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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: composition

Bach Reloaded

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Interviews, Other Artists, World View

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Abu Dhabi, Alexey Botvinov, Bach Reloaded, Burhan Öcal, composition, drum stick, Emirates Palace, Goldberg Variations, harmony, Istanbul, Kiev, mathematics, Montreux Jazz Festival, Paris, percussion, piano, rhythm, Saeed Saeed, Turkish, Ukrainian, western art music, Zürich

Burhan Öçal

Burhan Öçal

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach receives an innovative eastern spin in the hands of musicians Burhan Öçal, a Turkish percussionist, and Ukrainian pianist Alexey Botvinov, in their interpretation of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988). Since debuting the work in 2010, “Bach Reloaded” has been performed across Europe and recently received its Middle East debut in Abu Dhabi at the Emirates Palace.

Saeed Saeed interviewed Burhan Öçal to learn more about the project:

Saeed Saeed (SS) How did you and Botvinov come up with the concept of Bach Reloaded?

Burhan Öçal (BÖ) I’ve been dreaming about this project for fifteen to twenty years. However, as you know, Bach is such a prominent composer in the western classical-music world that it is very risky to even play his non-religious compositions, and not a lot of people have the courage to do this. So, it was not easy for us to revise his compositions with Turkish percussion and play it live.

We feel that we need to show the audience that these compositions are not for  religious purposes and that they are fully [musically] successful in their very nature. We’ve played these shows in Kiev, Zürich, Paris, Istanbul and at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and each time the audience was mesmerized, so we are trying to connect with the audience in Abu Dhabi in the same way.

SS What is it about Bach’s compositions that lends them to a fusion of percussion and piano?

BÖ Bach’s music is so strictly mathematical that you cannot change the structure whatsoever. So this leads Bach’s compositions to be very rhythmic. Of course, these are very hard variations. I’ve maybe listened to the variations hundreds of times to be able to adapt to the piano and percussion. The ten-finger technique used both by the pianist and the percussionist also plays a big role in being able to create a fusion between these two instruments.

SS You and Botvinov focus on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. What is it about that piece that inspires you both to perform it?

The first reason in choosing the Goldberg Variations is that the composition itself was not written with religious purposes. The second reason is that the piece was composed beautifully with its mathematics and rhythmic structure.

SS How would you describe your musical chemistry with Botvinov?

BÖ First of all we both are very disciplined musicians. His is a ten-finger technique and mine also, because I do not use drum sticks. This leads us to use our twenty fingers in perfect harmony.

SS What makes it so appealing to international audiences?

BÖ I think that the reason behind the performances being appreciated is that it is that, for the first time, such a courageous project is actually being accomplished and is a success.

SS In Abu Dhabi, do you feel people identify with your percussion. Does this feel familiar to Middle East audiences?

BÖ I think that they find the music to be familiar, and, as a result, their reaction is definitely positive. Because of this, I am also playing some Middle Eastern Arabic rhythms and solos for this audience.

– The National

A Renaissance for Rameau

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Interviews, Music Education, Other Artists

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Anne Vila, application, Atelier Rameau, bassoon, Beethoven, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Castor et Pollux, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Charles Dill, chord, chorus, color, composition, counterpoint, dance, David Ronis, d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, Descartes, Frère Jacques, French, Gluck, Graham Sadler, Handel, harmony, harpsichord, Haydn, inversion, Italian, Jean-Philippe Rameau: International Anniversary Conference, John Locke, Jonathan Williams, key, Les Arts Florissants, Louis XV, Madison, Malebranche, Marc Vallon, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition, Mozart, musicology, New York, Niccolò Jommelli, Opéra Comique, opera, Orfeo et Euridice, Oxford University, Paris, Platée, Princeton University Press, Rameau, Raphaëlle Legrand, Royaumont Abbey, Sorbonne, St. Hilda's College Oxford, Sylvie Bouissou, Thomas Christensen, Tommaso Traetta, Treatise on Harmony, University of Paris, University of Wisconsin, Voltaire, Washington, William Christie

Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau

It’s not very often that one receives international recognition two hundred fifty years after being placed in the ground. But with help from University of Wisconsin-Madison musicology professor Charles Dill and a host of international scholars and musicians, that’s exactly what’s happening for Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Rameau, a French composer (1683-1764) who lived during the reign of Louis XV, has become famous for his contributions to music theory, his early harpsichord works, and especially his operas. His 1722 Treatise on Harmony is considered revolutionary for having incorporated philosophical ideas alongside practical musical issues. His operas were equally famous for their rich choral singing and elegant dancing. In the last few decades, interest in Rameau has intensified, with French scholars leading the way and organizing major festivals in Europe. Because of Dill’s renown as a scholar of Rameau and the Baroque, the UW-Madison School of Music will present a series of performances and talks about Rameau during the 2014-2015 academic year.

On 13 November 2014, the first of these events will kick off with a discussion about the expressive qualities in Rameau’s music (with visiting opera director David Ronis and Professor Anne Vila of the Department of French and Italian), followed by a concert the next day featuring Marc Vallon, UW-Madison professor of bassoon, in a mostly-Rameau concert. You can read the full schedule of events here.

We asked Prof. Dill to tell us a bit about himself and what makes Rameau an important figure in music.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM)  How did you first become interested in Rameau?

Charles Dill (CD)  Modern audiences often view all composers of the past as struggling visionaries. This may be true of composers after Beethoven, but it isn’t true – or isn’t true in the same way – for earlier composers, even composers like Mozart or Haydn. They considered themselves to be working at a job. They wrote pieces to suit their performers, and the compositions were “disposable.”  If something needed changing, the composer changed it, generally without much grumbling. They didn’t continue to garner attention for decades.

What first interested me about Rameau, then, was that he revised his operas extensively and these revised versions continued to be performed. This suggests all sorts of remarkable things about him and his works. Notably, he was alert to how audiences responded to his works to an unusual degree, and he felt some kind of obligation toward “getting the work right,” as it were. That’s a very modern way of thinking about music. Because of this attitude, he also took risks as a composer. He was a remarkably creative individual, and he was rewarded for it. His works dominated French opera for a period of fifty years, until well after his death. For his time and place, this truly was an unusual relationship between composer and audience.

Add to that Rameau’s work as a theorist. Thinkers had been speculating about how music works for as long as music had existed, but Rameau was the first to envision a comprehensive system that accounted for all of its aspects: how keys or tonalities come into being, why some harmonic progressions are more effective than others, how musical knowledge influences performance. We still employ his basic terminology for describing fundamental principles of music – chord inversion, tonic, dominant. There were flaws in his ideas, to be sure, and there have been countless other systems proposed since that make similar claims, but if you imagine music as an organized, coherent system – something we do every day – then you are, to a degree, following in his footsteps.

And finally, around the year 2000, everyone became much more interested in Rameau, in response to a series of extraordinarily good performances and recordings, many of them under the direction of William Christie. It is no exaggeration to say the world thinks of Rameau differently as a result of William Christie’s work with the group Les Arts Florissants.”

UWM  How did you become a Rameau specialist?

CD  I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. When I began working in Parisian libraries in the late 1980s, as a graduate student completing my degree, there were only a handful of people studying Rameau. Students from that generation have done influential work. Thomas Christensen explained the development of Rameau’s music theory, Sylvie Bouissou became the general editor of the Rameau edition, and William Christie specialized in interpreting Rameau’s music in performance.

I was interested in Rameau’s relationship with audiences. Music criticism was still a fledgling enterprise in the eighteenth century, and yet his compositions elicited strong opinions, both for and against. He was one of the first composers to be treated not simply as a commodity, but as a public figure, one of the first to take that role seriously. To an unusual degree, he felt the need to experiment in his compositions, and yet he was also forced by circumstances to consider listeners and their perceptions in everything he wrote. After all this time, I still find this story remarkable.

Times have changed. Nowadays, France recognizes Rameau as one its most representative composers and devotes time, money, and effort to developing our knowledge of him. A small army of dedicated French researchers is poring over every available source and producing first-rate scholarship. They’re doing wonderful work.

UWM  What contributions have you made to scholarship?

CD  When I began writing about Rameau, there was a longstanding trend to approach composers solely from the vantage point of what they wrote. We could describe this as the “great composers” or “great works” approach. Discussing composers in this way cuts out some of the most interesting material: what audiences believed, how they liked what they heard, how they received the composers, and how composers responded to criticism. My book, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (1998), which Princeton University Press has recently reprinted as part of its Legacy series, addressed some of these questions. As an eminently public figure, Rameau was subject to intense scrutiny. Some critics distrusted opera as an overly sensual medium, and some regarded Rameau’s colorful music as an especially egregious example. Rameau encouraged these kinds of responses. Where earlier composers generally wrote simple, unobtrusive music, Rameau wrote music that demanded attention. In a way, then, he challenged critics and audience members to define their expectations regarding music openly and publicly. It is telling that, during the period in which he became popular, audiences changed, coming to resemble modern audiences more and more: they began to learn difficult and complex music by heart, they grew more quiet and became more attentive during performances.

My other contributions have had to do with aspects of his career. My early publications often dealt with the relationship between Rameau’s ideas as a music theorist and his actual compositions. Having an eighteenth-century composer who was so active on both fronts is truly unusual, and it allows us to think more carefully about the relationship between theory and practice. More recently, I’ve been interested in reconstructing Rameau’s intellectual life. He was a bit of a magpie, really, taking ideas from the writers and philosophers who most suited his needs, but given the time and place in which he lived, he could take from the best: Descartes and Malebranche were early sources of inspiration, but eventually, like so many of his contemporaries, he turned his attention to Locke. Among those who collaborated with him on projects were Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. So I’ve been developing a clearer sense of what he himself actually believed, based on what he drew on from these various sources.”

UWM  How does Rameau fit in with other well-known composers of the day?

CD  Rameau was two years older than Handel and Bach, almost an exact contemporary. Interestingly, although there’s no evidence to suggest he knew their music well, he helped popularize in France the kinds of music they were writing. From the Handel side of things, he took the kind of virtuosic playing and singing we associate with Italian composition, and from the Bach side, he took an interest in complex counterpuntal and harmonic language. To these he added an extraordinary sense of color – few at this time were combining orchestras and voices in such surprising ways – and an endless gift for invention comparable to Bach’s and Handel’s. During the late 1740s, a faction arose at the French court that wanted to set limits on how many operas Rameau could compose, because they felt he was dominating the music scene so completely.

Rameau was well known internationally. Initially, this was the result of his theoretical ideas, which he began publishing in the 1720s; reviews appeared almost immediately in Germany. By the 1750s, when his theoretical ideas were being popularized, his work was receiving attention in Italy as well. He also became an international figure musically in this period. His works were performed in Italy and Germany, and they were influential among the reform composers of that generation – Traetta, Jommelli, and Gluck. (For example, the famous opening scene of Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice, which begins in the midst of a funeral procession, was directly modeled on the beginning of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux.)

UWM  What activities have taken place around the world this year, and where?

CD  Well, as is always the case with composers, there have been performances around the world – in France and, more generally, Europe, obviously, but in the states as well, notably in New York and Washington, D. C. In fact, a phone app has circulated in France so that one can follow where Rameau is being performed every day this year.

Raphaëlle Legrand, who teaches at the Sorbonne, has put together a fascinating year-long series of presentations, open to the public, that combine historians, music theorists, professional musicians specializing in period instruments, and professional dancers specializing in historical dance techniques. This project is called the “Atelier Rameau” and it has an excellent website. It has been especially interesting to have singers, instrumentalists, and dancers working together, because dance is so basic to Rameau’s musical style. Performers quickly developed a new sense of what was and wasn’t possible when they began talking to each other!

The biggest events, however, were two international conferences that united all of the scholars currently working on Rameau. The first was held last March in Paris. Sponsored by the French national library and CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), the French government’s principal sponsor of scholarly research, “Rameau between Art and Science” was held over three days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Cistercian abbey at Royaumont (where an important research library is housed), and the Opéra Comique (which premiered a new production of Rameau’s comedy, Platée). The second, “Jean-Philippe Rameau: International Anniversary Conference,” was held at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, this past September. It was part of a vast research effort, The Rameau Project, which is being overseen at Oxford by Graham Sadler and Jonathan Williams. Both conferences were remarkable.

Among the surprises, those in attendance learned that we are still discovering eighteenth-century production scores for Rameau’s earliest and most important works, and that Rameau was the composer of the famous round, Frère Jacques, which he included in a recently discovered composition manual. I can honestly say that this past year has advanced our knowledge of Rameau and his music in unprecedented ways.

