> take, for example, the B minor fugue in Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, whose theme employs all twelve notes of the chromatic sequence, defying traditional notions of what constituted a beautiful melody.
Chromaticism doesn't defy traditional notions of melody. For example, Purcell's got all kinds of chromatic noodles in his melodies and people love to sing them.
What's melodically defiant is how disjunct that fugue subject is-- it keeps leaping around different registers with two-note sighing motives. In that sense it sounds like what a string instrument should be doing in the inner voices to fill out the harmony. Instead, it's presented unaccompanied at the beginning of the fugue because... that's how fugues typically work.
The reason it works is because the people who play and listen to Bach understand fugal forms and textures. They know that an unaccompanied fugal subject often has rhythmic and melodic holes in it precisely to leave silence that gets filled in later with the arrival of two or more additional melodies.
Lest you think you're too uninformed to hear any of this-- listen to Conlon Nancarrow's Study No.36 for Player Piano[1]. It's a four-part canon where, like Bach's fugue, Nancarrow leaves rhythmic and melodic space for the other voices to fill in as they enter. Except Nancarrow tweaks the tempo of each voice so that they move with a ratio of tempos that equals 17/18/19/20. If the result sounds unhinged to you, then congratulations-- you understand and can hear the basic musical premises that underpin Baroque period fugal forms.
The Netherlands Bach Society has done an incredible job capturing his pieces, using stunning camerawork and high quality recordings. It’s such a pleasure.
Also frankly the harpsichord is a much better instrument for WTC Books 1&2, especially with the added focus on video. Something about it just speaks to the soul.
You kind of miss the variation in volume. I think Bach used harpischords partly for technical reasons - the piano hadn't been invented - and preferred the clavichord but that was too quiet for performing to many people.
Bach knew about pianos, he even worked as a “piano salesman” for a period of time
> Bach went on to become an agent for Silbermann, selling his pianos in Leipzig. There’s even a receipt signed by Bach on May 9, 1749, selling a “Piano et Forte” to a Polish count, Jan Casimir von Branitzky.
Yes, he hated pianos when he first had the opportunity to try them. It is possible however that the first Silbermann prototypes, which is what he tried, were of low quality, even compared to other early pianos of the time. He certainly changed his opinion over time though and I agree with you that Silbermann must have listened to Bach’s early criticism. Anyway it is probable that Bach’s favourite keyboard instrument was the lute-harpsichord (see other link I posted in this thread).
Ah ok I got that a bit wrong. Though he would have been 64 at the time of sale and died a year after so I guess they were around in the later part of his life.
You didn’t get it completely wrong in the sense that piano was in its infancy at the time and nowhere near the capabilities and sonic features of modern pianos. So it is possible that when Bach wrote his “fur klavier” (“for keyboard instruments”) compositions, he didn’t have piano in mind. Probably his favourite keyboard instrument was the lute-harpsichord since he owned one https://baroquemusic.org/barluthp.html
That's awesome. I'd never heard of the lute-harpsichord before, but the sound is great! The bass is so deep and mellow, but otherwise sounds pretty similar to a harpsichord. I love it, thank you.
Do you have any good links for performances in the period style and instruments? THese are great in their own right, but I'd love to know how this music might have sounded in Bach's day.
Rachel Podger does quite a good recording of the Bach sonatas and partitas, but every violinist plays these (I mean that quite literally; violin competitions, modern or Baroque, regularly require a movement from these along side whatever else you do)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2e3eoOXeNs
I remember an amazing concert in an old stone church in Italy. The first half was upstairs on pedalled harpsichord. Then we all went down into the vaults of the crypt, crowded in, and the second half was on clavichord in this tiny, echoing space. The performer managed to find a space you could use to perform with that instrument, and the kind of audience that shows up to such a thing was dead silent.
in the first few minutes, Bernstein explains that it is hard to play Bach because there aren't many clues left in the score, leaving interpretation of the music on the conductor / musicians.
At this point, after a century of work, we have what seems to be a compelling performance practice that matches the evidence we can infer from the period.
I wouldn't pay much attention to either Bernstein or Gould on the question of Bach performance practice. I spent years studying this, and Bach recordings by either man sound bizarrely wrong, like someone weeping, emoting, and shouting their way through a recitation of Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'.
> there aren't many clues left in the score, leaving interpretation of the music on the conductor / musicians.
That's both true and false. It's true in that there are few explicit markings like you find on a modern score, and there was an expectation that the performer would take the score and improvise and ornament it according to a commonly shared performance practice. Think of it more like how a really skilled rock band will take a song as a base structure and fill in solos, bridges, ornaments and the like.
It's false in that the musical language was so full of idiom and convention that, if you know how to read it, the clues are all over the place. Especially in Bach where the idioms interlock in an almost crystalline way. There are only a few passages in Bach where I know of two quite different overall interpretations that are both reasonable. Compare Anthony Newman and Wanda Landowska playing the first variation of the Goldberg Variations, about halfway through, the cascading down and up. Newman follows the base line in making it a series of repeats, Landowska carries it through as dips in the same long line. Both work, but it's hard to imagine a third that doesn't fight the structure. Gould's is a ragtime disaster.
Look up "Baroque performance practice" and you'll find a mass of material.
Bach is my favorite artist & composer. There are times when I listen to a cantata of his and I feel as if I am in possession of a total understanding of life that departs me as soon as the music ends. It's a mystical and intellectual pleasure that has been among the chief joys of my adult life.
Yes, Bach was a dynamic and interesting person/composer. That being said, this reads less like a biography of a musical rebel and more like a sensationalist media retelling of his life as a way to sell a new book.
There's quite a gap between Bach the Person and Bach the Composer, and it's not obvious that it's possible to really appreciate the music without appreciating the person.
Classical music relies on standardised narratives that cluster around ideals of hard work, repetitive action, restraint, intellectual prowess, powerful but tightly controlled emotional expression, transcendence, and individualised heroism.
All of those narratives are are historically questionable.
The best creative artists have always been subversive and difficult. It's more realistic to see historic composers as part of an unbroken line of interesting people that continues through to the present - not as marble museum pieces of perfection.
These depictions of JS Bach as a rebel and a bad boy are from people who don’t recognize or connect with the timeless underlining genuineness of Bach. His goal in every writing was to make music for the glory of God, purely. Weather you’re religious or not, clearly his music is genuine. What’s missing from this article is why did he he do the things he did, and the back stories to each one is seeped in his struggle with those who are selfish or otherwise poor minded compared to him. You can recognize bits of Tibetan saints even in this stories.
Here’s a perfect example where a head master downplays a music ciriuclum at a school, and he reacts to what is right and the speaker in this video can’t believe why he would stick up for what’s right vs his own self interest only. And then seems to imply that saints are just nice and don’t stick up for what’s right.
>the speaker in this video can’t believe why he would stick up for what’s right vs his own self interest only
Indeed, why bother to leave behind great artworks for future generations when there are such steeply diminishing returns for incremental improvements? Gardiner's recordings reflect this attitude.
Weeeell. It's questionable in the sense that "Shakespeare"'s authorship of his plays is questionable. But just as no one has come up with a fully convincing alternative to William Shakespeare of Stratford, no one has come up with a fully convincing alternative to JSB writing 565. It has stylistic quirks, yes - but should that be surprising for "J.S. Bach the Rebel"?
There's a big gap between questioning the attribution of one piece to Bach and attributing all of Shakespeare's plays to someone else. For someone with a big body of work, there's always some debate around the edges. (For example, people now think Shakespeare was the co-author of a play about Edward III.)
Nothing about the arguments in the article are convincing. It seems he merely shoehorning a collection of disparate anecdotes into a predetermined (probably politically motivated) thesis. One which does not have a precise meaning, to boot. What does it mean, anyway, to be "subversive", simpliciter?
I've read that people in the past often did not drink alcohol (e.g., beer, wine) straight as we do now. Rather they diluted it with water, but if the water was unsafe, the alcohol killed the bad stuff.
Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"[1] was one of the demos on the Amiga 1000 that I still remember. Impressive in 1986. I was looking for it and couldn't find it on Youtube a few months ago, but that may be because I perennially confuse it with Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
Many of the most-admired composers of that time were colorful personalities, and very much ... including Beethoven and Mozart. That they openly revealed their humanity only makes the heights they reached all the more remarkable.
This author makes a similar mistake to the ones he accuses prior authors and historians of making. He's pretending as though Bach were operating alone in acting against certain norms in his music. It's obviously preposterous to suggest that anyone is acting alone or making a social statement in drinking to much or fucking hot chicks in the organ loft.
The most common misconception in music history is that it's fairly easy to attribute certain innovations to specific composers. Like, it's often dumbed down and presented as though Bach were the father of tonal music and that he was some kind of music radical in both inventing that system and taking it to its logical extreme.
This is the same kind of over-simplicity that brief histories of science and technology make.
