The Face-Off

The Great Contest: Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel
David Yearsley plays the Op. 85 Fisk organ (1984) at Memorial Church, Stanford University
Loft Records LRCD-1028; 2002

***

This is an intriguing concept: a CD that mimics the dream concert of the 18th Century, a meeting between Domenico Scarlatti, George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach. All were born in 1685 and died in the 1750s, and the three together represented the state of musical and keyboard arts of the day (by any objective measure, the year 1685 must count as one of music history's most momentous). Scarlatti and Handel did meet, I believe, and held a kind of contest; as I recall, the "decision" was said to go to Handel for the organ and Scarlatti for the keyboard. Very judicious. But neither man ever met Bach in person. This CD gives us a taste of what such a meeting might have sounded like. Or at least it stacks their compositions up side-by-side, even if we can't know how each man's performances might have illuminated his own works.

Scarlatti's sonatas are not often heard on organ, being conceived mostly for the harpsichord (though pianists often play them). They don't suffer at the organ, certainly, though the instrument puts Mr. Scarlatti at a bit of a disadvantage since this is not how we expect to hear his works. And it rather makes inevitable a direct comparison with Handel and Bach, both of whose works are much more commonly heard on the organ. But none of these three composers is painting with the same brush as the others, and hearing Scarlatti on the organ sandwiched by the other two kind of shines the wrong type of light on him.

And in this setting the great Handel sounds rather like a transitional figure toward the Next Big Thing. A bit more expansive, perhaps, than Mr. Scarlatti, and with his toe dipping in the galant. Handel has a wonderful fluidity, a pastoral beauty which is so often heard in his string writing. It's just a different aesthetic than Bach and Scarlatti.

But Bach is the party crasher here. That at any rate is how this little experiment sounds to me: Scarlatti and Handel give us delightful and engaging music, and Bach makes everyone else sound almost like a warmup act. To my ear he just overshadows everybody with his singular and towering musical genius. Part of it is a question of complexity, I guess. Handel's sounds are sparser--less dense, less wrought with detail--and Scarlatti seems at home with the small, finite statement. He is remarkably inventive--over 550 keyboard sonatas!--but it all exists within a very narrow sphere. But in Bach we find something altogether more expansive and beyond easy categorizing. His Duetto No. 1 BWV 802 from the Clavierübung III (an uncharacteristically spare piece for Bach) sounds like it might have come from Scarlatti's pen, but by the time we get a chorale prelude (Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr', BWV 676) one senses the other two would have looked on in stunned awe. His Toccata, Adagio and Fugue (BWV 564) is in its own league entirely. He's like a helicopter landing in the town square in the 1700s.

David Yearsley teaches musicology and performance at Cornell University. He has chosen for this recording the very felicitous 1984 Fisk organ at Stanford University, a vibrant and thrilling-sounding instrument that puts its tones before us almost like a 3-D hologram. His tempi are lively and the performances felicitous and sprightly. (I see, as an aside, that Dr. Yearsley writes a regular column for the online political magazine Counterpunch. The two I happened to stumble upon seemed like thinly-veiled Obama-hatred pieces, though the rest seem to be writing about more general musical matters. In any case, the playing on our present disc is delightful.)

As is so often the case, this Fisk instrument also merits a bit of mention. Here's another instrument from the hallowed Gloucester shops that plays with temperament (this time a bit like Martin Pasi's great Op. 14 instrument from 2003 in the Cathedral of St. Cecilia in Omaha). From the Fisk website:

By means of five additional pipes in every octave, a large lever can switch the Werk, Ruckpositive, Seitenwerk, and Pedal divisions from a Renaissance fifth-comma meantone to a well-tempered tuning like those J. S. Bach knew. The Brustpositive and the Brustpedalia are fixed in meantone and offer two sub-semitones, or split sharps, per octave, D sharp/E flat and G sharp/A flat.

I love these experiments, first for their glorious sound and second for the mechanical daring and sheer, whimsical expense. It says something good about our species that we can prioritize a device like this one. No A/B comparison between temperaments is on offer on this disc, but the instrument is noticeably not equally-tempered.

The sound from Loft is superb.

A Channeling

Mark Knopfler
Get Lucky
Mercury Records
2009

***

At some point enthusiasm crosses the line into something unseemly, into almost a fetish. I feel sheepishly as though I've crossed this line with Mark Knopfler, having put up several gushing reviews of his last few albums. He released a new album a couple months ago, so one can predict what's coming from my end. (Because I don't review much of this kind of music, I've become a bit like the dental hygienist who keeps picking at the same spot over and over until she makes a problem where you didn't think you had one: Mark Knopfler again.)

But something about his approach just resonates with me; he achieves perfection in this particular musical style. Though this genre is not my musical bread and butter, he confirms to me that a high enough degree of competence or genius or inspiration simply overrides the mundanities and generalizations of genre; talent becomes its own reward, its own justification.

On his latest release, Get Lucky, he remains firmly in the same nest he has feathered all along--at least since I've been paying attention, that of acoustic folk-rock with essential instrumentation and a few well-chosen spices. These last four solo albums--The Ragpicker's Dream, Shangri-La, Kill to Get Crimson and Get Lucky--all sound as though they might have been recorded in the same recording session (with the next earlier album, Sailing to Philadelphia not far off this path). The differences between these releases are subtle, both in thematic material and in presentation. But that's quite all right; his is a mature artistry, and he's concerned to do what he does with exquisite attention to detail and not with trying a splash in someone else's pool.

Knopfler is renowned as a guitarist, of course, from his Dire Straits days and onward. He has perfected a distinct clawhammer / fingerpicking style, a whole-instrument approach that enables him to play pretty much anything. On these solo albums, his guitar has a quietly authoritative presence, his artistry not needing too much of the spotlight to make itself known. He alternates between quietly contrapuntal backgrounds and these wonderfully lyrical melodic treatments, both electric and acoustic--it makes one want to take up the instrument, his effortlessness almost convincing you that playing a guitar just couldn't be that hard. He is not a virtuoso as a singer, with a grumbling hang-dog voice that's more mumble than song; but it's the perfect instrument for telling a story, and his pitch and phrasing are delicious.

That storyteller's voice is key to the synergy of his songwriting approach: solidly affecting, singable melodies with a basic rock and roll background, and some usually haunting image / theme tying it all together. While this stylistic approach is fairly steady, the stories themselves cover a lot of ground: A man operating a locomotive, Homage to a mandolin maker, the remembrance of friends gone, the occasional love story. A nostalgia buff after my own heart, he's found a really haunting folk-sounding melody for the song Before Gas and TV, a look back at a simpler time that's just about gone from public consciousness.

Knopfler shows some of his influences here, with several songs paying musical homage to other artists of the singer / songwriter genre. One of my favorites here, So Far From the Clyde, chronicles a ship on its final journey being intentionally run aground for scrapping--a song with more than a passing resemblance to Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. How deliciously he sets the tone:

They had a last supper
 the day of the beaching

She's a dead ship sailing
- skeleton crew

The galley is empty, 
the stove pots are cooling

With what's left of a stew
Her time is approaching, t
he captain moves over

The hangman steps in
to do what he's paid for

With the wind and the tide 
she goes proud ahead steaming

And he drives her hard into the shore

The title track, Get Lucky, with its lovely whistle solo, channels Simon & Garfunkel's The Boxer (my favorite song of theirs), in a gentler form, a kind of Boxer Lite.

The album's final track, Piper to the End--yet another haunting and infectious tune--begins with a statement of musical theme on whistle and violin and concertina, a theme that sounds like it's been rattling around the highlands for a couple hundred years. (I'm assuming, though I don't know, that it's not an old melody.) But it has an intriguing twist. I've had pieces of music over the years which lodged themselves in my mind in a certain way, and I later learned that I had the counting or phrasing of a section of the piece wrong--it had gelled in my mind with the wrong orientation. Later, when I see sheet music or hear a live version I realize the error of my ways and what I "know" of the song changes too. And this theme, in Piper to the End, makes its appearance seeming to be one way, when in fact the bar lines are two counts off from what one initially hears. The notes are all the same, of course, but the phrases begin and end at different points than where instinct tells us they do, kind of like an Escher painting that flops between this and that. The song lopes along with occasional odd phrasing details, hinting at something. When the drums come in about halfway through the song, a little nudge is given to emphasize these bar lines, as if they know that people aren't going to count the phrases right without a little help. It's a subtle thing, but it changes the nature of the musical statement just a bit--maybe an analogy is how a spoken phrase can change its meaning depending on what words are emphasized. Well, you can't make a song out of that detail, and maybe it's a trick my mind plays on me that others will not experience (though I expect not). And the unexpected phrases, coupled with this bone-marrow melody, make for a very satisfying experience.

