38: Sparse Markings and the Baroque Rules

 

If you pick up a score by Bach and another by Beethoven, you’ll see completely different attitudes toward markings. Bach’s Allegro assai from BWV 1005 (the last movement) has literally one marking: “Allegro assai.” The only other information a violinist gets is a bunch of notes and a few bowings—no “piano”, no “forte”, no “crescendo”. This was the common practice in the Baroque era: you were simply expected to know some conventions, and if you did, your mind would be aligned with the composers mind.

So here are a few of the rules:

1.       When a line rises, get louder, and when it falls, get softer

2.       When a line is repeated exactly twice, the second is an echo of the first and should be softer

3.       When a line is repeated 3 times or more to form a sequence, the beginning of each of the sequence’s legs should be clear, and you should do something to differentiate each leg

4.       When playing a polyphonic line involving repeated excursions away from and returns to some pedal point, the line that moves always takes precedence

Let me illustrate. Writing like this is all over BWV 1001-1006 (suites for violin) and 1006-1012 (suites for cello):


Here, it’s clear that E-G-A-Bb-A-G-F is the more important line, than the Cs we keep coming back to. This may be only one instrument (one violin), but it’s clear there are 2 voices here—the stuff that moves, and the Cs. The moving stuff is always more important.

5.       When a fragment is repeated identically around things that change, deemphasize the repeated fragment, and make the moving line interesting:
Here we are again, a few bars later:

F-D-A is clearly what’s important here, not those C-B-C groups that get tacked on. Bring out F-D-A more than the C-B-C each one has attached to it

6.       When you modulate without doing so explicitly, thereby introducing a bunch of non-chord tones, make them interesting, and relate them back to where “home” still is, technically, and where “home” feels like it is, thanks to the non-chord tones:


Here, that means “we spend a bunch of time in G melodic minor, and Bach makes us think we’re ending up there, but then we end up in G major at the cadence, but we never technically left C”—so make G minor and G major interesting, and do something as you play to relate G major and minor to each other, and to C major.

7.       When you repeat a section in its entirety, the two repetitions should be different, not carbon copies:

What follows the cadence from rule 6 is a return to the very beginning, and we play everything over from the top, starting with:


The second time, highlight another line you didn’t the first time, or play it consistently louder or softer (although echoes are, 99% of the time, softer), or change up a bowing, or play something in a different string/position. Whatever you do, don’t play the exact same thing twice

8.       When the piece is broken up into clear sections with similar/identical material in different keys, connect them and explore the relation, but play or sing the phrasing differently.

After the repeat of the material from rule 7, we continue on to the second half of the sonata, and it starts like this—identical to the original beginning, only down a fourth in G major (although still notated in C, now with an F# everywhere). It is true that the two halves are very similar. Take the time to explore the relationship between C and G, and make a point out of the existence of the F in the first half, versus F# in the second. Don’t treat the C major material and the G major material like they need to be almost identical in their phrasings.

9.       Whenever you see a sharpened tonic, something is changing—don’t ever let that go unexplored.

As the second half of the Allegro progresses, we eventually come to
Your mind should immediately see by now that something is changing—after all, what could a C# in a piece that’s been all about exploring C major so far, be doing here?? A sharpened tonic??

(It turns out that that C# is Bach’s way of gently shifting the ear’s center from C to A which after all has a very crucial C#—via major, but ultimately landing, from A major, into A minor for a while; then, the whole rest of the piece is spent, after exploring A minor for a bit, trying to find a way out and back to C major.

I know that, because where this came from is sometimes called the “Baroque violinist’s Bible”, so we all know these sonatas really well, whether we’ve actually played them or not. A first-time listener should only be expected to hear the C#, recognize something is out of place, and know change is coming; knowing what the change will be requires  a lot more listening time.)

10.  Recenter yourself—and show that happening—when the composer recenters the music.

We know from rule 9 that Bach, in the second half of the Allegro, sends us on a journey, kicked off by that C#. You know that feeling where you’ve gone somewhere, and you need the GPS to get back home, but a few miles from home, when you’re back in familiar territory, you turn off the GPS, or send it somewhere else, because you’ve gotten back to a familiar place from an unfamiliar one, and how that changes your attitude as a driver? Do the same thing—tell the audience “Ok we aren’t home yet, but we’re not lost/in an unfamiliar place anymore, so I can see home on the horizon, and we’re almost there” when a composer gives you a clear familiar harmonic milepost on your journey home.

For example, in the second half, we have this:

After many bars of meandering, we’ve finally found our way to… the bakery 3 blocks from home where we go get a croissant every morning. We’re not home yet, but we’ve made it to a very familiar place that’ll lead us there in short order. The “bakery” in this analogy, of course, is G major—just one stepping-stone away from “home” in C major, since G is the dominant of C. We’ve come back to G, so the meandering is over, and we have a straight shot to C

11.  Highlight extremes of register (very high or very low) and especially passages that move between them.

As we approach the end of the Allegro, having already found our way back to G, C is our next and last checkpoint. On the way there, you saw in rule 10 that there was a hugely important ascending scale. It turns out that this is, at least for violins (and probably for anyone else, except maybe flutes) the literal highest note Bach ever wrote. Extremes like that—and, at the opposite end, 3 octaves away, the lowest note possible on the instrument, of which Bach makes frequent use—and especially passages that travel between high and low extremes, should get special attention. Look at how the previous passage continues, traveling lower and lower after hitting that high G the first time:

12.  As in a well-written essay, the conclusion is the most important part; once you know you’re getting close to the end, start giving indications to the audience. Some of them may be in the music, some may be your own phrasing. Here, for instance, to end the Allegro, Bach recalls how it started, and, using that figure from the beginning, ties everything up with a bow and brings us back, finally, home to C major with the final cadence:

It was the practice of the Baroque masters to assume you knew all these rules—which apply just as much to sung music as to instrumental music—rather than using markings to make the rules explicit for you. It was only later, in the Classical and Romantic periods, especially as technology advanced and composers could be more granular about what they wanted (especially regarding tempo—specifying exact beats per minute, instead of a generic “play really fast because I marked this Presto”), that more frequent, detailed markings appeared. Knowing these rules is a key to musicianship, and understanding them even if only as a listener, will be tremendously helpful to your experience engaging with this wonderful music.