1. Fantasy

Volume I

14 Jul

Almost all lovers of music create their own imaginative worlds. Where better to start, then, than with fantasy?

The idea of fantasy covers so many things: escapism, invention, longing, improbability, freedom, all the way to loss of contact with reality. Such open-endedness seems intimately suited to musical experience, perhaps better than any other art, and the genre of instrumental fantasy (or ‘fantasia’) has been an important genre for several hundred years. Like the richly textured worlds of famous authors like JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling, a musical fantasy builds complex realms from the free play of the imagination.

Despite the lack of words, instrumental music has an amazing capacity to invoke narratives, images and feelings. You can think of composers and performing musicians rather like authors; and like authors, they are only part of the story! The really exciting transformations happen inside the mind of the person perceiving it: meanings and associations take shape, change, and linger all by themselves. For many of us, it’s the very lack of specificity in music which makes the experience so compelling. The imagination is free, but strangely bounded at the same time. If the music seems to tell a story, it can be a different one every time, and yet it can’t be infinitely different. Like counterpoint - that is, the art of putting melodies against each other - fantasy is all about the dialogue between freedom and limits.

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Fittingly, there are all sorts of musical fantasies. (And that only counts the ones which were written down!) Some of these pieces give a tantalising glimpse of spontaneous, elusive performances: extremely free - sometimes capriciously so - and grounded in improvisatory, gestural virtuosity. The creator of such a fantasy has to knit each thought into the next, just as it arises, and this is never an arbitrary process. Musicians in the past, as now, developed and practiced all sorts of strategies, plans and frameworks for arranging their spontaneous inventions into something more telling and effective. Many famed improvisers (like CPE Bach in the eighteenth century) were praised precisely for this skill of creating coherent musical organisation ‘on the fly’.

For some composers, particularly in the sixteenth century, fantasia implied a much closer relationship between those ‘pure’, almost divinely-inspired acts of invention, and the rigorous craft of counterpoint. One of the genre’s main distinguishing features was that it did not hang on any previously composed material (like plainsong chants or popular tunes) - which was a common gambit in instrumental music of the time. The famous Elizabethan musician Thomas Morley wrote that Fantasia was

the most principal and chiefest kind of music which is made without a ditty… that is when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seem best in his own conceit. In this may more art be shown than in any other music because the composer is tied to nothing, but that he may add, diminish, and alter at his pleasure. [1]

The genre’s special appeal for musicians, then, perhaps as for the modern fantasy novelist, seems to have been in ‘spinning out’ an initial object of inspiration to its full potential. Raw ideas were neither to be constrained by pre-existing procedures, nor abandoned to unconditional freedom. William Byrd, writing in 1605, described this dual aspect of the creative process vividly:

As I have learned by trial… the most suitable of all musical ideas occur as of themselves (I know not how) to one thinking upon things divine and earnestly and diligently pondering them, and suggest themselves spontaneously to the mind that is not indolent and inert. [2]

Byrd’s earnest, devout attention to the craft of composition is touchingly audible in his fantasias for viols. As you’ll hear, this music is profoundly inventive; yet it also sits a long way from spontaneous improvisation. Like all fantasias, these are ostensibly secular pieces. But as a listening experience, it feels to me like there is one foot in the nave, such is the care and attention given to the individual ‘voices’. Perhaps it is a historical bias, given what we know of the composer’s circumstances, but I can’t avoid hearing a distinctly devotional undertone of consolation and acceptance here. Maybe it is the same divine earnestness the composer described, which accompanies (and tempers) the various ‘passions’ as they arise?

One of the most compelling features of instrumental music, and which these old fantasias often take full advantage of, is the capacity for both imaginative play and ‘bodily’ engagement. The set of eight by Michael East that form the bulk of this album, is a great example of this combination. It’s the sort of music that’s simultaneously very simple and endlessly complicated, depending on what you want to get out of it! East wears his melodic style quite lightly, and seems to switch freely between cascading figures, easily singable tunes, and material that, if not always straightforwardly dance-like, really strikes me as having an identifiable gait. (No.5 offers an especially lovely example). Being for a pair of basses, rather than two differently pitched instruments, these fantasias are invested in the exchange of material almost as much as its invention in the first place. In that sense, the music feels rather stricter than Byrd’s more flexible style; and yet it unfolds unpredictably, almost as though imitating an actual conversation.

‘Exchange’ is one of those tropes that comes up again and again in music of this period, and frequently performs both a structuring and a kind of narrative function. In East’s pieces, for example, distinct sections within a number often follow a pattern in which the music gains energy as the same idea is passed playfully between the two parts. Each handover creates greater and greater intensity until the music breaks through a ceiling, and we are catapulted into a new invention (or sometimes scene) altogether! It’s not uncommon for one part to be more dominant than the other, but unlike later ‘galant’ music for pairs of instruments, these hierarchies alternate rather frequently - often taking a phrase each, sometimes shifting over within two or three beats! By the end of some of the pieces, this is happening so rapidly that the music seems intent on invoking a streetwise sparring match.

A compositional gambit like that perhaps suggests a desire to admit a grittier, more terrestrial reality into the music’s imaginative universe than the elevated idea of ‘counterpoint’ might otherwise allow. Even before one takes account of the brief titles of these fantasias - which generally provide only the most tantalising indication of narrative or ‘poetic’ content - it’s hard not to get a sense of 'people behind the notes’: characters going about their business, expressing their passions, having a confrontation, even sharing a beer. Sometimes it seems clear that we aren’t there ourselves, but are being told about a scene that’s already taken place. But often the viols themselves are the protagonists, and their story unfolds in real time.

The very first fantasia seems to take up a vantage point some distance away from the action. Could we be embarking on a mythological or biblical story, complete with severe, moralising exhortations? Just as the music starts to reach a point of reconciliation, however, it slips into madrigalian lightness. The knees-up doesn’t last long, and the last laugh belongs to our narrator. Perhaps that character’s solemn verdict carries greater weight for having been interrupted by frivolities?

Fanciful readings aside, this mode of fantastical composition practically demands that the listener’s attention shift between the voices. In the process, we encounter multifaceted characters through the instruments, each of whose melodic excursions are supported, inflected, or actively opposed by the other. In that same move, East also sets up the potential for a listener to have quite radically different experiences with each performance - indeed each hearing of the same performance, as we can do in the twenty-first century! You can be taken in by the play of patterns, or let your mind conjure more specific personalities, utterances, and dramatic situations. No doubt East’s contemporary audience, too, found added value in this flexibility.

So while on the one hand these pieces can seem like a rather abstract proposition - a feeling somewhat exacerbated by the fact that all eight hover around a single main key area (D minor) - yet the teasing titles do just enough. They remind the ear to embrace a more embodied, personified hearing - an experience that doesn’t have to be antagonistic with the ‘play of tones’ alone, but can co-exist with it. This music’s affinity with physical gesture is key in conjuring all manner of earthly experiences: whether that’s a character’s gait, or the sense of deep emotion.

Listen out, too, for a tension in the very first piece between a strict, ‘moralising’ tone and a carefree, ‘dancing’ impulse - if anything defines the entire set of fantasias, it’s that basic contrast. I have no idea if such imaginary personae were ever invoked or observed by musicians of centuries past in response to these pieces - nor do I really mind either way. It seems unlikely, however, that this kind of conversational counterpoint was ever regarded as ‘pure’, in the way later generations would idealise the skills of part-writing. These sounds seem, sometimes quite uncannily, to model people: their motions, their inner passions, and everything in between.

I think the designation given by the composer sums up the multi-dimensional aspects of the listening experience, in all of its imaginative fantasy: