Showing posts with label baroque. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baroque. Show all posts

Saturday, November 17, 2012

DiDonato, Sinkovsky, Il Complesso Barocco Bring Down the House

KC Star, (c) 2012 Jill Toyoshiba
W   e singers tend to boast that our careers offer the best form of psychotherapy in existence, for we are allowed to work out the bulk of our inner demons courtesy of the larger-than-life drama queens we encounter on the stage—divine ladies who weep, love, moan, and avenge more grandly and stylishly than in any other art form.”
  — Joyce DiDonato, 2012.

T he Joyce DiDonato/Dmitry Sinkovsky/Il Complesso Barocco performance last night in the Harriman-Jewell Series was really phenomenal. Many extraordinary, seldom-heard works by lesser-known Baroque composers, like Antonio Cesti (1623-1669), Geminiano Giacomelli (1692-1740), Giuseppe Orlandini (1676-1760), and Giovanni Porta (1675-1755). Extraordinarily dramatic and vivid vocal and instrumental interpretations. Extraordinarily tight and responsive interactions between the ensemble members and Ms. DiDonato throughout.

A scending cadences, each with the forte dynamic they require, imparting a strong sense of closure. Descending cadences to pianissimo, imparting a sense of sorrow with aspiration. The sort of gestures that Hatten once characterized as “yearning” (see links below).

F ormalized emotion—a dialectic of ‘drama queens’—DiDonato rations her body movement, reserves it mostly for recitative passages, while her body is relatively still during arias: her regal rhetoric is well-suited to these stories of queens and princesses. The arias ‘frame’ the dramatic recitatives, not the other way round (that is, ‘decorative’ arias, see Taruskin, p. 25).

M ost online reviews from performances on their current tour do focus, understandably, on Ms. DiDonato’s singing. But, my God, this ensemble! Gorgeous! And, my God, Sinkovsky! Prodigious!

W hat strings is Dmitry Sinkovsky playing!!? Silver-plated, copper on gut? Pirastro Eudoxa? Chorda? Sensuous with a glint, a sound that is a perfect match for DiDonato's rich mezzo-soprano voice!

T he wound G-string was common on violins in the 18th century. Beyond 1840 and already far beyond plain gut strings, composers were writing things that were, essentially, only playable with a wound G string. With modern strings, we’d lose this rich, complex sound of very thick gut strings. We’d lose the consort timbre within the violin family. We’d lose the diversity of articulation, and we’d lose subtleties of this 17th and 18th Century sonic architecture.

T o a software engineer like me, the musical score is an object-oriented ‘method’, procedural code executed on an instance of an object-class that may or may not grant all of the behaviors specified by the arguments passed to it. But Dmitry Sinkovsky and Il Complesso Barocco accomodate all args, all flavors!

T he range of Dmitry Sinkovsky’s articulation is especially interesting, because it allows him to imitate the singer’s diction, with diverse ‘consonants’ beginning each violin-syllable (or bow stroke) and diverse glottal and quasi-labial and -dental and -fricative sounds to match each of DiDonato’s vocal gestures. Through the centuries, the imitation of the human voice has always been an ardently sought goal for instrumentalists. Sinkovsky totally owns this! (He has even mastered American folk-fiddlish, jiggy “hoe-down” technic, which he improvised to humorous effect at DiDonato’s prompting for one of her encores, to the raucous delight of her hometown Kansas City audience!)

S inkovsky’s pulsatile, fluid bow-and-whole-body gestures, dance-like, match DiDonato’s operatic arms-and-whole-body gestures. Sinkovsky’s bow stroke is Transitional Period? Russian? Energized ‘non-legato’, at any rate! Because of the ‘give’ of the bowhair, the bow does not emit full sound immediately at the onset of the stroke, but only after some pressure has been exerted and some bow excursion has occurred—the momentary softness followed by a crescendo in each stroke.

H e plays fast passages with energy abounding but with still a roundness to his sound and supple articulations. A player trained in a modern, pressure-on-the-bowstick style feels immediately that baroque bow does not give the attack of a modern bow—it’s more from the wrist and fingers. But Sinkovsky’s Baroque bow attack is astonishingly sharp—more so maybe than would be achieved with a modern bow. Our jaws were agog for 2 hours in gob-smacked amazement.

A re these tempi faster than normal, or are we just glad to see you all? Was the room hot, or was it just you? :)

N ext up for these artists is Carnegie Hall tomorrow.


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Saturday, July 21, 2012

Martin Stadtfeld: Inspired Runtime Indirection

Martin Stadtfeld, Wiesbaden Kurhaus, 19-JUL-2012
T   he Busoni transcription is] absorbed in itself, moving round itself, decidedly turned away from the world... brooding; Beethoven-ish.”
  — Hugo Riemann.

A   lthough Bach set verses from Luther’s ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ nine times, many of the same Advent themes run through all the settings. Subtle nuances and theological allusions point to various verses of the chorale text, and the cantatas remain a starting point for the interpretation of the organ works.”
  — Anne Leahy, in Zager, p. 95.

M artin Stadtfeld’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Klavierkonzert Nr. 1 g-Moll op. 25 with Sir Neville Marriner and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at the Rheingau Festival was exceptional—a young man’s composition, performed with a young person’s sensibilities and energy. It simply sang!

B ut Stadtfeld’s 4’30” encore (Ferruccio Busoni’s transcription of J.S. Bach’s BWV 659 ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’) revealed a maturity and grasp of life’s setbacks and aporias: it was teleological, driving purposefully toward its goal(s) with pragmatism and propensity toward acceptance, yet with an open-heartedness/open-mindedness that still has room for hope.

S tadtfeld’s left-hand is quiet... ‘reticent’, as recommended in the performance notes in the original Breitkopf & Härtel edition of Busoni... enabling his melodic right-hand to have the terse prominence it requires. The tenuto and agogic accenting in the right-hand, in turn, conveys motives that are… pregnant.

T he expectancy was such that Stadtfeld impressed us that he himself was discovering things as he went, even though he has performed this prelude many, many times in the past... ‘sehr ausdrucksvoll mit vollem Anschlag.’ Many notes—the touch he applied to them—were, to me, like variable values in a software module that were resolved and bound at Stadtfeld’s pre-concert preparation—at ‘compile-time,’ so to say. But there were equally many that are only resolved on a moment-by-moment basis during performance (runtime). The balance between these lent a tremendous liveliness and interest and vibrancy to the performance of this beautiful Busoni transcription.

I t is, for me, analogous to the difference in software between a layered design with subroutines and an object-oriented design with event-handler methods. The terseness of the left-hand is such that Stadtfeld expresses not a human resoluteness but instead a process in Nature, something that is immutable, like mortality; not at all deterministic, but inevitable in the sense that human wishes and intentions cannot change the outcome.

I n software engineering terms, the Busoni-Bach left-hand module is a ‘wrapper’ and encapsulates the right-hand module. The left-hand ‘service’ owns a set of ‘objects’ with ‘handlers’ that share the same state. State is possible to preserve across invocations as the figures recur over the 3 pages of this transcription. It lends nicely to cooperation through message passing communication. Stadtfeld’s multiple levels of runtime indirection... reveal the extent and fate of our wishing and desiring.

E ach object has three parts: a component implementation, an export interface, and an import interface. Export and import can be modeled with runtime constructs specifically designed for component wrapping and interface adaptation, such as interception techniques for runtime resolution. The trills, for example, amount to handshake interfaces between right-hand and left-hand parts.

L iabilities of interpretations that entail generous amounts of runtime indirection include (1) variation-point management [adding and binding variants at a late moment in time implies extra work for managing and implementing variation points] and (2) predictability [a large amount of variability makes it virtually impossible to test all combinations during rehearsal]. But the merits of ‘romantic,’ liberal runtime indirection include danger, surprise, and excitement of the sort we were thrilled by on hearing Stadtfeld’s inspired performance of this Busoni-Bach ‘Nun komm’ Zugabe. A tiny encore that emotionally surpassed the gifts of the excellent, larger concerto that preceded it. Bravo!

Feruccio BusoniIndirection
M   athematics is the heart and soul of music … Without question the bar, the rhythm, the proportion of the parts of a musical work and so on must all be measured … Notes and other signs are only tools in music, the heart and soul is the good proportion of melody and harmony. It is ridiculous to say that mathematics is not the heart and soul of music.”
  — Johann Mattheson, 1743, ‘Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek’ 2:54.

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Saturday, May 12, 2012

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: ‘Bach Eternal’ & Eternal Success

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

I t’s always a good sign when a music performance sends shivers down your spine… as last night’s Australian Brandenburg Orchestra program did. In fact, for the artistic director of any ensemble or presenter organization, it is, I think, vital that you program and perform works that are capable of doing this to the spines of your audience. The released endorphins, enkephalins, and other natural neuropharmacology of this primitive reflex of joy and emotion are part of what gets butts in seats and keeps money flowing in, year after year. Challenge us with new works, yes, but make sure they are ones that give us shivers down our spines!

  • Bach – Sinfonia from Cantata ‘Wir danken dir, Gott’, BWV 29
  • Bach – Chorale from Cantata ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147
  • Bach – Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major, BWV 1066
  • Bach – Chorus from Cantata ‘Unser Mund sei voll Lachens’, BWV 110
  • Zelenka – Kyrie from ‘Misa Sancti Josephi’, ZWV 14
  • Telemann – Concerto for Two Horns in D major, TWV 51:D1
  • Handel – Coronation Anthem No. 2, ‘My heart is inditing’, HWV 261
  • Handel – Coronation Anthem No. 4, ‘Let thy hand be strengthened’, HWV 259

O ne aspect that is especially impressive about the ABO’s first-rate performance excellence is its personnel—a majority of the performers in ABO are part-time and are employed in other professions outside of music. This, and the fact that members hail not only from Sydney, but also from Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, and other places that are a considerable distance from ABO’s Sydney home-base. Rehearsals and logistics no doubt present challenges. With the logistical and geography issues, performing in this ensemble is more than the usual ‘labor of love’. Yet ABO, founded in 1989 by its director, harpsichordist Paul Dyer, has endured, has performed worldwide, and has 16 recordings on the ABC Classics label, including 5 ARIA Award winners for ‘Best Classical Album (1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2010).

Paul Dyer
P   ut another way, the provision of full-time orchestral work for graduates [would require] one quarter of Australia’s full-time orchestral musicians to retire every year. It also requires that no existing musicians, previous graduates, or overseas players apply for the positions. Even if this were to occur, four years later it will be [today’s] graduates’ turn to retire. In this context [of oversupply], part-time/seasonal orchestras rate special mention. In Australia, most part-time orchestras were founded by musicians... Most of the players in part-time orchestras come from academic institutions and from the pool of quality freelance players who engage in a number of different roles both inside and outside of music.”
  — Dawn Elizabeth Bennett, Understanding the Classical Music Profession, 2011, p. 83.

D espite challenges for the many who have day-jobs outside of music, the approximately 30 period-instrumental musicians and approximately 30 members of the choir maintain this tremendously high standard of musicianship—the technical fluency and enthusiasm and spine-tingling crispness that projected to our ears last night. They achieve warmth, joy, and musical intimacy that might plausibly and paradoxically be nourished by the challenges and part-timeness that dog their members’ hard-won individual commitments to music—á la “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”, or something like that. The Australian Chamber Orchestra and other ensembles here likewise thrive relying on part-time personnel.

C ould ABO’s music business model be replicated in the U.S. and elsewhere? The facts that ABO’s personnel come from more than one city and ABO’s performances are regional or national and not geographically bound to one city help to ensure that ABO’s sources of philanthropic financial support and corporate donors can be sought in a variety of cities and catchment areas, so that support from a small set of donors in a particular city doesn’t get tapped-out over a period of years and so that the cyclical economic ups-and-downs that disproportionately affect leading donors in one city don’t become an Achilles heel or point of latent financial instability for the organization. Each city and its donors feel strong attachment to the organization and its brand. Market diversity and de-concentration are sensible aims for any arts organization that aspires to sustainability and long-term financial success to have.

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra

S uffice it to say, this wonderful ABO performance gave me quite a lot to think about besides the endorphins and shivers. Eleven ABO Board members, all effective at fund-raising, none of them ‘figurehead’ material. Fifteen experienced staff members—with development and media relations firing on all cylinders. A charismatic artistic director known for affability and bridge-building and inclusive attitude. Lessons here for all of us! A few links below, for your interest.

Australian Brandenburg OrchestraAustralian Brandenburg Orchestra
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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Collaborative Poesy of the Goldberg Variations

Konstantin Lifschitz, (c) Froede
A  passage of music could have a ‘semantic range’ that is essentially the same as that of any word in a language, only much broader in scope—sharing the same kind of elasticity but of a much greater degree than is typical in language... Choosing whether the French overture [Var. XVI] in Bach’s Goldberg Variations connotes ‘sublime confidence’ or ‘deep despair’ is easy because the semantic fields of those expressions are so completely separate. One seems coincident with the music—and the other, far from it!”
  —  Joseph Swain, p. 55.
T  he hypothesis that syntax mediates tension—and its corollary, that if there is no sense of tension and resolution then there is no sense of syntax—do not entail that all tension is ‘syntactic’ in origin... The tension and resolution of this passage depend more on harmonic progression and meter than on the variety of rhythmic durations and texture.”
  —  Joseph Swain, p. 32.
K onstantin Lifschitz’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 last night was staggeringly beautiful, unified in conception and spiritually cohesive all the way through the Variations to the reprise of the Aria at the end.

T he left-hand/right-hand equality of voices that Lifschitz maintains is astounding—that it is biomechanically/anatomically very difficult goes without saying, but it is conceptually/expressively exceedingly difficult as well. (The intentions of the composer—and of the performer, and, now, of ourselves—are complex and tremendously varied through the course of this work. And they must emerge in the performance as fresh and totally genuine—a factor that learning and technically mastering and memorizing the musical text threaten to a degree, as anyone who has ever memorized and performed music in recital knows well...)

I  ntentionalism [in music]... not so much a coherent philosophical position but rather a kind of ‘antidote’ to hermeneutic analytic approaches that treat musical works as ‘organic matter’—in short, like vegetables—rather than as products of thinking [,feeling] people. Ideally, this means encouraging analytic results that might please composers if they were told about them... Intentionalism is meant as a heuristic device that asks that we pose the question: What might the composer have thought about this composition and its sense? It has become common practice for musicologists to invoke the warning of the Intentional Fallacy as if it were law accepted by everyone. In fact, the entire hermeneutic tradition stands opposed to this doctrinaire apologia for New Criticism, so that merely calling the quest for intentions structuring a work of art a ‘victim’ to a fallacy does not make it so.”
  — Laurence Dreyfus, p. 171.
T he interplay between the rhythmic, metric, melodic, harmonic, and textural tensions in Goldberg variation—notably in the French overture (Var. XVI)—was fascinating. When harmonic tension predominates, it “frees-up” the melodic syntax and vice versa. The realism of the multi-line, multi-voice dialogue or story-telling is enabled and augmented by the parity/equality of the hands, each tension-generating modality taking its “turn” and providing scope and opportunity for other modalities to express things freely.

L ast night our imaginations were permitted to run, taking all the “rope” they could, until close to the end near the 70-minute mark, when we realized in retrospect that the “story” explored by Bach (and Lifschitz) through all of these Variations is our very own. We had not only understood the story; we had in a palpable, true sense ‘said’ [to ourselves] the things that Bach—and Lifschitz—had just said. The story and these thoughts had come a huge distance to find us, as if meant (intended) to be found by us.

W e were inscribed by them, but we found that we, too, were, in a real sense, inscribing/authoring the thoughts. The attentiveness, the transcendent wide-awakeness that Bach has impelled us to with these Variations: like a newly-discovered, implausibly effective form of prayer. An unforgettable performance and a really wonderful evening.

A  poem as a persisting manifestation of language—and, therefore, essentially ‘dialogue’ [that can be indefinitely-extended, with unnamed or yet-to-be-named respondents]—can be a message in a ‘bottle’: sent out in the not-always-greatly-hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it might wash up on land—on some heartland. Poems [and music] in this sense, too are ‘under way’: they are making toward something... Wirklichkeit ist nicht! Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein! [Reality is nothing apart from our individual construction of it. It must be sought and won!]”
  — Paul Celan.
I ’ve come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long it may be, ought to have basically—I was going to say ‘one tempo’ but that’s the wrong word—one ‘pulse rate’; one constant 'rhythmic reference point'. Now, obviously, there couldn’t be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely. That’s what drives me up the wall about rock and about minimalism. Anyway, I would never argue in favor of an inflexible pulse. That just destroys any music. But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it—not necessarily on a scale of two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, but often with far-less-obvious divisions—and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a subsidiary pulse for a particular movement or section of a movement... So in the case of the Goldbergs, there is in fact one pulse, which, with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications that I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.”   — Glenn Gould, 1982 radio interview with Tim Page.


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Saturday, February 11, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Ich bin’s; ich sollte zu träumen (I’m the one; it is I who should dream on this)

Konstantin Lifschitz, image ©Felix Broede
M   usical ideas are such combinations of tones, rhythms, and harmonies as to demand/inspire a thoughtful treatment like the main theses of a philosophical tract. [Any non-trivial musical idea inevitably] raises a question—sets up a problem that, in the course of the piece, has to be answered, resolved, ‘carried through’. It has to be carried through however many contradictory situations are plausible; it must be developed by deducing however many inferences there may be from what it postulates; it has to be checked—has to be proved to be true, like a mathematical theorem. And all this, if you are successful, will lead to a conclusion—a ‘pronunciamento’, a fresh new certainty—a beautiful new discovery [that speaks].”
  — Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Beauty and Logic in Music,’ unpublished manuscript.
T he quote above was one we saw in the Arnold Schönberg Center archives, when we visited Vienna a couple of months ago. I was reminded of this insight of Schoenberg’s during Bach’s complete two- and three-part Inventions (Sinfonias), performed by Konstantin Lifschitz last night. Interleaved Invention-Sinfonia-Invention-Sinfonia as they were, in ascending chromatic sequence (as opposed to chronologically; as opposed to rank-order by pedagogic difficulty in Wilhelm Friedemann’s Klavierbuchlein), the pieces led us in the audience to some new insights.

S ome inventions, performed by many at faster tempi, became intense meditations on color and timbre. Other ones, often performed with wider rubato variation, became motoric illustrations of individual conviction and duty. Consider the editorial suggestions of the Alfred or others’ modern editions; consider the ur-texts of Bach himself; but make up your own mind—find your own true story. Which is what Konstantin Lifschitz did for us so wonderfully and spontaneously last night.

T   hese inventions began as [mere] ideas, that Bach conceived [in an improvisational, impromptu manner] and wrote as teaching tools. The complexities of the three-voice Sinfonias make the two-part Inventions seem [simple] when you play them side-by-side.”
  — Cynthia Siebert, founder, Friends of Chamber Music.
I t’s a joy to hear the unfiltered account of a friend’s or lover’s dream. We feel touched and, not just ‘connected’, but also more ‘human’ for the shared experience... ‘included’, ‘alive’. We are included in the ‘action’, and we feel the curiosity and the moral duty to engage with the friend who is relating this dream to us. We sense the truth that arises from the honest synapses firing without the interpolation of an ego in the process. The purity of (absence of—) motives and the transparency count for a lot.

I   st das möglich? Denkt ihr, man kann sich wirklich mit einer musikalischen Idee durch einen Traum verlieben, bzw. kann man tatsächlich träumen, verliebt sich in die musikalische Idee zu sein? Habt ihr sowas schon mal geträumt?

[Is this possible? Do you think you can really fall in love with a musical idea in a dream, or dream you can actually love to be in the musical idea? Have you dreamed something like this before?]”
  — Milton Babbitt.
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Monday, January 23, 2012

Communion with the Audience: Encores taken from Bach’s Solo Cello Suites

Yo-Yo Ma
M    any movements from Bach’s unaccompanied string works contain implied polyphony. Although earlier approaches describe this technique as a way of using arpeggiation to embellish a melodic line, to disguise an otherwise unacceptable melodic progression, to delay the resolution of dissonance, or to create underlying voice-leading patterns, these descriptions cannot account for the variety and complexity of the implied polyphony in these pieces. ...[using analysis based on auditory stream-segregation techniques, I come to the conclusion that—] Bach did not treat implied polyphony as solely a melodic feature. He instead used implied polyphony to apply irregular accent patterns to the otherwise ‘isochronous’ surface of the music, thereby creating perceived rhythmic variety at the fastest levels of the metric hierarchy.”
  — Stacey Davis.
I n the sarabandes of Bach’s cello suites, the second beat can be risky, easy to miscalculate. If you start the bow at the frog, instead of towards the middle, you’ll run out of bow on the two-beat upbow. The planning about distribution or budgeting of the bow is critical. You must maintain the pulse on the larger beats... this is far harder to do if you’ve chosen too slow a tempo. Difficult for the cello to maintain a steady pulse because of the many stops in these movements, especially the D major sarabande!

D ouble and triple and quadruple stops: a single part expressing several voices—and the registral placement of these voices doesn’t necessarily duplicate their placement in the underlying voice-leading. Dissonant, tension-creating intervals come from octave displacements in the voice-leading; notes out of the key of the piece to invoke/allude-to/tonicize another key before returning to the home key. And the bass line is not continuous! There are gaps, suspensions, and resumptions that take an eternity to arrive. The continuity of the voices the cello is speaking is tenuous, vulnerable, intermittent, waiting to be confirmed—even if the vulnerability only lasts a few beats. So much risk!

I n the D major sarabande, keep the high C in measure 13 in your mind throughout this and the following measure. The C returns in measure 14, and must sound as if it had been held throughout both measures, like loving parent returning to worried child left briefly alone.

Y o-Yo Ma’s beautiful sarabande-as-encore: dark; warm; transparent. Cello emulates the human voice; proposes spiritual communion between people. Communes with them—as close as a single body; reaches out and touches with sound. Generously melds with the strangers; friends them; speaks as if you and they had known each other for a long time—like kin, like lovers. Remember that small actions that may be heard clearly in a small venue may not communicate to an audience in a larger auditorium. You must not worry that large actions are maybe likely to be construed as ‘false’ or ‘suspicious’ ones. Acting is believing! Honest human behavior is sometimes enormous! And so long as you conduct yourself truthfully in imagined circumstances, no matter how large your expressions, the audience will believe you.

S uch intimacy and risk-taking and bigness-of-spirit are surely the essence of a perfect encore, whether from a student or from a master! And that—a perfect encore—is precisely what we received on Saturday night...

Yo-Yo MaYo-Yo Ma
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Thursday, November 24, 2011

Seoyoung Lee/Heejung Hwang Cello-Organ Duo at St. Peterskirche in Wien

I  looked at the reading on my hiking compass: the temperature inside the church at 3:00 p.m. at the time of the concert by cellist Seoyoung Lee and organist Hee-Jung Hwang was just 10°C (50°F). Brrrr! But what surprising, atmospheric music it was. The cello voice projects perfectly in the sanctuary.


H ow large can the literature for cello-organ duo be? Not too big, but due to composers’ increasing interest in it and several important recent commissions, the repertoire is growing.

F or a space as reverberous as St. Peterskirche, it’s important to keep the tempo slow—so the echoes have a chance to fade and not muddy what comes next. The meditative quality of the setting surely supports taking things at a slower-than-usual tempo anyway.
  • David Bednall - Sonata
  • Jean-Baptiste Breal - Sonate V in G-dur
  • Gabriel Fauré - Elegie, Op. 24, Siciliennen, Op. 78
  • Wilhelm Fitzenhagen - Resignation, Op.8
  • Georg Goltermann - Andante religioso, Op.56
  • Russell Hepplewhite - Invisible Landscapes
  • Jean Huré - Air
  • Theodor Kirchner - 2 Tonstücke, Op.92 for cello and organ
  • Julius Klengel - Andante Sostenuto, Op.51
  • Gustav Merkel - Ariosa, Op.55
  • Serge Rachmaninoff - Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14
  • Camille Saint-Saens - Le Cygne
  • Timothy Salter - Vitis flexuosa
  • Oskar Wermann - Sonata for Cello and Organ, Op.58

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

REBEL Baroque with Rufus Müller: Luminous, Numinous

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Annunciation
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.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011

Composing-while-Dancing: EROI Festival, Organ Improvisation, and Embodiment

EROI
I   mprovising is difficult-] because our current educational system makes it so.”
  — William Porter, keynote talk, EROI 2011.
B   ecause learning it happens so very late [in the course of pedagogy and acquiring musical skills].”
  — Eastman student, quoted by William Porter, EROI 2011.
T he EROI festival this year is centered on the topic of improvisation and opened this afternoon with a stimulating, expansive meditation-cum-keynote-speech by William Porter, entitled ‘Why Is Improvisation So Difficult?’

I t was followed by a breathtaking, virtuosic “triple-header” 8:00 p.m. recital on the Craighead-Saunders organ for a packed-in audience at Christ Church across the street from Eastman School of Music:
  • Böhm – Praeludium in C; Herr Jesu Christ dich zu uns wend (Chorale Cycle with 6 verses); Hans Davidsson
  • Hindemith – Organ Sonata No. 1; William Porter
  • Schumann – Etuden in kanonischer Form für Orgel oder Pedalklavier, Op. 56; David Higgs
  • Liszt – Präludium und Fuge über den Nahmen B-A-C-H; David Higgs
U p to the mid-18th Century, improvisation was a fundamental skill in which most if not all practicing musicians were adept. Since that time, however, fewer and fewer musicians have felt fluent at improvising extemporaneously.

EROIP orter catalogued the concepts and situations that he believes lead many musicians today to find improvising difficult. He averred that because genres and idioms are today so tremendously diverse, it is difficult to teach improvisation as ‘compositional performance’ insofar as it is not humanly possible for one person to be fully fluent in what constitutes improvisation in more than a few genres/idioms. It was far easier when the prevailing idioms/use-cases/purposes of the music were few in number and the contexts for the improvisation (e.g., liturgical/sacred music) were more structured.

F oremost among the reasons why improvisation has become ‘hard,’ Porter says, is that counterpoint, voice-leading, and harmony are in recent decades taught in ‘classroom’ settings, primarily as paper-based exercises in writing, instead of as practical performance on a keyboard instrument (or any other instrument, including voice). Student musicians only rarely these days develop any ‘muscle memory’ for improvisation per se, so that the body—the fingers, the hands, the diaphragm, the whole body—knows how to execute improvisation as a sort of ‘compositional performance’. Porter exhorted the teachers in the audience to amend the curriculum to impart such kinesthetic knowledge to students, and to do it from their earliest days when they are kids, just beginners, much in the manner that would be done with dancers or other kinds of athletes.

S ome book links are gathered below, for your interest, in the spirit of Porter’s remarks about embodiment, kinesthetics, and corporality in improvisation. Especially noteworthy is Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s new two-volume treatise ‘Bach and the Art of Improvisation’ (link below).

W hat a fantastic EROI Festival this will be, crafting the future of organ improvisation and improvisation pedagogy!
W   e must kill the twin demons of ‘originality’/‘novelty’ and ‘imitation’: these ultimately lead to paralysis and inhibit improvisation. Instead, we must teach the student how to be compelling, how to be convincing. It is better to be ‘interesting’ than to be original. The integrity of saying something with conviction, and of being spontaneously responsive to other musicians and to the audience—is what we really mean by ‘improvisation’. We must teach them to prepare—to prepare to take advantage of the unexpected when it happens.”
  —  William Porter, keynote talk, EROI 2011.
EROI



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