False Consonances
‘See the music, hear the dancing' Balanchine
A priori, the world is supposed to be governed by an order. ‘Universal' laws, chemical sympathies (and antipathies), biological ‘imperatives', or other divine wills, supposedly make the rules of the game. Yet, however ‘logical' it may appear, the world is manifestly not ‘fair'. A serious paradox. A conceptual incompatibility against which humanity's ‘intelligence' revolts: science and spirituality concern themselves with discovering new rules, while art and religion have no qualms over creating their own. However, art stands apart in this respect; it does not take its dogmas seriously for long. In truth, art does not aspire to order: it merely makes use of it the better to observe the unintelligible, to set it in relief. One need only refer to the history of tonal harmony or of perspective, artistic rules that have been adapted, manipulated, indeed mocked ever since they made their appearance.
Some composers have picked on this phenomenon, like Vivaldi and his famous Cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Invenzione (Struggle between Harmony and Invention). However, it is probably Nicola Matteis's treatise on continuo playing for guitar entitled The False Consonances of Musick (1682) that most subtly conveys the subjectivity of order in art: Matteis astutely uses an expression commonly employed for diminished or augmented intervals and here, taken out of context, gives it its basic meaning, all the more absurd in that it introduces a work on harmony, inevitably dogmatic and carefully argued. The warning is clear: ‘Any rule, however necessary it may be, inevitably remains futile.' The elusive spirit of this ‘Napoletano' violinist/guitarist hangs over his entire output. An oeuvre which was destined to play an important role on the musical scene of the period, but which by its very nature was to evaporate in the face of the massive rationalism of the Enlightenment and remain in limbo for more than two hundred years.
If we know only scraps of Matteis's biography today, his personality seems to have been just as enigmatic for his contemporaries. He lived between 1650 and 1700 approximately, and is said to have roamed all over Europe before settling in London in the early 1670s. Roger North describes him as being, at that time, as poor as he was proud: Matteis was persuaded to play in public only with difficulty, could not bear ill-timed applause, and improvised his programme as the mood took him. When the audience inspired him, he produced astonishing interpretations which drove him to a state of trance. In addition to his instrumental dexterity, the incisiveness of his dances, and the wide range of his sound-palette, contemporary accounts emphasise his lyricism and a surprising ability to combine all types of emotions coming from opposite extremes. North wrote that he was the only one who could ‘command... truth'.
Matteis achieved recognition for his art, but finally died in poverty after indulging in ‘excess of pleasure'. Between 1676 and 1685 he published four books of Ayres for the Violin, which enjoyed great success in England; they also reached the continent, as is shown by archives in Paris and Venice. These collections are composed of diverse movements of varying dimensions, often given extraordinary titles which make Satie pale in comparison: Bizzarrie all'Umor scozzese (‘A pretty hard Ground after the Scotch Humour to make a hand'),* Corrente tra la maniera francese e italiana (Courante between the Italian and French manners), Fuga curta per scarsezza di carta (A fugue, short for lack of paper), Bizarrerie, Movimento incognito (Unknown movement), Allemanda ad imitatione d'un tartaglia and ad imitatione della Trombetta (in imitation, respectively, of a stutterer and of the trumpet), Giga Al Genio Turchesco (Gigue in the Turkish spirit), and so forth. These individual movements may be assembled at will by performers to produce a suite or sonata made to measure for them.
The pieces selected for this recording perfectly reflect his special wit. While Matteis exploits a vast range of forms - dances, diminutions, ostinato basses, fugues and ‘ricercars' - following the Italian instrumental tradition of the Seicento (itself very influenced by that of Spain in its ‘Golden Century', notably through the intermediary of the city of Naples), he displays a wholly original inspiration when it comes to utilising the different facets of those forms. One may particularly notice the musical gestuality derived from the subtle rebounds and stresses in the dances, like the off-beat accentuation in imitations of hiccups (Aria Burlesca, Allemanda ad imitatione d'un tartaglia). Similarly, the creativity and breadth of the diminutions and variations on ostinato basses (La Vecchia Sarabanda, Movimento incognito, Gavotta), the double stopping, whether ‘folk-style' with full tone or intimate and carefully written (Giga al Genio turchesco, Musica Grave, Sarabanda), the eloquence and sweetness of the slow movements (Sarabanda amorosa, Adagio), the obstinate or nervous introspection of the musical ‘experiments' (Preludio, Passagio rotto), and the thematic fluidity of the counterpoint in the imitative movements all show the composer taking considerable expressive and stylistic risks.
