...second musical offering (GFH 2001)

Again I am borrowing Bach’s title (his Musical Offering was nominally for Fredrick the Great, but the title really refers to the procedures and forms of the musical art itself). Fifteen years ago, I wrote a piece about Bach’s procedures; this time it is about Handel’s and is based on an actual piece by Handel, an air from the Keyboard Suite in D Minor (the third of his eight Suites). When Handel supervised the publication of this piece (it was printed by Walsh in London in 1720) rather unusually he had it set in two sizes of musical print: the larger for the basic harmonic structure and the smaller for his decorated version. Technically we call this a diminution.

The two sizes of print gave me the idea that it was possible to rework a piece, retaining some elements of the original and substituting others by my own inventions. It is perhaps an unusual approach to composing but at the time I was experimenting with the reworking of Handel’s air as a study for the reworking of Monteverdi’s famous Lamento d’Arianna which forms the highpoint of my rewriting or more properly writing again of his lost (except for the Lamento) Arianna. The aim in the music is to achieve a kind of effect of transparency. One preserves the gestures of the old ‘through’ the new music. The idea has something in common with the way in which painters - Poussin, Manet, Picasso - reworked classical paintings of their predecessors, making something quite new but in various ways allowing the old to show through. Though this kind of working of painterly or musical material seems to constitute a special case, I believe it tells us something about how music has always and will continue to function for the listener. I reworked Handel’s air by altering the harmony while retaining enough of the original for it to remain recognizable and substituted a polyphonic counterpoint for what in the original is simple accompaniment.

The ‘offering’ is in two parts. The first is in the form of a classical overture: slow, fast, slow, fast in which the slow is characterized by dotted rhythms and the fast by fugato. At the close, following Handel’s own occasional practice when in an opera overture he added a short dance movement, I placed my version of his air set as a miniature harp concerto. The writing for the harp, which together with the organ is used in the overture as a continuo filling out the sound, is slightly modeled on the way Handel himself wrote for harp as if it were a keyboard instrument. At the end the notes GFH (GFBb) are introduced as a bass (they are not as evocative as notes as BACH) and the second movement, concerto, begins with these same notes.

The concerto was modeled to a limited extent on Handel’s own open-air sounding concerti for double orchestras, although in the result the contrast between the orchestral groups is not as simple and consequently as direct. Halfway through the movement I introduce the trumpet and drum sound so characteristic of baroque orchestration. As the movement develops
through a variety of related tempi, the music of the air is increasingly referred to and, symmetrically with the overture, the concerto closes with a ‘double’ (meaning a decorated version) of the original Handelian air.

Above all this composition is an attempt, by its harmony and its combination of instrumental forces, to make an imagined sound-world, somewhat based on the oboe, bassoon and horn (as well as string) choirs of Handel’s concerti but expanded and contrasted by the use of soprano-saxophones, flugelhorn, tuba and later two trumpets.

Alexander Goehr