The reality is quite a lot more murky. The tonal system was vestigially present early in the Franco-Flemish school of composition. You can see it forming in the work of Ockeghem and by the time you get to the masses of Orlando de Lassus you get profoundly different work than contemporaries who were firmly rooted in modal traditions like Zarlino and--more notably--Palestrina.
Bach's music is responding to a centuries-old tension between modal, tonal, and chromatic musical elements. Another gross simplification is the idea that modal music slowly evolved into tonal music. That all the modes except for Ionian and Aeolean simply fell out of use. Which is of course absurd since Ionian wasn't a real mode. It was just later included for the sake of theoretical completeness, not a thing composers actually used.
That aside, my point isn't that Bach is acting as a subversive rebel or charting new territory in the way that this author suggests, nor is he a god-like individual of lone genius in the way that traditional historians suggest. He is a part of a movement and incorporates elements from different musical traditions and expands on some of those and formalizes some of them.
The fugue mentioned in the article is more of a musical proof of a mathematical concept than it is an attempt to disrupt norms of melodic writing. The entire point of the Well-Tempered Klavier is to demonstrate that you can perform in all keys without stopping to retune your instrument. The b minor fugue (also weird thing here from this author: it's traditional in music theory and history texts to capitalize major keys and lower case minor keys. In a rigorous paper, this should be written as b minor fugue, not B minor fugue) is a demonstration that even within a single piece of music, you can work your way around the entire chromatic scale without retuning.
On top of that, the author isn't even correct about that particular fugue anyway. Again, Bach is operating in a context and responding to it. One of the main musical consequences of the protestant reformation and the resulting schism from the Catholic Church was that instruments were allowed in religious ceremonies. The "serious" composers of the Catholic church were focused almost entirely on vocal music, and instrumental music wasn't considered very seriously by scholars. But the protestants fostered a movement that was very focused on instrumental music that allowed the kinds of motivic writing that ignores melodic content to a certain extent and enables more intricate counterpoints. There is some aspect of what the author is saying, but it's hardly subversive. It's a continental and cultural and philosophical movement that started long before Bach was born. He's a part of that.
I do appreciate that we should stop pretending that people were pious and holy just because they wanted to be perceived that way and that Bach was way more human than perhaps we're often led to believe. But this author is really, really reaching in this excerpt, and in trying to set the record straight is glossing over all the relevant context that other historians skip over too.
Maybe he was a dissident, but his music is still boring to me. Or maybe his predecessors were just so boring that he was the first step away?
I usually don't understand from his music why he is celebrated. Is it that he is just historically important? Like the discovery of logarithmic tuning of sqrt_12(2)?
It could also be that I am just moved more by the romantic era. Mozart generally gets relegated lower in my list of great composers, but in Mozart's case my objection is the strict adherence to tempo and clear tone.
Edit: It should also be mentioned that the organ is not a very versatile instrument when compared to a piano. Although I have been treated to some great organ interpretation with a distinct familiarity to Daft Punk.
Bach boring? No arguing about taste I guess. As for the organ not being very versatile compared to a piano: think of an organ not as a piano, but as a very early version of a synthesizer without 'touch sensitivity'.
Technology is part of it. What would Bach have produced if he had sampling?
But equally importantly, all composers are limited by only having heard their contemporaries and predecessors. Bach was exposed to a certain set of music. You are exposed to a superset of the music he was exposed to.
People heard his music juxtaposed with everything else they had heard. Some of it sounded fresh, some too different to be enjoyed.
We hear his music juxtaposed with all the music composed after him, including music composed be people who heard his music and innovated further.
That’s the nature of progression. His music, like Mozarts, has timeless beauty. But it will always be “less” in a certain way than the music we hear today.
Bach is celebrated for himself, not his historical importance. He reached his current status as one of the most celebrated classical composers in the Romantic era, well after his Baroque style had become old-fashioned.
Bach is so celebrated because it has a precision to it, and because all of the musical quality is right there on the page. It's the exact opposite of modern pop music, for example, which is production-driven, and relies much more on dramatic musical gestures.
I hear this a lot from people, and I think much of it is due to the milquetoast performance practice for Baroque music that was until recently widespread outside musicological circles. I remember how I was taught to play Bach orchestral suites or Corelli sonatas when I was young, and it was mind numbing and dull. Fortunately my father was also playing me Christopher Hogwood and company at home so I knew something was up.
