The Gamba's Return

Peter Holman’s long-anticipated Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch was published at the close of last year. In this fascinating post, he outlines how he came to his subject and some of the research that has grown out of it:

The origins of this book go back to a day in the late 1990s when my Ph.D. student Ian Davies mentioned that he had come across a manuscript in London University Library that contained some eighteenth-century English sonatas for bass viol – or ‘viol da gamba’ as it was more commonly known at the time. He had come across it as part of his research into English cathedral music around 1800, and he knew I was interested in stringed instruments and their history. The London University Library manuscript turned out to include six sonatas for bass viol and continuo or two bass viols evidently composed or compiled (it includes arrangements of violin sonatas by Angelo Michele Besseghi and recorder sonatas by Francesco Barsanti) around 1730. However, it was evidently copied much later: it also includes a gamba part from a hitherto unknown sonata by Carl Friedrich Abel as well as trio sonatas from Maximilian Humble’s op. 1 of 1768.

Researching the manuscript for an article made me realise that the viol did not entirely drop out of use in England at the end of the seventeenth century, as was conventionally thought, and that there was scope for a larger study. At the same time I had become aware that I was in danger of repeating myself in writing about seventeenth-century music, and that it was time for a change of direction. Working in a later period would give me access to a far richer range of primary sources than was available before 1700. I was aware that others were developing interests in late gamba music in other European countries, notably Vittorio Ghielmi, Christophe Coin, and Michael O’Loughlin, for example. I also benefited from the interest and encouragement of the viol player and cellist Mark Caudle, an old friend and colleague in The Parley of Instruments; he is the dedicatee of the book. From the material I had assembled at an early stage, in 1998 we recorded a CD, The Noble Bass Viol (Hyperion CDA67088). It covered the repertory of compositions and arrangements for one, two and three bass viols with continuo from Purcell to Handel, including pieces by them and Benjamin Hely, William Gorton, Giovanni Battista Draghi, Gottfried Finger, Francesco Conti, and Arcangelo Corelli.

In beginning to research and plan a book on the viol ‘after the golden age’ I started with two areas where I knew gamba players had been active and there was surviving music for the instrument. The first was a group of musicians associated with Handel and the orchestra of the Italian opera company at the Haymarket Theatre. It was known that Handel wrote a gamba solo in the famous Parnassus scene in Giulio Cesare (1724), and that about the same time he wrote out the first bar of his G minor violin sonata HWV364 in the alto clef, labelling it ‘Per la Viola da Gamba’, presumably as an instruction to someone else to copy out the whole work in that form. Handel’s involvement with the gamba had been explored before, though the problem had always been that these pieces appeared to exist in a vacuum: no gamba player was known to have been active in London around 1724, and no other contemporary English gamba works appeared to have survived.

That quickly changed: in addition to the Williamson Manuscript (as it became known), colleagues working on Handel and his contemporaries, including the late Anthony Hicks and Lowell Lindgren, pointed me to a cantata by Pietro Giuseppe Sandoni for soprano, two gambas and theorbo, and cantatas by Tommaso Bernardo Gaffi and Francesco Gasparini arranged in early eighteenth-century England with gamba obbligatos. It also became likely that the various trio sonatas by J.C. Pepusch with gamba obbligato had been written for Pietro Chaboud, an Italian bassoonist and flute player who arrived in England around 1700 and played in the Italian opera orchestra. Chaboud may also have been responsible for a set of gamba arrangements of Corelli’s op. 5 violin sonatas, two of which were published in London in 1712, and the publication Aires and Symphonys for ye Bass Viol (London, 1710), which contains a set of arrangements for solo bass viol of arias from Italian operas in the repertory of the Haymarket Theatre. Arrangements tended to loom larger in the repertory of early eighteenth-century gamba players than their predecessors partly because Italian opera and violin music was all the rage at the time, and partly because gamba players in England had begun to read music in the (octave-transposing) treble clef, which made all music written for soprano instruments and voices available to them.

The other task was to try to identify the person or people who had played this new repertory of gamba music. Chaboud was the obvious candidate for the second decade of the eighteenth century, but there is no trace of him in London (or anywhere else) after May 1719. To cut a long story short, a number cellists in the opera orchestra, including Nicola Haym, François Goodsens, Pippo Amadei and Giovanni Bononcini, may have played the gamba, though only the German David Boswillibald, principally a double bass player, seems to have been active in Handel’s circle around 1724. In the book I put him forward as the person most likely to have played the solo in Giulio Cesare.

The other topic I researched early on was Carl Friedrich (or Charles Frederick) Abel, the greatest gamba player in the late eighteenth century. Abel had been studied by Walter Knape in the 1950s and 60s, who produced a thematic catalogue of his works, a biography and a complete edition. However, Knape’s work is flawed in a number of respects and is now out of date; the time seemed ripe for a new study of his gamba music and his life as a gamba player. I started by reading through The Public Advertiser, the main newspaper for concert advertisements, for each London concert season between 1759 (when Abel made his London debut) and his death in 1787, omitting the period between 1782 and 1785 when he was in Germany. Getting a clear idea of his concert career (and the careers of other professional gamba players at the time) was subsequently made much easier by Simon McVeigh, who kindly made his database Calendar of London Concerts, 1750-1800 available to me, and by the appearance of the online database Seventeenth-Eighteenth-Century Burney Collections Newspapers.

Another topic that developed early on was the life and work of John Frederick Hintz (1711-72), who seems to have been the only maker of viols in England between Barak Norman and his contemporaries in the early eighteenth century and the first makers in the early music revival at the end of the nineteenth century. He is now by far the best documented London instrument maker of the eighteenth century, thanks to the work of furniture historians and those such as James Lomax and Lanie Graf who have researched the early history of the Moravian Brethren in England; Hintz was successively a furniture maker, a full-time Moravian evangelist, and an instrument maker. The realisation that he specialised in making and selling unusual and rare instruments led me to look more generally at the cultivation of them in the late eighteenth century, helping me to understand the role of the gamba in musical life. It led in turn to studying others in the same field, such as the inventors John Joseph Merlin and Charles Clagget, and the steam engine pioneer James Watt – who made at least one gamba before he moved from Glasgow to Birmingham in 1774 and went into partnership with Matthew Boulton.

One of the pleasures of researching a rare instrument, one that was not used in mainstream public and private music-making at the time, is that many interesting people were attracted to it. James Watt is one unexpected example, and others are the American statesman Benjamin Franklin; the writer Laurence Sterne; the aristocrats Sir Edward Walpole, John, Viscount Bateman, Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her cousins Margaret Georgiana, Countess Spencer and Lavinia, Viscountess Althorp; the musician and writer Ann Ford; and the artists Thomas Jones, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Cheesman, John Cawse, and perhaps John Constable. Many of these amateurs were inspired by Abel’s example and tuition to take up the gamba. Others doubtless thought that playing an unusual instrument would make them appear distinctive among their musical friends. For aristocratic women it was just about the only ensemble instrument open to them, since wind instruments involved distorting the face and playing the violin or violoncello involved adopting ungraceful postures. In addition, artists seem to have been attracted to the graceful shape of the gamba, which often featured in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings they studied.

A parallel study of amateur gamba players in the early eighteenth century revealed much about musical life at the time. Having made a list of all those amateurs known to have played or owned gambas at the time, it became clear to me that they divided into roughly three groups according to social status. There was a small group of aristocrats who probably received musical tuition from household musicians or on the grand tour – which at the time often meant a period studying in Paris or Leiden as well as visiting Italy. At the other end of the social scale there was an interesting group of self-made and self-educated artisans and tradesmen, including the musical coal merchant Thomas Britton, the apothecary and botanist James Sherard, the writer Daniel Defoe, and the clock maker John ‘longitude’ Harrison. In between there was the great mass of members of the professions – clergymen, doctors and lawyers – who must have acquired their musical skills and knowledge of the gamba at university in Oxford or Cambridge or (in the case of lawyers) at the Inns of Court in London; dissenters, who were barred from the English universities, went abroad, often to Leiden, or to Scottish universities.

We know from letters, diaries, inventories of music and surviving manuscripts that these amateurs often used the gamba as a solo instrument, though it was also indispensible for providing the bass line in the music clubs that were springing up all over the country at the time; amateurs did not start to take up the violoncello in England until about 1730. In general, there was a transition at the time from using the gamba as a bass instrument, reading music in the bass and alto clefs, to a solo instrument in the tenor register reading from the treble clef. This was also associated with a change of name, from ‘bass viol’ to ‘viola da gamba’ or some Anglicised variant such as ‘viol di gambo’. After about 1720 most people outside elite musical circles normally used ‘bass viol’ to mean a four-string unfretted instrument. This was particular true in parish churches, where people would have been familiar with the Sternhold and Hopkins ‘old version’ of Psalm 150, which includes the phrase ‘Praise him upon the viol’. However, this usage was not confined to church: Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789 that the six-stringed instrument ‘called Viol de Gambo’ is ‘about the Size of a Bass Viol, but is not the same’.

I originally planned to confine the book to the eighteenth century, but it soon became apparent that gamba playing continued sporadically throughout the nineteenth century. In 1889 the historian, lawyer and gamba player Edward Payne (1844-1904) stated in a lecture to the Musical Association (now the Royal Musical Association) in London: ‘I could prove, if it were necessary, that the art of playing it [the gamba] has never died out in this country, but that the traditions of the instrument have survived in a constant succession of amateur players’ – by which he seems to have meant Thomas Cheeseman (1760-?1842), John Cawse (1779-1862), and himself.

The last professional player in England in the continuous tradition, the Dutch cellist Johan Arnold Dahmen, died in 1813, though other professionals occasionally took up the gamba for particular concerts throughout the nineteenth century, mostly as part of the developing early music movement. They include an unnamed player in a concert directed by the harpist Nicholas Bochsa in 1836; the cellist Richard Hatton in a Concert of Ancient Music in 1845; the viola player Henry Webb in at least one of Ernst Pauer’s historical concerts in 1862; and the cellist Walter Pettit (1836-82), who became well known in the 1870s for playing the obbligato parts in J.S. Bach’s passions on the gamba. By the 1880s gamba playing by amateurs and professionals was fairly common, so that when Arnold Dolmetsch organized his first old music concert in 1890 his innovation was not to revive the viol per se, but to attempt to assemble a complete viol consort and to use it to play English seventeenth-century consort music. Even so there were compromises: his first viol consort included a viola and a viola d’amore. However, Dolmetsch was a turning point, and the model he developed of the scholar-performer came to dominate the British early music scene during the twentieth century.

As always with a major research project of this sort there are loose ends to tie up and further avenues to explore. One is the history of early music: I am hoping to write an article on the harpsichord in nineteenth-century England, and I have been asked to give a paper on the twentieth-century British early music scene at a conference in Salzburg in December. I have also been using material I have accumulated on other eighteenth-century ‘exotic’ instruments. I am editing Geminiani’s treatise on the English guitar for Christopher Hogwood’s Opera Omnia of the composer, and I have recently written a study of John Russell’s fine painting of the actress Dorothy Jordan playing a lute-family instrument. In addition, I am planning a study of Handel’s use of the archlute and theorbo, which will reveal the identity of the person I believe was his regular lutenist in the 1720s and 30s. I have also started work on another research project on the history of conducting and musical direction in Britain, in collaboration with Fiona Palmer. I hope it will result in another volume in the Boydell series ‘Music in Britain, 1600-1900’, provisionally entitled Before the Baton: Conducting and Musical Direction in Georgian Britain.

Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch by Peter Holman is available from all good booksellers.

Introducing Balcarres

With Burns Night fast approaching, we are pleased to post an article with a Scottish theme. Recently the University Presses of Glasgow and Aberdeen published the long-awaited Balcarres Lute Book as part of the Music of Scotland Series. Described as a ‘beautiful production’ by the Times Literary Supplement, it is intended both for the lute player with a facsimile of the tablature and extensive notes and concordances, and the scholar with a introduction on the background and context followed by a full transcription. Here, editor Matthew Spring provides some background to this important discovery:

The Balcarres manuscript is the largest and arguably most important post-1640 British source of lute music. The collection is also possibly the most extensive and interesting of all Scottish late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century instrumental manuscript sources, whether for lute, keyboard, violin or lyra viol. It contains 252 pieces of Scottish, English and French provenance, written or arranged for the 11-course lute. It may have been copied out by or for Margaret, the fourth wife of The Earl of Balcrarres. Along with native Scottish music, Balcarres contains arrangements of violin music, English popular tunes and French baroque lute music by mid- and later seventeenth-century masters.

Although its date of compilation cannot be pin-pointed, nor its early provenance traced, it clearly does not date from before the last few years of the seventeenth century and it more probably originates from the first years of the eighteenth. Hence it is contemporary with and comparable to the group of Scottish instrumental manuscripts that date from the period 1680-1725. These were the years before the trickle of printed collections of Scots songs, fiddle tunes and dance music produced for the English and Scottish market became a veritable flood. Seventeen twenty three/four saw the publication of Ramsey's The Tea-Table Miscellany and 1725 Stuart's Music for Allan Ramsey's Collection of Scots Tunes, both published in Edinburgh, and the first edition of William Thompson's Orpheus Caledonius in London. The popularity of such books, and those that followed, ensured that Scots songs were staple fare for music publishers aiming at the popular market in the eighteenth century.

The sheer number of publications that continued throughout the century and into the next which included, or purported to include, old Scots melodies, largely ensured that the living and changing body of popular Scots melodies was gradually replaced by tunes that were full of the ‘highland humours’ that the general British public expected, in 'tasteful' eighteenth-century arrangements calculated to sell. Balcarres is representative of the pivotal years when manuscript circulation, which was clearly responsive to oral tradition, was being increasingly undermined by the scale of popular publications.

Writers on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish music who have mentioned Balcarres have all assumed that the book originated from the household of one of the Lindsays of Balcarres. Certainly it survives today as part of the Crawford-Lindsay family possessions. The manuscript has the shelf mark, English MS 970.201 on the front cover. This refers to its cataloguing as part of the library at Haigh Hall, near Wigan, Lancashire, the residence of the Lindsay family after the merger of the Balcarres and Crawford branches in 1808. There is nothing within the manuscript’s contents to substantiate this, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that it was acquired by the Lindsay family after completion. However given that it survives as part of the family papers, and that it formed part of the Haigh Hall library in the nineteenth-century, it is likely that it did originate with a family member, and was kept after its period of use because of the family connection. It is called the Balcarres Lute Book presumably because it came from Balcarres House, and had belonged to the Earls of Balcarres.

Margaret Campbell, Colin, third Earl of Balcarres’ fourth wife, is the most likely candidate as author of the Balcarres lute book. There are a number of similarities between her known hand and that of the book’s compiler. While these similarities are insufficient to make a positive identification they certainly admit a possibility.

One of the most striking characteristics of the book is that almost every piece has a careful attribution that names one, or often two, individuals. These attributions set the manuscript apart from contemporary music books, and give the best clues as the musical world from which it comes, and the manner in which the book was put together. In 85 pieces a certain Mr Beck is given sole credit for pieces as ‘by mr Beck’, or ‘mr Beck’s way’. This man turns out to be a certain John Beck, a musician working in the Canongate area of Edinburgh in the 1690s.

A second important character mentioned frequently in the title is Mr McLauchland. Through the research of Sally Garden a geneology of McLauchland has emerged. He married Margaret McKenzie, on 19th April 1699 in Edinburgh, the marriage record listing him as ‘musickmaster’ in the city. His wife was the daughter of Daniell McKenzie and Eupham Miller. Birth records for Margaret McKenzie show that Daniell McKenzie was active as violer in Edinburgh in 1680, and that he lived in or around the Canongate. Witnesses to this birth suggest that the family was from the artisan class and well settled in the area.

John McLauchland’s testament and inventory dated 30 July 1702 shows that he had died earlier in 1702, and had drawn up a marriage contract on 24 March 1699 with Margaret McKenzie. The considerable number and variety of beds, furniture, blankets and bedding, plates, cutlery, and drinking utensils might suggest that John McLauchland, his wife, and father-in-law, were running an inn. The inventory lists 8 instruments; 5 violins, a bass violin, a viol and virginals. His compositions alone suggest he was an important figure in Edinburgh musical life at the end of the eighteenth-century and one that was developing a distinctive style of violin composition that brought together native folk melodies and art music variation techniques.

The manuscript was produced at the point in the development of Scottish instrumental music when the folk and art traditions were closely linked, when oral and manuscript circulation of music were predominant, and before printed music had begun to dominate the circulation of Scottish melodies both in the Lowlands and in England. The music contained in the manuscript reflects this background. Thus it includes French art music composed by celebrated lute masters, pieces drawn from Playford’s publications for the violin and much native folk music in various arrangements, many of which can only be found in this manuscript and were clearly locally produced by musicians known either to Mr Beck or the original owner.

It is a magnificent manuscript both in its execution and in the rich diversity of its contents. It deserves to be better known by both lutenists and by those interested in the national music of Scotland.

The Balcarres Lute Book, edited by Matthew Spring, is available from all good music booksellers.

