The Score

Even if you can’t read music, a composer’s hand—the touch
of pen to paper—reveals much. Mozart’s swift slashes of ink
capture his buoyant confidence; Beethoven’s sketchbooks abound with
furious, angrily scribbled-out passages. In the 20th century, before
notation software became a composing tool and threatened to render
rough drafts extinct, composers’ calligraphic skills flourished: The
flowing strokes seen on Debussy’s manuscripts match the efflorescing
ethereality of his music. And though Stravinsky, an inveterate hoarder
of paper scraps, crammed arrows and insertions marks into any blank
space he could find, his elegantly finished manuscripts still show a
penchant for disjunct, cut-and-paste structures.

Yet some manuscripts seem to tell us nothing. The famed Suites
for Solo Cello by J. S. Bach (1685–1750) looks
cold and bureaucratic: Row after row of apparently perfunctory notes
span stave upon stave. The hand is not Bach’s but that of his second
wife, Anna Magdalena; along with raising a pack of children, she
somehow found time to help her ever-harried husband, which some
scholars believe explains why the Suites seem so stripped down.
Scholar and forensic musicologist Martin Jarvis suspects that Anna
Magdalena actually composed the Suites, telling the CBC in 2006,
“It doesn’t sound musically mature. It sounds like an exercise, and you
have to work incredibly hard to make it sound like a piece of
music.”

Despite Jarvis’s overly harsh opinion, the Suites do compel
cellists to make a tremendous number of composerly decisions. Aside
from coping with inconsistently indicated bowings, performers must make
each suite their own, calibrating tempo (exactly how much faster should
an Allemande be from a Prelude?), phrasing, and pacing. Some musicians
go too far—Stravinsky once chided the revered Pablo Casals for
“playing Bach in the style of Brahms”—while others,
wielding authentic replicas of a Baroque-era “Bach bow,” try to conjure
what Bach intended.

This weekend, several cellists present their own take on the
Suites. The annual Bach Suite Marathon (Sat March 21,
Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church, 7500 Greenwood Ave N, 10 am, free)
features over two dozen performers including Walter Gray, KUOW’s Dave
Beck, Rajan Krishnaswami of the Simple Measure ensemble, Julian
Schwarz, and Miriam Shames tag-teaming each movement in all six suites.
Expect to hear Bach in various guises: impassioned romantic, musical
mechanic, and whimsical experimenter.

The Seattle Symphony serves up more splendid string music: Conductor
Leonard Slatkin leads the band in Stravinsky’s Violin
Concerto (Thurs–Sun March 19–21, Benaroya Hall, see
www.seattlesymphony.org for details). The Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz and Four Sea Interludes from the Benjamin Britten
opera Peter Grimes round out the program.

Finally, fans of the avant should check out the contrasting double
bill of the old-school free-jazz hurricane John Gruntfest
Trio and the meditative solo percussion of Paul Kikuchi (Fri
March 20, Gallery 1412, 8 pm, donation).