BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
“Our contemporary fascination with music of the past would be considered an aberration in Bach’s time.”
It’s a fascinating idea, isn’t it? Particularly when it comes from Dr Josinaldo Costa — a co-founder of the Sydney Bach Society. Josinaldo is a guitarist who has dedicated much of his career to the exploration of historically informed performance practice. So when he advocates for new music on an old program, it’s worth a listen.
The Sydney Bach Society will present Create NSW-supported concerts in May and June. They’re free, and they’re in your lunchbreak. But practical convenience aside, these concerts return to the structure of performances past: they include works by Bach — and world premiere performances of new music, too.
According to Josinaldo, this combination of old and new is about “honouring tradition” of centuries-old performance.
In this interview, we explore this idea with Josinaldo. But we also take things a little further, because there’s a whole lot more to talk about when it comes to these lunchtime concerts — and that includes the way they were funded, and the creative minds who work together to make them happen.
Josinaldo, it’s great to chat with you. You’ve co-directed a program of Baroque masterworks in two lunchtime concerts. Tell us how that started.
The Sydney Bach Society’s lunchtime concerts were born from a combination of necessity and serendipity.
In 2017, I moved to Australia from the United States, and I found myself missing the supportive network of colleagues and collaborative partners who had shaped my life as a musician. In establishing the Sydney Bach Society, I was hoping to a create a vehicle with which to connect to my new adopted community of Australian performers.
When planning our first events in 2018, I noticed that Sydney lacked a dedicated Baroque lunchtime concert series that focused on solo and small ensemble works. I have a background in Baroque performance practice — my doctoral lecture recital explored Baroque ornamentation — and my wife and co-director of the Sydney Bach Society Aristea Mellos is a composer and experienced arts administrator. So, it felt natural to combine our unique skill sets to establish a series that would provide new professional opportunities for young Australian performers.
It was just lucky that lunchtimes were convenient for our host venue: Christ Church St Laurence. Lunchtimes also work well for our performers, many of whom either teach or have larger or commercial gigs later in the evenings.
These events will see the world premieres of music by Aristea Mellos and fellow composer Peggy Polias. Why was it important for you to place contemporary Australian works on an otherwise Baroque program?
We took some of the guiding principles for our series from J.S. Bach’s activities with the Leipzig Collegium Musicum. Bach’s involvement with this informal music society is very similar to what many freelance musicians do today: he collaborated with colleagues, organised performances, sold subscriptions/tickets, and adverted the events. Most importantly, although some of the music the Collegium performed included favourite works from the past, a substantial part of the program was newly composed music.
We often fail to acknowledge this, but our contemporary fascination with music of the past would be considered an aberration in Bach’s time. Regardless of their historical awareness and appreciation of the past, the 18th Century musician and their audiences were much more interested in experiencing music of the present time.
We are of course working with a completely different set of circumstances today. However, having new compositions in our program is not only a way of providing variety, but actually — and rather ironically — a way of honouring tradition.
Tell us more about the performance side. You’ll be playing solo guitar in the first event. And you’re quite the expert in Baroque music — a performer and academic. You’re trained in, and you teach, performance practice of the 18th and 19th centuries. Now that you’ve talked about programming old and new works, how do you consider the different styles of their performance?
My opinion is that, like any rhetorical art, the performer of music ultimately relies on the classical modes of persuasion to communicate: pathos, ethos, logos. These often present themselves on the musical surface of a given composition, but sometimes the language is cryptic, and both performer and audience need a key to decode the message.
I didn’t quite understand this at the time, but as a student I had a great deal of difficulty learning repertory of which I did not have this decoding key. On my first day at the Eastman School of Music, I had the good fortune of attending lutenist Paul O’Dette’s Performance Practice course, and it was a lightbulb moment: I felt that I had finally found an intellectual process that allowed me to start unravelling works that seemed hermetically closed.
Initially, this of course helped me with 17th- and 18th-Century repertory, but I soon realised that the process was applicable to repertory of any era. Alike the music, performers are sometimes better suited to ethical, logical, or empathetic expression. It is perhaps the case that the logical side is the motor of my creativity.
It all seems easier to me if I start learning a work with an informed and analytical point of view. I find I can then articulate the pathos and ethos if I follow that thread carefully.
So, as soloist at the first event, what goes through your mind when you know you need to practice to give a top-notch performance and go through the actions of curating the event behind the scenes?
We all have strategies to deal with our busy modern lives. Mine involve planning ahead, and a somewhat obsessive focus on utilising my small amounts of free time. For example, three of the works I’ll be performing I also transcribed. I started work on my Scarlatti and Gaultier transcriptions in March 2020, when we were all under a strict lockdown, as a way of keeping myself distracted from the doom and gloom of COVID.
As the months of 2020 wore on, and it became apparent that my live performances would be postponed to 2021, I shifted my attention to recording. So, the Bach on the program – the Lute Suite in E Minor — was recorded in June last year.
This concert is the first time I will perform any of these works live, but I feel like I’ve been living with them for as long as we’ve all been living with this global pandemic.
This sense of familiarity with the material allows me to use a spare 10 or 15 minutes in between my teaching and administrative commitments to work on short passages productively. I feel that the pieces of this program have come together like a puzzle, slowly clicking into place over the past year.
These events are facilitated through a Create NSW Play the City grant, which you were awarded for the two lunchtime concerts. What did you learn through the process of putting together your grant? Also, congratulations!
When Aristea and I first started the Sydney Bach Society, we had an open definition of what the project entailed. Going through the process of applying for grants — and specifically, the Play the City grant — prompted us to think carefully about our goals as a presenting organisation; namely, to stage live performances, to promote the talents of younger performers, and to commission new works — specifically, works by women.
Sometimes, as a performer, the routine of daily practice and the act of perfecting small details in your playing can lead you to become tunnel visioned. It’s easy to start believing that subsidiary aspects of your musicianship are the principal objective. Grant applications have a way of making you step back so that you can see the whole picture. They give you permission to take some risks, and to attempt something new without worrying about the need for perfection.
The pragmatism of any given grant is also a good invitation to be flexible. For example, you might not be able to find funding for the specific project you’re dreaming of. But, with some adjustment, something else quite similar might be possible. It’s wonderful to have the support of grant funding, but I think it’s helpful to acknowledge that there are other ways to fund your projects, too.
When it comes to co-directing SBS, you’ve talked about your work with Aristea. Together, you have quite a structured way to divide up the work. Aristea handles communication, fundraising, and logistics. On the flip side, you work on the technical side — audiovisual, website, and graphic design. How did you come to divide these roles, and how has it benefited your workflow?
I think we just naturally fell into those roles. I’ve always been a keen photographer, so it felt logical for me to work on visual elements like filming, graphic, and web design. Aristea is more extroverted, so she’s in her element when reaching out to performers and venues to cultivate collaborative partnerships. We’ve got very different personalities, and we’ve learnt to draw on our individual strengths to tackle the many facets of running a concert series together.
How valuable is it for musicians to be able to collaborate in a way that respects their individual skill sets, rather than attempt to ‘do it all’ on their own?
Speaking from my personal point of view as a guitarist, I find that collaborative projects are very important catalysts of musical growth. It’s rather easy for players of polyphonic instruments, such as the guitar and the piano, to isolate themselves in the world of solo repertoire. We become quite myopic and somewhat incurious. In collaboration of any kind — may it be a musical partnership, or teaming up to promote concerts — all participants have an opportunity to learn something new.
What I’ve come to realise is that to become a better musician, sometimes one needs to learn quite unrelated skills: audio engineering, coding, improving one’s writing, being more of a scholar. In the best collaborative projects, I end up learning things I wasn’t even aware I needed to learn.
With regards to the structure of these events, you chose free lunchtime concerts. What about that appealed to you more than the formal evening gig?
Aside the matter of avoiding the scheduling conflicts I mentioned earlier, the free lunchtime concert format also differentiates how we target our audience. The informality of the lunchtime hour, and the casual nature of our concerts, is attractive to infrequent concertgoers or classical music neophytes that might be intimidated by the formality of the concert hall.
We run our concerts for free with an optional donation model. This makes it possible for a more diverse cross section of our community to engage with classical music. At past events we’ve had retirees, university students, mums with their bubs, and visitors from the nearby Ted Noffs Foundation in the audience. Some of these people can’t access classical music in traditional venues for practical or financial reasons, so our lunchtime concerts aim to bridge that divide.
How did you know cellist James Larsen would be a great-choice musician to perform at your second event?
We first worked with James in 2019 for a Sydney Bach Society concert that explored works for string quartet and guitar. Later that year, we founded our record label Xenofone, and our first big project was an album of Aristea’s art songs entitled Songs for a Day. Several of Aristea’s songs had quite involved cello parts, so we were lucky James came onboard for the project.
James is a wonderful musician, and he draws a breathtakingly beautiful tone out of his instrument. We’ve been waiting for a chance to work with James again, and the Play the City grant provided us with the perfect opportunity to showcase his skills as a soloist.
What advice would you give to other Australian artists who are looking to host successful live performances of their own?
A common mistake for musicians dealing with the business side of the industry is to approach it as a zero-sum market – that is ‘me and my projects and not you’. This mindset creates a negative competitive outlook, which is counterproductive to our collaborative and co-dependent lives as musicians.
The more performers we have who are active in our cities and towns, the better, because they grow our audiences. So, there’s no need to worry about being squeezed out by your colleagues – the more we work together and create opportunities for each other, the better off we’ll all be.
My other bit of advice is to hold onto great ideas, and to put them in motion as soon as possible without looking sideways. Don’t worry about what other people are doing, or what they might think of what you’re doing! Give things a go, and if you aren’t satisfied with the results the first time around, you’ll certainly be a more experienced musician after having attempted something new.
See Josinaldo Costa (guitar) perform works by Bach, Scarlatti, Gaultier, and a world premiere of music by Peggy Polias at 1pm May 27.
James Larsen (cello) will perform selected works by Bach and a world premiere of music by Aristea Mellos at 1pm June 24.
Both Sydney Bach Society concerts are free at the Christ Church St Laurence.
Images supplied.
