A couple of weeks ago I met up with Jan Willem de Vriend, conductor slash violinist slash famous baroque specialist. Funny how you know certain colleagues in a small country like ours, but never really got to meet them. And once you do: BANG! Things happen. I never knew JW was such an enthusiastic man, and…a real Handel lover!

So we worked in a spacious room with a horribly out-of-tune piano. But that usually annoying aspect wasn’t of any importance really. I played a suite and we talked about the levels of intensity, ornaments and their meaning, the balance between harmony and melody, if Handel was gay or not, his religion, his temper, his love of (lots of) food (he ordered for three!) and the beauty of the music. I am happy I decided to record everything on film. Not just for you, also for me: there was a lot of information that I have to think about.

One aspect I would like to single out for now. It was a subject at the end of our three-hour meeting, and as it struck me in the heart, it keeps bothering me now.

As JW pointed out at some point: we actually did not differ much in our thoughts about the music and the reason why we play it our certain way. But it is the certain way that showed me there is a strange friction. JW says: “ We both talk about affects, temperament and the feeling of used keys in pieces, but if you want to play with the methods and style they did play it in the 18th century (with people making whole studies and innovations at that time), you should turn your feelings off as it were and learn these things scientifically: learn the rules”.  Yes, when to play long notes short, when to give accents on longer notes etc.: there is a whole practice that is made out of rules.

I of course know this all too well, I am absolutely not ignorant about that, but the phrases “ turn your feelings off “ and “ scientifically” made me feel nautious and sick… i could not help it. It was like a poisonous arrow in my heart, although i want to be open minded about it. In a split-second I thought about my musical upbringing, my feelings about music, why i play music and why I live with it and why it keeps turning my life into a difficult one at times. Also I thought –in that split-second- about the fact that I actually am the child of academic parents and that I love learning facts, especially when it comes to historical facts or soccer game scores…(mind you, I do not always remember them, that’s something different).

But when combining music and scientific interest, I get a hugely childish reluctancy towards the thought. And it is quite pertinent: it just stays there.

I understood though what he was saying. Musicians in the 18th century (in a way also still in the 19th) were so much more subtle about the phrases they played, so much more thoughtful about the articulation and bowings then we do now. The landscape was always so finely layed out in phrasing. Good harpsichordists must have also been so much more subtle about timing because it was one of the important ways to give a suggestion of dynamic difference. Affect and emotion had all kinds of thought-out ways of being brought in the music.

40 or so years ago, this whole movement in the music world started rediscovering this practice. But now it often bores me, because when attending a performance too often I end up thinking “ O, here we go again” when a new movement of another baroque concerto starts with long non vibrato bowings. It becomes predictable and something is missing. That something is called true emotion. And I am sure it wasn’t meant that way. So rules, no rules, something else is more important, and we as musicians and people live in another century, on another part of the curve. I can imagine that in certain specific ways that makes a difference.

As a musician I want to bring out the feeling I had when I first heard that music. And there are many ways. My way is the intuitive way, but only after I am conscious of all the different ways to play this. So rules, here I come. It will be an adventure!

(Source: handelatthepiano.com)