An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin by Rohan Kriwaczek
I have often been asked how I came to exist involved with the Guild of Funerary Violinists, and, indeed, information technology is an interesting tale, to me at least. On completing my advanced diploma at the Royal Academy of Music with considerable honours in the early 1970s, my mind was filled with delusional dreams of becoming a concert soloist. Having done little other than play the violin since the age of seven, my unbounded naivety left me completely blind to the many eternal realities of the life of fifty-fifty the greatest of musicians, and for a number of years I floundered on the shoreline of popular success, endlessly surprised by the amazing ignorance (equally I saw information technology then) of the critics and audiences alike. But, alas, the fantastical determination and vigour of youth is soon worn out, and I was reluctantly forced to embrace the actuality of my being.
Looking around me at the few colleagues and friends who had institute a niche in the many-cornered industry of classical music, I saw that specialisation was the key to a successful career. Some colleagues were playing exclusively seventeenth-century music on period instruments, some only played modernist bedchamber music, i had moved from the violin to the musical saw, and one had a flourishing career in the more than theatrical stop of the industry, playing the works of J. S. Bach backwards (with some most musical results), though it must be admitted that afterward a brief television advent his success was brusque-lived. What was needed, in the cynical seventies, was a gimmick, though I insisted on finding a gimmick with some caste of artistic integrity.
I had e'er been drawn to the more tragic and solemn works, indeed I believe that is what drew me to the violin in the first place -- its inherent, securely felt tragedy of tone -- and so I resolved that henceforth I would but play the saddest of music; indeed, I would market my concerts every bit 'The Saddest Music in the Globe'. I vigorously delved into the libraries and archives of all of London'southward music colleges seeking ever sadder works, and by May 1975 I had assembled a fine repertoire of greatly sonorous pieces and had embarked upon a tour of Northumberland. (I chose Northumberland both because of its distance from London -- I was admittedly a niggling nervous of the critical response of the London scene -- and considering of the likelihood of a swell storm blowing up during my concerts, a notion that I felt would add to the sense of gloom and tragedy I was at that place to impart.)
It was after i of these concerts that I was approached by a rather alpine and stiff-looking gentleman, previously unknown to me, who invited me to attend a meeting of the Guild of Funerary Violinists. He was, it turned out, an amateur musician from London, who was in Northumberland to take the air because of a chronic case of nocardiosis (a debilitating lung illness defenseless by inhaling particles of earth), and a member of the board of the Society, and though I have promised non to mention his name, or that of any members of the Guild since Herbert Stanley Littlejohn (who died in 1957), I volition exist forever grateful to him, equally this introduction was to change the course of my life and vocation forever.
My initial impression of the Guild was not terribly inspiring; indeed, a more dreary collection of fellows could not be imagined, by me at least, although Dickens did at times come close. Afterwards a couple of meetings, where nosotros discussed the Funerary Aesthetic, and the terrible events that befell the Guild, I was nigh ready to leave for good, just then mention was made of the Guild'due south athenaeum. Immediately my involvement was rekindled, and I asked, nay begged, to be given admission to whatever materials they might contain. It took a couple of months for me to proceeds the members' trust, merely finally I was immune to see the archives first hand.
Never in the history of tape-keeping has there been a more than cluttered, disorganised or neglected archive than this. The conditions were atrociously damp, pages were rotting, trunks were falling apart on top of each other, objects were stacked with all the coherence of a landslide, and I realised, at that moment, that it was my mission to preserve, collate and study any was not beyond saving. It was not long before the Society's initial suspicion of my motives turned to enthusiasm, and even, at times, help, but the task itself was painstakingly slow. Much of the material amounted to piddling more than than clues and fragments, and many years of earnest restoration and scholarship were necessary for fifty-fifty the simplest of stories to slowly reveal their full form.
In 1982, mainly as a result of my devoted enquiry into their history, I was elected Interim Secretarial assistant of the Order and, information technology must exist admitted, used my position, in part, to nominate many new members and slowly eliminate the paranoid onetime guard, whose deep conservatism had merely served to further condemn the Society to isolation and ignominy. It was in this way that I was able to drag what had become little more than than a stuffy admirer's order for amateur musicians into the twenty-first century.
Although never a 'secret social club', the persecution it had received during the nineteenth century, combined with indifference throughout the twentieth, had caused the Order of Funerary Violinists to get a deeply secretive organisation over the years. When I first mentioned, in 1980, that some of these works should exist available in the public domain, the reaction I received could be described as i of outright horror. It took until the yr 2002 for the composition of the board to have changed substantially enough for provisional permission to be given for me to compile a book and an accompanying collection of CDs and sail music, and even now there are many prohibitions: mainly, that I must mention very little of the Society's history beyond 1841, and nothing whatever after 1914 -- with a few notable exceptions that take been specifically agreed.
The history of the Art of Funerary Violin is securely fragmentary, beingness made up of niggling more than glimpses, rumours, and occasional pieces of evidence that were missed by the agents of the Vatican during the Great Funerary Purges of the 1830s and 1840s. Since I embarked on this enterprise of discovery and consolidation many new documents have come to light: some as a upshot of my own efforts, some discovered independently, and some that had been in the vaults of museums and libraries all along, either incorrectly catalogued or simply never studied until at present.
Given this lack of sequential evidence, the story I am attempting to portray could be vastly altered at any time past some new discovery or determination. I am limited to reporting those few facts evidenced past materials I have seen for myself, representing the many rumours and insinuations that abound around the history of Funerary Violin, and making occasional speculations on my own role.
My intention in compiling this book is to bring the venerable Art of Funerary Violin again out into the open space of public consciousness. It is a history divers by the evolution of art, politics and changing attitudes to mortality, which holds many lessons for us all. Like a smashing tree whose roots reach all the way back to the renaissance of modern homo, it has born many fruits over the years: some that mouldered where they fell, some that sprouted shoots of their ain, and some that were picked and carried many miles abroad to feed the souls of other musics in far afar lands. In the terminal thirty years a number of such works have come to calorie-free after years of idle obscurity, and may now be brought to the attention of scholars and musicians alike. That these pieces, born of man's courageous struggle with his most ancient of all enemies, should be heard one time once again in their true context, is undeniable by whatever who merits to value fine art and spirit above the tedium of everyday existence. I therefore offer upwardly these pages, the apprehensive fruits of many years of painstaking scholarship and enquiry, that History may once again be rewritten, and perhaps, some day in the future, churchyards and cemeteries all across Europe may band to the sonorously cathartic tones of the solo Funerary Violinist.
Rohan Kriwaczek B.A. (Hons) M.Mus F.M.F.V.
Acting President
The Lodge of Funerary Violinists
Excerpted from An Incomplete History of the Fine art of Funerary Violin by Rohan Kriwaczek Copyright (c) 2006 by Rohan Kriwaczek. Excerpted by permission of The Overlook Printing. All rights reserved. No function of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2006/10/05/6202644/uncovering-the-true-history-of-the-funerary-violin
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