Marlboro Man

Leon Kirchner first visited the Marlboro Music Festival in 1959 but it was from 1963 that his participation started to grow. He enjoyed renewed contact with old friends—Schneider, Serkin, Fleisher, and Horszowski—and by conducting a performance of his Double Concerto, with Jaime Laredo and cellist Madeline Foley as soloists, Kirchner made many new friends. Kirchner and Marlboro proved to be an ideal match, and in the course of ensuing seasons his participation and role in the festival quickly grew. Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro’s artistic director, wanted to augment the festival’s involvement with twentieth-century music, and Kirchner was wonderfully suited to guide this effort. Here is another extract from Robert Riggs’ superb new biography of the composer, who died in 2009, which looks at a rather unwelcome political intervention in the Festival:

In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, world events were not just distant news—Marlboro occasionally had direct personal encounters with major players from the political stage. In 1967 an orchestra rehearsal conducted by Casals was disturbed by the noisy arrival of two helicopters from Washington, DC. They disgorged a team of sleek Secret Service agents sent in advance to run a security check on the premises prior to the arrival the next day of Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his entourage: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, and Katharine Graham, owner and publisher of the Washington Post.

Graham, whose wealthy parents had helped Serkin establish Marlboro, spent a weekend there every year, and Fortas, an amateur violinist and music lover, was also a regular visitor. Years earlier, government business had taken Fortas to Puerto Rico, where he served on the Board of Directors of the Casals Festival and became friends with Casals, even playing chamber music with him informally. When Franco became dictator in Spain in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Casals’s public musical profile became politically charged by his refusal to play in Spain or in any country that recognized its regime. Thus, Fortas had instigated a coup—both political and artistic—by proposing and orchestrating an invitation to Casals to perform in the Kennedy White House in 1961. Casals had requested and received a private meeting with the president, during which, it was later reported, their conversation focused on world peace.

These visitors from Washington were not unequivocally welcome at Marlboro. Some musicians resented that Fortas, a mere amateur, would be playing with Casals, which they did not have the opportunity to do. A far more serious matter, however, was that without exception the younger participants, and most of the senior ones as well, were vehemently opposed to American policy in Vietnam.

Serkin—who had played in Minneapolis in 1947 and had met Humphrey, at that time the city’s mayor—viewed the visitors as musical pilgrims rather than as representatives of a corrupt government, but he was in a distinct minority. Strong sentiment to mount a political protest put Serkin in a very awkward situation. According to bassoonist Sol Schoenbach, Serkin threatened, “If you insult my friends, I’m leaving”; and Schoenbach noted: “We finally worked out a compromise: the angry students wrote letters of protest and Serkin promised to give all the letters to Humphrey. And he did just that: he handed him about seventy letters, which I’m sure Humphrey never read.”

Although the visitors took an interest in and enjoyed the music making, the real—but unannounced and secret—purpose of Humphrey’s visit was more political than musical. He had come to urge Casals to accept another invitation to perform at the White House. Casals, however, was terribly disturbed by Lyndon Johnson’s policies, which he considered immoral, in handling the Vietnam War. According to biographer H. L. Kirk, “This time his conscience would not let him accept, but the decision preoccupied Casals for days and made him physically so ill that he curtailed his stay in Vermont, canceled scheduled engagements abroad, and returned to Puerto Rico.”

Kirchner also had a dramatic personal encounter with one of the Washingtonians. On leaving his rehearsal studio, he ran directly into Serkin and McNamara, and was summarily introduced to the secretary of defense.

I was very uncomfortable. There he was, the man who was sending out over a million of our men to Vietnam—a place where we didn’t belong and had no understanding of what was going on. There were people dying by the hundreds of thousands. This was McNamara. He asked me what I was doing, and I said that I was working on a piece. He asked which one, and when I told him it was by Hindemith [Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24, no. 1], he wanted to know what it was about. I told him that it was actually about fascism. This really rattled him, so I explained that at the end of the work there was a dance-like section—rapid and fast, with a trumpet that seems out of control—and that it appears to end in violence with the tremendous whine of a siren. He listened without saying much, so I continued and told him that it was like a pickup truck. Some artists have the means to feel what is going on in the world around them. Hindemith left Germany not only because his wife was Jewish but also because he was severely antagonistic to Hitler’s policies.

They parted, but the following day Katharine Graham (whom Kirchner knew from previous visits) came up after a rehearsal and asked Kirchner to join her and McNamara, who wanted to speak with him again: “I had to; there was nothing else to be done. McNamara began to reflect on this Hindemith; he asked me all sorts of questions. I always thought he was a smart brute, a person who had no feelings, no sensitivities, but he was really quite sensitive to what was going on. He wanted to know how these things came about with artists. He asked me crucial questions.”

When Graham came to Marlboro again the following year, Kirchner was reminded of these conversations, and he told her that he had found McNamara to be extraordinarily sensitive. She suggested that he might write to McNamara, who—due to intervening developments in Vietnam, and his subsequent “demotion” by Johnson in February 1968 to become head of the World Bank—had become one of the most unhappy creatures on the globe. McNamara was in agony, she explained, and now regretted his policies; he felt that he had made terrible mistakes. He knew it in his stomach—perhaps, Kirchner wondered, partially through the kind of intuitive, artistic process about which they had conversed—but not in his mind and did not yet have the courage to come out and admit everything publicly. Kirchner never wrote.

It should be noted that Robert S. McNamara finally revealed his personal views and analysis of the Vietnam War when he published In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). In this book he discussed his mistakes in detail and acknowledged a strong sense of guilt and regret. The image at the top of this post shows Kirchner (on the right) and Jaime Laredo at Marlboro in 1965 (photographer unknown).

Robert Riggs’ new book, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher, is published by the University of Rochester Press and is available from your favourite bookseller.

Christmas Post

As snow falls on both our US office in Rochester NY and our UK home in Woodbridge, Suffolk, we draw our chairs a little closer to the fire, cup our gloved hands around a mug of mulled wine and look back on our publishing programme for 2010:

Alexander Zemlinsky ‘leaves us in no doubt of just how complex and how crucial Zemlinsky's personal and professional relations were’, declared the Gramophone.
CHOICE claimed that there is ‘nothing quite like [Reading Mahler]’ - an essential addition to the centenary literature.
Busoni as Pianist: Svetlana Belsky’s new translation of Grigory Kogan’s classic study.
The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola reveals the great twentieth-century Italian composer's innovative handling of harmony, form and text setting.
The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola: a paperback edition of a book described as ‘an overdue landmark in Dallapiccola studies’ by the UK’s Classical Music magazine.
Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love: a controversial book that divided Wagnerite opinion, but it was one of the Financial Times’ top music books of 2010.
Wagner’s Ring in 1848 presents an English translation Wagner's original Siegfried libretto and his early essay on the Nibelung myth.
Art and Ideology in European Opera examines the interplay between opera, art and ideology across three centuries.
Ian Woodfield’s The Vienna Don Giovanni looks at the compositional history of Mozart’s opera.
Samuel Barber Remembered: Peter Dickinson’s collection of interviews and essays shed new light on this popular - and misunderstood - composer.
Robert Riggs’ Leon Kirchner is the first biography of the great American modernist who died in 2009.
The Whistling Blackbird is the charming title of composer Robert Morris’ essays and talks on music.
‘One of the best-written books about a musician to appear for many years’ said BBC Music of Diana McVeagh’s Gerald Finzi, newly available in paperback.
BBC Music of the Glock Era and After: Leo Black’s mixture of memoir and portraits enchanted reviewers.
The fifth volume of Benjamin Britten’s Letters from a Life covers the period of his pacifist masterpiece, War Requiem.
Completely revised and updated, Imogen Holst: A Life in Music, was issued in paperback in November.
The New Aldeburgh Anthology was also reissued in paperback, bringing Benjamin Britten’s Suffolk and the Aldeburgh Festival to life as never before.
Of Poetry and Song is a truly interdisciplinary study of text-music relations in the German Lied.
Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell looked at music from the medieval carol to the twentieth century.
Marianna Martines ‘sets new standards [for books on women composers]’ observed the Musical Times.
Juan Esquivel: A Master of Sacred Music during the Spanish Golden Age is the first study of this master of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
New in paperback from Toccata Press, The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins (Volume I) concentrates on the composer’s music for viols.
The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 was described as ‘vivid’ (TLS) in its portrayal of Lawes’ music at the Court of Charles I.
Peter Phillips thought the Balcarres Lute Book a ‘beautiful publication’ in the TLS. A revelation for lute players worldwide.
Peter Holman’s Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch is a fascinating new study of the history of the viol.
The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is a long-overdue study of the music of the eldest of Bach’s four composer sons.
Szymanowski on Music, newly paperbacked, includes selected essays and other pieces by the most important Polish composer since Chopin.
Martinu and the Symphony is not only the first book in English but by far the most comprehensive work on the subject in any language.
At the heart of Comrades in Art is the correspondence of the composer-pianists Percy Grainger (1882-1961) and Ronald Stevenson (b. 1928).
The older composer is celebrated in The New Percy Grainger Companion, a new collection with contributions from performing musicians and Grainger scholars.
Tully Potter’s monumental Adolf Busch, thirty years in the making, was described as ‘a magnificent achievement, one to challenge all future biographers of any musician,’ by Fanfare.
Beethoven's Chamber Music in Context shows how the larger scale works relate to the chamber music and how the composer evolved an increasing freedom of form.
Bernarr Rainbow on Music includes a memoir and selected writings by the leading historian of music education.
Good Music for a Free People examines the activities of the Germania Musical Society, a group of immigrant musicians who toured the United States from 1848-1854.
A Tanner's Worth of Tune is the first book on the post-war British musical, described as ‘an instant must-have for any lover…of musical theatre’ by the Stage.

A very happy Christmas and a harmonious New Year from all at Boydell & Brewer, the University of Rochester Press, Toccata Press and Plumbago Books.

Herzliche Glückwünsche zum Geburtstag, Wilhelm Friedemann!

As 2010 comes to an end, lovers of keyboard music will remember the bicentenaries observed during the year for Chopin and Schumann. Some will look forward to that of Liszt in 2011, while others will recall Mendelssohn's in 2009. Before 2011 is over, all these composers will have been the subjects of numerous symposia, festivals, and publications. Yet it would be a shame, in the midst of these celebrations, to overlook the fact that the present year has marked the three-hundredth birthday of another composer arguably of comparable merit: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, born at Weimar on Nov. 22, 1710.

Friedemann, the oldest son of the great Johann Sebastian Bach, has often been described as the most brilliant of his father's children. No fewer than five of the latter became professional musicians; four are known to have been composers. Of these, Sebastian's second son Carl Philipp Emanuel, born in 1714, is now probably the best known, his music the most frequently performed. But Emanuel has long been rivaled by Johann Christian, the youngest of all (born 1735), thanks in part to his influence on the young Mozart. Friedemann has never been so well known or appreciated, and although a new critical edition of his works began to come out in 2009, before the appearance of my recent book he and his music had been the subject of only a single monograph, published in German in 1913.

Unlike some Bach specialists, I've always been interested in the music of the sons as well as the father, not to mention other members of the family. Virtually all of them were, of course, keyboard players, writing substantial quantities of music for harpsichord, organ, clavichord, and (in some cases) early pianos. Most, including Friedemann, also made important contributions to chamber, orchestral, and vocal repertories. A keyboard player myself, since my college days I have been fortunate enough to have had access to their music, and to good instruments on which to play it.

But even on a good clavichord or fortepiano, Friedemann's music, although often very expressive, is challenging for both player and listener. His friend J. N. Forkel (Sebastian's first biographer) even said of one piece that the difficulties of learning to play it were incommensurate with the rewards of hearing it. Nevertheless, as Friedemann's tercentenary approached, I felt that the time was ripe to test this and other perceptions of his music by subjecting it to a careful critical review. Even if some of the music is indeed not worth the challenges of learning it—a position far from certain—the question of how Friedemann's distinctive style might have emerged within the Bach household was certainly an intriguing one. Therefore, about three years ago I set out to examine and write about all of his surviving works.

Having previously done something similar for all of Sebastian's keyboard works, I knew what I was getting into. In the case of Friedemann, the task did not appear to be as difficult. True, only about half his music was available in modern editions, and some of these are quite old and not terribly reliable. But the German scholar Peter Wollny, in his Harvard dissertation of 1993 and subsequent publications, had laid the groundwork for a critical re-examination of Friedemann's music. And virtually all of the music was available at least in microfiche facsimiles of eighteenth-century manuscripts, many of these the composer's autographs. Best of all, Friedemann left only about one hundred works, making it possible to study and write about his entire surviving output much more quickly than would be the case for, say, Emanuel, whose collected music comprises perhaps ten times as many compositions.

When I began the process, I thought I knew Friedemann's music reasonably well. After all, I had performed a number of his sonatas and fantasias, and I knew his famous flute duos as well as recordings of several of his concertos and vocal works. I had examined the manuscript of his flute concerto almost as soon as it had become available in Berlin in 2002. The general impression I had from these was, as various scholars had observed previously, of a style that combined elements of his father's contrapuntal manner with the so-called galant style popular in the mid-eighteenth century, and more specifically the so-called empfindsamer version of the latter associated with Emanuel.

As I worked on the book, however, it became clear that this was an over-simplification. And although I found myself confirming some of the oft-repeated assertions about the peculiar challenges of Friedemann's music—and of his own personality—I realized that he was far more his own composer than I had realized, distinct from Emanuel and other contemporaries in certain aspects of his approach to both composition and performance. Forkel had reported that both brothers, realizing the impossibility of equalling their father, had determined to be original, musically distinct from Sebastian. Clearly they had also turned out to be distinct from one another as well.

How could two brothers, born in the same town into the same family just four years apart, have turned out so differently, in their music as well as in their careers and personalities? The biographical side of this question must remain obscure, for we simply lack the requisite documents, especially with respect to Friedemann. This is so despite the survival of unique sources such as the famous Little Keyboard Book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a manuscript (now at Yale University) prepared for the young Friedemann by his father, or several pages of counterpoint studies that Friedemann, now a young professional in his twenties, wrote out jointly with Sebastian. These naturally deserved close consideration in the book, and I decided to devote a chapter to Friedemann's musical upbringing.

But as intriguing as Friedemann's personal development and character may be, our questions about it are largely unanswerable except within the realm of fiction—which may be one reason why he, alone of his brothers, has been the subject of a novel, plays, and even two operas. These largely ignore historical realities, although the 1941 film Friedemann Bach is surprisingly true to life in some respects. For instance, one scene depicts him improvising for an aristocratic audience; he performs fragments of three actual works, on a real eighteenth-century harpsichord that the historical Friedemann may have known, now in Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin.

The really interesting things in the life of a musician, however, are his or her works. I therefore chose to focus my book on Friedemann's compositions, which fall into three categories: keyboard works, music for instrumental ensemble, and vocal music. The last category was the most difficult to write about, for relatively few of the compositions are published. At first I intended to consider only representative examples—mostly sacred cantatas—especially as they were more or less dismissed by most commentators. Yet as I studied them, often in Friedemann's own barely legible manuscripts, I realized that—like the equally underestimated vocal music of Emanuel—they too deserve careful consideration. Particularly notable was a large secular cantata or serenata in honor of King Frederick the Great of Prussia—a musical monarch more frequently associated with Emanuel, yet important at least indirectly in the life of Friedemann, who, after starting his career in Saxon territory, eventually followed Emanuel (and Christian) to Prussia and its capital Berlin. Indeed, the journey of this son of Bach from Dresden, with its musical culture dominated by Italian opera, to a more northerly region where subtle chamber music reigned supreme, became an important theme of my book.

One challenge that I had to overcome in writing the book was the absence of legible or accurate scores for many of Friedemann's major works. Without such scores, it was simply impossible to evaluate works such as the serenata for Frederick or a keyboard concerto in G minor whose attribution to Friedemann had been dismissed by previous scholars. Nor could readers get a good idea of what these works are like. For this reason I found it necessary to create my own scores of many unpublished works, some of which I have put online. Some other works can be found in passably accurate editions at the International Music Score Library Project website, and all will eventually appear in the ongoing collected edition.

Nevertheless, in view of the difficulty of accessing this music, I determined to place far more musical examples within the book than is customary. I am grateful that my editors at the University of Rochester Press were able to accommodate me, and even secured a subvention from the American Musicological Society, for which I am grateful, to facilitate publication of what turned out to be a somewhat larger book than they originally bargained for. Of course, such examples create an additional challenge for many readers: lacking recordings of many of these works, how can they evaluate what they read about them or adequately judge what the music sounds like?

My solution to this problem has been to include on my website audio versions of all the music examples in the book. These audio versions are no substitute for recordings of actual performances; they're synthesized versions of the scores, generated automatically by my music notation software. But I hope they will help make the examples more usable for readers.

When I perform my own recitals of Friedemann's music, I am always asked two things: Was he really a drunk (as was alleged), and who was the better composer, he or Emanuel? I don't know the answer to the first question, and I don't think the second can have a simple answer. Friedemann is a more rigorous composer than his younger brother, maintaining three- or four-part imitative counterpoint and intensively developing a few memorable motives throughout many compositions. Emanuel's textures are lighter and his decorative approach to composition, which I've called “composition as variation,” can be more facile. Many of Emanuel's simpler pieces are frankly trivial, something that cannot be said of anything by Friedemann, who never wrote pedagogic pieces, strophic songs, and the like.

