 Welcome to Senior Momas. We're here at the Senior Center on Berry Street in Montpeyre. And this is the second class of Bach by Eric Nielsen, my favorite composer. Johann Sebastian Bach's early career, he bounced around a lot. When he was 18 he started with a job that involved a lot of menial non-musical tasks as well as playing organ in the Duchy of Weimar. In 1705 and 6 he only stayed there for seven months and then he went and spent three years in Arnstadt. And that is the first period in which he starts to show pretty much a career-long predilection for having disagreements with his employers. Like a lot of composers he chafed under authoritarianism. The only one at all in this period from about 1700 to about 1850 who actually got along quite well in that position as Haydn. But Mozart got literally booted down the front steps of the Archbishop's palace in Salzburg literally. Yes. As he put it, kicked out on my arse. And Bach had many difficulties and that's to say nothing of Beethoven who insulted patrons left right and center and then would always apologize afterwards. For Bach the difficulty was that in 1705-06 he received a leave of absence for four weeks to go to Lübeck to hear Dietrich Buchstuhut, who was not just a well-known organist but one of the primary composers of the Middle Baroque in Germany. And Bach wanted to learn firsthand rather than through just looking at scores what he was about. And so he went but he stayed for four months. And so he got in big trouble when he came back. I think he even spent a little time in jail over it. The difficulty was that it was over 500 miles round trip and he walked all the way. So he probably wore out his shoes several times. But in any case that made it difficult for him to stay there. And so in 1706 he went to Mühlhausen and he stayed there for three years. During that period he married his first wife Barbara in 1707 and then in 1708 he went back to Weimar but this time he took the position of being Capellemeister, an organist. So it was much more about music and much less about tutoring children in London. And here he had a very good professional instrumental ensemble and a good organ. They set up house and two of his composer sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, were born there. And what I did not realize was that Carl Philipp Emanuel's godfather was Georg Philipp Telemann. And so all of these people were quite collegial. Telemann, Handel, Bach, they all either got together or wanted to. Bach and Handel kept missing each other. They never actually met in person. But they certainly knew of each other and knew of each other's music. Everybody admired books to Huda. And in fact the German composer Matheson and Handel both came at the same time to visit and to see him. It was close to the same time that Bach came to see books to Huda. And books to Huda wanted to retire and he offered the position to both of them but the condition which was less unusual than I thought. The condition of employment was that the successful organist had to marry Telemann's oldest daughter. So they both said thanks but no thanks and they both left. I had read somewhere that Telemann actually accepted that but that's not true either. In any case, Bach wasn't offered the position. So a lot of his work, a lot of Bach's work in Weimar and in his next appointment which was at Anhaltkirchen, which together they lasted from 1708 to 1723. So from his early to mid-20s all the way up into his late 30s. Both these were fairly secular posts. There was not the emphasis on writing for church services that there was later when he was in Leipzig at the Thomas Kierke. He did write cantatas, he did write sacred music. A lot of his spiritual meanings went into his organ music where he composed a great number of chorale preludes and other works. But this is the period in which he does a lot of work on instrumental music. So this is the period in which he wrote his Brandenburg Concerti, his orchestral suites, a lot of his sonatas for solo instruments, duets, trios, as well as and keyboard music, solo keyboard music meaning harpsichord or clavichord as opposed to organ music which he also wrote in great profusion. It's not that he didn't write cantatas and other sacred music during this time and in fact we'll listen to a cantata in a few minutes but a lot of his emphasis was on instrumental music. So in his first year in Weimar 1708 he produced a tremendous amount of music and included in that was two different sonatas for violin and keyboard and we're going to hear the one in E minor right now and this is done on period instruments. So this is a baroque violin that you're going to see and a harpsichord. So here is Jennifer Roig-Francoli and Vivienne Montgomery playing Bach's Sonata in E minor. Now notice that the free virtuosic prelude or introduction is followed by a slow movement rather than a fast movement. There's several things that I would like to point out about that. First of all you will notice how far up on the bow she was holding it. That's a baroque technique so there's not too much pressure. It's much more about being light on the strings. You'll also notice there was almost no vibrato on long notes at the ends of phrases. It's a very straight tone at least that is the received wisdom these days and has been for about the last 20 or 30 years that it's a