I am very excited about this next program, intitled
Virtual salon 2: chamber music of Haydn and Schubert
To present the essence of the event, here is the letter of intent prof Beghin sent to all the participants:
The Virtual Salon
@ CIRMMT, February 2 and 3, 2012
Statement of Intent
December 7, 2011
The impetus to these concerts has been technological: to see how it feels to play chamber music or sing songs with piano in virtual acoustics. We did a concert like this in the Multi Media Room back in September 2009 (at the launch of The Virtual Haydn). But the concert featured me as the single player. We’re curious now how Virtual Acoustics Technology will behave when several of us play together.
The main goal, of course, remains for us to have fun performing together, and putting up a good & entertaining show, twice (Friday & Saturday).
During the whole week (from Tuesday to Saturday) we will be working in McGill’s Multi Media Room. On and off during this time, a sound recording & video crew will be monitoring us. Some of the rehearsals and the two concerts will be recorded for the purpose of research, though it is not excluded that we will use portions of the recorded material for non-commercial distribution later on. I hope I have stressed this aspect sufficiently when I first contacted you, but IF ANYONE OBJECTS TO BEING RECORDED OR FILMED, PLEASE LET ME KNOW: THIS WOULD BE THE LAST CHANCE TO LET ME KNOW.
The program is as follows:
1. Haydn, Piano Trio in C Minor, Hob. XV:13 (Artaria, 1788)
2. Five Schubert Songs
3. Haydn, String Quartet in G Major, Opus 33 Nr. 5 (Artaria, 1782)
4. Schubert, Trout Quintet (1819)
(I’ll use a 6 & ½ octave Streicher replica, 1808, and a 1782 Walter fortepiano.)
The one item in the program where I’ll have special hopes and ambitions is the Haydn String Quartet. I selected it for specific reasons. It’s the first quartet of Haydn’s Opus 33, the third installment of a series of publications geared to a new & specific public: that of the salon-attending musical amateur. (Haydn’s re-negotiated contract with Esterházy in 1779 allowed him to embark on a partnership with publisher Artaria in Vienna: he first provided six piano sonatas in 1780, then 12 German Songs in 1781, and then these Opus 33 string quartets in 1782—so, first, catering to a female market, then, with the string quartets, also to a male one.)
The first movement is well-known in Haydn scholarship for its “my end is my beginning” epigraph. A distinctly closing gesture—played in an understated pianissimo—is the first thing one would be playing, not just of this particular quartet but of the whole set of quartets.
In various classes I used this piece to explore the themes of salon culture & conversation. Exactly at this time, Haydn had started to mingle in intellectual-artistic circles in Vienna, such as the von Greiner salon, with husband Franz Sales particularly interested in the arts and literature and wife Charlotte a science-aficionado. Inspired by Elisabeth Le Guin’s essay (in Beghin/Goldberg, Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, 2007), we’ve used especially the first movement for the exploration of Parisian salon veteran André Morellet’s eleven “faults” of conversation, such as inattentiveness, egoism, or pedantry.
The narrative I perceive throughout the quartet is one of a conversation that is purposefully (and wittily) “bad” in the first movement, a theatrical scena in the second (featuring the first violin as the hero, whether appropriately or not), the third a caricatured minuet, and the fourth (which is a short set of variations) giving the players a second chance to engage in what now turns out to be a perfectly polite or “good” conversation (but a less stimulating one?).
My hope—which I discussed in greater detail yesterday with Abe Kerstenberg and George Massenburg (who showed me some of their stunning videographic work at McGill)—is to integrate virtual acoustics in a video performance that also conveys the essential elements of the narrative that I just outlined. Main source of inspiration will be the image or concept of a circle, as of an actual string quartet table of the time (see picture below). I’ll ask you to sit in this formation. Virtual acoustics (imagine above your head a whole array of loudspeakers spreading your live sounds and reverberations in an expanding circle) will allow the audience around you to be intimately present. But I would also like to integrate actual rehearsing in the eventual edit of the video performance: stopping to talk, exchanging ideas, agreeing/disagreeing, et cetera. As we move from the one acoustics to the other—from a small living room of a private house to a more formal salon or a grander ballroom of a palais, either from movement to movement, or within one and the same movement—we will explore questions of formality vs. informality or the listener as “just” an eavesdropper or something more.
All this to announce the following. Instead of sending you the music in advance, I’ll prefer to send you a few items for background reading (the kind of stuff I’d set for a seminar meeting)—but not too much, I promise. It seems crucial, however, to what I have in mind for the eventual video that you DO NOT LOOK at your part before the first rehearsal. It’ll make for a much more compelling narrative in the end. (To ease your professional pride: we’ll explain all this to the audience too, so they’re in on this experiment—but by that time you’ll have three rehearsals under your belt anyway.)
Are you game for this? (Or am I being cruel?…)
As to the rest of the program—the Haydn Trio, Schubert Songs, the Schubert Quintet—yes, by all means: do look at the music before! (I’ll certainly have to.) I just finished assembling the parts and will send them to you ASAP. (For the Schubert Quintet I found the original Artaria edition, which I’m thrilled to use. Also for Haydn Quartet I’ll provide you with the first Artaria parts: away with urtext!)
Looking forward,
Tom.
As you can guess, everybody is very thrilled by the whole concept!
Only 100 tickets for each night are emitted, here is how to get some
To be continued.
Nick Lessard english blog 