And it's an example of Knopfler's genius: he is not concerned to make a bold statement or to blaze new trails or to pander to the masses. This is another quiet effort, but one which stands up to repeated listenings and continues to yield satisfying little details. And that's right up my alley.

Recommended.

A Thing to Celebrate

Now Let Us Rejoice: Organ Hymns for the Sabbath
John Longhurst, Clay Christiansen and Richard Elliott
The Schoenstein Organ at the LDS Conference Center, Salt Lake City
Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
2006

***

I'm a bit behind the power curve on this release as well.

A couple years ago on a Salt Lake City layover I made a visit to the Mormon Tabernacle to see the famous 1947 Aeolian-Skinner organ there--arguably the single most famous instrument from arguably America's most notorious organ building concern--actually, it's probably the single most famous pipe organ in America.

What I did not know was that at that moment I was a hundred yards or so from the recently-completed (in 2000) Latter Day Saints Conference Center. Wikipedia says (echoing the Mormon website) the new space is the largest theater-type auditorium ever built, seating some 21,000 people. That's over three times the capacity of the Tabernacle, a space larger than many sporting arenas. And the new space has an organ! I learned of space and organ alike while browsing the recent catalog from the Organ Historical Society.

A little further digging--especially a fascinating article by the primary Tabernacle organist John Longhurst about the design deliberations regarding the organ--reveals the difficulty involved in putting a pipe organ in a space that's much more akin to a stadium than to a church or theater. The initial planning asked questions about what kind of instrument to put in the new space, a conventional pipe organ versus an all-electric organ versus an electric / pipe hybrid or perhaps something altogether different. If we think about the electronic organs used in sport stadiums, we get a sense of the difficulty in getting a pipe organ to sound in so large a space, and to sound, well, like a church or auditorium organ. (John Longhurst's article also addresses the impracticality of specifying a concert organ, since 20,000 people are unlikely ever to come specifically to hear the organ. This is all stuff to be considered.)

After deliberating it was decided to follow the formula that had proved so successful in the smaller space, but adapted to the unique new setting: that is, a large "American Classic" style pipe organ designed to blend at appropriate power with the unassisted Tabernacle Choir, with the whole to be amplified to sound adequately throughout the space (this strikes me, actually, as one of the "hybrid" options, since what most people will hear in the space will be very much influenced by whatever public address system is employed). The necessity for amplification made it unnecessary to scale the instrument up to match the building, with the result that the new organ is about the same size as the Tabernacle organ (still a very sizeable instrument). The concern was more about colors and variety than power. The organ's "American Classic" style would be similar to the Tabernacle's famous Aeolian-Skinner, which makes for stylistic continuity with the Tabernacle. But it poses a challenge for whatever firm is chosen for the task (see Most Famous Organ in America comment above).

(The new upstart.)

(The tried-and-true.)

The Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company closed its doors in 1972 after a decade of steady decline, a victim of changing tastes. By this time the public taste had been in the thrall of the "neo-baroque" organ movement for over a decade. As so often happens in matters of public taste, we have in recent years come to recognize and celebrate some of the merits of these earlier ways of thinking about organ design and tone (and indeed there were those whose enthusiasm had never wavered). But in the early '70s the American Classic organ, the aesthetic embodied by Aeolian-Skinner and M.P. Möller and others, was distinctly out of fashion. By 2000 there weren't many firms with experience designing and building this style of organ (even if we'd begun to restore and protect the remaining American Classic organs).

