(Originally posted on February 20, 2011)<\/p>\n
Fairly recently on facebook, I commented on an online video clip that I watched earlier.\u00a0 It was of an European virtuoso violinist making a recording of Bach violin concertos.\u00a0 In the video this young violinist said: “I love to hear about authentic interpretation and baroque violins; however, we do not know how it was actually played. So the freedom of interpretation is much wider than some people might think.\u00a0 I do believe that I play for the people of the 21st century.”\u00a0 My comment was about this quote that stuck with me… It struck me as too shallow a thought for an established violinist to have.\u00a0 She seems to ignore something that I consider crucial: the importance of the context<\/em> of those early works.<\/p>\n I love machines that fly.\u00a0 I love airplanes and I love helicopters.\u00a0 I am a huge fan of the Saturn rockets and other NASA launch vehicles, and of spacecrafts!\u00a0 And I love the whole story of American endeavor of getting to outer space and to the moon in the ’60s and early ’70s.\u00a0 One of my all-time favorite TV series is HBO’s miniseries From the Earth to the Moon<\/em> from 1998.\u00a0 I still have the VHS tapes of this series (yes, it was still the era of VCRs) and I still go back to them every once in a while.\u00a0 One of my favorite episodes is about the crew of Apollo 15 getting some practical training to be real lunar field observers under geologist Dr. Leon (Lee) Silver (“Galileo Was Right”).\u00a0 The most of those astronauts were just exceptional military pilots, not scientists, and they needed to develop scientific minds in order to get the most out of those astronomically expensive Apollo moon-landing missions.\u00a0 In this episode Dr. Silver takes the crew and back-up crew of Apollo 15 Lunar Module to Orocopia Mountains in California, and introduces to them the concept of the context<\/em>.\u00a0 He tells those astronauts that field geology is like solving a mystery of a dead cat\u2014 the dead cat itself could only tell you that it’s dead and it was a cat, and you have no idea what killed it, but if you tell him it was found in the middle of the road, or in the kitchen of a restaurant\u2014 its context<\/em> is the difference between roadkill and a meal.\u00a0 The professor then picks up a rock, a fist-size granite, and tells them that the rock has its story.\u00a0 How it was made, how it got here, what happened between then and now\u2014 to find out the whole story, you have to understand the language of the rock.\u00a0 On the moon surface, they have to be able to give the most complete descriptions of things they see; not just about which rocks they are going to bring back but also their context<\/em>.\u00a0 To be his eyes on the moon, first they have to learn to speak the language of this little rock here\u2014 the professor tells them.<\/p>\n To interpret something is to tell or re-tell the story of something as you<\/em> take it.\u00a0 But your story of a dead cat is going to be more specific if you know where the cat was found\u2014 and your story may be hugely different depending on where it was found.\u00a0 Your understanding of its context will determine the scope of your interpretation.\u00a0 If you try to understand the context of Bach’s violin pieces, the more you find out, the narrower and more specific your interpretation will get\u2014 and that is my point.\u00a0 The freedom of interpretation, in playing baroque music especially, should be much narrower than some of those star violinists may think.<\/p>\n Not only in Bach but also in any field \u2014 music or else \u2014 the lack of efforts to understand the context seems to be the cause of many problems today.\u00a0 You can easily criticize any public figure by extracting a line from his\/her statement and interpret it outside the context.\u00a0 Without the context, you can shape a story in any way you like.\u00a0 That’s what some of those political pundits on TV or radio do daily.\u00a0 Another significant example is the Scriptural passages; since it is not that easy to fully understand the context, those passages can be interpreted to affirm whatever your moral standard is…\u00a0 The Bible can be used to denounce slavery as inhuman, and at the same time, can support it.\u00a0 The lack of context can be one of the most significant causes of any religious tensions we have in our world today, or so it seems.<\/p>\n What, then, is the context of the music by J.S. Bach?\u00a0 It’s really anything and everything that contributes to your shaping the story of it.\u00a0 Knowing the instrument for which composers intended is one very important area of its context, and that’s the reason some of us play the period instruments.\u00a0 Musicological study is really about understanding the context.\u00a0 Familiarizing yourself with the language of the music of Bach is what it is.\u00a0 if you are a musician trained in the field of so-called classical music, you know how baroque music sounds.\u00a0 You know how classical or romantic music sounds.\u00a0 And if you play many pieces from the classical era, you learn to recognize distinctive expressions or writing of a classical composer, and oftentimes you can tell if it was by Haydn or Mozart.\u00a0 That’s understanding the musical idioms which is also a significant area of the context.\u00a0 Understanding the notion of articulations and how to execute them is another.\u00a0 We’d better know what a slur <\/em>is in the context of baroque music.<\/p>\n If you ask professional modern violinists what baroque pieces they revisit every now and then, the most of them would just list the Bach.\u00a0 They don’t really play anything other than Bach’s six solos, concertos and six obbligato sonatas\u2014 because they are the great ones, and other baroque composers’ pieces don’t inspire them enough.\u00a0 This fact diminish their chances to get to know general baroque idioms.\u00a0 You don’t think playing only Haydn will make you understand the coherent idioms of the era…\u00a0 Knowing and to be able to actually dance some of those partita\/suite movements are perhaps important if you care about the context.\u00a0 Getting to know what the music was about in Bach’s time, and to understand that instrumental music was considered less important than vocal music is a huge step toward understanding the context of Bach’s music.\u00a0 A piece of baroque music is a vehicle to transmit some kind of message, not music for music’s sake\u2014 understanding this notion will get you jump-started on your new endeavor.<\/p>\n But… who has time to delve into the context of a piece you are going to perform?\u00a0 It is a life-long journey, and.. quite frankly I believe that the reason I exist in this world is to help others in their endeavors to understand the context of Bach’s music.\u00a0 I just don’t want them to dismiss the context of it like this violinist in the online video clip seems to be doing.\u00a0 What she’s saying basically is that, since she doesn’t know where the dead cat was found, she’s going to make up a story of her own.\u00a0 I’d like them to at least try<\/em> to solve the mystery of the dead cat.\u00a0 Well, some of you may ask: what’s wrong with making up a story of my own?<\/em><\/p>\n We should not assume that everybody doesn’t know where the dead cat was found just because we don’t know.\u00a0 For example, let’s just say that we have a beautiful piece of East Asian calligraphy here.\u00a0 It looks beautiful and it looks nice on the wall, but we have a tiny problem: we don’t know which side is the top side.\u00a0 It looks fine this way so we don’t care; we’re going to enjoy as it is, let’s not bother to figure out the correct orientation of this piece of art!\u00a0 ..Well, what’s wrong with this picture here?\u00a0 This scenario may be totally okay in a personal residential setting, but you don’t want to do that in a public place like a museum.\u00a0 And if you really care about the art, you’d want to know its content and context.\u00a0 You may even want to put it on another wall with a different theme after realizing what’s actually written in there.\u00a0 To hear a Bach performance that ignores its context, to some people, can be as awkward (or even offensive) to an East Asian as to see a calligraphy piece on the wall upside-down.\u00a0 Really.<\/p>\n I agree with the violinist from the clip, though, about one thing; that we perform for the 21st century audience.\u00a0 That’s why I think that the musicologists are not always the best storytellers, however comprehensive their understanding of the context may be.\u00a0 Interpretation is about how to tell\/re-tell the story as you understand the subject based on its context.\u00a0 Storytelling, or delivering, has a lot to do with rhetorical skills of the orator [performer], and that’s why the notion of rhetoric is important in performing baroque music.. but this has to be a topic of another blog entry.\u00a0 Our storytelling should NOT be just ‘reenacting’\u2014 our storytelling should be about telling in the way that’s most effective for you to send the story out to the audience today, and if it means you need to pre-inform the audience about how you are going to do it, so be it. \u00a0That’s exactly what program notes are for. \u00a0Let them in on the context!\u00a0 Let’s all enjoy the story together.<\/p>\n The crew of Apollo 15 brought back a moon rock of significant importance in understanding how the moon came to be.\u00a0 What they found was a rock of anorthosite. \u00a0The press called it the<\/em> Genesis Rock,<\/em> and it is considered to be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of Apollo.\u00a0 Those ex-test pilot astronauts becoming fluent enough in “the language of this little rock” and knowing which rocks to sample is one thing, but to be able to inspire them to be lunar field observers is another… I would have loved to attend Dr. Silver’s field lectures.\u00a0 And someday I want to be able to inspire my musician colleagues to the journey of contextual exploration like Dr. Silver did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Originally posted on February 20, 2011) Fairly recently on facebook, I commented on an online video clip that I watched earlier.\u00a0 It was of an European virtuoso violinist making a recording of Bach violin concertos.\u00a0 In the video this young violinist said: “I love to hear about authentic interpretation and baroque violins; however, we do not know how it was actually played. So the freedom of interpretation is much wider than some people might think.\u00a0 I do believe that I play for the people of the 21st century.”\u00a0 My comment was about this quote that stuck with me… It struck me as too shallow a thought for an established violinist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,5],"tags":[24,42,65,90],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-bach","category-early-music","category-essays","tag-apollo-15","tag-context","tag-interpretation","tag-rhetoric","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bachpeople.com\/jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}