– University of Wisconsin-Madison

New Instruments for NuRoque Music

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education, Organology, Other Artists

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acoustics, Adrian Belew, amplifier, Anticon, BEAM Foundation, Childish Gambino, Columbia Records, composition, computer, crowdfunding, Dan Deacon, Dave Smith Instruments, Donald Buchla, East Bay Express, electric viola, electric violin, electronic music, feedback, gesture, guitar, hip-hop, improvisation, iPad, Keith McMillen, Keith McMillen Instruments, keyboard, Kronos Quartet, laptop, Laurie Anderson, loudspeaker, Matt Hettich, MIDI, Mills College, NuRoque, O Superman, Oakland, Oberheim Electronics, pitch, Playboy, polyurethane, popular music, QuNeo, QuNexus, Robert Moog, Sam Lefebvre, San Francisco Tape Music Center, Skrillex, Smart Fabric, soldering iron, string bass, StrongArm, Switched-on Bach, synthesizer, textile, timbre, TrioMetrik, University of Chicago, Wendy Carlos, West Berkeley, Zeta Music Systems Inc.

Keith McMillen

Keith McMillen

Switched-On Bach outsold every classical album that had come before it. In 1968, composer Wendy Carlos performed Bach pieces on Dr. Robert Moog‘s early analog synthesizer systems and convinced a skeptical Columbia Records to release the recorded result. Switched-On Bach shattered expectations. It reached number one on the pop charts the following year, and spawned a glut of imitations. Most importantly, though, Switched-On Bach exposed a mass audience to an entirely new palette of electronic sounds. Among those radicalized by the recordings was Keith McMillen. “I lusted after control of those sounds,” he said. “Being a guitar player at the time, they just weren’t available.” McMillen’s guitar wouldn’t sound like a Moog, but synthesizers lacked the gestural sensitivity of stringed and acoustic instruments. In essence, the instrument builder’s three-decade career has sought to give electronic sounds the expressive physical interface that he cherished in a guitar – and usher in a new musical movement in the process.

At the West Berkeley headquarters of Keith McMillen Instruments, a company founded by its namesake in 2005, about fifteen employees labor to solve the problem posed by Switched-On Bach. Programmers rattle computer keyboards in one nook, while soldering irons flicker in two cluttered engineering rooms. Upstairs, there’s a tidy space where Matt Hettich, the company’s product specialist, demonstrates gear. Like most of the company’s employees, Hettich began working at KMI after graduating from the music program at Mills College in Oakland, where he wrote about electronic music performance for his master’s thesis. In the demo room, he showed off two of the company’s recent devices, QuNeo and QuNexus. They were connected to a computer, modular effects processors, and synthesizers produced by the local companies Dave Smith and Oberheim.

In practice, most musicians use these devices to control MIDI – the digital information produced by computers that constitutes sounds. The QuNeo, which raised eleven times its crowdfunding goal for initial manufacturing in 2012, is the size of an iPad, with raised pads in a variety of shapes. The QuNexus is distinguished from the QuNeo by its shape, which is similar to a keyboard, and its ability to control analog as well as digital sound. Through the company’s software, users assign every pad a specific sound. For the QuNeo, users can assign different sounds to the four corners of every pad.

Beneath the device’s polyurethane exterior rests Smart Fabric, a malleable textile with integrated digital parts. KMI was the first company to use Smart Fabric for instrument design, and McMillen worked personally with a local manufacturer to refine the material. Used in almost all KMI devices, Smart Fabric provides the sensitivity that McMillen sought in electronic interfaces since first hearing Switched-On Bach. Smart Fabric makes KMI devices sensitive to the velocity at which a user strikes each pad, the location within each pad that a user strikes, and the pressure that a user continues to apply after striking. In addition to assigning sounds through KMI software, users can manipulate the parameters of how such physical gestures affect the sounds. Smart Fabric takes live electronic music from an activity akin to typing on a laptop all the way to a physically expressive performance. For instance, the pad’s pressure sensitivity can be programmed to shift the pitch of a given note to mimic a guitarist who stretches a string – and much more.

Hettich explained the devices with exacting technical precision, like an engineer speaking to an electronic musician. His delivery was a reflection of KMI’s core consumer group: innovative musicians seeking to push their instruments’ sonic and expressive limits. Like McMillen himself, many users arrive at KMI gear hoping to defy electronic music’s limited response to physical gestures. The guitar iconoclast Adrian Belew uses a QuNeo to manipulate an array of effects kept in what he calls the Magic Closet. Other users include the experimentalist Dan Deacon, members of the Anticon hip-hop collective, and producers working with acts such as Skrillex and The Weeknd. The crew behind hip-hop artist Childish Gambino‘s live show even uses KMI devices to control lighting and visuals. The theme that echoes throughout artist testimonials about KMI devices is relieved frustration. What seemed impossible, their praise goes, actually isn’t.

McMillen built his first piece of gear – a guitar amplifier – at the age of ten. “I couldn’t afford one,” he said. “I was happy to make something that didn’t electrocute me and made the guitar louder.” Throughout high school, he played in bands and pondered the possibilities of creating an interface for instruments and computers. At the University of Chicago, he took composition courses and earned an engineering degree in acoustics. Attracted to the musical and technological innovation of Bay Area synthesizer luminary Donald Buchla and pioneering institutions like the San Francisco Tape Music Center, McMillen moved to town in 1979.

That year, he founded Zeta Music. The company rose to prominence for producing electric violins and modules to synthesize string sounds. Laurie Anderson, the composer behind 1982’s surprise pop hit O Superman, commissioned an electric violin. In 1992, Zeta made an electric viola at the request of the Kronos Quartet. In 1998, Zeta’s electric violin graced the cover of Playboy magazine’s Sex and Music issue. Zeta enabled string players to amplify their sound and retain the instrument’s timbre. It also reversed the process by synthesizing the sound of string instruments electronically. Though the company practically invented and dominated a new instrument market, it didn’t quite fulfill McMillen’s lifelong goals quite like his work under the KMI banner.

In 2004, McMillen established the nonprofit organization BEAM with the stated goal of fostering a new musical movement called NuRoque. The name referred to the seventeenth-century emergence of Baroque music, which McMillen considered an important revolutionary period because new technology expanded composers’ creative possibilities. McMillen thought that the help of computers in composition – and collaboration – was underexplored. The line of thought created a personifying habit, where components are said to “talk” to one another and “understand” the physical expression of human operators.

“If you’re focused on building tools, it’s very different from using them,” McMillen said. Under the BEAM banner, McMillen founded TrioMetrik to perform NuRoque. A typical TrioMetrik performance featured McMillen on guitar, an electric violinist, and an electric stand-up bassist, all flanked by monitors. Computers interpreted the string-playing in real time, then provided visual feedback, which the performers used in turn to influence the parameters of their improvisation. The goal was to spontaneously collaborate in tandem with computer systems.

TrioMetrik toured rigorously for two years before McMillen encountered more problems to engineer his way out of. The equipment was too large and too costly; these obstacles pivoted him back to starting his current instrument company. Plus, his long-standing dream of being able to control electronic sounds by gesture remained incomplete. NuRoque had to wait.

Keith McMillen Instruments shipped its first product in 2008. Most recently, the company unveiled the StrongArm, a piece of guitar hardware that allows notes to sustain indefinitely. McMillen said that the tool took thirty-five years to make. McMillen’s products solve the problem posed to a young guitarist enraptured by Switched-On Bach, and strive to defy the limitations he’s encountered since. Still, McMillen predicts that when his inventions allow enough expression, sound, and practicality, he’ll stop building. “I basically told myself that once I was done with all of these instruments,” he said. “I’d return to making music.”

Sam Lefebvre – East Bay Express

Melbourne Mass in B Minor

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists, World View

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Australian Bach Society, Bach Studies in Australia, cantata, Christoph Wolff, church, composition, Dresden, Elector, gestation, Latin, Leipzig, liturgy, mass, Mass in B minor, Melbourne, Melbourne Bach Forum, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sanctus, Saxony, St. John Church, The Canberra Times, western art music

St.  John Church, Melbourne

St. John Church, Melbourne

It has been called “The Greatest Musical Artwork of All Times and All Nations,” an opus summum, and a crowning musical achievement of the Baroque era. And yet, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232) remains an enigmatic work, a towering monument of Western art music that in its length and scope far outstrips anything else that had been previously written in the genre.

A work of sublime beauty, intense emotion and perfect construction, and one that continues to fascinate scholars, performers and audiences alike, at its time of creation it had no explicit purpose or performance context.

For a long time, musicologists thought the Mass in B minor had been written entirely during the 1730s, when Bach had already completed the majority of his church cantatas and was turning his attention to other types of vocal music. In fact, the work in its final form dates from the last years of Bach’s life, around 1748-49, but it had a far longer gestation, for much of the piece is made up of independently-conceived compositions that were then later revised and incorporated into the final work.

For example, the Sanctus (the third of the four major parts of the complete Mass) began life as a separate setting for use in the Leipzig churches on Christmas Day 1724. Another of these individual pieces was a Missa (the first of the parts) that Bach composed in 1733 for presentation in Dresden to the new Elector of Saxony. His dedication letter to the Elector referred to it as a “small work of that science which I have achieved in musique.”

Exactly why Bach decided to expand the Missa into a complete mass setting remains uncertain. He had long been fascinated with Latin church music and had already written several short pieces in the genre, but there would have been no place for a complete Latin mass setting in a Lutheran church service, and, in any case, the sheer length of the final composition (over two hours) would have made a complete performance in a liturgical context very unlikely.

Did Bach perhaps view the Mass in B minor as a kind of personal artistic legacy? Certainly, part of the appeal for him seems to have been that the text is not tied to an expressly Lutheran doctrine, but rather transcends theological boundaries. This made the Mass a truly “universal” sacred work that could speak to the widest possible audience.

In its final twenty-seven movement form, the Mass in B minor represents a complete synthesis of all the major kinds of vocal writing of Bach’s day. It encompasses music for every type of solo voice and complex choral textures for four to eight voices; it showcases the Baroque orchestra to its maximum effect and features representative solo instruments of all kinds; and it spans a vast range of musical styles and compositional techniques, from old-style strict part-writing to the most modern musical language. It draws on music written over a period of more than twenty-five years and therefore represents in many ways the pinnacle and summation of Bach’s formidable vocal output.

On 7, 8 and 9 August 2014, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will perform Bach’s Mass in B minor. In anticipation of this event, and in honor of the visit to Australia by one of the world’s most renowned Bach scholars, Professor Christoph Wolff, the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (in association with the Australian Bach Society and St. John Church) will be hosting a symposium titled “Bach Studies in Australia,” as part of the Melbourne Bach Forum. The symposium will showcase the very best of Bach scholarship from across the country and feature concert performances of music by Bach, his family and his contemporaries. The highlight will be a public lecture on 25 July 2014, given by Professor Wolff, on “Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig,” where he will address general aspects regarding this period in Bach’s life, including a context for the Mass in B minor, this most universal and celebrated of all Bach’s vocal works.

– The Canberra Times

Focusing on the Brothers Bach

01 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists

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Bückeburg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Wolff, clavichord, composition, David Schulenberg, fortepiano, harpsichord, Haydn, Jacques Ogg, Johann Christian Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, London, opera, organ, piano, UNCG Now, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Bückeburg Palace

Bückeburg Palace

Four of the Brothers Bach will take center stage at the eighteenth Focus on Piano Literature conference 5-7 June 2014 in the Music Building at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Guest artists and lecturers Jacques Ogg, Christoph Wolff and David Schulenberg will examine the careers of four of Johann Sebastian Bach’s musical sons:

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
The famous brother, Emanuel “wrote the book” on keyboard playing and distinguished himself as an inspired improviser. All the great Classical masters acknowledged their debt to him. Never at a loss for a musical idea and a host of ways to express it, he created a body of works for keyboard rivaled only by Haydn’s for imagination and craft, yet many of today’s pianists are scarcely aware of his work.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784)
The eldest brother, Friedemann struggled to find stability in his life yet amassed a respectable record of professional achievement as an organist and composer.

Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
The rebellious brother, Christian left Germany, mastered the idioms of Italian opera, traded Lutheranism for Catholicism, and climbed to the apex of London musical society as the Queen’s music master, yet he left a widow in penury.

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795)
The quiet brother, Christoph Friedrich settled into service at the small court of Bückeburg and spent his days composing in the fashionable genres and styles.

During the conference, professors John Salmon and Andrew Willis, along with several other UNCG School of Music, Theater and Dance faculty, will perform works composed for clavichord, harpsichord, organ and fortepiano by the many members of the Bach family.

– UNCG Now

Reading with Bach

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Books, Other Artists

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architecture, Chaconne in D minor, choreography, ciacona, composition, dance, death, Frankenstein, Lizzi Kew Ross, Lizzi Kew Ross and Co., London, Mary Shelley, Reading with Bach, rhythm, Ruth Elder, violin, Walking and Talking Books

ReadingcropLizzi Kew Ross and Co.’s Reading with Bach brings us dancers and musicians into the territory of books. Reading with Bach is a kind of excavation, where the real and imagined worlds collide. Through movement and music, we watch, see, listen, engage and speculate on that strange, solitary act that is reading.

For what is it to hold and handle the physical reality of a book? What is it to read – to turn the page and be led into minds, bodies, objects, space, architecture, netherworlds, underworlds and other worlds? What is to be charmed, seduced or even bludgeoned by language, images and actions? All this happens in our imaginations, and we construct these worlds within ourselves.

As in the act of dying, we read alone. Each person’s experience is solitary, individual, and unique: the list of books we read, re-read, wish for and avoid is as personal as a fingerprint.

Reading with Bach, with three dancers and two live violinists, was developed from choreographer Lizzi Kew Ross’s Walking and Talking Books events, where participants discussed one of a series of books while walking a number of interconnected routes through the City of London. It gave Lizzi the chance to observe people as they walked among crowds, closing themselves off from the exterior world by reading, in an interior world of their own. What is it to read – to turn the page and be led into other worlds? Not only do we construct these worlds within ourselves, but what we imagine can become so vivid that the real and the imagined collide.

Lizzi Kew Ross asks, “can I, as a choreographer, through dance and music, explore the notion of public and private with the world of books and Bach as a starting point? As soon as the dancer opens the book on stage, we go into her head, we hear the music she hears and as she is lifted up reading, she is taken by them on a journey. But who is leading whom? Are they figments of her imagination, characters in the book she is reading, or are they, as in Shelley’s Frankenstein, manipulating her vision and writing the page before she reads it? We will play with the rhythm of this dynamic, asking the audience to ‘read’ the work in a variety of ways.”

Composer Ruth Elder notes, “When choosing the particular extracts from Bach’s music to incorporate into my score, I looked to his solo violin works and found the Chaconne in D minor [BWV 1004] is a piece that really speaks to me. I often find it playing in my head even if I haven’t physically played it for a long time. After choosing the pieces, I then had to create my own extended sound worlds inspired by Bach’s piece. I thought of those composers in 1720 deciding against attempting a ciacona for the violin and realized what a task it would be to create these links that would transcend from Bach’s music to my own material and for them to sound integrated and organic without disrupting the mastery of Bach’s compositions.”

– Lizzi Kew Ross and Co.

Kennedy, the Potty-mouthed Virtuoso

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists

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apartheid, baroness, Bob Monkhouse, British Broadcasting Corporation, brushes, Chaconne in D minor, composition, drums, emotions, Fairport Convention, Fats Waller, freedom of speech, geezer, guitar, improvisation, jazz, Jimi Hendrix, London, Modern Jazz Quartet, Nigel Kennedy, percussion, Perth, promenade concert, punk, rock and roll, Ron Banks, Royal Albert Hall, Ruth Deech, Stéphane Grappelli, string bass, television, The Guardian, The West Australian, violin

Nigel Kennedy

Nigel Kennedy

Nigel Kennedy, the enfant terrible of classical music, is always good for a quote. Try this from an interview last year with The Guardian newspaper after the interviewer pointed out that his concert will be conducted by a woman: “I really don’t see what’s so important about gender. I think conductors are completely over-rated anyway, because if you love music why not play it? . . . I don’t think the audience gives a shit about the conductor. Not unless they’ve been pumped full of propaganda from classical music writing or something . . . no one normal understands what the conductor does . . . they just wave their arms out of time.”

It’s a typical Kennedy rant – the sort of one-sided expletive-filled generalization we can perhaps dismiss as trash talk – or simply Kennedy being Kennedy. He might sometimes be wrong, or perverse, but he’s lovably wrong or irresponsible in the way of the naughty child.

And speaking of children, there is another great quote from comedian Bob Monkhouse who said: “Growing old is compulsory, growing up is optional.”

As Kennedy told an audience at a performance last year of music from his recent CD Recital, which blends Bach with Fats Waller and his own compositions: “All this repertoire is music which I have either grown up with, or feel I’ve grown up with, bearing in mind that growing up is something I haven’t been overly interested in so far.”

Perth fans of this violin virtuoso with the potty mouth, extreme opinions and arrested development will get the full flavor of his personality in an intimate recital on 29 April 2014. Kennedy will divide his concert into two distinct halves – the first half solo violin compositions by Bach. After interval he will introduce his four-piece combo of acoustic guitars, bass and drums playing his own compositions and jazz improvisations.

For some reason I’ve got it into my head that his Australian tour will feature music from Fats Waller, recorded on his CD Recital. “Nuh, man, Fats is not on the list, although Fats might find his way in there at the end,” he says on the phone from London.

Of the Bach violin compositions, Kennedy says: “I love the geezer, man. I’ll be playing his Chaconne in D minor (BWV 1004), a set of variations which are just phenomenal.” (It’s been praised as one of the greatest pieces of music ever written). And on his own music, Kennedy searches for a comparison: “It’s intimate stuff with acoustic guitars and the drummer just on the brushes, very quiet really: somewhere between the Modern Jazz Quartet and Fairport Convention.”

Kennedy is one of the few classically-trained musician who feels comfortable playing jazz, particularly that distinctive sense of freedom that comes from improvisation. In his youth he played on stage with the great jazz violinist and improviser Stéphane Grappelli and he has created music in homage to the equally celebrated rock guitar improviser Jimi Hendrix.

It’s rare to find someone who can move so easily between strict classical music and the spontaneity of jazz, I suggest. Why do so many classical musicians find it so difficult to play jazz or improvise? “I think it is because classical musicians are over-taught and over-trained,” he shoots back. Improvisation is a lost art in classical music. Bach used to do it a lot but somehow it got lost in the eighteenth century. “Classical musicians now just read the notes. But you can’t just play the notes: you’ve got to bring emotion to it. Jazz improvisation is like the real truth behind the music.”

He might buy an argument with classical musicians over that one, but Kennedy is never far from controversy over his views. Even his off-hand remarks are likely to get him into trouble.

Take the controversy that erupted at last year’s Proms concert, where Kennedy played with a group of Palestinian musicians. At the end of the performance, Kennedy told the Albert Hall audience: “We all know from experiencing this night of music that giving equality and getting rid of apartheid means there is a chance for amazing things to happen.” His apartheid comments were interpreted as an attack on Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and were edited out of the BBC’s television broadcast which went to air later. Kennedy furiously denounced the action as an attack on freedom of speech, a response lapped up by the British media.

In our phone interview Kennedy is more philosophical, saying he was only making a remark about how good it was to be able to play with Palestinians. “Then some baroness, who is not worthy of that name, got it into her head that my remark should be banned,” he says, clearly annoyed that the comment had gotten out of hand. (He is referring to a former governor of the BBC, Baroness Deech, who said Kennedy’s remarks were offensive and untrue and that there was no apartheid in Israel.)

But, really, should he have been surprised? Kennedy has spent a career developing a reputation for his “punk” attitudes to classical music, of debunking myths and being provocative about how he feels about music and life in general.

Ron Banks – The West Australian

Graupner’s Long Life Paralleled Bach’s

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Music Education

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blindness, cantata, cantor, Christoph Graupner, Christoph-Graupner-Gesellschaft e. V., composition, concerto, dance suite, exmatriculation, French, German, Hamburg, Handel, harpsichord, Hesse, Hesse-Darmstadt, Italian, Johann Kuhnau, Kapellmeister, Kirchberg, Leipzig, Oper am Gänsemarkt, opera, Reichenbach, score, sight-singing, sinfonia, St. Thomas School, Telemann, University of Leipzig, violin, Vivaldi, woodwind

A scene at the Oper am Gänsemarkt

A scene at the Oper am Gänsemarkt

Born in 1683, two years before J. S. Bach, to a family of Kirchberg clothmakers, Christoph Graupner displayed an unusual facility for sight-singing at a young age. His uncle, organist Nikolaus Küster, provided Graupner his early musical training and convinced the boy’s parents that he should accompany him to his new post in Reichenbach, also in Saxony, for further education. Graupner was admitted to the St. Thomas School in Leipzig in 1696, long before Bach’s arrival, studied under Johann Kuhnau and collaborated with Telemann, and, upon exmatriculation in 1704, began to study law at the University of Leipzig.

The invasion of Saxony by Swedish troops in 1706 cut short his advanced studies and forced Graupner to flee to Hamburg where he found safety in a position as harpsichordist in an opera orchestra where Handel was a violinist. Between 1707 and 1709, Graupner composed five operas for the Oper am Gänsemarkt in an ecelctic musical style, combining French and German elements, that were well-received by the Hamburg audience.

Then, in 1709, Graupner’s life took another important turn when he accepted the position of Assistant Kapellmeister at the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, rising to the top position in 1712. At first he focused on operatic composition at the Darmstadt Hofkapelle, at one point supervising some forty musicians, but after financial cutbacks in 1717, Graupner abandoned opera, cut the size of his staff and turned his attention to instrumental music and cantatas. Tempted, however, by the thought of returning to Saxony, Graupner competed for the position of cantor of the main churches in Leipzig that had opened up as the result of Kuhnau’s death, but when the Landgrave raised his pay and gave him other incentives to remain in Darmstadt, Graupner turned down the position that Bach finally accepted in 1723.

Now firmly entrenched in Hesse, Graupner composed more than one hundred “symphonies” (three-movement sinfonias or multi-movement dance suites in major keys), half as many concertos (mainly for woodwinds, half in the three-movement Vivaldi pattern and the others in four movements), and a sizable number of chamber works and keyboard suites that fused French and Italian styles. Highly regarded as a harpsichordist and for his accurate, elegant copies of the scores of other popular composers of the day, Graupner composed more than 1,400 Lutheran church cantatas, many of which reflect an awareness of compositional innovations originating elsewhere.

As with Bach, blindness ended Graupner’s career, but Graupner outlived Bach by a decade, dying in Darmstadt in 1760.

– Christoph-Graupner-Gesellschaft e. V.

Deconstructing the Genius of Bach

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Music Education, Organology, Other Artists

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MonumentcropTo deconstruct the genius of Bach, to fathom how the cold math of line plotted against line, note riding against note, voices knitted into voices, can translate into sounds often held up as the very pinnacle of Western music, to explain the whole history of a composer who the history books insist “invented” musical grammar but whose reputation evaporated from view for a hundred years after his death in 1750 – the name “Bach” meaning a famous teacher and organist to most people living in the early 1800s – to view Bach not through the prism of our twenty-first century minds, where we might mistakenly assume that the lifestyle, function and expectations of a composer were the same as today, but to place Bach in the right historical context, could take some kind of genius in itself.

Or perhaps not. Wrapped up in the mystery of Johann Sebastian Bach is his very familiarity. Once you’ve internalized the lessons of harmony and counterpoint that Bach formalized in the near-200 chorale harmonizations he wrote throughout his life and in works like the The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) – the so-called forty-eight; two books each made up from a prelude and fugue in all twenty-four major and minor keys – practically every note he composed can be slotted neatly into his rational and consistent system. Familiarity is bred from an early age. Every night my two- year old son goes to bed, his music-box offers two choices: sounds of nature or Bach, the inference being that at some deep human level they have become interchangeable. And if, one day, my son goes to music college, those same Bachian principles of harmony and counterpoint will be hardwired into his consciousness like, at primary school, the alphabet, or the reliable simplicity that one plus one is always going to equal two.

Theoretically interpreting and making sense of Bach ought to be as straightforward and user-friendly as assembling an IKEA bookcase: begin with the component parts, follow the manual, and you can’t go far wrong. And a door opens on perhaps Bach’s most profound enigma. Musicians can actively hear the harmonic processes of Bach clearly and unambiguously functioning in front of their ears – unlike Haydn, Beethoven or Bruckner there are no blots from the blue. These harmonic patterns are deeply woven inside our cultural DNA. Where would the Scherzo from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, The Kinks’ Village Green, the forward-thinking jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, or The Beach Boys’ Lady Lynda have been without Bach? And yet it’s entirely possible to play all the notes devotedly and still get the music wrong. There’s a part of Bach we can’t have. One plus one might always make two, but Bach’s music is interested in the mysteries of why.

The leading British conductor and Bach scholar Christopher Hogwood, who in 1973 founded the Academy of Ancient Music with its mission to play Baroque music on period instruments, tells me that he’s puzzled by students coming his way who, for instance, play minuets every day of their lives without knowing how to dance a minuet. “That doesn’t mean they don’t play a charming minuet,” he says, “but trying to make sense of Bach without knowing what was in his world is a compromise. I understand that students who practice their instruments for eight hours a day are unlikely to want to go to the library to learn about eighteenth century theology. But there’s no point in playing a chorale prelude without knowing the chorale. And if you know the chorale you might as well know the words that were sung to the chorale; and then you might as well know a little bit about eighteenth-century theology, Lutherism and Calvinism, and you’ll be a little closer to what was in Bach’s world.”

And Hogwood is keen to press another distinction about the distance between then and now which knocks back on the sort of compositional material Bach generated and worked with. Interpreters take note. “All music then was contemporary music,” he explains. “You wrote to be played tomorrow and you forgot about it the day after. It was very immediate and if there was no performance, or the opportunity suddenly collapsed, you simply stopped writing. People didn’t want to hear something that was a year old, certainly not ten years old, and never a century old. Composers were workers, employed on the same terms as the cook, or the coachman, or the gardener. You didn’t always require to know the name of the gardener, but if you became a well-known gardener people might come to look at your garden in the same way people came to Venice to hear Vivaldi. But very few people came to hear Bach. He never got a top job and was isolated – and knew it.”

Hogwood talks about the pressure on Bach to crank out a fresh cantata every Sunday. And with his wife and sons lined up to copy parts and fill out Bach’s harmonies – applying those forever internally consistent harmonic procedures – the sheer industry of his art becomes clear. The bottom drawer was regularly and unapologetically plundered. Up against an impossible deadline? The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048), with added chorus, becomes that Sunday’s cantata. (“You don’t have any sense that a chorus is ‘missing’,” Hogwood muses, “but Bach certainly had a sense that one could be added.”) Practicality, recycling, the brutal craft of needing to have his cantata ready each Sunday was everything.

Which means Bach needed his material to be bulletproof; self-generative processes, like canons and fugues, once triggered, had to slot together and move forward with the architectural logic of a subway map. No time for unpicking, correcting or finessing. Bach was a servant writing music for the greater glory of God. Move forwards a century and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is a dialogue with the divine, albeit an essentially God-fearing one. Beethoven’s great works – the Symphony no. 5 in C minor, the Violin Concerto in D Major, his Opus 111 Piano Sonata in C minor – are dialogues with a world that has Beethoven and his obsessions at its center. The techniques of harmony and counterpoint he inherited from Bach are re-sculpted, re-constituted, thought through afresh. Each piece requires a new solution, part musical and part philosophical, that could not be turned around on weekly cycle. Which doesn’t mean Beethoven couldn’t have worked under pressure. But he opted not to – patronage had switched from the church to wealthy individuals and secular organizations. Beethoven was no servant; he was an “artist” in a sense Bach would not have understood.

The modern construct supposes that Bach himself was divine, which on some level may or may not be true, but it’s not an idea that would have pleased him. His work was an attempt to deal with, give voice to, offer some humble explanation for, worlds beyond this one. The personalities and experiences of Beethoven and Mahler understandably became part of the story: the frustrations of a deaf composer, the terror of heart disease makes good copy. But Bach as physical, living presence was unimportant to the notes he put on the page. A cool, emotionally objectifying distance exists between Bach and his material; beauty and emotional resonance, rather like in the music of Varèse or Xenakis, is found in the high-intelligent design of structure, proportion and inner-order.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), a sequence of thirty variations on the bass line of an aria, written near the end of his life in 1741, has been endlessly analyzed, line by line, note by note, voice by voice, as music object, mathematical phenomenon and cultural icon. The work that haunted the eternally haunted Glenn Gould and bookended his recording career – cue Romanticized, rock-star idolatry – has also been reversed-engineered by musicologists with the plucky determination of scientists trying to whistleblow the formula for Coca-Cola. Bach’s proportional arithmetic, apparently, proves an irresistible draw. Certain features reoccur, structural markers in time. Every third variation is a canon, and each canon progressively imitates at a step further along the scale. The surrounding variations alternate between generic forms – dances, arias, a fughetta and at the mid-point a stately French Overture – and quick, freer form variations. How deeply performers need to grasp these underpinning numerical relationships is an ongoing point of discussion.

Christopher Hogwood is surprisingly phlegmatic. “What’s helpful to a student composer might not be helpful to a player,” he counters as I express some half-baked opinion that he must devote lots of time to counting bars. “You can’t play proportionally, you play what’s in front of you. In music, some mathematical things fall out by default – the Goldberg theme is in a regular number of bars, every variation is the same number of bars, and a mathematical matrix is imposed. More complicated relationships I suspect, yes, were artificial constructs. A number system is a tremendous aid to composers who don’t want to spoil the form of something; artists and architects rely on golden means and Fibonacci series calculations, and composers are no different . . . apart from in one way. Pure proportion with nothing else would be a dull piece of music. You don’t “see” a fugue in one moment, like a painting or a building; music is temporal. It’s pleasing to realize something so well proportioned that it is aesthetically a work of art. But if a piece were to overshoot the Fibonacci series by one bar I’m not certain that would worry most people.”

The jazz pianist, free improviser, composer and onetime classical organist, Oxford-based Alexander Hawkins – who earlier this year premiered a major Bach-inspired commission for jazz musicians on BBC Radio 3, One Tree Found – is clearly more entranced, perhaps even slightly spooked, by the symbolism of Bach’s numerology than Hogwood. As we sit down with the score of the Goldberg Variations, Hawkins turns human calculator. “I’ve always liked,” he reflects, “that the second book begins with a French Overture. It’s nicely perverse having an overture in the middle. And it subtly breaks the regularity of Bach’s maths. This is piece that isn’t sixty-four, or thirty-two, bars long. How long is it? With the repeats it comes out at ninety-five bars – nine plus five equals fourteen; BACH – B is two, A is one, C is three, H is eight, add those numbers together and it comes to fourteen. Bach has embedded his own musical signature into the middle of the mathematical architecture, surely no coincidence.”

By extension, Hawkins tells me, the number five (one plus four) always has significance in Bach, while the number three invariably symbolizes the holy trinity. But Hawkins and Hogwood are in agreement about a wider point: these numerical markers are buried way too deep for performers to communicate their specifics to audiences. “As a performer,” Hawkins says, “you treat the Goldberg Variations with care because you admire the craft and realize things happens for a reason. The maths works on so many levels, but at the same time, the piece wears the arithmetic very lightly. You never listen with the mathematics at the forefront of your mind.” Hogwood draws an analogy with Schoenberg’s serialism. “If it helps a performer to trace the tone rows through a piece of Schoenberg, or reach an understanding of how the maths operates in the Goldbergs then, fine, analyze away. But those relationships will not be audible, and your audience is only interested in what is audible.”

Hawkins’ One Tree Found makes you take notice, quenches your thirsty ears, via its thoughtful riffing off Bach’s palette of techniques and its refusal to go for the easy option – hello Jacques Loussier – of aping Bach’s style. Here’s a performer who has arrived at an understanding of how Bach operated by filtering his fingerprint techniques through other preoccupations. The first section of Hawkins’ piece revisits the idea of canons, but working with improvising musicians required a shift of focus.

“I’m interested in giving musicians leeway,” he elucidates. “There would have been no point in writing a canonic piece – and telling everyone in the program note, hey, my piece is about Pi – if no one could hear Pi. And I asked myself what exactly is the essential idea of a canon? The first time I felt a sense of wonder about canons was in my teens when I played the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her (BWV 769) and realized, despite everything I’d been taught about parallel and consecutive fourths and fifths being an absolute no-no, here was Bach – Bach! – writing canons at the fourth and fifth and it sounded beautiful. The essential feature of a canon is that material occurs consecutively, out of phase. And in my piece the musicians can move through the material I give them as they wish, improvising their entries. The basic melodic modules are arranged additively (1; 1+2; 2+3+4; 3+4+5+6) and effectively you hear canons both vertically and horizontally, because your ear never quite knows where you are in the process.”

Gottfried Reiche, Bach's trumpeter

Gottfried Reiche, Bach’s trumpeter

Hawkins projects Bach into the future as a creative going concern; Hogwood tries to strip away layers of accumulated misunderstandings and outmoded ways-of-doing to reach an historically-informed view of how Bach can be played most authentically today, while a musician like the natural trumpet specialist Jonathan Freeman-Attwood has toiled at the coalfield of hard, exploratory, instrumental trial-and-error. Top of the agenda when I meet Freeman-Attwood is Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 in F Major (BWV 1047) with its fleet, chromatically devil-may-dare, trumpet writing designed with a clarino trumpeter in mind – a trumpeter who found, lipped and tongued notes without the safety net of valves or holes.

Valve technology would not evolve for another century and Freeman-Attwood continues to be pulled towards what he terms “the raw Pythagorean science” of making music through what amounts to a four-foot length of metal. “The perpetual conflict between pragmatism and idealism is a composer’s lot,” he says, “and we know that Bach regularly wrote music that was too difficult for the forces he had. At times he must have said this makes absolute sense compositionally; I am going to take this fugue to this place, knowing full well that a couple of top trebles aren’t going to be around next Sunday.”

There’s more than a suggestion, Freeman-Attwood says, that the Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 concertante group might originally have consisted of violin, recorder, oboe – and horn rather than trumpet. “The trumpet part was so high, much higher than anything else he’d written for the instrument. Bach never wrote a trumpet part in F [the pitch of the horn] in any other context. It could well have been played an octave lower during Bach’s time. Having said that, some of the concertante dialogues don’t make as much sense without the crystalline spacing of the solo quartet with the trumpet in the stratosphere.”

And the spur to write – or recycle – the Brandenburg Concerto no 2 for trumpet must have coincided with Bach encountering a top-notch clarino virtuoso? “That’s difficult to say. Trumpeters usually had some sort of municipal role, playing fanfares in court and the like, and the good ones were selected to play concert music. What is key, and actually creates the difference in sound in the second Brandenburg Concerto between the modern and old trumpet, comes down to the mouthpiece they used – a considerably larger mouthpiece than today. Their approach to articulation and strength must have been formidable because, today, if we feel a little insecure about high notes we put in a mouthpiece that is slightly shallower, which means you can hit the high notes a little bit easier. In Bach’s day trumpeters must have had something in their diet, or perhaps a special technique, because they played high notes with these huge mouthpieces. We don’t know who Bach had in mind for the second Brandenburg Concerto; but he must have had considerable chops.”

Then we dive into the score, Freeman-Attwood pointing to notes that natural trumpeters would have needed to lip down, plucking notes out of the chromatic ether. The effect, he says, of hearing a natural trumpet play the second Brandenburg Concerto rather than a piccolo trumpet – the modern day alternative – is that you hear a “clucking” rather than a “symphonic” attack. The sound is more coppery than brassy. “Bach is so ingenious that all the notes he uses are in the harmonic series. And here – look! He even dares to go into a minor key. There’s one other piece, by Biber, that has a natural trumpet play in a minor key.”

As a writer whose usual terrain is New Music and jazz, I feel strangely at home discussing a composer who pursues instruments to the very limits of their capability. As we’re wrapping up, Freeman-Attwood discusses the insolvable balance problems that inevitably exist between trumpet, oboe, violin and recorder; Christopher Hogwood goes even further. “It contains some grand music but it’s a failure; I defy you to hear the recorder part when the other three instruments are playing. It looks good on paper but, short of close miking every instrument and falsifying the balance, it’s impossible to bring off in a concert hall.”

And now that we know the world – from macrophage blood cells, to our genetic code, to fractal geometry – is constructed from systems evenly balanced between the rational and chaotic, the science and the acoustics and the intelligent design of Bach has become part of a wider argument. Published in 1979, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by the American mathematician and computer scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter refracted Bach’s techniques through the maths of Kurt Gödel and the optical illusion art of MC Escher. “Every aspect of thinking,” Hofstadter writes, “can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level is governed by simple, even formal, rules. . . . The image is that of a formal system underlying an ‘informal system’ – a system which can make puns, discover number patterns, forget names, make awful blunders in chess and so forth.” Meanwhile, another scientist, Albert Einstein, left the world in doubt about where he stood in regards to Bach.“I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach.”

Philip Clark – Limelight Magazine

Bach’s Perpetual Counterpoint

02 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Works

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canon, Christoph Wolff, composition, counterpoint, Denis Collins, Johann Gottfried Walther, organ, Saxony, The Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, viola, Weimar

Canon à 4. Voc: perpetuus

Canon à 4. Voc: perpetuus

Bach’s life-long interest in canonic composition is manifest not only in the large-scale works devoted to exploring various contrapuntal techniques, but also in a number of short occasional works of a generally theoretical nature written throughout his life and usually placed in albums dedicated to students or friends. Canons of this kind were often notated in enigmatic fashion, and their solution provided intellectual enjoyment to the dedicatees. Christoph Wolff suggests that Bach derived much pleasure from writing pieces in this genre and in solving similar puzzle canons by others. Wolff also suggests that Bach’s occasional canons could “challenge his visitors with simple-looking yet complex vignettes of musical logic.” Some eight occasional canons by Bach survive, and it is very likely that many more are lost.

Three hundred years ago today, on 2 August 1713, Bach dedicated Canon à 4. Voc: perpetuus (BWV 1073) to the distant relative and fellow Weimar organist Johann Gottfried Walther. Written in four voices, with the beginning pitch of each voice corresponding to an open string of the viola, the dedication reads: “This ditty is written for the owner [of the book] with fond memories. Weimar, Joh. Sebast. Bach. Chamber Musician and Court Organist to the Prince of Saxony.”

Denis Collins – The Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute

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