jwilzewske: koopman

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ton Koopman: C.P.E. Bach, Improvisation, and a License to Imagine

T he very difficulty of this music could be seen as a mark both of its sublimity and of its visionary modernity.”
— Annette Richards, p. 153.

T o better understand ... conventional form not only drives perception and expectation, it promotes coherence. ... C.P.E. Bach could play with the audience’s expectations to heighten their sense of drama. ... C.P.E. Bach’s affective musical discourses involved many contrasting rhetorical materials such as exclamation, interjection, suspension, interruption, affirmation, and negation. Through the dramatic use of these semiotic guides, situating them within the framework of the rhetorical model, as well as associating these ideas with congruent key affects, C.P.E. Bach produced organized, coherent, musical arguments that were imbued with content and effected communication.”
— Damian Espinosa, MTO 10(3), 2004.

T he SPCO’s performance last Sunday with Ton Koopman and his wife, Tini Mathot, was an inspired tour de force.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Concerto in F for Two Harpsichords, Wq. 46
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in G, Wq. 183, No. 4.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sinfonia in D, Wq. 183, No. 1.
Johann Sebastian Bach - Sinfonia from Cantata No. 42.
Georg Philipp Telemann - Tafelmusik III Suite

C hoices of tempi and pauses in the C.P.E. Bach Wq. 183 Sinfonias stylistic narrative were dramatic but not extreme. These are all highly melodic works that require great sensitivity to the lyrical contours and cues regarding expressions’ prominence, and the SPCO and Koopman rendered these with beautiful mastery.

Y es, the accompaniment’s “single lines, stabbing chords and pauses avoid covering up the delicate harpsichord sonorities” [Aaron Grad, program notes]. But, far more significant, the extemporaneous pauses—and interrupting the rhythmically cohesive fast movements with fantasy-like slow movements—impart an exuberant, expansive, improvisatory quality to each of these pieces—aided and abetted by Koopman’s enthusiastic conducting. This seems to grant us permission to apply looser, improvisatory paradigms to our listening. The ‘Allegro assai-Andante-Presto’ and ‘Allegro di molto-Largo-Presto’ best characterize how we feel the movements’ form and intent, reminiscent of ‘extroversive semiosis’ which involves the progress of variations in communicating meaning (Agawu 1991, see link below).

M oreover, some physical correlates of ‘prominence’ are duration, pitch movement, loudness, and timbre contrast (see Patel, p. 118). The loudness changes and timbral changes that occur with ‘releases’—with the decay and reverberation of the notes that the players have just released—are correlates that C.P.E. Bach uses to great advantage in these pieces. There are back-beat emphases in the Allegro assai in Wq. 183 No. 4 that are strong correlates of ‘prominence’ as well.

T he Concerto in F for two harpsichords Wq. 46 is likewise comprised of three movements, ‘Allegro-Largo-Allegro assai’, the same fast-slow-fast pattern of the Sinfonias. The harpsichord parts require phenomenal technical virtuosity, with really fast passages in the outer movements. Koopman’s and Mathot’s execution of these was flawless and successfully communicated to the audience in the acoustically-excellent, modest-sized 1,100-seat Ted Mann Concert Hall on the University of Minnesota’s main campus West Bank.

C .P.E.’s dramatic and rhetorical devices include some features that, to me, resemble ‘time compression’ or ‘time focusing’ in laser systems—the interaction between an amplifier and a saturable nonlinear absorber results in pulse compression and intensification of harmonics in lasers (see Akhmanov Fig. 1-3, reproduced below). For example, the triplet figures (and 3x2 sextuplets) in the Allegro and Presto movements of the Sinfonias played against and coherently sync-ed with notes of longer duration yield a steeper pulse—a sonic contour with steeper loudness waveform—in much the same way as would be the case in a laser system. (I have no idea whether others have considered this before, but I swear it would be a common and natural reverie for any optical engineer or laser designer attending a Ton Koopman interpretation of C.P.E. Bach to have. Seldom confessed out-loud, this sort of conniption and trans-discipline serendipity is contributory to why we engineers and scientists love attending live chamber music performances.)

M y delight and wonderment at these features make me entirely ready to believe that C.P.E.’s writing anticipated modernity and postmodernity by 200 or 250 years—anticipated not only laser physics but, gee, flexible, disintermediated capitalism of mobile rather than fixed capital; anticipated the victory of agility over power, of transnationalism over nationalism, of instantaneity over duration, of software over hardware, of services over products, of consumption over production; anticipated the supremacy of Now over the Past or the Future. Maybe even a Tardis. So dramatic and radical are these C.P.E. Bach pieces that all sorts of things seem plausible.

D oes [Emanuel] Bach stand between the times? [Baroque and Classical] No, he is his own time.”
— Ludger Rémy, harpsichord, liner notes to C.P.E. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos Wq. 30, 37, & 38, CPO, 1995, p. 18.

T hese C.P.E Bach pieces—so vivid and dramatic as they are when interpreted by Koopman—also remind me of the ‘unmediatedness’ of photographs—so ‘unproblematic’ for modernists insofar as the photographer’s intent, the photograph, and the viewer’s experience of the photograph are assumed to cohere with each other, the meaning is assumed to be self-evident, and “unlike other cultural texts, even the simplest among us can read a photograph” [Lutz & Collins 1993; p. 28]. C.P.E.’s Sinfonias as acoustic holograms?

I n short, SPCO and Koopman and Mathot succeeded in diverting and inspiring us, in ways that we had no reason to expect or hope for. We came; we listened; we innovated—and went home very, very happy.

N ote/Update, 03-MAR-2011. Some readers emailed me to say that I must be joking, when I suggested the bit about acoustical lasers above. But no! I was entirely serious! Can chamber orchestras performing in chambers “lase” acoustically? Yes! I witnessed it in U of M Ted Mann Hall last Sunday. Ton Koopman and SPCO acoustically lased in the frequency range 0.1 Hz to 10 Hz... several decades lower than test-tube thermoacoustic lasers (see videos, links below). To have composed these peculiar pieces in the way he did, C.P.E. Bach almost certainly grasped this, even if he didn’t have a word like ‘lase’ to name what he was doing. The repetition of it in the Sinfonias is too ‘deliberate’, I think, for Bach to not have known what he was doing! The acoustic laser action is not stable, on account of the irregular shape of the chamber and the varied reflections/absorptions from the Ted Mann Hall’s walls and ceiling and surfaces below. Indeed, the intermittency/instability of the effect adds tremendously to the drama and emotional impact of the pieces. And the lasing is supported not at one frequency only but intermittently at several, also owing to the irregular shape of the enclosure. Chamber orchestra = polychromatic acoustic laser! Listen harder! You will hear it, too!

YouTube video #1
YouTube video #2
YouTube video #3
YouTube video #4

Some things to read, about acoustic lasers:
Item #1
Item #2
Item #3
Item #4
Item #5

What a novel compositional device, C.P.E.! Make the chamber ensemble ‘lase’!

T he Enlightenment exemplified intellectual changes of early modern time-space compression, including the Copernican revolution and perspectival painting. These changes were important moments in the scalar jump from the city-state to the nation-state, the most important social and political unit of the modern era, homogenizing local cutures and economies...”
— Barney Warf, p. 12.

N ever in history has distance meant less... Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and then dispose of them.”
— Alvin Toffler, p. 75.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Koopman’s Sacred Canopy: An Abcediary of Baroque Spiritual Excitement

O ne mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self—it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited... The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced. They are these:
A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner versions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.
A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.
An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down.
A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards "yes, yes," and away from "no," where the claims of the non-ego are concerned. These fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical consequences, as follows:
Asceticism: The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn into self-immolation. It may then so over-rule the ordinary inhibitions of the flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism, measuring and expressing as they do the degree of his loyalty to the higher power.
Strength of Soul: The sense of enlargement of life may be so uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent, become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!
Purity: The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first, increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced, and the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes imperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless severity.
Charity: The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly, increase of charity, tenderness for fellow-creatures. The ordinary motives to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among human beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats loathsome beggars as his brothers.”
— William James, 1901, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 234.

DSM: Ton Koopman’s performance yesterday in Utrecht was a dazzling, athletic tour de force. It was a veritable ‘catalogue’ of Baroque varieties of religious experience.

