London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: May 2017

On the road again

Well, anything but literally really.

Firstly because you can’t reach an island by road. There are ferries to the Channel Islands, but they take quite a while and leave from south coast ports that aren’t that easy to reach from London by public transport. So from the start it was always going to be flying to Guernsey to play, and in practice that means from Gatwick with Aurigny.

So far, so much the orchestra fixer had anticipated. However, my survival / paranoia brain kicked in at this point. I contacted Aurigny to make sure I could take my violin with me in the cabin. (For the uninitiated, even much more robust and slacker-strung instruments such as electric guitars stand a fair chance of not surviving a flight in an unpressurised, unheated aeroplane hold. I’ve seen more photos than I can remember of snapped necks, usually when someone is getting up a petition against an airline who refuse to admit responsibility.) Their response: if it’s bigger than regulation hand luggage size, you’ll either have to put it in the hold or buy a seat for it. The largest dimension of the hand luggage constraints is 48cm, and a short session revealed the violin by itself is around 60cm long; since the case has to accommodate the bow, which is rather longer, the whole thing is more like 85cm. Wanting to be very sure of not being denied my flight, and not showing up to work without a working instrument (regardless of questions of insurance, difficulty of replacement and personal attachment to the particular instrument), I gritted my teeth and paid up for the second seat. Credit to the Guernsey Choral and Orchestral Society for paying for that as part of ‘reasonable travel expenses’.

However, I was to discover that this was really rather unnecessary. Someone (I never found out anything else about her because she didn’t turn out to be playing in the same concert!) was carrying a violin as hand luggage on my flight out. A bassoonist who was also a hired hand was on the same flight home, and her bassoon case (pretty similar size to my fiddle; certainly over 48cm) went in the overhead lockers with no questions asked. One of my immediate neighbours in the first violins makes the trip on a fairly regular basis and said she has never had trouble taking her instrument as hand luggage on those flights. So this reveals one characteristic of the successful gigging musician I hadn’t thought about too much before this job other than in a purely musical context: brazen self-confidence. If I work in the Channel Islands again, I will certainly just show up with the instrument case and face it out, thereby either saving myself some money or being less of a pain to my clients.

Another quality I wonder about is whether this is essentially a young person’s game. The final rehearsal (only one for the hired hands) was Friday night for a Saturday concert; together with small airport flight schedules, this meant two nights on the island for the hired extras, which the organisers sensibly dealt with by putting us up with volunteers from the choir and orchestra membership rather than shelling out for B&Bs. Massive gratitude to my hosts Caroline and David here, with whom I had a great time and who did a fairly comprehensive job of spoiling me rotten; but whether it’s just coincidence of ages (we were twice asked if they were my parents, and the numbers would be about right despite how embarrassing that question was!), I couldn’t help feeling that this felt like the sort of thing you do when you’re young and relatively footloose, even if I’m 30. Do people still get put up by volunteers in order to work when they’re in their 40s and 50s? Maybe this is just one of those things that is shifting, like how my generation are (fairly) calmly renting and sharing flats after a decade of full-time employment.

Just one essentially musical reflection makes its way into this post. I mentioned above that the rehearsal (definite article from my point of view) was the night before; unusually, since most jobs of this sort that I do (or, put it another way, most of my orchestral playing) have an afternoon rehearsal with not much more break than is needed to eat and change before an evening concert. Of course, this means just one set of travel expenses and just one day blocked out; there’s even the possibility of another job on the previous night. But it does severely restrict options for practising, if the parts aren’t available online (probably because they aren’t out of copyright) or you aren’t sure which one you’re playing. Both applied to The Wasps in this instance, and I had some trouble sightreading it due to ottava notation (see rant in yesterday’s post), besides it having a reputation as a moderately tricky piece in general; but the day’s gap meant I could do an hour’s practice on it the following morning and be really quite happy with how much of it I got right in the concert. I’ve been known to fit in half an hour’s note-bashing in a Saturday teatime rehearsal-concert break, but it’s a slightly desperate game and depends how long it takes me to find and eat some dinner (diabetic priorities: food even before music). Just possibly, the tide may be turning against the sightread-and-go afternoon plus evening model, or it may be fluke of what’s in my diary at present: the concert with La Folie a couple of weeks back had morning as well as afternoon rehearsals on the day (and I imagine the repeat appearance with them, booked for 8 July, will do the same), and I have a choral-orchestral job booked for next month which involves an extra rehearsal two weeks in advance besides the afternoon rehearsal on the day. Adding an extra date definitely puts the cost of hiring musicians up, but there must be repertoire and even slightly more picky performers and audiences for whom the improvement in standard of allowing for some serious personal practice time on technical tight corners makes a perceptible improvement; one rehearsal and no practice time is definitely austerity preparation for serious repertoire, even if that does correspond to the budgets available to most hirers.

Finally, I was surprised on many counts by being asked (before we played at that) to stand and be acknowledged as a guest player (polite term for hired bumper!). Firstly because it’s never happened before and I don’t expect to get used to it; while the other players are usually touchingly grateful even for having their string section stiffened, if they are short enough to bother hiring in extras, let alone for having missing wind and percussion lines finally covered, it’s rare to assume the audience will really be interested who is a permanent member and who a paid helper so long as the combined result is up to scratch. And after all, I was getting paid quite well to be there doing what I was doing! Secondly, though, because the programme required essentially a small Romantic symphony orchestra: harp, two or three percussionists, four horns, double woodwind, and so on. And out of those forces, with only an island of population about 63,000 to draw on (and the university students away, and everyone in the last 3 years of school in the middle of exam season), they had only had to hire in two violinists and a bassoonist (as I was very aware – not much safety in numbers in standing for applause there! And when do we get to sit down again? … ). They are clearly a musical bunch on Guernsey! – and their local society clearly is able to attract and retain players, which does not go without saying.

Back at going on the road though … not many bands really do this in the sense of piling into a van and doing gigs in rapid succession as an actual tour, these days. If you’re below the level of playing the O2 Academy circuit, then you probably can’t make any money on it (I know a punk band who could all fit in one big estate car, lived like students, but still went collectively something like £5000 into the red when they toured in the UK last summer. Admittedly they may have spent a lot of that on drugs and booze). But without the van or the continuity, the never-ending UK tours of my two home bands finally get going again this weekend, after a couple of months off (for me – Kindred Spirit played two weekends ago, but I was already booked for Elijah in Lincolnshire by the time the call came through). Kindred Spirit get in first, doing a full-length performance with local support at the Belmont Conservative Club on Saturday (27th). I’m assured you don’t have to pledge allegiance to strong and stable government to get in and door charges will not fund the campaign bus. Then on Sunday (but it’s a bank holiday weekend! You can stay up late and sleep in on Monday!) The Filthy Spectacula emerge from hibernation to play as part of Crewe Steampunk Convivial, sharing the stage with a positive royal selection of steampunk acts: Professor Elemental, Victor and the Bully (fresh from American success at the Steampunk World’s Fair) and the Wattingers (who I certainly thoroughly enjoyed at Steaminster last year). Tickets available here. It’ll be good to get back to the band gigs, much fun as the recent run of classical performances has been, and to play some material I haven’t learned in the preceding few days specifically for that event! See you there!

Both old and new

There is a fair amount I could, and probably will, write about the logistical side of Saturday’s concert on Guernsey. However, given several people (including me … ) found my post on the conducting masterclass a couple of weeks back rather too long, I will split that part of what could otherwise become another long write from my reflections on the repertoire. And so first the music.

This was a concert by that relatively unusual beast, a choral and orchestral society. As such, both singers and players are members and both halves have reasonably equal status. It made sense, then, firstly that all the choral music in the programme would have orchestral accompaniment, and secondly that (given the choir gets most of the limelight in most choral-orchestral works) there would be a spot in the concert for the orchestra to come downstage (and to reduce the demand on the choir’s voices).

This was Vaughan Williams’s overture The Wasps. The piece is quite well known and I don’t intend a detailed description here. It has some very programme music wasp buzzing and some folky-sounding but actually I believe original melodies, roughly one faster and one slower, handled as themes for development.

My response to the piece as a player, though, is mainly to do with the part I was playing and editorial practices in the classical music industry. Relatively unusually for my orchestral work recently, I had been hired to play violin 1. In Vaughan Williams’ orchestration as in a great deal of other music written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the 1st violin part is regularly asked to ascend to very high pitches, not just for the occasional special effect but also doubling melodies an octave above the 2nd violins (a device that became a cliché of orchestration of the period). In much music typeset at that same time, the high notes are indicated, not with bundles of ledger lines, but by writing them an octave lower than wanted and marking ‘8va’.

Now there’s nothing musically wrong with that – indeed as a composer’s or arranger’s shorthand it makes evident sense. But I find that octave transposition is not a very intuitive unit on the violin – it doesn’t correspond to a string tuning gap, there’s no way of achieving it directly unlike on a piano or in the lower registers of the flute. And so I find sight-reading ottava notation passages significantly more difficult than reading the same melodies would be if written out at pitch, despite the eye-blurring effect of all those lines.

Which brings me to two reflections. Firstly, of course, a great deal of orchestral music is played off of old copies, because sets are expensive and (sensibly enough) a system of generally hiring, not buying, them for one-off performances (the lifeblood of orchestral music) prolongs their lifespan. Secondly, however, it is amazing to what degree editorial intervention in classical music is restrained, even when the actual notes sounded are not being changed. So later printings or even editions of The Wasps are likely to retain the ottava notation because it is somehow interpreted as part of the composer’s intention, even though the difficulties of mechanical typesetting which made it advisable to avoid lots of ledger lines are now done away with for anyone actually setting the type again rather than producing basically a facsimile of the previous version.

The same can be said of brass parts, where editions mostly used by players of modern instruments will nonetheless faithfully reproduce the 18th-century transpositions tailored to crooked horns and trumpets, in which lengths of tube were interchanged to change the keys in which one could play a harmonic series with the mouth alone, before the invention of valved instruments that can play chromatically. Result: players of the modern, valved French horn, which we are taught in school transposes in F, are nonetheless obliged – for ordinary orchestral purposes, particularly Classical symphonies – to learn no less than 8 other sight-transpositions in order to play the parts they are likely to see. Similar problems on a smaller scale plague trumpeters, and occasional other wind players (apparently late-Romantic parts for bass clarinet in A are significantly more common than instruments with that transposition. Given the cost of owning one bass clarinet, it is hardly surprising few players stretch to a second), and yet the initiative on the part of publishers to supply a retransposed part for modern instruments (obviously, with the proviso that period-instrument ensembles will require the original transpositions) is hardly ever taken.

This can even extend to ways of notating parts that are evidently egregious. High cello parts tend to progress from the normal bass clef, through tenor, to treble, depending on just how high the notes are, in order to avoid illegible clusters of ledger lines. Players accordingly learn to read all three clefs. However, not only are composers given to not thinking through when and how often they swap clefs very coherently, sometimes they intervene with strange inventions of their own. Dvorak is notorious for writing stretches of cello parts in treble clef, but an octave higher than they are meant to sound, without any indication of the octave shift – to the predictable panic of cellists sight-reading these, until some kindly and more experienced colleague informs them the notes are an octave lower. This is clearly both unhelpful and ambiguous, running a real risk of producing ‘wrong notes’ in performance – and yet, the fact that these parts remain notorious reveals that publishers fail to take the initiative to print them differently and more clearly.

The remainder of the programme from Saturday illustrates an unusual, even reverse position. Both pieces are well-known, but were being played here in recent rearrangements – an all too rare example of reworked classical music being afforded similar respectability to the original, in a tradition which (at any rate since the dying out of private playing of chamber arrangements of large scale works, which died an understandable death with the arrival of recordings) has sometimes tended to ossify composers’ versions and permit nothing else.

First up was Stainer’s Crucifixion, a sort of parish oratorio (or indeed parish Passion setting – J S Bach for the Victorian church choir) which still receives countless performances by church and chamber choirs in its original form for tenor and bass soloists, SATB choir (the sections occasionally have to divide in two) and organ. As such, a good organist can make as much of the organ part as the available instrument, the inventiveness of the player (stops, reharmonisations of the verses of the hymns which punctuate the piece, etc.) and balance with the choir will permit. Here, the vocal parts had been kept as-is, but the accompaniment expanded by one Barry Rose, apparently a top-level organist as well as an arranger, still including an organ part (but reduced I think), and with material passed out from the original organ to a small orchestra. The effect was certainly to heighten the drama of the more narrative sections (timpani and the slightly disproportionately large ‘heavy brass’ group – two trumpets, trombone and tuba – were used to very good effect for the more crushing moments) and to make more of the melodic content of the instrumental parts, with effective solos for clarinet, flute, oboe and solo violin which may or may not have been entirely drawn from the original material.

I know little of the context of the arrangement, except that it was premiered in 2001 on the centenary of the composer’s death. However, I suspect that the choir available must have been more or less chamber-sized, since the orchestration is kept very small, presumably for reasons of balance: just one each of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn, and no dividing of the string sections (except for the violin solos mentioned above, in distinction to tutti 1st violins). This imposes limitations, particularly the need to employ several wind timbres at once in order to orchestrate a chord. Most of the chordal material was relatively lightly scored, and there were places where the arranger in me itched to have added extra lines that simply could not have been played on an organ or would be unnecessary in the original format. but could have added drama, density and (usually, given the character of the piece and the sort of thing I’m thinking of) darkness. Particularly, Rose followed the original in all but one of the hymns in simply arranging them once, despite the up to 8 verses of text in the libretto! (Several are often cut.) This leaves it, in the original, up to the organist and conductor in collaboration to change stop registration, redistribute the choir (all in unison; all in harmony; selected voices on the tune, at pitch or an octave below) and reharmonise where singing is in unison and the organist is up to it. For an orchestrated concert version, particularly if, as this weekend, the audience are not invited or facilitated to join in with the hymns, having only one arrangement is limiting, even if it poses particularly challenges to write varied and additional instrumental parts around an already harmonised hymn (though, again, the choral arrangements could be ‘fixed’ with unison verses which could be reharmonised). I cannot help but feel that if the Crucifixion retains its popularity and starts to move from the church into the concert hall, a more inventively orchestrated version, for a larger orchestra and with the instrumental parts written more freely of the original, would be a viable and worthwhile project.

Nonetheless, as someone who has sung the original version, it was interesting to see the change in effect of expanding the instrumentation, even without adding much new material, to the impact. And it certainly did belong in its concert situation in a way that the organ version I think would not have done, even if it felt a little like the underdog alongside its programme mates for the evening.

The remaining one of those being Elgar’s Sea Pictures. This is, of course, a solo song cycle in its original form; there is some debate about the processes of its composition, but certainly by the time it was premiered and published, it was for contralto and symphony orchestra. The version we played, arranged by Donald Fraser, has a somewhat convoluted history of its own. He appears to have first created a version for SATB choir (no solo whatsoever) and string orchestra (with in effect a solo string string quartet set against the sections), which was recorded professionally in 2013. This almost completely changes the soundscape of the work, dispensing with winds and a prominent harp part to produce a much more homogeneous timbre (voices and bowed strings only, and those are somewhat similar to each other) with subtler inflections. More recently, he has combined the choral parts more or less as they stood in that version with a return in essence to Elgar’s instrumentation, doubtless tweaked wherever necessary to avoid conflicts with the choral material. We were playing the UK premiere of that version on Saturday (the fact that Guernsey, being a part of the Channel Islands which are a crown dependency, is not technically in the UK can be overlooked for this purpose).

The result could easily be messy, if the integration of the choral parts into orchestral writing they were not originally written for had been done poorly. Equally, given the original scoring, the handling of the choir could easily seem perfunctory, merely adding harmony parts below the tune or passing the original solo part around between voices for variety which the original did not really need (it is quite varied enough!).

In fact, even having at some point played the original (it sounded immediately familiar, but I think I probably played 2nd violin whenever it was I played it), this version seemed durable and effective. Fraser has found lots of space, and lots of ways, to use his choral forces effectively, and has been able to preserve certainly the vast majority of Elgar’s orchestral effects (the note of uncertainty because this is purely subjective and impressionistic; I have not, and have not been able to, study and compare the scores). The result sounds essentially seamless, and Elgarian.

If anything, the objection might be that it is simply difficult. Not particularly on a level of notes, for the players at least. For the singers, the fact that this is all densely accompanied, and derived from music written for a professional soloist not a choral singer, probably does lead to parts which are less than intuitive coming from a background of more conventional choral repertoire. However, the Guernseyan singers did not seem to be having any trouble with pitching. What was commented on as a struggle by some of them (though one dealt with very well) was the ensemble challenges of the piece. Elgar makes full use of the potential of a professional conductor and soloist, and both calls for and implies a generous use of rubato and shifts of tempo without a pause to establish the new one, throughout most of the movements. Usually, this is navigated by conductor and soloist together, with the orchestra following rather as in a concerto of the same era (a discipline which most orchestras are at least used to, and have more attention to spare for since they have no text to read!). In the choral version, there can be no leading of speed from the voice as a great deal is with the solo contralto version; everything has to be set from the conductor, and the number of people to be kept in sync is something like doubled, depending on the size of the choral and string sections. Alan Gough did an excellent job (conducting that both choir and orchestra find easy to follow is a challenge, as conducting only one or other has tended to develop divergently), but he certainly had to put a lot of work into it, and this is a good choral society, certainly better than several I have been in orchestras accompanying. The Elgar-Fraser as we performed it is a very durable work, but one not to be attempted too lightly by all performers!

Come back later in the week (assuming I find time to write) for reflections on getting to and from the island, concert logistics and their implications for musicians’ personalities, and looks forward to a period of both-old-and-new live performances for me coming up.

Squeezing in

It would be conventional, almost instinctive, to say that Saturday’s orchestral job could not have been more different than Friday’s. Actually it could, not least in point of scale.

Granted, we were performing Mendelssohn’s Elijah, one of the ‘warhorses’ (the term of a chorus member speaking to me, not my own!) of the choral society repertoire. It requires organ, Romantic symphony orchestra, a large choir, a female semichorus and five vocal soloists; and it is lengthy. Even with two numbers and part of a third cut, the music alone must have taken up over two hours (plus interval etc. in terms of looking at how long the concert lasted).

However, Mendelssohn’s symphony orchestra is quite restrained, compared to Wagner’s or Mahler’s. And in fact, we weren’t using Mendelssohn’s orchestra. Constraints – which, depending on who you were talking to, might have been financial (the orchestra were all being paid quite ‘properly’ professional fees), spatial (it was certainly very cramped with the choir and orchestra in the crossways of a large church with non-negotiable Victorian pews, leading to some drastic compromises on positioning) or musical (the choir were numerous, at 50 or 60 in my guess, but not a particularly youthful or forceful bunch) – led to the use of a reduced orchestration, the wind parts rearranged to roughly halve the number of players and correspondingly it being possible to balance them with a small body of strings. The most extreme example of this was that there were only two cellos; but there is an aria late on in the work with a (gorgeous) solo cello countermelody, plus a bass-line in the remaining cellos. Or, as on this occasion, the remaining cello.

The result was perhaps to slightly reduce the hammer-blow effect of Mendelssohn’s biggest moments (he definitely aimed for the most fire and brimstone version of an Old Testament miracle-working prophet he could get); less because they were less absolutely loud, more because a smaller group has less dynamic range to play with and so the gap between quietest and loudest is less shockingly huge. But it certainly remains a work to make a powerful first impression – or even, on me, second, since I played it (in the original, and feeling correspondingly more adrift in a sea of musicians with a conductor somewhere on the far horizon) a couple of years back.

It is also an odd composition, something which familiarity of the choral society circuit perhaps blurs. Romantic composers did not generally try their hand at oratorio – most of the similar works in existence are from the late Baroque, Handel in particularly churning out a rapid succession in his London years. Haydn’s Creation, nearly half a century later, is partly a deliberate effort to reinvent the oratorio for the Classical era and partly a backward-looking attempt to ape an older style; and it is more or less the last oratorio to have remained in the repertoire until Elijah. As such, the genre works a little like an unstaged version of Baroque opera, with a fairly dependable alternation of recitative (carrying forward the plot) and aria or soloist group singing (conveying emotional responses to the last section of recitative). Oratorio, perhaps because of its sacred nature (the plots are almost exclusively biblical) possesses rather more in the way of choruses, either part of the dramatic action or reflecting upon it; which are frequently polyphonic, imitative or even fugal, as grand set-piece movements often are in Baroque works of all kinds, and continued to be in church music for rather longer.

And that brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the main odd thing about Elijah. The lyrical content – particularly the arias – is written in Mendelssohn’s early Romantic style, and some of it is gorgeously expressive (though I admit, to my surprise, after playing them on consecutive days, it was Bach’s tunes, not Mendelssohn’s, that stuck in my head. In fairness Bach’s violin parts, even accompanying ones, contain many more melodies than Mendelssohn’s viola parts; such is the nature of their respective compositional approaches). The recitatives perhaps occasionally smack of older styles, but less had changed about the way recitatives were written, except for their accompaniment. In that, Mendelssohn is thoroughly of his time, demanding that the conductor cue the entire string section, and occasionally some winds too or (much more rarely) in their place, in interjecting stabs and sustained chords around the essentially free speech rhythm of the vocal line. This both demands a much greater degree of group concentration (even in Haydn and Mozart, recitatives are accompanied by continuo only, usually making them a three-handed effort between singer, harpsichord or fortepiano player and principal cellist) and makes for very hard work for the strings, who get hardly any time off from playing in the entire piece!

