at all the case for Bach. Bach was not an opera composer, and one wonders if Bach’s music could have survived if he had somehow managed to land a position with a major opera company.

I say this because even Bach’s vocal writing is so highly contrapuntal, with multiple, coexisting melodic lines, rather than simply lyrical. Within Bach’s counterpoint, a melodic line, such as a chorale melody, will appear and disappear and reappear while primary and secondary obligato voices weaving a complex texture over a bass line. This style of writing is really distinct from the kind of composition that Handel was undertaking, yet Handel’s writing, while more straightforward, is not simple. While it is every bit as harmonically complex as Bach’s, Handel’s writing is more accessible. Handel’s melodic lines start and finish with the same instrument, while Bach’s melodic lines are constantly shared among the participating instruments.

I remember reading a quotation that great counterpoint is like a great democracy, that each individual line or each individual person willingly sacrifices some freedom for the betterment of the whole organization. I think that that is what is really happening all the time in Bach’s music.

I guess that this is very similar to Mahler’s symphonies. Mahler can be compared to Bach in that Mahler rarely allows a melody to started on one instrument and completed by that same instrument. Working in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, Mahler was fascinated with tone colors and sonorities and would first have part of a melody doubled by the trumpet and clarinet and then replace the clarinet with and oboe and then ask the trumpet to drop out and go with a flute instead. Thus Mahler’s melodies are spun out with multiple timbres one hundred and fifty years after Bach, and that’s what Mahler did differently from Brahms and what Bach did differently from Handel.

EM The upcoming Chamber Concerts also include a work by Corelli. Wasn’t Corelli sort of the old man among this group of composers being featured?

ZC Indeed, Corelli was already quite popular in Rome in 1680, while Bach was not born until 1685. Corelli was the “grandfather of the concerto,” or at least he gets that credit today. Corelli was writing in the concerto grosso genre where there are two dueling forces: the ripieno, which is the tutti or the whole orchestra, and the concertino, which is the soloist or group of soloists.

Often in Corelli you’ll have two violin soloists, a first violin and a second violin, along with a cello soloist. Generally, there will be a four measure phrase that is first played by a soloist and that is then is repeated in imitation by the whole orchestra. As a result, a conversation takes place between the leaders of the sections and the rest of the instrumentalists. While parts of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are very much reminiscent of this older concerto grosso style, the concertos for solo instruments by Vivaldi or Bach have evolved into something else.

The Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043) that Nurit Pacht and I will be playing is a good example of a greatly evolved concerto grosso. The two solo violins are always playing solo materials even though at least half the time they are joined by the other violins in the section. What I mean by that is that the two violinists can play the double concerto without additional accompaniment because the two solo parts make musical sense on their own. Yet, when you hear the concerto performed live with the orchestra, you realize that the concertino versus ripieno is very much what’s happening, in the outer movements especially, and nowhere more obviously than in the first movement.

EM In conclusion, is there anything else you want to say about what makes Vivaldi Vivaldi and Bach Bach?

ZC While I have strongly experienced Northern Italian culture, as an outsider, as an American, in spite of the fact that people around the globe are becoming more similar as the result of the various forces of globalization, I would have to say that Italians still seem to thrive on a lack of predictability while many Germans really do get along extremely well with a lot of organization. And nowhere better can these cultural distinctions be seen and heard than in Vivaldi’s and Bach’s music. 

Still, while Bach’s counterpoint is highly organized, Bach is never lacking in surprise and in absolute beauty. While Vivaldi is really into shocking the listener, I would never say that he is more passionate or emotional than Bach. Both Bach and Vivaldi strived to accurately document the psychology of his own world and his own time. I think that’s why, after the passage of three hundred years, so many of us are so fascinated with the music and the musicians of the Baroque era.

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