Music  of  Time

FROM EARLY MUSIC IMPROVISATION

to

HISTORICALLY INSPIRED COMPOSITION
 

Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione

The Contest of Harmony & Invention

[The title of Vivaldi's 1725 collection,

which includes the Four Seasons]

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Composer - Performer

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In repertoires before the year 1800, distinctions between the roles of  composer and performer are blurred. Josquin, Dowland, Bach, Handel & Mozart were all celebrated in their own life-times as performers, whereas we look back on them as composers.

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Bach, Handel & Mozart were famous for their improvisations, which displayed not only performance skills but also stupendous feats of compositorial structure and content. 

 

Dowland, Bach & Handel reset their own music for new combinations of voices and instruments. They also borrowed, copied and imitated other composers' work - paying homage to the past, adapting to the present, and handing on to the future new masterpieces constructed on older foundations.

One of the paradoxes of modern-day Early Music is that Historical Information about period performance practices shows that the raw notes of the original score must be altered, in highly subtle and specific ways. An Ur-text is a good beginning, but it is certainly not the desired end!

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Improvisation in Early Music

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Throughout his career in Historically Informed Performance, Andrew Lawrence-King has been deeply involved with period practices of Improvisation. On tour with Tragicomedia, audiences and colleagues were captivated by his spontaneously composed settings of Amarilli mia Bella  - a fresh work in each concert. In solo recitals audience members are invited to call out the first note, or a local musician supplies a theme in a sealed envelope, as the seed from which a new Fantasia will grow.

In Early Music, there is always freedom for spontaneous re-composition, varying from light touches of impromptu variations to creation of the entire part for certain instruments or invention of an entirely new piece. The HIP improviser needs an artist's inventiveness and inspiration, as well as a craftsman's knowledge and discipline. 
 

Medieval
In medieval song, all that survives is the bare melody line. A harp-accompanist must invent his own part, according to the rules of early polyphony.

 

Andrew Lawrence-King responds to the exquisite poetry and musical subtlety of this repertoire in a series of recording projects with Paul Hillier (including Hillier's masterpiece Bitter Ballads in which the duo's creativity extends to 17th and 20th-century material), in countless performances with Jordi Savall, and on his own award-winning CDs of Les Miracles de Notre Dame and a 'medieval opera', the liturgical music-drama Ludus Danielis.  

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Renaissance

In the 16th century, Diego Ortiz described three ways to improvise: melodic embellishments to a pre-extant madrigal; variations over a repeating chord-sequence (known as a Ground); creation of an entirely new Fantasia.

 

In every performance, Andrew adds spontaneous variations to the composer's score - carefully controlling the grammar of renaissance polyphony and sensitively matching the sung text to instrumental gestures.

 

He created a mini-portfolio of variations on different versions of the Folia ground for Savall's Eloge de la Folie project, and his Irish harps swirl around traditional melodies in two collections of Celtic Viol (Spanish Premio de la Música in two successive years).

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Directing The Harp Consort in El Arte de Fantasía, he explores all Ortiz's three ways to create new Renaissance music for solo harp or for the entire ensemble. 

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Baroque Continuo

Continuo-players must improvise their part from the composer's bass-line, adding appropriate harmonies, and rhythmic or harmonic embellishments. This characteristic baroque practice challenges the player to - in Vivaldi's words - a contest of Harmony and Invention.

Agazzari (1607) describes the continuo-player's dual role in this creative process, working as co-composer from a bass-line by Caccini or Monteverdi. The fundamental role is to lay down the essential harmonies and rhythms, guiding the entire ensemble of instruments and voices. Over this, one can decorate and embellish: "having fun, and playing counterpoints". 

Andrew Lawrence-King is recognised as one of the worlds most skilled and inventive continuo-players, on harp, keyboard instruments etc. In hundreds of concerts and recordings, his mastery of spontaneous composition can be heard: selecting colours from the rich tone-palette of early instruments; realising harmonies with flair and finesse; adding deft counter-melodies. 
 

For the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra's and Barocco Boreale's recordings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Andrew led improvising continuo-sections that brought to sonic life the vivid imagery of the original descriptive Sonnets. Directing Monteverdi's Orfeo or Cavalieri's Anima & Corpo from the continuo, his realisations drive the rhythm and the drama with powerful contrasts.

Baroque Inventions
His recording with The Harp Consort of Ribayaz's Luz y Norte expands the original harp-tablature - a phrase or two to indicate the ground for each Spanish, South American or African dance-type - into an entire program of spontaneous compositions.

 

Bach's Bradenburg Concerto #3 has no written slow movement, just the two orchestral chords that form the ending to an improvised solo. In concert with Kymi Sinfonietta on harpsichord, in recording of a similarly improvised Vivaldi concerto-movement with Baltic Baroque on harp, and in live EBU radio-broadcast of a Handel organ concerto, Andrew spontaneously composes the entire slow movement, linking smoothly into the final orchestral cadence. 

Editor - Composer

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Just as Dowland, Bach and Handel adapted material for performances with new forces, so a significant element of Lawrence-King's work is editing and arranging historical scores for the particular early or modern ensemble at hand. 

A missing voice-part or instrumental movement may have to be supplied. Bold changes are often required. Sometimes an intriguing fragment demands composition of almost the entire piece, so that listeners can appreciate the musical context. 

A portrait of Bach's trumpeter, Gottfried Reiche, shows him holding a fragment of music, part of an ensemble fanfare or Abblasen. For Kymi Sinfonietta's Brandenburg series, Andrew Lawrence-King composed a fanfare around this fragment, as a companion-piece to Concerto #2 with its virtuoso trumpet solo.

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Historical Creativity

All of these disciplines of historical creativity come together in Andrew Lawrence-King's settings of folk-poetry from his native island of Guernsey Les Travailleurs de la Mer: Ancient Songs from a Small Island. Traditional poems and new work in the island's distinctive Norman-French dialect were collected in the 19th-century, but religious prohibitions erased all musical evidences, apart from a handful of tunes passed down orally: Andrew collected, compiled and composed all the music.

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Similarly in his most recent recording, Piae Cantiones with the Helsinki Utopia Chamber Choir. The single-line carol melodies in the original (1582) print are the starting-point for rich ensemble & solo performances. As in contemporary theatre, directed improvisation is moulded into a composed art-work.
 

21st-century Early Music

From 2010 until 2022, Andrew Lawrence-King's academic research into Early Opera, and practical experience of directing stage & music in historically informed productions crystallised into the work of OPERA OMNIA, his Academy for Early Opera & Dance at Moscow State Theatre Natalya Sats, the home of Peter & the Wolf.

Now, Andrew continues his mission to present music of the past for audiences of the future through the association Early Music Estonia, which works in harmony with ensembles and institutions to support early music in his new homeland. Andrew is Musical Director of Tallinn Baroque Orchestra, and a visiting teacher at the Estonian Academy of Music & Theatre and Tallinn Music & Ballet School (MUBA). In 2022 he was Composer in Residence at the Arvo Pärt Centre, and he is now a member of the Estonian Composers Union.

Flowing on from this activity, and from his work on Early Music with modern ensembles, Andrew has extended his composing to full-length music-dramas. When in full flow, the compositional process feels like 'improvising onto paper'. And as in CD-recording, many alternative 'takes' can be reviewed and refined, before a choice is made.

Significantly, Andrew leaves space for performers to treat his score just as they would perform an opera by Monteverdi or Vivaldi. Text and rhythm are essential, continuo realisation and added embellishments are welcome, sensitivity for style is invited, the energy of emotional contrasts is shared.

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Each work engages profoundly with a literary text of the highest quality; each work is inspired by the aesthetics of a particular historical repertoire; each work invites a particular new audience to re-discover lost sound-worlds; each work represents another 'Contest' between the discipline of period Harmony and the creative force of Invention.