The Cornettist & A Potato Chip

Since the early 90s the Roy Barnett Recital Hall at UBC’s School of Music has been my avenue into the past and the future.

The paradox is that sometimes that future (of new music) is not always contemporary music but music from the past. This music of the past, heard with more frequency  in the last few years in Vancouver, music of the early 18^th century and of the turn of the 17^th, is so new in that it has been unheard by most (or at least by me).

While the experts tell me I am wrong I insist that the popularity (particularly in the Early Music Vancouver programming these days) of the 17^th century has to do with an explosion of new ideas in that period that some call the Fantastic. Many of the compositions feature wrong/right notes that pre-figure Thelonious Monk. They are moments of dissonance more in keeping with this 21^st century or the early years of the 20^th.

The Wednesday Noon Hours segment yesterday October 21, at Barnett Hall was no different in time travel to the past which transferred magically into an exciting present.  The concert was performed in partnership with Early Music Vancouver and featured our very own transplanted Munich-born Alexander Weimann and the venerable and best cornetto player in the world, Bruce Dickey.

Of the former I can only in a nutshell mention that he plays the harpsichord in a virtuoso manner, directs many baroque orchestras (including the Pacific Baroque Orchestra)  with a punctilious (but most pleasantly so players rise to his demand for perfection)  approach and on the side he can play one hell of a jazz piano!

Of the latter, the man set the standards for an instrument (made of wood but with a tiny mouthpiece that is like that of a trumpet) the cornetto that had its heyday in the 16^th and 17^th century.  It was a pleasant foil for the church organ and an instrumental version of the soprano voice. The ascendance of the violin became its death knell.

trebble cornettos (they came also as small trebble and tenors)

Dickey is almost singly responsible in bringing back the instrument into the repertoire of early music.

Dickey is a pleasant low key man who knows his Italian. If anything I noticed that his playing sounded effortless even though the instrument is very difficult to play.

I must interject that I lived with my family in Burnaby from 1975 to 1986 and part of my relative success in editorial (magazine/newspaper) and annual report photography was the fact that I made my photographs with that middle-of-the road comprehension that I gave to the inhabitants of Burnaby which were (in my sole opinion) a few notches above those of Whalley, BC.

Cornetto mouthpieces

So I asked Dickey backstage after the concert, “From the point of view of this average idiot (me!) how can one tell the difference between the cornetto and a baroque trumpet?”  Without any condescension he gently answered that the sound was different (to him perhaps!).  I then asked the question that almost flustered his politeness, “Would any cornetto player have ever or would ever play Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto?” His answer (I am not sure there was an answer) was one of someone who if he had known of the existence of Whalley would have banished me then and there with a “Be gone!”.

The programme listed composers of the 16^th and 17^th century. I am familiar with Giovanni Gabrieli (1556-1612) and have heard of Giovanni Pierlugi da Palestrina (1525-1594) but the others were new (and their music new and fresh) Ascanio Trombetti (1544-1590), Gioseffo Guarni (1542-1611), and Antonio Brunelli (1577-1630).

The concert was beautiful, pleasant, surprising, new and more so since this old 73 year-old was surrounded by the youth of UBC -  it all felt new-music/avant-gardish.

But this noonday concert in, all its satisfying menu, had one snack that hit me ever so nicely.  Alexander Weimann (Dickey sat down) played a Ciaccona by Bernardo Storace (flourished around 1664).  A ciaccona, sometimes written in its French form Chaconne, was the 17^th and 18^th century version of Louie Louie. These ciacconas seem to have a fixed melody (which like a potato chip I cannot only have one of it) and then performers improvise in an early form of jazz. I can truthfully write here that there were moments when I thought Weimann was going to demolish the instrument.

For those who might be curious as to exactly a ciaccona is I have written about it here and here.

And for this man who no longer lives in Burnaby I wish only that my ex-fellow Burnabites might just give some of this music a chance before it becomes a rave in Whalley.

Addendum: My fabulous digital Fuji X-E1 has a flaw that I will have to solve with tape. There is a little switch on the front that moves from auto-focus to manual focus on its own volition. That is my excuse for the decided out of focus nature of my portrait of Dickey and Weimann.