Bach's Cello Suite no. 1

I just came back from playing the first cello suite by Bach at the Oosterpoort in Groningen. On baritone sax. Although I am not doing much these days because of recovering from my illness, these concerts I wanted to do.

Madness of course to play Cello Suites by Bach on sax. But some years ago I wanted to learn this piece. And maybe continue with some other suites. I stuck with the first one until now. 

And of course the first problem starts in the first bar: the big jumps. Very easy on cello, but very hard on sax to make them sound 'normal'. The whole concept of these first bars is almost gone when played on a wind instrument. The idea is to present some arpeggios in the first position, to discover the cello, introducing the instrument and preluding the entire six suites. 

That idea doesn't really work on a wind instrument. But you know, when I play it well, when it works, it's still really great music. It does work in the end. And that's typical for Bach's music. The genius of the notes goes beyond the instrumentation. That's why I wanted to play this on the sax. But it needs the best reed I can find, the best preparation possible and preferably the best acoustics.

Notewhise, the idea of Bach was to leave out as many notes as he could. And leave a lot of notes to the imagination of the listener. Anner Bijlsma once told me during one his lessons that the name of the performer ánd the audience should be on the poster for any concert with the cello suites. This concept makes the pieces rather abstract, but more than that, intriguing and fascinating.

When I restudied the Cello Suites I payed attention to the following things:

-I had to play the piece through, in its entirety. With Bach's music it's so easy to stop at every detail and find a more suitable expression for every note. But I often forget that not only musically I have to construct the whole piece and oversee it, but I also have to find a way for my body to keep going in a relaxed way the entire suite.
I have played this piece may years now and I have noticed that I need to find a balance between preparing the piece in a certain, musical, way and playing in an improvisatory way during the concert. This tour I focussed more on improvising the expression.

-My instrument has to be in order. It has to close and have the least key noise possible. When it doesn't close it's always worse during the concert, for some reason. Everything has to work as smoothly as possible. The piece is hard and long enough.

-When I come back to this piece I have to always rediscover it. It's multilayered, the notes can mean so much, and so many different emotions can be attached to every passage that I experience the piece differently every time I come back to it. If I don't get this right, the performance won't work.

-I have to have different tempi ready because of the acoustics. Every acoustic asks for its own tempo. The wetter, the slower I can play, and then I also have the benefit of the bass notes resounding the rest of the beat or even the rest of the bar.

-This time I reinvented my embouchure again. Every so many years I reinvent my embouchure, and coming back to the cello suite after half year of chemo therapy I changed some things. This had the following reason: I needed to keep on playing during the therapy because I had to monitor my fine motorics (one of the medicins could damage the nerves and influence the motors of the hands). After one month I didn't know what to play anymore and I started to play jazz, transcribing solos and practicing exciting transcriptions, mostly by Coltrane. When I play jazz I play with more under lip out and I tried to also do this when playing classical. And it works. I needed reeds that are a bit harder and that makes playing much easier.

I will write a bit more about embouchure in a later post.

Advice for young music professionals and conservatory students

I would have never written a blog with this title before I got cancer. But now I feel I have some things I want to share. I had time to think. About myself, music, life....

1) Do what you like.

Sounds obvious, right? But for me it was hard to even find out what I like and how to choose. It still is. Right now I feel I do not want to go back to the way I lived my life. This may sound dramatic, but the changes can be little. Hardly noticeable even for someone who is not me. I recently read an article online that said that busy people are people who cannot choose. And I think that's true for a lot of people. I do so much different stuff, I was always behind with administration, studying, contacting people. It's very frustrating.

The first thing you have to do is find out what you want to do, what you like to do. And that's not so easy. Especially as a classical musician. We have all of this tradition, composers, musicians, recordings, concert etiquette. A lot of people choose something they go for because people before them did it successfully. Or play music because it is great music. Sounds like a good reason? It's not! There's so much great music out there, but you have to find music that awakens passion in you. And it might not be Bach, and that's ok. You can listen to Bach, but you don't have to play it because he or she did it and recorded it and it became a huge success. Horowitz is great, the Royal Concertgebouw is as well, but it's not the basis of music, it's a road you can go, but you don't have to.

As a saxophonist I wanted to make my life work out of playing the Creston and Denisow Sonatas with my pianist. And they are great pieces, but in retrospect, I like playing with a pianist, but I love to come up with my own ensembles and experiment, do cross-over. My teacher was Arno Bornkamp and he played those sonatas many times per year with Ivo Janssen. And he was my example. So I wanted to do what he did. But there's so much more. Music is art. Is about creativity. Also as a performer.

2) Take composition classes at the conservatory.

As early as you can, learn to play with notes, make up your own, compose, improvise, even as a classical musician. You never know what is going to happen. My buddy Remy van Kesteren is a composer now, he became one in half a year and recorded a cd for Deutsche Grammaphone with his own music. Reall, you never know. And if you don't do anything with it, it at least gives you insight in the composing process.

I do think that classical musicians should start writing their own notes at least partly. We are influenced by Stravinsky and Bach, we see and hear their notes and know we can't do better. Sure, for most of us this is true. But Stravinsky is not you. We've heard what Bach is about, and it's great, but I would love to hear your contemporary comment on it for example.

I found Spotify, despite the obvious criticism of the medium, to be a great tool to find out what I like to listen to.

3) Don't go with the obvious flow.

A conservatory is called that because it wants to conserve music. So what we learn (and what we should learn!) is the stuff people before us did. Like Creston and Denisov. Learn that stuff and in the mean time think about what you want to do. In the last year of your bachelor I think you can have a basic idea of how you want to spend the coming couple of years. Stick with it, and on the other hand, give yourself time to adapt to new developments:

4) Allow yourself to change.

When students come to the conservatory to inquire about the study., they often say (influenced by their parents) that they might study something more 'useful' first and that after that they can always still study music. I would say it's much more logical to do it the other way around.

Motoric development is very important for conservatory and it's just much more flexible when your around 20.

My point is, after conservatory you do not have to stick with it (despite what I wrote earlier). We all develop. In those four years of study you might find out that you have talents in other areas. Meanwhile you did a study which develops the brain and body in a certain way. You learn to be the ultimate multi-tasker, you have spend numerous hours by yourself and with your instrument in a lonely studio, studying and learning about your music and yourself. It's a form of therapy. Those traits always come in handy at some point in your life.

Also within the music area: you can learn about music theatre and decide you want to pursue that. (See number 5) or maybe you wanted to be a soloist and find out that you are really more of a chamber musician.

But in the end it is very important you finish what you were doing. If possible, finish that bachelor study, study the basics, scales, some traditional pieces, different styles, etcetera. It's never for nothing.

5) Be a sponge.

Absorp as much as you can, not only music, but also fine arts, literature, concerts by others, interact with other people, philosophize, etcetera. Because your music has to be about something. In the end we are story tellers. We need a story to tell, experiences in our life.

This is very important: absorp as much as you can and, especially I the beginning of your studies, do not try to form an opinion just yet. Just listen to what's out there and let your taste develop by itself, without your head telling you what to do and feel.

But you also need to find out what's out there. You don't want to rely on releases by the biggest labels and concerts in the largest concert halls to know what's going on in the music world. There's so much more. There are underground concert halls, musicians who work with music theatre, chamber music in so many forms, ... Find out about initiatives like Splendor (splendoramsterdam.com), zaal 100, OT301, about musicians who go their own way, like Remy van Kesteren, Raaf Hekkema, Ralph van Raat, ...

(Picture by Co Broerse)