The choruses, however, are decidedly schizophrenic. Rather like post-Baroque composers writing large-scale Mass settings, Mendelssohn feels obliged to at least gesture towards fugue, and often attempt it full-scale. He does so frequently – in almost every big chorus in fact. This constitutes a real departure from his usual compositional environment, and it is very easy to hear and indeed see the shift from one of the inner parts. Compared to the generally monumental and textured approach of most Romantic orchestration, it is a sudden shift of gear, and with the best will in the world I’m still not quite sure he pulls it off. There is usually great energy to the result, as there almost always is to imitative textures, but also a slight sense of obligation and constraint – a sense that, as an alternative and (for his musical culture) so to speak secondary mode of expression, it had not been practised enough to become a means to what it was meant to express, and instead became an end in itself.

Densely polyphonic writing, and fugue in particular, had a peculiar history from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It continued to be de rigueur for larger sacred works (of which almost all leading composers wrote some), and writing fugues for keyboard instrument continued to be a regular part of advanced musical training – Bach being taken as the model for this, and that composer being known for quite some time almost solely as a creator of polyphonic keyboard music (which was more studied than perhaps listened to with enjoyment). It forms part of a toolkit of ‘untimely rhetoric’ (read: old-fashioned musical technique) which critics have identified as characteristic of early Classical ‘severe’ minor-key writing – this essentially a delayed part of the fading away of Baroque compositional approaches then. Thereafter, there is a marked tendency for it to be explored by major composers in isolation over against prevailing taste; Mozart famously employed fugal entries (though they are not thoroughly ‘worked through’) in the last movement of his last symphony, at a point when he was losing popularity and in works whose purpose is disputed; Beethoven ‘discovered’ both Bach and Handel late in his career and concluded his last string quartet, one of a truly enigmatic and difficult set of works, with a monumental fugue which his publisher forced him to replace with a more conventional conclusion.

Mendelssohn himself is involved in the real shift in popular taste here. He came across some of the non-keyboard works and carried out a quite extraordinary championing of them in the concert hall, bringing concerti, orchestral suites and so on back into performance and insisting on their high musical value. This led in turn to wider interest and investigation, and from Mendelssohn’s efforts we can trace, for instance, Brahms’s almost obsessive study of the Bach cantatas, the rediscovery of such lost masterpieces as the solo violin works, and ultimately the composer’s elevated place in the canon.

In order to realise the importance of this, it is necessarily to think back to a much more faddish classical concert world than today’s. Many composers barely kept the concert stage after their own death; indeed, those who lived long and innovated little might well find themselves rejected as dated well within their own lifetimes. Many (though far from all) adherents of a particular style or era tended to despise its predecessors: Hummel, who was taught by Mozart, found his music attacked as pretty (in the worst sense of the word) and insubstantial, partly on the grounds of that same tutelage, despite the high regard he was held in by Beethoven (who represented, in general opinion anyway, the Romantic new broom that had swept away the Classical lack of true feeling). Today’s chronologically cosmopolitan concert hall, let alone record collection, is a relatively recent innovation in aesthetic appreciation.

To proclaim the virtues of century-old music in the mid-nineteenth, then, was a bold step for Mendelssohn, even if some pendulums had swung one way and most of the way back in the meantime. And perhaps it is not surprising that he should try to imitate some aspects of the music he had discovered with wonder, as others were to perhaps more comprehensively integrate elements of it. What is more surprising is maybe not that Mendelssohn trying to do Handel is occasionally clunky, but rather that the result is as successful as it is, even today when more time separates its performers and hearers from its composition than separated Mendelssohn from Handel.

How big is an orchestra?

Some of my jobs involve being part of very large ensembles indeed – such as playing Wagner excerpts with St Giles Orchestra a little over a fortnight ago. Many, of course, are categorised as band, or occasionally chamber group performances (or, very rarely, solo recitals).

On Friday, I travelled down to Chichester to perform with La Folie Baroque Consort. On the all-Bach programme were a trio sonata and a selection of orchestral pieces – an organ fugue transcribed for strings, one of the orchestral suites, and two concerti (one solo, one concerto grosso). The last three are fairly core repertoire, found until relatively recently in symphony orchestra repertoire and still performed by medium-sized chamber orchestras on a regular basis.

All of which I mention because the total number of players involved was seven. And this was not a gimmick, or a product of rearrangements, or a particularly radical decision about number of people per part; simply a consequence of a fairly minimalist approach to music that came into existence before a hard division into chamber and orchestral.

A lot of this is about balance. Big orchestras are partly big because there are lots of wind and percussion parts (almost exclusively played by one player each, though quite possibly orchestrated with lots of doubling); and partly because the string sections have to be that much bigger to provide the sort of balance composers expect (and also because of some peculiarites of psychoacoustics that mean the law of diminishing returns is in evident operation almost from the start of the process of adding extra players to a given part). The Bach pieces we were playing call for various combinations of strings, harpsichord (playing continuo filling in of harmony and texture, or a scored concerto solo part) and in two cases for one flute. So the number of parts never exceeded six, and nothing was loud enough to really require doubling elsewhere to balance – I got it lucky in the sense of being able to double up on two of my parts with another violinist, everyone else being on solo roles throughout. I would not recommend trying to perform with an ensemble of solo strings and tuba, or solo strings and large organ! Even solo strings and grand piano, though quite often written for (in the form of piano trios, quartets, quintets and occasionally larger), is liable to run into problems with today’s concert grand unless the pianist exercises significant restraint.

Descriptions of musical performance in Bach’s time suggest that at least some would have been this small, particularly amateur play-throughs or smaller regional aristocracy establishments, as opposed to the royal or near-royal centres where most composing went on. Of course, orchestra string sections certainly could be larger and there were exceptional instances of huge ensembles being gathered for grand ceremonial occasions; but there is nothing that implausible about Baroque ‘orchestral’ music in soloist performance.

Having established the setup, what was this like to play in? Firstly, of course, it is much quieter than a symphony orchestra (or a rock band) – and that of itself connects with what we know of the aural world of the eighteenth century. Groups were often smaller, instruments quieter, and many of today’s sources of noise absent – no recorded or broadcast music or speech, no amplification (beyond cunningly-designed rooms!), no internal combustion engines or trains or pneumatic drills.

It also ‘concentrates the mind wonderfully’ to be the only one playing your part. All the more so in largely polyphonic music such as this, where being in time with someone else’s entry may mean you are right – or may mean you are wrong because the entries are imitative and should be staggered at half-bar, or one bar, or five-bar, intervals. The solo group, so to speak, in Brandenburg 5 is flute, violin and harpsichord. Not only do they take the entire slow movement to themselves as a trio, but they are also able to dispense with the accompanying three string parts for long sections, either of trio again or in one massive instance a written-out harpsichord cadenza of mind-boggling density. The absence of conductor or section leader adds greatly to the difficulty, and importance, of coming back in again in the right place when the ensemble resumes!

A throwaway description of this music as ‘deceptively complex’ on the day is to the point as well I think – and a small performance, with its vastly greater clarity, sheds light on this. Baroque music is often thought of as ‘easier’ because the instrumental technique required to play the ensemble parts is generally scant (concerti can be an entirely different matter) – violin parts, for instance, can generally be about 85% covered in first position, with no more than third required for the rest. Double stops are almost non-existent. However, the interplay of parts is, as already touched on, complex. And the structure of the music can be very much so; angular melodic leaps are almost elevated to the status of a feature at times, and syncopations which would have sent composers of the following era cross-eyed are commonplace, particularly in slow movements where notes seem to grow tails at will (demisemiquavers? oh yes, lots of those. And semiquavers with ornaments on them, and ties of every length you can name). Almost inevitably, syncopations in one part sit across foursquare rhythms in another to produce rapid suspensions and resolutions, far from the slow and even harmonic progressions of most Classical music.

Given all of that, very small forces make it much easier to hear clearly how this complex music is fitting together, where a large ensemble (or even, in my experience, too many organ stops) can produce a sense of merely overwhelming musical rhetoric, like a page scribbled over with so many lines none is distinct any more. There is a famous comparison of Bach’s last movements to sewing machines, meant to be insulting but perhaps in fact not so, provided one can appreciate the beauty of a very complicated and precise mechanism working correctly. Part of that appreciation is probably to be given a clear sight of the whole thing in distinct, even delicate, lines – is this why many people find small clockwork industrial-revolution-period devices more fascinating than vast temple-sized machinery of the same era?

Of course, whatever is different tends to be refreshing, and it so happens that much of my playing lately has been orchestral, or over a somewhat longer time-period amplified band – so polyphony, low volumes and solo lines are unusual and welcome. If I was a harpsichord specialist, the situation might be entirely different. Nonetheless, for me this made a very welcome change (as well as an unexpected experiment with reproduction Baroque bows, and a chance to try out some reasonably authentic technique), and is something I hope I get the chance to repeat, if not exactly then at least in broad outline. Here’s to a change, since future posts will reveal there isn’t much rest going on at the moment!

In which size may or may not matter

And I may or may not make inconsistent attempts to punningly link disparate observations from a day’s playing back to an eye-catching headline.

On Sunday, I was swelling the ranks of St Giles Orchestra’s violas again – and if anything with rather more need than last time, since we were four in total. That might have balanced about right with the two double basses, but was underpowered to the five cellos let alone the serried ranks of violins I didn’t try to count, and is definitely on the low end for balancing the wind and brass scoring of Bizet (first Carmen suite) and Dvorak (fourth symphony).

The event was not a conventional concert though. It was a conducting masterclass – so primarily a training event for young aspiring conductors. Of course, one can only do a quite limited amount of training conductors without an actual orchestra for them to conduct, and so we were acting as, perhaps, the clay on the wheels of these trainee potters (adjust metaphor to taste). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also had a competitive element, to which I shall return later. I’m unsure that education and competition are as good bedfellows as some contemporary praxis might suggest, particularly (as in this instance) where the participants are at wide-ranging levels of experience and commitment to the craft. An emphasis on a winner in (almost inevitably) terms of level of ability demonstrated draws attention away from progression, perhaps the only metric that could fairly be applied across the board here. Further, if someone has ‘won’, can they therefore stop learning? If someone has ‘lost’, do they see the day as a failure rather than assessing what they learnt and how much better they got? There is incidentally a subtle difference here between assessing for a qualification – which is, at least in principle, an objective, transferable, constant level of skill which can be used to indicate whether one is equipped for such and such an opportunity, essentially – and judging a winner from a field – which indicates the best of those present without any necessary objective benchmark, and so is or should be a much less used indicator of ability thereafter.

