Volume 23 Issue 7 - April 2018

nunsploitation (nun + exploitation), known to us from genre movies
but already familiar to 19th-century operagoers. Rossini’s Le Comte
Ory is still probably the best known of the type. “Meyerbeer’s Robert
le diable also has some of that with the dance of the ghosts of nuns
who rise from their tombs,” Kettlewell says.
As to the question of how Gounod fits in with the idea we have of
French Romanticism: “I’d always offer some other names first in that
context – certainly Berlioz – but with Gounod, there’s always a bit
of restraint there, I think,” he says. He also mentions the then-star
Meyerbeer as a more typical exponent. “What operas by Meyerbeer
I’ve heard, I liked a lot. You sometimes wonder why some things fall
out of fashion… and Meyerbeer has.” His Les Huguenots has seen some
revival success in Belgium, France and Germany in the last few years.
“Yes, and I just got a DVD of Margherita d’Anjou… and Robert le diable
was done at the Covent Garden recently.”
Of all of Gounod, what would be his top five that everybody should
hear? “Remember the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series? The opening
credits music? That’s Gounod, the Funeral March of a Marionette,
and he wrote it to poke fun at a British music critic.” Also on that list,
the Jewel Song from Faust and Je veux vivre from Roméo et Juliette.
“O ma lyre immortelle from Sapho is beautiful, as is the one from
Cinq-Mars that we’re including in the program, Nuit resplendissante,”
he says.
“And, of course, the Ave Maria.”
Ga-Ga for Gounod takes place inside the modernist concrete beauty
that is St. Andrew’s United Church, 117 Bloor St. E., on April 7 at
7:30pm. Tickets $20 in advance (triciahaldane@gmail.com to arrange
an e-transfer) or $25 at the door, cash only. There will be a salon party
after, directions to the location to be given from the stage.
Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto. Send her your
art-of-song news at artofsong@thewholenote.com.
Beat by Beat | Early Music
Transcribing the
Masters
MATTHEW WHITFIELD
The act of musical transcription has existed as long as notation
has, used over the past millennium to facilitate artistic crosspollination
and the exchange of ideas across international
borders. Utilized in centuries past as equal parts pedagogical tool,
musical tribute and vehicle for musical propagation, transcriptions
exist from some of music’s greatest figures, including Johann
Sebastian Bach.
Historically, transcribing involves some element of copying, whether
for pedagogy, plagiarism, or practicality, such as copying performing
parts from a full score, a task for which Bach received much help,
often from his wife and children. It is often from these copies that a
work is passed down through
Forestare
centuries. According to the
late-18th-century German
musicologist Johann Rochlitz,
even the Thomaskirche did
not possess the full score
for Bach’s motet Singet dem
Herrn, but only the vocal parts
which were preserved “as if
they were a saint’s relics.”
Bach’s use of transcriptions
extends throughout his lifetime,
from his student days
copying forbidden scores by
candlelight to his organ tablature
transcriptions of music
by Reincken and Buxtehude,
as well as his transcriptions
for organ of Vivaldi concerti
and his own Schübler Chorale
Preludes. In fact, a well-documented
theory postulates that Bach’s most famous organ work, the
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, wasn’t written for organ at all, but was
an organ transcription of an earlier work for violin.
In its modern conventional use, the term transcription refers to
two similar but distinct actions: notating a piece or a sound which
was previously unwritten, such as Bartók’s folk song transcriptions
or Messiaen’s notations of birdsong; and rewriting a piece of music,
either solo or ensemble, for another instrument or other instruments
than those for which it was originally intended, including Liszt’s piano
versions of the Beethoven symphonies.
Transcription in the latter sense is often conflated with arrangement.
In theory, transcriptions are faithful adaptations, whereas
arrangements change significant aspects of the original piece. In practice,
though, there are many works which fit equally well into either
category. Consider, for example, Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition or Mahler’s re-orchestrations of Beethoven
and Schumann symphonies. There is an equal amount of faithful
adaptation and significant change in each of these examples, which
ride the line between transcription and arrangement.
The act of transcribing is, at first glance, an uncomplicated one –
nothing needs to be changed in a work’s notes or rhythms – the piece
simply needs to be re-notated for a different instrument. It is in this
adaptation, however, that the art and craft of the transcriber is made
apparent, for each instrument contains its own idiosyncrasies, technical
challenges and limitations, particularly if the music being transcribed
and the instrument being transcribed for have their origins centuries
apart – Hildegard von Bingen for saxophone and theremin, for example!
34 | April 2018 thewholenote.com