Andrew McIntosh plays Biber’s Rosary Sonatas

Program

• Biber The Rosary Sonatas

• In music, tuning sets the stakes and the boundaries of our world. It is the carbon we build mountains with, the oxygen we breathe in, it is our environment and, within the duration of a piece, it becomes us. Tunings often resemble nature, ratios instead of generalities, cycles mirroring the cosmos, and patterns turning up anywhere and everywhere the way we see for example Fibonacci in nature. It is with that outlook then that we turn to look toward ancient musics and pieces not yet heard to find tuning, central in its crystal mathematics and ecstatic formalities shaping a whole weekend of music making. For this special search we call Darkness Sounding congregating and coalescing for the first time outside Los Angeles at 92NY, this year honoring tuning.

  Baroque violinist and Wild Up member Andrew McIntosh will give a rare complete performance of Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, joined by Ian Pritchard (harpsichord/organ), Maxine Eilander (baroque harp), and Malachai Bandy (viola da gamba). Composed circa 1675, the Rosary Sonatas are a set of fifteen violin sonatas, each featuring a different re-tuning of the open strings, and many of them extreme in their evocations of various episodes from the life of Jesus, with radical musical depictions of earthquakes, trumpets, prayer, suffering, adoration, awe, violence, love, pain, acceptance, crowns, joy, teaching, mystery, and victory. These sonatas served as an inspiration for Tony Conrad in the 1950s when he was a violin student at Harvard, sending him down the path of re-tuning which would later become central to his work with the Theater of Eternal Music. Conrad’s iconic 1964 recording, Four Violins (which Wild Up is performing in McIntosh’s arrangement on the Friday night show), is in the same tuning as Biber’s Sonata X, which depicts the crucifixion. A recent performance by McIntosh of the complete Rosary Sonatas in Los Angeles was described by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as one of the most memorable performances of 2023.

  The fifteen Rosary Sonatas are divided into three sections, each lasting approximately 40 minutes: the joyful mysteries, the sorrowful mysteries, and the glorious mysteries. The performance will be presented with two intermissions, for a total runtime of 2 1/2 hours.