If it isn't Baroque...

[kenjari]

I have recently had a growing interest in playing Baroque music on the piano, after resisting doing so for years. See, I studied organ until I graduated from high school. And playing organ involves a steady diet of Bach, with a little Buxtehude or Pachelbel. Not much organ music of note was written from the end of the Baroque period until the end of the 19th century. Despite the resurgence of interest in the instrument at the close of the Romantic period and during the 20th century, the core of the organ repertoire is still largely music written before 1800. Thus, throughout college, I had very little interest in playing Baroque music, having had my fill. I concentrated instead on Romantic music.
But now, more than ten years since I stopped playing organ, I really want to go back to the music of Bach and Scarlatti. So I have. Yesterday I got a volume of Bach's keyboard music and a volume of Scarlatti to supplement the edition of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier that I already own. I sight-read through some of it during practice yesterday and today and I'm finding myself completely enchanted by the elegant counterpoint and insistent momentum of the rhythms. I particularly like the way the Baroque style sounds in the minor keys. And despite the completely tonal, common practice harmonies, Baroque treatment of dissonance can produce some rather pungent and surprising sounds. The figuration and ornamentation also just plain feels good to play in a purely physical way.

Comments

..don't nix it?

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

About the only piano playing I ever did was sight-reading Bach preludes and fugues; I'm a lousy sightreader, but it's very meditative to follow the contrapuntal lines, watch the hands doing their thing, chasing the theme around the keys. I also loved playing the Shostakovich preludes and fugues, for the same reason, for variety. It's wonderful to see the similarities and differences between Shosti's take on the fugue and Bach's-- the medium is formalized enough that even with wild fugual subjects and disobedience to the rules of counterpoint, Shosti's preludes and fugues are recognizably the same sorts of animals as Bach's. And Bach's own creations are surprisingly modern; especially some of the harmonies in the works in minor keys. As you say, nothing unusual, but the resolution of the dissonances can take you in a direction that even a modern listener might not expect. (I have some even older motets by Agricola that also sound weird in the way a dissonance is resolved.) Sometimes I wonder if maybe the classical period wasn't a step *back* from the baroque in some ways...

Something else fun about baroque music is that if you let your head turn off at the piano, you can let baroque-y improvisations slide off your fingers.

But on the just feeling good to play: It reminds me of the people who walk labyrinths-- not mazes, but patterns on the floors of chapels etc-- for meditation and spiritual enlightenment. Following the path that's been laid out with your own feet (or fingers), being mindful of the formality and the antiquity of the thing that is now being articulated into the world, new as long as it is played; each time you walk the piece it's the same, and each time different. Playing Bach brings mindfullness through simplicity and beauty of formal progression.

Er... anyway, I've gone off way too long here. See ya. ;-)

[epilimnion.livejournal.com]

I was listening to some Baroque vocal music in the car with D yesterday, and thinking about how Baroque vocal music is uniquely delicate, often due to the poignancy of the dissonace and balance of expression and restraint. Not sure what I was listening to. I think it was an orotorio, because of the use of the chorus, the fact that it was in Italian, and the lack of virtuosity in the parts. Definitely not opera, but not liturgical either. It's been quite a while since I've heard that kind of thing. I rather liked it.