Last night Voices of Music returned to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church to present the third of the four concerts in its 2018–2019 season. The title of the program was Musical Crossroads; and the selections demonstrated how the early history of “Western” music often involved “imports” from “remote” sources. The program featured two guest artists, Imamyar Hasanov playing the Iranian bowed kamancheh and Laura Risk playing a baroque violin on which she explored the influences of different sources of fiddle tunes.
The earliest of those “fiddle sources,” however, was performed by Hasanov at the beginning of the program. This was an instrumental account of the eleventh of the 420 poems documented as monophonic songs probably by Alfonso X of Castile under the title Cantigas de Santa Maria. 356 of those poems are about miracles brought about through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, the others being songs in praise of Mary. All of the poems have rather lengthy strophic texts with a single melodic line setting all of the strophes. When countertenor Russell Oberlin released an album of about half a dozen of the Cantigas, each one sounded as if it went on forever.
Last night’s performance, on the other hand, involved only the melodic line. This allowed Hasanov to “jam” with Hanneke van Proosdij on recorder and Cheryl Ann Fulton on harp while Peter Maund provided percussion accompaniment with his usual skill in negotiating the pitch range of his hand drum. Such “jamming” provided the spirit for the entire evening, since almost all of the selections amounted to monodic tunes that could be readily embellished through polyphonic performances, many of which could easily have arisen through improvisation.
While the Cantigas were collected and documented on the Iberian Peninsula, Alfonso ruled at a time when that geographical region enjoyed a diversity of “foreign” influences from both the Middle East and the “interior” of continental Europe. It would thus be not too far out of the question to suggest that Alfonso was one of the earliest pioneers of what we now call “world music.” This became the point of reference for the entire program, whose “world” included Scotland, Quebec, and Azerbaijan, as well as seventeenth-century Italy. For almost all of the works performed, the source material was monophonic, with polyphony arising from the qualities of “jamming” brought by each of the performers.
Indeed, the first half of the program concluded with the world premiere of a composition by Proosdij that amounted to celebration of such “jamming” practices. As might be guessed, the title of the piece was “Musical Crossroads.” In the performance she again played recorder, joined by both Risk and Alana Youssefian on violins, William Skeen on gamba, Fulton on harp, Hasanov on kamancheh, David Tayler on archlute, and Maund on percussion. In other words, this was an “all hands jam session,” for which Proosdij provided the thematic foundation and the performers took care of the rest. By way of symmetry, the evening concluded with a similar group improvisation, this time based on the traditional “Folia” theme.
The final measures from the manuscript of Antonio Bertali’s C major chaconne (copied in 1662 by Jakob Ludwig, from IMSLP, public domain)
There was, however, one documented composition that exhibited prodigious virtuosity. This was a C major chaconne by Antonio Bertali, whose solo part was performed by Youssefian with continuo provided by Skeen on cello, Tayler on archlute, and Proosdij on harpsichord. After several minutes I realized that I had run out of counting the number of virtuoso hoops through which Youssefian was required to jump; but she worked her way through each of the mind-blowing variations with the sort of calm demeanor that made it clear that the music is more important than the musician. It would not be out of the question to suggest that Bertali’s spirit was the “original source” of prodigiously improvised iterations that would eventually bring us to the monumental (almost an hour in duration) account of “My Favorite Things” that John Coltrane played with Pharoah Sanders in Tokyo in July of 1966. Indeed, even if the instruments were different, one could easily imagine Trane’s spirit coming back to life through Youssefian’s violin technique.
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