Last month’s report on a YouTube account of making music in cyberspace discussed how the New York Youth Symphony used video conferencing technology to perform an excerpt from the second movement of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony while practicing social distancing at the same time. Today I take pleasure in reporting on the launch of the Oneperbar YouTube channel presenting an alternative approach to uniting musicians from around the world in a shared performance of a single composition. Almost all of the contributors to this channel are violists, and their international distribution is an impressive one.
The name of the channel provides the basic explanation. Each performance is a movement from a composition that can be played by solo viola. That movement is “sliced” into individual measures, each of which is assigned to a different violist, whose performance of that measure is captured on video. Some uncredited editor (or editing team) then pieces together all of the fragments to present a smoothly executed account of the entire movement.
The project was launched with one of those selections that tends to be known only by violists, since there are so few recital opportunities at which to encounter it. The music was the first movement from the first of Max Reger’s three suites for solo viola (Opus 131d), composed in the key of G minor; and the video was posted on March 25. This was followed about a week and a half later by the most familiar of the selections currently on the channel, a performance of the opening (Prélude) movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 (first) suite for solo cello. Those that have followed my writing for some time probably know by now that viola strings are tuned to the same pitches as those of the cello, only an octave higher; so the Bach suites are as amenable to viola performance as they are for the cello. This second video was posted on April 4.
The opening measures of Paul Hindemith’s Opus 25, Number 1 solo viola sonata (from IMSLP, public domain)
Only a few days later, on April 7, the third video appeared. This involved a far more ambitious selection, the third (Sehr langsam) movement from Paul Hindemith’s Opus 25, Number 1 sonata for solo viola. This selection presented the first effort to stretch the original “ground rules.” While the Bach prelude easily lends itself to measure-by-measure decomposition and the Reger movement can be similarly “sliced and diced,” the phrasing of the Hindemith movement is far more sophisticated. As a result, the torch was passed, so to speak, over less consistent intervals of duration, making the necessary effort to honor the phrases as the composer had conceived them, rather than a slavish commitment to the marks on paper. In addition, two of the segments were performed by cellists; and the final segment was played on the double bass (whose strings are tuned in fourths, rather than the fifths found on violas and cellos). The result was a significantly more imaginative approach to creating the video, which served up its own innovations to bring attention to the inventiveness encountered in Hindemith’s score.
All three of these videos take an imaginative approach to encourage attentive listening to each of these selections. All of the movements are performed at a relatively slow tempo. This tends to allow for smoother transitions from one player to another, as well as allowing each player to exercise some degree of personal expressiveness in his/her contribution. This is clearly not a “recital experience;” but it is still one that honors Bach, Reger, and Hindemith with informative listening opportunities.
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