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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: Vivaldi

Vivaldi with a Bit of Oud

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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

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Abercrombie Street, Arabic, ARIA Awards, Australian Chamber Orchestra, folk music, Four Seasons, Hercule Poirot, Illawarra Mercury, iPhone, Joseph Tawadros, key, melody, moustache, oud, popular music, Redfern, Richard Tognetti, riq, Salvador Dalí, tambourine, The Wiggles, Vivaldi, world music

Joseph Tawadros

Joseph Tawadros and his oud

Winning three consecutive ARIA Awards – for best new world music album – is not something many people achieve. But Australian musician Joseph Tawadros, a virtuoso on the oud, a pear-shaped Arabic string instrument, says it’s largely because he writes so many songs.

And besides, he knows he still has a way to go to catch the Wiggles with their seven straight.

“It’s hard for pop people to pull out an album a year,” Tawadros told the Mercury. “I’m pulling an album a year, so I can get up for it again. I’m writing so much. Every year I have about three albums’ worth of repertoire.”

Aided by technology and a fertile mind, he is prolific. “When I’m touring, sometimes you’re just stuck in the room with your instrument – I’m just writing,” Tawadros said. “I’m always coming up with themes, and with the invention of the iPhone, I can record these themes. “Now my phone is full of little sketches. I probably record about three sketches a day, especially with this Vivaldi music.” By that, the 31-year-old Sydneysider means the material for his next tour, with Richard Tognetti‘s Australian Chamber Orchestra, playing the Four Seasons.

“I’ve always been a big fan of Vivaldi, and the Baroque period interested me in Western classical music, because it was the closest thing to Arabic music I found,” Tawadros said. “I always identified Vivaldi and Bach – especially in the minor keys, and especially in the harmonic minor keys – as Arabic; I always thought they were Arabic melodies. That’s why they’re so much more accessible to an Eastern ear. There’s no big leaps; the intervals are shorter. The melodies are linear.

“My background was Arabic traditional music and folk music, but Bach and Vivaldi were real eye-openers to the classical music world. . . . Vivaldi is my absolute favorite in the classical world.”

Born in Egypt, and moving to Australia at the age of three, Tawadros, 31, grew up in Redfern and still lives within a few kilometers of Abercrombie Street. He has learned how to play several instruments, aided by regular trips to Egypt and having a brother, James, who is an expert on the Arabic tambourine called the riq and who is also joining the orchestra on this tour.

With his immaculate dress sense, a cheeky sense of humor and an upturned moustache like a cross between Salvador Dalí‘s and Hercule Poirot‘s, Joseph is likely to stand out on a classical music stage.

Apart from Vivaldi, the rest of this program is mostly Tawadros’ original music, with the orchestra’s contribution to these pieces arranged in collaboration with Tognetti.

Tawadros said he plays a complementary role – until it’s time for his own music. “I think [the orchestra’s] interpretation of the Four Seasons is lively enough and amazing,” he said. “So what you need is just to color that, to add a little bit of spice.

“The oud is just to add to the greater picture. And I think that’s the great thing about the Four Seasons. It’s such a group thing, and I’m just assisting in some spice.”

Ben Langford – Illawarra Mercury

Billboard’s Top Classical Recordings

21 Sunday Dec 2014

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

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27 Pieces, Angels and Saints at Ephesus, Ann Arbor, Anne Akiko Meyers, Billboard, Brian Wise, Chris Thile, Easter, Four Seasons, Gustavo Dudamel, Hafez Nazeri, He Is Risen, Hilary Hahn, Iranian, Joshua Bell, Lent at Ephesus, Lindsay Stirling, mandolin, Mater Eucharistiae, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Nielsen Music, piano, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Rumi Symphony Project Untold, Shatter Me, Simone Dinnerstein, violin, Vivaldi, WQXR, YouTube, Yuja Wang

The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles

The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles

As music critics assemble their best-of 2014 lists, another, probably very different barometer of musical taste has been revealed. Billboard has reported that, for the second year in a row, the top-selling classical artists were the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, a community of nuns from rural Missouri.

