Posted by Klaus on August 14, 2002 at 06:12:14:
In Reply to: Bach Cello Suites posted by Hiram Diaz on August 14, 2002 at 04:32:35:
More aspects:
These suites basically are dance music. Baroque dance music, which means, that you should investigate the nature of each of these dances. If you are at a school, that teaches viola da gamba, harpsichord, or recorder, you would be close to good sources.
In the cello world these pieces have had their own traditions, which not all are strictly based on the baroque roots of this music. (The most common feature of the cello performances, that I have heard, were scratchy strings and terribly out of tune playing).
Whereas the baroque dances do keep the pulse of the beats, the subdivisions of the beats not always are strictly metric. There often is an agogic stress of the first note on heavy beats.
In the prelude of the G major suite, that would imply, that the first sixteenth in the 4/16 groups on the first and third beats in each bar would be slightly stretched in length, whereas the 3 last sixteenths would be proportionally shortened. This practise of performance comes from the fact, that the typical baroque instruments mentioned above did have very little capacity for dynamic variance.
The euph does not have the same capacity in playing multiple stops as have string instruments, so you will have to plan some arpeggios to outline some of the harmonic structure. (Exactly the arpeggios are the reason, why I have not played these pieces very much on euph. I have practised them a lot on bassbone, which called for a very carefully planned slide action, where the slide moves outwards, when the music moves upwards. That approach is neither necessary, nor desirable on euph. I have not yet been motivated to reprogramme my brain to a proper euph attitude towards this music, even if it actually is much easier on euph than on the bone).
The harmonic structure is very important in this music, even if it mostly is just a single line of notes. In my ears it is impossible to play this music right, if one is not always very well aware of the relation between any played note and the imaginary bass note below it. Bach works very much with harmonic tension and release even within these single line structures. The performance must fake the presence of this absent harmonic foundation by stressing some of these "suspended" notes, that would have sounded very tense in a 4 part setting.
The link below goes to a page, that might give you an idea of agogic stresses, even if the explanation is not specifically related to baroque performance.
Klaus
(if Mick and his fellows with their limited perception capacities found my text longwinded, they should just have skipped this posting. I have only produced a very sketchy and superficial outline of, what could be said on playing Bach's cello suites on brasses. Actually nobody can be sure, that this music actually was written for cello. Some researchers think, that Bach actually wrote it for an oversized viola).