Bach #3

It's been a long time since I've posted anything on my Bach project.  This past Sabbath, I was invited to play offertory and special music at a little church in Burien.  The connection was that one of our former associate pastors is now the pastor at that church.  I prepared the first and third movements of the G Minor Partita.  If you're on facebook, you've already read this heart-warming moment one day last week:

This afternoon, a boy of about 8 or 10 was sneaking around under my open window with a smart phone, trying to record my violin practice. I stopped playing and made acquaintance of him and told him he didn't need to hide; I'd be be happy to let him record. He ran off and came back with his three sisters and they listened some more. The oldest girl said the music was really beautiful, and I told her it was written by Bach who lived from 1685 to 1750. It was Really Old music. She was quite amazed and wanted to know if Bach played that music. I said I wasn't sure, since he mostly played the organ, but he wrote it at least...

I've played this Siciliano at least 1000 times over the years.  I'm positive it's been that much, but I don't really have an accurate count on how much more it might be.  And even with that much playing, it's not perfect.  It has also gotten stale, so you'll see in the video (and all last week, too) that I took the liberty of holding the bow at the grip rather than at the frog.  The balance is quite different and the bow behaves differently - lighter, more Baroque-ish.  And it was just what I needed to shake up my 1001st time and get some new inspiration.  For some reason, I find this movement fiendishly difficult to start.  After a phrase or two, I get into the swing and the mood and the color, but it's like I have to hear some of it before I understand it.  Every single time.

I made this recording in the back yard of the house where I teach on Fox Island yesterday afternoon when I had a break between students.  I hope you enjoy it.

The thing I most appreciated about visiting that little church last Sabbath was that the service had about nine or ten hymns, and we sang all the verses of each.  So rich, thought-provoking, and reflective of our amazing God.  

In contemplation of Him, here are a few Bible passages I looked up last night:

Words of Jesus from John chapter fourteen, verses one through four, and verse six:

"Don't let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God, and trust also in me.  There is more than enough room in my Father's home. If this were not so, would I have told you I am going to prepare a place for you?  When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am.  And you know the way to where I am going.... I am the way, the truth, and the life."

The words of Luke in Acts, chapter one, verses nine through eleven:

Jesus was taken up into a cloud while the apostles were watching, and they could no longer see him.  As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them.  "Men of Galilee," they said, "why are you standing here staring into heaven?  Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!"

The words of Paul from First Thesselonians, chapter four, verses thirteen through seventeen:

And now, dear brothers and sisters, we want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died so you will not grieve like people who have no hope.  For since we believe that Jesus died and was raised to life again, we also believe that when Jesus returns, God will bring back with him the believers who have died.

We tell you this directly from the Lord: We who are still living when the Lord returns will not meet him ahead of those who have died.  For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God.  First, the Christians who have died will rise from their graves.  Then, together with them, we who are still alive and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clods to meet the Lord in the air.  Then we will be with the Lord forever.

Reality Show: Rode #2

I haven't recorded Rode Caprice #1, so you didn't miss anything. I just jumped right into #2, because I always liked it. I diverged from the Bach a bit, but I'm working on prepping Bach G Minor, 3rd movement, so you'll get that next recording you've been dying (!) for. If you're my mom, you'll notice that so far I've only recorded things I learned about twenty years ago. There's a reason for that. They're easier to pull back when you're super out of shape than newer stuff.


But before you hear the Rode, you get a super cute clip of Anne. She's been watching my new pre-Twinkle group in Gig Harbor, which consists of two little girls, ages four and five. She requested a foot chart this week, and spontaneously started practicing Coin on Hand for Square of the Arm (page 171 in Ed Sprunger's book Building Violin Skills.)

 The Rode is not as technically perfect as I might like, due to my lack of practicing it, but at least it is interesting in an interpretive sense.

Reality Show: Bach #2

I've been dragging my feet on posting the Bach G Minor Fugue which comes right after the Adagio.  I recorded it in early December and was horrified by what I heard on the playback.  Despite the fact that I have played the piece well over a thousand times and have performed it several, it had gotten out of shape both physically and, shall we say, spiritually.  I went back to the drawing board, and I reinvented my interpretation of the seed from which the whole piece grows.  Not that the new idea is better than the old, just that I needed some fresh material to avoid going down the same road that was no longer inspiring.

It used to be this (all separate bows, aiming for the fourth note):

Now it's this (starts with four up-bows, aiming for the last note):

I put in some time, including changing most of my bowing scheme, and recorded it again in mid-December, and it was certainly new, but boring.  Very boring.  I'd worked out some sections and technical issues, but the love was not there.

There are so many challenges in the piece.  The biggest for me right now is that it's three pages of nothing but eighth notes and sixteenth notes, so in a certain way it's a marathon, but every note has meaning - it's about the journey, not just making it to the end.  Bach was so intentional - none of the notes was thrown onto the page for convenience or because it was "good enough."  I had to rediscover the big goal points, the big cadences, the terrain within.  And learn to let the phrases breathe again - rushing through them lends monotony that Bach never meant.  The organ figures prominently in my thinking: different voices and different parts of the piece are played on different keyboards with different pipes. I started listening to recordings of others which I hadn't done for a long while, and I discovered that over the years (I first learned the piece in eighth or ninth grade), I'd let my tempo creep faster and faster, leaving less time for beauty.  In a certain way, fugues are incredibly academic, and Bach himself was a very academic composer, but what I love about his writing is how he can combine the apex of mathematical and musical integrity with a profound and timeless beauty.  I found a period performance recording of Rachel Podger on YouTube, which I have enjoyed immensely.  Performance practice musicians are bound to a different set of "shoulds" and "should nots," and there is a lot of freshness and drama to be drunk in.

I finally recorded it last Thursday and decided it was time to put this out *there* since I was slated to play it for offertory at church this past weekend, so it was a ready-or-not situation.  The recording I made took a couple of lines to get off the ground, but I was relatively happy with the end result (recording crammed in during a toddler nap time between lessons)...

Reality Show: Bach #1

This is the first in what I expect will be a long-running reality show series in which I will be playing violin pieces for you in various scenic locations, such as in front of the closet door in the piano room, with the usual background noise of my life.

Today I bring you J.S. Bach Sonata No. 1 in G Minor: I. Adagio.  I did two takes after I finished teaching last night, because I realized when I listened to the first take that it was pretty close to perfect technically, but logy in the expression department - e.g. slow, even, boring vibrato.  The second take was more interesting, although it does have a couple of slightly out-of-tune notes, and the interpretation is not as integrated as I might wish - some of it feels a little rushed.  I haven't put any deep thought time into the interpretation lately, so this is what you get.  You can also hear Anne standing on the desk behind the camera saying, things like "Down!", and just after I finish playing she says, "Done!  Camera!" and you can hear Jared practicing in the living room.  Also, several times while I'm playing I am peering over at the desk to make sure Anne isn't about to leap off and injure herself.

For many years I have imagined this piece as the columns which have remained standing from an ancient Greek temple on a hilltop under a pale blue sky.  An artist has strung up narrow, colorful silk scarves between the column tops, and the hues are billowing in the breeze.  The columns are represented by the thick, substantial chords, and the scarves are represented by flurrying scales and twirling ornaments.

I have a second image for this piece, as well, where I look at it in its place as the first movement of a set of six monumental works totally twenty-seven movements, depending upon how you do the math.  In this scheme, Sonata No. 1 and Partita No. 1 depict the Christmas/Nativity/Incarnation portion, Sonata No. 2 and Partita No. 2 depict the Passion portion, and Sonata No. 3 and Partita No. 3 depict the Easter/Resurrection portion.  

This Adagio and the fugue which follows set a dark, sombre, and somewhat intense backdrop for the more pastoral Nativity movement which follows, leaving us to contemplate the Incarnation from God's point of view.  What was it like for an all-knowing, all-powerful, and entirely pure Being to pour himself into a limited and breakable human life with firsthand knowledge of temptation and suffering?