Damn, Gotta Cut Out That Morning….

First of all, Dear Reader, let me discharge my surging sea swells of gratitude to the cashier in the gas station whose first words—drenched and virtually dripping with compassion and concern—to me, as I presented my bloody nose, face, and hands, were, “no hay baño.” (“There’s no bathroom…”)

I had been out on the trot, and hadn’t noticed—so involved was I with Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber—the manhole cover that wasn’t raised sufficiently to be immediately apparent but was certainly raised sufficiently to catch my foot and hurl me to the pavement, where I skidded for most of the length of three football fields, leaving huge skid marks of epidermis and blood. I ended up by screaming an obscenity, which was completely ignored by the tattooed gentleman ahead of me—who was also listening to music.

It’s undoubtedly Biber who is the villain here—since who else could it be? True, the man has been dead for 310 years, but the point is that his Requiem à 15 in Concerto is a seriously wonderful piece of music—a sublime and rapturous piece of music that you definitely should listen to—especially if you’re in restraints in a padded cell. Otherwise, you could have the experience of Marc’s morning: floating until skidding. Click on the clip below, if you dare…



I had known about Biber for years, since a cello teacher had told me that he (that’s Biber, not the teacher) had been an influential composer for the violin in the last half of the 1600’s. In fact, there’s a famous passacaglia for solo violin that gets hauled out periodically. But it wasn’t until recently that people began to begin listening—often at serious risk to limb and tissue—to Biber.

What I didn’t know about Biber is that, in addition to his many works for violin, he wrote a lot of sacred music, of which the most famous is probably his Missa Salisburgensis from 1682. It’s a knockout too, though to date it’s never inflicted bodily harm on me.

So there I was, on the sidewalk watching the help walk away from me (it does occur to me to wonder how much of the world I’ve missed as I’ve listened to music these many mornings since Wal-Mart), and pondering which was more difficult: picking myself up or dying under a tropical sun.

So I walked into the gas station that was across the street from where I had been felled, to be greeted by the lady who made Mother Teresa look like Ivana Trump or Leona Helmsly, or whoever the Queen of Mean was. Her first words, as you recall, made reference to the lack of a bathroom in the gas station. Unfortunately, she was standing in front of and to the left of an open room, in which there was a sink.

“I wonder if you might be mistaken,” I said, sounding cooler than in fact I felt, “since there appears to be a sink in that room there to the left.”

As clever as she was compassionate, she instantly denied that that was a bathroom.

“Hay una correlación estadística con la presencia de un lavamanos y un baño.”

(“There’s a statistical correlation with the presence of a bathroom and a sink.”)

Wonderfully, the clerk admitted that there was a sink, but there wasn’t a bathroom.

“Muy bien, porque no quiero un baño; lo que quiero es un lavamanos.”

(“Great, because I don’t want a bathroom, what I want is a sink…”)

“Lo siento, pero los baños están cerrados…”

It now, you see, was a bathroom, but it was closed.

I pointed out—with crystalline Aristotelian logic—that any room that had an open door was by definition not closed. She responded—with murky French Deconstructionism—that it was closed in the sense of being unavailable to customers. It now occurred to me that I had been drafted into a George Burns / Gracie Allen skit; ‘this has been quite a morning,’ I thought.

As resourceful as she was clever and compassionate, Gracie had the answer. I could use paper towels—which felt slightly harder than the sidewalk—with hand sanitizer! Oh, and she was good enough to point to where the paper towels were.

It was a good thing, I decided later, on two levels. Because what happened, twenty minutes after applying the hand sanitizer on the open gashes on my chin, nose, and hand? Yup—I felt as if I had drunk two martinis on an empty stomach after flying across the Atlantic. So now I know—if the shock of pain hadn’t been enough to tell me—exactly how much alcohol there is in hand sanitizer. Put bluntly, hand sanitizer is rubbing alcohol in gel form.

“Thank you so much,” I told my heroine, with heartfelt…something. “You’ve been so much more than helpful!’

“You oughta go to the Emergency Room,” she said.

Hunh?

“Or to the bathroom,” I nearly said, but by this point I was floating—chemically if now not musically—home.

And now?

Well, I’ve taken a shower, my hand periodically oozes blood or exudates or something, and my left chest feels as if the entire Green Bay Packers had spent the morning tackling me. My chin hurts, my hand hurts, my whole body hurts. And guess what? Even drinking two cups of coffee and eating two utterly-illicit-but-needed Milky Ways had absolutely no effect: the average nursing home patient is a master instructor of Yoga compared to me….

Oh, and I have a blister on my left finger, which means that I can’t play the cello today, which is a major annoyance, since having gotten back to playing, I now suffer when I don’t play.

Damn, now I know what it is, now I know why I feel so awful!

I’m medical history, Gentle Readers—the first known patient to get a hangover…

…from hand sanitizer!

Try and Maybe

“Who the hell is playing that Bach suite,” I asked Raf, the excellent gentleman at the café who gives me great coffee. Well, Bach now lives on iPhones—in this case Raf’s iPhone—so he was able to tell me.

“Rostro… …povich.. Some Russian guy…”

Could it be true? I went to YouTube to see, or rather to hear. And yes, the same Rostropovich that could be ardent, heroic, tender, raging, mythic, you-add-your-own-adjective in the Dvorak concerto was not so much playing the Bach suite as assaulting it.

Look, his was an age that knew relatively little about baroque interpretation…well, that’s what I was about to write. But then I looked up Anner Bylsma, who is famous for playing both the modern cello and the baroque cello. And yes, he plays in what is now tiresomely called “historically informed performance,” or sometimes “historically informed style.” And he’s only seven years younger than Rostropovich….

Back up for anyone who didn’t spend time in music conservatories in the seventies or eighties. Generally, students were taught to play music essentially the same way. True, if you were playing Bach, you weren’t supposed to have the lush, rich tone of Rachmaninoff. You aimed for simplicity, clarity, articulation; with Bach especially, you tried to bring out the musical ideas: the counterpoint, the harmonic progressions, the lines and phrases.

Into this picture emerged a new group of players whom everyone accused mentally and occasionally orally of being unable to tackle the technical challenges of the classical / romantic literature. Because let’s face it—the Dvorak concerto is not something you give to a beginning student. However, any kid in high school can saw his way through a Bach solo cello suite. They’re just not that hard.

And so the new group specialized in playing baroque music, learning the historical performance practices, refitting their instruments, using gut instead of metal strings, adopting a convex instead of a concave bow. And in those years, there was a lot still to be learned, and a lot of controversy about what was and wasn’t authentic.

The historically informed performers (hey, let’s call them HIPsters!) tended to bunch together and look down on the rest of us—or so it felt to me at least. And they also tended to play in ways that—however deadly correct—were completely uninteresting and unmusical.

The good news? Most of us grew up, began to listen to each other’s playing, and began to find out ways to make music that was—apparently / supposedly—consistent with what Bach and other Baroque composers might have wanted. But the point was that it was music, not an exercise in historical performance.

Well, I said we grew up, but did we? Because my current feeling is that the “early music people”—as we used to call them—have gone on, learned, and started to create some astonishingly beautiful music. Bylsma, for example, recorded the Bach suites twice: in 1979 and then again in 1992. And while I’ve heard criticism of the recordings from HIPsters, the recordings are out there and should be listened to, especially if you’re in the business of playing the suites.

That said, why was the young conservatory (I presume) student I heard playing his cello in the New York City subway rendering a Bach suite in exactly the same way as did Casals, all those many decades ago when he was championing the works? Has performance practice become fossilized? Are we to go on playing the suites as Casals played them for the rest of all time?

The curious thing is that—reportedly—Casals was never particularly satisfied with his recordings of the suites: he felt, as I recall, that they were all too slow.

For years, I disliked the suites, and felt that they were greatly inferior to the solo violin sonatas and partitas. Still, I played them, since they occupy a central place in the repertoire. And more—they are to cellists as the Bible is to Christians. There are other religious writings, as there are other pieces of music for the cello. But for many of us, a part of every day is given over to Bach, even if we don’t play Brahms or Beethoven on that day.

And now? I’ve started to like them a lot, and only discovered why yesterday. I was in the café, recording myself—but that wasn’t it. I was on a small stage, across from which was a long mirror. I thus had a perfect chance to watch myself play. And what did I see?

‘What was the big deal, for all those years’ was what I thought when I first saw myself. Because there was nothing physically difficult, nothing strained in my arms or neck or torso. My fingers were making funny little movements up and down on the fingerboard; my left hand was making funny little movements sideways with the bow. Wildly, for a moment, I conceived the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be taught in ten seconds to play the cello as well as I was playing. Silly little movements here, silly little movements there—presto, you’re a cellist!

It wasn’t that I made it look easy—it was that it was easy. I could have been playing the fastest movement, and still have given you directions to Plaza las Américas, our largest mall.

That was part of the equation. And the second part? Well, I turned to a clip of the Master himself—Casals—giving a master class to a young cellist at the University of California, Berkeley. The cellist plays correctly, if somewhat unimaginatively; Casals responds simply by playing the same passage as he would play it.

Sadly, however great he was as a cellist and as a musician—he was a bit lacking as a teacher. Yes, any student can hear that his teacher plays better than he or she does: he knows that, that’s not the point. The point is how to get to the level of the Master.

The student was playing the opening of the Brahms E minor sonata—a wonderful, expansive, Brahmsian theme. I heard what Casals was playing, and the difference between his rendition and the students: Casals was being metrically precise, giving each note its proper length, and playing strictly in time. In addition—ever so slightly—he was emphasizing the first and third beats. The effect was to give the passage the feel of a dirge, of something solemn and majestic that drove to a climax.

Casals could play it; he couldn’t explain it. And as I saw myself yesterday, I realized that I had taught myself what I believed about the suites. I had thrown out most of what people had told me, I had played them in wildly different ways in various tempi, and various styles. I had made them beautiful, I had made them ugly; I played them as I might play Brahms, or as I imagined Bach would want me to play them.

I stopped caring, you see. There have been other cellists, who have played them better than I. There will be other cellists, who will play—perhaps—them much better. But you know what? I don’t care, nor do I need to. And in that space, that freedom from the tyranny of teachers or the disapproval of audiences, I made my peace with the suites.

“Oh, no; oh, no!” cried Casals to the student. “Don’t separate the notes at all, don’t separate them at all!”

I winced.

I grew up with a lot of “don’t,” you see—with an occasional “do,” added for good measure.

I now live in “try” and “maybe.”

Drama Queens

A year ago, it was the pianist Martha Argerich who was the object of an infatuation that almost verged on stalking, though only electronically. Which is to say that I watched every clip on YouTube that I could, in both English and Spanish. In fact, it got so bad that I was driving myself crazy by revisiting my high school French when I finally got over it.

OK—so who is it now?

Joyce DiDonato, the American mezzo-soprano whom Dame Janet Baker recently called “at the peak of her game,” or words to the effect. And when Dame Janet says that about you, you can take the day off and go have a beer. Or maybe not—maybe you should hit the practice rooms really hard that day. It’s serious praise….

Well, DiDonato would know, since she gave the single most cogent comments about the inner critic when she gave a master class at Juilliard, some time back. “Would you ever,” she asked, “ever speak to another human being the way you speak to yourself?” Then she went on to give a parody—no, wait, it was an exact replica—of the nonsense that lived in my brain for about four decades: “that’s not GOOD enough you have to get that better and it worked yesterday….”

You get the picture…

Not surprisingly, DiDonato also gave the most helpful, the funniest, and the most supportive master class I’ve seen. Maybe because, as she stated in one interview, she had once been savaged in a master class when she was a student. 

So of course I had to watch DiDonato talking about her latest project, Drama Queens, which features mostly unknown but by no means unworthy music. How unknown? Well, have you ever heard of Guiseppe Maria Orlandini, who…wait, here’s Wikipedia:

Giuseppe Maria Orlandini (4 April 1676 – 24 October 1760) was an Italian baroque composer particularly known for his more than 40 operas and intermezzos. Highly regarded by music historians of his day like Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Charles Burney, Orlandini, along with Vivaldi, is considered one of the major creators of the new style of opera that dominated the second decade of the 18th century.

OK, I’m proud to announce that I’d heard of one of the names in the paragraph above….

Right—what about Giovanni Porta? Here I give you the full text of what Wikipedia has to say about him.

Porta is believed to have been born in Venice. One of the masters of early 18th-century opera and one of the leading Venetian musicians, Porta made his way from Rome, to Vicenza, to Verona, then London where his opera Numitore was performed in 1720 by the Royal Academy of Music (1719), and eventually back to Venice and Verona, and finally Munich, where he spent the last 18 years of his life.

Well, as you can hear in the clip below, Porta’s treatment of the soon-to-be-dying Ifigenia is a knockout. But in fact, the album—which I bought weeks ago, and which I listen to frequently—is filled with knockouts.

I once had a friend who insisted: baroque music is the most expressive of all the styles in classical music. And listening to this music, it’s not hard to make the case.

The other great thing about the album? Absolutely stunning performances by Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco—performances that are both historically informed (as the jargon has it) and also tremendously musical.

Il Complesso Barocco is a joint endeavor by Curtis and the American crime writer Donna Leon, one of whose novels I had just finished yesterday. Here’s one description of how they work together:

Mr. Curtis does the hands-on artistic and administrative work for Complesso. Ms. Leon lends her name and underwrites the costs. But more than that, she travels Europe, tracking down potential singers. And sometimes she appears in mixed words-and-music shows herself, reading appropriate excerpts from her books: the "operatic" moments in which Brunetti ponders (as he tends to) the relationship between the lyric theater and real life or simply sinks into a reverie about some favorite voice.


Well, she’s a fascinating character. She writes during the day, and runs an opera company during the evening. And she lives in Venice….

It’s impossible to gauge the happiness or depth of fulfillment of any person’s life. But why do I think Curtis, Leon, and DiDonato aren’t doing badly?

Easy Playing

I knew that he did it—I didn’t know that he did it so well, and to such an extent.

Because there he is, the preeminent cellist of our day, Yo-Yo Ma, playing baroque cello, and playing it damn well.

It may not look like it to you—but there are real differences in the equipment and the technique. First, the strings are gut—not the metal strings that the modern cello has. And that accounts for the softer sound.

Second of all, the endpin—the metal rod that goes from the bottom of the instrument to the floor—is not there. And that means that the instrument has to be cradled in between the legs, a feeling which I, at least, enjoy.

The bow is radically different: here’s one writer on the subject:

Italian music was light and airy, requiring agility and rapidity. German music was more introspective; tempi were slower, and the music frequently required individual string players to produce true chords.

These two musical styles were reflected in the violin bows. The Italian bow was slim and light, the bow strings fixed in relatively high tension, while the German bow was highly arched, and the string tension was fairly loose. In contrast to the Italian technique of holding the bow lightly from above with curved wrist, the German bow was held with the thumb placed under the bow strings. In this way the player could tighten or relax the bowstring tension at will. A tighter tension in the bow was used for single string, single melodic line playing, while a relaxing of the bowstrings' tension permitted playing on two or more strings simultaneously, and thus of course, the playing of true chords.  

The instrument is also held differently—more vertically, with the pegs near the left ear, not behind it.

But one of the most important elements of baroque playing is that the pitch is different. To start with, the A—the note that the oboe plays at the beginning of a concert to tune the orchestra—is not the 440 Hz, but varied from 392 to 465 Hz. But generally, the A was much lower—which contributed as well to a softer, darker sound. And so the standard among baroque players has settled at 415 Hz.

There are stylistic differences, as well. The tendency of the baroque era was to ornament heavily—whatever got written on the page was meant as a guideline, not a Bible. So a performer was free to ornament, and did so.

When I first moved to Puerto Rico, I played in a baroque group, and the experience was a revelation. It was hard, initially, to limit the vibrato, and to create the long, expressive notes that start softly, grow slowly, and then recede again. Most difficult was tuning—the high leading tones and major thirds of modern playing vanish when playing baroque.

But there’s something tantalizing about it—it is the simplest, easiest playing in the world.

“I never want to work so hard again,” I said to the violinist of the group. She knew exactly what I meant: a large, major Romantic work like the Dvorak Concerto is less a piece of music than a battle. To play baroque music is…well, to play.

The last question, of course, is whether Ma gets away with it. Has he really mastered the baroque cello? I drifted over to Amazon.com to check on what the audience was saying.

Predictably, Ma has his critics. But me? I’m convinced!

A Genius on Top of the Heap

Why do I never hear anything but Johann Sebastian Bach?

At least, that’s the way I frequently feel when I’ve just heard Bach. And the funny thing is that I never feel that way about any other composer. Yes, I can’t imagine a world without the Beethoven string quartets, and I would miss sorely the Brahms’ symphonies. But if I had to take only one composer to the famous desert island, there’s no question who it would be.

Among musicians, this is hardly a radical statement. In fact, most musicians would say exactly the same, and I’ve never met a musician who didn’t like Bach, or was indifferent to him.

What’s surprising about Bach is how little anybody knows of him, and how, in general, unpleasant a man he must have been. As you can hear in the clip below of John Eliot Gardiner, a clinical psychologist brings in a list of symptoms of a personality disorder, and reads them off: deeply suspicious, feels that others are after him, feels surrounded by enemies, refuses to believe that he may be wrong. That’s Bach completely, says Eliot Gardiner, or words to that effect. And what is the disorder? Paranoid Personality Disorder.

Well, he didn’t have an easy life—he lost both of his parents when he was nine, and had to go off to live with an elder brother. As well, he did poorly in school, and may have been bullied; there was also a cruel schoolteacher. But he pulled himself together, got a scholarship as a chorister, and then set out to study.

Everybody in the family was a musician—in his part of Germany, the name “Bach” was virtually synonymous with “musician.” But in a letter written by his son, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, the names of Johan Sebastian Bach’s teachers are written and then drawn through. Did the son remember—his father wanted to appear as if he had had no teachers, as if he sprung fully formed on the world?

And nobody can say that he was a particularly happy or pleasant employee—he was complaining constantly about one thing or another: the quality of the musicians who would play his works, the living conditions, having to teach Latin to the school boys. In his first or second job, in fact, he simply got up and left, walked a couple hundred miles to go see the great Buxtehude, and stayed four months. Oh—and this was without permission.

He composed an insanely hard passage for the bassoon, and then abused the poor bassoonist, calling him the equivalent of a “prick.” So the bassoonist, with friends, jumped Bach, who drew out his rapier in self-defense. It was either this, or a dispute over wages that landed Bach in prison for a month.

Bach had twenty kids—only ten of whom made it to adulthood. And his first wife, to whom he was devoted, died before him. His second wife, Anna Magdalena, was both a musician and bore him 13 children.

So it doesn’t seem that Bach had much pleasure in his life. Yet however difficult an employee he may have been, there’s no question: he delivered the goods. And so frequently, Bach surprises by being “cheeky,” as Eliot Gardiner puts it. Check out the clip below….

But then, Bach can grab your heart and absolutely wring it of every last drop of blood. And nowhere he does he do it more effectively than in the aria Ebarme dich, mein Gott from the St. Matthew Passion. Here, Peter has betrayed Jesus, and the violin and alto trade long, agonizing lines. Here’s the German text with the English translation:
 

Erbarme dich, mein Gott,

Un meiner Zähren willen!

Schaue hier, Herz und Auge

Weint vor dir bitterlich.

Erbarme dich, mein Gott.

Have mercy, my God,

For the sake of my tears!

See here, before you

Heart and eyes weep bitterly.

Have mercy, my God.

Lastly, there’s often a glorious, triumphant quality to Bach—a jubilant quality that no other composer can match. As nowhere does Bach do it better than in one of his last compositions, the Gloria from the B Minor Mass. And the Et in Terra Pax that follows?

Sublime. 

Bach died at the age of 65, probably because of two botched operations to attempt to restore his failing sight. And the question remains—did he know how great he was? Was he aware of what he had accomplished in his life?

This man, surrounded as he thought by his enemies, would be compared to Shakespeare in literature and Newton in physics. And guess what?

It’s hard to believe that anyone will ever topple him from top of the heap.

A Great Concerto Grosso

All right—let’s get the players straight. In the clip below, you have three groups of people. On the left will be a baroque flute and violin—and they’re the soloists. Next up are the cello and the harpsichord. The cello is playing at times the basso continuo, which for any less complicated composer / thinker than Bach, would be simple chords that provided the harmonic structure. But here Bach has the cello constantly shifting back and forth from the traditional role to one of almost soloist status. The cellist who doesn’t itch to play these parts is dead.

The continuo, by the way, is often left unspecified by baroque composers—whatever bass instrument came along could be used. Nor was the part frequently written out; like jazz musicians today, there was a complicated notation of numbers denoting notes based on the bass note. Sounds complicated? Initially it is, but after a bit, it starts to feel natural. Here, by the way, is what it looks like….

The other part of the basso continuo is the harpsichord, or really, any other keyboard or strummed instrument (The theorbo makes a really good one). And in this concerto, the Brandenburg 5, the harpsichord is given what some have called the first modern cadenza. It’s the long, showy solo at the end of the first movement. The cadenza, designed to showcase the virtuosity of the soloist, is also meant to fool around with the main themes of the movement—it’s all a showy rehash.

