Carnal Musicology in a New Edition of

Luigi Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478 ​

D.M.A. Document

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in

the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Samuel Converse Johnson, M.M.

Graduate Program in Music

The Ohio State University

2020

D.M.A. Committee:

Professor Mark Rudoff, Advisor

Dr. Kristina MacMullen

Dr. Juliet White-Smith

Dr. David Clampitt

Copyright by

Samuel Converse Johnson

2020

Abstract

The music of Luigi Boccherini has experienced a slow and steady revival over the last half century, yet few of his twelve cello concertos are widely published. This document presents a newly engraved edition of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478, including solo parts ​ ​ and full score. I use carnal musicology to support a historically informed editorship of the cello part. In doing so I critique the anachronistic ways in which Boccherini’s music has been edited and published, particularly by Friedrich Grützmacher in his late 19th century Boccherini concerto mash-up. Grützmacher’s widely accepted version compromises the techniques that would have been implicit in Boccherini’s music, such that these inventions are lost in modern cello pedagogy and performance. My approach offers a new way of teaching and historicizing music that is faithful to Boccherini and caring toward the cello playing body.

This project provides resources for the well-being of musicians and their bodies through a musicology that re-centers practice as community rather than isolation. The primary historical contributions I make to what we know of Boccherini are embodied and transcribed into the performance edition itself. This carnal musicology serves as the connective framework between history and embodied feeling, such that musicians and students can feel both the music and the history.

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The practice guide develops an analytical teaching methodology toward mastery of Boccherini’s unique musical style and technical inventions. The Concerto G. 478 serves as a case study by ​ ​ which I teach historical performance using contemporary research methodologies of formal and harmonic analysis, topic theory, and carnal musicology. I offer insight for feeling, interpreting, and translating these components of text and history through the sound of the cello. I invent practice strategies that engage the student in technical and musical inquiries of the Concerto that ​ ​ allow them to take ownership of their performance.

Finally, the score portion of the document prints a new edition of Luigi Boccherini’s Concerto in ​ D major G. 478, including the full orchestra score, a performance edition of the solo cello part ​ with original cadenzas by the editor, and a clean copy of the solo part.

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Acknowledgements

Connection, community, and collaboration are central to my work as a musician, teacher, and researcher. This project bears the fingerprints of many communities and individuals who have invested in my flourishing. For this work and the connections it creates, I am deeply grateful.

To The Ohio State University School of Music, for supporting me with a graduate associateship, and offering space and resources for my research, community, and artistic development.

To members of CELLOHIO and the OSU cello studio, for showing up ready for anything, for trusting me with our wild transcriptions, and for generating mutual support in our creative processes.

To the Boccherini Ensemble: Mary Brandal, Yi Chieh Anita Chu, Anna Dorey, Nora Dukart,

Ben Hottensmith, Esther Krumm, Erik Malmer, Maggie Mueller, Drew Postel, and Sam Zelnik who, on March 31, 2019, joined me in performing this radiant, effervescent music with the intention and detail it deserves. And to Benji Robinson, for generously recording the show.

To Elisabeth Le Guin, who has articulated for me a way of being a whole musician through connecting music history with practice, analysis, gesture, somatics, feminism, and queerness.

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To Luigi Boccherini, whose music and life continues to captivate and teach me, and without whom this project would not have been possible.

To the musicians of Columbus Ohio and beyond, whose collaboration and companionship has made this work a joy, including Professor Ed Bak, Cory Blais, Devin Copfer, Clara Davison,

Aubrey Liston, and Sarah Troeller.

To my doctoral committee, Drs. David Clampitt, Kristina MacMullen, and Juliet White-Smith, who showed up for many performances, read and offered critique on the drafts of this paper, and held space for my research and experimentation.

To all my cello and chamber music teachers who challenged and nurtured my growth: Lucy

Fink, Jon Jeffrey Grier, Christopher Hutton, Anne Poe Matthews, John Ravnan, and Bion Tsang.

To Professor Mark Rudoff, who at a critical moment in 2012 saw the artist that I vision myself to be, whose deep investment in my professional life brought me to Columbus, who has taught me so much of what I know about teaching and historicizing music, who has been on my side at every step in this work, and who continues to cultivate with me paths toward community, collaboration, and growth.

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To my queer family, whose artistic and human processes vibrate in life-affirming counterpoint with my own: Jeffrey Clark, Noah Demland, Jake Shannon, and Sharon Udoh. You amaze and inspire me, you teach me how to love my artistic process, and you help me realize my power.

To Michael J. Morris, who reflects my strengths back to me and gives me words to articulate my work, who teaches me how to show up in my vulnerability as an artist, who comforted me when this project felt like too much to bear, and who has offered their compassion, feedback, and insight as a brilliant writer and thinker.

To Maggie Mueller, who was on board from the earliest moments of charting the edition and performance, who read every word of this document and offered her valuable feedback, and who continues to be a bright star in my musical life.

To Stewart Johnson, who shares with me blood and home and an instinct for musical innovation, who celebrates my victories and encourages me in my distress, who holds space for the study, research, and musicking, even when it is messy.

To my parents, Sue and Paul Johnson, and to my grandfather, Charlie Johnson, for their unwavering support of my creative life, from the first moment I held a cello until now, and for encouraging and believing in what I can share.

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Vita

2013………………………………….B.M. Cello Performance, The University of Texas at

Austin

2015………………………………….M.M. Cello Performance, The Ohio State University

2016 to present……………………..Graduate Teaching Associate, School of Music, The Ohio

State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Music

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Table of Contents

Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………. i

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………….iii

Vita ……………………………………………………………………………………………. vi

List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………….viii

List of Tables …………………………………………………………………………………. x

Overview ………………………………………………………………………………………. 1

Part 1: The Musicology of Performance Editorship ………………………………………….... 6

Chapter 1: Grützmacher Musicology …………………………………………………………. 7

Chapter 2: Carnal Musicology ………………………………………………………………. 15

Chapter 3: New Edition for the Concerto G. 478 ……………………………………………. 21 ​ ​ Chapter 4: Luigi Boccherini …………………………………………………………………. 40

Part 2: Practice Guide ………………………………………………………………………... 46

Chapter 5: I. Allegro con spirito ……………………………………………………………... 47

Chapter 6: II. Larghetto ………………………………………………………………………. 69

Chapter 7: III. Rondo: Comodo assai …………………………………………………………. 81

Chapter 8: IV. Rondo …………………………………………………………………………. 90

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………. 107

Appendix: Part 3: Scores for Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478 …………….... 109 ​ ​

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List of Figures

Figure 1. IV. Rondo, bars 3-4 (Dresden copy) ……………………………………………… 23

Figure 2. IV. Rondo, bars 3-4 (performance edition) ……………………………………….. 24

Figure 3. I. Allegro con spirito, bar 93 (Dresden copy) ……………………………………... 27

Figure 4. I. Allegro con spirito, bar 93 (performance edition) ………………………………. 27

Figure 5. Portrait of Boccherini …………………………………………………………….... 30 ​ ​ Figure 6. II. Larghetto, bar 36 (Dresden copy) ………………………………………………. 32

Figure 7. II. Larghetto, bar 36 (performance edition) ………………………………………... 33

Figure 8. Brilliant music ………………………………………………………………………. 52

Figure 9. Singing music ………………………………………………………………………. 52

Figure 10. Singing music → Brilliant music …………………………………………………. 52

Figure 11. Brilliant music → Singing music …………………………………………………. 53

Figure 12. Canzone brillante …………………………………………………………………. 54 ​ ​ Figure 13. Shifting practice …………………………………………………………………... 61

Figure 14. Bariolage reduction ………………………………………………………………. 65

Figure 15. Double-stop practice ………………………………………………………………. 66

Figure 16. Bariolage practice …………………………………………………………………. 67

Figure 17. “Building Individual Notes” practice ……………………………………………. 77

Figure 18. Rhythm & subdivision practice ………………………………………………….... 79

Figure 19. Contrast practice ………………………………………………………………….. 85

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Figure 20. Drone practice ……………………………………………………………………. 87

Figure 21. Thumb position scale practice ……………………………………………………. 88

Figure 22. Gavotte theme ……………………………………………………………………. 95

Figure 23. Gavotte theme phrase diagram ……………………………………………………. 96

Figure 24. Pencil bow ………………………………………………………………………….99

Figure 25. Rhythm variations ……………………………………………………………….. 102

Figure 26. Rhythm variations practice ………………………………………………………. 103

Figure 27. Contrast practice 2 ………………………………………………………………. 105

Figure 28. Score study practice ……………………………………………………………... 106

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List of Tables

Table 1. I. Allegro con spirito, form diagram …………………………………………………. 48

Table 2. II. Larghetto, form diagram …………………………………………………………... 72

Table 3. III. Rondo: Comodo assai, form diagram …………………………………………….. 81

Table 4. Character development chart …………………………………………………………. 83

Table 5. IV. Rondo, form diagram ……………………………………………………………... 91

Table 6. Tempo variation chart ……………………………………………………………….. 104

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Overview

This document seeks to contextualize the music of Luigi Boccherini by giving a close reading to his Cello Concerto in D major G. 478. Boccherini’s music has not yet emerged in the canon of ​ ​ so-called “great works,” and performance research on his music is still rare. My intention is to illuminate the text of the concerto in the hopes that the subtle genius of his music be widely recognized and more frequently taught, studied, performed, and recorded. The ideal outcome of this project is to reintroduce this fine concerto and the unique techniques of Boccherini’s cello playing to the world of string teaching and performance. My hope is that more people access support, connection, and inspiration through Boccherini’s legacy.

My motivation in generating a new edition of Boccherini’s concerto is to give presence to

Boccherini as a voice that has been silenced and whose contributions have been relegated to the margins of concert music. I advocate for Boccherini’s music by engaging with the work in its own terms, namely, cello technique as he practiced it; the use of formal structures in varying states of evolution; and aesthetic crossfading with threads from both baroque and classical styles.

My interpretive framework supports performance practice using theories of harmony, topic, and form. Much music from the late 18th century occupies liminal space that evades the language of later music historians and the programming of modern symphony orchestras. It is not my mission to fit Boccherini into a pre-fabricated story. Instead, by learning how Boccherini may have told his own musical story, we can investigate a clearer picture of how to historicize and perform his music.

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Chapter 1 deals with the ways in which performers have edited Boccherini’s cello concertos in the past, and specifically Friedrich Grützmacher’s arrangement of the Cello Concerto in B-flat ​ major. Instead of directly depicting Boccherini’s music and the conditions through which it was ​ written, Grützmacher treats the 18th century concerto with new 19th century technologies, forms, and aesthetic principles. This model of anachronistic musicology is quite common and demonstrated throughout the works of Kreisler, Casadesus, Cassadó, and Busoni. This style of musicology, though inventive, actually limits the possibilities for connecting with the past and creates confusion in the decoding of music. Consider the scene in Back to the Future in which ​ ​ Marty McFly retroactively “invents” Chuck Berry’s sound. The implications here are that rock and roll originates with a Van-Halen obsessed white teenager, and the roots of rock and roll in black American life become further obscured.1

I argue for an alternative style of historical practice in chapter 2, inspired by Elisabeth Le Guin’s carnal musicology, which she introduced in her 2006 monograph Boccherini’s Body. Carnal ​ ​ ​ musicology claims that our relationships with dead musicians are real and reciprocal, that we can learn from those relationships through our bodies, and that that knowledge serves as a primary source of information about the composer and their work. In practical terms, a historically informed reading is made possible through playing Boccherini’s music with curiosity about the way he may have played it, using the bow he used in creating it, and borrowing his unique approach to organizing the left hand. By giving attention to the body’s felt experience, one gains

1 Jack Hamilton, “How Rock and Roll Became White,” Slate, October 6, 2016. ​ ​ 2 access to knowledge about Boccherini and his music. Approaching Boccherini’s music with a carnal musicological framework re-centers history as a form of ancestor work, providing meaning, connection, community, and belonging to both the performer and the composer through embodied collaboration across time.

Chapter 3 reports on my editorship of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478. This ​ ​ edition puts flesh on the skeleton of performance practice. Anyone can find general information about playing in a Boccherini-like style, but many will get lost and make errors. My performance edition serves to walk a cello player through a first-time study of Boccherini. I present the musical text in three parts: (1) a full orchestra score, (2) a performance edition solo part, and (3) a clean copy solo part. The full orchestra score is a source-critical reproduction of the Dresden copy of the concerto. The minimal edits I have made to the score serve to unify shared gestures by giving instruments with the same gesture matching slur marks, dynamics, articulation, ornaments, and rhythm. The performance edition provides my embodied research on the page. In this solo part I share all the tools necessary for a first-time study of Boccherini by including slurs, bowings, fingerings, dynamics, ornaments, and character words in Boccherini’s vernacular.

My edition serves as a basic pronunciation guide for anyone new to historical performance.

Finally, the clean copy is simply the solo cello part extracted from the full score. In this part I have printed the notes alone. This foundation of a cello part serves as a teaching and performance tool, whereby a professional cello player can reference the Dresden copy, the score, or my performance edition to build their own interpretation, without having to wade through an

3 editor's markings. Chapter 4 relates a brief account of Boccherini’s sixty-two years of life on earth as an innovative cello player and prolific composer.

In Part 2, the Practice Guide, I develop a novel approach to analytical pedagogy. For each movement, I teach how to imagine and perform Boccherini’s concerto using analytical techniques including form, harmony, and topics. I offer practice strategies to connect the particular challenges of this piece with specific styles, techniques, and colors to aid in translating musical text into accurate and historically informed sounds.

Personal practice of an instrument can feel deeply isolating. The practice guide sets in motion what carnal musicology claims: that we are not alone, that our relationships to musicians of the past are with us in flesh and bone, and that those relationships provide support, connection, and belonging when we invest in them.

The first movement Allegro con spirito is bright and festive. The orchestra introduces a wide ​ ​ array of energetic tunes in preparation for the cello’s entrance. The solo cello contrasts and combines elements of singing style with brilliant style. The fusion of these two opposites creates a dazzling new topical reference which I call canzone brillante. I offer practice strategies toward ​ ​ embodying mastery through slowness and ease, building a secure shifting technique, and the execution of a special string technique called bariolage. ​ ​

4 The second movement Larghetto is slow and sensual. Boccherini indulges in intimate singing ​ ​ style music and a proclivity for subtle colors in soft dynamics. My practices focus on cultivating a historically informed approach to the bow, maximizing resonance, and refining rhythm through subdivision.