Buxtehude—Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 149)
Buxtehude—Nun lob, min Seel, den Herren (BuxWV 213)
Froberger—Toccata in D minor (FbWV 102)
Frescobaldi—Toccata terza
Buxtehude—Preludium in D major (BuxWV 139)
Buxtehude—Nun lob, min Seel, den Herren (BuxWV 212)
Buxtehude—Canzonetta in A minor (BuxWV 225)
Buxtehude—Kom, heiliger Geist (BuxWV 199)
Buxtehude—Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 148)
Buxtehude—Canzonetta in C major (BuxWV 167)
Bach—Praeludium in C minor
Bach—In dulci jubilo (BWV 608)
Bach—Fugue in G minor

CMT: We have, too, the fantastical rose window of the church where Koopman gave this performance. It reminds me of Rilke’s famous poem—the rose window propelling one’s heart toward God. It reminds me of Borges’s famous Book of Imaginary Beings.

DSM: The relationship of the idea of ‘journey’ to the emergence of image is difficult. In terms of their symbolism, rose windows and labyrinths are paradoxical. They are simultaneously in two categories: a ‘multicursal’ form, associated with literary and verbal and musical practice, and a ‘unicursal’ form, reflected in architecture and the visual arts. In contrast to the multicursal form, the unicursal has only one entrance point, which inevitably, though not easily, leads to the center. Unlike the multicursal model, which requires constant judgment to successfully traverse, the unicursal model demands endurance and patience—it requires determination and stamina, emphasizing judgment only in the initial decision to enter.

CMT: It evokes a winding road or a meander—maybe even a fatalistic view of life, or the reception of the literal level of a literary or musical text or philosophic argument. It signifies patience in adversity, but paradoxically also persistence in folly. The adaptation of the unicursal model to textual purposes can be seen in its combination with the wheel and the rose window in Gothic cathedrals.

DSM: This transformative effect of labyrinthine music and labyrinthine iconography is reinforced through repetition: the stonework tracery of the rose window viewed from outside the structure before we go in and hear Koopman, the labyrinths woven into the music as Koopman plays, and the rose window realized as a pattern of light when viewed from within the cathedral following the shifting sun during this performance. These repetitions create a ‘coincidentia oppositorum’ that mirrors the cathedral’s primary function in guiding the community and individual souls to the perfection of the rose. They evoke a grand, labyrinthine and uncertain wheel of fortune which governs the world of human affairs and the universe. The music plays upon the clockwork of our mind—the effect is to inspire and impel us, in directions we may desire or, alternatively, in directions some of us in the audience may prefer not to go.

CMT: The surprise—my eyes were damp several times as Koopman performed—is that such music can take hold of us and transport us, can propel us so forcefully—even in directions that we may resist. For some of us, it’s not a question of resisting—it’s more the shock or surprise at being escorted to a perception of transcendence that we have known before but have not visited recently. That is what a performance of the caliber that Koopman delivers can do. He physically takes us there, regardless whether we anticipated the journey or not.

DSM: The ‘nonconsensual’ aspect of the experience is a major part of its shock value. We make our way through the routine of most days under the illusion that we have autonomy, have power, are free to choose, are masters of our lives. The ecstatic journeys that Koopman takes us on remind us of our utter dependence on others—it is not merely a sacred or ‘Godly’, let alone ‘Christian’, notion; it is instead a powerful reminder of this profound connectedness, a reminder of our inescapable mortal frailty and diminutiveness, a reminder of this ineffable and fantastic vastness of the cosmos.

I n de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw waren ht vooral leerlingen van Jan Pietersoon Sweelinck die de Noord-Duitse klaviermuziek nieuwe implsen gaven. Later doen ook Italiaanse elementen hun intrede, zoals de ‘stylus phantasticus’. Vanmorgen volgen we de lijn die van Frescobaldi naar Bach loopt, met Dieterich Buxtehude als stralend middelpunt… Hierin verschijnt de cantus firmus als canon tussen sopraan en tenor, terwijl ook in de andere stemmen imitatie voorkomt: oude technieken worden hier door Bach zeer geraffineerd toegepast.”
— Wilmer de Jong, Program Notes, 2007, Oude Muziek Festival.

I n the first half of the seventeenth century the pupils of Jan Pietersoon Sweelinck gave particular impulse to the North-German keyboard music. Later on, Italian elements also appeared, as the ‘stylus phantasticus’. This morning we follow the line tracing Frescobaldi to Bach with Dieterich Buxtehude as radiant center… In this appeared the cantus firmus as a mutually-reinforcing ‘canon’ between the soprano and tenor voices on the organ, while in the other voices imitation and parallelism ‘prevent’ and ‘rebut’ each other: the by now old techniques are refined and applied here by Bach.”
— Wilmer de Jong, Program Notes, 2007, Oude Muziek Festival.

D a drin: das träge Treten ihrer Tatzen
macht eine Stille, die dich fast verwirrt;
und wie dann plötzlich eine von den Katzen
den Blick an ihr, der hin und wieder irrt,

gewaltsam in ihr großes Auge nimmt, -
den Blick, der, wie von eines Wirbels Kreis
ergriffen, eine kleine Weile schwimmt
und dann versinkt und nichts mehr von sich weiß,

wenn dieses Auge, welches scheinbar ruht,
sich auftut und zusammenschlägt mit Tosen
und ihn hineinreißt bis ins rote Blut -:

So griffen einstmals aus dem Dunkelsein
der Kathedralen große Fensterrosen
ein Herz und rissen es in Gott hinein.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Fensterrose, Neue Gedichte, 1907.

I n there: the lazy pacing of their paws
creates a stillness that’s almost dizzying;
and as one of the cats then suddenly
takes the gaze that watches it carelessly

and snatches it into its own great eye, -
and that gaze, as if caught in a whirlpool’s
circle, for a little while stays afloat
and then goes under and is lost to oblivion,

when this eye, which apparently rests,
opens and slams shut with a roaring
and yanks it all the way inside the blood -:

this in olden times out of the darkness
the cathedral’s great rose windows
would seize the hearts and forcibly propel them toward God.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rose Window, New Poems, 1907.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Koopman & Amsterdam Baroque: Buxtehude = Theater

H et idioom van Buxtehude vraagt een enorme creativiteit van de speler. Bij Bach kun je gewoon de nootjes spelen of het werk op een draaiorgel laten uitvoeren. Zelfs dan is het nog mooi. Buxtehude vraagt meer van de musicus. Het is heel theatrale muziek. Heel creatief, geestig en soms enorm macho. Hij kan heel deemoedig zijn in de koralen, om vervolgens in de orgelwerken weer flink uit te pakken. Al in zijn eerste periode, waarin hij nog voornamelijk in de middentoonstemming schrijft, is Buxtehude buitengewoon avontuurlijk. Hij schakelde over op de Werckmeister-stemming en dat leverde hem zowel harmonisch als melodisch een enorme vrijheid op. Hij durft het bijvoorbeeld aan om te beginnen met een lange pedaalsolo. Dat was ongehoord in die dagen. Hij was als een jazzimprovisator en de toehoorders lieten een vergelijkbaar enthousiasme horen. Mensen stonden in de kerk gewoon te klappen. Buxtehude is theater. Critici uit zijn tijd zeiden vaak dat Buxtehude geen opera hoefde te schrijven: de kerk is zijn theater.”
— Ton Koopman, interview with Paul Janssen, Tijdschrift Oude Muziek, 2007, Band 2, 23.

B uxtehude’s musical idiom demands enormous creativity from the player. In Bach, you can play the notes normally or allow the organ to do the work. Even then it is beautiful. Buxtehude asks more of the musician. It is quite theatrical music. Quite creative, lively and sometimes very ‘macho’. Buxtehude can be not quite humble in the chorale, and then ‘take it out’ in the organ part. Already in his first period, in which he writes yet mainly in a middle-tone mood, Buxtehude is extremely adventurous. He communicates with a masterwork-mood and that, for him, is a very harmonious, tuneful mode in which he exercises enormous compositional freedom. He dares to begin a piece for instance with a long pedal solo. That was outrageous in those days. Buxtehude might be heard as jazz improvisation—and the listeners had a comparable enthusiasm and personal investment in the music. People in those days routinely stood and applauded in the church. Buxtehude is theater. Critics who were Buxtehude’s contemporaries said often that Buxtehude did not need to write opera: the church was the theater of the time.”

— Ton Koopman, interview with Paul Janssen, Tijdschrift Oude Muziek, 2007, Band 2, 23.

DSM: The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are, basically, a golden age of theater. Throughout western Europe, the dramatic arts carried tremendous cultural prestige, political importance. They were also highly commercial.

CMT: The interactions between the Baroque audience members and performers were also intense and stylized. This is one of the points in Larry Norman’s book, published several years ago, and Kerala Snyder’s book, just published. The audience directly—not vicariously—participated in this popular form of social performance. The participation was a kind of ‘acting out’—a reification of the Enlightenment’s exalting of the individual. This is part of what Koopman means in his remarks during the interview with Paul Janssen. It was highly ‘active’, not ‘passive’.

DSM: Some of the aims of Buxtehude’s music—prime examples are the Cantatas in last night’s performance by the Amsterdam Baroque in Utrecht—are the shaping of space and time for the individual—the performer and the listener alike. There is a transcendental motive that directs the participant to consider her or his responsibility to regard the finiteness of human life and time’s passing—a duty to consider her/his place in the Universe. The individual in Baroque society has wonderful rights and new entitlements but with them come new duties—at least in Buxtehude’s Germany. Beautiful, inspiring Cantatas! But, still, these are cantatas for a fastidious German culture.

CMT: These Cantatas also call into question the relationship that musical and theatrical representations have to the subjects they portray. The Membra Jesu Nostris cantatas BuxWV 75 are sacred pieces, and yet they compel the performers and the audience members to examine what it is to be human, what it is for humans to regard their relationship to the Divine. Who are we to offer prayers of praise and supplication? Buxtehude is asking ‘What kind of supplicatory prayer is authentic?’

DSM: These Cantatas are not only authentic in and of themselves—they ‘ring true’ in the capable hands of Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (Miriam Meyer, soprano; Bettina Pahn, soprano; Bogna Bartosz, alto; Marco van de Klundert, tenor; Klaus Mertens, bass; Margaret Faultless, violin; David Rabinovich, violin; Jon Manson, viola da gamba; Susanne Braumann, viola da gamba; Alberto Rasi, bass viol; Michael Fentross, theorbo; Ton Koopman, organ). They also stand as exhortations to authentic conduct in all aspects of life—they assert that beauty and dignity depend on such conduct. Dialogical consonances, not just hierarchical ones. Narrative counterpoint with moral imperatives and individual free-will and consequences, not just passively-received, priestly counterpoint filled with determinism and dogma. The elegant tonal progressions and persuasive cadential ‘points’: these Cantatas function as philosophical meditations on right conduct in bourgeois secular society. In other words, they are not merely sacred ‘cantatas’—they are much more.

CMT: You mean they stand as propositions of the meaningfulness of human existence when one conducts one’s life with authenticity and earnestness. I think this is true. They’re convincing arguments against futility, absurdity, and nihilism. These are filled with emblems, symbols—you could say these Cantatas are allegorical in their rhetoric. I know that there are those who deny that music can use symbolism at all, who deny that allegory in music is even possible. To be sure, music doesn’t represent abstract concepts directly. But that doesn’t imply that allegory is impossible. The music supplies a sensual impression, and the meaning is superimposed on the impression by us. If we enter into the music at all, the meaning must be an individual, personal one—although we may be led to some degree by the composer, the artists' gestures, the program notes, other experiences and expectations, and so on. Individualism! All who participate—the performers, the audience members—turn that proposition round and round, during the time the music lasts and afterward. That’s part of the theatrical magic that Koopman and colleagues worked last night. That’s part, too, of what Koopman means regarding Buxtehude and baroque theater—theater that is intellectually deep, theater that can move minds and hearts. ‘Baroque’ as “irregular, individualistic pearl.” Bravo!

Sonata in A minor, BuxWV 254
Membra Jesu nostri, Cantatas 1 – 7, BuxWV 75
Sonata in C major, BuxWV 266