Just before seeing this on HN I was listening to Buxtehude's organ works on my way home. Buxtehude was one of the main inspirations for Bach as a composer¹, and I always find it interesting to go back and forth. But there's a reason Bach is the one that has come to be a superstar - there's the huge number of surviving works, of course, and in many ways how "the student surpassed the master", not least in contrapunctal complexity and fugal techniques, but also in the incredible fluidity he could achieve with a seemingly arbitrary number of voices.
Still one can listen to Buxtehude and get taken in the beauty and playfulness of his works, and we instantly imagine how young Bach was equally mesmerized by the same music, and in a way, how it kindled a passion and Bach continued to dig into the same musical goldmine that Buxtehude had been excavating - sometimes even the same tunnels, to my ears.
Some of my faves in the Buxtehude collection, mostly dramatic stuff (no links because I'm on crappy 3G):
Toccata In D Minor (Bux 155)
Toccata in G Major (Manualiter) (Bux 164)
Passacaglia in D minor (Bux 161)
Prelude in G minor (Bux 149)
[1]: I won't say "the main inspiration" because this is going a bit far into opinion-land, and it doesn't even make sense to single out a single composer as "main influence", but either way, Buxtehude is definitely up there with Bach's mentor Georg Böhm.
> [...] not least in contrapunctal complexity and fugal techniques, but also in the incredible fluidity he could achieve with a seemingly arbitrary number of voices.
Just to give a striking example of one of Bach's novel fugal techniques:
Bach's St. Matthew Passion starts out with an instrumental fugue with three voices. The first voice does introduces a little fugue subject, then the second voice imitates a fifth above, and finally the third voices enters above that one. Then there's a short episode where the voices trade licks and end on a half cadence. So far a fairly typical beginning for a three-voice fugue.
Then something strange happens-- the baseline moves up a fifth from where it started, and Bach repeats almost everything I just described up a fifth. In other words he takes all three entrances of the fugal subject together, treats them as if they were a single fugal subject, and builds an outer fugue out of that. So we've got a kind of fugue within a fugue. Sure enough, after this second outer entrance finishes the choir enters with the third outer subject. And to the casual listener this all just sounds like a Baroque-era instrumental beginning to a choral piece.
But it's important to point out that the complexity of the counterpoint doesn't truly match the structural complexity. There isn't an additional set of instruments playing the outer fugue-- it's just that Bach organized the music in such a way that we can hear these relationships.
In this case there's a pedal point in the bass-- that is, it just keeps repeating the same note as the harmonies above it change. So when that bass finally begins to move and then anchors a fifth above for the next phrase of music, it's about as aurally striking as music can get.
> In other words he takes all three entrances of the fugal subject together, treats them as if they were a single fugal subject, and builds an outer fugue out of that.
It's not a fugue-within-a-fugue texture. But it is a fugal exposition within a larger fugal exposition, both in terms of harmony and phrasing. That's important because it is the larger exposition which sets the pacing for the following sections of that opening movement.
It's also important from the standpoint of musical drama. Imagine someone tells you a story and gives you the essential setting in the first 17 seconds. Then over the next 10 seconds they begin to describe what sounds like the story's rising drama. Now you have an expectation for the form of this short story, and you start to listen more intently.
However, they then begin laying out another, closely related setting followed by its own little internal conflict. Finally this leads to a description of a setting that sounds like an intensified and more detailed version of the original setting. Only then do they finish the actual exposition of their story and move into the rising action.
At some point in all of that you're going to get the sense that this is a much more involved story than you had initially anticipated. You're also going to anticipate that the rising action itself is going to last a lot longer than 17 seconds.
That's a fitting dramatic arc for introducing the listener to the subject matter of St. Matthew Passion.
Also, to better answer the question about listening vs. analyzing notes: I just sang the opening melodies to myself to get the durations for the analogy above. I originally got the idea about the exposition-of-expositions walking somewhere and being struck by the relative brevity of the fugue subject compared to the gravity of that movement. (As well as the fact that the entire inner exposition reappears twice later in the piece, which AFAICT never happens in any of the other music Bach's wrote.)
There is of course a long-standing debate over music for the ears vs. music for the eyes. But I don't think this falls into that at all-- everything I'm describing can be heard and weighed with a musician's ear in the same way an experienced coder can make an assessment that some code "smells", etc.
