Musica Catalana

We went last night to an extraordinary early music concert. We're on holiday in Barcelona, and we found that Jordi Savall, the great viola da gamba player and founder of Hesperion XXI, was giving what we think was the first performance in 400 years of a 1611 Barcelona Vespers!

The concert had us a little confused -- we went to the wrong venue, but got to the right one in time to settle in for the concert, though not in the best seats. It was in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, where the seafaring Barcelonans used to hope for safe trips and give thanks on coming home. It's a gorgeous, austere, Gothic church from the 15th century, I think.

The concert was the Vespers of the feast of St. George (San Jordi, in Catalan), from 1611, which Savall, I believe, transcribed and arranged for choir and wind and viol bands, from a manuscript. St. George is the patron saint of Catalonia (the district/nation of whcih Barcelona is the capitol). Here we were in Catalonia, with a program booklet in Catalonian (we are just learning to read Catalonian, which is like looking at French through a Spanish glass), hearing a Catalonian piece from a MS in the Catalonian National Library, performed by great Catalonian musicians!

The piece itself reminded me of Praetorius: some homophonic elements, a lot of cool dance rhythms, and vigourous polyphony: clearly past the the quieter styles of Vittoria. Sometimes there were even "hymns" like the Germans might have written. It wasn't Monteverdi, no solos, no duets, not the "second pratica" of soloistic music that Monteverdi had brought in about the turn of the century.

I'm writing this on my new iPad in Barcelona, so I'm sorry the picture is too big: I can't quite figure out all the options!

There were wonderful rhythmic instrumental interludes, the two bands and the harp/organ continuo vying for control of the sound. The whole series of concerts, by the way, is called "El So Original" -- the primal sound, I think.

There were also wonderful percussion, drums, and either chimes or (I think - we were way far back) handbells.

Perhaps the most amazing thing was what the acoustics of the church did for and with the music. I usually prefer clean, crisp acoustics, but this was amazing. The church's space towers above the singers and instrumentalists. The reverb time is probably five full seconds, certainly three full tactus beats. So when the cadences happened, and the cornetto played a cadential trill, the trill notes sustained themselves all the way to the cadence on the tonic> The final chord, then, undulated, pulsed with dissonance while the overtones worked their way through the church spaces. There was no incense in the church, but this almost seemed an acoustic incence, a kind of smoke that blessed the sound, made it more complex, purified it through its dissonances until it finally settled in. Again and again. (BTW, the cornettist was the fabulous Basel-based Bruce Dickey, whom we met last year in Oberlin at the Baroque Performance Institute).

Space, time and music once again

Music, like life, matter, and energy (as well as that Golden Record that we sent up on Voyager in the 1970s to make interstellar contact) exists in time and space. It comes fully alive when both of those parameters are active. That "aliveness" is what makes live music irreplaceable.

These days, recorded ("non-live") music is amazing. On a CD, I can study music carefully, going backwards and forwards, stopping and starting, shutting the rest of the world out with my headphones. Because it's miked so carefully, the inner voices in a string quartet are as clear and accessible as the violin and the cello, so I can hear them clearly. Notes, lines and structures are so wonderfully articulated.

But compared to live music, the CD almost always seems flat. It's like that Golden Record compared to life itself. "Hello" in 55 languages doesn't add up to much of the complexity of language or the interconnectedness of life on Earth.

I keep thinking that in live music, it's the "liveness" of time and space that matters. Space demand that the music be embodied in real people. Performers, unlike their avatars on a CD, can't occupy the same space in real life; they are articulated, positioned, individualized by the laws of physics and biology. So their sounds come from different places, are "engrained" (made distinctive, vital: I'm thinking of Barthes' essay on "The Grain of the Voice" here) by their locations in space.

And there's time, that strange fourth dimension that, unlike the other three, has no reversibility. We can't go backwards in time the way we can on the CD. We have the one chance, performers and audience in the very same moment, to catch the music. One of Blake's strange "Proverbs of Hell" "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

Two case studies from this week:

Listening to the  lutenist Paul O'Dette play Bach. There were a lot of people in Harkness Chapel at Case Western University, and the lute is a very quiet instrument. The space was large, the instrument small. But as the music started, you could hear the hall contracting. The intensity of his playing and the intensity of our listening made the space alive. The hall became centered on the intimate touch of his fingers on the strings. (An unsolicited endorsement: he was brought to Cleveland by the excellent series Chapel, Court, and Countryside at CWRU. If you live in NE Ohio, subscribe!). Here's Don Rosenberg's piece with much more about this concert.

Singing Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium. I was honored to be a guest in the alumni reunion for Oberlin's Collegium Musicum, celebrating twenty years of musical leadership by my friend Steve Plank. Tallis's piece is written in forty distinct vocal lines (the score is about as big as a card table) divided into eight choirs. It is a piece you don't get to hear, or sing, often. For me, it made the irreversibility of time totally visceral: the inexorable tactus passes on, each of us singers hanging onto the one precious moment of each of our entrances into the cosmic soup of polyphony. The harmonic rhythm, too, passes by, chord to chord, almost every new entrance shifting the harmony slightly until the next tonality shows itself. And then, the space! Eight different choirs, each its own sonic center, the music enchaining itself around these stations, passing itself towards a new center, living in it a few bars, and passing on to another. It is paradoxical in a blog about live music to reference a video, but here it is. This is five of the King's Singers recording Spem in Alium (overdubbing: the electronic equivalent of acoustic space):

More on space in music

Music needs space to live and breathe. Last night, I was singing Messiah in the choir loft at First Church in Oberlin. This historic meeting house is a big rectangle; the choir is at one end, about two thirds of the way up to the ceiling. A lecture I heard cornettist Bruce Dickey give last week talked about his experience playing in Italian churches, often from the organ loft: the sound makes sense when it's played from up there, he said.

This seemed true at First Church, too: the church gave back to us from that wonderfully mostly empty space in which the sound does its wonderful movements.

Too many concerts put the performers in only one place, I think. Last week I was in Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland for the Apollo's Fire Christmas concert -- they were performing a mostly Praetorius concert. Great variety, energy, and color in the music: but disappointingly, very little use of the space. I know it's hard to keep space-separated groups in sync, and precision is what you gain by keeping the performers on one stage. But for one final number, they spread out around this mid-size Gothic hall, and the music started to expand.

When the choir and instruments are together in one space, I as a listener am focused right there, intent on where they are and what they are doing together (at least, I try to be). When they use the space differently -- an offstage brass choir in Mahler; trumpets at the rear of the cathedral; cornetti in the organ loft -- I too have to open up as a listener, darting with ears and mind around the hall. The myth of focus -- which is of course an illusion, as you can't pay attention to all things at once, even when the performers are close together -- the myth is shattered, and for good effect.

I was playing Bach's Magnificat last week, too. The text comes from the gospel account of Mary's response to the incredible shattering of her life in the angel's announcement of her pregnancy. The hymn she sings is all about the changing of space that the birth meant for her and the world. "My soul doth magnify the Lord" -- magnificat:  her soul and body have together become a space that "magnifies" -- resonates -- with God. Through this birth, the hierarchical spaces of power are going to be overthrown, since, in her prophecy, "He hath cast down the mighty from their thrones" -- Deposuit potentes. And again the spaces of the body itself: the womb, the stomach: "He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away." Bach sets that radical emptiness -- the Latin word is inanes -- by ending that part of the piece with a single, low pluck in the cellos; a pluck that resounds through the hall.

To end with, here's a link to an incredible example of music in space: horn player Willie Ruff playing Gregorian chant alone in St. Mark's in Venice.