Getting in Tune

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Galileo at his telescope

On being subjected to long stretches of tuning at some early music concerts I’m reminded of the old joke about going to a fight and having a hockey game break out. Even if the tuning doesn’t actually take longer than the musical works on the program, its repeated eruption throws things badly out of balance: before the music has even begun, the listener’s excited anticipation deflates. Between the pieces the flow of the concert is continuously diverted because of all those finicky viols with their profusion of strings, and even worse the lute in the unwieldy state to which it had evolved by the eighteenth century. One contemporary wag quipped that having such an instrument was more expensive than keeping a horse, and that if a lutenist lived to sixty years of age, forty of those had been spent tuning the beast.

In a modern symphony concert the tuning proceeds quickly and has a strictly policed ritual form that hearkens back to the militaristic origins of the orchestra as an institution. The second-in-command – the concertmaster – orders an A from the oboe and then directs the various platoons to fall in line with the pitch. The present-day orchestra has modernized musical weaponry that can be quickly calibrated: the mustering of the troops takes about a minute. This demonstration of uniform sonic discipline then quickly recedes into respectful silence for the entry of the generalissimo – the conductor – who leads his army into battle against the massed armies of one great power or another – Brahms, Beethoven, or some new contender.

Such discipline is often absent among the disorganized irregulars of many an early music battalion. Their dutiful fussings are necessary perhaps, but often dispiriting.

In the eighteenth century tuning was typically done to a prelude improvised by the organist or harpsichordist. He was charged with slowly traversing harmonies that made for useful references for the adjustments of the stringed instruments. The American musical traveler and collector Lowell Mason heard precisely this approach in the nineteenth century in Bach’s old church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. Mason reported that the result was the most out-of-tune band he’d ever heard.

Nowadays there are apps for iPhones and kindred gizmos that make off-stage tuning possible for strings and winds. But some recalcitrants cleave to their twentieth-century ways rather than go back to the eighteenth or join the twenty-first.

Imagine never having to listen to protracted tuning at a concert – neither before nor during. Such a concert would have two robust halves of music separated by an intermission that felt like it had been earned rather than just being more dead time to added to that already killed by the tuning.

And while we’re bent on focusing our concert on content, uplift, and edification, let’s dispense with the clutter of applause and move things along directly between the pieces with an enlivening script presented by a fabulous speaker/actor who brings the story of the concert to life as no set of stuffy program notes could ever do. And since we’re cleansing the stage of distraction, let’s sweep aside the scores and the music stands. Disappear the conductor, too.

Impossible, you say, to ask every one of the dozens members of an ensemble to memorize their own parts in a program that approaches two hours in duration. And to expect all these disparate minds to remain on track without traffic-cop direction given by a conductor will lead to too many collisions to count. How can all these folks remain on the same page when there is no page in the first place?

But banish these objections for a moment further and picture these unencumbered players interacting with one another musically and physically, sometimes moving about the stage in a kind of dance and assuming visually striking formations. The seated soldiers of music rise up to become ever-changing tableaux vivants.

What this revolutionary approach opens up is the possibility of a concert as theatre in which the grace and vibrancy of bodies at music become integral to the performance.

Such a vision of performed music, be it is classed as early or modern, is no mere pipedream. One of the world’s great baroque orchestras, the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has brought this ideal to eloquent and unforgettable reality with its “Galileo Project” conceived for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, marking four hundred years since Galileo Galilei made his first astronomical observations and Johannes Kepler published the Astronomia nova.

Developed by Tafelmusik during a residency at the Banff Centre, the Galileo Project was premiered there in January of 2009. Like a heavenly body migrating through the sky, the Galileo Project crossed Lake Ontario from Toronto to Ithaca, New York five years later to light up the Saturday night firmament in Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, a century-old neo-classical pile whose cavernous interior sometimes seems as if it could accommodate a couple of solar systems within its vaults. In spite of the far-from-ideal venue for the intimacies of early music, Tafelmusik filled the place up with the energy of its music and the appeal of the story it told with the aid of movement and image. The musicians traced their own orbits and cycles on stage beneath a large circular image projected behind them whose circumference was ornamented like Galileo’s telescope. It was as if we were looking through his lens at the extraordinary things from across the universe, from here on earth to the most distant stars; from Kepler’s printed words and music about the songs of the planets, to photographs of stunning terrestrial landscapes and fabulous nebulae and comets that we now can see at levels of resolution and magnification never dreamt of by Galileo himself. The well-researched and elegant script was written by the long-time Tafelmusik double bassist Allison MacKay, who has frequently collaborated on what she calls “cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary projects for the orchestra.”

