Interesting realization while playing baroque music

I’ve been playing these baroque pieces which involve – on a string instrument – playing three and even four notes together – what are termed triple- and quadruple-stops. Double stops are pretty common, triple stops add a little bit of complexity, but then quadruple stops really make things interesting.

I don’t think a lot of composers wrote music with a lot of quadruple stops. Not exactly sure why this is but possible reasons may be a lack of intimate knowledge of the instrument – to compose music with a lot of quadruple stops you really have to intimately know the instrument. Another possible reason is that it might simply have been considered too difficult if not impossible to play.

But then there’s my favorite baroque composer and all his music with quadruple stops and so it makes me wonder. Some things I’ve been wondering are: How different might the instrument he played have been? Over the decades and centuries the design has evolved. This evolution equates with an increase in power and tension.

I’ve seen a picture of a baroque bridge and the radius of curvature is a lot less than on a modern one. This would imply that the radius of curvature of the fingerboard would also have been less, since the bridge’s curvature matches the fingerboard.

I imagine playing an instrument with a fingerboard and bridge with a smaller radius of curvature, with strings that were gut and less tense, and a sound of the instrument that was a lot softer. This reminds me of the little tabletop clavichords of the time – also soft-sounding instruments.

So as I’ve been playing these pieces and dealing with these complex fingerings for all these double-, triple-, and quad-stops in succession I’m starting to realize that one strategy for approaching playing them is to relax more, not to intensify as the initial impulse might be.

I’m finding that this music, as intense as it is, is actually very soft. The radius of listening to the instrument would have been much smaller. This was not only because the instrument itself was softer, and because the way you have to play these notes involves being more relaxed and soft, but also no doubt because the world then was much, much less filled with noise.

Changing the design of an instrument and playing it with a different technique are one thing, but changing your ear at a deep level – undoing all the damage from living in a world with constant, abhorrently loud noise – is quite another thing.

I can kind of see why this music – as profound, beautiful, and inspiring as it is – is not really popular in this world filled with noise.

And when it is played you frequently hear it interpreted in a way where the musicians are using power – a technique that is not appropriate and kind of perverse for this type of music, yet sadly fitting to how things are in the modern world.