Due essercizi

For Harpsichord


Commentary
Recording
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Commentary

The Due essercizi were composed in June 1989 at the request of their dedicatee, the harpsichordist Genoveva Gálvez, of whom I was a disciple for four years at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, and to whom I owe much of my interest in the harpsichord repertoire, both ancient and contemporary, the result of which is a concert for harpsichord and chamber orchestra, entitled Variations and variances on themes by Boccherini, from 1988, these Due essercizi, from 1989, and the harpsichord sonata entitled L'art d'être touché par le clavecin, from the year 2000.
Everything in the Due essercizi freely recreates environments and procedures related to the golden age of the harpsichord: from its title, in which the reference to Domenico Scarlatti is evident, to the character of each of the two short movements that it consists of. The first, entitled "Præludium", is based on the controlled randomness that -nihil novum sub sole - is already found in Louis Couperin's "free" Preludes: the notes are carefully written, but not rhythmically organized, so it depends exclusively of the interpreter its definitive distribution in periods and phrases that can vary from one interpretation to another.

The second movement, entitled "Sonata", is structured in the bipartite form characteristic of the famous Scarlatti sonatas (repetitions of each section included), as well as reflecting some of the typical technical procedures (hand crossings, big jumps and keyboard changes) that make them the culminating point of harpsichord literature of all time.
The Due essercizi were premiered on February 2, 1991 at the Villa de Madrid Cultural Center by Genoveva Gálvez, and have been recorded and published twice: the first recording, by María Teresa Chenlo, was included in 2008 in the CD "José Luis Turina. A portrait", with which the BBVA Foundation's "Spanish and Latin American Composers of Current Music" collection was inaugurated; the second was performed by Silvia Márquez, and was part of the CD "Herbania (20th. century Spanish music for harpsichord) ", published by the IBS Classical label in 2019.

Recording

Recording: Silvia Márquez

I. Præludium (fragment)
II. Sonata (fragment)


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Textos relacionados

HERBANIA. 20th-Century Spanish Music for Harpsichord
By Silvia Márquez Chulilla
Notes to the booklet of th CD Herbania, by Silvia Márquez – IBS Classical, 2019

For Annelie de Man, who both opened up and shared pathways.

One must go along with one's own time. Let new beauties be created, and we shall like them.
Wanda Landowska

It turns out to be impossible to avoid certain autobiographical lines when introducing this new collection of not particularly commonplace pieces: sounds recorded in Granada, the city that welcomed Manuel de Falla in 1920 and in which he received a visit from the charismatic Wanda Landowska in 1922. Thanks to this encounter, Falla becomes the leading composer of the 20th century to turn his gaze to the harpsichord, inserting it in an orchestral score -El retablo de Maese Pedro (1923). His Concerto for harpsichord and five instruments (1923-26), dedicated to Wanda, was the first piece from the 20th century to become part of my repertoire while still a student in Zaragoza, and I was barely aware of its significance for the History of Music.
In my subsequent studies in Amsterdam, and guided by Annelie de Man, I was introduced to the world of graphic scores, extended techniques, electronics, and working together with composers; I discovered the one and only Antoinette Vischer and enjoyed live concerts of the cardiac rhythm of Elisabeth Chojnacka. In another event in The Hague dating from the same period, one devoted to the composer György Ligeti, I vividly remember a young José María Sánchez-Verdú handing me Palimpsestes II. It was the first time a composer gave me a piece for my instrument, dedication and all... here, more than two decades later, you have the scoop rounding off the recording.
And what has become of harpsichord music in Spain between Falla and Sánchez-Verdú? Through the eyes of a young student, it wasn't easy to answer this question when such repertoire was neither included in the regular training nor in the concert halls. Names such as Luis de Pablo or Tomás Marco soon appeared beside those who had written for A. Vischer or E. Chojnacka, but beyond those, the prospects were not very encouraging.
In one of her notebooks from 1952, Wanda Landowska wrote: "I wonder what modern music can bring me. Will it be a refuge, a diversion, joy, or consolation? I wonder... ". The oldest piece on this CD dates precisely from that same date 1952: Le Clavecin Voyageur by Joan Maria Thomàs. An organist, composer, and far ahead of his time, he had founded the "Bach Association for Early and Contemporary Music" in Mallorca in 1926. This is perhaps the first piece for harpsichord composed on Spanish ground in the 20th century after the aforementioned Manuel de Falla, at the time an intimate friend of the Mallorcan composer.
The first real impulse or incentive for creation will take place when harpsichordist Genoveva Gálvez appears on the scene, the first professor of harpsichord in our country, beginning in Santiago de Compostela in 1959 and after that in Madrid, in 1972. Genoveva bursts onto the scene in the capital city with an open mind and in contact with the composers of the time. What this conservative Spain will offer is a rather conventional type of writing -reading like a recreation of past worlds, or a type of hommage- still not transgressing the bounds of the instrument nor entering into the world of electronics, in certain cases innovative in sonority: this CD's own first and last pieces, Herbania and Palimpsestes being its most rebellious examples. In spite of everything, the fact that a good number of composers pays attention to the instrument entails a breach, a renovation, a gradual pivot of the harpsichord to the contemporary creative world. Genoveva will be a key figure in this process; it is for good reason that three of the pieces amassed here are dedicated to her, those of Joaquín Rodrigo, José Luis Turina, and my Aragonese compatriot Ángel Oliver.
The Leonardo Grant from the BBVA Foundation which I was awarded in their 2017 edition, has allowed me to turn not only this CD into reality, but also to realize an extensive education project to disseminate 20th-century Spanish music for harpsichord. The project includes a documentary which will see the light of day in the near future. Of the composers on this CD who are still among the living, some, such as our own Genoveva, had the graciousness to meet us and share a good part of their time, their first contacts with the harpsichord, their memories...
At times we do everything in our power to discover sense and explanations in works of art. There is no greater fortune for a present-day performer than to be able to rely on the presence of the composer. Honesty and unaffectedness spring from the conversations with Tomás Marco, José Luis Turina, and José María Sánchez- Verdú; virtues which help us to normalize and disseminate this repertoire, perhaps also to update its performance. These composers do not impose limits, even suggesting the option of adapting the music to the instrument and its available registers. There are no great aspirations nor tribulations behind each of these works: a moment in time, a discovery, an idea... a past, a reference, and a timbre, to ultimately attract a player. With respect for the past, the harpsichord reads new pages from times more recent.
Because of this, I didn't want explanatory notes with technical, analytical, complex information -dates and names accompanying each of the tracks of the CD; a quick search on internet yields a lot more information about any of the composers than the amount desirable in a CD booklet-. What I did want was a perspective from outside, an unsullied ear, shaped by the beauty and inquisitiveness exuding from the pen of Luis Baeza. Together with him, I invite you to enter into a sound world that is caustic, metallic, rhythmic, and evocative, from the Spanish second half of the 20th century.


