Author: cjfreitag

Bach’s Other Chaconne

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Shakespeare’s other Hamlet. Da Vinci’s other Mona Lisa. Reuben’s other sandwich. You’d be shocked to learn of any of these, right? That’s how I felt when I learned that the final movement of Bach’s Partita in D minor was not his only ciaconna. To be sure, the closing movement of the Partita for Violin in D minor, BWV 1004 is the most famous, and the only one to bear “Ciaconna” as a title. But the final movement of Cantata BWV 150, “Nach dir, Herr, verlangt mich,” is also marked by Bach as a ciaconna. And, in its own way, it too has a claim to fame that goes beyond the work itself.

The cantata’s final movement is the chorus “Meine Tage in dem Leiden” (My Days in Sorrow), scored for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices supported by two violins, bassoon, and continuo. The chorus is built on a four-measure bass line that is repeated, with some variations, 22 times. The basic pattern of the bass line is a rising tetrachord with a consistent rhythm:

BWV_150_ex_1

Bach varies the pattern in two ways. In order to move out from the home key of B minor, he changes the third and forth measures to cadence on a new pitch, as in this example:

BWV_150_ex_2

And, just once, he inverts the pattern so that the tetrachord falls rather than rises:

BWV150_ex3

The vocal and instrumental voices interweave above this bass foundation, with phrases and counterpoint stretching across, and often independent of, the four-measure patterns.

The similarities and differences between the two ciaconnas are revealing. Some similarities are broad and superficial:  both are in triple meter, this being in the nature of the ciaconna, and both are in minor keys. More subtly, both are based on four-measure units. There are obvious differences in scoring (solo violin vs. voices and instruments), genre (instrumental vs. vocal music), and function (music for listening vs. music for worship). But the most interesting differences are in the details of composition and structure.

The four-measure units in the violin ciaconna are generally self-contained, and each has its own melodic idea. The unit always begins in D (minor or major) and ends on the dominant A, but there is not a consistently repeated (or even implied) bass line and the harmonic progression can vary. By contrast, every four-measure unit in the choral ciaconna has a prominent bass line that gives the whole movement a unifying motif, but melodic material flows freely across the units and Bach modulates through several keys before returning to the home key of B minor. In short, the same basic formula—triple meter, stately tempo, four-measure units—yields very different works.

In my very first post I quoted Brahms on the violin ciaconna, and he apparently took note of the ciaconna in BWV 150 as well. He is reported to have played this chorus on the piano for his friend, the conductor Hans von Bülow, and suggested that a symphonic movement might be built around the ciaconna idea. The result was the finale from the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, built around this recurring bass line:

Brahms_sym_4_bass

So, much as Bach was willing to borrow techniques and forms from an earlier generation of composers and use them as the basis for new music, so too was Brahms.

Progress report: I haven’t yet pulled my own Chaconne out of the doldrums but I am making headway. My focus now is on preparing for master classes at the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival in three weeks. I’ll be playing for Jason Vieaux, Elizabeth Kenny, and Petra Polackova–and for Petra, I will play the first half of the Chaconne. I was delighted to learn that she has programmed it for her Sunday recital at the festival, so she will surely have many insights to share with me!

Interlude 5: A teacher appears

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While a freshman at Concordia I got a job at Marguerite’s Music in a little strip mall south of campus. It was a big store with a very good inventory of electric guitars, amplifiers, drums, keyboards—so good, in fact, that any bands that came through the area on tour would stop by. I sold guitars and gave lessons to beginning guitarists. On slow days, when I had finished dusting and polishing and straightening, nobody objected if I sat in the guitar section and played. Since I taught lessons for the store there was always the chance that I might pick up a new student—or sell a guitar.

I was playing on just such a slow afternoon early in the fall of 1977, staring at the floor and lost in the music, when I noticed a pair of shoes. Looking up, I saw they belonged to a young man dressed in jeans, a black t-shirt, and leather jacket. He had a stubble of beard, an olive complexion, and dark eyes that peered at me intently from beneath unruly black hair. He didn’t look like he was from Minnesota.

I finished what I was playing.

“You study guitar?” he asked me in a thick accent. He was definitely not from Minnesota.

I told him no, that there were no classical guitar teachers in or around Moorhead.

“I come from Spain to teach at Moorhead State this year. I can teach you.”

And that is how I met my first guitar teacher, Manuel Estevez Cano.

How could it be that a classical guitar teacher from Spain would suddenly appear in Moorhead? Somewhere in my life at that time I had heard or read the saying “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” I thought it was something Buddhist (it’s not). But meeting Manuel certainly had that feeling for me. I’d gone about as far as I could go on my own, and no doubt had already developed some bad habits. Manuel’s appearance seemed like an act of fate.

As it turned out, Manuel was a student of Demetrio Ballesteros, who had given the master class the previous spring at Moorhead State, and Ballesteros had arranged a one-year appointment for him. Manuel was staying at the home of the same faculty member who had translated for Ballesteros in the master class. He gave me the address and we agreed on a time for a lesson.

We had lessons once or twice a week through the fall and into the winter. Our meeting place was a room that had been converted from a porch, and I remember the dim lamplight by which we played and the view through the windows into the living room of the house. Manuel’s English wasn’t very good and we conducted the lessons primarily in French, working on the first of the preludes by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and some studies by Fernando Sor. Our lessons were long–an hour or more—and afterwards Manuel would make tea and we’d talk.

It was during one of these talks in the early spring that Manuel asked, “So, Chris, what do you want to do with your guitar playing?”

“Well,” I replied, “I’d like to study seriously, perhaps get a degree and become a teacher. But that’s not realistic…I’m too old to start now. I’m nearly 20!”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled. “Chris, I am only 25 it is true. But I didn’t start to play seriously until I was 17. You have talent. If you want to study, you should study.”

In that moment many things came together for me: my love of the guitar, my abandoned plans to major in music, my worry about what I would do with a degree in French. But to go back to the beginning as an undergraduate to major in music seemed like a whimsical, foolish, impractical fantasy.

So, of course, that is what I decided to do. In the weeks that followed I prepared audition tapes and submitted applications, taking the first steps along a new path.

A postlude. I lost track of Manuel after I left Moorhead that summer. He returned to Spain, and I went to South Dakota to start my music degree. Many years later with the arrival of the internet, I  learned that he ended up teaching in Madrid at the Royal Conservatory. In 2015 at a guitar festival in Cleveland I met one of his successful students—Susana Prieto of Duo Melis. She gave me an email address for him that turned out to be a dead end.

Then, late last year, I signed the musicologist Walter Clark to write a biography of Joaquin Rodrigo. Walter’s coauthor on the project is a Spanish musicologist and guitarist from Madrid named Javier Suarez-Pajares. When I introduced myself to Javier by email I mentioned my early lessons with Manuel. Madrid’s a big city, but the guitar world is small. Javier wrote me back immediately: “I have lunch with Manolo almost every Friday!”

And so it was that I was able to write Manuel to thank him for those lessons, and for that conversation—which led me in to the life I’ve lived.

The Doldrums

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The great age of fighting sail is an odd interest for someone who grew up thousands of miles from the nearest ocean. But as a teen in South Dakota I chanced upon C. S. Forester’s “Captain Horatio Hornblower” in a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books volume, and the time of “wooden ships and iron men” during the Napoleonic wars has fascinated me ever since. I’ve devoured an entire canon of cannons (and carronades): Forester, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope, and many others. I have made four–four!–traversals of the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels by the master of them all, Patrick O’Brian.

Each of these authors at some point in one of the books describes the woeful situation of a ship caught in the doldrums—those areas of low pressure near the equator where the wind and current die away. The sails hang loose and useless from the yards, their purpose reduced to providing some shade from the merciless tropical sun. The rudder won’t steer. The ship lies becalmed, surrounded by flat, oily water littered with the detritus of her crew.

There is only one recourse in this situation. The bosun sounds his call, the crew launches the ship’s boats, cables and hawsers are roused out and passed through the forward ports, and they begin to tow the ship. It’s backbreaking work in the heat, slow and painful, and the rough calloused hands of even the most veteran seamen crack and bleed on the oars. But they row on, until the ship at last finds that first fine hint of a breeze that will carry her onward.

In my journey with the Chaconne I have found the doldrums.

Gone are those heady first days when, with a fresh breeze at my back and a fine feather of a bow wave, I moved quickly through the first stages of learning the piece. Measures flew by, and I could look back in satisfaction at a long wake. It began to seem that my goal was just over the horizon, and a voyage I expected to last a year might be completed in just a few months.

Today that bow wave is a memory, and the long wake has vanished into the surrounding water with nary a ripple. I am becalmed. Playing through the first half of the piece that, just weeks ago, seemed so nearly in my grasp now reveals countless flaws and a lack of direction. The Chaconne, once a continent ripe for exploration, has now become an ungainly ship that has stopped moving toward her destination.

So what do I do? The only thing I can do. I launch my boats and rouse out my cables—a metronome, a pencil, my ears, my effort, my concentration. I apply my calloused fingers to the strings.

And I begin to row.

Interlude 4: First Master Class

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On a spring day in 1977 I saw a flyer announcing a master class to be given by classical guitarist Demetrio Ballesteros at Moorhead State University. I didn’t know what a “master class” was, but since it was free and open to the public, I decided to go. I was entirely self-taught at that point and thought I might pick up some technical tips. As it turned out, I was more right than I could have known.

