Inventions, Sinfonias, Preludes, Fugues & Bourrees as transcribed and performed in unique multi-track recordings by GEORGE FIELDS Four-octave chromatic & bass harmonicas Angel Records S-36067 - 1971/1972 (Out of Print)

THE POCKET BACH Introduction by Elmer Bernstein Let us consider the harmonica. Is there one among us with soul so impoverished that he or she hasn't at some time tried to puff music out of a "mouth organ?" We've given it up, most of us, with lips and tongue tingling and breath and patience exhausted. The harmonica is a diabolical instrument requiring nothing less than a wizard to make real music upon it. Here is our wizard - one of a handful of harmonica virtuosos in the world - George Fields. He plays with the facility, the astonishing artistry and sense of perfection that characterize all his endeavors. It is characteristic of George's demanding pursuit of excellence that he spent two years preparing this extraordinary recording. He transcribed all the Bach works heard here (and many more saved for later). He recorded without assistance his own performances on equipment he carefully handpicked and then, in some instances, modified in order to achieve the most musical results. Bach's music, of course, has enjoyed a startling explosion of interest in the last two decades. Musicians today take a key from the fact that Bach himself freely transcribed his own works, and they play him on a wide range of instruments and in a a variety of settings impossible in Bach's own time. No doubt there are purists who would assert that this interchangeability stops at the harmonica. Their point of view must now be drastically revised. George Fields' performances here firmly establish Bach and the harmonica as a totally felicitous combination. They also prove once again that the body of Bach's music grows ever stronger as the horizon of instruments on which it is played expands; and the limit on interchangeablility stops, probably nowhere short of the kazoo. - Elmer Bernstein

LINER NOTES by Rory Guy Like the guitar, the harmonica had a long history as a folk instrument before it found its way, quite recently, to the concert stages. As with many instruments, its furthermost origins are obscure. It may have emerged in primitive form thousands of years ago in Indo-China. The first written mentions of a related instrument were set down in China in 1100 B.C. The Chinese fastened into a gourd a graduated set of free reeds. These were activated by a mouthpiece through which the player blew; and each tube contained a hole which, when finger-stopped, produced sound. The Chinese called their instrument the sheng. The Japanese called it the sho. Marco Polo, whose importations from the Orient added much to the quality of European life in the Thirteenth Century, seems to have over-looked the sheng. It waited, in fact, until the late 1700's when it was introduced to Europe by Pere Joseph Amyot, the French Jesuit missionary to China who authored "Memoirs Concerning the History, Sciences and Customs of China" (15 vols., 1776-89). Inspired by the sheng, Europeans began to experiment with free reed stops in small organs. In 1821, C.F.L. Buschmann of Berlin produced the first satisfactory harmonica which he called the Mundaoline. (The following year, the same Friedrich Buschmann developed the accordion.) In 1822, Damian in Vienna and Wheatstone in London introduced their versions. Wheatstone called his the aeolina, and a number of current British reference works chauvinistically credit this instrument with being the first true harmonica. Throughout the 19th Century, the harmonica was known chiefly as an instrument of the people. Its haunting, reedy voice which spoke, on the one hand so poignantly of nostalgia and regret, and, on the other hand, so perkily of hope and jollity, made it the perfect instrument for a range of folk expression from Deep South street blues to the cowboy songs of the West. In our own century, Larry Adler established the harmonica as a concert instrument of subtlety, dignity, and sensitive response to virtuoso artistry in both light and classical repertoire. Another artist of great stature is John Sebastian who, thanks to Adler's trail-blazing and his own wizardry, is the first harmonicist to attain renown solely as a classical musician. Harmonicists oriented more toward jazz and popular music include the celebrated "Toots" Thielemans and a virtually unknown New Yorker whom George Fields considers to be the great master of the harmonica, Charles Leighton. George Fields is a classical harmonicist of prodigious gifts whom the odd circumstances of his profession have made, till now, better known for his playing of lighter repertoire. The Brooklyn-born Fields took up music with violin lessons at the age of eight. His teacher was an old-school martinet who drove his points home by twisting pupils' ears. Fields bore the tweakings patiently through the first and second positions, but in the course of mastering the third there occurred an almost unbearably painful session. Fields went home with both ears in agony, solemnly broke his violin beyond repair, and never resumed its study. Soon afterward, Fields obtained an inexpensive Marine Band harmonica. Within a month, he was so adept upon it that he persuaded his father to get him a more costly chromatic instrument. Fields taught himself to play it, gravitating almost at once to classical music. A harmonica performance of Brahms' Hungarian Dance No.5 caught his attention and he learned to play it by ear. The dearth of transcriptions for the harmonica drove Fields to the New York City Music Library, where he determined unaided how to relate the printed music to the harmonica. With this skill, he produced transcriptions of "Danse Macabre," "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," themes from "Scheherazade" and Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, and many other works. At 14, Fields began to study under the tutelage of a skilled contemporary, Eddy Manson. Manson recalls that Fields turned up for a lesson one day and, without preamble, played on his harmonica the entire first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. At 16, Fields won the New York City Park Department championship medal with his version of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, and the diatonic was cast. Immediately after graduating from school, Fields joined the Cappy Barra Harmonica Gentlemen. Dressed in white tie and tails, the Gentlemen played classical, jazz and popular selections straight, in vaudeville and music hall engagements across the country. In 1938, they appeared in the Deanna Durbin film "Mad About Music." In the early Forties, Fields settled on the West Coast. There was a dearth of expert harmonicists who could read music and follow a baton, and Fields found himself in demand as a studio musician. His solo harmonica was featured prominently in many notable film scores, among them "The Tall Men," "Raintree County" and "Paint Your Wagon." Transferred to recordings, two of his performances became best-sellers: the haunting "Ruby", theme from "Ruby Gentry," and his delightful "Moon River" solo in Henry Mancini's "Breakfast at Tiffany's." In the mid-Fifties, Fields and guitarist Laurindo Almeida collaborated in composing and performing two unique film scores which utilized to brilliant effect only harmonica and guitar. These were the award-winning documentary "The Naked Sea" and the William Wellman feature "Goodbye My Lady." Fields remembers, too, with particular affection, a stint as musical director of the weekly Stan Freberg radio show, which he scored for the unusual trio of harmonica, xylophone and bassoon. Through these years, Fields inevitably made many appearances at the Hollywood Bowl as soloist with Victor Young, Nelson Riddle and Henry Mancini, and played on recordings with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony under Felix Slatkin and with the Roger Wagner Chorale. In company with all his colleagues, Fields found that a great obstacle frustrated his wish to play classical harmonica: the virtually non-existent repertoire. No music of significance exists from the 1800's. In our own century, urged and assisted by Adler, Sebastian and others, a dozen or so composers of distinction have created works for the harmonica, among them Malcolm Arnold, Arthur Benjamin, Henry Cowell, Norman Dello Joio, Alan Hovhaness, George Kleinsinger, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Darius Milhaud, Alexander Tcherepnin, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Hector Villa-Lobos. These are a heartening, but still very slender beginning. All serious harmonicists, therefore, are necessarily compulsive music researchers and transcribers, striving to create a literature for their instrument. "From the beginning," says Fields, "I loved Bach. At first, I found myself drawn to works readily playable - the Little Fugue in G minor and some of the Two-part Inventions. Later, I decided to see if all the Inventions were playable. They were. I then went into the Three-part Inventions, some of the Sarabandes, Gavottes, Bourrees, and, most recently, the more complex Preludes and Fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier." Gradually, the idea of recording the best of these took shape. Among Fields' many avocations (he is a skilled photographer, model railroader and designer of chess sets), he has impressive background as an audio engineer. In the 1950's, as executive director of the Audio Arts company, he produced one of the original lines of pre-recorded stereo tapes. Fields realized that to do the Bach recordings in a studio would cost astronomical months of time. He decided, therefore, to do them at home on his own recording equipment. Fields dwells in a spacious California-style house just off Sunset Boulevard, which was the final home of the late violinist Scipione Guidi, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic under Mengelberg, Furtwangler and Toscanini, and of the St. Louis Symphony under Golschmann. Fields placed his recording/playback equipment in the living room. He played into a microphone situated in the adjacent study, a cozy, well-insulated room, the walls of which are covered with Guidi's personally inscribed photos of the fore-named conductors, of Bruno Walter, Horowitz, the boy Yehudi Menuhin, a laser-eyed young Wilhelm Backhaus, and other imposing titans. "They were formidably inspiring," Fields recalls. Fields used, predominantly, one instrument, employing its voice as often as four times simultaneously in multi-track recordings. This was the Hohner chromatic 4-octave 64 Chromonica, model 280, an instrument of an impressive range larger than that of any other wind instrument. In essence, its range encompasses the capabilities of the bass flute and flute combined. For those passages requiring the extreme low register beyond the range of the Chromonica, Fields used two bass instruments: the M. Hohner Chromatica No. 265 and the Hohner Polyphonia No. 7. The #265, with its double row of mouthpieces, is a bulky instrument ill-suited to produce any melodic line and was designed essentially for simple band-type "oompah" accompaniment. The Polyphonia is one of a family of instruments designed for glissando effects. Fields used it not for glissando but for its extension of the 4-octave Chromonica's range. In addition, he employed occasionally a large variety of other instruments from his collection of almost half a hundred harmonicas. The 22nd Fugue, the Little Fugue in G minor, the Seventh Fugue, and the middle section of the Bourree No. 2 have four voices, all recorded separately on multi-track. The Sinfonias Nos. 3, 8 and 11, the Gavotte No. 2 and the Prelude No. 22 have three voices. The remainder of the selections in the album have the two predominant voices, except for the Sarabande form the Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 5 which is played solely on the 4-octave Chromonica, an octave higher than written. "I had to make quite a study of ornamentation and trills to get the proper baroque feeling," Fields says, adding, "I made few departures from the actual written notations. In a rare instance, I've added a trill or a mordant, or deleted one. Also, for example, the Third and Eighth Inventions are done with the lower voice occasionally up an octave, giving intervals of a third instead of a tenth." Fields made his recordings over a period of two years, working in the after-midnight hours of morning when traffic had died down. He was highly successful in the avoidance of extraneous noises, but shortly before the project was completed, he learned that his own nocturnal sounds sometimes seeped out. A patiently-worded note from a neighbor advised: "I have long regarded myself as a music lover. I do not mind being awakened fleetingly by the song of a nightingale. After many months, however, I've learned that my enthusiasm stops short of Bach on the harmonica, at three o'clock in the morning, played over and over again!" Fields' achievement here is impressive. It has already been hailed, by colleagues who have heard it in advance, as a landmark in harmonica music. Fields' sleepy neighbor may be forgiven for failing to perceive what will be manifest to wide-awake listeners: In his own remarkable way, George Fields is a nightingale. - Rory Guy

SIDE ONE Invention No.10, S.781 "Little" Fugue in G minor, S.578 Invention No.14, S.785 Sarabande from the Fifth Cello Suite, S.1011 Gavottes I & II from the Third English Suite, S.808 Fugue No.7, S.876, from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II Invention No.12, S.783 Invention No.3 & Sinfonia No.3, S.774 & 789

SIDE TWO Invention No.8 & Sinfonia No.8, S.779 & 784 Invention No.13, S.784 Prelude and Fugue No.22, S.891 from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II Invention No.4, S.775 Sinfonia No.11, S.797 Bourrees I & II from the Second English Suite, S.807

For the historical information concerning the harmonica in the annotation for this recording, Angel Records thanks George Fields and Eddy Manson. Eddy Manson's letter to the October, 1970, edition of Allegro is of particular interest in this regard.