Accompanying the Beethoven Violin Sonatas

This weekend, I attended a marathon performance of all of Beethoven's violin sonatas in a single concert, organized by one of my McGill colleagues as a studio project. Each of her students (plus two participants from other violin studios) paired up with a pianist to learn and polish one of Beethoven's ten magnificent violin sonatas. Along the way, a wide range of other colleagues attended studio classes to coach the students (including a modern piano professor, our historical keyboard professor, and me, as a historical violin and musicology professor), and then, this weekend, the whole gang got together to present the cycle in public, moving chronologically from Op. 12 no. 1 all the way through Op. 96. (Studio teachers, take note! This was a fabulous experience for everyone involved.)

I love the Beethoven sonatas dearly, and I know them well, having performed the cycle a few times on period instruments. But as a performer, I've always split the sonatas into three concerts, which in turn could be separated by days or even months. I had never heard the whole cycle live in a single event--and this listening experience alone was edifying and instructive. There is the sheer creative ingenuity Beethoven exhibits across the set. It feels like each work is a fresh attempt to solve the problem of how to write for these two instruments. Not once did my attention flag. I also marveled at Beethoven's creative development across the set. Unlike his piano sonatas, symphonies, and quartets, which are spaced more evenly across his career, the violin sonatas are chronologically lumpy. He composed the first nine within about five years (c.1798-1803) but waited nearly a decade before writing the final sonata, in 1812. This, too, is remarkable. I still find it hard to believe that the first sonata and the "Kreutzer" have only half a decade between them--that an artist can undergo that much growth in such a short span of time, redefining so many formal and expressive features of the genre. And of course, it was equally uplifting to see ten different students, each a true musical individual at a singular stage of development, grappling with the composer, the music, and the instrument.

Watching this inspiring performance, I found myself reflecting on what it is that makes these sonatas so difficult. Flip through the score: there's nothing in the music that "appears" at first glance to be technically impossible--certainly nothing that even begins to approach the challenges posed by, say, Paganini's Caprices, composed 1802-1817 and thus contemporary to the last five of Beethoven's violin sonatas. And yet, despite the seemingly simple notation, these pieces are incredibly hard.

Many of the challenges Beethoven sets for us violinists in these works are expressive rather than technical. If I had to identify the single most important thing for a violinist to keep in mind while playing this music, it would be this: that we are, for much of the time, accompanying the piano. The late 18th-century violin sonata was a genre in which the piano soloist would take center stage, with the violinist often playing quiet whole notes in support; and although Beethoven does expand the role of the violinist beyond mere accompaniment, very often we are there to bolster the pianist. This is even reflected in the way Beethoven and his contemporaries referred to the genre. Although today we think of these as "sonatas for violin and piano," in the late 18th century they were known as "sonatas for piano and violin."

If you're a violinist starting to dig in to these pieces, one way to begin thinking about your role is to ask your pianist play various passages without you. Sometimes, as in the opening phrases of Sonatas 1, 3, 4, and 8, you'll see that absolutely nothing is missing, that the piece is "complete" even without the violin part. Ask yourself, then: in such cases, what exactly is your job? Why did Beethoven bother writing a violin part? One answer is that the violinist's function is to provide aural "background" so that the pianist can act like a soloist. In Sonata no. 3, for instance, the piano part alone sounds like a coherent solo sonata. Add the violin playing those half notes, though, and you suddenly have an "orchestral" background from which the pianist emerges, like a concerto soloist. (In fact, once you see it this way, isn't the opening just like the beginning of the "Emperor" Concerto?) At other times, as in Sonatas 1 and 8, the unison helps the pianist sound more orchestral. And in Sonata 4, the violinist gets to manufacture the illusion of the piano's resonance, so that the pianist is free to play a clear left hand without obscuring the eighth notes with the pedal. With the violinist's help, the pianist can have it both ways, articulating the left hand while also producing a halo of sound that supports the long slur and adds warmth.

Here's how I usually describe all this: the violinist's job in 80% of this music is to make the pianist sound better. Once you take this outlook on board, so many interpretive matters clarify themselves. Vibrato, tone color, articulation, and the like are suddenly to be used in the service of blending with the piano and creating resonance that is unavailable on that instrument alone. Try, as an exercise, having your pianist play just the left hand along with the violin part, so you can coordinate these matters: you'll find, for instance, that if you really focus on supporting the piano, you'll vibrate a lot less on those long notes than you might have otherwise. One of my favorite passages for this exercise is the theme in the slow movement of the "Spring" Sonata (no. 5). Those interjected quarter-note sighs in the first iteration of the theme, and the syncopated eighth notes and gentle sixteenth-and-eighth-note rhythm when it repeats, need to be both audible and truly in the background, supporting what the soloist does without taking attention away. When the violin plays a dissonance that is absent from the piano part (the G flat in m.35, for example), it's a moment to reclaim aural focus. And even when the task isn't to play an accompaniment "with" the pianist, you can benefit from imitating the pianist's style of executing similar figures. In the slow movement of Sonata 6, don't try to sing out every sixteenth-note triplet in the arpeggiated accompaniment passage in the second half of the movement; instead, ask your pianist to play their version of that accompaniment for you, and try to imitate the lilt so easily achieved when a keyboardist plays that figuration.