I think that Emanuel, at his best, is more imaginative and more capable of moving the listener. But Friedemann is capable of amazing, almost Beethovenian strokes in works like his F-major keyboard concerto (as yet unrecorded and unpublished in a modern edition). Even more extraordinary is the G-minor concerto, which remains almost completely unknown, although in my book I restore it to Friedemann's list of works. Here again one hears pre-echoes of Beethoven, particularly in its alternatingly meditative and rhetorical slow movement. Friedemann's famous flute duets, probably completed in his Berlin years, surpass anything else written for the instrument in the eighteenth century in their florid melodic writing and the density of their two-part counterpoint, not to mention their technical challenges.

Friedemann himself will remain an enigma. Even his personal appearance before his last years is mysterious. A widely reproduced portrait showing a lively figure perhaps forty or so of age actually depicts his pupil Johann Christian Bach of Halle—not to be confused with his brother of the same name. Yet Friedemann's music is invaluable. If his adherence to his father's tradition restricted him to some degree, it is also a continuing reason for interest in his music, which contains a fascinating and always original combination of stylistic elements belonging to both his father's generation and his own. More important, however, is Friedemann's uncompromising commitment to writing music that is at once rigorous and free, enlivened by wit as well as passion, challenging to both listener and performer and never satisfied with being merely pleasing.

We don’t usually run two posts on the same subject over two weeks but couldn’t resist the opportunity to wish this ‘enigmatic Bach’ a happy birthday. In addition to writing The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, David Schulenberg is author of The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach and Music of the Baroque, both now in their second editions. He also has edited several volumes of sonatas and concertos by C. P. E. Bach. He plays clavichord, harpsichord, and fortepiano and is professor and chair of the music department at Wagner College on Staten Island, N.Y.

Happy birthday, Wilhelm Friedemann.

The Enigmatic Bach

You might be forgiven for imagining that Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is another invention of “Professor” Peter Schickele. However in a superb new study of the music of the eldest of J S Bach’s composer sons, David Schulenberg argues that we should afford his music more respect. In this extract from the book, we see how Wilhelm Friedemann differed from his more famous brothers:

In 1774, one of the most accomplished living European composers arrived in Berlin, the prosperous capital of the powerful Kingdom of Prussia. The composer’s works included a dozen or so extraordinary keyboard sonatas, a half dozen startlingly original concertos for one or two keyboards and orchestra, and perhaps two dozen or more vocal works for virtuoso soloists and ensemble. The list of compositions is small for a musician of his time and stature, but the surviving works are remarkably original, and we do not know how many have been lost. By any measure, it is a notable oeuvre.

Nevertheless, it was unusual for a musician of his age—he was in his sixties—to be traveling in search of a position, if indeed that was his purpose. By this point in their lives, most German musicians of his abilities had been long ensconced in lifetime court appointments, or, like Johann Sebastian Bach, as municipal employees in a church or school. Why Wilhelm Friedemann, Bach’s oldest and by many accounts most talented son, was seeking a position is just one of the many enigmas that surround this peculiar yet extraordinary figure.

Other questions also loom: Where was he and what was he doing during the decade before his arrival in Berlin? Why did he leave his two previous positions, as organist first in the bustling musical capital Dresden, then in the university town Halle? Why, despite his great gifts, did his career diverge so radically from those of his younger brothers Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, who went on to fame if not fortune as royal court musicians in Berlin and London (and later, in Emanuel’s case, to a prestigious cantorship at Hamburg)? Distinct too was the life of the less well known Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, who spent his entire career working quietly but apparently happily at the minor ducal court of Bückeburg.

No less puzzling than these biographical enigmas are those raised by the music itself. How did this son of Bach, who presumably received more or less the same training as his younger brothers, come to write compositions so very different from theirs? For whom did he write his often extravagantly difficult music? Where and by whom was it heard? How are we to make sense of it today?

Although never completely forgotten, especially in the German cities where he lived, the music of Friedemann Bach was never widely distributed. It remains little performed or published by comparison with that of Emanuel and Christian, and writings devoted to it have been few and far between. Hence, even for those that know something of him—flutists and violists fascinated by his challenging and rare duets for their instruments, adventurous keyboard players seeking things to complement the better-known sonatas and fantasias of Emanuel Bach—Friedemann has been something of a footnote in music history.

Yet 300 years after his birth, there are good reasons for taking a closer look at his music. Recent years have seen renewed interest among performers as well as musicologists in the music of his brothers Emanuel and Christian, and more generally in works of the so-called galant age. Musically speaking, this is the period that lies between the Baroque and the Classical; in terms of social history it corresponds to the last decades of monarchial absolutism, preceding the French Revolution. This was the period during which the foundations were laid for the European musical structures and institutions of the nineteenth century, many of which—the star performer, the composer as popular icon, the public concert hall—are still with us. Friedemann played at least a minor role in creating that world, not only as (perhaps) an early touring virtuoso but also as teacher of Sara Levy, great-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn and an important figure in her own right in Berlin concert life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Still, had Friedemann not been born into the most famous musical family in European history, he probably would be remembered merely as one of many honorable but obscure musicians from a particularly busy period of music history. Like his younger contemporaries Johann Friedrich Kleinknecht and Johann Gottfried Müthel, he would be known for a few unusual compositions—in their cases, a couple of extraordinary flute sonatas and several astonishing keyboard sonatas and concertos—that command respect but perhaps not a great deal of affection, if only because they are so difficult to perform and to interpret.

Problematic, too, would be the seemingly narrow character of his output, which, although encompassing most of the familiar eighteenth-century genres, centers on music for keyboard. Stylistically, Friedemann’s best-known works seem limited to what is known today as the empfindsamer style. The German term, translatable as “sensitive” or “hyperexpressive,” implies a rhapsodic, proto-Romantic manner now associated especially with his brother Emanuel Bach. In fact, Friedemann’s music shows greater range than has just been suggested. But it is indeed less diverse than that of other major composers of his time, either because he actually wrote less or because less has survived.

Therein lies another enigma: Was Friedemann truly reluctant to write his music down, preferring to improvise at the harpsichord or organ, as was already reported by his contemporaries? Or was he such a perfectionist that he allowed only a small number of highly refined, carefully worked-over compositions to leave his studio? At a time when social conditions for musicians (and audiences) were changing significantly, did he fail to understand the need to produce more popular types of music—and more of it—if he was to attain the good repute and material well-being enjoyed by both his father and his younger brothers, who better recognized the need to adapt?

The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach by David Schulenberg has just been published by the University of Rochester Press, and is available now from your favourite bookseller. A piece from the author and a further extract will follow over the coming weeks.

‘A locked door of which she had thrown away the key’

In 2007, we published the highly acclaimed Imogen Holst: a Life in Music, the first full-length treatment of the life and music of one of the most fascinating and influential English musicians of the twentieth century. The book was intended as a celebration both of its subject’s centenary, and of the eightieth birthday of Rosamund Strode, Imo’s great friend and her successor as Benjamin Britten’s music assistant in Aldeburgh. Three years later the discovery of much new material has prompted the issue of a new revised edition that is able to explore more fully the creative and emotional development of this much-loved character, who for all her friendliness and charm, would in her later years dismiss talk of her past in a manner that reminded Rosamund of ‘a locked door of which she had thrown away the key’. What we now know is that the key was never thrown away, only hidden, and that, moreover, its owner was far from clear in her own mind about whether or not she really wanted somebody to find it and unlock the door. Christopher Grogan explains:

The newly discovered materials came to light in the aftermath of the decision by the Holst Foundation in 2008 to gift Imo’s remaining archive to its sister organisation in Aldeburgh, the Britten-Pears Foundation. What followed was a thorough sorting through wardrobes, boxes under beds, cupboards and filing cabinets to reveal a goldmine of documentation – unsorted and uncatalogued – relating to Imo’s life and covering all periods of her career. The discoveries included correspondence, travel journals and diaries and a wide range of ephemera; more intimately there were also examples of Imo’s early enthusiasm as an artist, two books of poetry written during her teens, and a wallet of nude photographs of herself, taken in 1931.

In her own treatment of these papers, Imo reveals herself as profoundly ambivalent about the possibility of any future interest in her life and career. Although to friends such as Rosamund (who knew her better than anybody) she repelled questions about her past, she kept all the materials that would one day provide a biographer with the route into her intimate thoughts and feelings. Towards the end of her life she went a step further and wrote out entries from her old engagement diaries into a series of exercise books, thereby mapping the days of her life in a way that suggests that she was thinking about either writing her own autobiography, or preparing the ground for a later biography. Most illuminatingly she wrote on the cover of one travel journal that it should be thrown away as being too old to be of any use. Significantly, however, she didn’t perform the act herself (which would have taken less time than writing the note on the cover), thereby dangling the journal in front of posterity and inviting those who were to come after to make the final decision about its worth. It is not surprising that this particular journal – covering the winter of 1928-9 – should record one of the happiest times of her life, when she enjoyed an Alpine holiday with the man she was then profoundly in love with, Miles Tomalin, a holiday that prompted her to write ‘Return’, one of a sequence of heartfelt love poems that light up Imo’s inner emotional journey through her late teens and early twenties:

After those days and nights of restless joy & agony,
Of vague desires, & uncertain hopes,
It is like drifting into a dreamless sleep,
A calm & deep peace, a long quietness,
To have your arms about me once again,
To feel your dear, familiar limbs pressed close
To mine: - your head lying on my breast.
To stroke your hair, & look into your eyes.
To laugh – so safe, & so secure at last.

The Imo that emerged from these newly discovered materials, and whose story is explored in the revised text, is a more complex, troubled and ultimately sympathetic figure than it was possible to present in the first edition. Raised by a loving but emotionally stilted (and frequently absent) father and a disinterested mother, she found the forging of close emotional connections painfully difficult, often falling hopelessly in love during her early years but never letting on, pouring out her desires and frustrations into her poetry instead. In Miles Tomalin she found a partner who allowed her to recreate her relationship with her father; the closer the two became the less able they were to express their feelings (both resorting once again to poetry to do this) and the relationship eventually foundered on their mutual inability to commit themselves emotionally. In the years that followed, Imo gave herself into relationships that were more physically intense but left her emotionally untouched, before the death of her father sent her spiralling into feelings of guilt and shame, ostensibly because she hadn’t offered to help him more in his professional life, but in reality because she had never been able to express or share the depth of her love for him.

Thus it was that she chose to dedicate her life to his memory and began to shut herself off from her own emotional fulfilment. On a visit to Santa Barbara in 1936, recorded in a diary not available when the first edition came out, she tearfully weighed up her options before coming to a final decision:

I decided that this was obviously the place to live, and that the sensible thing to do would be to earn a lot of money writing music for the films and then retire to Santa Barbara with a small house, a large garden, a select library and a lover. (The last being essential in such a climate.) After ten minutes reflection, however, came to the conclusion that Primrose Hill and celibacy would be more satisfying for any length of time … I was in the depths of gloom by the time E. [her uncle Ernest Cossart] rescued me with the mention of food.

This decision was to inform Imo’s creative journey over the next half-century, laying the foundations on which she was to build her achievements, but also affecting profoundly her approach to relationships, appearance and lifestyle. Moreover it puts into context the shattering emotional impact of her falling in love with Britten, fifteen years after her Santa Barbara decision and at a time when she believed she had put such things behind her. With Imo’s early life and emotional journey now so much better understood, her infatuation with the composer no longer comes out of the blue, but can be understood as a complex reliving of her teenage crushes, repeating the dynamic of her relationships with both her father and Miles Tomalin. In the wake of all this turbulence, it now seems much less surprising that this most self-effacing of creative musicians should finally decide to dedicate her whole existence to opening out the genius of Gustav Holst and Benjamin Britten, whilst locking away her own past and hiding the key.

The revised and updated edition of Imogen Holst: A Life in Music by Christopher Grogan is available now in paperback.