notes

A note (Latin nota) is a written mark used to represent a sound, letter, word, or action.  It is also the sign that something has been noticed, marked, indicated, noted (Latin notāre).  The score from which I play is a palimpsest of notations, layer upon layer of notes, in ink, pencil, memory, and imagination.  There are the musical notes Bach must have written, nigh perfectly transcribed by his wife Anna Magdalena Bach and by Johann Peter Kellner in the two most authoritative manuscripts of the four that editors collate to arrive at a text of the suites.  (They also use a fifth, an arrangement of the fifth suite for the lute in Bach’s own hand.)  There is the less consistently recorded order of notation in those manuscripts that may tell us what articulation Bach expected, though we can argue about how constraining he would in any case have expected his slurs and staccato marks to be.  There are the ornaments:  signs in shorthand which the player expands into a trill, turn, or shake.  In some of his other compositions Bach gives us more of these than we have here, so there is again a possible gap between what we find on paper and what we may imagine were his expectations.  All these manuscript notes authorise even as they are replaced by the printed notes of the edition – in my case the superb Peters viola transcription of Simon Rowland-Jones.  And there they are inevitably joined by editorial notes:  the suggested trills in square brackets, the slurs added for consistency’s sake with lines through them so we know they are not original, the hypothetical arpeggiation of the bare five chords at the end of the prelude to the second suite.

Still, fewer notes than in the Watson Forbes transcription from which I first learned this music, with its suggested tempo markings and dynamics and its fingerings (the one, and crucial, editorial intervention that Forbes does not think to mention in his preface).  Many of us may still be haunted by those notes, which lead the player to a performance very much of the early 1950s, when Forbes published his version – keeping string crossings and open strings to a minimum, so the sound can be smooth and intense.  My copy includes the pencil annotations of many younger versions of me (starting at age 11 or so) and those of my teachers, first Douglas Reid and then Eta Cohen:  fingerings, bowings, dynamics, passages to push the tempo on and moments to hold it back, and more general technical instructions (from Eta especially) – ‘Finger action at heel’; ‘Steady practice’.  It has been a relief to put this copy away and work from a clean copy of Rowland-Jones’s edition.

The wonderful 2012 film ‘A Late Quartet’ depicts a string quartet trapped by the roles their music has cast them in – the first violin, primus inter pares, the cello who is the base on which the whole is built, the very dependent second violin and viola, married and squabbling.  They play from parts in which every nuance of interpretation has been fixed in the detailed pencil annotations they have established over the years, restricting their movements like arthritic callus.  And they wonder whether they dare play without the notes.  Playing from memory is a strange thing, and one I have become worse at over the years with the day job making its own demands on my brain function.  You remember the sound of the notes, but that is not enough.  You have a spatial sense of the piece, which for some of us may coincide more or less with a mental picture of the pages of music.  Most of all, you have muscle memory – your fingers know where they are going before your mind can think it, much less send an instruction.  These different kinds of memory are less free than you might think from the film.  Muscle memory requires that one establish a fingering for the music and stick to it rigidly.

How many notes to add to the notes in my still clean Rowland-Jones edition, then?  Should I work out all the fingerings and bowings and ornaments and dynamics, or should I leave as much as possible to chance, or rather to the inspiration of the moment?  Ornaments should sound, and be, spontaneous, but if one doesn’t at least practice possibilities, one can end up tying the fingers in knots and messing up badly.  My compromise is to work my way towards an outline interpretation, with habitual fingerings and bowings decided (or alternatives clearly enough in mind to offer a safe choice in the moment of performance), with the chiaroscuro of varied articulation, ornamentation, and dynamic in repeated sections thought through (and again, alternatives at least mentally noted), but to write down as little of this as possible.  Because sometimes forgetting is an important creative tool, and this way I am free to do things differently next time.  There are risks to this approach, but I am still finding my way.