Faced with so many disparate, often opposing elements, one might be tempted to speak of contrast. Yet it is precisely the contrary that occurs with Matteis. If his music often aspires to the theatrical, the burlesque, indeed to caricature and irony, it can also veer, with a feigned nonchalance, towards the domains of sincerity and emotional abandon. The ‘serious' and the ‘non-serious' do not oppose each other, they blend, and this absence of demarcation between two incompatible concepts makes them all the more arresting.
This surprising unity of style, which avoids any hint of forcedness, undoubtedly makes Matteis an outstanding musical personality. And in addition to this, he also revolutionised violin playing in England, in both ‘art' and popular music; his declared penchant for the charms of traditional cultures was to propel the fiddle to the foremost position in Anglo-Saxon folklore. Moreover, it was Matteis who introduced England to Italian tastes, already tinged with the ‘profane' spirit which was to find an obvious echo in the output of Henry Purcell; one cannot but think here of Dido's celebrated ‘Lament', which derives its terrible emotional decorum from the ‘lightness' that precedes it.
A tendency that reminds us of the extent to which order and disorder can only exist thanks to each other, showing that all creation, all movement, all life, come from false consonances.
Olivier Fourés
* English title published in the original edition. (Translator's note)
Melancholy and bizzarrie in the works of Nicola Matteis
Each time I play the music of Matteis I get a very special pleasure from it: the pleasure of crossing the frontier between our world and his, practically within a bowstroke of us, yet so assertive in its originality. His music and his invention always oscillate between certainty and magic, the known and the impalpable. The path leading to Matteis is strewn with pitfalls because of the halo of mystery that surrounds him, but for me it has something of the initiatory quest, worthy of a fairytale, where each piece picked up en route is a pearl whose powers of evocation have been preserved intact. In my view, the uncanny power of his music comes from the juxtaposition of very familiar elements with pieces from a puzzle. On the side of the certainties lies the violinistic aspect of his compositions: melody, metre, harmony, each plays its well established role. Matteis was an excellent violinist, and one immediately senses this when listening to and playing his music: everything falls under the fingers. The pieces are reassuring in formal terms: there is everything required to make up fine suites, with typical dances some of which seem to have stepped straight out of some universal folklore, simple and charming.
But alongside this, there is an ever-present aleatory element to amaze, confuse, destabilise us. Of course the tone is violinistic, but more than once the harmonies are surprising, the melodic line seems suddenly to be seized by depression or madness, and the well-behaved rhythms grow obsessive to the point of giddiness. This must surely have something to do with Matteis's prickly character!
Although this may seem a highly empirical observation, I am convinced that, in a musician-composer, musical technique and invention are closely connected, and that if we try to get as close as possible to the way Matteis himself played, it can have a drastic influence on the performer's musical gesture. To bring our two worlds closer together, I have therefore tried a physically different approach to the violin. What follows is a brief attempt to explain this decision, which led me to call my habits into question in a fairly dangerous way. I hope the listener will feel it was worthwhile!
When learning to play a musical instrument, one always starts from bases more or less well established by tradition, with the aim of mastering ‘a' given technique which then allows one to express one's musical ideas. But things are often rather different with period instruments, since in the seventeenth century the notion of a ‘school' was not yet firmly established and almost every musician had his own technique. The case of Nicola Matteis gave us the chance to experiment, to look for and come up with extremely varied solutions.
Many descriptions have been preserved of this violinist's playing style after his arrival in London, where he apparently held his instrument very low (around the level of the lower ribs), a position to be seen in many seventeenth-century paintings (especially from the Netherlands) and which must surely be closely connected to folk practice. On trying out this low position (while of course taking account of female physiology!), one discovers that Matteis's music is perfectly suited to the technique, which in fact poses no insoluble problems (there are few shifts, and the double stops are carefully chosen). The two most surprising consequences are, first of all, the modification in the violin sound, which clearly becomes more resonant with more harmonics, and above all the effect on the bow, which in my opinion creates a transfer of weight that helps to concentrate the musical intention on the phrase rather than the instrument. One can play in a lighter, more relaxed way, and bring out the evocative, even melancholy mood of many of the pieces. Reading John Evelyn's description of Matteis's playing in 1674 - ‘I heard that stupendious Violin Signor Nicholao . . . whom certainly never mortal man Exceeded on that instrument: he had a stroak so sweete, & made it speake like the Voice of a man; & when he pleased, like a Consort of severall Instruments . . .' - one immediately grasps the notion that technique can also give us keys to interpretation.
Hence, in order to make all the changes of affect and bizzarrie perceptible, we have tried to follow the ‘Good advice to play well' Matteis gives in The False Consonances of Musick: ‘You must not play allwayes alike, but somtimes Lowd and sometimes softly, according to your fancy, and if you meet with any Melancholy notes, you must touch them sweet and delicately.' And please believe us when we say that every effort has been made to find those melancholy notes and share them with you . . .
Amandine Beyer, 2009
