Already looking forward to some Easter programming where we will play some of the Rosary sonatas by Heinrich Biber. I have always loved these sonatas, and have performed them individually in various programmes throughout my life. So, to be able to a good chunk of them in a single concert will be quite a nice challenge!

Now, these sonatas are a set of 15 (plus 1) sonatas that are reflections on the Catholic Rosary (or Mysteries) that depict the story of Jesus. What really sets these sonatas apart is the use of scordatura, a technique of "mistuning" the violin to get different chordal possibilities as well as changing the sound of the instrumental quite drastically!

It was a technique that was quite common in the early German Baroque era... but it died out, and very few people (apart from some Early Music specialists) will try their hand at these days. In fact, you will find it more commonly in folk and rock circles for violins and guitars!

Anyway, each sonata is in a completely different tuning... which makes the performance of more than a couple of them to be a bit of a logistical nightmare as you will need 3 to 5 good violins to feasibly make it work.... and then each violin will play and respond differently, so you will also need to be familiar enough with them to pick them up and play them at potential immediately!

The pictured violin shows off the most "bizarre" of the scordatura tunings... where the strings are crossed over to be able to change the order of high-low in addition to the regular scordatura. The bottom strings are an octave G apart, and the top two are an octave D apart... now, if you kept the regular stringing order (without the crossing at the tailpiece end...), you would have the middle strings in terrible tension.. one would be strained near snapping point (or beyond!), and the other would just be flopping around uselessly!

I have always wanted to play this particular sonata... but haven't ever had the guts to try the crossed strings... and I'm forcing myself to do it next year. It is a little strange... I don't mind the mistuning of the strings, that is familiar enough to me... but it appears that my reflexes as to which direction to move my bow when I hear a higher or lower sound is a little bit hardwired into my bow arm!

So, that means when I'm double-stopping on the middle two strings, and when I want to balance towards the higher or lower tone... I am still rebalancing in the wrong (the normal, instead of the reversed) direction! Sigh... I have a few months to get that under control!

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