The third movement Rondo: Comodo assai is a gentle minuet in triple meter. In rondo form, the ​ ​ orchestra’s steady dance repeats several times between the cello’s dynamic dialogue of voices. I offer practice strategies for maximizing contrast and building security in thumb positions through drone work and scales.

The fourth movement Rondo is a buoyant, jovial contredanse. This group dance borrows a ​ ​ rhythmic and phraseological cadence from the baroque gavotte. Also in rondo form, the cello introduces the repeating theme each time before the full orchestra’s echo. Practice strategies here include movement practices for gavotte rhythm, score study practice, and rhythm variations for fast passagework.

Part 3, the Appendix presented in a supplemental file, is an engraving of the full score, performance edition solo part, and clean copy for my edition of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in ​ D major G. 478. ​

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Part 1:

The Musicology of Performance Editorship

6 Chapter 1: Grützmacher Musicology

The presentation of a new performance edition of a Boccherini cello concerto would be inadequate without addressing Friedrich Grützmacher. Grützmacher was a German cello player who discovered and published a concerto by Luigi Boccherini in 1895. For decades, people believed this concerto to be the original, and for well over a century it has been the most widely performed and recorded “Boccherini concerto.” It is, in fact, a new concerto written and orchestrated by Grützmacher, an assemblage of melodies and ideas borrowed from three different Boccherini concertos.

In History of the Violoncello, Edmund S. J. van der Straeten gives a detailed history of ​ ​ Grützmacher’s life and works drawing on primary sources and oral histories.2 Friedrich Wilhelm

Ludwig Grützmacher was born in Dessau in 1832. He received his first musical instruction, like

Boccherini, from his father. Grützmacher picked up the cello at an early age and began studying with Charles Dreschler, a pupil of Friedrich Dotzauer’s. In 1848 Grützmacher moved to Leipzig for the experience of performing in the private orchestras where he was mentored by violinist

Ferdinand David. He took over Bernhard Cossman’s position in the Gewandhaus Orchestra and professorship at the Mendelssohn Conservatory in 1850. He moved to Dresden in 1860, taking over Friedrich August Kummer’s position at the Dresden Conservatory.

2 Edmund S. J. van der Straeten, History of the Violoncello, 428-432 ​ ​ 7 Beginning in 1867 Grützmacher toured all of the major cities of Europe, receiving marks of distinction from many courts for his cello playing. Grützmacher was widely praised for the brilliance of his left hand technique. Old musicians in Dresden claimed that listeners did not appreciate his tone quality, the primary task of the right side and bow arm. These accounts suggest that critics compared his sound with Kummer’s superior powerful, rich sound.

Grützmacher became one of the greatest cello players of the mid-19th century, appreciated as a soloist and even more as a chamber musician. His greatest strength, however, was his teaching.

A great number of prominent cello players studied with him including his brother Leopold

Grützmacher and Wilhelm Fitzenhagen.

His compositions bear the legacy of Grützmacher’s virtuosity and capacity for teaching. His

Daily Exercises Op. 67 are highly useful for study and practice. Book 1 of his Technology of ​ ​ Violoncello Playing Op. 38 includes twelve etudes involving great rhythmic and technical ​ complexity played in the lower positions of the instrument. Most of book 2 presents extreme cello playing challenges all over the instrument, comparable to the caprices of Nicolo Paganini and Alfredo Piatti.

Grützmacher made essential contributions to the canon of cello repertoire by editing earlier works of Joseph Haydn, C. P. E. Bach, Luigi Boccherini, the Duport brothers, and Francesco

Geminiani. However, his editorship seems to obscure the original works rather than illuminate them.

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Unfortunately he treated these masters with little reverence as regards the text of their compositions, and in various cases he pieced together “sonatas” from about half-a-dozen original compositions and edited them as if they appeared in their original form. In the case of the six solo sonatas by Bach, he went so far as to edit a “Concert Edition,” in which he crowds additional chords, passages and embellishments, distorting these great and fine works in the most unpardonable manner.3

Only a decade after Grützmacher’s death, Van der Straeten tears into Grutzmacher’s musicological approach to early works for the cello. Nevertheless, he expresses gratitude for the many works which Grutzmacher “rescued” and made accessible.

Grützmacher’s Boccherini concerto arrangement borrows from G. 482 in B-flat major, G. 480 in ​ ​ ​ G major, and G. 478 in D major, the centerpiece of this document. The main thematic ideas of ​ ​ ​ the first and third movements are drawn from G. 482. The original second movement Andantino ​ ​ of G. 482 is extracted and replaced with the Adagio from G. 480. Grützmacher’s new ​ ​ ​ ​ development section in the first movement features an elaborated version of the bariolage passage from the first movement of G. 478. ​ ​

The scores that Grützmacher used to formulate his arrangement were borrowed from the library of cellist and professor František Hegenbarth in Prague. It is unclear whether Hegenbarth’s scores - hereafter called the Prague copies - are autograph manuscripts, working copies, or early published editions. Grützmacher’s brother Leopold copied the Prague scores faithfully, and

3 Ibid., 430-432. 9 wrote on the title pages, “Transcribed from and compared with the copy of Professor Hegenbarth in Prague.”4 Leopold’s copy, called the Dresden copy, serves as the source material for my own transcription, as well as the transcriptions of Aldo Pais and Thomas Fritzsch discussed later.

The orchestra parts are heavily edited in Grützmacher’s concerto when compared with the

Dresden copies. Whole measures and phrases are missing and/or new ones have been added.

Grützmacher totally reconstructs the narrative of the first movement from Boccherini’s original ritornello form into a sonata form. He adds oboes to the orchestration and amps up the role of the winds toward lush and soloistic textures. The concerto plays with an interesting thought experiment: “What if Luigi Boccherini lived and wrote in the late 19th century?”

The solo cello part is deeply influenced by 19th century conventions of cello playing.

Grützmacher’s modern bow allows for long slurs of often more than eight notes, slurs across barlines, accents under slurs, crescendos on the down bows, and diminuendos on the up bows.

His edition prints the solo part in treble, tenor, and bass clefs, according to 19th century practice.

Grützmacher and editors of this concerto provide some fingerings, and the fingerings in the solo part prefer the 19th century convention of traveling up and down one string whenever possible and convenient.

This style of reinventive editorship was common practice during the late-18th and 19th centuries.

Felix Mendelssohn, responsible in large part for the 19th century revival of the music of J. S.

4 Luigi Boccherini, Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra in B Flat Major G 482, ed. Thomas Fritzsch, 3. ​ ​ 10 Bach, edited and rearranged many of Bach’s original scores, adding clarinets, bassoons, flutes, and horns. He even added piano accompaniment for the prelude to the E major violin partita and the D minor chaconne.

At the end of the 18th century, Mozart rearranged Handel’s Acis and Galatea with the addition ​ ​ of clarinets, bassoons, flutes, and horns. He changed many substantial features to the original including dynamics, durations, textures, and the overall mood of the piece. In Mozart’s German translation of the Messiah, the choruses are pared down to solo singers, and orchestra ​ ​ counterpoint is added to the arias. Mozart cut full numbers and composed new music for others.

If Mozart’s intention was not to improve Handel’s original, what purpose do his arrangements serve? These new arrangements express the joy of experimenting with new technology. Mozart’s experiment seems to ask, “What can a new instrument do to a familiar model?” What better way to understand what the clarinet is capable of than adding its sound to a familiar setting? New sounds offer the possibility for richer orchestration. Mozart’s operatic approach to Handel’s oratorio reflects the Enlightenment shift of values from sacred to secular. Concertante orchestration offers a dialogue between group and individual that is not possible with the unisonic singularity of choir. Mozart’s arrangement recognizes these social shifts and adapts the music accordingly.

Grutzmacher’s Boccherini concerto similarly works along these lines of reinventive musicology.

The tragedy here is that by the end of the 19th century, Boccherini’s music had fallen out of

11 recognition. If Grutzmacher had been experimenting with the effect of new technology on a well known model of cello repertoire, as he did with Bach’s solo suites, then the original version, the modified version, and the differences between them would be obvious. Instead, Grutzmacher presents, as though in its original form, a work that was totally unknown. Published by Breitkopf

& Härtel, the arrangement would go on to be widely accepted as a faithful edition of Boccherini, in spite of its experimental approach to modern performance practice and anachronistic disconnection from the composer.

Later performance editions

One century later in 1997, cellist Thomas Fritzsch published the first source-critical performance edition of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in B-flat major G. 482. The edition seeks to faithfully ​ ​ reprint the Dresden copy of the score and provide insightful, period appropriate performance instruction in the solo part. The bowings in the solo part reflect the abundance of slur marks that appear in the Dresden copy of the concerto. Fritzsch’s approach to the left hand fingerings follows 19th century conventions of traveling up and down a single string when possible and using fixed thumb positions only when necessary.5

The only published edition of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478 - the centerpiece ​ ​ of this document - was published by cellist Aldo Pais in 1987. Pais references the Dresden copy of the concerto as the primary source for the edition. The published score is a piano reduction of

5 Ibid. 12 the orchestra score. The solo part reprints in exact detail the slur marks that appear on the cello line in the Dresden copy. There are no additional fingering, bowing, or string suggestions.6

Grützmacher musicology

With no negative judgement on Herr Professor Grützmacher himself, I want to ask the question

“What does Grützmacher’s Boccherini Concerto do?”

By asserting that the concerto he published in 1895 was an authentic and original concerto by

Boccherini, Grützmacher deceived generations of cello players that his composition was the work of someone else. He presented an 18th century work and filled it with 19th century stylistic anachronisms, as if to say, “The cello has always been played this way.” Grützmacher’s concerto introduced countless musicians across the world to the music of Boccherini. He crafted a story about Boccherini’s music in which some facts are verifiable, some rearranged, and some totally fabricated. For decades following, cello players believed Grützmacher’s story and re-told it repeatedly, solidifying its legacy.

Grützmacher’s concerto demonstrates a method of musicology. Musicology explains how we tell stories through music. Grutzmacher’s musicology assumes:

1) That the modern concave bow is preferable to the convex bow that Boccherini used. Or,

if Boccherini had access to a modern bow, he would have preferred to play with that.

6 Luigi Boccherini, Concerto N. 8 in Re Maggiore per Violoncello, ed. Aldo Pais, 1. ​ ​ 13 2) That shifting on one string is preferable to staying in position and crossing strings. It is

likely that Grützmacher was familiar with Romberg’s research on Boccherini’s use of

clefs to indicate thumb position. Grützmacher knowingly (or unknowingly) rejects

Boccherini’s approach for familiar technical and aesthetic practices.

3) That sonata form is preferable to ritornello form. Indeed, sonata form is durable in its

ability to contain the extremes of contrast that late 18th and 19th century composers were

interested in creating. Sonata style was still evolving during Boccherini’s lifetime.

4) That 18th century style tastes are subordinate to 19th century tastes. Or, that 18th century

tastes are in the past and unknowable. Or, that 18th century tastes are irrelevant to

Grützmacher’s project.

This relationship to the past is speculative, transactional, and unjust. For example, by crafting extra-long bowings using a modern bow, the particular qualities of the convex bow that was used to write the piece get lost in translation. Grützmacher looks to the past to extract ideas for creating his own story about Boccherini. Grützmacher could have introduced generations of cello players to the great diversity of Boccherini’s twelve masterful cello concertos, but instead he mashes up three of them into a work that serves his own musical values. The arrangement obscures our view of the musician whom it claims to illuminate, it muddles our hearing of

Boccherini’s music, and it models a narrow, presentist style of performance and musicology. By neglecting to share the composer and the concerto through the edition, Grützmacher’s arrangement limits the contemporary performer’s ability to feel with the history and body of

Boccherini.

14 Chapter 2: Carnal Musicology

What if Grützmacher’s musicology is not the only way we can tell stories about the past? What if our relationship with the past could be reciprocal, a matter of dialogue in spite of difference, with the ability to give and receive across space and time? What if historical musicology were something you could experience firsthand, without traveling across the world to make sense of primary sources in a library?

My assumptions

In embarking on this performance edition of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478, ​ ​ here are some intentions I made at the outset:

1) Boccherini’s music does not need to be fixed, salvaged, or rescued.

2) Boccherini made intentional decisions about the form, narrative, and style of his music.

He wrote what he wanted to hear. The music is good enough. He does not need me to

revise it for him.

3) The cello technology with which Boccherini played and composed this music - the

convex bow, gut strings, and the endpin-less cello - are unique tools that hold key clues

about Boccherini’s experience and the playing of his music.

4) Boccherini’s particular approach to organizing the left hand provides essential

information around string crossings and tone colors. These ideas would have been

implied through the use of clefs in the score.

15 5) As musicians, our relationship with the past is real, reciprocal, and embodied. We can

either choose to honor that relationship and be in mutual support, or we can extract what

we want and ignore the rest.

Carnal musicology

A reciprocal relationship with the past provides a different way of telling stories about music than Grützmacher’s limited, presentist model. In her book Boccherini’s Body, cello player and ​ ​ musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin lays out what she calls “carnal musicology”.

My role constitutes itself as follows: as [a] living performer of Boccherini’s sonata, a work which he wrote for himself to play, I am aware of acting the connection between parts of someone who cannot be here in the flesh. I have become not just his hands, but his binding agent, the continuity, the consciousness.7

Le Guin’s approach offers that by playing Boccherini’s music, my body stands in for his body.

He is dead but his cello playing body rematerializes in the form of my cello playing body. In addition, there is real knowledge passed from him to me through our physical bodies.

Furthermore, Le Guin contends that this embodied knowledge is a primary source of information about the composer and the work of art.8 When my relationship with Boccherini is real and two-directional, I am less inclined to tell my own predetermined story, laden with my biases and anachronisms, and more interested in telling Boccherini’s true story as it intersects with and supports my story.

7 Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 24. ​ ​ 8 Ibid., 14 16

Through playing the cello the way Boccherini may have played the cello, his body and his music come into clearer focus. When I play with the type of bow Boccherini used, the convex or

Baroque bow, a new world of sound and gesture is opened to me. The natural inequality between down bow and up bow makes a different type of gesture than the modern bow makes. The convex bow responds poorly to added weight and muscle, but it wakes up to a change in bow speed or contact point. Many of the slur marks in the Dresden copy begin to feel more comfortable when played with the convex bow. We can imagine the bow as the breath and the voice of the cello, and the baroque bow comes with unique strengths and limitations. Sounding the concerto with Boccherini’s equipment can bring us closer to hearing the voice of the cello as

Boccherini heard it.

When I organize the left hand the way Boccherini might have - playing with stationary thumb positions whenever possible and convenient - voice-like registers with distinct timbres begin to emerge. Subtle colors become possible high up on the D and G strings, where our modern training rarely has us play. My body and ears might initially resist playing this way, and I trace that resistance to Boccherini’s omission from the canon and the exclusion of his technical innovations from the dominant pedagogy. To move through that resistance and posture the left hand with Boccherini brings him into the room with me.

When I play without an endpin and support the cello between my calves, the cello sits lower and closer to my body. More of my own surface is in contact with the body of the cello, and I can

17 receive more resonance and vibration directly from the instrument. With the fingerboard lower and more vertical, it is less of a journey to access the higher positions. Playing this way might feel awkward at first, but I experience a heightened degree of intimacy with the cello that

Boccherini may have been familiar with.

When I imagine the small chamber orchestra for which these concertos were written, I can let go of the compulsion - learned through years of playing cello concertos from the 19th and 20th centuries - to over-project my sound. The baroque bow responds with warmth and resonance when I stop trying to control it. Then, I can start to experience the immense variety available in soft dynamics to which Boccherini is so drawn.

Carnal musicology teaches me that my body is already in relationships with many other cello players across time and space. When I challenge my impulse to generate long, sustained, powerful lines with the bow, I confront the cello players who put that impulse in my body in the first place: people like Sebastian Lee, David Popper, and Friedrich Grützmacher. Those relationships are already in the practice room with me, supporting me deeply at the level of my flesh and consciousness. In fostering a generative relationship with someone new like Luigi

Boccherini, I allow those other relationships and what they have taught me to temporarily fade into the background. I accept that I do not have all the answers to playing Boccherini’s music. I invite into my body openness, curiosity, and playfulness. I formulate postures that resemble

Boccherini’s cello playing. I experiment with practices that allow me to hear sounds I have not heard before.

18

In addition to the particular ways in which carnal musicology and embodied approaches to music history give me access to Boccherini and his contributions, I contend that this approach generates vital resources for supporting musicians and the important role that music plays in our lives.

What do we experience when we practice an embodied approach to musicology?

● Connection with and care for our whole being. Carnal musicology takes place in our

bodies, through practice, listening, perspective, and posturing. Our capitalist world has

taught us to ignore our bodies through overwork, so listening to and caring for our bodies

are revolutionary acts.

● Relationships with artist ancestors. Carnal musicology recognizes that we are already in

real, reciprocal relationships with our musical ancestors. Through our felt experiences,

we can access connection, community, belonging, and support.9

● Tools for being in relationships when they are hard. Communicating with dead people

presents many challenges. Dead people are distant, invisible, quiet, and mysterious. Since

ancestor work happens in my body, it is also a practice of being in touch with those parts

of myself that are dead, wounded, hurting, and mysterious.

● Healing. If we can feel our wounded, hurting, or mysterious places, and those parts of us

are already surrounded by the ancestors living there, we have support and community in

pursuing wholeness.

9 I trace my first understanding of artistic practice as ancestor work to Pavani Moray’s podcast Bespoken Bones. ​ ​ ​ Pavani Moray and Keith Hennessey, “4: Lipstick, Green Man, and ancestor-supported creative process,” Bespoken ​ Bones. ​ 19 ● Empathy. Embodied research gives us the tools to learn new ideas through the felt

experience of our senses. The ability to adopt knowledge that challenges my training or

conflicts with my biases is empathy. Empathy may be one of our most powerful tools for

understanding others, honoring our differences, and building community.

● Spirituality. Brené Brown defines spirituality as the recognition that we are connected to

each other by a power greater than all of us.10 If carnal musicology connects us with our

bodies, community, ancestry, healing, and empathy, then it is a spiritual practice.

10 Brené Brown, Rising Strong, 10 ​ ​ 20 Chapter 3: New Edition for the Concerto G. 478 ​

Source material

In presenting a performance edition of this concerto, my intention is to be faithful to Luigi

Boccherini. What can be known about his life matters. His playing style, technique, equipment, body, compositional style, and the score itself are important keys that hold knowledge about how he might have envisioned this concerto. Gathering and using this knowledge gives us the tools to formulate authentic, true, faithful performances of this concerto.

The two oldest known scores for Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478 are housed at ​ ​ the Statni Konservator in Prague and at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden. The

Dresden copy is supposed to be an exact replica of the Prague copy, according to a note on the title page in Friedrich Grützmacher’s handwriting, “Transcribed from and compared with the copy of Professor Hegenbarth in Prague”.11

The Dresden copy is a far cry from an autograph manuscript in the composer’s hand. Up to this point, the scope of my research has not allowed me to access the Prague copy of the concerto. It is possible that the Prague copy could be an autograph manuscript of the concerto in

Boccherini’s hand, and at this time no other possible autographs of any of the concertos have surfaced. Furthermore, if the Prague were an autograph manuscript (and the Dresden a precise

11 Boccherini, Concerto, ed. Fritzsch ​ ​ 21 replica thereof) I believe we would expect to see a variety of C clefs, the likes of which are found in numerous autograph copies of Boccherini’s chamber music and cello sonatas. I also expect unique dynamics and character markings which are profuse in his autograph manuscripts. This is not the case in the Dresden copy, leaving me to believe it is either not an exact copy or that the

Prague copy is not a manuscript.

The score portion of this document, the Appendix: Part 3: Scores for Boccherini’s Cello ​ Concerto in D major G. 478 found in the supplemental file, presents a full orchestra transcription ​ of the Dresden score, a performance edition of the solo part, and a clean copy of the solo part.

Source-accuracy is central to my reproduction of the orchestra score. The only edits I have made in the full score are to unify slur marks and bowings across multiple instruments with shared figures.

Full Orchestra Score

The edits I have made in the new engraving are in the spirit of unifying parallel or similar musical gestures. The phrase “parallel musical gestures” refers to any two musical objects with identical or similar melodic contours. I believe that parallel musical gestures bear a singular or unified meaning. A coherent musical performance depends on similar gestures being understood as related. The unified pronunciation of similar gestures allows non-musician listeners to hear and understand them as related. This principle of audibility is essential to crafting a coherent performance.

22 The Dresden copy presents many clear examples of parallel musical gestures with different performance instructions, including slurs, articulation, and ornaments. Many examples of what we would consider performance instructions, if read and performed literally, would contribute to a disunified sound. The shared meaning of parallel gestures becomes vague and the performance becomes incoherent.

Figure 1 shows three voices moving together in parallel and similar gestures.

Figure 1: IV. Rondo, bars 3-412

The Dresden copy gives three different slur marks at once. A literal reading of this text suggests that these slur marks indicate three distinct performance directives. An exact execution would

12 Luigi Boccherini, Cello Concerto in D major, G. 478, 31. ​ ​ 23 result in three widely different articulations of the quarter note in bar 3, desynchronized bow changes through the eighth notes, and opposing bow directions on the downbeat of bar 4.

Instead, I read the gesture and its shared meaning as a more concrete component than the written slur mark. I believe to pronounce a shared gesture in a unified way, all three string players must perform the gesture with the same slur, articulation, and bow direction. My edition of the full score prints this passage as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: IV. Rondo, bars 3-4 (Full Orchestra Score)

24 The resulting performance is unified in bow style and articulation. Visually, the matching slur marks indicate a parallel gesture, shared execution, and unified meaning.

Slur marks are the most conspicuous example of disunity in the Dresden copy. Other inconsistencies include dynamics, articulation, ornaments, and on rare occasion rhythms. In general, my editorship is more additive than subtractive. That is, if one or two instruments are missing a general performance instruction like a dynamic, I have added that instruction to those parts. Or if one gesture bears a specific articulation that is missing from a parallel part, I have added that as well.

The Dresden copy utilizes the rather confusing 18th century convention of notating treble clef music up one octave for the solo cello. This was common practice even among famous composers like Beethoven. I have adjusted all treble clef music in the Dresden copy down one octave, to be played at pitch. As a result, some of the music that the Dresden copy originally marks in treble clef ends up very low. Some of those moments I have notated in tenor or bass clefs for ease of reading.

Clean copy solo part

The clean copy prints the notes of the solo cello part with none of the bowings or slur marks.

This part is intended for professional cello players who want to generate their own interpretation.

The clean copy provides space for a performer to add in their own bowings, dynamics, fingerings, and character words and to compose or improvise cadenzas. This part also functions

25 as a useful teaching tool. A teacher may choose to fill in their desired technical suggestions for a student, or they may give the student the clean copy, the Dresden copy, and the necessary information about Boccherini’s history, style, and technique (e.g. this document), and send them on their own interpretive journey.

I frequently use blank scores in my own teaching and performing, especially with music like

Bach and Boccherini where I have access to an early manuscript. When using the clean copy as a performance or teaching tool, I suggest referencing the source material, that is, the Dresden copy available on IMSLP13, as well as my edition of the full score and my performance edition - as you wish - for a second opinion by a performer and researcher.

Performance edition solo part

The performance edition of the solo part includes an abundance of helpful indications for the advancing young cello player or the professional first-time Boccherini player. In the score I annotate fingerings, bowings, dynamics, character markings, cues, ornaments, and string instructions. These indications provide clues for drawing a performer into a relationship with the composer, assist the learning body with technical instructions, and inspire color and expression.

Trills

13 Luigi Boccherini, Cello Concerto in D major G. 478, ​ ​ https://imslp.org/wiki/Cello_Concerto_in_D_major%2C_G.478_(Boccherini%2C_Luigi) 26 Trills and ornamentation serve as some of the key pronunciation markers for 18th and 19th century music. In the performance edition I have included some upper neighbor tones and nachschläge, or termination tones, to many of Boccherini’s trilled notes. The upper neighbors ​ have been notated as slashed or short grace notes, and the nachschläge as 16th notes. Figure 3 shows how most trills appear in the Dresden copy, and Figure 4 shows how some trills are notated in the performance edition.

Figure 3 (Dresden copy)14 Figure 4 (full orchestra score)

These extra notes are common performance practice, but they rarely appear on the page in a printed performance edition. Although invisible, the extra notes of trills are not ephemeral. The notes and the pacing of trills are essential to pronouncing 18th century music coherently. I do not make the lofty assumption that every cello player approaching this piece knows what is typical of 18th century trills. So this performance edition has provided something I have always craved from published editions of early music. I choose to explicitly spell out the extra ingredients that

14 Ibid., 13. 27 may go into a trill, so that a performer can plan for the bit of extra bow they will need, write in any fingerings, and practice trills slowly for accuracy.

Appoggiatura tones & grace notes

The Dresden copy includes both grace note notation and appoggiatura notation with no identifiable distinction between them. In the performance edition I have chosen to notate stressed non-chord tones in small notation with no slash. These notes are to be played longer and on the beat, with the following note shortened in duration. Shorter grace notes, to be played quickly and before the beat, are printed in small notation with a slash.

Slurs

As stated previously, slur marks in the Dresden copy are wildly inconsistent. Unifying slur marks around parallel gestures is one of the most significant editorial tasks for this concerto. The performance edition takes the slurs in the Dresden copy as suggestions, and many more have been added.

Slurs make up an immense and varied vocabulary of bowed string playing. Slurring multiple notes within a bow has the effect of joining some and separating others. That is, slurs are a key tool for crafting a connected sound and legato articulation, and they are essential to a faithful ​ ​ pronunciation of the singing style. Because this concerto references singing style extensively in all four movements, the performance edition includes many slurs in addition to the ones indicated in the Dresden copy.

28

Bowings

The most famous portrait of Luigi Boccherini appears in Figure 5. A smiling young Boccherini is pictured preparing to play, cradling an endpin-less cello and holding a convex Baroque-style bow. This is the only known image of the composer with the equipment he played. Based on this image, we can assume that Boccherini used the convex bow to create the music we now play.

Playing with that technology today can provide ways of getting closer to how Boccherini may have imagined this music.

29

Figure 5. Italian school, 18th century, Portrait of Luigi Boccherini, c. 1764-67. National Gallery ​ ​ of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.15

15 Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 40. ​ ​ 30 The bow directions and slur marks that appear in the performance edition were made using a convex bow, like the one Boccherini is pictured playing with. These instructions serve as a shortcut to simplify and clarify the physical task of bowing. The bowings in the performance edition will work with modern, concave bow as well.

At the frog, Boccherini’s convex bow sits heavier into the string due to the weight of the frog and the direct line of weight channelled from the right arm into the string. In the upper half and at the tip, the bow sits lighter because the swan’s head-shaped tip has much less mass than the frog. Additionally, the convex bow collapses at the tip if you add right hand pronation or extra force through the first finger, like you might normally do with a modern bow.

These physical and technological proclivities give the down bow - the bow gesture which starts at the frog and moves toward the tip - emphasis, weight, and gravitational force. The up bow - which starts at the tip and moves toward the frog - has a lighter, preparatory, pickup quality. As a rule, the down bow always occurs on down beats and strong beats of the bar, and the up bow occurs on up beats and weaker beats of the bar.16 Since Boccherini coded the gestures and music of the concerto with this bow and the unequal sounds it generates, it seems appropriate to approach the bowing of the solo part using the same tool he would have used. This is not to say that you need a baroque bow to play his music, or that to play it with a modern bow is stylistically inappropriate. Most of the cello players whom I envision playing this music do not

16 Valerie Walden, One Hundred Years of Violoncello, 146. ​ ​ 31 have access to a baroque bow. My intention is to offer a new (old) approach to modern bow technique for pronouncing music the way the baroque bow pronounces it.

