At Vancouver Bach Festival, violinist David Greenberg fuses the Baroque with Cape Breton fiddling knowhow
Early Music Vancouver’s artist-in-residence “enlivens” classical music with Scottish style
David Greenberg. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Millot
Early Music Vancouver presents the Vancouver Bach Festival at various venues from July 26 to August 6
ACCORDING TO VIOLINIST David Greenberg, the best thing to do when encountering any kind of historical music is to give it a poke to see if it’s still alive.
He should know.
Now living in Oregon, following decades in Toronto and Halifax, the American-born performer and educator has pursued two parallel paths: one as a leading exponent of Baroque music, and the other as a recognized authority on the Scottish musical traditions of Cape Breton Island. Increasingly, however, those two idioms are fusing in his work—as we’ll see during this summer’s Vancouver Bach Festival, where he’s one of two guest artists who’ve been brought in to expound on the theme of the Scottish Baroque.
That theme has two primary components: how Baroque music flourished in Scotland years after it was considered passé elsewhere in Europe, and how “classical” music can be inspired and enlivened by folk-music forms and techniques.
“Enlivened is a good word,” says Greenberg, in a telephone conversation from his Stateside home. “I like the idea of poking the music, poking a moment of music. I’m all about the living moment, making living moments on the violin. There are amazing things in all kinds of music, and of course [Johann Sebastian] Bach is so densely packed with amazing things from a Baroque perspective. And yet there are also all kinds of potentially amazing things hidden inside the score. Just poke it a little, and once you poke it those amazing things come out in all sorts of exciting ways that even I don’t expect.
“One way of poking it is silence,” he continues. “You’re playing an allemande or whatever, and you come to a moment where you just can’t go on yet. It’s like ‘This moment of music isn’t done with me,’ and so you just wait there for what seems like 10 minutes—it might actually be a second and a half, but that’s a tremendous amount of time in the scheme of things, especially when you think of Baroque music as something based on dance. Anyway, by waiting there for a moment, in that way you’re poking it. Something blossoms in that moment that you didn’t know was there.”
EMV artists-in-residence David Greenberg and David McGuinness.
He adds there is also an “opposite” way of poking the music: “Using some of my Cape Breton-style sounds that are not conventionally thought of as beautiful tone or intonation. Just giving it a kind of flourish that’s almost intentionally messy, but that is giving this life into that moment in a way that’s unexpected.”
Greenberg didn’t set out to play poker, but he’s well-suited to the role. As he explains, he picked up the violin at four, and his music-loving parents balanced his formal training by spinning folk LPs at home and taking him to the Smithsonian Institution’s legendary folk-music festivals.
“I would just start picking tunes off records, whether it was [Irish fiddle virtuoso] Tommy Potts or Mississippi fiddlers or whatever it was,” he recalls. “It was just like ‘Oh, that’s a nice tune. Why don’t you learn that one, David?’ So I’d gravitate towards certain tunes and learn them in that very child-like way, being five and six and seven and eight.”
Music took a more serious turn when he signed up for courses at Indiana University—where life, as it turned out, gave him quite a serious poke. Dissatisfied with the academic world’s emphasis on technical perfection over emotional expression, he gravitated to Bloomington, Indiana’s folk scene.
“It was mostly old-time and some Irish players, but there was one person named Kate Dunlay, who was a specialist in Cape Breton music,” he says. “I met up with her, and she sent me a few tapes of some fiddlers, and I started getting hooked on them. And then we ended up marrying!”
Not only did they tie the knot and go on to raise two gifted children: they also wrote the book on their favourite folk form. Although an assortment of tune books preceded it, Traditional Celtic Violin Music of Cape Breton Island: the DunGreen Collection was the first publication to give detailed and specific performance instruction, and it remains a key reference for fiddlers interested in playing that style.
Greenberg soon made fast friends in the close-knit world of Cape Breton fiddlers, but his professional life consisted primarily of playing Baroque music, frequently with Toronto’s acclaimed Tafelmusik orchestra.
“I found certain ways of combining both styles, not out of any kind of strategy or forethought, but just because I was playing this kind of music that fell between the cracks of Baroque style and Scottish traditional style,” he stresses. “I just played how it felt to me, like how it needed to go, and that became kind of my niche, I guess. That’s what I’m known for: interpreting 18th-century fiddle music in a way that comes naturally from my fluency in both Baroque and Cape Breton styles. If you want to know in a nutshell what kind of animal I am, that’s what it is.”
Perhaps the best opportunity to discover Greenberg’s music that the Vancouver Bach Festival affords is his solo concert Multiple Voices for One, at Christ Church Cathedral on August 4. It’s essentially a preview of his upcoming record of the same name, in which he takes Bach and other Baroque composers, Cape Breton classics, and his own original compositions and merges them into long but quick-morphing suites. Just as intriguing is July 28’s A Curious Collection of Tunes, in which he’ll be joined by the Bach Festival’s other artist in residence, Scottish keyboardist David McGuinness, and nyckelharpa virtuoso Kirsty Money in a wonderfully eclectic program that spans Finnish folk music, Baroque and Scottish tunes, and a sprightly, Swedish-inflected number by avant-garde guitar hero and composer Fred Frith (at Christ Church Cathedral). Greenberg and McGuiness will also join the Pacific Baroque Orchestra for the festival’s opening-night concert at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on July 27, and at the same venue on August 5. The two, with Métis fiddler JJ Lavallee, will also play a pub set at the Wolf & Hound on August 3.
It’s a massive amount of music, and yet we’re left with the feeling that it barely touches on everything that Greenberg has explored through what he calls his “experiential” approach.
“I like to analyze things when I’m preparing for my courses and teaching and that kind of thing, but as far as why I got into this or that, it’s usually just something that came up as an opportunity along the journey of my life,” he says. “I gravitated towards certain ways of approaching music because they spoke to me—and I think that’s a pretty honest way of going about it, in general.”
Related Articles
