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Steve Hancoff- From Tragedy to Transcendence
Steven Hancoff first heard the music of the Cello Suites back in the 1980s and fell in love, with not just the music, but also the story which accompanied the music; a story which Bach has used to create the music which weaves and entrances, as fresh today as it was when first written back in 1720. That the music survived at all was nothing short of a miracle. That it has been transcribed into modern format or metre suitable for acoustic guitar, thus reintroducing it to a wider audience, is indeed something very special, rare and beautiful.
When I was first smitten with the desire to transcribe and record the Six Suites for Cello Solos, the entire idea was to transform each of the 36 movements six pieces of music in each of six suites into music for the guitar. I had fallen in love with the music back in the 1980s, and as I was approaching my 60th birthday, the timing felt right. That is to say, it was now or never!
Transcription is not merely the transferring of notes from one instrument to another. Transcription here is the art of creating a piece of guitar music out of a piece of cello music. One of the central issues that was necessary to confront was this: cello is a one-note-at-a-time instrument you can't play separate, concurrent melodic lines and you can't play chords. In short, this means a cello soloist can play melody but not harmony.
A guitar, on the other hand, is idiomatically suited, or even designed, for the musician to do all these things. So, transcription here ultimately means harmonizing the Bach Cello Suites.Every day I practiced two suites twelve pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Normally, when a musician is working on a piece of music, he memorizes it, both mentally and muscularly. This practice was essentially different in that I had to struggle to not memorize because, whenever a new harmonic idea occurred to me, I kept on changing the transcriptions. And of course, the more I practiced the Suites, the more intimate I became with them, and so the more ideas came my way.
Early on, it dawned on me that familiarizing myself with the life of this man might deepen my understanding of who he was, and that understanding would serve me to better organize the music. So, I began to read biographies. And the more I read, the more I wrote. This man, "the miracle of Bach," as Pablo Casals once put it, led a life of unfathomable creativity and giftedness on the one hand and neglect and immense tragedy on the other.
http://www.stevenhancoff.com
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LocationSt. Lawrence Arts (View)
76 Congress Street
Portland, ME 04101
United States
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