avec Sarah Davachi
To help prepare us for her concert this Friday, composer Sarah Davachi has curated a playlist. “My new piece employs two instruments that were prominent in Renaissance and early Baroque music (organ and viola da gamba). For this reason I am highlighting a few of my favourite composers of early music.”
1. Thomas Tomkins – A Sad Pavan For These Distracted Times
Tomkins (1572 – 1656) was a Welsh composer primarily of madrigals, anthems, consort music, and keyboard/virginal music. I’m especially fond of the latter two collections, with this particular work – which may be arranged either for consort or keyboard – having served as a sort of funerary dirge for Charles I. Sadly, Tomkins is often overlooked in favour of his famous colleagues, Byrd and Gibbons, but I find his use of cascading transitions and suspended tones, which are especially meaningful in slower works, to be very unique and very soothing. It’s like an inscribed delay effect that most composers of the time incorporated into keyboard music simply out of technical need rather than aesthetic choice. Listen here.
2. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina – Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet and Ricercar del Primo Tuono
Palestrina (1525 – 1594), an Italian composer of mostly sacred polyphonic music, is one of my most admired in the world of early music. His approach, although overt in content, was subtle and calculated, and feels akin (to my ears) to a lot of the principles that guided the earliest streams of minimalist music in the 1960s. His works are textural in a sense; they hover softly across very closely placed tones with few drastic movements, I suppose not unlike a lot of the chant that preceded by a few centuries, and there’s an interesting balance between consonance and dissonance that I also find somewhat in line with more contemporary tonal music. Listen to excerpts one and two.
3. François Couperin – Harpsichord works, Volume 1
I should make it clear that my omission of Bach in this list is simply because everybody already knows that his music is incredible. Instead, I’ve opted for the French composer Couperin (1668 – 1733) in light of the fact that his extensive contributions to the repertoire of keyboard music – specifically the harpsichord – are not nearly as heavily recognized. What I find interesting about his music is in no relation to artistry for counterpoint – in which Bach will undoubtedly reign supreme until the end of time – but rather in relation to his keen awareness of the harpsichord as an individual instrument and its highly unusual idiosyncrasies. I find Bach’s music to be somewhat transparent in terms of medium – it’s just as psychologically engaging whether it’s performed on harpsichord, organ, or piano – but I don’t believe that the same can be said of Couperin on account of the fact that, for me, something is lost when transferred to an instrument such as the piano. I don’t mean that as a negative assessment; on the contrary, I think that he understood the acoustic mechanisms of the harpsichord’s action to such a fine point and, whether deliberately or not, wrote specifically for the instrument, which was pretty radical and very uncommon in the context of the era’s approach to non-specific keyboard composition. As a side note, the recording I’ve selected was performed by the wonderful American harpsichordist, Scott Ross, a personal hero of mine who crosses some kind of magical bridge between Glenn Gould and Terry Riley and who died tragically at the tender age of 38. Ross taught music in Laval throughout the 1970s, during which time these recordings were produced, finally settling in France in the early 1980s. Listen here.
4. Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber – The Rosary Sonatas (also known as The Rosenkranz Sonatas or The Mystery Sonatas)
H.I.F. Biber (1644 – 1704) was an Austrian composer primarily of violin music, having greatly advanced the instrument’s technical possibilities. The Rosary Sonatas are an expansive collection for violin and continuo; in this recording, the latter duty is handled both by harpsichord and organ. The majority of sonatas in this collection employ scordatura, which, in popular parlance, is essentially a system of alternate tuning. Compositionally, this is not necessarily exactly the type of early music that I enjoy listening to very frequently; it’s really the unadorned solo passacaglia at the close of the work that is the great pay off, in my opinion. Structurally, the entire work is fascinating to me, though, as it begins and ends in the same place – this being the regular G-D-A-E tuning of the violin. In between, the various tuning schemes are explored without being obvious or ostentatious in any way, and I really respect that. This work is deceptively avant-garde, but even quietly so, almost secretly, which I think is often the best approach. Listen here.
Find out more about the Friday November 25 concert featuring Marc Djokic and Sarah Davachi.
Le Zine Innovations est rendue possible grâce au soutien généreux de la Fondation SOCAN.