The impetus for this three-day symposium on historical improvisation was twofold: the emergence of an important new source and the release of a new publication. The new source, discovered by researchers at the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, is the only known copy of the ‘Anweisung zum Fantasieren’ by Jacob Adlung (1699–1762). This manuscript treatise, which probably dates from the 1720s, contains thirty-four voice-leading models for keyboard improvisation, all intended for the beginner and illustrated with numerous examples. The new publication is a collection of essays by staff of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and members of the Forschungsgruppe Basel für Improvisation (founded in 1996 and jokingly dubbed the FBI) entitled Compendium Improvisation: Fantasieren nach historischen Quellen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by Markus Schwenkreis (Basel: Schwabe, 2018). The Compendium was originally intended to compile teaching materials used at the Schola. But in the fifteen years since its inception, the project has grown into a wide-ranging overview of recent scholarship and pedagogy concerning historical improvisation and music theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The symposium provided an enticing foretaste of the fruits of the FBI's labours as found in the Compendium.
One of the most promising aspects of the FBI's work is its modelling of what we might call ‘embodied scholarship’. Over the years, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis has provided particularly fertile ground for the blending of performance and research. This is no doubt due to the institution's history as a centre for the emergence of ‘Historische Satzlehre’ in the 1980s, following the founding of the Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis in 1977. The growing interest in historical music theory in English-speaking circles in recent years can be understood in part as a continuation of developments begun in Basel. ‘Historische Satzlehre’ and the current English-language ‘Early-Theory Revival’ (if we may call it that) thus have in common an obscuring of the traditional disciplinary boundaries between performance, composition, musicology and theory. The FBI's embodied scholarship carries this cross-fertilization of ideas to one of its logical conclusions: improvised music-making by performer-scholars. Through their multifarious activities as researchers, teachers and performers, these present-day Meister are witnesses to the fact that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, improvisation was the performance of music theory.
Fittingly, the symposium began with a concert of improvised music by members of the FBI. Next, Schwenkreis (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) presented an overview of the Compendium. The twenty-six chapters (covering some four hundred pages) are organized into the following sections: Thoroughbass, Figuration and Variation, Partimento, Chorale, and Prelude and Fugue. The outlook of the articles as a whole is both historical and practical, borrowing ideas from sources and reworking them for today's student improviser. But the Compendium also provides countless ideas that could easily be applied in today's ‘written’ theory classroom so as to require active music-making or what we might call ‘embodied theory’. One can only hope that an English translation of the Compendium will eventually be made.
The afternoon session continued with a workshop by internationally renowned improviser Rudolf Lutz (St Gallen) entitled ‘Blütenlese bei Johann Sebastian Bach’. In his engaging, humorous, insightful and sometimes off-the-wall way, Lutz spotlighted perhaps the most important point of the entire symposium, encapsulated in the word ‘Blütenlese’ (flower gathering). The roots of this metaphor reach back to ancient rhetorical pedagogy, in which students would keep commonplace books containing both topics and figures of speech (the ‘flowers or rhetoric’) culled from works of literature. Lutz guided a volunteer student through a lesson in which voice-leading models (‘flowers’) were extracted from Bach's Inventions and reused in other harmonic and rhythmic contexts. The goal of this approach is not merely to recreate a historical style through Satzmodelle, but to individualize the patterns through ornamentation. In this way, classical musicians are not museum curators of a static canon, slavishly bound to the musical text, but creative participants in a living tradition.
One of the highlights of the symposium was a concert on the 1761 Silbermann organ at Arlesheim Cathedral by Emmanuel Le Divellec (Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover). He began by improvising seven versets on the Magnificat in alternation with a men's choir, showing his mastery of the French Classical style of organ composition. There followed Nicolas de Grigny's Dialogue sur les Grand Jeux from his Messe (1699), played with masterful rhythmic inequality and ornamentation. Then Le Divellec improvised a fantasy on affects suggested by the audience: ‘Gelassenheit’ (serenity) and ‘Neid’ (envy), the latter of which is actually not an affect. No matter: Le Divellec managed to combine them brilliantly in a binary-form pastorale with a middle section on 8′ reed stops that tripped over each other in ‘envious’ imitation and returned at the end to spoil an otherwise ‘serene’ cadence. The concert concluded with Le Divellec's own version of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C minor bwv562, the fugue of which is incomplete. The inclusion of a written piece in a concert of improvisations highlighted the importance of written-out compositions in the training of improvisers, something that was stressed throughout the symposium's workshops.
On the symposium's second day a workshop led by Sven Schwannberger (Basel and Vienna) explored a newly discovered pedagogical source addressing lute instruction, and, to my mind, inadvertently called attention to a flaw in the current discourse in historical improvisation and the Compendium, namely a bias towards keyboard instruments. Unfortunately, this issue remained unaddressed in the symposium. Dirk Börner (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) then led a workshop on L'A. B. C. Musical (c1734) by Gottfried Kirchhoff (1685–1746). This important source, which was rediscovered in about 2002 after being believed lost for many decades, evinces the use of figured-bass preludes and fugues as a teaching tool in central Germany during the time of Bach. Börner made a crucial point that is too often ignored today: such figured bass exercises (‘partimenti’ in the Italian tradition) must be approached with a high degree of creative licence, for this is perhaps the ideal form of ‘historical authenticity’.
Nicola Cumer (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) presented the only lecture-workshop with a topic drawn from the seventeenth century: the improvised fantasia. He noted that Frescobaldi's works are problematic as introductions to improvisation, and he looked instead to diminution practices from contemporaneous Italian treatises as potentially more suitable pedagogical models. In this tradition, called intabulatura diminuta, a polyphonic vocal work is transferred to the keyboard and ornamented in a variety of ways. Cumer demonstrated various diminution strategies based on Girolamo Diruta's Il Transilvano (1593). One useful point is Diruta's advice to use figuration in which the first and last notes are the same, for this avoids parallel fifths and octaves. Johannes Menke (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) then presented his book Kontrapunkt II: Die Musik des Barock (Laaber: Laaber, 2017). My review of Menke's book, which is a valuable introduction to the current state of baroque scholarship (not merely counterpoint), appears in Music Theory and Analysis 5/2 (2018).
Michael Maul (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) introduced Adlung's ‘Anweisung’ and discussed how the author, in his Anleitung zu der musicalischen Gelahrtheit (1758), describes his youthful self as caught between careers in science and music. Ultimately, Adlung became a professor of music, languages and mathematics, while also serving as organist at the Predigerkirche in Erfurt. Adlung's dual role as music theorist and organist, most fitting for the symposium's theme of ‘embodied scholarship’, is reflected in the ‘Anweisung’ through clearly explained ideas and their immediate practical demonstration through examples. These examples, which consist of unornamented Satzmodelle, represent Adlung's own ‘Blütenlese’ – his commonplace book. It remains, then, for students to transpose and ornament these models in original ways. In sum, Adlung's treatise reveals what was expected of the average organist in central Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. The evening concluded with a concert by Rudolf Lutz at the Predigerkirche in Basel that related to this theme of the budding baroque organist's skill set. Lutz recreated an ‘Orgelprobe’ (organ exam or audition) as described on 2 June 1762 in the German town of Schleiz. This included an improvisation on manuals and pedal in G major, an introduction to and accompaniment of congregational singing, a fugue on a given theme, a chorale prelude in the galant style and a postlude on a ‘Bachian’ ritornello. It is safe to say that Lutz, through his astounding artistry, passed the ‘exam’.
On the symposium's third and final day, Peter Wollny (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) and Jörg-Andreas Bötticher (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) led workshops on Bach's continuo practice. Wollny illustrated with numerous examples that Bach's practice was based on a four-part texture, that he required his students to write out their realizations (not just improvise them) and that he often indicated the position of the upper voice (Lage) with figures. Christine Blanken (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) described her research into a little-known source of chorale arrangements by the Nuremberg organist Leonhard Scholz (1720–1798). Scholz copied many works by Bach but altered them, sometimes drastically, exemplifying a lack of textual fixity characteristic of music culture at the time. Le Divellec demonstrated how one can apply this notion of freedom in reworking piece by others in a lesson (similar to Börner's philosophy regarding partimenti), using the same cyclical ‘deconstruction-reconstruction’ model suggested by Lutz. Le Divellec relied in part on written-out elements, which he said are sometimes wrongfully omitted from improvisation instruction (as highlighted in his above-mentioned reworking of bwv562). The final lecture-workshop was presented by Bernd Koska (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) and Schwenkreis. Koska described student–teacher relationships through documents by Bach and his contemporaries, lending a personal touch to our understanding of historical pedagogy. For instance, according to Adlung, the student should not copy his teacher's music without asking, and the teacher must not withhold the best ideas from his students. Finally, Schwenkreis led a lesson using a manuscript of fugues in figured-bass notation by Daniel Magnus Gronau (c1699–1747). An edition of this valuable, yet little-known, source is newly available, edited by Adrzej Mikolaj Szadejko as Daniel Magnus Gronau (1699–1747): 517 Fugues, two volumes (Gdansk: Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki w Gdańsku, 2016).
As a whole, the symposium offered a wealth of useful and historically grounded ideas for practising and teaching historical improvisation. These included the admonition for a more creative interaction with repertory, which calls into question hallowed notions of the fixed masterpiece. In part because of this outlook, the concerts were an integral part of the symposium. As William Porter, a former teacher of mine from the Eastman School of Music, once said, the improviser undertakes a ‘double risk’: the invention of an idea and its execution. This element of double uncertainty lent added adrenaline to the concerts. In fact, this aspect of chance is central to the means by which improvisation adds a fresh spark to the experience of classical music. For this reason, research and performance into historical improvisation practices may in fact contribute to the preservation of classical music culture in the future. In this regard, the work of the FBI and the Compendium Improvisation provides a promising way forward.
