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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: computer

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

A Guitar God Lives

06 Sunday Jul 2014

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

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amplifier, arpeggio, Caprice no. 24 in A minor, CD, computer, Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E-flat minor, Dreaming (Tell Me), DVD, Eddie van Halen, electric guitar, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, Fireball, Genesis, grunge, guitar, Guitar Hero, guitar pick, heavy metal, Jim Fusilli, Jimi Hendrix, karate, long-playing record, Los Angeles, Marshall Amplification, Orlando, Paganini, popular music, Pro Tools, Rising Force, rock and roll, Rock Band, Ron Thal, Sayreville, shred guitar, shredding, Stockholm, Stratocaster, Swedish, Tampa, tennis, The Wall Street Journal, Tony Banks, video game, Woodland Hills, Yngwie Malmsteen, YouTube

Yngwie J. Malmsteen

Yngwie Malmsteen

A household name in heavy-metal shredding, guitarist Yngwie J. Malmsteen describes himself as stubborn and dictatorial. “I’m very set in my ways and not necessarily in a bad manner,” he said over breakfast. “I know what I want and I go for it.” Though his style of music isn’t as popular as it once was, he presses on with renewed vigor, his titanic talent intact.

Now on tour with Guitar Gods, a mind-warping, blizzard-of-notes-per-bar bill that also features guitarists Bumblefoot – Ron Thal‘s stage name – and Gary Hoey, Mr. Malmsteen, 50, is getting ready for the release in August of a live DVD and CD, recorded in Orlando and Tampa, respectively.

Ranked with Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen as innovators of electric rock guitar, the Stockholm native became obsessed with the instrument after he received a copy of Deep Purple‘s Fireball for his eighth birthday. But though he admired the band’s guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, young Yngwie was even more intrigued by the work of Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks, who made references in his compositions to J. S. Bach. In fact, it was a recording of a Niccolò Paganini composition that helped Mr. Malmsteen find his musical voice. Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 in A minor would eventually become a model for his style, which relies heavily on clearly articulated arpeggios and dazzling speed. “Niccolò Paganini and Johann Sebastian Bach with a Strat and a stack of Marshalls” is how Mr. Malmsteen described his approach last week, referring to his Fender Stratocaster guitar and Marshall amplifiers, his preferred gear.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1983, recruited by a producer who placed him in a group that was beneath his talents. “It was the most banal band I could be with, but I wanted to be on a piece of vinyl,” Mr. Malmsteen said. “It wasn’t an ideal situation, but I knew I was going somewhere.” He released his first solo album a year later.

With ear-splitting, classically influenced shredding as his trademark, Mr. Malmsteen quickly became a star – and lived the lifestyle that went with it: In 1987, while driving drunk, he plowed into a tree near his home in Woodland Hills, CA, and was in a coma for a week.

“A lot of people pine for the ’80s,” he said. “I don’t.” No longer a drinker, Mr. Malmsteen’s game these days is tennis. Framed by right-angle mutton chops, his moon face was bright, his smile engaging. Vitamins went down with his scrambled eggs.

With the arrival of grunge music, the ’90s were a bleak period for gonzo guitarists such as Mr. Malmsteen, who had no US record deal and relied on touring in Japan and South America to keep going. Late in the decade, he composed Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E-flat minor, op. 1. Many rock artists have played with full orchestras, but Mr. Malmsteen said his concerto was the first to be composed in a classical mode with electric guitar as the solo instrument.

The recording industry in a shambles, his career received an unexpected boost via Guitar Hero and Rock Band, video games that featured his challenging music. Footage of his wild performances were viewed by millions on YouTube – the kind of exposure, Mr. Malmsteen said, that was impossible when the industry was in control. Resistant initially to new recording techniques, he eventually used Pro Tools software on his home-studio computer to record his most recent album, Spellbound (2012), which he released on his own label.

“In a bizarre way it’s like I was going back to when I was seventeen years old,” he said of life in rock’s new model. “I had no expectation of radio airplay, no anything else.” As a teen in Stockholm, he explained, “I would play a seventeen-minute guitar solo, sing four bars, and do another seventeen-minute guitar solo. That was the greatest means of expression then. I love to have that feeling.”

