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Lucas Harris joins Les Délices for La Guitarre Royalle, February 12 & 13
by Mike Telin
Lucas Harris will bring his expertise as baroque guitarist and theorbist to two concerts by Les Délices on February 12 and 13 featuring music from the court of Louis XIV. We reached him in Toronto to chat about continuo playing in general and about the repertory for his Cleveland performances.Mike Telin: You have an extensive background in jazz and popular music, and in a recent interview with Debra Nagy, you said that “playing basso continuo is not so different from ‘comping chords’ in jazz.” Could you expand on this a bit?
Lucas Harris: Sure. In jazz, when we talk about comping chords, comp is kind of a contraction for accompany, which of course means to accompany a soloist by playing chords, reading from a sheet with chord symbols on it. Very often the player just gets the bars with little hash marks on them and then above the staff you get the chord symbols, like E-flat7 and so forth, and you need to know how to spell those chords and find them on your instrument whether it’s a guitar, a piano or a vibraphone, or what ever instrument you happen to be playing. It is up to the player to improvise the accompaniment, and to do it in the correct style and to provide the appropriate articulation and dynamics, depending on what is going on “upstairs” as we like to say, meaning whatever the soloist is doing.
When I discovered continuo playing, it seemed to me that it was very much the same thing, but obviously a very different style and a different way of notating it. Basically, basso continuo leaves the finer points of constructing an accompaniment to the player, who knows more about the resources of his or her instrument, and how best to use them. So the player needs to know enough musical theory to be able to harmonize the composer’s bass line, with the help of figures, or the little numbers that the composer may or may not write next to the bass line. The player needs to be able to “realize” those harmonies on his or her instrument. The player also has to have enough stylistic knowledge to play the instrument with the kind of texture and phrasing that supports whatever kind of delivery the soloists are using. So the parallel I’m drawing is that both are ways of notating accompaniment that leaves the finer details to the player.
MT: What finally caused you to choose classical music as your career direction?
LH: Sometimes I think of it as having chosen “early” music, and I think of that choice as being almost like a bridge between jazz and classical music. When you play renaissance and baroque music you are still playing classical music so that you get that satisfying experience of interpreting a score written by somebody who died a long time ago, but has something astounding to say that transcends the centuries. But at the same time, in renaissance and baroque music you have freedoms that you don’t have in other kinds of classical music, such as being able to improvise doing basso continuo as well as embellishing things. So for me it was almost the perfect bridge between those two worlds. It satisfied my love of playing old music and also the fun that I like to have with improvisation.
MT: You’ve taken your love for bass lines one step further with Toronto Continuo Collective. Did you start that group?
LH: Yes I did. The Toronto Continuo Collective is what I like to call my “pluck” band, because it is a huge continuo group made up of mostly plucked instruments. For our last performance we did staged opera scenes by Cavalli and the continuo group was made up of a baroque harp, viola de gamba, harpsichord, two baroque guitars, two lutes and five therobos. The idea for creating this group came from a sister group in New York, called the New York Continuo Collective. I was involved in that group when I lived in New York. So when I moved to Toronto, I thought that rather then starting a new ensemble in Toronto, because there are already so many there who are doing very interesting things, I thought I would start a sister group to the one in New York. We’ve been going strong for about five years; it’s a group that sort of has an ongoing identity crisis because it is always walking the line between being a professional group and being an amateur ensemble. Sometime the meetings look like we are having a continuo class, and at other times we are preparing for a performance. Most of the members are professional musicians in some area of music even if they are not full time continuo players. I like to think that the group does give professional quality performances, and we have been invited to play, so it’s a group that is hard to define, but it basically exists for exploring the finer points of baroque accompaniment.
MT: You do a lot of performances with Tafelmusik; did you go on their recent tour to China?
LH: Yes I did
MT: How many continuo players are there in China at this time?
LH: I don’t think there are very many. And in fact one of the problems we had was that it was really hard to find a harpsichord in Beijing. Apparently there is only one good harpsichord in the city and at first it was not available on our concert date. Eventually things worked out and they paid way too much to rent it, but that harpsichord did end up being available for the concert. There is a lot of music in China, but not so many lutes and harpsichords.
MT: Perhaps you should start a continuo collective in China. I understand that you will be borrowing a special guitar from Oberlin for the concerts with Les Délices; tell me about the instrument.
LH: It’s a guitar that was specially made for Oberlin by Michael Schreiner, who is a lute and guitar maker in Toronto. It was made about five years ago, and it’s modeled after an instrument that was made by Jean LeBum in 1690. It’s a beautiful instrument with a flat back. It is a little bit heavier then the Italian 17th century baroque guitars, the ones we typically play. The bouts are wider relative to the length of the body, and the bridge is moved forward a little bit, which all foreshadows the future development of the guitar. The results of this heavier guitar, is that it has more sustain and it’s a little bit better for plucking. Especially in the music that I am going to be playing by Corbetta, who came from Italy to France in order to become the personal guitar tutor to Louis XIV, he developed a style of playing where you combine plucking and strumming into one fluid technique. It works super well on this guitar.
Another thing that I recently discovered that makes it work is having right hand fingernails. That’s kind of a controversial issue in my field, the lute world, especially back in the 70’s when things were a little less established. If you played the lute with nails, your were seen as a traitor to the cause. But there are little bits of evidence about fingernails, and there happens to be a document that describes Corbetta as having cancelled a concert because he broke a fingernail. For years I played the lute and guitar with fingernails, because I do a lot of continuo playing. And especially in orchestras it is nice to produce a strong attack to the sound. I actually cut off my nails about a year and a half ago and have been exploring that whole world, but I was working on the Corbetta, and I thought that it really wasn’t quite working, so I went down the street to get some fake nails form the local Korean nail salon. I don’t know if it is true in Cleveland, but in Toronto there is a Korean nail salon on every corner, so you can get nails in about fifteen minutes. So I got home and began to play the Corbetta pieces and they were so much nicer.
MT: That’s a great story, and this is a great program. What about it do you think people should know?
LH: The program is called “La Guitarre Royalle”, the Royal Guitar, named after these two books that Corbetta published, and going with that theme, there is also a viola de gamba solo by Marin Marais called “La Guitare”, and he mimics the sound of the guitar with these big strummed like chords on the gamba. It’s a fantastic piece. Another thing that I am excited about is that Debra Nagy has arranged a suite by Francois Couperin called “Ritratto dell’amore” or A Portrait of Love, which is a perfect Valentines Day theme. The titles of the movements are called Charm, Cheerfulness, Grace, Le je-ne-scay-quoy, and so on until the last movement is called L’et Caetera, or "the aftermath of love". I’ll leave that to one’s imagination. I think it’s going to be really fun.
MT: Finally, and I like to ask this question because I never know what the response is going to be; what do you do with your free time?
LH: Actually that is a good question. I think I have the life style of somebody that is very impassioned with their work, or somebody owns their own business, which means that I am working most of the time. I don’t take many vacations and even when I have forced down-time, like in the subway, or at the airport I’ve got my computer with me translating a text for a cantata, or sending information to a student. I am trying to find time for other things; I have a dog now, and my wife and I have a baby on the way, and so I think that is going to force me to take time away from working.
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