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MONTAGE Hopkinson Smith, Beyond the Instrument A lutenist pursuing “beauty and gesture” by lara pelligrinelli opkinson smith ’70 describes such an abstract plane that J.S. Bach as a musical ecologist. the score already appears “He recycled so many of his own to be a kind of adapta- H works,” Smith explains. “He nev- tion” from a theoretical er stopped trying to adapt what he’d writ- ideal. Bach’s arrangements ten.” It was an accepted musical practice highlight a rigor and logic at the time, but one imagines the composer to his compositions not was driven at least in part by pragmatism: rooted in individual in- his posts in a number of German cities re- struments but able instead quired him to produce new compositions at to transcend them. a fierce pace. Refashioning musical materials Smith himself has al- helped him keep up with those demands. ways possessed a poly- “Even so,” Smith adds, “writing a cantata morphous musicality. a week would not have been a manageable Growing up, he played electric guitar, ban- Hopkinson Smith playing the German task for the rest of us mortals.” jo, and mandolin, and in high school, he theorbo built for him by Joel van Lennep As a lutenist, Smith has had to contend remembers, “I’d learn how to play what- he studied with musicologist John Ward, with the Baroque composer’s propensity ever they needed in the band, without a who specialized in the repertoire for Span- to repurpose. Bach wrote little for the in- teacher.” It was the 1960s, and Smith, in- ish vihuela (a Renaissance guitar that strument, mostly transcriptions of existing spired by the likes of the New Lost City Smith has also mastered) and English lute. works. Smith’s latest recording is a collec- Ramblers, delved into folk and Appala- Smith’s attraction to the lute was fourfold: tion of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (BWV chian music. “Then I latched on to classi- “It was the sound and shape of the instru- 1001–1006), six pieces ostensibly for violin, cal guitar—or it latched on to me. It was ment, in addition to the incredible quality and the Suites (BWV 1007-1009, 995, 1010, clear what I wanted to do, and there was and quantity of the different repertoires 1012), widely recognized as scored for cello. no looking back, and there was no choice.” from different regions and different eras.” But as Smith writes in his liner notes for the That is, until he discovered the lute in He found ready opportunities to play violin sonatas,“[T]he music is conceived on college. For three semesters at Harvard, within Boston’s incipient early-music scene. Upon graduation, he opted to study for a year at the prestigious Schola Can- C hapter & Verse torum in Basel, Switzerland, where he’s lived ever since; Smith likens it to “step- Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words ping out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.” The burgeoning community Orin Tilevitz writes, “One day early mer of a Forsyte, the second part of John there included the late vocalist Montser- in Chem 20, Professor Doering told us Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. The direct rat Figueras and her husband, viol player that if your experiment was inconsistent quote is, “By the cigars they smoke, and Jordi Savall, with whom Smith performed with your hypothesis, there must be the composers they love, ye shall know and, in 1974, officially founded Hesperion something wrong with the experiment. the texture of men’s souls. Old Jolyon XX, arguably the most acclaimed early- (He was joking.) Is there an original could not bear a strong cigar or Wag­ music ensemble of all time. The perform- source for this?” ner’s music.” ers’ imaginative yet scholarly approaches breathed life into Hispanic and European “the music they love” (March­April). Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter repertoires from before 1800, music that Jeremiah Jenkins and Sarah Hamilton and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware had been all but forgotten. Smith per- were the first to identify this borrow­ Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e­mail formed with the ensemble until the mid ing from the first chapter of Indian Sum- to [email protected]. 1980s, when, he says with good humor, “Hesperion’s projects got bigger and big- Photograph by Philippe Gontier/Courtesy of Hopkinson Smith Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE ger and I got smaller and smaller.” pitched sibling, the theorbo—of Bach’s ment that is inherently In Renaissance repertories, the lute elabo- compositions. His instruments were built chordal and plucked, Visit harvardmag.com rates on the written lines in ensemble mu- by Joel van Lennep, incidentally an old not bowed, Smith can to hear selections from sic. During the Baroque period of the seven- Somerville, Massachusetts, neighbor. realize Bach’s notations Smith’s recordings of teenth and eighteenth centuries, it renders Smith compares the sonatas and partitas, in a more literal fash- Bach. the basso continuo, a flexible system for creat- when played on the violin and cello, to “the ion. As a result, his versions naturally feel ing harmonies from a notational shorthand. sound of a storm raging against the coast.” more pastoral and at ease than their violin Smith preferred to focus on solo repertoire The technical challenges of those works and cello counterparts. Rather than waves rather than these supporting roles. Today, and the suites—among the most formida- dashing against rocky shores, the varia- his 30 recordings (www.hopkinsonsmith. ble a performer can face—foster their own tions of the Chaconne in D Minor sound com) range from the sixteenth-century sense of time and drama. “For example,” more like gentle rain on a quiet pond. On publications of Pierre Attaignant, the first Smith explains, “if you look at the begin- cello, the Prelude from the Suite in C Ma- sources of French lute music, to the compo- ning of the Chaconne [from Partita no. 2 jor makes the heart race with its joyful sitions of Bach’s prolific contemporary, the in D Minor], the violin has a three-voice striving, the bow pivoting boldly across lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss. chord—and it’s impossible for the violin to the strings. On lute, it is all warmth and A master of musical ecology himself, play the three voices. But Bach wrote it as a intimacy, the fingers showering precious Smith has followed in Bach’s footsteps. three-voice chord. I’m sure what he’s saying dewdrops. With the exception of two pieces, what is that this is what you must hear inside. It “With any instrument, what one wants Smith presents in his most recent col- points you in a direction. What you want is to do is find perfect union of physical ges- What Works Our Divine Double Naturalism, Realism, and From the War on Poverty to Beyond Timbuktu Gender Equality by Design Charles M. Stang Normativity the War on Crime An Intellectual History of Muslim lection are his own renderings—for the beauty and gesture.” ture with musical gesture,” Smith says. Iris Bohnet $49.95 Hilary Putnam The Making of Mass Incarceration West Africa 13-course Baroque lute and its lower- Yet with the lute, a stringed instru- “This is the lifelong task of a musician.” Belknap Press | $26.95 Edited by Mario De Caro in America Ousmane Oumar Kane $49.95 Elizabeth Hinton $39.95 $29.95 Seeing Spring Photographs that teem with life In 2013, office-bound in a high­stress architec­ ture job in Manhattan, Anna Agoston, M.Arch.II ’04, then an occasional photographer, rarely ven­ tured outside. “I was let go in March,” she recalls, “and it was as though I had never seen spring.” Once she saw, she couldn’t stop looking. Camera in hand and flush with time, she began taking pic­ tures of what grew in the sidewalk cracks on her street in Brooklyn, and in the nearby parks and Heart of Europe Nothing Ever Dies History and Presence Legal Plunder African Pentecostals in botanic gardens. The result is a series, hundreds A History of the Holy Roman Empire Vietnam and the Memory of War Robert A. Orsi Households and Debt Collection in Catholic Europe Peter H. Wilson Viet Thanh Nguyen Belknap Press | $29.95 Late Medieval Europe The Politics of Presence in the strong, that examines floral features in extreme Belknap Press | $39.95 $27.95 Daniel Lord Smail Twenty-First Century close­up: the ridge along a stem; a thistle’s spikes. $39.95 Annalisa Butticci Agoston attributes her delight in these details 39.95 to her limited contact with nature while growing new in paperback up in Paris. “I was stunned by the countryside,” she says, especially during family hiking trips to the nearby forest of Fontainebleau, with its huge Photographs 152 (left) and 60, from Agoston’s untitled series formations of white rock. “Maybe now with my macro lens, looking at tiny things with a lens that makes them the diversity within a local ecosystem, Agoston’s current project look much larger—maybe I’m looking for the boulders of my removes life from the context of habitat. (And her current sub­ childhood.” jects—numbered, but unnamed—don’t object to being studied Even in close­up, her plants don’t look like monuments of a so closely, from every angle.) A tendril curls, doubling back to distant geological age. But captured in black and white, against coil around itself; two woody twigs reach to braid together.

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