PORTRAIT OF MELANCHOLY: A MUSICAL SCRAPBOOK

At this point, finding ourselves over two years from the start of the pandemic, we’ve all read plenty about pandemic projects. Making fresh pasta, reading the books “I should have,” daily meditation, and watching all 220 episodes of Dynasty were some of my personal pandemic pastimes, but recording and musical study really kept me out of the twin fires of boredom and existential dread. I’ve already written about Trios for One and Unaccompanied: Volume Two, albums I’d call the bookends of my pandemic experience. Today I’d like to explain a bit more about Portrait of Melancholy, the project that straddled the uncertain space between 2020 and 2021. 

Like the earlier release, Trios for One, Portrait of Melancholy is an album almost entirely composed of chamber music performed by me, alone. Unlike Trios the repertoire for this album was selected as I moved through the project, picking and choosing from pieces I’d played over the years that percolated up through the briar patch of memory. As I learned, focused, and recorded a work I would inevitably start thinking about what to record next. That the music on Portrait leans toward the moody and melancholic isn’t really a surprise to me in hindsight. Frankly, I’ve always enjoyed playing lyrical, dark music, and I’ve threatened colleagues with a “Best of Baroque Adagios” project for years. But in 2020 and 2021 the music fit the mood, and I needed space to burn emotional energy. The resulting collection of music allowed me to express some of the angst and sadness we were all feeling. With selections spanning from the renaissance to today, from my schooling to some of the last concerts I played prior to the coming of COVID, Portrait of Melancholy became a scrapbook not just of those strange days, but of my life with the viol. 

So here was the situation: I’m in a house in suburban LA with a recording studio, two viols, and a double bass. I had a fair number of spare strings, but with so much uncertainty about the supply of all things in 2020, I decided to tune my instruments to low pitch (A=392 Hz) after I recorded the first piece, hoping what strings I did have would last longer under lower tension. Between IMSLP.org and my own music library, I had more than enough resources to find repertoire to record. With the mics set up and my schedule comically cleared, I began by recording a longtime favorite by Vivaldi, a Largo from his Cello Concerto in d minor, RV 407 (track #4). This is a piece I’ve played since first hearing it on Pieter Wispelwey’s album of Vivaldi Concerti in 1997. Introduced to me by my first and most important viol teacher, Ann Marie Morgan, this Largo comes from a time when I was starting to dive deep into baroque music, discovering that it was a repertoire far richer than just The Four Seasons, the Brandenburg Concertos, and The Messiah. Fresh off learning my first “ground basses” by Simpson and Purcell, the repetitive yet modulating bass line that anchors the piece drew me in then as it still does today. In my recording I honor my first hearing of the music, with the pulsing bass line played by a single viol and double bass. Composed in a way that lends itself to performance on the bass viol, the solo line floats atop the murmuring bassline, lamenting at one moment then shifting towards a nostalgic warmth at others, all while tugging the accompaniment along like a grieving friend in need of support. I’ve always heard this piece as a musical rendition of reminiscence and loss, with its inevitable forward motion akin to the movement life demands despite devastating change. 

After completing the Vivaldi I went ahead and tuned my strings lower and settled in for the dark fall and winter of 2020. Honestly, I’m not sure what I recorded next with the world being what it was in those days, so I think it would be best to talk about the remaining music in album order. That works out fine since the opening piece on the album is another favorite from my days at Peabody Conservatory - Claudin de Sermisy’s Jouyssance vous donnerai. One of my dearest musical memories from my time working under Mark Cudek as a member of the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, the tension between its sensual and melancholic natures has made this chanson a lifetime favorite. The pairing of sex and death is no stranger to anyone who has enjoyed any art, music, or poetry from the Renaissance, with celebrations of sacred and profane love being potent antidotes to the harsh realities of renaissance life. Presented here in an arrangement for an ensemble of four bass viols, I chose the key of a minor so that I could take advantage of the full range of my instrument. And though the instrument on this recording is anachronistic to the repertoire, I found the richness of the resulting sonority irresistible. Plus I couldn’t go outside and that was the instrument I had. 