much lighter sound and that in this case I think there's been a lot of research done reading contemporary texts about technique and how you were supposed to express the music. You also have to realize that there are no dynamic marks and that's because music was very local. So if Bach wanted somebody to play more loudly he would say okay when we get to this place play more loudly. So and he would often be the person accompanying on the keyboard although he was also a skilled violinist. Another thing to note is that pieces like this sonatas like this or partitas or any of the other multi movement forms of this era going back to the late Renaissance and forward into about 1740 or 1750 are very different from the sonatas and multi movement pieces that came afterwards. There's no sonata, Allegro form, there's no Rondo form, there's no A, A, B, A. They're none of the forms that Haydn and his contemporaries invented and that went on for another 150 years. Instead what you have are collections of shorter movements based on dance forms for the most part. So that last movement was a jig or in English a jig. Six, eight. Another thing you'll notice is that the melodies are constructed of small rhythmic groupings that are then repeated in what's called a sequence. We have you know and where that's how the melody is constructed and whole movements are made out of that as you could hear. So it's a very different format from what we are used to listening to Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven and Brahms and Schumann and Mendelssohn and Chopin and all those other composers from the mid-18th century right through to the 20th and into the 20th century because there were composers like Vaughn Williams and Shostakovich and a number of others who used these forms still in the 20th century and some used them in the 21st but before that period during Bach's lifetime and before that you had free sorts of movements like toccatas or canzonas which are pretty free form. You get to improvise and then write it down and others that are based on the rhythm of folk music that is six, eight for gig or something else but not necessarily on the melodies although a lot of times they were based on hit dance tunes. La Follia which was written in the 1400s was a popular tune to make variations out of from then right through the 18th century. It just never lost its popularity not two weeks on the top 40 and then off. So this is the sort of thing that we can get used to. Yes, Nan? I was wondering if the balance between the two instruments was what you expected because I heard so much, I heard hardly any of the keyboard. Part of that was the miking. This is not a very well miked performance. You can hear all the echo in there and it wasn't as loud as I would have liked but I had the volume on maximum. This is a, this looks like a single manual harpsichord. If you wanted more volume you would get a bigger harpsichord with two manuals that is two keyboards and do a lot with the coupler whereas you would play on one keyboard but they would both be operating it's the same thing that you get on an organ and that boosts the volume but these are little tiny strings and they're and they're plucked and there's nothing you can do about the volume. So it wasn't supposed to be, it was, it was supposed to be very strong. It was written to the violin. The understanding, the understanding was that the keyboard was going to give what it gave and the violin would do its best to balance but the violin was the prominent instrument. You have to understand also that a sonata like this could be accompanied by some other instrument as well. You could have a cello or a viola de gamba or something like that playing the bass line in single notes and the keyboard filling out the chords because all Bach or his contemporaries would write for this would be a bass line with little numbers underneath and the player would be expected to know how to harmonize based on those numbers. It was a skill that they had. So a lot of the music of this period was what did you have available? Did you have a bassoonist? Well he could play the bass line and then you'd get somebody to play harpsichord and that would give more volume to the accompaniment. Jig, G-I-G-U-E. Jigu. Or jig in English, J-I-G. Bernice. Why haven't you said it was a period instrument? Is the violin different? Is that violin different? A little bit. And some are more different still. There are some earlier violins that for instance have a flatter bridge so that they can play multi-note what are called multi-stops like a double stop or triple stop and hold the notes instead of having to roll over them because today string instruments have a rounded bridge. So unlike a guitar you can't hold more than two notes without letting go of one. Some of the baroque violins have a flatter bridge so you can do more with it. We are going to hear a violin concerto, the famous double violin concerto, the D minor at the end of the class and in that the two instruments are actually period instruments but they're more modern violins they are strativarius, both of them. So it's quite interesting. Sacred music. We can't go very far with Bach without getting back to it. He took many many many old choraltunes. It was his stock and trade. It was his home language if you will. And one of them that he said in a number of