Dressed all in black but with touches of color brightened by the colored hair of two of the female violinists, the players moved silently onto the stage to welcoming applause and started right in – no tuning! – with a Vivaldi concerto whose virtuosic allegro and seductive largo astonished and seduced, two things the night sky is also very good at doing. While this sensuous music of Venice introduced the Harmony of the Spheres in the context of the Galileo Project, it evokes for me the water and tenuous earth of its birthplace, Still, there is also something weightless and celestial in this eighteenth-century top-of the-charts stuff when done by Tafelmusik and its long-time director, Jeanne Lamon, recently retired but for the time-being still at her post.

From Vivaldi’s Venice we moved to France by way of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and comets and skyscapes seen through the Galilean lens to witness Phaeton’s disastrous crash of his father Apollo’s sun chariot. This suite of pieces came from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1683 Phaëton, the magnificent tragédie en musique about the ill-fated teenage joyrider. Tafelmusik literally moved from the overweening confidence of the pompous overture to the inexorably elegant and elegiac Chaconne in which twelve of the musicians themselves formed a circle and, like the signs of the zodiac, rotated through their choreographed yearly cycles. These motions allowed for the players to engage in seemingly spontaneous – but in fact carefully staged – dialogues of artistry and emotion in configurations at or near center stage that momentarily escaped the gravitational hold of the group.

From France we vaulted back a century to the musical world of Galileo, himself an amateur lutenist who came from a family of musicians. Galileo first demonstrated his telescope in 1609 in Venice, the same city that would later foster – and occasionally thwart – Vivaldi’s prolific genius. The transition was achieved effortlessly through the recitation of Galileo’s own writings by the narrator, actor Shaun Smyth. An Albertan born in Scotland, Smyth brought with him from the old country a mastery of dialects of the British Islands that he deployed occasionally – and only when called for – with humor, flare, and taste.

Smyth and the musicians traced the chronologically retrograde path from Vivaldi to Lully to Monteverdi Smyth by way of McKay’s insightful and well-researched script. Now with Galileo we heard the streaking comet of Monteverdi’s concerted madrigal Zefiro torna set by Tafelmusik for its two cellists, Christian Mahler and Allen Wheat, singing through their instruments like cosmic angels. Unleashed from the planets Plato imagined them sitting, they ran wild through earthly meadows and woodlands. A deft modulation lead to another treatment of same bassline by a fellow composer of Venetian stamp, Tarquinio Merula. We then retreated the shadows of a solo lute Toccata by Galileo’s younger brother, Michelangelo, the piece played with captivating melancholy and finesse by one of the orchestra’s most potent forces, lutenist/guitarist Lucas Harris. The plaintive voice of his instrument, designed to be heard in renaissance chambers, drew the hundreds-strong Bailey Hall audience into its inner feelings with a pull as strong and ineffable as gravity. It was a piece Galileo would have heard and indeed likely played himself, especially during the years of his long house arrest. These offerings were framed by pieces from the most famous work of Galileo’s time and place, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which premiered two years before the astronomer first pointed his telescope at the sky.

After a fact-checking peek at the night sky from the plaza in front of the concert hall, I returned from intermission to my seat just as the orchestra marched back on stage for a Purcellian prelude to a re-imagining of the festival of planets organized in Dresden for the Saxon-French royal wedding of 1719: with Rameau, Handel, Telemann and Zelenka we toured Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury.

After Smyth’s hilarious rendition of an eighteenth-century English drinking song that lauds and ridicules the paradigm-shifting discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, we heard J. S. Bach’s flights of fancy around Venus in the sinfonia to his cantata, How Brightly Shines the Morning Star (BWV 1). The chorale melody around which the other contrapuntal parts orbit resounded from one of the orchestra’s wonderful oboists placed in the hall’s distant balcony – yet another instance of the group’s creative use of the venue as a tool for mapping sound and space.

The evening closed with a rocketing rendition of another of Bach’s beloved cantata sinfonias, the opener to BWV 29. This piece had once been repurposed by Bach from a solo violin work to an organ concerto. It was again transformed by Tafelmusik into a violin concerto during which yet another of the group’s many star fiddle-players had a chance to shine, concluding a concert/performance that among its many marvels was an astounding feat of group memorization demonstrating the limitless reach of music in and as motion that, like the Keplerian cosmos, was never out of tune.

David Yearsley – CounterPunch

Unembellished Bach

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Alan Hovhaness, Anner Bylsma, Art Blakey, balance, Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition, cello, Charles Lloyd, Christmas, Christopher Hogwood, chronic fatigue syndrome, color, counterpoint, drums, emotions, Gary Peacock, Glenn Gould, Handel, improvisation, intonation, Jack DeJohnette, jazz, Köln Concert, Keith Jarrett, Lincoln Center Great Performers, Lou Harrison, melody, Michelle Makarski., Miles Davis, Mozart, Nathan Milstein, ornamentation, piano, pitch, Shostakovich, Sonata in F minor, Sonatas for harpsichord and violin, string bass, Stuart Isacoff, tempo, The Everly Brothers, The Wall Street Journal, viol, violin, violoncello

Michelle Makarski and Keith Jarrett

We’ve heard him as a jazz sideman with Art Blakey, Miles Davis and Charles Lloyd, and in expansive solo improvisations like the Köln Concert of 1975 – one of the best-selling piano recordings in history. His own jazz trio (with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette) is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. But Keith Jarrett has consistently reminded listeners of his classical bona fides as well, with forays into the music of Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Shostakovich and more.

On his first classical album in fifteen years, Keith Jarrett is joined by violinist Michelle Makarski in Johann Sebastian Bach: Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano [BWV 1014-19]. The performance – profoundly beautiful – holds some surprises.

One is a lack of embellishment – those interpretive flourishes that many Baroque specialists automatically insert into the music – despite the pianist’s improvisational pedigree. That, combined with the remarkable sound that Ms. Makarski achieves with her instrument – suggesting in some inexplicable way the soul of an ancient viol – and the meticulousness of the rendering, makes for a unique listening experience.

“I feel responsible to the page, probably more than most players,” explains Mr. Jarrett, 68, by phone from his home in western New Jersey, “because I also do the ‘other thing’ [improvisation]. If you take the music away from a classical performer who has never improvised, he’ll be in shock and won’t know what to do. That’s why he has to put his entire personality into his interpretive skills. He has no music of his own.”

Mr. Jarrett’s musical life as an active improviser, he suggests, frees him of the compulsion to add something extra when he turns to Bach, a fellow improviser. That includes heart-on-your-sleeve emotion – though, in its honest search for Bach’s voice, the recording conveys both passion and tenderness. “I don’t think Bach would appreciate what Christopher Hogwood once called ‘teardrop’ style,” Mr. Jarrett says. “On early instruments, expressivity depended on how good your pitch was, and how graceful you could be. Michelle and I are pretty direct players,” he adds, “but I think we understand grace.”

The project came together serendipitously. “Keith was asked to play on the Lincoln Center Great Performers series in the early ’90s,” recalls Ms. Makarski, “and he wanted to use some of his written music, including a violin-and-piano sonata and a piece for violin and string orchestra. I had recently won the Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition, and his manager asked me if I would play that concert. It went well, but we didn’t see each other much after that.”

Then, beginning in 1996, Mr. Jarrett had chronic fatigue syndrome for two years when he wasn’t playing at all. “In 2008,” Ms. Makarski says, “I got an invitation to visit him at Christmas. ‘I think we should play something,’ he said. I knew he had already performed some Bach and suggested that I bring along the sonatas. He agreed. We read through three, had dinner, and then played the other three. We were so delighted by the experience that we continued to do it. But it was always playing – not rehearsing. We didn’t stop and talk a lot. There was no sense of fine-tuning, no aiming for a result. It was all about listening.”

For Ms. Makarski, it was the beginning of a musical adventure. For Mr. Jarrett, it was more like a moment of salvation. “When I had chronic fatigue,” he remembers, “I listened to my old recordings and all I could see were the flaws and the self-indulgence in my playing – finding too many notes, asking, ‘Why did I do that?’ I thought that if I ever played again I would focus on my improvising.” By that Christmas season he had decided that he “wasn’t going to be in the classical world again. And I had never read these Bach pieces before. But after the first couple of times with Michelle I thought, ‘OK, let’s not stop.’ It was a triumph. At the end of the sessions I thought, ‘You did it, Keith.’ I’m glad I went through this.”

Ms. Makarski had been working on developing the unique violin tone heard on the recording. “I had received praise for my playing by artists like Nathan Milstein. He loved my Bach. But I was dissatisfied, feeling my approach was overly Romantic. Then I heard a performance by the Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma, who often plays on period instruments. I loved it. I took it as a challenge to develop a technique to get that sound using modern materials,” she reveals. “I’m still having to make adjustments. But you can hear what I’m after especially in the slow movements.” I mention their gripping performance of the Largo from the Sonata in F minor (BWV 1018), with her poignant, detached swells on key notes in each phrase, as a particularly moving example. “I tear up at that,” she admits. “Keith and I would play that and we’d stop and hug.”

“Every time we went over the music,” Mr. Jarrett says, “the tempo was different. But the interpretation progressed on its own. One of our strengths is in sounding together when it counts. At one point there was a stream of thirds, and we were playing them so tightly that I said, ‘The Everly Brothers!'”

Jazz and classical music are, in his view, two different worlds, but Mr. Jarrett says that Bach’s ideas spark a certain resonance with his improvisational art. “When I’m playing chords with the Trio,” he explains, “I’m always thinking about what parts [separate lines] are moving, and how many can move at the same time. That’s what happens in Bach: all these melodies going past each other – I always think of them as voices – and his mind is operating at a remarkable speed. Hearing Glenn Gould, you could tell which ones he was listening to more because of the way he sang along. But I try to keep things balanced in this music and don’t want to give precedence to any of these voices unless it deserves it.

“You can think of the result as lacking in color. But that’s not true of this recording,” he adds, with justifiable pride.

Stuart Isacoff – The Wall Street Journal

The Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord

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Boulder Bach Festival, Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major, Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major, Brandenburg Concertos, Carl Friedrich Abel, Christian Ferdinand Abel, concerto, continuo, da gamba, Diego Ortiz, Erbarme dich mein Gott um meiner Zähren Willen, First Congregational Church, frets, harpsichord, Leipzig, ornamentation, rebab, Rick Erickson, siciliano, sonata, sonata da chiesa, Sonata in D Major, Sonata in G Major, Sonata in G minor, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, St. Matthew Passion, Trattado de glosas, vihuela de mano, viol, viola da gamba, Weimar, Zachary Carrettin

Carl Friedrich Abel

Although the circumstances behind Bach’s composition of three Sonatas for harpsichord and viola da gamba (BWV 1027-29) are unknown, recent research indicates that they were most likely written in the early 1740’s, when the greatest virtuosos of the viola da gamba were long a thing of the past. No original source combines all three sonatas into a cycle, but a single score of the Sonata in G Major (BWV 1027) that details performance instructions for ornamentation and articulation supports the idea that Bach wrote the sonatas for Carl Friedrich Abel, the son of Cöthen colleague Christian Ferdinand Abel, for performance during his 1737-1743 sojourn in Leipzig.

The viola da gamba emerged in Spain during the fifteenth century, perhaps as a hybrid between the North African rebab and the Spanish vihuela de mano. With six strings and a fretted fingerboard, this novel instrument in various sizes traveled quickly to Italy and was soon being produced by master luthiers throughout the Continent and England. Bach became acquainted with the North German instruments owned by Johann Ernst von Sachsen-Weimar, and an inventory of Bach’s possessions shows that he owned a hundred-year-old English “viol” at the time of his death.

A description of a harpsichord collaborating with a viola da gamba can be found in the Trattado de glosas published by Diego Ortiz in 1533, but instead of the harpsichord simply introducing themes to the viol for further elaboration, Bach calls for the harpsichordist’s left hand to play basso continuo while the right hand acts as a melody instrument.

The Sonata in G Major is a reworking of a Sonata for two flutes and continuo (BWV 1039). Written in the four-movement (slow-fast-slow-fast) sonata da chiesa form, Bach infuses this sonata with the newer gallant style and engages all three voices in intense contrapuntal conversation.

The Sonata in D Major (BWV 1028) is the most virtuosic of the three sonatas for the viola da gamba, although the harpsichord remains at least an equal partner throughout. Again in four movements, the opening adagio presents an arioso-like melody shared between the two instruments, and he following allegro features a melody full of lively rhythms and exuberant momentum. The third movement, an andante, presents a siciliano melody reminiscent of Erbarme dich, mein Gott, um meiner Zähren Willen! from the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), and the final movement includes an extended, cadenza-like harpsichord solo similar to the one in the Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major (BWV 1050).

The Sonata in G minor (BWV 1029) differs from the other two sonatas in that it is in the three-movement Italian concerto form. From the outset, the harpsichord’s accompaniment resembles the orchestral texture of the Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048). In the adagio, Bach exploits the viola da gamba’s capacity to soar in a movingly, tender way, and the final allegro deftly handles a profusion of themes.

Boulder Bach Festival music director Rick Erickson will join concertmaster Zachary Carrettin in a performance of the entire Sonata in G minor at a Benefit Concert at 6:30pm on 24 May 2012 at First Congregational Church in Boulder.