jwilzewske: Coherent Symphonism: Paul Leenhouts and The Royal Wind Music Recorder Ensemble

Presentation is the performer’s task, and to divine and interpret to a modern audience the intentions of baroque [and earlier] composers.”
— John Mansfield Thomson and Anthony Rowland-Jones, 1995.

The Gods’ Flute Heaven
Royal Wind Music, Paul Leenhouts, Director
Boston Early Music Festival, 17-JUN-2007, Jordan Hall, Boston
Sweelinck (1562-1621), Est-ce Mars*
Susato (1500-1561), Pavane ‘Wenn durch Leiden’*
Adriaensen (1550-1604), Almande Prince*
Brade (1560-1630), Courante XXIV
van Eyck (1590-1657), Amarilli mia bella
R. Dowland (1591-1641), Amarilli mia bella*
Anon., ‘When Daphne’
J. Dowland (1563-1626), Lachrimae Antiquae
Anon., ‘En m’en Revenant de Sainct Nicolas’
Philador (1647-1730), Bourée d’Avignone
van Eyck (1590-1657), Boffons
Mainero (1535-1582), Salterello
V. Schumann (1520-ca.1559), Vater unser im Himmelreich
Steigleder (1593-1635),Vater unser im Himmelreich*
Praetorius (1571-1621), Vater unser im Himmelreich*
Scheidt (1587-1654), Vater unser im Himmelreich*
Bach (1685-1750), Vater unser im Himmelreich*
Schuyt (1557-1616), Padovana del secondo modo
de Cabezón (1510-1566), Tiento I*
de Arauxo (1577-1663), Glosada LXVI sobre la canción de Tomás Crequilion*
del Encina (1468-1529), Triste España sub ventura
Flecha el Joven (1530-1604), Ay que bino in tierra estrana
Lunenberg (1981-), Recercada sobre Mille regretz
Desprez (1450/5-1521), Mille regretz, de vous abandonner
de Morales (1500-1553), Agnus Dei III de la Misa ‘Mille Regretz’
Weck (1495-1536), Spanyoler Tancz*
Flecha el Viejo (1481-1553), Ensalada
Praetorius (1571-1621), Spagnoletta XXVII*
* - arrangement & diminutions by Paul Leenhouts

DSM: Some professional recorder groups provide programs that consist predominantly of arrangements and transcriptions of works originally written for different instruments — possibly because they feel that the baroque recorder repertoire is too limited? But in the case of the Royal Wind Music, Paul Leenhout’s programming makes no such admission. Arrangments are included so as to perfect the orchestration and to better illustrate the timbral range and choral textures of the ensemble.

CMT: We have little written record of these composers’ compositional ideas or techniques, in their surviving correspondence. And relatively few sketches of their compositions have been preserved, so attempts to reconstruct their compositional thought and formal logic must rely on evidence drawn from close analyses of the works themselves. It takes great effort to discover how these composers employed compositional principles to structure their forms; it takes careful scholarship to account for specific details of individual movements as well as the relationships between the movements. But the effort is worth it, and the analyses can have a larger purpose: to fully appreciate that compositions can’t be analyzed in a meaningful manner if the analysis is divorced from the works’ historical contexts.

DSM: And part of ‘context’ is how the acoustical physics of the instruments and the available 16th and 17th century performers’ abilities constrained the writing. We can know something of the former from examining surviving historical instruments. But it’s hard to deduce the latter; hard to do history when the written record is so thin.

CMT: And, of course, social forces and biographical realities are fundamental elements of any historical situation. From their performance, one gets the sense that Leenhouts and his RWM colleagues have a deep understanding of this.

DSM: The insightfulness of their scholarship is clear from the sound that they produce. And all of their arrangements and performances rest on careful analysis. We can ask of their analyses: Does it tell us something that we didn’t know before? Is that ‘something’ a recognizable component in the piece? Does the analysis account for anomalies in the composition? Does the analysis provide a rationale or justification for what we understand and feel about the piece? Listening to this concert, the answers are emphatically “Yes!” to these questions.

CMT: Think, too, about the orchestration of these pieces. These 12 recorder voices—I would say they correspond almost literally to an organist’s 10 fingers and two feet. Beyond recorder literature-proper, RWM performs arrangements that closely reproduce some of the organ repertoire, except with more independent motion and cadential structure than one human being could execute at one time. Besides instrumental works, a recorder choir like this may also perform arrangements of vocal literature.

