"Shall I program wonderful, known, popular works, or something unknown that I think my audience will love?" While musicians may have asked this of themselves at any point over the last few centuries, I imagine that the question has never been as pertinent as it is now. Audiences have access to more music, both famous and obscure, than they ever did before, and -- thanks to digitized archives from around the world -- performers are able to rediscover entire libraries of unknown works without even leaving their homes. But, in fact, our focus on what the audience will hear, and what music the audience will or won't know, may actually mask another, equally important difference between (some of) the popular and obscure repertoires.
Specifically, it strikes me that much of today's known, popular early-music repertoire consists of works written by the composer for other people, while a lot (though not all) of the still-unknown music was written by composers for themselves. Of course, this isn't always the case, but the correlation seems pretty consistent: sonatas by Handel, Bach, and Telemann, still the most-frequently-played baroque violin works, were either written for other violinists or for publication. At the other extreme, a violinist-composer like Johann Georg Pisendel published nothing during his lifetime, and composed primarily for his personal use. As one might expect, his surviving manuscript works are quirky and idiosyncratic, designed to suit his own styles rather than those of anonymous consumers.
Aside from the obvious pleasures of reconstructing obscure repertoire, one of the wonderful things about practicing the music of Pisendel is that it offers us a tantalizing glimpse into the mechanics of his hands and mind. Spend enough time with his unique, recurring technical demands, and you begin to feel what sorts of things he was good at, and what he liked to do on the violin. He quickly becomes a living, breathing, violin-playing personality. In Pisendel's case, this musico-physical understanding is particularly enticing: as a student of Westhoff, Pisendel was firmly rooted in the 17th-century polyphonic violin traditions; at the same time, however, he influenced countless composers of his own generation, and was the recipient of dedications by Albinoni, Bach, Tartini, Telemann, and Vivaldi. And, most useful for my current purposes: his violin sonatas are extremely challenging. (Although some performers might find Pisendel's technical demands gratuitous, there's no better way to get an idea of his abilities than to try to learn his hardest music.)
Technique was so central to Pisendel's craft that it sometimes seems each of his sonatas is "about" a different technical challenge, as though he thought first of whatever technique he wanted to showcase, and then structured the music around it. The C-minor sonata (come back for the second Bach Explored concert, in January!) is all about thirds high up on the D and A strings; the unaccompanied sonata is all about contrary-motion double stops; the D-major sonata, on my music stand for early next month, is all about micro-sequences in which a single hand-shape moves up the fingerboard in small increments. This isn't exactly like the standard baroque practice of writing a melody and then repeating it sequentially; this happens on a tiny scale, perhaps five or six times within a single phrase.
He uses this technique all over the sonata, but its most vivid manifestation comes during the last movement's cadenza: the performer strikes an exceedingly awkward left-hand pose and then takes it on a stepwise tour up and down the fingerboard:
In Pisendel's hands (as it were), mere mechanics can thus take on real musical importance.
If he was indeed the violinist for whom Bach wrote the Sonatas and Partitas, as popular legend holds, then it's tempting to view a passage like this -- from the C-major fugue -- as having been designed with Pisendel in mind. Note the similar incremental rise and fall:
Of course, in the pre-chinrest era, everybody was shifting in steps. Pisendel may have inspired parts of the C-major fugue, but ultimately we have no idea what was actually on Bach's mind when he came up with the above passage. Still, aside from the Sonatas and Partitas, in only one other violin work is Bach so obsessively sequential on such a small scale -- and, in this case, the manuscript (of BWV 1023) survives in Pisendel's own collection, so we can be quite sure that he played it. One particularly sequential passage in the first movement hardly requires any left-hand finger adjustment -- just Pisendel-style micro shifts:
After becoming acquainted with all of Pisendel's violin sonatas, however, one begins to wonder whether he would have been very good at the rather sophisticated bowing technique required for this passage. If we can judge by his surviving works (can we?), his brilliant left-hand technique far outstripped that of his bow arm…but that's a musing for a different post.
Specifically, it strikes me that much of today's known, popular early-music repertoire consists of works written by the composer for other people, while a lot (though not all) of the still-unknown music was written by composers for themselves. Of course, this isn't always the case, but the correlation seems pretty consistent: sonatas by Handel, Bach, and Telemann, still the most-frequently-played baroque violin works, were either written for other violinists or for publication. At the other extreme, a violinist-composer like Johann Georg Pisendel published nothing during his lifetime, and composed primarily for his personal use. As one might expect, his surviving manuscript works are quirky and idiosyncratic, designed to suit his own styles rather than those of anonymous consumers.
Aside from the obvious pleasures of reconstructing obscure repertoire, one of the wonderful things about practicing the music of Pisendel is that it offers us a tantalizing glimpse into the mechanics of his hands and mind. Spend enough time with his unique, recurring technical demands, and you begin to feel what sorts of things he was good at, and what he liked to do on the violin. He quickly becomes a living, breathing, violin-playing personality. In Pisendel's case, this musico-physical understanding is particularly enticing: as a student of Westhoff, Pisendel was firmly rooted in the 17th-century polyphonic violin traditions; at the same time, however, he influenced countless composers of his own generation, and was the recipient of dedications by Albinoni, Bach, Tartini, Telemann, and Vivaldi. And, most useful for my current purposes: his violin sonatas are extremely challenging. (Although some performers might find Pisendel's technical demands gratuitous, there's no better way to get an idea of his abilities than to try to learn his hardest music.)
Technique was so central to Pisendel's craft that it sometimes seems each of his sonatas is "about" a different technical challenge, as though he thought first of whatever technique he wanted to showcase, and then structured the music around it. The C-minor sonata (come back for the second Bach Explored concert, in January!) is all about thirds high up on the D and A strings; the unaccompanied sonata is all about contrary-motion double stops; the D-major sonata, on my music stand for early next month, is all about micro-sequences in which a single hand-shape moves up the fingerboard in small increments. This isn't exactly like the standard baroque practice of writing a melody and then repeating it sequentially; this happens on a tiny scale, perhaps five or six times within a single phrase.
He uses this technique all over the sonata, but its most vivid manifestation comes during the last movement's cadenza: the performer strikes an exceedingly awkward left-hand pose and then takes it on a stepwise tour up and down the fingerboard:
In Pisendel's hands (as it were), mere mechanics can thus take on real musical importance.
If he was indeed the violinist for whom Bach wrote the Sonatas and Partitas, as popular legend holds, then it's tempting to view a passage like this -- from the C-major fugue -- as having been designed with Pisendel in mind. Note the similar incremental rise and fall:
Of course, in the pre-chinrest era, everybody was shifting in steps. Pisendel may have inspired parts of the C-major fugue, but ultimately we have no idea what was actually on Bach's mind when he came up with the above passage. Still, aside from the Sonatas and Partitas, in only one other violin work is Bach so obsessively sequential on such a small scale -- and, in this case, the manuscript (of BWV 1023) survives in Pisendel's own collection, so we can be quite sure that he played it. One particularly sequential passage in the first movement hardly requires any left-hand finger adjustment -- just Pisendel-style micro shifts:
After becoming acquainted with all of Pisendel's violin sonatas, however, one begins to wonder whether he would have been very good at the rather sophisticated bowing technique required for this passage. If we can judge by his surviving works (can we?), his brilliant left-hand technique far outstripped that of his bow arm…but that's a musing for a different post.
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