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!

Embellishing Mozart's C-major Quintet

 For many of us who play music by canonical composers like Mozart, the notated score is sacred. Our job as performers, we might think, is to realize the notation as faithfully as possible--and this means in particular that we can't just change things without Mozart's permission. But this isn't how musical scores were treated during Mozart's lifetime. It's now clear that Mozart and virtually all his contemporaries expected performers to make all kinds of changes to the music they played, especially through the insertion of elaborate cadenzas, lead-ins ("Eingänge") and embellishments.

Research into these topics has been carried out most thoroughly in studies of Mozart's keyboard music. And the practice of improvisation and embellishment in modern-day performing culture are most closely associated with keyboard players, especially Robert Levin, who has recorded highly embellished readings of Mozart's complete piano sonatas and piano concertos. (There are very few exceptions; one of them is Nils-Erik Sparf's lively and daringly unconventional recording of Mozart's violin concertos.) One reason for this keyboard-centrism is the simple, historical fact that Mozart himself identified primarily as a virtuoso pianist for much of his career, and studies of his performing practices therefore often lead back to his activities as a keyboardist. In my own recent book on Mozart, which devotes a chapter each to improvisation and embellishment, keyboard music features more centrally than string music because there's more direct evidence for Mozart's stylistic preferences, in the form of manuscript models, published variants, and pedagogical samples, in his keyboard output.

But I wonder whether there's also another, perhaps more interesting, reason that most Mozartean embellishers are keyboardists. Much of Mozart's keyboard music is written not just for a soloist playing alongside accompanying forces, but rather for an individual player, as in the piano sonatas or in so many concerto passages where the orchestra drops out and the soloist forges on alone. In such context, embellishment presents the fewest possible practical obstacles. The performer who plays entirely alone can do all sorts of things to mess with the musical text, and never needs to worry about the effect this might have on collaborators. Thus, Levin's hilarious reading of the last movement of the Sonata K.283 features madcap textural changes and transpositions, and Andreas Staier's brilliant recording of the last movement of the Sonata K.331 introduces some unexpected contrapuntal tricks during repeated passages--and these kinds of textual interventions would be impossible in the context of a work for multiple performers. For us string players, however, everything we play by Mozart is a work for multiple performers! What are we to do?

I started asking such questions in earnest last year, when I recorded Mozart's violin-viola duos (and I blogged back then about many of the performance decisions, including the embellishments and cadenzas). One of the reasons I selected those pieces as my entry-point into embellishing Mozart's string music is that the players are comparatively unconstrained. Although there are many instances of real textural complexity, there are also plenty of phrases where the violinist plays the tune and the violist accompanies. (This did not stop me from inserting a surprise viola Eingang in the first movement of the B-flat duo!) The practice of writing and performing embellishments for the duos was highly instructive--but at no point did it challenge my fundamental understanding of the topic.

This month, however, I'm performing the great String Quintet in C major, K.515, perhaps the most daring piece Mozart wrote. Part of the pleasure of doing K.515 is, of course, simply to be inside Mozart's mind at this high-point of his compositional life. A nice add-on, however, is that I get to try to embellish in a limit-case: a context where it is always stylistically appropriate but extremely difficult to pull off in a way that seems musically appropriate.

One of the hardest things about embellishing in K.515 is that counterpoint features centrally throughout the work--and this means that very few melodies can be innocently tweaked without wreaking havoc among the other players. For instance, the final theme in the first movement exposition might look like a perfect candidate for embellishment:

However, following those first four bars, the theme is immediately played in octaves between the first and second violins, and imitated contrapuntally by the first viola and cello. The first violinist can embellish mm.132-35, but short of pre-coordinating some embellishments with the other players (a no-go, since it would shatter any sense of improvisatory freedom) this would mean that the embellished theme is followed by a necessarily unembellished restatement. That's something Mozart himself rarely gives us in his composed embellishments. Embellishments are meant to ratchet up the intensity of a melody, not vanish and let the intensity wane.

Then there are passages like this:

Here, it's entirely possible to insert embellishments! First off, the violinist has four bars of sitting on a D dominant 7th chord, and can easily turn those bars into a stylistically-appropriate Eingang of some kind. I jotted this down, but the possibilities are endless:

However, problems pile up in the following phrase. Beginning in m.86, we get another melody that should be eminently embellishable: there's no immediate contrapuntal imitation, and the first violinist is just as free as any soloist, with all four other players holding long notes beneath the tune. But look closer, and once again constraints appear. The voice-leading is such that, when we move from tonic to dominant in m.87 and m.89, the first violinist still needs to hover somewhere around the fifth scale degree, as in the unembellished original. Move anywhere else and we'd hear parallel octaves, since the second violinist controls the third scale degree and the two violists control the first scale degree. What might one do? A possibility would be something like this, a chromatic wiggle that coexists with the original melody for m.86:

As far as embellishments go, I like this one--though it hardly draws attention to itself as a florid embellishment.

