The Sonatas themselves

Preludes aside, learning a new Scarlatti sonata for each concert is often the largest claim on my practice time, sometimes by far—and even so the result is often less than I hope for. Well, almost every performance of anything is less than hoped for, but I mean they’re often pretty rough and not something I’m really comfortable posting online.

When I started, as I’ve said, I had never learned a single Scarlatti sonata. The commitment to learn a new one for every concert (actually two, according to my original plan) was, like the entire project, a leap of faith. By telling myself I was capable of doing this, I was willing it to be so, willing myself to be a more mindful, efficient, intentional, and musical practicer, one with more conventionally virtuosity than I felt I owned.

And it went reasonably smoothly for the first dozen or so concerts, which took place at the end of a sabbatical semester and in the summer following. But when my teaching started up again in the fall, learning the Scarlatti became an often hectic and stress-inducing element of the project. Even when all went well, I was increasingly aware that it was handicapping another quixotic ambition: to learn a lot of new repertoire, including works by contemporary Vermont composers and more music by women. I began to question my Scarlatti commitment. 

As it happened, the end of the first, busy academic year of this project coincided with a landmark in the Scarlatti cycle. Though he wrote 555 of the things, in his lifetime Scarlatti published only a single volume of 30 Sonatas (or Exercises, Essercizi, as he called them in this publication) which are nos. 1-30 in the now-standard Kirkpatrick numbering. And concert no. 30 was scheduled on the day of UVM Commencement, the endpoint of my semester obligations. Completing the 30 Essercizi, which finish with the monumental Cat’s Fugue, would bring me to a convenient milestone where I could gracefully announce a change in plans. Also, the following concerts, nos. 31 and 32, were a double-header (back-to-back concerts on the same weekend), which would add to the challenge of preparing the sonatas in time. So I told myself that I’d at least get through these iconic first thirty, then reassess.

And then...it was as if Scarlatti* saw me coming. Sonata no. 31 is a notch less virtuosic and complex than most of the sonatas in the Essercizi, while Sonata no. 32 (titled “Aria”) is slow and melodic and, at less than a full page, maybe 20% the average sonata length: easily the most sight-readable one thus far, though so gorgeous and subtle that it rewards loving preparation. It was like Domenico was apologizing for having ridden me a little too hard, and was now coaching me along: All right, ease up, come on, you got this! 

So I’m strapping back in for another round.

*Or Ralph Kirkpatrick, the harpsichordist and musicologist who assembled and numbered the most complete and scholarly edition of the sonatas. Kirkpatrick’s ordering is chronological, not arbitrary, but there is uncertainty and editorial discretion involved.

Les préludes: Part 2

As I’ve explained previously, I precede each Scarlatti sonata with an introduction based on themes of the sonata, over a series of ii-V-I progressions, the number of ii-V-I progressions matching the number of the concert and of the sonata in chronological order of composition (according to the scholarship and best guesses of Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsichordist and editor, hence the “K” numbers).

The ii-V-I progressions do not stay in the key of the sonata, but modulate through a variety of different keys. The first ii-V-I is in the home key, and the last one has to set up the beginning of the sonata itself. Usually this means the last ii-V-I must also be in the home key, though a couple of times I’ve ended the intro elsewhere, making the opening a bit of a tonal surprise; but even then, the key is not random, but chosen for good effect.

That means the series of progressions has to satisfy two different conditions: it has to be the correct length (number of ii-V-I progression) and it has to start and end in the appropriate key, while also making harmonic sense along the way. This is not something I can do on the fly. It's not hard to end up in the right place harmonically, but tricky to get there at the right time; not only is it a challenge to think ahead to make the keys work out after the exact number of ii-V-I progressions, but after maybe 8 progressions it's hard to keep count.

So I have to plan out the series of chord progressions, at least. But the introduction also has to relate to the thematic material of the sonata it introduces. I go through the sonata and look for motives that I can fit to ii-V-I progressions while still keeping their motivic identity clear. Actually, I do this as I work out the harmonies, not afterwards, because while certain chord sequences are idiomatic and generically satisfying, melody and rhythm and harmony are all interrelated, and must work together to create convincing progression. So I always work through my intros with at least a rough idea of which Scarlatti motives I plan to use in which phrases. Sometimes a rough idea is all I set in advance, and the intros are somewhat more improvised; at the other extreme, particularly if I figure out something especially wonderful, or if I don’t have sufficient practice time to be confident that my improvising will come through convincingly, on a couple of occasions I’ve written out my intro note for note.

But most of the time I just write out the harmonic progression as a “cheat sheet” of chord-symbol abbreviations. Sometimes I also write measure numbers or short musical descriptions to indicate which Scarlatti motive I plan to use where, but that’s just to remind me as I work the intros out; by the time I’m ready to perform an intro, that basic game plan has usually been internalized, even if details are left to improvisation. Sometimes I internalize the overall chord progression too, so I don’t need a cheat sheet at all.

Here are a few examples of my intro notes. I don’t know if these are among my favorites; no. 25 just happened to still be handy (I’ve tossed most of them) and the other two are here because they’re the rare examples of fully written-out intros.

K.25 intro. Measure numbers and text refer to the thematic material of the sonata.

K.16 intro. It’s rare that I write the intro out completely.

K.30 intro, another fully written-out one. The sonata is the “Cat’s Fugue”, so called because of its strikingly disjunct subject that made people imagine Scarlatti was inspired by his cat walking across the keyboard. I tried to keep that feeling in my intro, which made me think of Thelonious Monk (though it doesn’t sound so Monkish to me listening now). That’s why in my note to play the opening in a flexible tempo, I wrote “rubato my dear”, a play on Monk’s tune “Ruby My Dear”. I was hoping that seeing this little pun, and addressing myself with a term of endearment, would put me at ease.

The close reader will note that the intro to no. 30 does not, in fact, consist of 30 ii-V-I progressions, but rather 30 chords. From the start of this project, people (including me) have asked what I’m going to do when I get into the sonatas numbered in (say) triple digits. You can make a ii-V-I progression go by slower or faster, but at some point the intro is going to dwarf the sonata. And, as I may have mentioned, learning the sonata and figuring out the intro is already a large—often the largest—demand on my practice time. I didn’t really have a plan for what to do when the intros started to get out of hand; I figured I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

It turned out that bridge was in Essex Junction (concert no. 26). Preparing the intros had become more and more stressful, and going into the Essex Junction concert it was too much for me to try to sustain interest that long while restricting myself to themes from the sonata that lent themselves to a ii-V-I harmonic pattern. A day or two before the concert I realized I could instead play 26 measures of ii-V-I (which typically equates to about half as much music). After 25 intros with a single inflexible rule, this option was incredibly liberating! 

And in no. 30, I played 30 chords’ worth of ii-V-I’s (roughly 1/3 as long, though not always exactly because it’s possible for a sequence of ii-V-I’s to elide, such that the target I chord becomes the ii of the next cycle). And who knows: when I get into higher cardinalities, I could do n beats’ worth, or even n notes’ worth.

It felt fitting that the pattern broke in Essex Junction, since it was Essex Junction’s disjunction from the Town of Essex in July 2022 that broke my ii-V-I pun by bringing the number of Vermont municipalities from 251, where it had stood for 100 years exactly, to 252. 

Les préludes: Part 1

As I’ve whimpered before, my Scarlatti renditions are often rough, touch-and-go, error-ridden. Putting one together in a week or two, on top of my other obligations, is challenging.* Preparing a ii-V-I intro often feels like yet one more thing I have to cram in, often the day or two before the concert.

Yet as soon as I start working on the intro, I notice that it immediately improves my performance of the sonata. I think there are a few reasons for this. When improvising, paradoxically, I often make fewer errors than when playing prepared pieces. Maybe because I’m more likely to be playing things I audiate, that is, hear clearly in my head, or maybe just feel-hear with my fingers—but that in any case are less mediated by reading or remembering or intentive-style thinking. That is, I’m playing more intuitively. And this intuitive flow state carries over into the beginning of the sonata. By contrast, preparing to launch into a cold start, particularly of a piece that is technically challenging or musically imposing, can feel like standing on the edge of a diving board.

Playing my own introduction also gives me a sense of command, ownership, authenticity—a word which shares a root with “author” and “authority”. I feel less like I’m trying to prove something as an executant, an occupational hazard with these typically flashy, virtuosic Scarlatti pieces. Instead I’m just expressing myself, creating music for music’s sake.

And this isn’t just an internal psychological shift. By playing these unique introductions, I’m in fact distinguishing my performance, however rough-edged, from the ten zillion others (seven zillion of which are on YouTube) from the get-go, so that it isn’t entirely about minute differences in interpretation or execution.

In the next post I’ll go into a little more detail about how I go about devising these intros.

*Scott Ross, the harpsichordist who released all 555 Sonatas on 34 CD’s in 1988, recorded them in just 15 months. That’s about 8½ per week, and he claimed not to have known many of them before undertaking the project. That’s just…I don’t know what that is. I don’t even know why I bring it up, it kind of depresses me.**

**Seriously, though, it’s mind-bogglingly inspiring. Did I mention he was already beginning to feel the first serious symptoms of AIDS, then untreatable, when he started recording?

This is not a blog entry

It’s been a long time since my last post. 

A form of nonresponse bias: you don’t see so many posts about how little motivation the poster is feeling. This is not alarming—I knew even before I started that there would be lulls over the course of the several years and 252 concerts. But since it takes time and energy to write, the doldrums are underrepresented in the blog.

I’ve had many entries in mind, but not the time or the additional oomph after other project activities to compose them. I’ve been overstretched between the demands of this project, my regular job, which tends to intensify as the semester progresses, and a couple of other things. Meanwhile the concert writeups, which I originally imagined as just a basic online substantiation of the events—a program, maybe a clip or two—have turned out to be more involved and more narrative, taking a fair chunk of creative energy themselves and also competing with this blog as the main documentation of the project.

And while the blog entries, as I’ve noted, are sometimes more unfiltered, less primping, more diary-like, than the concert writeups, apparently this is not yet to the point of posting “hey what up, btw I am really sick of this now” or the like.

Anyway, UVM exams and end-of-semester performance juries just ended, and I feel some blog posts coming on in the next few days…