#period performance

So, how can respectively student vocalists and violinists not only listen to recordings of the Baroque and early Classical pieces presented in the 24 Italian Songs and Arias and the 10 books of the Suzuki Violin School in their original forms, but also expand beyond them?

The reason why pianist and composer Mark Polesky created a website for the latter group, Suzuki Violin Pieces in their Original Forms, is to have them transcend beyond the Suzuki Method International CDs to enhance their skills of playing by ear, which the eponymous violin pedagogy system and moniker Dr. Shinichi Suzuki chiefly have long advocated.

"For each piece, I have also tried to suggest a recording that represents as authentic an interpretation as possible," Polesky wrote, "Obviously, whatever constitutes an authentic interpretation is (at least in part) a subjective matter, especially since most of this music is more than 200 years old. However, as a rule, I have favored recordings using period instruments (and period sensibilities) wherever possible, so you will not find any Isaac Stern or Hilary Hahn here."

"What you will find, however, is some marvelous baroque violin playing, complete with improvisatory flourishes and a lot less vibrato, played on instruments using plain gut strings, tuned a half-step or whole-step below what you may be used to. You will also hear harpsichords in the baroque keyboard pieces, and fortepianos in most of the pre-Brahms piano pieces (Robert Schumann’s The Happy Farmer, Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Minuet in G, and Franz Schubert’s Lullaby)."

"In cases where multiple period-instrument recordings exist (as with the George Frideric Handel sonatas, the Antonio Vivaldi concertos, and the JS Bach cello suites), I have tried to avoid recommending any one player too much, but I too have my favorites."

Alice M. Chuaqui Baldwin also has a comprehensive YouTube playlist of a few (but HOPEFULLY growing) historically informed performance (HIP) takes on the pieces presented in the 24 Italian Songs and Arias. Most of the selections are from Nathalie Stutzmann's and HIP ensemble Orfeo 55's album, Quella Fiamma.

Although not listed, anyone fixing to sing the first 2-or-less-minutes of Claudio Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna (titled as "Lasciatemi morire!") at one's university's vocal recital or state vocal solo and ensemble music performance assessment (MPA), if living in the USA, MAY want to listen to 12.5 glorious minutes of the Consort of Musicke's take on his 1614 5-part madrigal arrangement or the ensemble's co-founding soprano Dame Emma Kirkby's 1992 solo recording with co-founding lutenist Anthony Rooley.

"Another advantage of listening to the (Suzuki Violin School baroque pieces in original forms) is the exposure to baroque performance practice," "Polesky wrote, "And students who see the original manuscripts and early editions can learn to read the modern interpretive editions with a more critical eye."

"Perceptive students may be drawn to ask valuable questions: Why is the soloist playing something different from what’s in the score? Can I add embellishments too? When and how? Why is everything tuned flat? Where is the harpsichordist getting all those notes from? Why are there so few dynamics, articulations, etc. in the original score? Do I have to play it the way it’s written in my score?"

Chuaqui's playlist also entices vocal students learning material from the 24 Italian Songs and Arias for their vocal recitals or state MPAs to ask such similar questions as they listen to the selections.

Again, expanding student vocalists' and violinists' horizons is key to respectively appreciating Baroque material presented in the 24 Italian Songs and Arias and the 10 books of the Suzuki Violin School. Most of those students live far from a concert involving HIP ensembles and performers (including baroque orchestras and - SQUEALS - COUNTERTENORS). Many of such performances are archived online, and most of them (including ones on YouTube) are free to watch.

Some of the materials that can suit them both are performances of Bach cantatas. (To be fair, not all Baroque vocal music is in Italian, and that can benefit the students who are learning material in the 24 Italian Songs and Arias wonderfully.)

Take Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn!, BWV 132, for instance. A solo violin does a duet with the alto voice - in this case of the Netherlands Bach Society's above account of the said cantata, countertenor Tim Mead's - in the aria, "Christi Glieder, ach bedenket." (Michael Chance's take on the said aria with the English Baroque Soloists in 2000 is a close second as my fave rendition, IMHO.)

Besides enticing vocal and violin students to ask the aforementioned questions Polesky mentioned, period-instrument performances also potentially would have them nod their heads, them "getting it."

In 2019, Boston-based HIP ensemble Handel and Haydn Society's performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music astounded 9-year-old neurodivergent child Ronan Mattin so much that he audibly sighed once the music concluded, "WOW!" It prompted his father to write a children's book on that experience 5 years later.

And I bet that an HIP performance, especially a live one if accessible AND affordable to them, can elicit similarly and positively visceral reactions in respectively student vocalists and violinists learning the Baroque material presented in the 24 Italian Songs and Arias and the 10 books of the Suzuki Violin School.

Stay tuned for Part 5!

As someone who partook in many spring concerts, I for one have encountered at least one instance of a classmate performing a chestnut from the 24 Italian Songs and Arias.

That instance occurred in 8th grade, in 2004, when I was clarinetist in the concert band and violist in the orchestra. One of my classmates - who previously played Ti Moune in my middle school's production of Once on This Island to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling - sang Giovanni Bononcini's "Per la gloria d'adoravi."

Fast forward 20 years later - to March 29, 2024. Beyonce Knowles made an allusion to another selection from the 24 Italian Songs and Arias in her gripping, country-infused ballad about domestic violence, "DAUGHTER." That time, it was Giuseppe or Tommaso Giordani's early Classical concert vocal piece, "Caro mio ben:"

Several vocal studio students, voice coaches, voice major undergrads, and pro classical vocalists took to social media upon the song's release and shared memories - both good and traumatizing - of singing excerpts from "that yellow book."

"(I'm looking forward to hearing and seeing) impressionable young singers trying to work those melismata into their renditions at a local National Association of Teachers of Singing festival," a voice teacher sarcastically commented on Facebook.

"('Caro' was) The very first aria I heard in an American theater camp," another vocalist recalled, "and they made us sing it! Mmm, flashbacks."

"(Sing 'O Del Mio Dolce Ardor' from Christoph Willibald Gluck's Paride ed Elena) next, Bey," soprano Josephine Shaw beseeched in her caption of her video on TikTok, "I'm begging you."

Unsurprisingly, Beyonce herself was an alumnus of the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in her native Houston, TX. Thus, she and her sister Solange had their fill learning and reciting "Caro" and other chestnuts from the "yellow book" as voice students.

For this early music and historically informed performance (HIP) hound since 5th grade, "DAUGHTER" unlocked that very core memory of hearing my classmate sing Bononcini's "Per la gloria d'adoravi" in person, accompanied by piano, at a middle school spring concert, despite me being in band and orchestra as opposed to choir.

But Beyonce's "DAUGHTER" wasn't the only time the 24 Italian Songs and Arias was referred to in pop culture. Terri Fletcher (portrayed by Hilary Duff) struggles through "Caro mio ben" in her voice lessons in the 2004 musical film Raise Your Voice.

BuzzFeed ranks "Caro" as a topper for their list, "A Definitive Ranking Of 24 Italian Songs And Arias." Nina Mohan described it as the "bread and butter of classical singers. Everyone's done it, and everyone loves it." (Notably and wryly, the subheading in the article plays a pun on "Tu lo sai," an aria from a lost Giuseppe Torelli cantata.)

Photo via The Drunken Tenor on FB.

But the iconic yellow book has some thorns. Some alumnus vocal students call it a "source of torture." Some others criticized the use by students who are especially tyros in Italian diction. Some musical theater majors who are forced to trudge through it to hone and improve their vocal skills love to set it in a pit with other fuel and kindling and roast their whole sucking pigs (aka mga lechon) over it. (After all, they must be proficient in dancing, acting, AND singing.)

"My problem," a Redditor said, "is that I just don't like the songs. It's not like I haven't tried them either - I started my training with 'the 24' during my first stage of voice lessons when I was 11-14 years old. I've also sang a few of them in recitals. As I'm discovering my musical preferences, though, I'm realizing that I strongly prefer the German and French song repertoire, especially Richard Strauss, Francis Poulenc, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and Cecile Chaminade, as well as German Volkslieder."

For many early music and historically-informed practice scholars, the issues with the 24 Italian Songs and Arias musicologically and historically run MUCH deeper than mere indifference and animosity.

To better understand how they are problematic, let's make an analogy to a similar pedagogical set of books for violin students: the Suzuki VIolin School. But before that, let's look at the "yellow book's" parent predecessor, Alesandro Parisotti's Arie Antiche.

"Parisotti collected these antique arias in what was the 19th century vogue for discovering forgotten old or antique music from the classical and baroque eras," reads a Wikipedia article.

"The taste for rediscovered music was de rigueur among musicians and audiences of the nineteenth century, with composers lesser than Mendelssohn and Brahms participating as well. Parisotti found forgotten scores and arranged their arias (or duets) for solo singer and piano accompaniment. Parisotti romanticized the pieces by altering word placement, chordal structure and/or adding ornamentation to the vocal line."

