Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 04:38:41 -0400
From: bf250@freenet.carleton.ca (John Sankey)
To: prs@hk.net
Subject: new scarlatt.txt file
Reply-To: bf250@freenet.carleton.ca

The Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti on MIDI
Played by John Sankey, bf250@freenet.carleton.ca

Welcome to the wonderful sounds of Domenico Scarlatti! Here you 
will find over 500 short pieces for harpsichord, with 
evocations of the bells, shawms, flamenco guitars and drums of 
18th century Spain. To me, it is a feast of sounds. I hope you 
agree.

Domenico Scarlatti was born in Italy in 1685, the same year as 
Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel. He moved to 
Portugal in 1719 to become music master to the young Princess 
Maria Barbara; when she became Queen of Spain in 1729, he 
followed her there. Respected as an extemporizer on the 
harpsichord, and for his dazzling technique, he did not begin 
to formally write his keyboard music down until 1738, when he 
was knighted by Portugal and composed a volume for 
presentation. A few years later, he collected a number of his 
older pieces into two more volumes. But then, ill health and 
gambling debts galvanised him into finding his voice. During 
his last 6 years 1752-7, he transferred his keyboard skill to 
paper in the form of some two hundred suites which he called 
sonatas. They combine pure joyous harpsichord sounds with the 
taut rhythms of Spanish dance and the harmonic brilliance of 
his Italian heritage to a degree that places him among the 
greatest musicians of all time.

For a performer, there is always a conflict between saying as 
much as one can with each individual piece, and being faithful 
to the lifetime-built philosophy of the composer. Intellect 
produces complexity, but feeling demands simplicity. Most 
performers faced with the range and quantity of Scarlatti's 
music quickly choose a few pieces, display his at-times 
breathtaking technique, and interpret him as a capricious 
mannerist. This tendency is exacerbated by the characteristics 
of the piano, to which Scarlatti's sounds do not transfer 
well. Here, I attempt  the opposite - to present the overall 
stylistic development and cumulative achievement of a great 
musical colourist, on the instrument which was his canvas.

MIDI is a system of recording the finger motions of a keyboard 
player, rather than recording the sound produced by the 
player's instrument. As a serious classical-music recording 
medium, it is as avantgarde today as Scarlatti's music was in 
it's day. Just as Scarlatti's keyboard technique was far 
beyond that of most of his contemporaries, so recordings such 
as these are beyond current MIDI practise. In particular, 
there is not yet a standard way of prescribing sound fonts to 
the required precision. Few MIDI instruments implement key 
release velocity (string damping), and none of which I am 
aware take account of the effect that one string's sound has 
on other harmonically-related undamped strings. But, pushing 
the limit of things is what artists have always done. So be 
it. Finger motions are pure information, the stuff of the 
modern age.

My recording follows the numbering of Kirkpatrick, whose study 
of Scarlatti is the base from which a modern player must build 
("Domenico Scarlatti", Ralph Kirkpatrick, Princeton, 1953). To 
start, there are the 30 "exercises", as Scarlatti called them, 
of 1738. Sonatas 31-93 were presented to the Queen in 1742, 
and 94-147 in 1749. Both of these volumes contain some works 
for organ, and some for violin and continuo, all of which I 
omit from this recording. Some almost certainly predate 1738. 
Then, with number 148, we begin the Sonatas proper, the pieces 
that were presented to the Queen as they were composed, 
between 1752 and 1757. The Queen's copy of the music, in the 
original 16 volume binding, is preserved in the Biblioteca 
Marciana in Venice, Italy. Sixty of the sonatas were published 
by Schirmer for harpsichord in 1953, edited by Kirkpatrick. 
545 were transcribed for piano by Alessandro Longo in 1906, 
and are still available from Ricordi (Italy) and Kalmus (USA).

It was normal in Scarlatti's time to mark off thematic sections 
of music with repeat signs. The commonest interpretation of 
this marking at that time was to repeat the section with 
ad-lib variations by the performer, who was expected to be as 
able a musician as the composer. Another interpretation, 
however, was that each marked section could be treated as a 
unit to be interspersed with other sections at performance, as 
in the French rondeau form. Scarlatti, I feel, often meant the 
latter interpretation. His carefully crafted sounds admit of 
little casual variation, but almost all of his writing 
displays hierarchical pair patterns - pairs of sounds paired 
in turn with other pairs, which in turn can be paired with 
other pair sets. Since this recording is an exploration of 
sounds, I have omitted repeats except where I feel they are 
rhythmically necessary. In my view, listeners can best 
recreate the aural ambience of an actual Scarlatti performance 
by selecting and repeating sonata pairs of their choice to 
form groups lasting four or eight times the length of 
individual sonatas as recorded.

Harpsichord actions have a tiny inertia compared to that of 
modern pianos - a well-voiced harpsichord can be played much 
faster. Scarlatti obviously enjoyed having the fastest fingers 
in the west, and explicitly noted some passages even faster 
than I can play them. Nevertheless, modern players unfamiliar 
with old instruments and old performance surroundings often 
play harpsichord music much faster than it would have been 
played at the time. Although harpsichords have no sustaining 
pedal, playing any note on good Italian instruments, such as 
Scarlatti played on, re-excites into sound all other undamped 
strings, thus sustaining a tonality for as long as one has 
fingers available to hold down the relevant keys. The Spanish 
royal quarters were veritable echo chambers compared to 
today's concert halls. Scarlatti did not mark precise tempos, 
but just noted a word or two concerning the way the piece was 
to feel. These recordings are an attempt to produce on modern 
wavetable cards sounds of the musical character of which 
Scarlatti was a master - those of a powerful Italian 
instrument in rooms typical of the Spanish court.

When making a recording, which will be listened to (hopefully) 
many times, it is necessary today to edit a recording to 
remove barriers to communication; all recording musicians do. 
I have, however, strictly restricted the techniques I use to 
those that were available to Scarlatti on his instruments. 
Many of Scarlatti's early works were centered upon the visual 
drama of his technique, particularly of keyboard-length leaps 
and mind-boggling hand crossings, which must be absent from a 
recording. Nevertheless, this recording still displays, I 
hope, some of his brilliance. First, there is the consistency 
of Spanish dance rhythms as the foundation of his sound. To 
me, these rhythms are not polyphonic, but elaborated 
percussive solo accents, and as such are entirely consistent 
with the precision striven for by most recording musicians of 
today. And, when Scarlatti's phrases are repeated with no 
variations, as he mostly explicitly wrote them, they build 
structure and power into the sound upon a sustained rhythmic 
foundation, rather than on a phrase-oriented vocal one. I have 
therefore eschewed melodic inflections and rubato for the most 
part (perhaps to a degree that overcompensates for the 
tendency of most performers to take the opposite approach).

The rarity with which Scarlatti notes pauses or breaks between 
superficially-disjoint phrases becomes justified when his work 
is studied overall - the silences he marks explicitly become 
more effective, and the phrases take their place as his 
development of melodic sequences, using sounds rather than 
just notes. The harmonies of these sequences are based on 
tonalities, and multiply in the manner of Italian toccatas 
(as, in fact, Scarlatti labelled some of his early pieces), 
while the melodic lines proper continually expand into 
multiple voices that blend into harmony. In the Italian style 
of his training, it is pure sounds, free of extra-musical 
allegories.

Italian harpsichords such as Scarlatti used had a much more 
robust sound than those used as the model for most MIDI 
harpsichord voices, so you may wish to experiment to find the 
setting on your synthesizer that suits you best. On most 
modern wavetable cards, the clavichord patch is closest in 
sound to the sort of instruments Scarlatti played on, and that 
is what is set in these recordings. On FM-synthesis cards, the 
steel-string guitar setting with reverberation on is closer to 
the sustaining character of Scarlatti's playing.

A twelve-note scale can not have all intervals in tune at the 
same time. MIDI systems default to equal tempering, where only 
octaves are really in tune. This tuning was not musically 
acceptable to keyboard musicians of Scarlatti's time, who 
restricted the keys they played in so that more of the 
musically-important intervals could be in tune. They also 
valued the variety of characters that differing keys have when 
all intervals are not equal. I used a technique of consonance 
analysis (W.A.Sethares, Journal of the Acoustical Society of 
America 96:10, 1994) to aid me in finding the systems of 
tuning that Scarlatti probably used most commonly, since no 
records of it survive other than the music itself. These 
recordings use the best tuning I have found, one published by 
d'Alembert in 1752 and refined for these sonatas by the 
consonance technique.

Anyone may copy, play, and adapt these files for their personal 
enjoyment. Scarlatti did not claim copyright on any of this 
music and it was widely copied during his lifetime. These 
files are a record of my performance and are not mechanically 
derived from any source. They were created and edited using a 
Kawai MIDI keyboard, Cubase Compact for Windows, and a 
Soundblaster AWE32. They are collected in email-sized 
"volumes" according to their number in Ralph Kirkpatrick's 
chronological catalogue, as follows:
V0   1-21
V1   22-45
V2   46-66
V3   67-104
V4   105-119
V5   120-134
V6   135-156
V7   157-174
V8   175-193
V9   194-211
V10  212-228
V11  229-246
V12  247-263
V13  264-282
V14  283-304
V15  305-324
V16  325-347
V17  348-368
V18  369-391
V19  392-412
V20  413-434
V21  435-456
V22  457-476
(remaining volumes in progress)

They are available in PC General Midi format by email from:
mail-server@cs.ruu.nl
send MIDI/SONGS/CLASSICAL/SCARLATTI
by FTP from:
ftp.cs.ruu.nl /pub/MIDI/SONGS/CLASSICAL/SCARLATTI
and as individual files on the Web at:
http://www.hk.net/~prs/midi/scarlatti.html
A Mac site is under construction.