Diary of a Recording: Telemann Violin Sonatas

Although my previous post here is clearly marked 23 July 2015, I still have a hard time believing that 13 months have passed since I last added to this journal. Now -- with September and a new season in view -- seems a good time to begin again.

To ease in, I'll start by posting a few photos and thoughts from my Telemann recording in mid June. My colleague Paul Cienniwa and I spent two days at WGBH in Boston recording seven early Telemann violin sonatas -- six from his brilliant Frankfurt collection, and one from the Dresden archives that will be a premiere recording. (Who knew there was still unrecorded Telemann out there?)

Although I've participated in other recording projects as part of orchestras and small ensembles, I've never done a solo project like this, so I've never had quite this level of artistic control. Needless to say, I'm still feeling my way through the process. There are so many trade-offs -- for instance, when the perfect takes feel a bit lifeless, but the exciting ones are all ragged. The number of possibilities, too, is numbingly vast. (I left the studio with 300+ takes of a mere 28 movements, and spent about two weeks weeding through them.)  I surely knew, intellectually, at least, how artificial the recording process is, but none of my anti-recording philosophising prepared me for the experience of conjuring, take by take, a completely 'fake' interpretation: one in which I know I played every note, but which never, ever, sounded quite that way before, either in reality or in my imagination. And, with so much material, so much of it useable, I could have decided on any number of different final products. For some movements, I constructed four or five take-maps, all viable, and each with its own strengths. At best, it destabilizes the whole notion of the recording as document of an interpretation, and replaces it with that of recording as unconscious inventor of an interpretation.

There's an interesting contrast here with what various philosophers, most ably Taruskin in Text and Act, have said about live performances, recordings, and interpretations. Taruskin looks at a composer-performer like Stravinsky, whose many repeated recordings of his own works are so bewilderingly different, and so often diverge from performance instructions in the score, to argue that there is no such thing as a single 'Interpretation' of a piece of music, even (I say: especially?) by the work's composer. He begins from the 'evidence' of divergent recordings, and extrapolates to include live-performed interpretations on his list of nonexistent things. My experience suggests the opposite trajectory: for me as a performing musician/human, there is never a single interpretation of these works -- but in doing the recording and putting all the 'good' takes together and discarding the 'bad' I've had the rather disconcerting experience of watching an interpretation come to life, seemingly on its own, simply by piggy-backing on the good takes. On 17 June, there was no 'Interpretation'; now there is.

Ironically, and despite having watched the interpretation take shape, I still don't know quite what it will sound like, since I haven't yet heard what magic the engineer will work with my take-maps, but I should find out any day. And, in the meantime, I'm still savouring the memory of these sonatas as live performances. I have a long-abiding love-hate relationship with adrenaline -- but, listening through my 300 takes, meditating on the vicissitudes of excitement, technical 'perfection' and musical sterility, I've never missed the concert stage more.

***

Although Paul and I were too distracted to make a video in the studio, we did get some photos.

Setting up beforehand:

Action shot (look closely!):

Taking a break, touching up the tuning:

And, as we played our last note, my E string snapped:

Birth of an 'interpretation':

Relics from a recital a week before the recording sessions. Having done these pieces in the studio, I almost don't remember what it was like to play them on stage.

Sonata II in D major:

Sonata V in A minor (don't miss the last movement!):

Listening to the Listeners?

"Psycho" has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ. 

 -Alfred Hitchcock, interview with Francois Truffaut

A few weeks ago, I was discussing various classic films with one of my UK friends, and, of course, Hitchcock came up. My friend commented that he's not really a fan, since he finds Hitchcock's emphasis on audience manipulation ("playing the audience like an organ") to be deeply unsettling, and unworthy of great art. Yesterday, during a conversation otherwise unrelated to film, an American friend of mine made the same point about Hitchcock. Last week, discussing the arts with one of my former students, a similar theme emerged when he suggested that one of the differences (among many) between good artists and great artists is that the great artists do not consider their audiences. The "greats" create for themselves, whereas the "merely-good" create for their viewers, readers, and listeners.

