Composer: Johann Albrechtsberger (1736-1809)

​

Albrechtsberger was an Austrian composer.  He was a teacher, music theorist, and composer who was friends with Mozart and Haydn and a mentor to Beethoven.  He wrote well regarded treatises on teaching methods and counterpoint.  He was Kapellmeister of the St Stephens Cathedral in Vienna (i.e. master of music). 

 

For someone who had a not insignificant influence on 19th century music and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of the greats, there doesn't seem to be much of his stuff recorded and his music apparently not performed very much.

 

Date: 1803?

 

Original Instrumentation: 2 violins, 2 violas, cello, and bass

​

Movements:    

1. Adagio

2. Moderato​

 

Why this one:

​I was looking to play something more ambitious from a "number of instruments" perspective and I was intrigues by a composer who was a mentor to Beethoven.  Plus the second movement is a fugue and I really like fugues.​

​

Description:  

 

Movement 1 - Adagio

Key:  Dm

Time: 3/4  BPM=65

​

This is a slow, stately movement that kicks off with the instruments all playing a descending Dm arpeggio, cello/bass first, followed by violas, and then violins.  The main rhythmic component of this part is the quarter note.   It slips into F major (the relative major of D minor) several times and also modulates into a bunch of other keys.   There's lots of accidentals here.

 

The violins, especially violin 1, are more of featured here as they're doing a bit more than the other instruments, having nearly all of the sixteenth notes in the movement.  The violas and cello / bass are firmly in support, mostly playing quarters.

 

(Note: I played the bass part on my mandocello.)

​

Performance:​

​

​This movement was pretty easy; the biggest challenge was not rushing ahead of the slow metronome.

 

Errata:

 

There were a couple of mistakes in the handwritten score, e.g. accidentals that weren't marked.  Most of them I caught when I was preparing but there was one in the cello that I didn't notice until I had recorded 3 of the instruments.   (The note didn't clash with anything until I got more parts down.)   We fixed it by tuning it with Melodyne.​

 

Movement 2 - Moderato

​

Key:  D minor

Time: 2/4  BPM=90

​

This one is a fugue, where the instruments stagger their entrances and play the same general note sequence as each other, but on different starting notes.   The main motif of this one kind of sounds like an excerpt from Handel's Hallelujah Choir and at the start a new instrument enters every 7th measure.  The viola 1 enters first by sketching out a D minor followed by violin 2, cello, viola 2, violin 1, then bass. 

 

Being a fugue, there's a LOT going on and it's kind of hard for me to parse.  It sounds cool though!  All the instruments are on equal footing here without an obvious featured instrument, which tracks with how fugues work.

​​

Performance:

​

When I first looked at the score I was worried this was going to be extremely hard.  As it turns out it wasn't.   All the parts were about the same difficulty because you know... "fugue."  

 

What made recording challenging wasn't the technical facility required but the mental focus.  When you're multitracking a fugue by yourself, the first few parts don't sound like much on their own which means you really have to focus on counting because there isn't much to queue on in the music you're hearing while you record.  As you start adding stuff though the problem comes from not getting distracted by all the parts starting to interview together, especially for a piece you haven't heard all together before.  Standard occupational hazards for fugues and the Lazarus Music Project, though since this was a sextet there were more things to get distracted listening to.

 

I was prepared for this aspect having done a few fugues and fugue like pieces for the project so it went fairly smoothly.

​

Errata:

​

When I first looked at this movement's score I was massively confused by the way it notated multi measure rests.  It used a notation I hadn't seen before where different block shapes meant different number of measures.  So a block spanning half a staff line is a one measure rest, a block spanning the entire line is 2 measures, one spanning two staff lines is 4 measures etc.  I was used to notation that put the actual number of measures above the multi-rest measure and part of the reason it took me a long time to decode is that some of them had this super number and some of them didn't.   

 

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why all six parts were different lengths until I reverse engineered it using the (few) instances that had the super number above.  (Googling this didn't do much good; "multimeasure rest notation" gives a lot of results, but not what I was looking for.)

 

But now I know.

​

Album Art:

 

This is a picture I took in Vienna inside of St Stephen's cathedral, where Albrechtsberger was kappelmeister.