Friday 31 August 2012

Over lunch with Barnaby yesterday, he mentioned an ongoing conversation he’s been having with Andrew Lawrence-King on our assumptions about rhythmic freedom or rubato in early music of many kinds. It’s an issue that we managed not to talk about in Tobias Hume rehearsals (although Alison and I did discuss it when no-one else was listening) as that kind of discussion can derail a rehearsal completely. If you listen to A Mery Conceit, you can hear that we played it pretty much as a straight-ahead dance tune, with no ‘early music’ mucking about with the tempo.  But we also recorded the solo viol version of the same tune from Hume’s first book, called Tickell Tickell, letting the two viols share it between them, and the rhythm this time was so flexible that you would barely recognise it as the same piece.

Viol players are particularly susceptible to this kind of thing: negotiating your way around the six or seven strings of the instrument involves plenty of physicality – you just can’t do it in a hurry – so most viol players give in to the instrument’s lead and are pretty indulgent with the tempo. As a result you rarely hear Hume’s music played with a coherent sense of underlying dance pulse. And this is fine: there is no way that I would expect Hesperion XXI to start playing in time.

But there was a neat unexpected discovery from Alison’s new lira d’amore, which she asked to be made with a relatively flat bridge, as specified for a lyra-viol in Christopher Simpson’s The Division-Viol (1659). A flatter bridge makes it easy to play chords (you can play three notes at a time with little difficulty) although you do have to be technically much more precise if you want to play single notes. But … it also saves you a lot of flailing around getting from one part of the instrument to another, and as a result it’s much easier to play simply and in time. 

The shape of a stringed-instrument bridge is a small and quite elementary part of the technology, but tiny things like that can have a huge effect on what is technically possible, and on what musically feels right. Our assumptions about how and when to ‘take time’ when playing many kinds of early music can be led by some unexpectedly mundane considerations. Our dialogue with our instruments carries on, and is occasionally argumentative.

Rubato was already in the forefront of my mind from learning music hall songs on the piano for a Radio 4 drama that I was recording this afternoon: check out Vesta Tilley from 1906. And this morning Alasdair was here for our final ballad rehearsal, before we try them out in front of people for the first time tomorrow.