BEAUTY AT A DISTANCE
By Luis Baeza Andreu
Notes to the booklet of the CD Herbania, by Silvia Márquez – IBS Classical, 2019

We refer to beauty as something strange. or something mysterious and inaccessible. According to Nabokov, for a human to recognize beauty it is necessary to maintain a certain distance to that object of brilliance for a considerable amount of time.
Routine is stultifying. We quickly accustom ourselves to the conventions of any particular gesture and its attendant terms and no longer speak of the matters of the world with that same intense brilliance as when we first encountered them. Enter artistic imagination, forcing us to be surprised and even go into ecstasies, obliging us to feign innocence when we encounter a creation that remains by definition on the edge of the world but which cannot exist without it. Forever being, over and over again, something distinctive yet the same. Returning to it, once again, to be able to distance oneself from it.
This is the journey taken by the harpsichord, a solemn beast that has traversed time and has been both its witness and its bearer. 'I give you: time', states the harpsichord. It brings it to us in a decorative form or with the greatest simplicity. It represents it with complicated twists and turns or by rips and tears. It picks up the gallant atmosphere of a palace but also a reckless, adventurous wind from the islands of the avant-garde. It insists that we take our time, and occasionally it reminds us of a gilt suit or a dance from days gone by.

FEMININE HARPSICHORD
Guided by the hand of numerous women, her steps soon brought her to an unexplored path. As someone who sees a destiny with intense clarity, Wanda Landowska determinedly entered that still uncertain forest of new esthetics. Both a propagator and a performer, and apart from rescuing the harpsichord for the performance of baroque and classical music, she also detected an ideal, expressive medium for novel contemporary manifestations. Now the ear would search for impassivity and a restraint of expression, far from those romantic and sentimental outbursts of earlier eras. An animal of measured strength, this harpsichord; a species that would cause great composers such as Falla and Poulenc to succumb to its charms.
After Landowska, other women crystallized the return of the harpsichord to the podia and to contemporary creations. Many composers from the 20th century enthusiastically wrote for Antoinette Vischer, Annelie de Man, Elisabeth Chojnacka, and Goska Isphording. And in Spain, in the sixties, it was to be Genoveva Gálvez, the first professor of harpsichord, who would manage to make that initially solitary voyage attractive to contemporary composers, convincing them to choose to inhabit such a novel space with its surprising sonorities.

ATMOSPHERIC SKETCHES
Music organizes us. It lets us exist. It resonates beneath our flesh and in our veins over and over again. Always the same, yet different. It resounds pain at nighttime and always hears joy as a drumroll of guffaws.
This recording evokes a lot of primitive recollections. It is an invitation to a voyage, an approach to someplace and to a past that has fled, a journey to a city or to a temperature because it doesn't travel only to the ports and the town squares; it often shows up in an atmosphere or in a memory and it is this music which transports its form most clearly to our understanding.
[...]

DUE ESSERCIZI. JOSÉ LUIS TURINA (1952)
PRAELUDIUM.- The performer unfolds the chords as if they were an uncertainty, in the style of Louis Couperin's preludes non mesurés. The melody will be a prospect, a suspended desire waiting for its most plausible resolution or its most logical continuation. It is a game of wills: the performer groups the notes together immoderately, like an artesan giving form to the material, and the listener volunteers to function as the destiny, where that new creature of air will die.
SONATA.- Commotion will commence after the unstoppable bursts of the sixteenth notes. Cheerful and insistent, they will give silence no respite, and the music will be forever remorseful. Miguel de Unamuno showed his thirst for eternity, the secret, bashful longing of men to live forever. Death is perhaps simply a spelling trick that gives meaning to life. We need it in the end after all possible combinations have been exhausted. As Borges says, the end will produce, beyond anything else, a great relief.
[...]

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