The Cincinnati Early Music Festival, February 2014

J.S.Bach

Imagine a world without Bach.  A world that reacted to his death by putting his music aside in favor of the composers who came after him.  A world where children are not taught to play his Inventions, where orchestras never perform the Brandenburg Concertos, where you have never heard the Toccata in d Minor.  

 

It really happened.

It turns out that genius alone is not enough to ensure that a composer is remembered, that his works continue to be performed centuries after his death.  In our modern publishing and recording era, even the most mediocre artists live on in the ether, side by side with the greats, and in earlier centuries a similar dynamic was at work:  the afterlives of the greatest composers and the weakest were all at the mercy of chance and the accidents of birth. The question of which music got neatly published and catalogued, ready to be picked up and played, and which was lost behind the bookcase, had less to do with the worthiness of the music and more to do with where one was born, and how uncertain were the times one lived in.  

Vive la Révolution!

In France, for example, most pre-Revolutionary music was condemned in the 1790s for its association with the aristocracy, and was shelved.  This is all the more shameful because until then France had had a rich musical heritage, going back to the earliest written music, up to an extraordinary flowering during the Baroque era.  Much of this stunning French music is still just returning to the repertoire.  

In Italy, a decrepit publishing industry was the greatest hindrance to composers.  As long as they were alive to hand copy their music for their performers, well and good, but the music was rarely made available for sale to the public. The city-states also jealously guarded their citizens’ achievements from their rivals; as a result of these two realities, music did not become widely disseminated.

Compared to the chaos of Revolutionary France and the chronic chaos of Italy, the German-speaking areas were relatively peaceful, productive places to pursue a career in the arts. Nevertheless, when Bach died in 1750, his music dropped completely out of the public eye.  Bear in mind he was writing Baroque music at the very twilight of the Baroque era, so he quickly came to seem old-fashioned.  His music was complicated and not always accessible to the amateur.  New instruments were suddenly replacing the old ones—harpsichords were starting to vanish as people bought the new pianos; viols were superseded by modern strings; recorders were drowned out by new, louder winds.  Within a decade or two of his death, no one had heard of Johann Sebastian Bach.  His sons were quite popular, but people didn’t know it had been a family business.

The brothers Bach:  C.P.E., J.C., W.F., J.C.F

Bach benefited from the modern publishing technology of his region—once Felix Mendelssohn starting poking around in 1829, he was able to find quite a bit of Bach still in print, studied by scholars.  Mendelssohn’s enthusiasm for his exciting new discovery spread when he began staging performances, and so Bach crept back into the public consciousness.

Antonio Vivaldi

 Here’s another once-forgotten name that may surprise you:  Antonio Vivaldi.  Acclaimed in his lifetime, 1678-1741, when he died his compositions were also laid aside.  New composers came along who preferred to stage performances of their own work.  And in a country without mass publishing, neglect led to an obscurity even more profound than Bach’s work ever experienced.  By the mid-20^th century, virtually no one had heard of or played Vivaldi for 200 years.  Yes, your grandparents very possibly never knew of him, and never heard The Four Seasons; Vivaldi managed to find his way back into the repertoire only in the 1970s.

 Bach returned to us after 80 years.  It took Vivaldi over 200.  Who else is out there?  What are we missing?

One of the great aspects of the early music adventure is the real possibility of discovery.  Composers are out there who are not well known by the public—you could easily attend a concert and fall in love with a composer, or a style, or a historical period, that you had completely missed until now.  And “new” music continues to emerge that no one alive has ever heard.

Josquin, Monteverdi, Byrd, Tallis, Galuppi, Dufay

 Why have an Early Music Festival?  When great paintings are found, we put them in museums, and we throw open the doors and invite everyone to come and see them. When great music is found, it must be performed. So we get ourselves organized, throw open the doors, and invite you to come and listen. Come and risk falling in love, risk learning something new, risk having your life changed by the experience.  The Cincinnati Early Music Festival will present music by composers you probably know, like Bach, Telemann, and Monteverdi, and by composers you may not know, like Machaut, Tallis, and Rossi, and even some music that no one knows, music that has just been found and wakened after centuries of slumber.

You think you know music, but you don’t know this music. Keep your world view flexible, walk on the wild side. Join us in our adventure of discovery.

