138 ❧ chapter thirteen
effect. If you listen to any ensemble of human voices, you will fi nd, for exam-
ple, that the sound of lower notes cuts off less rapidly than the sound of high
notes. This is also true in the orchestra. If the cut-off of a cello is much less
sudden than the cut-off of a fi ddle, the cut-off of horns is quite different from
the cut-off of violas. If you want to bring out part-writing, the releases of simul-
taneous notes must never be done in lumps. They must be done according to
the way they fall as linear progressions. I suppose it was the fugues of Bach that
taught me more about this than anything else, but it’s equally true for perfectly
simple chordal accompaniment of any Scarlatti sonata. One usually needs to
hold the bass a little longer than the upper part in, let’s say, a three-voice chord
in the left hand; even if they are rapidly repeating, even if one can hardly hear
the difference, it makes itself felt. It also produces all sorts of possibilities of
infl ection.
I think that one can almost make a blanket rule never to make a simultane-
ous release unless there is a defi nitely valid musical reason for it—never do
it as an automatic thing, never play chords as fi stfuls of notes. Chords must
be played not with mittens but with gloves so that you can have independent
digital control over the notes within a handful of notes. There is in the pre-
dominating two-voice texture of most of Scarlatti’s music an abundance of
polyphony, of cross accents, of outlinings of more than one voice, in what is
notated as a single part, which, of course, is true in Bach; but it is Scarlatti who
almost never, in later life, writes full part-writing, especially in fast movements.
It is riddled with a multiplicity of non-simultaneous accents. I think in a genu-
inely musical performance, there is rarely an accent at the same moment in
two voices. In two or more voices, the accents usually fall in different places,
or need to. The opposition between one kind of note value and another needs
constantly to be brought out, if the music isn’t to shrink into sounding like
what I thought it sounded like in 1931.
Well, I suppose the most important requisite of all, and I have it noted here
in capital letters and underlined with an exclamation point, is IMAGINATION!
There is nothing abstract, keyboardish about Scarlatti; there is always a hint
of an extraneous sound, a suggestion of another instrument, a suggestion of
an opposition between a solo instrument and a multiplicity of instruments, a
suggestion of several dimensions. Above all, the imagination affects not only
the notes that Scarlatti put on paper and the notes while they are sounding on
the harpsichord, but perhaps it affects more than anything else the silences
between the notes. If those silences aren’t fi lled with some kind of imagina-
tion, the music shrinks into considerably less than life size.
I come now to a not-entirely-representative set of specifi c examples, many
of them of a kind that is easily misunderstood, of Scarlatti’s handling of the
harpsichord. A much more balanced and complete treatment can be found in
that chapter of my book with numerous examples. But I simply picked out a
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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