viola

If Goldilocks had played a string instrument, it would have been the viola.  Not too big, not too small, not too high, not too low, but just right.  Middle fiddle it is sometimes called, a nickname that implies that the so-called violin family of instruments is defined by its smallest member.  Which it is not.  Violin means ‘small viola’.  Violoncello means ‘small big viola’ (that is, a small violone, an instrument roughly equivalent to the double bass).  The viola is the paradigm.  The via media and golden mean.  It is just right.

Why do I play the viola?  The question is perhaps – as for many of us – why do I not still play the violin (the instrument on which I started when I was a small boy)?  So why did I play the violin?  Because my older sister Fiona did (and does), and her violin teacher used to give her a sweet at the end of each lesson.  And why did I change to the viola?  Partly because taking the same grade exams two years after my sister had taken them, on the same hand-me-down half-size or three-quarter-size fiddle she had used, and getting a few marks less (because she was, and is, pretty amazing at the violin) was somewhat dispiriting and hardly felt like blazing a trail.  And why did I stick with the viola?  Because I fell in love with the sound, with the range, with being in the middle of things, seeing the music from the inside.

Mozart, who like Bach preferred to play the viola, has a habit of writing pedal notes for the viola in his chamber music.  The melody, bass line, and harmony move as the viola’s note stays the same, sometimes for bars on end – as if Mozart wanted just to enjoy listening to the music in orbit around him, making the viola the still point of the turning world.  The viola is the glue that holds the string sound together in quartet or orchestra; the intermediary between bass line and melody; the harmony; the third dimension.  But these are reasons for a viola player to stay in the middle of the sound and not – as must be the case when we play solo Bach – to be its outer edges too, to be all of the music.

So why play Bach’s cello suites on the viola?  Isn’t this music designed for the cello’s rich low bass register?  Pitch is relative and not absolute.  The viola’s low notes sound low, just as a tenor singing at the bottom of his range sounds low.  When viola or cello soar high, they both sound high.  Because the viola is tuned an octave above the cello, Bach’s music can be played in the same key, the same chords combining open and stopped strings in the same way.  The music works.  And one proof of that is how right it feels to play it, to explore and demonstrate the instrument’s range of sounds, its sonorities, its dark depths and giddy heights, its fast and its slow, its shimmy, sprint, and sidestep, its elegance and its intensity, its gravity and its humour.  For the viola has everything that this music calls for.  It can span, can touch and comprehend the outlines of, what is a complete universe of musical perfection.

steps

Not the least of the advantages of playing these suites on the viola rather than the cello is that one is on one’s feet.  This is dance music, and the instrument is your partner.  Each of the dance movements (not the freer prelude with which each suite begins) adapts the characteristic tempo and rhythms of its dance and a successful performance will capture that dance-like quality.  That said, these are not pure dances.  If you wanted to dance you’d choose some music which posed the accompanying musicians fewer technical difficulties, so that they could keep time strictly, and the dancers' steps would not stumble.  And because Bach has spliced dance motifs with sonata form, these dances are of the wrong proportions for the customary choreography.

So a certain rhythmic regularity pulls against the need to get fingers round chords, to shape phrase with rubato, to say something.  If you compare performances you soon see the difference between those players who want to keep up an even pulse and those who let it go perhaps too willingly.  Enter the metronome.  A useful tool for keeping us steady as we practice, for recording and repeating an appropriate tempo, for showing us when we rush and when we dawdle, for ensuring that subtle deviations from strict tempo are for musical reasons.

The metronome helps you learn a movement by starting slow and gradually notching up the tempo.  And that experience of advancing by slow degrees or little steps is one the Suites represent as a whole.  Each is a gradus ad Parnassum, a step to Parnassus and a step up in difficulty.  No surprise that we treat them as studies and that they are examined in Associated Board grade exams (again, gradus, Latin for ‘step’, ‘pace’, ‘degree’).  The preludes are themselves preparatory exercises, designed to get the fingers moving (that at least is the original nature of the ‘prelude’ or ‘pre-play’), and tending to concentrate on particular aspects of technique.

On many recordings you’ll notice that in simple terms of duration the suites get progressively longer.  This is not a coincidence.  Each suite is more extensive and complex than the last.  The highest notes, too, are found in the sixth suite, as we climb the ladder to its top.  Learning and playing a new suite each week, then, does feel like a well-graduated training regime.  I solve one problem and Bach asks me a new question.  I develop stamina week by week as I try to get in shape to tackle the last two suites.  Small steps.