As I understand it, we don't know how Bach tuned his keyboard instruments. We know he cared about tuning and tuned his own instruments, but apparently there are reasons to believe that he didn't use equal temperament.
Bradley Lehman has a bizarre theory, which you could look up if you're interested. I am not qualified to have an opinion on whether it's a good theory.
We know that most of his performance was done using meantone systems, like the rest of his contemporaries. They are are quite precisely known. What his well tempering might have been is a matter of conjecture and many fascinating proposals have been put forward. I had a great time playing in the orchestra for the Bach 4 harpsichord concerto trying out one particularly wild experiment.
I think it has little to do with the music and everything to do with the interpretations and the instruments. I realized that when hearing non-traditional versions used by Andrey Trakovsky in his films, e.g.: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p3SUEWCddsQ
Interpretation is an important point. My music teacher discouraged interpretation of Mozart. I in turn refrained from discussing much about composition with the teacher and instead did that independently. She wasn't a bad teacher, but I don't think she liked me.
I am mostly a autodidact when it comes to music, but one who made it to some level (I play in a improvisational band). In my experience there are only few classical musicians who are able to work freely when interpreting a existing piece (and they are usually very good at what they are doing). But when you ask a regular classical trained musician to improvise, they will look at you in fear or start playing a piece they know by hard.
I think this is sad, because musician should be about fooling around and experimenting with sounds, melodies and phrases that come out of your instrument. Of course you can refine it all for a concert, but beeing a perfect classical musician should be more like Picasso and less like someone who tries to paint like a photograph (and keep in mind: Picasso was pretty good at the photorealistic stuff too if you look at early stuff). Music needs soul and that you only get through interpretation.
> It should also be mentioned that the organ is not a very versatile instrument when compared to a piano.
I wouldn't say that at all. It's versatile in a different way. Listen to some 20th century organ music - maybe start with Howells, Duruflé, Cochereau and explore from there.
Yay, someone who is open to the idea! So yes, I think Dvorak is a good counterargument to Bach. I personally feel that for anyone to appreciate Bach, in 2019, you need to overlay some form of intellectualism before you can appreciate Bach. And that is something I don't like; music should grab your from the first second, if possible.
I would concede that I would appreciate Bach better if there was less public emphasis on his music. Someone like Grieg is to me fresh because it is unfamiliar. In that sense I would have had a much more open approach to Bach if the first time I heard his music had been through exploration, rather than publicity.
My issue is simply that a downvote doesn't tell me anything. Doesn't matter what I think about Bach, but did someone really downvote without saying "I think Bach in interesting because x, y and z"? The analogue would be if I go and downvote some of the other comments to the OP just because they promote Bach. Anyway, it's passed.
That is everything beyond fundamental physics, not just HN.
You can argue that laws are an absolute joke, morality is an absolute joke, society is an absolute joke, nations are an absolute joke, company cultures are an absolute joke (to be sure!), relationships are an absolute joke (evnen an absurd joke) and so on.
Nothing of interest to humans has immutable laws that are so objective to never require judgement.
I stress the word “immutable” because if you give me a law that intends to produce a certain outcome, I’ll give you a game, and once it becomes a game, we’ll need to adjust the laws to preserve the intended outcome.
That’s why we have moderators. And that’s why HN evolves over time. Old timers like me may shake their fist at the way it has changed, but we cannot expect it to remain preserved in crystal like a mosquito in amber.
Chromaticism doesn't defy traditional notions of melody. For example, Purcell's got all kinds of chromatic noodles in his melodies and people love to sing them.
What's melodically defiant is how disjunct that fugue subject is-- it keeps leaping around different registers with two-note sighing motives. In that sense it sounds like what a string instrument should be doing in the inner voices to fill out the harmony. Instead, it's presented unaccompanied at the beginning of the fugue because... that's how fugues typically work.
The reason it works is because the people who play and listen to Bach understand fugal forms and textures. They know that an unaccompanied fugal subject often has rhythmic and melodic holes in it precisely to leave silence that gets filled in later with the arrival of two or more additional melodies.
Lest you think you're too uninformed to hear any of this-- listen to Conlon Nancarrow's Study No.36 for Player Piano[1]. It's a four-part canon where, like Bach's fugue, Nancarrow leaves rhythmic and melodic space for the other voices to fill in as they enter. Except Nancarrow tweaks the tempo of each voice so that they move with a ratio of tempos that equals 17/18/19/20. If the result sounds unhinged to you, then congratulations-- you understand and can hear the basic musical premises that underpin Baroque period fugal forms.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubepzLKAcCo