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jaeleslie at 12:37pm on 23/09/2002
jaeleslie at 12:37pm on 23/09/2002Saturday night we went to hear the Wisconsin Baroque Ensemble. They are a group of five musicians who play half-a-dozen chamber concerts every season, at small venues where fifty to seventy people is a full house. Here they play at the Gates of Heaven, which is a small wooden building in a public park, a historical preservation building, with Victorian sandstone facade, the first synagogue in this part of the country. The room is a lively sounding box, with the tall carved wooden cabinet that used to hold the scrolls at the front to look at, a pale blue vaulted ceiling and period glass light fixtures.
We go to these concerts because I like live acoustic music, and before that because the cellist's spouse is a good friend. Anton got a new cello a couple of years ago. It is one of those fine instruments that cost more than our little house did. (Well okay the house is worth more now.) I enjoyed the concerts when he played with his old cello too, because I like that kind of very old music, and these are all very good players. I don't know if you know about Early Music, but to begin with these are not modern instruments but old style wooden ones: recorder, violin, cello, viola da gamba, and harpsichord. They are tuned a bit lower than modern instruments (a' = 412 Hz it says in the program). The music is so old and has been copied over so many times it is a puzzle now for professionals to figure out how it would have been played back when it was new.
The program this time was billed as Vivaldi, although there were only a couple of Vivaldi pieces played. The other composers were Castello, Frescobaldi, Colista, Chedeville, and Turini -- not quite all of them Italian either. The players talked a bit about each of the pieces informally, between pieces, and joked about truth in advertising. It seems Vivaldi copied from some of these pieces, and some of them were published under his name although he didn't write them, because they would sell better. (Back then, four hundred years ago, the attitude toward acknowledgement of the artist's creation was very different from our modern concern with copyright protection. We talked about that at the party afterwards.) The musicians were dressed informally, with comfy shoes, and only somewhat in black, the ladies in satiny red shirts.
There was lots of tuning between pieces. The harpsichord would offer an A and the recorder would check it and the strings would twist and turn for minutes on end. There's no apologizing for the weather, which has just turned from hot and humid to cool fall weather, a difficult transition for gut strings. And then the folding chairs in the hall were very squeaky, and the audience seemed to me unusually large and restless. The violinist's baby didn't stay quiet even through the second piece and daddy had to take her outside. There was a guy on the aisle who kept coughing and blowing his nose. Someone in the tiny balcony overhead was beating time, out of time, and with every noise reverberating in this little wooden room I could feel his boot thumping.
With all these distractions, I was having such a hard time paying attention, and then I thought how about the musicians? They played on through it -- feeling somewhat under-rehearsed, I heard later. The violin had a sonata, and the recorder had a sonata, and one or the other sat out for one piece or another, and then the cello and gamba had an ensemble, and the harpsichord kept at it, through all continuo, plinking away.
I don't know whether people from another culture would find this seventeenth-century Italian music as emotionally evocative as I do. But it seems to me that this music carries feelings quite directly. It seems to cover all manner of human emotion and thought, but hardly anything that can be translated. If it could be told in words, it would not be music. I might tell you all my passing thoughts as I listened and heard, and the waverings of attention, the squeaking of chairs, the whispering behind me, my puzzling over what these same sounds might have meant to another listener anytime in the last four hundred years, and the solace this music seems to offer from the troubles that beset our times. Perhaps it is the social intimacy of the setting that gives the occasion such import to me. I might make a note of which Largo movement brought me to tears, and which Allegro seemed to say, but it's okay, what about this? I heard my friends (for they all are my friends in offering this gift) working hard at difficult arts that they have studied for years, to make this twittering of birds, and sawing of sewing machines, that passes the time. It seems to me a good way to pass the time we have.
And afterwards we went to Marcia and Anton's house for the party. I told him, maybe we can't get Yo-Yo Ma to play for us, but we do have Anton... Anton TenWolde. I always think of Young Fred running from the Yellow Submarine to cry The Blue Meanies are coming! what shall we do? and the Lord Mayor of Pepperland answers, Finish The Quartet.
We go to these concerts because I like live acoustic music, and before that because the cellist's spouse is a good friend. Anton got a new cello a couple of years ago. It is one of those fine instruments that cost more than our little house did. (Well okay the house is worth more now.) I enjoyed the concerts when he played with his old cello too, because I like that kind of very old music, and these are all very good players. I don't know if you know about Early Music, but to begin with these are not modern instruments but old style wooden ones: recorder, violin, cello, viola da gamba, and harpsichord. They are tuned a bit lower than modern instruments (a' = 412 Hz it says in the program). The music is so old and has been copied over so many times it is a puzzle now for professionals to figure out how it would have been played back when it was new.
The program this time was billed as Vivaldi, although there were only a couple of Vivaldi pieces played. The other composers were Castello, Frescobaldi, Colista, Chedeville, and Turini -- not quite all of them Italian either. The players talked a bit about each of the pieces informally, between pieces, and joked about truth in advertising. It seems Vivaldi copied from some of these pieces, and some of them were published under his name although he didn't write them, because they would sell better. (Back then, four hundred years ago, the attitude toward acknowledgement of the artist's creation was very different from our modern concern with copyright protection. We talked about that at the party afterwards.) The musicians were dressed informally, with comfy shoes, and only somewhat in black, the ladies in satiny red shirts.
There was lots of tuning between pieces. The harpsichord would offer an A and the recorder would check it and the strings would twist and turn for minutes on end. There's no apologizing for the weather, which has just turned from hot and humid to cool fall weather, a difficult transition for gut strings. And then the folding chairs in the hall were very squeaky, and the audience seemed to me unusually large and restless. The violinist's baby didn't stay quiet even through the second piece and daddy had to take her outside. There was a guy on the aisle who kept coughing and blowing his nose. Someone in the tiny balcony overhead was beating time, out of time, and with every noise reverberating in this little wooden room I could feel his boot thumping.
With all these distractions, I was having such a hard time paying attention, and then I thought how about the musicians? They played on through it -- feeling somewhat under-rehearsed, I heard later. The violin had a sonata, and the recorder had a sonata, and one or the other sat out for one piece or another, and then the cello and gamba had an ensemble, and the harpsichord kept at it, through all continuo, plinking away.
I don't know whether people from another culture would find this seventeenth-century Italian music as emotionally evocative as I do. But it seems to me that this music carries feelings quite directly. It seems to cover all manner of human emotion and thought, but hardly anything that can be translated. If it could be told in words, it would not be music. I might tell you all my passing thoughts as I listened and heard, and the waverings of attention, the squeaking of chairs, the whispering behind me, my puzzling over what these same sounds might have meant to another listener anytime in the last four hundred years, and the solace this music seems to offer from the troubles that beset our times. Perhaps it is the social intimacy of the setting that gives the occasion such import to me. I might make a note of which Largo movement brought me to tears, and which Allegro seemed to say, but it's okay, what about this? I heard my friends (for they all are my friends in offering this gift) working hard at difficult arts that they have studied for years, to make this twittering of birds, and sawing of sewing machines, that passes the time. It seems to me a good way to pass the time we have.
And afterwards we went to Marcia and Anton's house for the party. I told him, maybe we can't get Yo-Yo Ma to play for us, but we do have Anton... Anton TenWolde. I always think of Young Fred running from the Yellow Submarine to cry The Blue Meanies are coming! what shall we do? and the Lord Mayor of Pepperland answers, Finish The Quartet.