Gwyn Roberts, Recorder
co-founded and co-directs Tempesta di Mare
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How did you start to play the recorder? What drew you to the instrument?
I started playing soprano recorder when I was about 6. My mom had one and I thought it was fun. I was already taking piano lessons, but I liked having an instrument that nobody made me practice in any particular way (I’m stubborn!). When I was 12, my family took a cross-country camping trip with another family, and I taught myself to play alto recorder while my friend Alex taught herself to play soprano recorder. Somehow, even though this took place in the back seat of a 1971 VW Camper occupied by two moms and four kids, they didn’t ditch us by the side of the road.
Starting in the fall after that car trip, I joined my mother in singing with the Bryn Mawr Renaissance Choir, a group she had been a member of for several years. I loved Renaissance music, so recorder was a natural instrument for me to keep playing. In high school, I started collecting records featuring the recorder stars of the time, particularly David Munrow and Frans Bruggen, who convinced me that it was much more than just a toy. But I didn’t have my first recorder lessons until my junior year of college, when a summer job playing recorder with a Shakespeare company finally made me realize that recorder was more than just a hobby for me. I was 25 when I finally went to conservatory in Utrecht to study recorder and baroque flute.
Could you tell us more about the recorder? What are the different types? What is the history of the instrument?
Recorders come in many sizes, from the itty bitty 6-inch gar klein flötlein (literally: quite small little flute) to the 9-foot-tall sub-contrabass, with many sizes in between. (you can hear a sub-contrabass here) The recorders most commonly used today — and the ones we’ll be using in this concert — are the soprano, alto, tenor and bass. These instruments have C and F as their lowest notes, and they sound an octave higher than written. There are plenty of other sizes beyond these, including ones in G, D and B-flat.
Recorders are a type of duct flute, and duct flutes are a very old phenomenon. The oldest known depiction of a duct flute in a painting comes from the early 14th century, and the oldest surviving recorder, excavated from the moat surrounding a ruined house in Holland, dates from somewhere between 1355 and 1418. What distinguishes a recorder from other duct flutes is that it has a thumb hole that is partially opened in order to divide the vibrating air column in half to produce a second octave. Early recorders were cylindrical inside and had a range of just an octave and a sixth. In the 17th century, instrument makers developed a more complex bore with a sharp taper at the bottom, which extended the range. Baroque-style instruments have a normal range of 2 and a half octaves, with even higher notes available for occasional ear-splitting effects. Modern-style recorders can have even larger ranges, thanks to further design innovations.
Could you tell us about your personal instruments? We understand you have quite an extensive collection. Any particular favorites?
I do have a lot of recorders. With just a couple of exceptions, each instrument I own serves a slightly different purpose. I have Renaissance recorders in 6 different sizes for playing consort music, so-called Ganassi recorders in two sizes for playing more virtuosic Renaissance music, transitional recorders in two sizes for playing 17th century music, baroque recorders in eight sizes for playing 18th century music, and modern recorders in two sizes for playing modern music and for playing baroque music with modern strings. And I have many of these instruments at several different pitches: A=466 and 440 for renaissance music, 440 and 442 for modern music and for baroque music with modern instruments, 415 for baroque music most of the time, and 392 for those times when we play baroque music at extra-low pitch. Yes, that’s a lot of recorders, but it’s still not enough!
The recorder I play the most is a baroque alto at A=415 made by Patrick von Huene in Boston. It’s a copy after Denner, and it is amazingly even and responsive across its entire range. I have terrific baroque sopranos at several pitches by the Canadian builder Jean-Luc Boudreau that somehow manage not to be shrill. I am also particularly fond of the transitional sopranos I have that were made by Adrian Brown, an English builder who lives in Holland. Adrian also made my voice flute (alto in d), which is a fantastic recorder that I don’t get to play very often. And my newest acquisition, a modern alto in g by Mollenhauer, is loud enough to stand up to the full Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.
Don’t get me started on enumerating all the flutes that are also in my cabinet…
How did you choose the Art of the Fugue for the upcoming recital, and what have been some challenges or discoveries in adapting it for recorder quartet?
Art of the Fugue is a unique work, with lots of questions surrounding it. I chose it because I love the practice of delving deeply into an idea and teasing out all the possibilities, and that pretty much describes what Bach was doing here. I’ve also wanted to assemble a baroque recorder ensemble for a while, combining my two obsessions with recorder and baroque music, so this seemed a natural fit.
Bach didn’t specify any particular instrument or instruments for Art of the Fugue. People have performed and recorded it on everything from solo keyboard to saxophone quartet, including viol consort, recorder ensemble, string quartet and chamber orchestra. I like the way it works on recorders because each recorder is essentially an organ pipe that can play a range of notes, but with the extra expressive possibilities that come from having a human’s breath and articulation independently controlling each one. So we get the unified sound that you would get from an organ, but with each line shaped with much more nuance that an organ could produce.
The main challenge in adapting it for recorders is that each line occasionally exceeds the range of a single instrument. For the most part, we can just fold the music back in on itself to make it fit, but there’s at least one place where we’ll need to switch instruments. Bach also occasionally added an extra line for a measure or two, which makes it necessary to choose what to leave out. For the four-part fugues, we’ll be using a recorder edition created by my friend and colleague Eric Haas. I’ve adapted the rest myself.
Have the four of you worked together before? What is your process for working in a small recorder ensemble?
We have worked together in twos and threes, but never all four of us together. So this will be a first! But we all have similar approaches to our instrument and to music-making (Rainer and I actually met in conservatory in Utrecht), so I’m expecting it to work really well.
The process of working together as a recorder ensemble is not much different from any other kind of chamber music, except that we tend to talk more about things like articulation syllables and less about stuff like bowing. As the instigator of this project, I’m thinking about questions like tempo and mood for each of the fugues and will share my thoughts with the others to give us a head start in rehearsals, but I expect that we’ll all have ideas once we start playing and will shape our interpretation together.