Pipe organs are traditionally custom designed and built for a specific site, and an instrument like this one--a large, expensive, high-profile instrument in a very public space--would be a plum commission for any organ building firm. And so the search was on. The commission was awarded to the Schoenstein Organ Company of San Francisco for a grand instrument in the American Classic style, a modern rendition, one might say, of Aeolian-Skinner's work 60 years ago in the Tabernacle. Schoenstein has been in business since 1877, and they're a firm I've heard of but whose instruments are unfamiliar to me. But their historical aesthetic seems perfect for this application. From their website:

We are builders of organs in the Romantic-Symphonic style employing electric-pneumatic actions. Many have characterized our work as carrying forward into the 21st century the type of approach pioneered by E.M. Skinner.

(One of the organ's most intriguing features is the installation of a 32' Diaphone stop from an old organ in Los Angeles. A diaphone is a kind of reed pipe that uses a valve rather than a reed to vibrate the air column. This makes for a very strong fundamental tone with little harmonic development. Its function over a standard reed is the production of penetrating power--diaphones are used much more for foghorns nowadays than organ stops! Diaphones were never commonplace in organs and they're quite rare today--and in this installation its inclusion is evidently a step made to accommodate the immense hall into which the instrument speaks.)

Armed with all this new information, I was especially interested to dig into this recording. New installations of massive, high-profile instruments like this one or Lynn Dobson's recent instrument for Philadelphia's Kimmel Center or the now-famous Fisk at Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas are rare and special (and I'm now on a mission to find other recordings of Schoenstein instruments).

So the instrument is most interesting. But I wish we'd had a bit more substantial fare here for demonstration purposes. The disc is mostly of contemporary pieces, almost all short bits that seem suitable for some part of an actual church service (I guess they've given us fair warning: Hymns for the Sabbath). While a couple are a mite intriguing--Vaughan Williams' Prelude on the Welsh hymn tune Rhosymedre, Walford Davies' Solemn Melody, two Bach arrangements--most are a kind of mundane celebration of tonality, straightforwardly tuneful and harmonically unadventurous. Not that there isn't a place for this: these selections might be just what will play in the sanctuary (I imagine the congregation en masse might have little patience for, say, César Franck's Priere, to say nothing of Messiaen's Dieu Parmi Nous). But it's hard for me to generate much enthusiasm for a program seemingly chosen for a congregation's attention span. The organ's rich literature contains so very much more than this, and it would seem trivially easy to assemble a recital of substantial pieces to satisfy the mind as well as demonstrate the instrument. Even the two Bach pieces here are "arrangements," a kind of dumbed-down Wal-Mart version of Bach (the idea of someone "improving" on Bach seems like a very good exemplar of real sacrilege).

I'd look forward to more from this instrument, but as alluded to above there may be little opportunity for concertizing on it. Perhaps it will find a recording life (despite the immense space having almost no acoustic, and the magnificent Tabernacle instrument a stone's throw away).

A Glenn Gould Repost

This is a repost from my other (non-music) blog. I'm thinking lately that these music-related posts should be moved over here; so a bit of housekeeping.

***

(A young Gould, with the original chair but before he took to raising the piano on blocks.)

I've been thinking the last few days about the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (the Wikipedia summary is excellent). (I also seem to have forgotten that I started this topic a year ago in this post.)

For those not familiar with his story, he is one of history's most gifted and eccentric musicians, someone who burst onto the scene in 1955 with a revelatory recording of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. He was 23 years old at the time. He was immediately hailed as a phenom and the Goldberg recording took off in a fashion then unheard-of for a classical release. An otherwise obscure work suddenly became mainstream, and Glenn Gould became a household name overnight. His manner of playing was, and remains, immediately recognizable: dry and dynamically-constrained (especially his Bach) with a kind of spare, puritan beauty, and with an astounding faculty for counterpoint. His was a very un-luxurious--un-romantic--approach to the piano for the time (not to say unemotional), and he revolutionized how we think of Bach on a modern grand piano.

He is renowned for his almost obscenely wide-ranging and exhaustive musical mind--and we'll come back to this--but also for his eccentricities. Indeed, more people probably came to know of him by his oddities than by his brilliance with what is after all a fairly obscure musical specialty. I feel a bit like a brain-cell-killing People Magazine article talking about his tics and mannerisms and his very odd career path, but in the final analysis they are extraordinary things, unavoidable aspects of one of history's most significant and noteworthy musical personalities. They are part of his story.