I’d been in Moorhead a couple of years, but this was the first time I went across town to the MSU campus. I arrived at the music building’s recital hall, guitar case in hand, well before the master class was supposed to start to guarantee myself a place in the front row. As the audience gradually filled the seats, it struck me as strange that no one else brought a guitar. Perhaps all of the students would arrive together? Maybe they were back stage? Or would the whole thing be more of a demonstration than a class?

A few minutes after 4 PM a man walked onto the stage and introduced himself as the chairman of the music department. He explained that Ballesteros’s visit to the school had been arranged by a member of the Spanish department and, since MSU had no guitar program, this was an exciting opportunity. Further, given Ballesteros’s limited English, he would speak through an interpreter. With that, he welcomed the guitarist to the stage.

Ballesteros was an imposing figure, with thick dark hair and a regal bearing. He sat with his guitar, adjusted his footstool, and played something that surely impressed me but I have since forgotten. After the applause a student brought out two additional chairs, and the translator joined Ballesteros on stage. He made a few welcoming remarks, duly translated, and then, peering into the audience, asked a question.

The translator said, “Very well. Who would like to play for maestro Ballesteros?”

There I sat in the front row, with a guitar case standing by my seat, my head swiveling back and forth, wondering who would step forward! But Ballesteros had already noticed me and, with a nod in my direction, said something to the translator.

“You, young man,” he said. “Would you come up and play?”

There is a wonderful kind of fearlessness that comes with ignorance. I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but this wasn’t my first time with an audience. I’d spoken at debate tournaments, acted in plays, and even played the guitar in front of people before, so I didn’t hesitate. I opened my case, took out my guitar, grabbed my folding footstool, and took my place on stage in the empty chair. Both Ballesteros and the translator smiled, and the translator asked me to introduce myself and tell the audience what I would play. Easy enough, since I knew my name and had a total of one piece in my classical repertoire.

“My name is Chris Freitag, and I will play Romanza.” I took a deep breath and played.

After the applause died down, Ballesteros made a brief remark.

“Very nice,” said the translator.

Then Ballesteros made a much lengthier comment. The translator, who was not a guitarist, looked a little puzzled and asked Ballesteros a question. Ballesteros looked puzzled in turn. The translator turned to me and said, “Maestro Ballesteros wonders why you do not play the melody ah-poi-YAHN-doh?” (Only later did I learn the proper spelling: apuyando.)

Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “What is apuyando?” I asked.

More consultation with the translator, then Ballesteros held up his left hand in my direction, palm downward and fingers splayed out. He placed his right hand above it, and with his ring finger he stroked the middle finger of his left hand, allowing the tip of the ring finger to come to rest on the adjacent left-hand finger. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Understand?”

Ah. So, he wanted me to play the melody notes on the top string with my ring finger (which I was already doing), but to play “through” the string with the fingertip coming to rest on the second string. As I was to learn later, this “rest stroke” is a basic technique in classical guitar. It gives more weight and emphasis to a note than the “free stroke,” where the tip of the fingertip arcs above the adjacent string.

Here is the opening of Romanza played with a free stroke:

And here it is played with a rest stroke:

Rest stroke is not hard to do. Unless you are doing it for the first time, on a stage, in front of an audience.

A few uncomfortable moments followed for all of us. But finally, I found the flow of the thing and he asked me to play the piece again. It didn’t quite have the ease of my first version, but the melody now sang out much more distinctly over the accompaniment.

“Bravo,” said Ballesteros quietly after I finished, and the applause this second time was a little more heartfelt in recognition of my struggle. I nodded to the audience, thanked Ballesteros and the translator, and returned to my seat. Since I was the only player, that was the end of the class.

I played in many other master classes over the years, but never again would I enjoy the happy ignorance that got me through this first one. In future classes I would be an aspiring professional, with much more at stake. And now I fully understood just how exposed I could feel.

Some 40 years later I still play this little piece from time to time. Here is how it sounds today. I wonder what Ballesteros would say?

On the other other hand

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In “On the other hand” we looked at some of the general principles of choosing fingerings for the right hand. In this post we’ll consider a specific example: a single measure from the Chaconne that requires thoughtful planning for the right hand.

Let’s begin by looking at the measure in question—60— from the violin score.

m60_urtext
Measure 60 from the violin version of the Chaconne. The slurs are also found in the autograph manuscript.

Here, for the first time in the piece, Bach’s writing for the solo violin implies a four-voice, polyphonic texture. If this were a passage from one of Bach’s chorales for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, it might look like this:

m60_satb
An SATB choral setting of measure 60 from the Chaconne

It’s the independence of the moving parts that makes this measure tricky for the right hand (and the left, for that matter).

