I’m working on a substantial rebuild of the action of a harpsichord here in Montreal, and keep running into unexpected frustrations. First off, the jacks:
I knew that the jacks were a problem from the start – many performers have complained about the repetition being unpredictable. With a little fiddling, I figured out that what’s happening is that, when the jacks drops past the string, the tongue goes flying back far more than necessary, to the extent that it isn’t back in position to play again when you might want it to. On some jacks, this is controlled by the toe of the tongue hitting the inside of the register, on others, it just isn’t a problem because of the geometry. Some discussions on Facebook have led me to believe that a small distance, less than 10mm, between plectrum and axle can help a lot here, and these jacks have closer to 15mm.
A more common fix for this is a staple or thread limiting the motion of the tongue, and many of these jacks had a thread fitted around them:
Unfortunately, most of them were far too loose to actually do any good. In a few cases, small pads (felt, leather, cardboard…) had been glued to the backs of the tongues to stop them against the thread sooner, and this is what I started doing:
Before I got to far though, I realized that the thread’s position was also going to be a problem! It’s so high that it will inevitably get in the way of the dampers. Also, a loose thread is never going to stay in position properly, so it won’t work consistently. Eventually, I decided to get rid of the threads entirely, and simply glue on little strips of cardboard across the back of each jack:
It’s a little ugly, but works much better than the thread did, and is doesn’t get in the way of work on plectra or dampers as much. The only real downside, besides the aesthetics, is that it probably won’t last as long as a well-attached thread would. If one comes of though, it’s very easy to replace, so I think overall, it’s an improvement!
The next steps with this harpsichord have been to rebalance the keys (so much unnecessary lead!), completely redo the stagger and replace most of the plectra. It’s been a huge job, with four ranks of jacks (224 all together), made much worse because of little inconsistencies in the original construction that I keep discovering. A few of the mortises in the tongues were punched off-centre, making them very prone to splitting for example. Also, many of the tongues aren’t sitting properly in the tongue body, leaning forward or backwards, making it very hard to voice the plectra, since they are very inconsistent lengths. Adding to this is the strings which have been rather inaccurately pinned to the nut. I considered repinning the worst of them, but there just isn’t much room in some places, and I didn’t want to add yet more time to what has turned into a very big job!
I’ll be performing a clavichord recital next Sunday, something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Part of the challenge has been finding a venue that works – a quiet clavichord needs a certain acoustic, a certain size of room, and a certain complete lack of background noise! Previous performances have suffered due to nearby traffic, excessive carpeting, etc… But this time, I think it’s in a wonderful space, where it will sound very nice indeed! Église Notre-Dame-de-Grâce is a huge stone church, but has a fine little chapel off to the side, with just the right resonance.
I had been hoping to do this port myself, but life got in the way, in the form of a new baby! Emiko was born in June, and, while being utterly awesome, is not exactly helping with taking on new programming tasks!
This fall, I’m going to be teaching a class at McGill University for the first time. I’ve filled in for a few days of this continuo class before, but this year I’m responsible for the whole thing! First day is tomorrow!
If you don’t want to deal with youtube, here’s the mp3 directly:
[audio:https://jono.redowl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-28-storace_passacagli.mp3] MP3 Download
Posted in music, recordings | Comments Off on Storace Passacagli
It’s been a while! I haven’t been recording like I had planned because I was working too much on the music for the Bruges competition. This is now finished, so I’m coming back to the blog!
And here, finally, is the fugue to accompany the prelude I recorded a while ago!
And about this, I just have to say that Bach is hard. So many little notes… even a short piece like this is exhausting to play! There’s really no chance to catch your breath once you get started! It’s really getting to be fun to play this though.
It’s been a while since the last recording – I spent a week in Winnipeg, another week in Fredericton, accompanied a pile of auditions at McGill, and have been learning Scarlatti, and Rameau both of which take me forever.
But now I’m back with a bit of Bach! I always have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Bach. The music’s fantastic, of course, but it tends to be so dense with counterpoint that it never sits still – most pieces are essentially saturated with moving 16th notes! This in contrast to the D’Anglebert I recorded earlier, where, even though there are a lot of notes, and plenty going on, you still get cadences where you can catch your breath. Not so much in Bach! My goal with this music is always to let it flow as smoothly as if it were a ‘normal’
piece despite all that clutter. (Bach fans, don’t hate me!)
Here’s the C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book II. I’ll try to get the fugue recorded in another week or two, though I’m spending some time in Quebec city, so can’t guarantee anything.
So, my clavichord started getting lonely with all the attention given to the harpsichord lately, and so I decided I should spend some time with it! Clavichord technique does not take kindly to neglect, I have found. It took quite a while before I could do more than butcher anything I tried to play.
I finally did get something recorded though: Attaingnant‘s setting of Sermisy‘s Tant Que Vivray. It’s curious writing for the keyboard – there isn’t a lot of French repertoire before the clavecinistes come in a hundred years later, and what 16th century music is out there is rarely played these days. But I think it has a certain charm, especially on the clavichord.
After uploading this, I realized that my computer speakers completely massacre this recording, even more than usual. I can barely even discern the melody at the beginning! Give it a chance with headphones or half-decent speakers, if you can.
As a followup to last week’s allemande, I’ve recorded the prelude from the same suite. I adore unmeasured preludes! If ever there was something that was purely harpsichord music, it would be these. They make the instrument ring in a way that nothing else can! And I love having the freedom to do almost whatever I want with it.
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to play it the same way twice – I considered editing a few sections together for this recording (some parts are not easy!), but decided that would really be a last resort. Finding two takes that fit together technically and musically would be a bigger challenge than just playing the whole thing through!
Speaking of the recording, I have an almost identical setup as I did last week: two Oktava MK-012s, angled at about 90°, four feet or so off the floor, maybe 8 feet away from the harpsichord. Is this the best arrangement? Probably not – suggestions are welcome! I plug it all into a Tascam US-122 which connects to my laptop, and then record and edit everything using Ardour running on Ubuntu linux. Yay for free software!
The only thing I changed for this recording is to tweak the equalizer settings a little bit – the harpsichord’s mighty bass doesn’t really come through on the recording, so I nudged it up just a little.
I’m a big fan of French unmeasured preludes, as I’ve mentioned before. I always have a blast trying to interpret all the little ambiguous notes, and trying to make them musical. They’re also such exquisite pieces of pure harpsichord music! (of course, unmeasured preludes exist for other instruments as well, but they they’re idiomatic for those instruments instead!)
François Couperin wrote a series of 8 preludes in his L’Art de toucher le clavecin which are particularly intriguing because, while he suggests they be played freely, they are very precise in their rhythmic notation as well, so there’s always a question of how much you can step outside of those rhythms, and how you do so.
A few weeks ago, Thomas Dent posted a recording of the first prelude to the harpsichord mailing list that were quite striking in how he moves individual 8th notes around in a fairly systematic way, but keeps the overall rhythm fairly strict. Personally, I feel that maybe this is a little bit backwards – to me, small changes within a stable beat characterize not an unmeasured piece, but just a typical baroque, and especially French baroque, approach to meter and rhythm. What makes the unmeasured pieces special, to me, isn’t that the small notes are flexible, but that the big beats don’t have to have the structured regularity that most French music, with its basis in dances, always seems to have.
With that in mind, I made a few recordings of my own of the first prelude, trying to emphasize different things. First of all, I tried to do the opposite of Thomas, just to see if I could! This version keeps the eighth notes fairly regular, but speeds up and slows down and stops on a few big beats. I think this is more or less the way I used to play this.
Then I tried adding in the sort of 8th note flexibility that Thomas talks about, while still thinking about the bigger beats. I think it’s quite successful, though I could stand to spend a bit more time on it, for sure! I found that, even though the notated rhythm is very similar from bar to bar, there are many different ways that Couperin uses the syncopated notes. Sometimes they are suspensions, sometimes they’re anticipations, etc..
Finally, I just bashed through, half-way ignoring the page, and making up my own sorts of things. Great fun! It’s not just pointless silliness though, by any stretch: I find it very useful, when trying to find out what little notes mean, to try improvising similar patterns. When improvising, I won’t play something ‘just because it’s there’ (because it isn’t!) but rather, I play things because it makes sense for where I’m taking the music. Doing this with this particular piece gave me a better sense of where the harmonies move, and what each syncopation is really trying to accomplish. Definitely a useful exercise!
So what conclusions are to be drawn? Mainly that there are many ways to interpret any piece as free as a prelude, measured or not. I think it’s important to keep in mind the underlying harmonies though, and to find a reason for every note to be where it is. Without that figured out, it’s nearly impossible to play the piece in a way that will hang together.
Posted in music | Comments Off on Couperin Preludes
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