 |
| William Byrd |
The New York Times delivers a substantial piece: William Byrd: An Essential English Composer for Four Centuries.
Byrd was, for the majority of his working life, a Catholic living under the Protestant rule of Queen Elizabeth I, but the situation was more fluid and complicated than that. Unlike his Catholic contemporaries John Dowland, John Bull and Richard Dering, Byrd didn’t flee the country, opting instead to stay and, in part, abide by the new, state-enforced Protestantism. And support for Byrd’s burgeoning career came from both England’s extant Catholic establishment and the queen herself.
The quote “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls” is regularly attributed to Elizabeth, during the early moments of her reign. “It was clear,” Johnstone said, “that she was making it possible for the Catholics among her subjects to continue to have this indemnity of conscience when it came to the essential religious matter of making your Communion,” the primary difference between the two religions at the time.
And don't we wish our current rulers might also refrain from "making windows" into our souls!
Carried through all Byrd’s vocal music is economy, lucidity and emotional clarity in his approach to text — at a time when words and their representations were contested so painfully. He, Dawes said, “fits in the same category as Benjamin Britten and Henry Purcell as one of the best setters of text from any composer in England.”
There is an accompanying article about Byrd's influence on contemporary composers: How William Byrd Influences Music, 400 Years After His Death.
Roxanna Panufnik:
I’m really in awe of Byrd. First, how brave he was being a Catholic in such dangerous times, during the Tudors and Queen Elizabeth’s reign. That’s no joke, and thank God he was a musician, because I think that’s probably what saved him. But I love his harmony. Byrd, Tallis and Bach — I think their harmonic changes are more emotional, and sometimes more radical than a lot of 19th-century composers. He was really a man ahead of his time.
* * *
On the enigmatic blues guitarist: ‘Biography of a Phantom’ Review: On Robert Johnson’s Trail
Johnson is a figure many a writer has chased and failed to catch, a journeyman guitarist who became a prodigy after, as legend has it, making a deal with the devil. The truth is that Johnson probably just followed the more traditional route to artistic success: He listened to and learned what audiences like, stole from others, and he practiced, practiced, practiced. As far as his personal life goes, the few people who knew him and the fewer still who were willing to go on record said that Johnson was shy. He liked to drink and was popular with women—single and otherwise, supposedly. He died in 1938.
Other than that, we know almost as little about him as we know about Homer.
* * *
Here is an interesting take: Bach Was No Liberal Humanist
In a scene in the 2022 movie Tár, a Juilliard student declares to his professor: “As a BIPOC pan-gender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it impossible” to play or conduct the German composer—in part because of the 20 children he obliged his two wives to bear. It is a caricature of woke excess: There has been no serious attempt to cancel Bach for living in the era before birth control. The response from the professor, the film’s protagonist Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), is a caricature of power: She launches into a semi-coherent rant, insulting the student and extolling Bach’s greatness. At one point, the two sit together on a piano bench while Blanchett tries to demonstrate the value of Bach, playing the opening of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and crooning that “there’s a humility in Bach, he’s not pretending he’s certain about anything. Because he knows it’s always the question that involves the listener, and never the answer.” The film is clever, and her arrogance only sharpens the knife. The viewer feels the despair of a closed system—both sides are right on their own terms, and both are loathsome.
Bach served as the director of church music in Leipzig from 1723 until his death, a position from which he composed religious music for the exhortation and edification of parishioners. He was aware of Enlightenment-style thinking that elevated reason, and railed against it in his vocal compositions. Marissen makes a survey of all appearances of the word “reason” in Bach’s texts, and quotes them, including “reason—the blind leader—seduces,” “reason does not help; only God’s spirit can teach us through his word” and the wonderful, “Shut up, just shut up, tottery reason!” Marissen dryly notes “I do not see or hear anything in Bach’s musical settings to suggest that these vocal compositions subvert their anti-Enlightenment messages at the same time as they enunciate them.” There is also, he says, no sign that Bach privately disagreed with the material. One of the primary sources of insight into the composer’s private reflections comes from notations and small corrections he made on his personal study Bible. Marissen analyzes these in some detail to demonstrate the pre-modern, anti-Enlightenment trend of Bach’s thought.
The whole thing is very much worth reading.
* * *
Manchester Collective: Award-winning group on a mission to shake up classical music
Glance at Manchester Collective's gig diary and you'll see conventional, comfortable concert venues like the Albert Hall for the BBC Proms this summer, the Southbank Centre in London, and the Bridgewater Hall in their home city.
Other dates, meanwhile, are a long way from the traditional classical circuit. Like a nightclub in a former MOT garage in Salford, an indie venue in a former nightclub in Birkenhead, a warehouse in Leeds and a multi-storey car park in Peckham.
Those venues don't always have the luxuries of plush concert halls. Like heating.
"When it's 150 people standing crammed into a small room and you're closer to the musicians than you would ever be at the [Royal] Festival Hall or Bridgewater or whatever, it does feel like it's this tightrope, and it has a sense of jeopardy and danger in the performance," he says. "The best kind of risk."
There is something to be said for exploring unusual performance situations. By taking away the usual relationships and barriers new things might be revealed about the audience, the performers and even the music.
* * *
Here is the Sanctus and Benedictus from the Mass for five voices by William Byrd:
And here is an In Nomine for viols:
"Hellhound on My Trial" by Robert Johnson:
And here is Cantata BWV 78 by Bach:
As decades accumulate into centuries, terrible controversies cool and no longer excite us in very different times with different social, political, technological situations giving us new and different controversies of the moment. If one's art is primarily political, it no longer speaks to us as time passes. The biography of the artist might be a curiosity and of interest if we love the art, but certainly the personality alone cannot carry art into long-term remembrance and embrace. No, enduring art must somehow transcend its time and place and strike a more enduring, probably subliminal sensibility in later times and places. Last night playing some simple Bach bass lines to a treble player's rendition of the top lines of various chorales, Bach's power for me was in the bass notes, the melodies of the 2 lines and the harmonic relationship between them. I couldn't read the German titles, nor did I need to. It is only the beauty and power of Bach's art that gives me some interest in his life and opinions, but generally I don't want to to know much or anything about the artist because all humans have flaws but I don't want that to color the work that in detached form has it's pure effect.
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting truth that whatever may have inspired the artist in the original creation, it may not have much interest for us. As you say, what is really important is the aesthetic substance of the work--however it may have been inspired. The religious context and needs were of prime importance to Bach, but not of great interest to us. But what he wrote has lasting value!
ReplyDeleteBach lived in what became East Germany during the Cold War. This led to some creative East German musicology which claimed the Thomaskantor was really a proto-Marxist. Susan McClary’s claim that the runaway harpsichord solo in Brandenburg 5 is a symbolic insurrection by the continuo servant class is a direct echo of their arguments.
ReplyDeleteI don’t condemn these scholars. They sought to protect Bach by persuading the authorities he was really on their side. Sometimes that’s what you have to do to save the things you love.
Great art seems able to endure most of the bizarre things we do to it. People have re-set Shakespeare in medieval Japan and in outer space, and something survives the transformations. People have rearranged Bach for synthesisers, vocal scat singers, jazz piano trios, and traditional Indian and African instruments; again, something still connects, no matter how far removed these versions are from anything Bach could have imagined.
One final point. I think the most culturally dominant view of Bach today isn’t that he was an Enlightenment gentleman, a sort of musical Benjamin Franklin. It’s more the strange sci-fi view of Bach which originates in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel-Escher-Bach; the Bach of puzzle canons and acrostics. I don’t remember reading the words “Luther” or “Lutheran” even once in Hofstadter’s wonderful book, so he’s clearly taking a partial, edited view of the composer. But he’s still onto something.
Very salient points, Mr de la Tour! I need to track down that East German musicology and the Susan McClary article. I read the Hofstadter book with great enjoyment back in the 80s and yes, that does tend to capture a lot of how we view Bach as the intellectual master of music, sort of a Pierre Boulez of the 18th century. Taruskin offers a valuable counter in his Oxford History where he digs into the harsh aesthetic of much of his religious music.
ReplyDeleteNot only do commentators prefer to pass over Bach’s devout Lutheran beliefs, one finds a similar phenomenon in reportage on the Bach Collegium Japan. In all the praise of Bach’s music as something universal, rarely is it mentioned that Masaaki Suzuki himself is a devout Christian (albeit Reformed, not Lutheran), and that ensemble has been supported by a Christian university in Japan. The idea that the religion itself might have some intercultural appeal, and not just Bach’s music, is clearly unpalatable to many today.
ReplyDeleteI was raised an atheist myself, but ironically, I often find myself pointing out and defending the positive influence of religion on art and culture. How much great music was created at the instigation of the Catholic Church over the last, oh, thousand years?
ReplyDeleteI've read some of his stuff before but it sounds like Bach Against Modernity is going quickly on to my "must read this" pile.
ReplyDeleteAgnostic here. I've play Bach most of my life, better more recently, I like to think. My takeaways - his ability to express blazing joy is unparalleled. And someone else said: in the more somber works he is like someone viewing human experience from outside of it. With compassion and wisdom that brings consolation. (Of course there is the supreme mastery of materials.) If Bach really believed it was all about a man in the sky controlling every aspect of our lives, I find that (a) hard to accept and (b) disappointing if true, but something that will not change my experience of it.
ReplyDeleteIt brings up the question of whether it's possible to get something out of music that did not cross the composer's mind (at least conciously)? I'm reminded of a teacher's story about a recital he played that he thought was terribly done on his part and audience members coming up to him afterwards and say how wonderful they thought it was.
Music might be universal in the sense that, if one is acculturated to a particular musical idiom, the aesthetic substance of works in that idiom can be experienced by various different listeners irrespective of whether they share any religious beliefs with the composer. That certainly seems the case with Bach. One might look at more politically ideological works in recent culture and ask if this is also true of them. It seems not as there is some backlash right now against cultural products by Disney and Hollywood generally. Entirely different situation, of course.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is entirely possible for the listeners and the performers to have entirely different responses to a performance--I have heard this expressed a number of times.