These colleagues were born in three different countries during three different decades, and are professionally involved with three different artistic media, so their agreement probably isn't generational, cultural, or genre-related. In any case, talking to them, I was struck in each of the conversations by how consistently I disagreed. I cannot imagine a single musical dimension that doesn't fundamentally depend upon manipulating the listeners.

Try a reductionist thought-experiment: beginning on a purely musical level, suppose I decide to play a certain dissonant chord louder than the surrounding ones (and even grant, hypothetically, that my ostensible reason for doing this is just a gut-feeling, with no underlying intellectual framework). Why play a dissonance louder? Because there's an aural clash that "wants" to be "brought out". Why does the aural clash "want" emphasis? Because emphasis will heighten the emotional impact of the clash -- and will help the performance match the musical content. Why will emphasis heighten the impact of the clash? Because if the clash is unexpected and unprepared, emphasis will increase shock-value; if the clash is prepared and expected, emphasis will provide a satisfying aural climax. Unexpected to whom? Shocking to whom? Satisfying to whom? Ding!

The same series of Why-questions can apply to meta-musical decisions, like whether to play from memory, or how much to visibly emote on stage. In every case I can think of, they still come down to the audience's experience. And, in fact, I think this is a good thing. With classical music (and the other arts) in a precarious position alongside contemporary culture, the idea of the lone artist creating only for his own satisfaction strikes me as selfish, arrogant, and entitled. Shouldn't we consider artists even more great when they care not only about the inside workings of their art, but also the outside world that will consume it?

I like deconstructing these issues partly because I'm interested in what makes an artist great, and also because the better we understand what exactly is going on in performance, the better we can take control of it. In this sense, Hitchcock may be the ultimate brilliant, self-aware creator. The filmmaker (or painter, or writer, or composer, or violinist) cannot avoid manipulating her audience in some way: as soon as she's turned on the camera and pointed it at something (or set a piece in C minor, or picked a tempo), she's already begun to control exactly what the audience can and can't look at. Hitchcock is a small leap from that recognition: as long as one can't avoid being manipulative in some way, he might as well do it as grippingly as possible! (Perhaps this qualifies as reductio ad perfectum?)

And if Hitchcock isn't your idea of a Great Artist, then what about Mozart? In two letters to his father (3 July 1778, and 26 September 1781) he consciously and explicitly takes the same attitude. Here's a particularly vivid excerpt from the first letter, on symphonic structure built entirely for the satisfaction of his listeners:

...Just in the middle of the Allegro a passage occurred which I felt sure must please, and there was a burst of applause; but as I knew at the time I wrote it what effect it was sure to produce, I brought it in once more at the close, and then rose shouts of "Da capo!" ... Having observed that all last as well as first Allegros here begin together with all the other instruments, and generally unisono, mine commenced with only two violins, piano for the first eight bars, followed instantly by a forte; the audience, as I expected, called out "hush!" at the soft beginning, and the instant the forte was heard began to clap their hands...

I can't imagine that the other great artists would disagree -- even Beethoven, that archetypal Romantic, who consistently shows himself to be a master of pushing the audience's buttons. (The Eroica alone is a case-in-point.)

More importantly, though, I think the consumers would agree. We go to the opera or watch the movie or read the book not for the story itself (if that were the case, we'd just skim the plot summary), but because we're interested in how the story is told. We want to be manipulated -- and who better to do it than a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Dostoevsky, or a Hitchcock?

(Also posted on violinist.com)

Aural DNA?

The location of my mtDNA as of about 47,000 years ago. The light gray lines show earlier routes (c. 60,000 years ago) taken by others who share my mtDNA; the white lines show paths others with my mtDNA took while my maternal ancestors remained near Iran.

For my birthday this past year, I had National Geographic sequence my DNA. [If you're interested, view my "Genographic" summary here!] I've long considered myself to be historically-minded -- after all, I think daily in units of 300 or 400 years, whenever I touch my violin. Even so, a decade of work in early music left me unprepared for what I felt upon receiving my DNA results. Here was my ancestors' migration pattern out of Africa, a temporal distance of 180,000 years broken down into 10,000-year increments. Here was a 142,155-line Excel file showing the As, Cs, Gs and Ts of my sequenced genome. This was both unimaginably larger and inconceivably smaller than anything I had encountered before.

This got me thinking about other kinds of lineages. I went to a cello recital yesterday during which the performer, in his remarks from the stage, said that he traces his musical ancestry to Pablo Casals. (He added that this is something he likes to emphasize in performance: he went so far as to "warn" us that he would not just be playing Bach, but playing Casals playing Bach.) Of course, many musicians have voiced such thoughts. When I was young, one of my piano teachers claimed to have traced his musical lineage to Beethoven; interestingly, popular legend holds that a different teacher in a different decade said the same thing to a young Richard Taruskin. (I resist the temptation to ask whether Taruskin and I are, therefore, musical relatives...)

My own musical genome is complicated. As a conductor, I have two main ancestral lines: on the "American" side, I can trace a line of teachers back to Koussevitzky. On the other side (my RAM teacher), I descend from Toscanini. As a violinist, I can claim to share small amounts of aural DNA with Arcangelo Corelli.

But, to keep this post from becoming a list of dropped names, here's the rub: whereas I do look like my grandmother (my actual grandmother, that is), I'm quite sure that I play nothing like my teacher's teacher's teacher. This becomes even more true with each generation as I count backwards. By the time I reach Corelli, the claim of kinship is quite meaningless. My conducting lineage shows the absurdity even more clearly: I'm removed from Koussevitzky by only two "generations", but one wouldn't know it to watch me conduct.

Still, the game is amusing.

Other fun facts about my real, genetic, non-aural genome: 1) My paternal line remained in Africa until surprisingly recently; 2) my maternal line lingered in the Middle East (Iran, it seems) for about 20,000 years longer than most others with the same migration route; 3) trace amounts of Native American DNA were introduced into my genome either when my paternal line arrived in America or when my maternal line and the pre-Native Americans were still in Russia [I secretly hope it's the latter, but, either way, I will only find out if one of my parents takes the test]; and 4) although I have no Bulgarian blood, my particular proportion of geographic markers very closely resembles that of the average modern-day Bulgarian.

That's d'amore!

I ended my last post, almost half a month ago, with some questions I had hoped to explore "in the next week." Predictably, a number of distractions have prevented me from writing anything that would be worth your time to read. In lieu (for now) of any well-developed philosophical musings, however, here's a bit of documentation from the most recent "Bach Explored" concert.

One doesn't get to hear (or play!) a viola d'amore every day. Since it was a very important instrument to Bach and his colleagues -- particularly to Pisendel -- I felt that it would be wrong not to feature it at least once during the series. I'm fortunate to own a very beautiful original 18th-century viola d'amore, and I'm always thrilled when I get the chance to perform on it. (After all, under "normal" circumstances, it comes out of the case only a few times per year, invariably for the St. John Passion.)

I don't have any closeup photos of my d'amore, but you can see it in this picture -- twelve pegs and all!

Last week, I performed an anonymous 18th-century dance suite on it. Here's a recording of the gorgeous Aria.

And the viola d'amore doesn't just do slow and beautiful. Here's a fast movement from the same work:

The viola d'amore's harmonic vocabulary is somewhat limited, since the open strings are tuned in a two-octave arpeggio, and you can take full advantage of its resonance only in that home key. (Notice, for example, in the second half of the fast movement, that the chords disappear as soon as we move to E-flat major.) Nonetheless, the sacrifice in modulatory freedom is amply compensated by resonance and chordal possibilities. One can imagine the inspiration that Bach, Pisendel, and the other great, early polyphonists derived from this instrument.

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...

2014: Year in Review

I regret having neglected this space over the past two months, but the autumn brought unanticipated distractions. Still, with another installment of "Bach Explored" on the horizon, I'll have a fresh batch of unknown composers to muse on in the coming weeks. (This time, the list includes Johann Christian Hertel [the "other" Johann of Eisenach] and two anonymous masters.)

For now, however, I've just performed for the last time this year, and this seems like an appropriate moment to re-launch my music journal as I look back on the successes of 2014. (Note: this tour of the year includes two recordings; if you don't have time for both, go for the Castello!)

Bach Explored

This season-long project (read about it in previous posts -- or, even better, attend our CBS-recommended next concert!) was conceived in February 2014, with the performances beginning in late September. Although I've been playing much of this 17th-century German repertoire for years, putting it all together in a single season, and judiciously juxtaposing these early works with some of Bach's, has been a great joy. 2014 has also seen the beginning of my commitment to perform 17th- and 18th-century music from memory; "Bach Explored" is thus not just a recital project, but a mental challenge. By May 2015, if all goes as planned, I will know a representative chunk of early German music by heart. As of today, I'm halfway through memorizing a Biber sonata -- my first time attempting to play from memory in scordatura. It's not easy!

Here's a Schenck Fantazia from the first "Bach Explored" concert:

Musica Poetica London: Reunited

I spent a significant portion of 2014 in the UK, playing with my London-based quartet. We hadn't officially performed together in about a year and a half, but in April and May we reunited for a 12-performance run of Cavalli's La Calisto (Hampstead Garden Opera Company); we also did a number of smaller recitals, and performed quartets by Becker, Biber and Buxtehude -- the music that first brought us together in 2010.

Sitzprobe: La Calisto

Musica Poetica London

In addition to these chamber projects, I gave a memorable recital with rising theorbo star, Alex McCartney. Although we played 17th-century sonatas that have been in my repertoire for nearly a decade, I challenged myself -- consciously, at least, for the first time on this front -- not to use ornamentation as a stand-in for musical expression. Passages such as the Affetti from Castello's Second Sonata, previously mere scaffolding for my improvisations, became experiments in aural emotion. [I realize that ornamentation and emotion-infused phrasing are, in theory, not mutually incompatible; one often seems to detract from the other, though! And I needed to start somewhere.]

A recording from this recital is below, and the phrase in question begins at approximately 2:25; whether it succeeds is, of course, a matter of opinion...

Other Projects

My exploration of the Beethoven String Trios with Sinfonia New York has continued (and might even continue to continue in 2015); I did guest solo appearances for a chamber contingent of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra; I played 6 Groupmuse house concerts this year. (Plus the usual miscellany: orchestral projects, church services, weddings, and teaching.)

Residencies and Education

In addition to the usual performing, I've expanded my educational activities quite a bit: I teamed up with an art historian to present three gallery talks at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, examining the intersections of aural and visual aesthetics. Topics included Passions and Affections in the 17th century; uses of, and (lack of) distinction between, foreground and background in art and music; and imitation and realism (suggesting, along with Touchstone, that the truest poetry may be the most feigning). I'm also a newly-appointed Affiliate Tutor for music and arts at Harvard University's Quincy House, and the Musician-in-Residence 2014-2015 for the First Church in Boston.

Coming Soon...

If performing from memory was my professional-development project of 2014, I believe that the new obsession for 2015 will be interactive concerts. Beginning in January, I'll try to work at least one or two interactive components into all of my solo performances. More on this soon!

Happy new year!

The Metropolitan Opera Graphs: Redux

Two days ago, composer Suby Raman published 10 graphs depicting the artistic history of the Metropolitan Opera. Taken at face value, the charts are provocative and, at times, perversely funny. ("How many female composers have been represented at the Met in the last 100 years?" To which the reply: "Dame Ethel Smyth is not impressed.")

