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Guest post by Ann Martin-Davis, pianist and teacher

‘Dum diddle diddle dum dum dum.’

How can it be that this simple tune that we all know isn’t counted in three? Yes, you heard me, not in three, but in fact in four plus two.

Try it out right now in your head – go on – and then go through all those other Baroque minuets that you have been humming for years and you’ll see that the shape of the melodies and the articulation that follows fall into the same pattern.

Now fast forward 200 years to Ravel; Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, the Sonatine, Menuet Antique, and you’ll find the same patterns, and why? Because this is how it’s danced.

Learning the dances of the Baroque period doesn’t just sort out your understanding and playing of these composers, but it can inform pretty much everything else dance related that you might be involved with.

I’m with the dancer and historical coach Chris Tudor, and I’m joined by harpsichordist Sophie Yates, and Bach specialist, Helen Leek. We’re here to learn some of the basics and after intros in our ‘comfortable clothing’, we’re warming up with a simple hand held chain called a linear carole.

Caroles, or carols as we now call them, always used to be danced and sung, but at some point we lost the dance element. The origins go way back to the ancient Greeks and to the choros, or circular sung dance. Remember the dancers on Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad? The magic of the shield creates a moment of escape from the pressures of reality and of the battle; I too quickly forget my parking battle off the Euston Road and settle into the conviviality of it all.

Next up is a renaissance dance, the Branle, which Chris tells us is a surreptitious way of introducing some of the steps to a minuet. We take one step to the right, close, then one step to the left and over with the right. Always rotating clockwise as we don’t want any negative energy.

We make swift progress and then I drop the bomb.

‘How about a Courante?’

Chris grimaces a bit and at this point I suddenly have a flashback to a grade exam, where I galloped through a Bach Courante and landed with a grateful ‘ta dah-like’ placement of the final ‘G.’

Sophie steps in and tells me that the Courante was fast in the Renaissance, but by the time J S Bach got busy with it, the metre had moved to 3/2 making it one of the slowest of all of the Baroque dances. She continues, ‘it could be apocryphal, but gossip colomnist in Chief in Versailles, Titon du Tillet said it slowed down because of Louis XIV’s long-toed shoes, meaning an extreme turn-out was necessary.’

So the Courante gets us talking about the ‘cadence’ of a dance which can relate to two ideas. We have cadence, as in the cadence of your voice, the qualities of the dance (a Courante has a noble and stately quality), but there is also the exploration of the cadences in the music and how these are going to relate to the cadences in the dance.

This is blowing my fuses now, so we all agree it’s time for coffee…

‘Dancing with Bach’, hosted by Ann Martin-Davis, with Chris Tudor, Sophie Yates and Helen Leek is a one-day workshop for pianists exploring the dance forms familiar to Bach that he used in his Partitas, Suites, and throughout his other collections of keyboard music.

Saturday 22nd February at St Mary-Le-Savoy Lutheran Church, London WC1H 9LP

Find out more here

Bring your dancing shoes!

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Guest post by Luca Bianchini

Mozart is said to have written a catalogue of his works, which he reportedly began in 1784 and completed in 1791—or so it was believed until recently.

The Thematic Catalogue, held in the British Library in London, is a small, ninety-page book in excellent condition. It is bound and features an elegant part-leather cover. Fifty-eight of its pages contain text and music. The catalogue is arranged with detailed descriptions of the instrumentation on one page and the incipits of the pieces—typically four bars written on two staves—on the opposite page.

All major books on Mozart, including the recently updated Köchel catalogue, which officially lists and dates his compositions, rely on this so-called autograph catalogue as a critical source. It serves to document and certify Mozart’s most important works, including, for example, the Jupiter Symphony. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto is attributed to him precisely because it is included in this thematic catalogue, supposedly in his own handwriting.

A recent study by Professors Luca Bianchini, Anna Trombetta, and Martin Jarvis, published in the prestigious Journal of Forensic Document Examination (JFDE), introduced an innovative method of ink analysis. This study revealed that the catalogue is a forgery, fabricated around 1798 and written by multiple hands.

To verify the authenticity of a document, one must first examine the paper’s watermark. In the case of the Thematic Catalogue, no identical watermark has been found from before 1802. Furthermore, Mozart never mentioned or wrote about the catalogue during his lifetime, nor did any of his closest relatives or acquaintances. The catalogue was not included in the inventory of Mozart’s possessions compiled by court officials after his death in late 1791. In fact, there is no record of the catalogue until 1798—seven years after his death.

At the IGS 2023 international conference on forensic handwriting analysis, Professors Bianchini and Trombetta demonstrated, using new software developed by Bianchini in C#, that the handwriting in the catalogue does not match Mozart’s own. (For instance, consider how Mozart wrote “Bassi” in his autographs, compared with how it appears in the catalogue.)

At the same conference, held at the University of Évora, Professor Anthony Jarvis presented another article, also subjected to rigorous double-blind peer review. He showed that all the bass clefs in the catalogue were not written by Mozart. If Mozart did not write the bass clefs on every stave, it is unlikely he wrote the rest of the catalogue. (Compare: on the left is an autograph, on the right the catalogue.)