Next is Couperin’s lullaby, Le dodo, ou L’Amour au Berceau, a piece I’ve already written about but is always worth mentioning. For a few years in the 2010s I worked with Four Nations Ensemble where I became acquainted with the cellist Loretta O’Sullivan. A consummate chamber musician who can take charge with elegance only to immediately support her fellow players with an understated beauty and quiet strength, Loretta’s musicianship illuminated this work in ways other performances had not. Honoring her perspective that this music’s success lies in the tension between the melody (the lullaby) and the bass line (the rocking of the cradle), I recorded this piece several times before learning it deeply enough to feel satisfied. Performed without a “click track” to keep the two parts together, I let the bass line be the leading element of the recording, like the rocking of a cradle luring its occupant off to sleep. The melody sits beautifully atop the unsteady busyness of the bassinet, like a mother never taking her eyes off her colicky charge. Listening back to the recording I am reminded of the work involved in memorizing my performance, often rerecording portions of each part until I found the right flow and the right amount of tension, allowing me to forget I was listening to only one performer. 

Purcell’s Two in One Upon a Ground from his near-opera, Dioclesian, is a piece I feel like I’ve always known. To be honest I’m not sure exactly when I first heard it, but I am certain an arrangement was one one of my degree recitals sometime back in the 1990s. Like the Vivaldi Largo that follows it, my love for Two in One Upon a Ground undoubtedly dates from my introduction to the art of the ground bass. Here the unbelievably clever Henry Purcell flexes his muscles by not just confining himself to a six bar bass line - he writes the two melodic lines in canon, with one part repeating the other verbatim just two bars later. That might not seem like much, but try writing one yourself. The fact that Purcell creates such a strong mood out of three such tightly controlled elements is impressive in itself. The resulting music sounds effortless, with its gimmick disappearing almost entirely despite being in the title itself. Often performed at a slower tempo, I’ve always heard a bit more despair in this music than in performances I’ve heard. Speeding up the tempo and leaning into the strained dialogue between the parts, I feel the lure of this work is in the near-claustrophobia of the melodies, and how the same music can have radically different meanings with the passage of just a few seconds. 

Sitting at the middle of the album is one of my own works, With the Rain, Dancing. The only unaccompanied work on this record, WIth the Rain, Dancing opens with a “lick” I’d often play mindlessly when sitting with my viol. That passage never went anywhere until I was coaching a consort of adult students and one of the madrigals we were playing depicted ocean waves musically. Those waves made me return to my recurrent passage, seeing it as a different sort of wave, ripples and splashes on a lake made by the falling rain. Soon I had a story in mind, a fairy tale where the sky and a lake fall in love, forever separated except when it rains. In my story the two beings could only caress one another when a storm blows across the trapped lake, each raindrop and ripple a moment of their fleeting reunion. Doomed to end as soon as it began, I did my best to capture the bittersweetness of their joining, imagining the two dancing until the parting of the clouds again separates them. Aside from the narrative, I wanted to write a piece for solo viol that approached the instrument from a deeply idiomatic standpoint. Inspired by watching my partner write songs by following the paths of chord shapes on his guitar, I see this piece as a rebuttal of the tendency for contemporary classical works to be written by composers largely ignorant of what it is to masterfully play an instrument. 

Moving on we come to Greensleeves to a Ground, a classic from John Playford’s late 17th century publication The Division Violin. Another ground bass, I can say I’ve loved this tune since I’ve loved music. The basis of my favorite Christmas carol, Greensleeves to a Ground is here presented with three bass viols pulling the duty of a small dance band, with one playing the melodies, another holding the bassline, and a third stepping into the space usually occupied by a lute or guitar. While I’ve played this piece countless times as a bassline player, this was the first time I ever took the lead myself. It was playing the role of the lute player that I found the trickiest - finding the line between support and distraction was a challenge, and I’ll never underestimate the nuance demanded of any lute, theorbo, or harpsichord player again!

Giovanni Battista Vitali’s Passa Galli per la lettera e is another ground bass that I’ve played off and on for years after first hearing Erin Headly’s performance on the Tragicomedia album Capritio. A truly seductive piece that has a throbbing asymmetry at its heart, I’ve always imagined the Passa Galli as a soundtrack to a foggy night in the medieval district of an Italian city. The work dances forward through the misty evening, its moods shifting from a steady romantic pulse to sensual outbursts and back again, giving the music a certain sense of gentle inevitability. When playing Passa Galli I like to imagine myself being the lone witness of a near-silent procession making its way through a veiled darkness.

Another ground bass that I first encountered during my time at Peabody Conservatory, Ane Ground is one of those pieces that’s hard to pin down. Dating from around 1600, the work is found in Duncan Burnett’s Music Book, an important source of renaissance keyboard works from 16th and 17th century Scotland. What draws me to this piece is once again the tension that resides within it. This time that tension comes with the styles that the work seems to embody simultaneously. Written in three parts, here I present the bass line first, its spacious modality conjuring the emptiness of the Scottish landscape. Next enters the second, lower of the two polyphonic lines. Written with attention to voice leading that would impress any of the masters on the Continent, to my ear the melodic lines have one foot in the space of traditional music and the other in a more academic style. As the higher of the two voices enters about halfway through the recording, the combination of the learned and the traditional is obvious, leading me to play with rhythm in ways I might not in contemporary works by the likes of WIlliam Byrd or Thomas Morley. 

The latest historical music on the album is a piece sometimes titled an Allemande most likely by the French viol virtuoso and composer, Jean Baptiste Forqueray. Immediately hypnotic for its unabashed use of sequence, this work beautifully straddles the tension between French and Italian styles as they battled for dominance in 18th century France. Taking full advantage of the richness of the sonority created by three bass viols, this piece was first introduced to me by my musical friends, Julie Jeffrey and Marie Szuts. Over the years we played the piece again and again, always swapping parts, learning it inside and out. While the music itself is moody and brooding, my memories around it are anything but. In this recording I did my best to recreate the friendly tug I experienced playing it with Marie and Julie, with each solo part stepping atop the other, all while the third player keeps the whole thing moving with a walking bass line. Somewhere between an Italian andante and French allemande, this music will always be connected to some of my fondest memories of making my home in San Francisco. 

Rounding out the album is a piece I’ve been shamelessly obsessed with since first playing Monteverdi’s opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea. Oblivion Soave is a masterclass in dramatic irony, being a lullaby sung amidst political violence and murder. Another track I’ve written about previously, I will never not be fascinated with Monteverdi situating the aria in the moment when the world contained within the opera goes sideways. Sung by Poppea’s lady in waiting, Arnalta, the lullaby comes at the moment when the emperor Nero, Poppea’s lover, takes action to make room for their marriage and his complete control of Rome. With this aria time stops for a moment, and the flow of the opera ceases in the seeming tenderness between a servant and her master. But with her mistress asleep, Arnalta sings of how Poppea’s “thieving eyes” can’t stop stealing even while closed and dreaming. Performed here with a main core of three viols, I expand the texture greatly once the vocal part finishes its verse, hinting at the pit of violence that Poppea so sweetly sleeps beside. 

One last thing I must mention about the record is its cover. Taken by amateur viol player, patron of the arts, medical doctor, and all around renaissance man, Lee Talner, the aptly entitled photo “Pigeon Lady” has hung in my home for years now. Her gnostic expression, with eyes almost entirely in shadow, has fascinated me since I first saw her in Lee’s Seattle home. One day I asked him about the photo, learning the image was made in the mid 1970s, when the woman was a fixture on San Diego beaches where she allowed birds to cover her as she fed them, like a living cloak. Before I knew it Lee returned from another part of the house with a print of the photo that would later go home with me. Now her unknowable gaze greets me daily. Not long before I released Portrait I wrote Lee a note thanking him for the use of his photo as the cover only to receive the picture below as a response. Shot the same day as the album cover, you can tell people gain pleasure from all manner of sources, and what you see outwardly might not be what a person is experiencing deep in their interiority.  

Not so dark after all: The Pigeon Lady loved her time with the birds.

As I finished recording and mixing the record the world had begun to right itself, with the vaccines released and more science about the pandemic steering us toward the place we find ourselves today. A tumultuous election and its aftermath had come and gone, and my partner and I eventually decided to leave Los Angeles behind to make our home in the city where we met, San Francisco. Sitting down to write these program notes, and relistening to the record, I see Portrait of Melancholy will serve as not just a scrapbook of my life playing the viol, but as a reminder of the chaos of 2020 and 2021. Finding comfort in such moody music might not be the path most people would have chosen, but for me it was the only choice. During those long, repeating days we all shouldered feelings we’d gladly not, living a reality that seemed less like our own but more akin to something from beyond the edge of living experience. With that said, I find myself sitting at my desk grateful for the comfort of memory and music.