I’m pretty pleased with this image from a below-zero morning:
and note that the left and right arrows take you to the adjacent images in the Flickr stream. If you click on the image it opens quite elegantly in Flickr.
I’m trying to figure out how/what to write about John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven, a book that I’m reading in short bursts because it’s so rich –like a small mountain of single-malt-filled chocolate truffles.
In more than 600 pages of smallish print there are hundreds of asterisked footnotes, 10 pages of chronology, 20 pages of notes and references, almost 30 pages of index, an 8-page glossary of musical terms, wodges of illustrations… The book is almost entirely concerned with Bach’s choral works, which are discussed in a level of detail that only a Conductor (and perhaps only John Eliot Gardiner…) could possibly attempt. I have only a tenuous grasp of music theory, no background in choral music, and no vocal training, but I continue to be riveted by Gardiner’s writing, and by the insights into Bach’s life and work on just about every page. Among materials that bear upon the book are:
a nice review from The Guardian.
In my podcast archives I have Gardiner talking about his Cantata Project:
And here’s a conversation between Gardiner and Philip Pullman, covering a lot of Bach territory:
YouTube has a 90-minute BBC special on Gardiner’s take on Bach’s life that’s supremely worth watching, and you can get a quick flavor of the tenor of this program in a bit more than a minute of Gardiner’s explication of a familiar portrait of Bach:
The whole 90 minutes:
The book is full of things I feel I should already have known, from basic facts (e.g., Martin Luther did his translation of the Bible into German in Eisenach, the town in which J.S. Bach was born a couple of hundred years later) to broad historical background (the wars of the Reformation fell especially heavily on Thuringia and Saxony) and ecclesiastical detail (Luther considered congregational singing to be an especially important part of worship).
On pretty much every page there’s the wherewithal for a dramatic enlargement of what the reader knows about music history and/or music theory. An example that sends me scurrying to Spotify to hear a piece that I’m not familiar with is this passage on Monteverdi:
[Monteverdi] recognized that the hitherto unexploited potential of what Florentines called the ‘new music’ was to allow the singer’s voice to fly free above an instrumental bass line, giving it just the right degree of harmonic support and ballast. Melodic shapes and rhythmic patterns no longer needed to be tethered by the guy-ropes of rigid polyphonic structure. Before L’Orfeo no one had grasped this potential freedom to manoeuvre or used it to plot expressive rises and falls for singers that encouraged spontaneous spurts of movement; to rush, drag or clash against the metrical beat and regular strummings of the plucked continuo instruments. It was with L’Orfeo that Monteverdi made the decisive creative leap — from a pastoral play, intended to be sung and not spoken throughout, to a musical-drama with emotions generated and intensified by music. (pg 104)
and further
Some unconscious inkling of the way the senses vary and clash in their receptivity to visual, aural and tactile stimuli may have been at the root of the anxiety that churchmen on both sides of the denominational divide in 1600 felt about religion borrowing the clothes of secular theatre. They bridled at the infiltration of ‘operatic’ techniques within their walls and liturgy. Contemporary musicians found ways, as musicians invariably do, to skirt around these rigid functional categories and, magpie-fashion, to pick and steal just what attracted them, maintaining only the thinnest formal veneer for the sake of propriety, while choosing the frame, design and modes of expression… (pg 105)
I expect to be tempted to quote passages whenever I return to Gardiner’s Bach.
I’m particularly fond of photographs that propose some sort of enigma, whose full narrative potential is only realized with the addition of something that’s not manifest in the image alone. ‘Whimsical misdirection’ seems like another earmark of this genre. I’ve done two such puzzle pictures in the last couple of days:
This short piece resides in my Dropbox, and is the version of mid-August (further evolved since then, but not re-recorded yet):
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The plugin should facilitate the incorporation of audio bits in postings.
Among the Great Joys is discovering and reading books that further enlarge what I already know about subjects I’ve been following for a while. As a lifelong collector of fugitive materials and odd bits of knowledge, my own personal landscape of such subjects is pretty well populated, and for some areas the prospect is highly articulated —musics being a case in point. My holdings threaten to overflow shelves and disk space, but there’s always room for more, and any given subdomain is always open for elaboration, via sound, print, video, and my own experiments.
Lately I’ve been reading two books that at first glance might appear to have very little in common: John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven and Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir. The two are in very different registers: Gardiner’s is über-scholarly and quite long, while Van Ronk is breezy and colloquial. Both are loving recreations of past time and place, full of outward links and references to things and people one already has some familiarity with. Both are significant social/cultural documents all by themselves, and both provoke orgies of listening and further ferretings. I’ll try to tempt you to further explorations of Van Ronk in this post, and save Gardiner for later.
