3 days Ago By David Noel Edwards
Stockbridge — The Berkshire Bach Society will present two performances in their annual harpsichord festival: a concert on Saturday, September 21, celebrating Peter Sykes’ 50th year of performing and teaching, and a program on October 19 of harpsichord music for four hands, with Elliot Figg and Caitlyn Koester performing transcriptions of Baroque opera by Henry Purcell, G.F. Handel, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and others.
I spoke this week with the composer of Saturday’s Partita in B-flat Major, Nicola Canzano , a composer, harpsichordist, and organist specializing in historical composition and improvisation. An adjunct professor of harpsichord at Michigan State University, Canzano is the dedicated accompanist for the Historical Performance department at The Juilliard School, where he also lectures occasionally on fugal improvisation. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
EDGE Can you tell us a little about the piece you composed that Peter Sykes will play on the 21st? Why did you call it a partita? CANZANO I called it a partita, because if I called it a suite, people would expect a more precise set of dances. If I called it a partita, I could sort of pick and choose which ones I wanted to include. EDGE What else should we know about it? CANZANO It’s part of a set of six, which is the usual number, I suppose.
I’m still not quite done picking all of them. I’ll publish them soon, I hope. But I wrote them for myself to play, to try out some concepts of formal composition that I had recently figured out from looking at some Bach pieces.
I did it also because I wanted to challenge myself to play something that I had written that I would really have to work up, that I couldn’t just write down an improvisation for. And also because somebody made a comment to me shortly before I embarked on these. They said, “For somebody who composes and plays professionally, you really don’t write much keyboard music.
” And I said, ‘You know, I guess you’re right.’ That does sort of sound insane, doesn’t it? So I thought I’d write some keyboard music. And, of course, I dedicated it to Peter [Sykes] because, well, I think I started writing it during the time that I was taking lessons from him.
And, I mean, I just adore the guy. I’m not sure how well you know him, but he’s a very nice man and, of course, very, very capable. And, you know, he’s always had an answer for questions that I’ve come to him with.
He’s examined them before, and he’s shown me endless generosity and kindness. So he seems like a natural dedicatee. EDGE What do you want people to understand about you as a composer? CANZANO I want people to know that I write music in a style that some people think should not be written in 2024.
I want people to know that I’m not the only one who is really trying to do this well—not necessarily properly, but just well. I’m just trying to write music that people will want to play and that I will want to play, and I don’t think that’s really any different from any other composer. A lot of composers are really obsessed with trying to sound new somehow, whatever that means.
And I think a lot of them lead themselves astray by not simply writing the stuff that they’d like to hear that’s in their head. But because of 20th-century militant avant-gardism, you must write music that makes no sense. Otherwise, you’re, you know, like a square.
Really, it was just a bunch of crazy people who ended up taking things over for 20 years in the 20th century. EDGE You mean, the people who wrote music that’s better than it sounds? Music that meets academic requirements but is utterly boring to listen to? CANZANO Right. EDGE For the last 200 years, what has been holding back the classical music world from improvised performance? CANZANO That’s easy.
I mean, the funny answer is: the Germans. It does start there, right? It starts with late-19th-century German piano teachers. There’s a quote from some German piano teacher—I can pull it up if you really want—who recommends that his students not improvise, because they might make mistakes, and because it’s really hard, and because, in general, the chances of you being able to improvise as well as you can play a prepared piece of music is zero.
Therefore, people should never do it. He says maybe you can do it at a party with your friends and, you know, make sure you don’t drink anything. So that was already sort of in the air.
Right? It was already in the air that accuracy was really sort of floating to the top of priorities. Like, cleanliness ..
. EDGE Kind of a Victorian thing? CANZANO Right. I mean, it was definitely a high romantic type of thing.
But they really wanted these performances to be on another level. It was the age of the virtuoso pianist, and there were a lot of them. It was a way to differentiate yourself, basically.
So that was all in the air, and then the recording industry happened. EDGE And composers wrote out their cadenzas. CANZANO Yes.
And it seems like that sort of happened at the same time. Music got more specific as people improvised less. But people all the way up to Brahms could improvise perfectly competently.
And yet, later, I think, composers wrote everything down because, at a certain point, performers lost that appendage. Composers didn’t trust performers. I think it was sort of a double pressure on that front.
Another consideration is that there wasn’t really much of a forum for improvisation. The main home of that kind of thing was in church for a long time, right? Improvised preludes. There are improvised moments of concerts and things like that.
But, in fact, we know from some sources that whenever people were going to improvise in concert, they pretty much practiced what they, quote, unquote, improvised. People were doing this as far back as we can tell, at least back into the Baroque era, but maybe not before then. Actually, they were pretty careful about what they performed for a general audience.
And improvisation for an audience was an exceptionally rare thing, usually left for, like, battles, you know, like Mozart and Scarlatti or Bach and Marchand. And Beethoven, of course. And then there became fewer places for this kind of thing, because the music became hard, and people needed to spend time learning it.
And the types of concert settings that evolved became increasingly formal. So there wasn’t so much space for this kind of thing. Mozart improvised all the time.
Like I said, it flourished right up through Brahms, but it began to die within his lifetime. He would have been able to to see the decline in the place that it happened. This is also the time when Germany became sort of the center of the musical world, like Vienna in Mozart’s day.
But in the 19th century, Austria and Germany dominated music. And, yeah, they became more concerned with accuracy, for whatever reason. EDGE Is there a John Coltrane of Baroque improvisation, a living master who improvises Baroque music as well as John Coltrane improvised jazz? CANZANO I doubt if anybody would have an ego big enough to call themselves that.
I’ll tell you who my favorite improviser is, besides myself. EDGE Robert Levin. CANZANO Yeah.
He’s pretty good. But Sietze de Vries is really good also. There’s plenty.
It’s not such an uncommon skill in France, for example. Anybody who trains as an organist learns how to improvise in, like, French baroque style. EDGE Is there still controversy about the validity of historically informed performance practice? CANZANO Performance practice? No.
Not so much. Composition? Yes. EDGE There’s been a shift in just the last 15 years? CANZANO Yeah.
I mean, it’s not that people didn’t do it 15 years ago. Of course they did. But nobody has been demanding it be taken taken seriously until now.
EDGE And Juilliard didn’t touch it until about 15 years ago. Right? CANZANO Juilliard? No. Juilliard doesn’t touch it now.
Nobody touches it. You you gotta learn it somewhere else. But, you know, they’re not trying to be composers of baroque music.
I’m not necessarily trying to either, not exclusively. I wouldn’t hope to make a living doing entirely that. But every year, I make more money doing it.
And they had this competition two years in a row for it. So it’s becoming more and more a legitimate thing when—absolutely!—10 years ago it would have been thought of as insane. When I started doing this, nobody took me seriously at all.
There have been, in the past, some people who have done it. But, you know, they would call it “pastiche” or they they would say it’s a 2024 type of thing. EDGE Well, it’s an exciting development.
CANZANO I think so. Hear Peter Sykes perform a program of Canzano, Bach, Couperin, and Sweelinck on Saturday, September 21, at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, 29 Main Street, Stockbridge, MA. More information and tickets are available here .
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