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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: timbre

Schroeder Hall Opens

28 Thursday Aug 2014

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

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acoustics, Auerbach Pollock Friedlander, BAR Architects, Bay Area, Beethoven, Boston Symphony Orchestra, brass, Buxtehude, cartoon, Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown, Chopin, David Benoit, Dutch, Fugue in E minor, Georg Böhm, Green Music Center, Halloween, James David Christie, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Jean Schulz, Jeff Cox, Jeffrey Kahane, Johann Bernhard Bach, Johann Heinrich Buttstett, John Brombaugh & Associates, Lawrence Kirkegaard, organ, piano, Preludium in C Major, reverberation, Rohnert Park, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Schroeder, Schroeder Hall, Silicon Valley, Sonoma State University, The Press Democrat, timbre, toy

Schroeder Hall at Sonoma State University

Schroeder Hall at Sonoma State University

Superstars were out in force Saturday evening, 23 August 2014, to open the new Schroeder Hall at the Green Music Center [in Rohnert Park, CA] with an organ recital, one of a series of showcase events on the new music hall’s first day. The recital was preceded by Santa Rosa pianist Jeffrey Kahane playing Beethoven and Chopin and followed by pianist David Benoit’s tribute to Charlie Brown.

The first superstar was the organ itself, a Baroque-style tracker organ – meaning the pipes’ valves are opened and closed by mechanical pushrods connected to the keys of the keyboards – built by famed organ builder John Brombaugh in 1972. It’s considered a masterpiece of organ building.

The second was James David Christie, world renowned as one of the finest organists of his generation. He’s the organist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and has won numerous international prizes for his playing.

The group of composers who wrote the program’s music were all superstars as well. Georg Böhm (1661-1733) wrote the oceanic Preludium in C Major. A piece by an anonymous Dutch composer from the sixteenth century was like a walk through a spring meadow. Jan Sweelinck (1562-1621) wrote the mystical polyphony of his Ricercar that turned from empyreal to earthily playful at the end. Johann Buttstett (1666-1727) wrote a Fugue in E minor that shimmered like images in a hall of mirrors. Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707), one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s teachers, was at his ponderous and stormy best, while Bach’s second cousin, Johann Bernhard Bach (1676-1749), wrote the Ciaconna in B-flat Major that beautifully showed off the organ’s various possibilities.

Christie finished the concert with that old warhorse, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565). He notched up the tempo, played it with enormous verve, and showed that it doesn’t have to be Halloween music.

The final superstar was Schroeder Hall itself, an acoustically perfect space for the world class organ. Christie chose these pieces to showcase the instrument, turning its pipes and stops and timbres like jewels reflecting sunlight. He got a well-deserved standing ovation, and the most common word heard among the crowd, as it filed out, was, “Wow!”

At a media event on the previous Monday, Christie said that the Brombaugh Opus 9 organ, with its 1,248 handmade pipes and all-wood cases, is not only a beautiful musical instrument, it’s historically important, too. When Brombaugh built it in 1972 for a Baptist Church in Toledo, Ohio, he designed it to replicate the clear voice of the great Baroque organs of northern Europe rather than the neo-Baroque style that was in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s and was common in church organs of the time. “It launched a reawakening of interest in that earlier construction,” Christie said.

Interestingly, Christie mentioned that when the Brombaugh Opus 9 was installed in Toledo, he was eighteen, traveled there to hear it, and had a chance to play it, so this world-famous organist and this instrument came full circle at Schroeder Hall’s inaugural recital.

Among others, the hall was funded by Jean Schulz, the widow of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. The Santa Rosa cartoonist’s characters included Schroeder, a tow-headed kid who loved playing Beethoven on his toy piano. The foyer of Schroeder Hall features many original cartoon panels featuring the young pianist at his keyboard. The Brombaugh organ was donated by B. J. and Bebe Cassin. Mr. Cassin is a Bay Area venture capitalist who invested early in many of the high-tech businesses that now rule Silicon Valley.

The Opus 9 sits high on its own balcony above the stage. The ceiling is high and vaulted, and the sound flows over the seats to the rear of the hall, which is curved like half of a cylinder. This allows the sound to refocus itself over the seating, adding rich texture and reverberation to the organ’s clarity of line. The walls leading from front to rear hold hardwood chests containing velour panels attached to rollers. Motors allow the panels to be pulled out or tucked away to “tune” the hall to the sounds of instruments, whether organ, piano, brass choir, voice, or chamber ensemble. The entire hall is an instrument and part of the action.

Some of the most savvy designers in the country took part in the planning of the $9.5 million recital chamber. The architecture was designed by BAR Architects of San Francisco, with acoustical expertise by Kirkegaard Associates of Chicago and theatrical consulting by Auerbach Pollock Friedlander of San Francisco. Structural and civil engineering were by Santa Rosa firms.

