Two Antiquarian Modernists

And I'm willing to bet that you would never guess which ones I have in mind. The first is possibly easier as he has been remarked on previously: Ezra Pound a famous figure in early 20th century modernist poetry. Here is the most famous example. the first instance of what became known as Imagist poetry:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

That's the modernist side, on the antiquarian side we might cite his study of the Provençal dialect and attraction to Dante, Homer and Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also translated Confucius and Chinese poetry and spent a lot of time in the Royal Library in Madrid. Some might say that what I claim is antiquarian, which I define as a deep interest in things that are old, of our or of other cultures, is simply one aspect of modernism.

Now for my second example that I'm sure you would never guess: guitarist/composer Leo Brouwer. In the early 1970s he was awarded a scholarship to study in Berlin where he worked with Hans Werner Henze and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Something not as well known (it is not mentioned in the Wikipedia biography) is that he also studied performance practice with harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and the fruits of this relationship can be found in his second set of studies where he notates many ornaments suitable for Baroque music and in his recording of Scarlatti sonatas (and published guitar arrangements) where he exhibits a marvelous creative brilliance in ornamentation. Here is an example:

By mere happenstance, I have connections to both of these figures. As an undergraduate at the University of Victoria in the early 1970s I met Basil Bunting, a poet and friend of Ezra Pound. I was delighted to have had a number of conversations with him about the relation between poetry and music. He shared with me his love for the playing of Andrés Segovia. Like Pound he was also an antiquarian and once said that at his age he was starting to lose his Persian. I also took two master classes with Leo Brouwer as a guitarist and in Salzburg in 1988 I met Karlheinz Stockhausen and had some interesting discussions with him about live performance versus recordings.

I have always had antiquarian leanings as well, so perhaps it is a component of contemporaneity. In my early days as a classical guitarist I took a summer course in lute-playing and later on, as part of my work as a concert guitar performer I had a lot of interest in performance practice of early (and 20th century) music. As part of that project, I put a lot of research into how to play the music of the Spanish vihuelistas and as a guide to that I studied the treatise of Tomás de Santa María titled Arte de tañer fantasía published in Valladolid in 1556. Luis de Narváez' book of compositions was published in the same city in 1538. I chose, however, a fantasia by Luys Milan to apply Tomás de Santa María's ornamental suggestions to. Here is the second page of the Milan Fantasía 10 in the edition of Emilio Pujol with my ornaments pencilled in:

Click to enlarge

Was this a component of my approach as a modernist? Or was this an antiquarian impulse? How can we tell the difference? Is someone who spends their entire life studying and performing 16th century music still a closet modernist? Obviously there are lots of modernists that have no interest in things antiquarian. Looking into my own heart, I really don't know how to answer these questions.

Luxury and Austerity

The violinist Joshua Bell was just robbed a couple of days ago as a thief impersonated him and was able to get access to his room, getting away with a laptop, cash and a $38,000 watch. Here's the story. My sympathies go out to him. But that expensive watch gave me a bit of pause. Coincidentally, I had to wait around in an office yesterday for an hour and picked up a travel magazine. I haven't looked at a glossy magazine in, well, years. It felt like entering some sort of alien world where everything is topsy turvy. Everything is surface: luxurious rooms, furniture, villas in exotic destinations. 'Design' is paramount. And what is 'design'? Luxurious and perhaps ingenious surfaces. Here is a sample of luxury travel. This is the shower of one of those villas:

Putting these two things together, I suddenly recalled an album I owned years ago of Gustav Leonhardt playing Buxtehude on pedal harpsichord. The cover was a, to me, wonderful photo of Leonhardt playing in what I presumed was his studio. Everything was white and, except for shelves and shelves of books and scores--and the harpsichord, of course--the room was completely empty. The perfect music studio. The 'surface', that is, the presence of material objects, was absolutely minimal. But the air was filled with music. Here is the closest similar photo I could find:

Now I'm going to speculate here; I think that our lives tend to fill up with things: $30,000 a week villas in Mustique, $38,000 watches and all sorts of lesser clutter. All this crowds out those less material joys like music. There are different kinds of austerity and luxury. That photo above, for example, looks pretty austere until you imagine (or actually hear) the music that is filling the air.

But we can extend this further: aesthetic austerity can produce great works of musical art. Haydn was famous for making very little musical material go a very long way. Here is the opening movement of a string quartet that uses very little more than the interval of a falling fifth for material:

Another famous example is his 'London' Symphony:

Ironically, the more disparate ideas you toss into a composition the more likely it is to turn into an indigestible smorgasbord. Perhaps that's true of life as well?

Gustav Leonhardt

From Norm Lebrecht's blog today comes the news that the great harpsichordist and organist Gustav Leonhardt is retiring--at age 83!

Leonhardt is a towering figure in the Early Music movement that grew strongly starting in the 1950s and continues today. He is a spectacular harpsichordist and organist. I have to confess that I have never been a great admirer of the organ, but the harpsichord is a different story. The edginess of the sound takes some getting used to, but the clarity and the depth of the repertoire makes up for it. Here is Leonhardt playing the Goldberg Variations, one of the first pieces he made his name with in the 1950s:

He also made some wonderful recordings of Domenico Scarlatti. I think you can hear in this performance some of what makes him unique as a harpsichordist. There is an expressive intensity that one doesn't usually imagine the harpsichord capable of. After the jack plucks the string, there is really nothing more you can do, but he seems to be able to control the way the jack moves the string to get a kind of spring or crunchiness that intensifies the expression. Have a listen:

He also is known as a conductor both from the harpsichord and from the podium. Here is the big solo from the Fifth Brandenberg. I don't think that's his real hair:

And here he is conducting a Bach cantata. The three-hundred and some cantatas by Bach are probably the greatest collection of music that is not widely known to the musical public.

Here he is playing some Couperin:

Indeed, it is hard to find any music from the 16th to the 18th century that he was not master of, for harpsichord or organ, or ensembles including those instruments. Not long ago Sony released a box of his recordings in this edition of 14 discs, which I purchased and enjoy greatly, but which no longer seems to be available. However, there is this one, even bigger with 21 discs.

One of my favorite photos of a musician was one on the cover of a disc of Leonhardt playing Buxtehude. He was sitting at the harpsichord in a white room. The only other items in the room were wall to wall shelves of scores. Now that is a dedicated musician...