It would be more accurate to say that you find it reminiscent of a fugual answer, or something along those lines. Which would be fair enough as an observation.
It would be less accurate to say that. It's a subject-answer-subject fugal exposition which itself consists of three smaller subject-answer-subject fugal expositions. Both are fugal expositions in terms of the harmonic progression and the melodic repetitions.
If Bach just repeated the fugal exposition again on the dominant, it would be a different piece.
People who know me say I'm a super music fan. Yup. I liked it well enough to get a violin and dig in, especially to Bach. For violin I have low talent, started too late, and didn't practice enough, but, still I made it through the Preludio of the E Major Partita and the D Major center section of the Chaconne.
From all the possible analyses I've seen of Bach, finally I come down on just one core point: He was one heck of a good musician, that is, in the basic art of the music, that is, "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion". I listen to Bach for the MUSIC, that is, for the art, the communication.
While later composers used style and means Bach didn't use or didn't have, to me as an avid listener Bach is in places as passionate, romantic, dramatic as anything in Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Tchaikowski, etc. E.g.,
Generally he very much gets it about the sense or meaning of the music, at least as I understand it.
I wondered what he was going to do for the last parts of the first D Minor section, and he was really good! There he made good use of some of the advantages of a guitar to make the notes sharp (with correct intonation! -- easier on guitar than violin!) and distinct in a musically appropriate way.
For the first parts of the central D Major section, he got the slow, delicate, maybe even pleading sweetness very nicely. As that section grew in passion, there are many triplets; these can be made to sound more passionate by being insistent, and he did well with that.
There are places in the music where the music jumps quickly down an octave or two, and, really, usually there needs to be some connection or legato between the two -- sometimes he does this and sometimes not. An interpretation of the jump is that the lower notes are a fast answer or response to the upper ones; then it's good to have the two sound connected. Or, the music is a diagram of someone in doubt and considering something; the upper notes are the current guesses, and the lower notes are a fast return to thinking the person is more confident about.
Maybe that music is like a guy trying to woo a girl and thinking (A) I really want to take her to that five star French restaurant BUT (B) I might look like irresponsible with money; (A) I really want to show her I care BUT (B) it's important to be careful with money; etc.
To me the climax of the piece is at the end of the central D Major section; have to play on all four strings of the violin, and the highest notes on the E string can result in a soaring impression, rising to something glorious -- Bach was not short on passion. There is a lot to interpret in those last few bars of that section. There the guitar might have tried again.
Just after the end of the D Major section is the final section, in D Minor, and the beginning of that section is confused as a catharsis or release from the soaring passion just before (Bach was something of an applied human emotional psychologist, that is, a good artist!). Well, for that catharsis, the guitarist might have tried again.
At the beginning, with just the D Minor tonic chord, he could have used more legato, made the sounds last a little longer, still within what a guitar can do. That is, clearly indicate for the listener that chord because it is central to the whole piece.
There's a story of a guitarist in the audience of a concert. He happened to be sitting next to composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known to be a man of few words. Before the concert, the guitarist said to the composer "The Bach Chaconne sure is difficult to play." The composer said nothing but when the concert was over said "The Bach Chaconne is the greatest piece of music ever written". I wouldn't argue with that. Playing it, even while learning to play it and playing it badly, is fun beyond belief -- get to replace own commonly limited voice with that of a violin, piano, guitar, or even a full orchestra (e.g., Stokowski) and Bach's music to scream out to the heavens the passion of the human spirit -- great fun!
Hi -- unrelated to your comment, but I saw this thread and was curious about the work you mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135353. Since that thread is archived I couldn't reply, so I'm replying here instead. My email is in my profile -- please send me the paper(s) as well if you're so inclined.
One of the great stories about Bach is when he requested leave from his church position in Arnstadt to see Buxtehude in Lübeck, "to comprehend one thing and another about his art" (Bach's words). He walked 250 miles in 10 days to get there. Then he overstayed the one month of leave he had been given, arriving back home months late.
The surrounding region of the city Buxtehude, called the 'Altes Land', has a lot of old instruments and one can hear the music of the composer Buxtehude on old organs from his time... The organ in a neighbour town, where I grew up, was completed in 1675. It has been preserved in as much original state as possible. The works of Buxtehude may sound today on that organ like 300+ years ago, when he lived...
I'm not really a religious music person, but the vocal harmonies are not quite the Bach fugue levels of mathematical (I think?), but really just stunning. Especially the female vocal together with the organ and cello? after 3:00ish. So minimal, but so many details.
Well, if you're a fan of Buxtehude, have you listened to any music by Franz Tunder (Buxtehude's predecessor in Lubek)? My knowledge is mainly of their choral music, not organ music. So, might not have useful recommendations for you.
I used to play the pipe organ before becoming a software engineer. Bach's works are like living inside of a multi-threaded algorithm in real time. You can understand/appreciate a lot of them from a high level without knowing what they really are doing as implementation details. Some people even can play his pieces just with muscle-memory. But if you try to fully understand as a composer what he is doing in any piece, it's this astonishing, unparalleld depth that just keeps giving over years and decades. I just realized something new from a movement of piece I've heard for 15 years now the other day, and this happens regularly.
> Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
I've always thought musical counterpoint and multi-threaded programming have a great number of parallels. Both are fundamentally about setting up independent but interlocking things that need to work together to accomplish a goal without crashing into each other. And I think the first time you experience either done by a real master, it is mind blowing in the same sort of way.
Even more amazing is that Bach (and others as well) could build a fugue while improvising. It's like live coding multi threaded software. Even late in life Bach was given a challenge on the spot to build something from a given set of notes, and the Goldberg Variations are the result (he remembered what he did and wrote it out later). I still love listening to the last thing he ever worked on (a quadruple fugue in the Art Of Fugue) where he died essentially in the middle of writing the piece, the stopping of the music is so stark you feel the death.
I think you might be referring to the Musical Offering.
The Goldberg Variations were after the aria in Anna Magdalena's book.
Also, research suggests that the story of Bach dying before finishing the final fugue in Art of Fugue is inaccurate. An analysis of the paper in the extant manuscript, the tools used to draw the staff lines, and the simple realization that there is no way even Bach could have undertaken such a huge work without deriving the final combination of the fugal subjects before hand, all point to a completion in the year 1747 or 1748, but lost. The fragment that survives is likely to be a rough draft.
I wrote my senior paper in undergrad on this.
In fact the last work completed by the master is believed to be the "Et Incarnatus Est" in second (later) half of the B minor mass.
I appreciate the complexity and ingenuity of Bach's compositions, but I can't really enjoy listening to them. I always feel like I'm missing out. So occasionally I try to get into it again, but I fail every time.
One needs to invest some time into the listening (and preferably: some music appreciation courses/ material) to start picking up the nuances. BTW -- the analogy with IT systems holds here. A layman will not appreciate the beauty behind some of the designs...
My personal experience with Bach as a beginning player is that a piece that sounds just fine becomes really interesting when you start playing it, and then at some point you get the extatic moment of enlightment... even if you still don't know it how Bach got there...
This is probably a style choice thing, which I understand. While I consider Bach the best of the Baroque style (although there are a lot of worthy composers in that era), I personally often find that style a bit rigid (it relied pretty heavily on a well defined set of voice leading rules, fairly strict counterpoint, etc.). Some Bach pieces (and other Baroque composers) are great for my personal tastes nonetheless, but my personal preference for music tends to come from late Romantic to early "modern" era composers.
I can easily see why programmers could get into Bach though, or other pieces that show amazing contrapuntal / strict voice leading type skills in particular -- that type of music skill is very "head oriented" / logic oriented to me.
Hooray for Bach on HN! I can't recommend highly enough the performances of http://bachcollegiumjapan.org, a Japanese ensemble that I believe has recorded the full choral works of J.S. Bach, along with many pieces for instruments only. The performances are vital and electrifying, while also extremely thoughtful and counterpoint-driven.
I really like AllOfBach's attempt to provide free/gratis recordings of, eventually, all of Bach's repertoire; it is a laudable endeavour.
What disappoints me is the lack of vision on how this cultural resource can be maintained and spread amongst whoever benefits from it in the long term. All the copyrights appear to reside with the Netherlands Bach Society, and there appears to be no legal way to spread this resource beyond streaming it via Vimeo (for which by the way you need to allow cookies for player.vimeo.com if you use Privacy Badger).
These are high quality recordings by excellent musicians, it's a shame that copyright encumbers it without some open culture license like Creative Commons.
I should really take the time to write them and ask about their views on this topic.
Edit: I should perhaps say middle-to-long-term, as copyright might eventually expire (if we are lucky).
For those who enjoy J.S. Bach's organ works, James Kibbie recorded performances of complete works, all played on original baroque-era organs, in Germany:
If you are interested in pipe organs but can't afford one, check out Hauptwerk and its collection of hundreds of pipe organ sample sets from everywhere in the world.
Check also its open-source alternative, GrandOrgue.
Musicians spend thousands of dollars to build MIDI organ consoles or convert real consoles to use with these virtual pipe organs, myself included. PCs with 64GB RAM and server specs are not uncommon.
you can also spend a lot less and still have tons of fun with it, I personally have 3 cheap midi keyboards, a pedalboard I midified myself and two launchpads and it works great, total expense was definitely under $1,000
In terms of HW I can strongly recommend the Metzeler Silbermann [1], not that expensive and extremely satisfying to play.
As an autodidact I am definitely limited in what I am able to play, but it is still amazing to learn Bach pieces: I have listened to Bach's organ repertoire all my life since I was a kid, but learning a piece shows you a lot more just how amazing the music is.
I love seeing this on HN! I'm particularly fond of Bach's cello suites but I'm probably biased since I'm a cellist. http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-1010/
My background is more on the singing side, and I absolutely adore his choral work (along with Haydn et. al). Over the years my voice slid down rather than went for a hard break, before finally settling in to a lyric bass-baritone range, so I've had the opportunity to sing pretty much every part over the years.
There's a long running joke amongst Altos that you can tell when the composer's wife was an alto, because you get melodic lines. Bach's choral work tends to include as much intricacy as his instrumental work, across all four parts. Bass still tends to get the "walking the root notes of the chords", but not to the same degree as with other composers.
I'm a tenor, but used to be a bass-baritone. So, the opposite of you.
The B Minor Mass is a favorite of mine, as well. I do enjoy Herreweghe. But have you ever listened to a one-on-a-part version? This is a landmark recording:
May I ask why you love it to be on HN? Sure, there have been lots of posts on HN over the years that I thought were borderline OT but for this I really don't see the connection to HN... But, in order to avoid tons of downvotes, I'd be happy to accept a good argument for why this should totally be here and not just, say, on Reddit.
Others noted a similarity between Bach's pieces and parallel programming. The way he managed to interplay tunes to create perceptions astounds. I'd suggest reading Goedel, Escher, Bach (sp?) for more. Also, organs have some relationship to transistors. I believe how they were engineered to handle air flows acts very similarly to a transistor.
For me, personally, Listenimg to Bach helps. His pieces are complicated in ways that stir my mind to creative thought and logic, at the same time.
My favorite for cello are the Bourrées in C. I'm not a pro, but I remember messing around with playing a (probably simplified) version of it on my bass guitar, everything an octave lower, and thinking I wish I had a lower C string.
The tapping on the fingerboard is quite audible, which isn't something I've noticed before. Is it normally muted (perhaps by mic position) in recordings?
This thread is turning into a set of recommendations related to Bach. So here's mine.
Zhu Xiao Mei is a Chinese pianist who teaches in Paris. She grew up during the Great Leap Forward and spent 5 years in a reeducation camp, never giving up her spirit and illegally importing her parents' "bourgeois" piano at great risk to her and their life, via friends doing her favours, storing and playing it in a freezer. Teachers stored the Western scores that had been banned by Madam Mao in a room on the 3rd floor which they never dared visit again.
Out of the camp, she emigrated to the US at the merest sign of the border opening, having heard Western playing and realised the gulf that stood between her understanding of what great music was and what was actually possible. She did small jobs like cleaning houses to survive until she ended up in Paris where she was noticed and her career could take off. [1]
She discovered Bach's Goldberg Variations almost by accident. The person in whose house she was staying could not stand hearing piano being practiced, except for that piece, so that's what she practiced for hours every day, gradually learning it inside out, and it became her favourite piece. Her performance on an Asia tour shocked a friend by its sensitivity and wisdom and he recommended it to me. Maybe you need something a little different from Gould.
I recommend reading the book before listening to her playing the Variations [2], there is an entire world in that performance and the knowledge makes it more personal.
And then the trio sonatas for organ are the master pieces of the master pieces if you ask me ... with three truly independent melodies masterfully interwoven most of the time ... did only find one so far though:
one of my favorite recordings of the vivace of BWV 530, which is one of my favorite movements of the triosonate, has been on youtube for many years now, definitely recommended
Oddly, when I try to play this in my normal browser (Chrome 58, fedora x64, EFF privacy badger extension installed) I get "Sorry
Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here."
Nono, just the classical guitarists who play my music flawlessly with a minuscule fraction of the effort needed on violin. You with your frets and extra strings and inability to sustain. grumble
(But seriously, play the music that makes you happy! The sonatas and partitas are amazing on guitar!)
For me it's this specific piece, I just hear two kind of separate and bland melodies. It wouldn't feel out of place in a B movie scene that goes on for way too long, where people shuffle around with no real motivation or aim. I don't know as much Bach as I should, but I love the obvious ones like "Air". I can't listen to air and imagine a straight-to-VHS movie with some 80s kid and his dog walking around in the fog, or dozens of similar thing, as I can with "Dearest Jesus, we're here" (even the title I find lame). Mind you, it's because of course I do adore Bach, in general. I think the master can take some snark from some random nobody :)
Ohhh, and the June 16th recital is the organ works of Duruflé, who is unquestionably one of the finest organ composers of the 20th century. I can't recommend that highly enough.
(And the organist, Robert Huw Morgan, taught at my school when I was a kid: he rejoiced under the predictable nickname of Organ Morgan.)
The web design used to be terribly unusable, with interface elements constantly feeling like they were trying to trick you. They managed to re-do it and improve it a lot.
It's a good sign. At one BWV per week, this project is going to take about 18 years in total. To succeed, they'll have to be prepared to go through many versions of the site.
No need for quotes. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_organ - the mechanics of a pipe organ are direct predecessors to phone switches and thence to transistors.
Haha nothing in particular! I just happened to stumble upon that site, which I had forgotten about, while searching for this particular piece, which I find incredibly moving for some reason. I thought the HN hivemind might also find beauty and inspiration in it, which is why I shared.
You obviously hit the proverbial nail on the head and "figuratively" broke it considering that you're right at the top of Hacker News, something that becomes many peoples' claim to fame, for technical articles of course
It was an odd coincidence on my end. I just finished listening to Bach's Capriccio in B flat major 'on the Departure of his Beloved Brother' when I browsed to HN.
If anyone on here wants to get fully into their organ music, Priory is a fairly definitive label (nb: Am son of the founder). The "Great European Organs" series was recently celebrated on BBC Radio 3 here in the UK.
As for the GG renditions, check out in 1955 recording first followed by 1981. The first recording was already amazing in its own right, but it's astounding to realize how much a proficient musician can mature even further. Steve Jobs famously contrasted these recordings in his authorized biography.
Thank you so much -- this is really fantastic!! There's something quite smooth about this performance or this organ's sound...I usually find organ music harder to get into but not this piece...I just finished listening to this for the eighth time...and it's on again...
When watching videos, you can always press `D` to open the debug panel – that gives you information about your streaming session, and a link to save that data for later.
Won't let me view anything until I use Landscape mode on a mobile device. It's MY device and I'll use it the way I want. I guess I'll watch it on YouTube, which isn't so dictatorial.
Still one can listen to Buxtehude and get taken in the beauty and playfulness of his works, and we instantly imagine how young Bach was equally mesmerized by the same music, and in a way, how it kindled a passion and Bach continued to dig into the same musical goldmine that Buxtehude had been excavating - sometimes even the same tunnels, to my ears.
Some of my faves in the Buxtehude collection, mostly dramatic stuff (no links because I'm on crappy 3G):
[1]: I won't say "the main inspiration" because this is going a bit far into opinion-land, and it doesn't even make sense to single out a single composer as "main influence", but either way, Buxtehude is definitely up there with Bach's mentor Georg Böhm.