About to perform Stravin­sky’s Rite of Spring on two pianos at the Guild­hal­l’s Milton Court tonight with David Kaplan, and remem­bered this journal entry which I wrote for Carolina Perform­ing Arts on the occasion of the piece’s centen­nial. Since it’s not avail­able online anymore, I thought I’d repub­lish it here. 

⁂

When I was in high school, a friend of mine got the opening bars of the Rite of Spring tattooed on his calf. This struck me as an entirely appro­pri­ate response to the piece, for several reasons. I can imagine that making a small sacri­fice (a percent­age of skin) at the altar of Stravin­sky could only be good for one’s compo­si­tional devel­op­ment. So much the better that it involved trans­gres­sion of the law (I suspect my friend was not 18 at the time). And the Rite reflected its own badassery on what is no longer a partic­u­larly badass act. For the Rite of Spring is a completely badass piece of music. It’s a musical super­hero’s first display of his full powers. This brings with it a satis­fy­ing type of emotional thrill: it’s Iron Man strap­ping on his suit and blasting off for the first time, and our viscera rise in our throats along with him. We forgive the brash­ness, the arro­gance, because in this case it is truly deserved: I listen to the century-old piece of music and think, I could not do that.

What makes matters worse is the poverty of Stravin­sky’s mate­ri­als. Like Frank Gehry’s chain-link fence house, it’s employ­ing a brutal kind of virtu­os­ity. How did he achieve so improb­a­bly much with so little? Here’s what I mean: try whistling some of the tunes from the Rite to yourself. Not exactly Brahms’s first symphony, are they? Stravin­sky’s melodies tend to encom­pass four or five pitches, not really going anyplace, but circling around the same figu­ra­tions in odd, gimpy-sounding group­ings. Again, it feels almost insolent: look what I can do with this singu­larly unpromis­ing handful of notes. 

Stravin­sky wields the orches­tra like a danger­ous weapon, with a finesse that belies the savagery of its sound. An incred­i­ble percent­age of the piece is scored tutti, even in quiet passages, which make them all the more terrifying—a giant chorus of whispers and mutter­ing. The indi­vid­ual parts are also remark­ably inter­est­ing and involved, an especial accom­plish­ment consid­er­ing the vast instru­men­tal forces employed. A quick perusal of the score confirms that, yes, the second piccolo is absolutely neces­sary, and kept quite busy at that; same goes for the second bass clarinet, the second contra­bas­soon, horns five through eight, and so on. There’s a profli­gacy to this sort of ensemble, for certain, but here it’s not a case of mega­lo­ma­nia. Each timbre is thor­oughly uncon­ven­tional, care­fully modu­lated, under­scored, or subverted—it’s not a piece you can hear in your head if you look at the score, because the instru­ments are used in such unex­pected ways. 

If all this sounds like a rather cold, unemo­tional piece, it’s because, in a way, it is. Nothing is tradi­tion­ally ‘expres­sive’, in the romantic sense, so there’s no heroic journey from dark to light (or vice versa). Nor is there the kind of harmonic telos that guides a listener through, say, a Mahler symphony. Instead, the dramatic struc­ture relies much more heavily on timing, repe­ti­tion, and layering. In this way the Rite works much more like a piece of mini­mal­ist or post-mini­mal­ist music: modular, not devel­op­men­tal. It’s a weirdly short distance from here to Steve Reich’s Drumming (as well as a short jaunt in the opposite direc­tion, to Elliott Carter). I imagine this was what truly disturbed 1912 audi­ences, even if the sour disso­nances and brash, multi-layered timbres were the more obvious scandal. All these elements would figure impor­tantly in Stravin­sky’s later works, but it’s easy to forget just how present they are in the Rite, for all of its sound and fury. 

But there is also some­thing which, to me, sets the Rite apart from much Stravin­sky’s music—I find it extra­or­di­nar­ily moving. I don’t mean this as a slight to those other pieces; I love and admire them, but in a more intel­lec­tual, reserved way. Faced with the Rite I am power­less to analyze. Perhaps this has some­thing to do with the fact that I’ve been listen­ing to it for quite a long time; it can be diffi­cult to gain an adult-like perspec­tive on the things which defined my child­hood and adoles­cence, almost as if I’m still listen­ing to that music with 14-year-old ears. 

I first heard the Rite listen­ing to the radio in the car with my dad, driving home from school. He wasn’t quite sure what it was but he thought it might be the Rite of Spring. Over the radio it sounded like a wild but not at all disagree­able tangle of notes; the colors and the hugeness weren’t lost in trans­la­tion, but I could tell that they were being hemmed in. I bought the Abaddo record­ing on my next trip to New York, at the Barnes & Noble across from Juil­liard. It still sounded like a thicket, albeit one I grew familiar with little by little. 

And after awhile, it began to take that powerful emotional hold. Its affect on me has only inten­si­fied over the years; the piece has the odd property of getting stronger with age and repeated exposure. It doesn’t matter if I’m listen­ing through small, tinny speakers, as I was that first time, or to a great orches­tra live in a concert hall, or watching a minus­cule version of the ballet on my iPhone—I find the Rite of Spring hypnotic and completely immobilizing.

A rather unique collec­tion of Bach pieces is out today on Nonesuch, performed by Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer. I had the pleasure of writing a liner note for the album, as follow.

⁂

Put any random combi­na­tion of musi­cians in a room together, and no matter their instru­ments, histo­ries, person­al­i­ties, it’s more than likely that they’ll find common ground playing Bach.

This is partly because Bach addressed so many musical contexts over the course of his lifetime. Though he is revered as a protean creator and obses­sive crafts­man, he was also equal parts humble artisan and compul­sive speed-writer. Suffer­ing was not yet a require­ment for 18^th–century artists; in Bach’s music, one senses instead a musician eager to make himself as useful as possible, to find every outlet for his immense skill and energy.

In a musician’s reper­toire, there­fore, Bach is both a foun­da­tion and a pinnacle. You start your training with some­thing from the Note­books for Anna Magdalena, a two-part inven­tion or simple prelude—music that teaches you not just how to play, but how to listen to harmony, coun­ter­point, voice-leading, and form. And you grad­u­ally ascend to the heights of instru­men­tal and compo­si­tional virtuosity—the Goldberg Vari­a­tions, the D‑minor Chaconne, The Art of the Fugue.

In these epic pieces, the performer neces­sar­ily channels the composer through a kind of indi­vid­ual heroism. But at the core, Bach was an intensely collab­o­ra­tive musician. Part of the utility of his music is its protean adapt­abil­ity to any number of instru­men­tal combi­na­tions; the labor of perform­ing is divided easily into voices or parts, each a satis­fy­ing narra­tive thread on its own. The more diverse the voices, the more it becomes possible to tease out the movement of these separate lines. There’s always some­thing inter­est­ing happen­ing, no matter which frequency you decide to listen to at a given moment. The act of hearing the mercu­r­ial A‑minor fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II becomes a kind of auditory tennis match, as subjects and sequences volley among players at warp speed.

One of the joys here is the extra­or­di­nary chamber group, comprised of three virtuosi: Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer. Mandolin, cello, and double bass are, at face value, an unlikely instru­men­tal combi­na­tion, but this is an obvi­ously harmo­nious set of person­al­i­ties and musical predilec­tions. Indeed, the history of collab­o­ra­tion between these three is long and wide-ranging; they first found them­selves playing Bach together as encores while touring in support of the “Goat Rodeo Sessions” in 2012. 

There is a huge range of possi­bil­ity in Bach inter­pre­ta­tion, from the revi­sion­ist, almost autho­r­ial approach (Busoni or Glenn Gould) to the schol­arly and histor­i­cally informed (epit­o­mized by John Eliot Gardiner). There’s much to be gained from both schools, and, wisely, the Thile/Ma/Meyer trio finds its voice some­where in the middle of the spectrum. Here, drawn in by the direct­ness of the music itself, it’s entirely possible to lose oneself for long stretches, just listening.

The trio sonatas book­end­ing the album are straight­for­ward and direct, with all the athletic rhythmic snap of the best period-instru­men­tal­ists. In fact, through some sleight-of-hand sonic mimicry, it sounds remark­ably Baroque. Chris Thile’s mandolin takes on the personae of harp­si­chord, lute, or even some­thing close to a piano; Yo-Yo Ma’s cello, a whole chorus of human voices and a few centuries of styl­is­tic string playing besides. Other moments, though, are unmis­tak­able musical signa­tures. The rollick­ing arpeg­gios in Kommst du nun, Jesu, jaunty with the barest hint of swing, could only be Mr. Thile; the chorale tune answer­ing it, complete in its shape and phrasing, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally Mr. Ma. Edgar Meyer’s bass, vaulting far above the instrument’s typical continuo register, gives a vigorous rhythmic punch to the opening subject of the A minor Fugue.

This unique and shifting orches­tra­tion brings an unex­pected trans­parency to some familiar music. Though one thinks of cello and bass as simi­larly dark-hued instru­ments, here they tend to take opposite roles in the three-part harmony, with the cello melody soaring above. The mandolin, so idiomat­i­cally suited to moving, contra­pun­tal lines, keeps the pulse while main­tain­ing a crys­talline clarity. Simi­larly, when the mandolin takes the highest voice, as in the bustling Sonata for Viola da Gamba, its short rever­ber­a­tion moves aside quickly, allowing the ear to parse the maze of inter­changes and switch­backs between cello and bass. Even more complex is the massive E‑minor Prelude and Fugue, orig­i­nally an organ piece. Far from making things simpler, dividing the soloist’s labor among three creates an oppor­tu­nity to show off the trio’s virtu­os­ity. The central section of the fugue is trans­formed into an over-the-top chase scene, cello pouncing on the mandolin’s tail in endless barrages of running notes. This tech­nique, called hocket, in which musi­cians inter­rupt each other at just the right moment to form a contin­u­ous musical line, is found in every­thing from central African Pygmy music to the work of the contem­po­rary Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. 

Not every­thing is quite so rough-and-tumble. Moments of suspended, almost shocking harmonic beauty abound, espe­cially in the chorale-derived works. In the second phrase of Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, the continuo (bass accom­pa­ni­ment) stub­bornly clings to the same note two beats longer than the ear expects—interrupting long enough that the arc of the vocal line (here a plangent and nearly vibrato-less cello) turns into a sequence of unstable, disso­nant inter­vals on its downward path, sounding simul­ta­ne­ously inevitable and lost.

The organ chorale Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott also features the cello as vocalist, though it is the unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally stark accom­pa­ni­ment that stands out—plucked bass, with Thile now joining on guitar, strum­ming a constant eighth-note pulse. The complete absence of contra­pun­tal activity draws atten­tion to a sly harmonic ambi­gu­ity: begin­ning seem­ingly in B minor, constantly feinting at D major, but never quite sticking the landing. The final phrase ends on B minor’s dominant, F sharp, as if to say, “Again.” Light and shade give way to each other in an endless cycle.

Bach’s music gives the player a sense of making some­thing tangible, conjur­ing the physical out of the abstrac­tion of a fugue or chorale. A musical score is, of course, just a set of instructions—the steps to take in construc­tion, with little spec­i­fied about the finished product. In Bach’s cata­logue, we have an entire city in plans, its cathe­dral ringing with organ preludes, its back rooms full of chamber music. That everyone has access to this trove—and can, with a little expe­ri­ence, will these same creations into being—is one of the most profoundly demo­c­ra­tic facts I know of, and stands as a great equal­izer in an unequal world.

—Timo Andres, December 2016