Baroque Arabesque
Fiori Musicali Austria
rec. 2022, 4earstudios, Vienna
Texts and translations included
Gramola 99279 [62]

In recent decades there has been something of a fashion (in some academic circles, at least) for what has variously been called contrafactual history, or virtual history. The terms relate to a kind of ‘historical’ writing which makes argued and evidenced conjectures as to what might have happened if specific historical events had never happened at all or had turned out differently. By way of illustration, there is an interesting collection of essays, edited by Robert Cowley and published in 1999 under the title What if? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. Among the essays included are ‘No Glory That Was Greece’ by Victor David Hanson, imagining what might have been different if the Persians had won the battle of Salamis and John Keegan’s ‘How Hitler could have Won the War’, speculating on what might have followed if “the Wehrmacht had turned towards the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union”. Such writings might, I suppose, be called ‘thought experiments’.

Something similar, in terms of the narrower field of the history of music, underlies this disc. Christian Heindl (as translated by Jens F. Laurson) opens his perceptive and interesting booklet essay thus: “Tribal migration – or, in today’s world, globalization and the associated travel – have always brought about cultural exchanges, enrichment, and adaptation […] contributing to […] attaining a broader horizon. […] With this album, Baroque Arabesque, the ensemble Fiori Musicali Austria invites a variety of thought experiments along the following lines: Baroque music of the occident – specifically from central and southern Europe – meets oriental music from the Middle East and especially the Sephardic culture of the Iberian peninsula. Songs and instrumental pieces demonstrate both the connections between them and what separates them […] how might musicians from the orient have interpreted works of their Baroque composer counterparts, had they settled in a central European metropolis rather than being imported later, then invariably labeled [sic] ‘exotic’? Baroque Arabesque forges links between epochs and music from a variety of European countries and the Mediterranean Near-Abroad which might not only have been theoretically plausible but which, in certain instances, have led to some very concrete fusions and amalgamations of diverse cultural elements.”

This album from Fiori Musicali Austria is, then, concerned both with what might have happened and what did happen, the factual and the contrafactual. Though the music played does not by any means belong exclusively to the age of the baroque, the core of the ensemble consists of familiar baroque instruments – the viola da gamba (played by Pia Pircher), the harpsichord (Marinka Brecelj) and the baroque violin (Julia Kainz); to these are added, for this project, the oud – eastern predecessor of the lute – played by the Syrian virtuoso Orwa Saleh and, on the first track,  by Özlem Bulut, some oriental percussion played by Patrick Feldner, an Austrian who studied percussion in India and plays in a number of world music ensembles. I particularly enjoyed the contributions of Özlem Bulut, a Kurdish singer and player of the oud, from Turkey. She studied opera in both Turkey and Vienna and has performed with, for example, the Opéra Bastille in Paris and Staatsoper Wien; she also has a busy career leading a band of her own which fuses middle eastern music with jazz and pop idioms.

The mixture on this disc is a heady one, but it is always controlled and disciplined; historical knowledge and imagination complement one another perfectly.

The first track on the album, Caccini’s ‘Dalle porta d’Oriente’, setting words by Maria Menadori, from the composer’s Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle (Florence 1614) provides a beautifully appropriate opening. Menador’s text celebrates the arrival of dawn dalla porte d’Oriente [from the Gate of the East], with flashes of light in the sky announcing L’alba candide e lucent [the white and shining dawn]. Ensuing stanzas (not all of those printed in 1614 are sung here) speak of perle orientali [oriental pearls] and of dawn dileguar la notte intorno [making the surrounding night disappear]. So, though there is nothing in the text which makes even an implicit suggestion that the music of the east might influence that of Europe, the whole poem finds in the ‘orient’ a source of new light (one might understand this word figuratively as well as literally). The mention of pearls ties the song’s implications to the baroque, since the very term ‘baroque’ may very well derive from the Portuguese word barocco,which was a term meaning a pearl with flaws. Here ‘Dalle porta d’Oreinte’ is sung and played beautifully, Özlem Bulet’s vocal line adding some decidedly oriental ornamentation and the sound of her oud opening up other aspects of ‘eastern’ music very relevant to this project.

For some European musicians, ‘Eastern’ music didn’t have to be sought beyond the boundaries of Europe. Francisco Tarrega, for example, a Catalan from Barcelona, was intimately familiar with that fusion of Christian, Muslim and Jewish forms and traditions which defines a large part of Spain’s cultural tradition, in poetry, architecture and music. One need only think of well-known pieces by Tarrega such as Recuerdos de la Alhambra (1899), Danza Mora (probably composed in 1900) and the one recorded here, Capricho árabe (1888). All of these respond to the Arab-influenced music still to be heard in southern Spain. But the performance on Baroque Arabesque still springs a kind of ‘what if’ surprise (what if, in a contra-factual world where time ran backwards, a baroque composer had transcribed this Moorish piece for harpsichord?). Marinka Brecelj has made, and here plays, just such a transcription, made within, but not confined by, the conventions of baroque writing for the harpsichord – and it sounds very handsome and colourful. I find myself entirely in tune with what Christian Heindl writes, “performed […] on the harpsichord, it attains a wonderfully timeless quality capable – hypothetically – of having enchanted its listeners at any given time in any given place.”

As regards time and place, the four Sephardic folk songs included in this programme elude, by their very nature, any accurate answer as to when, where or by whom they were first created.  That is often the case with any kind of folk music, but the case is more extreme here. The Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain at the end of the 1400s; many of them found new homes around the Mediterranean and beyond – in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, including modern Greece and Turkey, in Italy, Armenia and what is now Israel. They took their music with them, though they also created new music. As a consequence of this enforced diaspora, lyrics and melodies became separated or were put together in new combinations; songs were sung in new languages and old words were sometimes fitted to melodies discovered in the new lands in which the Sephardi were now living. Under such circumstances, naturally, the results were very diverse. The fact that the music was largely transmitted orally adds to the difficulties of discussing it in terms of time and place. What the four Sephardic songs in this programme do, however, have in common is the brightly coloured vivacity of soprano Özlem Bulut’s singing (which is a joy throughout the album) and, to adapt a phrase of Ira Gershwin’s, the fascinating rhythms of their instrumental accompaniments.

Along the way we are (re)introduced to some fascinating individuals (fascinating, but hardly topics of everyday conversation) such as Athanasius Kircher and Kevser Hanim. Kircher first came my way during some research on the poetry of the Seventeenth Century. A German Jesuit with enormously wide-ranging interests, he had a mind of seemingly endless curiosity (and eager to make unexpected connections). He studied texts in Hebrew and Syriac, as well as the Greek and Latin more normal in his age. At the age of 26 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Ethics at the University of Würzburg, where he also taught Hebrew and Syriac. He published books on, amongst much else, Egyptian hieroglyphics, magnetism, volcanos, China and various branches of medicine and biology. He was, in short, the kind of man for whom the word ‘polymath’ was invented. No wonder that one modern book on him, by Paula Findlen, is called Athanasius Kircher: the last man who knew everything (New York, Routledge, 2004). Another book, by Joscelyn Goodwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London, Thames and Hudson, 1979) perhaps offers the best entry into Kircher’s now ‘strange’ intellectual world. Kircher’s major statement on music, Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni, was published in 1650; its title might be translated as ‘Universal music, or the great art of consonance and dissonance). Kircher envisions the world as a set of sympathetic harmonies linking all that it contains. He writes, for example, of “the Sympathetic Harmony of the World, showing the whole Symphony of Nature in Ten Ennachords” (quoted thus from Musurgia univeralis inJoscelyn Goodwin, Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook, London, Arkana, 1987, pp. 158-9). This is, essentially, a “doctrine of correspondences […] envisioned as an instrument on which every string, when plucked, resounds through all the levels of being in the universe (same source, p.153). In ways that may seem rather odd to the modern mind, Kircher’s approach to medicine drew on such ideas. This is illustrated by the presence on this disc of his ‘Antidotum Tarantulae’ and ‘Tarantella “Modo Hypodorico”’, related to the South Italian folk-dance the tarantella, which has several variants, which was understood to cure the pains consequent on being bitten by a tarantula spider.

The idea that music can be medically therapeutic goes back to, at least, the Ancient Greeks, symbolised in the fact that Apollo was the god both of music and of healing. The use of music or dance is still with us though it is based on philosophical and psychological principles very different from those of Kircher. Kircher was by no means a great composer, but the two pieces played here, the first arranged for harpsichord and played by Marinka Brecelj, the second an ensemble piece merit inclusion in this context, their relevance to the rest of the disc being that they show something of the Arabic influence on the music of Apulia and Sicily that was a legacy of the centuries-long Arab presence in Italy, which is often overlooked by cultural historians (my eyes were opened to it by a reading of Alex Metcalfe’s book The Muslims of Medieval Italy, Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Kesver Hanim was one of the relatively few female musicians to make her name in the Ottoman Empire – others included Dilhayat Kalfa (d.1737) – whose house in Istanbul is now a hotel bearing her name – Adile Sultan (1826-1899), Peruz Hanim (1866-c.1920) and Shamiram Kelliciyou (1870-1955). Kesver Hanim was a fine violinist, who taught at the Darülehan, Istanbul’s first conservatoire. She had, as Heindl puts it, “a comprehensive knowledge of both Western and Turkish music”. It is not, of course, difficult to think of works by Western composers which shows Turkish influences (even if often rather superficially), such as the second movement of Haydn’s Symphony 100 or Mozart’s Die Entfürhung aus dem Serail and the Rondo alla turca, the third movement of his Piano Sonata No.11, K.331. The fascination with oriental music runs through the Nineteenth Century and beyond (a particularly interesting discussion can be found in Derek B. Scott’s ‘“Orientalism” and Musical Style’, Musical Quarterly, 82:2, 1998, pp. 309-335). For much of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries there was, in all the European arts, what one writer has called an oriental obsession, as discussed in John Sweetman’s book (Cambridge University Press, 1988) The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture 150-1920.

Another enduring craze which is also represented on this disc was that for ‘La Folia’, vividly described by Percy A. Scholes (The Oxford Companion to Music, Tenth Edition, revised by John Owen Ward, 1970), as “a wild Portuguese dance […] connected with fertility rites. Various melodies used for this dance are extant, but a particular one of these came to have an enormous vogue that endured for at least three and a half centuries”. The extent of that vogue can be illustrated by citing just a few examples across the chronological and stylistic range of the ways in which it has been used: Andrea Falconieri, Folias echa para mi Señora Doña Tarolilla de Carallenos (1650), Jean-Baptiste Lully, Les folies d’Espagne (1700), Arcangelo Corelli, Violin Sonata, Op.5, No. 12, Alessandro Scarlatti, 29 Partite sopra l’aria della Folia (1723), Francesco Geminiani, 12 Concerti Grossi (1726), Mauro Giuliani, 6 Variations sur les Folies d’Espagne (1811), Franz Liszt, Rhapsodie Espagnole (1858), Sergey Rachmaninov, Variations on a Theme of Corelli (1931) and  Hans Werner Henze, Aria de La Folia Española (1977). Hundreds of further examples can be found at the invaluable website ‘La folia; a musical cathedral’.

In arranging the present programme Marinka Brecelj has wisely chosen to use a relatively obscure instance of the use of la folia, by Tomaso Antonio Vitali, the eldest son of the better- known Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632-1692). Born inBologna, where Giovanni Battista was well established as a singer, instrumentalist and composer (as well as some 14 collections of instrumental music, he published two oratorios), when around the age of 11 Tomaso Antonio moved to Modena in 1674 when his father was appointed one of two vice-maestri di capella at the court of Francesco II, Duke of Modena. As far as I am aware, Tomaso Antonio’s only publications were four collections of instrumental music, the last of them being his Opus 4, Concerti di sonate (for violin, cello and continuo), from which his version of la folia comes. It opens rather slowly, but expressively; in its central sections the momentum builds, though never approaching ‘wildness’, before calmness is restored at its close. While I wouldn’t rank Vitali’s folia especially high amongst baroque folies, it is an assured and intelligent piece which so far as I can judge (without access to a score) is here given a well-judged performance.

Of the pieces I have not discussed, there are two cases (Barbara Strozzi’s Amor domiglione and François Couperin’s Les barricades mystérieuses) where, though both the music and the performances are attractive (Les barricades mystérieuses is one of the finest of all baroque compositions forthe harpsichord), I struggle to see their particular relevance to the declared aim of this project, concerned as it is, with creative interaction between, in Christian Heindl’s words, “the Baroque music of the occident – specifically from central and southern Europe [and the] oriental music from the Middle East and especially the Sephardic culture of the Iberian peninsula”. The relevance of the two remaining tracks, the traditional Turkish song Üsküdara gideriken [On the way to Üsküdar] and the traditional dance ‘Horon’ from the eastern shores of the Black Sea, is perfectly clear and they make their own contribution to a fine album. I lack the knowledge to make any detailed comment on either, but if I may be allowed a brief autobiographical note – I remember hearing a recording of Üsküdara gideriken being played, some 35 years ago (at least) in a Turkish restaurant in South Wales; one of the waiters who spoke good English, told me it was an old recording and wrote down for me the name of the singer, Safiye Ayla. I later discovered that the recording was made in 1949 and that she was one of the most famous singers of Turkish music. Not having heard the song for many years, I was delighted to hear this interpretation by Özlem Bulut.

Although I have offered a few small reservations above, none of them detract from my pleasure in this well-recorded and largely joyous disc. Though it has a serious ‘contrafactual’ purpose it strikes me as, above all, a powerful celebration of intercultural activity.

Glyn Pursglove

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Contents
Giulio Caccini (1551-1618)
Dalla porta d’oriente (1614)
Sephardic Folk *
Yo me enamore de un aire
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) *
Antidotum Tarantulae
Tarantella: ‘Modo Hypodorico’
George Frederic Handel (1685-1759)
Tomami a vagheggiar (from Alcina, 1735)
Kevser Hanim (1887-1963)
Nihâvend longa
Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) *
Amor domiglione (from Cantate, ariette e duetti, 1651)
Francisco Tarrega (1852-1909) *
Capricho árabe (1892)
Tomaso Antonio Vitali (1663-1745)
La Follia, from Sonata Op.4, No.12 (1701)
Traditional Turkish *
üsküdara gideeriken
Sephardic Folk *
Scalerica de oro
François Couperin (1668-1733)
Les barricades mystérieuses (1717)
Sephardic Folk *Yo era niña
Traditional Greek
Dance from the Black Sea (Horon)
Sephardic Folk *
Adio querida
Arrangements by Marinka Brecelj are marked thus *
Performers
Özlem Bulut (soprano, oud), Julia Kainz (baroque violin), Pia Pircher (viola da gamba), Patrick Feldner (percussion), Orwa Saleh (oud), Marinka Brecelj (harpsichord, arrangements, director)