Van Ronk’s perspective on The Great Folk Scare of the early 1960s is Greenwich Village-centric, and sometimes at odds with the Cambridge-centric version that populates Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years, but there are many viable versions of those realities. YouTube has lots of Van Ronk, and this clip gives a pretty good taste of what the written memoir is like:
Van Ronk’s book is full of quotable bits, stories and commentary both. For example, he says of jazz ear-training:
…There are people you can’t fool, people who can tell you, “No, that’s not Ben Webster, that’s Coleman Hawkins,” or “That’s not Pres, that’s Paul Quinichette,” and be right every time, and to do that, you can’t just groove with the music. You have to listen with a focus and an intensity that normal people never use. But we weren’t normal people, we were musicians. To be a musician requires a qualitatively different kind of listening… (pg. 10)
On toward the end of the book, Van Ronk offers this summary of the 60s folk era:
In fact, looking back on that period, very little of what got put down had much permanent value. There was a genuine artistic impulse, but the paradigms were flawed, and if you compare it to what was happening on Broadway in the 1930s, that scene was infinitely more creative and important than ours. The forms that were accepted as part of the folk matrix were too limited, both technically and in terms of staying power, and the ideology of the scene allowed for a great deal of sloppiness, which meant that nobody had to push themselves. Most of the songwriters were writing well below their abilities, and people who were capable of learning and employing more complicated harmonies and chord structures confined themselves to 1-4-5 changes. Some of them were enormously talented, but they were like an enormously talented boxer who insists on fighting with one hand behind his back. The result was that we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell –but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington…(pg 212-213)
I’m anticipating the release of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis a few days hence –it’s rooted in Van Ronk’s book, and I expect to love the film.
So I’m once again plunged into thinking about the ‘folk’ side of my musical interests, though I’m not much closer to a solution to the problem of organizing and interpreting their vastness.
I’m exploring the interconnection of text with YouTube clips, starting with a passage from John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven, where he discusses Christoph Bach’s Es erhub sich ein Streit:
Creating a magnificent tableau in sound, Christoph portrays the great eschatological battle in which the archangel Michael and his angelic squadrons fought the dragon and snuffed out a mutiny led by Lucifer and the forces of darkness… the halo of beatific string sounds of the sinfonia soothes the listener up to the moment when two solo basses appear and sing:are these dispatches from the front line or war reporters furtively recording their commentaries in the build-up to battle? Their antiphonal exchanges become steadily rougher, and they start to roar like a couple of meths-drinking tramps. Then almost imperceptibly the drumming begins.
One by one four field trumpeters bugle out their alarm calls and the voices start to pile up, while the circling angels size up the dragon and plan their attack. Soon a space opens up between the two five-voiced choirs… and a column of sound, six octaves tall, has been built up.
(that’s enough for proof of concept)
I have a lot more to say about Gardiner, but wanted to solve this problem of multimedia linkage. Stay tuned.
I read a lot of stuff, bouncing from thing to thing via fortuitous serendipities, offhanded references, bloggy recommendations, self-propelled curiosities and sheer accidents. Lately (in the wake of theTurkey trip) I’ve been reading Christopher de Bellaigue’s Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town, and this passage came along to broaden my conception of History:
I had dozens of hours of interviews… Many of these hours were worthless except as an illustration of history’s imprecision –not science at all, really, but the landscaping of churned ground so it looks nice.
We are not in the realm of historical interpretation. Under discussion are the bare facts. I had heard diametrically opposed accounts of things that happened 100 years before or last week. Concerning a single event dividing families or communities, I might be told three or four versions. Sometimes I sensed that all sides were lying or deliberately omitting things and I would be convinced that even on so simple a question of who started a riot, I would be unable to work out what happened. ‘It does not follow,’ the Cambridge historian E.H. Carr once wrote, ‘that because a mountain appears to taker on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.’ And yet that is what I saw: an infinity of shapes.
Here in the reserve store, rummaging through facts that no researcher had yet privileged with his attention, far less threaded into a coherent narrative, I got a new impression of the past: as a chaotic series of emotions, of outrage and guilt, scornful of chronology and very often founded on gossip, hagiography, or slander. A second obstacle was the tendency of my interviewees to dramatize things and turn them into a pageant; they shamelessly versified the most prosaic people and events. Every story had its ‘hero’, but often I found that the hero was spotted with villainy… (pg. 74)
Of course it’s not just History; the same could (should, even) be said of the data an anthropologist elicits from informants.
Recovering from a solid month of travels (Turkey, Nova Scotia, California) and visitors, all of it glorious. Fall is definitely upon us, leaves falling and climatic realities setting in (winter wood mostly stacked; we’ve already had a couple of fires in the stoves, mostly to warm visitors from less intemperate climates). Being past the 70 milestone gives pause for reflection on this and that, and opportunity for Resolutions for the onward path: more reading, more music, more photography, more [mindful] eating, more exercise. Not much less of anything, though, unless it be investment in political hoohah and righteous indignation.
Santa Cruz is sure that it’s the coolest place in the hemisphere. The denizens run the gamut from racy to flaky, with all expressing pronounced Green tendencies. The bakeries are simply amazingly wonderful
I’ve been carrying an iPhone for more than two years now, though previously I swore never to have anything to do with such appliances. I rarely use it as a phone, and the several camera apps get the most mileage. While flying from Boston to San Francisco yesterday I tried it out as an aerial camera and was amazed at the results. Try these on for size:
