REBEL Baroque with Rufus Müller: Luminous, Numinous

G    ood art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize—the minute and absolutely random detail of the World—and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form... the belief that the work of art reveals something of which the natural world is an imperfect image or symbol, and can reveal it more luminously if not more truly than [inartistic; uninterpreted] Nature.”
  —  Richard Elfyn Jones, p. 29.

L ast night’s Friends of Chamber Music REBEL performance with Rufus Müller (tenor)—a program entitled ‘Out of the Eclipse: Music of Transformation and Revelation’—was really excellent.

T he program was a meditation on Baroque idioms in terms of the Baroque chronotope of formation, the dynamics of space-time/dark-light interactions. Such interactions test the boundaries between truth and fiction, creation and destruction, conformity and iconoclasm.

• Handel – Overture to Agrippina in G minor, HWV 6
  
• Vivaldi – Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro in B minor, RV 169
  
• Handel – ‘Total Eclipse’ and ‘Your Charms to Ruin’ from Samson, HWV 57
  
• Purcell – Chacony in G minor, Z 730
  
• Telemann – ‘Wie? Kehren sich bei Jesus Krippen’ from Cantata No. 2 in C minor, TWV 1:1625
  
• Bach – Concerto in A major, BWV 1055
  
• Bach – ‘Zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel’ from St. John Passion, BWV 245
  
• Vivaldi – Sonata à quartetto al Santo Sepolcro in E-flat major, RV 130
  
• Telemann – ‘Bei heißer Tränen dickem Regen’ from Cantata No. 13 in B minor, TWV 1:862a
  
• Blow – Chacony in G major
  
• Telemann – ‘Was gleicht dem Adel wahrer Christen’ from Cantata in F major, TWV 1:1511
  
• Purcell – Fantasia No. 13 in F major ‘upon one note’, Z 745
  
• Handel – ‘Tune Your Harps’ from Esther, HWV 50a
  
• Handel – ‘His Mighty Arm’ from Jephtha, HWV 70

Q uestion’ figurations in ‘Wie? Kehren’ and ‘Bei heißer Tränen’ and elsewhere [much like mm. 8-9 of the tenor recitative ‘Wie hast du dich, mein Gott’ (Bach’s Cantata No. 21) or mm. 7-8 of the tenor recitative ‘Der Heiland ist gekommen’ (Bach’s Cantata No. 61] involve exchanges between the tenor part and the ‘contratenor’ line (viola in TWV 1:1625; violin in TWV 1:862a; oboe in TWV 1:1511). The questions—and the accompaniments to the answers—unfold a contrasting melodic pattern and a contrasting rhythmic pattern—which is how the composer creates structural contrasts among the motivic statements and develops depth. Constructing contrapuntal links out of the countersubject is a powerful method—a canon use-case that evokes a ‘receptive’ posture in the audience.

L eading/leaning tones abound, as we heard in the pre-concert lecture—especially in the pieces in the ‘dark’ keys (more than 2 sharps or flats), but the effect is not a cadential one. Instead, the melodic line moves in a peripatetic way... voice-leading that captures our attention by suggesting a self who has not made up her/his mind, or who is still discovering or questioning Life and the Divine... interrupted cadences on a large, “meta” scale that transcends the scope of individual works. This program—juxtaposing these pieces, strung together with hardly a pause between them—generates ‘hypercadences’, cosmic-scale implied plagal cadences. (Am I stupid for only now figuring out that that is what we mean by an excellent program or a good playlist?)

H andel’s cantatas have the women characters speaking/singing in their own voices, revealing a lot about their inner mental state, while the men tend to be detached, obscured by form and narrative. Stereotypically circumspect male, voluble woman. Lucrezia, Armida, Clori, or Diana, for example, versus Samson or Abdolonymus or Ruspoli [Harris, p. 51; presents arguments for interpreting the encoding and restraint used to veil same-sex meanings, while presenting alternative interpretations as well]. Müller’s Bach, Telemann, and Handel were powerful, inspiring, luminous.

I ndeed, as we listened our thoughts were wingèd, full of luminous hopes and dreams. And the dramatic changes in lighting in the darkened Grace & Holy Trinity sanctuary where REBEL performed helped to construct and reinforce the narrative authority that the music revealed to us... Revelations: by definition, novel; like dreams, they are subjective, and not readily corroborated by ‘evidence’. They persuaded us listeners to all-out belief, rather than reasoned with us or prove a specific predicate. One of my favorite performances! Bravo!

O  , zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel! Wirf, Himmel, deinen Strahl auf mich! [O, crush me, ye rocks and mountains! O, Heaven, cast your bright beam upon me!]”   —  Bach, aria from St. John Passion.

T his is a peculiar passage that occurs several places in the Bible, notably Revelation 6:16... I imagine that Karen Marie Marmer (REBEL violinist who curated this ‘Transformation & Revelation’ program) selected this aria for inclusion in part because of this (compare Isaiah 2:19). This is not some Romantic, intellectual, filial, reverent ‘Crush me, please!’ This is a servile, prostrate Fear-of-the-Almighty-consuming-fire-and-brimstone-before-whose-alienness-and-majesty-none-can-stand ‘Crush me now, then!’ wish of a prey animal for the predator to just finish it off. The voice grows silent, no protection or security for her/him. Because Christ is now unfurling the once and future scroll that had been closed with seven seals. William Cowper (1731-1800) was fascinated by this same passage and used it in his poem ‘Truth’. I wonder whether the pietistic, Lutheran Bach ever read Cowper.

P   ieces of music are like any other form of human construction: whatever the patterns of intention lying behind them [sacred or secular], they instantaneously acquire an element of autonomy whether we wish them to or not... music, or any art for that matter, can affect us in ways that we could not expect—not because they have some secret property that only posterity reveals, or purely because our climate of reception predisposes us to see or value something that was irrelevant before, but because there is an unpredictable and circulating relation between the piece and its reception—it is not a one-way process.”   —  John Butt, p. 27.

• REBEL Baroque website
  
• Rufus Müller website
  
• Rufus Müller discography
  
• Butt J. Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions. Cambridge Univ, 2010.
  
• Caplin W, et al. Musical Form, Forms & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections. Leuven Univ, 2010.
  
• Christensen T, et al. Towards Tonality: Aspects of Baroque Music Theory. Leuven Univ, 2008.
  
• Harris E. Handel as Orpheus: Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas. Harvard Univ, 2004.
  
• Jones R. Music and the Numinous. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts). Rodopi, 2007.
  
• Maiorino G. The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts. Penn State, 1990.
  
• van Benthem J. The Logic of Time: A Model-Theoretic Investigation into the Varieties of Temporal Ontology and Temporal Discourse. Springer, 1983/2010.