This previous example points to the most pervasive difficulty in embellishing Mozart's chamber music. Mozart favored an embellishment style full of chromatic sinews and twisty gestures that circle around the notes they embellish rather than connecting them in a direct scale. But introducing such winding, circuitous embellishments often brings problems of voice-leading in music so densely notated as these string quintets. This is not to say that embellishment is impossible; but the performer who wants to embellish is certainly on a leash.

In the slow movement, these effects are slightly diminished. The recurring theme calls out for embellishments, as to all repeated themes in Mozart, and here the soloistic nature of the first violin line makes intervention easier than it was in the first movement. One of the interesting questions here is how to treat the many short rests (an eighth note, a quarter note) in the first violin part--whether florid embellishments can just cross over those silences, as Mozart's own embellishments often do in his keyboard music, or whether the silences need to be observed in order to clear aural space for interjections from other players. My solution has generally been to cross over the rests; thus, this cadential figure returns twice and can be treated with various embellishments--perhaps a diatonic arpeggio on its first recurrence and a twisting, chromatic scale on its second:

Then there are passages where playful imitation occurs between the players, and embellishments in the first violin part will be a spur to creative invention for the first violist:

So far I've composed embellishments for the first violin part in the first two movements. The minuet, like the first movement, offers very few possibilities (though I'll certainly come up with some chromatic variants for the cadence gesture in m.9 (and m.23 of the Trio). But it's the last movement I'm most excited to do, where the rondo theme repeats a few times across the movement and feels very much like the soloistic rondos elsewhere in Mozart. It should offer plenty of opportunities for embellishment--and, as with the previous movements, I'm sure I'll learn a lot in the process of writing them!

In the meantime, here's a messy draft of my embellishments for the slow movement, in case others are interested in seeing them and playing them--or taking inspiration from these ideas and trying their own hands at composing different embellishments. These generally follow Mozart's melodic style as closely as possible--though I'm certain that these will change once we start rehearsing in two weeks:

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.

Music Notation CSI (Or, how did H.I.F. Biber tune in 1681?)

When historically-interested performers need guidance on practical issues, we often look for answers in 18th-century treatises. (Or, if we don't, we really should: as I've already discussed.) Anyone who has talked to me about this topic knows that I'm a passionate believer in the power of treatises to enrich us in ways that recordings and teachers can't.

Still, I concede that 18th-century sources are limited. They can't actually play for us; their musical advice must be approximate, mediated by language. Furthermore, each treatise represents its author's viewpoint, but that author is rarely a composer we care about. We may read, say, Geminiani and Türk; instruments in hand, however, who wouldn't rather play Corelli or Beethoven? And one often wonders whether Leopold Mozart's theoretical advice really applies to his son's mature compositions, or whether, by the late 1770s, a surname was the only thing Wolfgang and his father had in common.

In many cases, treatise-reading encourages generalization, while performing should really be about specificity. Unless we devote unrealistic amounts of time to reading an unrealistic number of treatises, we risk overburdening a few authors. Thus, Geminiani becomes a go-to source for all Italian music; likewise, so many French performances ape Muffat.

(As an aside: the widespread Muffat-infatuation has always puzzled me. Look at the dates: he went to France briefly in his late teens, and didn't write the treatise until decades later. Is his evidence reliable? I wonder, too, why nobody seems interested in his German bowings. They could be applied to Bach and Telemann, who, despite vaguely-Francophone interests, were writing German music, in Germany, to be performed by German musicians and consumed by German audiences.)

Muffat's Treatise: Menuet. The German bowing is above, the French is below. Note that the German version begins on an upbow, and is entirely bowed out. Presumably, the upbow at the beginning is meant to accommodate the figures in bars 3, 5 and 6.

Having now made a meal of the appetizer, I hasten to my main point: Treatises aren't our only option! We can steal the occasional glimpse into past practices by searching for clues within the notation. Of course, most notation is neutral, and we need treatises to help unravel "what" (if anything) it "means". But, sometimes, a composer leaves a clue.

For example, on the question of whether Mozart's grace-notes should be played on or before the beat, treatises are unhelpful. Most say nothing; Quantz, writing in Berlin, gives the wrong answer. We know that Quantz is wrong because an examination of the Minuet from Mozart's KV 304 reveals grace-notes of three different durations, all in a single phrase:

Copyright restrictions prevent me from posting from the NMA, but see here for an urtext original. Amazingly enough, all editions on IMSLP show incorrect grace-notes! (In our age of increasing IMSLP-reliance, it's a reminder not to believe everything posted there.)

At once, we infer that note-value does matter for grace-notes. It follows that they have to be on the beat -- after all, if grace-notes were to be played before the beat, could a quarter note be distinguished from an eighth or sixteenth?

The notational clues are not always even related to performance-practice per se. The example that inspired this essay comes from Biber's Sonatae Violino Solo 1681, on my mind this month. Halfway through Sonata VI, the violinist must retune into scordatura -- the only instance of mid-sonata retuning I'm aware of pre-1900:

I've spent the last few days testing various different retuning methods. When I last performed this piece, a few times in 2011, my habit was to knock the E string completely slack, and then retune it from scratch. (This seemed to improve the stability, but it takes a lot longer to bring off.) Now, I'm considering inching down from E to D, and then simply adjusting as necessary if the string creeps sharp -- the quick fix. After all, Biber's dramatic pacing is characteristically perfect, and drawn-out retuning would do more harm than would a slightly-sharp top string.

Whatever I decide to do, this moment speaks worlds about Biber -- his own ability to tune quietly and accurately, and his flexible stance towards tuning in general. There are also subsidiary inferences, such as the thickness of his E string (it must still have sounded good when loosened to D) and the stability of his G string (with the slightly decreased tension on the bridge, my own Aquilla "type F" silver-wound, sheep-gut string goes unplayably sharp).

Have you encountered any other moments in music pre-1830 when these sorts of indications are buried in the notation? My instinct is that such notational clues don't surface on our music stands every day...

Bach Explored: By and For Pisendel

"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.

Bach Explored: Westhoff's Continuo Sonatas

I had originally intended to profile Bach's forebears in chronological order; however, I've altered my plans slightly. For previously-discussed reasons, Johann Paul Westhoff has recently been on my mind a lot. And, despite the fact that only 14 of his works survive, he seems to show up on my concert programs and talks with a greater consistency than most other composers. (If memory and forecasting are both accurate, he will have been on my music stand every month of 2014 except for April and December.)

My persistent interest in programming and talking about him comes not only from the high quality of his output, but from his formal, structural, and technical imagination. Looking back as we do with the privilege of our 21st-century vantage point, we've become inured to the rhetoric of "musical innovators", since most of the composers we play were "revolutionary" in some way or other. In Westhoff's case, however, the terms are justified. He was the first violinist-composer to write down multi-movement unaccompanied works; moreover, his approach to polyphony therein is uniquely rigorous, in that his voice-leading and chord-spacing make no concessions to the inherent limitations of four-strings-tuned-in-fifths. (As an aside: he also developed a logical but frustrating notation system for his unaccompanied works: on the plus side, two different clefs and an eight-line staff allow him to show the voice-leading as clearly as possible. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to read, especially under pressure. My colleague and "Bach Explored" partner Paul Cienniwa has written a blog entry on the virtues of performing from memory. Well, Paul, here's another point to support your argument!)

(A page from the 3rd unaccompanied partita. The first note is B-flat)

And many of his other works are equally innovative. At a time when music imitating nature was all the rage, Westhoff went a step farther, depicting a battle in one sonata and, in another, the overtones of pealing churchbells. Audience members who attended my May 2014 gallery talks will remember that his remarkable A-major Suite features a three-voice melody in which, through various special effects and distortions, Westhoff is able to blur the polyphonic texture and show us two vastly different ways of hearing musical foreground and background -- all in the space of 16 bars. (Fortunately, these contrapuntal and violinistic abilities did not die with Westhoff: it was his student, the young Johann Georg Pisendel, for whom Bach probably composed the Sonatas and Partitas.)

Our first "Bach Explored" concert features one of Westhoff's sonatas for violin with continuo. If his unaccompanied suites are a string of rustic, tuneful dances that happen to be technically complicated, his continuo sonatas are simultaneously more interesting and more challenging. Gone are the pretty tunes; gone are the major keys. Instead, performers and listeners are faced with unrelenting gravity, modal counterpoint, and endlessly repetitive fugues. Since my previous post on them, however, I've performed the D-minor Sonata, and the question, "is it good?", has received the unequivocal answer, "yes."

