T h e W i l l i a m T. K e m p e r I n t e r n a t i o n a l c h a m b e r M u s i c s e r i e s
Tafelmusik Baroque orchestra
Sunday, November 9
2 pm
The Folly Theater
TAFELMUSIK BAROQUE ORCHESTRA
Jeanne Lamon Music Director
Jeanne Lamon, violin
Patricia Ahern, violin
Thomas Georgi, violin
Aisslinn Nosky, violin
Christopher Verrette, violin
Julia Wedman, violin
Cristina Zacharias, violin
Patrick G. Jordan, viola
Stefano Marocchi, viola
Christina Mahler, violoncello
Allen Whear, violoncello
Alison Mackay, bass
John Abberger, oboe
Marco Cera, oboe
Dominic Teresi, bassoon
Lucas Harris, lute/guitar
Olivier Fortin, harpischord
Rick Banville, Lighting Director
Raha Javanfar, Production Assistant
Beth Anderson, Tour & Stage Manager
THE GALILEO PROJECT: MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
Programmed and scripted by Alison Mackay
Glenn Davidson, Production Designer/Technical Director
Marshall Pynkoski, Stage Director
John Percy, Astronomical Consultant
Shaun Smyth, narrator
The Harmony of the Spheres I
VIVALDI Concerto for 2 violins in A Major, op. 3, no. 5
Allegro – Largo
Music from Phaeton
LULLY Ouverture
Suite des quatre saisons (Dances for the Four Seasons)
Entrée des furies (Entrance of the Furies)
Chaconne
The International Chamber Music Series is underwritten, in part, by the William T. Kemper Foundation
Additional support is also provided by:
the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.
program
Music from the Time of Galileo
MONTEVERDI Ritornello, from Orfeo
Ciaccona, after Zefiro torna
MERULA Ciaccona
GALILEI Toccata for solo lute, from Il primo libro d’intavolatura di liuto
MARINI Passacaglia
MONTEVERDI Moresca, from Orfeo INTERMISSION
PURCELL Song Tune “See, even night herself is here,” from Fairy Queen
Rondeau from Abdelazer
The Dresden Festival of the Planets
RAMEAU
Entrée de Jupiter (Entrance of Jupiter) from Hippolyte et Aricie
HANDEL Allegro from Concerto grosso in D Major, Op. 3, No. 6
RAMEAU
TELEMANN
Entrée de Venus (Entrance of Venus) from Les surprises de l’Amour
Allegro from Concerto for 4 Violins in D Major
ZELENKA RAMEAU
Adagio ma non troppo from Sonata in F Major, ZWV 181/1
Entrée de Mercure (Entrance of Mercury) from Platée
LULLY
WEISS Air pour les suivants de Saturne (Air for the Followers of Saturn) from Phaeton
Allegro from Concerto for Lute in C Major
ANONYMOUS, 18th century The Astronomical Drinking Song The Harmony of the Spheres II
BACH Sinfonia “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” (How brightly Shines the Morning Star) after BWV 1
Sinfonia after BWV 29
2014 / 2015 Season Presenting Sponsor
This tour is generously supported by:
The Galileo Project received its premiere in January 2009
at The Banff Centre where it was co-produced in a residency.
39th season 2014-15
45
program notes
The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres was created as
Tafelmusik’s contribution to the International Year of
Astronomy, marking 2009 as the 400th anniversary
of Galileo’s development and use of the astronomical
telescope. The performance uses music, words and
images to explore the artistic, cultural and scientific
world in which 17th- and 18th-century astronomers
lived and did their work.
In late 16th-century Florence, the house of the
lutenist and composer Vincenzo Galilei (father of
the famous Galileo) was a fertile breeding ground for
important innovations in the realms of music and of
science. Vincenzo’s experiments with the expressive
power of accompanied solo song influenced the creation
of opera as a musical form and the style of music that we
now describe as “baroque.”
He also conducted repeated trials with lute strings
to find the mathematical formulas that express the
relationships between length, tension and musical
pitch. He is thought to have been assisted in these
experiments by his oldest son, Galileo Galilei, a brilliant
young teacher of mathematics who went on to apply
his expertise to world-changing discoveries about the
universe.
magnificent music for his opera Phaeton. We include
excerpts from the opera in our concert as an example of
the cultural inheritance that the world of baroque music
received from the observations of ancient stargazers.
The first important opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s
Orfeo, was composed in 1607 and published in Venice
in 1609, the year that Galileo travelled from Padua
to Venice to offer his newly created telescope as a gift
to the Venetian Doge. Monteverdi and Galileo were
exact contemporaries and near the end of their lives
Galileo arranged for Monteverdi to procure a beautiful
Cremonese violin (probably built by Nicolo Amati) for
his nephew Alberto Galilei, the son of Galileo’s brother
Michelangelo who composed the lute solo in the first
half of our programme. Monteverdi, Tarquinio Merula
and Biagio Marini were the most important composers
in Galileo’s world and we present some of their most
beautiful works as a backdrop to his own account of his
discovery of the moons of Jupiter and the events that
followed.
In spite of the efforts of the Inquisition to suppress
his discoveries and writings, Galileo’s influence was soon
felt throughout Europe and the telescope was adopted
as a tool for astronomical research. England’s most
important astronomer, Isaac Newton was born within
Galileo inherited his spirit of scientific inquiry and
a year of Galileo’s death and was buried in 1727 in
love of playing the lute from his father, therefore, it is
fitting that a musical tribute should honor an astronomer Westminster Abbey near the tomb of Henry Purcell. This
period saw the establishment of a Royal Observatory in
whose intellectual and artistic vitality stemmed from a
place where music and science intersected. Performances Greenwich, Newton’s creation of the reflecting telescope,
of The Galileo Project around the world have brought us his discoveries about the properties of refracted light,
into contact with scientists, star-gazers and music lovers and his development of the principles of universal
gravitation.
in many diverse communities, greatly enriching our
orchestral life.
Newton used the musical analogy of a seven-note
scale in explaining the seven colours of the rainbow, but
Ancient civilizations depended on an awareness of
unlike Galileo, he does not appear to have been a music
the natural world for their livelihood and survival, and
enjoyed an intimate relationship with the daily, monthly lover. After having been to hear Handel play a concert,
he complained that there was nothing to admire except
and yearly patterns of the night sky. The Greeks and
the elasticity of his fingers.
Romans identified characters in their mythological
stories with planets and stars, and gave them names
that we still use today. In Ovid’s story of Phaeton, the
impetuous son of the sun god Apollo, the minutes,
hours, days and seasons are personified as denizens of the
palace of the sun.
At Versailles, the French “Sun King,” Louis XIV,
created his own palace of the sun, a building that
strongly reflected the cosmology of the ancient world
in its statuary and decoration. Jean-Baptiste Lully, the
resident composer at Versailles, wrote some of his most
George Frideric Handel made more of a sensation
when he travelled from his adopted country of England
to his homeland of Germany in order to play at a
glittering royal wedding celebration in Dresden in
September of 1719. It was a month-long “Festival of the
Planets” with numerous operas, balls, outdoor events and
special concerts in honour of each of the known planets:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
(Uranus was discovered in 1781 by oboist, organist,
composer and amateur astronomer, Sir William Herschel
the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.
biography
who, like Handel, had moved to England from Hanover.
Herschel also built the largest and finest telescopes of
his day, catalogued nebulae and discovered infrared
radiation with the help of his musician sister Caroline,
the discoverer of several comets.)
There are detailed archives of the musical events at
the 1719 Festival of the Planets, and we know that not
only Handel but also Georg Philipp Telemann, who
was living in Frankfurt at the time, joined the renowned
musicians employed by Augustus the Strong in Dresden.
These included double-bass player Jan Dismas Zelenka
and Silvius Leopold Weiss, Europe’s most famous
lutenist. We present excerpts from works by these four
composers, and we are grateful to Lucas Harris for his
reconstruction of the missing parts from Weiss’s Lute
Concerto in C Major. All that survives of the original
is the solo lute part, although the title page confirms
that the lute was accompanied by two violins, viola and
violoncello.
Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra
H
Our program begins and ends with reflections on the
ancient concept of the “Music of the Spheres,” thought
to have been created by a heavenly ensemble of planets
and stars making music together as they move through
space. The concert’s opening speech from The Merchant
of Venice contains Lorenzo’s beautiful expression of this
idea: “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
but in his motion like an angel sings, still quiring to the
young-eyed cherubins.”
ailed as “one of the world’s top baroque orchestras” by
Gramophone Magazine, Tafelmusik was founded in 1979 by
Kenneth Solway and Susan Graves, and has been under the inspired
leadership of Music Director and Concertmaster Jeanne Lamon
since 1981. At the heart of Tafelmusik is a group of talented and
dynamic permanent members, each of whom is a specialist in
historical performance practice. Delighting audiences worldwide for
more than three decades, Toronto-based Tafelmusik reaches millions
of people through its touring, critically acclaimed recordings,
broadcasts, new media, and artistic/community partnerships. The
vitality of Tafelmusik’s vision clearly resonates with its audiences
in Toronto, where the orchestra performs more than 50 concerts
every year for a passionate and dedicated following. Tafelmusik
maintains a strong presence both nationally and on the world stage,
performing in over 350 cities in 32 countries.
The subject was treated extensively in Harmonices
Mundi (The Harmony of the World, 1619) by Johannes
Kepler, who used the formulas from his laws of planetary
motion to derive musical intervals and short melodies
associated with each planet. We perform these short
tunes on their own, and then weave them into the
chorale tune “Wie Schön Leuchtet der Morgenstern,” (How
Brightly Shines the Morning Star).
Tafelmusik has released over 75 CDs on the Analekta, Sony
Classical, CBC Records, BMG Classics, Hyperion and Collegium
labels, and has been awarded numerous international recording
prizes, including nine JUNO Awards. In 2012 Tafelmusik
announced the creation of its own label, Tafelmusik Media, and
has released a number of new and past recordings. Among recent
releases are live-performance CDs of Handel Messiah and Beethoven
Eroica Symphony, and DVDs of three of Tafelmusik’s most popular
performance events: Sing-Along Messiah, and Alison Mackay’s The
Galileo Project, and House of Dreams.
This is followed by music adapted from the opening
sinfonia movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata of
the same name, BWV 1, and from the opening sinfonia
of Bach’s Cantata BWV 29. We have chosen these
works by Bach to end our concert because they speak
profoundly and eloquently of the wonders of the cosmos
and the achievements of the human spirit.
Program Notes by Alison Mackay / Tafelmusik ©2012
The Galileo Project premiered in Banff and Toronto in January
2009, and has toured across Canada and the US, and in Mexico,
Malaysia, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
The orchestra was honoured by the International Astronomical
Union, who named an asteroid after Tafelmusik in recognition of
this project.
Visit www.tafelmusik.org for more information.
Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra appears courtesy of Colbert Artists Management
Found a word or phrase that you are unfamiliar with? Check out our extensive
Glossary beginning on page 118 to discover the meaning.
39th season 2014-15
47
l i n d a h a l l l i br a r y c ol l a b or at i on
The celestial or divine monochord, engraved by Mathew Merian for Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi … historia
(History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm, Oppenheim, 1617-1618). The diagram links the notes of the Greek musical
scale with the orbits of the planets, suggesting a mathematical basis for the harmony of the spheres.
the friends of chamber music | Live Performance. Be There.
l i n d a h a l l l i br a r y c ol l a b or at i on
Pre-Concert Lecture, November 9 at 1 p.m.
Galileo, Kepler, and the Harmony of the Spheres
with William B. Ashworth, Jr.
Beginning in 1609, Galileo used the newly-invented
telescope to discover craters on the moon, satellites
around Jupiter, and stars in the Milky Way. At
about the same time, Johannes Kepler discovered the
laws that regulate the motion of the planets around
the sun. For Kepler, his discoveries were part of a
search for the harmony of the spheres, an idea that
had been around since Pythagoras, and which Kepler
fervidly embraced. Galileo showed us a new kind
harmony of, revealing that earth and heavens are
one, and not the two separate worlds envisioned by
Aristotle. The illustrated talk will discuss the ancient
origins of the idea of a harmony of the spheres,
look at the role it played in the work of Galileo
and Kepler, and examine why, by the time of Isaac
Newton, the idea of a harmony of the spheres had
faded from the scientific world.
Visions of the Spheres – A Display of Images from
Original Documents of the Renaissance
Shareholder’s Room at the Folly Theater
Ancient concepts of the stars and planets placed
them in crystalline spheres, centered on and
moving around a stationary earth. This graphic
display of images from rare books from the time
of Galileo illustrates that concept of the cosmos
– the one that Galileo learned -- and how Galileo
and others changed it with revolutionary thinking
and observations. New images of the stars and of
the cosmos allowed their viewers to imagine a new
universe that was truly out of this world.
Curator: Bruce Bradley, Linda Hall Library of
Engineering and Science
The Linda Hall Library
The Linda Hall Library (LHL) is the world’s
foremost independent research library devoted to
science, engineering and technology. Since 1946,
scholars, students, researchers, academic institutions,
and businesses throughout the Kansas City region,
the nation, and around the world have used the
Linda Hall Library’s collections to learn, investigate,
invent, explore and increase knowledge.
Hundreds of people of all ages attend the Library’s
public programs each year to expand their awareness
and understanding of science and technology. A
not-for-profit, privately funded institution, the
Library is open to the public free of charge.
BIOS
William B. Ashworth, Jr.
William B. Ashworth, Jr. is Associate Professor of
History at the University of Missouri—Kansas City,
and Consultant for the History of Science at the
Linda Hall Library. He has a PhD in the History of
Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
and has a special interest in Renaissance and Baroque
science, especially early scientific illustration.
He teaches courses at UMKC on the Scientific
Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution and,
for the Linda Hall Library, he advises on rare book
acquisitions, organizes exhibitions, writes exhibition
catalogues, offers a regular lecture series, and writes
two daily blogs on scientific anniversaries, one of
which can be accessed on the LHL website.
Bruce Bradley
Bruce Bradley is the Librarian for History of Science
at the Linda Hall Library, where he serves as curator
for the library’s special collection of rare books in the
history of science and technology. He administers
an active program of rare book acquisitions, oversees
the security and preservation of the collection, and
assists library researchers and visitors in need of
access to the collection. Through the acquisitions
program, the library was able to acquire at auction
a first edition of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (Starry
Messenger, Venice, 1610), the first book by Galileo to
report on his startling observations with a telescope.
Other books by Galileo and by his contemporaries
have also been acquired for the collection. Bruce
works with visiting groups and gives special classes
and presentations on aspects of the history of science
and rare books. He participates in the library’s
exhibition program of rare books, which is offered
to local visitors and, through the library’s website,
to virtual visitors around the world. He has degrees
in history and library science from Carleton College
and the University of Illinois.
39th season 2014-15
49