In 1982, Karlheinz Stockhausen gave a speech to introduce his month-long
residency at the conservatoire in The Hague, in which he stated:
I believe in a master, a teacher, only if he is able
to play himself – if he cannot play he should not teach – and this explains why
I asked to be allowed to bring with me to The Hague the singers, dancers and
instrumentalists with whom I have worked for many years so that the young people
can see and hear how they work. (Cf. here.)
The argument is somewhat crooked: clearly, the teaching to be done in
The Hague was going to be that of aligning the performance practice of Stockhausen’s works with his compositional intentions. This approach is common in new music, especially with
composers who don’t have time to work with musicians on pieces that have
already been premiered. When I contacted Kagel to engage with him with regards
to his music for the piano, he initially referred me to his trusted Aloys
Kontarsky.
For early music practitioners, this exact composer-performer
collaboration is obviously not possible, but, inversely, their repertoire
benefits from being the object of interest to countless more historians than what recently composed music habitually enjoys. Long before artistic research was
formally imagined, musicians who initiated and developed HIP had their noses in
period treatises, often with a degree in musicology in their pocket. No wonder
that many artistic research PhD candidates are situated in the early music
sector, aiming to tailor their performance practice to insights drawn from
historiographical research that they carry out themselves.
All the more surprising, then, to see this CD that came out a year ago, featuring
both violinist Daniel Auer and musicologist Dagmar Glüxam on its cover, indicating an in-depth collaboration in a project on
Affektenlehr and Bach’s works for the solo violin.
According to her CV in the booklet, Dr. Glüxam can be considered an "internationally active" violinist, and her website lists professional concerts as well as having founded her own ensemble with period instruments. For this project, however, she appears to have preferred to leave the performance of Bach's music to someone else, even if the latter, as heard on a video introducing the project (cf. here), had some initial difficulties identifying with the musicological findings of Dr. Glüxam.
The video promises that the booklet accompanying the CD is "more than a
hundred pages", but that is only technically 82, and taking away translations,
photographs and bios, we are left with a 32-page German essay. This text starts
with the "justification" for this recording, which is stated as (with my
highlighting) "[t]his is probably the first one made of an
interpretation achieved through consistent application of the principles of
affect theory and musical rhetoric." This reads like an odd marketing
disclaimer, as if to make sure the project wouldn’t be dismissed as failing to
introduce new knowledge other than through the consistency of the application,
but claiming it without conviction. An artistic researcher would be expected to
know not only the traditional literature on a given topic, i.e. peer-reviewed
monographs and articles, but just as well the relevant performance practice,
i.e. the recordings of the violinist-peers. In this case, that would have meant
that the Sei Solo research were to have been based on the fact that
there is, for sure, no such recording yet made, and include a study of what was
(not) achieved in those comparable efforts.
I practiced the violin myself, but only for some five years, so I don’t consider myself expert enough to comment on any previous recordings of these Bach pieces, nor on the performance by Auner in this particular CD. I will remark, though, that he states to have used a modern bow and modern tuning. His strings are the Dominant Pro type by Thomastik Infeld (who have "generously supported" the violinist), but on Auner’s personal website, we read (here) that he used "besonderen Barock-Saiten" developed by that company. (On the company’s website, neither I nor a professional violinist-colleague of mine found any mentioning of such special strings.) The explanation for the non-period tuning and bow is limited to claiming that the project’s concepts “need not be restricted to specialists on period instruments”. While I certainly see value in attempting to reach out with the affect theory to violinists who play in otherwise non-HIP ways, it would have been impossible for an artistic researcher to leave the consequences unaddressed. In fact, whereas the essay includes the discussion of "interpretive consequences", of translating an understanding "accurately into sound", and criticizes modern performances of lacking an adequate distinction between "light" and "heavy" playing, it is hard not to wonder why no wider framework of HIP and related in-depth concerns have been looked into.
I do have extensive experiences as recording supervisor, and to read
about how
On a harmonic level, the severity of a dissonance (as
well as the length of the tone in question) dictates the performer’s dynamic
approach: the "harsher" the chord and the longer the notes, the more emphatic
or even more aggressive the dynamic needed to evoke the intended affect.
makes me notice even more how sharp and crisp the violin sounds in all
of the sonatas and partitas, and not just when a tritone takes centre stage. It
also leaves the impression that at least some of the types of "pronunciation" have not solely been a matter of playing, but also of capturing the sound in
the studio. But how to appreciate the differences, then?
This is certainly not the first project for which a musician takes into
account the work of a musicologist. To my knowledge, though, it is the first time that
the scholar gets equal representation on the promotional level. Glüxam may have
demanded to visualize her involvement, given the fact that the project was funded (cf. here). Strange, then, that her personal website
has no mentioning of this particular output of the collaboration, other than listing
the monograph and the Wiener Urtext Edition. On the other hand, and thinking
back to what I noticed in a new DGG recording with Zimmerman playing Schubert
(see here), this Bach CD may be yet another way in which a label searches for
new power in attracting the attention of potential buyers.
In any case, this effort may be the first in a new tradition of giving
musicologists more credit for their work, helping them in turn to valorize their efforts in establishing social relevance. It may also point to a possible change
in attitude: in a conversation I had with a music theorist, a decade ago, about
the potential for music theory to develop insights that could be of use to
performers, he argued that scholars should be left to decide for themselves
what they wanted to research. Of course, with my nose deep into matters of
artistic research, my most pressing feeling is that of looking forward to this
project, itself, being investigated from an artistic research perspective. We could
then learn more about what things are like when the master is doing the playing.
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