different ways at a number of different times is an old Lutheran chorale tune for Christmas called Nun Kom Der Haydn Heiland. Now come thou wonderful savior. And the tune itself goes like so. And in the 16th century that would have been harmonized very very simply. Now in my trusty little book of 371 Bach chorales, there are two different settings of this. I'm taking the simpler one but I want to show you something about the ending that is quite I think is quite interesting. So with my handy dandy homestyle chicken noodle soup cans at very high tech holding up the the the book I will do my best here. Before I get to the last phrase I'll play you with quite a simple harmonization and then I'll play you Bach's harmonization to show you the difference. Now here's Bach's harmonization. Bach took these tunes he would ornament the tune but basically he made it so it was very recognizable. With the alto tenor and bass parts he was a master a wizard at being able to do tremendous things to make all of those parts alive and interesting and melodic in their own right and he played around a lot with different harmonizations and when we get to the st. Matthew Passion in a number of weeks he uses the same chorale over and over and over again but he harmonizes it differently each time. So in any case we're going to listen first very briefly to one of the chorale preludes and when I say brief this is a real short one and that's quite a simple setting of it you can really hear the tune there's ornamentation around it and now we'll hear a cantata bwv 61 based on this and basically the same format as the cantata that we heard last week that is there's a chorus at first that sort of sets it out in ornamented fashion then you have different solos and then we finish off with the chorus again in a chorale and this is with Nicholas Ardencourt conducting the consentus musicus of Vienna and the Arnold Schoenberg choir already changed the melody put in a sharp there in second and the third note and how ornamented that was in the instruments you'll notice that was a da capo aria that is he went back to the beginning com jezu com and you'll notice also how familiar it is in the poem now fascinating it's all about opening the door and strings they're knocking this light touch with the bowing that an unexpected ending they started by singing on that great beginning and instead of just fate so it's easy to think that of his 200 or so sacred cantatas that they would be sort of stamped out you know he had to write one a week when he was in in in leipzig but in fact he invests them within the generalized form that he uses with all sorts of individuality based on his interpretation of the text whether the text was by luther or one of his contemporaries as in this case or one of box contemporaries and you can tell by this text how the early lutherans at least viewed jesus as somebody with whom they could be familiar so it's not common z it's com jezu com that is the familiar doom not z second person singular which is you have to be on good terms in germany or austria to be able to use the doom form and then the tenor solo that's what you're hearing come jesus come into your church and so it's this joyous invitation and box certainly sets it that way so and then the next um retro the base about knocking hearing the knock and wanting to and opening the door and you hear the strings plucking away and that's some word painting you're really setting that in such a way that you can hear the knocking and and then it's often hard to tell and box sacred works there are two forms of of due that are used one in talking to god and the other in talking to your own heart do mine hats you my heart be open to this so i i think it's a wonderful example and the the final corral is not one that would have been sung at least easily by the congregation because it's an amen and so there's almost no trace of the original corral tune in it so it would not be something that on sunday they would get up and say oh yeah we can just sing through this when bach wrote instrumental music as i mentioned a few minutes ago he would use different types of dance forms and nowhere is this more apparent than in his suites for solo keyboard instrument and he wrote two rather sizable um collections that came to be known as the english suites and the french suites now the english suites were so named in the 19th century there's nothing particularly english about their music it was based on a misunderstanding that bach somehow uh was writing them for someone in england but there's no evidence of that nor that he was writing for a french verse chuo so who traveled to england a great deal so at least it's one way for us to differentiate the two sets of suites but when i say rather sizable there are six english suites each one of them is about 15 minutes long or more so you're talking about over an hour and a half of music in in each of these and they follow a very um fairly set pattern which is that you have a a a prelude an introductory movement and then what you have is a a set of particular dance movements and in this case in the case of the suite number three in g minor there's the prelude and then there's an alamon which is the french term for a german dance uh currant which was originally spanish dance a sarabande and then in this case two different gavots now gavot is a