August 14th, 2010
It’s been a while! I haven’t been recording like I had planned because I was working too much on the music for the Bruges competition. This is now finished, so I’m coming back to the blog!
I haven’t actually left Europe yet, so haven’t had a chance to record anything new. However, I have some recordings of concerts on this computer, and found a nice little clip of some Froberger from the 2009 Fredericton Baroque Music Festival. Here’s the Lamentation sur ce que j’ay été volé with accompanying Courante, Gigue and Sarabande.
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Lamentation:
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Courante:
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Gigue:
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Sarabande:
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April 3rd, 2010
And here, finally, is the fugue to accompany the prelude I recorded a while ago!
And about this, I just have to say that Bach is hard. So many little notes… even a short piece like this is exhausting to play! There’s really no chance to catch your breath once you get started! It’s really getting to be fun to play this though.
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February 27th, 2010
It’s been a while since the last recording – I spent a week in Winnipeg, another week in Fredericton, accompanied a pile of auditions at McGill, and have been learning Scarlatti, and Rameau both of which take me forever.
But now I’m back with a bit of Bach! I always have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Bach. The music’s fantastic, of course, but it tends to be so dense with counterpoint that it never sits still – most pieces are essentially saturated with moving 16th notes! This in contrast to the D’Anglebert I recorded earlier, where, even though there are a lot of notes, and plenty going on, you still get cadences where you can catch your breath. Not so much in Bach! My goal with this music is always to let it flow as smoothly as if it were a ‘normal’
piece despite all that clutter. (Bach fans, don’t hate me!)
Here’s the C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book II. I’ll try to get the fugue recorded in another week or two, though I’m spending some time in Quebec city, so can’t guarantee anything.
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January 23rd, 2010
So, my clavichord started getting lonely with all the attention given to the harpsichord lately, and so I decided I should spend some time with it! Clavichord technique does not take kindly to neglect, I have found. It took quite a while before I could do more than butcher anything I tried to play.
I finally did get something recorded though: Attaingnant’s setting of Sermisy’s Tant Que Vivray. It’s curious writing for the keyboard – there isn’t a lot of French repertoire before the clavecinistes come in a hundred years later, and what 16th century music is out there is rarely played these days. But I think it has a certain charm, especially on the clavichord.
After uploading this, I realized that my computer speakers completely massacre this recording, even more than usual. I can barely even discern the melody at the beginning! Give it a chance with headphones or half-decent speakers, if you can.
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Don’t worry – no more recordings today. I have other work to do!
January 23rd, 2010
As a followup to last week’s allemande, I’ve recorded the prelude from the same suite. I adore unmeasured preludes! If ever there was something that was purely harpsichord music, it would be these. They make the instrument ring in a way that nothing else can! And I love having the freedom to do almost whatever I want with it.
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to play it the same way twice – I considered editing a few sections together for this recording (some parts are not easy!), but decided that would really be a last resort. Finding two takes that fit together technically and musically would be a bigger challenge than just playing the whole thing through!
Speaking of the recording, I have an almost identical setup as I did last week: two Oktava MK-012s, angled at about 90°, four feet or so off the floor, maybe 8 feet away from the harpsichord. Is this the best arrangement? Probably not – suggestions are welcome! I plug it all into a Tascam US-122 which connects to my laptop, and then record and edit everything using Ardour running on Ubuntu linux. Yay for free software!
The only thing I changed for this recording is to tweak the equalizer settings a little bit – the harpsichord’s mighty bass doesn’t really come through on the recording, so I nudged it up just a little.
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June 21st, 2008
I’m a big fan of French unmeasured preludes, as I’ve mentioned before. I always have a blast trying to interpret all the little ambiguous notes, and trying to make them musical. They’re also such exquisite pieces of pure harpsichord music! (of course, unmeasured preludes exist for other instruments as well, but they they’re idiomatic for those instruments instead!)
François Couperin wrote a series of 8 preludes in his L’Art de toucher le clavecin which are particularly intriguing because, while he suggests they be played freely, they are very precise in their rhythmic notation as well, so there’s always a question of how much you can step outside of those rhythms, and how you do so.
A few weeks ago, Thomas Dent posted a recording of the first prelude to the harpsichord mailing list that were quite striking in how he moves individual 8th notes around in a fairly systematic way, but keeps the overall rhythm fairly strict. Personally, I feel that maybe this is a little bit backwards – to me, small changes within a stable beat characterize not an unmeasured piece, but just a typical baroque, and especially French baroque, approach to meter and rhythm. What makes the unmeasured pieces special, to me, isn’t that the small notes are flexible, but that the big beats don’t have to have the structured regularity that most French music, with its basis in dances, always seems to have.
With that in mind, I made a few recordings of my own of the first prelude, trying to emphasize different things. First of all, I tried to do the opposite of Thomas, just to see if I could! This version keeps the eighth notes fairly regular, but speeds up and slows down and stops on a few big beats. I think this is more or less the way I used to play this.
Then I tried adding in the sort of 8th note flexibility that Thomas talks about, while still thinking about the bigger beats. I think it’s quite successful, though I could stand to spend a bit more time on it, for sure! I found that, even though the notated rhythm is very similar from bar to bar, there are many different ways that Couperin uses the syncopated notes. Sometimes they are suspensions, sometimes they’re anticipations, etc..
Finally, I just bashed through, half-way ignoring the page, and making up my own sorts of things. Great fun! It’s not just pointless silliness though, by any stretch: I find it very useful, when trying to find out what little notes mean, to try improvising similar patterns. When improvising, I won’t play something ‘just because it’s there’ (because it isn’t!) but rather, I play things because it makes sense for where I’m taking the music. Doing this with this particular piece gave me a better sense of where the harmonies move, and what each syncopation is really trying to accomplish. Definitely a useful exercise!
