Tasto solo

Above: During the break at tonight's rehearsal. Paul Daniel is standing, talking to the oboe player.

(SKIP THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU ARE NOT IN THE MOOD TO BE EDUCATED!)

This phrase appears lots of times in the accompaniment to Messiah, and I wondered for years what it meant. Last year I finally got round to looking it up: Tasto solo (in the accompaniment) means bass alone, with no chords (e.g. at the start of He Trusted In God on page 115). It's not immediately obvious why the composer needs to write it, because every time you see it, it appears that only the bass part is playing anyway. However, you may not all be aware that in baroque music, the keyboard players would be expected to add harmonies to the written bass part, following shorthand provided by the composer. This is called "figured bass", and you can see examples of this shorthand throughout Messiah (well, you can in my edition, anyway - I presume you can in most of them) - for example, in the first line of the first aria, Comfort Ye. There are figures 6, 4, 3 and 6 under the bass part. The keyboard player wouldn't just play on those notes, though, he'd play on all of them. If there are no figures, it implies a root position chord; 6 means first inversion, etc. This method allowed the composer to specifiy exactly what harmony he wanted, with very little effort. So "tasto solo" means the keyboard player would play no chords at all - just the bass line - rather than assuming that no figures means root position chords.

I include the above because I figured (figured! hee! d'you see what I did there? :p ) that if I'd been curious about that, maybe someone else is too :-)

Oh, and I must just tell you a joke I heard today, which I like a lot!

A drummer goes into a library. "Have you got any drumsticks?" he asks the librarian. "This is a LIBRARY!" says the librarian. "Oh, I'm sorry," says the drummer. "Have you got any drumsticks?" he whispers.

*giggle*

Anyway, tonight was the orchestral rehearsal for Messiah. Went pretty well - Paul Daniel seemed very pleased (at least, he smiled a LOT and kept saying how fabulous we sounded. We decided we will be happy to have him back sometime :p ) We were a bit concerned at first, though, because when we arrived he was lying on his back on the floor, with one leg elevated. We never did find out why! Another surprise was the arrangement of the orchestra. The VIOLAS are at the front! Never seen that before. (The traditional arrangement for an orchestra has 1st violins on the conductor's left, with 2nd violins behind them; cellos on his right, with double basses behind them; and violas in the middle, right in front of the conductor. Mark Elder prefers to have the 2nd violins on his right and the cellos where the 2nds normally are, with the double basses separated from all the other strings, at the back of the platform behind the brass.) Tonight the 1st and 2nd violins were in their traditional places on the conductor's left, and (as is usual with baroque music) the harpsichord and chamber organ were in the centre of the platform, with the oboes, trumpets, bassoon and timps at the back. But the cellos, rather than being at the front of the platform, were clustered near the keyboard instruments with the double basses nearby, and the violas were at the front, to the conductor's right. Hands up who else noticed this! Right, you can have ten brownie points.

Another odd thing was that the orchestral parts were all headed The Messiah (not Messiah). I strongly suspect they deliberately chose that edition just to wind me up :p

As for the rehearsal itself, I was delighted to find that I can actually do all the runs without running out of breath. Never managed that before. I think it's because I never actually understood how to do them before this year! (i.e. with no h anywhere) Gone are the days of the "comedy ff" such as the one at the top of page 63 on "a son is given". (You know what I mean - there are loads of bars like that, that come at the end of a long run. All too often the choir runs out of steam during the run, so that by the end only half of them are singing... then in the next bar, after everyone's breathed, it's suddenly deafeningly loud. Comedy ff. Amused me every time!)

(Actually I was doing pretty well even before we got to the runs - I was impressing the people next to me by reading the mind of the conductor. For example, guessing which movement he was going to do next (that's actually pretty easy to do, if you know which movements the trumpets play in) and guessing which bar he was talking about, when we had different bar numbers to the orchestra... Good grief, I'm such a showoff, aren't I? I must stop that!)

One thing I do like about Paul Daniel's interpretation is that it's generally quite a bit faster than usual. Adds to the excitement - and also means we get more sleep on Sunday night! Messiah is a long gig - the latest time I remember leaving the stage (after a 7.30 start) was 10.20 pm. (That was in 2003, when we did it, unusually, with no cuts.) But the usual finish time is about 10.10. Anyone want to bet on 10pm for this year?

Not many amusing quotes tonight, I'm afraid. There was one Jamieism, when he was giving notes from last night: "Pretend it was written by Shostakovich, that bar. Middle period Shostakovich. Be really nasty." (that was to the sops in He Trusted In God.) I must admit I very much enjoyed singing that movement tonight, actually, because I saw that I'd written "Lucius Malfoy impression" and decided to try singing it like him. I think it worked pretty well! Imagine his voice when he says "Enjoy yourself, won't you? While you can." (That's a quote from the new film.) I also enjoyed it because it's a fugue, and I always find it exciting waiting to come in with the alto entry. It's kind of like running a relay (not that I've done that for about 30 years, but you know what I mean!) Generally the basses start, then the tenors, and by the time it's our turn I'm usually quite excited. (No, it doesn't take much!)

I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing an essay-length post for the second night running, when what I really need to do is try to sleep. (For that matter, I'm not entirely sure why I found it so difficult to summon the motivation to write actual essays when I was supposed to, when I have no trouble producing that amount of writing about trivial stuff! Oh well.) But I've started so I'll finish, as they say.

Yet another thing about He Trusted In God... there was a great soprano solo in it tonight :p Well, actually it sounded like more than one soprano, plus possibly one or two tenors and basses... all people who weren't watching at the end, and sang straight on instead of observing the general pause! Needless to say there were no altos who fell into this trap :-)

Paul Daniel almost called us mezzos tonight, until we growled at him. He then pointed out that "mezzo" and "alto" are both male words in Italian (they end in "o"). So we pointed out that "soprano" is too :-) (This seemed much funnier at the time!)

I was amused to see, on page 86 at the start of His Yoke Is Bloomin' Difficult, a drawing of a man apparently hanging himself. I was even more amused to glance around me and see that everyone else had a similar drawing. This is from last night, when Paul insisted we draw a picture of ourselves with string holding the tops of our heads high. Sadly we are all terrible artists and found it impossible to draw this without making it look like a hanged man!

I was delighted to find that I can still remember all the last few choruses from memory - yes, even Amen! And while singing the last page of the Amen Chorus it occurred to me that I mentioned dominant pedals yesterday, yet didn't point out that there's a great example of one on that page. Strictly it starts in bar 147 when the basses reach the A and hold it for several bars, although you could claim that it actually starts the bar before, with the long alto A. Both have the same effect, though - a dominant pedal is a kind of aural clue that we're reaching the end of the movement (once you know what they sound like you'll be amazed how many pieces have one). Listen to that long A and you'll see what I mean, I think. I have a thing about dominant pedals - I like them a lot. (Also Neapolitan 6ths and chord iii, but I'll explain those another time!)

In (almost) totally unrelated news, this is an interesting news story about how singing affects the brain. I've had that link for over a week and kept forgetting to post it!

Finally, I was interested to see that a few people found this blog today by searching for "hogwarts march brass band score", which is of course the music I planned to write out on Saturday (but didn't actually do till Monday night, due to getting distracted by World of Warcraft...) If you've seen the film and are wondering which bit of music I mean, it's what the brass band plays at the start and end of the 3rd task, and it looks like this (that's the first page of an 11-page score that took me several hours to produce!)