The adventure begins February 1. A complete list of events is available at www.catacoustic.com/season/

Holiday Gift Suggestions

Annalisa Pappano, Artistic Director of the Catacoustic Consort

I am so excited for the holidays this year. Here are my suggestions for early music gift ideas for yourself or friends on your gift-giving lists:

Books:

The Caldwell Collection of Viols: A Life Together in the Pursuit of Beauty: Catacoustic’s season-opener concert this year featured some of the instruments in the newly-published book about the Caldwell-Meints viol collection in Oberlin, Ohio. This is the second-largest private collection of historical violas da gamba in the world, and possibly the most exquisite! This book is filled with beautiful photographs and personal anecdotes of how the collection was assembled. It is now available at Joseph-Beth Bookstore in the Rookwood Pavilion (www.josephbeth.com).

Time & Joint Experiences:

Give the gift of live music with Catacoustic Consort concert tickets! (http://catacoustic.com/tickets/)

Make it your New Year’s resolution to learn to play the viola da gamba this year! The annual Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America is going to be in Oxford, Ohio at Miami University this July. Admission for beginners and the use of a loaner instrument are FREE-OF-CHARGE!!! You can commute or stay on campus with meals with the other attendees! (more information at http://vdgsa.org/pgs/conclave-2014/2014conclave.shtml.)

Recordings:

CD Recordings: I can’t get enough of the viol duo Musicke and Mirth. Their recording of 18^th century viol duos “Feuer und Bravour” and their lyra viol program “Musicke for Two Lyra Viols” are both fabulous.

New York Composer Gregory Spears takes his inspiration from early music (see recent blog post). His CD “Requiem” is available at http://www.amazon.com/Spears-Requiem-Ruth-Cunningham/dp/B005OZDXZ0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385413898&sr=8-1&keywords=gregory+spears

I strongly recommend this recording, and Catacoustic’s own Larry Lipnik (played in last season’s Lachrimae and this April’s consort program) is playing on the CD!

Regardless of how you celebrate the holidays, I wish you a lovely season and look forward to seeing you at the next Catacoustic concert!

A Conversation with Gregory Spears

Annalisa had the pleasure of meeting with NYC-based composer Gregory Spears recently. His opera Fellow Travelers was featured in Cincinnati Opera’s Opera Fusion: New Works workshop last week. She met him during the workshop and learned that he has a passion for early music and working with performers who specialize in early music.

Spears studied at Eastman and later went to the Royal Academy in Copenhagen on a Fulbright. One summer he worked at the Spoleto Festival as a stagehand for a Baroque orchestra when they were performing Cavalli’s Giasone with Harry Bickett. That’s when he fell in love with early music. Afterwards he got his Master’s degree at Yale, then a Ph.D. at Princeton. He currently teaches theory and composition at the Third Street Music School Settlement, which is the oldest community music school in NYC. This spring he will teach a class at Princeton called “Music and Madness.”

Most of Spears’ time is spent writing music on commission. He was recently in Miami, where he was commissioned to complete the Mozart Requiem for Seraphic Fire, a group who frequently performs early music. He also did a restoration of a Prokofiev ballet (under the guidance of musicologist Simon Morrison) for the Mark Morris Dance Company, is completing the opera Wolf in Skins for a Baroque orchestra, composed a commissioned song for Opera America, and is now finishing the opera Fellow Travelers.  One of his pieces will be performed on December 10 in Cincinnati by the Jack Quartet for Chamber Music Cincinnati as well. (www.cincychamber.org)

The following is paraphrased from their conversation.

My fantasy is to join the forces of new music and early music. This is the moment to do it! 

What is it about new music and early music that works for me? The revival of Handel opera and the excitement around newer operas like those of John Adams coincided, and their listeners had something in common. They liked a different type of drama and experience than traditional Verdi opera.  Today there are many fine early musicians, and it is less of a niche. You are also more likely to find musicians who can play Baroque period music AND Wagner AND contemporary music. Musicians have to be more versatile these days. There is never a cultural barrier in working with early musicians. They are looking for phrasing and affect of music, rather than waiting for words on the page (like dolce) to tell them how to play. It is thrilling to give musicians permission to connect with a new piece, as if it were an old piece.

I love working with singers. There is a special something about the type of sound of an early music singer. It’s paradoxical: The voice can sound almost like an electronic instrument with very little vibrato, but at the same time it has a deep soul.  The singer’s relationship to text is different too—the practice of musique mesurée was a fascinating moment in music history.  I am also very interested in the medieval practice of chant and in the use of the drone with music. The result of all these elements is music as both text and pure sound continuum.  

Period instruments are also great, and working with them is a very “vocal” experience. The challenge is that you really have to have the right venue. Period instruments are completed by their performing space. They collaborate with their acoustic. A black box theatre is not as successful as a live acoustical space.

What are the challenges of writing for early music instruments? Well, for instance you can’t write for a piano without considering what was written for it and why. That conversation with the history of an instrument interests me. You can figure who you are by looking through the lens of tradition.

I like working with traditional liturgical texts. While I am not an overtly religious person, I like working out of that tradition. Liturgical music has an electric charge - the infinite versus the finite (the human).

For more information on Gregory Spears’ music, visit his website at www.gregoryspears.com.

Orpheus' Lyre

Charles II

The next Catacoustic concert will continue a tour of 17^th-century England that we began last spring.  You may remember the concert in Terrace Park of music by John Dowland, and how in peaceful 1607 he could comfortably compose music of gorgeous longing and transcendent melancholy.  But what happened next?  The Tudors gave way to the Stuarts, the Stuarts thoroughly alienated themselves from their people, and so began the English Civil War.  The appalling story of this catastrophic war which was fought between 1642 and 1651, but whose tensions began many years before and whose fallout lasted decades after, must be told elsewhere; for now let us reduce all the facts to this one: almost one million people died in England, Scotland, and Ireland, out of a population of 7.5 million.

Oliver Cromwell

 But the music didn’t stop.  We live in wartime ourselves—we know that the need for self-expression becomes greater, if anything, in times of stress.  England produced many great composers during these benighted decades, and it is their music we will hear December 7.  Our tour of this tragic century in England will conclude in April with a concert dedicated entirely to the music of William Lawes, the soldier-composer.  

If peacetime gave us beautiful melancholic music, what did wartime produce?  Adrenaline and the sense that each day could be one’s last gave the music energy and made the composers bold.  Born of turbulent times, the music was experimental, even avant-garde for the day.  Some of it was light-hearted and comic, to suit people seeking an hour’s relief from their distressing daily lives.  An example of this is The Twelve Wonders of the World, a set of satirical songs based on stock characters by John Maynard, c 1577-1633.  Maynard’s fluffy satires were nevertheless ahead of their time in their instrumental arrangements.  

Christopher Simpson

Christopher Simpson, 1602-1669, on the other hand, was a dedicated teacher, and wrote the most important instructional books for viol ever—they are still used by students today, 350 years after their publication.  But Simpson’s outwardly dull books, with titles like A Compendium of Practical Musick, were actually filled with virtuosic pieces, startling in their creativity.  John Jenkins, 1592-1678, was an industrious, religious man, who fled to the countryside during the war, where he taught and composed prolifically for the viol.  The Oxford Companion to Music has this to say about this sober,
conventional man: “The best of his music is distinguished by its lyrical invention, emotional intensity, and adventurous tonal schemes, and his first-hand knowledge of the viol allowed him to exploit its expressive and technical capabilities to the full.”

Some of these composers were pro-Parliament, some of them were Royalists. Some wrote light music, others more serious.  But what all
these men had in common was that they sojourned in cataclysm, and
tried to make sense of their experiences through vibrant,
ground-breaking music. 

Which brings us to the lyra viol.  This is an odd little off-shoot of the viol family, a chordal instrument in a family of melody-makers.  Part viol, part lirone, it is capable of playing both a tune and its accompanying chords.  Music for it is written not on the staff, but in tablature.  Strings are often retuned to create the harmonic combinations they were looking for.  (Remember Jenkins’ “adventurous tonal schemes”?)  The resulting sound is warm, complex, and rich beyond all expectation—an entire orchestra speaking in one voice.

Lyra Viol

Lyra viol was popular 300 years ago, especially in England. Perhaps an anomalous instrument was necessary to describe a world gone mad.  But very few people today have taken it up.  The music you will hear at this concert, therefore, is very rarely performed, and is far outside the mainstream of Baroque viol music. An ensemble of extraordinary musicians, viols, lutes, and voices, will assemble at the beautiful Indian Hill Church to take us to another place and time, not so  different from our own. 

7:30pm Saturday, December 7, 2013

Indian Hill Church, 6000 Drake Road, Cincinnati (Indian Hill), OH  45243

Ample parking is available in church parking lot.

Individual tickets are $25 general, $10 student. Children 12 and under are always free. Tickets are available at the door, in advance by calling 513.772.3242, or at www.catacoustic.com.