Text Painting: What Colors to Use?

One of the most popular things to do as a Baroque composer was to use the text of a piece to dictate what happened in the music.  This technique is called text painting, and our October 2nd program has two pieces that feature this technique: Vivaldi's All'ombra di sospetto and Bach's "Ich folge dir gleichfalls".

Vivaldi's cantata is very interesting in that the text painting really helps to understand the text.  The text is talking about the deception of beauty and the simplicity of love.  The first recitative talks about how beauty can be flattering but deceiving at the same time.  In the following aria, the flute plays a melody that has many ornaments (smaller notes in between the longer, more important ones).  In fact, the melody sounds awfully complex at times, and when the soprano joins in, singing in more detail about the flatteries of beauty, she sings some heavily ornamented music.

In the next recitative, the soprano sings about the details of love.  She sings that true love sees dedication, even bloodshed, in order to prevail.  Obviously this section is more impassioned.  Then, as almost a reaction to this, the flute begins with a more upbeat, but simple melody.  There are fewer ornaments in this melody, and the singer continues about how love is more true and simple than beauty.

Text painting is not always about complex ideas such as love and beauty.  Many times, text painting is much more literal, such as what happens in Bach's "Ich folge dir gleichfalls".  In this aria, the flute and soprano are in a constant dialog throughout, and this dialog usually helps bring out the details of Bach's technique.  The main melody, or ritornello, is quite repetitive.  However, this repetition seems to prepare the listener for the text that follows.  The soprano sings something along the lines of, "I will follow you joyfully."  When she starts singing this, the flute follows immediately after.  This goes on for much of the first section of the piece.  As soon as the singer starts to sing, "Do not stop pushing and pulling me," she sings a very long line that has no pauses.  Then, she starts to repeat "do not stop" many times, essentially commanding the flute to continue playing a longer passage.  Some other ideas that come through with this technique are the parts where the soprano sings, "pushing and pulling me."  In these measures, the melody breaks up into smaller bits, slowly climbing up a melodic ladder, as if the singer were pushing through each challenge as a hypothetical other being were pulling her along.

I personally find that Bach's use of this technique were spiritually motivated, especially since some of his other uses of this technique are quite subtle.  The biggest example of this came to me during our dress rehearsal today.  In the St. John Passion, this aria comes right after Peter and another disciple decide to follow Jesus into His passion.  Whenever I read the gospel accounts of this and think about them, I can only imagine that this was a very dark time for everybody, and there was uncertainty with every step.  Bach actually incorporates this uncertainty into the music, which actually has made this particular piece challenging to put together.  The baroque flute is a finicky instrument, to say the least.  Unlike its modern metal descendant, the notes on the baroque flute are all very distinct in sound quality.  G is loud.  F is soft.  B-flat is dull, and A-flat is duller still.  C is uncomfortable, but D is gorgeous.  E-flat goes sharp; the list goes on and on (and I even complain about them during my lessons).  Bach was a smart man, and he used these peculiarities in the composition of this aria.  Something that is so important to Baroque music is the downbeat.  For many pieces, the downbeat is pretty strong in each measure, creating a steady pulse on which people could improvise.  Generally, these downbeats would be on "good" notes for instruments (such as a G or D on a flute).  However, in this aria, the downbeat is played by only one out of four instruments many times.  The flute has to play these downbeats on terrible notes, making them quite weak for a downbeat.  Add on top of that the bass and harpsichord coming in on the second and third beats, and you have a somewhat uncertain sounding rhythm throughout the piece.  I find that this uncertainty was intended to show the uncertainty that Peter and the other disciple felt as they followed Jesus into His passion.

In this video. I am playing through some examples of this text painting with my singer for October 2nd, Laura Councell.  Enjoy the video, and don't forget to come to my recital!

Senza Basso: The Challenge

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.