The search to balance textual fidelity, historically informed performance practices and artistic independence has occupied leading figures of the early-music movement since its beginnings. As the so-called pioneers of the revival sought to establish new ways of approaching first the ‘authentic’ and later the ‘historically informed’ performance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertories, the battles they fought about past and present and ‘text and act’ crystallized into distinct schools of thought. Up-and-coming early musicians are still trained in the resulting interpretative traditions, but owing to the pressures of the global market, they are increasingly taught these ‘ways of doing’ without also learning how those ways were developed: which historical sources, research networks and ideological feuds of generations past have coalesced to form their education. (A debate between Sigiswald Kuijken and Björn Schmelzer, with follow-up discussions, sums up these issues (Herman Baeten, Sigiswald Kuijken, Björn Schmelzer and Peter Vandeweerdt, ‘Musica Antiqua Revisited: On the Future of the Past’, Flanders Music Center, 2009, http://flandersmusic.be/file.php?ID=4246).)
Even if invisible, the politics of historical performance practices remain audible, and can be traced through repertories that have been canonical in the early-music revival, such as Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas. The major currents in Scarlatti interpretation on the harpsichord have been motivated by the generational rivalries of recording artists and pedagogues: Wanda Landowska, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Gustav Leonhardt, Kenneth Gilbert, Blandine Verlet, Scott Ross and Pierre Hantaï. For artists from Landowska, who used a Pleyel revival instrument, to harpsichordists who have more recently recorded on antiques, replicas and instruments inspired by different historical models, Scarlatti's sonatas have been a battleground for fundamental questions about textuality, artistry, touch, sound production, dynamics and the functionality and authenticity of historical instruments.
Political considerations can also be heard in the fraught social dynamics of early music. Contrary to the belief that early music serves as a haven for women and other minorities, women represent about a quarter of the aforementioned artists; they have recorded just over ten per cent of the entire Scarlatti discography on harpsichord (given the financial investment a complete-works series represents for labels and distributors, I have counted each volume of a complete-works series as a release; if they were instead considered to be a single project, this statistic would only rise to a little over seventeen per cent), and only three women, Landowska, Verlet and Elaine Thornburgh, have recorded Scarlatti more than once. As Scarlatti has become a standard for soloists in a growing early-music industry, it would seem that women have lost opportunities to perform and record the canonical works that would help them secure international careers. The irony, of course, is that so many of Scarlatti's sonatas were likely to have been composed while he was in the service of María Bárbara, the Portuguese princess who became Queen of Spain.
Lillian Gordis's first CD, Zones, raises these spectres of early music's past while proposing a future of fresh approaches to playing the harpsichord and recording Scarlatti's sonatas. The first woman since Blandine Verlet in 1976 to release a Scarlatti recording in France, Gordis brings a unique and dynamic perspective to this repertory while challenging the conservatism of harpsichord performance practice and the dominant demographics of Scarlatti interpreters. Born in Berkeley in 1992, she briefly studied with Katherine Roberts Perl and Arthur Haas before, at fourteen, she was discovered by Pierre Hantaï during a tour to the United States. He invited her to France, where she would study with him – a rare exception to his rule of not teaching – and where Skip Sempé and Bertrand Cuiller would serve as important mentors. To my knowledge, she is the only harpsichordist of her generation to have worked individually with artists from diverse pedagogical backgrounds both in the United States and in France, where students are strongly encouraged to attend the Paris Conservatory.
It is presumably this background that leads Gordis to upend the interpretative traditions that have dominated Scarlatti and the many preconceptions of how the harpsichord should sound and be played by reading between the lines of Scarlatti's sparsely notated sonatas. Why do we consider Scarlatti's rhythmic notation to be literal when we know this was not the case for his contemporaries? Why, when considering stylistic elements of Scarlatti's music, do we reject or limit the use of technical tools that we apply to slightly later eighteenth-century keyboard music, such as overholding or ‘finger pedalling’, a legato touch, rubato, ‘décalage’ (vertical stagger between the hands), arpeggiation or percussive attack? Do we assume them to be inventions of modern pianistic performance practice simply because they are not explicitly codified in textual sources that we now understand to have mostly been intended for amateur musicians? Noting the controversy surrounding Kirkpatrick's pairs of sonatas, Gordis turns to the eighteenth-century practice of ‘composing’ sets of pieces. Thus Zones offers the listener three sets of four sonatas followed by a bonus track.
Gordis's distinctive and sensitive technique brings into relief the strange mixture of sonorities, variety, monotony and violence of Scarlatti's sonatas by drawing on numerous performance traditions. Every sonata challenges the image of the harpsichord, and of Scarlatti, as facile, virtuosic and digital, instead proving that colour, contrast and dynamics are indeed idiomatic to the harpsichord – she reveals a world of technical tools, musical effects and timbres that have rarely been explored. She masters sparkling virtuosic passages with hand-crossings (k119) and multi-octave jumps (k122) with ease. Gordis's interpretative choices push the limits of the instrument. Her phrases are unusually expansive for Scarlatti recordings – compare the sinuous phrasing of k474 with recordings by Ross (Scarlatti: The Complete Keyboard Works, ECD 75400) and Hantaï (Scarlatti 5, MIR 326). The agile shifts in affect, as in k264, are arresting, as are the voicing of the cluster chords and the shimmering scales in k248 and k262. She accumulates so much resonance as to nearly saturate the microphones in k253 and demonstrates in k119 and k122 that percussive attack, often considered ugly and anachronistic (sometimes anachronistic because of its lack of beauty), can be just as effective on the harpsichord as on other instruments. It is not without reason that she has been lauded as ‘an Argerich of the harpsichord’ (Maciej Chiżyński, ‘L'eau et le feu ou les Scarlatti interprétés par Pierre Hantaï et Lillian Gordis’, ResMusica, 6 January 2020).
However much she excels in the virtuosic works, Gordis's greatest contribution to the discography lies in her interpretations of slower sonatas: k402 is a masterpiece of Schubertian proportions; k215's harmonic modulations take on a hallucinatory quality; k87's contrapuntal pathos recalls the B minor prelude from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, bwv869; the trills in k516 underscore Scarlatti's exoticizing of Iberian ‘local colour’; and k25 melts into a textural ‘tableau’, to borrow Elisabeth Le Guin's term (Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 77). Gordis's mastery of time and the pregnant silence, combined with her rich and varied tone, is more reminiscent of early twentieth-century piano recordings, like those of Rachmaninoff or Hofmann, than of any harpsichord recordings of this repertory. Her interpretations are enhanced by a relatively uneven temperament (we know little about the temperaments Scarlatti may have used) and a versatile, multifaceted instrument made by Philippe Humeau in 1999 after German models.
If Gordis reframes historically informed performance by exploring the possibilities of what scores and treatises leave unsaid, she broaches the tensions between historicism, performance, artistic licence and responsibility, and the act of recording in her liner notes. There, she paints an image of Scarlatti's sonatas as sparing in written material but infinitely rich in sonic possibilities. She seems to take inspiration from the works’ apparent irrational and fragmented qualities, jarring affective shifts, deconstruction of thematic material, monotonous repetition and use of percussion and resonance as a dynamic tool. She proposes the model of the ‘zone’ to describe spontaneous, affective ‘regions’ that make up the fabric of Scarlatti's sonatas. As they chafe against, slide into and splice abruptly to new ones, these ‘zones’ absorb both performer and listener. In an interview (Magnétique, Radio Télévision Suisse, 13 June 2019) Gordis suggests that recording and editing process parallels the modular structure of the ‘zones’ in the sonatas themselves, emphasizing the essential role of the collaboration between sound engineer and artist in linking the ‘zones’ notated in the score to the sonic ‘zones’ that unite artist and audience upon listening. That the medium of the audio recording itself is anachronistic with respect both to Scarlatti and to the harpsichord leads her to embrace the fundamental paradox of early-music performance – namely, that it is impossible fully to excise the influences of modern life from our aesthetic sensibilities. She therefore cites Apollinaire, Ravel, Pollock, (Simon) Hantaï and modern forms of communication such as Tumblr as formative to her conception of invention, repetition, boredom, texture and fragmentation in these sonatas, rather than rejecting the influence of anything postdating Scarlatti's life.
At first glance Gordis may seem resistant to forms of historicism that musicologists value, but she nonetheless raises timely questions. While the philosophies and techniques of instrument making have evolved over the last few decades, the links between harpsichord building, critical organology and musicology remain tenuous in recent scholarly work. As we continue to debate performance practice, how should we apply what we have learned about treatises and their readerships from historians of the book and about cultures of professional and amateur music-making from recent scholarship in musicology? This question is especially important given the often-unacknowledged influence that recordings can have on scholarship. Despite the widening rift between performance and musicology, scholars have become increasingly reliant on the growing corpus of early-music recordings on the market. These recordings often serve as unacknowledged sources and silent teachers that condition our ‘instincts’ for the historically appropriate in ways that still receive little historiographical attention. As someone whose research examines links between theories of colour in harpsichord building and technique from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, I find it especially inspiring to hear a recording that exploits the expressive and technical potential of the harpsichord in innovative ways. This CD should impel us to reassess critically the assumptions we often fall back on about historically informed performance practice.
Zones provides an opportunity for reflection about the history and future of the early-music movement, as well as about diversity within a growing industry that we, as musicologists, both support and rely on. The strengths of this CD lie in its balance between lesser known sonatas and warhorses, the novelty of Gordis's interpretations, her innovative approach to performance practice and her vision of the harpsichord's extensive sonic palette and artistic capacities – a rare asset even in the eighteenth century, if we are to believe Couperin and Rameau. At a time when the future of early music seems to be at a crossroads, Gordis reveals how much we have yet to discover about Scarlatti and the harpsichord.
