Info for both the Fredericton and Montreal concerts are now all in one place at www.redowl.ca. Please move your bookmarks accordingly!

Sari et Jon-o ont un nouveau site web et un nom d’ensemble!

Vous pouvez maintenant trouver tous les infos pour les concerts à Fredericton et à Montréal à www.redowl.ca. Veuillez transférer vos marque-pages!

We have three exciting concerts planned for this year.

We are also very pleased to announce that we’ve started a series of concerts in Montreal. We’ll be playing the same program as in the Gallery 78 series, so if you’re in La Belle Province, do drop by!

Nous sommes très excités de jouer à Montréal! On vous propose trois concerts cette année. Une page en français s’en vient sous peu!

As an example, here’s the beginning of a d-minor prelude by Louis Couperin that I’ll be playing in the concert:

Even if you don’t read much music, you can see that all the notes look the same – no rhythm at all!

So how do you actually play something like this? It would be awfully dull (and incoherent!) to just go through playing each written whole note equally! Instead, we have to group the notes together into chords, scales, and make music out of them! The long slurs give some hints, showing which notes should be held together, and when they can be released, but there is still a lot that’s left to the personal taste of the performer. You can hear the same piece 20 times, and hear 20 completely different performances – sometimes it’s hard to even recognize that it’s the same piece!

Here’s a quick recording I’ve made of the two lines above so you can hear what it turns into:

(download mp3)

François Couperin wrote a set of preludes as well, which he included in his Art de toucher le clavecin. In this immensely important pedagogical work, he actually wrote out the ‘unmeasured’ preludes with fully-notated rhythms! But he stresses that this is just to help out beginners, and that the rhythms are not to be followed exactly. Just like speech, he says, music has its poetry and prose, and good harpsichordists should be able to express themselves in both!

Please tell us if you find anything amiss, and let us know what you think!