In The Wondrous Cabinet (No, Not Trump’s)

After weeks of bitter subzero temperatures, the Polar Vortex loosens its grip on Upstate New York. Far more tenacious and deadly was the Little Ice Age that kept Europe in its grasp for the entire 17th century and beyond. This Saturday night, music of crackle and warmth from those colden years will heat Anabel Taylor Chapel at Cornell University in a live-streamed concert marking today’s release of an album from False Azure Records.

The concert given by Martin Davids (violin) and David Yearsley (organ) begins at 7:30 pm EST on Saturday, February 1st.

As an exclusive CounterPunch prelude to that event, we present the program notes here:

In size and power, the church organ dwarfs the violin, and the two instruments might therefore seem unlikely, even irreconcilable duet partners, the one infamous in the popular imagination for a bombast that could easily overwhelm the other. Yet, in Europe’s richest organ center, one of the most celebrated musical pairings of the seventeenth century was the collaboration between organist Heinrich Scheidemann and the violinist Johann Schop, playing together from the organ gallery of cavernous St. Catherine’s church to the delight of locals and tourists, musical colleagues and clerics, civic grandees and townspeople.

Scheidemann was renowned for his ability to express his lively humor on the four manuals and pedals of St. Catherine’s organ, a massive color-machine boasting impressive strength, but also equipped with a vibrant palette of registers imitating other instruments of the age: cornettos, viols, recorders, and dulcians. Flying over the stacked keyboards of the organ’s ornate console, Scheidemann’s famously “fast fists” launched bright figurations and witty echoes into the vast architectural space of the church. Scheidemann molded his buoyant musical temperament under his teacher Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s tutelage in Amsterdam from 1611 to 1614, but the great Hamburg organist also learned from his partnership with Schop, whose violin playing was praised for a liveliness rife with unexpected ideas and sparkling flourishes and for the occasional retreat into melancholic shadows.

The contemporary poet, hymn writer, and music-lover Georg Neumark was one of the duo’s most ardent admirers; in his Poetisch- Musikalisches Lustwäldchen (Poetical and Musical Pleasure Grove) published in Hamburg in 1652, he praised a performance by Schop and Scheidemann at a St. Catherine’s vespers service when both musicians were at the height of their individual and collective powers. For Neumark, these Hamburg compatriots outshone even mythic musicians of Antiquity.

The widely traveled Philipp von Zesen lofted a similarly effusive paean to the pair in a volume of poetry published in 1651:

It was not only the beauty and ease of the Schop and Scheidemann duets that so captivated these listeners, but also their ability to raise the spirits, even during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War that devastated Germany during the first half of the century when both men were in their prime. Indeed, another of the most famous Lutheran poets of the period, Johann Rist, called Scheidemann the “outstanding Amphion of Hamburg”—a reference to the mythical musician of Antiquity, who, with his voice and lyre, built Thebes by charming the blocks of stone to move themselves and form buildings. After his own house and its lavish garden in Lüneburg had been destroyed by marauding Swedish troops, Rist sought refuge in secure Hamburg and he thanked his friends Schop and Scheidemann for lifting him from sadness with their music from the organ loft.

Most of Scheidemann’s surviving keyboard works were rediscovered little more than a half-century ago, and since then his music has been prized by modern organists—as it was in his own time—for its optimism and grace. These attributes come immediately to life on an instrument such as the Anabel Taylor organ, whose case is based on that designed by Arp Schnitger for the large church in the German town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. That historic instrument was commissioned in the last years of the seventeenth century by the Lutheran pastor Caspar Calvör, a collector and curator of Scheidemann’s music, who attended to its preservation and cultivation even several decades after the composer’s death. It is thanks to Calvör that Scheidemann’s work survives in sufficient quantity to enjoy and appreciate the composer’s unique gifts.

Much of what Schop and Scheidemann played together was improvised; only poetic testimonials to these frequent, evanescent collaborations remain. Their joint music-making was conducted in the favored forms of the day, diverse and engaging. There were variations on dance tunes such as the ever-popular Spanish Pavane, a favorite among north German musicians and across Europe. The pair would also have joined together on florid elaborations of the greatest hits of European vocal music, such as Giovanni Bassano’s popular Easter motet Dic nobis Maria (Tell us, Mary) and Alessandro Striggio’s self-pitying, lovesick evergreen, the madrigal Nasce la pena mia (My torment begins …). Required of all musicians was the ability to decorate John Dowland’s Pavana lachrymae, certainly the most popular of all of these models, arranged many times for lute and keyboard by a diverse composers across several decades. We offer an antidote to this delightful dolor with a Galliard originally by another Englishman, John Bull; this lively dance is artfully elaborated by Scheidemann and further animated by his characteristic panache. While Schop’s untitled sonata (sine titulo) in the Italian vein shares many technical and stylistic attributes with his glosses on Striggio, the violinist’s own composition attests to the increased freedom and fantasy unleashed when he allowed himself independence from venerable models.

Schop was the first violinist in northern Europe to secure the prestige of having his work published. His music for violin and continuo comes down to us in a sumptuous Amsterdam publication of two volumes from mid-century entitled ‘t Uitnemend Kabinet; his voluminous consort music, from which we have arranged our Intrada, was published in Hamburg in the 1630s. Scheidemann, by contrast, left his keyboard music in manuscript, the bulk of it preserved only by Calvör. But as was doubtless customary in seventeenth-century Hamburg, Martin Davids and I have granted ourselves a good measure of interpretative license in expanding on and arranging this music—treating these pieces as templates rather than as works. Our versions of Scheidemann’s intabulation of Bassano’s motet and two-verse setting of the Lutheran chorale Christ lag in Todesbanden and his Canzon in G import into these pieces our own dialogues and occasional digressions conducted in the spirit of the Schop-Scheidemann partnership.

Like the other poets quoted above in praise of the illustrious duo, Rist was a prolific composer of hymn texts and enlisted Schop to write many of his melodies, the most famous of which is Werde munter, mein Gemüte (Be cheerful, my soul), later used by J. S. Bach in somewhat altered form in the cantata movement known in English as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—a piece that has, as a favorite of modern wedding ceremonies and Christmas-tide compilations, sashayed its way into the unconscious of global millions. We introduce our fantasy on Werde munter with Schop’s Praeludium, the first published work for solo violin which appeared as opening number of the first volume of ‘t Uitnemend Kabinet, as if to proclaim Schop’s status atop the first generation of northern European violinists. Our ad hoc fantasy—varied phrase-by-phrase reflections by the organ followed by a coda with violin—is offered up in the spirit of our seventeenth-century predecessors, a small tribute to the joyous skill, varied art and good humor of Scheidemann and Schop. From these pious joys of the spirit we charge into the dance-till-you-drop thrills of Schop’s Pavaen de Spanje, unabashedly exuberant music of, and for, friends.

For more on the performers and their new recording: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/31/in-the-wondrous-cabinet-no-not-trumps

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)