greatest hitstory: August 2012

If you want to know who made the best music in the 1670s I do not think you need to look much further than Lully in Versailles who had ruled the roost in the 1660s and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) in Salzburg both of whose music goes from strength to strength. Between them there is an abundance of really good, short and lively instrumental pieces, most of which are about a minute and forty seconds long.

Lully’s are mostly interludes from his various operas and ballets but Biber is best known for his Rosary Sonatas (aka the Mystery Sonatas) which is one of the earliest collection of pieces for solo violin, from 1676 (give or take a year or two). Of these sonatas (there are 15 of them), a couple of gigues and a gavotte make it into my compilation. For me the violin sounds best with accompanying instrumentation and I really like the selections from Biber’s fast and feisty Battalia à 10 (10 instruments) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC2oaSAToRE and slow and serene Balletti à 6 (6 instruments). IV. Der Mars from Biber's Batallia sounds to me like it might have influenced Gustav Holst when he composed 'Mars The Bringer of War' from the Planets in the 20th Century which in turn has been influential on many film scores. Also on the Battalia collection there is a curiously cacophonous piece called Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor which brings to mind Biber's earlier imitations of animal sounds (things like cats and cuckoos) from his 'Sonata violino solo representativa' to which I was referring in my 1660s posting.

This decade is also notable because in 1672 in London, the largest city in Europe at the time, the first ticketed public concert is believed to have taken place thanks to an ex-empoloyee of the king, John Bannister. John Bannister had held the equivalent post as that of Lully in France. That is he was in charge of the King's orchestra. Louise XIV had his Les Vingt Quatre Violins Du Roi, an orchestra of 24 stringed instruments and Louis' cousin, King Charles II of England had been impressed with this and so got himself an orchestra of 24 too, putting the violinist John Bannister in charge. The problem was there were some French players in his orchestra and John Bannister made some impertinent remark about them offending Charles' liking for the French, which got him the sack.

No longer in the employment of the king, it seems John Bannister then went about organising concerts for the public rather than for the king and his courtiers, the first being in 1672 at his house. They did not catch on in a big way, that would not happen until the 1720s (in France), but by 1678 at least there was a public concert hall at Charing Cross in London. Not much really great music had come from England since the days of Byrd and Dowland at the turn of the last century but the stage was being set for one of England's greatest ever composers, in his late teens at this time, but whom I’ll get to soon.

I will mention at this point another German composer whose name was Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707). Buxtehude organised Evening music concerts in Lubeck, Germany, that were free for the public (and funded by local business men) in 1673 which were held on the five Sundays leading up to Christmas each year and continued all the way until 1810. I mention Buxtehude mainly because he was a big influence on the soon to be born J.S. Bach who was such a big fan that he famously walked 400 kilometres to watch Buxtehude perform in one of these evening concerts. Buxtehude is a composer of organ music which is a bit of a challenge for a 21^st Century listener such as myself. However, I have selected Ciacona In E Moll Buxwv 160 which judging from its catalogue number I am guessing was composed in this decade.

The best of them all though is definitely still Lully and you can see a depiction of Lully’s ballet Alceste being performed at the King Louise XIV’s Palace at Versailles below. Look at that, listen to Le Concert Des Nations, Jordi Savall – Alceste, 1674: Marche Des Combattans and imagine you were there!

Lully

General history

The Dutch were at war with the French and English and Sweden were at war with Prussia (now Germany).

Peter the Great (1672-1725) became Tzar of Russia in this decade and over the next 50 years or so he would modernise his country making it one of Europe’s most prestigious nations.

Art

There was not an awful lot new happening in art and no massively significant works.

Architecture

Guarini continued to represent the height of the baroque period with his wild but yet perfectly geometrical designs. Christoper Wren set about rebuilding London after the great fire of 1666. Most famously he began work on St Paul’s Cathedral in 1675, known for it’s very elegant dome, which finally got finished off in 1710.

Literature

The Third of the century’s three great French figures in literature was Jean Racine, the other two being Corneille and Moliere. He was a playwright and his plays were mostly tragedies. May be his most famous play was Phèdre published in 1677. Today it is one of the most frequently staged tragedies of the 17^th Century.

Science and Technology

Great scientific institutions continued to be set up in this decade, the prime example being The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, London which was established in 1675.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who unbeknown to the rest of the world had possibly worked out most of what he would become known for back in 1666 (that is discovering gravity, inventing calculus (calculus is the study of change in maths) and his theories on light and colour and generally being a strong candidate for cleverest person that ever lived) published his first paper on light and colour in 1672. He worked out that white light was in fact a mixture of lots of different colours and that when shone through a prism it would split up into these different colours (just as the sun light does on rain drops, making a rainbow) but then when those separate colours went through a second prism they would not split further which showed that these colours were part of the white light itself and not something different that was produced by it. This led to him inventing a new type of reflective telescope which got him elected as member of the recently established Royal Society of London.

Great strides with the recently invented microscope continued to be made with Anthony van Leeuwenhoek who was the first to use it to examine single celled organisms. He was actually an amateur but made better microscopes than any of his professional scientific contemporaries and is known as the father of microbiology, not bad for a hobby. He might have been an amateur but he was probably important enough to be aquainted with the great painter Vermeer as they were both from Delft in Holland and he was appointed by Vermeer’s will as executor of his estate, which he had to administer when Vermeer died in 1675.

Philosophy

This was the decade in which Benedict Spinoza’s great work ‘Ethics’ was published. To be more specific it was in 1677, a few months after he died.

Benedict Spinoza was of the same rationalist school of thinkers as Descartes. Like Descartes he took a scientific and mathematical approach to philosophy and based his ideas on logic. However, he was not completely satisfied with what Descartes had said. He had two main questions that Descartes did not answer satisfactorily enough for him.

The first one was that if everything was a logical consequence of something else as Descartes had said, how could there be God in the first place? Spinoza's answer was that there could be God because God was absolutely everything, so there didn’t really need to be a first place.

Spinoza’s reasoning for why God is everything went as follows:- For Descartes there are two separate things: thoughts and tangible things but for Spinoza these could not be separate because with thoughts you can move tangible things. If I think that I want to type a sentence in this blog out, my fingers will then do that, so there is tangible movement which stems from thought, so for Spinoza thought and matter are in fact one and the same. By the same token if God is infinite he cannot be separate to us and so everything we know is in fact god himself. So God is not somebody who sits outside the world and created it (a view that Newton held) – God is the world the universe and everything. Just as we have a body and a soul which for Spinoza is one and the same (thoughts and typing are the same), the body is the outward form of the soul so God’s body is everything in the universe and everything in the universe is the outward body of God’s soul. This idea became very popular with the romantics who came along in literature, music and art in the late 1700s and early 1800s. They were the ones who revived Spinoza’s work which people had ignored for about 100 years after he had died.

The second question Spinoza had of Descartes’ philosophy was that if everything was a logical consequence of something else, as Descartes had said, how could there be free will? Spinoza’s answer was that there was no free will.

Spinoza saw the everyday actions of us human beings as being outside our control, that our idea of freewill was in fact an illusion because we might sometimes think we do but we do not really truly and fully understand the causes of our actions. The good thing about this is that if we become aware of this, we can see our personal problems as extremely petty in the grand scheme of things. If we look at our own lives through the eyes of eternity, any problems we may have are just silly little things, so let’s not worry too much!

Spinoza made a few other important contributions to philosophical thought. He was the first to argue that freedom of speech was necessary to secure public order – the people that try to stop freedom of speech are the main disturbers of the peace, not the people who exercise freedom of speech.

Another of his achievements was that he was the first to look at the bible as a historical document and to question its accuracy in this regard, which is really quite a significant development in Western thought.

http://open.spotify.com/user/historyomtssg/playlist/4ScOA61pnLIMRvfoNfrInh

greatest hitstory

Sunday, 26 August 2012

1670s Lully, Biber and the first public concerts

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