Dedicated Reading, using the 45-minute method, needs a complement in writing. Before this idea planted itself solidly in my mind, I made loose-leaf comments while I read my course books, and wrote some snide two-word comments in the margins, or drew lines, question marks and exclamation points in the text.

If anyone else is supposed to read your books as well, scribbling in the margins is an unkind habit. So I recently quit scribbling, but I still keep hand-written notes while I read. The important question is, however, what you do once finished. I remember reading some dry textbook once, and when I filed my notes I found another pile of notes on the same book, compiled a few years earlier. In order to avoid surprises like that, I now re-write my notes with the addition of my own observations and comments. Ideally, I do this every day. The true task is, again, to summon the discipline, while observing a reasonable time-frame for this job.

There are some brilliant books on writing available, and they contain an enormous amount of fantastic information. One recommendation I tried was to write 500 words per day. In this method, it is important to just sit and write, and to not edit the text too much – editing is done at a later stage. I suppose that this is a very good method for people who are uncomfortable with what they write and must kill the nagging inner critic before they get going. Occasional I have fits of this behavior, but my usual technique is to rough-edit a text while I write. So the 500-words method is tricky for me, since I do not really want to silence the inner editor at all.

My own solution is Writing Hour, a similarly simple and effective principle: you sit down and write for exactly an hour, no matter how much text you produce. Like in the 500-word method, the first goal is to write, so in spite of everything I said above, during Writing Hour, I do try to suppress my urge to edit. I sit down at four in the afternoon, set the timer for one hour and write. After the beeper goes, I spend a little extra time to iron out the bumps but I try to get off the computer after an extra half hour or so. I admit that this project is easier because it is a joint venture: Robin has her writing hour at four every day as well.

One can, in fact, write a lot in one hour. If there are no notes from reading to be worked out, one can always write blog posts about time management instead. Last week, an article that has been smoldering in the back of my conscience for months finally got started.

The advantage of this method is, again, that one uses a rather limited chunk of time for actually achieving things, which must be seen in contrast to all the almost unlimited time we normally spend agonizing about what we should do first and what we don’t like to do at all, and what we should have done a day, a decade or a lifetime ago. A page written each day is better than all that stomach-ache without anything ever written at all.

The magic ingredient of the method outlined in my previous post is boxes. If we create boxes of time, we can fill them with concentrated activity. If, on the other hand, we have a luxurious chunk of unstructured time ahead, we likely will fail to fill it with anything more elaborate than an occasional morsel of activity (or chocolate).  To be sure, if one, for example, has the task of reducing a book manuscript by 15.000 words in two and a half days, without throwing out all the good stuff and creating a mess with the footnote  and cross-references in the text, the only thing one needs to do is to sit down and do it. The boxes will be five: one workday, one short night, another workday, another short night and a frantic print-out wrap-up, topped off by the ride to the post office to get the final manuscript out of the house. While I have been in such situations, they should not be called normal. Also the required energy level is nothing one should try to mobilize on a regular basis – it cannot be good for one’s health. In normal circumstances, we’re given choices for our activities – and so we choose.

The act of preparing a new piece of music offers too many choices. Most of them can be justified in some really good way. For example, if we hate working on some easy passages, we can claim that some really difficult stuff needs a lot of training first. Conversely, the inclination to jog through a piece without bothering about the difficult passages can be excused because one needs to get a grasp of the structure before one dives down into the details. One can keep practicing the exposition of a sonata, fooling oneself with the belief that the recapitulation is very similar. One can skip the minuets of a suite until the last minute because one might be able to sight-read them, unlike some other movements.  All these evasive moves can be summarized in two words: sublime dawdling.

Some people have excellent reading and memorizing skills and can prepare their pieces in spite of everything. Some other people know so much repertoire that it is clear that they use some special technique for optimizing their time-efficiency. Descriptions of such techniques in the literature are almost always worth reading. The special mental states beneficial for optimal practicing, the ideal levels of discipline and even the preparatory stretch-thy-muscles ordeals brusquely take care of the dawdling. Not very many people, however, have the energy and faith in themselves to carry on like that as a matter of routine. Not everyone has a butler who wakes them up at five in the morning with a cup of strong coffee, either. We desperately need really simple time management methods.

