In conjunction with his visit to San Francisco to perform with Philharmonia Baroque,
Steve Isserlis offered a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory
of Music last night under the auspices of the Conservatory Baroque
Ensemble. The scope of the class was narrowed down to five movements
from three of the unaccompanied cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach
(the first three movements of the first suite and the opening movements
of the fifth and sixth suites) performed by four students. I have
always found these master classes to be one of the Conservatory's most valuable offerings. I continue to hold to the precept that the essence of a concert lies in the listening (which Igor Stravinsky made a point of distinguishing from mere hearing) experience; and one can only cultivate one's skills in listening to music
by building up one's "experience base." However, because the enjoyment
of music is a social one (rather than being purely subjective), we keep
facing the challenge of communicating to others about our experiences, discovering that it is never an easy matter.
Thus,
while cello students may seize the opportunity to play for Isserlis in
the interest of becoming better performers, the rest of us can enjoy the
chance to sit in the audience and witness the communication that takes
place. Isserlis' talent lies not only in his technical skill (or, for
that matter, his voracious love of repertoire). It is also firmly
grounded in his own talent for listening, and much of his master class
had to do with his communicating observations based on the experiences
of listening to these four students. Thus, while the students
(hopefully) become better cellists, the rest of us continue to build up
our skills as listeners and reinforce those skills with new thoughts
about communicating them.
Isserlis' first comments concerned the
courante movement from the first suite, and that strikes me as an
excellent way to begin. Living in the 21st century, we easily forget
that "courante" and "allemande" were the names of dances (perhaps
because we have so little knowledge of how those dances were actually
executed). For both of the movements he discussed, rhythm was of
primary concern. not so much in terms of what the beats were (which one
could read from the notation) but in how energy was distributed across
those beats. That distribution of energy has more to do with what
distinguishes a courante from an allemande than the fact that the former
has three beats to the measure and the latter has four. By beginning
with a sense of distributed energy at the measure level, Isserlis could
then escalate to the movement as a whole, talking about how it is
"punctuated" into phrases through the use of cadences. He demonstrated
his points through the prosody of texts he uttered concerning a visit
from his mother-in-law, a clever analogy, since the impact of prosody
often has more to do with connotation through acoustics than the logical
denotations of semantics. Having established that these movements were
fundamentally dances structured by their "punctuation," he could then
discuss the "journey" of traversing the entire structure. That
discussion involved some rudiments of music theory; but the theory
served primarily to offer a language that facilitated the description of
the journey, rather than an end in itself.
Having established his
strategy for communication over a dance form (albeit an unfamiliar
one), Isserlis could then exercise that same strategy on the prelude
movements. Like the preludes in The Well-Tempered Clavier, these
movements are not based on a common formal structure. Nevertheless,
each of these movements still has its own "journey;" and that journey
is still demarcated by the low-level management of rhythm and the
phrase-level understanding and execution of proper punctuation. Thus,
one need not hide behind vacuous phrases like "free form" in addressing
such movements, because they are as "committed to the journey" as the
dance forms (more familiar in Bach's time) are.
This then raises a
higher-level question, which Isserlis touched on briefly. Is there a
"journey" in an entire suite? Is there a "journey" across the set of
six suites played in the order of their BWV numbers (which may not have
been the order in which they were first conceived)? Isserlis talked
briefly about toying with the idea that the full set of suites unfolded
the narrative of the Life of Christ. He admitted that his best evidence
came from the fifth (C minor) suite depicting the Crucifixion, followed
by the Resurrection in the final D major suite. However, he confessed
that his argument was pretty shaky; and, on the basis of what I heard, I
would probably agree with him! Nevertheless, he raised these thoughts
as a way of suggesting that the Nativity might provide a useful
back-of-the-mind context setting for the first suite. I
certainly sympathize with this idea of a context-setting strategy and
often use it as part of the sensemaking that takes place in my own
listening experiences. However, whether I choose to escalate the
subjectivity of that strategy to a level of social discourse is a matter
of the conclusions I draw from it and whether those conclusions are
relevant to what I wish to communicate. This seems to be how Isserlis
approached his Nativity setting, but it is hard to tell whether or not
it had any impact on his students.
I hope I have now made the case
that there is much to be gained from these master class events, even if
one never gets beyond sitting in the audience. Lest I forget, there is
one remaining punch line: Most of these events at the Conservatory are
free. As Lee Iacocca would have said, "If you can find a better deal for learning to listen, take it!"
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