The sisters’ Lent at Ephesus and Angels and Saints at Ephesus – collections of ancient chants and hymns – were the first- and second-best selling traditional classical albums of 2014 (the traditional classical category excludes crossover releases, according to Billboard). Lent at Ephesus sold about thirty-four thousand copies this year and spent thirty-eight weeks on the chart. Angels came in second place with twenty thousand copies over forty-five weeks. Billboard’s rankings are based on sales data for the year’s top sellers compiled by Nielsen Music.

While interest in chant and spirituality has been a cyclical phenomenon in the recording industry – and almost entirely separate from the classical concert world – 2014 saw interest in this category grow. Other top-selling sacred albums included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s He Is Risen, an Easter-themed collection (no. 4 on the traditional classical chart); Rumi Symphony Project: Untold, by classical Iranian composer Hafez Nazeri (no. 10), and Mater Eucharistiae, by the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, a monastic order outside of Ann Arbor, MI (no. 11).

Billboard’s top 15 list (which is behind a paywall at Billboard.biz) also included mainstream classical fare including Anne Akiko Meyers‘s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and an all-star pairing of Yuja Wang and Gustavo Dudamel in piano concertos by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. New recordings of Bach by mandolinist Chris Thile, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and violinist Joshua Bell also made the top 15. The surprise entry, at no.7, was Hilary Hahn‘s 27 Pieces, a collection of encores by twenty-seven composers that the violinist commissioned.

There’s another, even broader measurement of popularity to consider: When factoring in crossover music, Billboard’s most popular classical album of 2014 was Shatter Me by the pop violinist and YouTube sensation Lindsay Stirling.

Brian Wise – WQXR

Getting in Tune

28 Friday Nov 2014

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

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Allen Wheat, Allison MacKay, application, Astronomia nova, astronomy, Bailey Hall, balcony, Banff Centre, bassline, Beethoven, Brahms, cantata, cello, chorale, Christian Mahler, comet, concerto, Copernicus, Cornell University, counterpoint, CounterPunch, David Yearsley, Dresden, Earth, English, Galileo, Galileo Project, gravity, guitar, Handel, harmony, Harmony of the Spheres, harpsichord, hockey, horse, improvisation, International Year of Astronomy, iPhone, Ithaca, Jan Dismas Zelenka, Jeanne Lamon, Jupiter, Kepler, L'Orfeo, Leipzig, Lowell Mason, Lucas Harris, Lully, lute, madrigal, mercury, modulation, Monteverdi, Newton, oboe, organ, overture, Ovid, Phaëton, planet, Plato, prelude, projector, Purcell, Rameau, score, Shaun Smyth, sinfonia, sky, solar system, space, St. Thomas Church, star, string bass, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Tarquinio Merula, Telemann, telescope, theatre, Toronto, tuning, vaulting, Venice, Venus, viol, Vivaldi, Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti

Galileo at his telescope

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

Some Summertime Bach

30 Friday May 2014

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

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Albuquerque, American Bach Soloists, Annandale-on-Hudson, Antonín Dvořák, Aston Magna, Bartók, Beethoven, Berkshire Choral Festival, Brahms, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Buxtehude, Cape Ann, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Carmel Bach Festival, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Caroline Shaw, cello, Chamber Music Northwest, Chamberfest Cleveland, Chanticleer, Charles Ives, Chelsea Music Festival, clarinet, Cleveland, Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, Concord Sonata, David del Tredici, David Lang, David Shifrin, Derek Bermel, Detroit, Dream of Gerontius, Elgar, Emerson Quartet, Frederic Chiu, Ghost Opera, Gloria, Goldberg Variations, Great Barrington, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Handel, Haydn, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Helmuth Rilling, Imani Winds, James Ehnes, James Tocco, Jeremy Denk, Kevin Puts, Kodály, Magnificat, Marc Neikrug, marimba, mass, Mass in B minor, Matthew Halls, Monica Huggett, Monteverdi, Mozart, New York, opera, Oregon Bach Festival, organ, Osvaldo Golijov, passion, Paul Jacobs, Paul Schoenfield, Paul Watkins, Pergolesi, Philip Glass, piano, Portland, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Prokofiev, Pulitzer Prize, Requiem, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, San Francisco, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Santa Fe, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Schubert, Schumann, Seattle Chamber Music Society, St. John Passion, St. Mark Passion, Strauss, Tan Dun, The New York Times, violin, Vivaldi, Vivian Schweitzer, Yefim Bronfman

SummercropCALIFORNIA

AMERICAN BACH SOLOISTS FESTIVAL San Francisco, 11-20 July 2014. Held at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the lineup this year features music by composers who influenced Bach, including Vivaldi, Pergolesi and Buxtehude; highlights of other programs are Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato and Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232).

CARMEL BACH FESTIVAL Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey, Pebble Beach and Salinas, 19 July through 2 August 2014. Bach naturally figures prominently here. On opening night his Magnificat (BWV 243) and Vivaldi’s Gloria (reflecting this year’s Italian theme) will be programed alongside a work commissioned from the young Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.

MASSACHUSETTS

ASTON MAGNA Great Barrington and Waltham, and Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 19 June through 19 July 2014. This early-music festival offers period-instrument programs including a celebration of C. P. E Bach’s three-hundredth birthday and a concert featuring Italian trio sonatas and a new work by Nico Muhly.

BERKSHIRE CHORAL FESTIVAL Sheffield, 13 July through 3 August 2014. This festival is proof that amateur choral singing continues to thrive, as eager singers arrive from around the country for an intense period of study and performances. Their efforts will culminate in performances led by professional musicians of Brahms’s Requiem, Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245) and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

ROCKPORT CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Cape Ann, 6 June through 13 July 2014. An estimable roster of musicians will play here, including the Emerson and Borromeo String Quartets. Jeremy Denk will perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) and Ives’s Concord Sonata. The lineup also features a concert for clarinet and marimba and performances by Chanticleer and the Imani Winds.

MICHIGAN

GREAT LAKES CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Detroit, 14-29 June 2014. Bach is in the spotlight this year and the pianist James Tocco has programed an appealing array of repertory favorites and contemporary works. The pianist Frederic Chiu will juxtapose music by Bach and Philip Glass and the cellist Paul Watkins, the festival’s artistic director designate, will join Mr. Tocco for Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Cello no. 1.

NEW MEXICO

SANTA FE CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 20 July through 25 August 2014. The pianist Yefim Bronfman is artist in residence at this festival, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He will play a solo recital of Prokofiev and Marc Neikrug; other highlights include a Bach series; new works by Lowell Liebermann and Brett Dean; and performances by Alessio Bax, Ran Dank and Sasha Cooke.

NEW YORK

BRIDGEHAMPTON CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 30 July through 24 August 2014. Concerts in various spots in Long Island’s East End include piano quartets by Brahms, Dvořák and Schumann; a premiere by Howard Shore; recent works by Kevin Puts, Gabriel Kahane and Evan Ziporyn; and Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043). Performers include Brooklyn Rider and the pianists Gilles Vonsattel, Shai Wosner and Joyce Yang.

CHELSEA MUSIC FESTIVAL New York City, 6-14 June 2014. The German-Brazilian theme this year is inspired by the anniversaries of Richard Strauss, Villa-Lobos and C. P. E. Bach. The multigenre concerts, held at various galleries and institutes and often intertwined with visual and culinary themes, feature ensembles including the Sirius Quartet and premieres by composers including Augusta Read Thomas.

OHIO

CHAMBERFEST CLEVELAND Cleveland, 19-29 June 2014. It’s never too early to celebrate an anniversary: This festival toasts its third birthday with a spotlight on music for trios, with works by Haydn, Kodály, Schumann, Beethoven, Kevin Puts and Paul Schoenfield, as well as an arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string trio. Also on the lineup is a new take on Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera.

OREGON

CHAMBER MUSIC NORTHWEST Portland, 23 June through 27 July 2014. David Shifrin, the clarinetist and artistic director, has programmed a wide range of repertory, including Mozart’s Quintet in A Major, for which he will join the Emerson Quartet. The lineup also includes the premiere of Stephen Hartke’s piano sonata for four hands by Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss; Sasha Cooke singing Mozart, Bach and Schubert; and music by David del Tredici and Osvaldo Golijov.

OREGON BACH FESTIVAL Portland, Bend, Ashland, Corvallis, Florence and Eugene, 26 June through 13 July 2014. Matthew Halls, who succeeds Helmuth Rilling as artistic director, commemorates his debut season with the Monteverdi Vespers; Bach’s St. Mark Passion (BWV 247); a solo recital by the pianist Gabriela Montero; a performance by the organist Paul Jacobs; and Monica Huggett leading the Portland Baroque Orchestra. Mr. Rilling returns to conduct Mozart’s Requiem and Symphony no. 40.

WASHINGTON

SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY 7 July through 2 August 2014. The violinist James Ehnes is the music director here. Programming features a strong roster of musicians – including Augustin Hadelich, Richard O’Neill, Edward Arron, Inon Barnatan and Anthony McGill – performing music by Bach, Beethoven, Bartók, Derek Bermel and David Lang.

Vivian Schweitzer – The New York Times

Bach Shopping at Cannes

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Works, Films, Other Artists

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12 Years A Slave, Adruitha Lee, Amadeus, American Beauty, Apocalypse Now, cantata, Capote, Catherine Zeta-Jones, cigar, Dallas Buyer’s Club, Film Agency for Wales, Ghandi, Godfather II, Hollywood, Jeffrey M. Freedman, Joel Harlow, Leipzig, Lincoln, Mark Berger, Munich, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Producers Network, Reel Life With Jane, S. J. Evans, Sarah Greenwood, screenplay, Sherlock Holmes, Tariq Anwar, The King’s Speech, Universal Studios, Vivaldi, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Weimar

BachpostercropStudio execs shopping for tent pole biopic projects in the manner of Amadeus (1984), Ghandi (1982), Lincoln (2012) and The King’s Speech (2010) at the Cannes Film Festival this year will likely stop in their tracks when they see the promotional poster for Bach, an ambitious biography of the great German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

Embossed over the imposing painting of the composer are the words “ORPHAN CONVICT REBEL GENIUS.” Although it seems like a crass Hollywood media spin on the life of a highly revered musician who spent most of his career as a church organist and composer of religious and secular works for royalty, town counsels, church authorities and children’s choirs, JSB was indeed all those things and more, says Bach co-producer and writer, Jeffrey M. Freedman. “Bach came from a long line of highly accomplished musicians and probably would have been remembered as just another dead, great Bach if it wasn’t for several remarkable events in his life,” says Freedman.

The short list includes:

  • Being orphaned by the time he was ten years of age.
  • Chronically complaining about employers he claimed underpaid him or didn’t supply him with enough able musicians and beer, which prompted the Duke of Weimar to have him thrown in jail when he threatened to walk out on a gig.
  • Living larger than life in terms of several human appetites, which was partly responsible for his taking two wives, with whom he had twenty children.
  • Re-writing the rules of composition so that music expressed the most personal and passionate inner life of the composer.
  • Collaborating with the world’s first head-strong, irascible and extremely talented, cigar smoking, cursing, confrontational feminist librettist who put words to his cantatas and attended what Bach initiated as the first extemporaneous live jam sessions at taverns and cafes in Leipzig, Germany, which are still in operation today.

“Subsequent to a screenplay Freedman wrote about the Venetian composer, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), rumored to be starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, he traced the steps and immersed himself in the life and times of J. S. Bach for two years. The outline for the film based on this research has already attracted Oscar winners Mark Berger (Sound, Amadeus, Godfather II, Apocalypse Now, Capote, Munich), Joel Harlow (Makeup, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest), Adruitha Lee (Hair, 12 Years A Slave, Dallas Buyer’s Club), and Oscar nominees Tariq Anwar (Editor, The King’s Speech, American Beauty), Sarah Greenwood (Production Designer, Sherlock Holmes).

Co-producer S. J. Evans said from Cannes that even before Bach set up shop at the prestigious Producers Network at this year’s festival, industry reaction to the biopic has been overwhelmingly positive. “In addition to development funding by Film Agency for Wales, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios have expressed interest in the project, as well as a number of German co-producers Jeff and I have spoken with.”

Asked about the director and actor slated to play the eponymous subject of the biopic, Evans is playing those cards close to his chest. “Much like the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which Jeffrey discovered is replete with courage, grace, tragedy, crime, bravado, passion and the expansive beauty of the life and visual canvas of J. S.Bach’s inner and outer universe, we promise the choice of director and lead will be no less spectacular and fitting of the singular artistic genius of Johann Sebastian Bach.”

