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Book Guts Baroque for a groupmuse

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Details

Guts Baroque full profile / Baroque String Duo / 2 musicians

Other players: Rebecca Shaw


Full program notes

Come join us to hear the whimsical, varied, and fantastic instrumental music from the courts of what is now Germany and Austria! The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, himself a musician and composer, brought several prominent Italian musicians, including violin virtuoso Antonio Bertali, across the Alps to his court in Vienna. There he gave them good salaries, and plenty of opportunities to perform and compose, as well as teach the new generation of German musicians the Stylus Fantasticus, the current Italian style of purely instrumental fantasies made popular by Italian composers such as Girolamo Frescobaldi. Bertali’s student Johann Heinrich Schmelzer continued and adapted the style, and helped spread it throughout what is now Germany. Several prominent composers emerged, including Andreas Oswald, Nathanael Schnittelbach and Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Each left their mark on the emerging German style of music, that would soon lead to famous composers such as J.S. Bach.

To give you a sense of what this music sounds like: Frescobaldi is somewhat modal, with divisions—lots of small notes that fill in between the skeletal notes of the melody. There’s a lot of D, there’s a lot of not-quite-major-or-minor, there’s a snatch of counterpoint here and there.

The virtuoso violinist-composers nurtured by Leopold I (the Freddie Mercurys of their time??) took these ideas and pushed them in all directions, exploring tonality in a more complex way than ever before and bringing it closer to what’s likely more familiar to you in “tonal harmony”: suddenly we have key changes! Sometimes very unexpected and expressive ones! The circle of fifths is now a thing! Also, there are a lot of notes. So many notes. Double stops. Variation patterns that love to hang around in the ears. Sass, panache, lyricism, dazzle.

Girolamo Frescobaldi: Canzon Prima a canto solo, F 8.01c
Antonio Bertali: Violin Sonata 2 in d minor from Partiturbuch Ludwig
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer: Sonata Unarum Fidium 1
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber: Sonata 2 from 8 Sonatas (1681)


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