During a masterclass, cellist Anner Bylsma explained one such method – this is how students prepare a chunk of repertoire for the lesson next week – it can be modified in all sorts of manners. What you need is, again, a kitchen timer (or, in the original version of the tale, a 5-minute hourglass for boiling eggs). You take all the music that needs to be studied and number the first five lines from one to five. Then, starting with one again, number the rest of all the lines in the same fashion. Now you tune your instrument (or whatever needs to be done before you begin to work), set the timer and practice the first line no.1 for exactly five minutes. This includes working out the fingerings, going through the arm and hand movements and identifying special difficulties. If possible, you end up trying to learn how to play the fragment a tempo. You stop as soon as the timer beeps, and turn to the second line no.1, repeating the action – and so on, until all the lines no. 1 are done for the day and you can go drink beer. Needless to say, it is beneficial to take a short break every hour or so.

The next day, you proceed with all the lines no.2, taking care to look at the transitions from no.1 to no.2 as well. Lines no.3 on the third day. After the fifth day, all lines have been worked on, and the sixth day can be devoted to playing through everything first slowly, then faster, and for practicing some sections that still require work.

If the individual lines vary in difficulty, you will have to endure it: this is one basic principle that shouldn’t be violated. There is always something to be worked on even on a simple line of continuo (in an obligato sonata), and you don’t have to do it for more than five minutes. If a line is much harder to play than the others, you’ll at least have had the chance to work out a fingering and to get an idea about what the difficulty is. Make a mental note that this part needs more work further on.

First, the disadvantages of this method: it is inherently stupid. You get no idea about the structure of your piece, and you are left in the dark about whether you can play it or not until one day before the next lesson. For playing real music in a real world, it sounds a bit like suicide in five-minute fragments.

Now the advantages: it is inherently stupid. You get no idea about the structure of the piece, and you are left in the dark about whether you can play it or not until one day before the next lesson. On that day, however, you will learn two things: first, it is amazing how much one learns about a structure while working on random unrelated selections. Unless the piece is a structural beast, or very hard to play (or both), you will have a fairly good idea what it is about, and playing through it (or sitting down to analyze) will likely solve the last few question marks for you. Second, you have actually spent all that time working on the piece. Again, provided the technical demands are not very high, or substantially too high for your abilities, you will actually be able to play most of the piece with quite some confidence.

Especially for the preparation of large chunks of only mildly interesting music (for an ensemble musician, there is occasionally no choice), this method has helped me enormously. But I have also used it to to get a grip on some pieces that were longer or more difficult than I was used to at that moment. Naturally, the amount of after-work needed exceeds the orignal one day in most cases.

In early spring, perfectly timed with the snow that paralyzed the south of England for a few days,  I introduced myself at the music department of the University Southampton – a first move in connection with my post-doc research project which is up and running as of 15 March (see a short abstract under the “research” tab). One of the questions I heard was how I combine playing and research. One could add, “how do I manage to write blog posts about either activity?” A look at the frequency of my postings during the last half year provides the answer, “hardly at all.” The rest is time management, to be attempted again every new day. The following posts are about this topic.

One of the reasons why I’m not drinking ale with my colleagues in Southampton at the moment is that the new project requires an awful lot of reading – and I’ve got more relevant books than I can handle right here at home. I used to be a performance practice person with a bit of knowledge about instrument building; now I am confronted with art worlds, how users matter, the history of technology and Viennese concert life, to name but a few of the things I have to know about before I can even begin worrying about the thickness of strings and hammer heads and the correspondence of various Viennese piano firms. All this material is spread out over several horizontal surfaces all over the house, and whether it is read or not depends solely on my discipline. I need discipline to refrain from cutting the firewood in the garden first, from making another cup of coffee, from thinking that I first need to practice for one of the upcoming concerts, from sliding off into the depths and widths of the world wide web and even from doing the dishes. The problem is not so much that reading books about theory isn’t fun (I will not put a parenthesis after this statement). It is that one needs to create space for truly absorbing what one reads. In the absence of a real plot in most of these books, “stuff” tries to invade one’s brain all the time, and one’s thoughts want to wander. But the paragraph that floats past un-understood is in effect an unread one. There are hundreds of candidates for such paragraphs in scholarly books. One must resort to foolproof and simplistic methods for getting the reading done. Half-engaged scholarly reading is a gigantic waste of time.

One such method involves a kitchen timer and a realistic take on one’s concentration span. Pre-conditioned by the German school system, I am comfortable with 45 minutes per reading session. I make sure that there is nothing that will interrupt me during the next three quarters of an hour, I set the timer, I sit down and I read.

So far, this is not too earth-shattering. Everybody can do this. The true problem is what comes next. The 45-minute chunk of dedicated reading only makes sense if one then does something to relax one’s brains. And that’s when we get lost. Especially the cutting of firewood, or other gardening tasks have the potential to suck me in and only release me when I get thirsty or when it gets too dark to work on. And I’m not even mentioning free-time activities like mounting new couplers on my train models, answering e-mail or web surfing. So I take my timer again: 30 minutes this time. It is quite remarkable how many chores get done in 30 minutes – if one actually does chores. After this I am back at my book for another 45 minutes. Usually it will be time for a meal after this chunk of altogether two hours – I am likely to use my next 30 minutes of free roaming for the preparation of the food. After the meal, one should take it easy for another 30 minutes or so. The next part of the day can be divided in the same fashion. If much reading needs to be done, one goes on until the evening.

Musical study can now be incorporated in the plan. The combination of scholarship and playing is not necessarily difficult because of a lack of time. The real problem is that switching between disciplines is hard: part of one’s mind stays with what one just has done and the effort to work on in the other discipline remains half-hearted. This risk is greatly reduced if one determines how long one will work on a specific assignment: there is no need to worry about everything else that needs to be done, or to think about the things one just has left at one’s desk. It is okay to just practice, for just 45 minutes.

The telephone may be answered twice during each work period (the timer gets stopped while one talks) before the answering machine takes over. The cell phone is turned off, naturally (people forget that there is a button for that function).

I wrote at the beginning that time management is something one needs to attempt again every new day. So what is the problem with my kitchen timer method? Apart from the fact that it is subject to a maddening flaw of human behavior, which is that we tend to apply any tested and approved life-improving method only once, it is exhausting. Several 45-minute long intervals of real concentrated reading or practicing cost an enormous amount of energy. So one of the things I learned about this routine is that some discipline is necessary to keep it intact, and that one must allow for occasional lapses and off-days.

This is an expanded version of a comment I posted earlier this week on the hpschd-l. Anyone who wants to get into historical harpsichord tuning and never come out again ought to search the archives of that list. There’s several lifetimes worth of tuning wisdom and tuning folly to be found. In this post, I discuss one randomly picked topic from tuning lore: the so-called inharmonicity of strings and what to do with it.

A very short popularized version of the theory says that in stiff or thick (or both) strings the partials are out of tune; thick, stiff strings act acoustically as a rod. Imagine a 1950s staircase and its iron handrails. The rods that attach them to the ground say (when one tried harping on them, which one wasn’t supposed to do) plink/plank/plaing/plunk/plong, but mostly “ploink”; the “oi” factor in this ploink indicates that something – in terms of a pure sound – isn’t as it ought to be. When tuning very thick foreshortened bass strings or the treble strings in a modern piano, we are facing palpable manifestations of this inharmonicity. Even in the strings of early keyboard instruments there is theoretically some inharmonicity. This wisdom works wonders for the fantasy of some insiders.

1) Stretching the treble. In modern piano tuning, the treble octaves are supposed to be stretched, i.e. tuned somewhat too wide, in order to cope with the string’s inharmonicity. However, this octave-stretching varies mightily, even when we only consider the absolute top level of performance of professional modern piano tuners. If you have access to the following recordings, you can compare how the pianos are tuned:
– Rudolf Serkin’s 1984 recording of Reger’s Bach variatons Op. 81, CBS (variation 5 is a good testing point)
– Vladimir Ashkenazy’s 1996-98 recording of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes & Fugues Op. 87, Decca (listen to the climax of Fugue 24)
– Claudio Arrau’s mid-1980’s Liszt CD that was issued in 1990, with his second recording of the sonata in B minor and other pieces, Philips (listen a bit into “La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell”)
– Murray Perahia’s 1991 Franck and Liszt CD, CBS (the beginning of the Rhapsodie espagnole)
Two of these are examples of extremely stretched trebles (Perahia, Arrau); in the two other ones the stretch is imperceptible for the listener. All examples lie more or less within the scope of ‘what is done today’; nevertheless they seem to vary strongly in the level of deliberateness with which the octave stretch was applied.

In view of the fact that modern equal temperament makes use of very large major thirds anyway, I believe that treble stretch should be applied with a light hand even, or especially, in modern pianos. Listen again to the Major thirds in the spread-out arpeggios at the beginning of Perahia’s Rhapsodie espaniole: in the upper treble, they are painfully and entirely unnecessarily out of true. (All this has obviously nothing to do with artistry and interpretation. I’m criticizing the piano tuner here).

One would think that all this has nothing to do with historical instruments with their relatively thin and soft strings. However, once after I tuned a Viennese 5-octave fortepiano for a performance, someone came with an electronic tuner  (call it a wise-guy-gizmo) and curiously checked what I had done. As it turned out, (and if we can believe the accuracy of that sort of apparatus, which some don’t), I had stretched the octaves slightly, without knowing, or hearing it.

An analysis of this experience should lead to an abrupt conclusion of this chapter: inharmonicity makes one involuntarily compensate in certain ways during tuning. This is something totally different from having to do these things in order to meet the requirements of inharmonicity. In short, inharmonicity does something to us, but we shouldn’t worry too much about doing anything to inharmonicity. Anyone who spends his time doing more than trying to get the octaves subjectively in tune will likely go over the edge and ruin the tuning for the ears of others.

2) Can we actually hear inharmonicity in historical instruments? I have my doubts. It always seemed to me that the inharmonicity of certain fortepiano trebles is difficult to cope with. Inharmonicity in a harpsichord, on the other hand, is not something that has ever caused me any trouble (except, I thought, in the most abysmal boxes). But if I re-think this experience, I must admit that I am talking about false strings, which is not the same as inherently inharmonious strings. False strings (strings with kinks, rust, strings that are guided by loose bridge pins, too thin strings that are excited too strongly and so on) are impossible to get fully in tune, so much is true.

3) In conclusion, I believe that the matter of inharmonicity often gets too much attention in harpsichord and early piano tuning discussions. At a recent early keyboard meeting in Edinburgh, there was a doctoral student who discussed the “problem” of tuning the so-called Vis-à-vis by J.A. Stein (1777),  a large harpsichord-fortepiano combination instrument, at length and to no avail with a specialist in the field. This specialist had tuned the recently restored instrument several times, and he kept telling the man that it had been no trouble at all, in spite of the fact that the fortepiano part of the instruments has thicker strings and a shorter scaling (consequently, the fortepiano strings have a higher degree of inharmonicity than the harpsichord strings – in theory). The man kept asking “but how is this possible considering the difference in inharmonicity between the parts of the instrument?”

The answer is, similar to my reasoning above that, in tuning, everything is possible as long as it is possible, whatever the theory may be. Successful tuning is about whether our ears can cope with a situation or not, and not about whether the theory allows us to cope or not. This realization should help to reduce about half of the woo-woo out there, and leave us more time to keep our 4′ registers in tune, which can be a real pain.

Yesterday I uploaded some samples from the completely remastered version of a CD that was issued in 1993 under the somewhat juvenile title Three harpsichords Seven composers (see here for the uploads). The idea of the original production, initiated by a friend who also provided the contacts, was to combine several harpsichordy instruments (a 2-manual French, a 5-octave 1-manual Italian and a pentagonal virginal) and a selection of suitable repertoire in a sampler fashion which he had seen and liked in a CD production with historical organs.

This disk has been sold out for years. Last year I bought the recording tapes, the master CD and the rights. My friend Erik Sikkema has now made a complete new edition from the selected takes.

Why all this effort, one could ask. Many musicians are actually not very interested in their old recordings – I would characterize my own interest in my early efforts as “mild” at best. But this production is different – it is my first solo CD. It is also different in that it came out of the editing process quite battered and bent. Here’s the story.

The recording was made in late 1992 in the rather large Caroli church in Borås. I had practiced like a maniac and played a long test recital in the same church. The label owner (a person with experience in choir recordings) and my friend and another friend all came per car from Holland. Microphones were set up, test recordings compared, the recording was made and after three days everyone left with a smile and a handshake. After that, it took a while to select the good takes, and I finally received a cassette copy with all the selected bits unedited in a row. Everything was in order, the sound was great. There were, however, two versions of the ‘a’ part of a Byrd Pavane on the tape, and one surplus bar in a Scarlatti sonata. But that’s what, in the age before e-mail, letters were for. I wrote a detailed one and sent it back to the producer on the same day (I found it back in the box with materials. It’s a very beautiful letter).

After that things went bad really fast. The producer called one day and told me with a hint of complaint in his voice that the person who did the editing had made a row about that he couldn’t get the takes together because of the acoustics of the church, and that they had to apply a filter of some sorts to the recording in order to make ends meet – but that the task was nevertheless almost undoable. I had been present at recording sessions; I knew that the amount of takes for my CD was normal and that harpsichord recordings in churches are not uncommon at all. What could I say? I told him to send me a sample so I could get an idea about what he meant.

Then I received a copy of the final master, completely edited and with the mentioned sound filter applied. The editing was good (even if some chord-release-articulations between a few of the Frescobaldi variations were magically missing), but the accidental bonus bit of the Pavan and the extra bar in the Scarlatti were still there. And the sound filter, whatever it really was, had done two really bad things. First of all, it subdued about half of the instrument’s attacks, making the total amount of attacks alternately too soft or out of proportion sharp. The overall impression is as if the plectra were made with soft tips and very little string overlap: sometimes they catch the string a little bit, sometimes more. Second, it generally steepened the decline of the after-sound, making all three instruments sound as if they have rather poor soundboards, loose bridge pins and/or corroded strings.

These were not my instruments any more. About an hour after I had opened the envelope I called the guy, but yes (or no), the CD was already in production, there was nothing to be changed now. This is the version that was sold in small batches in Holland until it was gone. I never listened much to it, couldn’t bear it.

Erik now used the unfiltered original tapes and, in a few hours of work, re-edited the entire disk. I was present to fix some final issues: there is no problem with the acoustic at all, and certainly not with the amount of takes. The real problem, as it turns out, is a good dose of background hiss from the original tapes. This was what the noise filter (because that’s what it was) was supposed to subdue. The story about the editing difficulties must have been an invention. In the new version, we simply accepted the hiss, because the overall improvement is otherwise quite dramatic: the new disk resembles a good analogue recording, and the instruments sound not at all unlike the real thing any more. Although this had to wait until 16 years after the deed, the final product makes me very happy.

Of course, I would be interested to issue the CD again in its resurrected form and with a good distribution this time. But what we’ve got now is good as it is: the order is restored at last!

I am still fighting with Bruce Haynes’s The End of Early Music. For me, the book turned out to be even more depressing than its pessimistic title suggested. It is truly the end of a lot of things when the art of text editing is being addressed in such a nonchalant manner as here (would you, in a scholarly book, expect a pallet-palate blooper?), and when the author’s promise to present the reader with “merely personal reflections on the present state of the historically informed performance movement” (p. viii) clearly serves as a free ticket for abandoning great thoughts (of which there are quite a few in this book as well) whenever their proper development becomes a little tricky. This is the opposite of a page-turner: one of those books where, right from the first page onward, the reader keeps mumbling “uh huh, this makes sense, but what was the point again?” And I am not even addressing the issues where I disagree with Haynes; these do exist, too.

Specifically, I disagree with the polemic undertone of the book, which disqualifies it as a HIP textbook, which it otherwise might have been. Polemics in Early Music were an often annoying reality of the discussions of the sixties and seventies. The pointed statement of otherness was the fuel that kept HIP performers going, and the gleeful celebration of aesthetic outrage was the main theme of the HIP–mainstream confrontation – both for the performers and the public. But this is history. Even when Taruskin published his collected work on the Early Music phenomenon of the 20th century in his book  Text and Act (1995), the polemic component of his style had become outdated. Clear thought – especially analytical, retrospective thought – can, in fact, be presented without the aid of vigorously kicking boots. The historian and the politician ought to be two different persons.

Tvelve years after Taruskin, Haynes can afford to be less belligerent. He writes with a smile and a wink. He loves anecdotes. But the boots are still there, and they come into action whenever you least expect it. He is less organized than Taruskin as well, which is even more problematic. His discussion of the canonization of Early Music, for example, is too hand-hewn to be truly deep, and as such it fails to be helpful for those who play Early Music today – who actually owe their dedication to their profession to experiences such as having heard Haynes in concert when they were teenagers (like I did).

All this makes me sad. I have always had great respect for Haynes as a performer, and I regularly consult his dissertation on pitch standards for my work. I would like to love his book – but I really don’t.

As said, I am still fighting. If I am still fit to write when I’m done reading there is likely more to come.

To anyone who occasionally plays organ continuo (not the most audible of activities unless one pulls out all the stops, which people tend to dislike), the typical agonies of a baroque band’s double bass – or violone – player will sound familiar: the 16-foot player’s possibilities to influence the course of musical events seem heavily restricted (unless s/he resorts to playing wrong notes on purpose). The high parts do all the shaping and the only thing you can do is follow and not despair.

This is not really true – just consider what a 16-foot player’s indifferent attitude towards heavy downbeats can mean for the rest of the ensemble (especially in Allegros, which under this regime will likely transform into Accelerandos), and how the upper parts’ striving for a historical intonation can be thwarted by equal-temperament thirds (or WWII airshow-from-afar noises, just as another example) from the double bass. Only when the double bass truly becomes part of the ensemble instead of remaining a hitch-hiker, takes an active role in the shaping of phrases instead of waiting for directives from above, and actively engages in being in tune with the ensemble instead of merely trying not to be out of tune with her or his own open strings, the ensemble as a whole will sound truly good and professional. Anything else is an illusion.

We are lucky here in Sweden. There are several ambitious 16-footers around, but I’m especially thinking of Mattias Frostenson (who tells me that he has no website), with whom I played several hands full of Glorias (Vivaldi) and Swedish Masses (Roman) throughout this autumn. The best ideas about articulation and phrasing usually come from him, and if the continuo gets out of tune, it is never because of the bass (usually because of the harpsichord, actually). This is the standard worth considering – below this standard, compromises very quickly become unbearable.

Given the abovementioned “nobody can hear me”-agony one should take special care to show one’s appreciation every time a double bass player is really good, or s/he’ll never learn about her or his true importance. Provide some extra chocolate during the rehearsal breaks. Smile. Chat (not during the rehearsal!) Write supportive blog posts. That kind of thing.

Most choir directors (if they are into oratorios or passions at all) conduct perhaps two bigger works each year (I’m thinking of those who also have church services to attend to, and a restricted budget). An average choir conductor can only go so far with the preparations of these concerts – there is so much to see to. Initiatives from the musicians are generally welcome, even expected. You hire a baroque orchestra – you expect that they know their stuff. Many arias go un-conducted at these events.

The cellists and organists offer a special recitative service to suit the situation. A very large percentage of our conductors rely happily and benevolently on that service: the continuo players and the singers get time for getting used to each-other’s style and for testing all the recitatives once, and that’s usually it.

What likely happens during this ‘getting used’ is the following: cellist, singer and organist play through a recitative, listen to what needs to be improved in terms of togetherness, character and note length, make perhaps some annotations in their music and try again. In difficult cases they perhaps try another time. That’s all.

One recurring potential stress-moment is caused by varying opinions about note and chord length: secco recitatives require one short chord at the beginning of a phrase and after that, during the phrase, no (or very little) support, even at harmony changes. Some singers or conductors ask for longer chords in certain important spots (a classic is the part of Jesus in Bach’s St. John’s Passion, which generally is played legato). If the decision is to play the chords legato one naturally needs to play all the harmony changes within the phrase that one normally wouldn’t bother with (this may require some getting used to). One also needs to mark these places so one recognizes the nature of the special request during a performance. At the end of a tour, the accumulated five or six different annotated versions will literally stand out on the page. An eraser is your friend in those cases, and you’ll need some time to get your score back in shape.

Socially, the tryout session relies on a well-working triangle: singer, cellist, organist.  Generally spoken, the first run-through is meant to sound messy in order to show where the problems lie (better now than during the performance). Sometimes different placements need to be tested because it is difficult to hear what’s going on. Sometimes, the singer wants to test a few different versions or expressions of a passage. Sometimes, small misunderstandings need to be addressed verbally. During all this, everyone strives (or should strive) for a comfortable, direct and intuitive approach. It is VERY difficult to get chords together if one is tense, nervous or upset, no matter how well prepared one might be. With good people involved, this approach generates outstanding results in very short time.

There are two vicious enemies to a good recitative rehearsal:

1) other musicians, who try to settle family matters over one’s head, or oboe players who discuss and test their reeds, while one is desperately trying to hear the singer and to get one’s chords in place. Don’t tell me this never happens.

2) those very few ambitious conductors, who do not trust the peace. They have no patience with first run-throughs and hence they intervene: “no, no, bar 40 is not together!” (this is a bit like entering your house after a rainstorm and the first thing you hear is “you’re wet!” It is only because we’re dealing with music that such samples of perceptiveness are considered necessary, even brilliant). They grant no time for making safe and clear annotations. After rocking the boat for a while, they’ve created proof for themselves that it is safer if they conduct the whole recitative from beginning to end. Conducting secco recitatives is the same as showing the cellist and the organist what the conductor thinks the singer means. If it’s not ineffective (which it likely is), it is sure annoying. Lucky are the contino players who encounter such a conductor at the end of a tour, after a bunch of totally fine and unperturbed recitative performances, and not at its beginning. You may feel a bit grumpy on your way home, but that’s okay.

In September, I participated in a program that was called Music of the 18th century at European Courts. This all-embracing title reminds me a bit of a flimsy book in my possession called Chinese cooking, or the yet to be written twenty-page ‘Guide to Western Philosophy’, not to mention the greatly anticipated fifty-page (because of the photos) ‘ history of the automobile in the 20th and 21st centuries’. (Nicholas Cook’s Music: A Very Short Introduction, on the other hand, is quite readable in spite of its mere 137 pages sans notes.)

We teased the leader-planner of our orchestra a lot about this – especially since about half of the program consisted of music from Bach’s cantatas. His excuse was – naturally – that he had been asked to give a name long before he knew what music we were playing. But even without this complication: to give a program a name, i.e. to transform an idea of pieces-to-play into a product, is really hard.

Consider a program with random snippets of quite optimistic religious music from the early  German  Baroque called “de Profundis”. We were only saved by the fact that we are in a country where the average inhabitant’s command of Latin begins and ends with ‘carpe diem’ (because all their boats are  called like that). Or what about “in Mozart’s and Haydn’s manner” (for mixed Classical chamber music), “Music’s Venice” (Monteverdi) or the vague “Europe 1697, a journey in time and space” (some music and an actor reciting eternal wisdom with a strong flat-country accent). Well, we did sell our concerts, so apparently this is the way to go.

Ensemble’s names are even harder to find. After gathering some experience with a prize winning ensemble called “Les Folies” (I later found out that there are more groups called like that. At the time, I was astonished about this fact) and a group called Trio Franciolini (A blatant case of non-sequitur: Franciolini was a 19th-century harpsichord forger), I am now playing in a Baroque group called “Corona Artis”. During the 17th and 18th centuries, music was usually not considered the crown of the arts at all. So how did we get stuck with this name?

Our group was built from scratch, by ways of two auditions during the fall of 1991 and a few follow-up convulsions. Even before the recruiting was properly concluded, a name had to be found. I remember that I had collected several pages of writing and drawings when I presented my research to our producer. As a result of my personality, most of the material was explicit nonsense. Apart from variations on the Borealis theme (in spite of the fact that our base, the Swedish city Borås, has nothing to do with this) I offered about fifteen ideas like “Les Miserables”; “The sleeping beauties”; “Les Enfants Terribles” etc. He made a gratifyingly sour face and subsequently posted a short article in our organization’s internal Monthly, asking our musical community for help – with no results. No wonder: the reward was a free-choice CD with 17th or 18th-century music…

So one day this producer calls me (the ensemble leader at the time) and says Corona Artis. I say Corona Artis what. He says, the name of the group, what did you think. I say aaahm, well. He says, I talked with all the others (there were some others at that point), and they approve of the name. I say if they approve, what can I say?

So he called the others and told them that I had approved of the name Corona Artis. That’s why we’re called like Mexican beer at a vernissage.

The 5-octave two-manual harpsichord has friends and enemies within the harpsichord community. I mean the large Dulcken model, the expanded Mietke, but first and foremost the Big French Double. Some teachers and students are reported to actually expect harpsichords to be like a Big French. Malicious tongues talk about the Steinway-ification of harpsichord playing. This is not as far-fetched as it seems: I am just reading a job notification for a university piano professor where it says “The School of Music is designated an All-Steinway School”. The step to “this department of Early Music performance provides an exclusive French Double environment” seems small.

Builders hate that they never get to make one of those other really interesting instruments with short octaves or wacky dispositions because the Universities and Conservatoires around the globe all want a big uniform two-manual box. Stylistic purists argue that the resulting loss of variety is evil. Nit-pickers of style would even say that playing Frescobaldi on a Big French is as remote from the original idea as is playing Mozart on a Bösendorfer. On the other hand, this type of harpsichord enables the performer to choose freely from 250 years of repertoire without blinking once. A preference for the one-size-fits-all harpsichord is, in fact, understandable: it seems so practical.

There may be nothing wrong with preparing one’s pieces in the relative safety of a standardized environment – I, too, prefer to reduce risks by preparing and performing my music on the same instrument whenever possible – but, on the other hand,  a bold assertion of one’s French-Double-rights really doesn’t belong to this profession at all. If we take harpsichord education seriously, a standardization is in fact not only highly impractical but downright wrong. The differences between historical harpsichord types are so great that one does well to get accustomed to it if one wants to become a true harpsichordist. Having to adjust to various octave spans, compasses, touches and dispositions belongs to our profession. If there is any time to actively work with all these differences, it should be during education.

Playing concerts is a different matter altogether. Harpsichord recital practice has no room for subtleties. Even if making a living by playing the harpsichord has, in fact,  worked rather well for me for the past two decades, it remains quite a challenge to sell solo recitals – for me as for anybody else. A mixed recital is often the only thing that attracts attention. The market has no tolerance for arguments that exceed our “it’s going to be nicer than you think, why don’t you try?” pleas, addressed to yet another concert organizer who, nevertheless, keeps making a doubtful face (or worse). If I want to be seen as a reasonable person, I will have to restrict proposals of whole evenings of single styles and composers to specialized festivals and dedicated occasions.

Now if I don’t want to carry two or three different harpsichords around with me in order to turn my recital into an informed show (and believe me, I’ve done even that), I’ll have to find a compromise. And this is where the Big French makes its glorious entry. I’ve played anything between Philips and Mozart on my French harpsichord. Some of the results are re-interpretations of the original circumstances, some are worse or better compromises for the historically aware – some repertoire actually works really fine, if the instrument is a fine one.

Then again, one can always incorporate some Duphly or Forqueray into one’s programs to show where these instruments truly excel, and tell the audiences all this.