DSM: In the opening measures of Robert Dowland’s Amarilli mia Bella there are successive statements of a melodic motive that foreshadows and then later accompanies the arc of the piece. This motive emerges from silence, swells through the bass recorders, ascends into the tenor and alto recorders, and then sinks into the stillness from which it came. Although our first inclination is to regard these various statements as “the same”, there are actually some expressive differences among them. The change in instrumentation contrasts with the distinct timbral quality that the motive has in the opening measures. There’s a diversity in the pitches through which successive statements are given voice. And, although there’re similarities in the rhythmic figuration used for the recurring statements, there’s a latitude of duration and accentuation to all of them as well. In sectional playing, one of the most important things is to try to achieve and maintain a common tone within the section. This can be difficult due to different levels of playing skill and different acoustical qualities, especially in the tenor and bass recorders. It’s important in sectional playing to come together in agreement on how the tone should be presented in the ensemble. RWM does this consistently.

CMT: To understand this music — to make sense of the sonic textures — requires us to be able to integrate these phrases into a coherent idea and hold that idea and turn it round and round in our minds.

DSM: Yes. There’s a contemplative, meditative aspect to many of these pieces, and that’s consistent with the process of conceptual integration and round-and-round reflection that you’re alluding to. It’s partly why applauding after these pieces seems to do violence to them — applauding obliterates our zen-like state, abruptly ending the reflection. The rhythmic contour is destroyed by applause.

CMT: I think that the motives in these pieces hang together not simply because their constituent parts are connected in time but because the connections emphasize similarities to other motives. So the musical coherence that we perceive reflects the attributes of whole collections of motives. The coherence isn’t a property of any one motive in isolation. These are sentences and paragraphs. This whole 2-hour concert that Royal Wind Music performed for us was something like a book-length anthology or novella, don’t you think? And, although skill in evoking coherence does matter to the composer or arranger, our apprehending coherence in these pieces fundamentally depends upon the performers’ incarnating that coherence.

The substance of ‘symphonism’ will make itself felt in the stratification of the qualitative element of diversity and the novelty of perception within the limits of the increase of sound, but not in confirming the conditions tested earlier. Therefore, diversity in unity — the emergence of new intonations with new significations and meanings — forms the substance of symphonism.”
— Asaf'ev, O Simfonizme, 1921, quoted in Tarasti, Musical Signification, p. 147.

DSM: In that regard, these pieces have what I would say is an ‘orchestral’ or ‘symphonic’ texture, a mass of sound, with RWM’s individual players’ egos mostly sublimated to serve the aims of the section or the orchestra as a whole. It’s almost homophonic, but the coherence isn’t ‘coerced’. There are ‘free’ exchanges between the sections of recorders in different registers. And there are the contrapuntal lines assigned to specific voices within the sections. But these are not individualistic dialogues like the ones we find in chamber music. It feels like the expression of one unified organism. The effect is orchestral or ‘organ-like’—which I suppose is fitting, considering the shapes of the recorders and the similarities that they bear to pipe organ pipes; in terms of the means of sound production and the geometry of their air columns and apertures; and so on. The voicing and balancing of melodies and inner voices are also organ-like and contribute to the coherence of the overall effect. But RWM’s performance is organ-like in another way. The effect is unified, as though there were one consciousness behind it, just as there is one organist seated at an organ. The coherence between RWM’s members is very high. But it is a happy, enthused, ‘assenting’ sublimation by the various members. You can see it in their body language—as they play, and as they search for the proper recorder in the rack-like stands and mats on the floor in between pieces. Each one joyfully relinquishes her/his individual diversity, for the duration of the performance.

CMT: Symphonic, orchestral playing may sublimate individual egos and pre-judgments to a degree, yes. But, still, aren’t those egos and pre-judgments nonetheless necessary for a vibrant, meaningful, ‘whole’ performance? Gadamer, for example, once showed that our pre-judgments or prejudices are necessary and even desirable — a precondition for our understanding and communicating. New texts have to collide with meanings and ideas we already have, for new meaning to be produced. Dialogue and comprehension don’t occur if we merely suspend our ideas and passively accept another idea; they occur by a collision of ideas, our own and those expressed in the music.

DSM: Well, there’s clearly room for the individual, even in a symphony of recorders, with their sine-wave, flute-like timbres—so compliant and self-effacing as these instruments’ sounds are. The voices of the recorders in RWM are, I think, like ‘solute’ molecules that dissolve into a solvent, where the ‘solvent’ is the symphonic composite of all of the voices together. And you might say there is a ‘cratic’ entropy of acoustical mixing, much in the way that physical chemists speak of ‘cratic entropy’ of liquid and gaseous solutions. In ensemble performance, if the voices are the same ‘size’ and the interactions between them are identical, then the ‘entropy change’ for forming the ‘mixture’ (symphony) is smaller than it is if the voices are of different sizes, or have dramatically disparate energetics, or engage in dramatically different interactions. In this statistical mechanics analogy, some of the ‘particle’ differences (or lack thereof) inhere in the instruments themselves, and other of the differences (or lack thereof) are in the individual performers who play those instruments. The ‘particle’ is simply the voice that results from the ‘composite’: the player, plus the instrument, plus the text that the player executes. The tenor and bass recorders have inherently dark tones, while the alto and higher recorders are brighter, because of their geometry and acoustical physics. But the ‘player-plus-instrument-plus-text’ combinations that RWM represents have a much lower ‘cratic entropy’ than your typical ensemble . . .

CMT: That’s an interesting and novel notion—applying statistical mechanics concepts to sonic textures, treating polyphony as a physical mixing process—quantitatively accounting for musical textures in terms of ‘particle’ properties and energetics, as one would do in thermodynamics. Quite an exotic analogy. But, coming back down to earth, how can communication occur if the historical conditions separating us from these old texts are so wide as to preclude much of any common language or common base of ideas, between us and the composer? We’re talking not only of the player-particles’ submitting to a collective superego under the Leenhouts’ direction, but also of our own submission, aren’t we? Are we listeners not all sentient “particles” too—all of us endowed with somewhat different ‘sizes’, different ‘energetics’, different ‘interactions’?

DSM: I think so. And the answer emerges when we realize that our contextuality consists of more than just ‘fixed’, static, ‘horizontal’ cultural positions. There are also ‘vertical’ cultural contexts. Gadamer talks about synchronic and diachronic positions. Diachronic relationships are what we call ‘tradition’. Gadamer in fact tries hard to legitimize the concept of tradition. He says that our position in history entails our deliberate participation in evolving and creating traditions. A tradition is not merely a passive accumulation of artifacts; it’s something we cultivate actively. We produce it and further determine what it will become, regardless what it was that we’ve received. Tradition isn’t a permanent precondition that constrains us. It’s the awareness of historical conditions that influence our present understanding. Gadamer calls this the ‘wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein’, or ‘consciousness-of-being-affected-by-history.’ Gadamer sees interpretation as a single process, one that’s coextensive with understanding. It’s never achieved by subjectifying a text, but rather by ongoing societal mediation and interactions with each of us.

CMT: That sounds more mystical than sensible. How can we possibly ‘engage’ a musical text in conversation? In what sense can we ‘converse’ with a composer who’s long dead?

DSM: Well, a solution becomes plausible when we understand that ‘interaction’ in the hermeneutic sense is a bigger concept than the narrow linguistic activity we normally think of. A dialogue begins with the recognition that there’s another voice ‘out there’ (in the guise of a score or musical text). We try to reconstruct the thick ‘cultural web’ in which the text originated — to discover the questions and problems to which it served as an answer in its own time, and to discover the nuances of language and rhetoric that the text ‘pinged’ in its original community. We become receptive to new meanings by projecting ourselves against an historical ‘horizon’. None of this diminishes the role of the individual performer or listener. None of this reduces the range of textural ambiguity or timbral ambiguity that a performance may contain. What is striking about a homogeneous instrumentation such as RWM represents—what is striking about Paul Leenhouts’ conception of this music—is the very low amount of textural and timbral ambiguity in their performance. The distinctive meanings that RWM conveys are largely a consequence of their unique homogeneity in poetically rendering and coupling the motivic material in this repertoire; a consequence of their ‘cratic’ mixing of similar voices of recorders across the plurality of registers; and a consequence of the RWM members’ superb and consistent, shared vision of the historical horizon that’s pertinent to each composition. A beautiful and extraordinary kind of historical coherence is what RWM delivers! Kudos to Paul Leenhouts! Without someone of great vision, great ears, great interpretations, and great depth like his, you could have the greatest musicians on the earth and you wouldn’t achieve a great orchestral effect like this. We in the audience witness the inspired fascination that the created musical object exerts upon its creators. We experience a beauty compelling enough to cause RWM’s members to set aside their own individuality in service of this transcendent collective creation. What musicianship! What drama!

M otive is at any one time the smallest part of a piece or section of a piece that, despite change and variation, is recognizable as present throughout.”
— Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea, in Carpenter & Neff, p. 169.

jwilzewske

Monday, June 18, 2007

Coherent Symphonism: Paul Leenhouts and The Royal Wind Music Recorder Ensemble

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