W eilerstein showed that she certainly has the technique to emerge as one of the leading cellists of the next generation. She produced a consistently lavish tone and demonstrated remarkably assured technical facility... With nearly flawless passagework and intonation, the cellist provided some pretty thrilling playing.”
— Chicago Tribune.
B arnatan … has an instinctive understanding of Schubert’s fragile, deep world... he obtained a hypnotic tone from the piano... he made sounds that might have won the approval of Schnabel himself.”Cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Inon Barnatan performed a program of Kodály, Golijov, Chopin, and Beethoven on Saturday evening in Kansas City in a Friends of Chamber Music concert at the Folly Theater. The program allowed the audience a wonderful opportunity to experience each of the artists as soloists, as well as their special chemistry together. Each is a tremendously passionate, emotional interpreter; together, their responsiveness to each other was magical.
— The New Yorker.
- Beethoven: Sonata No. 5 in D Major, Op. 102, No. 2
- Kodály: Sonata for solo cello, Op. 8
- Chopin: Barcarolle in F-Sharp Major, Op. 60
- Golijov: Omaramor
- Chopin: Sonata for cello and piano, Op. 65
Inon Barnatan is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, the Aspen Music Festival, the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, Salla Verdi in Milan, the Royal Festival, and Wigmore Hall in London. In past seasons Barnatan has made his debut with the Israel Philharmonic, Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre de las Suisse Romande, Jerusalem Symphony, and numerous other ensembles. He trained with Maria Curcio with additional coaching from Leon Fleisher, Radu Lupu, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, Claude Frank, Menahem Pressler, and Christoph Eschenbach.
The performance last night was engaging throughout. But the Kodály sonata especially intrigued me. Not the ubiquitous Kodály Eastern-European folk music elements, nor the fact that this sonata is imbued with the milieu of 1915, composed as it was in the early days of WWI. Yes, it’s a very passionate piece, and is therefore a perfect vehicle to illustrate the range of Ms. Weilerstein’s extraordinary expressiveness. Alisa’s use of rubato and rhythmic flexibility renders the improvisatory character of Hungarian elements with style, energy, and elegance. Yes. But those are not the aspects that really intrigued me.
What intrigued me—Alisa revealing this piece to us as though we were hearing it for the first time—was to grasp Kodály’s use of classical sonata form here and—oh, what does it amount to?—to figure out whether our own expectations have any force or moral standing? whether we’re fated to struggle and struggle and eventually lose? What I mean is, sonata form is conventionally an epitome of Enlightenment rationality. But, in this piece, our expectations keep getting dashed. Struggle and lose. How does this happen? Why? I think it’s not enough to think in terms of Epstein’s concept of ‘structural downbeat’ or ‘structural accent’, or, say, E. T. Cone’s concept of ‘frame’. I think the ‘How’ goes well beyond the notes on the page and the nominal structural features that are there. Our anticipation—and how it gets dashed repeatedly—is bound up with the timbral changes and the scordatura and the metrical displacements that keep happening.
Op. 8 requires scordatura tuning, borrowing an instrumental practice of the 16th and 17th centuries. The timbral characteristics of the cello are altered by the detuning of strings, and the cello’s resonance takes on a mysterious, hollow, melancholy quality. The scordatura is indicated at the beginning of the movement, above the first bar. The notes are performed ‘as-written’, as if the instrument were tuned normally.
The other characteristic element of this sonata is what I referred to as ‘metric displacements’, through which the repositioning of the beat continually generates a sensation of ever-present alternatives. Although written in 3/4, the beginning of the first movement up to m. 31 is marked by metric ambiguity caused by variable positioning of accents in each measure, so that our anxiety is heightened. The emphatic 4-note chords are a major source of the metric ambiguity—quasi-boundaries or pseudo downbeats. The metric slippage and preemption—the displacements—create a sense of pulse in a different part of the successive measures. It’s like structural accents, as discussed by Epstein (1995, p. 23-6). Even when we achieve a ‘stable’ measure, whose downbeat is strong enough to be believed, it cannot be trusted for long. The ‘exceptionalism’ is recurrent, pernicious … so emphatic that it’s inescapable. The exceptions become the rule rather than the exception. The metric ambiguity is one of the main elements lending (or permitting the performer to give—) an improvisatory feel to this sonata.
The first movement begins with two chords that are repeated emphatically as a feature of the first theme. Things progress in mm. 21-25 (the bars pictured above), but, dashing our expectations, a transition surprisingly drives instead in measure 31, to the beginning of a new thematic group. Once we get here, we naturally feel things should move toward some new harmonic center of this new (second) thematic group. But, again, our expectations are thwarted.
The slow, lamenting phrases have these rich ornamentations—offering some emotional solace, I suppose. But instead of solace, these make us feel still more ‘on-edge’.
The metric displacements can preoccupy a performer, but not Alisa. She preserves a ‘speaking’ style in each phrase—to which the paroxysmal rhythmic gestures are incidental, not dominant. I imagine Kodaly’s rhythms and phrasing are somehow descended from the inflections of the Hungarian language. Weilerstein ably contours her phrasing, through agogic and rubato embellishments—in the lamenting sections especially. While Alisa may not be Hungarian, her sense of these inflections is admirable.
Beyond the interesting metric displacements, the scordatura intrigued me even more—how it sounds in the rapid technical passage work; and how it sounds in the context of the impressive Weilersteinian ardor.
It feels weird to place your fingers when the string(s) is (are) de-tuned, the scordatura does. This wasn’t written in C minor—in which case Kodaly could’ve either (a) left the lower two strings normally tuned and the fingerings on the upper two strings would’ve been higher by a half-step or (b) called for raised-tenor scordatura up-tuning of the D string and the A string, to E-flat and B-flat. No, he wrote it in B minor. And the open strings have a dramatically different timbre compared to stopped strings. The sound the bow produces at a given pressure and bowstick velocity is different from normal. (The hollow, scary quality of scordatura is why Saint-Saëns scored it in ‘Danse Macabre’—the discordant double, unstopped bowing in the scordatura-detuned first violins evokes a far-gone, unstoppable, decomposing, pell-mell ride to oblivion. Also, the departure from conventional tuning suggests some sort of irrevocable departure from the community of the living.)
Scordatura’s an aggressively soloistic thing—it cannot help but draw attention to the otherness of the scordatura-detuned instrument, in much the way that prepared piano draws extraordinary attention to the pianist. This is noticeable even in a solo piece like the Kodály sonata Op. 8…
Oh, the scordatura changes things—easy to say, but what does it mean really? Well, when you tune the string(s) down to lower pitch, the upper partials of the lower-pitched strings now become significantly lower in amplitude than the neighboring partials of the normally-tuned strings. And, if you do Fourier Transform analysis of a digital recording of it you see that, since the acoustic spectral energy tends to decrease with successive partials, the higher-pitched tones now tend to ‘mask’ the partials of the lower-pitched tones more than the reverse. So the lower-pitched strings now sound … long-dead. Cool effect, directly related to the acoustic physics of the harmonics/partials—and how (and anatomically where, in millimeters from the cochlear apex!) these superimposed sounds register in the nerve cells of the inner ear.
Have a look at the graph below, showing the frequencies of the harmonic spectrum for a bowed cello’s top string, A220 (solid lines), and as detuned to G196 (dashed lines)—and showing too the anatomical positions within the inner ear where those frequencies are sensed. A relatively large change in millimeters on the x-axis, this—especially for the higher partials. Look how much those shift downward (to the left in the plot), compared to the big spike, the fundamental frequency of the note, off to the far left. It doesn’t shift nearly so far when it’s detuned down to G196. We could do a similar graph for the cello’s detuned C and G strings, as called-for in the first movement of this sonata…
And it’s not just the string by itself. It’s the change in the Chladni-plate resonances of the body—the radiation of the sound of the instrument. It’s the change in what the fingers are doing—the scordatura stopped string sounds muted (in general) compared to what the conventionally-tuned stopped string would sound like at the same pitch, because of the altered finger placement, the altered fingerboard coupling and the altered resonance acoustics. And it’s what the strings do in reaction to the bowhair, under the lesser tension after the strings have been scordatura-detuned. More weight of bow against the detuned string digs deeper than normal, starts up bigger amplitude vibrations quicker than normal. Bow speed that you are accustomed to now microtonally ‘pitch-bends’ on the detuned string many cents different than you expect. The note on the page, that’s not the half of it!
The scordatura-perturbed fine motor control of the hand muscles—and the disruption of the mind-body imaging of the fingerboard and its relation to the pitches—add yet another dimension (for the performer; not for a listener). The note on the page and the placement of your fingers no longer produce the note that your mind expects to hear. It’s tremendously disturbing to people with perfect pitch. But it’s disorienting to almost every performer. In fact, a friend of mine in Minnesota once said she couldn’t possibly play scordatura—it was too ‘painful’.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Kodály sonata in B-minor has the cellist de-tune the two lower strings by a half-step from C to B and G to F#, respectively, to enable open-string sonority for the recurring 4-note B-minor chords (bottom three notes are then open strings, with the scordatura arranged this way; only one finger down on top A-string) and to put the hand in first-position and make some of the passages easier to play. This ‘lowered-bass’ tuning, B-F#-D-A, down a half-step on each of the two lower strings is very different from the ‘raised-base’ tuning (up whole-step) that’s occasionally used with violin.
To hear Alisa Weilerstein play this is to realize that there are other timbral and gestural reasons to do the scordatura. The breadth of the 4-note chords forces you to attack the detuned low (B) string and quickly roll to the F# and D string together. The bowstick speed over that bottom string gives a forlorn, microtonally-bending B. This effect would be there, had Kodaly written it in C minor, but the effect would not be as pronounced as it is with the low B.
And besides that, with the open F#, etc., the string players among us just sense the different double-stops that are available, even if the composition turns out not to call for them. Sense where vibrato will not be. You don’t have to be up there performing it; you sense these things just sitting in your seat in the audience listening. It’s this pervasive, latent intuition of ‘possibilities’ now opened, of possibilities foreclosed—of unhingedness, of all bets now being ‘off’. And it seems implausible that Kodály would not have found all of those effects and rationales interesting and supportive—not just the nominal ‘detune the lower two strings, to enable open-string, tonic B-minor’ one. On the eve of WWI, all bets were definitely off…
Scordatura does appear in Bach’s ‘Six Suites’ for solo cello; many other Baroque pieces, too. In the Bach Suite No. 5, the discant string is tuned down one whole tone, from A to G. The cello in George Crumb’s ‘Vox Balaenae’ (for electric flute, electric cello, and electric piano) calls for detuning from C-G-D-A to B-F#-D#-A, which makes the B major last movement that much more sonorous, much like the Kodály.
Probably the weirdest and most symbolically over-the-top is Biber’s Sonata XI (The Resurrection of Christ), calling for detuning the G-D-A-E violin strings to G-G-D-D octaves and switching the two inner strings between the bridge and tailpiece, to make the sign of the cross. The D string moves into the position of the A string and vice versa! I don’t know of anything quite this strange in the cello literature, though.
The ‘other-worldly’ impact of scordatura on the performer is both visual as well as registral/timbral/aural. As mentioned above, the ‘normal’ sight-sound intuitions are thrown out-of-kilter by detuning the string(s). Since the notated music you see now bears only a tenuous relationship to what you hear, you experience a profound loss—a sense of alienation. I try it on my violin, and the psychological effect can be hypnotic … if you take it further, do we get a detachment from the self; a sort of ‘dissociation’ experience? Very weird anyhow, the visual disorientation and eyes and ears ‘lying’ to each other. I wonder whether scordatura matters to folk fiddlers who don’t read music…
Curiously, out of the detuning and disrupted sight-sound relationships come these beautiful pitch-bent microtonal pitch anomalies. The fingers go where they’re told, but not quite. We get circumstantial microtonal pitch shifts, not just the different timbre associated with the detuned strings. And we get big differences from performer to performer, owing to underlying neurophysiologic differences between individuals maybe?
[50-sec clip, Janoš Starker, Kodály Op. 8, ‘Allegro maestoso ma appassionato’, 1.2MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Xavier Phillips, Kodály Op. 8, ‘Allegro maestoso ma appassionato’, 1.2MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Roel Dieltiens, Kodály Op. 8, ‘Allegro maestoso ma appassionato’, 1.2MB MP3]
How did I get on this peculiar path—microtonality via scordatura—with Weilerstein and cello and Kodály? Well, Ted Mook’s concert of microtonal cello compositions by Ezra Sims and Daniel Rothman occurred a couple of weeks ago (16-OCT-2008) at Roulette in New York. ‘Sensitized’ to microtonality in this way, it’s not much of a ‘stretch’ to start hearing interesting microtonal features in cello pieces that are not, on the face of them, overtly microtonal—like Weilerstein’s Kodály. Not actively looking for microtonal features, but nonetheless finding some. Thanks for your interest in this topic. Please feel free to comment or email me about microtonality caused by circumstantial or biomechanical/technic pragmatics that you happen to notice in compositions that are not explicitly scored as ‘microtonal’ pieces per se. And please go and attend Alisa’s and Inon’s concerts whenever you get a chance.
T he notes and groups you ornament ... are, I think, best always performed with a glissando or portamento. This applies even when some notes will be detached clearly from the group.”
— Kodály Zoltán, Pentatonicism 1970, p. 239.
- Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan at Friends of Chamber Music, Kansas City, 01-NOV-2008.
- Alisa Weilerstein website
- Inon Barnatan website
- Weilerstein A, et al. Jennifer Higdon: Piano Trio; Voices; Impressions. (Naxos, 2006.)
- Weilerstein A. Debut. (EMI, 2000.)
- Barnatan I. Schubert Recital (Improptus D.935; Sonata in B-flat Major D.960). (Bridge, 3006.)
- Osvaldo Golijov website
- International Kodály Society website
- CelloGeek.com blog
- Cellos2Go.com
- DSM. Unplugged Folias & Romanescas. CMT blog, 12-MAY-2007.
- Pierre Lewis page on temperaments
- JustIntonation.net
- Stingting Huygens-Fokker website
- American Festival of Microtonal Music website
- AFMM Ensemble. Microtonal J.S. Bach, J.M. Bach, and A. Werckmeister. (AFMM, 2005.)
- Boston Microtonal Society website
- Ezra Sims website
- Braun M, Chaloupka V. Carbamazepine induced pitch shift and octave space representation. Hearing Res. 2005; 210:85-92. [anatomico-physiologically hard-wired octaves]
- DSM. Welcome to My Pitch Universe: Carbamazepine, Aripiprazole, and Pharmacological Pitch-Bending. CMT blog, 26-JAN-2008.
- Dieltiens R. Kodaly Op. 8. (Harmonia Mundi, 1995.)
- Epstein D. Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance. Schirmer, 1995.
- Kodály Z. Pentatonicism in Hungarian Folk Music. J Soc for Ethnomusicology 1970; 14:228-42.
- Phillips X. Kodaly Op. 8. (Harmonia Mundi, 2006.)
- Starker J. Kodaly Op. 8. (Delos, 1992.)
Y ou have to figure out what string players can do. It’s interesting when the instrumentality has been radically shifted. I love collisions. I hate cross-over, multi-culti—I prefer a colossal smash, where you get sparks that actually deliver something else, something surprising that the players could never have premeditated. The notion of musical possibilities defined by the instrument and by the playing—scordatura, for example—that’s of interest. But when the instrumentalist tells the composer what’s possible and what’s not, you usually don’t get the best results. An improviser is going to actually deliver that stuff all the time they play. That’s in the nature of music practice.”
— Jon Rose, The Relative Violins, ‘Johannes Rosenberg: Violin Music in the Age of Shopping’.
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