A Different Kind Of Authenticity
Relating Bach to avant-garde jazz in the enchanted desert of imagination
Inspired by observations of Bach’s contemporaries on his organ playing I minimised my movements as a classical organist in the past almost forty years. I called this The art of doing nothing or The art of playing with relaxed precision. The following video, recorded in 2013, is a perfect example of this art:
During these forty years I also built up my own musical language for improvisation and composition. In 2016, this resulted in becoming an avant-garde jazz pianist and using much larger movements than before, to increase intensity and fully relate my body language to the expression of the music. This can be observed here:
This —admittedly— extreme new body language now influences my way of playing the organ and in particular Bach. I would like to feel that my Bach interpretation and the avant-garde jazz which I play are connected through freedom and fluency of movements. It would be a very unorthodox, but in a way also very authentic response to titles which Bach used in order to refer to dance, such as Allemande; Courante; Sarabande; Gavotte; Air; Minuet and Gigue. It is not my intention to imitate (very codified) baroque dance gestures, but to feel the spirit of dance in the movements I make. As a result I started my Bach interpretation all over again (first the hands and pedal separately, then in all combinations) and share my experience on line, for instance in these examples:
To quote Aristotle: “Through discipline comes freedom”. Or in more poetic terms: forty years of dwelling in the desert of strictness to reach the enchanted desert of imagination. This now relates to the title of a full evening project of mine for organ, flute, percussion and with dance and performance, which was premiered in the Der Aa-kerk in Groningen on 30th June 2016:
A new kind of subjectivity
Broadly speaking, Bach interpretation from 1829 (the year of the Mattheus Passion’s revival by Mendelssohn) till the first and larger part of the 20th century can be considered as romantically subjective. On the contrary, historically informed performance practice in the latter part of the 20th century up to the present can be regarded as objective, or at least as aiming at objectivity. My authenticity is a mix of objectivity and subjectivity: firmly rooted in historically informed performance practice through my education, but seen through a personal and subjective filter: the 21st century practice of my own compositions and improvisations. If A represents romantic subjectivity and B historically informed performance practice, I do not want to go from B back to A, but forward to C, representing the present and the future. |