Another thing to notice about the violin original is the placement of the slurs—the little curved lines that join pairs of notes. In music for violin, such a notation indicates that the slurred notes are taken in the same upward or downward stroke of the bow. The effect of this is to create a softer articulation of the second note: not dah–dah but dah–ah.

Here is how this particular measure is handled by two of the eminent editions of the Chaconne for guitar: the versions by Andrès Segovia and Abel Carlevaro.

m60_segovia
Segovia’s version of measure 60

One of the first things to notice about Segovia’s version is that he adds an extra note; the low A on the first beat. Next, notice that Segovia also uses slurs in the same places that the violin version does (except for the final pair). And finally, notice how few RH fingerings Segovia provides for this complicated measure! However, what he does provide gives hints to what he likely intended the player to do:

m60_segovia_implied fingering
Segovia’s version with the implied fingerings written in.

This appears to violate one of the principles established in the previous post: note the repetition of fingers, for example. But the intervening slurs give enough time for each finger to get ready for the next pitch.

m60_carlevaro
Abel Carlevaro’s version of measure 60 from “Guitar Master Class – Chaconne by J. S. Bach

Carlevaro’s edition provides a lot more information to the guitarist than Segovia’s; in fact, his edition is called a “master class” and includes extensive commentary on performance and the technical aspects. Carlevaro does not add the extra bass note on the first beat; nor does he carry over the slurs from the violin version.. But the clever p-i-p-i alternation can make the sixteenth-notes sound smooth, and articulating all of the notes can help to bring out the counterpoint.

m60_cfj
My version of measure 60. Note the similarities and differences with the Carlevaro version above.

The version I arrived at owes a lot to Carlevaro, as you can see. The primary difference is how I treat the final 4 notes in the top voice, preferring a-m-a-m to his a-i-m-i. However, as with all of these editorial decisions about finger, this could change as I spend more and more time working on this section of the piece.

This is the last post that I will write about technical matters for some time. I’ve been doing more reading on the Chaconne itself and have found a few really interesting articles that have opened up some new insights into the music itself. I look forward to sharing those with you.

Interlude 3: Parlez-vous guitare?

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In my senior year of high school, it seemed clear that I was bound for college and then law school. I’d become a very successful debater, winning regional and state tournaments and placing in the nationals. Scholarship offers came in from several good schools, but somehow I knew that I didn’t want to debate my way through life. I was really, really good at it, and I loved being good at it. But I didn’t love it. The thing I loved was music. So when the acceptance letter from Concordia College arrived in the spring of 1974, I decided that’s where I was going to go. I’d major in music, sing in that wonderful choir, and become a choral conductor.Read More »

Interlude 2: Starting the guitar

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I found my first guitar under a bed. It was a Sears Silvertone, with six steel strings, a pick guard, and a sunburst finish. My older brother left it behind when he went off to join the Air Force. It was the summer of 1969 and I wasn’t quite thirteen. Awkward, bookish, a nerd before the term was invented—and so, of course, perfectly prepared for the high point of any adolescent life: junior high school (or, as most people know it, middle school). I didn’t know it at the time, but the guitar was one of the things that would help me get through the next three years.Read More »

A progress report

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Back in January when I started this project I likened the Chaconne to a continent that I was going to traverse like the pioneering wagon trains of yore. I even made a map.

In the beginning of this, the third month of the journey, I feel I’ve made good progress. I’ve completed my edition of the piece—deciding the notes to play and all of the left hand fingerings—through measure 132…just over halfway through. No doubt I will rethink some of those decisions in the coming weeks, but I’ve accomplished a lot of solid preparatory work.

What’s more, I can actually play through the piece that far. Not well, not fluently, but competently at about 80% of the final performance tempo I am aiming for. So, in my halting way I am halfway across the continent.f71a3eee-f8a3-4c19-aa54-51f2412eb9de

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The Fickle Fate of Flying Fingers (Pt. 2)

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In The Fickle Fate of Flying Fingers, Part 1 I described some of the basic parameters of deciding on left-hand fingerings for the guitar: the possibility of playing pitches in more than one place on the neck, the different voices of the individual strings, the potential pitfalls of shifting from one position on the neck to another.

All of these factors come into play when developing the fingerings for a passage. For consistency of tone and voice, keeping a single melodic phrase or line on one string (or even two adjacent strings) is preferable. But if that phrase spans more than a small interval it’s going to require one or more shifts to play it, increasing the technical challenge.  On the other hand, it might be possible to avoid or ease a shift by incorporating a pitch on an open string—allowing the left hand to move freely while the right hand plays the open string—or to skip across strings to play a wide leap. But that introduces the challenge of keeping the voice of the line consistent. Let’s look at a specific example. [Remember the Classical Guitar Primer if you need a refresher on notation.]Read More »