Jeff Cox – The [Santa Rosa] Press Democrat

New Instruments for NuRoque Music

04 Monday Aug 2014

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

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acoustics, Adrian Belew, amplifier, Anticon, BEAM Foundation, Childish Gambino, Columbia Records, composition, computer, crowdfunding, Dan Deacon, Dave Smith Instruments, Donald Buchla, East Bay Express, electric viola, electric violin, electronic music, feedback, gesture, guitar, hip-hop, improvisation, iPad, Keith McMillen, Keith McMillen Instruments, keyboard, Kronos Quartet, laptop, Laurie Anderson, loudspeaker, Matt Hettich, MIDI, Mills College, NuRoque, O Superman, Oakland, Oberheim Electronics, pitch, Playboy, polyurethane, popular music, QuNeo, QuNexus, Robert Moog, Sam Lefebvre, San Francisco Tape Music Center, Skrillex, Smart Fabric, soldering iron, string bass, StrongArm, Switched-on Bach, synthesizer, textile, timbre, TrioMetrik, University of Chicago, Wendy Carlos, West Berkeley, Zeta Music Systems Inc.

Keith McMillen

Keith McMillen

Switched-On Bach outsold every classical album that had come before it. In 1968, composer Wendy Carlos performed Bach pieces on Dr. Robert Moog‘s early analog synthesizer systems and convinced a skeptical Columbia Records to release the recorded result. Switched-On Bach shattered expectations. It reached number one on the pop charts the following year, and spawned a glut of imitations. Most importantly, though, Switched-On Bach exposed a mass audience to an entirely new palette of electronic sounds. Among those radicalized by the recordings was Keith McMillen. “I lusted after control of those sounds,” he said. “Being a guitar player at the time, they just weren’t available.” McMillen’s guitar wouldn’t sound like a Moog, but synthesizers lacked the gestural sensitivity of stringed and acoustic instruments. In essence, the instrument builder’s three-decade career has sought to give electronic sounds the expressive physical interface that he cherished in a guitar – and usher in a new musical movement in the process.

At the West Berkeley headquarters of Keith McMillen Instruments, a company founded by its namesake in 2005, about fifteen employees labor to solve the problem posed by Switched-On Bach. Programmers rattle computer keyboards in one nook, while soldering irons flicker in two cluttered engineering rooms. Upstairs, there’s a tidy space where Matt Hettich, the company’s product specialist, demonstrates gear. Like most of the company’s employees, Hettich began working at KMI after graduating from the music program at Mills College in Oakland, where he wrote about electronic music performance for his master’s thesis. In the demo room, he showed off two of the company’s recent devices, QuNeo and QuNexus. They were connected to a computer, modular effects processors, and synthesizers produced by the local companies Dave Smith and Oberheim.

In practice, most musicians use these devices to control MIDI – the digital information produced by computers that constitutes sounds. The QuNeo, which raised eleven times its crowdfunding goal for initial manufacturing in 2012, is the size of an iPad, with raised pads in a variety of shapes. The QuNexus is distinguished from the QuNeo by its shape, which is similar to a keyboard, and its ability to control analog as well as digital sound. Through the company’s software, users assign every pad a specific sound. For the QuNeo, users can assign different sounds to the four corners of every pad.

Beneath the device’s polyurethane exterior rests Smart Fabric, a malleable textile with integrated digital parts. KMI was the first company to use Smart Fabric for instrument design, and McMillen worked personally with a local manufacturer to refine the material. Used in almost all KMI devices, Smart Fabric provides the sensitivity that McMillen sought in electronic interfaces since first hearing Switched-On Bach. Smart Fabric makes KMI devices sensitive to the velocity at which a user strikes each pad, the location within each pad that a user strikes, and the pressure that a user continues to apply after striking. In addition to assigning sounds through KMI software, users can manipulate the parameters of how such physical gestures affect the sounds. Smart Fabric takes live electronic music from an activity akin to typing on a laptop all the way to a physically expressive performance. For instance, the pad’s pressure sensitivity can be programmed to shift the pitch of a given note to mimic a guitarist who stretches a string – and much more.

Hettich explained the devices with exacting technical precision, like an engineer speaking to an electronic musician. His delivery was a reflection of KMI’s core consumer group: innovative musicians seeking to push their instruments’ sonic and expressive limits. Like McMillen himself, many users arrive at KMI gear hoping to defy electronic music’s limited response to physical gestures. The guitar iconoclast Adrian Belew uses a QuNeo to manipulate an array of effects kept in what he calls the Magic Closet. Other users include the experimentalist Dan Deacon, members of the Anticon hip-hop collective, and producers working with acts such as Skrillex and The Weeknd. The crew behind hip-hop artist Childish Gambino‘s live show even uses KMI devices to control lighting and visuals. The theme that echoes throughout artist testimonials about KMI devices is relieved frustration. What seemed impossible, their praise goes, actually isn’t.

McMillen built his first piece of gear – a guitar amplifier – at the age of ten. “I couldn’t afford one,” he said. “I was happy to make something that didn’t electrocute me and made the guitar louder.” Throughout high school, he played in bands and pondered the possibilities of creating an interface for instruments and computers. At the University of Chicago, he took composition courses and earned an engineering degree in acoustics. Attracted to the musical and technological innovation of Bay Area synthesizer luminary Donald Buchla and pioneering institutions like the San Francisco Tape Music Center, McMillen moved to town in 1979.

That year, he founded Zeta Music. The company rose to prominence for producing electric violins and modules to synthesize string sounds. Laurie Anderson, the composer behind 1982’s surprise pop hit O Superman, commissioned an electric violin. In 1992, Zeta made an electric viola at the request of the Kronos Quartet. In 1998, Zeta’s electric violin graced the cover of Playboy magazine’s Sex and Music issue. Zeta enabled string players to amplify their sound and retain the instrument’s timbre. It also reversed the process by synthesizing the sound of string instruments electronically. Though the company practically invented and dominated a new instrument market, it didn’t quite fulfill McMillen’s lifelong goals quite like his work under the KMI banner.

In 2004, McMillen established the nonprofit organization BEAM with the stated goal of fostering a new musical movement called NuRoque. The name referred to the seventeenth-century emergence of Baroque music, which McMillen considered an important revolutionary period because new technology expanded composers’ creative possibilities. McMillen thought that the help of computers in composition – and collaboration – was underexplored. The line of thought created a personifying habit, where components are said to “talk” to one another and “understand” the physical expression of human operators.

“If you’re focused on building tools, it’s very different from using them,” McMillen said. Under the BEAM banner, McMillen founded TrioMetrik to perform NuRoque. A typical TrioMetrik performance featured McMillen on guitar, an electric violinist, and an electric stand-up bassist, all flanked by monitors. Computers interpreted the string-playing in real time, then provided visual feedback, which the performers used in turn to influence the parameters of their improvisation. The goal was to spontaneously collaborate in tandem with computer systems.

TrioMetrik toured rigorously for two years before McMillen encountered more problems to engineer his way out of. The equipment was too large and too costly; these obstacles pivoted him back to starting his current instrument company. Plus, his long-standing dream of being able to control electronic sounds by gesture remained incomplete. NuRoque had to wait.

Keith McMillen Instruments shipped its first product in 2008. Most recently, the company unveiled the StrongArm, a piece of guitar hardware that allows notes to sustain indefinitely. McMillen said that the tool took thirty-five years to make. McMillen’s products solve the problem posed to a young guitarist enraptured by Switched-On Bach, and strive to defy the limitations he’s encountered since. Still, McMillen predicts that when his inventions allow enough expression, sound, and practicality, he’ll stop building. “I basically told myself that once I was done with all of these instruments,” he said. “I’d return to making music.”

Sam Lefebvre – East Bay Express

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

Paul O’Dette’s Recital for the Ages

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Organology, Other Artists

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acoustics, Calgary, Calgary Bach Society, cello, Classical Guitar Society of Calgary, counterpoint, dance suite, fugue, gesture, guitar, gut string, harmony, lautenwerk, Leacock Theatre, lute, Monsieur Schouster, Mount Royal University, ornamentation, Partita in E Major, Paul O’Dette, phrasing, Silvius Leopold Weiss, Sonata in C Major, Sonata in G minor, Stephan Bonfield, Suite in C minor, Suite in D minor, Suite in G minor, The Calgary Herald, timbre, tone color, transcription, violin, violoncello

Paul O'Dette

Paul O’Dette

Only one thing was on everyone’s mind at the Leacock Theatre [at Mount Royal University in Calgary] on 25 January 2014, and that was Paul O’Dette’s programming of a generous helping of Bach’s lute works. Originally written for the lautenwerk, a keyboard instrument (and a curiosity even in its day) made with gut strings instead of metal, it could emulate a lute so exactly when played that it even fooled experts who listened to it in an adjoining room. Bach owned two of the instruments, and even though copies have been built so as to duplicate their sound, the music left behind for the lautenwerk still poses a problem – how do we play these keyboard masterpieces for their authentically-intended sound world, namely, the lute?

Bach’s lute works have historically presented many problems for transcribers and performers, whether for guitar or for baroque thirteen-course lute, but this night, Mr. O’Dette showed that he had no problems at all adapting to the challenges posed by this very difficult repertoire. The greatest living lutenist, arguably, and certainly the most recorded of all time, gave a recital for the ages, and left us all with an incomparable musical experience of such high quality we could never forget.

Restoring these works of Bach to the lute repertoire has been an ongoing process for some time now, and Mr. O’Dette has played an important part in that story. Furthermore, it was never an easy step to take these works to the level of guitar transcription either, and many of the audience members being guitarists at this jointly-hosted concert by the Calgary Bach Society and the Classical Guitar Society of Calgary showed tremendous interest in Mr. O’Dette’s polished transcriptional abilities and scintillating fingerwork skill.

Besides, the chance to hear Mr. O’Dette perform most anything at all, and to watch him as he artistically elicits a broad range of timbral tonal colors from his lute with unsurpassed musicality and transcendent technique was not to be missed.

The concert opened with the Suite in G minor (BWV 995), a transcription of the violoncello Suite in D minor (BWV 1008), but re-titled “Pieces pour la luth à Monsieur Schouster.” From the first few notes one is struck by the meticulousness of phrasing, particularly in the breathtaking fugue which was executed with uncommon and unstinting mastery over such difficult-to-play counterpoint. His Allemande was sensitively played – stately, slow, every small phrase accounted for, and every ornament and turn clean.

Mr. O’Dette’s sense of the dance is never lost, the rhythms played with an explorative ease, and gratifyingly, he let some of Bach’s more adventurous harmonies resonate a little longer for our enjoyment. In the Courante, Mr. O’Dette explored the broader range of rhetoric underlying the piece both rhythmically and in each phrase shape. He takes advantage of the intellectual abstractions offered by these highly stylized dance pieces at every point, particularly in the Sarabande, a movement now famous to us today for its somewhat existential qualities. Like so many movements of the Baroque dance suite which became stylized to such a point that they grew to become their own unique, artistically complex, musical identities, the works on this night’s program demonstrated how such works came to transcend the very rhythms and gestures for which these movements were originally written. It was entirely appropriate that Mr. O’Dette could convey a rich appreciation for the history and interpretation of these works and their intrinsic sophistication evinced through his manifestly astute playing of every note, every phrase and each color.

Next came the Partita in E Major (BWV 1006a), transcribed up a semi-tone and played in F, to accommodate the bassline. Absolutely hypnotic, lustrous, colored in ways I had never before heard, with fretwork skill that was truly outstanding, this is one of the toughest pieces to play on lute, from the point of view of virtuosity and skill alone. Yet the work is balanced throughout with quieter, genteel and often haunting moments of exquisite beauty, such as the Loure, a dance of subtler lilting demeanor, beautifully played by Mr. O’Dette. Always taking repeats, Mr. O’Dette adeptly showed a different timbral and Baroque character in every dance he played in this suite. The minuets have been taken slower on many recordings, but here, Mr. O’Dette is dedicated to a more authentic tempo in accordance with the speed at which these works would have been danced. The result was a nice narrative flow-through from Minuett I to II, with his handling of the Minuett II so moving, yet a little slower, never dragging, and with a premium paid entirely to the idiosyncratic beauty of Bach’s beautiful close harmonies. Mr. O’Dette’s interpretations of these dances underscores how these gallantries ought to be played – with intimacy, meditatively, even for private enjoyment. With these small pearls, Mr. O’Dette seemed to achieve the rarest of feats in concert performance, and that was to transcend the spacious hall of the Leacock Theatre and speak to us one by one as though playing to us in a private salon, respecting the original performing intent of these finely-crafted works.

The night only got better. Programmed in the second half was the evening’s only work authentically written for the lute, namely Silvius Leopold Weiss’s Suite in C minor, the composer’s first work in the genre. Weiss, a close friend of Bach’s, was as noted an improviser in his day as the great organist, and there is every sense that the suites we heard in the first half of the concert were written in Weiss’s honor. Mr. O’Dette, who spoke familiarly and charmingly to his audience between every suite, extolled the work as a mature and idiomatically authentic example of a young composer who had truly found his creative voice with his instrument. And certainly the work was played that way, with contrasts of strong accents measured with tender beauty. This has long been a favorite lute work of mine, and to hear it played live for the first time, and so well, was a real treat.

To conclude, Mr. O’Dette turned to another difficult work by Bach, the Italian-styled Sonata in G minor (BWV 1001), originally written for violin.

By leaving the G minor sonata for the end with its famous, monstrous fugue that is so difficult to execute, Mr. O’Dette saved the best for last. Navigated with true facility and always contrapuntally clear, this work was played with outstandingly uncommon expression. Usually lutenists and guitarists merely try to survive this work and get to the end intact, but for Mr. O’Dette, expression counted for everything, and this was by far the most impressive work that he played all evening. The final Gigue was spun forth from his lute with such considerable alacrity that its performance was impossible to rival on any artistic level.

