{"id":2140,"date":"2013-12-22T15:40:37","date_gmt":"2013-12-22T20:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2013-12-22T15:45:33","modified_gmt":"2013-12-22T20:45:33","slug":"why-persecutest-thou-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2140","title":{"rendered":"why persecutest thou me?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I continue to nibble at Gardiner&#8217;s <b>Bach<\/b>, finding juicy nuggets every time. Today I happened upon his description of Sch&uuml;tz&#8217;s <i>Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich<\/i>, which I&#8217;d never heard (or might have heard, without paying any attention to the text):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Implied\u2026 in this quite stupendous work &#8211;a &#8216;sacred symphony&#8217; lasting less than five minutes&#8211; is an imaginary <i>mis en sc&egrave;ne<\/i>:  of Paul on the road to Damascus\u2026 [Sch&uuml;tz] marshals his ensemble of six soloists, two obbligato violins, two four-part choirs\u2026 not just to depict the scene with pictorial effects, not to fill in the textual gaps by means of apt rhetorical figures, but to <b>create a compelling psychodrama compressed into eighty bars of music<\/b>. The result is an astonishing portrayal, every bit as striking in its way as Caravaggio&#8217;s altar painting\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s arresting enough that I thought maybe YouTube would have the piece, and sure enough, complete with the Caravaggio painting and conducted by Gardiner himself:<center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/npFUYTrzaK4?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/center><br \/>\nAnd here&#8217;s Gardiner&#8217;s exegesis:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>True to past practice when setting Christ&#8217;s words, Sch&uuml;tz employs his voices in pairs. They emerge from mysterious depths as a barely audible mutter in a four-fold repetition of Saul&#8217;s name, separated by rests, before transferring to the next terraced pair, each climbing through the space of an octave before evaporating in a wordless violin extension\u2026 What began as a quiet reproach, the voice of conscience, now grows into an accusation, the monosyllable punched out and tossed between the two halves of the double choir &#8211;to encircle and disorient the now-enfeebled Saul before the <b>Was verfolgst du much<\/b> is sped up in dizzying contracted rhythmic patterns and terraced echoes. Sch&uuml;tz&#8217;s purpose is to make sure that the listener gets caught up in the process and becomes equally disoriented. In performance (especially in a church with a long reverberation and with the musical forces deployed spatially) it can amount to an aural bombardment with a disturbing resemblance to the amplified noises of the torture chamber directed at the target from all sides, in all pitches and volumes. (pp 116-117)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Without the YouTube version I&#8217;d have thought Gardiner&#8217;s description pretty gripping, but the combination of text and audio and visual doth elevate the experience considerably. And Gardiner keeps pulling musical rabbits like this out of a whole forest of hats, which makes for slow going but potent education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I continue to nibble at Gardiner&#8217;s Bach, finding juicy nuggets every time. Today I happened upon his description of Sch&uuml;tz&#8217;s Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich, which I&#8217;d never heard (or might have heard, without paying any attention to the text): Implied\u2026 in this quite stupendous work &#8211;a &#8216;sacred symphony&#8217; lasting less than five minutes&#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2146,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/2146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}