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.

place

Music is a temporal art, painting a spatial art.  But we imagine music as occupying space – the notes on the page, the span of a piece.  ‘Where shall we go from?’ we ask in rehearsal; not ‘when’.  And our bodies move through space as they play – we place notes, fingers lift and drop, the bow moves up and down and from string to string.  But these are not the only kinds of place or space involved in this music.  As a player, I bring together materials from an improbable range of places.  Ebony, silver, Pau-Brasil, Alpine spruce, horse hair, rosin, maple, mother-of-pearl.  And with this assemblage of matter I throw sound into a space of stone, wood, marble, and glass, high and low notes exploring its contours and corners and bringing back reports to the listening ear.

And this is Bach.  A German writing in the early eighteenth century in the suite form that itself represents a very deliberate bringing together of different points of origin.  For the suite developed as an expression of music’s ability to ignore national borders and linguistic boundaries, in the immediate aftermath of the religious wars that had consumed Europe in the period after the Reformation.  The German allemande; the Franco-Italian courante (coranto); from Spain, the Sarabande (zarabanda); the minuets, bourrées, and gavottes of France; and the British gigue.  And these dances do not only bring with them a national character, but they also come with the baggage of the different places in society where they have lived.  In most cases their story is one of lowly, popular origins and a rise through society to success at court.

We should think more about where this kind of music was performed, and where this particular music might have been performed.  Echoing through it is the shaping hand of closet and chamber, schoolroom and inn, hall and salon, chapel and church.  This music can be intimate or grand, it can stomp and it can skip, it can whisper and it can declaim.  It carries its history, its many times and spaces, a gathering suite or succession of moments and places, through to the particular moment of performance, ‘Now and in England’.

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.

six

Six suites.  Six movements each.  Bach gave these works a higher degree of mathematical order than he did the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, with their varied numbers and kinds of movements.  For the solo cello suites he used the standard baroque dance suite structure – allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, adding between the last two a two-part minuet (suites 1-2), bourrée (suites 3-4), or gavotte (suites 5-6), and prefacing those five dance movements with a freer prelude.  A perfect musical square, then:   six suites of six movements.

For Bach, music is numbers, geometry, mathematical pattern.  This is made explicit when, for example, he composes his set of 24 preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, The well-tempered clavier.  What does this mean for the cello suites?  To start with, it clearly justifies thinking of them as a whole.  It is not that there happen to be six of them.  It is that they are a set – a suite in fact – of suites.  I think that this mathematical symmetry makes the suites not only perfect in themselves but emblematically so – they are a world, a universe, of music and of human emotions; everything is there.  It might also encourage us tentatively to ponder the fundamental analogy on which this maths is based, between the suite and the suite movement.  Is the first suite a prelude to the other suites?  Without taking things too far, the analogy might suggest why the great prelude to the sixth suite is based on the triplet rhythms of the gigue.  Or why, uniquely, the fifth suite has a two-part prelude (prelude and fugue) when the fifth movement of each suite has two parts.

The analogy ought at least to encourage us to think across the suites.  Yes, each suite has its own key, and that unity is crucial to the effect of each movement.  That is why I am playing one suite per week over six weeks (and starting at six each time) – measuring time by the unit of the suite.  But what sort of a musical journey through the suites might a diagonal route offer?  What might we learn about this music as a sum of parts by hearing the prelude from the first suite, followed by the allemande from the second, and so on?

Bach’s play with numbers in the suites suggests a way of playing them and playing with them that I would like one day to try.  It justs needs a die.  Throw it – the number tells you which suite to take your prelude from.  Throw it again – that’s your allemande.  Again – your courante.  And so on.  The die-throwing should probably be the job of the audience, so that they make the suite I have to perform.  This method yields an amazing  46,656 (6⁶) potential suites.  Even if we introduce a condition that one movement must be contributed by each suite, we still have a potential 720 (6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) suites.  Working title:  pick and mix.

open

The opening:  open G string, open D string, a first finger on the A string, then open A string, and so on playing the same notes for that first bar, the G and D strings at no point stopped, at no point stopped from ringing on.  We are simply playing the home triad of G major, and the same chord opens two of the other movements of this suite.  Bach has chosen the key because its first and fifth notes (tonic and dominant as we say) are open strings.  The open string is the purest and most resonant sound the instrument makes.  Touch an open string and it carries on resonating for a long time.  Play a stopped note and the note dies much more quickly.  As far at least as the instrument is concerned.  A resonant acoustic will pick up any note and let it ring.  At its simplest, the performance of these Bach suites is a collaboration between the acoustics of my viola and those of the space in which I am playing, a negotiation between resonance and decay.  What I do is affected by the acoustic.

Bach grounds all but one of the suites on open string keys.  First G major.  Then D Minor, a key which also has open strings as its first and fifth but, as importantly, has its lowest tonic almost at the bottom of the instrument’s range, a tone above the C string.  Then C major, and time for the biggest sound the instrument can make because there is a simple chord using all four strings, the bottom two open, the top two stopped, and the highest note a C.  Then E-flat major, the odd one out:  an open string as the third of the chord, but the chordal possibilities reduced and so a different kind of writing called for.  Then C minor, and an ace up the sleeve, as Bach tunes the top string down to a G, so we have two open string dominants to play with.  And finally D major, but written for an instrument with an extra, fifth string at the top, and so most often played down a fifth, in G.

This emphasis on open string keys, I think, tells us that we need to use open strings as much as possible in performance, and this goes against training, where changes of hand position are used to avoid string crossing.  We get a glimpse of the lack of such changes that Bach expected in the way he writes out the fifth suite.  The notes for the top string, which is tuned down a tone, are simply written up a tone.  It only works if you don’t try to play any of them on the next string down by shifting up a position or two:  he is expecting us to stay in first position, and to use open strings.

David Ledbetter (Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works) has observed that Bach avoids using the open C string for C major in the prelude to the first suite.  When we finally get the C string in bar 21 it’s in an inverted dominant seventh chord of D, a wonderful dissonance.  Let the big C major chord out of the bag before its own suite and it will upset the balance.  In performing this suite I’ll be thinking about open strings, letting them ring out in the resonant acoustic of Christ’s Chapel, but also playing with stopped strings for effect at times.  That may include the very last note of the suite, depending on how I feel in that moment – whether when I get there that last G feels like an ending or an opening.