Early Music on the Piano

Researcher: Daniel-Ben Pienaar

Playing early music on the piano is not a new idea, and we see an increasing number of pianists trying their hand at music written before Bach's early Toccatas of 1707-13 and Rameau's Premier Livre, 1706. These excursions, however, are usually folded into mixed repertoire projects that form part of an ‘interesting programming’ strategy. Sustained efforts that focus exclusively on early music on the piano are still rare.

My most recent work in this field is comprised of three recorded collections – a two-a-half hour exploration of William Byrd’s Pavans and Galliards, Variations and Grounds (Avie, released 2023), the first commercial piano recording of Peter Philips’ complete Dances and Fantasias (to be released in 2025), as well as the first commercial piano recording of Gaspard Le Roux’s Keyboard Suites (also to be released in 2025).

While each of these projects requires specific ways of engaging with the scores and particular technical interventions to vivify the music on the piano, they also have important overarching aims in common:

• To find inventive and complex ways of harnessing the means of piano playing to make these pieces artistically viable in their new guise.
• To fashion a personal response to the sounds and styles of playing associated with ‘period’ instruments, especially non-keyboard ones.
• To freely embrace performance practices and contexts anachronistic to the compositions themselves as part of the creative endeavour.
• To encourage other pianists to a wider engagement with the large bodies of keyboard music before Bach.

The Byrd project highlighted the key problem of playing groups of pieces with a family resemblance – that of variety. I consciously set out to establish parameters of tempo, tactus, gesture, diction, character and mood that I would then systematically essay, taking care not to ‘repeat myself’. This densely-composed music, where every note counts, also requires careful thinking about how to handle the great proliferation of ornaments successfully on the piano. Just to mention a few variables: for each ornament one has to decide whether the auxiliary note is above or below the main note, whether the ornament will have two, three, four or more notes, whether the first note of the ornament falls before, on or after the beat, whether the first note falls before, with or after the LH bass note and so on. That all aside from considering its speed, how ‘sung’ it may be or what kind of ‘texture’ one might want to achieve. Inevitably, one needs to develop some ‘rules’ with certain consistent principles, where, nevertheless the aimed-for variety is possible.

The keyboard music of Peter Philips is much less consistent than that of Byrd and requires a different attitude altogether. Celebrated scholar Oliver Neighbour, great aficionado of Byrd, is critical of Philips’ ability to sustain a long-form musical argument. However, the music yields much of local beauty and interest. This presents the pianist with the challenge to find performative solutions that are rhetorically compelling and propels the music forward through sometimes awkward transition passages, and that sustain tension and excitement through a few over-long pieces. The ornamentation is also haphazardly annotated, requiring in some cases the addition, and some cases the subtraction of ornaments for an aesthetically pleasing effect. In a few cases I directly intervened in the text, for example by adding divisions to the short G-major Galliard, conflating the two versions of the great Pasamezzo Galliard, and by transposing a number of pieces for colouristic or programming reasons.

The Pièces de Clavecin of Gaspard Le Roux (about whom virtually nothing is known) form a bridge between the old regime of French keyboard masters like Louis Couperin and D'Anglebert and the more modern masters of the 18th century, Rameau and François Couperin. It is a fascinating score. At the top of the page, one can see a beautifully engraved keyboard score, and below it a version of the same music for two melody instruments and accompanying continuo of the same material. The trio version on occasion contains subsidiary voices that are not to be found in the keyboard score. Le Roux also adds an addendum where he shows examples of how to turn these charming pieces into versions for two harpsichords.

In this do-it-yourself spirit, after carefully considering the trio versions, I decided to combine the two scores to fashion a piano performance score, sometimes adding some of the extra inner voices or descants on repeats. Other textual interventions involved the occasional octave displacement or bass doubling, acting as touches of colour put in relief as the cycle progresses, but always in a subtle enough way that the delicate poise and occasionally elliptical voice-leading of the original keyboard score would not be lost. I wanted above all to avoid the feel of a typical ‘gothic’ 19thC faux-baroque arrangement where textures are filled out with nothing left to the imagination. This project also required careful thinking on how to render notes inégales meaningfully or effectively on the piano. Throughout the project, I took an ad hoc approach to this element, at times exploiting it and at others employing it extremely sparingly.

As I continue my exploration of early keyboard music, looking over my shoulder at my previous projects helps me to formulate ways to frame each subsequent project – the principle being for no two projects to explore the same paradigms in the same way, that each project should be framed and defined by a set of distinguishing features of its own – whether that relates to programming, ornamentation, variety of characterisation, references to other instruments or performance practices, or textual interventions. This forms a bulwark against a mere ‘churning out’ of repertoire.

A lot of music written during this period originates from an artisanal tradition of writing, a daily bread of musical production, as it were. But that is inevitably not where we are in terms of music-making now. The piano itself, with its storied history and its acknowledged legacy, and the very notion of recording itself, demand that pianists don’t merely react to the notes on the page, but respond to them, actively raising the stakes, even as they engage with a field of repertoire which still feels relatively unexplored.