Exploring Bach: An Introduction

With just a month and a half left before the launch of Bach Explored, I've been spending increasing amounts of time with the various composers who feature in the series's opening concert. Although I've performed most of these works before, I've never put them all together in a single program. About a week ago, I mused on the early-music-induced question of whether certain lesser-known pieces really are good enough -- whether they're worth the countless hours we musicians will spend learning them, and whether they ultimately deserve the audience's time and attention. Well, in putting together "Bach Explored", I've had to revisit these thoughts over and over again. It may seem, ultimately, that the question is rhetorical: indeed, if I'm actually asking whether an hour and a half of unknown music is worth reviving, then surely the answer can be found, in abbreviated form, behind the very title of the series. It is Bach we want to Explore, and it is Bach's gravitational pull around which Walther, Westhoff, Pisendel, and countless others merely orbit. Right?

Well, one rhetorical question often hides another. "Exploring Bach" is not so much about Bach's music itself as it is about the riches on which he built. Bach, of all baroque composers, had an exceptionally well-developed sense of music's value and enduring artistic importance, and he combined this with a deep pride in his German cultural heritage. It is not by coincidence that he based his cantatas and chorales on traditional Lutheran melodies, or that he wove German folk-music into many of his works: he saw himself as The Great German Musician of his age.

This sense of heritage is as present in his violin works as it is in his sacred music. His Sonatas and Partitas are the earliest unaccompanied violin works to have entered the standard repertoire; however, when he penned them, Bach was joining a tradition of polyphonic violin writing that had thrived in Germany for two generations before his birth. Nor was his debt only to the virtuoso violinists who revolutionized technique in the 17th century: baroque musical composition was a pragmatic art, and he must have been equally motivated by the brilliant technique of the friends and colleagues with whom he performed. These violinists, ranging from the vaguely-familiar Pisendel to a number of long-forgotten anonymous masters, are the inspiration for the present series. Without their innovations, Bach's violin music could not have been written. To Explore Bach is to perform them.

In the coming weeks before the opening concert, I'll be writing about each of the sonatas that make up the first program. I hope you'll join me as I investigate these forgotten greats -- and, ultimately, I hope you'll join me for the performances!

Is it good?

"Is it good?" I imagine that, in the last century's days of innocence, musicians and listeners rarely had to ask this question. "It may not be to everyone's taste, but of course it's good; that's why we're playing it," the musical canon replied in the past. Since then, Early Music has complicated things: archives have been explored, long-lost works have been revived, and suddenly a wealth of great music has (re)entered the repertoire. Many of these discoveries really are wonderful: composers like Becker, Strungk and Walther absolutely do deserve to be played and heard. Occasionally, however, one suspects that the thrill of discovery (or, let's be honest, the attention we hope to get when we make premiere recordings) has led us to spend a lot of time with music that just isn't worth it.

I've recently found myself facing this question again. The opening concert of "Bach Explored," my soon-to-begin series, will feature one of Johann Paul Westhoff's sonatas for violin and continuo. Unlike Westhoff's brilliant unaccompanied partitas, these works have not yet made it into the mainstream baroque repertoire, and I think it's clear why. Suffice it to say that this sonata is dark, dense, long, serious, and repetitive -- the kind of piece that hugely challenges both the player and the listener.

Although I've been happily practicing this Westhoff since June, I didn't realize until a few days ago that others might not enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoy playing it. Ultimately, how can one really know until one tries it in public? Even so, some of the friends and colleagues who have played through it with me suggest that I either take it off the program, or at least cut it a bit, and thus make it easier to listen to. In this case, though, I think I'll do neither.

So much successful, thought-provoking classical music is dark and difficult, and this Westhoff is no exception. Of course, crucially, it must achieve its expressive heights (and depths) by different means than those used in later music -- his harmonic and melodic language is, after all, of the 1690s. Here, we encounter obsessive repetition, almost constant slow movements, and a seeming-inability to leave D minor. In some sense, these spell disaster; at the same time, though, one does wonder whether Westhoff was pursuing a deeper aesthetic goal, or maybe even producing a spiritual essay set in music (a notion bolstered by the "Imitation of Churchbells" at the work's center). We can observe the opening’s slow, heavenward ascent, and the downward spiral that follows; the liturgical call-and-response of the Largo with its modal, antique counterpoint and tangled repetitions; the stately, yearning, pathos-ridden Adagio. One possibility is that this work dramatizes the ars moriendi: the soul’s initial struggles, the last rites, the pealing of churchbells, the Adagio of death, and then, finally, jubilation. Yet another is that the violin and accompaniment, constantly playing in opposing dialogue, may represent the soul and body, the heavenly and earthly, even a conversation between the soul and Christ (a common trope in German sacred music -- just think of the soprano-bass duets in Bach's cantatas). Of course, we will never know whether the work really "means" anything -- but we can only gain by listening to it.