more ceremonial dance and then finally agig and we're going to hear it on piano not on harpsichord and the reason that i chose that is because the player andras schiff is one of the foremost keyboard interpreters of bach's music alive today uses no pedal on the piano and his touch is brilliant so we will listen to as much of it as i can squeeze in because i have another good sized piece to play for you at the end of the class so we might not get all of it so i'm apologizing in advance if that's the case notice it's almost all hooks at a time right hand left hand comes the alamond listen to the two gavots and the gig yourselves but i need to tell you about 1717 because it was like 1708 a big year for bach in terms of number of compositions and like 1708 it was also a big year in terms of transition because he left his position in weimar i should say he was asked to leave he was dismissed i'm not sure why probably there was some sort of disagreement in fact i know there was a disagreement because he was thrown in jail for protesting the terms of his dismissal and that was at the very end of the year but in the meantime he had been um and he had been engaged by prince leopold of anhast curtain to come and be his cappellmeister and so during that transition he was still writing a lot of music and some of it's sacred and a good deal of it's secular and he wrote during that year two violin concerti one for a single violin in a minor and the one that we are about to hear i've i've included links for both of them but this is the more famous of the two they're both well known but this is the more famous of the two the d minor so-called the bach double that's what string players call it that's all they call it this is the bach double well it's the concerto for two violins in d minor and this particular performance is quite interesting because as i mentioned it's arabela steinbacher and akiko su and i and you'll notice that they're not accompanied by an orchestra but by five string players and a harpsichordist so it's a very chamber ensemble version but you'll notice also the instruments that they are playing one of them is playing strativarius from 1716 so just the year before this work was written and the other strativarius from 1714 and this is notice this is sponsored by a japanese foundation and in fact a lot of the criminese violins guaneri amati strativarius violins are owned by banks and by collectors rather than musicians and they loan them on a long-term basis to soloists and the difference in sound is is pretty striking from what i've been told between one of these old violins and just a a middling new violin there are some there's some string players now who play new instruments that they like very much members of the emerson string quartet for instance use instruments created by a luthier in boston so it's not just that people have to have these criminese instruments that is from chromona it was this group of three master amati and his two students guaneri and strativari but this is interesting that they are playing on these period instruments right around the time that this piece was written so in any case here it is the concerto for two violins in d minor and it will sound familiar tation that happens in this to point out before we go on to the other two movements how typical this is of baroque concerto writing that is there's a main melody and it will go oftentimes between the soloists in this case there are three choices because it can go back and forth between the two soloists but also the ensemble will often pick up the melody and take it so you could hear it particularly in the lower instruments later in the movement and so that's basically this alternating technique between the small group or the soloist and the larger ensemble is something that is very very prevalent in this era much more so than in later music classical or romantic era music okay second movement is after a vivace very lively is a largo manon troppo slow but not too much and then that's followed by an allegro final movement that this was quite a modern performance that is they used a full length bow modern bow and though even though these were instruments built contemporaneously to that is being performed the technique used especially in the slow movement lots of vibrato i i'm i have to confess that with all those long notes in the melody in the slow movement i'm having a hard time envisioning how with a lighter bow and no vibrato that were a little vibrato that would sound um i like this performance a lot but it's not the same as an earlier use of technique that that we saw before may i assume correctly that you would for the most part much rather see performers play then follow the music on the screen okay i thought so fine we need for those of you don't read music it wouldn't make any difference to see this thing yeah yeah a little bit to show that i have a dish towel that has Bach on it i'm not sure which particular piece but he said they had subtitles with the music running along and yes that's right here's here's d next week we will go to one of the large instrumental cycles of Bach his brandenburg and charity although we only cover five we will cover one of them number two the following the first class in november for very specific purpose but it ought to be an interesting class so i hope to see you all next friday