Friday Soirée V: Elizabethan Excitement
Today it was rainy and gray around here and for some reason that's put me in an Elizabethan mood for tonight's program. However, it may not be the weather since I'm frequently in the mood for Elizabethan music: music from around 1600, particularly the English Virginalists, always delights me.
How fortunate we are to have the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, that fabulous compilation of 298 keyboard works by the leading composers of the day. How doubly fortunate we are that the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book has been available for decades in an affordable, two-volume edition published by Dover. (They also seem to be available for free download at IMSLP.) I've owned my own copy for so many years I can't remember when I bought it, but the price printed on the back cover of my Volume 1 is $8.95 rather than the current retail price of $28.95.
William Byrd: "The Bells"
The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is called that because the Viscount Fitzwilliam donated his manuscript copy to Cambridge University in 1816; it subsequently moved to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.
William Byrd (1540–1623) is handsomely represented in the collection with 69 pieces, over 23% of the total. His prominence is not surprising given his importance to music of the time, not to mention his prolific output.
This six-minute piece, "The Bells", is clearly evocative of bells ringing. It is essentially a string of variations over an unchanging ground bass. The two notes heard at the opening repeat several times, then one more note is introduced for a cadence at the end of the phrase, and the whole thing repeats over and over while the variations play out in improvisatory style overhead. The simple repeated motif gives it a hypnotic quality.
This performance is by Maxwell Steer on a harpsichord. I know nothing about Mr. Steer but he does have a website so we can both learn something about him together. However, I found his playing very personable and intimate and entirely suitable for this music.
[YouTube link for those who don't see the embedded player.]
Sagan on Brahe & Kepler
The time period around 1600 was not only exciting for music, but for science as well. Just around the corner (about 1610) was Galileo with his revolutionary observation of Jupiter's moons; Newton would publish his theory of universal gravitation in 1666. The time was pregnant with possibilities.
But before we got there, science was tough slogging. Keep in mind that John Napier didn't publish his book of logarithms until 1614 and geometry was considered advanced mathematics.
Against that mathematically undeveloped time Johannes Kepler managed to come up with his laws of planetary motion, working out that the orbit of Mars — and of all the planets — must be an ellipse, spending some 20 years doing the calculations by hand (without logarithms!) based on the remarkably precise, naked-eye astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe. What a time!
Brahe was a celebrity of his time, famed for his skill at observing and for his silver nose. (Actually, it seems he only wore the silver nose for special occasions, using a tin nose for everyday wear.) A dual figured in his impetuous youth….
Anyway, they did work together for a short while before Brahe's death, which is how Kepler finally got his hands on Brahe's Mars observational data. It's a bit of a story, but if you're interested I can recommend Kitty Ferguson's Tycho & Kepler : The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens (my book note).
Here Carl Sagan talks a bit about the interaction between Brahe and Kepler, and the remarkable moment in time that led Kepler to his laws of planetary motion.
[YouTube link for those who don't see the embedded player.]
William Byrd: The Carman's Whistle
Here is Mr. Byrd again in the piece that may be my favorite of the entire Fitzwilliam collection, "The Carman's Whistle". This is another set of variations, this time it's a tune that is repeated seven times with various decorations that keep the harmonic progression intact until the final variation where Byrd allows some harmonic changes to effect a very grand, rather pompous finale. I love it!
I also am delighted by the jaunty rhythm. The piece is in compound meter (6/8 time), very dance-like, with a syncopation (in effect, one hand plays a half-note/quarter-note figure against a quarter-note/half-note figure in the other hand) that you'll hear at the very beginning and that's maintained throughout, giving the piece it's characteristic lilt.
Again, Mr. Steer is at the harpsichord, but in a different setting this time. I rather like the fact that he makes a mistake in the last variation and just picks himself up and moves on. It makes the whole performance seem very spontaneous to me and I enjoy his vitality. Look at the music cover that hangs over the edge of his music stand and you'll see that he's playing from the Dover edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.
[YouTube link for those who don't see the embedded player.]
If, like me, you can't get enough of this piece, here's another charming performance, this one by Dutch harpsichordist Ernst Stolz. His performance is a little slower, a little more elegant, and somewhat more poignant. Also, it's a good chance to compare different instruments.
Tycho Brahe: The Greatest Naked Eye
Okay, now that the main program is over, let's have something odd and frivolous for dessert. This is an oddly comic seven-minute "modern interpretation" of the life of Tycho Brahe, written by Charles Yi & Christina Ian, with one Jesse Shoem as Tycho. I give them high marks for creative interpretation and paying respect to historical fact, with a good dose of entertaining scienticity.
center>
[YouTube link for those who don't see the embedded player.]
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Sunday, 13 September 2009 at 19.32
Permalink
Interesting how coincidences happen. This afternoon I went to the Victoria Symphony's season-opening concert, mostly to hear Anton Kuerti play the Beethoven third piano concerto. But on my way I walked past Lund's, our high-end auction house, and there, sitting in the window, was a 2-manual harpsichord. Not something you see in the window of an auction house every day. (Indeed, something you should never see in any window, particularly a south-facing window, particularly on a hot, sunny September afternoon.)
Then the first item on the program was a premiere of a work written for the Victoria Symphony by its composer-in-residence, Rodney Sharman. It was called "Byrd's Dances," and was an orchestral transcription, expansion, and distortion (like a Star-Trek "distortion of the space/time continuum") of a Galliard and Pavane from the FitzWilliam Virginals Book.
BTW, I note that the purchase date inscribed on my copy of the Dover edition of the FitzWilliam is 1969, and that the prices are $4.25 for volume 1 and $3.75 for volume 2.