Joel Quarrington
A hallway chat about bass tunings has led to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra landing the world premiere for a rare composition for double bass, writes ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Double bassists are the grunts of the orchestra, who support everything and seldom get to shine on their own. There are about 200 concertos for double bass sitting in the world’s music libraries, but even most bass players can name only a handful, and not one is by a major composer.
So when Joel Quarrington , principal bassist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, heard that American composer John Harbison was writing a concerto for solo bass, he hurried off to a concert at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre (where he has also played principal bass with the NAC Orchestra) of chamber music by Harbison, who is best known for his opera The Great Gatsby.
The composer was in the hall, so Quarrington, who is a much better player than diplomat, confronted him in a hallway afterwards and began to air his views about the pros and cons of various systems of bass tuning. It’s a subject so near to his heart that he forgot to introduce himself.
“In retrospect, that was probably a mistake,” Quarrington said. “He looked at me like I was insane.” Undeterred, Quarrington then told the composer that the title of his work-in-progress (Concerto for Bass Viol and Orchestra) was all wrong, because, he said, the modern bass is not a viol but a member of the violin family.
“By that time, he was backing away from me,” Quarrington remembered. But the encounter had a happy ending: Harbison wrote his concerto, kept his title and is travelling to Toronto to hear Quarrington play the world premiere tonight.
“World premiere” is sometimes a euphemism for first and last performance, but in this case there’s no doubt that the piece will be heard again. Fourteen other North American orchestras — including those in Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle — signed on to perform and help pay for Harbison’s 25-minute concerto, in a consortium deal arranged by the International Society of Bassists (ISB).
Consortium commissions are nothing new, but this one may be the most heavily subscribed ever and is probably the first to start with a contribution from employees at Wal-Mart, an organization better known for bass-fishing lures than for its support of the arts. A group of staffers, mourning the sudden death of their music-loving colleague David Capoccioni, collected $10,000 and gave it to his widow at the company’s annual convention. Capoccioni’s son Hunter, a bass student at Rice University in Houston, thought that a concerto might be a fitting way to memorialize his father, so the family approached the ISB, which sent a letter to all the professional orchestras in North America asking if they’d be willing to make a small investment in a starring role for their principal bassists.
“It was mostly to make it affordable,” said ISB general manager Madeleine Crouch, referring to her pitch letter. But the prospect of multiple performances by the principal bassists of several orchestras was a strong secondary motive, especially given how rare it is to hear orchestral music featuring solo bass.
The TSO is playing it first because it scheduled its performance earlier than anyone else. That was harder done than said, since Harbison’s deadline for composition was the end of December, and orchestral parts weren’t due to be delivered till the beginning of March. That left only a few weeks for the parts to be prepared with string bowings (a standard, time-consuming chore for every orchestral piece) and learned by the players.
Quarrington had to work initially from a hand-written part he received around Christmas. Loie Fallis, the TSO’s director of artistic administration, had long since smoothed over relations between him and Harbison, who even asked Quarrington for technical advice (though his main informant was Boston Symphony Orchestra bassist Edwin Barker).
“Loie was all over this thing,” Quarrington said. “She was so aggressive [in her scheduling] that we got the world premiere.”
Quarrington is certain that Harbison spent a fair amount of time thinking about how he in particular would play the piece, and not just because he gets to do it first. Most bassists tune their instruments in fourths, like bass guitarists. Those who play solo often tune a whole tone higher, using a special set of strings. Quarrington is one of the few bassists (jazz player Red Mitchell was another) who tunes his instrument in fifths, the way a cello is tuned. It means that he had to learn a whole new fingering system, and that he has to do more shifting on the fingerboard. But he can also reach a low C without resorting to any of the contraptions that bassists sometimes use, and can claim to be following the system used when most of the standard orchestral repertoire was written.
For Harbison, knowing that at least one player would approach his concerto from a whole different place on the fingerboard had an effect on how he would deal with open strings and harmonics, and on what kinds of sonorities he could expect at any given point. He has said that he wrote the piece with all three tunings in mind, but Quarrington is sure that his comes out on top.
“He wrote it ideally for me,” he said. “It’s just perfect for fifth tuning — how it lies, how things ring.”
Harbison came to the task with a greater feeling for the sound and fragility of bass-string sounds than most composers, because he has played jazz piano in small groups and has a lot of experience conducting the cantatas of J. S. Bach. The tone and weight of the bass line, especially in the exposed recitatives, is of crucial importance in performing those baroque works.
It’s probably fitting that Quarrington first heard Harbison’s music in chamber-music form. The orchestra for his concerto is large and colourful, but it’s used sparingly, so as not to make the solo bass seem like a small voice fighting the crowd. However you tune them, the lower stringed instruments don’t project nearly as well as a violin.
“I’ve never been particularly happy with the viola concertos for giant orchestras,” Harbison said in an interview with Jeremy Kurtz, one of the 13 other bassists preparing to play the concerto, “because the orchestra stops playing, and the viola comes in and sounds wimpy. . . . I wanted the scale of the orchestra to be something that would make the re-entry of the bass sound appropriate.”
The piece opens, Quarrington said, with just three basses playing together, in an overt allusion to the viol consorts of the 13th century. Other sections have implications of Bach, and walking bass lines familiar from jazz. Quarrington has figured out a special orchestral seating plan for the unamplified piece, though final word on that will come from music director Peter Oundjian and conductor Hugh Wolff.
One review, of sorts, is already in, from Houston Symphony Orchestra music director Hans Graf, who grumbled good-naturedly during a recent visit to the TSO podium that the orchestra’s nimble scheduling had beat him to the punch by a month. As they say in baseball, score won for the home team.
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra performs John Harbison’s Concerto for Bass Viol tonight at 8 p.m., as part of its New Creations Festival. CBC Radio is recording the concert, which also includes music by John Weinzweig, Chen Yi and Paul Hindemith.
