Let's rewind back to my time as a freshman in music college. I was just getting used to practicing compulsively, just as my high school teacher had taught me, and I was supposed to play everything evenly and easily. I was a bassoonist making his first time through the Milde Scale and Arpeggio Etudes (a standard book of exercises for bassoonists that covers all the difficult things of the instrument). At the same time, since I was at Longy School of Music, and since I'd just started to toot on the recorder and baroque flute, I thought it would be helpful to take some lessons from the baroque flute teacher. So, I decided to take a stab at a new book of music I'd just purchased at a festival the summer before, a collection of fantasias by Georg Phillip Telemann.
Of course, when I saw all the notes, I thought it would be a good time for me to practice the way I'd always known how: slowly, shifting the beat, and making sure everything was even. Then, I went ahead and took the piece to play in a masterclass in front of all of my fellow students, quite confident that I'd covered everything necessary in the music because it was even. After playing through what I thought was a great performance, my teacher told me to look at the music again.
"What is happening in this music?" she asked.
"It's a French Overture." I said proudly, throwing around that advanced vocabulary.
"Yes. So what does the middle section usually have?"
"A fugue."
"Exactly. Why aren't you playing the different voices?"
I looked closely at the notes and noticed that there was a simple melody hidden behind all of those extra notes. You see, a fugue is a type of technique that requires more than one voice to be playing at the same time, and on flute, it's not really possible to do that (unless you want to sing while you play, but that wasn't very common at the time). So, after seeing that Telemann had come up with a way to write more than one voice into a flute piece, I never forgot to consider that with all of the other pieces in the collection. If I had been more aware at the time, I would've realized how important the title of the collection was for the interpretation.
One of the most important aspects of Baroque music, much like music today, is the bass. Not only was it important to have somebody playing the bass, but it was also important to have at least two people covering the bass part: a melody instrument, and a chordal instrument. A melody instrument is one that would play just one line, like the bassoon, viol, or cello. A chordal instrument is one that would supply chords, like a harpsichord, a lute, a harp, or even a guitar. Because of this expectation, one of the biggest lies in Baroque music titles is the "Trio Sonata". There would be two solo voices and one bass voice, but it was always assumed that there would be a melody instrument and a chordal instrument covering that part - therefore, four instruments.
So what? Why is that relevant? Well, let's just say that a piece titled, "Fantasia per il flauto senza basso" [fantasia for the flute without bass], terrifies me at the onset. All of a sudden, I, a flute player, a melody instrumentalist, am in charge of supplying more than a melody. I have to take the role of three people with just one instrument!
In this particular fantasia, I as the flute player have to supply a bass line to my fleeting melody. This happens in two different movements: one is a little more abstract sounding, and the second is a dance, a gigue. Luckily, at my last rehearsal with my bass viol player, Pedro Funes (whom you'll be hearing much more from), I was able to have him help me play the fantasia with a bass. In this video, I have three different play-throughs: one with the bass and soprano parts separated, then one with me playing the actual written music with the help of the bass instrument, and then one with just me, playing the way it's supposed to be played: without bass.
Don't forget, if you're free and in town, you can come hear my recital, Musica Inspirata: A Baroque Flute Recital.
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