At the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ, a wall of Marshalls at his back, Mr. Malmsteen jumped and karate-kicked, spun the guitar around his back, flung picks at the rabid audience and discharged a torrent of fully articulated thirty-second notes – all during Rising Force, his first number. Later, he offered the Bach-influenced Dreaming (Tell Me) on acoustic guitar before returning to his Strat for metal’s roar. His relentless attack seemed effortless, and never did he seem to mind that he was playing for far fewer people than when he filled stadiums in his glory days.

“I don’t know what the carrot in front of me is,” he said the morning before the show. “I take criticism and praise the same way. Of course, everyone likes to hear good things, but I don’t change. I know what I’m doing.”

Jim Fusilli – The Wall Street Journal

The Cube with a Twist

04 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Books, Films

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algorithm, Anthony Brooks, architecture, baseball, cartoon, Clive Owen, color, computer, Douglas Hofstadter, Duplicity, E-mail, Edward J. Snowden, Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Hong Kong, hula hoop, Istanbul, James Barron, Jersey City, Julia Roberts, key chain, laptop, Liberty Science Center, Museum of Modern Art, National Security Agency, patent, Paul Hoffman, Piet Mondrian, Pulitzer Prize, puzzle, Riverhead, robot, Rowe Hessler, Rubik's cube, Scientific American, teenager, The New York Times, toy, website

A one-handed solution

A one-handed solution

A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways, and 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 of them are wrong. Those truths – especially the second, maddeningly frustrating one – have been known since soon after the modish, Mondrianish plastic object was invented in 1974. The cube went on to become the must-have toy of 1980 and 1981.

Its popularity faded fast.

By 1982, the cube was so last year, doomed to Hula-Hoop faddishness. In 1986, The New York Times said the cube had been “retired to the attic, the garbage heap and, with a bow to its elegance and ingeniousness, to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.” Lately it has undergone a resurrection in a world in which engineers and computers can generate helpful algorithms that would-be cube solvers can share with each other. But some things have not changed. The typical Rubik’s cube still has nine squares on six sides, and the same eye-popping colors. And those unfathomable huge numbers in the first paragraph are still quintillions. “Four-point-three times ten to the nineteenth,” explained Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

Rubik’s cubes have trailed Mr. Hoffman for his entire career. On his first job after college, as an editor at Scientific American, he shepherded a March 1981 cover story about Rubik’s “magic cubology” into print. It was written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, the professor known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller Gödel, Escher, Bach, who said it had taken him “fifty hours of work, distributed over several months,” to solve the “unscrambling problem.” He mentioned group theory, which has to do with algebraic structures, and something he called “cubitis magikia,” a “highly contagious” condition “accompanied by the itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact” with a certain multicolored object.

Now Mr. Hoffman is capitalizing on the cube again, with a $5 million exhibition that opened to the public on 26 April 2014. It features an eighteen-karat gold Rubik’s cube said to be worth $2.5 million that pivots and swivels like an ordinary plastic one, and a cube-solving robot that is no match for speed cubers, as competitors who try to beat the clock are known. It took the machine a minute to unscramble a jumbled cube. In that time, Anthony Brooks, a speed cuber with several records to his name, did it three times, once using only one hand.

Speed cubers can memorize algorithms they have developed on their laptops and shared on websites or by email to unscramble a jumbled cube in less time than it takes to read a sentence like this one aloud. But Mr. Brooks said speed cubing also involved muscle memory and tricks, like breaking in a cube the way baseball players break in a glove with neatsfoot oil.“You can buy lubricants – cube lubes,” Mr. Brooks said. “Or regular silicon spray you can find in any hardware.”

In the forty years since it was invented, the cube has made some intriguing cameo appearances. Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked intelligence secrets, told two journalists he had arranged to meet that they would recognize him outside a restaurant in Hong Kong because he would have a Rubik’s cube in his hand. Mr. Hoffman said that sounded like an homage to the 2009 film Duplicity, in which spies played by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen realize who they are because they are both carrying Rubik’s cube key chains.

That could not have happened to the cube’s inventor, Ernő Rubik, 69. He said he did not travel with a cube. “I don’t need to,” Mr. Rubik said as he previewed the exhibition this week.

For the record, he calls it “my cube.” “From my mouth, it sounds strange to call it ‘Rubik’s cube,’ ” Mr. Rubik said. “If I have a child, I call it ‘my child,’ not ‘Rubik’s boy’ or ‘Rubik’s girl.’ Naturally, after forty years, I have a strong relationship with my cube.”

He passed a display case containing his original pride and joy, a wooden cube. It sat in front of the Hungarian patent he was issued for his “magic cube” in 1975. He invented the cube as the solution to the kind of structural problem that could bedevil an architecture professor, which is what he was at the time. The structural problem was how to keep a mechanism with many moving parts from tumbling to the floor.

Do not expect him to face off against a speed cuber like Rowe Hessler, a bowling-alley manager from Riverhead, NY. Mr. Hessler, 23, is a former United States speed cubing champion, whose fastest time unscrambling a standard three-by-three-by-three cube was 6.94 seconds. At the science center, Mr. Hessler did it in a seemingly effortless 9.69 seconds of twisting and pivoting. The only noise was the cube, clicking like bad dentures in a cartoon.

Mr. Rubik said he had not imagined when the ink on the patent was fresh that the cube would become so universal. “I had a feeling about the intellectual value of the cube” early on, he said, adding that items with intellectual value can be a hard sell in a material world. Mr. Rubik said he had thought that toy manufacturers would pigeonhole it as a puzzle. “Traditionally, the puzzle section in the toy business is very narrow,” he said, “and they don’t believe it’s possible to make a business. They’re not selling mass production.” He said the cube had changed that thinking.

Mr. Hoffman said one billion to 2.5 billion cubes had been manufactured, assuming there were five counterfeits for every legitimate one sold. “They’ve seized whole 747s full of illegal knockoffs,” he said.

Experts have calculated that a cube could be solved in as few as twenty moves, no matter how it is scrambled. But speed cubers do not have time to think about the elegance of economy implied by minimizing moves. Mr. Hessler said speed cubers averaged about fifty; his lowest was thirty-one. For his part, Mr. Rubik declined an invitation to go up against Mr. Hessler, but he said he understood the appeal of speed cubing, even if it was not the sport for him. “The main group who is buying the cube is teenagers,” Mr. Rubik said, “and they are competitive and they have the time. When you are working, you don’t have the time.”

James Barron – The New York Times

Bach Psychology

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Films, Other Artists, Video Recordings

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Alzheimer's disease, Archiv Produktion, aria, Bach: The Learned Musician, Beethoven, Brahms, British Broadcasting Corporation, Busoni, cantata, Cantata Pilgrimage, cantor, Caravaggio, CD, Chaconne in D minor, Charles Ives, Chopin, Christoph Wolff, computer, concerto, counterpoint, dance, Davitt Moroney, deafness, dynamics, Eisenach, emotions, English Baroque Soloists, Eric Siblin, First World War, Freud, fugue, Giulio Cesare, Glenn Gould, Handel, Hannibal Lecter, harmony, hermeneutics, Holy Roman Empire, Johan Huizinga, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, John Butt, John Eliot Gardiner, Joseph Kerman, Kapellmeister, Leipzig, Leopold Stokowski, liturgical year, Los Angeles Review of Books, Magnificat, Mahler, Martin Geck, Martin Luther, Masaaki Suzuki, Mass in B minor, Mendelssohn, mental health, metaphysics, Michael Markham, Modernism, Mondrian, Monteverdi Choir, Mozart, Music in the Castle of Heaven, Nadia Boulanger, National Geographic Magazine, NBC Radio Orchestra, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Oedipus, Ohrdruf, opera, Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique, Otto Klemperer, Palestrina, Passacaglia in C minor, passion, Paul Elie, performance practice, Peter Williams, Philippe Herreweghe, psychology, Pythagoras, Rachmaninoff, radio, Reinventing Bach, Rembrandt, rhythm, Richard Taruskin, Robert L. Marshall, Romanticism, rubato, Schumann, Second World War, serialism, Sharbat Gula, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sodom, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Steve McCurry, Stravinsky, Susan McClary, tautology, Telemann, tempo, The Silence of the Lambs, Thirty Years War, Thuringia, timbre, tone color, transcription, Trinity Sunday, vibrato, Vivaldi, Wagner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, YouTube

PsychologycropThere is an unofficial marker in the timeline of canonical classical music. It falls around 1800, during Beethoven’s lifetime, separating composers for whom biography matters to non-academic listeners from those for whom it doesn’t. It is assumed the listener needs to know about the lives of post-1800 composers: about the onset of Beethoven’s deafness and resulting feelings of alienation in order to understand the storming anger in his music, about Chopin’s sense of exile in order to properly feel the longing expressed in his, about Schumann’s struggles with mental illness in order to properly feel the spasms between passion and introversion in his, about Mahler’s faith and disillusionment in order to feel the weight of existential crisis in his. It grows out of our desire to find personal meaning in art, to find some message encoded in all those notes. We need to believe we know what our composers were about before we can trust that we’re receiving their ideas properly. To get it wrong is somehow to do them an injustice. It certainly simplifies the process of listening. We know, with Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Mahler, what sort of mood we are supposed to be in even before the music begins to play. But it also simplifies and often distorts the historical record, reducing the complicated lives of our heroes to a series of mythological icons. Elsewhere in this publication [Los Angeles Review of Books], I’ve wondered if this is a problem worth worrying over: “A thousand battalions of Mozart scholars cannot erase the image of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. But should they try?” With the publication of John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, a new quasi-biography of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), we’re situated comfortably on the other side of the 1800 line, back during the musical “Baroque” where we have a chance to see the problem at its thorniest, focusing on the composer who proves its most difficult test case.

For today’s classical music audiences one of the most problematic aspects of music before circa 1800 is answering the simple question “why did they make this piece of music I’m about to listen to?” The answers, for Beethoven and all composers succeeding him are comfortably familiar: Music is testimony of the self or the world of the self. It is done for Art (capital A), for the Inner Spirit, for the memory of the persecuted, to expose the existential anxiety of it all, etc. The early Romantics reached back a little bit and quickly salvaged Mozart (who, after all, should have lived to see 1800) by projecting testimony back onto him – of Oedipal strife and a difficult personality – fairy tales that still make up his mythic badge (“drunken child savant”), providing a framework for listeners to have satisfying emotional experiences when listening to him. But further beyond the wall mythology gets more difficult. As entertaining as Vivaldi’s music is, and as intense as his life may have been, who seeks out his music to experience the artistic integrity of his personal testimony? No one cares what Palestrina’s relationship with his father was like, or whether or not Handel believed in authoritarian order when he wrote Giulio Cesare. So much of the daily reality surrounding the music of the more distant past gives us less heartfelt, less Romantic, less personally-resonant answers to the question “why do it?” (for the King, for the paycheck, for the Pope’s pleasure cruise) that the profundity of the music can seem to suffer for its lack of subjective, creative angst that we seem to crave and they perhaps did not.

Thus much pre-1800 music is today relieved of being much more than “mood” music. Our approach to the music of the Renaissance, for instance, often becomes caught in a circular logic that keeps us at a distance. It is beautiful, yes? It is expressive, yes? And so what does it express? Beauty. And why is it beautiful? Because it is so expressive. But what does it express? . . . and on and on. The music of the Baroque, on the other hand, often represents extreme emotional states. It is not, however, the conduit of the composer’s own feelings, but of the “official” emotional posture required for whatever event, patron, institution or (for the opera) story they were writing. Emotional states, during the enlightenment, were just another natural phenomenon to be illustrated and represented, like winds or water or birdsong. As Joseph Kerman put it “Baroque composers depict the passions. Romantic composers express them.” The idea of personal expression had to wait for a few big cultural rifts. First, the freeing of composers from the Ancien Régime system of patrons and institutions, making them independent artists following no one’s taste but their own or their public’s. Second, the Napoleonic cult of the individual commanding that the artist, no less than the philosopher, look inward. As Johann Gottlieb Fichte pitched the new Romantic creed in 1792: “Turn your gaze away from all around you, and inwards on to yourself.” Once again, Mozart and Beethoven were the earliest prototypes of the new musical artist who would not or could not submit to the whims of church or aristocratic patronage and who instead struck out on their own, misfits, outlaws, non-conformists misunderstood by their era. This is all as much mythology as history, a plotline we internalized so long ago it will likely never be shaken.

And so biography for Pre-Romantic composers has often seemed superfluous to the experience of listening – merely academic, and usually pretty hopeless. Among the pre-1800 masters, Bach biography in particular is a prickly and thankless calling. It requires one to fuss endlessly over minor details, or at least to pretend to. It entails teasing phantom details from in-between precious few lines of actual primary sources, most of which are notoriously dull and legalistic. It requires you to do this while knowing that these same precious few, dull, legalistic sources have already been pored over by dozens of prior adherents to produce dozens of contradictory hagiographies and incompatible mythologies leaving us little more than a name-symbol accompanied by a jumble of tepid modifiers. To Christoph Wolff‘s recent Bach: The Learned Musician, we can add a few more alternately dismissed or embraced by Gardiner: the “exemplary Teuton,” the “working-class hero-craftsman,” the “bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister,” the “incorrigible cantor.” If none of these monikers sounds terribly appealing or particularly dramatic to you, as opposed to say, Beethoven: The Stormy Napoleonic Revolutionary, or Mahler: The Disillusioned Neurotic Spiritualist, then you are starting already to see another problem with Bach biography. When you combine the stubborn refusal of the historical record to yield much of anything tantalizing, the expectation that none of it makes it into his music anyway, and the cowing complexity of that music, the end result is not a familiar emotional character-type but a cold distance, a sense that he and his world are unreachable and irrelevant to the listening experience. Yet Bach receives more biographical attention than any composer before Mozart and remains his chief rival for sheer quantity. Unlike the other canonic masters, the popularity of Bach studies shows no sign of letting up. The early twenty-first century has already seen more attempts to figure him out, of both the strict academic variety (along with Christoph Wolf’s biography, there are substantial essays and monograms by Robert L. Marshall, Peter Williams, and John Butt) and user-friendly “crossover” variety (Davitt Moroney, Martin Geck, Paul Elie, Eric Siblin) than any of the other candidates, including those like Mozart and Beethoven whose source material is richer in detail and drama. This mania for redundant parsing of the same scant material remains an unusual situation. Understanding it is key to figuring out what, if anything, Gardiner’s attempt has to offer.

His goal, on one hand, is humanization, to bring Bach closer to us. And, having throughout his life as a conductor absorbed any and all research on his favorite composer, he acknowledges many of the problems:

Even to his most ardent admirers Bach can seem a little remote at times: his genius as a musician – widely acknowledged – is just too far out of reach for most of us to comprehend. But that he was a very human human being comes across in all sorts of ways: not so much from the bric-à-brac of personal evidence such as family letters and first-hand descriptions, which are few and far between, but from chinks in his musical armour-plating, moments when we glimpse the vulnerability of an ordinary person struggling with an ordinary person’s doubts, worries and perplexities.

The anxiously modified tautology “he was a very human human being . . . ” gives you some sense of what Gardiner fears he is up against. More than any other composer, Bach illustrates the problem of articulating the emotional mechanisms of music. There is a long tradition of disappointing hermeneutics lurking there. The mainstream of Bach reception has been characterized by a frustrating poetic reticence, a dissonance between strong claims that his music is emotive and deeply moving coupled with a refusal or inability to identify the source of that emotion in terms other than its exhaustiveness or its impressive contrapuntal achievement. The poetic potential of his music is usually tied to its stylistic breadth and technical complexity, an exercise in the monumental and the logical, which impresses only insofar as it remains aloof from emotional particularity. That distance has proven useful. The vagueness of those powerful emotions everyone claims to feel, their being tied to something so seemingly unnameable, has allowed each generation to remake Bach in whatever image suits them. It is, in other words, what makes possible that most ubiquitous and banal claim about Bach’s music: that it is “Universal.” That cardinal cliché is difficult for any biographer of a “great” to avoid, and Gardiner is no exception, finding in Bach’s sacred music, “a universal message of hope that can touch anybody regardless of culture, religious denomination or musical knowledge.”