One of his oddest traits was his hostility to performing in public. He came to feel there was something competitive and gladiatorial in live musical performance, and so in 1964, at age 31, he renounced playing concerts, and he kept this resolution for the rest of his life. But for the few years where he graced the concert stage, he presented quite a spectacle (which, of course, played some role in how he viewed the music-consuming public).

If his playing were not so transporting, his manner at the piano might suggest some form of mental illness. He could not keep himself from vocalizing audibly and swaying precariously while he played; he often conducted himself and others if either hand were not in use, and he could not keep still when he was not playing; his posture at the piano was most unorthodox: he insisted the piano be raised a few inches on wooden blocks, and he sat on a low, folding wooden chair with the legs chopped off, and he slouched in the chair so that his nose was not far above the keyboard (this chair, which was originally altered by Gould's father, traveled with him everywhere, eventually coming to look like something salvaged from a junk yard--very odd indeed in Carnegie Hall! When it finally fell into splinters, he was bereft and unable to play properly, and he eventually commissioned an almost identical custom-made replacement, which he used until his death); the chair would creak distractingly as he swayed around during the performances, and between the squeaking and the singing his recordings all sound as though a brilliant pianist kept a disturbed friend at his side for the performances; his appearance was almost comical, as he slouched on his child's chair with his legs crossed and pedaled in his stocking feet, often with the wrong foot--his clothing was ill-fitting and often dirty and unkempt, and he played at least one concert with mismatched shoes; he was a legendary hypochondriac, traveling everywhere with a huge cache of pills and wearing a heavy topcoat and hat and scarf and mittens even in the hottest weather.



This list can go on and on, but it takes us ultimately in the wrong direction, I think. What remains to us after his death from a stroke in 1982 (at age 50) is a legacy of really extraordinary recorded performances. The recordings are of piano music, primarily, ranging from the pre-Baroque up to really compelling advocacy of contemporary composers. But he also left quite a bit of writing, and he worked in radio and television as well. One of his passions was for experimental radio quasi-documentaries (which he called "contrapuntal radio"), and he was one of the first people to see the possibilities of the new and emerging technological media.

He was particularly innovative with his own recordings. His rejection of concertizing stemmed in part from his conviction that recording was going to revolutionize how we consume music. It seemed quite reasonable to him that we might assemble our own favorite Mahler symphony by cobbling together individual movements from different recordings according to our preferences. And he was one of the first to record many takes of a work, or a part of a work, and then assemble a "perfect" version from the bits and pieces. This is, of course, commonplace today. The recording studio (or radio studio or television studio) enabled him to experiment almost without limit, and gave him absolute control over what was put forth to the public.

In the end it's his piano work which has set permanent hooks in me. So many of his recordings--of Bach particularly, but of other composers too--set the bar for the repertoire he tackled, and many remain the gold standard decades later. He had a unique aptitude for counterpoint, an ability to seemingly divide his brain into however many discreet sections as he had musical lines to play, giving each top billing. Like the mysteries of relativity, whatever you're looking at seems to be the musical idea getting fullest attention; everyone's the star! I'm sure I've not pinned it down exactly, but he simply does counterpoint better than anyone else.

Whatever his approach, whatever the admixture of composer and performer, his musical output remains absolutely compelling. To watch him playing on video is to witness complete mastery. More than mastery: his command of the piano itself makes this technical part of the process seem the least of his challenges, and I don't know that I've ever heard or seen a single incorrect note from him (I say this not because I think it should be anybody's priority, but because it shows something of how seamlessly he melded with his instrument).

He came from quite unextraordinary circumstances, showing signs of his odd, savant-like personality from a pretty young age. He rarely strayed far from Toronto, especially once he stopped concertizing, and as time went on he more and more lived a hermit's life where he interacted with people mostly over the telephone and tinkered with his technology in his own spaces. But it's hard to find fault with his approach when it yielded the results it did.

So here's a tip of the hat to one of my favorite geniuses.

***

There are a whole host of videos on YouTube with which to make one's introduction, and I'll just finish up with a few of my favorites.

Here's one that shows how he thinks and speaks about Bach. He had a pretty dense and high-flown way of talking and writing, but his understanding of his subject matter is always encyclopedic. (This is not the original video I posted, but that one is gone. Luckily, there are plenty of others.)



And here's one where he plays the first movement of Bach's Sixth Partita: