A Friday with Frescobaldi
The organ at church has been on the fritz off and on for a little while. Perhaps to the titillation of my microtonal oriented colleagues, the digital portion of the organ has been tending to overcorrect town to A432 (thanks to a faulty temperature sensor on a 4’ principal pipe) while the pipes have been hovering around 438 or so, rendering unspeakable beatings and effects that even I find a little hard to stomach when trying to play a hymn for the congregation. The silver lining of consulting the technician about the repair is that I learned of the instrument’s capacity for manual alteration of pitch and temperament. That’s right: while the pipes on the organ can sit at normal concert pitch (or something approximating, depending on the weather), I myself can take matters into my own hands, crank up the digital stops to say, A455, set the temperament to meantone and zone out with some seicento music therapy on a Friday afternoon. Why? Well the sounds of wildly tuned sharps make certain triads feel like expansive spaces of discomfort, longing to be stretched out before falling into a consonant harmony, making good the etymological root of word “cadence” (in Latin, cadere, “to fall). The bumps in pitch make one stop and pause from time to time, as those perpetual endless lines which seem malicious and endless on a piano become naturally disjointed and independent.
The last few weeks I’ve been focused on reviving the Goldbergs on the pedal harp as I’m set to play them for in mid-December in New York and West Palm Beach. It’s an interesting exercise this time around as I’ve not really touched them for two and a half years. They seem to fall off the fingers (the kinetic memory is still there) but naturally I’m wanting different things from them now. Once upon a time, I had liked making them precious and careful, but lately I’ve been into applying Occam’s razor to allow myself to step on the gas and get on with it. It’s perhaps not totally surprising. My activities in hardcore early music (on period instruments, in temperaments, replete with fussy ticks and pauses) have wound down as I’ve focused more intensely on chamber music and new commissions. I’ve also been traveling a lot more to perform and becoming increasingly focused on reliable reproducibility and ironing out inconsistencies. Performing was already tiring, and I was tired of being tired when I played.
Existential corrections are perhaps on the horizon. I’m presently mellowing out (with wine) to 80’s French synthwave, yesterday I had some spicy Machaut bleating through my headphones at the gym. As for this morning, I practiced some Buxtehude continuo on my baroque harp before meeting a presenter about pulling together a program of Bach and Frescobaldi for 2026. The idea was to highlight Bach’s return to the seicento and his longstanding affinity with Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali late in life (if Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach’s testimony about his father’s musical journey is to be believed). The evidence is strong: Frescobadi’s techniques of treating Gregorian chant quotes as foundational micro material for fugues turn up all over Bach’s music; hexachordal fugues recall the extended Fantasias on Frescobaldi; the open score format of the ricercars in The Musical Offering, nod towards the Frescobaldi’s own publication conventions; and even the form of the Clavier Übung III seems to mirror Fiori Musicali, in devising an entire mass (be it Lutheran in this case) for a solo organist to perform in dialogue with sung liturgical music. Arnie Tanimoto and I have our work cut out for us showcasing the connection in a way that’s tangible and audible for the audience.
After the meeting, I was kind of eager to get back into the Frescobaldi and see what was there, but I was also looking for an excuse not to head back to the harp and practice any number of pedal changes and ill-suited fingerings, or generally confront the fact that the modern pedal harp for all its beauty, makes Bach unnecessarily more difficult to play. Counterpoint is especially prone to muddiness, and at times it feels as if there’s scarcely time to focus on the canons, as the bravura movements have to played with the the customary 8 fingers which harpists use (as our pinkies are too short when the hands are set up and pivoted toward the thumb). Indeed, I have memorized the Goldbergs but cannot seem to make it through the final variation, the famed Quodiblet, without consulting a score. The two folk tunes layered on top on one another always feels to dense by that point in the performance, by which point my brain and arms are fried after 30 movements/60-ish minutes of G major (with the occasional foray into the minor).
Today in the organ loft, I would say that I was happy as a clam, except that I was in fact borderline clapping like a seal as I revisited the astonishing material embedded in Fiori Musicali. Whereas the organ was at one point in my life the workhorse and the harp was the therapy instrument, the tables have turned a decade after my decision to divert career paths. The harp is now the tool for practicing, while the organ is for relaxing. I flip to the back of the volume and find the Bergamasca, Frescobaldi’s one of only two pieces that is unattached to the liturgical material that makes up the rest of the volume. It also bears striking resemblance to one of the folk tunes which Bach sets in his Quodiblet in the Goldbergs.
And what’s more, is that motivic material from La Girolmeta (which appears just after the Bergamasca in Fiori Musicali) is used as the secondary melody.
And to boot, they are both in G major (as are most settings of the Bergamasca, such as that of Bach’s teacher Dietrich Buxtehude, who himself composed 32 variations on that very theme).
Apart from being confronted by my procrastination, I’m also confronted by yet one more Easter egg left behind by the great master. For while Clavier-Übung III contains no extra little movements at the end, Bach has seemingly saved them both for one at tale end of the Goldberg Variations – originally published as under the title Clavier Übung IV in 1741 (an apt year for publication one might say, as Bach’s own copy of Fiori Musicali dates from 1714.)
I don’t like being trite, but Bach renders me a sap. Over and over, you can find these wonderful reminders in his music that no journey really ends, but seemingly gets extended in different forms time goes by, with elements of our past gently rearing their head to remind us not only where we’re headed, but where we’ve started.
(But also that I should go practice.)
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What I’m reading:
Napoleon the Great /Andrew Roberts (reading currently)
Bismarck’s War / Rachel Chrastil (just finished – great account of the plights of civilians during a short but intense war.)
Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914-1945 / Victoria Harris (reread prompted by a conversation recently about the sexual practices of SS officers in the 1930s.)
What I’m hearing:
Rosenmüller Sonatas / Musica Fiata
Bella Donna / Ensemble Apotropaïk
Korngold / Das Wunder der Heliane (various)
NTS Guide to 80s French and Belgian Disco Pop
What I’m drinking:
Marcel Deiss / Alsace blanc Complantation / 2022
What I’m cooking:
Onion tart with leeks, capers and anchovy
What I’m ordering:
Pizza from Sotto La Luna