Professor Heidi Harralson, a leading authority in forensic document examination, co-authored another article with Professor Martin Jarvis of Charles Darwin University in Australia, who is also an expert in the field and a Board Member of the Australia and New Zealand Forensic Science Society Northern Territory Branch. They presented evidence suggesting that Mozart could not have authored the catalogue. (For example, the regular strokes in The Marriage of Figaro autograph differ from the tremulous lines in the Thematic Catalogue, indicating copying or forgery.)

Bianchini and Trombetta had already published a book in 2018 highlighting numerous contradictions between the catalogue and Mozart’s original manuscripts.

For instance, the catalogue claims that a well-known aria was sung by the bass Albertarelli. However, it was written for the tenor Del Sole, since the higher notes would be unsuitable for a deep bass voice. Tempo markings, notes, rests, and musical themes often differ between the catalogue and the original manuscripts. Additional instruments are also listed in the catalogue, though they do not appear in the autographs.

Even the signature on the cover is forged.

Signature in the catalogue:

Mozart’s verified signature (from his marriage certificate):

Furthermore, certain entries were added later using different inks. These discrepancies are invisible to the naked eye but become evident when computer filters are applied, as demonstrated in the recent scientific article by Bianchini, Trombetta, and Jarvis. (For instance, the initial text highlighted in pink differs in ink composition from the darker addition at the end of the line.)

It is no wonder that the musical world, especially Mozart scholars, is in turmoil. The revelation that the catalogue is a forgery challenges long-held assumptions.

For the sake of accuracy, the newly published Köchel catalogue must be revised to account for these findings. All works attributed to Mozart from 1784 to 1791 must be re-examined, as their dates and attributions have so far relied on this forged document. Given that Mozart often left his autographs unsigned and undated, the authenticity of many works is now in doubt, potentially revolutionising the history of music.

For those interested in exploring this topic further, please refer to the press release available at: https://www.mozartrazom.com/mozarts-legacy-under-scrutiny-groundbreaking-forensic-study-published/

Luca Bianchini is a musicologist from the University of Pavia, Italy, specializing in historical musicology and document analysis.

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American pianist James Iman continues to release groundbreaking albums which challenge convention (his previous recording with music by Debussy is a case in point) and which present lesser-known or rarely-performed repertoire written since 1900 and specifically post-1945. He’s one of the few pianists I know who seems completely at home with composers whose music is often challenging to listen to – yet James has the ability to make these less accessible works engaging and clear, in part due to his meticulous preparation and a genuine affinity with this repertoire.

His third album on the Metier label was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic and was intended to be recorded prior to the United States going into lockdown. That didn’t happen, leading to a period of reflection about the programme of pieces featured on the album (works by Klaus Huber, Alban Berg, Morton Feldman and Betsy Jolas). The result is a thoughtfully conceived recording where the pieces connect, not via an overall narrative or general theme, but rather through traits and contrasts and “tendrils of musical abstracta” (James Iman). I wasn’t aware of the album’s initial conception (I hadn’t read the liner notes when I first started listening to it), and yet I sensed a certain separation and introspection, not only in the choice of music but in its actual performance.

The opening piece Ein Hauch von Unzeit II (“A Breath of Non-Time”) by Klaus Huber (1924–2017) quotes Dido’s Lament by Purcell in its opening measures and shares some of that work’s melancholy tone, though the ambience overall is one of calmness rather than sorrow. After the initial statement, the music grows more fragmented, with silences which create moments of separation rather than expectation or resolution between notes and phrases. In this way, it anticipates the works by Morton Feldman, which come later in the album. It requires control and concentration, which Iman certainly has, each note or phrase carefully sculpted.

Alban Berg’s single-movement sonata provides more florid textures and richer harmonies, a good contrast to the pieces which bookend it. Scored in B minor, the same key as that other great one-movement sonata by Franz Liszt, the music is firmly rooted in late Romanticism, despite its bold harmonic wanderings, at times redolent of Scriabin. The music feels curiously tethered; it aches to be free yet continually hovers around its home key. I wondered if this sense of yearning has anything to do with this album being conceived during lockdown….? In any event, Iman gives a convincing account, alert to the work’s shifting emotional palette and climactic episodes.

Morton Feldman’s Last Pieces date from 1959. They are not valedictory, farewell works, despite their title, nor do they quote other works or pay homage to other composers. Formless, the duration of notes and chords is left to the discretion of the performer. Thus, sounds emerge, hang suspended, merge or recede. Feldman called these ‘sound events’, and the skill of the performer lies in discerning a particular sound or nuance for each note or tone. Iman captures this brilliantly, allowing the music simply to “sit”, recalling the Japanese concept of ma (間), whereby the silence between the notes is as much music as the notes which actually sound.

The final work on the disc is another single-movement sonata by Betsy Jolas (b.1929). The music inhabits much of the same world as Feldman – and once again, certain decisions are left to the pianist. It’s more textural than Feldman’s writing, with its filigree gestures and multiple lines which stretch and contract. Rhapsodic in nature, it harks back to the Berg sonata in this respect, and Iman’s account is masterful, replete in colour, wit and spontaneity.

Iman: Album III is available on CD and via streaming on the Metier label

(This review first appeared on the Interlude.HK site)

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Music by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange

 

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Wishing you a very happy and music-filled 2025

Frances

The Cross-Eyed Pianist