Vol. 4: Archaeology Isn’t Enough
I find myself looking at 250-year-old letters, manuscripts, and scores. They’re about music, but they aren’t the music - they’re silent, apart from the way they rustle like dry leaves in hushed library reading rooms. Friedrich Wilhelm Rust’s hands are now bone and dust, and the sounds of his violin have long since dissipated. Documents are a pretty dark glass through which to peer into the past.
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In Rust’s lifetime—can we call him “Freddy,” between us friends?—classical music was what we would call new music: the continuous search for invention, contemporary relevance, and novelty. Freddy and his contemporaries were well aware of their musical forebears, but typically reserved their appreciation of them to private study or performance. As far as public performances went, their reputations and income relied on creating new music in the latest styles to satisfy a discerning audience.
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Excerpt from DB Mus.ms. Bach P968
Freddy, allegedly, was able to play substantial portions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier from memory by 13. At any rate, he was an ardent J.S. Bach aficionado for the rest of his life, and collected countless valuable manuscripts by Bach and others.
Among these manuscripts is a rare early copy of Bach’s Sei Solo. It’s incredible to know that he had it. It’s now stored in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus.ms. Bach P 968. We can’t say whether Rust publicly performed Bach’s Sei Solo, but we do know he had this manuscript, a killer set of violin skills, and an affinity for Bach. More compelling still, Rust’s two Sonate a violino solo senza basso CzaR 80 and 81 (1795) are clearly modelled on Sei Solo, featuring forms and styles that were strikingly anachronistic for Rust’s day. But, at the same time, Rust’s Sonate go out of their way to showcase the latest advances in violin techniques and styles.
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There’s a circularity here; just like Rust looked to documents of the musical past to inform his contemporary music making, I find myself digging into his documents to change how I perform in the present day. But both of us are in this not to copy the past but to feel it through the lens of our own bodies and experiences.
Rust must have felt that Bach’s works were old-fashioned: by the time Rust wrote his Sonate, he was as far removed from Sei Solo as we are from the pop hits of 1947. So, of course, he didn’t write a knock-off Sei Solo—he took what inspired him, made it his own, and made it fit the needs of his lifetime.
For my part, I think some of Rust’s compositional tricks have aged poorly; in the search for novelty he could be a little twee. But that’s okay; I don’t need to idolize or copy him. I need to ask, instead, how it feels and sounds to use his techniques and music in a living performance practice of the present day.
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The Citadel of Aleppo, a tell used since the third millenium BCE.
A professor once reminded me that “archaeology isn’t enough”—in other words, it’s not enough to just dig up the musical past and put it on display. But if you’ll forgive a small archaeological tangent:
In the ancient Near East, some of humanity’s first and largest cities were built and rebuilt for thousands of years on the same site. Over time, the accumulation of mud brick fragments and other refuse raised the foundations of the cities into tells, huge manmade hills rising from the landscape. Countless remain today, many of which still host living cities and towns.
I think the tell is an important idea. It’s an archaeological site, yes, but one on which you build, with a mix of respect and ambivalence about the past occupants.
So little of the musical past remains to grasp onto - just dusty documents, archaeological ruins of a music that once sounded out loud. Rubble, cryptic runes, statues of forgotten gods.
But something like Sei Solo is a tell: a lingering remnant that whispers “build here,” a place where my forebears have built, and where more will build for centuries to come. Out of and on top of this rubble, one can build performances which are neither exact replicas of the past nor fawning tributes to Another Dead White Man: you are just building where they once happened to be too, and with every additive generation the view of the surrounding landscape gets a little better.
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My time as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with additional research funding from the Mitacs Globalink Research Award. The upcoming European component of my research is supported by the American Bach Society's William H. Scheide Research Grant.