Inventiones Magnum Bonum | Chamber Music | Canons, from the Caritatem-Charivari Collection |
Celebrity Chamber Players, under the baton of Dir. Marshall Thomas | Artwork, courtesy of Thos. Illustration Studios | All rights reserved.
Celebrity Chamber Players, under the baton of Dir. Marshall Thomas | Artwork, courtesy of Thos. Illustration Studios | All rights reserved.
About the chamber music...
An overview from a copy editor at Signature Recordings to Chief Editor Timothy Beck, principal trombonist at the
WDR Sinfonie-Orchester Koln
Chamber Music, by Marshall Thomas
Thos. Illustration Studio |Copyright 2011
by 7 Arts Foundation
Chamber music like that found in the Caritatem-Charivari Collection is a sensual art for a conditioned salon audience. While the ears are occupied, a certain logic dictates the combination of alternatingly transforming, transfixing and transporting musical miniatures. The poetics of this particular chamber music craft builds upon complementary and contrasting scores interwoven into an apt accompaniment designed to interweave complex feelings with intimate, unmistakable manifestations. For each finished work in every folio is a complete musical idea. And, as a composer who likes to commune with his performers, Dr. Thomas allows for the completed forms to be combined into a kaleidoscope of transcendent images that can achieve tonal or other effects by the organized mind of the ensemble leader or artistic director who can focus on what is inviting about rare expressions,what is special about chamber music gatherings, what is unique about the works cobbled together as more than nourishment, and what is connected to one or more essential truths that can bring conditioned minds and hearts together to experience melodies chase.
In this collection, the sympathetic and trained ear detects and enjoys some subleties and refinements with which Dr. Thomas has decorated and, to the enthusiast, deepened the sober, the spiritual and the playful goings-on his interpreters can offer to complete a lovely picture, accent an event or punctuate an extra-musical statement. Here there is music for the chapel, the stage, the ceremony, the retreat, the documentary, the poetry reading, the happening - with gestural outcomes depending upon the sensibilities of the organizer for order and tone, context and other ingredients of contextual aptness.
The Caritatem-Charivari Canons present, by turns, haunting tones, gentle introductions and grander fanfares and even memorable 'flutters' to express acute introspection balanced, in the folio settings, with rhythmic illuminations leveraged with occasional confections. We can accept these conventions of chamber music levity and confession, exuberance and declaration, piety and intellectual attack as informative and clearly correct expositions for passionate openings, for tender plaintive calls in undertow to momentous readings, sacred gatherings, theatrical punctuations - all composed to be performed in ways that address the gift of combining forms to serve watchful, critical ensemblists positioned, by design, only feet away from their fans and guests, invigilators and students.
All melodists who interpret the scores in this collection of canons, being two or five as called upon, need to share one another's air and room for shared essences, however brief. For at points along the way, they must embrace or converge, doing so side by side, like monks at chant points attuned to one another's brief utterances in launch or arc and cadence falling into hushed silence. Similar contextual management is needed for the combining of interlude, intermezzo, impromptu and/or inventione(s) to enrich the mixture - sometimes a meal, on occasion a snack or, other times a dessert - into shapes that consume listeners in forms heretofore unknown to programming.
To generalize, in chamber music - as in all public transformations centered around displays - convention rules. Habit and custom make clear the intention, which is why intimate chamber music calls for intelligent players, works that call for supreme musicianship, and ensemble sensibilities magnified beyond the normal powers of merely competent interpreters to imitate, play in unfolding parallels and capture everything in an average 23-bar presentation or less. A precious dimension-bending element - that these works can be combined and even repeated in many ways to form new wholes - is what can bring adventure and surprise to the post-modern salon.
It is true a few compositions that serve as introductions to vocal works and some laments can be presented, if not so much performed, by players with intermediate powers of expression and ordinary approaches to the notes, silences and over twenty other aspects of performing chamber music scores. Nearly all the other canons in the collection require expert performers.* Now, some previewers of the Caritatem-Charivari Canons have predicted that future ensemble leaders or programme directors who put these combined form works before their salon audiences will preserve and gradually reserve certain combined forms to exaggerate their importance for just the reasons advanced in this overview. Chamber music wants a salon of connoisseurs and erudite performance note writers and rabid proponents of authentic interpretation: The combination is half the action, the other half being the artistry on display in an intimate tableaux setting or a black box housing. Add intelligent mixing and matching of works from all the folios to the salon experiences, and chamber music may savor an edge not often seen since the invention of the figured bass.
To clinch the point,we need only appeal to experience: The acme of fulfillment for the Idea of Chamber Music is the Editor or a cache of Editors. In the realm where Caritatem-Charivari Canons can serve well, editor gifts are the gold braid and the mottled light, the interpreters' guide identified, the illuminator's placing of works in a proper light, the only cast member who addresses all - the performers, the audiences, the historians, the invigilators, the students - correctly and in keeping with the latest scholarship and playbill customs. As these offerings on the salon floor is to intellectual discourse among equals, so is the editor to interplay between marketplace, musicological reflection and conservation forces.
Long live the Idea of Chamber Music. May the Caritatem-Charivari Collection simply add to the conversation.
* You might note that the preview versions in the SRI catalogue feature only the notes and silences, as explained in all introductory passages to this presentation.
R. M. Thomerson, for the 7 Arts Foundation | Copyright holders of the visual and musical works by Dr. Thomas
WDR Sinfonie-Orchester Koln
Chamber Music, by Marshall Thomas
Thos. Illustration Studio |Copyright 2011
by 7 Arts Foundation
Chamber music like that found in the Caritatem-Charivari Collection is a sensual art for a conditioned salon audience. While the ears are occupied, a certain logic dictates the combination of alternatingly transforming, transfixing and transporting musical miniatures. The poetics of this particular chamber music craft builds upon complementary and contrasting scores interwoven into an apt accompaniment designed to interweave complex feelings with intimate, unmistakable manifestations. For each finished work in every folio is a complete musical idea. And, as a composer who likes to commune with his performers, Dr. Thomas allows for the completed forms to be combined into a kaleidoscope of transcendent images that can achieve tonal or other effects by the organized mind of the ensemble leader or artistic director who can focus on what is inviting about rare expressions,what is special about chamber music gatherings, what is unique about the works cobbled together as more than nourishment, and what is connected to one or more essential truths that can bring conditioned minds and hearts together to experience melodies chase.
In this collection, the sympathetic and trained ear detects and enjoys some subleties and refinements with which Dr. Thomas has decorated and, to the enthusiast, deepened the sober, the spiritual and the playful goings-on his interpreters can offer to complete a lovely picture, accent an event or punctuate an extra-musical statement. Here there is music for the chapel, the stage, the ceremony, the retreat, the documentary, the poetry reading, the happening - with gestural outcomes depending upon the sensibilities of the organizer for order and tone, context and other ingredients of contextual aptness.
The Caritatem-Charivari Canons present, by turns, haunting tones, gentle introductions and grander fanfares and even memorable 'flutters' to express acute introspection balanced, in the folio settings, with rhythmic illuminations leveraged with occasional confections. We can accept these conventions of chamber music levity and confession, exuberance and declaration, piety and intellectual attack as informative and clearly correct expositions for passionate openings, for tender plaintive calls in undertow to momentous readings, sacred gatherings, theatrical punctuations - all composed to be performed in ways that address the gift of combining forms to serve watchful, critical ensemblists positioned, by design, only feet away from their fans and guests, invigilators and students.
All melodists who interpret the scores in this collection of canons, being two or five as called upon, need to share one another's air and room for shared essences, however brief. For at points along the way, they must embrace or converge, doing so side by side, like monks at chant points attuned to one another's brief utterances in launch or arc and cadence falling into hushed silence. Similar contextual management is needed for the combining of interlude, intermezzo, impromptu and/or inventione(s) to enrich the mixture - sometimes a meal, on occasion a snack or, other times a dessert - into shapes that consume listeners in forms heretofore unknown to programming.
To generalize, in chamber music - as in all public transformations centered around displays - convention rules. Habit and custom make clear the intention, which is why intimate chamber music calls for intelligent players, works that call for supreme musicianship, and ensemble sensibilities magnified beyond the normal powers of merely competent interpreters to imitate, play in unfolding parallels and capture everything in an average 23-bar presentation or less. A precious dimension-bending element - that these works can be combined and even repeated in many ways to form new wholes - is what can bring adventure and surprise to the post-modern salon.
It is true a few compositions that serve as introductions to vocal works and some laments can be presented, if not so much performed, by players with intermediate powers of expression and ordinary approaches to the notes, silences and over twenty other aspects of performing chamber music scores. Nearly all the other canons in the collection require expert performers.* Now, some previewers of the Caritatem-Charivari Canons have predicted that future ensemble leaders or programme directors who put these combined form works before their salon audiences will preserve and gradually reserve certain combined forms to exaggerate their importance for just the reasons advanced in this overview. Chamber music wants a salon of connoisseurs and erudite performance note writers and rabid proponents of authentic interpretation: The combination is half the action, the other half being the artistry on display in an intimate tableaux setting or a black box housing. Add intelligent mixing and matching of works from all the folios to the salon experiences, and chamber music may savor an edge not often seen since the invention of the figured bass.
To clinch the point,we need only appeal to experience: The acme of fulfillment for the Idea of Chamber Music is the Editor or a cache of Editors. In the realm where Caritatem-Charivari Canons can serve well, editor gifts are the gold braid and the mottled light, the interpreters' guide identified, the illuminator's placing of works in a proper light, the only cast member who addresses all - the performers, the audiences, the historians, the invigilators, the students - correctly and in keeping with the latest scholarship and playbill customs. As these offerings on the salon floor is to intellectual discourse among equals, so is the editor to interplay between marketplace, musicological reflection and conservation forces.
Long live the Idea of Chamber Music. May the Caritatem-Charivari Collection simply add to the conversation.
* You might note that the preview versions in the SRI catalogue feature only the notes and silences, as explained in all introductory passages to this presentation.
R. M. Thomerson, for the 7 Arts Foundation | Copyright holders of the visual and musical works by Dr. Thomas
Paris Sabbatical: The inspiration for many a canon
(c) 2014, by TIS and Dr. Marshall Thomas | All rights reserved.