
J.S. Bach the Rebel: The subversive practice of a canonical composer - tintinnabula
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/js-bach-rebel
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jancsika
> 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.

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubepzLKAcCo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubepzLKAcCo)

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spacechild1
Hey, nice to see you here! Thanks for that link! Today I happen to have a live
performance with a player piano ensemble controlled with Pd.

~~~
jancsika
Hey, that's awesome!

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motohagiography
Seems tendentious to secularize Bach. There's something to be said for deistic
awe for creating great art.

If you were just getting interested, here are some contemporary performances:

BWV 1006 by Nigel Kennedy:
[https://youtu.be/nWx4pIe7FoE?t=179](https://youtu.be/nWx4pIe7FoE?t=179)

BWV 988 (goldberg variations) Glenn Gould
[https://youtu.be/p4yAB37wG5s?t=169](https://youtu.be/p4yAB37wG5s?t=169)

from BWV 816, Gigue, Andreas Schiff:
[https://youtu.be/f_U0lm6HZMk?t=777](https://youtu.be/f_U0lm6HZMk?t=777)

~~~
nerdponx
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.

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olau
Here's one on clavichord:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Nto_-j5Ao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Nto_-j5Ao)

~~~
madhadron
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.

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lordleft
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.

~~~
mellosouls
Beautifully put.

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Meerax
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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Except that his life was actually fairly unusual.

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.

~~~
QuesnayJr
I know literally nothing about Bach except he had a lot of children (I
think?), and yet I think his music is easy to appreciate.

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org3432
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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzCfB2gpAhw&t=5m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzCfB2gpAhw&t=5m)

~~~
tzs
> His goal in every writing was to make music for the glory of God, purely.

I'm having trouble seeing glorification of God in the Coffee Cantata (BWV
211).

~~~
org3432
No sense of humor?

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mrich
Bach was the first rock star

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho9rZjlsyYY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ho9rZjlsyYY)

Don't miss the chance to listen to this in a church.

~~~
dbcurtis
For BWV 565 I prefer this youtube performance, check it out:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA)

~~~
jacquesm
For contrast, one of the nicer piano versions out there:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3aI7Oo3GMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3aI7Oo3GMo)

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prvc
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?

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lispm
> tax-free beer

I don't think there was anything subversive about it. Beer was regular drink
and food.

~~~
jacquesm
And at the time _much_ safer to drink than water.

~~~
QuesnayJr
I think it was also weaker than modern beer.

~~~
throw0101a
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.

I have no idea how accurate this is.

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perl4ever
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.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522uWGQV134](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522uWGQV134)

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halotrope
I hope this will be the last time I read „Javascript Bach“

~~~
gherkinnn
Introducing bach.js, a highly optimised harpsichord synth.

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8bitsrule
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.

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ianamartin
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.

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mikorym
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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'.

~~~
vixen99
Could one describe a famous mathematician's output (as a whole) as boring and
put this opinion down to taste?

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mikorym
You can describe output as boring, but you can't argue about correctness.
Music does not have definibility of the latter.

