Bach Tunings
Marc Sabat & JS Bach
Sara Cubarsi & Xenia Gogu (violins)

Johann Sebastian Bach  /  Marc Sabat

Sei Bach-Intonazioni per Violono solo   (ca.1720 / 2010-2019)
version for two violins in just intonation tunings

&

Marc Sabat    Streams Barely in Winter  (2019)

1  Streams barely in Winter 1 - Cold   2:04
2-5   Sei Bach-Intonazioni Ia: Sonata Prima   18:28

6   Streams Barely in Winter 2 - Sun   1:14

7-11   Sei Bach-Intonazioni IIa: Sonata Seconda    25:07

12   Streams Barely in Winter 3 - Stones   2:00

13-16   Sei Bach-Intonazioni IIIa: Sonata Terza   25:03

INTERVIEW WITH MARC SABAT

Could you tell us about the background to this project, and why Bach?

Like many other string players, I have a special connection to Bach's six solos for violin. The pieces are experimental compositions in a timeless sense, playing with the limits of harmony and counterpoint sounding on an unaccompanied melody instrument. The music is completely idiomatic, aware of the violin’s physicality, and at the same time absolutely utopian, following a musical exploration that goes beyond instrumental limitations and challenges the player to attempt the same. I guess that Bach deliberately chose the six primary tonalities of his cycle to complement and challenge the traditional tuning in perfect fifths (a violin has open strings G D A E); the six solos present, in order, the keys G B A D (minor) and then C and finally E (major). 

Unlike keyboards, where the (usually 12) notes have to be tempered to work in various harmonic contexts, strings can adjust the tuning of notes on a case-by-case basis. Ideally, the open strings, when sounded, ought to fit the mode, and decisions about intonation ought to be made consistently and logically. Some years ago, in my own music, I started to work with untempered intervals and chords, sometimes called just or rational intonation, which is tuned according to the row of harmonic partials and provides many different microtonal sound combinations. I especially like that musicians can learn to distinguish and tune such sounds by ear.

“Bach Tunings” tries to apply the intervals of JI music to Bach’s three solo sonatas, mainly using the relationships of lower harmonic partials and trying to keep the sound somewhat idiomatic (to my ears) by avoiding obvious “quartertones” and microtonal-sounding melodies. At the same time, my approach tries to avoid illogical or inconsistent use of the open strings, which means, for example, that the note C often has three different tunings, ranging across a quartertone range: as a perfect fifth from G, as a major third from E, or as a natural seventh from D. In the third sonata, C is the tonal centre, so in my version, the keynote (tonic) is continually shifting! In fact, at one point in the first movement, I combine all three of these different C’s in close proximity, sometimes even simultaneously! This, of course, is taking things a little far, but to me it sounds surprisingly fitting in the context!

To compose the tuning, I annotated Bach’s score with JI accidentals, and eventually found myself writing a second violin part, a mix of bordun and counterpoint, which serves to enable and colour the JI tuning. The collaboration with Sara Cubarsi, who combines instrumental virtuosity with a deep conceptual curiosity, inspired me to turn my studies and sketches into a completed musical project which we have presented live and now are documenting on this disc. Thank you Simon for appreciating this work and for making it publicly available on Another Timbre!

Can you say a bit more about the second violin part?  As a non-musician who knows Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin quite well, for me it’s the second violin part even more than the unorthodox tuning which really ‘makes the music strange’ on first hearing, and it captivated me on first listening. As I understand it, when you started composing you thought of the second violin as a kind of drone, but as you started composing it became much more.

My first attempts at tuning the Bach solos were simply annotations of the original score. At some point it seemed to me more musical to hear the subtle variations of tuning both melodically and as simultaneously sounding intervals. So, I started composing a second violin line made of changing drone notes, mainly open strings and harmonics. 

Sometimes it made sense to provide a lower note, and sometimes a note in the middle or higher register. The way these tones started to complement and transform some aspects of Bach’s music, adding syncopation and unexpected accents, inspired me to go deeper and freer into a kind of conversation with the score, sometimes writing counterpoint and imitative lines. 

Because the tuning isn’t always rooted in the bass line, my additions step outside the approach typical of traditional Baroque voicings, moving away from style imitation or parody into something more experimental and free, which I feel allowed me to make the music my own. I my imagination I really found myself in a kind of collaboration with Bach. In the first sonata I made very few, if any, alterations to his solo, focussing on my added part. But by the third sonata, I decided to divide Bach’s notes between the two violins when needed, allowing the often-unplayable sustaining notes Bach wrote (but expected to be only briefly sounded in broken chords) to be actually sounding through the moving melodic lines, revealing parts of his score that aren’t usually heard.

Both Sara Cubarsi and Xenia Gogu’s playing is tremendous. But how did you meet Sara, and was she involved in the project from an early stage?

Sara was studying violin in London at the Royal Academy in 2014 when she wrote to me to find out about my music and work with microtonal just intonation. She adapted and performed an early piece of mine, a duo for violin and viola called Three Chorales for Harry Partch and shared some of her own fascinating compositions with me. A few years later we met in Berlin after her performance of a trio by Catherine Lamb in the Studio 8 series, and we decided to meet at Cat’s studio the next day and have a look at my sketches for the Bach Tunings, which I had just started to adapt for two violins. She became excited about the project, and some years later we made a first rendering during her doctoral studies at Cal Arts. Finally, when Sara moved back to Europe and began working with MusikFabrik, we had the opportunity to plan a recording session and a live concert featuring all three Sonatas and my three preludes, which is how this recording came to be.

You preface each of the Sonatas with three short compositions of your own – Streams Barely in Winter, 1, 2 and 3. If I have one regret about the disc, it’s that these pieces are so short. I think they’re gorgeous. But what relation do they have to the Bach sonatas?

These three pieces are intentionally miniatures, each focussing on a particular aspect of the Sonata it precedes when combined with the Bach-Intonations, as they are presented on this disc. I imagine the pieces also can be played on their own or as a small set, and in fact I adapted and extended the first two into a longer form as a piece for chamber strings sharing the same title. 

The first piece, titled “Cold”, explores how the descending minor scale in Bach’s g minor Adagio, which serves as the opening melody and also as the bass line, takes shape from simple intervals tuned below the note D. My second prelude, “Sun”, explores the bright, shining sound of septimal harmonies in which the lower open strings of the violins serve as natural sevenths, forcing the fundamentals to be tuned a comma higher than usual. This gives another take on the descending minor scale, in this case echoing from a similarly tuned passage in Bach’s a minor Fugue. This unusual tuning offers an alternative sounding of the e minor chord on violins, which in its conventional form combines open G and E into a Pythagorean harmony. The third and final miniature, “Stones”, explores different “shapes and sizes” of the note C, which is the multiply tuned tonic of the third sonata. The C bends up and down so much it even introduces a quartertone to our ears, which is even made explicitly into harmony by including two soundings of the 13th harmonic.