Jean-Heny D'Anglebert.
The son of a wealthy shoemaker, he was born in the town of Bar-Le-Duc, the seat of the old County of Lorraine, in 1629.
He was a talented musician, but without the right background, without the noble origin. At that time, it was impossible to succeed as a musician and build any kind of career without it. So he took the good-sounding name 'Jean-Henry' instead of the somewhat porous 'Henry', and then later on he maneuvered very skillfully with his 'pseudo-nobility', a wide network of contacts, and of course his music. In this way, he was able to enter very high court circles.
Later, he became a colleague and friend of Lully, and a favorite of the Sun King, 'Royal Harpsichordist', and became known as the most outstanding keyboard composer of his time.
From the 1650s, he composed many works, and in 1689 he published his harpsichord pieces, dedicated to the Duchess of Conti, who was herself an amateur harpsichordist.
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There are many excellent recordings of D'Anglebert's works, but there is one that is very, very special.
Listening to it, you immediately notice the strangeness that characterizes 'Style Brise'.
What is it?
Actually, at first glance, it's a kind of over-decoration, usage of series of irregular arpeggios.
To understand it, we have to go back to the lute, because that's where part of the origin lies. The Renaissance lute, but later, the Baroque lute as well, is a distinctly quiet instrument, so the emphasis, the dynamics that the Baroque required, were extremely limited.
The keyboardists, and especially D'Anglebert, went much further than this: they used continuous arpeggio garlands, keeping the basic melody constantly unfolding. From the first bar to the last.
This gives a kind of strange fragmentation and covers the basic melody so much that the musical motif itself remains barely discernible.
We could say, with a nice analogy, that yes, exactly like the overly decorated clothing culture in the court of the Sun King.
Yes, there is a lot of truth in this, but the situation is much more complicated.
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Because it is not possible to decorate completely according to one's own momentarily ideas; the internal structure of the expansions is very important; in many places a kind of pseudo-polyphony can be observed, with numerous begun fugue sections that lead nowhere due to their irregular, even irregular use, missing closures, motif returns that never occur, unfinished structures - all this envelops the entire performance in a charming unpredictability. Even if the basic melody itself is ridiculously simple. And the superimposition of the ornamentation-fluid opens up irrational spaces, a feeling of infinity suddenly enters the formula.
It's worth going a little deeper here.
This basic motif is indisputable, actually a cover-up, a concealment, a disguise, a mask, and we immediately find ourselves in Venice.
And in the middle of Carnival, in the middle of the Karnevál.
... Barnabas didn't believe him at first and even scolded the hippopotamus.
You think I don't recognize you! My own brother! Who do you think I am –
I am Gambrinus, said the whale.
Barnabas took off his mask.
Enough of the joke, he said, now take off your mask yourself.
Gambrinus said that he admitted it was a mask, but it was a mask imposed on him by material nature at birth, which he would only be able to take off when he moved away –
Barnabas was surprised by the answer. He immediately saw that the person he was facing was no ordinary person.
So you really are not Andrea.
Indeed, replied the stranger, I have no luck in knowing Mr. Andrea.
So you were not traveling in disguise at that time.
There was no question of any disguise. That is true, as I say.
Then you -
But please, didn't you know that when you travel, you travel in the most appropriate mask, because in this way you deceive the demons?
Perhaps, said Gambrinus, perhaps there were among us who knew about it. I, for example knew about it, but I confess I didn't think about it -
You neglected it rather frivolously -
I admit, I forgot. Next time I travel, I won't be so carefree, if only to avoid a similar situation in the future –
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The word form 'ornaments' in old sources very often operates with the meaning field of 'blooming'. Covering in flowers. In other words, the essence is not the branch, nor the tree, nor even the flower itself. But the 'inside' of the whole, the metaphysics of 'blooming', according to which neither the future harvest nor the reproduction, nor even the new life, is of importance. One true and incorruptible essence constantly floats between Heaven and Earth: the phenomenon of flowering, its selfless beauty and grandeur.
Like a continuous series of impressions. There is no Art of Fugue, no Grand Closing, only the mystique of constantly recreating flowering.
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According to another / many approaches, this whole thing can be understood as a real immersion into the microstructure of music. It's as if we were looking at the melodic arc with a high-resolution oscilloscope, where strange roughnesses appear on the sustained note, and when zoomed in even further, it turns out that these are themselves melodic fragments, which are connected to the external, 'big' melody according to a very precise system.
Anyone who is good at math will immediately say that it is a 'fractal structure', and that is exactly what it is. And to make it even more complicated, this 'system', sonically, in these arpeggios, also receives pseudo-chromatic movement, which increases the scope for expression even further.
Elizabeth Farr's performance is simply brilliant. Because she further exacerbated this above incomprehensibility by sometimes separating the rhythm of the two parts, the right and left hands, more or less, breaking away from the metrum, to the point that there are a few quarters of a minute where things slip into complete isorhythm, remember?, isorhythm was Machaut's favorite tool back in the 1300s, in the era of HighArt polyphony...
At first it seems as if two harpsichordists are playing two different notes under/over each other, but then it turns out that this is a very intentional maneuver, the returns/meetings take place nicely, at each node, along a given line, and it becomes a beautiful sense of harmony.
This is freedom itself, isn't it?
In comparison, the metronome's time-segmentation is completely unnatural, ab ovo not even belonging to music, it brought more bleakness than it gave joy. The functioning of living systems, and indeed the functioning of the entire Universe, follows the above unpredictability much more than the artificial intervals created by man.
And the mystery of unpredictability, as so often in Early Music, instead of the direct constraint of causality, gives rise to something much more beautiful and much more elegant.
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The tones of the two Keith Hill instruments chosen fit nicely into this 'knightly work'.
The Blanchet harpsichord is a faithful reproduction of an early Rückers instrument, with two manuals and a beautiful tone.
The other is a lute-harpsichord with gut strings and a very special, delicate sound. No existing instrument has survived here, so the copy built in 2000 had to be created from paintings and old order documents; many of the latter papers bear J. S. Bach's signature, as the lute-harpsichord was his 'home' composing instrument.
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The slow pieces are my real favorites. They have a strange, Wurlitzer-like feeling to them. Like when you turn the knob of a music box and something great, from a completely different plane, comes out of the strange little parts.
The Music.
If we spin it slowly, even if we spin it quickly, it doesn't affect its reality.
Where does music come from?
From the wooden box?
From the small metal plates?
In the recording, from the instrument?
Or is it an independent spiritual reality that has always existed?
I don't know.
One thing is certain, this is a pure magic.
And that's the point, and that's the only thing that matters.
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