San Francisco Classical Voice

EDITORIAL Love Lost, and Regained

January 27, 2004

By Michelle Dulak

Our Questions of the Week generally tend to be the sort of questions I first want to answer and then think I'd better not. But last week's put me in an excessively embarrassing position. Actually, most of the music I love I first loved, then "went off," then came back to.

In my late teens and early twenties, I had, if you like, passionate flings with particular composers. Shostakovich; Bartók; Fauré; Britten. There was an obsession with 20th-c. English string chamber music that led a friend to dub me "OBCME" ("Obscure British Chamber Music Enthusiast"). The thing is that I grew out of all these and back in again. I made myself sick of Shostakovich, and now I no longer am. I love Bartók again; I love Britten again. (Actually, I don't think I ever did get tired of Britten, and I hope I never will.) I have friends who can't imagine what possessed me to love late Fauré chamber music in the first place, and to be honest I'd find it difficult to spell it out myself; but it's a taste I dropped for about a decade and now have back.

But never mind the esoteric examples. Just to take one that will strike a chord (or shall we say an eight-chord sequence?) with the string players reading this . . . I think I first heard the Pachelbel Canon somewhere in the mid-70s. Jean-François Paillard's soon-to-be-famous recording had just come out, and a documentary that my family saw at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington used it — not during the film, but before — and my father was entranced by the music, inquired about it, and immediately bought the LP.

Pachelbel, Mark One
So that's the Pachelbel I knew first — the lush version, with Paillard's added viola pizzicato line and the massed strings and the general cushiness. And, yes, I did love it. But fast-forward ten years, and while I can't say I hated the piece, I'd gotten prematurely cynical about it. Anyone who's played several dozen string-quartet wedding gigs will know exactly what I mean. The Pachelbel was the ideal wedding processional — partly because you had a nice harmonious cadence every two bars (you never do know when exactly the couple is going to get to the altar); partly because more than half the couples were requesting it anyway.

I think most freelance string-quartet players must have a sheaf of Pachelbel anecdotes. There was the time someone mislaid the parts and I had to write the whole thing out from memory an hour before the ceremony. (Not nearly as impressive as it sounds; there's basically only one part.) There was the time we "ran out" of Pachelbel during a bridesmaids' procession and had to double back to the beginning, not once but twice, because there were seven or so bridesmaids and they were sent in with methodical regularity as though at a very slow-motion clay pigeon shoot, one every two minutes or so. There was the time my string quartet auditioned a new cellist on the job at a bridal fair, thinking that at least Pachelbel would be safe; but then, incredibly, she managed to lose her place in it . . .

You can get jaded about a piece very quickly if you play it exclusively as wedding music. I was working in a classical record store with a lot of other gigging musicians on staff, and every so often one of them would throw on the Musica Antiqua Köln recording of the Pachelbel, just because it was abrasive and screechy and insanely fast and would invariably irritate someone browsing. "How dare you do that to a beautiful piece of music"? Well, I didn't quite know how they dared either. I was bored stiff with plush Pachelbel, but MAK's Pachelbel just bewildered me.

And then another dozen years passed, and I came to know a lot more 17th-century music, and fell in love especially with pieces on "grounds," or repeating basslines. I sought out bergamascas; I positively collected ciacconas. And finally I fell on a recording of the Pachelbel that made me love it again, because it suddenly put it back in that ground-bass context. That is when the ground really does drive everything and the rhythmic impulse and the harmonic one are working together. It didn't hurt that the piece just before it on the disc was Purcell's extraordinary "Three Parts Upon a Ground," with a ground a lot like the Pachelbel, but upper parts that have to be heard to be believed. (I don't think all of that counterpoint would pass academic muster, but he who hath no stomach for this music hasn't any talent for fun, and that's that.)

Connecting with the piece, at last
Anyway, now the boring old I-play-this-constantly Pachelbel has a context, some close companions, and a sort of beat-to-beat bounce that, collectively, make it definitely alive, not just a bit of "utility music." The proper tempo makes a big difference. I don't love it quite like the Purcell, or like Nicola Matteis' "Ground after the Scotch Humour," or like Monteverdi's "Zefiro torna," but I do admire it; and I know now that I have misunderstood it all my life. I suppose the only consolation is that most other musicians didn't get it either.

(The disc in question, for what it's worth, is Hespèrion XXI's Ostinato, Alia Vox AV 9820.)

This doesn't happen every day, nor with every piece, but it's the kind of thing that might happen any day with any piece. Anything might suddenly set you thinking about a work in a completely different way. It might as easily make you think worse of it as better; but thinking seriously about music, whatever the upshot, is a good thing.

(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)

©2004 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved