The lowest notes on the theorbo or archlute have a remarkably profound and projecting sound.  This is partly due to the lowness of the notes (below the low C of the cello), but especially because the colour of these notes is very rich in overtones and high partials; the length of the bass string (often over 5 feet) means the strings can be relatively thin, making them bright and penetrating, despite the low pitch.  A short, thick string, by comparison, would sound dark, dull and lacking in overtones.

If you are as confused as I am as to the differences among lutes, theorbos and archlutes look here and you will still be as confused as I still am! 

Stephen Stubbs - chitarrone - copy mid 17th century Italian model by the English Luthier Stephen Barber in 1995.

Suffice to know that this instrument has a sound that is rarely heard in an ensemble. I cannot compete with string instruments. It shares some ignominy with its continuo partner the harpsichord. In many baroque performances I have attended in the past I can see it but rarely hear it. And until I went to performances by Richard Eggar and of Alexander Weimann (who has just moved to Vancouver) I did not appreciate the pleasant capabilities of the instrument. In fact my memories of the instrument have been haunted by having seen Vincent Price in Roger Corman's  House of Usher (based on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher) playing a harpsichord while Technicolor blood oozed from surrounding walls with the sounds of a woman (not quite dead?) moaning.

Alexander Weimann

It was Weimann who once told me that a lot of the music that he plays on the harpsichord as continuo accompaniment (sometimes the instruments can also be, the viola da gamba, the cello,  the bass, the organ and, yes, the lute) was not written so he had to improvise. Since I love jazz, that opened my eyes to the instrument. Some of have been lucky enough to listen to Weimann play jazz on the harpsichord.

In the pre-concert talk with EMV Artistic Director Matthew White and the two performers I found out that as the quantity of courses went up as the lute players attempted to compete with the harpsichord, the complexity of playing the instrument finally set it on a decline. Interesting to me is that Vancouver keyboardist extraordinaire Michael Jarvis once played for me his antique pre US Civil War square Chickering piano that had a lever that could give the instrument a waterfall sound. And that waterfall sound mimicked the sound of a harpsichord! It would seem that the lute tried to imitate the harpsichord and when the harpsichord went in decline the interloper, the piano could in some instances mimic it.

Alexander Weimann, Matthew White & Lucas Harris

Last night’s concert featured these composers. Since little music seems to have been composed for the lute and the harpsichord as solo instruments in tandem the performance began with only one of two where Weimann and Harris played together. This was Gregorio Strozzi’s (1615-1687) Sonata a basso solo. Weimann played it on José Verstappen’s (former EMV Artistic Director) harpsichord which he made in the Italian style. Weimann gave us the opportunity to listen to it and Craig Tomlinson’s ( West Vancouver) French style instrument. The former was precise, sharp with a short decay of sound. The French-style instrument’s sound lingered and seemed to me more subtle.

The other piece played by both was Sylvius Leopold Weiss’ Adagio & Allegro in which the second instrument part ( a lute) was reconstructed by Karl –Ernst Schröder and adapted by Weimann.

Lucas Harris playing Ray Nurse's 10-course lute & Weimann at Verstappen's Italian harpsichord

The other pieces were all played with great virtuosity including Bach’s Fantasia cromatica & Fuga in d minor BWV 903 which was so taxing for Weimann’s fingers that after a wonderful long flourish of notes and when Harris began that other virtuoso piece for lute, Bach’s Prélude & Fugue in E flat major BWV 998 I could see Weimann frantically extending and contracting his fingers.

Since the harpsichord has no pedals like a piano, Weimann who is the Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra or has been leader for many EMV concerts, sometimes has the task of having to direct while playing the harpsichord or organ. He likes to do this standing up. It was interesting to see how Weimann when playing the Bach fugue, and in some places only used his right hand, he would close his left hand in a point and direct himself! I found this charming.

As for Harris’s Bach fugue performance, a most complex and difficult piece that had stumped him for years, a tragic event made it possible for him to play it. The death of his mentor and teacher, American lutenist Patrick O’Brien two weeks ago saddened him but as Harris explained, O’Brien was somehow a third man on stage last night. So we had two men, very close, playing with a degree of intimacy that was frightening and that may have been haunted by a ghost.

I should end here and against the advice of my wife Rosemary who was shocked when I told her of the plan I shall soldier one with my conclusion.

In 1985 I went to New York City with a male writer friend. One evening, I was comfortably reading in bed he told me, “I am going to 42^nd Street (William Gibson called it Forty Deuce Street) want to come along?” I declined as I was not interested in watching a live sex show which was what the street was notorious for.

Somehow last night there was a level of mutual communication between two men who have known each other for 15 years that approached an instance  that for me almost uncomfortable. I felt that I, and the people around me were superfluous to the performance. At the same time I knew we were lucky to be there even if we didn’t belong. It wasn’t sex, but close enough.


Next this Friday

Harris playingStephen Stubbs' 13-course lute by Michael Lowe, Oxford

Almost as close as the sound of that bass note of the lute or the final note of Weimann’s harpsichord in that Weiss Allegro. The bass note sounded suspiciously like (but not quite) that of the lute! 

From David Macaulay - Cathedral -The Story of its Construction

Betty Mayfield - Photographs Clyde Umney

Not too long ago when the Drake Hotel closed, one of its former owners, Jack Cooney called me up and told me, “There are some pictures here. We found in the  dancers’ dressing room, in one of the drawers. They look like yours. Do you want them?”

 I went but they were not mine. The folder, with pictures, almost all in colour were faded and the colours were all off. The folder had the name Betty Mayfield. One of the contact sheets had a stamped name, Clyde Umney. I told Jack that I had never heard of the photographer. If Umney, was indeed the photographer. We looked at the pictures and we identified Betty Mayfield as a young woman both of us had known as Cheri Partridge. The only other clue was an address 757 Willington Ave in East Vancouver.

  

Jack told me that he was prepared to throw the folder away so I told him I would take it.  Just a couple of days ago I found the folder and decided to scan some of the faded pictures as they are rather good. They seem to convey a look of the time.

  

Google searches for Clyde Umney only had info on a Stephen King short story called Umney’s Last Case that was first published on line in 1993. Further investigation led me to Raymond Chandler’s Playback in which Clyde Umney is a lawyer.

 

In 1962 when I was 20, I listened to the music of an Italian composer called Frescobaldi in a baroque church in Mexico City. The music was unlike the music my mother, a pianist, loved, Grieg, Chopin, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff. To this day baroque music sounds as inventive, fresh, and as new as if I were listening to it for the first time. Baroque music is New Music of the past.

With the likes of our very own Early Music Vancouver in the swing of their annual Summer Festival (2014 Vancouver Early Music Festival) chances are that, indeed, what you will witness in performance will be brand new. Brand new in the sense that you will probably have never ever heard it live. And more so now that Early Music Vancouver is putting emphasis in the baroque music of the 17^th century.

Ellen Hargis & Matthew White

The baroque period that spans the 17^th and the 18^th century paralleled the Age of Enlightenment. This age was ushered in by scientists like Newton and Leibnitz and by explorers that embarked on their wooden ships to find new worlds. Galileo and Copernicus took found new worlds elsewhere.

In this age of precision where man could do anything imaginable by reason there would seem to be no room for emotion. This, to me is the lovely paradox of baroque music. It seems metered, precise and yet if you happen to look at the faces of our performers you will note their smiles of pleasure.This can be contagious.

This was not more evident than on Sunday night at the Roy Barnett Recital Hall at the UBC School of Music.

Natalie Mackie, Christopher Bagan, Marc Destrubé & Ellen Hargis

I will be blunt in stating here that although I am crazy about baroque music I usually pass on the French variety. Worse still is French Baroque for the harpsichord (and yes that's Couperin). In a recent past I could not abide by the harpsichord so I was happy that most of the time it was inaudible, usually drowned out by the louder instruments that I could appreciate.

But thanks to the Pacific Baroque Orchestra’s Artistic Director and virtuoso harpsichordist Alexander Weimann I have learned to appreciate the harpsichord.

Tonight the little trio of Marc Destrubé, violin, Natalie Mackie, viola da gamba and Christopher Bagan, harpsichord, took care of that second prejudice with more Rameau than I have ever heard before in one sitting.

The trio played two Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) Cantatas (Ellen Hargis, soprano and Sylvia Szadovszki, mezzo-soprano) and two Pièces de Clavecin, the Deuzième concert (Second Concert in G major) and the Cinquième concert (Fifth Concert in D minor).

I approached Marc Destrubé after the night’s performance and asked him, “Why was that Second Concert so complex, elaborate, interesting and wonderful?” He answered, “Because Rameau was complex, elaborate, interesting and wonderful.” I then asked him, “Why was the Fifth Concert so charming?” His answer was short (I would believe that Destrubé must have had ancestors who were scientists in the French Enlightenment), “Because Rameau was charming and perhaps because his fifth was his last.”

The harpsichordist Christopher Bagan (if you have never seen him before) has a penchant for wearing very slim black pants and with his short hair and youth you might suspect that he is the page turner. This is not the case as he has a doctorate and is a professor. 

Sylvia Szadovszki

Natalie Mackie our expert (and passionate, too) viola da gambist (or is that violist da gamba?) chose to sit stage right. I had to ask as the continuo section of any baroque orchestra is always on stage left. She was there so she could connect with Bagan, while Destrubé took care of everything centre stage.

Since I am no music critic I can only attest to the fact that the instrumental music of the evening was excellent and that I will now appreciate those Frenchie composers much more.

It was the cantata section of the concert that was the most interesting, thanks to the pre-concert chat between Ellen Hargis and Early Music Vancouver Artistic Director Matthew White.

White know his singers as until he went on a sabbatical he was one of the best countertenors in our nation and good enough to have sung in Versailles even though the Sun King was not in attendance.

It seems that White last year spotted mezzo-soprano Szadovszki (who has been banned from inserting her name in Scrabble) performing at the opera. He approached her and asked her if she had ever sung French Baroque. Her negative was countered by an offer that we the audience are extremely glad she accepted. It seems that opera singing and singing a baroque cantata are not quite the same thing. There might be a parallel here similar to the subtlety of a baroque violin and the power and loudness of a modern violin.

Szadovszki learned fast and learned from the best. The best is Ellen Hargis who has been coming to perform (Early Music Vancouver Summer concerts) and teach baroque singing performance at UBC also in the summer for many years. I have been told that she is an excellent teacher and Szadovszki’s stellar performance attests to it. But I must add that of all the sopranos that I have heard and hear, my all-time favourite is Hargis.

I asked baritone and lutenist Ray Nurse tonight why this is the case that Hargis is so good. His answer floored me as it was an unexpected one. It was particularly unexpected in that I love Hargis because her singing is full of emotion and sweetness. Nurse said, “It is because of her phenomenal intelligence.”

Again that is another indication that the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason could and did accommodate emotion, too.

Hargis sang Rameau’s Orphée (ever so sweetly)  and Szadovszki his Diane et Actéon. 

This coming Tuesday, July 29, also at the Roy Barnett Hall, Alexander Weimann and Lucas Harris will play a bit less French baroque music (alas!) but some Strozzi, Rossi, Bach, Couperin, Piccinini,  Robert de Visée and if some of these are not known to you, surely you will have heard of Sylvius Leopold Weiss. He and Bach were up to something. What you ask? Find out on Tuesday. 

Addendum: You might note the beautiful harpsichord in my photographs. It was built by West Vancouver's Craig Tomlinson for Bruce Wright. The painting on the harpsichord cover is by Colombian painter (lives in Vancouver) Marco Tulio. 

My Argentine painter friend Juan Manuel Sanchez, well into his late 70s could make any woman he met; divest herself of all her clothes within minutes of having met them when he told him he was a painter.

I thought I was very good at this until one day when both of us where in my studio and we had requested the presence of a beautiful Latin American woman. She entered my studio. I checked my watch and two minutes later she cast off everything she had been wearing.

Perhaps it was Juan’s face. He had Spanish blood from Galicia. In Buenos Aires you might have easily seen him as a waiter. But this he was not. He had one obsession (I would like to qualify that as huge, but then when is an obsession not that?) and that was to render the woman, a woman, the essence of woman on his canvas.

Unlike this photographer who needs a woman of flesh and blood to face my camera, Juan can conjure woman with his imagination. One day as I noticed the simplicity of his paintings I asked him what was going on. He explained that the concept of woman was a problem that needed a resolution. One, day, perhaps close to his death he would paint a line on a white canvas and the white line would be a platonic woman, the perfect woman resolved with nothing missing and nothing to be added.

 When I last saw him in his studio in Buenos Aires last September his drawings were as clean and as perfect as I could have imagined. It would seem that by now at age 84 his talents were super attuned to the problem of hand. How can one convey the universal woman?

On August 31 I will be 72 and I find that there is no way I can compete with Juan to convince women to face my camera undraped. I don’t have a Galician face or perhaps I am seen as a viejo verde (a green old man is Spanish for a dirty old man). Whatever it is my output is definitely in decline.

What comes to mind these days is the wonderful but sad scene in The Magnificent Seven when Robert Vaughn (Lee) as a former quick-draw gunfighter now with a streak of cowardice spots three flies. He swoops at them with his hand and catches two. He says, “At one time I would have caught all three…”

It was perhaps some 25 years ago that at the Railway Club (I met with friends on Thursdays for lunch) I had noticed a beautiful woman (a bleached blonde) who always showed up at around noon. One day I simply got up and said to her, “My name is Alex and I would very much like to take you photographs without anything on.” She looked at me and quickly said, “Fine, this is my phone number.” And that was that. Now the flies buzz around but I am not catching any of them.

 I may have been around 1982 when I first met Julie Mennard. I called her the watch lady. In her profession she divested herself of everything within minutes of her performance. But she always kept her Cartier watch. Mennard reminded me of a sophisticated version of Susan Sarandon. Mennard’s skin looked like the coating on white Limoges china. She had a liking for red lipstick that set off her unsaturated skin.

There was a streak of existentialist sadness in her demeanor. But I was told she was tough. She had a little daughter and she did her best for her. One day I asked if she would pose for me. I remember that she lived right next to Grandview Park on Commercial Drive not far from where I was to photograph Dave Barrett by his Volvo a few years later. I picked her up in my yellow Fiat X 1/9 and we drove to Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver. We walked to the cliffs where I took the pictures on a hot sunny afternoon in summer.

I note that I used four film stocks. With my Pentaxes I loaded one with Kodak b+w infrared and the other with Kodak Technical Pan. With my Mamiya RB-67 I used Kodacolor in 120 and a Fuji HR- 100. The latter really shows off Mennard’s white skin but unfortunately the negative has stained in places and you might note that there is some yellow in her white slip.

Shortly after I took the pictures she told me she was going back to Montreal and I never saw her again. 

Many years ago in the dawn of electronic cameras I used to have students who were extremely proud of their A-1 Canons. These were a marvel of the age.

In a fairly quiet tone I voice I would instruct these proud owners to remove the single, fairly large battery. Some of them did not know how to do this. Once this was done I would declare, to their shock, “You now have in possession a very expensive door stop.”

In my last years of teaching at Focal Point I used to ask my students, “Is there some way that you can take pictures with your digital cameras in this studio and then go home and have nothing?” The answer was, "Yes,"  and the most often one was, “Sometimes the storage cards become corrupted.”

I found out that if the scary mantra of the turn of the last century into this one was, “The computers are down.” (and this century, too if you think Translink). This was and is not as scary as, “Your storage card is corrupted.” “Your hard drive is corrupted.”

Before we photographers depended on those electronic door stops we would go with two cameras if we needed one. We had four rolls if we though we would shoot one. We'd  have several flash chords, and two light/flashmeters. When my prime Mamiya portrait lens, a 140mm floating element macro lens failed, on a job (Raymond Burr) because the shutter main spring gave out I never ever went to another job without two 140 lenses.

So we photographers have always been paranoid about photographic failure and we respected Patterson’s Law which stipulated the Murphy (of Murphy’s Law) was an out-and-out optimist.

And when we have been faced with failure in a job we have found roundabout methods of overcoming it. Once when I was sent to Calgary to photograph a CBC announcer my Mamiya RB suffered a broken mirror (it would not go down. My solution was to find a used Mamiya at a pawnshop (I gave him a credit card number) and have it delivered to the CBC by taxi. The chap of the pawnshop was happy to get money and still keep the camera!

At the persistent urging of my wife Rosemary I finally purchased a digital camera last year. I did not want to buy those expensive clunker Canons or Nikons. I chose a rather sophisticated mirrorless Fuji X-E1. I bought it at Leo’s Camera knowing that Jeff Gin would help me every step of the way into the 21^st century kind of camera. And so he has.

Jeff Gin at Leo's Cameras

Meanwhile I have been overtly making fun of my friend Paul Leisz’s Canon klunker. He has been fairly subdued in countering my rude aggression. I believe he might have, in the end had the last laugh.

You see this Fuji X-E1 can do just about everything. It will shoot panoramics (left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up, long or extra long) without need of Photoshop stitching (like Leisz’s Canon). The X-E1 is light and compact. It is elegant and the zoom lens that I purchased with it (my first ever zoom lens) gives me just about every focal length I want. And if that was not enough with an adaptor (which I have) I can use every old manual Nikon lens I own.

While teaching at Focal Point I used to tell my students that digital cameras like the ones they had were much better than film cameras in rendering the true colour of human flesh. Even some of the cheaper DSLRs could do this very nicely.

My Fuji X-E1 has one design flaw that most people would not note. You see few photographers these days that fire studio flashes with their cameras. I do.

I have been unable to get a correct flesh tone when mating my Fuji to my studio flash. In fact the pictures are incredibly tinted red/yellow. I have to work extra time to get my colour pictures of people taken in my small home studio to almost (never quite) accurate.

Leisz’s Canon has like most decent DSLRs something called Custom White Balance.

My Fuji has Custom White Balance but unlike Leisz’s klunker it does not allow for balancing flash (intermittent light) but only continuous light sources.

So I went to Leo’s with my camera, a portable studio flash and a small softbox and went at it with Jeff Gin as my subject.

This was our conclusion.

1. The camera does not have a separate flash setting. It has a flash setting for the little on-camera retractable flash.

2. The camera will give an almost correct flesh tone with a studio flash if the camera is set for the sun symbol (sunlight).

3. At 5800 degrees Kelvin (a Kodak definition of daylight and a well corrected studio flash) the Fuji will give you very warm pictures as the camera simply adjusts to the light in a studio, and ignores that it is tethered to a studio flash.

4. Going against the grain of logic (it does make sense but it is much too complicated for me to explain here) if we set the camera to a warmer 4800 degrees Kelvin the camera will attempt to correct and with a studio flash you will get similar results at with the daylight symbol.

In short we photographers have always found a way of circumventing those systems designed to thwart us!

The device you see sitting on the camera is a safe sync. It is the only way I can connect the camera to my studio flash.

A-10

In my library I have a pretty good collection of airplane books. One of them Dogfight – Air Combat Adversaries – Head to Head by Robert Jackson with illustrations by Jim Winchester is not among them. This one is in my guest bathroom. In that place where the king is always alone I like to glance at it.

Of late two planes in the book have been in the news. The Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt II commonly, almost affectionately called the Warthog for its ungainly ugliness has an uncertain future. US Congress is attempting to save money and an airplane that was supposed to bust tanks of a Soviet invasion into Western Europe perhaps has no future in an era of drone warfare.

Had that Soviet invasion happened the Warthog would have faced its Soviet counterpart the Sukhoi Su-25 ‘Frogfoot’ (the name given it by NATO).

Although this blog will be up for another day, I am writing this today Wednesday, July 23, it just so happens that the Frogfoot is in the news. Two of them, property of the Ukrainian Air Force were shot down by Russian surface to air missiles today. Ukrainian authorities allege that the missiles came from inside Russia.

Whatever happens I kind of like the fact that although the articles mention the plane here in my blog you can have a look at what it looks like.

For those who have a memory for the Vietnam War I might not here that a converted military version of the Douglas DC-3, the Douglas AC-47 aka Puff the Magic Dragon was equipped with an advanced electronic version of the 19th century Gatling Gun. These were gunships that terrorized the Vietcong. The Warthog has such a weapon and you can see its multiple barrel sticking out the front of the A-10 in my photograph which took some years ago at the Abbotsford Air Show.

Both aircraft were heavily armoured to protect its pilots who in many cases as they strafed troops while flying low would have been subject to ground fire. There was heavy stuff under their seats, too!  It is for this reason that it seems that the pilots of both downed Frogfoots were able to bail out. 

I first saw Reid on Wreck Beach. She had a body to die for. It was a healthy exuberant body like few you see now. She was with a musician friend who was busy placing two tape recorders a few feet apart by the water.  It seemed he wanted to record the sounds of the sea in real stereo. 

I have no memory on exactly how it was that I approached this monumento (as we say in Spanish) and enquired on the possibility of snapping her pictures.

What you see here are my first of her. In 1977 I was still attempting to find my style and direction. I was unsure if I wanted to be a portrait photographer or a fashion photographer. I did not have studio lights. I took these with existing light with a Spotmatic F with I believe a precursor of Kodak Technical Pan film. The other photos (sitting in the chair and looking up) I used a Pentax S-3 with Kodak b+w Infrared film.

I photographed Reid many times through the years. For a while she worked at a Video Rental place Mega Movies on 16^th and Oak which subsequently became Rogers and then closed.

It is probably a sure thing that I was not the only patron of the place who was so, because Reid was always a sight to behold. And since I knew her she would talk to me with that voice. It was heaven!

The pictures reflect the almost post-hippie era when folks like Reid would congregate on 4^th Avenue and in cafés (that did not have lattes or capuchinos) they imbibed red zinger tea. One of them was called the Soft Rock Café.

The video rental girl stretches