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| 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.
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| Vive la Révolution! |
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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-20th 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.
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| 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/
About 1000 years ago the modern system of musical notation
was developed. Medieval music had its
own characteristics, from modal plainchant to motets to the melodies of the
wandering minstrels. As the Middle
Ages slid into the Renaissance, music played a key part in this rebirth of
European culture. Madrigals, polyphony, and
new instruments were all evolving. Six
hundred years into the journey, Baroque composers were inventing opera and
oratorio, were composing for a vast spectrum of instruments, and were selling
music like hotcakes to the growing class of educated amateurs. 
The year 1760, give
or take a decade, is generally where we shift out of “Early Music” and into conventional
classical music. The reason for this
date is largely because of the instrumentation. The recorders and lutes of the Renaissance, and the harpsichords and
viols of the Baroque, by 1760 had been almost entirely replaced by the modern
strings and winds we still find today in the modern symphony orchestra. The main reason it’s easier to find a concert
of modern music is not that there is more, or better, of it available, but that
more people play the violin, the piano, or the clarinet, than play the theorbo,
the clavichord, or the crumhorn. 
Find a great theorbo player, though, and you’ll never go
back. 