If you do not have access to a baroque bow, one way you can feel how a baroque bow feels is by relocating your bow hold to the winding of your modern bow. That is, about 6 inches closer to the tip than you would normally hold your bow. The weight and mechanics of the bow change.

The tip becomes proportionally lighter than the frog. The drawing out of sound must be done more through speed and length of bow than by arm weight. Down bows sound heavier and up bows sound lighter. You might practice some of the concerto with this new bow hold, or you may choose to perform the whole thing with a “baroque” bow hold.

Beams

Many of Boccherini’s manuscripts as well as the Dresden copy demonstrate beam groups that do

2 not reflect the meter of the piece. For example, the second movement Larghetto is in 4​ and ​ ​ features subdivisions of 16th triplets. The Dresden copy beams together groups of three triplets throughout the movement, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6.

II. Larghetto, bar 36 (Dresden copy)17

17 Ibid., 25. 32

Visually, this beaming appears to reflect four 8th note beats per bar rather than the two quarters that the meter indicates. This beam grouping appears in the solo cello part as well as all oboe and violin parts. Also in the second movement, the Dresden copy frequently beams together four

2 eighth notes. Although this is highly conventional in 4​ , it clouds a performer’s sense of pulse, ​ ​ seeming to indicate one half-note beat per bar. This full-bar beaming appears in every orchestra part in the movement.

For the sake of visual clarity and rhythmic unity across the orchestra, I have taken the liberty of joining the beams of a subdivision if it is within a single beat. For heavily subdivided music like the second movement, one beam connects two sets of 16th triplets if they are within a beat, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 7.

II. Larghetto, m. 36 (performance edition)

33 With this notation, Boccherini’s triplet grouping remains, but the quarter note pulse is visible as well. I have also chosen to separate beams across multiple beats, as with the convention of

2 beaming together groups of three or four 8th notes in 4​ . ​ ​

Dynamics & character markings

The solo cello part of the Dresden copy includes no particular dynamic or character markings.

Any that appear in the performance edition were added by the editor. Every text and symbol found in the performance edition was drawn from Boccherini’s unique poetic language, the abundance of descriptive Italian and Spanish words that appear in the scores and parts of his chamber music.18

Added text and symbol are intended to inspire the creative mind of the performer, invite them into Boccherini’s poetic imagination, and connect them to other possible musical reference points. I have added as many symbols and words as feel necessary in my own charting of a new piece of music. My desire is to provide the young Boccherini player an abundance of possibilites to work with through studying the performance edition. I recognize that the seasoned professional might prefer to imagine and study the clean copy solo part and score, referencing the performance edition only when they desire a second opinion.

Left hand tessituras

18 I owe my knowledge of Boccherini’s markings to the research of Loukia Myrto Drosopoulou who has catalogued the many unique dynamic, articulation, and special effect markings found in the manuscripts of Boccherini’s chamber music. 34 In many of Boccherini’s autograph manuscripts of chamber music and cello sonatas, we see a wide variety of C clefs in addition to bass and treble clefs. According to Bernhard Romberg,

Boccherini’s scores utilize moveable C clefs to communicate to the performer what positions to play in, and in particular, where the left hand thumb bar should be placed.19

The earliest working copy or an autograph of this concerto likely included a variety of C clefs and with them some clues as to how Boccherini might have organized the left hand thumb positions. The Dresden copy, however, is printed in only bass, tenor, and treble clefs. Romberg’s research suggests that Boccherini cared about where the left hand might remain in a stationary position and cross strings, and where one might travel up and down a single string to reach high and low notes. Furthermore, Boccherini’s manuscripts communicate these left hand performance instructions through the use of moveable C clefs. At least in this concerto, that particular communication has been lost.

Elisabeth Le Guin draws our attention to the possibility that when we play Boccherini’s music in stationary thumb positions when possible and convenient, distinct voice-like registers or tessituras emerge.20 Tessituras are distinguished by subtle shades of tone color due to relative ​ differences of string length. These differences disappear when we play Boccherini’s music travelling up and down a single string, like the 19th century cello playing style that is more available to many of our bodies than Boccherini’s peculiar way.

19 Walden, One Hundred Years of Violoncello, 76. ​ ​ 20 Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 21. ​ ​ 35

When we play using stationary thumb positions to create distinct tessituras as Boccherini envisioned, the cello becomes the spirit guide for a cast of characters, each with a distinct voice and role on the stage. If part of understanding Boccherini’s music is through his thumb position tessituras, and those indications are lost in the existing copies of the concerto, is it impossible to realize those hidden vocal characters and give an authentic rendition of the music? Indeed not.

My study of this concerto involves a sort of reverse forensic whereby I experiment with playing as much of the solo part as possible in stationary thumb position registers. The music gravitates around three clearly delineated thumb position registers:

1) A very high thumb register with thumb on G4 and D5 on the D and A strings. The notes

of this position live at about one-quarter of the total string length. The tone color of this

tessitura is bright, fragile, and nasal. Boccherini may be imagining this tessitura as a

soprano role.

2) A middle thumb register with thumb on D4 and A4 on the D and A strings. This position

lives at about one-half the total string length. The tone color is very bright and

penetrating, like a strong chest voice. To Boccherini, this may be a mezzo soprano role.

3) A low thumb register with thumb on B3 and F♯4 on the D and A strings. This position

lives at about three-fifths the total string length. The tone color is deep, breathy, and

warm. Boccherini may imagine this as an alto role.

Two additional registers emerge from passages that are not playable in a thumb position:

36 1) A register utilizing primarily the first position on all four strings. Notes in this register

use almost the full length of string. The tone color is resonant, boomy, and true.

Boccherini may be imagining a bass voice role.

2) A register on the A and D strings, traveling up and down the string to reach higher and

lower notes. The tone color possesses the qualities of A string, strong, quick, and

increasing with brightness the higher the register. Boccherini may imagine this as a tenor

voice.

By creating unique vocal roles, Boccherini’s music endows the cello with magical, shape-shifting qualities. In this concerto the cello embodies both female and male, high and low, old and young, bright and dark. These roles offer layers of contrasts for the performer to play with. They provide a way into Boccherini’s imagined role for the cello in generating character and narrative in this concerto. By imagining with the composer and posturing the left hand as he did, we can access new ways of hearing and playing the music that would not have been available otherwise.

This gives us some ways to unpack and discuss “Western culture’s powerfully normative, powerfully tacit understandings of embodiment,” which for Elisabeth Le Guin is essential to practicing carnal musicology.21 For example, Western culture propagates the myth that a person’s gender is one thing. Most of us believe that if “I am male” then also necessarily “I am not female.” Societal norms leave very little room for the wide gender variance and fluidity that

21 Ibid., 24. 37 exist among humans and throughout nature. Boccherini’s music invites us to experience the multiplicity of human life in quite a radical way, by allowing us to embody and give voice to more than one idea of gender. The cello serves as a sort of amniotic force, giving life to both male and female voices. The role of the cello itself is neither male nor female, but serves as a conduit through which many genders might flow.

For me, a male-passing cello player, studying a Boccherini concerto provides ways of showing up in the world that society has deemed deplorable, namely the female, feminine, sensitive, receptive parts of myself. I sing with a voice much higher than my own. I vision ways of being in the world that I have not experienced. This is a radical way of imagining my own possibilities through the music of Boccherini.

Fingers & strings

The performance edition includes fingering and string suggestions to streamline the playing of

Boccherini’s vocal characters for first-time players. A finger number suggestion appears any time the left hand shifts into a new position or tessitura, and whenever a stationary thumb tessitura extends beyond the basic four-note hand shape. In passages when our contemporary cello playing instincts might send us shifting up and down a single string instead of staying in one thumb position, the word “stay” has been added, the English translation of the often used restez. ​

38 The fingerings are not mandatory, rather they seek to honor a lost notation that Boccherini would have used to indicate left hand execution. A performer might choose to study from the clean copy solo part and craft different interpretations about tessitura and character than I have. I expect and encourage a diversity of opinions on Boccherini. I believe we are remiss if we attempt to study and perform his music without addressing the subtle colors and vibrant characters that become possible when we shape our technique and imagination with the composer.

39 Chapter 4: Luigi Boccherini

The following history of Boccherini’s life is drawn from Elisabeth Le Guin’s thorough biographical chapter in Boccherini’s Body. In it, she compiles the scant and disjointed accounts ​ ​ of the composer’s life by drawing on the most up-to-date primary source scholarship by Jaime

Tortella, Daniel Heartz, and Christian Speck, the editor of Boccherini’s Opera Omnia complete ​ ​ works edition.22

Luigi Ridolfo Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy on February 19, 1743. He received his first musical instruction from his father Leopoldo Boccherini, a cello or bass player. Luigi grew up in a household of musicians and dancers, and was likely trained in the dance arts. In 1751 Luigi sang as a soprano in Lucca’s annual Festa di Santa Croce, a music festival that drew renowned music and performers to Boccherini’s home town. Attending these festivals throughout his youth, Boccherini would have seen opera seria works by Metastasio and heard the music of C. ​ ​ W. Gluck, Hasse, Traetta, and Galuppi. In 1756 Luigi performed an original “Concerto di

Violoncello” at the monastery of San Domenico in Lucca. He travelled to Florence in 1761 to perform a cello concerto “in an entirely new style” between two halves of an opera. During his teen years Boccherini likely also performed the cello in Rome, Venice, and Modena.

Between 1751 and 1763 Luigi and father Leopoldo began travelling between Lucca and Vienna to perform together in the orchestra of the German theater at the Kärntnertor. They would have

22 Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 42-64. ​ ​ 40 been two of the lowest paid musicians in the orchestra. Vienna was a city full of promise for any young artist, and Boccherini performed at least four solo concerts at the Burgtheater during these years. His visits to Vienna overlapped with many fine performers and instrumentalists including

Pietro Nardini and Karl Ditters, as well as cello players Fransichello and Antonio Vallotti. In a letter from 1760, Boccherini claims to have visited “all the other electoral courts of The

[Prussian] Empire, where he received great compliments on his violoncello playing”. This claim is not corroborated anywhere. It is more likely that he toured from Vienna as far as Munich where he may have also been heard by members of the courts of Dresden and Cologne.

In Vienna, Boccherini likely spent time with his sister Maria Esther, seeing performances at the

Burgtheater which would have included French classic spoken drama, Parisian opéra-comique, ​ ​ Metastasian opera seria, experimental dance by Gluck and Starzer, and Italian comic opera. ​ ​ Nearly all of the ballets performed at the Burgtheater at this time were produced by Hilverding and Starzer. Their new style of pantomime ballet involved narrative coherence, relatable, expressive human gesture, and extreme coordination between dance and music. Le Guin suggests that Boccherini’s music is the most direct representation of this pivotal moment in dance reformation.

The mark of the pantomime style in particular can be felt in the telegraphic, visualistic expressiveness of many of his melodies, harmonies, and timbres, which suggest that he precisely “observed [gestures’] connection and correspondence, recogniz[ing] their value and harmony.”23

23 Ibid. 48. 41 The first twenty years of Boccherini's life were filled with watching and performing alongside dance. A carnal musicological approach to Boccherini’s music should consider that his body knew what it felt like to be a dancer and to coordinate the body with music. Many analogies can be drawn between the dancing body and the cello playing body. Much of learning to play the cello fluently is choreographing the bow and left hand through coordination and desynchronization. In the music, one can find evidence that Boccherini is deeply aware of the cello playing body as a dancing body.

In 1766 Boccherini played in a string quartet touring northern Italy with Giuseppe Cambini,

Pietro Nardini, and Filippo Manfredi. He wrote his first string quartets for this group, imbuing each part with an unusually independent and soloistic capacity. The sudden death of his father spurred his year-long relocation to Paris in 1767, along with violinist and duo partner Manfredi.

The prestigious Concerts Spirituels were the primary performance space for instrumentalists in

Paris at that time. Cello players Jean-Baptiste Jansson, Jean-Pierre Duport, and Jean-Louis

Duport played frequently at these events with great success. In 1768 Boccherini was invited to perform at the Concerts. The Mercure de France printed an unfortunately vague mention of the ​ ​ performance: “Boccherini, already known through his trios and quartets, which are very effective, performed in a masterly fashion, upon the violoncello, a sonata of his own composition.”24

24 Mercure de France, April 1768, 199, quoted in Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 52. ​ ​ ​ ​ 42 Boccherini’s music was already widely accepted in Paris before his arrival. Having mailed them from Lucca, Vénier began publishing six of his string quartets in early 1767. From 1768 until the first third of the 19th century, Boccherini’s music was a substantial presence in the Paris publishing scene.25

Boccherini and Manfredi had plans to travel to London, where several generations of Italian string players had enjoyed patronage. Instead they parted ways for a time and Boccherini went to

Madrid. Some biographers have asserted that the Spanish ambassador in Paris provided

Boccherini and Manfredi with letters of recommendation from the Royal Court of Madrid. Le

Guin (via Jaime Tortella) theorizes that Boccherini joined the Compañía de Ópera Italiana de los

Sitios Reales, an opera company serving the rural palaces or “royal sites” of the Court of Madrid.

His name appears as a composer in a program for the Compañía in 1768. He may also have joined for personal reasons. In 1769, Luigi married Italian soprano Clementina Pelliccia, a member of the Compañía.

In 1770 Boccherini was hired by the king’s brother, the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, a position expected to be held for life. After several years, the king exiled Don Luis and his family from the court of Spain in an attempt to exclude his children from inheriting the throne. Don Luis and his entourage, including the Boccherini family, wandered small towns of the Spanish countryside before settling at the remote Arenas de San Pedro in 1777. The palace was not inhabitable until

1783.

25 Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 55. ​ ​ 43

The culture of 18th century Spain featured an unusual mix of solemn Inquisitional Catholicism and the undercurrent of prohibited Enlightenment thought. Boccherini’s 1770 string quartets, op.

9, are dedicated “to the Gentlemen Music-lovers of Madrid”. The noblemen of Madrid met together in salons or tertulias to enjoy food, conversation, and chamber music. In 1786 ​ ​ Boccherini was hired by the Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente-Osuna as music director for her tertulia. The Benavente-Osuna establishment had a professional orchestra and scores to the ​ chamber and orchestral works of Joseph Haydn unavailable anywhere else in Madrid.

In 1786 Boccherini was hired as chamber composer for cello player Prince Friedrich Wilhelm II of the Berlin Court, a role that he fulfilled from his home in Spain. Until 1802, Boccherini continued remotely publishing his music in Paris as well as fulfilling commissions for the tertulias of Madrid and the Court of Berlin. It is unlikely that he ever left the Iberian peninsula. ​ Almost nothing is known of Boccherini's activities between 1787 and 1796. During these years he had stopped performing due to chronic illness, what we now know as tuberculosis. Many young musicians visited him at this time including cellist Bernhard Romberg, who significantly documented Boccherini’s particular approach to cello left hand technique and notation. His last twenty years were marked by the deaths of his patron, two wives, and his daughters. He lived with his two sons in a single room apartment until he died on May 28, 1805.26

26 Valerie Walden, 100 Years of Violoncello, 12. ​ ​ 44 The Opera Omnia, edited by Christian Speck in 2005, publishes engravings of Boccherini’s ​ ​ complete works. Highlights include fifteen concert arias, a stabat mater, a zarzuela (a large-scale ​ ​ Spanish vocal-instrumental work), nearly one hundred string quartets, well over a hundred cello quintets, twelve cello concertos, twenty-nine symphonies, thirty cello sonatas, and many other works of string chamber music including duos, trios, quartets, quintets, and sextets.27

27 Christian Speck, “Boccherini Opera Omnia”. 45

Part 2:

Practice Guide

46 Chapter 5: I. Allegro con spirito

Background, form, & style

Boccherini’s first movement plays with the polarity of brilliant music and singing style music, what Roman Ivanovitch refers to as “the basic contrastive mechanism of the classical style”.28

This movement presents a musical paradox by combining topical opposites.

During the late 18th century, the “mixed style,” the contrast of brilliant music and singing music within a single movement, was praised by music critics and sought after by composers.

Alternating between brilliant and singing styles was an essential compositional technique for

Johann Friedrich Daube, a galant style teacher and writer. Daube says, ​ ​

The ear likes something new and unexpected. Therefore the melody must necessarily possess a beautiful continuity, but it certainly ought to be constructed so that the listener could not tell what to expect from one passage to the next.29

This quote describes most accurately what Boccherini actually achieves in the fourth movement ​ ​ Rondo of this concerto, with rapid-fire changes between the very simple and the very furious, like a patchwork of different materials found, deconstructed, and sewn together. In this first movement, however, Boccherini’s contrasts appear blurred without boundary or hem, like a blend of various raw fibers spun together to create a completely new and unique fabric. Within a single phrase, Boccherini seamlessly weaves elements of singing music and brilliant music

28 Ivanovitch, “Brilliant Style,” 1. 29 Wye Jamison Allanbrook, The Secular Commedia, 126-127. ​ ​ 47 together. This music resembles the surface of the ocean, ever-changing in texture and form, moving in many directions at once, simultaneously one thing and many things.

Table 1. I. Allegro con spirito, form diagram.

section R1

Theme a b c d e f aI group ​

Unison Brassy Gossiping Growing Festive Intimate Cadential event ostinato tune tune tune music tune ostinato

singing → topoi brilliant brilliant brilliant singing brilliant brilliant → brilliant singing

key DM DM AM DM DM DM DM

section E1

Theme a g h i j k l group

Ostinato + Heroic Duo music Spinning Climbing Chromatic Spirals + event solo tenor tune with basso music tune tune exit trill descant

brilliant → singing → canzone topoi singing brilliant singing → brilliant singing brilliant brillante

key DM DM AM AM AM Am / AM AM

voices soprano tenor tenor tenor tenor soprano soprano

48

section R2

Theme a d e aI group ​

Unison Growing Festive Cadential event ostinato tune music ostinato

topoi brilliant singing brilliant brilliant

key AM Bm DM DM

section E2

Theme f h g m j k l group

Heroic Intimate Duo tenor tune Triplet Climbing Chromatic Spirals + event tune music in tune tune tune exit trill Bariolage

singing → canzone canzone topoi singing brilliant → brilliant singing → brilliant brillante brillante singing

key DM GM / AM DM DM DM Dm / DM DM

Tenor + voices soprano tenor soprano soprano soprano soprano Basso

section R3

Theme a – d e aI group ​

Solo cello Growing Festive Cadential event ostinato cadenza tune music ostinato

topoi brilliant – singing brilliant brilliant

key DM On A DM DM DM

49 In the form diagram, lower case letters (a, b, c, d, e, through m) represent distinct topical, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ melodic, or contrastive objects. Each letter marks a change in surface activity through the use of local contrast or a pause between phrases, even if there is not a substantial cadence separating them. Throughout the movement, many of these musical ideas reappear, some in the same order as they appeared originally, and some in scrambled order. Others appear only once and disappear. And some reappear transformed.

The upper case letters R1, E1, R2, E2, R3 refer to larger sections delineated by the exchange of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ attention from tutti orchestra to solo cello. This structure sums up a Baroque ritornello form ​ ​ where the full orchestra plays during all iterations of R and the cello takes over for episodes E1 ​ ​ ​ and E2. These sections serve as containers for Boccherini’s fanciful profusion of melodies. ​ ​ Ritornello form resembles the rondo (ABACA), but allows for the returning theme group R to ​ ​ reappear abbreviated, rearranged, and transposed to different key areas.30 The form of this movement is one of the more conservative elements of the concerto, looking back in time toward the ritornello models of Antonio Vivaldi. On the other hand, the number of melodies contained in each large section and the extreme degree of local contrast account for conspicuously progressive elements of this movement that look forward to the classical era and sonata styles.

The cello's role in the narrative is similar to that in the third and fourth movements, where the cello generates musical material almost completely distinct and separate from the orchestra's music. In this first movement, the soloist’s episode music has the power to modulate to new key

30 Simon McVeigh and Jehoash Hirshberg, The Italian Solo Concerto, 1700-1760, 6-12. ​ ​ 50 areas, resulting in transposed ritornello responses. At the scale of the whole movement, this means the cello is responsible for contrast, difference, and leading progress.

Finding your sound

The sheer number of distinct musical objects in this movement creates interpretive and performance challenges. The first orchestra ritornello R1 and both of the cello solos E1 and E2 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ contain between 6 and 7 different ideas. Furthermore, many of these objects transition between or dart from one topical reference to another. The boundaries between different topoi become so ​ ​ blurred that the movement is challenging to pin down and enigmatic to perform.

As an interpreter and performer, it is essential to determine what references Boccherini is making at any given moment so that your concept and sound can pronounce the references clearly. What follows is a series of examples highlighting Boccherini’s various distillations, combinations, and transformations of the topics of the brilliant style and singing style in the first movement. First, two moments of isolated brilliant and singing musics. Next, Boccherini’s combined phrases, one that begins singing and dives into brilliant, and one that begins brilliant and eases into singing.

Finally, a special hybrid topic I call canzone brillante, or brilliant song, made through the ​ ​ simultaneous combination of brilliant and singing styles.

51 Figure 8. Brilliant music

Figure 9. Singing music

Figure 10: Singing → brilliant

52

Figure 11. Brilliant → singing

We might consider the end of this passage mm. 84-88 to be in the hybrid category of canzone ​ brillante, due to the extreme height of range of this tune. It is clearly singing and singable, ​ especially compared with what came before, but in a super-human way like listening to the extended singing registers of Whitney Houston or Prince. This is singing music by virtue of being sung, but the range of the voice far exceeds the amateur or average human singing voice.

53

Figure 12. Canzone brillante ​

The Tenor tune mm. 64-71 (top line above) is an example of mostly singing music that darts toward instrumental virtuosity in the last two bars. When this tune returns in mm. 142-149

(middle line above) during the second cello episode, Boccherini transforms it using bariolage, a ​ ​ flashy string crossing technique involving open strings. This style of passagework is particularly idiomatic to bowed strings and practically unsingable. When we look at a reduced version of the bariolage music, the tune that is shared between the two passages is a simple, singable melody very similar to the one from mm. 64-71. Boccherini transforms the singing tune by embedding it within a brilliant technical display.

54

Given Boccherini’s nuanced strategy for mixing topics in this movement, your job is to formulate a decisive and mutable style of playing. This style of playing is fully singing one moment, and without question fully brilliant the next. A mutable sound is about committing to the music you are playing in the moment while readying yourself for the music to come.

Readiness for change is a mark of mastery in your cello playing.

The spirit of mastery or virtuosity is in the ability to make everything you play intentional and effortless. If the music is a simple, singing tune, the virtuoso engages the music with commitment, expression, and ease. If the music is challenging, rapid-fire passagework, the virtuoso also engages the music with that same commitment, expression, and ease. Mastery is not achieved through hiding effort or discomfort. Instead, mastery is reached through transforming the mind and body with practice and conditioning in order to feel comfortable and strong in the midst of challenges.

The simple and the dazzling are both available to the virtuoso musician. The path toward virtuosity is paved with self-honoring, sustainable growth, and practice that focuses on ease and integration of the human body with the cello body. This first movement will present challenges to anyone who has not played 18th century cello music like this before. Boccherini knows, however, that the cello excels at both singing music and brilliant music. The trickiest passages of this concerto may have felt easy and automatic in Boccherini’s body.

55 In a letter to Ignaz Pleyel, Boccherini says “All those who know me and who have dealings with me do me the honor of judging me a man of probity, honest, sensitive, sweet-natured, and affectionate, as my works show me to be”.31 If we trust the composer, we know that it is not his intention to make us suffer through the playing of this music. In fact, he goes so far as to say that his music is a literal expression of his own goodness. Seek out and amplify those soft, sweet, graceful qualities in the score, in your body, in the cello’s body, and in the sounds you hear.

Inhabit sensitivity and sweetness before and while you practice this music.

Challenges inspire artistry

Here are some questions to focus your experience of practice:

1) This music calls us to be in paradox. Even when a passage is difficult and stretches your

limits, this music communicates joy, playfulness, and sweetness in various ways. How

might you invite both playfulness and courage into your practice and performance?

2) Several passages begin in a simple, singing style and end with a brilliant flourish. What

practices can build your readiness and resilience around extreme change, when the music

gives you no time to prepare for it?

3) Boccherini creates a hybrid topical reference that is equal parts brilliant and singing

styles. How might you practice these passages so that its song-like effortlessness shines

in spite of the technical demands?

Mastery: Slowness, Ease, & Intention

31 Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body, 38. ​ ​ 56 When we witness a virtuoso at work, it seems as though everything they play is easy and ​ ​ effortless. How is that possible? The following practices include intentions, strategies, and habits for paving your unique path toward mastery through practicing, conditioning, and perspective.

These principles also serve as a guiding light for compassionate, generative string teaching.

Easy practice

● Begin your practice of a challenging passage with a question: What can I change about

this passage to make it easy?

● Isolate a small amount of music and practice in great detail for a limited amount of time.

● If the passage is very quick, practice it slowly (see below).

● If there are long slurs, split them up to make the bow work easier.

● If the passage is in a high register, practice it down an octave or two so you can hear it

better.

● If the passage has unusual or high pitch content and the left hand gets lost, play the

passage on a fixed pitch instrument like a piano. Playing tricky music slowly on the piano

allows you to hear the flow of the phrase and the relationships between pitches. Then, use

your voice to speak the music or follow the sound of the piano, inviting your body into

the pitch-generating cycle.

● Use your voice to try out tricky or extreme music. Just speaking the rhythm of a passage

on a syllable of your choice makes a big difference in being able to play it.

57 ● Practice only the right hand challenges. Bow the open strings on which the notes of the

passage would be found. Bow the music as accurately as possible, following the rhythms,

bowings, articulations, characters, and dynamics all with open strings.

● Practice only the left hand challenges. Finger the passage with decisive, accurate

rhythms, imagining the character and dynamic that you envision for the passage.

Intentions for ease

The goal of easy practice is to honor what your body can do right now. Easy practice allows you to let go of harsh expectations or negative judgements on your own cello playing. Use these intentions to bring into focus your experience of physical ease and relaxation.

● I allow the bow to sit on the string without squeezing it. I feel the string support the bow,

such that my right hand fingers and arm can rest.

● My relationship with the cello is a tactile one. I come to know the cello through knowing

my unique experience of what I can feel in my own body.

● I let my left hand fingers lift and drop with ease. I land in the center of the pitch. My left

arm supports each finger by adjusting balance for any change of finger or position.

● My left hand thumb sits gently on the neck, securing the fingers and arm without

gripping.

● I choose not to expect anything more than what I am capable of. And, in order to play the

music I want to play, personal growth and change are necessary.

● I choose to grow and develop my abilities with the cello and my body at a pace that feels

good to me. There is no rush.

58

Slow practice

● Take a small passage and play it at a tempo where you can catch every detail.

● If you frequently stumble and go back to fix something, you are playing too fast.

● The path to mastery is not paved by playing the passage over and over at concert tempo.

● Slow down to allow your body to catch up with the music.

○ Start by playing every note slowly, cleanly, with pure tone.

○ Then add the bowing.

○ Then add dynamics.

○ Then add character.

○ Then start to build tempo.

○ If at any point in this process your body or the music start to disintegrate, move

back a step or two. Move even slower. Do whatever you need to allow the detail

you want to achieve to come to you.

● Use slow practice to mentally and physically prepare for oncoming changes.

● Slow practice is also zoomed in practice. The detail you see on the page or that you

intend to communicate must be present in finer detail and more extreme contrast during ​ ​ ​ ​ slow practice than at your goal tempo. That is, zoomed in practice is highly exaggerated.

Practice zoomed in by playing slowly and with:

○ Louder louds & softer softs,

○ Clearer articulation,

○ Earlier preparation,

59 ○ Deep awareness of your body,

○ And, your best sound always.

● When you practice the music zoomed in, the zoomed out version (at your goal tempo)

will lose some fraction of detail and contrast but will still be clear, colorful, confident,

and courageous.

Shifting practice

This practice is inspired by Otakar Ševčík’s Changes of Position.32 The purpose of this practice ​ ​ is to deconstruct your shifts and practice their component parts for accuracy and stability in the changing of the left hand positions.

For the sake of practicing position changes, the last finger in the previous position will always serve as the finger on which the shift will occur. That guide finger slides along the string into ​ ​ the new position. The pitch on which that finger lands in the new position is the guide note. Use ​ ​ the key signature or the notes of the new position to determine the exact pitch of the guide note.

After sounding the guide note in the new position, lift or drop your left hand fingers to play the first note of the new position.

The purpose of sounding the shift and using guide notes is to build security and accuracy into your shifting technique. Changing positions can feel like travelling blindly into unknown

32 Otakar Ševčík, Changes of Position and Preparatory Scale Studies, ed. Haidee and Helen Boyd. ​ ​ 60 territory. Deconstruct your challenging or inaccurate shifts in order to practice their component parts.

Each bar of the following practice reduces one bar of the solo part (mm. 80 to 88) into several discrete tasks, like a skeleton of the original. The reduction includes the three notes of the left hand frame, the shift, and the guide pitch that glides between positions. In bars 80 through 83, the last finger before moving to the next position is the 2nd finger, so finger 2 will always serve as the guide finger for traveling to the new position. Then, from 84 to 88, the guide finger from the old position to the new one is finger 1.

61

Figure 13. Shifting practice

1) The diamond shaped note heads indicate the notes that the guide finger will sound in the

new position. Sound these notes as well as the gentle slide into them. Accuracy of pitch at

the start of the new position is essential. Feel free to add drones on A and E to this

practice in order to center and secure pitch on the shifts.

62 2) The guide notes now are a little shorter, so the change of position happens more rapidly.

Soften the bow during the travel portion of this practice - from the shift until the moment

before playing the new finger - without sacrificing the singing quality in the bow.

3) The guide notes, notated here like grace notes, are now as brief and gentle as you can

make them while shifting accurately and pulling smooth, even bows.

4) Here is the original passage from the concerto (written without the use of appoggiatura

notation for clarity). Short guide notes have been printed as grace notes. Continue to

practice this version until the shifts feel secure, repeatable, and reliable. You might begin

to polish away the sound of the shift and the guide note, but do not lose the motion and

the process that you practiced.

Building a reliable shifting technique is essential for mastery of the instrument, and the sound of the shift is an organic byproduct of the technique. It is advisable to continue to sound the guide notes gently, even when you begin performing this music in front of others. It is more secure to sound the shifts and guide notes a little for the sake of your own ears and muscles than to try to erase them completely. When we feel compelled to hide the sound or the process of the shift, it only creates more mystery around an already elusive technique.

Bariolage practice: double stopping & string crossing

Bariolage is a French word that roughly translates to “odd mixture of colors” or “streak of colors”. In string playing, the term bariolage refers to a special technique of mixing open strings

63 with stopped notes.33 Conventional string playing technique often compels us to avoid open strings or an excess of string crossings. This is because staying on one string and shifting maintains the consistent tone color of that string. Bariolage then is a special technique which highlights the unusual colors that become possible from using two, three, or four strings together in alternation.

Boccherini’s bariolage passage in bars 142-153 is a series of rapid string crossings starting on the

G string, crossing to D, to A, and back to D. This slurred G D A D series repeats over and over while the left hand fingers various sixth and seventh intervals on the G and D strings. In the

Dresden copy, after two bars of 16th note bariolage a three-note chord appears. The performance edition includes the words segue arpeggio, Boccherini’s command to continue likewise breaking ​ ​ the chord across three strings. The three-note chord is a sort of horizontal reduction for the performed passage. The A whole note is always the open A string, the lower of the two moving notes is fingered on the G string, and the higher of the two moving notes is fingered on the D string. The texture and bow work remain the same as before, and Boccherini saves ink and reveals the hidden tune from mm. 64-71 by notating only the pitches as they change through the bar.

33 David D. Boyden, The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761, 265-266. ​ ​ 64

Figure 14. Bariolage reduction

To strengthen this bariolage passage, practice two strings together like double stops. By reducing the passage down to the double stops on two strings we can clearly visualize, hear, and sound the tune from bars 64-71. Practice so that when you play the bariolage passage you can still hear the tune come through the flurry 16th notes. This style of practice is so helpful for bariolage because it reduces the amount of information you have to process down to two or three events per bar.

65 The music moves so fast that the left hand must be prepared to play the whole beat before the bow changes direction.

This passage makes use of the repeated open A string like a drone. Practice the following with an

A drone on your pitch producer app, and be sure the A drone matches the pitch of your open A string. Land in the center of the fingered pitch each time and be sure that there are no wobbles in the combined sound of your tune with the drone sound.

Figure 15. Double-stop practice

(1) Play the D string music only as full quarter note values.

(2) Play the G string music only.

(3) Play the D and A strings together.

(4) Play the G and D strings together.

66

Begin practicing the bariolage string crossings without the left hand. Make sure each string speaks clearly: the G string at the bow change, and the A and D strings under the slur. The path your elbow takes in space over the course of one down bow plus one up bow is a sort of sideways figure eight or ∞. Imagine tracing that shape in the air with your elbow, a never-ending curved line with no bumps or stops. Practice with a metronome to ensure each note has the same duration and receives the same amount of bow. In general, this bariolage works better when the upper arm is active, and the shoulder joint is really loose and open. You do not need much length of bow, but you need flexibility.

Figure 16. Bariolage practice

1) Begin slowly and repeat this many times with a metronome for evenness and consistent

tempo. Which notes end up a little longer than you expect? Which end up a little shorter?

Which notes consistently scratch or crunch?

67 2) Increase the tempo gradually and focus on keeping the right shoulder joint very loose.

Listen again for evenness and sound quality. With your right arm, create one impulse per

bow so that the string crossings become one seamless gesture.

3) When the first two practices are even, increase your tempo gradually toward your goal

tempo for the piece. As tempo increases, use less bow while maintaining clarity of sound.

68 Chapter 6: II. Larghetto

Background, form, & style

The only slow movement of the concerto, the second movement provides a global contrast next to the other fast and moderate movements. Boccherini’s title Larghetto is the diminutive version ​ ​ of Largo, a tempo and character marking meaning broad, wide, open, and sweeping. The -etto ​ ​ ​ ending of Larghetto modifies the root word toward a tempo with more intimacy, forward motion, ​ ​ and lightness than a full-fledged Largo. ​ ​

The second movement takes a deep, intimate look at the singing style. Though evident in every movement of this concerto, the singing style is perhaps most at home in a slow tempo, where a voice or instrument has more time to luxuriate and there is less of an obligation to fill the music with technique and virtuosity. This is music about the blossoming of a melody or even just one note, which draws in the listener in a very different way than brilliant music does.

18th century musician Johann Mattheson indicates that the emblematic characteristics of singing music include melodies that are easily singable, flowing, mostly stepwise in motion, rhythmically regular, and considerate of breathing. Where listening to brilliant music evokes the supernatural or elemental, to listen to singing music evokes the human, the organic, and the relatable.34

34 Sarah Day-O’Connell, “The Singing Style,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka, 8-9. ​ ​ 69 For centuries, musicians and historians have discussed how instrumental music might imitate the human voice. The music in this concerto is not vocal music. This is music written by a cello player, for the cello, in recognition of the things the cello does well. Through the cello, some of this music imagines or speculates about the voice. This concerto is primarily idiomatic music for ​ ​ ​ ​ the cello, as it imagines how the human voice might sound through the lens of the cello. Our loyalty is first to honoring and celebrating what the cello does well in and through our bodies, and in doing so we connect with the very relatable human capacity for embodied expression made possible through the voice.

That is to say, this is not vocal music that has been translated to the cello and there is no text for the cello’s sound to attach specific meaning to. Thus, there are many different ways one can interpret and perform this singing music. When we recognize that Boccherini is referencing the human voice, that can feed our imagination and interpretation of this music. Imagine what the soprano might be saying in bar 36 in response to the tenor in bar 24. Listen to vocal music that

Boccherini would have heard in his lifetime, by composers like Gluck and Haydn, as well as music that he wrote specifically for the voice. These methods of study can provide tools for expressing this music in ways that are coherent, honest, expressive, and relatable.

Singing style music might involve legato articulation (imitative of the human voice), the tasteful addition of vibrato, messa di voce (an increase in volume toward the middle of a long note ​ ​ followed by a decrease), and rubato (the flexible push and pull of tempo relative to a regular ​ ​

70 accompaniment).35 The term around with all of these diverse ideas about how singing music can be played is comprehensible, or easily understandable. Comprehensible describes the polarity of ​ ​ singing music versus brilliant music. While brilliant music has the power to alienate the listener from the performer through dazzling displays of sound and technique, singing music draws the listener in by the recognition that their own voice could sing what is being played.

The form of this movement is called ritornello, Italian for “little return”. Discussed more fully in ​ ​ the guide to the first movement, ritornello form was derived in part from the structure of the da ​ capo aria and made popular through the instrumental concertos of Antonio Vivaldi. The ​ ritornello music of this movement - R1, R2, and R3 in the form diagram - is performed by the orchestra and features several different ideas of singing style music. These ideas appear transposed and rearranged in later statements of the ritornello. The solo cello plays with ideas the orchestra introduced and invents new ones during the episodes - E1 and E2 in the form diagram - occurring between ritornello statements. Two voices appear in the solo music of this movement, the tenor and soprano. Boccherini’s tenor register travels up and down the A and D strings, and the soprano register uses two fixed thumb position tessituras across all strings.

35 Ibid., 12. 71 Table 2. II. Larghetto, form diagram

II. Larghetto

R1 E1 R2 E2 R3 theme caden a b a c b a c a c a b b group za

modul DM + modul modul GM + key GM GM DM Am GM On D GM ating Em ating ating Gm

who orch solo orch solo orch

voices tenor tenor mezzo tenor tenor tenor soprano

meas 94-10 0-12 13-23 23-31 31-35 35-50 50-56 56-63 64-65 65-69 69-77 77-93 93 ures 5

Three distinct musical ideas appear in this movement. Theme group a features soulful, singing ​ ​ music of falling triplet figures, stalling tied rhythms, and grace note figures evoking a tearful voice. Group b sounds light and optimistic, with laughing triplet figures, rising and falling scales, ​ ​ and the playful suspension of voices. Group c is the heaviest music, with long, intimate chain ​ ​ suspensions. Group c’s appearance is usually only brief and modulatory, but the central orchestra ​ ​ tutti expands on c with a long pedal bass and poignant delayed resolutions. ​ ​

Finding your sound

For Boccherini, singing style begins with feeling good in your body and comfortable with the cello. This is music that sits well on the instrument: G major is a resonant key for the cello with its root and fifth scale degrees as our open G and D strings. Let the bow sit on the string and use every inch of hair. In the lower register, every note must have resonance and ring. In the upper

72 register, your task is to let the cello’s brightness shine while mediating this register’s hot, reactive quality.

When you run into issues with your tone, use words to describe the sounds you hear. Simon

Fischer shares a framework for diagnosing and repairing our sound:

● Is your sound scraping, tearing, crushed, and broken up with lower frequency sounds?

○ You may be using too much arm weight. Ease up with the right arm and release

any gripping. The bow does not want to be controlled. Add some air to your

sound.

○ You may be moving the bow too slowly. Use your whole bow, from frog to tip.

Loosen up the joints of the shoulder and elbow so the arm can swing more freely.

○ You may be bowing too near the fingerboard. Use a mirror to monitor where

between the bridge and fingerboard gives you the best sound with the least effort

for this passage.

● Is your sound whistling, fizzing, and broken up with higher frequency sounds?

○ You may be using too little arm weight. Settle the right shoulder, elbow, and

fingers into the bow. Let the string hold up the bow.

○ You may be moving the bow too quickly. Draw a ribbon of sound out of the

string with your bow. Imagine releasing that ribbon into the air in slow motion.

Develop the shape, direction, and shading of your sound in clearer detail.

73 ○ You may be bowing too near the bridge. Use a mirror to monitor where between

the bridge and fingerboard will give you the sound you envision for the passage in

question.36

A slow movement is a special opportunity for Boccherini to indulge in his proclivity for soft dynamics and subtle variants of color. Quiet music invites the cellist body into practices of gentleness, receptiveness, and softness. Practicing long, singing music is an opportunity to slow down and notice more detail. Notice detail in the articulation of the right arm, in the lift and drop of each left hand finger, in the sound of bow on string, in the quality of the harmony supporting the solo cello.

As in each movement of this concerto, separate the voices that are different and unify each voice to itself. The melodies in tenor and soprano actually seem to overlap somewhat: both include sixteenth triplet subdivisions and repeated notes. Since they are sung by different voices, it is essential that these two tunes imagine different bodies and different characters. I have added several expressive words to the score to aid in your imagination of this music. Some words that

Boccherini uses frequently in his chamber music that I have included here are: poco forte and ​ ​ amoroso for the tenor music, and pianissimo and dolcissimo for the soprano music. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

Challenges inspire artistry

36 Simon Fischer, Practice, 48. ​ ​ 74 Singing style in the soprano registers of the instrument is a true test of courage and nerve for the inexperienced Boccherini player. The passages at pickups to mm. 36 and 78 invite sustained sound and flexible, fluid motion in the cello’s most temperamental range. These upper registers will not provide the same resonance or feedback that the cello gives you when you are playing in tune like the tenor register does. The following practice strategies are aimed at refining the security, reliability, and flexibility of tone and pitch in these passages.

Resonance and Vibrato Practice:

I highly recommend devoting some focused energy to practicing the music from this movement - and any passage in the concerto for that matter - without vibrato. Vibrato is a left-side technique whereby the finger pressing down the string, guided by the left upper arm, oscillates towards and away from the bridge in small, regular motions around a single nodal point. The results are twofold: Physically, the string undergoes small changes in length; aurally, the ear perceives a gentle undulation in pitch above and below a note. The advantages of vibrato include boosting projection, masking small pitch errors, blending sound in a string ensemble, and imitating the natural vibration in the human voice. Vibrato is an addition in string playing - it is not a technique that appears automatically in our bodies. As such, adding vibrato requires a difference in bow use. When the string length changes regularly, as it does with vibrato playing, the bow and bow arm must sit heavier into the string and closer to the bridge to avoid bouncing and trembling in response.

75 Non-vibrato practice means the bow does not have to sit so heavily into the string. The arm can flow more freely and you can minimize effort throughout the right side of the body. This enables you to pull a more honest, organic sound out of the string. Herein lies the connection between non-vibrato practice and singing style in cello playing: Without the added muscle engagement from both left and right sides of the body, you can finally feel and hear the purity of sound the cello is capable of. What you sacrifice in projection, the cello makes up for in resonance, ease, and purity. Remembering that Boccherini is deeply interested in exploring the great detail and variety available in soft dynamics, letting go of the need to blast our sound has important lessons to teach us.

Practice a small amount of music, repeating one or two bars (or one or two notes) several times.

Focus on maximizing resonance. Resonance is that open, ringing, spinning quality of sound you get when your finger is in the center of the pitch, the bow is flowing fluidly, and the string is bearing only the weight of the arm and the weight of the bow. When resonance is working, you will get a byproduct that is carry-over sound or reverberation, whether from a space in the hollow body of the instrument vibrating after a bow stroke finishes, or from an open string vibrating sympathetically. Resonance is vibration you can feel through the whole cello, in your body, and in the room around you. That being said, resonance practice requires a shift of consciousness from active - i.e. “I am projecting my sound” or “I am bowing the string” - to ​ ​ receptive - i.e. “I can feel the vibration of the cello” or “I am searching for an increase in ​ reverberation”. Your body is the primary source of knowledge about whether resonance is working.

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Practice single notes on their own first. Experiment with bow weight, speed, and placement relative to the bridge until you find the desired tone quality, feeling of ease in the body, and resonance in the room. Then add vibrato.

Figure 17. “Building Individual Notes” Practice

(1) Play only one note of the passage several times using the whole bow. Find a bow style

that allows the arm to both settle intro the string and flow freely. Experiment with

changing arm weight, bow speed, and placement. Take care of the bow changes, noticing

when the bow crunches or skips. Then, add vibrato without losing quality in sound.

(2) Bow two notes and listen to the sound in the space after you play. If the cello sound is

dead across the rests, it is likely that your sound lacks resonance even when the bow is

moving. Experiment with the bow again to add ring and carry-over resonance across the

rests. Then, add vibrato without losing resonance across the rests.

77 (3) Play one note while following the bowing of the passage. Imagine playing the passage,

including finger changes, shifts, slurs, articulations, shaping, and vibrato. While you play

the passage in your mind, maintain the feeling of flow and ringing sound. Then, add

vibrato, imagining how this addition of shading in your sound might reflect the overall

character and help you shape the phrase. Finally, play the passage as notated.37

Performing 19th and 20th century concert repertoire, whether accompanied by an orchestra or a piano, demands that we blast to be heard over our collaborators. The cello string set-up has been optimized for loudness over warmth with the move from gut strings to steel core sets over the last 50 years. For many of us, a rich, muscular, high-power, Romantic-era cello style has been imprinted into our bodies. With that reality, my three-point shortcut to a resonant sound is:

(1) Use the whole bow - or, use a little faster bow speed. ​ ​ (2) Weight of the bow + weight of the arm - or, use a little less arm weight. ​ ​ (3) Find a soft, pillowy spot for the bow to settle - or, bow a little closer to the ​ ​ fingerboard.

Rhythm Practice:

The rhythm in the tenor music of this movement features sixteenth triplets, ties, slurs, and grace notes. This is a rather unusual example of singing style music, with its rhythm that avoids strong beats. This passage is an example of Boccherini’s love for soft music - it is dense with

37 This practice is inspired by Simon Fischer’s “Building Individual Notes,” in Practice, 52. ​ ​ 78 articulation and decoration, indicative of the high level of detail he imagines to be desirable in soft music.

This rhythm practice separates the various bow challenges of the passage into their component parts. We begin with (1) the foundational rhythm, then add (2) bow direction, (3) slur and legato articulation, and finally (4) grace notes, stacatti, and trills.

Figure 18. Rhythm & subdivision practice

79 (1) Use the bow to subdivide the passage into its smallest note value - the sixteenth triplet.

Simply let the bow keep time, moving back and forth evenly while the left hand learns

how to coordinate changes of pitch and shifts.

(2) Maintain the rhythmic subdivision and separated sound (not slurred) in the bow. This

time, follow the bow direction of the notated passage. Stop the bow between each

subdivision to let the bow sit on the string. Ensure that the quality of sound in the bow is

clear, articulate, and pizzicato-like with every bow move.

(3) Subtract the bow stops between each subdivision, letting the bow arm flow through both

long notes and changing notes. Imagine the subdivision of the passage you practiced

earlier, to keep a steady rhythm.

(4) Add the grace notes, just before the beat and slurred to the music of the following bar.38

Then, add the gentle, singing staccato articulation. Finally, add the trill.

38 In this version, I have placed the grace notes of bars of 28 and 29 just before the barline. This serves as a visual reminder that it may be easier to shave a little time off of the last note of the previous bar to make space for the grace note. The less desirable alternative is to place the grace note directly on the downbeat, which will require that you rhythmically compress the triplet slightly. 80 Chapter 7: III. Rondo: Comodo assai

Background, form, & style

Boccherini marks the third movement Comodo assai or “extremely comfortable.” In triple meter, ​ ​ the music has a gentle lilt and sentence phrase structure, much like a minuet dance. The minuet was considered the most noble of all courtly dances under the ancien régime. The minuet is a ​ ​ couples’ dance where two soloists display the qualities of aristocratic behavior and high society for the approval of spectators.39

Table 3. III. Rondo: Comodo assai, form diagram

III. Rondo: Comodo assai theme A B A C A BI caden A ​ group za

key D D major → A major D B minor D D major On A D major major major major

who orch solo orch solo orch solo orch

voice mezzo tenor mezzo alto mezzo tenor mezzo part

meas 1-16 17-24 25-37 38-48 49-64 65-88 89- 105- 113- 120- 137 1-16 ures 104 112 120 136

“Rondo” refers to the narrative of the musical form whereby the orchestra periodically returns a musical refrain, or repeating theme, which I call theme group A in form diagram 3. This ​ ​ orchestra music appears in exactly the same form four times through the movement. Each time

I the soloist enters, the music is new. I call those theme groups B, C, and B .​ ​ ​ ​ ​

39 Eric McKee, “Ballroom Dances of the Late Eighteenth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. ​ ​ Danuta Mirka, 6. 81

Within the solo cello music there are three different voices, based on the Boccherini Tessitura

Principle - Soprano, Tenor, and Alto. The cello’s first solo, or B, is an argument between ​ ​ Soprano and Tenor. In the middle section, or C, the Alto turns toward B minor, singing and ​ ​

I dancing alone. In B ​ Soprano and Tenor again dialogue, this time more cooperatively. ​ ​

A note on repeats: Within solo sections B and C there are repeat signs around the two sections of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ music within each theme group. It is appropriate for a soloist to add ornaments or decoration to any music the second time it is played. In my edition I have taken the liberty of writing out the repeats with decoration added. You may choose to play the decorations exactly as I have added them, or you may invent your own.

Finding your sound

In the third movement, the orchestra gets the job of creating home, and the solo cello gets to adventure into new territory. So the form ABACABA sounds like the alternation of home, away, home, away. Your main function is creating distinct characters whose roles are independent from the orchestra's role. The clearer you are in your playing with expressing variety, the more those cello solo episodes stand out in relief from the orchestra's refrain, and the more the rondo form becomes audible to someone who has never heard the piece before

The cello plays three different characters throughout the movement, so there are additional layers of contrast possible within each solo. Your job in this movement is to decide which voice is

82 singing which music, unify each voice in color, character, and style, and delineate those voices from one another.

Brainstorm words to develop each of the characters in this scene. Use words that describe what you hear in the music and the image that you believe that music could portray. The types of words you might ascribe to what you hear include character, image, sound, or an Italian word ​ ​ that Boccherini used in his other music. These words and images are your tools for maximally saturating each tessitura’s color so that they stand out against one another distinctly. Here are some examples of guiding images for the three voices in this movement:

Table 4. Character development chart.

character image sound Boccherinian

Mezzo soprano optimist springtime open dolce

Tenor hero summertime brassy con espressione

Alto mystic wintertime pale con innocenza

Additionally, repeats in the solo part provide an opportunity to add decoration and embellishments. In performance, your embellishments can be improvised. In your practice, however, take time to decide where and when you might add trills, ornaments, grace notes, and flourishes the second time around. Your pronunciation of ornaments can also be subtractive. If

Boccherini’s music already appears decorated, try simplifying the music on first iteration and add his ornaments back in on the repeat.

83

As a reminder, the minuet dance is the overarching topic that unifies this scene full of contrast and dialogue. The cadence of this movement is built on the eight-bar sentence structure of 2 ​ ​ measures + 2 measures + 4 measures. The sentence is designed to easily correspond with the pas ​ de menuet, a two-bar choreography that unifies the dance. No matter which voice is singing, use ​ the 2+2+4 hypermeter to carry the energy of the phrase across every other barline. Allow the phrase to rest and breathe at the end of the eight bars.40

Character development and color saturation are about creating contrast in the cello part. Contrast is an essential function of Rondo. The form becomes coherent when contrast is audible. The repeating refrain provides sameness, unity, a home to return to. And the episodes offer different journeys or destinations to visit. Without contrast there is no Rondo.

The third movement pings the minuet topic, and Boccherini's orchestration separates group from leader. Perhaps Boccherini's orchestration is responding to what the minuet dance does. The ​ ​ minuet - with its challenging choreography, display of nobility, and limit to two dancers only - functions as a dance wherein the wealthy display their superiority and the poor must spectate.

The dance creates a clear inside/outside dichotomy based on class and wealth.

Challenges encourage artistry

Contrast practice:

40 Ibid., 9. 84 The contrast in this movement is rapid, resulting from the quick back-and-forth dialogue between voices. Sometimes there is not even a rest between the trade of statements, a little like people interrupting one another. It is your job to make those voices different and extreme in their differences.

To practice contrast, start by playing all of one voice together, say, all of the soprano music, to unify the feeling and the sounding of that music around the words and images you’ve decided on.

When you begin playing the piece through from top to bottom, insert a whole measure rest or more between voice changes. Use that extra time to shift your body, mind, and sound into the new character.

Figure 19. Contrast practice

85 As you continue practicing, shorten the rest and speed up your physical and mental transition time without losing the contrast between voices.

Drone practice:

Although the Alto music doesn’t involve changing between different voices, it is some of the trickiest music in the entire concerto. Between mm. 73 and 81, the pitch of the thumb bar descends by step every two measures. The arrangement of half and whole steps in the left hand changes completely with every step. With a mobile thumb and rapidly changing finger patterns, this music demands that you find and stabilize your changing pitch centers rapidly.

86

Figure 20. Drone practice

Practice this music with drone sounds, or with a cello teacher or a friend who can lay down a sustained bass line for you to play into. In deciding which drones to practice with, sound the

87 same pitches that the thumb bar fifth is on - those notes are the root and fifth of the chord. That is true for most other thumb position passages in this concerto: The notes your thumb is playing are the root and fifth of the chord of the moment or guiding pitches of the local key area.

Mobile thumb position practice:

Scales are designed to be easy to play, to focus the sound, and to deepen the organization and accuracy of the left hand. For cello players new to thumb position and just starting to practice pressing the thumb into the string, practicing scales regularly will help build confidence and comfort.. Each line of this practice exercises a scale followed by two arpeggios. Like in the alto voice passage mm. 73-81, the thumb bar shifts down one step every two bars.

Figure 21. Thumb position scale practice

88 This practice was inspired by a thumb position warm up I play regularly.41 It came from comfortably improvising in each of the four thumb positions in this passage. Use what I have printed above as merely a starting point for your own free-form thumb position fantasy. You can play the above measures in order, or jump from bar 2 to 1, 4 to 3, and so on. You may play the whole thing backwards. The point is to let your ears and your body guide your practice of this music and let go of the need to play the whole thing perfectly from top to bottom.

41 Carl Flesch, Scale System for Violoncello. ​ ​ 89 Chapter 8: IV. Rondo

Background, form, & style

Boccherini’s fourth movement is in the style of a contredanse. Derived from the “country dances” of rural England, the contredanse made its way to the upper class ballrooms of England by the middle of the 17th century. By the time Boccherini was born, this up-beat, lively, spinning group dance was practiced in the mainland dance halls of Europe and had overshadowed the minuet in popularity. Unique forms of contredanse developed regionally, borrowing choreography and musical styles from locally practiced dances. In France, the contredanse ​ française, also known as the cotillon, adopted dance steps from the gavotte, bourée, or rigaudon. ​ ​ ​ 42

The four movement symphonic cycle of Boccherini’s day often showed up topically as overture–cantabile–minuet–contredanse. In ballrooms at this time, the minuet–contredanse pair was a standard sequence for dancing.43 For this reason, although this concerto’s minuet (Rondo -

Comodo assai) and contredanse (Rondo) appear in reverse order in the manuscript, I have chosen to publish them in minuet–contredanse order.

42 McKee, “Ballroom Dances,” ed. Mirka, 3-4. 43 David Neumeyer, “The Contredanse, Classical Finales, and Caplin’s Formal Functions,” in Music Theory Online, 2. 90 Figure 5. IV. Rondo, form diagram.

IV. Rondo

Theme A B A C A group

key D major D major G major D major On A D major D minor + F major D major

who solo orch solo solo orch solo solo orch solo solo orch

Frag- Brilliant Contre- Contre- ment- style vs. Wind refrain & event refrain refrain danse cadenza refrain refrain danse ation & refrain Singing interlude codetta style style Tempest style a

alto, tenor, mezzo, bass, mezzo, voices mezzo mezzo, mezzo mezzo bass, tenor, mezzo tenor alto mezzo mezzo

measure 0-8 8-16 16-45 46-78 79-86 86 86-94 94-102 102-120 121-139 139-154 154-162

With its half-measure upbeats, gavotte-like lilt, period phraseology, and rondo design, the refrain of this fourth movement bears many of the musical characteristics of the contredanse française.

The refrain, called A in the chart, repeats three times throughout the movement and serves to ​ ​ sandwich longer episodes of contrasting music. The cello, in its bright soprano register, guides the orchestra for each statement of the refrain. Unlike the third movement, the solo cello first states the eight-bar refrain theme each time with quartet accompaniment, followed by a full orchestra response of the same eight bars in celebratory forte. ​ ​

The first episode, B in the chart, takes after the refrain in contredanse gavotte style. In this first ​ ​ half of B the alto and soprano voices dance and dialogue in alternation. Midway through this first ​ ​ episode in measure 46, the solo cello breaks with dance style for a display of extreme brilliance.

This barrage of fast music is in the bass register, reminiscent of patter singing by a basso buffo

91 role in Italian comic opera. In this section, the cello part capriciously alternates between brilliant music and simple singing music. The orchestra loudly interjects before and after the cello’s contrasts and gives the soloist time to shift into a new role. The contredanse and gavotte music is mostly abandoned in this second half of B, except for the occasional half-bar upbeats in the ​ ​ basso of the orchestra. A celebratory wind interlude ushers in a brief scripted cadenza for the cello alone who then returns the second statement of the refrain.

In the next episode, C in the chart, the tonality and mood shift to minor mode. The cello ​ ​ introduces two regular-shaped eight-bar phrases - a period (4 bars + 4 bars) from the soprano followed by a sentence (2+2+4) from the tenor. Then, those phrases begin to fragment with stormy, rocket-like interruptions and fortepiano bursts in the orchestra. A brief retransition ​ ​ returns the home key of D major and the final refrain. The cello states the first eight bars in full before interrupting the orchestra’s expected entrance with a brilliant, showy codetta. The full ensemble finishes the movement in optimistic contredanse style.

Finding your sound

In this rondo movement, like the third movement, the cello always states the refrain first followed by an orchestra response. The episodes involve the cello solo adventuring away from home, here farther afield than in the third movement. The orchestra also gets swept up in the episodes, with loud interruptions between the cello's statements. But where the third movement separates the tasks of unity and contrast to orchestra and soloist respectively, the fourth movement joins the orchestra and soloist as co-adventurers. The cello's responsibilities to this

92 particular rondo are twofold: First, the soloist gets to create a clear, decisive model for the refrain tune, such that it is repeatable by the orchestra and sounds familiar every time it is heard.

Second, the cello must create distinctive characters during the episodes that stand out in relief against the shared refrain.

Gavotte style desires a particular attention to rhythm, meter, and character. The Baroque era gavotte was typically performed and notated with two beats per bar. The music begins half a bar before the first downbeat, and the choreography begins on the first downbeat. Rhythmic tension is resolved on every fourth and eighth downbeat, where dance steps and music line up.44 Even

4 though this movement is notated in 4​ , let the half note take the pulse. Your job is to carry the ​ ​ energy of the phrase from the two pickups all the way to the downbeat four bars later. If the quarter note gets the pulse, you will have to carry twice the weight and work twice as hard to maintain the energy to the end of the phrase. Feeling the phrase in 2 impulses per bar will help you maintain the graceful, simple, joyful, tender qualities that 18th century writers ascribe to the gavotte45.

Brilliant music is about sparkling and shining, dazzling the ears and captivating the senses.

Brilliant music is at home in the concerto genre, and one could argue that almost all the music in this piece pings the brilliant topic46. The fast passages between measures 46 and 78 stand out as a decisively brilliant reference. This passage wants to be articulated with the clarity of sound and

44 Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, 50. ​ ​ 45 Ibid., 47-48. 46 Roman Ivanovitch, “The Brilliant Style,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka, 3-4. ​ ​ 93 accuracy of rhythm so that it may sound radiant, feel effortlessly virtuosic, and be heard above the longer note values in the orchestra.

Singing style is about simplicity, ease, and coherence. The song-like moments between measures

46 and 78 create stark contrasts against the rapid brilliant music. The rate of change between loud fast music and gentle slow music is most extreme at this moment in the concerto. This scene requires that you constantly prepare for what is coming next, without giving away the next change or getting rattled by the orchestra’s interjections. Roman Ivanovitch says that the brilliant–singing dichotomy “accounts for the basic contrastive mechanism of the classical style”.

47 The contrasts in this scene feel extreme to the point of absurdity, so I hear this as Boccherini’s way of humorously poking holes in what will soon become a widely-accepted protocol of classical music.

The fourth movement references both the contredanse, a newer group dance practiced by commoners, city dwellers, and country folk alike, and the gavotte, a topic that other composers have used in marriage scenes and celebrations of relationships. The contredanse itself is accessible and adaptable to many people through the assimilation of regionally known dance moves. Contredanse and gavotte are dances that join rather than separate, and Boccherini's ​ ​ orchestration responds to that function. Cello and orchestra share the refrain, the familiar music.

Cello and orchestra also share the episodic music, the adventures into new territory.

47 Ibid., 1. 94 Challenges encourage artistry

Phrase study & shaping practices:

Figure 22. Gavotte theme

The refrain tune is repeated 6 times throughout the course of this Rondo. This goal of this study in phrase structure is to make the refrain feel unique and specific in your mind and body. When you, the guiding light in this movement, feel convinced and confident in the style and shaping of the phrase, the orchestra will have a clear sense of what we are saying together, how to support you, and how to repeat you accurately.

The refrain tune is in two parts: antecedent and consequent phrases. Each phrase begins a half-note pulse before the downbeat and lasts for 8 half-note pulses. The two phrases begin the same way and end differently. The difference between the endings is both melodic

(surface-level) and harmonic (substantial).

95

Figure 23. Gavotte theme phrase diagram

The antecedent phrase asserts a half cadence by landing on the dominant harmony on the downbeat of measure 4. A half cadence functions like a harmonic question mark, creating punctuation and pause in flow and a desire for response. The consequent phrase asserts a perfect authentic cadence by landing on the tonic harmony or D, satisfying the response that the earlier half cadence demanded.

What does all of this have to do with gavotte and contredanse? The sites of the two cadences are where the music and gavotte dance step line up. Gavotte dance steps last for seven half-note beats, landing together with the music on the eighth half-note beat of the piece. The downbeats of bars 4 and 8 assert not only harmonic question and response, they are also moments of

96 rhythmic, embodied unity. As performers, these substantial musical phenomena give us something to respond to in our playing.

Shaping practice 1: Voice and movement

How do we put all this music theory to practice? Invite the phrase, harmony, and rhythm of the music into your whole body. To begin, stand and march (or sit and clap) in time with the half-note pulse of the contredanse. Use your voice to sing or speak the refrain. Singing all the right notes in tune is not essential; what matters is your commitment to rhythm, pulse, articulation, shaping, and character.

Use your voice to carry the energy of the antecedent phrase to the half cadence, the first meeting point between music and dance. Maintain the pulse you have established with your clapping or marching. The energy of the phrase builds up to that downbeat of bar 4. The idea you assert on that cadence point is both the end of a phrase and the desire for another one to follow. Try speaking the first half of the phrase in one breath. When you do take a breath midway through bar 4, give yourself time to get the air you need to prepare for the next phrase. Let the pulse in your feet suspend the tempo just enough for the time it takes to breathe.

Now, do your best to speak the whole consequent phrase in one breath, still supported by the half-note pulse in your feet or hands. Carry energy all the way to the cadence point on the downbeat of bar 8. This moment is the conclusion to what came before, the release of the

97 combined force of harmonic tension from the half cadence in bar 4 and the rhythmic tension initiated by the first two pickups of the movement.

The goal of this practice is to fully embody the music of the refrain before sitting down to do the complicated work of playing it on the cello.

● Aim to feel forward motion flowing through you from the beginning of the phrase to the

end of the phrase. On a more zoomed-in level, beat 2 of nearly every bar supports your

phrase with a new wave of forward-moving energy. Each time you see the staccato

quarter-note pickups, let them lead your voice to the next downbeat.

● Feel in your body the tension and release of harmony and phrase. Use your voice to

communicate the question and answer quality of the antecedent and consequent phrases.

Build up expectation toward the half cadence, and feel the resolution at the authentic

cadence.

● When the rhythm and flow of the gavotte refrain feel comfortable in your body, it is time

to zoom out. Connect to what you feel is the overall character of the contredanse

movement. I have chosen to add one of Boccherini’s favorite and most unusual Italian

words: smorfioso. Smorfioso can mean grimacing, affected, flirty, or coaxing.48 To me, ​ ​ ​ ​ Boccherini’s smorfioso music feels silly, mischievous, devilish, and tongue-in-cheek. ​ ​ What changes in your demeanor, physical posture, and delivery when you embody

smorfioso? ​

48 Loukia Myrto Drosopoulou, “Dynamic, Articulation and Special-Effect Markings in Manuscript Sources of Luigi Boccherini’s String Quintets,” 285. 98

Shaping practice 2: Voice and pencil bow

Leaving the cello to the side, take the bow in your right hand. Hold a pencil in your left hand out in front of you, at the place where your bow usually sits on the A string. Place the bow on the pencil.

Figure 24. Pencil bow

99 Speak or sing the refrain tune while the bow moves on the pencil, matching the bow directions and articulations on the page. Embody the same conviction of rhythm, shape, energy, and smorfioso character you cultivated during your voice and movement practice. ​

Pencil bowing can show you the ways in which the bow may be disconnected from your body and voice. Even though the bow is silent, imagine that the bow is making the sound of your voice. This helps connect your internal vision with your external communicator, the bow.

Now, watch your bow on the pencil, noticing how much bow you use on long notes versus short notes. Make sure there is an intentional difference between the staccato quarters and the slurred notes. Pencil bowing lets you plan bow distribution and choreograph where in the bow each note wants to live.

These shaping practices teach us that the communication we do on the cello begins in our bodies and minds. Start by feeling and knowing what it is you want to say and how you want to say it.

Vocalizing gives you the chance to test out what you want to say in the air. How close does your voice get to speaking accurately what you want to say? Next, pencil bowing invites the bow into the body–voice relationship. Eventually, the bow will stand in for the voice. Practicing the back and forth bow motion silently helps to bridge the gap from knowing to communicating using objects that are not your body, the cello and bow.

Rhythm Practice:

100 The brilliant music in this movement is the fastest and most unrelenting passagework of the concerto. Your sixteenths must be even in pacing, equal in sound, and rhythmically accurate, while maintaining the comfort and ease of virtuosity. This brilliant passage occurs after you have already played 90% of the concerto, so you are likely to be physically tired. Part of the challenge is budgeting your energy through the whole concerto in such a way that you are not depleted by the time you play this passage. How might you practice and perform this passage to minimize the effort necessary to make it sparkle?

For rhythmic accuracy, practice Simon Fischer’s rhythm alteration. Fischer says this practice works by “setting the mind a series of timing and coordination problems to solve. In solving them, the mental picture of the passage becomes clearer, and the physical response to each mental command becomes quicker”.49 In this practice, you lengthen one note of every group of four. Variation 1 is one long note followed by three short notes. Variation 2 is one short, one long, and two short. Variation 3 is two short, one long, one short. And finally Variation 4 is three short, one long. Begin by practicing the rhythmic variations alone on an open string like this:

49 Fischer, Practice, 36. ​ ​ 101

Figure 25. Rhythm variations

My approach differs slightly from Simon Fischer’s, but if you want to see the original, look at page 42 of his book called Practice. In my version, if the first note of the passage begins on a ​ ​ downbeat, that note will always occur on the down beat, no matter which note gets lengthened.

Or, if the passage starts one sixteenth before the beat, treat that note as the final note of a four-note grouping before the downbeat. The intention here is that the metrical emphasis and the bow direction remain the same always. The rhythmic puzzle is generated by shifting the meter

4 2 12 from duple meter (e.g. 4​ or 2​ ) to compound meter (here, 8​ ). ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

102 Here is a selection of brilliant music from the fourth movement Rondo, to be practiced with rhythm variations. Only two bars are printed, but you can practice rhythm variations for all of the brilliant music in this movement.

Figure 26. Rhythm variations practice

This practice is not only for solving a mental puzzle, it is also to reinforce the easy, settled quality of your playing during challenging passagework. Once you’ve learned the rhythm, the goal is to make each variation feel easy. How do you know if it feels easy? The left hand fingers ​ ​

103 lift and drop with gentleness and flexibility. The tendons of the left arm feel spacious, not overloaded with heat, swelling, or tension. The left thumb is gentle and articulate, not squeezing the neck. The bow arm feels settled into the string, pulling sound out. The right shoulder and elbow are fluid joints. The right fingers are soft and heavy. Every note is clearly articulate, without mumbling.

The tempo goal for this rhythm practice is when the rate of the 16th note in the variation is the same as the rate of the 16th note in the original passage. Practice your rhythm variations with a metronome pulsing dotted quarters. When a variation is comfortable with the metronome on dotted quarters at ⅔ of your goal tempo, your passage is in good shape. The table below serves as a guide for the metronome based on a variety of possible goal tempos for the whole movement.

Table 6. Tempo variation chart

As written tempo Variation tempo

.

50 100 66

54 108 72

60 120 80

66 132 88

72 144 96

76 152 101

104

Contrast practice & score study:

The contrasts in the fourth movement are more extreme and rapid than in any other movement.

Practice with pauses before and between contrasting musics to fully envision the sound you want before you move.

Figure 27. Contrast practice 2

When your contrasts feel confident from one sound to the next, practice counting beat numbers through the rests so that your transition happens in time. When you play this with orchestra or piano, you will notice that there are loud orchestra interjections during the rests between cello

105 entrances. Practice speaking or singing those interjections so you know what to listen for between the music you play.

IV. Rondo mm. 68-75

Figure 28. Score study practice

Your job is to know the score well so that you are not surprised or derailed by what you hear when assembling the concerto with piano or orchestra.

106 Bibliography

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Boccherini, Luigi. Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra in B flat major G 482. Edited by ​ ​ Thomas Fritzsch. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1997.

Boccherini, Luigi. Concerto N. 8 in Re Maggiore per Violoncello. Edited by Aldo Pais. Padova: ​ ​ G. Zanibon, 1987.

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107 Little, Meredith and Natalie Jenne. Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, Expanded Edition. ​ ​ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

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108

Appendix

Part 3:

Scores for Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D major G. 478 ​

[See supplemental file]

109