Musicians such as flutist Emi Ferguson have been helping to make what some people see as off-putting aspects and strictures of classical music fly the coop.
You can have fun, for example.
Ferguson and the early music group Ruckus certainly seem to be doing that on their acclaimed 2019 album “Fly the Coop,” which features their new arrangements of sonatas and preludes by J.S. Bach and plenty of spirited playing.
“That’s the goal,” Ferguson said during a phone conversation recently when it was suggested that the musicians on the recording were enjoying themselves while also playing exquisitely. “Music can bring people together for many different reasons, and many of them are emotional.”
Ferguson and Ruckus will be sharing the fun, humor and other emotions when they perform “Fly the Coop”on July 25 at the BrickBox Theater at the Jean McDonough Arts Center in Worcester. The concert is part of the Summer@Music Worcester series presented by Music Worcester.
‘Shake up classical music’
Besides already being a renowned flutist, including principal flute for the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, and a singer, the youthful Ferguson is also an educator, arranger, music director and author, as well as taking part in other related activities. She is described on her own web page as being on “a mission to shake up classical music” with performances “blending historical performance with a fearless, modern edge.”
Meanwhile, Ruckus — “a shape-shifting early music band” from New York City with a core of musicians that expands in various configurations — has been described as“the world’s only period-instrument rock band” (San Francisco Classical Voice).
As the New York Classical Review observed, “Typically, to perform a Baroque-era flute sonata, you need three players: the flutist and a harpsichordist and a cellist to make up the ‘basso continuo,’ which plays the bass line and fills in the harmonies.”
‘Ever-evolving’
“Fly the Coop” is orchestrated for Ferguson’s Baroque flute and and six members of Ruckus with instruments that include theorbos, Baroque guitars, Baroque bassoon, cello, viola da gamba, harpsichord, organ, bass and the occasional banjo. Everyone contributed their own ideas into their Bach interpretations.
Ferguson and Ruckus members are friends who perform together quite frequently, Ferguson said.
For “Fly the Coop” they perform “ever-evolving” arrangements of Bach sonatas and keyboard preludes — works that Bach intended to be improvised on by musicians, Ferguson said.
“Bach was a master improviser. Improvisation was really a part of any music that was happening at the time.”
In a way similar to jazz now, “any player in Bach’s time would be expected to improvise,” Ferguson said. Bach’s sonata scores, like most composers in that time, left much composing work for the player to do.
There is a top line and a bass line with some numbers to indicate the harmonies. “Then Bach would have said, ‘Alright, you figure out the rest.’ That’s the goal,” Ferguson said.
Which isn’t to say that Bach was calling for jazz. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Ferguson said. Rather, she described “Fly the Coop” as “Baroque performance practice in a living tradition. What we (Ferguson and Ruckus) think people would have heard. There are things we get right, things we get wrong. I wouldn’t say it was jazz but it has (our) influences of jazz artists and jazz music.”
Another side of Bach
A particular aspect of “Fly the Coop” is that “there is so much levity and humor in Bach,” Ferguson said.
“We rarely see Bach as a fun guy. We see portraits of him in a wig, looking stern.” Bach’s prodigious religious music was certainly serious. “But there is another side of him,” Ferguson said.
“In the sonatas you get a beautiful sense of what he was doing on the side for fun. In the middle of his crazy schedule, composing cantatas for church, taking care of 13 kids, he was taking the time to write these sonatas that would have been performed at the local coffeehouse where he lived,” she said.
“It was community music making.”
The New York Times has called Ferguson and Ruckus’ “Fly the Coop” live “blindingly impressive… a fizzing, daring display of personality and imagination.”
The New York Classical Review said, “The coop in question was the strictures of early-music scholarship, which along with its valuable insights seemed also to produce an ever-lengthening list of no-nos for the performance of Baroque music: no vibrato, no rubato, no anachronisms, etc.” The ensemble “decided to take their clavichords and lutes and go in search of new yes-yeses.”
The album debuted at No. 1 on the iTunes classical charts and No. 2 on the Billboard classical charts.
‘Always more to learn’
“I’ve always been someone who’s inspired by music of all genres … There is always more to learn,” Ferguson said.
Born in Tokyo to an Australian father and a British mother, Ferguson lived in London before the family moved to Boston when she was 10.
Neither of her parents are musicians, but “they took me to little kids’ class when I was very little. Never in a pressuring way.”
She took to the flute, but a defining moment came a little later when she was a music student at the Julliard School in New York City.
Ferguson said that she had decided to leave Julliard and go to medical school instead. She was working as an intern at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York when “I realized I missed playing my scales,” she said.
She has since been a faculty member at Julliard and performed at major festivals and concert halls around the world. Her debut album from 2017, “Amour Cruel,” is a song cycle inspired by 17th-century French music. The album spent four weeks on the Classical, Classical Crossover and World Music Billboard charts.
‘We need to have music’
Ferguson has some new projects of her own and hopefully will have something to share soon, she said.
In 2023 Ferguson was a winner of Lincoln Center’s prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. Jeremy Geffen, who served on the selection panel, spoke of Ferguson’s “alignment between intellectual curiosity, emotional connection, technical brilliance, stylistic rigor and compelling stagecraft.”
She now lives two hours north of New York City. Although she is principal flute with the Handel and Haydn Society, which has come to Worcester several times, the July 25 “Fly the Coop” date will be her first time performing here, she said. Ferguson has been seen locally at Stone Church Cultural Center in Gilbertville earlier this year and also in 2022. She performed there with acclaimed classical guitarist and conductor Michel Poli in a concert with selections ranging from English Renaissance composer John Dowland to 20th-century Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu. The concert was presented by Friends of the Stone Church.
It is true that classical music “needs shaking up,” Ferguson said.
Much of the 20th century was taken up “with ideas of what classical music is and should be,” and these could be dogmatic, Ferguson noted.
However, “I think that’s changed in the past 10 years. What’s really exciting about now is we’re starting to see audiences and presenters embracing these holistic ideas that composers were full human beings,” she said.
“We need to have music and we need to do it in smaller spaces. We also have the challenge that tickets are expensive. You don’t necessarily have time to go to a concert.”
With that, “I think that hearing an instrument is always going to be of interest to people live in performance,” she said.
Besides “Fly the Coop,” the Summer@Music Worcester series also includes the internationally renowned South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on July 18 in Mechanics Hall and the multi-Grammy Award-winning Hermitage Piano Trio on Aug. 15 in Tuckerman Hall.
‘Fly the Coop’ — Emi Ferguson and Ruckus
When: 7 p.m. July 25
Where: BrickBox Theater, Jean McDonough Arts Center, 20 Franklin St., Worcester
How much: $40 to $63; student, $20; youth (18 and under), $10.musicworcester.org.
