Tobias Hume - Eric Fischer
Poeticall Musicke... Topographic Long-Range
The constantly renewed pleasure of playing the early viola da gamba repertory quite naturally leads to an interest in the music of today. For more than three centuries - from the Renaissance to the beginnings of Classicism - composers wrote for this highly idiosyncratic instrument in the most varied styles.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have introduced us to other ways of hearing the viol, and many composers active today devote their attention to the deep resonances that the bass viol, in particular, inspires in them.
Eric Fischer has always had a pronounced taste for Tobias Hume. It seemed like an obvious idea to ask him to write a response to this composer who so stirs him. Frequenting the two composers' music side by side enables us, as interpreters, to live in our own time with the same curiosity as we feel for past centuries.
Playing techniques vary spontaneously, according to the requirements of each of these repertories, and the passage from one to the other is always ludic, instructive, and inspiring.
Marianne Muller
Captain Tobias Hume, Scottish mercenary, dilettante composer, virtuoso exponent of the viola da gamba, scorned during his lifetime and subsequently ignored by the musical encyclopaedias (‘So I must mone bemonde of none' in What Greater Griefe), was a colourful personality who, in the view of many, went beyond the bounds of mental equilibrium in his outrageous words, attitudes, and writings. Of his trade of arms, we know only what he himself relates: ‘When I was in Russia, I did put thirty thousand to flight, and killed six or seven thousand Polonians by the Art of my Instruments of Warre when I first invented them' (from the ‘True Petition of Colonel Hume'). Let's take his word for it...
Of his works, two collections published during his lifetime have come down to us. The first of these, issued in 1605, was The First Part of Ayres, containing 117 pieces, principally for solo viol with the exception of a few duos, trios, and accompanied songs. (John Dowland had published Lachrimae or Seaven Teares the previous year.) Then in 1607, came a second anthology, Captain Humes Poeticall Musicke, consisting of twenty-five pieces for consort of viols, some of them intended to be sung and suitable for playing on other instruments, as the composer himself recommends. (In the same year, Claudio Monteverdi wrote his Orfeo.) He died at the London Charterhouse (an almshouse) on 16 April 1645.
There in bare outline are the facts about this strange individual. However, if one looks beyond the barrack-room bravado and the fashionable melancholy of the period, it does not take much effort to hear in the music of Tobias Hume a substance at once profound and vivid, concentrated; and through that substance a man of paradoxes, fragile and enigmatic. Profound, for under the most extravagant titles it develops melodies combining intimacy and sincerity.
Concentrated, because Hume relentlessly reworks not the same themes but the same melismas, the same gestures (his written style is unquestionably derived from orality and the instrumental gesture; in other words, what he set down on paper was merely the final outcome of sound materials and melodies long kneaded by his own hands), and thus the same modes implied by the practice of the viol: the keys of G and D (major or minor) make up a huge percentage of his output. Of the 117 pieces in The First Part of Ayres, more than a third respectively are in each of these two tonics! Here too the instrumental gesture is crucial. It is really in G minor that he finds his most moving and personal colours, as in Captaine Humes Pavan, A Question, and An Answere. (In the present recording, seven of the eleven pieces are in the tonic of G, including five in the minor.) Let us not forget that in the early seventeenth century equal temperament (the octave divided into twelve equal semitones) did not exist in the sense we give it today; temperament took multiple forms, and as a result each tonic developed its own intervals, possessing specific ‘humours' that no other mode could reproduce. The standardisation of temperament based on the ‘Werckmeister' system of 1691 should not be seen as an artistic advance but rather as an option in the history of western culture.
The inner world of the Captain (or self-styled Colonel in his senile wanderings!) is extremely precise, centripetal, and controlled; the colours of his universe are immediately identifiable on first hearing. Although he fought without the slightest diplomacy against the hegemony of the lute, claiming supremacy for the viol instead, his style derives directly from the instrument of the ‘English Orpheus', both aesthetically - he was among the first to employ polyphony and chordal technique on the viol; his counterpoint is simple, clear, and skilful - and in scribal terms, since the great majority of his scores are in the form of tablatures and table-books similar to those for lute.
The programme meticulously chosen by Marianne Muller is particularly good at teasing Hume out of his shell (or rather his armour) and his nefarious legend, allowing us to hear his personality in all its sensuality (Sweete Musicke), humour (Tinckeldum Twinckeldum) and melancholy melodic clarity (The Virgins Muse), what Hume himself termed ‘the onely effeminate part of mee'.
Captaine Humes Pavan, so often recorded, assumes here a dimension of abyssal introspection tinged with a little resigned smile, as if to excuse itself. In the repetition of the last twelve bars, the melodic line moves irremediably downwards by means of a slowly articulated point of imitation on a diatonic motif, starting initially on G, then a fourth lower still on D. Even the final speck of light represented by a little cell of a rising third is set in a harmonic progression which tends ever downwards until it reaches its resolution. From these depths, light is probably shed on ‘A Part of the true Face' of the enigmatic Captain Tobias Hume!
Eric Fischer
Topographic Long-Range
To write for the viola da gamba (or any other so-called ‘early' instrument) is an exercise unrelated to any sort of nostalgia. As a result of its slow eclipse from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the viol has now re-emerged as if new, like a treasure-house of timbres and textures for the composers of today. Thanks to its unmistakable grain which gives a rugged sound to intimacy, it speaks the language of our time.
Sounds produce inside us volumes, spaces and distances, to the point where they constitute an imaginary, abstract cartography of time in which each instant of music becomes long-term. Of course this is not to be understood from a descriptive point of view but in its poetic nature.
The overall thematic material of Topographic Long-Range is split up into small modules which succeed one another, overlap, are transformed in a circular trajectory, so that their course (which emerges from a dance, or at any rate from its energy, until we reach the suspended world of the final trio) prompts one to say at each revolution: I hadn't heard that before; it will never sound the same again.
One could also speak of a slow mutation of the inner state, which starts out from the mineral and moves towards an aqueous substance (even in the terminology, since the first duo is a ‘rock' and the final trio is called ‘la clepsydre';* but I only realised that after the event!). Our ear gradually leaves the equilibrium of a temperament (whichever it may be!) and loses its gravity, in the physical sense of the term, to float in a state of weightlessness (quarter-tone melodies, glissandos, long unmeasured sustained notes, simultaneity of unsynchronised fluxes).
This shift, barely perceptible throughout the work, punctuated and nourished by repetitive rhythms, will become blatant, indeed will be revealed, in the second duo, thereby reminding us that at the exact centre of ‘géosophiques', a solo viol had sung its beginnings in ‘médius'.
Then, as the clepsydra slowly ebbs away, gently and a little sadly "a little resigned smile", our traces and gestures will fade beneath the silences in tomorrow's morning dew.
Eric Fischer
* ‘Clepsydra: an instrument used in antiquity to measure time by the flow of water; a water-clock'
(Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). (Translator's note)
