jwilzewske: fan fiction

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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Trio Hantaï and Marin Marais: Intimate Character Pieces and Politics of Melancholy

M arais’s third book of ‘Pièces de Viole’ (the source of this afternoon’s work) came out in 1711 [when Marais was 55 years old], two years after he withdrew from his operatic career after the failure of his fourth opera, ‘Sémélé’. The suite in C minor from this book begins with a deeply tragic Prélude, which is followed by a vigorous Fantaisie with a brilliant and virtuosic variation or double.”
— Robert Mealy, Program Notes, BEMF, 2009.

T he suites [of Marais] are more loosely organized than those by Couperin. The policy of mixing the ‘difficult’ with the ‘easy’ is discreetly expressed by Marais in his ‘Avertissement’ to Pieces de Viol (I): ‘And because simple melodies meet the tast of a lot of people, I have composed some pieces with this in mind, where chords scarcely enter. One will find others where I have used them more, and several which are entirely filled with them for those who love harmony...’ Marais differs markedly from Couperin in that he made little conscious effort to achieve anything resembling goûts réunis [conforming to prevailing/popular taste]. This is not surprising, since the music itself is so wedded to the [viol] and so bound to the tradition of virtuoso solo performance... Some of Marais’s expressive and quasi-improvisatory preludes, especially those from Book (2), seem indebted to the lute repertory in particular. The same ornaments, the same melodic turns and the same rhythms are found.”
— James Anthony, French Baroque Music, p. 389.

T he Trio Hantaï performance at BEMF yesterday was especially intimate—exerting a wide range of forces on our emotions. The Jordan Hall (New England Conservatory) venue was a bit large for the trio. But, on the other hand, the acoustics of the large hall only served to accentuate the intimacy of the Trio’s playing. It felt as though they were playing in a private home, so great was the person-to-person, player-to-audience expressiveness of each of the three Hantaï brothers.

T he Marin Marais piece especially captured my imagination—the profound sadness of it. A number of us in the audience had damp eyes—signaling an affective resonance with what we were hearing. We thought of the trials that Marais had been experiencing 300 years ago—not about three Hantai ‘talking-heads’ discoursing about Marais, but instead projecting ourselves into Marais’s actual historical, political situation.We remained intensely ‘present’, not displaced to the margins of what was represented by the Hantaïs’ playing. The signs of this affective state—these tears—were real tears of mourning, just like the ones we cry for, say, Anna Karenina, or other fictive characters.

A n affect is never a purely psychological thing, nor a purely somatic one.”
— Joyce McDougall, The Many Faces of Eros, p. 157.

I n other words, it was French Baroque stage recreated in Boston, complete with ceremonies where our passions were called into being—by the sacrifices exacted by a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Marais evoked our own [post-modern] subjectivity, from the distance of the 17^th/early-18^th Century. In short, I loved it.

A t age 20, Marin Marais married Catherine d’Amicourt (on 21-SEP-1676), and they had 19 children together [?!]. He studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully and bass viol/da gamba with Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. Subsequently, he wrote his five remarkable books of ‘Pièces de viole’ (1686-1725), a life’s work that covers the gamut of court preferences and personal emotions. But not a great amount of historical detail or correspondence or other evidence has been preserved, through which we might know very much about Marais’s life. The Milliot – de la Gorce biography from about 20 years ago is good so far as it goes, but it is frustrating in that it is unable to go as far as one might wish. For example, were these ‘Pièces en ut mineur’ (Prélude — Fantaisie — Allemande — Sarabande grave — Gigue — Rondeau) a personal statement or instead an oblique commentary on political developments in France in about 1711?

D uring the so-called ‘Age of Melancholy’, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes and preventions of political disorder, on both specific and abstract levels. Thus, at one and the same moment, a writer could write about melancholy to discuss specific and ongoing political crises and to explore more generally the principles which generate political conflicts in the first place.”
— Adam Kitzes, Politics of Melancholy.

T he other music by Leclair, Rameau, Couperin, and J. S. Bach was excellent, too; I don’t mean to diminish it by commenting only on the Marais. The wit, imagination, and virtuosity of the Hantaïs’ playing were superb throughout. Jérôme, still bowing to the audience’s applause, rises and sees that Pierre and Marc have already left the stage a few seconds earlier. He shrugs to the audience, gives a comical “Well, you two are at liberty to exit, then” gesture, dangling his viol out toward the gaping stage door through which they had passed. He smiles and good-naturedly exits himself. The Hantaï brothers are masters of absolutely every Baroque gesture that exists, and not only the musical gestures!

Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord
Jérôme Hantaï, viola da gamba
Marc Hantaï, Baroque flute

Marin Marais page at Wikipedia
Mealy R. Program Notes. BEMF, 2009. [100KB pdf]
'Music and Emotion' bibliography at Ohio State Univ
Intl Conf on Music and Emotion, 31-AUG - 03-SEP, Durham Univ, U.K.
Max Planck Institut for Cognitive & Brain Sciences
Anthony J. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau. Amadeus, 2003.
Bowles G. Thematic Catalog of the Works of Marin Marais. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
Hsu J. Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique. Liss, 1982.
Kitzes A. The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton. Routledge, 2006.
Koelsch S, et al. A cardiac signature of emotionality. Eur J Neurosci 2007; 26:3328-38.
Li T, Ogihara M. Detecting emotion in music. ISMIR, 2003.
McDougall J. The Many Faces of Eros. Norton, 1995.
McDowell B. Marais & Forqueray: A Historical and Analytical Study of their Music for Solo Basse de Viole. PhD Dissertation, Columbia Univ, 1974.
Milliot S, de la Gorce J. Marin Marais. Fayard, 1991.
Petrides K, Niven L, Mouskounti T. Emotional intelligence of ballet dancers and musicians. Psicothema. 2006;18 Suppl:101-7.
Radden J, ed. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford Univ, 2002.
Sadie J. The Bass Viol in French Baroque Chamber Music. UMI, 1980.
Sloboda J, Steinbeis N, Koelsch S. The role of harmonic expectancy violations in musical emotions: evidence from subjective, physiological, and neural responses. J Cogn Neurosci. 2006;18:1380-93.
Teplow D. Performance Practice and Technique in Marin Marais’ ‘Pieces de Viole’. UMI, 1986.
Thompson C. Marin Marais’s ‘Pieces de Viole’. Musical Quarterly 1960; 46:482-99.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Fontijn’s ‘Desperate Measures’: Confabulating a Plausible Bembo

It may come as something of a surprise to learn that at least four of the Venetian students of Francesco Cavalli were women: the singer-composer Barbara Strozzi; Betta Mocenigo; Fiorenza Grimani; and the young singer Antonia Padoani.”

— Claire Fontijn

CMT: It’s a popular thing in publishing and in movies these days: fan fiction, speculative extension of what’s known. Star Trek’s James T. Kirk when he was at the Academy, in a way that Roddenberry would never have conceived. Taking liberties with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The wildly speculative Da Vinci Code. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, extended ad infinitum; episodes addressed to a seemingly endless demand.

DSM: The sequel-prequel approach is natural, I suppose—for authors and for publishers and marketers. You have a ‘brand’ or ‘franchise’—a ready-made, existing market; people already familiar with the subjects and themes; who find them appealing; who identify with them, and who buy them—and you just continue it.

CMT: The last ten years has seen an explosion of this because of the Web. Anybody who wants to write fan fiction can now do it, with almost zero investment other than their time. And, increasingly, some originators of the intellectual property are relinquishing certain rights to their characters or works—at least in idioms that they themselves do not intend to pursue. That was the subject of one of the pieces on the NPR Morning Edition program this morning . . .

DSM: It’s surprising, though, to see instances of this when the phenomenon touches some of the more arcane dimensions of classical music and early music. We are not astonished to see a film like Amadeus appear, but would we be astonished to see Claire Fontijn’s biography of Antonia Padoani Bembo made into a feature film?

CMT: Well, it would be exotic, I admit. But Fontijn’s book and the accompanying CD are juicy. Bembo was a larger-than-life figure. She was blocked by the church from divorcing her abusive husband and fled from Venice to Paris, where she worked as a composer at the court of Louis XIV. There are a number of aspects that would resonate with feminists in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. ‘Desperate Measures’ is bona fide biography—fastidiously respecting historical details and the preserved correspondence of Antonia Padoani Bembo; all the extant details—as befits Fontijn’s role as Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Music at Wellesley College in Boston. But the book is a page-turner! It reads like an A.S. Byatt book. I can see that ‘Desperate Measures’ could readily be turned into a successful screenplay. This book is not the mere publication of Fontijn’s 1994 doctoral thesis!

DSM: Antonia Padoani Bembo fled the abusive situation and had to leave her children in Venice, is that right? Her rapport with Louis XIV, according to Fontijn, caused Louis XIV to change his views of women generally—not just women as composers, but women as equals of men in all respects?

CMT: She lived with Louis XIV’s sponsorship in a flat near the church of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle. But her situation was still precarious and highly dependent upon Louis XIV—both financially and socially. So don’t get carried away with your notions of ‘equal’ or Louis XIV’s progressiveness. Bembo continued to worry about people revealing where she lived. The scanty correspondence that Bembo left gives us few factual clues as to why this concern persisted, years after her departure from Venice.

DSM: But there is no evidence of paranoia or other psychiatric issues. ‘Desperate Measures’ is perfect—very Byatt-like in its portraying the backstory of Fontijn’s own sleuthing to deduce the motives and causes behind Bembo’s life!

CMT: So Fontijn takes her thesis and wants to write a story, wants to make it accessible to a large audience. Perhaps more to the point, she gets further and further into researching Antonia and discovers a story so rich and multi-faceted that it’s just begging for her to write it. It’s been nibbling at her ankles for ten years now, keeping her up at night with promises of great literature yet to be, and distracting her when she has all sorts of other commitments at Wellesley and with La Donna Musicale and other groups she performs with. She already knows the characters—Louis XIV and many others of them are canon. She embellishes with a few of her own, given that they’ve probably been talking in her head since she began her doctoral program. And she’s got a Creativity Demon. Good for her! The story has legs! It practically writes itself!

DSM: So she writes it down. Fontijn writes what she knows about Bembo’s story, and she writes the way that works for her. She writes best when she does each scene in order, rather than skipping ahead and back and forth—although the Byattish historian in Fontijn does do some chapters that provide character background and context. Some of my writing friends work well when they write the dialogue first, then go back and add descriptions. Some people write the last paragraph or last page, then go to the beginning and see if they get to that point. Some people—my friend Teresa, for example, writes an outline and religiously works from that.

CMT: Plots are very important to this process, and that is something that Fontijn does very well. It must amaze her editor at Oxford University Press! While you can write an academic monograph without a plot (PWP = Plot? What Plot?), if you’re addressing a broad audience and you aspire to selling a screenplay, then you probably want to start with a good plot! In fact, that’s probably the nature of Fontijn’s Creativity Demon: a plot that just won’t go away.

DSM: Or maybe she just had a scenario. What’s the difference? A scenario is “Bembo, displaced from her kids, composes her heart out.” A plot is, “Bembo goes to Paris where she is transformed into a prominent social and political figure, threatening in many ways to elements of the Ancien Regime, and has to adjust to her new lifestyle in the middle of negotiating a trade agreement.” Maybe ten years ago she couldn't tell someone else what the rising and falling action is, or what the goal is that the character Antonia Bembo is seeking. But incubate it awhile! Maybe Fontijn needed to take ten years before she could figure it out for herself.

CMT: No, I think that, given Fontijn’s careful scholarly publications and journal articles, she clearly knew what she had from the start. But what did it mean to her, in 2001, when her story was already over 1 megabyte of juicy story and still wasn’t anywhere near finished? Well, she clearly wasn’t spending too much time going over the same ground. And she wasn’t struggling to stitch fragments together. She realized that this wasn’t just a static ‘plight of baroque woman’ scenario! She had an honest-to-god Plot! She had Antonia and Louis. Are they spending a lot of time thinking long paragraphs about their feelings for each other? She breaks away from the lead characters for a bit and works on a subplot. No, not just one! A second, a third, a fourth plot, related to the main plot. All of these plots may come together at the end (in many good stories, they do, and in many, they remain separate like in real life).

DSM: And in fact this helps to focus her main plot once she’s distanced herself, even if just for a scene or two. Claire Fontijn teaches courses on Early Music, Opera, Women Composers, and German Lieder. She has appeared as a singer and baroque flutist with La Donna Musicale of Boston, the Washington DC Bach Consort, and Le Concert Spirituel of Paris, among other ensembles. Her students must count themselves very lucky!

D esperate Measures stands midway between scholarly work and novel—with the rigor of the former and the readability of the latter.”

— Giovanni Zanovello, Padua, Italy