Viol weekend – The viol music of Germany
VIOLS
Tutors: Ibi Aziz & Hugh Cherry
Location: Llanarmon, in the Ceiriog Valley
Reviewer: Clive Tolley
The fourth annual NWEMF viol weekend was held from Friday to Sunday, 1–3 March, at the West Arms, Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog, in the beautiful Ceiriog valley, which extends up towards the Welsh mountains from Chirk.
This was our second time at this venue (the first two weekends were held at Fort Belan, on the Menai). The West Arms is an inn built in 1670, and hence appropriate for viol repertoire composed around this time, and it retains much of its period charm. It is also renowned for its restaurant. As on previous occasions, our tutors were Ibi Aziz, who came up from London, and, on Saturday, Hugh Cherry, from rather closer to hand (near Wrexham). This year we had a much smaller number of participants – twelve players (plus the tutors), of whom three came only on the Saturday; there were also two accompanying spouses, who spent time walking and painting in the district. Of the participants, only two (or three, to stretch things a little) could be described as local; others came from London, Ireland and remote corners of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. We were fortunate to have several participants who have not attended previous weekends; on the other hand, rather large numbers of previous participants were unable to attend. The smaller numbers meant that we did not have the whole of the West Arms to ourselves this time, but we nonetheless had three rooms to play in (which the venue is good enough to let us use without additional costs), and did not suffer any particular difficulties, though we rented a cottage separate from the main building and had to ferry things between them for sessions. We separated into either three or two groups, depending on the sessions, and everyone had longer with the tutors to guide us than in earlier years.
We seemed to squeeze the maximum playing potential out of every minute of the day – the beautiful countryside and beaming early spring sunshine was gazed at longingly by some, but nearly everyone chose to spend the whole time playing, from around 5 pm on Friday up to about 10 pm (with dinner between), then from 9.30 am to 9.30 pm on Saturday, and right up to 3.30 pm on Sunday, when we were due to leave. We must thank our tutors for putting in the work of guiding us through all these sessions; in particular, Hugh was only engaged to go on up to dinner on the Saturday, but stayed on, and for example gave my group some detailed post-dinner advice on how to lift the Byrd piece we were doing above the level of just getting the notes in order, and lend it some proper shape.
Byrd did sneak in, along with a number of other personae non gratae: we were supposed to be working on German viol music. In fact, the majority of what we looked at was German, but we never felt the need to stick absolutely strictly to the theme. We covered pieces from anonymous fifteenth century works right up to Bach’s fugues, with a lot in between, mainly Schein, Scheidt and Senfl, with some others such as Isaac making an appearance too. The music offered a wide range of styles, and difficulties, from low-lying and distinctly ‘early’ sounding Renaissance pieces, through the lively and quite tricky ‘Musical Banquet’ collection of Schein, on to the contrapuntal fugue so typical of Bach.
We did not have any beginners on the course, but players’ levels of skill naturally varied. Fortunately, there did not seem to be any fundamental problems with people being able to work together on a good variety of pieces, and I think it is fair to say there was a general feeling that the weekend was a musical success. One of the particular features of the NWEMF viol weekend is that we do not expect people to arrive in pre-formed groups, which is the case on many courses (and which does not serve those well who are not in fixed consorts); indeed, part of the purpose is to enable people to play with others.
One of the serendipitous delights was that Liz White brought a whole consort’s worth of Renaissance viols. At least, it was not entirely just serendipitous, as it was part of the original intention for the weekend that we would have sessions on these instruments, but as the two players most familiar with them were unable to attend, I had given up the idea of being able to carry the idea through, until Liz suggested bringing her collection. This proved an immensely successful idea, and nearly everyone had one or two sessions playing these rather different instruments, with great enthusiasm. The sound is quite different – more resonant, but a bit reedier (they have no sound posts, generally speaking). The bows are held differently, without the finger touching the hair, so control is different. The tuning is also different. The highest instrument we had was a tenor in A. It was interesting to play at pitch, especially with the unusual B string, but we also played transposed. This is easy enough with the A tenor and massive A bass (known as the Monster) – we just pretended they were D treble and D bass – but we encountered some interesting problems with the middle instrument, involving strange clef and key signature changes which I could not fathom. Anyway, we managed to do more than just get by, and were successful in coaxing some real music from these instruments.
The weekend was a success musically, and the venue and what it has to offer were much appreciated. On the other hand, we need a minimum of around twelve residential participants to make such weekends financially viable, and on this occasion we made a loss. Clearly, it is not feasible to sustain losses on a recurrent basis, so the future of such weekends remains uncertain, and they may not be possible to repeat. Part of the aim of the course is to make use of an attractive location and charming venue with good food; we are competing against successful institutions elsewhere that are in a position to offer courses more economically (but probably without the charms specific to our weekend), so making this sort of event, with its non-institutional ambience, viable is rather a challenge.
Clive Tolley
First published in April 2013 Newsletter