So what conclusions are to be drawn? Mainly that there are many ways to interpret any piece as free as a prelude, measured or not. I think it’s important to keep in mind the underlying harmonies though, and to find a reason for every note to be where it is. Without that figured out, it’s nearly impossible to play the piece in a way that will hang together.
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June 12th, 2008
We made it! It was a lot of work, but the 2008 Fredericton Baroque Music Festival pretty much all came together nicely this past weekend! Highlights included playing a quiet intimate harpsichord solo (Hezekiah’s Lament, from Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonatas) and being almost entirely drowned out by a huge rain and wind storm! At least the tornado warnings didn’t come true… and I hope at least the people near the front of the church enjoyed what they heard! Unfortunately, attendance was a little bit lower this year than last – probably due to the weather and Riverfest, which was happening the same weekend, along with many end-of-school-year activities. Next year, there isn’t quite so much happening at the same time, so more people should be able to come!
We’re already planning next year’s festival, and the Early Music Fredericton’s other concert dates have been mostly finalized. I’m going to be doing three all-Bach concerts, featuring all six (possibly seven, if you count the G minor reconstruction) sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord, along with many solo keyboard pieces. It will be a great chance to hear some well-known masterpieces, along with some of the music by Bach that you might not be familiar with.
Mark the dates on your calendar!
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May 21st, 2008
Work towards the festival is coming along nicely, with programmes essentially finalized, rehearsal schedules tentatively ready, programme notes starting to get written, last-minute advertising going out, etc. With all that, it’s regrettably easy to forget about the whole reason for doing all of this: the music!
I’m going to be performing an early Mozart concerto with YEME – actually a J.C. Bach sonata arranged into a concerto by Mozart. It’s a nice little piece, full of sparkle without being overly fluffy, and interesting little quirks without being angsty.
One thing about it though, is that it calls for at least two cadenzas — I think I’ll add in a third as well, since I’m a big fan of them. However, I don’t actually have much experience playing cadenzas! It’s not too surprising, since this sort of cadenza is mainly a product of the later 18th century (with the very notable exception of some of the Bach harpsichord concertos), and I generally don’t play much of that repertoire. Actually playing a cadenza isn’t much trouble — as I said, I really like the sort of rhythmic freedom that it calls for, whether it’s in a prelude non mesuré or a Frescobaldi toccata. The tricky part is in coming up with something to play, since none of these cadenzas are notated, except with a fermata over a dominant 6-4 chord, implying that you’re supposed to do something there.
Many people, when performing concertos from this time turn to published cadenzas, sometimes coming from sources contemporary to the concerto itself, sometimes written by famous performers from later years. Many people do write their own, but as is often the approach taken with ornamentation, they carefully write out their own cadenza and then follow it every time they perform. I much prefer the idea of improvising a cadenza though. There’s no doubt that this was the usual approach in the 18th century (and much later as well — it’s only relatively recently that it has fallen out of practise). The problem with it is, well, it’s hard!
I’ve been experimenting with improvising cadenzas for the past few weeks, and, while I’ve had a lot of success at coming up with some interesting patterns and melodies, it’s not so easy to make something that hangs together. Generally speaking, I find I can either make something that’s harmonically coherent — starts in one key, moves through some others and gets back where it started without breaking too many rules of counterpoint and harmony — or else I can do something that’s dramatically/rhetorically interesting — builds in mood, and flows from one idea through another and then back to the original thought — but it’s extremely difficult to do both at once! Countless times, I’ve done some really neat twists through unexpected chords, and neatly got back to the home key, but without really making it sound like anything except a series of chords. Other times, I’ve made a spectacularly exciting switch of mood from one end to the other, but then run out of steam before I get back to the right key!
The solution for me, is to not improvise everything blindly, but to start with a road map, and improvise within those limits, so I know where I’m going and can pace myself. But it is awfully fun to just leap in without really knowing where I’ll take it this time! It’s all somewhat new territory for me, in any case, and I hope that soon I’ll be more comfortable with this style of improvising, and will be able to safely dive into something in the middle of a concert.
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May 5th, 2008
Yes, it’s been a while. What have I been up to? Some gigs, some work, making some bread, tuning some harpsichords…
Work on ttuner has slowed down a little lately, since I’ve been busy with other things, but I’ve made a lot of progress on a GUI. This was a big task, since it involved rewriting everything in C++ (which also meant I had to learn C++). It does just about everything it used to, but I have a lot of cleaning up to do, and a few more things to add in – configuration files, keyboard shortcuts and so on – before another release. If you want to, the latest code is available at the git repository I’m using. On that note, I gave up on subversion, and switched to git. I heartily recommend it!
In other news, the Fredericton Baroque Music Festival will be happening June 6-8! We’re knee-deep in preparations for that. With four concerts and a masterclass and all the ensuing rehearsals and organization, there’s a lot to do!
March 6th, 2008
Yes, these releases are coming frequently. There was so little time between 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 that I wasn’t even able to update the web page in between!
The new version adds volume adjusting (with plus and minus keys) and pausing (with space bar) to the interactive mode. I found a pile of other bugs of course, too! There’s also a bit better information displayed when notes are playing, including a list of available key commands. I’ve also included a few different harmonics files which you can use with the -H option:
ttuner -h harmonics/simple_sine.harmonics
for example. They’re straightforward, but I hope they show how you can make your own files if you like.
As always, you can get it at the programming page.