At the beginning of this month, Brilliant Classics released the seventh volume in the project of Dutch harpsichordist Pieter-Jan Belder to record the 297 compositions collected in The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Unlike its six predecessors, this album consists of three, rather than two, CDs. A little bit of arithmetic reveals that, collectively, these seven volumes consist of 295 tracks. This leads me to believe that the third CD was included to bring the project to conclusion, even if none of the advance documents say anything about this being the final volume. My current conjecture is that, across all of those CDs, there are two tracks that consist of two short compositions played back-to-back. (The closest to “hard evidence” I have is that the advance material for the sixth volume described it as the penultimate release.) [added 5/16, 4:20 p.m.: I have now identified that "The New Sa-Hoo" [CXLVII] by Giles Farnaby is not in any of the seven volumes.]
Cover design for the Dover publication of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (from its Amazon.com Web page)
Conditions being what they are, I decided this morning that the time on my hands could be put to good use by pulling my two Dover Edition volumes of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book off the shelf and onto my keyboard’s music stand. I have done this from time to time in the past, but never before with the recordings by a scholar like Belder at my disposal. As a result, listening to this final volume had more impact on my motivation to play the music for myself than it did on discussing the music itself. This is entirely understandable, since, as I have already observed, this music was compiled for personal recreation, rather than for performances before an audience.
That said, I have to confess that a rather significant skill set has to be acquired before the experience can feel “recreational.” Most important is that the approach to embellishment differs in some significant ways from the sorts of practices one encounters in the keyboard music of François Couperin or Johann Sebastian Bach. Listening to Belder as a student with not much of a skill set was significantly different from “audience” listening organized around recognizing tunes and how they unfold into variations. As a result, even the shortest of dance forms quickly reveal themselves as technical challenges, the sorts of challenges that require either highly-focused students or adults with enough financial and social security to devote the better part of their time to learning to play these pieces.
This leads me to wonder whether listening was ever part of the equation cooked up by the compilers of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Such questioning might lead to the conclusion that this impressive collection of CDs was never really intended for “audience-oriented” listening. Rather, the value of the collection is pedagogical. For any piece in the collection, Belder confronts the would-be student with a perspective on how the music should sound. It then falls on that student to figure out how to make the piece sound that way. This need not be “faithful reproduction,” since there are any number of possibilities for both melodic and rhythmic variation that lead the skilled performer beyond the mere marks on paper.
Many, if not most, of those possibilities can be apprehended by even a casual listener. However, where the sociology of music-making is concerned, listening takes a distant back seat to executing for the sake one’s own listening and little more. In that frame of reference, I can recommend both Belder and the packaging of his recordings as a first-rate resource for those willing to take the plunge into making the music for themselves.
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