June 2004 Newsletter

June , 2004 Volume 16 Number 4

Letter from the President

The Society’s celebration of J. S. Bach’s birthday, March 21, was very exciting and successful. The program was presented under the baton of Janet Youngdahl and Jeffrey Plotnick , and the cake devoured in record time. Many thanks to all the participants.

The Board would like to welcome David Sperling, who has taken over the duties of Librarian from Les Meares. Les was a great organizer, who spent much time cataloging our music last year, and putting all the information into a computer. Thank you Les, for your reminders, and keeping us in line.

Another Board member stepping down is Karen Fowlie, Publicist for three years. She worked hard to have news of our concerts seen and heard where they had never been before. Your groundbreaking work is much appreciated. Diane Antoniuk will assume those duties, and would appreciate an assistant who resides in Calgary. Diane’s phone number is 949-7717

The choir is looking for two tenors! We had to say goodbye to Herman Cooper, and Rich Revel, both moving away. Please call me or Janet Youngdahl if you would like to be part of our very friendly and talented group. Marijke van Wijk is pleased with your response to our need for Casino volunteers. But, if you were missed, we can still add your name to our list of spares. Phone her at 283-0231.

Here is an outline of the concert season for 2004-2005:

Bach Marathon Oct. 30 Scarboro U. Church

Bach Advent Concert Dec. 5 Scarboro U. Church will include Cantatas No. 3 & 4 from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and A. Corelli Concerto Grosso Op.6 No. 1 & 2

Childrens’ Concert Feb. 5 Mt. Royal College Leacock Theatre

Bach’s Birthday Celebration Mar. 20 Scarboro U. Church will include J. S. Bach’s Cantatas BWV 119 and 130 and Albinoni’s Concerto for piccolo trumpet in D Minor as well as G. F. Handel concerto grosso

The Annual General Meeting of this Society will be held on September 20,2004, at Knox Presbyterian Church. All members are welcome to attend to hear reports from our officers, and to give us new ideas.

Have a safe and adventure filled summer.

Constance Jackson

Interview with John Hall

by Anna Carnell

John Hall, a piano technician for over 30 years, and organist at the Anglican Cathedral Church of the Redeemer, is also a specialist in antique instruments, an invaluable resource for the Calgary Bach Festival Society. He has worked on organs, pianos, harpsichords, a few accordions, synthesizers and even carillons, real and electronic. 63 of his pianos, in fact, made up part of the collection at the Chinook Piano Museum (now Cantos Music Foundation), one of which was one of the oldest known Steinway grands, made in 1859.

John came to Calgary 4 years ago from a position with the Kingston Symphony Orchestra. He earned his BMus. from the Universtiy of Western Ontario with a major in theory and composition with organ as his applied instrument. His technical training came as a sort of apprenticeship with his inspiration and mentor Ted Sambell, who started one of the first programs for piano technicians at George Brown College in Toronto, in 1976, in response to a lamentable lack of training programs in Canada, excluding that at the CNIB, the Canadian Institute for the Blind.

John has studied with piano technicians from many of the best manufacturers and is now himself an instructor and the current president of the Calgary chapter of the Piano Technicians Guild. 4000 strong, the guild provides a strong teaching and support network across Canada and the US. He’ll be teaching a Canadian piano history class and a class in piano appraisal at an upcoming convention in Banff, sponsored by the Canadian Association of Piano Technicians.

Tuning, John says, is a science and an art. There are, of course, electronic aids but they fall short of the human touch and a knowledge and analysis of the acoustics and the effect the environment has on the instrument, elements affect which in turn, influence the performer’s interpretation.

John is fascinated with the history of keyboard instruments, and is keen to set up his own keyboard museum, after a stint as head technician at the the Chinook museum. After hearing of the additional parts of his collection which include gramophones, radios, records and sheet music, it seems the challenge will be to find enough space. Now that he is no longer working as senior technician at Irene Besse Keyboards, he has more time to devote to projects such as a history of Canadian Piano Manufacturers who have all long been closed. He’s agreed to share more of his insights about the art of tuning with an article for this newsletter. Of particular interest to him is Bach’s approach to tuning in his Well-Tempered Klavier.

Your Membership is important!

The CBFS has managed to put on performances of a high standard with help from our major funding sources: casinos, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Calgary Region Arts Foundation.

These sources of funding often place restrictions on how the proceeds can be used, and will not cover all the day to day expenses of running the society. For that we depend on other sources of income, like memberships. Your membership is important! Without it the society cannot continue to bring baroque music to the community.

We realize that it is not always easy to remember if your membership is current, so we have begun to print membership expiry dates on the address labels of newsletter envelopes. If the top right corner of the label has the date "09.2004", you will know that your membership is good through September of this year. If you are a little behind, don’t be embarrassed -- your renewal is gratefully received 12 months of the year.

Membership entitles you to discounted ticket pricing at most CBFS concerts and to continue to receive the quarterly newsletter. Most important of all, it entitles you to feel good about helping to make classical music a part of Calgary’s cultural landscape.

Alvin Albrecht, Treasurer/Administrator

Interview with Amy Zaluski

by Anna Carnell

Amy Zaluski, alto with the Calgary Bach Festival Society, is a new member of the Bach Festival Choir and is pleased to be singing in a choir after a long hiatus. Bach was a favourite composer in her piano studies. “Anytime I had an option, I chose Bach,” she remembers. “My mother sang all the time, at home, around the campfire, and it was natural that I would begin singing duets and trios with my sisters. Amy sang in church and school choirs as a child and performed regularly in festivals from the young age of 4 to 18. She sings now at occasional weddings and is thrilled with the opportunity to sing Bach on a regular basis.

Learning to sing alto, and singing in German have intensified the learning curve, but Amy is well aware of the difference between singing Bach in English, compared with the natural fit of words and music when singing the original text in German. She is impressed at how much progress the choir makes from week to week, even during the course of one rehearsal. She’d like to videotape the choir to have an opportunity to hear what people hear outside the choir, and feels it would be an excellent practice tool.

A highlight this year was the workshop with Mel Braun. “We worked intensely on shaping the sounds and the words consistently as a group, and it was amazing to hear how it unified the choir.”

Bach has particular therapeutic value at the moment as a stress reliever. “I sing my heart out at rehearsals and all the stress of the week goes away.” Yoga is another stress reliever, as are historical biographies and, no doubt, her husband of 4 years.

Amy’s life is particularly intense at the moment since she will be defending her Master’s Thesis in Environmental Design on June 4. She has spearheaded a collaborative, multi-stakeholder process to develop and evaluate an Ecosystem and Risk Management plan for a park in Medicine Hat. With her BSc from the University of Saskatchewan in Biology, and this MEDes from the University of Calgary, she’d like to go into environmental consulting, analyzing impacts and coordinating recovery efforts. And of course, she’d like to keep singing Bach!

Book Review

by Les Antoniuk

Godel, Esher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braidby Douglas R. HofstadterReading Douglas Hofstadter’s book is a bit like sightseeing from a comfortable chair bolted to the back of a cruise missile. Hofstadter brings Bach and Escher along for company as he takes us on a breathtaking tour of our brain, DNA replication, computer science, artificial intelligence, and Zen Buddhism, stopping for a breather now and then with braintwisting dialogues between Achilles, a Tortoise, and an Anteater in the style of Lewis Carroll.

The book is about formal systems of thought and how we use the rules of any system to assemble new truths from basic axioms. Hofstadter starts by explaining why the world of Mathematics was thunderstruck in 1931 when Kurt Godel published his Incompleteness Theorem, proving that any formal system of thought must contain statements which are perfectly true, but not provable using only the rules of the system itself. Mathematicians like Russel and Whitehead had been toiling mightily for years to purge mathematics of just such paradoxes and “strange loops” and make its foundations bombproof, so Godel’s work came as an catastrophic surprise.

