Program Notes
Contents
- Annette
Richards — Editor’s
Preface
- Emily
I. Dolan — “Toward a Musicology of
Interfaces”
- David
Yearsley — “Strungk’s Lament: On
Mothers, Death, and Counterpoint”
- Tilman
Skowroneck — “A Brit in Vienna:
Beethoven’s Broadwood Piano”
- Richard
Kramer — “Review Essay: Probing the
Versuch”
- Davitt
Moroney — “Gustav Maria Leonhardt: A
Personal Tribute”
- HISTORICALLY
INFORMED ORGANS IN THE 21ST CENTURY: AN EXCHANGE
- Zachary
Wadsworth — “Composing with an
Accent: New Old Music for New Old Organs”
- Martin
Herchenröder — “Composing for
Historically Informed Organs”
- Jonathan
Ambrosino — “The Volume of Creativity”
REVIEW
- Evan
Cortens — “The Legacies of J. S.
Bach” — Review of Engaging Bach by Matthew Dirst
Guidelines for Contributors
Preface
Several previous installments of Keyboard Perspectives have been
devoted if not to single themes then to interlocking ones: Improvisation; Bach
and the Organ; Keyboard Culture in Eighteenth-Century Berlin. As editor I have
mined many of the excellent papers given at Westfield Center sponsored
conferences as a rich resource for our journal. Alongside such thematic
groupings we have published topics at first glance seemingly unrelated to the
main theme of the volume. Nonetheless, these, as it were, à la carte essays inevitably, and often
unexpectedly, converse and contend productively with the other contributions
housed within the confines of a single binding. (I won’t mention all those
essays that were anticipated as the intellectual glue of a given volume but
were never written: buried in the distant corners of the editorial in-box are
the outlines of many brilliant ideas that, though promised to the patient
editor, never materialized. Who am I—herself a notoriously over-committed
scholar who isn’t always up to the editorial deadlines of others—to blame such
never-produced essays for the lack of alignment between the year printed on the
cover of the current volume and the calendar date of its actual appearance?)
In view of the sometimes
unanticipated, and therefore all-the-more welcome, conjunction of ideas in various
past issues of Keyboard Perspectives, I am especially delighted, not to say pleasantly dumbfounded,
that Volume 5 has proven a haven where Emily Dolan’s imagined
“de-keyboardification” can be discussed in close proximity to Davitt Moroney’s
illuminating and moving account of the towering contributions to keyboard
culture made by Gustav Leonhardt, a man who, during his abundant life, would
sooner have skipped naked through the streets of his beloved Amsterdam than
play a pièce croisée on a bananaphone (see Dolan). Such are the fertile juxtapositions
to be discovered among the present volume’s holdings: Dolan’s provocative
reflections on the keyboard as interface and the insurgent attempts at undoing
its long-held hegemony meet a figure—and indeed a readership—dedicated to
nurturing that reign in both traditional and novel guises.
As one reads through the
individual essays and the volume as a whole, themes emerge. The death of
Leonhardt echoes in David Yearsley’s treatment of one of the most profound
Tombeaux in the keyboard repertoire, this one by the much-travelled,
multi-faceted Nicolaus Adam Strungk; intellectually ambitious and emotionally
profound, Strungk’s Ricercar written on the death of his mother is a work both
retrospective and visionary. Perhaps it is fitting that the piece was composed
in 1685, that watershed year in which the three great figures of the next
generation of keyboard greats were born. Full of path-breaking research and
vibrant scholarly connections, Tilman Skowroneck’s article on Beethoven’s
Broadwood not only buttresses Dolan’s arguments regarding the centrality of the
keyboard paradigm in Western music-making, but also documents the seemingly
irrepressible impulses towards innovation furthered by the best thinkers and
craftsmen of the piano in the early nineteenth century; fascinating are the
modifications and evolutions of the piano, that symbol of the “universal
keyboard” in a cosmopolitan, industrializing age.
For keyboardists, both historical
and modern, C. P. E. Bach’s seminal Versuch can be seen to relate to everything we do: connections here are
inevitable. Richard Kramer’s thoughtful and detailed review essay on Tobias
Plebuch’s important new edition of the celebrated Essay is attuned to the subtleties of
Bach’s eighteenth-century German, demonstrating how simultaneously close and
distant this vital text is to our own keyboard culture. As in musical
performance—one of the most important and revealing of Bach’s topics in the Versuch—the devil is in the details; with
refined scholarly eye and ear Kramer guides us through the rewards and
potential pitfalls of this latest contribution to the Versuch’s long publication and reception
history, reinforcing the still undiminished practical value of that book.
Moroney’s encomium is a monument
to Leonhardt the indefatigable performer, teacher, and scholar—and a testament
to how the historical imagination can enrich our own culture. Many kindred
ideas can be heard in the resonant essays of composers Zachary Wadsworth and
Martin Herchenröder, both writing here about composing new music for historical
(or historically informed) organs: once again, knowledge of the past
invigorates the present; the inspiration provided by “old” organs and later
instruments inspired by them yield not a fusty antiquarianism but a vibrant
culture of new composition. Such enlightened enthusiasms for
historically-informed instruments and the musical products of these gifted
composers’ pens (or perhaps computer keyboards?) are followed directly—and
tempered—by the thought-provoking essay of Jonathan Ambrosino, who grapples
with issues of innovation in organ building that themselves relate to Emily
Dolan’s considerations at the outset of the present issue. With great
sensitivity and unmatched knowledge of twentieth-century organ building,
Ambrosino praises those makers, especially the Skinner Organ Company, committed
to pursuing costly new ideas even in difficult economic times, while asking us
to consider whether the sometimes blind embrace of old traditions is best for
the long-term health of organ culture. Similarly nuanced and ever-changing
attitudes towards historical cultural artifacts are traced in Evan Cortens’s
spirited review of Matthew Dirst’s recent book, Engaging Bach, itself a vividly engaging work
of scholarship that traces the ever-shifting image of its subject’s music in
the changing European intellectual and cultural landscape on either side of
1800.
Complementing the writing to be
found here, the CD tucked into the back of the book offers performances of new
music for the ‘historic’ organ and for other period instruments by Zachary
Wadsworth and Martin Herchenröder, with performers Jonathan Ryan, Hans
Davidsson, Angela Early, and Heather Miller Lardin, as well as David Yearsley’s
recording of the Strungk Ricercar and other works by N. A. Strungk and his
father, Delphin, on the historic Arp Schnitger organ at Norden in Germany. In
addition, we have included live recordings of performances by two young
Westfield-sponsored artists—Mike Lee, who won the second and audience prizes at
the Westfield fortepiano competition in 2011, and who performs here with
violinist Wayne Lee, and Ignacio Prego, who won first prize at the Westfield
harpsichord competition in 2012. The wide chronological span, the range of instruments
represented, and the diverse backgrounds of the performers wonderfully
encapsulate the breadth and depth of the Westfield Center’s activities.
It would be rash, not to say
downright foolish, to suggest that the colloquies and collisions between the
various contributions to the present volume are the product of assiduous
commissioning on the editor’s part. The truth is rather that rigorous and
creative scholarship will inevitably find itself in dialogue with the work
around it, just as the Westfield Center provides forums for unexpected and
fruitful exchanges at its conferences and other events and in the lively
sharing of ideas between its members. We on the editorial staff of this journal
feel ourselves privileged to provide a home for the best research, thought, and
writing about keyboards in all their multiplicity and unity—organs, pianos,
harpsichords, clavichords, and even the occasional bananaphone.
— Annette
Richards
Ithaca, NY
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