Such platitudes, of course, tell us nothing except how easy it has been to renew Bach’s music decade by decade. As anyone surveying the last hundred years will realize, and as Paul Elie pointed out last year in his Reinventing Bach, the twentieth century belonged to the miraculous Leipzig cantor. While other composers had their moments, and the center of the concert hall canon might seem to tilt every so often between earlier and later Romantics, by the beginning of the twentieth century it had been decided that Bach would always stand as the monad, the font, the Grossvater of us all. The image of Bach as prototype has been a cultural obsession since the 1830s when the Romantics first rediscovered his great settings of The Passion of Christ. That revival, beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) in 1829, the first time it had been heard since Bach’s own lifetime, succeeded in doing two things for Mendelssohn’s generation: it extended the German canon back a century, proving that “deep” music had always been a Teutonic thing, and it made a literal merger between Art and Religion for a generation that increasingly saw the concert hall as a site for their most spiritual and philosophical experiences.

Since that moment, Bach has been the official center of gravity that binds together the musical universe. It’s not an empty honorific. “In Bach,” according to Mahler, “the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.” For Brahms his music represented “a whole world of the deepest thought and most powerful feeling.” The nineteenth century turned his off-putting complexity and biographical distance into a mechanism for confronting the sublime, that ultimate proof of Romantic ideals. Whether it was the tangle of a solo keyboard fugue, or the glacial face of the opening chorus in the St. John Passion (BWV 245), his music was a test, a mountain to be climbed so that one might, with pain and awe, glimpse and reach out to touch the highest possible points mortally attainable.

By the third decade of the twentieth century, the sublime had met up with the mass market mechanisms of radio and recording. His most famous works were packaged for maximum virtual mountaineering, the keyboard works played in lush, gargantuan transcriptions by the likes of Rachmaninoff and Busoni or clothed in the grandest garb of all, the oversized Wagnerian symphony orchestra. If the mountaintop is too far away, and too steep a climb, then the NBC Radio Orchestra would snip off the peak and send it to your living room where it would still seem plenty big. The transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski of works like the Chaconne (BWV 1004) for solo violin or the  Passacaglia and Fugue (BWV 582) for organ were gorgeous, plodding wooly-mammoths that marked a moment of maximal popularization for Bach: Gothic Bach, Unfathomable Bach. This was the Bach world that John Eliot Gardiner was born into and would eventually help to replace.

His career as a conductor of the Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique falls squarely into a newer phase of Bach reception, an epochal shift in what Bach symbolized and eventually what he sounded like. This new Bach, the Bach that has reigned in the cultural imagination for the last seventy-five years, which musicologist Susan McClary has dubbed “Pythagorean” Bach, emerged as part of the stark turn away from Romanticism following World War I. The modernist rejection of “subjectivity” and personal psychological confessionals in art led to something of a downfall for Wagner, Mahler, and most of the great nineteenth-century Romantics. But the disillusioned post-war avant-garde found intellectual solace in the alienating distance between Bach and the human. Unlike Wagner, and Beethoven, and Schumann, Bach was untainted by personal psychology and corruptible human desire. He again benefited from having no historical personality, seeming to float above it all in a positivistic paradise where music and number intersected free of the original sin of emotion. His difficult and seemingly flawless counterpoint could serve as a crucible for what mattered in the years of Modernist formalism: Truth, objectivity, incorruptible processual integrity. The chores of complicated composing rules seemed to the modernists the best protection from backsliding into old bad (read: Romantic) habits. For Stravinsky, Bach’s fugues were “a pure form in which the music means nothing outside of itself.” Even as multiple generations or artists turned for comfort to the play of abstract forms, Bach managed to remain the center of the musical universe.