Perhaps because the violinist spends so much time accompanying, I've always felt a little strange standing in front of my pianist when I play these pieces. So I generally set up the stage with the pianist in front, while I stand behind and read over their shoulder. The very nicest way to do this is to have the pianist actually facing the audience, the end of the instrument pointed directly out, with violinist standing by the pianist's left side. This is how musicians generally set up in the late 18th century, and it works beautifully in this repertoire. It makes it easier to play in the background, since the piano is, quite literally, in front--and it carries the added benefit of allowing you to actually see the pianist's left hand and adjust your playing in response. The benefits accrue everywhere, but are especially palpable when the violin and piano left hand carry joint accompaniments. Of course, being a historical performer, I'm ok doing wacky things like radically rethinking the stage setup for this music, since I'm not contending with the weight of a modern-instrument performance tradition. But as HIP practices become increasingly mainstream, even modern players might want to experiment with this setup. (And, to their great credit, many of the McGill students did this past weekend!) It really allows both players to make these pieces into the chamber masterpieces they are, rather than putting the accompanist out front while the piano soloist, in the back, does much of the work.

Another set of ideas that can help performers find their way through this music involves understanding the gestures that make up Beethoven's expressive arsenal. I hinted briefly already at the value of thinking this way, when discussing the opening "concerto" passage of Sonata 3. Once you recognize the opening four bars as sharing some elements of the "concerto" genre, your pianist might feel emboldened to play those bars out of tempo, like the quasi-cadenzas they appear to be. This idea can be generalized as follows: always ask whether the texture of a given phrase implies some performance directives. To me, the opening of Sonata 1 looks like the start of a symphony; and this means that my job as a violinist is to help the pianist sound like a full orchestra, complete with strings, winds, trumpets, and drums. This means that I'll limit the vibrato and adopt a different tone color than I would in a more melodic setting. Sonatas 2 and 6 open with what seems more a string quartet texture, with the violinist playing either second violin or second violin + viola, and this in turn carries a different set of associations for phrasing and rhythmic feel.

Nor are Beethoven's signals purely textural. Other rhetorical or expressive gestures come in the form of rhythmic patterns that suggest various dance types, which can also offer insight into tempo and phrasing. The last movement of Sonata 2 is a minuet--so, don't play it too fast, and be sure those lovely syncopations tug against the more usual downbeat-centric hierarchy. Likewise, the second movement of Sonata 8 is a minuet--in this case, don't play it too slowly! And make sure the unslurred quarter-note upbeats to the second melody are light. Other dance-like patterns found throughout these works include gigues (last movement of Sonata 1); contredanse (last movement of Sonata 3); gavotte (last movement of Sonata 8). Other rhetorical markers, meanwhile, are broader and say something about the atmosphere of a piece. Particularly well represented in this cycle are features of the "pastoral" style (drone basses, 6/8 meter, woodwind textures), which show up in Sonatas 4, 5, 8, and 10, and may suggest a less virtuosic, and more muted and intimate style, than what you often hear in modern-instrument recordings.

Of course, despite their often simple appearance on the page, these sonatas are exceptionally difficult. But I hope this brief overview of some of their expressive features helps others find a productive point of entry into Beethoven's writing for these two instruments. Although thinking of the music in such ways does not automatically disarm the technical challenges, I've found time and again that the technical difficulties become less acute with these adjustments of mindset--that accompaniment passages become a little easier to play when we stop trying to emphasize every note, and that even the flashier phrases become more approachable when we recognize them as part of an intimate dialogue with the other performer rather than as soloistic flights that demand high-octane delivery. The dance-like movements, too, become easier when we allow the gestures to have some strong notes and some weaker notes, and when we relax our sound and arms on the lighter parts of the bars. Needless to say, these are just a few of the relevant expressive issues, and there are others as well, for instance the sense of humor that imbues these sonatas, and other kinds of expressive characters. I may revisit them in a future blog--but for now, happy practicing!

Diary of a Recording: Mozart's Violin-Viola Duos

I've been a Mozart fanatic for as long as I can remember, and his music is absolutely central to my life -- outside my career as a violinist, that is. I've conducted his operas, symphonies, and concertos; I've written a book on interpreting his instrumental works; I jump at any opportunity to coach his chamber music; I routinely try to pick my way through the solo parts of his piano concertos at home when nobody's listening...and yet for some reason I've rarely found occasion to actually perform his string music, preferring instead to engage with it as a conductor, teacher, or author. Maybe I've been just a wee bit scared of the enormous challenges, both interpretive and technical, he throws at us violinists!

But this summer, my relationship with Mozart changed. I finally gathered the courage to embark on a recording project exploring his string writing. I experimented quite a bit along the way, and I learned a lot in the process!

Where does one begin when trying to get inside Mozart's violin music? Pianists have it easier than we do, since the piano concerto served as an artistic vehicle for the entirety of Mozart's life and career, meaning that any point of entry into the repertoire is sure to yield interpretive riches. Mozart first dipped his toes into the genre of the piano concerto at age 11, with four pastiche concertos arranged from music by contemporary composers, and he wrote his last piano concerto in 1791, his own final year. This means that his piano concertos chronicle a good 25 years of his stylistic explorations. By contrast, his violin concertos are youthful pieces, all dating from his teens. They provide a snapshot of his development at a single moment, but they are not mature masterworks. And even broadening the purview to include pieces outside his official five concertos, such as the "Haffner" Serenade K.250, or the spectacular Sinfonia Concertante K.364, we remain in the early phases of Mozart's musical development. The "Haffner" dates from 1776, only a year after the A-major violin concerto, and the Sinfonia Concertante from 1779, when the composer was just 23. The music is great by any measure; yet it clusters at a single moment of his life, and it can feel limited.

Why does Mozart turn away from the violin concerto at this point in his life? It's not that he abandoned string writing altogether -- though he did announce to his father, in a letter of 7 February 1778, that he planned to stop performing publicly on the violin in order to focus his efforts on the piano and composition. And with this turn away from public performing as a violinist, his innovations with the instrument shifted away from music for the concert stage, relocating instead to the home and salon, where Mozart continued to play the violin and viola as a chamber musician. It comes as no surprise, then, that beginning in the early 1780s, the string writing in his chamber music became more daring and more complex. Thus, I elected to begin my explorations in that world -- not with the quartets or quintets, but with the two extraordinary duos for violin and viola, K.423 and K.424. I spent spring and summer of this year preparing these remarkable pieces with the intrepid Catherine Cosbey of the Cavani Quartet and McGill's violin faculty, and we took them into the recording studio in June. The other works on recording are the Violin Sonata in A major K.305 in an anonymous arrangement for two violins published around 1799, as well as selections from Mozart's final opera La Clemenza di Tito in an arrangement published around 1800. Although Catherine is primarily a modern violinist, we used a period-instrument setup. I played viola for half the recording and violin for the other half. Despite my longtime professional association with Mozart, the experience was by turns challenging and revelatory.

Perhaps the primary discovery I made during this process -- maybe it sounds obvious in hindsight, but I didn't take it for granted at the start! -- was just how good Mozart's violin-viola duos are. Of course I had played them recreationally before, but I had never actually learned them properly or interpreted them, and I was unprepared for their astonishingly high quality. Many academic discussions of the duos focus on the fact that Mozart wrote them as a favor to Michael Haydn, who was unable to finish a set of six duos and requested that Mozart provide the remaining two. In such discussions there's often an implication that Mozart tailored his duos to match the quality of Michael Haydn's less inventive efforts. But nothing could be further from the truth. I discovered, approaching the pieces this year, that there isn't a lazy phrase to be found. This is true, first of all, on the level of sheer compositional technique. Mozart's craftsmanship is always astonishing. Consider, for instance, the first movement of the G-major duo K.423, whose second theme is full of subtle wit. The melody seems unassuming enough, but look closely and you see that each zigzagging interval is one step larger than the previous one. The theme begins (m. 27) with an ascending second, followed by a descending third, ascending fourth, descending fifth, ascending sixth, and descending seventh - a fun effect in itself, since Mozart somehow manages to bring this off without warping that old standby of a chord progression, I-V-vi-IV, or undermining the tune's lyricism. After this wedge-shaped bit of melody, in m. 29 the sixths and sevenths catch on and spin out into a melodic answer in their own right, even as they continue to push lower and lower, the harmonic rhythm increasing before steering to a cadence.

So far so good. But in the recap, when the theme returns, the descending answer runs away with itself. The viola begins the gesture in m. 118. But instead of successfully bringing about a cadence, as the violin did previously, the two players get tangled up, endlessly tossing the melody back and forth and continuing to desperately transpose up so as not to crash into the bottom of their instruments' ranges. They keep this process going for so long that, if we removed the ascending leaps, the whole passage would plunge down more than four octaves. Meanwhile, as the players get lost in the tangle, chromaticism creeps in, and by the time the violist starts in on the sixteenth notes in m.121, things seem to be spiraling out of control! Yet somehow we arrive back on the necessary predominant in m.122 and come, once again, to the polite cadence a bar later.

Beyond such compositional cleverness, the duos are impressive for their expressive range. We find in them a massive store of operatic references -- there are phrases and melodies in the last movement of the G-major duo that come to feature in Don Giovanni, and throughout the B-flat duo that come to feature in Die Zauberflöte. Most of all, however, I'm struck by Mozart's textural ingenuity. Even with only two instruments at his disposal, he simulates a dizzying number of non-duo textures, from the string quartet (when both musicians play double-stops, yielding four-part writing) to horn calls, symphonic fanfares, an aria, and more. Taking this in, and considering that Mozart composed the duos in late 1783, I found myself understanding that this is where he really learned how to write for strings. By the time he wrote the two duos, he had completed only one of the mature, "celebrated" string quartets, and in the duos' immediate aftermath he would write five more in relatively rapid succession. Perhaps the burgeoning textural and instrumental ingenuity in those quartets was sparked by the creative constraints he faced here, in writing for only two instruments.

All this was on my mind while preparing the recording. But the duos, like all of Mozart's music, also present considerable interpretive challenges that performers have to face.

One of my Mozartian obsessions is musical character. It's often said that Mozart's output is fundamentally operatic, and I wholeheartedly agree. Every phrase suggests a character of some sort, and the duos are no exception, whether in the literal operatic references (for instance, Donna Elvira's aria "Mi tradì" makes a brief appearance in the last movement of the G-major duo, m. 96-97) or through more general references -- here a gesture implying the gravitas and menace of The Count, there an amorous march redolent of The Countess, elsewhere the patter of Figaro or Masetto. The question I sometimes wonder about, however, is not whether there are "characters" present in the music, but how to tell where one character ends and another begins. Do we divvy up expression at the level of the entire phrase? Of the half-phrase? Perhaps by the bar, or even the beat? I feel that this may be the most pressing challenge I face when interpreting Mozart.

In some rare cases, Mozart makes it very easy to tell where one character ends and the next begins. Consider, as an example from a different work, the familiar first movement of the G-major violin concerto, mm. 64-68. The contrast between the staccato marks and slurs, which suggests a broader expressive contrast between implied fanfares and swooping, lyrical gestures, makes it clear that the passage implies a dialogue, and that the characters shift back-and-forth by the bar. No problem there! But the situation is usually more ambiguous. How many expressive stances might we find, for instance, in this unassuming passage from the slow movement of the G-major duo K.423?

On first glance, it might seem like just one: some sort of a "singing" melody in the violin, tied together with the two rhyming downbeats of m.9 and 10, all above an unobtrusive accompaniment in the viola. But, looking more closely, each bar also carries its own expressive implications, and the whole progression tracks a series of highly distinct gestures, perhaps even a hint of dramatic narrative. The first bar shown here, m. 8, features a slinky, intense chromatic line. Indeed, when we hit G# on the downbeat of m.9, there's even a small moment of uncertainty: is it an A flat, and have we just veered into F minor? (The movement is marked Adagio, so between the slow tempo and a touch of rubato to elongate the G sharp slightly, the suspense is not negligible!) But then the note resolves up to A, and we remain safely harbored in F major. ("Phew! That was a close call!") The ascending figure later in m.9, with its delightful dotted rhythms, seems to laugh after this brief musical double entendre. ("Did someone say F minor? Not me! Hah!") The bar might be played in a way that is dainty, almost coy. And then the trill-and-scale in m.10 seems altogether more lyrical, confident, and operatic. Viewed thus, the character changes by the bar -- and this rapid succession of implied expressive states is a challenge to bring out. Both performers need to remain constantly alert for opportunities to deploy those small shifts of inflection so as to convey the whole story.

The situation is largely the same in the fast movements. In the B-flat duo first movement, the second theme runs:

Here too, it isn't obvious how many characters we should imagine. It might be just one -- another largely lyrical melodic line. But maybe the pantomime unfolds more quickly. Perhaps the upbeat (m.43) is playful, slowing down with the ascending chromatic line and hesitating ever so slightly to create another moment of suspense: something new is coming! What kind of theme will follow? In m. 44, we find out that the theme is lyrical. The arpeggiated line can swoop forward and up. The real question is about m. 45: are the trills joking, even teasing? Or do they remain lyrical? That the repetition of the theme in the subsequent phrase places the trills in both instrumental parts (m. 49) makes me think the gesture in m.45 is more delightful than lyrical, less a continuation of m. 44 than a new, interrupting idea that takes hold and humorously distracts both players away from the songlike theme that began the phrase. Then, m.46 stops the trilling delight and re-introduces melodic sincerity.

