Volume 25 Issue 1 - September 2019

EMILY DING
Beat by Beat | Early Music
Food of Love
An Introduction to
Contractual Expectations
MATTHEW WHITFIELD
Allow me to digress before I even start. Everyday life is comprised
of innumerable contracts: spoken and unspoken; written and
unwritten; casual and formal. In their most severe forms these
contracts appear as proper written agreements between parties, in
the case of business transactions or employment contracts, where
the stakes are high, sums of money higher still, and the dissolution
of which is often an involved and prolonged matter. At the other end
of the spectrum are informal agreements, the least formal of these
being nothing more than unexpressed
or assumed expectations, time-tested
arrangements that typically need no room
for second thought.
This latter category of contract,
though far less cut-and-dried than the
former, can nonetheless lead to intense
disappointment when one party does not
uphold their end of the assumed bargain.
Imagine, dear reader, that you are at
your favourite burger shop ordering your
(increasingly expensive) favourite burger.
You order it exactly so, and so it is served,
to all appearances as promised; but upon
biting into it, you are shocked to discover
that one of your desired toppings has
been omitted or, worse, that an expressly
forbidden item has been included against
your known wishes. Admittedly a manifestly first world problem, but
regardless of its lack of impact on anyone in the global network except
yourself, you are nonetheless disappointed out of all proportion to the
life-spanning insignificance of the aforementioned burger.
Why? Because during the ordering process we justifiably expected
the transaction to be an instance of a well-established relationship
between ourselves and the proprietors and staff of this theoretical
burger joint: if I don’t give you my hard-earned $11.50, I don’t get the
burger I love; so if you don’t give me what you know I love then the
manager gets called to account, or at the very least to the counter.
A small-scale instance, admittedly, of the extent to which you, dear
reader, or I, experience a disproportionately acute sense of disappointment
at the falling through of a simple social contract: an understood
even if unspoken agreement, shipwrecked by a foiled expectation.
Every facet of our lives is determined in some way by such agreements,
whether ordering takeout, taking public transit, or receiving
notice that “We’ve updated our Terms and Conditions… click HERE to
accept.” And accept we usually must, especially when the contract at
issue is over trivial things like burgers, or transit, or hydro ...
But what do we do when an organization that delivers an essential
service, like music, makes a move that similarly defies our
expectations?
Tafelmusik Tackles Tchaikovsky
Period-instrument performance in North America is, for the most
part, a contented and self-contained corner of the Classical Music
multiverse: a specialized field full of treatises and correspondence,
from which are gleaned kernels of information as to how previous
generations (read: 1600-1750 AD) performed their music. This
September, Tafelmusik breaks that mould by presenting “Tafelmusik
Meets Tchaikovsky,” the orchestra’s first public experience playing
music of the late-Romantic era. Presented in chronological progression
alongside the music of Mendelssohn and a world premiere
by Canadian composer Andrew Balfour, this is a blatant, willful,
and potentially exciting severance of the unspoken contract which
Tafelmusik has shared with its audience for decades.
There were, of course, hints of such a progression in past seasons,
with Mozart and Beethoven appearing on concert programs, as well as
progression within the Historically Informed Performance movement
itself. To prepare for such a departure from their standard programming,
the orchestra is working with Kate Bennett Wadsworth, a cellist
and specialist in 19th-century performance practice, who will lead the
orchestra in an intensive workshop to help the string players prepare
for the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings. Here are Wadsworth’s
own words regarding the move towards historically-informed
Romanticism, a micro-manifesto in itself:
“The Romantics have left us almost endless source material to learn
from: treatises, memoirs, personal correspondence, concert reviews,
and – most exciting and bewildering of all – early recordings. We can
hear Tchaikovsky’s voice on a wax cylinder, we can hear the playing
and singing of his close colleagues, and we can even hear a handful
of acoustic recordings by Mendelssohn’s
protégé, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The
sounds on these recordings can answer
our questions, but they can also blast
through our beautiful theories and send
us scurrying back to the written sources
with fresh questions…
“It is an open secret that our musical
ancestors had much more artistic freedom
than today’s classical musicians. Our
increasing reverence for the composer’s
creative process tricked us into giving
up more and more of our own creativity
as performers, leading to an increasingly
literal interpretation of the notes on the
page. While the period-instrument movement
has reclaimed a lot of the performer’s
creative scope within 18th-century
Kate Bennett Wadsworth
music (and earlier), we are only just
getting to know the artistic freedoms enjoyed by the Romantics.
Putting these old freedoms back into circulation does indeed require
courage and mutual trust: we have to step out of our own comfort
zones and take liberties we were never allowed to take in our classical
training.
“For example, we all learned as music students that we can make
the music leap off the page by subtly varying the dynamics and sound
colours according to our own feelings. The Romantics did this as well,
but they also had the advantage of a multilayered, elastic use of time.
The tempo of the music can vary as our heartbeat varies, or as the
pace of a storyteller varies, increasing with excitement and decreasing
with calm, grandeur, or emphasis. On a smaller scale, the written
rhythms are only a rough guide to a whole world of rhythmic nuance.
Notation is itself a distortion of the music, and a great performer is
someone who [according to Marion Bruce Ranken, a student of Joseph
Rezonance
Baroque Ensemble
2019-20 SEASON
OCTOBER 27
Bach’s Extraordinary
Oboe
FEBRUARY 9
Flights of Fancy
APRIL 19
Encounter in
Constantinople
All concerts: 2pm, 361 Danforth Ave
www.rezonanceensemble.com
22 | September 2019 thewholenote.com