7 February
11:30–12:00 Ana Llorens: “Pau Casals’ recording of Bach’s cello suites: Micro-scale shaping in the sarabandes”
Recorded between 1936 and 1939 and perhaps constituting the most remembered legacy by Casals, his HMV interpretation of Bach’s suites for solo cello represent not only invaluable evidence of pre-IIWW performance practice and recording mediation, but also, and very importantly, the culmination point of the cellist’s engagement with these solo pieces, which had already started in the 1910s in his recitals and orchestral concerts. Each suite has a unique character through its key, its motivic content and manipulation, and changing phrase and harmonic structure within the closed dance format of most of the pieces. Indeed, Casals exploits the particular effects that each of the suites affords on the cello, yet one can perceive a common stylistic thread across them, despite the constant fluctuation between interpretive resources and the time span elapsed between the first and the last recordings. However, appreciations of the sort stem from an auditory perception and thus, one may wonder what it is really that makes Casals’ performance of the suites so unique and recognizable.
To respond to this, I applied computational techniques to the digitized original records, extracting duration and dynamic data. On such data, I applied unsupervised learning techniques (clustering and dimension reduction) to determine i) which groupings between the movements emerge through Casals’ interpretation (whether dance-, time signature-, or key-based), and ii) which micro-level duration and dynamic patterns does Casals employ in each piece and dance type. A better insight into Casals’ performance style and, importantly, musical understanding is gained through the dialogue between musicology and computation.
Ana Llorens holds a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge. She is Lecturer in Music Theory and Analysis at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the scientific director of the ERC ‘DIDONE’ project. She is specialized in the analysis of large corpora and, since 2019, board member of the Spanish Society of Musicology. Currently, she is Principal Investigator of the project ‘The Sound of Pau Casals’, funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as co-editor of the volume The Cambridge Companion to Music in Spain (Cambridge University Press, to appear). Her work has been published in Music Theory Online, Empirical Musicology Review, Routledge, and Brepols. She received the 2024 “Julián Marías” Prize for Research on the Humanities by the Comunidad de Madrid.