Music@Menlo: vocal chamber music
Aug. 1st, 2025 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThursday I attended one of Menlo's lectures, an introduction to vocal chamber music, prefatory to a concert of some I'll be attending on Sunday.
The lecture was given by the noted tenor Nicholas Phan (pronounced Pan, not Fan), who won't be performing on Sunday but who did illustrate his lecture with projected videos of himself performing works from throughout the history of the repertoire: not live, so he wouldn't have to wrangle on stage all the instrumentalists he was performing with.
Like the lecture on wind chamber music I attended last week (which I didn't describe here, but maybe later), it was divided into two parts: before the 19th century, when there was a kind of hole in the repertoire, and afterwards.
The hole came when the piano developed around 1800 into an instrument capable of virtuoso expressive shading, and the art song with piano became the default vocal chamber music genre. Before that time, music with a consort of lute and viol and other instruments was common. Phan spent a lot of time on the Baroque genre of the cantata, which is not just a sacred music form by Bach as we tend to think of it today; in fact Bach and other Lutheran composers had appropriated what was originally a secular form.
A cantata was typically 15-25 minutes long and consisted of a sequence of numbers in a variety of moods or styles for a single singer, often telling a story. What was really interesting was Phan's description of the revival of the cantata form in recent years, and he had a notable example of it.
It was by Viet Cuong, an American composer whose work I'm familiar with, as he was the composer in residence at the California Symphony a few years back. The title is A Moment's Oblivion, and the ensemble is of Baroque instruments: oboe, violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord. Its story concerns a man who has lost his memory, but his family find a doctor who is able to restore it. This number presents the man, who - like Buffy after she's returned from the dead in the sixth season - turns out not to be pleased about his restoration. He was happier in bliss without memories.
Here's Phan singing the number. I thought it was a really striking piece of contemporary music.
The lecture was given by the noted tenor Nicholas Phan (pronounced Pan, not Fan), who won't be performing on Sunday but who did illustrate his lecture with projected videos of himself performing works from throughout the history of the repertoire: not live, so he wouldn't have to wrangle on stage all the instrumentalists he was performing with.
Like the lecture on wind chamber music I attended last week (which I didn't describe here, but maybe later), it was divided into two parts: before the 19th century, when there was a kind of hole in the repertoire, and afterwards.
The hole came when the piano developed around 1800 into an instrument capable of virtuoso expressive shading, and the art song with piano became the default vocal chamber music genre. Before that time, music with a consort of lute and viol and other instruments was common. Phan spent a lot of time on the Baroque genre of the cantata, which is not just a sacred music form by Bach as we tend to think of it today; in fact Bach and other Lutheran composers had appropriated what was originally a secular form.
A cantata was typically 15-25 minutes long and consisted of a sequence of numbers in a variety of moods or styles for a single singer, often telling a story. What was really interesting was Phan's description of the revival of the cantata form in recent years, and he had a notable example of it.
It was by Viet Cuong, an American composer whose work I'm familiar with, as he was the composer in residence at the California Symphony a few years back. The title is A Moment's Oblivion, and the ensemble is of Baroque instruments: oboe, violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord. Its story concerns a man who has lost his memory, but his family find a doctor who is able to restore it. This number presents the man, who - like Buffy after she's returned from the dead in the sixth season - turns out not to be pleased about his restoration. He was happier in bliss without memories.
Here's Phan singing the number. I thought it was a really striking piece of contemporary music.
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Date: 2025-08-02 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-02 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-02 10:16 pm (UTC)No, there were baroque violins. They did not use chin rests or shoulder rests, the strings were gut, and the bows were shorter and the wood curved outwards.
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Date: 2025-08-03 12:33 am (UTC)Similarly, by writing "The oboe is definitely a Baroque instrument," I didn't mean "There were oboes around in the Baroque," but that that particular oboe was a Baroque oboe, not a modern one.