Monthly Archives: August 2012

Sharing the Spirit of Bhakti

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

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Tyagaraja

The great composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Tyagaraja hailed from two worlds different from one another in space, time, race, language, religion, social order and musical tradition. Bach lived in Germany, while  lived in South India, in present-day Tamilnadu. Bach died in 1750 whereas Tyagaraja was born seventeen years later in 1767. The former’s mother tongue was German whereas that of the latter was Telugu. Bach was a Christian whereas Tyagaraja was a Hindu. The former lived in a increasingly capitalistic semi-feudal society while the latter lived in a traditional caste-based society coming under the growing influence of British colonialism. The western musical tradition to which Bach belonged was polyphonic whereas the South Indian tradition to which Tyagaraja belonged was based on ragas and talas. Nonetheless, the most moving music of Bach is similar in spirit to that of Tyagaraja. This is due to the strong similarities of the spirit of profound religious devotion, the spirit of Bhakti, ever present in their great compositions. Bach’s duet Mein Freund ist mein from Cantata no. 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 140) and Tyagaraja’s krithi Rama Nannu Brovara (raga: Harikamboji, tala: Rupaka), along with countless other examples, prove the point.

It is true that Bach and Tyagaraja were musical geniuses with innate spiritual sensitivities. However, this alone cannot explain the presence of a profound devotional element in their music. Necessarily, they had to be deeply influenced by the great movements of religious devotion – Bhakti movements – of their respective countries. Interestingly, these movements, which developed separately from one another (one in Germany and the other in South India), show striking similarities with each other.

Bhakti is selfless devotion to a personal god (istadevata). It calls for an intense, intimate and mystic relationship with God. Bhakti is passionate, spiritual and ecstatic. The devotee – bhakta –  surrenders himself to the deity and aspires to directly experience the divine without the mediation of priests. Bhakti is conceived by the bhaktas as the path to salvation –  Moksha.

Bhakti emerged in South India as a response to Brahminic Hinduism, the established religion of India. Brahminic Hinduism legitimized the caste based social order, in which the Brahmin caste was placed at the top. Further, it promoted elaborate rituals and sacrifices, which were to be performed exclusively by Brahmin priests. All religious rites were performed in Sanskrit, which was the language of the educated elite. Brahminic Hinduism was closely aligned with the ruling classes. It actively promoted the mediation of priests in the relation of man with God. The priesthood was restricted to male Brahmins.

The pioneers of the South Indian Bhakti movement were the wandering poet-saints called Alvars (Vaishnavites, devotees of Vishnu and his incarnations Krishna and Rama) and Nayanars (Shivites, devotees of Shiva).They were active from the sixth to the ninth century in the Tamil country. They composed a vast collection of devotional songs in Tamil, the language of the common people (as opposed to Sanskrit). These hymns are contained in the Tirumurai of the Nayanars (the hymns are known as “Thevarams”) and the Divya Prabandham of the Alvars. The Bhakti movement promoted social inclusivity. Interestingly, the first Bhakti saint was Karaikkal Ammaiyar, a woman. The Bhakti saints also included outcastes such as Nandanar. This was a radical departure from the male dominated, caste-ridden world of Brahminic Hinduism.

The Bhakti movement spread from the Tamil lands to the rest of India. Its next home was modern day Karnataka, where it got radicalized in twelfth century in the form of Virasaivism, which was opposed to Brahmins and the caste system. However, the Bhakti movement saw its heyday from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. It enjoyed a resurgence in South India, when the Vijayanagar Empire was at its prime. This led to the birth of Carnatic music. In fact, the poet-musician saint Purandaradasa (1484-1564), who is considered as the founding father of Carnatic music, lived during heydays of the Vijayanagar Empire. Purandaradasa composed his devotional songs mainly in his native Kannada language. A few generations before him, Tallapaka Annamacarya (1408-1503) and Arunagirinathar (fifteenth century) composed moving devotional songs in Telugu and Tamil respectively.

From the eleventh century onward, a movement of Christian devotional mysticism developed in Germany, which was similar in nature to the Bhakti movement of South India. This Bhakti movement arose as a response to medieval Roman Catholicism, the institutionalized religion of Western Europe.

Medieval Roman Catholicism centered on the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the pope. It placed great emphasis on the mediation of priests and Church in the relations between man and God. It prescribed elaborate public rituals, which were to be conducted by Catholic priests in Latin, the language of the educated elite. The Church was closely aligned with the ruling propertied classes. Further, the elite of the priesthood belonged to the ruling elite. The priesthood was restricted to males. The Church forcefully imposed its Scholastic teachings, which were heavily influenced by the philosophy of Aristotle, on the common people.

Hildegard von Bingen

Interestingly, as in the case of the South Indian Bhakti movement, the pioneer of German Bhakti was a woman, Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), who was a Catholic nun. She was followed by several other nuns such as Elisabeth von Schoenau (1141-1165), Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210-1283), Gertrude von Helfta (1256-1302), and Mechthild von Hackeborn (1241-1298). For them, “the longing for inner spiritual union with Christ found allegorical expression in the form of a mystical wedding of the Soul with the Savior” (Fritz Martini, Deutsche Literaturgeschichte). However, the most important representative of German Bhakti was the mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1327). Wilhelm Goessmann notes, “He emphasized the intense and intimate relation of Man with God. Man must be seek detachment and distance himself from the World, in order to focus his sole attention on divine wisdom and truth. Then the inner power of the Spirit, the Spark of the Soul, is enabled to directly reach the divine consciousness.” Eckhart described this as the birth of God in the human soul” (Wilhelm Goessmann, Deutsche Kulturgeschichte im Grundriss). Eckhart was followed by his disciples Johannes Tauler (1300-1361) and Heinrich Seuse (1295-1366). Like the South Indian Bhakti saints, they expressed themselves in the native language of the common people. This enriched the German language and enabled the German people to express their innermost spiritual emotions in their mother tongue. They emphasized the need for man to directly experience the divine through personal efforts. These thoughts violently clashed with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which saw itself as the intermediary between God and Man.

The German Reformation led by Martin Luther (1485-1546) gave a great boost to the Bhakti movement in Germany. Luther, who was himself a gifted poet and a musician, composed numerous congregational hymns in German. These devotional songs, which are commonly known as “chorales,” became immensely popular among the German people. Numerous poets and composers followed Luther’s example and composed moving chorales. These included poets such as Nicholas Decius (1485-1541), Philipp Nicolai (1586-1608), and Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) and composers such as Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612), Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654), Johann Adam Reinken (1623-1722), and Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707). The chorale was indeed a great vehicle of Christian devotional feelings.

It should be clear from the foregoing that music has played a crucial role in the propagation of Bhakti in South India and Germany. In fact, music is an integral and inseparable part of Bhakti. Interestingly, most of the Bhakti leaders such as Tallapaka Annamacarya, Arunagirinathar, Martin Luther and Purandaradasa were gifted poet-musicians. This is due to the fact that music is an incomparable medium to express the mystic feelings of intimate and intense devotion, passion, and blissful ecstasy of Bhakti. Perhaps, one could suspect that Bhakti itself sprang from the Nietzschian “mystical essence of music.” In this regard, it could be useful to contemplate on “Nadopasana,” worship through music, and “Nadabrahma,” manifestation of the Divine in music, which Tyagaraja expounded in his songs. Did “Nadopasana” arise from “Nadabrahma?”

Bach and Tyagaraja were great musical geniuses with innate spiritual sensitivities. They were hugely influenced by the Bhakti movements of their respective countries. Bach was brought up in the tradition of north German polyphonic music, which gave pride of place to the chorale. He adored the chorale and the devotional music of revered composers such as Reinken and Buxtehude, and he was a devotee of Jesus Christ, a “Christubhakta.” Tyagaraja was brought up in the tradition of South Indian Carnatic music. Tyagaraja, who was born more than two centuries after the demise of Purandaradasa, was greatly influenced by the latter’s songs. In fact, as a child he heard them sung by his mother. Tyagaraja was a devotee of Rama, a “Ramabhakta.” Bhakti profoundly influenced the music of Bach and Tyagaraja. Their musical genius and innate spiritual sensitivities were wonderfully receptive to the spirit of Bhakti. Their creations are the highest musical expressions of the spirit of Bhakti of their respective countries.

Satyajith Andradi – The Island

As Simple as Bach

28 Tuesday Aug 2012

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For the past forty years at my jam sessions, I’ve told the audience and musicians that we are professional, spontaneous co-arrangers. Describing our musical efforts simply as “jazz” doesn’t convey enough. We should someday create an organization or club or music society called “Spontaneous Co-arranging Universal Musicians,” better known as S.C.U.M.

Developing the ability or knack for spontaneous co-arranging takes time and study. There are rules and laws surrounding the music we play, and no one was more important in creating (or is it discovering?) these rules and laws than Johann Sebastian Bach. Even a general study of Bach will reveal much valuable music acumen.

Charles Mingus said, “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird – that’s easy. [I call this ‘originality through incompetence’] What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple – awesomely simple – that’s creativity.”

So how “simple” is Bach? For $139.98, the Collector’s Music Catalog will send you everything Papa Bach ever composed – chamber works, concertos, cantatas, vocal works, keyboard works, organ works and orchestral works – all on one hundred fifty-five compact discs. Most of these can be played on any kind of instrument. To listen to and digest the entire canon would take a long, long time (The Beatles wrote three hundred tunes; Duke Ellington, nine hundred – that’s relatively few compared to Bach!). But volume does not equal quality, so volume of work aside, we should try to realize Bach’s importance to and influence on every single musician – ever – in the whole world that uses the Twelve-tone System.

How the piano looks – with eight white keys per octave and five black ones (two, then three) – and how frets are placed on a guitar are a direct result of the Twelve-tone System derived from the overtone series of any given sound. Bach realized that perfect or “just” tuning produced unpleasant or unharmonious (and, therefore, much of it unusable) combinations of tones. In order to play in different keys, and in different octaves, the tuning must be tempered or adjusted.

This required ratios between pitches to be used rather than simple math. In construction of the Parthenon, the Greeks used what they called the “Golden Ratio,” which came about through Pythagoras’ experiments with a vibrating string. The science of mathematics and the science of music both began with Pythagoras. For more about this complex subject, I suggest a book by Stuart Isacoff entitled Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization.

Johann Sebastian Bach (born March 21, 1685) is the fount from which the science (mental) and art (spiritual) of all music in Western civilization flows. That’s all of us who play jazz, classical, blues – all styles on all instruments (piano, guitar, violin, etc.) found in Western civilization. The Twelve-tone System, along with its semi-tones (i.e. Funk, tones, blues tones, in-between tones), is as complex a system as the human brain can handle to send and receive musical information – musician to musician and musician(s) to listener. So it’s safe to say that this Twelve-tone System (well-tuned) is all we’ll need for many centuries (maybe forever) to create music – to transmit art in sound and combinations of sounds (vibrations per second) in time (in motion) – not on paper or in books, but live human music.

The science part of Bach’s music is monumental. But that’s only half of it. The spiritual part is simply awesome, and understanding it takes time – lots and lots of quiet listening time. It is said that the six Bach cello suites (BWV 1007-12) may be understood only if you try to play one yourself on the cello. In today’s world that’s a tough thing – but it’s deeply rewarding, both on the surface and at the subconscious level. Today, there is a convenient and generally held view regarding popular music that just as Bach’s music was the popular music of his day, we have the popular music of our day – equally good, just another era. That isn’t really so. Bach never traveled much during his life – only a few hundred miles. Most people outside of his own town never knew much of his music. A few certainly did. Mozart did. And Goethe did.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (born August 28, 1749 – Bach died in 1750) is the greatest figure in German literature. He was a brilliant dramatist, lyric poet, novelist and philosopher. This genius in the world of letters is to Germany what Shakespeare is to England and Dante is to Italy. He was from Weimar, as was Bach, which is how he became familiar with Bach’s music. Goethe said, “[When I listen to Bach, it is] as if eternal harmony were conversing with itself – so it must have been in God’s bosom just before the creation of the world. This, too, was how the music circulated in my innermost being, and it appeared to me that I neither possessed nor needed ears, eyes even less, and for that matter, any senses at all.”

For the most part, however, Bach was all but forgotten. Bach was not a well-known celebrity of his day. He was an artist-scientist, not unlike Copernicus, Galileo or Einstein. It wasn’t until about 1829, eighty years later, that Felix Mendelssohn initiated a widespread revival of Bach’s music, an interest that is still growing today.

My buddy and a beautiful trumpet player, Dave Hibbard, told me that he got to know Slam Stewart while at S.U.N.Y. in Birmingham, N.Y. “Slam told me ‘music is our religion,’” Dave said. Slam had told me the same thing. Music is our religion. Of all the proofs of God’s existence by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Voltaire, and so many others, there is no more compelling proof of the existence of God than “love”—for all human beings (as well as for animals, like my dog, Chloe). The greatest logical proof of this can be found in music. Perhaps the most brilliant mind among the modern philosophers belonged to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who said, “Music comes eons before religion.” Herbie Hancock once noted, “Jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit, because in jazz, we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment.”

No one has to believe what we musicians believe – but they do have to respect our right to that belief, just as they would respect any other religion. I think it’s entirely possible that a thousand years from today J. S. Bach will be regarded as more beneficially important to the human race than Jesus, Moses, Buddha or any of the formal religions.

John Bany – Chicago Jazz Magazine

Kemal Ebcioglu, Musical Mathematician

24 Friday Aug 2012

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Kemal Ebcioğlu, lead guitarist, to the right

Kemal Ebcioğlu, a student at the Robert Academy in Istanbul, was only sixteen years old in 1971 when his band Optikler (referring to the corrective lenses worn by members of the group) won the Milliyet newspaper’s second annual contest of high school pop bands. The event was televised to an audience of over twenty thousand viewers, and the winners were announced in the newspaper the next morning under the headline “future stars are born.” Their set list at the finals included “Köylü Kizi” (“Country Girl” or “Farmer’s Daughter”), an original instrumental by Ebcioğl that included a fugal introduction guided by his lessons in counterpoint and harmony.

Following their initial success, Optikler played occasional live shows, and Ebcioğlu  composed Turkey’s entry in the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest. Unfortunately, “Seninle Bir Dakika” (“A Minute With You”) came in last place, but the nostalgic song has remained popular in Turkey, especially among the older segments of the population.

After emigrating to the United States, Ebcioğlu wrote a doctoral dissertation at the State University of New York/Buffalo (“An Expert System for Harmonization of Chorales in the Style of J. S. Bach”) that proposed an approach to creating a simple form of tonal music with a computer algorithm, based on simultaneous adherence to three principles:

  • Programming a comprehensive amount of knowledge about the desired musical style,
  • Using rigorous constraints to impose high musical quality and to rule out unacceptable solutions, efficiently utilizing a computer’s power for search and backtracking,
  • Using many style-specific heuristics to prioritize the algorithm’s choices when extending a partially created composition, given that rigorous constraints are not by themselves enough to generate beautiful music.

The resulting CHORAL project was awarded a two-year National Science Foundation grant. It featured a new logic programming language called BSL that included universal and existential quantifiers (unlike Prolog), more than three hundred fifty rules based on Bach’s chorales, and an artificial intelligence framework based on multiple views of the music, including Schenkerian analysis.

Ebcioğlu continued working on CHORAL after going to work at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, New York. In 1988 IBM made a press release on the project that resulted in worldwide coverage, and in a 1989 concert by the Westchester Choral Society, Bach’s and the program’s chorale harmonizations were sung back to back. (Here Bach’s harmonization is sung first, followed by the computer program’s version.)

Before his retirement from IBM in 2006, Dr. Ebcioğlu received two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards. Today he is president of Global Supercomputing Corporation.

Bach Voyages Beyond the Planets

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

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21 August 1977

The world’s longest space exploration began today with the launch of a Voyager spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. In 1990 it could still be sending back information from the outer reaches of the solar system, four thousand million miles away.

Its main purpose is to provide close-up pictures and scientific data about two of the outer planets, Jupiter and Saturn, both huge and somewhat insubstantial bodies consisting largely of the gases hydrogen and helium.

The Voyager spacecraft – another is to follow within the next fortnight – will take a close look at Saturn’s rings and at the moons of both planets.

The most interesting of these seems likely to be Titan, a Saturnine satellite almost half as big as the earth. Titan appears to have an atmosphere consisting of a mixture of methane and hydrogen and might even have oceans full of liquid methane.

The two spacecraft will also pass close to Jupiter’s satellites Callisto, Ganymede, Io, Europa and Amalthea (the first four were discovered by Galileo and take their names from Jupiter’s lovers) before using Jupiter’s huge gravitational field to swing them round on target for Saturn.

Assuming the spacecraft are still in good shape after looking at Saturn, its rings and its satellites, one of them will continue to Uranus, recently discovered to have Saturn-like rings.

Uranus will be reached in 1986, and then the spacecraft might be able to fly on to Neptune, the outermost of the planets. Only once in every one hundred eighty years do the planets line up conveniently enough to make such a grand tour possible.

After Neptune, the spacecraft will glide off into the abyss of interstellar space, carrying with them some earthly artefacts in case they ever fall into the hands of civilizations way out in space. The cargo includes a recorded message from President Carter, some music (Bach and Chuck Berry), a complete listing of the membership of the US Congress and information in sixty languages.

The chances that this message in a bottle will ever land on a friendly shore are infinitesimally small, and one or two scientists have grumpily accused the National Aeronautics and Space Agency of gimmickry.

But it does no harm, takes up little of the spacecraft’s cargo capacity, may have helped to extract the money from Congress and makes the stern scientific purposes of the mission seem more human.

[Both Voyager spacecrafts are still in operation, nearing interstellar space.]

Carlo Curley, the “Pavarotti of the Organ”

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Memorials, Music Education, Other Artists, World View

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Carlo Curley, born August 24, 1952, died August 11, 2012, was the self-styled “Pavarotti of the organ” – an entertaining figure with a phenomenal keyboard technique whose oversized personality drew large crowds.

Like Pavarotti, Curley was an enormous bear of a man, standing six feet tall and almost as wide, wearing a floppy, multicolored tie and beaming behind his beard. He also shared with the tenor an irrepressible degree of showmanship; he could work a crowd into frenzy – dancing in the aisles and weeping in the pews were reported at some concerts – by blasting away with the fortissimo range of his powerful instrument.

“Bach invented rock ’n roll,” he would insist, adding that a work by Handel was a “real toe-tapper.” A typical Curley program, whether in the concert hall or the cathedral, was as likely to include the theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus as it was the classics. Such kitsch would have purists sneering about his lack of taste, but Curley was unabashed, instructing his audience to fasten their seat belts before pulling out all the stops to ensure that they got their money’s worth.

In a profession known for its relative anonymity, Curley cut a brash, ebullient and outspoken figure, collecting almost as many musical enemies as friends, particularly in Britain. When the purists became too vociferous he would challenge them to a “battle of the organs,” in which he would pit his portable Allen instrument against the finest British cathedral consoles, a form of musical bloodsport in the nave.

Naturally his preference was for bringing the organist out of the organ loft and on to center stage. When the keyboard itself could not be moved, he would insist on a camera and a video screen so that “the audience can all see me flying,” as he once told the journalist Mark Pappenheim.

In the 1970s he was resident organist at Alexandra Palace, introducing each work to audiences of up to four thousand in recitals compèred by Richard Baker or Thora Hird. He was also the first organist to play at the White House (for President Carter), and liked to recall how he had performed for several European royal families. Prince Henrik of Denmark was a particularly close friend, but Curley found the Danish organ world “extremely narrow.”

Although a man of devout faith, Curley railed against the instrument’s association with organized religion. “I have to oversell the organ because it has been relegated to accompanying church services for so many years . . . people forget that it can be a very viable concert medium.”

Curley played most recitals from memory, mercilessly mocking those performers who needed both a page-turner as well as assistants to pull the stops. “It looked like a typewriter convention,” he said of one colleague’s recital, adding, “I’d like to see the organ put back where it belongs: in the forefront of the concert world.” No Curley recital would end without him kissing the instrument and shamelessly plugging his recordings from the stage.

Carlo James Curley was born in Monroe, North Carolina, on August 24, 1952, into a Methodist family of Irish descent. He was as mystified as anyone about his Italian name. “Perhaps they went out for a great pasta meal on the night I was conceived,” he would joke. His mother was an orchestral violinist in Florida and his grandmother a professor of piano in Massachusetts. Carlo was soon playing the piano and singing in the choir. However, his desire to explore the church organ was persistently rebuffed by a choirmaster, who regarded the instrument as his “own personal fiefdom.” Aged six, Carlo “took a Coca-Cola bottle, broke a back window [of the church] and pulled myself through.” Although he required twenty-five stitches to his arm – and was soundly thrashed with a belt by his grandfather – he had found the instrument of his dreams. “I thought I was in heaven.”

He attended North Carolina School of the Arts and, by the age of fifteen, was organist at a large Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia, before studying privately with a number of teachers, including Virgil Fox in America and Sir George Thalben-Ball in Britain. At eighteen he was director of music at Girard College, Philadelphia.

Thereafter he lived a somewhat peripatetic life, moving between the United States, Scandinavia and Britain, eventually settling in Melton Mowbray. Unlike many musicians he was disdainful of academia, always refusing to teach or take on pupils. “I don’t have the patience,” he told the Buffalo News in New York.

In 1998 he published his autobiography, In the Pipeline, which regaled readers not only with his taste in musical instruments but also a detailed account of his predilection for Danish blondes. He also made several recordings for Decca, many of which were accompanied by his own idiosyncratic sleeve notes.

On one occasion he reportedly had to be rescued from an organ loft where he had become stuck because of his massive physique. A master of the double entendre, he regaled listeners to the BBC World Service with the tale of how he could “erect my organ on any stage in less than twenty minutes.”

In the Christmas 1991 edition of Private Eye, Curley advertised for a romantic partner. “One-off, good-humored, handsomely statuesque Yank teddy bear . . . seeks a prospective Mrs. Bach,” he wrote.

He remained unmarried.

– The Telegraph

Listen To Your Buds

15 Wednesday Aug 2012

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As the new school year kicks off, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA) has launched a “Listen To Your Buds” initiative, a public education campaign aimed at preventing noise-induced hearing loss by helping adults teach children how to use personal audio technology safely. The ASHA is dedicated to helping more children develop safe listening habits to avoid the devastating, lifelong effects that can accompany hearing loss.

ASHA’s Listen to Your Buds 2012 national poll results show that eighty-four percent of parents are concerned that the misuse of personal audio technology is damaging the hearing of children in general. Seventy-five percent of parents say that teaching the proper use of this technology is important, yet only fifty percent of parents have discussed safe listening with their children.

“Studies show hearing loss can occur painlessly over time and is most commonly caused by exposure to loud sounds,” says ASHA President Shelly Chabon, PhD, CCC-SLP. “For children, even mild hearing loss can lead to delays in speech and language development and affect their academic performance, social interaction and more. ‘Listen to Your Buds’ educates everyone to practice safe listening in easy, everyday ways.”

The “Listen To Your Buds” campaign provides tips such as keeping the volume down to half and taking listening breaks when using personal audio technology. It also provides parents with warning signs and resources on where to get help if concerns arise.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is the national professional, scientific, and credentialing association for more than 150,000 audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists in the United States and internationally. Audiologists specialize in preventing and assessing hearing and balance disorders as well as providing audiologic treatment including hearing aids. Speech-language pathologists identify, assess, and treat speech and language problems including swallowing disorders.

– American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

The Baroque Bassoon

09 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Bach's Works, Organology

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Poverty is like a woodwind instrument:

It makes palpable the breath of love and arouses the fingers with generosity.

Its sound of thanks fills one with joy, and, by piercing the clouds, it showers blessings upon us all.

