Musical revolution - pondering the relevance of early music today

While curating the first program for my newly established early music group, Régence sonore, I have been pondering the questions of relevance and relatability of early repertoire nowadays - in short, why bother? What makes us tick? Why is it that three young musicians living in different countries will go the extra mile (or the literal extra hundreds of miles in our case) to indulge in playing obscure and ancient music together? And most of all, why should anyone in the audience care?

Such and similar questions are no novelty to musicians occupied with early music - in fact, specific programming requirements within the industry have already been the subject of many a piece of prose. In an attempt to order my own thoughts on the matter, I anchored them in a specific selection of repertoire. Whilst this very article is thus closely related to the music described, I believe it touches upon significant notions that continue to preoccupy us as musicians, and that are not so different to the issues of our 18th century forbears. You will find the original text below, as authored by Weronika Paine and edited by Alexander Paine. Featured photo by Karpati & Zarewicz.

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Music and art have always been driven by revolution, transforming the creativity of composers and performers who remake, reinvent, and even destroy the status quo - not to mention the inevitable imposition of a new status quo that replaces the old. In this concert, the process of revolution is examined through the prism of the high baroque and its decline, a period well known to many listeners, and simultaneously a time of great musical upheaval and renewal. The aim of the Musical Revolution program is to approach understanding the nuances of the relationship between artists and wider society in an honest yet subversive way, thereby revealing the extraordinary parallel between the decline of the high baroque and our current artistic reality through the performance and interpretation of bold, innovative, and ultimately extremely beautiful music.

Program:

François Couperin – Huitiéme Concert dans le goût Théatral

Jean-Marie Leclair – Sonata Op. V, No. 6

Johann Sebastian Bach – Sonata, a Cembalo obligato e Viola da Gamba, BWV 1029

Johann Sebastian Bach – Sonate für Clavier und Violine, BWV 1019

Francesco Maria Veracini – Sonate a violin o flauto solo e basso: Sonata Terza

Jean-Philippe Rameau – Pièces de clavecin en trio: Troisième Concert

Context

The program curated for this "Musical Revolution" concert has been assembled in order to reflect the intense processes of transformation present in the lives (both musical and everyday) of the music’s composers and contemporaneous performers. By approaching how the role of music informs our understanding of the relationship between artists and wider society in an honest, yet subversive, way, an extraordinary parallel between the decline of the High Baroque and our current artistic reality is revealed, a parallel that reaches across three centuries.

The life of a musician in the early to mid 18th century, although seemingly privileged, was in fact extremely challenging, requiring constant adaptation. The spectacular shock of the French Revolution saw widespread social and cultural change, and proved to be a critical point in musical history as artistic patronage, musical forms, and even the very instruments and ensembles often used in performance evolved and adapted to this new egalitarianism. However, these long-term processes of social and economic change had been gaining significance and momentum for decades beforehand, being rooted in the upheaval caused by the death of the Sun King in 1715; processes which influenced the development of philosophy, art and living standards across the continent.

On the one hand, the decreasing influence of rulers and aristocrats forced them to gradually reduce their artistic patronage, leading to the musicians themselves experiencing increased competition in finding employment in the courts, which had previously served as havens of prosperity for the elites and intellectuals to thrive and achieve great works. Young artists had to demonstrate increasingly higher levels of skill to stand out from their numerous competitors and secure employment, and so many musicians and composers had to discover alternative ways to make a living from their profession.

These social developments of the 18th century were closely linked with economic and philosophical transformations. The strengthening of the bourgeois class and the gradual domination of the music market by amateur musicians in the growing urban agglomerations of the largest European countries meant that it would be these groups that would shape the future of music, both artistically and financially. This phenomenon in turn resulted in composers, teachers and music theoreticians having a new and distinct market in need of repertoire and education; so during this period, the practice of publishing and selling both sheet music and theoretical and pedagogical treatises ​​became both lucrative and favourable on an international scale. In Germany itself, this amateur community dominated the market until the mid-18th century to such an extent that they became the target demographic of many newly published treatises, which, along with new repertoire, were discussed in the music salons that had flourished since the 1730s.

The perception of music as a mercantile profession developed and grew, leading to innovative achievements of pioneers in music and business, such as Rameau, Telemann, and Handel. Naturally, this new reality introduced pragmatic considerations for artists, who experimented with initiatives such as subscriptions for weekly sheet music magazines and ticketed concerts. However, these novel considerations went beyond business opportunities, being coupled with aesthetic evolutions in performance techniques and compositional styles that remain interesting and relevant for today’s performers.

Music

The multidimensionality of this new High Baroque music is based on two pillars: repertoire composed for amateur musicians had to be sufficiently technically accessible to ensure the middle-class community’s interest, whilst also possessing the potential for artistry and virtuosity to be suitably attractive to professional musicians. On the one hand, it was based on the traditions of high art spanning generations, strengthened by pride in the continuity of development of compositional techniques, and on the other, there was a need to keep pace with the prestige of elite connotations by staying within prevailing aesthetic fashions (which F. Couperin complained about in 1717, criticising the Parisians for their passion for new things). The influence of the Italian style, of foreign manners and eclecticism in Couperin and Bach are no secret, and this gradual development of the new galant style - together with the proposal of a new harmonic understanding proposed by Rameau - ultimately led to a revolution in musical thinking and the further shaping of classical music.

The changes that took place in the 18th century were reflected in greatly expanded compositional techniques, which arose from the search for a path in the artist's life: attempts to achieve a delicate balance between the work of a court or church musician and the work of a publisher fighting for the attention of the bourgeoisie by the publication of letters in magazines, books and treatises. Achieving some crowning legacy and leaving an indelible mark upon musical development was the dream of many composers and performers, who often travelled for years from location to new location in search of inspiration, happiness and a means of livelihood. Where before local styles and tastes had generally prevailed in music, compositions were now grafted ever more frequently and successfully with elements from other environments and cultures, flooding the market with a fantastic mixture of courtly, pastoral, popular, foreign, conceptual and literary elements, the exotic and rare blended with traditional structures and textures. The border between the form of a solo work and the orchestral forms that had been intensively developed in the 17th century also became ever less clear, leading to the culmination of the popularity of the concerto grosso form at the turn of the century. This caused the existing niche to expand into a fascinating and versatile chamber repertoire that was made possible by flexible instrumentations, containing influences and inspirations from the various techniques and forms described above.

Our "Musical Revolution'' program chiefly aims to explore the enormous range of compositional, expressive and instrumental possibilities afforded by the artistic upheaval of this period. The program consists of a contrasting combination of four sonatas and two concertos, selected to highlight the incredible depth of variety possible to our small group, which is itself typical of a late Baroque ensemble. The program develops from those pieces that are most traditional in structure, to those that explore the more unconventional possibilities that musicians found were available to them. The opening Concert is written in Couperin's theatre style (being a suite of both dance and quasi-orchestral movements), and is followed by violin sonatas by Leclair and Veracini - the latter of which is a solo piece, but which features a prominent and virtuosic basso continuo part.

Veracini's cosmopolitan style is juxtaposed with two compositions by Bach, both of which escape the era’s traditional confines of chamber repertoire. Sonatas BWV 1019 and 1029 are examples of a pioneering combination of solo and trio sonata textures. Both sonatas feature a single melodic instrument and an obbligato harpsichord, which performs the bass part and basso continuo as well as the counter-voice, achieving the texture of a solo sonata with the contrapuntal variety and complexity of a trio sonata. Through this technique, Bach also refers to the aesthetic of the French style, best seen in the microcosm of our program in the second movement of Couperin's Concert, which features a similar setting. Then, with the status quo having been undermined by Bach, it is utterly deconstructed by Rameau who, in the form of an elegant joke, reverses the roles typically (or even stereotypically) played by instruments in a chamber context, giving the harpsichord a soloist part while the melodic instruments take on an accompaniment function.

Vision

Today, the reality of artists' lives (especially post-Covid) form a close parallel to the situation from 300 years ago. Increasingly intense competition both in achieving the means to carry out artistic projects, and for the attention of an audience in a saturated market cause musicians to expand their artistic offerings; forcing them to acquire new skills and work tools at an unprecedented pace, and respond with attention and flexibility to the changing socio-political situation, interests and tastes of their public. For musicians, this is a challenge that either inevitably overcomes performers who are unable to leave the artistic platonic isolation of their conservatories, or an opportunity that can bring them closer to their audience, translating into a synergistic sharing of the experience of beauty. Through the achievement of the latter, it is our artistic duty to restore mindfulness, delicacy, closeness and trust, reestablishing our internal and external relationships, relationships with our own values ​​​​and with those who accompany us in this experience of beauty. The fruition of this process is the development and elevation of our art to an ever greater meaning and depth, to the benefit of performers and audience alike. In our program, we contemplate artistic life as being a transgenerational process of linear creation that connects the past and the present, and that is our responsibility to build upon this process to achieve a better and more beautiful future.