Interesting, yes. But, on a deeper level, Raman's graphs miss their mark. It's nice to see statistical evidence that the Met plays too much Puccini, but, then again, nobody ever doubted that. All in all, the graphs simply confirm what most of us already thought -- to wit, that the Met is one of the most reactionary institutions in opera.

Why might this be? Aside from the obvious -- the ideological and aesthetic baggage of the Met's creative team -- I believe it has a lot to do with house size. If we had enough data to extend Raman's charts, we might be able to plot the same parameters (repertoire-focus, -origin, -vintage, -age, -sex, etc.) against the size of opera companies around the world. Of course, I have no proof, but I wouldn't be surprised if the biggest companies all function as museums of mid 19th-century operatic taste.

There are very good historical-economic reasons for this. During the time of such patrons as Emperor Joseph II (under whose aegis Mozart and Da Ponte produced Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così), professional opera didn't need to make money because it was supported by the monarchy. As Enlightenment faded into revolution, opera became the domain of patronless companies and freelance composers; houses had to expand to accommodate a paying public, and artistic styles changed accordingly. Da Ponte's layered sub-plots and Mozart's tangled recitatives were designed for the intimate court theater. Instead of belting to fill cavernous halls, singers enunciated, and audiences understood the words. As opera houses grew, so did voices, and clarity was sacrificed for volume. The Met epitomizes this logic at an extreme: it is a house designed for a very specific breed of opera (vintage 1870) in which the stories are simple (dying heroine) and the words don't really matter.

This is not to suggest that the fall of the 18th-century aristocracy is solely responsible for the Met's troubles. But, amidst a multiplicity of artistic and organizational problems, that of size remains fundamental and unavoidable. The Met is the product of a different century's musical ideology, and has not changed with the times.

(As an aside, let me note emphatically that repertoire is not the problem -- or, at least, not the primary one. The Royal Opera House does Verdi just as often as the Met, but hires the likes of John Eliot Gardiner to bring new musical perspectives to familiar works, as in their recent Rigoletto. And, throughout Europe, one finds mainstream productions in which 18th-century classics become staged explorations of terrorism, orientalism, racism, and colonialism. No, repertoire is not the Met's primary problem. There are ways to offer audiences their 19th-century favorites while also making an artistic statement.)

But, back to size: in the Met's case, bigger has ceased to be better. The prospect of increased ticket revenue may have motivated 19th-century operatic expansion, but now, in 2014, a full house is no longer a guarantee. Some expenses, including lighting, climate control and security, are proportional to house size; still more crucially, a large auditorium exacts a great toll on vocal production, intelligibility, and stage direction. Combine this with a creative team that seems to believe audiences haven't changed since 1890, and it's not hard to see why the Met is in financial trouble. (I resist the temptation to mention that the Met's productions feature singers who, with no discernible irony, perform Mozart as though it's still the 1950s…)

A mere century ago, listening to music meant being in the room with a performer. 50 years ago, period instruments had not yet reached the Anglophone world. Three years ago, Spotify was not available in America. Audiences can now find expressive operatic riches in far friendlier environments than the Met -- even, occasionally, in a London pub:

Video courtesy of Hampstead Garden Opera, © 2012;

Stage Director: Daisy Evans;

Guest Music Director, Conductor, Fortepiano: Dorian Komanoff Bandy;

Ferrando: Nick Pritchard

Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London, April-May 2012

As a young conductor entering the profession, I need to believe that listeners know the difference between tired, lackluster, stereotypical productions and those with real musical and dramatic purpose. Isn't that what the Met's problems are really about?

UPDATE, 30 October:

Since posting this yesterday, I've come across two other excellent pieces on the Met's problems. One was written in 2010; the other in 2006. Unfortunately, everything they say remains true…

A Ticket to the Opera (Felix Salmon, 2006)

A life of power, between walls of steel and crystal (Michael Smith, 2010)

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.

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.