 

In this engraving published by Johann Christoph Weigel in Regensburg in 1698, a woodwind instrument maker is putting finishing touches on a dulcian while a completed bassoon leans against his workbench. Music historians generally consider the dulcian to be the forerunner of the modern bassoon, as the two instruments share many characteristics: a double reed fitted to a metal crook, obliquely drilled tone holes, and a conical bore that doubles back on itself.

The origins of the dulcian, or fagotto in Italian, are obscure, but by the mid-sixteenth century it was available in as many as eight different sizes. Its primary function was to provide the bass in wind consorts made up of either loud shawms or soft recorders, indicating a remarkable ability to vary dynamics to suit the need. Otherwise, only eight finger holes and two keys limited each size of dulcian’s usefulness to very few key signatures.

It appears that the Baroque bassoon was a newly invented instrument, rather than a simple modification of the one-piece dulcian, but the dulcian continued to be used by Bach and others alongside the bassoon well into the eighteenth century. The person most likely responsible for developing the more advanced bassoon was Jacques-Martin Hotteterre. Some historians believe that, sometime in the 1650s, Hotteterre conceived the three-keyed bassoon in four sections (bell, bass joint, boot and wing joint), an arrangement that allowed great accuracy in wood machining. While no French instruments from that time period have survived, bassoons from the 1680s of Johann Christoph Denner and Richard Haka are still extant.

Composers first used the bassoon to reinforce the bass line of the string orchestra or as the lowest voice in a double reed choir of oboes and tailles. Jean-Baptiste Lully combined the newly invented oboes and bassoons with strings in his Les Petits Violons. Antonio Cesti included a bassoon in his 1668 opera Il Pomo d’oro. The use of bassoons in concert orchestras was sporadic, however, until the late seventeenth century when double reeds began to make their way into standard instrumentation. This was largely due to the spread of the oboe to countries outside of France. Increasing use of the bassoon as a basso continuo instrument meant that it also began to be included in opera orchestras, first in France and later in Italy, Germany and England.

Sometime around 1700, a fourth key was added, and it was for this type of instrument that Vivaldi, Telemann and Bach wrote their demanding scores. A fifth key was added during the first half of the eighteenth century. Notable makers of the four-key and five-key Baroque bassoon were J. H. Eichentopf; J. Poerschmann; Thomas Stanesby, Jr.; G. H. Scherer and Prudent Thieriot.

Today, many Baroque bassoonists in North America play a reproduction of a late seventeenth-century instrument discovered by William Waterhouse in the former East Germany. The Model HKICW by Guntram Wolf Holzblasinstrumente features a wing joint and bocal that pitches the instrument at a’ = 415 Hz, the Kammerton at which most historical woodwind instruments are pitched.

Reeds for Baroque bassoons vary widely among players. Not only do the physical characteristics of cane vary from one shipment to the next, but every possible design variable, including length, profile, gouge, shape, diameter of cane, etc., is investigated by each player in an effort to derive the best musical effect from his or her Baroque bassoon.

A great degree of flexibility of pitch control, through the use of breath support and embouchure, as well as reed profile, is available to bassoonists, and players can also use alternate fingerings to adjust the pitch of many notes. In a manner similar to other woodwind instruments, the overall length of the bassoon can be slightly increased to lower pitch or decreased to raise pitch. On the bassoon, this is done by pulling out or pushing in the bocal, the curved metal piece to which the reed is attached.

With warm and lyrical tone, Baroque bassoonist Michael McCraw is featured in an online performance of the Concerto for two Oboes and Bassoon in C minor by Johann Friedrich Fasch.

 
 

The Other Sebastian Bach

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Other Artists

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With his larger than life personality, his herculean vocal range and his honest, in your face approach to music, Sebastian Bach (born Sebastian Philip Bierk in 1968) is the embodiment of rock. While he will forever be referred to as the “former lead singer of Skid Row,” Bach has transcended his time spent with Skid Row with successful runs on Broadway, becoming a reality TV staple and most importantly to him, his thriving solo music career. Bach sums it up best in his own words, “I’m just going to keep making kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll ‘til the day I die.”

What drew you to the theater?

Singing. Before I was into rock ’n’ roll when I was little boy, I was the lead soprano in my church choir and I would put on a gown and rehearse Tuesdays and Thursdays when I was eight. I’ve always loved singing, and if you love singing, Broadway is the place for you. If you don’t love it, get the fuck off, Jeremy Piven.

What’s been your favorite role?

Jeckyll and Hyde, without a doubt. It was fun. Jesus Christ Superstar was not fun. They’re super mean to old JC in that play. They let him have it. If it was a good show, we’d all be crying afterward. But I just wanted to have fun. Jeckyll and Hyde was more fun. It was like a comic book.

With Jesus Christ Superstar, you’d pull into town on a bus and see protestors that say Jesus is not a rock star. At one show, someone wanted to debate me on TV when I was in town. I said, “No. I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m just here playing this role. I’m not going to get into this religious discussion.” The director would say to me, “You’re Jesus.” I would say, “I’m not. I’m just this dude.” You show me a guy walking around thinking he’s Jesus Christ, and I’ll show you a real fucking asshole.

One of the most classic reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life was in New Orleans. The first paragraph said, “Just the fact alone that Sebastian Bach is playing the role of Jesus could be the first true sign of the oncoming apocalypse.” That’s one for framing. The floods came shortly thereafter. I’m sorry.

What is it with ’80s hard rockers like you and Bret Michaels and Dee Snider, that you’ve been able to carve out second careers on Broadway or TV, where a lot of the alternative rockers haven’t? Was it the over-the-top nature of the music that made it translate better?

I think with heavy metal it was a visually-oriented art form. We looked good in the videos and we knew how to front a band. A lot of the (alt) rockers were anti-stardom. Like when you have a label called “Kill Rock Stars.” How long are you going to be a rock star with that attitude? Bret Michaels and Dee Snider and I know how to step on a stage and front a band, and we’re not ashamed to. We’re not shoe gazers.

Were you really approached to play what would become Tom Cruise’s role in Rock of Ages?

Yeah, I was the first actor on Broadway to be asked to do that. They asked me many, many, many times to do it and I didn’t know if it was cool. I still don’t. I haven’t seen the movie. I’m in the movie, but I haven’t seen it.

Speaking of movies, and TV, it’s been awhile since we’ve seen you on TV. Do you see any new reality or sitcom adventures in your future, maybe a Dancing With the Stars stint?

I really hope not but people keep asking me when I’m going back to TV. TV is such a disposable art form, nobody cares. For example, the show Supergroup that I was on. People still listen to the music I made with Skid Row more than twenty years later but TV is so forgettable. I’ve done so many TV shows that I’ve literally forgotten about whole series that I’ve contributed to. I did one show called Never Mind the Bollocks and there was an article in Rolling Stone and they had a picture about the show and it said “VH1 Never Mind the Bollocks – Nobody Did.” Rock ‘n’ roll is what lasts. Once people get a hold of a song they love, they love it for their whole lives.

Has it been difficult to adjust to Twitter and the Internet – things that weren’t really around when you started out?

Yes, it’s been very difficult. It’s been most hard in personal relationships. When you find a girl you love or are interested in, and if you mention a name, fans around the world (will try to) just destroy this person. It’s kind of tough to be with somebody famous when you’re on the Internet all the time. It makes you a target.

You’ve ruled out a Skid Row reunion many times. Do you ever see yourself being a member of a band again or do you prefer solo work?

I definitely prefer the solo work. I only have one life and I’m not getting any younger. That’s why my new albums are released under the name Sebastian Bach. I want you to know what you’re getting. You know what you’re getting with me, and I’m not going to let you down.

Mary Ouellette – Loudwire

Jeff Niesel – Scene Magazine

More Bach Resources

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Bach's Life, Bach's Works

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Additional Bach Resources can be found in the side bar next to the Boulder Bach Beat posts. Today, a schedule of the liturgical year in Bach’s Leipzig, including a list of the prescribed readings and cantatas composed for each occasion, joins the ongoing catalogue of the works of Bach as they are mentioned in Boulder Bach Beat posts. Other resources being developed are a Bach chronology and a collection of maps and other images related to Bach’s life.

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