This is an adaptation and expansion of the introductory text in the program booklet accompanying the CD. NEO – French Baroque Music and New Compositions (GLOBE 5288)
The trio Saskia Coolen (recorders), Rainer Zipperling (viola da gamba), and Patrick Ayrton (harpsichord) recorded this CD in an old church in the historic landscape of Burgundy, near Patrick’s home. The recording features their beloved French music from the seventeenth century (Couperin, Marais) – but on their beautiful historical instruments, they also treat the listener to new music written especially for them by composer friends.
NEO – going back in history
Blending the old and the new comes naturally to these early music specialists. After all, for them, playing early music ‘authentically’ also means that the written music is never ‘finished’. The historical styles they cherish in their hearts, minds, and fingers are naturally also practiced creatively: Patrick Ayrton improvises ornamentation, continuo accompaniments, and even independent pieces in virtually all styles; Rainer Zipperling is an expert in rich Baroque ornamentation; Saskia Coolen improvises Renaissance diminutions and, as a member of Camerata Trajectina, arranges 17th-century music ‘in the style’.
Torben Klaes, gambist, harpsichordist, and composer in the old style, is also such a “creative historical” musician. His brand-new trio could have been written around 1700—a tribute by a master musician of today to the masters of yesteryear.
For many contemporary, ‘modern’ composers, none of this applies. They often find composing ‘in the old style’ reprehensible. ‘Historically creative’ musicians compose ‘in the style’ because the history of that old style has not yet ended for them. ‘Contemporary creative’ composers, on the other hand, often consider fidelity to a historical style to be at odds with ‘originality’. For them, stylistic purism is unoriginal and a form of provincialism. They do not consider ‘going back in history’ to be an option.
What is special about the new pieces on this CD is that they demonstrate three fundamentally different ways of dealing with history. Historical elements (such as the instrumentation of this trio) and Baroque stylistic devices can be used creatively in a variety of ways.
A long NEO history of historical borrowing
It is important to realise that, historically speaking, complete originality (total ‘creative contemporaneity’) was actually a major exception, just like pure stylistic fidelity. While our ‘Modernity’ in the twentieth century was equated with the pursuit of ‘novelty’, it is striking that the entire ‘modern’ cultural period (from around the early sixteenth century onwards) was characterised above all by a growing awareness of history and an ever-deepening knowledge of it. This historical awareness often found expression in music and architecture in a deliberate blending of historical and contemporary elements, which over the centuries has often raised interesting questions, caused friction, and produced beautiful works of art. The examples of this are well known.
Around 1600, practitioners of musique mesurée à l’antique (such as Claude Le Jeune) attempted to restore the supposed Greek unity of music and poetry, while Peri and Galilei sought to reconstruct Greek drama musically with their opera in musica. Unfortunately, the Greeks left them no music. The result was idealized, highly contemporary constructions—new styles in a new genre. In the case of opera, this historicizing construction has proved viable to this day.
Idiosyncratic (Neo) Classicism
Architects had it much easier in the late Renaissance: they had been handed down Vitruvius’ precise descriptions of classical Roman architecture. Yet Palladio and Bramante did not imitate their classical examples. On the contrary, Palladio interpreted classical architecture in his own idiosyncratic way – simply by applying the stately sacred temple front to fashionable villas.
Palladio’s style, derived from the Classics, was imitated in a unique way by many builders in the 18th century, and the ‘neo-classicists’ of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the architects of the French Panthéon, the US Capitol, and Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, took Palladio’s style and made it their own, combining it with recently discovered Greek and Roman examples.
And what was happening at the same time in eighteenth-century music? At that time, Bach’s sons, and many with them, were shaking off the ‘old’ music and, as in the case of J.C. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, something completely new emerged: that remarkable mixture of expressiveness and formal rigour that only later, in the early nineteenth century, would be called the ‘Classical’ style by the Romantics – an innovative break with the past that they would take as a shining ‘historical’ example.
The past as a yardstick
The Romantic nineteenth century, particularly in architecture, remains the pinnacle of Europe’s extensive and visually tangible historical reuse. Neo-Baroque buildings evoke a wealthy aristocratic lineage, neo-classical universities draw from classical heritage, and neo-Gothic arches lend a religious character to steel structures. The past elevates and imbues the present with meaning. Historical styles serve as a yardstick for significance.
In this ‘neo’ era, music and architecture developed somewhat out of step with each other in terms of their development and their use of history.
Examples of (neo)historical architecture were everywhere, but in music, historical examples from, say, before 1750 had been quietly gathering dust in the archives for a long time. Sure, Mozart had ‘used’ Handel. Polyphony, especially the strict fugue, was seen as a sign of old-fashioned and lofty craftsmanship. But it was only when historical sources became accessible (as in Mendelssohn’s Bach performances) that the foundations were laid for the later Early Music movement and, ultimately, for musical ‘neo’ styles.
For the German musical Romantics, it was not Mozart, whom they christened ‘classical’, but rather the recent, ‘Romantic’ Beethoven who was the benchmark, the example of historical greatness. After that, they believed, only decline was possible, and they gave meaning to their great German past within the frameworks created by their more recent ‘Classical’ predecessors. Brahms varied themes from Handel and Haydn, but through the stylistic prism of Beethoven. Unlike in architecture, his view was more one of nationalistic nostalgia for that past and its sentimental reconstruction than of proud exaltation of a great present, and this was true of most musical ‘historicism’ in the 19th century. Brahms’ treatment of Schütz, Mendelssohn’s psalm settings, and their joint emulation of Bach echo a longing for a German Protestant past. And just like the Germans, the French also sought cultural greatness in their own heritage: French Classicism and the Catholic religious tradition. With their own versions of Gregorian chant, Couperin, and Rameau, Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel drew on the earlier French Catholic and aristocratic culture.Het is dat restauratieve aspect dat in de ‘progressieve’ twintigste eeuw het ‘neo’-denken een slechte naam bezorgde.
Where architecture and music converged at that time was that historical examples were not literally imitated, but rather linked to new functions and materials in both arts. Pointed arches and barrel vaults gave the cast iron and concrete of train stations a spiritual twist; the passepied, the rigaudon, and modal turns gave French modern composers an air of French historicity.
The past is being suppressed
After the First World War, references to the past became increasingly abstract. Strawinsky, renowned as a ‘neo-classicist’, certainly did not compose literally in the old style, as Resphigi did in his Antiche danze ed arie, or even Prokofiev in his Classical Symphony. Schönberg’s Suite op.25, his first atonal work, can only be described as Baroque with a great deal of effort.
Respighi, Antich Denze ed Arie (Boston Symphony, Osawa)
Schoenberg, Suite op.25 (Boffard)
After World War II, the heavy burden of the present seemed to have buried the past forever. For several decades, the arts consciously embraced historical oblivion in the name of innovative originality, with their eyes fixed solely on the future. Historic centres were brutally modernised, and demolition became king. Concrete and glass reign supreme in a land of unadorned block buildings. Around 1980, the restoration of old city centres came back into focus. In this culture of amnesia, it is perhaps no coincidence that the Early Music Festival was also established in the Netherlands.
Composers also hesitantly allowed the past back in. At first as quotations and irony, but when minimalists such as Reich and Glass made tonality fashionable again, this set the tone for a veritable wave of neo-romantic and neo-baroque pieces, as popular as the revival of neo-traditionalism and New Classicism in architecture.
Neo-traditionalisme: Brandevoort in Helmond
Just like in the Burgundian landscape where this CD was recorded, you can now find many traces of history in contemporary cities and contemporary music—restored buildings, new construction in old buildings, remnants of old buildings made visible in new construction, a winding street that was once an old river; Vivaldi in minimalist style, fragments of Romanticism, New Classicism, Bardcore—pop music in a medieval style.
Connecting with the past?
Under the motto ‘NEO’, this CD also combines historical works with new works that have a historical character. This poses an obvious question to the listener: how ‘new’ can the past be, and how ‘old’ is the present? Are the past and present related to each other or do they go their own way? Didn’t much of what was new in the past centuries arise from historical knowledge?
This historical knowledge served various ideological purposes, such as ‘back to the roots’, ‘nationalism’, ‘progressivism’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘never again…’, but at its core remained a strong awareness of history, not in the form of a tradition handed down by previous generations, but as knowledge of earlier, sometimes distant historical periods. This meant, and still means, above all, that history is a source for the creation of historical meanings and historical experiences in the arts.
With French Baroque as its theme, this CD offers three examples of different ways of dealing with history and historical experience.
Creative imitation in early music: ‘style composition’
Torben Klaes‘ Suite en Mi is a reconstruction, a stylistic exercise that continues the history of early 18th-century style in the present day using the means of that time. The challenge is to create a ‘new version’ that remains faithful to the style. In doing so, he offers the listener a historical experience. It contains no audible references to contemporary styles, yet provides the paradoxical pleasure of being evoked by a contemporary. It is a historical ‘style composition’: creative imitation.
This ‘creative historical’ style of composition is an extension of historically informed performance practice. It is usually practised by musicians, and their works are most often heard in programs featuring ‘authentic’ early music. Torben Klaes is an excellent example; other well-known examples are singer Elan Rotem, harpsichordists Patrick Ayrton and Hendrik Bouman, and recorder player Matthias Maute.
Such creative historical reconstruction is very contemporary—the historical experience is captured in a stylistically faithful new (“neo”) version that emerged three hundred years later, not by following the old tradition, but purely based on thorough historical knowledge.
A new world, a fabricated past?
Calliope Tsoupaki’s piece For a Time Never to Come is far removed from the historical French Baroque. Her lyrical, ornate monophony sounds more floating than rhythmic. There are no clearly moving harmonies with a bass and middle voices. Ornaments are less reminiscent of French Baroque than of folk music, and the trio’s often unison sound creates an anti-modern experience of imaginary folklore with a suggestion, not of ‘seventeenth-century-ness’ or ‘Frenchness’, but of timelessness and placelessness – of wanting to stand outside history. Her piece is ‘neo’ at most through its instrumentation and the title’s detour. This refers to early music idol Gustav Leonhardt’s last recital, after which he still made notes in the music (Le Tombeau de Mr. Blancrocher by Couperin) – ‘for a time that will never come’. Establishing a historical connection through a striking anecdote—that ‘conceptual’ link is worthy of her background in the ‘Haagse school’, but (as far as can be heard) does not necessarily translate into a musical experience.
Her music is a mild example of what was the choice of ‘modernist’ compositional practice in the twentieth century: keeping ‘historical experience’ at bay by avoiding audible, recognizable references to a particular past. Certainly until the turn of the millennium, this was the academic consensus (at conservatories and universities) and the ideological-political consensus (in policy-making bodies). Historical themes, or purely material historical references (sound, instruments, forms) do stimulate the listener’s imagination and function in a literary way as a status-enhancing ‘context’, but they do not create a ‘historical experience’.
Listen to Schoenberg’s Suite above—the Musette, for example, has a bourdon, but I don’t think the piece resembles a historical musette in any way. In Louis Andriessen’s Hoketus, the stereophonic drone of two groups of bass guitars, panpipes, and electric keyboards may be impressive, but to me it doesn’t work at all as an audible parallel to the vocal hoquetus of Ars Antiqua.
Giving history a voice in the present—and vice versa
The third way is to evoke a historical experience by looking back at musical periods, reusing elements from them, and creatively blending them with contemporary experiences.
In principle, such ‘neo’ composing can, just like the ‘modernist’ attitude did in the past, take on myriad different forms.Zulk ‘neo’-componeren kan in principe, net als de ‘modernistische’ houding dat vroeger deed, myriaden uiteenlopende vormen aannemen
I will give three post-minimalist examples from the last few decades, because this movement (confusingly dubbed ‘neoclassical’) rivals the Baroque style in popularity.
In Max Richter’s music, Vivaldi’s well-known rhythmic triad harmony, with a strong bass and repeated, broken or unbroken chords, emphasises the repetition of a single sound. In contrast, in Michael Nyman’s version, the bass is emphasized by catchy, clear harmonic patterns. Both composers use Baroque harmony to emphasise the typically 21st-century experience of time and rhythm: Nyman’s ‘thump’ of strong basses is close to (club) dance music, while Richter’s rhythmically drawn-out sound has a more meditative or hypnotic effect. Simeon Ten Holt’s famous Canto Ostinato also has such a hypnotic effect, but through the repetition of fragments of romantic harmonies and melodies.
As for my piece L’Europe des Amants on this CD, I call my music ‘new classical music’ because I enjoy using chamber music ensembles and forms from the Classical and Romantic periods. I often base my work on existing melodies from European sources from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is a kind of ‘neo’ project that draws on multiple historical sources rather than just one.
In this special ‘neo-baroque’ piece on this CD, I have chosen to use a few melodies of my own, or more recent traditional ones – I explain how and why in this explanatory note. These melodies contrast sharply with everything in which they are incorporated: the characteristic Baroque instrumentation, Baroque topoi such as the tambourin, the operatic duet and the da capo-aria and figures ‘in the style’: harmonic figuration and ornamentation, fragments of harmonic counterpoint, fixed harmonic patterns (such as sequences), characteristic ostinato rhythms, ostinato bass figures, and folk music-like melodies. These recognizable Baroque patterns are the building blocks of a playful use of Baroque forms such as ritornello, rondeau, and da capo aria. The genre of opéra-ballet is recognizable by its dance-like rhythms and characteristic themes. This creates a kind of interweaving of old and new elements, a play with what you might call familiar similarities, much like a newborn baby who resembles its parents and grandparents and yet remains entirely itself—a newborn baby.
In short: just as architects and many composers have done over the past four hundred years, the new pieces on this CD challenge the listener’s historical sensibility. The listener is asked to participate in a game of similarities, references, and meanings.
As composers, we need history as a reference point. Listeners, in turn, may need other (historical) pieces to help them understand the relationship with history. The programming of this CD is therefore one example of the many ways in which old and new music can provide a historical framework for each other.
Below is the Spotify link to the CD and some examples of Richter and Nyman.
Minimal Barok: Michael Nyman – uit: The Draughtman’s Contract – Chasing Sheep is best left to Shepherds.
My suite L’Europe des Amants appears on the CD NEO – French Baroque and New Compositions as tracks 10 to 13:
