Today's Listening: Sokolov, Bach, Chaconne

 

Today's Listening: Thomas Dunford at the Concertgebouw

 I have to confess I don't actually like the way Bach is usually played on guitar. The performances typically range from technically inadequate to robotically correct. Sketchy or mono-dimensional. This is often the case on other instruments as well, just a bit worse on guitar. I have put up a few posts complaining about Bach on guitar under titles like "why do they play Bach as if they hate the music?" But there is a wonderful antidote. This all-Bach concert by Thomas Dunford in the Concertgebouw is a demonstration of how to play Bach. I don't see any reason why these musical ideas couldn't be realized on guitar. Instead of strings of technically perfect and musically meaningless ones, every note has its own direction and weight.

UPDATE: Thomas Dunford isn't the only Baroque lutenist to play Bach very well. Have a listen to Hopkinson Smith.

Large Repertories

This is one of those posts that does not fit comfortably into any particular category, so I should start with a definition. By a large repertory I mean a large collection of works by a single composer in a specific genre. The locus classicus might be the five hundred and fifty-five single movement sonatas for harpsichord by Domenico Scarlatti. Another prominent example is the one hundred and four symphonies by Joseph Haydn. A lesser-known collection would be the three hundred and seventy-one symphonies by the Finnish composer and conductor Leif Segerstam.

Of course we would want to include the three hundred some cantatas by J. S. Bach. And there are some smaller collections that are also well worth looking at such as the two hundred and thirty some pieces for harpsichord by François Couperin gathered into twenty-seven suites or Ordres. Another spectacular collection is that of the two hundred and fifty-two madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, collected in nine books. Mind you, over the course of the composition, Monteverdi made radical changes in the very nature of the genre and from Book 7 on there is a wide variety of versions of the form using different kinds of  poetic texts, different vocal combinations and especially different instrumental combinations to the extent that some of the longer examples are like miniature operas--a long way from our basic conception of the madrigal.

What fascinates me about these large repertoires is the astonishing creativity involved. Imagine sitting down year after year and composing over and over again short sonatas for harpsichord, overwhelmingly in binary form and each time coming up with something new and fresh. Or doing the same with the symphonic form, though there you have instrumental variety as well as contrasting movements to work with.

What is required for these repertories to flourish is not only the creative genius of the composer, but also the availability of musicians to play the works and a venue and sponsorship to support performances. Of course Scarlatti could count on the patronage of Philip V, the King of Spain and Haydn that of the wealthy Esterhazy family. Bach was employed by the city fathers of Leipzig and Monteverdi by the Gonzagas and the Serene Republic of Venice. So what you really need is decades long support of some wealthy patrons, something we don't really have these days.

How could I possibly introduce these repertories in the context of a blog? Not very easily, I'm afraid. The topic is not only too big for a blog, it is also too big for a series of hefty books. Because of the extensive nature of these repertories, many of them have not even been examined in a thorough way in monographs. And when they have, as in the massive three-volume book on the Italian Madrigal by Alfred Einstein, they are often many decades old. So, basically, it can't be done! So what can I do? Well, I can certainly give little tastes of them, call it a "repertory sampler" which might encourage you to explore this music. I think it is really worth your time because here we tend to have pure creativity unaffected by commercial or ideological considerations--and wouldn't that be a relief!

So I'm going to pick up on a post I put up not long ago and delve into the Monteverdi madrigals to start with. I'm going to pick one madrigal from Book 3, one from Book 5 and one from Book 7 that I hope will enable me to illustrate the shift from Renaissance style to Baroque style in one composer in just a few years.

Performing Bach

I attended an all-Bach performance yesterday and I am left with a host of nagging questions. On the one hand, I think that kindness is a virtue and criticism can often be mean-spirited. On the other hand, honesty is also a virtue. So, yes, there were issues with the quality of the performance, But there were political and cultural issues as well. Let me set the scene.

A classical guitarist with whom I was previously unacquainted is doing a series of concerts in which he presents all the music that we can legitimately (more or less) perform on guitar. This includes all the so-called lute suites as well as the solo suites and sonatas for solo violin and the six suites for solo cello. The performance was on eight-string guitar. Those two things in themselves were a powerful motivation for me to attend the concerts. There will be six concerts, but I only became aware of the series after the first two had already taken place. So yesterday was the third concert, held in the central patio of the local library. These concerts are all to benefit scholarship programs of the library. The series as a whole is titled "A Peace Musical Offering" as it is dedicated generally to "peace" and references Bach's A Musical Offering.

In the introductory remarks there was no mention of peace between which parties, nor which party might be favored so it was just nebulous virtue-signaling. But that nebulosity also extended to the performance itself. As a long-retired guitar instructor I was troubled by the casual sitting position with the guitar resting simply on crossed legs. Mind you, Thomas Dunford, an extraordinary lutenist, uses the same position. But no professional classical guitarist does, choosing either a footrest or a guitar rest. The guitar itself was quite reasonable with a good resonant sound. The problems started with the first note. I think I can describe the effect as being very like an intermediate guitar student trying to sightread Bach and only partially succeeding. The analogue in prose might be like this:

ok,   here we go ... with the ... first phrase of.... the pre. lude to thethirdcello  suite uh the third ... cel. lo. suite...

I have taught at two universities, two conservatories and a two-year college and this kind of performance would have failed the audition for acceptance to the program at all of them. I'm not sure what to call the basic failing: complete lack of discipline? If you sit down to learn a piece by Bach, you have to take it in small sections and work on each section at a very slow tempo until all of it is in your fingers. It was as if he had never encountered this idea. He didn't lack technical skills because there were passages that came off relatively complete. But then the next phrase would be interrupted by a forest of missed notes, incorrect bass notes and frequent hesitations.

One of the best master classes in Bach on guitar I attended was that of Oscar Ghiglia at The Banff Centre. I'm pretty sure that if this kind of playing had been offered there, Oscar would have stopped him after the first couple of phrases and made him repeat them over and over and over again until they were smooth and consistent. This performance was like listening to someone with a hopeless stutter try and recite Shakespeare.

What was puzzling was that the performance was not unmusical as such. Nor did he play Bach as if he hated it like some otherwise professional guitarists do. No, the timbre was nice and there were even some phrases that were well-delivered. But the whole was hopelessly sloppy, as if the concept of a minimal professional standard of accuracy just didn't exist. Perhaps what was needed was a little less peace and little more anxiety about simply playing the right notes.

I am reminded of attending a recital of an up-and-coming young Canadian cellist years ago. My flautist friend and I were just leaving at the end when we ran into Paul Kling, a truly great violinist. We sort of shrugged as the concert had been rather frothy with a lot of throwing about of the hair. Paul, in his delightful Czech accent simply said: "you were expecting Rostropovich, maybe?"

Fugue in Parts: Part 1

The two best courses I took at McGill were a graduate seminar on the symphonies of Shostakovich and the gnomically titled: "Fugue."

Pretty much everyone who has an interest in classical music knows about the symphonic form, and likely many know something about fugue, but what a fugue is and how it works are fairly obscure topics to even classical music lovers, though they certainly know what they sound like.

When I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology they required that I make up for not having taken an honours undergraduate degree by taking two graduate-level courses in music theory. The course called "Fugue" is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students and never has a very numerous enrollment.

Here is the first extraordinary thing to know about fugue. It is a type of musical composition that dates back to the Renaissance with roots in even older music and appears under various names like fantasia, ricercare, and in later years, fugue. One also finds fugal sections in many other forms such as the mass, oratorio, requiem and so on. So, one would expect that a course called "Fugue" would take a broadly historical approach. Not so. The first thing the professor said was "while many composers have written fugues over the last four hundred or so years, we are only going to look at pieces by J. S. Bach."

With the possible exception of Chopin and the mazurka, nothing like that could be said about any other music genre. Bach dominates the fugue like no other composer dominates any other form. Imagine a course in opera that only covered operas by Verdi.

So what I would like to do is a few posts on fugue that will take you inside the kinds of things that happen in fugues. Fugue isn't a form or genre or style--it has often been described as a texture, but you could also think of it as a process or collection of related techniques.

My main reference will be an excellent book by Joseph Kerman published in 2005 entitled The Art of Fugue.

The book comes with a CD of many of the pieces discussed. I'm going to follow Dr. Kerman in his choice of the first fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier to begin with. The reason that fugue is not a form, genre or style is that each fugue differs in fundamental ways. There is no common rhythmic structure, phrase structure or even contrapuntal structure even though the fugue is typically referred to as a contrapuntal composition. Let's look at how the C major fugue from Book I of the WTC exemplifies these characteristics.

One of the techniques associated with fugue is the stretto. To explain what that is I have to back up a bit. A fugue, particularly a fugue by Bach, has a subject or theme which may consist of anything from four whole notes to a whole bunch of sixteenth notes. Because of their role, subjects often have a distinctive rhythmic character that enables them to stand out in the texture. Of course, Bach sometimes conceals this by just stating a fragment of the subject, known as a "false entry" to fool the listener. The subject is answered by another version of itself, usually at the fifth. When this answer begins, the subject often continues with  contrasting material called the "counter-subject" which may serve an important thematic function--or not! Stretto is the technique of coming in with another statement of the subject before the first is finished, a piling on effect which often results in an increased intensity.

This fugue is a stretto fugue par excellence because in its twenty-seven bars, the fairly extended subject appears no fewer than two dozen times. This fugue consists of almost nothing but strettos. Compare this with the next fugue, in C minor, that has absolutely no strettos! One begins to see why I say that fugue is not a form or genre or style, but rather a family of musical techniques and processes. Let's have a listen before we dig into the details.

As this is the first fugue in the WTC, Bach took the occasion to sign his name: B (2), A (1), C (3), H (8) = 14. The subject, ending on the E on the third beat of the second measure, has fourteen notes. We know this is not just a coincidence because Bach used number symbolism in a number of places in his music.

The fugue begins in methodical fashion by stating the subject four times, once in each voice. Here is an annotated score. I show each entry with a blue bracket. Each stretto, i.e. overlapping entry, I show with a red bracket. As you can see the strettos come spaced one beat later, two beats later and three beats later at a variety of intervals.

I hope you can see my blue and red brackets. Just click to enlarge.

UPDATE: The color wasn't coming through, so I redid the scans.

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Grigory Sokolov

There are so many reasons why Bach is such an enormous presence in music. This morning I watched a little Rick Beato clip and despite the title it turned out to be just a "listen to this piece by Bach" clip. Well, sure!

But I want to play something else by Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier, a set of preludes and fugues in every key, is one of the most monumental keyboard pieces ever written. And to show it wasn't a fluke, twenty or so years later, Bach did it all over again. There have been a few attempts in the last 300 years to match this achievement, but the only successful one was by Shostakovich.

Here is the transcendental pianist Grigory Sokolov playing book one in a concert in Munich in 1990.

UPDATE: Something I didn't realize until I had finished listening to the whole clip: this only goes up to the D# minor fugue, so only half of Book I.

Tyler Cowen on Bach

Every now and then a perfect opportunity comes along to be a curmudgeon, which I treasure. Even if no-one else does. Often these opportunities come from Ted Gioia and such was the case yesterday when he linked to a chat between Tyler Cowan and Evan Goldfine. What is so delicious about this kind of opportunity is that it comes as a result of amateurs waxing ponderous about music.

We live in odd times, when the expert class in general, those folks constantly pontificating on climate, health, socialism and gun control, have seen a shocking loss of credibility due to them being, well, pretty much constantly wrong.

So this is more of an old-fashioned curmudgeon opportunity when someone with long experience in a certain area, me, is taken aback by the sheer fecklessness of people who are experts in another area, feeling free to share their inner thoughts about something in my area: J. S. Bach. Here is the link. The first thing that just astonishes me is the long, long, long list of artists they feel free to opinionate on. Good lord! But let's move to a quote:

Evan Goldfine: Correct. And I love Leo Kottke. I've seen him many times in concert in

Tyler Cowen: Same here.

Evan Goldfine: And, um, what a, what an incredible American, uh, weirdo character, but also he performed the, uh, Jesu Joy of Man's desiring on the Six and 12 string guitar album.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: Which is just a beautiful, beautiful arrangement for steel string, not usually done on the steel string guitar.

And I recommend everyone take a listen to that.

Tyler Cowen: It's better than most classical guitarists, how he has some sort of feel for Bach, even though it would not count as traditional in any way.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, he, uh, Bach can translate into folk music, uh, if, if it's in the right hands. [00:04:00] You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time.

This is ok, of course, just a couple of folks sharing their likes. In the old days, this would happen in a coffee-shop and no-one else would ever hear it. But when you call it a podcast or YouTube clip and put it on the web, somehow it becomes iconic, monumental? Just for the record, Leo Kottke is a very virtuoso folk guitarist who has no special gift in Bach performance and I'm happy to point this out anytime.

You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time.

How did he do it?

Tyler Cowen: We don't know. So there's plenty of records about Johann Sebastian Bach. But what he really was like to me is quite a cipher. And I've read the major books on him by Gardiner, Wolff. Others, uh, you can read about the records, different places he worked, tax records. But at the end of the day, he's the least easily graspable major composer.

I feel Beethoven in Mozart. If I met them, they wouldn't fundamentally surprise me. Oh, you're Beethoven, you know, Bach. I don't know. It's, uh, that's part of the mystery and challenge, isn't it?

Let me help out here. The main difference between the general perception of Bach versus Mozart and Beethoven is that the latter two composers have been heavily romanticized in countless program notes and biographies so you can barely hear the music behind the melodrama. This is much less the case with Bach. But he is anything but a cipher. He was a superbly gifted musician coming from three hundred years of Bachs in the music business. He had the skills and came at a time when he could synthesize the whole tradition of Western European music--and do it better than anyone before or since. He was inherently a conservative cultural force, something that current narratives have difficulty dealing with. If you want a better sense of Bach, read the three volume treatment of Spitta. The trouble with these guys basically comes down to, they have read a couple of books and listened to a few dozen pieces, which means that they really know nothing about Bach--they just think they do!

Well, that was fun! Now let's listen to some Bach. One of my favorite pieces from the Art of Fugue is this canon. The second voice is upside down, down a fifth and in double note values.

 

Today's Listening: Bach

 When I was an active performer I did a huge number of chamber music concerts. I played in just about everything worth playing for voice and guitar, violin and guitar, flute and guitar, and odd ensembles like bassoon and guitar and even the Sextour Mystique by Villa-Lobos for flute, harp, celeste, saxophone, guitar and oboe. And when that ran out I transcribed a lot of music for flute and guitar and violin and guitar.

One of the best ensembles I was in was with flutist Richard Volet. We transcribed the English Suite no 2 by J. S. Bach for flute and guitar. It's a bit tricky, requiring the flute player to not breath for long periods of time and the guitar player to do a lot of non-guitaristic things. We performed the whole suite on a number of occasions but the only decent recording we have of it was from a live concert where we just played the Prelude, Sarabande and Bourrées.

A Bach Film

I haven't been able to watch all of this film, but judging by the first part, it seems quite good.

 

Rondeau, Bach

Yes, I will listen to pretty much anything that Jean Rondeau has done:

 

Beato on Bach (and me on everybody else...)

Rick Beato is a real musician and his videos are often surprising. Like this one, a tribute to Bach and Glenn Gould:

One of the joys of growing up on Vancouver Island in the 60s was that on CBC TV on Sunday afternoons you would often find Glenn Gould playing Bach on piano, or Orlando Gibbons on harpsichord or telling us remarkable things about music as in this video. Yes, all that is gone from television.

Now let me share a few out of the way cultural things. First of all, a couple of poems. No-one reads poems any more, let alone writes them. One exception was Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who in his pre-vampire days was a rather feckless poet. Here is the first part of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1502 - 1542)

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking in my chamber:

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not once remember

That sometime they have put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Written when he was in prison. This is from a wonderful anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse, the New Edition of 1941. This is an excerpt from a song lyric by Leonard Cohen:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for

trying to change the system from within. I'm coming

now, I'm coming to reward them. First we take Man-

hattan, then we take Berlin

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens. I'm guided by the

birthmark on my skin. I'm guided by the beauty of our

weapons. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

Next, from a famous poem by Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are use to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

How about a couple of books? One of the most enjoyable books I have ever read is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. Not only is it a great science fiction adventure, but it is the first book that I know of that has an artificial intelligence as a protagonist. It is also a libertarian novel and, that rarity, a tragedy. Master and Commander is perhaps the finest historical novel ever written, by Patrick O'Brian--and it starts with a string quartet concert on Minorca. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is probably the funniest novel ever written, and a quick read.

That ought to keep you occupied for a few days!

Today's Listening: Bach, Art of Fugue, Sokolov

This is a reminder of just how long Grigory Sokolov has been at the pinnacle of pianistic capability. Recorded in a concert in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1981.

Today's Listening: Bach, Sviatoslav Richter

There are a lot of recordings of this monument of music and as a Canadian I guess I am supposed to prefer that of Glenn Gould which is certainly fine. I also quite like Friedrich Gilda's and that of Grigory Sokolov. But this recording by Sviatoslav Richter is extraordinary.

Today's Listening

The pleasures of listening are many and varied, but there are some wide, general categories. One of these is the unique and rare pleasure of hearing something so new and unusual you have little to compare it to. This is a pleasure associated with new music. Some examples I can recall: the first time I heard one of the piano-roll compositions of Conlon Nancarrow; the first time I heard Steve Reich (it was the DDG recording of Drumming); the first time I heard music by Arvo Pärt.

Another and contrasting pleasure is that of hearing a piece or group of pieces that you have heard hundreds if not thousands of times before--and the pleasure is enriched and deepened every time. This is what we experience when we listen to some of the music of J. S. Bach in particular. I have been listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier for some fifty years and it just gets better.

Today's Listening: Bach, Cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen BWV 51

 You can't do any better than listen to a little Bach on a Sunday morning. This is a particularly ecstatic cantata.

Bach's Birthday (Old Style)

Today is the 339th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer who just gets more appreciated every year. Yes, ok, his actual birthday, after the Gregorian calendar reform, is actually March 31st, but I'm afraid if I wait I will forget to post anything. So let's lift a glass today. Apparently Bach liked to compose while drinking beer and brandy, according to a tavern bill, but raise the glass of your choice. Bach wrote a couple of secular cantatas alongside the religious ones. Here is a particularly jolly one, the "Coffee Cantata":

And while we are on joyous music, here is one of the most exuberant that Bach ever wrote, the Magnificat BWV 243:

One of my favorite pieces by Bach, the Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu in which the answer to the theme is upside down, in double note values and down a fifth. Then, when all that is worked out, the voices simply switch, meaning that the whole thing was also in invertible counterpoint. I'm not sure we have a sufficiently robust expostulation for that! Shpadoinkle!

And finally, something really sublime, the Brandenburg Concerto no. 2, beloved by every listener and every trumpet player's nightmare:

An Economist Looks at Bach

The economist Tyler Cowen has a real interest in Bach and offers an evaluation from an unusual point of view: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time.  That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time.  I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:

1. Quality of work.

2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.

3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.

4. Quantity of work.

5. Peaks.

6. Consistency of work and achievement.

And a few other parameters. He concludes:

I see Bach as ranking very, very high in all these categories.  Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time?  Shakespeare?  Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level).  Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories.  Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was.  Archimedes?  Plato or Aristotle?  Who else?

Well in music, two possibilities would be Mozart and Schubert. Generally the obvious candidate, I would say, is Aristotle who dominated virtually every category of intellectual thought, from aesthetics, to ethics to politics to physics to logic, for roughly two thousand years. But in the arts? No, I suspect Bach has no real rival.

Me and the Chaconne

The list of really great pieces for the classical guitar is surprisingly short. Mind you, not everyone would agree with this assessment. But it seems clear to me that there are only a few really substantial pieces. We could try to list them: the Concierto de Aranjuez would qualify and for solo guitar, the Nocturnal of Britten, the Invocation and Dance also by Rodrigo, the Variations and Fugue on Folias de España by Ponce and then we are likely into the transcriptions: the Chaconne of Bach, a few works by Albéniz and Granados, some by Scarlatti and that's about it. Of course arguments could be made for a few others, perhaps something by Sor or Giuliani, but that's about it. A shockingly brief list for such an important instrument.

Perhaps the most brilliant thing Andrés Segovia did for the guitar repertoire was transcribe the Chaconne of Bach. Instantly we had a piece that not only worked surprisingly well on the instrument, but it was also an addition of tremendous stature. One could argue that it is the greatest piece written in the whole Baroque era (though of course that would start a whole host of arguments!).

Perhaps the stupidest thing I did in my career was to put off learning the Chaconne. It was really a mixture of poor judgement and sheer laziness. I could never quite bring myself to learn the Segovia transcription as it didn't quite conform to my taste as far as interpretive choices. And I was too lazy to do my own version from scratch--there are a lot of notes in the Chaconne! I was also unsure that I was going to bring something worthwhile to the piece. That was pretty stupid as I could not NOT do otherwise than play it my own way. Anyway, I let decades go by without learning the piece, instead performing cello suites and lute suites by Bach.

But now I am rectifying all this and I'm well into doing my own transcription (which is mostly just lightening up Segovia's and rethinking the slurs and ornaments) and working on memorizing it. Some of the thirty-second note passages are surprisingly hard to keep straight!

Working on this piece every morning has the lovely benefit of putting Bach in your head all morning, something I heartily recommend.

There were three pieces that convinced me to convert from steel string and electric guitar to classical guitar: the Chaconne, the Concierto de Aranjuez and Asturias by Albéniz. The latter two I often played in my career, the Chaconne was the only one missing. So now I am finally getting around to it. I think I have just enough technique left to be able to play it, so it will make a nice envoi to my performing career. About a year from now I should have it all memorized.

Here is a version I rather like:

And of course...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Anu6qvhrM&t=1622s

Some of the most joyful music ever.

UPDATE:  A suggestion, the only way I know to avoid the irritating ads on YouTube is to download the Opera browser and select the ad-blocker in preferences. Other browsers, even Brave, don't seem effective.|

Die Kunst der Fuge

I've enjoyed quite a few performances by the Netherlands Bach Society and just the other day they posted a really interesting one. We all know that the Art of Fugue by Bach was written for, uh, harpsichord? Clavichord? Organ? Actually, not! There is no instrumentation specified! From the notes to the new recording:

Bach’s Kunst der Fuge is shrouded in mystery. We don’t know which instrument it was written for and whether Bach intended the music as material for practice or performance. The order of the 18 sections is unclear as well and we don’t know whether the piece was ever completed.

As it is not clear which instrument Bach had in mind, Shunske Sato made his own instrumentation for the Netherlands Bach Society. “I wanted to bring out the many colours of the work and of my ensemble. Every fugue has its own character. On the basis of the rhythm, time and chromatic lines, etc., you can determine which instrument is most suitable. I’ve studied each part very carefully, in order to decide which instruments are best to use. I wanted the whole Netherlands Bach Society to be heard, so the singers are taking part as well. They sing without words, to vowel sounds.”

I'm just listening to it for the first time now. The first fugue is performed by solo voices, the second by viols, the third by winds and I look forward to seeing how the rest have been instrumented.