The Art of Fugue

Do you give much consideration to the structure of the music you play? For those of us who aren’t composers, the dark art of writing music can seem a bit of a mystery, but a little understanding will often help us play better. In previous posts I’ve talked about a selection of different musical forms - dances (Renaissance and Baroque), the canzona and sonata and the trio sonata too. While all of these musical forms have a common pattern, there’s another genre of composition which has perhaps the most formal structure - the fugue.

As recorder players we’ll often encounter fugues, whether we recognise them or not. Sometimes they’ll crop up during the course of a piece, and in this situation we often describe the music as being fugal - the composer uses elements of the fugue’s form without writing the complete fugue structure. Of course there are plenty of composers who’ve written formal, standalone fugues - perhaps the most obvious being J.S.Bach. As well as his Well Tempered Klavier (a collection of 48 preludes and fugues - two in every major and minor key) he went even further towards the end of his life, creating a work called The Art of Fugue. This is a collection of fugues, composed during the final decade of Bach’s life. It comprises fourteen fugues (he called them Contrapuncti) and four canons, all in D minor and all based in some way upon a single melodic phrase - truly the pinnacle of Baroque fugue writing and an example for future generations of composers to follow and build upon.

Bach’s handwritten score of The Art of Fugue

As we’ll see, each movement becomes ever more complex. But why did Bach write this magnum opus? Maybe it was the musical equivalent of climbing Mount Everest - simply because he could? Perhaps a more likely reason is it was intended as a didactic work, designed to show others the possibilities of the fugal form.

The final fugue remains unfinished - yet another mystery. There are three possible answers I can see. Perhaps he died while writing, quill in hand? That’s certainly a romantic theory, but probably unlikely. Maybe he purposely left it unfinished so future students could try their hand at finishing the master’s work? Again, this is possible, and dozens of people have done exactly this in the two and half centuries since Bach’s death. If you fancy exploring the infinite possibilities, the Half of the Alphabet blog has collated a list of them, but be prepared to disappear into a vast musical rabbit hole if you start here!

Perhaps the most likely, and most prosaic answer, is that Bach did finish the final fugue, but the last pages have been lost. We’ll look at this theory in more detail later, but at a time when it was far from simple to make a back up of your creations (there were no photocopiers in the 1740s) this strikes me as the most practical reason for its incomplete state.

Which instrument was The Art of Fugue composed for?

This is another conundrum which has had musicians debating for centuries. Bach’s manuscript, and the editions which followed, are laid out in open score (that is a separate line for each voice) rather than the two stave layout we expect for keyboard music today. This has led some to speculate that Bach meant the work to be an intellectual, didactic work rather than one for performance. However, it wasn’t unusual for keyboard players of the period to read from open score, and placing each voice on its own stave also makes the individual melodic shapes much clearer. Modern pianists might find this type of score more challenging to read, but it’s entirely possible to play The Art of Fugue on a keyboard, with two lines being played by each hand.

Of course the open score arrangement has also led many musicians to consider the possibility of performing the Contrapuncti as works for four individual instruments. This has resulted in performances and recordings for almost every conceivable combination of instruments. Woodwind, strings, brass - you name it, it’s been recorded using endless combinations of sounds! This may not have been Bach’s intention, but I like to think he’d have approved of such ingenuity. Some of my favourites include the following:

• Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet’s complete recording of The Art of Fugue from 1998. I attended a live performance they gave of this album in the Turner Sims Concert Hall in Southampton and was amazed at their perfect, musicianship, ensemble and tuning.

• Rachel Podger with Brecon Baroque - a recording for strings, with added harpsichord continuo. Rachel also took the opportunity to record a short video about the experience of recording this work.

• The Swingle Singers jazzy recording of Contrapunctus IX - not one for the purists, but huge fun!

• Calefax Reed Quintet - a mixed ensemble of reed instruments, which creates a beautiful contrast of colours in the music.

• Aurelia Saxophone Quartet - a sound world which would have been unimaginable to Bach, as the invention of the saxophone was still almost a century away when he composed The Art of Fugue. A fascinating album containing the complete Art of Fugue, plus 15 New Fugues.

A life beyond Bach’s death

Unfortunately Bach died before The Art of Fugue could be published, so that task fell to his son, C.P.E. Bach. He oversaw the engraving of the printing plates, as well as including a number of movements which weren’t part of his father’s original plan. The first edition was published in May 1751, some ten months after Bach died, followed by a second edition in 1752. Sadly the copper engraving plates have long since been lost, but a scan of this edition is available to download from IMSLP. Unusually the engraver chose to make good use of the blank space at the end of several of the Contrapuncti, filling it with elegant engravings of flowers, as you can see below. What a shame modern editors don’t think to make such beautiful use of blank pages today!

A page from the first edition of The Art of Fugue

Let’s go exploring…

Through this blog I’ll use examples from The Art of Fugue to help you understand the structure of a fugue, but later we’ll look at examples from other composers too. I’ve created my own arrangements of eight of the Contrapuncti for you to play. Look out for the black buttons on screen which you can click to download the sheet music. I’ve also chosen recordings of some of the individual Contrapuncti, played on recorders, so you can hear the music as you follow the score. Think of this as a full immersion exploration of the fugues of Bach and others!

But what is a fugue?

Let’s begin at the beginning…

Every fugue starts with a subject – this is the main theme that runs through the work. In The Art of Fugue Bach uses the following idea as his subject and it connects the entire collection of fugues and canons. It’s made from music’s simplest building blocks – an arpeggio and a scale.

The subject on which the whole of The Art of Fugue is based.

This subject is played by one voice and then imitated by the second voice – this imitation is called the answer. The second voice plays the subject at a different pitch – usually four or five notes higher or lower than the original. If you look at the example (from Contrapunctus I) below, the subject is marked in blue, while the answers are marked in red. See how the second entry of the subject (in the bass part) reverts to the same pitch as the first, while its answer (in the tenor line) is at the same pitch as the first answer in bar 5.

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The exposition of Contrapunctus I

In a fugue there are two types of answer – a real answer and a tonal answer. A real answer is one where the notes follow exactly the same shape as the original. A tonal answer is one where the shape of the phrase has been altered slightly to help it fit with the other lines. In Contrapunctus I Bach uses a tonal answer. If it were a real answer the second note (circled in red below) would need to be an E:

Bach’s tonal answer to the subject in Contrapunctus I

While the second voice is playing this answer, the first voice plays a new musical idea against it. If this music also recurs in other lines it’s called a countersubject. Some composers are very consistent in creating a recurring countersubject, but Bach doesn’t use this technique much in The Art of Fugue.

All of Bach’s fugues in this work have four voices, but there’s nothing to say a fugue can’t have fewer or more voices. The key thing is that each voice begins the piece with the subject. When all the voices have played their first iteration of the subject, we’ve reached the end of the exposition. The example above shows the whole exposition of Contrapunctus I.

What comes next?

After the exposition, the music continues through a series of episodes. These give the composer an opportunity to explore fresh musical ideas, bringing the subject back from time to time.

In Contrapunctus III Bach takes the music in a more colourful direction, with slinky chromatic scales (marked in blue below) and a rising scale pattern (marked in red) which repeatedly appears in the bass line to create a sense of cohesiveness.

Bach’s clever use of chromaticism in Contrapunctus III

Decoration and ornamentation

There’s nothing in the fugal rulebook to say a composer has to keep the subject exactly the same throughout a fugue. While the form has a very clear structure, there’s no reason why the subject can’t be creatively decorated to vary its rhythmic and/or melodic shape. Bach does this often in The Art of Fugue, and Contrapunctus V is a very good example. He uses dotted rhythms to add connecting notes (circled in red in the example below) between the minims, creating a line which has a new shape but is still perceptibly related to the original subject, as you can see here:

Bach’s decorated version of the Art of Fugue subject

In Contrapunctus II Bach leaves the main subject unadulterated, but instead chooses to have some fun with the melodic lines following its entries. As you can see from this extract from the first published edition, the music is filled with jaunty dotted rhythms interweaving with each other.

Contrapunctus II with its tapestry of dotted rhythms

Exploring different styles from other nations

In Contrapunctus VI Bach looks beyond his native Germany to the style of another country - France. Here he uses more dotted rhythms, along with free flowing runs of faster notes to create the impression of a French Overture. He even labels the movement, In stylo Francese. As you can see from the extract below, it has a much more florid look and style than the other Contrapuncti, and as a result is rather more challenging to play.

Bach also uses Contrapunctus VI to experiment with some mathematical tricks, but we’ll come onto that in more detail shortly.

The opening 16 bars of Contrapunctus VI

Inverted music

Have you ever wondered how a melody might sound if you played it upside down? You’re about to find out, because this exactly what Bach does in Contrapunctus IV!

This technique is called Inversion and here the music is literally turned upside down. Intervals (the distance between neighbouring notes) which rise in the original subject will now fall by the same distance, and vice versa. See how the shapes mirror each other in the two examples below. If you have a recorder handy, why not play both versions to hear how inverting the theme changes the sound and feel.

Subject from Contrapunctus I, the right way up…

…and the inverted subject from Contrapunctus IV

Going backwards as well as forwards

You might think Bach used everything from his toolbox when composing The Art of Fugue, but there’s one technique he doesn’t include - that’s Retrograde. This is where a composer flips a theme horizontally, so every note is played in reverse. For instance, a retrograde version of the subject from The Art of Fugue might appear like this:

If Bach had used his theme in retrograde it might have sounded like this….

Bach wasn’t a stranger to the concept of retrograde though, writing a Crab Canon in The Musical Offering, BWV1079. This is an earlier collection of canons and fugues, from 1747, which are all based around a theme given to him by Frederick the Great. In the following version of the Crab Canon for recorders (arranged by R.D. Tennent) you’ll see I’ve marked the first two bars in green. Now look at the final two bars of the tenor recorder part and you’ll see red box, which contains exactly the same notes and rhythms but in reverse. If you follow both lines from opposite ends with your fingers you’ll see the contain exactly the same notes and rhythms - so clever!

Why not find a friend to play this with and you can find out how it feels to play the same music in two different directions at once! You can download the PDF sheet music here.

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The Crab Canon from The Musical Offering

Playing with rhythm

As I mentioned earlier, Bach sometimes plays with rhythm in his fugues, by extending and contracting the musical lines.

Making the note values longer is a technique called Augmentation. For example, in Contrapunctus IX he includes main subject of The Art of Fugue, but doubles the length of each note. Compare the two extracts below and you’ll see how each note is twice as long as the original.

Original theme

Augmented theme from Contrapunctus IX

In contrast, Diminution does the opposite, making the note values shorter.

You remember I earlier showed you the decorated theme Bach uses in Contrapunctus V? Not content with simply ornamenting his musical idea, in both Contrapunctus VI and Contrapunctus VII he uses that decorated version in both diminution and augmentation. Not only that, he does this with the theme the right way up, and in its inverted form!

This is the decorated theme:

Compare that with the version in diminution - all the same notes, but half the length:

And finally, the same musical idea in augmentation:

Cranking up the excitement

As a fugue progresses, composers often look for a way to crank up the energy and excitement. One way to do this is Stretto – a technique where the main subject is repeated in a second voice before it has finished playing in the first. These closely packed entries create a sense of greater urgency and tension. In Contrapunctus V Bach does exactly this, writing entries of the decorated subject just two beats apart from each other. To add to the complexity, one of them is the right way up (shown with a red box below), while the other is inverted (in a blue box).

If you want an even more extreme form of stretto, that can also be found in Contrapunctus V. In this extract, he uses just the first few notes of the decorated theme in all four voices, with just one beat between each entry, as you can see with the green boxes below.

Double fugues - twice the fun!

What could be more exciting than a fugue with a single subject? A fugue with two different subjects, of course! Unsurprisingly this is called a Double Fugue, and Bach uses this trick several times in The Art of Fugue.

His first experiment with this appears in Contrapunctus IX, which begins with an entirely new, and altogether more energetic idea:

The new subject for Contrapunctus IX

The movement begins with what seems like a fugue based entirely on this new theme, but he has a surprise waiting in the wings. At bar 35, after all four voices have played this new subject he reintroduces the original subject, from Contrapunctus I, but this time in augmentation, as I mentioned earlier:

From here to the end, every time the busy subject appears it’s accompanied in parallel by the main Art of Fugue subject.

Not content with writing one double fugue, Bach continues with this strategy in Contrapunctus X, although his new musical idea is more fragmented than the one from Contrapunctus IX. Again, he uses it the right way up and in inversion, before reminding us of the decorated version of the main Art of Fugue subject at bar 23. Finally, at bar 44 he brings the two together, as you can see in the full score (which can be downloaded by clicking the button below).

The rather fragmented subject in Contrapunctus X

The grand finale

As if double fugues weren’t impressive enough, Bach brings The Art of Fugue to a climax with a Triple Fugue for Contrapunctus XIV. As you might imagine, this brings together three different, new subjects.

The first subject shares some genetic material with the original, used in Contrapunctus I, but is more static and provides a calm, thoughtful start to the fugue:

Subject No.1 from Contrapunctus XIV

The second subject has a more fluid feel, with running quavers. It’s also the longest subject, running for almost seven full bars:

Subject No.2 from Contrapunctus XIV

For the final subject Bach takes an autobiographical turn, converting his name into music. In German the note B natural is indicated by the letter H, so the name BACH is spelt out by the first four notes of the subject. Other composers have also used the same technique. For instance, Dmitri Shostakovich used DSCH as a musical motif D-E flat-C-B natural in several of his works.

Subject No.3 from Contrapunctus XIV

In the final few bars Bach finally brings all three subjects together for the first time. The extract below shows this meeting of ideas, with the 1st subject in red, the 2nd in green and the 3rd BACH theme in blue.

Before we get to see more of how these three ideas will work together, the music stops abruptly at bar 239. It may be that Bach originally intended it to become a quadruple fugue, bringing the original subject back, combined with the others, but his true intentions remain a tantalising mystery!

The final few bars of Contrapunctus XIV, where all three subjects coalesce.

It’s not all about Bach…

While you could argue that Bach is the master of the fugue structure, he’s far from the only composer to have written such works. I’m now going to point you to some works by other composers to listen to. Several of them have appeared among my online consort videos over the years, so for those you’ll see buttons which will whisk you over to the download folder, so you can play along with me if you want to.

The roots of the fugue

The concept of imitation wasn’t a new one when Bach started composing fugues - composers had been writing imitative music for many years. Canzon Seconda by Giovanni Gabrieli begins with strict imitation between all four voices. Composed more than a century before Bach wrote The Art of Fugue, it doesn’t yet follow the precise format of a fugue, but you can see its genetic connection to the Baroque fugue.

Bach’s hero

At the age of 20 Bach walked nearly 400 kilometres to meet his hero, Dietrich Buxtehude, and hear him play the organ, so you won’t be surprised to learn that he too wrote fugues. This Organ Fugue in G (you can download the score here to follow along) also uses one of the techniques favoured by Bach in The Art of Fugue, inverting the main theme for the middle section, from bar 19, before returning to its original form for the final section at bar 39.

Beethoven’s counterpoint teacher

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger is best known today as the person who taught counterpoint and fugue writing to the young Beethoven, so it’s no surprise to find he wrote a large number of fugues himself. The subject of this Organ Fugue is really quite simple - just seven notes - but he is still able to create a satisfying fugue from them.

Following in the footsteps of his teacher…

Albrechtsberger was evidently an effective teacher, as Beethoven went on to write powerful fugues in many of his works, including several of his symphonies. His fugal efforts culminated in the Grosse Fuge, Op.133, composed in 1825 and originally intended to be the finale of his 13th String Quartet. By this stage, just two years before his death, Beethoven was profoundly deaf and this disability led him to write some extraordinarily forward thinking and very demanding music. Ultimately his publisher insisted on a different finale for the Quartet, so as not to harm sales of the sheet music, and the Grosse Fuge became a standalone work. It’s an immense double fugue lasting some fifteen minutes and not an easy piece to understand. The video below includes the score on screen so you can follow along to the music as you listen.

The fugue as part of a bigger picture

As I mentioned earlier, fugues don’t have to be standalone works and composers often include fugal sections within larger works. Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus (from Messiah), for instance, begins as a joyful chorus in block harmony, but then introduces a series of fugal entries from bar 41. This doesn’t progress into a full blown fugue, but the subject returns again at the end of bar 71 against the other musical ideas.

Mozart’s foray into the double fugue

I’ve mentioned Beethoven’s double fugue writing already, but there are many more by other composers. One of the best known is the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem, which contains two contrasting subjects. You can play along with my consort video, but here is one of my favourite recordings too, which I think captures the full operatic drama of the music.

Fugues in every key

Bach wasn’t the only composer to explore the possibilities of writing fugues in every key - Dmitri Shostakovich also composed a Prelude and Fugue in each major and minor key, inspired by and dedicated to the pianist Tatiana Nicolayeva, during 1950 and 51. No.4 in E minor is a powerful double fugue, played here by Vladimir Ashkenazy. If you’d like to follow the score as you listen you can download it from IMSLP here (page 27). The second subject first appears at the Piu mosso section, and Shostakovich brings the two themes together from the last five bars of page 30.

A devil of a fugue

To complete my round up of amazing fugues, we have a truly astonishing fugue contained within a brass band piece by Derek Bourgeois - The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Composed in 1992 as a test piece for the final of the National Brass Band Championships at the Royal Albert Hall, it builds into a truly virtuosic fugue. This was inspired by Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings, which includes (in Elgar’s own words) “a devil of a fugue”. The subject Bourgeois writes is one of the most expansive I’ve ever encountered, covering some seven bars and dozens of bustling semiquavers, followed by a tour de force of fugal writing.

The fugue (you can see the score here) begins at bar 119 and it’s still going strong a hundred bars later when Bourgeois brings the subject back in the trombones, tubas and timpani at half speed! The entire work last some 17 minutes and I recommend listening to the whole piece, but if you want to skip straight to the fugue, you’ll find it 5 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording below. Bear in mind that this is a performance by a band of amateur musicians - genuinely awe inspiring!

A surfeit of fugues?

If I haven’t already overwhelmed you with fugues, I have one final recommendation, and that’s an episode of BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show from 2014 about The Art of Fugue. Presented by the late Lucie Skeaping, it also features Simon Heighes, one of my history of music professors at Trinity College of Music, who talks about this magnum opus in a very informative and user friendly way.

I realise this post has been something of a fugal marathon but, as you will now realise, the fugue is an immense subject!

Even if you don’t think you’ll ever listen to fugues purely for pleasure (I know some find them a little too esoteric) I hope I’ve opened your eyes and ears to the special way they organise themes and can create a tremendous sense of excitement and drive. Hopefully you’ll more easily recognise a fugue when you encounter one in future and perhaps appreciate the huge skill required by Bach and other composers to bring the themes together to create a satisfying whole.

Have I missed out a fugue you particularly enjoy? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and perhaps your recommendations from this tremendously broad field - please do leave a comment below to tell us about your favourites!

The Practice Diaries

I’ve written about practising before, but always in a theoretical, didactic way - introducing you to the principles of practising. While conducting a recent orchestra rehearsal we encountered a passage containing some fast moving notes for most of the players. Naturally I encouraged them to practise these bars before our next rehearsal, but I also talked more specifically about how to practise them.

This topic has been uppermost in my mind of late as I’m working towards a concert myself. In one of the pieces we’re going to perform I have a couple of passages which stretch my technique and need some serious tidying before the concert. I’ve been working on this section each day and it occurred to me that you might find it interesting and useful to actually see and hear first hand what I do when I practise. So here we have The Practice Diaries - what may become the first in an occasional series. Using short video clips (most are 2-3 minutes long) I’ll take you along on the journey with me, explaining the process and hopefully you’ll see some progress along the way. The first few videos all come from one practice session, bringing you up to speed on the music I’m learning, plus some insights into what I’ve done so far.

Let’s jump into this warts and all exploration of my practice techniques. It won’t necessarily be pretty, but hopefully seeing my personal failings and successes may inspire you to make some of your own!

What are we practising?

The piece I’m focusing on here is Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.8 - often known as his Christmas Concerto. During the 18th century an alternative edition of it, with the solo violin parts transferred onto recorders, was published by John Walsh, with the advice that it could also be played as a trio sonata. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing - using two recorders, cello and harpsichord.

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Day 1 - let’s get started…

Although this is Day 1, I’ve been practising the Corelli for a couple of weeks already, so let me explain my journey to this point. But before that, here’s one passage which particularly needs my attention - the semiquavers from bar 70 to 80. The image below is a snap of my own copy, complete with my pencil markings, which are intended to help me play it better.

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Corelli Christmas Concerto, 4th movement - Adagio-Allegro.

Let’s begin with a brief introduction to the music and this new project…

Although I’ve played this piece before, I still need to asses how much work there is to be done, considering one or two small adjustments to make it feel more recorder-friendly…

The next step is to identify where I’m particularly prone to glitches and mistakes. I mark these in my music as a warning, reminding me that I need to concentrate even more in these spots.

Next I explain the way we learn when we practise and what goes on inside our bodies to make sure the work we’ve done stays done!

I wrote another blog post about this topic last year and if you haven’t already read it, I strongly suggest you do. When I learnt all about the magic of myelin it was a real game changer for me - you can read all about it in my blog post here. In these early stages, practising slowly is the best thing you can do, ensuring you’re not learning mistakes into the music.

Do you love your metronome? I love mine!

Used in the right way it can be a fantastic tool, especially when you want to gradually increase the speed of a piece of music. Here I talk about the way I use a metronome when I’m practising.

If you want more metronome top tips why not take a look at my blog post all about this brilliant and much maligned tool?

But how does a metronome help you increase the speed of the music? I have a cunning plan which, with a little patience and persistence, is utterly foolproof - watch it in action here…

Having explained my strategies for the early days of practising a difficult passage, let’s see if the work I did yesterday has stuck, and find out which bits still need some polishing…

If you feel you’re making good progress, a clever way to test this is by making the music even harder. Let’s take a look at my own strategies and how well they can work…

It’s very easy to get caught up in thinking about your fingers, forgetting about all the other things you need to consider at the same time! Here I talk you through some of these:

Have you ever tried practising the music backwards? I did just that and discovered that it can be another really useful strategy!

How long should we practise for and how often? Here I ponder the ins and outs of practice routines. You might be surprised how much you can achieve in a modest amount of time if you practise in the right way.

In today’s practice session I realised that hidden dangers occur when familiar patterns change…

My final snippet from today’s practice session - let’s see how much progress I’ve made…

Now it’s time to go and do some different work - I’ll return in a few days with some more updates and glimpses behind the scenes, warts and all!

Day 2 - more thoughts on alternative fingerings, relaxation and when to feel you’ve really fixed a problem

After a good night’s sleep I’m back on the case, now turning my attention to a different section of the music, shown in the image below. Once again you can see I’ve marked the groups of notes which need my attention.

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Corelli Christmas Concerto, 6th movement - Allegro

I started this project to help you with your practice, but looking back at the previous day’s clips I realised they had their uses for me too!

At what point can you say you’ve really mastered a passage? I consider this today and find out if I can put my own advice into practice…

My final thought for today - using smooth or detached articulation.

Day 7 - getting to grips with slurs and changing gear

Five days have passed since I last spoke to you, but I’ve been practising every day, making incremental improvements. Each day new ideas occur to me, so let me explain some of my latest discoveries with you…

We’ll start off by thinking about how I can control the movement of my fingers more effectively while I’m playing slurs.

There comes a point, when practising with a metronome, that a gear change is required. As I’ve gradually increased my speed that moment has arrived - here I talk you through my thought processes on this.

Here we have a fresh scan of my music. Over the days I’ve gradually added a few more markings, to help remind me what I need to think about and where. These include updates on where my metronome practice has got to, and notes about the specific fingers I need to work more efficiently as I play.

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My final thought for the day is when you should stop practising. Concentration is a finite resource - knowing when your allocation for the day has run out will help you practise more efficiently and effectively!

Day 12 - playing with other people and trying to overachieve

After a weekend off and a rehearsal with my colleagues I have a much clearer perspective on how successful my practice has been so far…

Playing the music at the right speed is one thing, but it pays to build in a margin for error. Here I look at my aims for the remaining few days before our concert.

Finally, I consider the possibility of making mistakes during the concert - after all, no one is perfect!

The final countdown…

As I publish this post, we have six days left until our concert, but will I be ready for whatever a live performance can throw at me?

I’ve practised in a thoughtful way, taking small steps to work on my weak areas. At no point have I spent more than an hour a day on my practice, but instead I’ve focused the bulk of my attention on the passages that need the most work.

What about the rest of the concert programme?

Alongside the Christmas Concerto I’ve spent shorter periods tidying up the other pieces. It’s rare to perform an entirely new programme in any concert, so many of the other works are ones I’ve played before and know well. I keep these ticking along in parallel with the Corelli, but the good quality practice I’ve done one them in preparation for previous concerts means they don’t need the same quantity of work.

Have you enjoyed this glimpse behind the scenes?

Practice can seem like a dark art. People talk about it a lot, but how often do you get to see and hear exactly how a professional practises?

I hope this look behind the scenes has given you some inspiration for your own practice sessions. Please bear in mind I’m coming to this work as someone who’s spent many years studying; developing my technique and musicianship. Some of the music I find easy may seem like an impossibility for you at the moment, especially if you’re still near the beginning of your recorder journey - please don’t let that put you off. All of the techniques I’ve talked about and demonstrated in these video clips can be modified and used in your own practice sessions. Your tempi may be slower, and your pace of improvement may be more modest, but I absolutely believe that anyone can become a better musician and technician if they practise in the right way.

If you’ve found this video diary helpful, please do let me know by leaving a comment below. Is this something you’d like to see more of? If so, are there specific topics or techniques you’d like help with? I have lots of ideas, but they’ll be so much more meaningful if I know what you’d like help with.

Sounding Pipes, Edition 8

It’s a year or so since I last brought you one of my Sounding Pipes playlists, and during the intervening months I’ve been collecting a myriad of wonderful recordings, played on recorders of all sizes. This eighth edition of Sounding Pipes, focuses on one of our instrument’s superpowers - its infinite flexibility and versatility.

The recorder’s native repertoire stretches for 1000 years, but we do have a missing century and a half - that period from around 1750 to the early twentieth century when orchestras grew ever larger, thus squeezing our relatively quiet instrument into oblivion. During this period other woodwind instruments evolved, with a larger bore and extra keywork to give them added power, a greater range and the ability to easily play chromatic music. The recorder, however, missed out on these innovations and it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that modern makers really began to experiment and expand our instrument’s technical possibilities.

There were of course recorder-like instruments that persisted in particular geographic areas (as you’ll see and hear below), but even these remained fairly true to the way Baroque recorders were voiced. At first glance this lack of evolution may seem a negative thing, but I would argue it’s ultimately worked in our favour. Having too much choice can be a bad thing - one gets paralysed by the endless possibilities. Because we have that historical gap in our instrument’s native repertoire, recorder players have become very good at ‘borrowing’ music and making it our own. Admittedly it’s not possible for every type of music to suit the recorder (anyone fancy Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas for voices and recorder orchestra?!), but our willingness to try playing unexpected music on recorders has proved surprisingly effective at times. It’s hard to think of another instrument which can play such a wide range of musical styles as effectively as the recorder. For instance, how often do you hear a string quartet playing jazz, or a clarinet choir exploring the medieval stylings of Perotin?

It’s this thought which inspired the collection of music I’ve brought together for you today. Prepare yourself for a smorgasbord of musical styles, from the Medieval to jazz, with forays into Classical opera and lush orchestral Romanticism along the way. I realise not everything will be to your tastes - after all, you can’t please all the people all the time. Hopefully though you may find some unexpected pleasures along the way and I feel sure it’ll broaden your horizons, opening your eyes to even more of the recorder’s possibilities.

Let’s begin by stepping back 700 years to Medieval France….

Guillaume de Machaut - Douce Dame Jolie

Performed by La Morra: Corina Marti (recorder), Michał Gondko (lute), VivaBiancaLuna Biffi (voice, vielle) and Marc Mauillon (voice).

This was one of the most popular songs from 14th century France and here it’s performed on instruments which would have been familiar at the time. Like most popular songs today, the lyrics are written in verses, interspersed with choruses, talking of love - some things remains the same, even after 700 years!

Sweet, lovely lady for God's sake do not think that any has sovereignty over my heart, but you alone.

For always, without treachery cherished have I you, and humbly all the days of my life served without base thoughts. Alas, I am left begging for hope and relief; for my joy is at its end without your compassion.

Sweet, lovely lady....

But your sweet mastery masters my heart so harshly, tormenting it and binding In unbearable love, so that [my heart] desires nothing but to be in your power. And still, your own heart renders it no relief.

Sweet, lovely lady....
And since my malady healed will never be without you, sweet enemy, who takes delight in my torment with clasped hands I beseech your heart, that forgets me, that it mercifully kill me for too long have I languished.

Sweet, lovely lady....

Hildegard of Bingen - O virtus sapientiae

Sophia Schambeck - double recorder

Much is made today of the need for women composers to be more visible - the world of composing has long been dominated by men. But there have always been women who defy this norm, composing music which survives to this day. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is a prime example. A German Benedictine Abess, she was also a polymath, active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary and as a medical writer and practitioner during the Middle Ages. And she did all of this over a long life - 81 years - which would have been exceptional during the 11th century.

Music at this time was simple in form - single melodic lines, or perhaps organum - that’s two lines played in parallel, creating the simplest form of harmony. Here this beautiful melody, O virtus sapientiae, is performed by Sophia Schambeck on a double recorder. With one hand she plays the tune, while the other half of the instrument creates a static accompaniment of drone-like held notes. The result is absolutely mesmeric.

Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto RV580 for 4 recorders, first movement

Recorders: Michael Form, Claudius Kamp, Yi-Chang Liang, HyeonHo Jeon, Baroque Cello: Hyunkun Cho, Harpsichord: Eunji Lee

It’s been said that Antonio Vivaldi composed the same concerto 600 times, but I think that’s more than a little unfair! Granted, there are many works among his output which feel quite similar - hardly surprising for a composer who was so prodigious. But there are some wonderful works of tremendous ingenuity and drama too. This piece comes from a collection of twelve concertos for strings, published in Amsterdam in 1711, titled L’estro armonico - The Harmonic Inspiration. In this volume Vivaldi uses solo instruments in a creative way, with combinations of soloists rather than just a single violinist. In this concerto, No.10, he writes no fewer than four solo violin parts and in this performance they’ve been replaced by four recorders.

One of the challenges of playing music with multiple recorders of the same size is making each voice stand out as an individual. Without the dynamic range of the violin, recorder players have to get creative with articulation instead, using infinitely varied note lengths to create contrast between the lines. This wonderful performance does so beautifully when all four recorders are together, as well as having solo spots featuring each individual player.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Overture to The Marriage of Figaro

Flutes in Situ - Belgian duo Laterna Magica: Nathalie Houtman & Laura Pok - csakans, Thomas Waelbroek - piano.

From the Baroque period, we shift forward into the recorder’s missing century and a composer who wrote some of the most exquisitely perfect music - sadly none of it for our instrument. As I mentioned earlier, recorder-like instruments continued to exist in small pockets throughout the Classical period. One of these was the csakan in Austria and Hungary. Like the recorder, it’s a fipple flute, but usually pitched in A flat and designed as part of a gentleman’s walking stick. A small group of composers (Anton Heberle and Ernst Krähmer being the best known) wrote original music for the instrument, but it wasn’t unusual for performers to use it to play arrangements of popular music from the era.

In this arrangement of the Overture from The Marriage of Figaro, Nathalie Houtman and Laura Pok play two csakans, accompanied by a piano typical of the period. The lighter sound of the piano (compared to modern grand pianos) pairs with the csakans perfectly and it’s such a delight to hear Mozart played in this way.

Gustav Mahler - Symphony No.1, third movement

Hsin-Chu Recorder Orchestra, conducted by Meng-Heng Chen

Mahler isn’t a composer who immediately springs to mind when you think of the recorder, but this is an unexpected arrangement which works surprisingly well. In the third movement of his first Symphony Mahler reuses the familiar children’s song, Frère Jacques, changing the key from major to minor to create a funeral march. Along the way he also incorporates melodies reminiscent of Czech folk songs. Mahler was a master of orchestration, using colourful combinations of instruments, and that’s the one element which inevitably remains absent in a recorder arrangement. The Hsin-Chu Recorder Orchestra add cello and double bass in their performance, and the pizzicato strings sound undoubtedly adds a fresh tone colour. Even if you disagree with the borrowing of music which is so alien to the recorder, I think it’s important to push the boundaries from time to time to explore the almost limitless boundaries of our instrument.

Eugene Magalif - Colibri

Berlin Recorder Orchestra, conducted by Simon Borutzki

Born in Belarus and now living in the USA, Eugene Magalif may be an unfamiliar name, but he has a long track record of composing music for the flute. Colibri (Hummingbird) was originally composed for flute and string orchestra and was crucial in bringing Eugene to the attention of flautist James Galway, with whom he had a long working relationship. Simon Borutzki, the conductor of the Berlin Recorder Orchestra, created this arrangement for recorder orchestra and, listening to this spectacular performance, you’d be hard pushed it realise it’s been borrowed - it first the BRO like a glove.

Eugene writes the following about the piece:

“Hummingbirds migrate annually from Central America to New Jersey for the summer months and then back again, flying thousands of miles. They are the only birds that can move in any direction and hover in the air like bees. There is a family of hummingbirds that return every summer to our backyard, where we put out feeders filled with sweet nectar for them. One day I was sitting on the balcony, talking with professor Oleg Sytianko, from Turku, Finland. He asked me to write something for flute, promising to perform it at the music conservatory. In the same moment, the hummingbirds arrived. Seeing these cheerful little birds, a melody instantly came to mind—a simple melody, but with a special rhythmic pattern.”

Chick Corea - Armando’s Rhumba

Arrangement by Tal Zilber. performed by Tali Rubinstein - recorder and Tal Zilber - piano

My last Score Lines blog introduced you to advice from jazz musician Chick Corea, so when I discovered this phenomenal performance of his music by Tali Rubinstein I just had to include it in my Sounding Pipes playlist. This may have the genes of jazz at its heart, but Tal Zilber also manages to squeeze in snippets of music from Georges Bizet’s Carmen and J.S.Bach’s Badinerie from his second orchestral suite. A musical tour de force!

That concludes my playlist, featuring a tremendous variety of music, covering ten centuries. I can’t think of another instrument which could so effortlessly play all these different styles of music and I hope you’ll agree our lives as recorder players are richer for this. Have I missed out a style of music you might have included? If so, why not leave a comment below and share some of your favourite recorder gems with us?

Advice from beyond the recorder world

Every so often friends send me pieces of writing they think I might appreciate. Two of these struck a particular chord, and I thought I’d share sections of them with you. Chick Corea and Richard Strauss come from very different musical genres, neither of them with any connection to the recorder, but I think their words still have something to teach us.

Cheap but good advice for playing music in a group

This is the title of a list shared with me by Steve Marshall, himself a composer who most recorder players will have encountered at some point. Steve has spent a lot of his life playing jazz, so naturally he would have a greater knowledge of the work of Chick Corea (1941-2021), an American jazz musician, composer and band leader, than I do. Of course, not all of Corea’s advice is applicable to playing the recorder, but these items which particularly jumped out at me as being pertinent to our own music making…

• Play only what you hear.

• If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

• Don’t let your fingers and limbs just wander – place them intentionally.

• Leave space – create space – intentionally create places where you don’t play.

• Make your sound blend. Listen to your sound and adjust it to the rest of the band and the room.

• Don’t make any of your music mechanically or just through patterns of habit. Create each sound, phrase, and piece with choice – deliberately.

• Guide your choice of what to play by what you like – not by what someone else will think.

• Use contrast and balance the elements: high/low, fast/slow, loud/soft, tense/relaxed, dense/sparse.

• Play to make the other musicians sound good. Play things that will make the overall music sound good.

• Play with a relaxed body. Always release whatever tension you create.

• Create space – begin, develop, and in for phrases with intention.

• Never beat or pound your instrument – play it easily and gracefully.

Advice from the conductor’s rostrum

Richard Strauss, painted by Max Liebermann, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Richard Strauss (1864-1949), whose life overlapped with Chick Corea by just eight years, occupies a very different musical style, but like Corea, he was a prolific composer and a musician whose words are still pertinent to the rest of us. This collection of musical advice was sent to me by another composer of recorder music, Michael Graham. Like myself, Michael spends a lot of his time conducting ensembles and orchestras, and he thought I might appreciate Strauss’s Ten Golden Rules for Young Conductors. While some of these comments may not be applicable to you as a recorder player, the humour is undeniable, and yet his words have a lot to teach about making music sympathetically with others.

• Remember that you are making music not to amuse yourself, but to delight your audience.

• You should not perspire when conducting. Only the audience should get warm.

• Conduct Salome and Elektra (two of Strauss’s most challenging operas) as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.

• Never look encouragingly at the brass, except with a brief glance to give an important cue.

• But never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight. If you can hear them at all, they are still too strong.

• If you think that the brass is now blowing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two.

• It is not enough that you yourself should hear every word the soloist sings. You should know by heart anyway. The audience must be able to follow without effort. If they do not understand the words, they will go to sleep.

• Always accompany the singer in such a way that he can sing without effort.

• When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, double the pace.

• If you follow these rules carefully, you will, with your fine gifts and your great accomplishments, always be the darling of your listeners.

If you’d like to see Strauss’s conducting for yourself, this film from his 1944 recording of his own tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel, makes fascinating viewing. He’s a model of minimalism and economy of movement - something I know I could sometimes learn from!

With that I’ll leave you to ponder the advice of these masters, I’m off to figure out which section of a recorder orchestra is the equivalent of the brass, with whom Strauss evidently had something of a love/hate relationship! Many thanks to Steve and Michael for sharing these gems with me - if you’ve come across useful musical advice from an unlikely place which might help others why not leave a comment below so we can all enjoy it?

Time travel for musicians - from the Medieval to the 18th century

What’s your favourite era of music? Is there a style of music that communicates to you more clearly than others? Teachers often refer to different periods of music, but what do we actually mean by Renaissance or Romantic music?

Like art and architecture, music is generally defined as belonging to particular stylistic eras. There are often features in common between these genres - for instance ornate decoration is a characteristic of both Baroque architecture and music. But there are also other terms too, which describe particular styles of music, as much as the period of history in which they were composed. At the most basic level, musical eras are divided up into periods of time, as follows:

• Medieval up to around 1400

• Renaissance 1400-1600

• Baroque 1600-1750

• Classical 1750-1820

• Romantic 1820-1900

• Modern/Contemporary 1900 onwards

While these dates are a useful guide, music doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into them, as we’ll see. Some composers were rule breakers, ahead of their time - think of Carlo Gesualdo, composing extraordinary harmonies in the Renaissance, some of which still feel extreme today. In contrast, we have composers like Elgar whose music is firmly rooted in the Romantic style, even though he was writing at the same time as modernists like Schoenberg. As a result the boundaries become rather blurred, so the dates above are a rough guideline rather than strict rules.

Having a sound knowledge of these different periods of music will undoubtedly help you understand the repertoire you play more easily - a composer’s intentions often become clearer when we understand the context in which they were writing. Of course there are some periods in which our instrument, the recorder, barely featured at all. That’s not to say we won’t play music from the Classical and Romantic periods, but in order to do so, we have to be prepared to borrow repertoire from other instruments.

In this blog post, I’m going to focus on three periods of music, returning to later eras in a future post. My original intention was to cover the whole of western classical music, but I quickly realised doing so would result in something worthy of an entire book, rather than a single blog post! Let’s make a start with the earliest years of formal music making…

Medieval Music

Humans have been making music in one way or another since our species first evolved. Initially we used our voices, but instruments made from animal bones have been found from 60,000 years ago. By the start of the Medieval period, music had become intrinsically linked with the church and it was here that vocal music first flourished. This earliest music can be described as monophony - that is a single line of plainsong, sung in unison. Over time this expanded into organum, where two lines were sung in parallel, a fourth or fifth apart - the simplest form of harmony.

But music wasn’t purely used in religious settings. Troubadors travelled throughout Europe, singing secular songs, often about courtly love. These musicians would have accompanied their singing with instruments such as the lute, dulcimer, vielle, psaltery and hurdy-gurdy. Wind instruments, such as the recorder and flute, were also common, as well as simple brass instruments and percussion.

An Ars Subtilior manuscript

Gradually polyphonic music developed during the Medieval period - the use of multiple lines working independently of each other - by composers such as Machaut and Perotin. Later still, in southern France, music of even greater complexity evolved - Ars Subtilior. This was mostly secular vocal music, with enormous rhythmic complexity - some of it unmatched until the 20th century.

A selection of Medieval composers

Hildegard of Bingen, Léonin, Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut, Francesco Landini, John Dunstable.

A musical Renaissance

By the time we reach the Renaissance, music was an important feature of all parts of life, appearing in religious, civic and courtly settings.

Early in the Renaissance, the church was still the most significant setting for music and many composers wrote motets and masses for this purpose, usually based around Latin texts. Polyphonic music had now become the norm, with parts moving independently of each other, and lots of imitation between the voices.

A Renaissance printed part book

The advent of printing allowed music to be published at an ever greater rate, with much of it aimed at amateur musicians. Secular vocal music, such as chansons and madrigals, and instrumental music too, was published in partbooks which could be used in a domestic setting. Before this music had to be copied by hand, a very time-consuming and expensive process, and the advent of printing allowed music to be disseminated much more widely and speedily.

Many different forms of instrumental music developed during this period, including forms such as the toccata, prelude, ricercar and canzona, as well as many types of music for dancing. The Canzona gradually evolved into the sonata, a form which composes continue to us to this day. I’ve written a blog all about the evolution from the canzona to the sonata which you can read here.

Madrigals became one of the most popular types of secular vocal music during the Renaissance, and composers typically used word painting to depict the text they were setting. For instance, in Thomas Weelkes’ As Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending when the text talks of running down the hill we hear the notes in scurrying downward runs.

Renaissance instruments

A bass viol or viola da gamba

The Renaissance saw many developments in musical instruments. The viol family became very became very popular and a huge repertoire of music developed for this family of instruments. Viols (not to be confused with the violin family, which we’ll look at later) have sloping shoulders and a flat back, with six strings (occasionally seven for the bass viol) and frets on the fingerboard to help the player with intonation. Like the recorder, they come in several sizes, from treble down to bass and consort music was composed for endless combinations of treble, tenor and bass viols. This consort repertoire included standalone pieces, such as Fantasias, but dance music too became very popular. Many composers wrote sets of dances, often pairing the Pavan with a faster dance such as the Galliard. I’ve written in more detail about Renaissance dance music here if you’d like to learn more about this topic.

Wind instruments were also popular in the Renaissance, such as the recorder and flute, and they were sometimes combined with strings in broken consorts. Music formed a large part of life in the royal court, in religious, domestic and ceremonial settings. Henry VIII in particular employed a large number of musicians, including a court recorder consort based around the Bassano family.

Precursors to many of today’s instruments developed during the Renaissance, including the violin, lute, guitar, curtal (predecessor to the bassoon) and sackbut (an early form of trombone). These presented composers with an ever greater array of musical colours to explore, although the precise instrumentation was rarely specified in the music. Of course this gives us carte blanche as recorder players to explore any type of music from this period!

The following video features a consort of sackbuts and cornetts. The cornett uses a cupped mouthpiece, much like the trumpet, while the body is made of leather-covered wood and fingered much like a recorder.

Harmony and ornamentation

Although complex polyphonic writing was common during the Renaissance, composers still used simple major and minor harmonies, saving dissonances for special effects and moments of high tension. One harmonic curiosity existed in English music of this period - the use of false relations. This is a simultaneous clash of major and minor harmonies, often at the end of phrases, as rising and falling melodic minor scales meet with each other, as you can hear in the video below. These piquant harmonies are particularly prevalent in the music of composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

Another innovation during the Renaissance was the development of ornamentation, in the form of divisions. In contrast to the free trills and embellishments we encounter in Baroque music, Renaissance ornamentation is more structured, with melodic lines being mathematically divided into smaller note values. Sylvestro Ganassi wrote a very detailed treatise teaching the art of divisions, Opera intitulata Fontegara (pictured below), and performers of the day would have been well versed in adding such decorations to the music spontaneously.

The cover of Ganassi’s Opera intitulata Fontegara

A selection of Renaissance composers

Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, John Taverner, Claudin de Sermisy, Tielman Susato, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando de Lassus, Andrea & Giovanni Gabrieli, William Byrd, Maddalena Casulana, Anthony Holborne, Elway Bevin, Thomas Morley, Peter Philips, William Brade, Claudio Monteverdi, Thomas Lupo, John Wilbye, Giovanni Coperario, Thomas Weelkes, Michael East, Samuel Scheidt, John Dowland.

The Baroque - a musical pearl

Next we come to a period beloved by recorder players - the Baroque. The word itself comes from the Portuguese barocco - an oddly shaped pearl - which hints at the ornamental character of music from this period, stretching from Monteverdi to Bach.

While Baroque music had distinct national styles, these became ever more fluid as people travelled more widely. 17th century London, for instance, was a tremendously popular location for musicians, and became a melting pot of composers from all over Europe. The type of music a composer wrote was often dictated by their employer and location. For instance, J.S.Bach wrote lots of sacred music because he was employed by the church, while Henry Purcell wrote many works for the London theatre scene.

A movement from Telemann’s Methodical Sonatas, showing a simple melodic line and how it could be ornamented. Click on the image to see it enlarged.

Ornamentation developed from the divisions of the Renaissance, into much freer but equally florid decorations, including the trills we perhaps most closely associate with Baroque music. Again, several composers (Quantz perhaps being the most famous) wrote treatises on the art of ornamentation, while others composed music with sample ornamentation as didactic resources - for instance, Telemann’s Methodical Sonatas.

In contrast to the Renaissance, polyphony became less important and the concept of a melody with an accompaniment became more prevalent. This was the period where basso continuo developed - a style of accompaniment usually played by a sustaining bass instrument, such as the cello, with a keyboard instrument (harpsichord or organ) providing the harmonies. Rather than prescribing precise notes for the keyboard player, composers simply indicated the harmonies they desired with numbers – figured bass – written above or beneath the bassline. This is a type of shorthand, which may seem impenetrable at first glance, but allows immense freedom for the harpsichordist. With practice a skilled continuo player can interpret the numbers very quickly and add lots of character to the music.

An extract from a recorder sonata by Francesco Mancini, with figured bass above the bassline

The idea of writing for specific instruments became much more common, allowing composers the ability to create carefully planned contrasts of musical colour. That said, it was also common for publishers to suggest a sonata could be played on a variety of instruments (flute, oboe or recorder, for instance) - no doubt a ploy to sell more copies of the music! Baroque composers began to write solo and trio sonatas for specific instruments and continuo, and it was during this period that the concept of a Concerto for soloist and orchestra evolved. The solo parts in concerti were often highly virtuosic – a feature that was retained and expanded during the Classical and Romantic periods.

Another huge development during the Baroque was opera. The genre evolved a long way during the period, from the free flowing writing of Monteverdi to Handel’s very formal Italian operas of the late Baroque. Opera featured two distinct types of music - recitative and arias. Recitative was a musical imitation of speech, usually for a singer with basso continuo accompaniment, and its purpose was to move the storyline forward. In contrast, the aria was a moment for an operatic character to express how they were feeling about what had just happened. These usually had an orchestral accompaniment and gave singers a chance to demonstrate their enormous virtuosity. At this time it was common for men to take all of the leading roles, even playing female characters. The highest, dramatic roles were most often given to men with castrato voices, with best castrati, such as Farinelli and Senesino, commanding huge fees and mass adulation – the equivalent of a modern day Hollywood star. Lower voices tended to be used for comic roles.

Dance music also continued to thrive during the Baroque, although the dances themselves evolved. Out went the Pavan and Galliard, and in came the Gavotte and Minuet. If dance music of this period particularly interests you I’ve written a blog all about the dances which you can find here.

Baroque performance practice

In common with music of the Renaissance, most Baroque composers gave very little information in their music regarding the way it should be played. Performers of the day would have been taught what was expected of them in terms of articulation, phrasing, dynamics and more. But for those wishing to learn more, numerous treatises were published during this era to help performers. For recorder players, the notable sources of advice are by Ganassi and Dalla Casa in the Renaissance, with Hotteterre and Quantz during the Baroque. But if you’re interested in looking for advice from either period, I can recommend this article which shares a comprehensive list of historical treatises.

Instrumental evolution

There were continued developments in musical instruments during the Baroque period, with composers taking advantage of these innovations. The Baroque orchestra was based around an ensemble of strings, as are today’s orchestras, usually with harpsichord continuo adding colour and texture, as well as filling out the harmonies. The instruments used were almost all members of the violin family - violins, violas and cellos. Sometimes you’d have an instrument doubling the cello line an octave lower - either a double bass (with four strings, like the cello) or violone (which had up to six strings). The popularity of the viol family gradually waned during the Baroque, and Purcell’s astonishing Fantasias (composed at the tender age of 21) are some of the last consort works for viols. The bass viol or viola da gamba persisted though, often used in chamber music as both a continuo or solo instrument.

Baroque violin

The violin family became the most important string instruments of the Baroque. Compared to the viol, they have rounded shoulders, a curved back and f-shaped tone holes in the front of the instrument. Both the viol and violin were strung with gut strings (today’s violins use metal strings), so they produce a softer, less strident tone than their modern counterparts. The Italian city of Cremona became a hugely important hub for luthiers (makers of violins, violas and cellos) during the Baroque, with the most talented makers creating instruments which are still in use today. Violins by Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri are played today by the world’s top virtuosos, although many have been modified and strengthened to suit the greater technical demands of 19th century repertoire.

A Baroque oboe, with fewer keys than its modern counterpart

Woodwind instruments were often added to orchestras to create extra colour - perhaps a bassoon doubling the bassline and oboe, recorder and flute player higher lines. It was common for Baroque woodwind players to be multi-instrumentalists, playing oboe, flute and recorder in the same work, switching between movements. It was only in the Classical period that it became the norm to specialise on a single woodwind instrument.

Some composers also add brass instruments into the mix from time to time - notably the trumpet and horn. At this point they were made from simple lengths of bent and coiled metal, with no valves or pistons, so players had to use their embouchure (shaping the lips and surrounding muscles) to play different pitches in the instrument’s native harmonic series. This also meant each instrument could only play in one key. If a composer chose to use the horn or trumpet in a movement with a different key signature, the player would need to remove a section of tubing, replacing it with one of a different length to make the instrument longer or shorter, thus changing its native key.

A Baroque trumpet

Composers of the Baroque

Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Johann Christoph Pezel, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Matthew Locke, Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann, James Paisible, Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedric Handel, Domenico & Alessandro Scarlatti, Johann Joachim Quantz.

If you want to explore the music from these periods for yourself, clicking on the composer links will take you to some of my favourites from the consort music I’ve shared with you over the last five years.

So there I’ll pause our exploration of the many musical periods - the remaining eras will follow in a future blog. We stop at the recorder’s high point, with the prospect of more than 150 years to be spent in the shadows. However, a second heyday is still to come, about which more very soon!