Royal Conservatoire of Music, Brussels Symposium:
Performance Practices of Basso Continuo on the Violoncello in the 18th Century 29th April 2023
David Watkin
“Corelli op5 ‘Violino e violone o cimbalo’?” 25 years on
Researching French cello methods as an undergrad during the 1980s I kept coming across references to the practice of realising figured bass on the cello – something I was struggling to learn on the piano. Soon, for me learning harmony “at the fingerboard” was easier than at the keyboard.
40 years, an Early Music article, and many performances and recordings later, including a “dialogue” with the Bach Suites, I am still promoting this approach and teaching these techniques. Nowadays Nicholas Cook’s ‘composer-improvisor-performer’ paradigm makes this “practice as research”: what is the future for improvised chordal accompaniment on the cello?
It’s a great pleasure to be here. I’d like to thank Marc Vanscheeuwijk and his team for their kind invitation and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland for funding my visit here today.
I wanted to start by telling you a little bit about my journey with this thing we are talking about. As an undergraduate I was researching French cello methods from around 1800 and came across frequent references to chordal accompaniment, in particular of recitative. It sewed a seed for me as a remedial piano player, being forced to do keyboard harmony: I found I could do it much better at the cello. So “figured bass at the fingerboard” became a really important part of my musical development. Soon after I started working with violinist John Holloway – whom I have to thank and acknowledge, including for his great patience. We spent many hours together experimenting with Corelli op 5 Sonatas, he with Italianate florid ornamentation of the top line (from the many surviving versions and ideas that he was improvising), and me experimenting with the possibilities for harmonising a bassline, sometimes meeting in the middle – a shared process of experimenting where being prepared to take risk, which Hilary Metzger has been talking about this morning, was a very important aspect. In our concerts we often finished with Corelli op5/12 La Folia (which makes an excellent duo for violin and cello suitable for instance to hear alongside Ravel’s Duo). As an example of our process, when I was reading it with John for the first time, I came up with a pattern for realising the Folia progression with gentle rising triplet arpeggios. I was very happy with it and thought it worked very well. Then I turned the page and there it was. I had done exactly what Corelli had already thought of. I have to admit I was a little bit pleased with myself, but equally annoyed that now I couldn’t use it there. Looking back now this feels a little bit like what Nicholas Cook in his book Beyond the Score is getting at: musicians as composer-improviser-performers reconnecting these two sides of music which became separate during the 20th century: musicology and performance. Cook is calling for nothing less than a reintegration of performance into music. This “thing” that we are talking about feels like a very important aspect or tool in that process of re-integration.
Harmony doesn’t have to be anchored to the keyboard. If like me you have poor piano skills, why should harmony not be for us? The early music industry has been dominated by keyboard players who have the knowledge of harmony. The rest, who have grown up with a conservatoire solo repertoire-based training can be somehow marginalised. But the harpsichord and organ rely on agogic expression whereas the voice and the other instruments, including the viola family, are capable of dynamic expression. This has sometimes created the odd scenario of hearing dynamic voices and instruments being limited to long-short expression under the direction of the harpsichord or organ player. Let’s reclaim our connection with harmony.
Shortly after my Early Music article came out in 1996, Claudio Bacciagaluppi (who has also written about the “Pflicht des cellisten”) organised a symposium at Bern Hochschule on the subject. There I met Claudio Ronco, a wonderful Italian cellist a great free spirit and improviser. When we were working together with a student I was thinking very much about voice leading and ideas of subtle harmonic inflection. Claudio interrupted saying “But it can go like this!” and demonstrated with an extravagant flourish of arpeggios and accented passing notes etc. He introduced me to this more florid 19th century style, for which I’m very grateful. Another character in my journey was the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras. Hilary was talking about whether conductors will allow us to add improvised chords: what I found was that I could say to conductors “there is this technique which was practised in those days, and I can do it if you like”. Some said yes, but even when they said no, life was a lot easier just playing the written bass note. When I had that conversation with Charles Mackerras doing a Mozart opera, he was already in his 80s. He said “You can try it in the rehearsal and I’ll let you know in the coffee break.” In the break he came over to me beaming saying “I love it, keep doing it”. What lead from that was perhaps a very particular ‘negotiated’ practice, with fortepiano AND cello both realising chords, which I suspect may have not been common in the 18th or 19th centuries. Sir Charles didn’t like passing notes especially at the bottom of chords which he felt could distract the singer, and I didn’t do many flourishes. He would ask for me to play continuo when he did Mozart opera, at one point saying he “felt like the King of Prussia with his own personal cellist”. I was very lucky to be attached to many of his later projects.
Some of the sources talk about adding chords in quartets, symphonies and larger ensembles as well as recitative. One of the key points the sources mention is that if you’re trying to play only on one string in the middle of the instrument there is only a certain amount of energy you can give to the string with the bow before you foul one of the neighbouring strings. If your hand is in a chord position ready to play one of those strings and you do strike a neighbouring string, the note will still be in the chord. That is only a short step from a fully realised harmonic accompaniment. I noticed when doing this that often conductors were unaware of it. Occasionally the technique has been practically useful in a concerto where, at the end of the cadenza the 6/4 pause chord needs to resolve to the dominant seventh. This is indicated by Mozart under the final trill in his piano concertos, but sometimes (for example in the Flute Concertos) it is not made explicit. Even though going straight from chord Ic to chord I breaks the most fundamental laws of tonal music, some eminent musicians are reluctant to “add to” or “change” anything written by Mozart.
I’ve talked in my written introduction to today about my dialogue with Bach. What I mean is that during the 1990s I plundered the Cello Suites and Violin Sonatas and Partitas as a repository of ways of thinking about how to accompany on an instrument with four strings tuned in fifths. The third Cello Suite has the most obvious example in the Prelude where the dominant pedal sequence is copied from Corelli op5/1. Conversely, playing the cello Suites I found that my experience of being an improviser – “playing with” works like Corelli op 5 – fed into my understanding of how the music works. It didn’t mean that I changed Bach’s text, but my stance towards it was one of a fellow improviser. Rather than being part of a continuum of great solo cello repertoire culminating in Shostakovich, Bach’s suites emerge organically from his basso continuo writing in Passions and Cantatas- they ‘belong’ to continuo cellists.
In recent years I have been teaching this technique at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, not only specifically to Baroque cellists but to string players in general. I’ve tried to include this way of thinking about music in the education of all string students. For example, I have a 4 string cello Piccolo tuned to G an octave below the violin and I can work with 20 violinists exploring harmony together. Often they want to work on their Bach, while I’m saying “let’s start with Happy Birthday”. Playing be ear is vital to this approach. I’m sure many of us have experienced as teachers, very advanced students coming for a consultation lesson who have great facility but no fluency. When I ask them to play Happy Birthday many discover a deficit in their playing. This was also me in my 20s discovering the same deficit. I decided to think of a different tune every day, play it in different keys, and harmonise it. It took me a few weeks to develop that fluency. Without this fluency how far can we say that we are an interpreter, if our ear is not connected with our fingers and our musical brain, or we don’t have a basic understanding of harmony?
I did an informal survey of string students at RCS. I asked them to look at the first page of Bach solo violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor and identify the second chord in bar 1, using any musical terms or vocabulary. (Laurence Dreyfus argues that 19th-century harmonic vocabulary should not be applied to Bach. I’m sure his right but the challenge is to reach these young musicians and get them thinking about harmony in any way possible – the three chords that the street busker knows are a good starting point.) I’m not going to tell you how many were able to identify it, but I encourage you to try the same experiment with your students. I like to imagine a dialogue with a 19th-century cellist who comes along to this class as a guest, saying “I accompany operatic recitative, improvising florid arpeggios and chords, I give the singer their note, and if they forget their lines, I improvise a prelude to cover the silence – and you can’t identify a dominant seventh?” How far does this fit the commonly held assumption of progress?
In my classes I invite students to propose songs, tunes, pop music, which we then harmonise in different keys, mostly using bariolage, all without screen projection or text, we are just using our ears. If we can take this approach and share it with any string player not just baroque cellists, we can equally take our inspiration from any string player who has strings tuned in fifths. Chris Thile is an amazing mandolin player from the US. I watched him in concert for 2 hours. Like me he has 4 fingers and 4 strings tuned in 5ths, but I was constantly wondering how he had played certain chords. I talk to my students about Joey from the TV sitcom “Friends” who has to learn the hand shapes before he is allowed to touch a guitar. We also have “handshapes”, such as Breval sonata chord 1 and chord 2.
The systematic patterns for scales on the cello in any key avoiding open strings, I always found puzzling as I was growing up. You would probably not use those fingerings in Beethoven A major sonata, but find more sonorous fingerings incorporating open strings. A Karl Krauss puts it “it is equally fatal to have a system and not to have a system, one must combine them both.” Chordal playing presents similar possibilities for systematisation.
Rather than prescribing to my students “this is how you play D major first inversion” I’m more interested in saying to them “what is that chord in Blackbird or Take 5, and how can you play it on the cello?” What I have found is in almost every class one of them will come up with a fingering pattern I hadn’t thought of before – that’s a lovely gift.
I talked a little bit about how we can rethink the way we ‘situate’ the Bach Suites in the cello repertoire. In the same spirit I want to talk now about Margaret Campbell’s book The Great Cellists, as an example of how the way we think about the past affects what we do in the present. She offers two metanarratives: one of them is the metanarrative of Progress – each generation of cellists having pushed forward the bounds of technique; the other is the acceptance of the cello as a solo instrument – the cello’s liberation from the bassline. There are all kinds of problems with these assumptions, but one of the most important to question is that it leaves no space for thinking about how ordinary musicians accompanied. In contrast the approach we are discussing today is a radical one, inviting musicians and audiences alike to hear music as part of a living process, rather than as great “monumental works”. Inherent in this “de-composition” (seeing archetypical structures behind the decoration) is a “de-monumentalisation” which can help bring us closer to the music. We live in a time of change. We question the narrow repertoire of canonised, dead, white men usually presented in concerts, and how we play and present it – the rituals and learned etiquette of walking on and off the stage and bowing in Edwardian evening dress. Quite rightly that is connected with the wider questioning of the European colonial legacy and its monuments, perhaps in particular, as we go about our daily lives here in Brussels under its shadow, the statue of Leopold II. We are part of this movement of change. The “thing” we are talking about is not just a “technique”, it is a stance which reframes how we make music. It is not just a “style”, as it covers every “style period” from the advent of the cello in the 1670s right up to the early C20th. (It was only the advent of Modernism where all we have to do is play what is written, that cellists lose that ability, we forget about it). It is something that paradoxically can liberate us from an overliteral reading of the text, and at the same time it can connect us more meaningfully with the text as performers. It can also liberate us from the genre. In Glasgow we have several cellists who have taken this approach and used it to connect with Traditional music or Jazz, eg they’ve found ways to play #9 chords that they can take into a Jazz context. We had a Palestinian student who would sing Arabic songs while accompanying herself on the cello.
It sets us free – it’s a tool, it’s a stance.
Thank you.
davidwatkin 