The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Baroque

  • Guitar, Sewing Machine, and Typewriter

    I was browsing through my old stack of Frederick M. Noad guitar books, acquired when taking classical lessons back in the early 80s. In “Solo Guitar Playing II,” published in 19771, Noad’s comments are witty and engaging, critical and evaluative. He emphasizes an incremental and developmental approach to learning the instrument, the idea being to “master one level before moving to another” (13), but I’ve never met anyone who learned the instrument that way. I’m not even sure what a “level” is when it comes to actually playing, but levels may be more evident and necessary in instruction books than in sitting down on your own and discovering the instrument in your own hands. In any case, crawling is not a prerequisite to walking, and all beginning walkers are amateurs:

    “I have written this book primarily for the amateur, since of the enormous number of people who fall under the spell of the guitar only a handful become professionals, and those not always the best players” (13).

    In his introduction to “Lesson Nine, Style and Ornament: The Baroque Period,” including music from the years 1610 through 1750, since the 1950s in popular resurgence, Noad brought his students up to date on audience expectations, employing an ornamental writing style suitable to a discussion of the Baroque:

    “Although much genuine understanding has emerged from this revival, so has much specious academicism. The first wave of enthusiasts tended to be pedantic and unyielding in their opinions, giving rise to heated controversy and a surfeit of pettifoggery” (129).

    We may notice today that kind of expert or rule-bound performance insistence in other musical forms, including folk music concerts where the audience must pretend they are in a church where everyone can hear the pin drop. And as Noad wrote in 1977:

    “The result of this was that fine musical performances were often dismissed by the new cognoscenti on some technical ground, more often than not based on the execution of ornaments.”

    As if Django himself had ever reached a level where no further experiment was permissible if the music was still to be called Gypsy Jazz, where naming something supercedes the essence of the sound.

    But Noad goes on to say the rule-bearing aficionados had relented a bit:

    “Today a calmer approach reigns with the passing of what Louis Crowder2 has called ‘the panic period of Baroque interpretation,’ and we find with relief that Bach need not, or should not, be played with the regularity of a sewing machine” (129).

    Martin Messier has created music for the sewing machine, and Les Sewing Sisters have created music featuring sewing machines as musical instruments:

    I’ve never learned to sew, but I took typing lessons in high school, though I don’t recall typing much outside of class. The typing lessons were definitely developmental, jjjj ffff, etc., with bells going off all around the room, and keystrokes clicking and carriages returning at varying tempi. The classroom was an orchestra pit. What style each student brought to their instrument was a function of muscle strength and restraint, clarity of touch, rhythm and self-expression, each sitting with appropriate posture and attempting a graceful carriage as instructed, as if playing a guitar.

    The composer Leroy Anderson wrote a piece featuring a typewriter as a musical instrument in 1950. First performed in 1953, it’s often directed with humor, as if it’s not to be taken too seriously, but apart from the typewriter, the music in Anderson’s short piece sounds traditional, unlike, say, what a piece featuring a typewriter might sound like if written by John Cage. Two examples of the Anderson piece, titled “The Typewriter,” follow, the first directed seriously, the second with jocularity.

    1. Solo Guitar Playing, Book 2, An introduction to technique and repertoire for the intermediate guitarist, Frederick M. Noad, Schirmer Books, A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1977. ↩︎
    2. Noad footnotes the Crowder: “See Crowder’s introduction to Denes Agay’s piano anthology, The Baroque Period (New York: Yorktown Music Press, 1971).” ↩︎

  • Awash in Baroque

    How do we recall a past occurring prior to our visit to the planet? The physicists are busy trying to recall the origin of the universe, and beyond. Meantime, I’ve been busy visiting the Baroque era of the 17th and 18th Centuries. We discover timelines to be arbitrarily drawn. Borges explains in his Kafka and his Precursors, arguing how Kafka influenced Shakespeare, for example. And J. S. Bach, even when played on so called period instruments in a cold church in Saxony, continues to be influenced by Thelonious Monk. It’s best to keep the algorithms confused, guessing.

    For some time, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel The Blue Flower sat buried in the to-be-read stack, even as all her other novels were read, some more than once: The Bookshop, At Freddie’s, Offshore. The problem seemed to rest in the tag historical novel. But couldn’t Offshore also be considered a so-called historical novel? In any case, it was Eric Siblin’s The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, thoroughly enjoyed, that brought about a reconsideration of The Blue Flower, bringing it to the top of the stack, opened, and listened to.

    Here is an example of how Penelope influences the Baroque era of Saxony:

    “‘I am not sure about that,’ said Fritz. ‘Luck has its rules, if you can understand them, and then it is scarcely luck.’
    ‘Yes, but every evening at dinner, to sit there while these important people amused themselves by giving you too much to drink, to have your glass filled up again and again with fine wines, I don’t know what…What did they talk about?’
    ‘Nature-philosophy, galvanism, animal magnetism and freemasonry,’ said Fritz.
    ‘I don’t believe it. You drink wine to forget things like that. And then at night, when the pretty women come creaking on tiptoe up the stairs to find the young innocent, and tap at your door, T R I U M P H !’
    ‘There are no women,’ Fritz told him, ‘I think perhaps my uncle did not invite any.’
    ‘No women!’ cried Erasmus. ‘Who then did the washing?’”

    The Blue Flower, 1995, Penelope Fitzgerald, page 30 in the Second Mariner Books edition 2014.

    It’s that bit of who does the washing, to cite but one example, which begins her 20th Century novel and remains a motif throughout where Penelope influences the Baroque era that is her setting.