For his encore, to send us into the night, Mr. O’Dette chose the Largo from the violin Sonata in C Major (BWV 1005), which he played with such sincerity and beauty, none of us likely would have left had he elected to play all night. He continued his entrancing hold over us, never missing any of Bach’s harmonic twists and turns along the way, giving each its due, and then more. It was worth every moment to hear Mr. O’Dette light up the room with one more resonant chord held for all its worth, one more graceful gesture, one more moment of refined beauty, the like of which in the hands of such a master, we are unlikely to ever hear again.

Stephan Bonfield – The Calgary Herald

Bach-Gamel

07 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists, World View

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cello, Cornish College of the Arts, flute, gamelan, Gamelan Pacifica, harpsichord, improvisation, Janet See, Javanese, Jessika Kenney, Linda Tsatsanis, melody, Nathan Whittaker, Schenkman, Seattle, similitude, symmetry, timbre

GamelancropThe word “gamel,” which means “to hammer” in Javanese, is the root word for the fascinating orchestral music known as gamelan. There are a number of surprising similarities between Bach’s music and the Southeast Asian tradition of Javanese Gamelan.

On 8 December 2013 at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, the renowned gamelan ensemble, Gamelan Pacifica, with vocalist Jessika Kenney and four Baroque music specialists, Linda Tsatsanis (voice), Nathan Whittaker (cello), Janet See (flute), and Byron Schenkman (harpsichord), will juxtapose the two traditions, revealing elements of contact, nearness, similitude, and symmetry, be they of musical features (rhythmic structure, melodic flow, timbral qualities, stylized improvisation) or simply atmospheric feel. In the far background of this, one might sense the elusive “universals” of musical expression.

– Gamelan Pacifica

The Lautenwerk

19 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Works, Organology, Other Artists

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acoustics, archlute, bell, brass string, chitarrone, color, dynamics, foreshortening, Gergely Sárközy, gut string, Hamburg, harpsichord, Hungaroton, jack, Jakob Adlung, Jena, Johann Christoph Fleischer, Johann Friedrich Agricola, Johann Nikolaus Bach, lautenwerk, lute, lute stop, lute-harpsichord, manual, metal string, organ, Partita in C minor, plectrum, quill, resonator, soundboard, spinet, stop, tension, Theorbenflügel, theorbo, timbre, Zacharias Hildebrandt

LautenwerkcropOver a period of three centuries there are numerous references to gut-stringed instruments that resemble the harpsichord and imitate the delicate, soft timbre of the lute, including its lower-sounding variants, the theorbo and chitarrone (or archlute) or the harp, but little concrete information is available. Not a single instrument has survived, nor is any contemporary depiction known apart from a rough engraving of the early sixteenth century. Fewer than ten lute-harpsichord (“lautenwerk”) makers are known, and there are reasonably detailed descriptions of instruments made by only two or three of them. Nonetheless, the instrument is mentioned fairly frequently in music books of the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

Much of the available information relates to three eighteenth-century German instrument makers: Johann Christoph Fleischer of Hamburg, Johann Nikolaus Bach and the organ builder Zacharias Hildebrandt.

Fleischer built two types of instrument. The smaller had two 8-foot gut-stringed stops with a compass of about three octaves; in the lower two octaves these could be coupled with a 4-foot stop analogous with the pairs of octave-tuned bass strings (courses) on the lute. Below the soundboard of the instrument, an oval resonator in the shape of a shell, resembling the body of a lute, was attached.

Fleischer called his larger instrument the “Theorbenflügel” (theorbo-harpsichord). Its two gut-stringed stops together made up a double-tuned, 16-foot stop, with the pairs in the lower octave-and-a-half tuned an octave apart and in the upper range in unison. In addition, there was a 4-foot metal-stringed stop, and the combination of the 4-foot and the 16-foot stops produced a “delicate and bell-like” tone. This larger instrument was in the shape of a regular concert harpsichord.

Johann Nicolaus Bach, a second cousin of Johann Sebastian, was a composer, organist and instrument maker in Jena. He, too, built several types of lautenwerk. The basic type closely resembled a small wing-shaped, one-manual harpsichord of the usual kind. It only had a single gut-stringed stop, but this sounded a pair of strings tuned an octave apart in the lower third of the compass and in unison in the middle third to approximate, as far as possible, the impression given by a lute. The instrument had no metal strings at all.

According to contemporary accounts, even this simplest of versions made a sound that could deceive a professional lutenist, a fact considered almost miraculous at the time. But a basic shortcoming was the absence of dynamic expression. In order to remedy matters, J. N. Bach also made instruments with two and three manuals whose keys sounded the same strings but with different quills and at different points of the string, thereby providing two or three grades of dynamic and timbre. J. N. Bach also built theorbo-harpsichords with a compass extending down an extra octave.