In any case. Four teenagers got to use movements of the Carmen suite as test beds for relatively (in at least one instance totally) novice efforts in conducting. Some showed genuine expression; some had at least a very clear and followable beat; one I am sorry to say looked a little like he had changed his mind about wanting to be there, but I’m no mind-reader. The others certainly had intent and progressed markedly in their bare half-hour’s coaching and a performance of their movement at the end of the day. From the orchestra’s point of view, the material provided about the right level of musical challenge to work with these inexperienced conductors – the individual parts are sometimes difficult (solo woodwinds mostly, particularly the oboe – St Giles are very fortunate in their principal oboist, Matthias Winkler) but the ensemble fit has only occasional corners where the performance will really stand or fall on the conductor’s work, though of course good conducting can make it much better.

Particularly in this first half, where more time was spent on coaching and less was needed on running through the movements, I found it fascinating to watch Peter Stark, the ‘master’ of the masterclass if you will, at work as a teacher. (He is also an excellent conductor, but I spend a lot more time with conductors than tutors, particularly of conducting!) Conducting, perhaps like teaching, is a craft and role I am more inclined to avoid than pursue, but for any musician who is going to be conducted on a regular basis it cannot be other than helpful to know more about it. How one goes about teaching is of course widely varying and individual, and depends on the context and the subject matter and so on and so forth. One consequence of this situation was that Stark was simultaneously giving individual pointers to the conductor currently having their half-hour – and also projecting general summaries of this to the rest of the group of eight, who were sat at the back of the stage throughout. It says something for his ability as a teacher that I cannot recall him having to make the same point to two different people.

Teaching an individual, as this mostly is, of course allows a closer engagement with their individual response. One can take hold of the wrist or elbow and guide the shape of a beat; converse directly if briefly; and so on. And of course what one does next is targeted to the weaknesses, and the strengths, of the pupil. But there are some other things that struck me.

One is that above a certain level, the role of physicality seems to be re-accepted into art music training (this does not only apply to the conducting workshop under discussion). Whereas it is almost all about sound, with a perhaps rarefied reverence for the purity of musical art, in a certain middle territory, if one advances to the level perhaps of those who train future or would-be professionals then the embodiedness of musicians comes back into the picture. Of course, conductors do not actually make any noise; while actually conducting, their role is essentially entirely gestural (hands; body language; facial expression; but all gesture) and this leads to a more physical understanding of technique; perhaps. But a conscious division of labour between baton, face and body; instructions on handling tempo by using more or less length of the arm; literally standing with one’s hand outstretched to be struck from underneath in order to make a double point about all beats being ultimately upwards (interesting! ban the word ‘downbeat’ – quite a drastic suggestion for orchestral circles) and about a moment of much greater acceleration at the point of the beat itself – this to me correlates rather closely with my current viola teacher’s insistence that posture and body language are not merely a question of avoiding damping the instrument’s vibrations, or of avoiding later life back trouble, but can actually create the impression of more volume than the instrument will in fact project, and that looking confident and performative will improve the sound beyond what is explicable in simple acoustic terms. (I have had to start wearing shoes I can stand on tiptoe in to my viola lessons, for purposes of fortissimi!)

Returning to chronology. Three university students and one decidedly precocious sixth-former each had a movement to handle of Dvorak’s fourth symphony. Whether the division into two groups was entirely fair to the distribution of conducting abilities I’m not sure – I think it probably was; but certainly this was a massive step-change in demands.

I have never otherwise played or heard in concert any of Dvorak’s symphonies except the last two, the eighth and ninth. He famously disowned the first four, hence why some old copies label the ‘New World’ as his fifth, confusing the issue. However, the earlier symphonies are very rarely performed. Having played the fourth, I perhaps have a glimpse of insight into this. It is not significantly less ambitious than the later symphonies – purely on grounds of length, the first two movements clock in over ten minutes long each (this will indicate the difficulty of coaching conductors having only half an hour to work on each movement!), and the architectural desire of a grand scale, if that phrase makes any sense, is similar. It could be argued that the last two symphonies are slightly more successful – more varied, perhaps, in their final output, where there can be a sense of overkill to some of the fourth. But I would not want to overstate this – few composers have written post-Beethovian, grand-scale symphonies as successful in their goals as this one is in its pursuit of musical expression of Burke’s sublime (a minor key symphony from the mid-nineteenth century is almost always seeking after the terrible, more than the beautiful) as early as opus 13. My suggestion is simply that the earlier Dvorak symphonies are rarely heard because their musical goals are too similar to the later, very slightly more accomplished, ones. The symphonies of Beethoven, to take an obvious contrast, set out to do wildly varying things in widely varying ways; the only ones that are felt to end up overlapping or in competition with each other are numbers 1, 2, 4 and 8,  and even this might be held to be a misprision or oversimplification.

In any case, returning to conducting. This presented much more real musical (and, for most players, playing-of-notes) challenges to both conductors and orchestra than the Bizet. At an obvious level there are tempo changes indicated and implied, pauses to be negotiated, balance of parts to be kept when there is more to it than tune and accompaniment. There is also the question of how to create variety and structure within a movement that may last 11 minutes and have a couple of dozen ff markings; and of creating, where appropriate (arguably for most of the three fast movements), that now rather unfashionable projection and indeed adulation of intense negative emotion that goes with Romantic art.

Much less of the tuition was about straightforward directing technique at this level of course. Ironically one moves largely from how to conjure forth something from players – to the question of what should really be requested, and how one makes aesthetic decisions of that nature.

Minefields abound in discussions in which the terms of reference may include the creative arts, gender, and different kinds of emotion. But at some point I have to bring up, if only in token protest, a significant point about this workshop, which is that the young woman who conducted the first movement of the Dvorak was the only female participant out of eight. Sadly, this is still all too indicative of the situation in conducting, particularly orchestral conducting, in general (I probably play under woman conductors less than one-eighth of the time in fact); something which I have commented and speculated on at length in another post and so will not return to here.

Nonetheless, it cannot but be ground of speculation to wonder what difference it would make if around half of conductors (not necessarily at top-flight professional level either) were women – whether, factoring in cultural gender specifics in the postmodern West, this would lead to a change in the as it were sign language used between conductors and players (the orchestral players are increasingly well gender balanced, with some specific instruments exceptional but not as badly so as rock instrumentalists), or even to some aspects of the music sound. It is all too familiar, perhaps, that in this instance the key piece of feedback from Peter to Gabrielle was to engage more vigorously with the intensity and the negativity of some aspects of the movement – more grit, as it were. And with any sense of the cultural history of post-Enlightenment Europe, one cannot do otherwise and successfully render Dvorak (nor, let me hasten to add, such female composers as Clara Schumann or Amy Beach – the women creators of the time certainly did not allow the men monopoly over the ‘sublime’, whatever some male theorists may have sought to command). However, I would wish to record that, to me, the single most noticeable instance of a change in conducting technique over the day was the extra call to intensity in the performance of this movement compared to the rehearsal – it could certainly have gone further, but the change was striking even having heard it being requested.

One last aspect of this day’s playing has little to do with conducting, though something to do with the moody power demanded of his orchestra by Dvorak, and is responsible for the title (apart from all sorts of dreadful low-Freudian implications about batons and female conductors). I came back from a break towards the end of the day, having left my viola on my chair, to find my section leader holding it up against hers. It took me a moment to realise what she was doing, but it may take a little longer to explain for anyone reading this who is not very familiar with the viola.

The violin and the cello are more or less ideally constructed, in terms of projection, for their pitch and playing with a bow. In other words, I am assured that a bigger-bodied violin, or a cello with a longer scale length, would not actually be heard more clearly. The viola as we normally know it is not constructed in the same ratio to its range; it is essentially undersized. It is possible to create violas in the same proportions, but they are too long to reach the end of the neck with the instrument under the chin, and the notes are too far apart to play with the conventional two semitones to a finger of viola technique. Those who play them (including one player with St Giles, whose extra power was significantly missed on Sunday) hold them upright, on a long cello spike, on top of or between the knees, and use something more like a cello fingering pattern, with many more changes of hand position. The result is certainly louder, but arguably does not sound quite like a viola – the different set of correspondences leading to a normal behaviour that is part of listeners’, and indeed players’ and composers’, expectations (compare the degree to which an electric guitar amp is expected to distort the input signal because ‘that’s what electric guitar sounds like’).

In any case, the conventional viola exists in a land of compromises, in which there is a tacit agreement that a bigger body would be desirable (no sniggering at the back there), but the main constraint is what an individual player can actually comfortably perform on. While there are variations in the ratio of body width to body length, and probably lesser ones in neck length to back length, the standard metric for comparing violas is the back length (excluding neck) in inches, in practice to the nearest half an inch. The standard range appears to 15 to 16.5 (giving a choice of four sizes), though I am sure I have come across as small as 14.5 and as large as 17. (For comparison, the ‘correctly proportioned’ instrument mentioned above has a back length of 20.5″.) Unsurprisingly, there grows up a perception that large violas are straightforwardly more powerful and gritty, and smaller ones both quieter and of a more soft and muted sound. Equally unsurprisingly to anyone who has any experience dealing with stringed instruments, there is in fact a great deal more to it than that and the length principle may be much less important than other factors of construction – there is after all huge variation in the volume and sound of violins, some of which can be changed on the same violin by altering apparent minor factors of setup (I posted about this recently), and all of which take place within instruments that are an almost exactly standard size.

What Judith was doing, then, was using her viola as a measuring-stick to get a sense of the back length of mine; almost certainly, from the way in which she commented on the result, to see if it was on the larger end, having been able to hear me projecting significantly during louder passages. (There were only four violas, remember, so her left ear was probably only four feet from my soundholes, and there were not that many sound sources to disentangle.) For the record, my viola appears on application of a tape measure to have a back length of 16″; so large, but not the top end of the normal range. I would suggest it does punch above its weight for this sort of context – it is probably a ‘better’ instrument than many being played in amateur orchestras, and certainly inclines to the loud and gritty – which is of course not always a good thing; it requires extra work to produce a really effective singing piano on it. However, I would go further and suggest that, again in the context of an amateur orchestra viola section, the extra power that had caught Judith’s ear (herself I am told an ex-pro, by the way) is as much to do with the technique being brought to bear by training at diploma level with a teacher who only recently left a conservatoire Master’s degree programme, as it is to do with the instrument itself. Perhaps, to resume awkward cliché where the title left off, size matters less than what you do with it.

This has become a long and rather dense read on a long and decidedly hard work day – but the day was at least fulfilling and interesting. Expect shorter write-ups of small-forces Bach in Chichester and Mendelssohn oratorio in Lincolnshire this coming weekend, and of choral and orchestral music in the Channel Islands the weekend after (though the travails of organising transport to and from that event might warrant a post to themselves). And keep your eyes peeled to a return to rock band gigging after what feels like a very long pause!