While investigating the Bach Chaconne, I found this beautiful lute performance by Hopkinson Smith.
It’s enlightening to compare Smith’s performance to Moran Wasser playing the Chaconne on 11-string guitar. The lute is less bright and resonant than guitar, but I like Smith’s playing better, he’s not as melodramatic. I couldn’t find any video of him playing lute, but you can see him playing a Renaissance guitar. Meanwhile, I did find a video of this gentleman explaining how the lute works.
If you find the lute interesting, check out its heavy metal cousin, the theorbo.
The lute descends from the Arabic oud. The main difference between them is that the lute has frets, which quantizes its pitches to the Western tuning system. The oud is fretless, so you can do all kinds of nice slides, quarter-tones, and other pitch inflection.
I have a lifelong love of the outlying members of the guitar family. I played mandolin before I played guitar, and at various times have also performed on mandola, baritone guitar, and banjo. The sound of the lute reminds me of the banjo’s old-timey plunkiness. I’m not the only one to have noticed that; there’s a thriving subculture of banjo players doing Bach.
Anyway, having gone to the trouble of making an Afro-Funk groove track for Viktoria Mullova’s recording of the Bach Chaconne, now it’s easy to warp out other recordings on top of it as well. Email me if you want to hear the Afro-Funk version of Hopkinson Smith’s version. Gimme the lute!
I was asked on Twitter why I am doing these remixes. I started doing them for no particular reason at all except for enjoyment. I enjoy listening to the remixes, but I also enjoy the process of making them, there’s something meditative and soothing about quantizing the rubato out of the performances. But I’m finding musicological benefits too. The remix process makes me listen to the pieces repeatedly and intensely. It helps me learn how classical rhythm works, and how different it can be in performance from the note values on the page.
With Bach in particular, putting the music on the grid brings out nuances of the rhythms that are less apparent when people play them out of time. The push and pull of harmony and phrasing against strings of uniform note values jumps out at you more when you hear the note values as being actually uniform. I guess you would be more conscious of that kind of thing if you listened while reading along in the score, or if you were more familiar with the conventions of Baroque music and could hear the bar lines. But I couldn’t feel the rhythms in the Chaconne at all until I put them on the grid. I don’t mind a little tempo inflection here and there, but in all the Bach performances I’ve been able to find, the rubato is completely out of hand. Maybe drum machines and looped breakbeats are an overcorrection for that, but it feels like a step in the right direction to me. The beat version also opens a window into what a chaconne might historically have sounded like in its original dance context.
I said on Twitter that I don’t feel the need to turn classical music into pop, that I just want it to be better music (by my definition of “better”). My analogy is the way that modern violins sound better than Baroque violins. A few people pushed back against that idea.
I can appreciate "updating" it to your taste, but then it's not longer the original and the original conception. For pure enjoyment, do what you like, but it seems like you aren't willing to meet the music where it's at.
— Smellioosh (@smellioosh) January 23, 2020
This is a fair point! My sensibility was shaped by jazz and rock, and more recently by hip-hop. If those musics share one thing in common, it’s an unwillingness to meet existing music where it’s at. That said, while meeting Bach where he lives isn’t my main objective, the remix did motivate me to analyze the Chaconne, listen to it hundreds of times, and learn to play (parts of) it, and that none of those things were likely to happen otherwise.
like reading rap lyrics w/o a beat because the repetition of the groove is annoying. You'd be missing the point. As a tool to gain insight into the music is ok, but to decide that you aren't hearing what you want hear from the performance seems to be a little presumptuous.
— Smellioosh (@smellioosh) January 23, 2020
The remixes come from several decades of hypothesis testing. For example: as a kid I heard the Nutcracker Suite many times, and I thought it was pleasant but uninteresting. Then I heard the big band at Amherst College perform Ellington’s arrangement of the suite. Within the first four bars of the overture, I was laughing out loud in my seat, not because it was funny, but because I couldn’t contain the joy I was feeling. It was like Ellington had solved a problem that had been bothering me my entire life.
I felt the same way about Django Reinhardt’s arrangement of Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins, that it restored a missing piece of my soul.
I’m lucky enough to live in the age of Ableton Live, where if I’m curious how other canonical works would sound with Afrodiasporic rhythms, I can quickly and easily find out. And what I’m finding out is that they sound pretty excellent.
I meant, what if I removed the beat from rap songs because I thought the repetitive dance groove was annoying and it made it easier to focus on the lyrics? Interesting, perhaps, but I’d be missing a large point of the song’s richness and depth, right?
— Smellioosh (@smellioosh) January 27, 2020
This question gets precisely at the difference between the ethos of Afrodiasporic music vs the current culture of European-descended “art” music, and why I like the Afrodiasporic ethos better. If you wanted to alter a rap song to better suit your own preferences, that would be exactly in keeping with the norms of hip-hop. It’s a participatory culture! Rappers, DJs and producers are constantly repurposing other people’s songs to their own tastes and purposes. Every club DJ does it as a matter of course. My fondest wish would be for more people to take a similarly participatory view of the Western canon.