Author: Jonathan Cable

For once, I’ll add a post here that is non-musical, because this is very personal to me. The news I heard today has shaken me to my core.

Have you ever thought, “Hey, that bow I haven’t used for a while, how about I get it out of its case and give it a little workout?”

Then, you open the aforementioned case and you find bow hair all over the place, and it looks like someone slit right across the hair with a knife.

This monumental work, BWV 232, has always been one of my favorites to perform. It has great orchestral writing, great continuo parts (there are no recitatives, of course, but that doesn’t matter), amazing choral movements, and stunning moments of incredible harmony and emotion.

Why are we even asking this question?

In Volume I of Wenzl Hause’s double-bass method, published around 1820-25, he gives these unusual instructions in the chapter about fingering (Fingersatz).

I recently acquired a lovely book by my late teacher, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, entitled Wir sind eine Entdeckergemeinschaft (We are a Community of Explorers), published by his wife Alice (Residenz Verlag, Salzburg – Wien, 2017). The book tells how Concentus Musicus Wien started, and mentions the different people in Vienna that were part of the long story of that group. It goes on, through several chapters, to chronologically cover what things they did, where they performed, what they recorded, and it’s lovely to read it and to remember all the fabulous people that I had the honor to meet, work, perform, and record with, way back in the 1970s and 80s.

I have to address, once again, something that I find quite maddening: the question of underhand and overhand double bass bows in baroque music.

Actually, this shouldn’t even be a question.

By now – and I have talked about this extensively – any bass player who takes early music and authenticity seriously must know that during the baroque era, the classical era, and even part of the romantic era, underhand double bass bows were the only trick in town. Overhand or “French” bows did not exist, as far as I have been able to tell, before the 1840s at the very earliest. Read More

Maybe at some point you’ve heard someone say, or you yourself might have even thought at some point, that accompanying singers is too difficult. That can give the impression that it sometimes isn’t attractive to play continuo. But remember, it’s absolutely something that most continuo players can learn to do and all continuo players must learn and be able to do.

Simply said: if you can’t accompany singers properly, don’t play continuo. Read More

So it seems that it’s Michel Corrette’s birthday. I suppose we could just say “happy birthday” and let it go at that, but there is a little bit more to talk about than just his birthday. Otherwise – as you can imagine – I wouldn’t be here writing about it.

Corrette wrote methods for all kinds of instruments (most of which he did not play himself) during the second half of the 18th century, including a bass method. One of my pet peeves for a long time has been bass players today actually taking this method seriously and/or giving it way more credit than it deserves.

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