No strings attached

Cervantes once declared that the sarabande was “invented in Hell”. Spanish church authorities of the 16th century considered the musical style so licentious that they banned it on pain of excommunication.

Originating in the colonies of Central America, the triple-metre music danced its way across the Atlantic, spreading to France and Italy during the 17th century. Religious leaders found this concentus with the New World obscene, and preferred to stick to more rigid Spanish musical traditions.

As Jozef Lupták, cellist and one of Slovakia’s foremost musicians, plays the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No.1, it is clear that he suffers no such hauteur. In fact, Lupták appears to revel in the borderless-ness of the music’s history.

He is the perfect musician to play this style, performing Bach’s Sarabande alongside the works of other composers, and even his own improvisations. His performances unapologetically mix high and low, young and old.

As a performer, Lupták’s repertoire speaks of the unfixed. He seems attracted to composers who explore the interstices between national identities. Shostakovich, for example, wrote music with Jewish themes, despite being appointed an official composer for Stalin. Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born Jewish American, composed a symphony called Israel and another called America, and Lupták regularly performs Schelomo, Bloch’s interpretation of Jewish identity, written at a time when the Jewish nation did not exist.

Lupták’s love of transnational music might stem from his own upbringing. His home city, Bratislava, is the only city in the world to border two countries: Austria and Hungary. Just an hour downstream of Vienna, Bratislava has historically been a home to populations of Slovaks, Germans and Moravians, among others. The city’s cultural heritage is similarly cosmopolitan, counting Bartók among its former residents.

Under Communism, however, marks of difference were strictly forbidden throughout Czechoslovakia.  In 1958, Lupták’s father was imprisoned for 18 months for professing his Christian faith, and was routinely interrogated by Party officials. Questioning the State’s supremacy was prohibited, and his belief in the sovereignty of God was an affront to the Party’s ideology.

Reading his father’s memoirs, Lupták discovered that his father was imprisoned alongside “intellectuals, professors, opera singers and priests,” and was hounded by the secret police until Jozef was a boy.

This backdrop of non-conformism and radical thinking appears to have made an impression on Lupták, as he started his musical career as a drummer in a rock band. He remembers this experience as being formative. “It brought me to the idea that I love to try new things; I love to experiment and look for new forms of communication – new styles,” he says.

Even as he moved into classical music, Lupták pushed boundaries; he was the first musician in Slovakia to record Bach’s six Cello Suites. He describes Bach’s music as being “good for [his] individual growth,” and it was through a deep love of Bach that Lupták first developed his unique style of improvisation. He describes this process as a desire to “combine music in both directions – linear and vertical – having two, three, or four voices fugue. Each of the voices are individual, yet are in quite a perfect harmony, vertically.”

It is this “vertical” fugue of voices and music that is most recognisable about Lupták’s recent work. In his Voices Live performances, Lupták opens his set with moody spiccato strokes, before starting to beatbox over the top of the cello. After a couple of bars, he begins to sing a falsetto hum above the cello and the beat, developing an improvised melody in response to the repeated cello refrain. The skill of vocalising two different types of musical output – whilst playing the cello – is so unexpected that it takes a moment to realise that they are both coming from Luptàk’s own mouth.

As the melody progresses and builds, the physical feat of the performance gives way to the hypnotic musicality of the piece. The vocal quality of the cello enters into dialogue with Lupták’s voice, and at times the two become indistinguishable from one another. The piece recalls religious observances like the Jewish tradition of piyyut, liturgical Hebrew poems set to music, and Luptàk’s beatboxing brings to mind the Khoisan languages of southern Africa, which use clicking sounds as consonants.

Lupták’s interest in foreign musical cultures invites questions about his own relationship to these legacies. Are his performances homage? Appropriation? Luptàk’s work opens up these questions, rather than closing them off. The title of his recent performance at a TEDx Talk is testament to this attitude: Spontaneous Speech.

In these improvised performances, there is a sense that Lupták’s idiosyncrasies are dialled up, borrowing from different musical styles and histories. His rhythmic vocalisations may be his way of adding his own “voice” to music that speaks in a different language.

With their disregard of musical propriety and their exploration of cultural legacies, Lupták’s compositions bring back to mind the sarabande – that style that was formed in the darkness of Hell. As Lupták finishes his improvisation and plays those inimitable opening notes of Bach, perhaps he is aware of the legacy he is stepping into. And perhaps, as the cellist in Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband says, he “can see a flickering light in the music. Like Bach.”

This article was first published in Solas magazine. Solas is published quarterly in the U.K. Click here to learn more or subscribe.