And this cadenza is spectacular—I’ve heard knowledgeable folk argue that it shouldn’t be played on the harpsichord at all. It’s so far ahead of its time, the thinking goes, that the piano is better suited to bring out all the nuances. Bach was writing for an instrument that didn’t exist. (Don’t please, argue this point with anyone connected to what is now being called HIP—historically informed performance.)

OK—you have on the left two soloists; in the center is the harpsichord and the cellist, who are both soloists and basso continuo; so who’s on the right? Well, it’s a little group called the ripieno—yes, computer, there are words you don’t know—who join in and form an “orchestral” backdrop. In this case, you have a violin, viola, and bass.

Bach wrote this concerto in 1719, and dedicated it to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. Here, should you ever need an example of a dedication that goes from fulsome straight into brownnose, is the dedication:

As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness's commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness's most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.[3][4]

All right—be fair. It was the style of the time.

And it also has to be said—this is a terrific piece of music. Yes, it may be a warhorse, a piece that is played so often it stops sounding new. Then, the curious thing happens—people shun the work because it seems trite, or overplayed. And then, of course, you go years without sitting down to listen to it again. And then when you hear it, you’re amazed—what were you doing all this time, listening to perfectly good though obscure music but neglecting a masterpiece?

Well, fortunately we have YouTube, which spies on me and then makes suggestions (I know, I should be upset and I’m not…). So when they suggested that I listen to the Croatian Baroque Ensemble playing the Brandenburg 5^th, I thought, ‘why not?’  Nor was I disappointed—they’re a knockout.    

I may have shot myself in the musical foot, by starting out with Bach—what else do you play after that?

Well, Corelli came to mind, and he wrote, in the good Baroque manner, a set of twelve of the little guys, written in the 1690’s but published in 1714—almost exactly at the time of Bach’s Brandenburgs. And they are as clean and fresh three hundred year later as the day Corelli wrote them. One of them gets trotted out regularly at Christmas—it even bears the name “Christmas Concerto.” The name was given by Corelli himself: Fatto per la notte di Natale ("Made for the night of Christmas").

It’s serenic—all right, not a word, but you know what I mean—music punctuated by gleeful, almost manic, sections. And check the guy playing what looks like a weird guitar or lute; that’s a theorbo.

Handel wrote two sets of concerti grossi—and composed them in 1739. Yes, they’re conventional—there’s nothing as thought-out as Bach, nor really as fresh as Corelli. But still, Handel on an off day is still Handel.

After the baroque era, everybody went off to compose other things, until, in the twentieth century, the form was rediscovered. Ernest Bloch composed one in 1925 in Cleveland Ohio. To me, it’s bombastic and unpleasant music; but interesting to listen to. Stravinsky, more notably, composed Dumbarton Oaks in 1937—and the main theme of the first movement is a direct reference to the Third Brandenburg Concerto. Lastly, Vaughan Williams composed a concerto grosso in 1950. Here they all are….

Fifth Shade of Grey—A Walk on the Slow Side

OK—if you’ve been to more than ten weddings in your life, you’ve heard it: the Pachelbel Canon. What’s interesting is that, up until the 70’s, nobody had ever heard of it. Then, it was everywhere—especially after the movie Ordinary People used it.

Two things about the piece—it’s got a ground bass, the musical way of saying that the cello plays the same damn thing over and over. Trust me, any cellist who doesn’t have the Pachelbel Canon memorized has a serious problem.

And yes, it’s a true canon. Nope, it doesn’t fire a ball—it has three violins all playing the same thing two bars apart. It a more sophisticated version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s a bit ironic that Pachelbel is known, now, for just one work, because in his life his music was well known and well received. But there’s a lot of music, only a bit of which I’ve listened to. So let’s start, yes, with the famous Canon.  

And here, because I couldn’t resist…..

Right, so it may just have gone over the edge, there, but it’s actually in the good baroque tradition, which was to deem the written music as a starting point, never an end, for playing. So yes, there was always room for invention, for throwing in a new riff, for ornamenting. Music at the time was like jazz—much more open.

OK—enough Canon. How about a chaconne?



The chaconne is a musical form that takes a short fragment of music and spins off endless variations of it. And this chaconne has a ground bass, as did the canon, and as do many chaconnes.

Oh, and speaking of chaconnes, there’s a great chaconne by Monteverdi. Here it is, with our old friends from L’Arpeggiata.

OK—that was a bit not on the slow side. But how’s this—the famous Adagio from Albinoni?  
  

There are other famous adagios—not the least of which is Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But that’s the work of a different day!