April 17th, 2007 funky baroque music

I am playing the harpsichord in a baroque trio this semester, and we are currently working on a cello sonata by Bononcini. Of course, this is the first time that I have even heard of this composer. But I am growing to love the music more and more. Some parts are very Vivaldi-like, riffing repeated sixteenth note arpeggios. I love these parts because I can really rock-and-roll on the harpsichord. But other parts are just really funky in a way that only Baroque music can get away with! Of course, this is why I love barouqe music in the first place: the music sometimes tends to do really unexpected and even modern-sounding things.

But there is one measure in the opening Adagio movement that is perhaps the funkiest I’ve heard. The cello line does an unexpected turn into a chord that no body expects to be there. The overall effect is very emotional and jazzy. Maybe this is why Bononcini never got famous in his day, but it is totally awesome by today’s aesthetic tastes! In some sense, the piece is very progressive rock. At the end of the piece, the cello and the harpsichord cadences together, than the cello does two bars of solo arpeggios. It sounded so out of place that the cello player thought she was a measure behind the first time we played through it!

Playing this piece got me thinking about our conceptions of period music in general. Both in repertoire and studying music history, we tend to focus on the famous composers. And that surely has an effect on our perception of a period or a genre. The most obvious effect is that we tend to think all of classical music is expertly-crafted and masterful. But without the filter of history, there must have been more crappy music than good music, just like today. And the crappy composers probably wrote music that sound wildly different from what we consider to be “normal” classical music from a certain period. More uncommon is like with Bononcini, where the style of a relativiely unknown composer may sound totally awesome by today’s standards. I just wonder how much good music we are all missing out on?