{"id":2919,"date":"2015-10-28T09:25:47","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T16:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=2919"},"modified":"2016-07-13T09:47:25","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T16:47:25","slug":"steven-hancoffs-multimedia-bachstravaganza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/steven-hancoffs-multimedia-bachstravaganza\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Hancoff\u2019s Multimedia Bachstravaganza"},"content":{"rendered":"

His new solo guitar recording of the Six Suites for Cello<\/em> is just the beginning\u2026<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A CG<\/em>\u00a0online exclusive\u00a0b<\/strong>y Blair Jackson<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"StevenH\"<\/p>\n

I first encountered the guitar artistry of Steven Hancoff<\/strong> <\/a>a dozen years ago, when I reviewed a fine CD he made called The Single Petal of a Rose: Duke Ellington for Solo Guitar, Vol. 2<\/em> for Mix<\/em> magazine. I was intrigued enough by it that I went out and bought the first volume, Duke Ellington for Solo Guitar<\/em>, also excellent. However, when Hancoff\u2019s three-CD Bach set, From Tragedy to Transcendence: The Six Suites for \u2019Cello Solo for Acoustic Guitar<\/em> arrived here at Classical Guitar<\/em>\u2019s office, I didn\u2019t initially make the connection that these incredibly disparate projects came from the same guy. And as the newly minted editor of Classical Guitar<\/em> magazine, I raised a somewhat skeptical eyebrow over the notion that a fingerpicking acoustic guitarist\u2014rather than a nylon-string classical player\u2014was taking on the Cello Suites<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But then a curious thing happened. I went onto YouTube and watched a series of short videos<\/strong> <\/a>Hancoff made promoting his project. Over a backdrop of him playing a movement from one of the Cello Suites<\/em>, he laid out a fascinating biography of Bach accompanied by hundreds of images\u2014paintings old and modern, sculptures, 17th and 18th century documents, drawings and engravings of people and places from Bach\u2019s world, etc.\u2014that I found utterly engrossing. Independently, I started going through the CDs and I enjoyed them immensely; I don\u2019t know if it helped that I\u2019ve been a huge fan of solo steel-string guitar music since I first discovered John Fahey in the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

It turns out those YouTube teaser videos were just the tip of the iceberg\u2014as is the CD set<\/strong><\/a>. (The music is also available through iTunes<\/strong><\/a>.) For what Hancoff has ultimately produced is an incredibly rich multimedia exploration of the Cello Suites<\/em>, Bach\u2019s universe, and his influence through the centuries, expressed through the CDs and also a four-volume iBook that blends music, videos, and well over a thousand still images\u2014like a Ken Burns documentary gone wild!\u2014into a vivid and compelling tapestry of history, stories, ruminations, and fascinating tangents that grow like vines off the main Bach saga. It goes in directions you\u2019d never expect, which is part of the fun of it.<\/p>\n

The iBook<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is divided into four parts: Volume 1<\/em> is on the life of Bach; Vol. 2<\/em> deals with his legacy; the jumping-off point for Vol. 3<\/em> is Pablo Casals, the great Catalonian cellist who \u201cdiscovered\u201d the Cello Suites at the age of 13 (in 1889) and is wholly responsible for bringing Bach\u2019s forgotten masterpieces to light; and Vol. 4<\/em> is called From Tragedy to Transcendence<\/em>, which is, Hancoff says, an attempt to \u201carticulate the mystery of the greatness of Bach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working alone and with a gifted Chinese exchange student named Jiayi Lu, who was getting her Master\u2019s degree in audio-visual technology from American University in Washington, D.C., Hancoff spent years unearthing the mountains of images that populate his book, drawing as much as possible from the copyright-free public domain, and also approaching more than 300 contemporary artists about using their works inspired by Bach or Casals in his grand opus. He speaks excitedly about stumbling upon the work of \u201ca genius named Mattha\u00fcs Merian who, before 1650, published a book of copper-plate engravings of something like 2,500 villages and towns, including the town where Bach was born, Eisenach,\u201d but he was equally moved by the modern masterworks that he uses throughout. For Hancoff, Bach is an artist for all times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the steel-string acoustic guitar world, Hancoff is best known for his skillful and heartfelt interpretations of different strains of 19th and early 20th century American music, from ragtime to jazz and other forms. Indeed, it was his mastery of those idioms that allowed him to become an Artistic Ambassador, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, playing American music (often in tandem with banjo virtuoso Buddy Wachter) all over the world for 15 years.<\/p>\n

When Hancoff and I spoke in mid-October 2015, our conversation centered primarily on the musical side of his enormous Bach undertaking.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How does the Bach project dovetail from other projects you\u2019ve been involved with? Is there a musical link or some spiritual connection that takes you from Scott Joplin and Ellington and those other Americana people and ties it to the Bach? Or was it just immersing yourself into something new and different?
\n<\/strong>It wasn\u2019t about new and different. Here\u2019s the story: I bought my first \u201cexpensive\u201d guitar when I was around 20 years old\u2014this is maybe 1968, \u201969. I used to get Sing Out!<\/em> magazine and I wanted a Martin [acoustic] guitar, so I went to my local music store in Baltimore [Maryland, USA], called Schubert\u2019s and the guy behind the counter said, \u201cI\u2019ll order you one.\u201d I came back in two weeks and that\u2019s how I got that guitar. As I was leaving, the guy, who I thought must be \u201cMr. Schubert,\u201d said, \u2018Here try this,\u2019 and he handed me a guitar transcription of the Bach Lute Suites<\/em>, rather than a Beatles or Bob Dylan songbook or something. So that that\u2019s the music I actually learned to read music from. I used to struggle and stumble through them\u2014they\u2019re very difficult. I didn\u2019t know anything\u2014I didn\u2019t have a teacher. I was into Dylan, like everybody else. Many years later, in the mid-\u201980s, I was playing in southern California and I had two days off, and I knew that Michael Lorimer, who had been Segovia\u2019s student, lived down there, so I called him up and asked if I could spend a couple of days talking to him about stuff and getting a couple of lessons. He asked about my background and I mentioned the Lute Suites<\/em> and he said, \u201cWell, the Cello Suites<\/em> are more \u2018guitaristic,\u2019\u201d as he put it. So after that tour I got a hold of [Lorimer\u2019s] transcriptions of the Cello Suites<\/em>. At that point, I think I was working on my New Orleans album [New Orleans Guitar Solos<\/em>], and to warm my hands up every day, I would play one of the Cello Suites<\/em>, and I just fell in love with the music, and at some point I decided I\u2019d like to do my own transcriptions.<\/p>\n

About ten years after that, I was at my old friend Ruth\u2019s place in Greenwich Village [NY], and her boyfriend at the time was a producer, and he\u2019d just produced an album by John Lewis, the pianist for the Modern Jazz Quartet, playing Bach. He brought it home and I listened to it, lying on the floor, and it just blew my mind. I said to myself, \u201cI\u2019ve got<\/em> to immerse myself in Bach sometime.\u201d It was heavenly\u2014literally.<\/p>\n

But then Buddy Wachter and I got the gig with the State Department to be Artistic Ambassadors and travel the world, so I never had time after that. We did something like 45 countries, some more than once, doing this program of Americana. So I\u2019d start with Stephen Foster and do songs of the cowboys and the Civil War and the railroads and all that, and go up through to about Ellington and Gershwin and all the guys we could think of in between.<\/p>\n

So, when you finally did get around to the Cello Suites<\/em> project, what was the appeal of doing the transcriptions yourself? Did you go through other people\u2019s versions and find things that were either not to your liking or not suited to your playing?
\n<\/strong>To my knowledge, there are five publications of the complete Cello Suites<\/em>, including Michael Lorimer\u2019s. Some of them have changed the notes because it makes it \u2018more guitaristic,\u2019 some of them only add an occasional bass note to ground your ear to the center, or whatever. Michael\u2019s and the one by French guitarist Michel Sadanowsky who did it, are more in keeping with how I conceptualize it, which is pretty full of harmony and makes it sound like it was written for guitar\u2014that\u2019s the main thing. You\u2019re not just transporting these notes to a different instrument, although people have done that with Bach\u2014including Bach did that with Bach. The idea for me was to make it into a guitar piece, and to be more specific, if I was going to spend my hours focusing on this with my attention and my energies, I wanted it to express me<\/em>, too. To stay true to Bach\u2019s intention, but to express me, and to do that took completely immersing myself in these melodies\u2014because that\u2019s what they are. I concluded ultimately that the Cello Suites<\/em> are the voice of Bach in a dialogue with his wife who had just died.<\/p>\n

To give you just a very basic outline, Bach wrote them when he was 35 years old, and up until the age of 32 his life was nothing but tragedy. Everybody close to him had died\u2014he was an orphan at nine\u2014and the gigs he got were horrible. He was working for drunkard dukes and heavy-handed church people who didn\u2019t care a whit about what he was doing. And, significantly, by that he hadn\u2019t written any of his great masterpieces.<\/p>\n

At 32 he finally gets a job writing music for a prince who loves music and is a good musician, and he\u2019s finally contented. He and his wife move to this little town and after he\u2019s been there for three years, he and the prince go away for a month to a fancy spa; Bach is 35 years old. He comes back and his wife is dead and buried. That\u2019s when he writes the Violin Sonatas and Partitas<\/em> [which have also been arranged for guitar] and the Cello Suites<\/em>; his first real masterpieces. I concluded that the violin is her voice and the cello is his voice. So I felt doing the Cello Suites<\/em> was taking the voice of Bach and putting them onto a stringed instrument.<\/p>\n

Now, the cello is a one-note-at-a-time instrument, but a guitar is idiomatically suited to play chords and bass lines and harmonies. So the challenge was to harmonize Bach\u2019s Cello Suites<\/em>\u2014get every one of Bach\u2019s notes and keep true to the profundity of his musical and emotional content, but to harmonize it according to sort of what he implied by what he did on just four strings [of the cello].<\/p>\n

It was such a gift to be able to jump into that, because one of the qualities of playing the Cello Suites<\/em> is you never ever get to a note where you say, \u201cHe should have used a different note.\u201d They\u2019re all the right notes. Mischa Maisky, one of the great the cellists, called [the Cellos Suites<\/em>] \u201cdictation from God,\u201d and yeah, I could go along with that!<\/p>\n

There has never been and never will be another Bach. The quality of mind and thought and the music he made\u2014no one is ever going to do that again. Casals called it \u201cThe Miracle of Bach.\u201d It is so beyond what our comprehension can fathom, and to me, what made this such a profound experience was the question, \u201cHow in the world did he do it?\u201d His wife dies, and that\u2019s when he starts writing this torrent of iconic, immortal masterpieces. He didn\u2019t say \u201cI hate life. I\u2019m a victim.\u201d None of that. Instead it deepened his experience of who he is.<\/p>\n

\"Bach\"<\/p>\n

Not that many people have recorded or played all six of the Cello Suites<\/em>.
\n<\/strong>A lot of people have played Suite No. 1<\/em> because it\u2019s gorgeous, it\u2019s perfect, and technically it\u2019s probably the least demanding of the six. Segovia recorded Suite No. 3<\/em>. But it\u2019s true, not many have done all six. There\u2019s an Austrian guitarist [Andreas von Wangenheim] who did it, and another by Kazuhito Yamashita, who to my ears is the greatest guitarist who ever lived. In fact, when I got Kazuhito Yamashita\u2019s recording, I almost decided not to do mine! Cellist and playwright Harry Clark once called him \u201cthe Franz Liszt of the guitar.\u201d There\u2019s also a guitarist named Michael Nicolella did it recently. In fact, Michael and I just exchanged recordings. His came in yesterday\u2019s mail. But mine\u2019s very different. No one will do it the way I do it, because it\u2019s me<\/em>, and of course because on it\u2019s on acoustic guitar.<\/p>\n

Well, let\u2019s talk about that for a minute, since that\u2019s the elephant in the room\u2014the fact that it\u2019s on steel-string rather than nylon-string guitar, unlike most of what get billed as \u201cclassical guitar.\u201d Is everything you do on the Suites translatable to classical guitar?
\n<\/strong>Sure. The transcriptions are the same notes, the same fingers.<\/p>\n

Then what does the steel-string bring to it for you?
\n<\/strong>Well, the reality is it\u2019s my instrument, and to play it I use picks, and if you try to use picks on a nylon-string it sounds horrible. Of course there are differences. The tone of the classical guitar is warmer than mine, but on the other hand, mine rings more brightly. There are other differences that are technical in nature, and also the acoustic guitar is louder and the unwound strings\u2014my B and E\u2014are brighter and less sweet; less fat. One of the drawbacks of steel-strings is they\u2019re not as influenced by vibrato as a classical guitar. My bass strings, the wound strings, of which there are four, are maybe more brash than on a nylon-string.<\/p>\n

But to me, they\u2019re both guitars. Over the years I\u2019ve probably listened to a little more classical guitar than acoustic guitar\u2014though I love flatpicked acoustic guitar. Tony Rice is a genius. I love Doc Watson, too.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the guitar you play on the Suites<\/em>? It\u2019s not the old Martin\u2026
\n<\/strong>No, no. I was playing in California in the 1980s and when I got to San Francisco I visited [pioneering Windham Hill steel-string guitarist] Alex de Grassi. I\u2019d been looking for a guitar-maker for myself. I played one chord on [de Grassi\u2019s] guitar and I said, \u201cWho made this?\u201d And that was it! It was Ervin Somogyi in Berkeley, and he built me the guitar I used for my other four CDs. When I was getting ready to do the Bach\u2014nine years before I started, as it turned out\u2014I said, \u201cErvin, I need a guitar that\u2019s a jumbo, not a modified dreadnought.\u201d Because I wanted a sweeter, deeper bass. So he built me [another] guitar.<\/p>\n

Some people said to me, \u201cThat sounds like a harpsichord!\u201d\u2014which totally mystifies me. But they have pointed out that steel-strings might be more in keeping with what Bach may have heard in his inner ear, because that what the claviers of his day were strung with.<\/p>\n

What can a cello do that a guitar can\u2019t do?
\n<\/strong>Here\u2019s the most essential difference: With a guitar, you get the most volume the instant you pluck the string, and thereafter the note decays. With a cello, you can start soft and make it loud and you can hold that note almost forever. You can do a tremolo on a guitar and pretend you\u2019re doing that, but it\u2019s not the same thing. Fortunately in the Cello Suites<\/em> there\u2019s not that much of that. It\u2019s single-note melodies and as a bunch of cellists have pointed out, what Bach had in mind was to take those four strings and, without chords, with only melody and arpeggiated passages, be harmonically clear.<\/p>\n

Another reason why these pieces of music feel so intimate is the way you hold a guitar and a cello is, in a sense, you\u2019re embracing<\/em> it. You\u2019re holding a curvy figure right next to your body; they have that in common. That\u2019s not true with the violin. There\u2019s a great two-CD set of [Bach\u2019s] Violin Sonatas and Partitas<\/em> by Paul Galbraith, who plays an eight-string guitar and holds it like a cello\u2014his has an end-tailpiece but he plucks it like a guitar. It\u2019s truly gorgeous.<\/p>\n

Have you played the partitas and the sonatas?
\n<\/strong>I\u2019ve stumbled through. In fact, I have had in mind maybe that will be my next project. On the other hand, I\u2019ve thought I\u2019d like to do an album in honor of [great country guitar picker] Merle Travis. I know that sounds like the extreme ends of a very big spectrum\u2014<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s one reason people love to play guitar.
\n<\/strong>That\u2019s right. Music is music. I\u2019ve played a lot of the classical repertoire in the privacy of my own room. Many, many years ago, when I was literally broke and staying with a friend in San Francisco, as a gift he bought me the guitar part for the Concierto de Aranjuez<\/em>, and that was when I found out how wide the spectrum is.<\/p>\n

I notice you\u2019ve given subtitles, in a sense, to each of the Cello Suites<\/em>: \u201cEcstasy and Optimism\u201d for No. 1, \u201cIntrospection and Sorrow\u201d for No. 2, \u201cExtrospection and Excitement\u201d for No. 3, and so on. Is it treading on dangerous ground to, in effect, impose your own views about what the music \u201cmeans\u201d?
\n<\/strong>No, it\u2019s not dangerous. Here\u2019s the deal. Every cellist is sort of compelled in his or her own way to write down or articulate what each of the suites expresses. The last chapter of the iBook is on the meaning of the suites, because Casals called the first one \u201cOptimistic,\u201d the second \u201cTragic,\u201d the third \u201cHeroic,\u201d the fourth \u201cGrandiose,\u201d the fifth \u201cTempestuous\u201d and the sixth \u201cBucolic.\u201d [Cellists] Yo-Yo Ma and [Janos] Starker, and [Mstislav] Rostropovich say what they say about it. Nigel North, the magnificent lutenist who recorded these, gave me his list.<\/p>\n

And Volume Four<\/em> is literally a video exposition\u2014my unique take\u2014on how Bach metabolized his agony in such a way that he turned himself into BACH, the great genius of Western music. The bedrock of Western harmony, for goodness sakes, and he did not allow himself to let his tragedies define his life or, indeed, who he was. For me, each Suite<\/em> is a stepping stone in that process, a process I want to be able to do for myself.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a tradition.
\n<\/strong>Right.<\/p>\n

And of course, every listener will come up with his or her own interpretation anyway. I\u2019m impressed you\u2019re providing your transcriptions for free.
\n<\/strong>Well, the best thing I can imagine is that after I\u2019m dead and gone, guitar players will be trying to play these things. I can\u2019t tell you how many times I went through records trying to figure out what the guitar players were doing\u2014that\u2019s how you learned, right? So this is just a little gift to the world.<\/p>\n

(The free transcriptions can be requested from Steven Hancoff’s website<\/a><\/strong>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SHBach\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

His new solo guitar recording of the Six Suites for Cello is just the beginning\u2026 A CG\u00a0online exclusive\u00a0by Blair Jackson I first encountered the guitar artistry of Steven Hancoff a dozen years ago, when I reviewed a fine CD he made called The Single Petal of a Rose: Duke Ellington for Solo Guitar, Vol. 2 for Mix magazine. I was intrigued enough by it that I went out and bought the first volume, Duke Ellington for Solo Guitar, also excellent. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":2928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/HancoffCello.jpg?fit=222%2C227&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}