– Reel Life With Jane

Modulating to Every Key

04 Friday Apr 2014

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

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Andreas Staier, chord, Couperin, Fantasia Ut re mi fa sol la, fugue, galant, Georg Böhm, harmony, hexachord, John Bull, key, La Fondation Royaumont, mode, modulation, Paris, Peter Wollny, Praeludium Fuga et Postludium in G minor, prelude, Pythagoras, Royaumont Abbey, stylus phantasticus, temperament, The Well-Tempered Clavier, tuning, Vivaldi

Royaumont Abbey

Royaumont Abbey

The exploration of the mysteries of harmony that began in the sixteenth century has much in common with the exploration of the real world with the help of the natural sciences and critical thinking. Similarly, the journeys into the most remote key areas were only possible after composers had learned to look behind the rigid system of modes and hexachords and began to see the sheer unlimited possibilities of transposition and modulation. Since these harmonic experiments were long considered a secret art, it is no surprise that they were confined to solo keyboard instruments, where chords and their progressions could be handled by the ten fingers of the two hands and where the composer and the performer were often the same person. Yet at first the keyboard with its preset and fixed tuning allowed excursions into remote key areas only to a limited degree. As a consequence, adjustments to the old Pythagorean tuning were necessary, and this led to various forms of mean-tone and irregular temperament culminating in the establishment of equal temperament in the early nineteenth century.

J. S. Bach’s monumental double cycle of The Well-tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) has always been regarded as a major landmark in the history of keyboard music and the utilization of the full spectrum of keys. The first part, containing preludes and fugues through all twenty-four major and minor keys, was completed in 1722; the second, of the same scope, followed around 1739/40. Although The Well-tempered Clavier is often associated with the use of equal temperament, we know from various documents that Bach – like most of his contemporaries – actually favored a pragmatic temperament that made playing in remote tonal areas possible but at the same time kept the variegation of the individual keys. The unique artistic value of Bach’s double cycle lies not merely in the comprehensive treatment of this key system, but rather in the idea of combining the richness of harmonies he explores with an equally comprehensive richness of musical styles and composing techniques.

Bach drew his inspiration from various models – some of which will be introduced 22-27 June 2014 during the keyboard program presented by Andreas Staier and Peter Wollny at the thirteenth-century Royaumont Abbey north of Paris. One of the earliest journeys through the key areas is taken in John Bull’s Fantasia Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which leads a simple diatonic subject set in a strictly contrapuntal fashion by means of transposition through a labyrinth of harmony. Another way of exploring the spectrum of keys is the free improvisatory style called stylus phantasticus in the seventeenth century. A fine example of this type of composing is Georg Böhm’s Praeludium, Fuga et Postludium in G minor, a piece transmitted in a manuscript copy from Bach’s circle.

Bach and his German contemporaries devoted much of their compositional efforts to adapting and merging the French and Italian national styles. Thus Bach studied and held in high esteem the works of Antonio Vivaldi and François Couperin. The combination of German, Italian and French elements eventually yielded the highly expressive and galant mixed style that became the great composer’s legacy to his sons and students.

Peter Wollny – La Fondation Royaumont

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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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

Graupner’s Long Life Paralleled Bach’s

16 Thursday Jan 2014

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

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blindness, cantata, cantor, Christoph Graupner, Christoph-Graupner-Gesellschaft e. V., composition, concerto, dance suite, exmatriculation, French, German, Hamburg, Handel, harpsichord, Hesse, Hesse-Darmstadt, Italian, Johann Kuhnau, Kapellmeister, Kirchberg, Leipzig, Oper am Gänsemarkt, opera, Reichenbach, score, sight-singing, sinfonia, St. Thomas School, Telemann, University of Leipzig, violin, Vivaldi, woodwind

A scene at the Oper am Gänsemarkt

A scene at the Oper am Gänsemarkt

Born in 1683, two years before J. S. Bach, to a family of Kirchberg clothmakers, Christoph Graupner displayed an unusual facility for sight-singing at a young age. His uncle, organist Nikolaus Küster, provided Graupner his early musical training and convinced the boy’s parents that he should accompany him to his new post in Reichenbach, also in Saxony, for further education. Graupner was admitted to the St. Thomas School in Leipzig in 1696, long before Bach’s arrival, studied under Johann Kuhnau and collaborated with Telemann, and, upon exmatriculation in 1704, began to study law at the University of Leipzig.

The invasion of Saxony by Swedish troops in 1706 cut short his advanced studies and forced Graupner to flee to Hamburg where he found safety in a position as harpsichordist in an opera orchestra where Handel was a violinist. Between 1707 and 1709, Graupner composed five operas for the Oper am Gänsemarkt in an ecelctic musical style, combining French and German elements, that were well-received by the Hamburg audience.

Then, in 1709, Graupner’s life took another important turn when he accepted the position of Assistant Kapellmeister at the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, rising to the top position in 1712. At first he focused on operatic composition at the Darmstadt Hofkapelle, at one point supervising some forty musicians, but after financial cutbacks in 1717, Graupner abandoned opera, cut the size of his staff and turned his attention to instrumental music and cantatas. Tempted, however, by the thought of returning to Saxony, Graupner competed for the position of cantor of the main churches in Leipzig that had opened up as the result of Kuhnau’s death, but when the Landgrave raised his pay and gave him other incentives to remain in Darmstadt, Graupner turned down the position that Bach finally accepted in 1723.

Now firmly entrenched in Hesse, Graupner composed more than one hundred “symphonies” (three-movement sinfonias or multi-movement dance suites in major keys), half as many concertos (mainly for woodwinds, half in the three-movement Vivaldi pattern and the others in four movements), and a sizable number of chamber works and keyboard suites that fused French and Italian styles. Highly regarded as a harpsichordist and for his accurate, elegant copies of the scores of other popular composers of the day, Graupner composed more than 1,400 Lutheran church cantatas, many of which reflect an awareness of compositional innovations originating elsewhere.

As with Bach, blindness ended Graupner’s career, but Graupner outlived Bach by a decade, dying in Darmstadt in 1760.

– Christoph-Graupner-Gesellschaft e. V.

Suzuki Completes Cantata Cycle

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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

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aria, Bach Collegium Japan, Bible, BIS, cantata, chorale, chorus, Cross of the Order of Merit, Deutsche Grammophon, Early Music Vancouver, fanfare, German, German Record Critics’ Award, Handel, harpsichord, hymn, John Eliot Gardiner, John Ibbitson, Leipzig, Masaaki Suzuki, Mass in B minor, motet, oboe, Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music, recitative, rehearsal, Robert von Bahr, soprano, St. Matthew Passion, Stockholm, The Globe and Mail, Tokyo, Ton Koopman, Vivaldi

SuzukicantatacropIn 1993, when Robert von Bahr received a letter at his Stockholm office proposing that his company, BIS Records, undertake a complete cycle of all two hundred Bach cantatas with someone named Masaaki Suzuki conducting a Japanese choir and ensemble, he reacted, he recalls, with “uncontrollable laughter.” But the proposal also came with an offer of a plane ticket, so von Bahr flew to Tokyo to hear Suzuki conduct his Bach Collegium Japan. “And then,” he remembers, “the sun came up.”

Now, twenty years later, BIS is releasing the fifty-fifth and final volume of Bach Collegium Japan’s traversal of the Bach cantatas. While there have been other cantata cycles, none has taken this long, been prepared with such care or been greeted with higher praise.

“Although the excellence of rival surveys is not in doubt, this Japanese survey is the strongest and most consistent,” the venerable Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music declared, stamping it “an obvious first choice.”

“It’s beautifully crafted,” said Matthew White, the Canadian countertenor and artistic director of Early Music Vancouver. He sang in Vol. 23 of the series. Suzuki’s cycle “balances rigor and passion, which Bach’s music embodies in a very simple way,” he said. “And when I was rehearsing with them, I felt them embrace that.”

How did thirty-odd mostly Japanese singers and musicians a world away from Germany deliver what many believe is the greatest-ever interpretation of this cornerstone of the Western canon? They practiced. For two decades.

Suzuki became obsessed by the cantatas as a music student in Tokyo. He learned that as a church composer in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach was expected to deliver a new cantata for every Sunday service. Each cantata is about twenty minutes long and consists of two choral movements and several arias and recitatives for solo voice, with the texts adapted from hymns or Bible passages and  the singers accompanied by a small ensemble.

For Bach, it was journeyman work, but it was also the very core of his life as a composer. The cantatas are chock full of beauty – an exultant chorus, a soprano’s voice floating above an accompanying oboe, weaving melodic lines, a stolid Lutheran hymn transfused with passion.

“The texts were so different and the polyphonic structure of Bach’s music is so fascinating to me, I couldn’t stop listening to the different recordings,” Suzuki said in a telephone interview. “And . . . afterward I couldn’t resist performing these works myself.”

From 1979 to 1983, he studied period performance in the Netherlands – playing early classical music with the instruments, ensemble sizes and performance practices that would have been used at the time the music was composed. He then returned to Japan to teach, establishing the Bach Collegium Japan in 1990. In 1995, Suzuki and von Bahr began to record cantatas.

It was a rocky beginning. “We had many discussions and arguments about the way of recording, and also about performance style with period instruments and so on and so on, because he was the producer as well as the president [of BIS],” Suzuki remembers. “And our members thought: ‘It’s not possible to work with him.’” But Suzuki’s performances left von Bahr ecstatic, and the entrepreneur eventually convinced Suzuki that he was in it for the long haul. Very long, as it turned out.

Unlike other traversals, which were often recorded in haste while everyone was available, or with one conductor beginning the cycle and another completing it, Suzuki and von Bahr resolved to rehearse intensively – “at the very beginning it took us two hours just to perform ten bars,” Suzuki remembers – and then perform the cantatas in concert before recording them.

Over the years, individual musicians changed, but the Suzuki sound remained remarkably consistent – technically perfect, vocally pure, yet imbued with a spirituality imbedded in Suzuki’s deep Christian faith.

Initial releases were treated with polite caution – at best. One Italian critic opined that the Japanese throat was physiologically incapable of reproducing German speech. When a Spanish reviewer criticized the German pronunciation of the chorus, von Bahr phoned him and began complaining in German, only to discover the critic didn’t know a word of the language. “He was fired,” von Bahr recalls with some satisfaction.

Suzuki believes that being Japanese has its advantages when performing Bach. “If our choir has a Japanese character, and not a European one, then it makes the voices and the intonation very pure. And in Japanese culture as well, it is not so important to project your personality, but to be homogeneous with others, and that can work very well in a choir,” he said.

It didn’t take the critics very long to come around – and stay around. “Standards haven’t slipped an inch,” Fanfare, an American classical music magazine, raved in 2009, judging the cycle “a set for the ages.”

One French critic wrote about the music’s “clarity of purpose, sweep . . . the sumptuous timbre of instruments, innate sense of ideal orchestration . . . and wonderfully luminous chorus, which hit all the marks.”

“Their music-making is contained and precise,” White observes, “but punctuated by moments of emotional outburst that transcend all that beautiful accuracy.”

The Germans not only warmed to this Asian interpretation of their sacred Bach cantatas, they awarded Suzuki and his ensemble the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2001, the German Record Critics’ Award in 2010 and, in 2012, the Bach Medal, presented by the City of Leipzig.

No one is more surprised than Suzuki that they pulled it off. “I never thought until recently that we could complete it,” he said. “Whenever I was asked how long it would take, I would say: ‘Another fifteen years.’ And then: ‘Another fifteen years.’” After all, times were hardly good for the classical music recording industry. A cycle by the Dutch conductor Ton Koopman, Suzuki’s teacher, was interrupted when his recording company went bust. (Another company took up the torch, allowing the cycle to be completed.) Deutsche Grammophon abandoned a planned cycle by the British conductor John Eliot Gardiner. (He completed it with his own money.)

But not only did little BIS survive, the Suzuki cantatas “have been our bread and butter,” says von Bahr. A typical release sells ten thousand copies; some have sold much more. (That’s a strong number, considering other BIS releases usually sell around three thousand copies.)

It hasn’t ended with the cantatas. Along the way, the Bach Collegium Japan has recorded acclaimed performances of the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), the St. Matthew Passion (244b) and the motets, as well as works by Handel, Vivaldi and other composers. And, to keep himself busy, Suzuki is also recording a complete set of Bach’s music for harpsichord.

For von Bahr, the success of the Suzuki cycle speaks not to one culture interpreting another, but to music that transcends cultures entirely, proving that “it is a language that anyone can understand, if they’re willing to listen.”

John Ibbitson – The Globe and Mail

Deconstructing the Genius of Bach

12 Thursday Sep 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gottfried Reiche, Bach's trumpeter

Gottfried Reiche, Bach’s trumpeter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Clark – Limelight Magazine

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