If It Ain’t Baroque…

Journal 31; April 8, 2009

Sometimes people wish they could express themselves in a song. Throughout history, moments of note have been recorded by scribes immediately, hoping never to lose such an event in the chronicles of time. Filled with the fear of the eventual loss of such events, people have taken to song as a form of remembrance. After all, isn’t a song easier to remember than a speech? In this way music can be a form of remembrance, of salutation for an event that happened within the past. It can tell the same story, albeit with more dramatics than a historical reading could do. The Baroque period provided a perfect opportunity for composers to use the new musical techniques to tell the oldest stories in a new way.

The program started off with Henry Purcell’s Welcome to all the pleasures, a song about a Saint Cecilia’s Day celebration. St. Cecilia’s Day seemed like a perfect way to begin this Baroque concert, as in its heyday composers of the time would use this musical celebration in November to showcase their new music, Purcell being one of them. The music frequently broke into oratory patterns, a welcome, a salute, and a petition to sing thanks for all your loss. This pieces builds up unto a crescendo of both command and forcefulness, but leaves the audience with a deep bass thrum, perhaps a sign that things are not over, not even close.

Moving ahead, Selections from Jephte by Carissimi used music to tell the biblical story of Jephthah, a victorious Israelite who returns home with the oath to sacrifice the first person he sees. The harpsichord is used to announce the Greek-like narration, and the switch between this victorious triumph and the later lamentations is echoed by the instrument change: harpsichord becomes organ, victory speech becomes eulogy. After this point his Jephthah’s daughter begins her final lamentation, a piece rife with religious undertones as the organ leads her on a final farewell to both her father and to her young life.

Another favorite was the selections from Les Surprises de l’Amour by Jean-Phillippe Rameau, representing the portion of a musical piece first preformed in 1748 as a celebration of love, and the upper register tones certainly create a celebratory mood. With cascading rhythms bleeding into each other, bouncing between notes almost joyously, the whole piece gives of a sort of “buttered” feeling, as if it isn’t meant to be not only light and airy but sweet, too. Though the notes are often in a high register, they are very rarely shrill, but instead a sort of gentle piping representative of the shepherds who would have played the wooden flutes participating in the song.

It’s interesting to think of the Baroque period as a response to the music and culture that came before it. Renaissance music certainly had its day, but at the time I can’t help but think the Baroque music must have seemed terribly avant-garde, moving in an entirely new direction, and I wonder if early Baroque composers ran into the same problems that all new musicians run into, trying to create within a form that’s new and controversial. Of course there is something to be said for the lack of distinct timeline; Baroque in a lot of ways existed at the same time as other musical periods with no distinct cutoff period. Pieces that had been played slow were sped up, dramatics were added, and humor too, something that made the performance more enjoyable in that the singers seemed to be having fun, too.

Every generation thinks it’s the first to be rebellious. And every generation just happens to be wrong.

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