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[Singing]
Play just the trill.
You know, you might want to hook it.
Play with it a little bit.
[Singing]
That was really good. Yeah, that felt good.
I'm a professor in the historical performance department here at the music school at BU.
Nowadays there is a whole field built around people having gone back and learned the instruments
of Bach's time and earlier, Monteverdi's time, and also studying how people played as far as we can tell.
I find it very interesting to teach earlier music because that's the music that Bach knew.
If you're coming to it from later music only and Bach is your earliest, you're gonna play
it somewhat differently than if you know what came before and what he knew.
You know what's happening at this point. He's pleading and he's in front of a god of Hell.
That's a scary moment, right? He's terrified, but he's got to do something very beautiful
because he's the great musician.
There's a modern sensibility that begins with the beginning of opera and with Monteverdi.
You listen to an opera like Monteverdi's "Poppea" and it's got a modern sensibility, emotionally
it just strikes people.
I find baroque music closer to modern than what's in between.
My professional work outside of school is as the founder and music director of Boston Baroque,
and that is an orchestra of period instruments, that is instruments of the 17th and 18th centuries.
We have this funny idea today that symphony orchestras are modern instruments.
Those are instruments that are 150 years old.
Truly modern instruments I think of as two kinds: one, electronic instruments and the
other is our baroque instruments which have been resurrected in our way for modern audiences.
Both those and the electronics are things that you wouldn't have heard 100 years ago.
That's why I think of it as a modern endeavor, not an antiquarian one.
If it were just going into antiques, it wouldn't be as interesting to me because my training is as a composer.
I have composed all my life since the age of six. Modern music, sometimes very modern music,
is what I've grown up with and what I'm still involved with; it's the other part of my life.
Now, I've been working on a piece based on "Finnegan's Wake," the text of "Finnegan's Wake."
Setting large sections of the text, uncut, for a speaker and seven instruments.
"Finnegan's Wake" is Joyce's last novel and it's in a language that is sometimes described
as a dream language. It's combining lots of words and lots of languages.
Dealing with the intricacies of that text, adding musical layers to it is very interesting.
I was composing long before I was doing baroque music, but I'm more comfortable with the baroque
period and the modern period which feel closer together to me. It's emotionally closer and
so I find them close, I don't find a dissonance for myself.