I haven’t done one of these for a while, but this piece is so extraordinary and so undeservedly obscure that I very much wanted to share it. It’s The Bells of St. Genevieve by Marin Marais, a French composer of the generation before Bach and Handel. As a musician, he was one of the great masters of the viol 1, which this piece features. While its repetitive, droning harmonies sound old-fashioned, its emphasis on the viol’s deep bass note seem modern, almost baroque music played by John Entwistle.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZKam4g7kik&w=420&h=315]
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Check this out, from about two and a half centuries earlier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91jag9yqiqE
It is a canon in thirty-six–Yes! Thirty-six!–voices. There was a fad for such massive polyphony, but I was a brief one, I suspect due to the technical difficulty, but the small repertoire it produced is fantastic. In this example, the entire text of the canon if ‘Deo Gratias.” This can come through as a cheap gimmick, or as childishly simple, but in this instance the simplicity of the text is gorgeously balanced by the musical technique.Report
I’m a huge fan of viola da gamba. Check out Timothy Vajda for a modern artist who plays viola da gamba: https://soundcloud.com/timothy-vajdaReport