Baroque: Think Bebop

Any musician, not just those with an interest in improvisation, would do well to read Derek Bailey's Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. One of my favorite things about the book is its decoupling of improvisation from genre, which allows Bailey to investigate aspects of improvisation common to several traditions, including Hindustani and Carnatic music, jazz, rock, flamenco, organ, and yes, the Baroque. Another thing that I enjoy is the contrast that Bailey raises between Baroque performers' discussions of performance practice in their own time, and the goals of the modern-day "historically-informed performance" movement. What becomes clear through the comparison is the extent to which improvised Baroque ornamentation was a language unto itself—one of which very few people are native speakers today.

If it's difficult to imagine Baroque music as having a rich improvisational history, observe the number of parallels between it and a more familiar 20th-century genre: bebop. A bebop combo is basically a Baroque continuo group (someone playing melody, someone playing bass lines, someone filling out harmonies on a chording instrument) that uses more complex harmonies and has a drummer; both practices use shorthand notations (chord symbols/figured bass) to suggest a desired harmonic framework; most importantly, perhaps, both practices make use of improvisation within a fairly tightly controlled language and set of expectations. (Wynton Marsalis: “Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study." Or as one of my professors said sarcastically in response to a famous bebop musician's assertion that free jazz was superfluous, because bebop was as free a music as anyone could want: "Get a group to play any jazz standard in the key of B-flat, and when it's your turn to solo, hold a B-natural for as long as you can. Then you'll see how free [insert eye roll] it really is.") And while Baroque and bebop are far from contemporaneous, both of their improvisatory languages are non-native for the vast majority of us—we recognize them when we hear them in the same way most Americans can recognize spoken French or German, but speaking them ourselves is an entirely different matter, one that requires significant devotion and practice.

What follows below is a sort of Dick-and-Jane-esque primer for a language of Baroque free ornamentation, divided into two parts: a toolbox of basic materials, and an ecology that describes the safest ways to use those materials.

A Free Ornamentation Toolbox

1) Agrèments or agrèment-like figurations: trills, mordents, appoggiaturas, and turns, either using symbols or written out explicitly, as well as upper- and lower-neighbor embellishments that don't precisely qualify as one of the types listed above.

2) Passing tones: filling in leaps with scalar figures.

3) Arpeggios: either 3a) articulating individual members of a chord in rhythm, or 3b) stating implied harmonies.

4) Rhythmic modifications (usually dotting): either 4a) expressively double-dotting figures that are already dotted, or 4b) delaying a written pitch so that another ornament can be executed smoothly.

5) Free borrowing of common Bach figurations: anyone who plays Bach over a period of time will notice that he seems to favor some melodic figurations over others. and in cases where scales and arpeggios seem insufficient, employing these figurations might be part of an ornamentation solution.

A Free Ornamentation Ecology

1) Be conscious of space.

My concern over space is twofold. One part refers back to a statement I made in an earlier post: that the number and complexity of ornaments will generally increase as tempi decrease. This is another way of saying that ornaments need to have a space in which to be used—if a passage is already dense, ornaments are probably not needed at all.

The other facet of my concern about space is that it is all too possible, using free ornamentation, to turn any movement of Bach into a moto perpetuo by filling every possible space. Part of what gives character to individual movements of Bach are internal consistencies of rhythmic character, and the articulation of rhythmic characteristics requires both attack and silence. Filling every silence makes rhythmic character impossible.

Perhaps my concern about space can be summed up thusly: don't ornament every single thing.

2) Maintain the prevailing harmony, carefully resolving any dissonances you introduce.

At any given point in Bach's music, there is a harmony that is active, even if it is only implied. Whatever ornamentation you add should work within that harmony. Likewise, passing tones and other non-harmonic notes you add should resolve correctly, i.e., fourths above a root resolve down to thirds or roots, not up to fifths; non-leading-tone sevenths above a root resolve down by step, etc. When Bach creates tonal expectations, they are always resolved, even if they are delayed. Any additional tonal expectations your ornaments create need to be resolved locally. 

3) Maintain the contour and range of the area to be ornamented, as well as the manner of entry and exit from that area.

When adding a specific ornament, you're essentially defining part of the music as an "ornament zone," and the ornament you add should elaborate upon the figuration in the area, not obscure it. If the passage to be ornamented generally descends, your figuration should not generally ascend. If the ornamented area has a range of a third or fourth, your figuration should not span an octave. Likewise, make sure that any ornamentation you add does not disrupt the flow of the music immediately before and after the ornament.

4) Maintain the prevailing rhythmic character.

This ties in with my previous comment about space—just as your ornament should be in concordance with the harmony, contour, range, and voiceleading of the original passage, it should also be in general agreement with its rhythmic character. In particular, try to avoid adding ornaments that use rhythmic values more than twice as small as the smallest prevailing note value, i.e., is the movement is mostly eighth notes, try not ornament with anything smaller than sixteenth notes. (Unmetered realizations of agrèments are an exception to this general guideline.)

Next: Analyzing previous free ornamentation examples in light of these guidelines, as well as discussing some new examples.

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]]>William SallakTue, 21 Jul 2015 19:13:15 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/6/16/guitar-craft-aphorism-du-jour5570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:5580609ee4b0e5fde3f218f5If we can ask our body to do nothing for half an hour,

perhaps we can ask our body to do something for half an hour.

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]]>William SallakMon, 13 Jul 2015 22:09:52 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/6/20/thoughts-on-free-ornamentation-vi-or-actual-free-ornamentation-i5570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:5585ac1ee4b034c0c1d6ca6dLooks like we made it.

Unlike the kinds of ornamentation we've discussed so far, free ornamentation involves elaborations and embellishments that cannot be expressed in shorthand symbols. It has its origins in Italian vocal practice rather than French instrumental practice, and it is mentioned in most standard Western music history curricula in relation to the da capo arias found in Baroque opera. The form of these arias is ABA', where the A and B sections evince contrasting emotions, and the concluding A' section (the da capo!) is a space in which the soloist can freely insert florid runs, arpeggios, and other ornaments to express both the emotional intensity of their character's current state and their own vocal virtuosity. Eventually the ornamentation practice, everyone agreed, got way out of hand, and you can read about reform opera, Christoph Willibald Gluck, etc., to see how that story wrapped up.

It is not a straight path from the da capo aria to the kind of free ornamentation practices found on modern lute recordings (and which I employ at the marimba). There are several important differences:

• While I can't be sure, I'm fairly certain that most modern lutenists and guitarists compose, rather than improvise, the vast majority of their free ornamentation. Because a good portion of my own free ornamentation is deployed to solve musical problems, it also is predetermined.

• Again, while I can't be sure (because I can't read minds), I'm fairly certain that the purpose of modern free ornamentation in Bach can best be described in terms of instrumental idiom and the further elucidation of Bach's ideas as they exist on the page, rather than the glorification of any performer's emotional capacity or technical skill.

While there are significant differences between a da capo aria and a movement from one of the Cello Suites, there is a sort of "da capo principle" that operates in both cases: your audience is going to hear the same stuff twice, and playing the second time through the same as the first time isn't the most reliable way to maintain musical interest. Every effective performance of these pieces takes that into account—most performers of Bach, at the very least, try to play a repeated section with some kind of increased expressiveness or intensity, to make the repeat a somehow heightened version of the initial presentation. That da capo principle extends to ornamentation as well, and a lot of performers, especially lutenists and guitarists, purposefully increase the ornamental complexity of their repeated material as a means of increasing musical interest.

Examples

When I wrote above that I use free ornamentation to "solve musical problems," the beginning of the D minor Corrente came immediately to mind. 

Like the Doubles from the B Minor violin partita or the Presto from the G Minor violin sonata, this is one of those barnburning moto-perpetuo sixteenth-note-fests, with the exception of several points like the downbeat of measure 2, where a chord appears and sustains for a beat—sustains, that is to say, if you're playing a cello. If you're playing the marimba, the chord as written has the effect of jamming on the music's brakes, and even at a fast tempo, I didn't like the hole that the chord created in the musical texture. A lot of performers (both cellists and lutenists) ornament this spot in conventional ways: an appoggiatura D before the C-sharp, trilling the C-sharp, etc., and while there's nothing wrong with any of those options, my favored solution is this:

It's based on what Nigel North plays the second time through the passage, and it points up a lot of the characteristics of good "problem-solving" free embellishments: it reinforces the prevailing harmony and rhythm; it stays within the compass of the written material; it contains smooth melodic transitions into and out of the embellishment. (It also doesn't hurt that parts of the embellishment can be derived from conventional ornamental practice—that first G in measure 2 is essentially a written-out appoggiatura.) In cases like this, the embellishment should appear to be something that a contemporary of Bach's could plausibly have written.

While it's based on Nigel North's performance, it is important to point out that it is not what Mr. North played. Mr. North's figure is also in sixteenth notes and contains the appoggiatura-ish G on the downbeat, but it arpeggiates down the dominant chord to A (G-A-E-C#-A) rather than use the passing-tone D to maintain the original compass. I found that refraining from going below the C# maintained the satisfying descending-bass-line feeling of the first four-measure phrase. (We will, however, soon be discussing cases in which I do lift verbatim from Mr. North and others, with attribution.)

I've found engraving programs to be very helpful in generating and comparing different free-ornamentation options for a passage: if you copy a passage and paste it onto multiple ossia staves, you can tinker with each one independently with minimal effort and maximum flexibility.  Below, I've inserted some ideas for freely ornamenting part of the Allemande from BWV 1010. The amount of elaboration increases as you read downwards—start with ideas based on simple agrèments and expand from there. The eight ideas here are only the beginning.

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]]>William SallakThu, 09 Jul 2015 15:47:06 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/7/9/proposed-addition-to-the-lexicon5570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:559e9632e4b0863e47a07af3feng-shoehorn (v., portmanteau of feng shui and shoehorn): the process that takes place in nearly every musical theatre pit during tech week, when the musicians of the orchestra find incrementally more satisfying arrangements of their equipment in a very limited space, approaching (yet never quite reaching) some kind of socio-spatial perfection.

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]]>William SallakMon, 06 Jul 2015 15:53:00 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/6/18/thoughts-on-free-ornamentation-v-15570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:5583751ee4b0527968925901Greetings—the last three posts on this topic have given a pretty thorough exposition on the many ways in which one can think about trills, by far the most common ornament in the cello suites. This post will discuss a few of the other agrèments that you may encounter in the suites. (An agrèment, you will recall, is any one of a number of French ornaments that are expressed in shorthand symbols within a piece of music.)

Mordents

Trills are rapid alternations between a written note and its upper neighbor. Mordents are similar; they are rapid alternations between a written note and its lower neighbor. The mordent is usually denoted by a short zig-zag, as above.

(Aside: If you've been following along closely, yes, you might be asking why this notation doesn't coincide with Bach's own ornament chart from the Klavierbüchlein, to which I've referred in previous posts. The main reason for this is that most editions of the cello suites use the "tr" abbreviation for the trill, rather than dealing with the vertical strikethrough notation that indicates an ornament's inversion. Since it is so pervasive in this context, it makes no sense to abandon it. Again, notational conventions about these things aren't terribly consistent; what is important is the consistent use of these symbols and concepts within your local body of work, rather than trying to check them against a [nonexistent] global standard. In other words, this is theory, but this is not theory class—use a system that works for you.)

The execution of mordents does differ slightly from that of trills: 1) mordents usually have fewer alternations than trills (often only a single one), and 2) mordents start on the written pitch. Like trills, however, mordents can be supported or plain, and metered or unmetered. Examples for discussion:

BWV 1011 is easily the Frenchest of the six suites—its Courante is a true French Courante (not a Corrente), its Gigue is a true French Gigue (not a Giga), and its prelude is a French overture (an adagio with lots of dotted rhythms, followed by a faster, more imitative, more rhythmic section, sometimes alternating back and forth between the two types more than once [though not in this case]). It also exists in a version for lute that Bach made himself (BWV 995), and most recordings of BWV 995 include a number of French ornaments added at the performer's discretion. Göran Söllscher doesn't add many ornaments when he plays the above passage, but he does add a mordent (with one alternation) on beat 3 of measure 3. (He also does something on the downbeat of measure 3 that we'll get to in a minute.)

In contrast, Paul Galbraith uses ornaments in more places that Söllscher, and both of the mordents he adds to the passage contain more alternations and a significant amount of support. Galbraith also plays the passage at a slower tempo, and that tempo choice affects his ornamentation decisions. Stated as a principle: ornaments exist in part to help fill space, so their number and complexity will decrease as tempi increase. 

One last thing about mordents (that also applies to trills): occasionally, the unwritten neighbor pitch may require a chromatic inflection, especially in minor keys. In these cases, the accidental to be applied to the neighbor pitch is written above the ornament. Technically, a mordent written above beat 3 of measure 3 in the above example should have a natural sign above it, indicating alternations with B-natural, not B-flat (because this is Bach, not Ockeghem). In the 18th century, this would likely not have needed to be spelled out, but for the purposes of clarity in our time, it can't hurt to add the accidental in cases like this..

Appoggiaturas

Appoggiaturas allow for the addition of single notes with specific rhythmic values to a passage. Appoggiaturas look like grace notes, so percussionists might at first be tempted to play them like flams; this is decidedly not the case. Instead, the small note is played where the main note would otherwise be, and the appoggiatura's value is then subtracted from the main note. Here's an example from BWV 1007 (this is one of the few places on the suites where source manuscripts contain appoggiaturas):

In this passage, because the appoggiaturas are written as sixteenth notes, they take half of the main eighth-note's value for themselves, so to speak.

One of the most common ways to use appoggiaturas is to create suspensions and retardations. (I guess, technically speaking, they're not true suspensions or retardations because the appoggiatura is rearticulated, but that's a minor point.) This is what Göran Söllscher is doing on the downbeat of measure 3 in the first video: placing an eighth-note appoggiatura D-natural in front of the half-note E-flat. The resulting dissonance and its subsequent resolution help create interest in a place that might otherwise be too plain. On paper, the passage would look like this:

(Aside: again, if you've been following this series closely, you might be scratching your head a bit—during the discussion of starting notes for trills, weren't we trying to avoid consecutive repeated pitches? And now one of the most common uses of appoggiaturas creates consecutive repeated pitches? You are correct—this is a point at which ornamentation principles begin to conflict with each other [avoid repeated pitches!/insert repeated pitches!] and where subjectivity becomes increasingly important. Better yet, think of it not as contradiction, but as the articulation of a range of options in an ever-more-personal practice.)

Another common use for appoggiaturas is to have them replace trills in very tight spaces where even one alternation might not be effective. Any trill over an eighth or sixteenth note might be a good candidate for an upper-neighbor appoggiatura instead—it's worth a try, and your ears will tell you pretty quickly if it's not a good idea. (But it might create a repeated pitch! Yes, it might, and it might sound good, and it might not.)

Next up: Some Free Ornamentation, Finally

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]]>William SallakThu, 25 Jun 2015 15:56:44 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/6/17/thoughts-on-free-ornamentation-iv5570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:55822f61e4b016439eea4dfbAs promised, our discussion of ornamentation continues—today's post addresses the metered or unmetered execution of trills. As with the starting-note issue and the concept of support, most of what is presented here will be in the form of guidelines as opposed to hard-and-fast rules.

(Aside: I'm beginning to re-consider the title of this series of posts, if only because we haven't broached the topic of free ornamentation yet. We're still talking about trills, and only after finishing trills [and introducing mordents, appoggiaturas, etc.] will we begin discussing free ornamentation per se. Regardless of what the posts are titled, though, I hope this is a valuable discussion.)

The best advice I can give about whether to rhythmicize ornaments comes from my own experience: the extent to which I give ornamental notes specific rhythmic values increases as the tempo of the music increases and/or as the rhythmic value of the trilled note decreases. Over time, this has made the most practical sense—if I have to fit an ornament into a small amount of time (either because the tempo is fast or the trilled note is short), I want to be more certain about exactly where I'm placing each of the alternations as well as the termination. The long trilled B-flat at the end of the A section of the Sarabande in BWV 1010 is very leisurely and can accept a lot of variation in alternation speed and density...

...whereas some other passages leave no time for lollygagging, such as this trill from the Corrente in BWV 1007.

In cases like this, it can even be helpful not to think of it as a trill at all; I think of this (and play it) as a C#-D-C# sixteenth-note triplet, accenting the first C# slightly. (The main-note start is for what I hope by now are obvious reasons.) This same concept can be applied to the amount of support a trill receives as well as the exact number of alternations the trill contains—the less time you have, the more precision is required.

There is one fairly strict rule that's worth introducing at this point: when a dotted note is trilled, place the termination on the dot. This largely has to do with maintaining rhythmic clarity throughout an ornamented passage; ending the trill on the dot rather than continuing the alternations right up to the next printed pitch will help clarify the overall rhythm of the passage for listeners. Examples:

Before wrapping up, I'd like to emphasize that the ideas discussed here are only one way to think about ornaments and rhythm; some performers give rhythmic values to ornamental notes even at tempos where they could play more freely. The best examples of this kind of playing I've heard are guitarist Paul Galbraith's recordings; here's his recording of the Adagio from BWV 1003 (the A Minor Violin Sonata), with nearly every note right on the rhythmic grid. The fact the Galbraith does this while maintaining a sense of breath and expression is really inspiring to me—his rhythmic integrity gives the music a sense of pace and inevitability without being dry in the slightest. Amazing.

Next up: Mordents and Appoggiaturas 

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]]>William SallakTue, 23 Jun 2015 15:51:36 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/6/16/thoughts-on-free-ornamentation-iii5570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:558095c5e4b075255e38a145In addition to the starting-note question, there are a couple other characteristics of trills that are worth addressing. In this post, we will discuss...

Support

A supported trill is one in which the first note is held slightly, in an expressive fashion. (You can also think of a supported trill as one in which the second note is delayed.) Most of the trills you'll play will have some support; how much support will depend largely on taste and context. Here's a video Hilary Hahn playing Mozart K. 216; note the supported appoggiatura trill at the end of her first movement cadenza, right at 10:09.

Because the marimba doesn't sustain, there's a practical limit to how much one can support a trill; if the first note decays completely, it will sound like a separate entity, and that's not so good. That being said, again, some support for most of your trills is in order.

There are circumstances, though, where an unsupported or plain trill will work much better—namely, instances in which the note marked with the trill is part of a larger ornamental figure. For me, this was one of the biggest conceptual takeaways from reading Jerome Carrington's book—that the notes in the immediate vicinity of a notated trill can influence how you think of that trill.

Here's the ornament table from the last post:

And here's an passage from the C minor Allemande:

So far, we've talked about how this example would be best played as an appoggiatura trill (to avoid the immediate repetition of the A-flat). Carrington's point is this: if you consider the two previous notes as part of the ornament (and they're quick, so they're going to kind of smoosh together with the trill), then this is really a doppelt-cadence (#5 in the table) whose first two notes are written out. (What the chart calls a doppelt-cadence, Carrington refers to as a Triller von unten, or "trill from under." Neither the naming conventions nor the notation of ornaments tend toward consistency. )

If that's the case (and I think it's a strong argument), then any support you give to the notated trill would actually be a pause in the middle of the whole ornament. There will be metric stress on the first note of the trill, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to highlight that moment further by supporting the notated trill. This is probably best played as a plain appoggiatura trill (PAT).

Here are some other examples of trills-inside-ornaments from the Suites:

If you consider the four notes immediately preceding the written trill, this is actually a trill starting with a turn, or #6 from the chart. (While these compound ornaments constructed from notated trills with written-out prefixes occur throughout the suites, they are especially plentiful in BWV 1011.) The trill should be a PAT.

The Allemande from BWV 1012 is an example of a movement in which Bach wrote out the free ornamentation he desired, rather than allowing performers to improvise it. (He also does this in the first movements of the Violin Sonatas BWV 1001 and 1003 and the second movement of the Italian Concerto BWV 971, among others.) In movements like this, one could consider any short mid-phrase trill as being inside a larger ornamental figure, but this stands out as another instance of a distinct, codified ornament: the Italian double trill, which is a trill preceded by not one but two lower-neighbor alternations that are usually explicitly written out. (While the Italian double trill isn't listed on Bach's ornamentation chart from the Klavierbüchlein, it is discussed in Tartini's roughly-contemporaneous treatise on ornamentation.) This trill should be a PAT.

The Prelude from BWV 1010 is really all about the juxtaposition of two kinds of music: 1) motoric arpeggios in eighth notes, and 2) florid (often chromatic) sixteenth-note-based running material. The trill on the downbeat of m. 90 comes in the middle of the final instance of the second type of music—it's practically a small cadenza. (Is cadenzetta a real word? If not, it should be.) You can experiment with varying amounts of support here, but I would argue again using too much—there's nothing so special about the downbeat of m. 90 that it should detract from the totality of three-measure run and final chord.** Your best bet is either playing it completely plain, or with a small amount of support.

There are now four kinds of trills in play: supported appoggiatura (SAT), plain appoggiatura (PAT), supported main-note (SMT), and plain main-note (PMT). Next time, we'll discuss metrical and rhythmic considerations for playing trills.

** I can't help but wonder if there isn't a more global lesson about effective expression embedded in this discussion. Within the scope of a piece, expressiveness is not strictly cumulative: playing the most expressive rendition of measure 1, followed by the most expressive rendition of measure 2, etc., usually won't lead you to the most expressive rendition of a work. There are, as economists say, diminishing marginal returns on your attempts to evoke emotional reactions from an audience, and just as accents become more audible when non-accented notes are played more quietly, the moments of greatest expression become much more effective when they appear in a general context that provides a baseline affect against which they appear in relief. (Or, as I said to someone in a lesson once, "You don't get to make your audience cry at some point in every line.")

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]]>William SallakMon, 22 Jun 2015 16:09:11 +0000http://www.billsallak.com/blog/2015/6/19/premiering-a-piece-at-pasic5570ee0be4b09b26d67fcf1f:5573630ee4b0620d1b39bc29:5584d470e4b025cf78378ba3Just a quick announcement: I'm thrilled to be giving the world premiere performance of Stuart Saunders Smith's The Such Falling Voice with Percussion at PASIC Focus Day this year! Stuart's music is always rich and thought-provoking, and this piece is no exception. I hope to see you there!