J. S. Bach’s connection with and interest in the lautenwerk was considerable. He clearly liked the combination of softness with strength which these instruments are capable of producing, and he is known to have drawn up his own specifications for such an instrument to be built for him by Hildebrandt. In an annotation to Adlung‘s Musica mechanica organoedi, Johann Friedrich Agricola described a lautenwerk that belonged to Bach:

The editor of these notes remembers having seen and heard a “Lautenclavicymbel” in Leipzig in about 1740, designed by Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach and made by Mr. Zacharias Hildebrand, which was smaller in size than a normal harpsichord but, in all other respects, similar. It had two choirs of gut strings and a so-called little octave of brass strings. It is true that in its normal setting (that is, when only one stop was drawn) it sounded more like a theorbo than a lute. But if one drew the lute stop, such as is found on a harpsichord,  together with the cornet stop [the undamped, 4-foot brass stop], one could almost deceive professional lutenists.

The inventory of Bach’s possessions at the time of his death reveals that he owned two such instruments as well as three harpsichords, one lute and a spinet.

The lautenwerk therefore differs from the harpsichord in several important respects. While historical references indicate differing approaches to design, there is general agreement that whereas harpsichords are designed to be strung in metal, the use of gut strings is of primary importance in a lautenwerk. However, simple replacement of metal strings with gut will not give satisfactory results.

Generally, a gut string requires a longer scale (or length at a given pitch) than a metal string, which in turn infers a larger instrument. Pitch for a given string length however, is a function not only of length but also of string material and tension. The lower-pitched strings of the lute-harpsichord are thicker and under less tension – a technique known as “foreshortening.” Thus lautenwerks are often smaller than their metal-strung relatives. Extreme foreshortening of the scale, in comparison to the harpsichord, reduces the tension that a lautenwerk must bear. Lighter construction is made possible, thereby enabling a lautenwerk to better respond to the less energetic gut string. This is especially true of the soundboard, which can be half the thickness normally found in harpsichords.

Gut stringing has other implications for lautenwerk design. As gut strings have more internal friction than their metal counterparts, they generally have less sustain, allowing one to dispense with dampers to a large degree. Individual instruments will dictate where dampers are needed and how effective they need be, but one rarely finds a lautenwerk fitted with dampers on every string. Any resulting “over-ring” is likely to enhance the lute-like effect.

The lautenwerk also demands special attention concerning string layout. Thick gut strings vibrate more vigorously than thin metal ones at higher tension. This requires that more space be given between adjacent strings to avoid interference. This consideration encourages the builder to keep his design simple. Two choirs of gut strings seems to be the practical maximum, although a third choir strung in brass is sometimes found.

Harpsichords normally have one dedicated jack per string. Lautenwerks often have more than one jack independently serving the same string. Tonal variation is achieved by plucking the string at different points along its length. Dynamic and color variation can also be pursued by using plectra having different properties. This sort of elaboration is most often reserved for instruments having more than one manual. Adding more strings to achieve tonal interest is avoided, and resonant construction is maintained.

As noted above, the internal volumes of some of Fleischer’s lautenwerks were determined by a dome-like structure shaped much like the back of a lute, and indeed modern instruments have been made in which a “lute shell” defines the exterior shape of the instrument. Internal structures placed below the soundboard are also sometimes found. Other modern makers adopt construction methods normally associated with other keyboard instruments.

Of the few attempts to reconstruct and record a lautenwerk, one of the more successful is the instrument built for the player Gergely Sárközy who performs a work that has traditionally been assigned to the lute, Bach’s Partita in C minor (BWV 997), on a recording by Hungaroton.

– Baroque Music

The Kunst of the Keller Quartet

12 Sunday May 2013

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

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acoustics, Budapest, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, cello, counterpoint, ECM Records, fugue, Judit Szabó, Keller Quartet, Kings Place, Michael Church, National Socialists, polyphony, saxophone, tempo, The Art of Fugue, The Independent, timbre, vibrato, viola, violin, violoncello

The Keller Quartet

The Keller Quartet

The story of Bach’s pen slipping from his lifeless fingers while composing The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) – which ends in mid-bar, notes hanging in the air – may be apocryphal, but this work will always be one of music’s sacred mysteries.

It is thought he began it at a time when his overriding interest lay in the technicalities of counterpoint – how to achieve “natural” polyphony while obeying mechanical rules – and that he went back to it when musical dramaturgy was uppermost in his mind. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel tried to drum up interest in it by pointing out that his father had encoded his name in the unfinished final fugue, but the sheet music didn’t sell and he had to dispose of the printer’s plates as scrap metal. Since then the work has exerted ever-increasing fascination – the Nazis flourished it as being iconically German – and Bach’s keyboard scoring has been trumped by scorings for a wide variety of instruments, including saxophones.

If the most successful transpositions have been for string quartet, that’s for two good reasons: these instruments bring out the voices in high relief, and their combined sound can generate the choral effects which Bach was often implicitly striving for. And to hear the Budapest-based Keller Quartet play this work in the perfect acoustic of Kings Place on 1 May 2013 was an unforgettable experience. Any lingering keyboard thoughts were banished in the first few bars by the muscular dissonances and by the sheer glow of their sound, and as each successive fugue added its variation – inverted, back to front, inside out – the structure attained magnificence. The timbre was vibrato-free, the tempi were vivid and varied, and though the sound of Judit Szabó’s cello sometimes stood out as a particular delight, the synergy was ideal. One had the sense, as the four bows finally froze in mid-air, of having assisted at a performance for the gods. Anyone interested can catch this ensemble (with two cast-changes) playing the same work twenty years ago for ECM Records, and with the same poise.

Michael Church – The Independent

Interview with Paul Miller: The Viola d’Amore in the St. John Passion

17 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Festival Events, Interviews, Organology

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aria, Baroque bow, bass, Betrachte meine Seel', Boulder Bach Festival, Boulder Bach Festival Players, cantata, chorale prelude, Erwäge wie sein blutgefärbter Rücke, Hindemith, Johannes Eberle, Kammermusik Nr. 6, Kleine Sonate, Leipzig, lute, luthier, Martin Biller, Mein teurer Heiland, Mittenwald, nylon string, organ, organ registration, organ stop, passion, pastorale, Paul Miller, Prague, Rick Erickson, solo stop, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, sympathetic string, tenor, timbre, Tomastik, tone color, Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn, viola d’amore, Weimar, Zachary Carrettin

ModernvioladamorecropEdward McCue (EM) Few of us are familiar with the viola d’amore. What is it about this many-stringed instrument that Bach found attractive, and what role will it play in Boulder Bach Festival performances of the St. John Passion (BWV 245), under the direction of Rick Erickson, on 1 and 2 March 2013?

Paul Miller (PM) Bach already included the viola d’amore in his score for the cantata Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (BWV 152) at the end of 1714, but we’re not certain what kind of instrument he would have known during his years in Weimar. It’s quite likely that that viola d’amore had five or six playing strings, but we’re not sure if that instrument included resonating, sympathetic strings strung below the playing strings. In any case, we can be certain that Bach appreciated the nasal quality of the tone produced by the viola d’amore and realized that it did not project as loudly as a violin.

Later, while in Leipzig, Bach featured the distinctive tone color of the viola d’amore in the St. John Passion. For nearly fifteen minutes, following the violent scourging of Jesus, a pair of these gentle instruments, with the accompaniment of a lute, reflect on the beating of this innocent man during a bass arioso, Betrachte, meine Seel’, and a tenor aria that immediately follows, Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken. With these two arias, Bach reveals what lies at the center of his interpretation of John’s gospel, that is, whatever bad happened to Jesus must be interpreted as being good for us. This is in stark contrast with the later St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), where our guilt and sin are lamented over again and again.

Bach portrayed the interplay between darkness and light in the St. John Passion by employing the full Baroque palette of musical devices, including contrasts in tone color. Bach was so very sensitive to tone color, and since many of the organs of his day included a viola d’amore stop, I like to imagine him really enjoying that solo stop for extended periods of time.

EM Few twenty-first century listeners have had an opportunity to hear the extraordinary sound of the viola d’amore. How many orchestral string players have ever heard one, and when they do, how many commit to its mastery?

PM Few upper string players take the time to double on the viola d’amore, and when they do, they must contend with a number of thorny technical issues.

Since Bach didn’t specify a tuning for the strings of the instrument, Zachary Carrettin, our concertmaster for the Boulder Bach Festival Players, and I have had to discover for ourselves what tuning will work. We have found that a G minor tuning of the strings, even though the arias are in E flat Major and C minor, respectively, works really well. Even though there certainly would be other ways to go about it, we find that it is easier to play in tune with each other when we tune both instruments with the same open strings. While there are a couple of spots that are genuinely a bit tricky, most of it works pretty well with the G minor tuning, and we find that the open strings resonate very nicely in all of the right places.

Zach and I have also decided to play on instruments built by the same luthier, Martin Biller. Zach is playing on Biller’s classic Mittenwald model with an absolutely beautiful arched back of interwoven cherry and maple woods. I’m playing on an viola d’amore modeled after a flat-backed instrument made by Johannes Eberle of mid to late eighteen-century Prague, so you’ll see two instruments with different shapes but complementary sounds.

Lately we’ve also been working out other technical issues, including different ways of using the Baroque bow and string selections. Because our violas d’amore have seven strings, rather than the four found on modern violins and violas, it’s easy to crash into the wrong string if you’re not careful, and if you blindly insist on using gut strings, your instrument quickly goes out of tune. As a result, we’ve decided to use metal-wound perlon strings by the Viennese manufacturer Thomastik, the same string-maker that supplied Paul Hindemith when he composed and performed his Kleine Sonate and Kammermusik Nr. 6 for viola d’amore in the 1920s.

EM Paul, it’s obvious that you are very much looking forward to performing the two arias that include your viola d’amore, but what will likely be the high point of the St. John Passion for the other members of the orchestra, the chorus and the audience?

PM Even though I’ve always played one of the viola d’amore parts in previous performances, I think that the other players also like the d’amore arias because they give them a break from playing and an extraordinary opportunity to join the audience in listening to fifteen minutes of sheer beauty. But for all of us performing the St. John Passion, it’s the bass aria and chorale after Jesus has died, Mein teurer Heiland, that is truly amazing. This pastorale in 6/8, very much like a chorale prelude for soloist, chorus and orchestra, confirms that the terror of Jesus’ passion is finally over and that the brightness of God’s glory can now shine forth.

Bach certainly composed gems for the viola d’amore in the St. John Passion, but I’ve got to say that Mein teurer Heiland is even greater evidence of his musical and theological genius.

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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bassoon, Boulder Bach Festival, bowing, Brahms, Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major, Brandenburg Concertos, cantabile style, cantata, cantilena, cello, chorale, Christopher Hogwood, clarinet, composition, concertino, concerto, Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, Concerto for Violin in A minor, concerto grosso, Corelli, democracy, Dresden, French, globalization, Handel, harpsichord, Italian, Jaap Schröder, Lüneburg, legato, Leipzig, London, Mahler, minuet, Nurit Pacht, obligato, oboe, opera, Rick Erickson, ripieno, Romanticism, Rome, St. John Passion, tessitura, timbre, transverse flute, trumpet, Venice, violin, Vivaldi, Zachary Carrettin

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.

An Alternative: Spider Silk Strings

27 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Organology

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acoustics, Cornell University, electron microscope, gut string, harmonic series, Jun-ichi Matsuda, Katherine Selby, Nara Medical University, Nephila maculata, nylon string, Shigeyoshi Osaki, spider, spider silk, steel string, Stephen Battersby, Stradivarius, string tone, Tchaikovsky, timbre, violin

Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan has studied the properties of spider silk for thirty-five years. In the past decade he has focused on trying to turn the silk into violin strings, even taking lessons on what was required of a string in terms of strength and elasticity.

Osaki learned how to coax Nephila maculata spiders to spin out long strands of dragline, the strongest form of silk. He bundled filaments together and twisted them, then twisted three of these bundles together to make each string. The thickest of these, the G string, holds 15,000 filaments.

The strings turned out to be tightly packed and strong. The key seems to be that the individual filaments changed shape when twisted: an electron microscope revealed that their circular cross sections turned into polygons, which nestle together more tightly than cylindrical strings.

This came as a surprise. “To my knowledge, no one has observed such a change of cross section. I doubted my experimental results,” says Osaki. The spider silk must be deformed by the twisting process.

“The material is a bit squishy, like twisting plasticine,” says physicist and violinist Katherine Selby at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Osaki tested the new strings by comparing their performance with three established materials: steel, nylon and gut. He says that the spider silk has a unique and “brilliant” timbre, or quality of tone. You can judge for yourself in this snippet of Tchaikovsky, played by Jun-ichi Matsuda on a Stradivarius violin using all four types of string.

The timbre seems to result from a difference in how harmonics – frequency multiples of the main note – reverberate in the spider silk strings compared with other materials. Spider string has strong high harmonics, while steel and nylon tend to be stronger in low harmonics. Osaki does not yet know what mechanical properties lead to this acoustic performance.

Selby is impressed. “What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity,” she says. “Spider strings also have this brilliant sound – even more than gut.”

“It is impressive when you remember these are prototype strings, just out of a material science lab, being compared with commercial strings perfected for years,” she adds.

Selby points out that the high strength of spider silk may give it another advantage: “You could have a thinner string for playing the same pitch, which would be a bit more bendy and responsive – it would hit a note quicker.” The material could be especially suitable for thin E strings, which are very fragile when made from gut.

“Is it something all violinists will like? That’s an open question. It will have some surface texture, like a rope. Some people may find that off-putting as they slide a hand up and down the neck. I think these will be gourmet strings,” Selby adds.

The price will be too steep for most fiddlers in any case, but Osaki is now trying to find a way to produce the strings in larger numbers.

Stephen Battersby – New Scientist

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