Stile Moderno, Turlough O'Carolan & Music Of The Spheres
Saturday, January 17, 2015
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| Arthur Neele, Angela Malmberg, Natalie Mackie & Konstantin Rusianov Bozhinov |
My granddaughter Lauren Stewart and I are fans of StileModerno. This is a local group fronted by the core trio of Arthur Neele on
baroque violin, Natalie Mackie on Viola de Gamba (hers has seven strings and
unlike the similar looking baroque cello it has frets) and Konstantin Rusianov
Bozhinov on archlute. This latter instrument is similar to the lute but has a
much longer neck. For the concert that Lauren, my friend Graham Walker and I
attended this Sunday a second violin was needed. The part was played by Angela
Malmberg who like all the other three are members of the Pacific Baroque
Orchestra.
From my mother’s side, the de Irureta Goyena surname we had
marquis in Spain. While with the mingling of my father’s English blood I will
not be a nobleman ever I felt like royalty on Sunday. The three of us and a
full house that amounted to some 26 souls sat in a sunny west side studio to
listen to Stile Moderno play baroque music of the 17th and 18
century from England, Ireland and Scotland. We listened to the fine music with
plates of nice goodies and good wine. 
While we were familiar with the Henry Purcell (1659-1695) Sonata a 3 no. 7 Z.796 and 9. Z.798 I had never heard Matthew Locke’s (1621-1677) Broken Consort No. 6 and No. 3.
Of interest, too was John Eccles, an English composer,
1688-1735. His A Division on a Ground had Malmberg doing ever more rapid and
complex variations on a theme while Mackie and Bozhinov accompanied in a sort
of continuo.
While all this was going on, Lauren and Graham were
collaborating on a sketch that featured the planets. |
| Illustration Lauren Stewart & Graham Walker |
It wasn’t until the concert was over that I explained to Lauren that she was not far off the mark. Scientists of the 17th and 18th century thought that the planets made music as they moved through space. They called it Music of the Spheres.
Stile Moderno will have further concerts. You can find them
here. But Arthur Neele is also collaborating with UBC scholar, organist and
harpsichordist Christine Hutten in a concert (extremely unusual featuring one
violin and keyboard, be it the organ or a harpsichord. They will be playing on
January at the lovely and intimate chapel of St. Andrew’s Wesley Church which
houses a small 1986 made organ. The idea of one violin being able to compete
with an organ promises a great acoustic challenge. The two will then play the
next day in North Vancouver’s Gloria Dei Lutheran Church.
REVERBERATIONS
By John Rockwell
Or so scientists told us a few months ago when they
announced that the Perseus galaxy cluster, 250 million light years from our
little planet, was emitting that note, or a series of those notes, which
''appear as pressure waves roiling and spreading as a result of outbursts from
a supermassive black hole,'' in the words of Dennis Overbye, a science reporter
for The New York Times.
The notes have a period of oscillation of 10 million
years, which makes them ''the lowest note in the universe.'' So said Dr. Andrew
Fabian, an X-ray astronomer at Cambridge University in England and the leader
of the team that discovered the note.
Most of the commentary since has been about the
implications of this discovery for the study of black holes and hence of the
physical properties of the universe. My interest is, to put it mildly, less
scientifically informed and more aesthetically speculative.
These B flats may be the oldest and the longest notes in the universe, but just how universal are they? My eye was caught by another recent article in The Times, this one about a mysterious low hum that bedevils some people, a kind of basso variant of tinnitus, which is a high pitch likewise heard in the ears of sufferers. Are those sounds, I wondered, also in B flat, suggesting an even more cosmic implication for this once-humble pitch?
As for the hum, Dr. Kelly reported that it was close to
66 hertz, two octaves below middle C. But he suggested that other patients
heard hums as low as the lowest E on a piano. No specific correspondence with B
flat, but one can always hope.
Back to the macro picture, the black hole B flat. If that
frequency (or pitch) is now the acoustical bedrock of the universe, perhaps our
entire tuning system, centered on middle C, needs revision. The Western
harmonic system involves keys with increasing numbers of sharps and flats
exfoliating out from middle C, or from C major, all white keys on the piano.
Now, perhaps, we have to exfoliate from B flat. Maybe this is as big a shift in
human thinking as that from a flat-earth-centered universe to the solar system.
Or maybe not.
As a digression, I thought of the California composer
Terry Riley. Mr. Riley, always something of a cosmic mystic, won his first fame
in 1964 with his composition ''In C,'' which has been endlessly recorded and
played, in part because it's so beautiful and in part because it's so
ingenious: a series of simple melodic figures that any group of any kind of
instrumentalists may play according to certain simple rules, setting up a
dappled tapestry of sound.
Mr. Riley's most recent piece attests to his fascination
with the cosmos. It's called ''Sun Rings,'' and although lavishly praised on
the West Coast (the Kronos Quartet performs it), it hasn't yet made it to our
benighted Eastern outback. ''Sun Rings'' is based on ''space sounds'' recorded
by Dr. Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa. One wonders idly if B flat plays
any special role. To judge from ''In C,'' Mr. Riley is a C man.
According to the music encyclopedias, the Internet and
Jamie James's chatty book ''Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural
Order of the Universe,'' thinkers and artists have been less interested in what
might be designated a universal fundamental tone as in the relations between
the tones: scales and modes and keys.
Tables ascribing emotional characteristics to keys have
poured out over the centuries, back to the ancient Greeks. The most complete
compendium of these descriptions was compiled by Dr. Rita Steblin in a book
published by the University of Rochester Press and titled ''A History of Key
Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries,'' although she ranges far
earlier and later than that. Check it out for $95 plus shipping on Amazon.com.
The descriptions were always highly subjective, but those
in Dr. Steblin's book for B flat major (let's try to keep this reasonably
simple, avoiding B flat minor) generally call it a happy key. ''Magnificent and
joyful,'' as per one early French source. ''Noble,'' thought another Frenchman.
''Condescending greatness mixed with venerable seriousness,'' said a
late-18th-century German. ''Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspirations
for a better world,'' wrote another. ''Tender, soft, sweet, love, charm,
grace,'' according to an Italian.
If we listen to these sages, a B flat universe is not
such a bad place to be. And if we buy into August Gathy, a Frenchman who wrote
in 1835, the key relates to ''noble womanliness,'' too. Maybe there's something
to Erda or Gaia, after all. Check out www.gaiaconsort.com, a site devoted to
''music for freethinking pagans, humanists, psychedelics, visionaries, wiccans,
mystics.'' Perhaps Mr. Riley already has.
Before we reluctantly leave the concept of keys, here is
a highly selective list of well-known compositions in B flat major; make of
them what you will: Beethoven's ''Hammerklavier'' Piano Sonata and Symphony No.
4, Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2, Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 98 and 102,
Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5, Schubert's Symphony No. 5, Schumann's Symphony No.
1.
But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves, besides
managing to annoy any serious acoustician or physicist or musical theorist. The
universe has not yet been detected as emitting music in any key or mode. It is
just steadily (and very slowly) singing the note of B flat, over and over. What
song did the Sirens sing? What note? What key? We await further word from our
intrepid scientists, ears cocked to the cosmos.
