Tonight: Advanced Mandolin Classical Group @ 7pm

If you're a current student in good standing you are welcome to attend the Advanced Mandolin Classical Group which meets Wednesday nights at 7pm.

This is the core of Mandolin New England, a 501(c)3 nonprofit mandolin orchestra that performs free concerts and master classes in western Massachusetts, Rhode Island and the Boston area.

Currently the group  is working on the Bach Double Concerto originally written for two viols and continuo.  We are playing it with 2 mandolins and continuo.  Continuo generally refers to string instruments that play the rhythm and echo parts of the melody, but are not part of the solo.  In a chamber group, it would be comprised of violins, violas, cellos, bass and harpsichord; or perhaps Viols*  and harpsichord, depending on the composer.  For example, J.S. Bach composed a fair number of pieces for viols*

J. S. Bach "Lost Portrait"

The Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043, also known as the Double Violin Concerto (Doppelkonzert für zwei Violinen), is one of the most famous works by Johann Sebastian Bach and considered among the best examples of the work of the late Baroque period.  Bach may have written the concerto between 1717 and 1723 when he was the Kapellmeister at the court of Anhalt-Köthen, Germany, though the work's surviving performance materials were created for the concert series that Bach ran as the Director of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig and are dated c. 1730–31.  The concerto is characterized by a subtle yet expressive relationship between the violins throughout the work. In addition to the two soloists, the concerto is scored for strings and basso continuo. The musical structure of this piece uses fugal imitation and much counterpoint.  Here is a link to the score.

The concerto comprises three movements:

1. Vivace
2. Largo ma non tanto
3. Allegro

The group is also working on a string quartet of Mozart's commonly referred to as The Hunt.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat major, K. 458, nicknamed "The Hunt", is the fourth of the Quartets dedicated to Haydn. It was completed in 1784.  Here is a link to the score

 It is in four movements:

1. Allegro vivace assai
2. Menuetto and Trio. Moderato
3. Adagio, in E-flat major
4. Allegro assai

Neither Mozart nor Artaria called this piece "The Hunt." "For Mozart's contemporaries, the first movement of K.458 evidently evoked the 'chasse' topic, the main components of which were a 6/8 time signature (sometimes featuring a strong upbeat) and triadic melodies based largely around tonic and dominant chords (doubtless stemming from the physical limitations of the actual hunting horns to notes of the harmonic series)." According to Irving, Mozart's first intention was to conclude with a polonaise and sketched 65 bars.

Its popularity is reflected in its use in various films, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mystery Date, The Royal Tenenbaums and Star Trek: Insurrection.

The Advanced Mandolin Classical Group has performed this piece once before during a concert at the Porter Phelps-Huntington Museum in Hadley, Massachusetts on September 17th, 2018.  Ah those pre-Coronavirus days when we all took for granted that playing together in an intimate group setting was commonplace and would never leave us.  Those were the days!

The group will be meeting at 7pm online in a Meet.Google.Com session.  If you are a current student and would like to attend, let Adam know through Slack and you will be invited to the closed Slack channel.  You must be a regular weekly student to attend this group.

Viol da Gamba (viol of the leg)

* The viol (/ˈvaɪəl/), viola da gamba[a] (Italian: [ˈvjɔːla da ˈɡamba]), or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Frets on the viol are usually made of gut, tied on the fingerboard around the instrument's neck, to enable the performer to stop the strings more cleanly. Frets improve consistency of intonation and lend the stopped notes a tone that better matches the open strings. Viols first appeared in Spain in the mid to late 15th century and were most popular in the Renaissance and Baroque (1600–1750) periods. Early ancestors include the Arabic rebab and the medieval European vielle, but later, more direct possible ancestors include the Venetian viole and the 15th- and 16th-century Spanish vihuela, a 6-course plucked instrument tuned like a lute (and also like a present-day viol)[4][5] that looked like but was quite distinct from (at that time) the 4-course guitar (an earlier chordophone).

Although bass viols superficially resemble cellos, viols are different in numerous respects from instruments of the violin family: the viol family has flat rather than curved backs, sloped rather than rounded shoulders, c holes rather than f holes, and five to seven rather than four strings; some of the many additional differences are tuning strategy (in fourths with a third in the middle—similar to a lute—rather than in fifths), the presence of frets, and underhand ("German") rather than overhand ("French") bow grip.

All members of the viol family are played upright (unlike the violin or the viola, which is held under the chin). All viol instruments are held between the legs like a modern cello, hence the Italian name viola da gamba (it. "viol for the leg") was sometimes applied to the instruments of this family. This distinguishes the viol from the modern violin family, the viola da braccio (it. "viol for the arm"). A player of the viol is commonly known as a gambist, violist /ˈvaɪəlɪst/, or violist da gamba. "Violist" shares the spelling, but not the pronunciation, of the word commonly used since the mid-20th century to refer to a player of the viola. It can therefore cause confusion if used in print where context does not clearly indicate that a viol player is meant, though it is entirely unproblematic, and common, in speech.

Viols come in seven sizes: "pardessus de viole" (which is relatively rare, exclusively French and did not exist before the 18th century), treble (in French dessus), alto, tenor (in French taille), bass, and two sizes of contrabass (also known as a violone), the smaller one tuned an octave below the tenor (violone in G, sometimes called great bass or in French grande basse) and the larger one tuned an octave below the bass (violone in D).

Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 for 2 violas and continuo

in B-flat major for 2 violas de braccio, 2 violas da gamba, violincello + continuo (violone and cembalo)

The last of the Brandenburg Concertos is often considered the oldest, as its instrumentation conjures a 17th century English consort of viols, similar scoring had been used by Bach in his earlier Weimar cantatas, and its structure relies heavily upon both the ancient canon form and the conservative Baroque gesture of a chugging bass of persistent quarter-notes.

A viola da gamba

Yet, typically, Bach combines a knowing salute to the past with a bold leap into the future, raising the violas, customarily embedded in the continuo accompaniment, to solo status. The unprecedented gesture was triply suitable – the viola was Bach's own favorite orchestral instrument (as he once put it, placing him "in the middle of the harmony"), it was also the instrument played by his patron Prince Leopold, and the Margrave's orchestra was known to have employed two especially accomplished violists.

Scholars assume that Bach only had enough forces at Cöthen for one player per part. Indeed, performances with full string sections, or even large chamber ensembles, no matter how well rehearsed, tend to blur the precisely articulated interplay of buoyant rhythms and swamp the harpsichord, whose bright plucked overtones need to emerge from the depth of the strings. Moreover, the nasal sound of violas da gamba (six-string bass viols held between the legs) and a single violone are needed for bright, transparent middle and bass lines that complement rather than thicken the tone of the featured violas de braccio (hand-held violas comparable to current ones) and solo cello. Similarly, modern substitutions of deeper and more powerful modern instruments, including a double bass, unduly deepen the sonority and fuse the timbres.

In one sense, the work seems a concerto for two violas to display Bach's love of his instrument and its full range of expressive possibilities. Yet, it is their interplay, both with each other and with the cello and continuo, that characterizes each of the three movements, thus exemplifying the claim of Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Bach's first biographer, that Bach considered the essence of a polyphonic composition to be a symbolic tonal discussion among instruments, each presenting arguments and counterpoints, variously talking and lapsing into silence to listen to the others.

Shorn of the violins' customary brilliance, the dark timbre suggests a harbinger of the mystery and somber thoughts of the Romantic era to come. Indeed, Boyd sees the instrumentation as an allegory of progress, as Bach elevates the then-newest member of the string family to prominent status while relegating the older viols to the background. Yet Bach ingeniously creates a compelling and complex aural image of irresistible gaiety that arises out of and is enriched by its seemingly melancholy components.

The sections of the first movement are closely integrated into a continuous flow of vigorous thrust, led by the two violas in tight canon a mere eighth-note apart during each of the six ritornellos, blending into a lively dialogue with the gambas during the five episodes, all over a persistent quarter-note continuo rhythm. The second is a lovely, if somewhat quaint, meditation for violas and cello. The finale is an irresistibly propulsive dance in 12/8 time with astoundingly catchy primary and counter-melodies, in which Bach seems to tease us as the violas constantly begin, abandon and resume canonic imitation. Indeed, while Bach is reputed to lack humor, he manages to play an unintended joke on those of us relegated to listening on record – the violas constantly switch parts but the difference is inaudible and thus imperceptible without the visual clues in a concert. Perhaps out of respect for the limited stamina of his royal soloist, after sitting out the adagio, the gamba parts of the finale are easy accompaniment, leaving all the work to the violas and occasional fits of activity from the cello.

Source: Classical Notes