It's worth noting at the time of Arie Antiche's publication by Ricordi in 1885 and G. Schirmer's American edition, Anthology of Italian Song of the 17th and 18th Centuries', publication in 1894 that those arrangements of the airs were pieces of a Romantic Era umbrella music subgenre: parlor music.

"Parlor music," a Library of Congress article reads, "became very fashionable as increased importance was placed on musical proficiency as a hallmark of good taste and moral reputability. Musical prowess, particularly keyboard playing, was highly prized, and a commonly-held value was that a proper education was incomplete without the study of music."

"Parlor music repertoire frequently included sentimental songs about romantic and maternal love, odes and tributes to historical figures and leaders of the day, and patriotic songs."

Arrangements of ancient airs - as it was the case with Arie Antiche and Anthology of Italian Song of the 17th and 18th Centuries - were also included in the parlor music canon.

Around the same time when parlor music was on the rise, editors of instrumental music also romanticized Baroque music for especially amateur string players. "When Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites received their first publications in Paris in the 1820s," cellist Sarah Freiberg wrote in Strings Magazine, "they were renamed 'Sonatas (or Solos).' Heavily edited with tempo markings and dynamics, essentially they were updated for the mostly budding cellists who were likely to buy them."

"There was not another edition until 1866, when Friedrich Grützmacher tried his hand at it. He’s now remembered for 'updating and improving' a Luigi Boccherini cello concerto to make it more palatable for the Romantic era, and he did something similar for the cello suites. He thought his revisions would allow hopelessly old-fashioned, otherwise forgotten works to remain in the repertoire—and his Boccherini edition is still performed today."

"Grützmacher’s 'performer’s edition' of the Bach Cello Suites is so heavily edited, arranged, and re-harmonized that it is listed under arrangements and transcriptions on the IMSLP website. His objective, as quoted in Bradley James Knobel’s 2006 dissertation on the suites, was 'to reflect and to determine what these masters (Schumann and Mendelssohn) might have been thinking, and to set down all they, themselves, could have indicated.'"

"As to Bach, Grützmacher pointed to successful performances of his own edition as 'something that would have been impossible with the bare original in its primitive state.'"

It wasn't surprising that violin and piano transcriptions of Baroque music were heavily edited at the time. Even more unsurprising was that those were the pieces pedagogue Shinichi Suzuki based the pieces of the Suzuki Violin School on.

One of them was Arthur Bent's and Norman O'Neill's violin-piano transcription of the 10th movement of the first suite from Joseph-Hector Fiocco's Pièces de clavecin, Op. 1. Perhaps Dr. Suzuki might had learned the above 1928 recording by Yehudi Menuhin and Louis Persinger by ear or read the score while he studied violin in Germany in the 1920s before teaching it in turn in his native Japan.

Just as Parisotti and the G. Schirmer publications initially pandered to amateur singers, most of whom domestic entertainers with occupations outside the music fields, Dr. Suzuki's Violin School initially pandered to student violinists who intended to make music solely for recreational purposes. "What I intend is not education for creating prodigies, but rather a mode of cultivating the abilities of children by means of the violin," he stated.

Though the intentions of edits of Baroque music in Arie Antiche; Anthology of Italian Song of the 17th and 18th Centuries; 24 Italian Arias and Songs; and the Suzuki Violin School are beneficial for respectively budding vocalists and violinists, they often deviate from the original manuscripts.

Namieyski (XVIII c.) - Symphony in D-Major, V. Allegro. Performed by Capella Czestochoviensis on period instruments.

“Namieyski was a Polish composer in the early classical style, who flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Very little is known about him; even his first name has been lost (though it might have been "Jan").  The only composition about which there are no doubts concerning his authorship is a Symphony in D major, taken from the music collections in the parish church of Grodzisk Wielkopolski near Poznań. It is scored for two violins, two flutes or clarinets, two horns, viola, and double bass).

A. Mrygoń maintains that pieces found in Austrian collections signed "Johann Namiesky" ("Harmoniemusikdirektor" in Baden, probably connected with the church band) are undoubtedly works by Namieyski. Together with works by Johann Namiesky, discovered by B. Chmara-Żaczkiewicz in libraries and archives in Austria, the output of the composer, with the current state of research, would increase by a few religious pieces: two masses (in E major and E flat major), two litanies (one of them in C major), two Graduals (B-flat major, D minor), an Aria in B flat major, an Offertorium in A major, and three Tantum ergo (in C major, C major, E flat major). In 1830, in Vienna, a singer called Johann Namietzky performed at a concert for the Society of the Friends of Science. With our current knowledge, it is difficult to determine whether it is the same person as the creator of the Symphony in D major.”