Too bad for the mathematicians, you say, but where do Bach and Escher come in? Bach and Escher were as brilliant within the structure of their own formal systems as Godel was in his own field of Mathematics, and the truths they built within those systems are recognized as great Music and Art. Both artists also delighted in playing games within the rules of their discipline, and Hofstadter draws on such examples as “Ascending and Descending” by Escher, and “Crab Canon”, “Art of the Fugue”,and “Endlessly Rising Canon” by Bach to illustrate mathematical ideas such as recursive loops, those troubling paradoxes, and various sorts of encoding. As an example of encoding, did you know that in Bach’s day the written note “B” was actually “Bb”, and a true “B” was written “H” and that on the original manuscript of “Art of the Fugue”, C.P.E. Bach had written “N.B. In the course of this fugue, at the point where the name <B.A.C.H.> was brought in as a countersubject the composer died”? This example may be a bit dark (as is <B.A.C.H> when played), but don’t let me give the impression that the author spends all his time seeking Embedded Masonic Mysteries or anything of that sort.

Hofstadter approaches Bach as a mathematician first, philosopher second, and a musician last. This initially left me disturbed that Hofstadter focuses on such mental gymnastics more than the beauty inherent in the music, but then I began to enjoy trying to follow Hofstadter as he frolics through insights, anecdotes, puns, and puzzles about Bach and Escher.

The author subtitles the book “A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll”. To be fair, the book isn’t really about Bach or Escher. It isn’t even really about Godel. Hofstadter’s brain goes boldy where my brain certainly couldn’t have gone by itself, and I’ll admit that I took “brainchecks” when it cramped up at the formal symbolic logic. The book isn’t aimed at readers who have a total grasp of Kurt Godel’s work anyway, but I still may go back to pick up on those brainchecks.

This is an enormously worthwhile book. Borrow a copy if you’re only interested in the bits on Bach, because the musician is merely a bit player in the sweep of Hofstadter’s vision. If you like the rest of the book, though, you will need to buy a copy for yourself, because the owner will certainly want it back before you want to give it back.

Editor's Website Picks

Interested in contacting other choral groups in Calgary? You will find the Calgary Region Arts Foundation client list at http://www.craf.org/clients4.html

The Academy of Ancient Music at http://www.aam.co.uk/ has program notes on works and shows pictures of artists, such as Bach. To find these, click on News and Features.

A little embarrassed that you don’t know some musical term like appoggiatura? You won’t be if you check out the Glossary page of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem at http://www.bach.org/bach101/suites/glossary.html

The Denton Bach Socety revisits Bach’s first Leipzig Christmas at http://www.dentonbach.com/archive/magnificat9.htm where you can find program notes, commentaries, pictures and the full texts of the Magnificat in Latin and English.

For a site with a multitude of links to all sorts of Bach info try http://www.bachfaq.org/Interesting trivia about Bach can be found at: http://www.spiritsound.com/bachbits.html

Bach Cantatas Website URL: http://www.bach-cantatas.com

Don’t forget our own http://www.bachcalgary.org with newsletters back to September 2000, pictures of the choir and orchestra and profiles of our conductors.

A quick quiz for all the youngsters (or young at heart)

(For answers to all these questions log on to http://www.ipl.org/exhibit/mushist/bar/bach.htm)

1. Where and when was Bach born?
2. What instrument did Bach play exceptionally well?
3. How many brothers and sisters did Bach have? Where was he in the order of children-first, last, the middle?
4. How old was he when his parents died?
5. How old was Bach when he secured his first position in the choir of St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg?
6. Bach really loved to hear great organ music. How did he get to the town of Lübeck to hear the organist Dietrich Buxtehude?
7. During the years that Bach was in the service of the royal courts, what was he obliged to do that ultimately benefited Bach lovers today?
8. How many children did Bach have with his first wife? How many children did he have with his second wife? How many of his total children lived to be adults? How many of his children also became well-known composers?
9. In which German town did Bach spend most of his life?
10. While Bach was employed by the Lutheran church, what was he obliged to do that, again, ultimately benefited Bach lovers today?
11. What catastrophic thing happened to Bach in 1749? After this event, how did Bach compose his music?
12. When did Bach die? How old was he when he died?

Membership Information

The Calgary Bach Festival Society has a large library of cantatas which can be rented. If interested, please contact us at 282-8525 or e-mail Bill Zdep tcprint@telus.net

Volunteers are welcome and needed for several positions and projects. If interested, please contact us at 282-8525 or e-mail Bill Zdep tcprint@telus.net