In the above examples, nothing conclusive can be said about these changes of character. They may simply be a matter of taste: how playful, how irreverent, how mercurial do you like your Mozart? Those with a high tolerance for Mozartian volatility will accept more rapid changes of character; those who prefer a more staid Mozart will find my suggestions implausible. But there's little in the music itself to adjudicate the matter. The interpretive approach I find useful in such cases, and one I explore at greater length in the final chapter of my book, is to really focus on what specific expectations are plausible at each individual musical moment. To do this, I imagine that I am, truly, encountering the piece for the first time. This isn't a cliché -- it suggests a very specific stance, one that lives in the moment and ignores our knowledge about how each phrase will actually unfold. In the case of the K.423 slow movement, with that G-sharp discussed above, the very idea that we should pretend it "might be an A flat" relies on this outlook. Sure, in some sense we know that the G sharp is, in fact, a G sharp, that it will resolve up to A, and that the F major chord will continue through the bar. But if we pretend just for a moment that we don't know that, then a whole new interpretive mindset presents itself. The viola accompaniment doesn't make it clear whether the chord is major or minor. We can easily try to imagine that the note might in fact be an A flat, and that it will move down to F and set off a soaring, dark F minor arpeggio. The entire notion that the phrase is somehow dangerous, that the character might have to change by the bar, follows irresistibly when we begin to think of music in this way, adopting a stance of make-believe ignorance, responding to each successive moment on its own terms and pretending that the interpretation isn't premeditated. Applying this approach to Mozart often leads to readings that are alert, dramatic, even wild. We are able to hear, and thus to play, each piece as though it is, in fact, unfolding in real time from a series of compositional decisions. Asking at every opportunity what Mozart "might have done" differently and comparing the options, can spark a more complex and nuanced way of approaching the issue both of character and of character-shift.

In other cases, meanwhile, the question of how quickly expressive states shift is moot: it might be clear that one character persists over a long stretch of music. Even in those cases, however, identifying a phrase's expressive world is not always a simple matter. For me, playing viola in K.424, I faced this challenge most directly in the slow movement. The violinist doesn't need to entertain any doubt: Mozart marks the movement "cantabile" and spins out one of his most operatic melodies:

For the violist, however, the nature of the phrase is far less obvious! What kind of accompaniment is this? Preparing for our recording, we experimented with a range of options. The usual approach, and the first we tried, is to play the accompaniment fully legato, in the style of a wind serenade -- as if scored for basset horns and bassoons. We also experimented with bowings, trying both linked and unlinked versions of the quarter-eighth rhythm. Then we explored a totally different conception of the piece, playing the viola part very staccato (except when there are slurs), and imagining the accompaniment as if scored for a strummed instrument like guitar or lute. I even tried it pizzicato once or twice! We tried, too, a middle-of-the-road version -- what I thought of as staccato with a dab of "fake reverb". For the recording, we ultimately settled on doing it mostly staccato: not actually plucked, but light and short enough that it would sound song-like. But, even though that's how we recorded it, it's clear that the choice might be wrong. The piece remains elusive, and I have no doubt that when I next perform it, I'll feel differently about the articulation and, by extension, the expressive nature of the movement.

Although in this particular case I don't feel that I personally hit on the one "right" answer, there's a more general principle at work. One of the fundamental goals I always pursue when interpreting Mozart is to be alert to possibilities for simulating the sounds and styles of other instruments. Sure, I'm actually playing the violin or viola (or talking to a member of an orchestra, as the case may be); but often Mozart writes music that seems ventriloquistic, where one instrument is meant to embody the timbre or attitude of another. This is the thought behind my deliberations on the slow movement of K.424 and the question of basset-horn vs. guitar. In addition to that example, there are plenty of other phrases in the duos where such antics take place: at times, for instance, the viola part approximates a horn call (K.423 last movement, mm. 34-39), and perhaps this means that the violin during this phrase is really meant to feel a bit like an oboe -- boisterous and reedy. Elsewhere, including much of the first movement of K.424, it feels like both instruments are referencing a wind serenade. And needless to say, this idea applies across Mozart's output, far beyond the duos. In the string chamber repertoire alone, we find countless horn calls (famously at the outset of the E-flat major string quintet), and the same might be said of the concertos -- consider the G-major concerto, where in the first movement (mm. 76-77) the soloist joins a melody previously played by the winds. But these questions struck me as being particularly acute in the context of the duos, where the instrumental forces are uniquely limited. In the concerto, the soloist plays with the winds but is not necessarily ventriloquizing a wind line, whereas in the duos there is a much more visceral approximation of a wide variety of instrumental writing, and thus a relentless challenge to the performers to adopt the right kind of "voice" for each phrase.

One final realm of experimentation in this recording was embellishment. This, too, has been central to my Mozartian explorations in the past -- I write about it in Chapter 4 of my book, as well as in this open-access article. Although we know that Mozart himself was a habitual ornamenter, and he expected his contemporaries to creatively intervene in his works by adding extensive embellishments, many string players have been slow to take up the challenge. Period-instrument pianists are generally more willing -- Robert Levin's complete cycle of Mozart's piano sonatas is a fascinating example of the interpretive riches that flow when a performer is sufficiently uninhibited! -- and in approaching the duos we set ourselves the task of bringing the same ethos into Mozart's string music. Of course, the situation in a duo is a little different from that in a sonata: an individual pianist can intervene in a musical text without worrying about how any embellishments might affect other performers' lines, whereas in a duo the players need to respond to each other. Even so, in this recording we went all-out.

We started by adding significant embellishments in all repeated passages, which was Mozart's own practice. This means that embellishments -- sometimes so dense that they seem more like wholesale variations -- feature in the repeated exposition from the first movement of K.423 as well as in smaller-scale formal repeats, such as reprises of the rondo theme in the last movement of K.423 and all the repeats in the variation movement of K.424. Throughout, we attempted to mirror the style of embellishments Mozart uses in the handful of movements for which he provided models. Here's what we came up with, for instance for the rondo-finale of K.423. Mozart's original theme runs:

Our embellishments for one of the melodic reprises (the handwritten passage pasted into the score):

We wrote different embellishments for each appearance of the theme, increasing the density of additional notes every time the theme recurs. In another case, in the slow movement of K.423, we drew embellishments from the first edition of the piece, published shortly after Mozart's death. The Bärenreiter edition excludes these because they can't be confirmed to have originated from Mozart; but we thought the style was convincing, so we re-introduced them! And even if they weren't written by Mozart himself, they are contemporaneous, so they certainly reflect historically-appropriate practices:

Finally, we added cadenzas at every fermata, and even placed one or two brief extra cadenzas in the outer movements of K.424 where no fermata is indicated but where we thought Mozart might have expected a touch of improvisation. We generally tried to base these, too, on models: for instance, the cadenza we added in the K.424 variation movement imitates the cadenza Mozart wrote for a piano variation set. For the other cadenzas, we drew from motifs in each movement and did our best to match Mozart's style.

It's been an exhilarating and rewarding experience to get inside this music and to try to give it fresh, creative life. The final product is due for release in November. I certainly hope this will be but the first step in a longer-term project featuring similar expressive experimentation with Mozart's other, later string chamber music -- but in the meantime, we have another round of edits to check!

New article: 17th-century German violin technique

 My new article has just been published in Early Music, and is available on the OUP website!

Link: "Violin technique and the contrapuntal imagination in 17th-century German lands"

Because the pandemic introduced so many difficulties for reviewers and publishers, this article was very slow to move through the pipeline. In fact, although it was only published a few weeks ago, it was the first thing I wrote after I finished my PhD in 2019. I wanted a wee break from writing about Mozart, so I turned to one of the other topics I've spent a lot of time thinking about. (And indeed, some of the observations that wound up in the article originated in posts here, way back in the first iteration of my attempts as a blogger, c.2014-2015!) I also wanted to explore a few ideas about evidence, explanation, and epistemology, so I tried to angle the topic in such a way that it wouldn't just be about violin technique, but something far more elusive and speculative: the imaginative structures that arise in the player's mind when an instrument is used in a particular way.

Ars Rhetorica

What is it about the idea of rhetoric that so fascinates musicians? It's a word that I hear thrown around in rehearsals by my colleagues, abused by my forebears in their articles and books on period-performance (pace Bruce Haynes), and generally misunderstood by the modern gut-string community. Only last week a collaborator enjoined me to "phrase more rhetorically" in a sonata I was performing, and, even as I write, one of my Boston colleagues is blogging about Quantz, "The End of Early Music", and the importance of performing with the "rhetorical consciousness" of an orator.

In a sense, I know what these people are trying to say: phrase more, differentiate more, emote more, show more. But are "phrasing, differentiating, emoting, and showing" actually related to musical rhetoric? It appears that many people think so, some even going so far as to distinguish the "romantic" style of mainstream modern players from the "rhetorical" style of period-instrumentalists.

There are a number of problems with this popular viewpoint about early music and rhetoric. First, on the most basic level, the word "rhetoric" meant something very different to 17th- and 18th-century musicians than it does to baroque performers today. Virtually all of the extant sources, from Burmeister to Mattheson, discuss rhetoric in music as an important skill that a composer needs to develop -- not something for a performer to worry about. Upon reflection, this makes perfect sense: treatises constantly compare musicians to orators, and the orator's first task is to consider the argument of his speech and arrange its content accordingly. In music, this is all within the purview of the composer. The 18th-century view of rhetoric was so composer-centric, in fact, that even improvisors seem to have been exempted from thinking about it methodically: most treatises include a separate set of guidelines for the creation of extemporized fantasies.

If this seems a mere linguistic squabble, consider a far deeper problem today's musicians cause when they label playing as "romantic" or "rhetorical": they create a false dichotomy between two equally valid, equally useful, elements of expressive playing. An arresting irony lurks behind the fact that "romantic" musicians often find "rhetorical" performances unmusical, while "rhetorical" musicians often find their "romantic" counterparts unexpressive. But, upon reflection, doesn't this make sense? Should we be surprised that practicing only a single aspect of expressive music-making results in a paltry performance?

In reality, all musicians of all eras have tried to move their listeners in performance. All music tells an emotional story, and a good performer in any style turns that story into an expressive performance. This is as true for Quantz as it is for Heifetz, Rubinstein, or Malcolm Bilson. Not only is the "romantic - rhetorical" dichotomy useless for describing the true beauty of these artists' performances, but it encourages others to limit themselves to a single category. Ultimately, the magic of Heifetz's "romantic" playing is the clear, actor-like portrayal of affects and characters; similarly, in Bilson's "rhetorical" hands, the fortepiano sings with an emotional depth that few modern pianists can match. (Of course, while Bilson's and Rubinstein's expressive goals may be the same, no listener could claim that they play in the same way. But the difference is not a matter of "rhetoric" and "romanticism," but [to extend the comparison with language], of dialect, pronunciation, and hardware.)

A further ill-effect of the "rhetorical" revolution is that it has encouraged grotesque exaggeration in performers. It's one thing to try to get inside of the music, play expressively, and bring this expression to an audience; it's something else to turn "rhetorical gestures" into the main substance of a performance. So many HIP musicians seem to believe that once they've identified an affect, their work is done. The image of Stephen Colbert vowing "to feel the news at his viewers" seems to find an echo in those purely-"rhetorical" musicians who believe that depicting the music at their listeners is enough.

I still find that, despite my professional baroque affiliations, I derive much of my listening pleasure from early- and mid-20th-century recordings, which manage to combine stylish gestures with real emotional depth. With hundreds of excellent, expressive models at our disposal, why do we period performers still hold to an anachronistic misconception about "rhetoric", while ignoring so much else?

Improvisation: Responding to "The Bulletproof Musician"

The Bulletproof Musician [hereafter, TBM], one of those music-blogs that I've enjoyed reading over the last year or so, today came out with a post encouraging classical musicians to experiment with improvisation. Although TBM's articles are usually very stimulating, I felt that there were some gaps in this one. I've never been entirely comfortable publishing comments on other blogs, but today I decided to make an exception: classical improvisation is a topic that I've engaged with for many hours over many years, and I'd like to contribute a bit to the discussion.

First off, I have some philosophical differences with TBM. As a serious classical improviser myself, I don't agree that brain scans and memory lapses should be motivating factors in starting to improvise. (I know, I know, the memory-lapse discussion may be light comedy -- but the brain scans are a central part of TBM's article.)

The variations in brain activity between improvisers and non-improvisers is all very interesting, but far more important is the variation in musical, rather than mental, activity, both for performers and listeners. Our classical-music culture is saturated with performers who depend entirely on the printed page. To draw a comparison with language, imagine a world in which people could only recite sentences that they spent months practicing and repeating, but were unable to formulate any coherent, grammatically-correct (read: harmonically-sensible) thoughts on their own. This would not be considered a healthy environment: conversation topics would be severely limited, and people would get very bored very quickly. Yet this is the environment that we've fostered in classical music. In fact, I would go even farther: speakers who cannot spontaneously create a correct, if short, sentence, are not considered to be fluent in the language. Similarly, I think it's fair, if pessimistic, to claim that most classical musicians are not really "fluent" in the language of classical music.

Brain scans aside, improvisation liberates those musicians who do it, and engages those audience members who are there to witness it. As Robert Levin points out in the video that TBM cites, when an audience watches an improvising performer, they know that they are hearing something unique, something that belongs only to them, and something whose memory they'll cherish. They know that they won't be able to look it up on iTunes or Spotify the next day, and, accordingly, they'll listen differently. Performers in this situation benefit as well: huge portions of the music-related self-help material I've read involves ways to keep repertoire from going stale, or to keep performers from getting bored with pieces they've been playing. Well, those techniques are all fine, but if the performer is a habitual improviser, he may never come up against the problem of staleness or boredom in the first place. Improvising, whether cadenzas and ornaments or entire fantasies, keeps repertoire feeling new, and increases the risk and excitement of performing. This, too, benefits those on both sides of the stage.

Second, TBM's "Take Action" suggestion of doing some free improvisation is admirable, but ultimately, I think, off-the-mark. The great improvisers, from Bach and Mozart to Chopin (and Robert Levin!) don't improvise by playing random notes. Likewise, if we want to learn to do it, and do it meaningfully, riffing thoughtlessly on a scale isn't going to get us very far. To continue the comparison with language: David Foster Wallace pointed out that anybody who knows enough words can come up with a sentence like "Did you seen the car keys of me?", but that this is neither beautiful nor elegant. In music, of course, we need our sentences to be beautiful. A musician improvising a structureless melody may experience some illusion of improvisatory freedom, but, as scales, arpeggios and etudes teach us, true freedom in any pursuit comes only with technique and structure. I suspect that one of the reasons so few classical musicians improvise is that they believe improvising to be random -- that is, they think that the next note is a matter of intuition and emotion, and that if they don't "feel it", they must not "have it". Nothing could be further from the truth, though. As my old teacher once told me: "Improvising is easy, just like singing an opera, tuning a piano, or playing the violin; someone just needs to tell you how to do it."

For classical musicians who want to explore improvisation, there are a number of very useful resources, which I suggest perusing in the following order:

1. 1. A great starting point for anybody who plays a melody-instrument is the two-volume "Division Violin", available on IMSLP and also in a nice edition from Broude Brothers. These "divisions" are written-out improvisations over repeating ground basses (the classical equivalent to a jazzer's improvisation over a 12-bar blues), and they're very useful for developing freedom and a melodic vocabulary. These are important first-steps whether your ultimate goal is to improvise fugues, fantasias, or cadenzas. (They're also on 25% end-of-the-year sale from Broude Brothers right now!)
2. 2. From there, after using the "training wheels" of other peoples' written-out improvisations, those who can read German should try the excellent, very clear and complete, "Improvisation mit Ostinatobässen," published by Edition Walhall. This is a complete textbook for the beginning improviser. It offers suggestions for how to create mental frameworks for chord progressions, how to incorporate these frameworks into a variety of different forms, and how to start spinning out melodic figures from scratch. Sure, this book still focuses on repeating basslines, but this is an extremely useful way to build up an improvisatory vocabulary, and can then serve as a jumping-off point into other forms.
3. 3. Having worked through those ground basses, the next step is to free yourself from the repeating bassline pattern. If your intended destination is the classical cadenza, go straight to CPE Bach's "Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments". The final chapter contains many useful sample chord progressions, which serve as excellent models for fantasias and cadenzas of any length. And next to the extended chord progressions, he also shows many useful shorter progressions that go to very distant keys and back. These should be internalized, and are great for getting out of harmonic binds. (Note for violinists: there's another useful section, distilling some of the same information, in Baillot's Treatise.)
4. 4. Finally, for those who want to take the next step, Music in the Galant Style is an excellent resource. It is a compendium of partimenti -- stock phrases, chord progressions, melodic figures, etc. -- in a variety of styles, and in a variety of different contexts, from Bach's fugues to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. This text is great for making the leap from CPE Bach/Baillot into coherent, larger-scale improvisation, and for improvising with/in counterpoint.

The Devil Reads Treatises

On a transatlantic flight I recently found myself revisiting "The Devil Wears Prada" (I know, I know…). I had last watched this film as an undergraduate, and back then I assumed that its sole purpose was to show us Anne Hathaway wearing designer outfits. Well, as ever, I'm happy to be proven wrong: upon seeing it again, I wondered whether the whole thing wasn't just a large-scale, thinly-veiled critique of the Early Music industry. Consider the following quote, spoken by the Prada-clad Demon herself:

"You think [fashion] has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis: it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then Yves Saint Laurent showed cerulean military jackets… And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers; then it filtered down through the department stores and trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room."

This sounds suspiciously like a sentiment that's been voiced about, in, and around the early-music movement. (We all know Taruskin, Butt and Haynes; now a newer book has joined the ranks!) It's also an issue that strikes me as one of the most important facing young performers on both period and modern instruments. The value of treatises is a topic of almost constant debate among my colleagues. Many musicians of my generation are rebelling against the sources, instead building their sound, style, and approach around the recordings and teachings of their elders.

This may seem prima facie okay. But consider the fact that our entire picture of the way early music sounds was, in fact, an invention of these elders. Of course, they read their sources and did their homework, but the sources are not oracles. In the current state of early music, we under-30s are like Anne Hathaway: playing in a style that was selected for us by musicians in the '60s and '70s. (And, as an aside, what do we really think of the older interpretations now? Often we find their playing somehow lacking -- as we should, because tastes change -- yet we continue to take many of their stylistic assumptions for granted.)

This state of affairs is especially dangerous now, for two reasons. For one thing, the generation of pioneers is in its senescence, and new creative, innovative, thinking leaders must be ready to carry the torch. More important, Early Music's place in the larger classical-music world is changing. In the UK, even the most respected baroque orchestras seem to be struggling, while some adventurous modern groups are successfully incorporating into their concerts baroque works that were once the sole domain of period performers.

The Early Music Movement's success has created a breed of highly-informed modern musicians who can play very stylish Handel one night and technically-assured Berio the next (or, in some cases, both in the same night) -- and do it all in tune. From an audience's perspective, why shouldn't that be preferable to the technical clumsiness we hear in some of the less-polished period performances?

Early Music will face many challenges in the coming years, but one thing that my generation can do to further its cause is to return to the 17th- and 18th-century sources. Re-invent the sound of early music for the 2010s, re-examine the assumptions underlying the way we play, and challenge the habits of our musical forebears. Rather than "wearing a sweater that was selected for us" 40-50 years ago, we can use the sources to update authenticity. This would give listeners another new way to hear music, and would also keep period performers unique -- not impoverished copies of our modern-instrument colleagues.