Even the radical post-World War II composers of total serialism, chance music, and computer music could not fault the pristine precision of his counterpoint. Gothic Bach had given way to Harmony-of-the-Spheres Bach, a different kind of metaphysics, but one no less rooted in the sublime – The Mathematical Sublime. Think no further than the close bond between Bach and Glenn Gould, that next great mythic icon of modernist detachment. To twist Gardiner’s tautology, Gould was one of the least human human beings to have ever been. Like everyone else, he found himself in Bach, imagining him as an artist “withdrawing from the pragmatic concerns of music-making into an idealized world of uncompromised invention.” This, of course, is precisely what Gould did in 1964 when he retired from live performance to concentrate his efforts exclusively within the precision-bubble of the recording studio, freed from the concert hall and its stink of the human and the social. Gould, too, is now central to our mythology of artist types and, in the popular imagination, Bach has remained the music for that type: esoterics and ascetics and Beautiful Minds. It is the music to which Hannibal Lecter plans his meticulous escape in The Silence of the Lambs. It is the music obsessively plinked out by the father of Allison Janney’s character on The West Wing, of course a mathematician, of course seeking structure through the spreading disorder and isolation of Alzheimer’s Disease. Music, Math, and Discipline. Clarity, Structure, and Complexity.

It is necessary to revisit Bach’s complicated reception history because it is out of all of this that Gardiner hopes to bring back to human form his “very human human being.” It is a tall order, and a motivation one may not immediately trust considering how much Gardiner’s own recordings have helped to solidify the modernist view. As he relates it in Music in the Castle of Heaven, he experienced that version of Bach early on in his studies with Nadia Boulanger who preached the Stravinskyan catechism of discipline and order: “She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws.” His own recordings, part of the wave of “historically informed” interpretations using original instruments and claiming to resurrect the performing styles of Bach’s own era, have come to define the sound of Bach for the current generation of listeners. Those initial claims to “authentic reconstruction” have long been put aside, and we have (most of us) come to admit that we like this sound not for its historical authenticity but for how well it matches up with our own Mondrian-esque view of Bach: sleekness, clarity, momentum, almost superhuman precision (with Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir often at tempos that take the breath right out any mere humans foolish enough to try and sing along). Gardiner’s interpretations are only the most successful of an entire generation of conductors (along with those of Sigiswald Kuijken, Phillipe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Masaaki Suzuki among others) whose sound lays bare the abstract lines in Bach’s counterpoint by eliminating all of the distractions of older, Romantic performing styles: too much vibrato, too much rubato, too much dynamic swelling, not to mention too many performers. It would be impossible to overestimate how important Gardiner’s recorded legacy is to contemporary Bach reception. As novel and shocking as his recordings may have seemed to my own teachers who grew up on Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler, I am just young enough that his 1990 Mass in B minor (BWV 232) recording on Archiv was the first I heard, as was his St. Matthew Passion, and most revelatory to me, his recording of Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243a). Today, for my students, Gardiner’s Bach is “normal” Bach, and those earlier conductors seem shocking, impossibly foreign, as from a lost and bizarre era.

The book, then, surprises. Given this reputation for clarity and precision, it is surprising that Gardiner’s inner dialog with the composer is such a humanely messy concoction of the spiritual and the psychological. One wonders if the motivation for the book is not to provide something of a correction to his own public reception. That a great performer may look back on his career and fear that everyone has missed his point all along must be daunting. Though one suspects that the thirty-year-old Gardiner, caught up in the heady days when the “authentic performance movement” was laying siege to record labels, might have written a different book. Much of Gardiner’s current view seems to have been born of the extraordinary project he undertook in 2000, dubbed the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. While hardly as austere an experience as the name implies (it was backed by a major record label and documented by a BBC camera crew), it was still a powerful testament to our continuing Bach obsession – a full year spent living life as an itinerant cantor, moving from one church to another throughout Europe, preparing and rehearsing two complete, often unfamiliar, Bach cantatas each week along with a number of other Bach monuments, some two hundred total pieces of difficult music all conforming to the liturgical calendar that was the composer’s own constantly ticking task master. That intensity of focus, of having one’s international conducting career turned for a year into the comparably claustrophobic vocation of Lutheran cantor, in short the pretense of “walking in the composer’s shoes,” seems to have shaken loose a lot in Gardiner. He speaks of it like an evangelist bringing back answers from the desert:

Following Bach’s seasonal and cyclical arrangement of cantatas for an entire year provided us with a graphic musical image of the revolving wheel of time to which we are all bound . . . solving the enigma of how this music brimming over with vigour and fantasy could have emerged from beneath the wig of that impassive-looking cantor . . .

The punishing pace of creativity and the picturesque settings seem to have provoked a sort of vision quest, part time-travel fantasy and part genuine insight into how distant a figure as Bach might actually be. It is no surprise, then, that the most satisfying sections of the book are those where Gardiner lets us into that inner dialog by reconstructing his thoughts during moments when he is swimming in the music during rehearsal or performance. Some of this talk is very much in line with the Pythagorean orthodoxy:

to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it – connected to the motor and dance rhythms of the music, caught up in the sequential harmony and the intricate contrapuntal web of sounds, their spatial relations, the kaleidoscopic colour-changes of voices and instruments . . . the way it exposes to you its brilliant colour spectrum, its sharpness of contour, its harmonic depth, and the essential fluidity of its movement and underlying rhythm.

So far so Gould: sequences, spatial relations, colors, contours, lines. But as the book progresses, Gardiner reveals another layer of his current thinking about the composer, through both his perspectives on those same dull primary sources, which unfortunately he chooses to revisit in great detail, and through his favorite individual passages of the cantatas and Passions, which happily he does in just as much detail. The biographical half of the book shines in those sections when he imaginatively recreates the feel of the places Bach lived, penning him in a much smaller and uglier world than one might wish to imagine. Gardiner’s biographical Bach is impressively small: not a German but a Thuringian, not part of a Lutheran community but part of a family-clan, not a citizen of the Enlightenment but an overworked and alternately obsequious and litigious crank mired in the petty squabbles of provincial town life. Remote from the big thinking that usually makes up the intellectual context of Baroque studies, Bach’s world as presented by Gardiner is decidedly un-sublime. While far too conjectural in its details to be taken as an authoritative biography, it is a welcome antidote to the sweeping historical movements which usually serve as the “context” of important artist’s lives: The Enlightenment, The Baroque, The Holy Roman Empire. Bach’s world is too small for such big frames. Gardiner usefully reminds us that it is entirely possible to live “in the Enlightenment” without knowing it or showing many signs of it. It is a common sense point that some academic writers of epistemological “top-down” history might heed more often.

With a Huizinga-esque flair, Gardiner depicts Bach’s milieu in terms calculated to pull him off the mountaintop of “pure music.” From the rough and tactless scrounging required of preceding generations of the great “Bach Clan” to survive the gray landscape of the Thirty Years War (“the malaise which through most of the previous century had blighted the struggles of their parents’ and grandparents”), to Bach’s own dingy coming of age in the brutish boy’s schools of Eisenach and Ohrdruf with their Caravaggiesque gangs of knife-wielding ruffians (“brawls . . . [that] . . . developed unchecked while the burghers stood by, impotently wringing their hands . . . [over the] territorial division of the town between these embryonic Jets and Sharks or Mods and Rockers”), all the way to the petty arguments that made up much of his life in a Leipzig run by “a formidable alliance of secular and religious powers whose methods of subjugating employees had been honed over time and who were expert at making life difficult . . .,” Gardiner shows a consistent flair for the drab and depressing.

As in Huizinga’s history writing, the rough detail in this portrait of a querulous, often petty cantor and his dour world is meant to shock and alienate the reader. In breaking the composer out of his abstract cocoon, Gardiner also manages to break down the stereotype of the detached ascetic inhabiting a world of pure intellect. But that distance, once achieved, and the reader’s predictable recoil from the grubby reality offered up, is actually just a step toward Gardiner’s next goal, to locate in Bach some basis for a tragic persona that can serve as a framework for reading his works psychologically and autobiographically. The goal is not without merit. For listeners, it promises a renewed emotional resonance between we moderns and Bach’s sacred music that goes beyond the old saws of purity or complexity. The tactics, however, are predictable and problematic. To pull Bach, and only Bach, across the 1800 wall and into the world of authentic testimony, Gardiner needs to pick and choose when to allow him to be a very human human being living in his very small human world, and when to allow him the luxury of transcending that world in order to communicate his “universal” message. It is a difficult needle to thread.

The Bach that emerges is heavily marked by that rougher, darker setting. But the resulting scars are arranged into a familiar pattern, that of the romantic outsider. He is orphaned, death-obsessed, outlaw, non-conformist, a sullen misfit. He is “battle scarred” from disputes with both civic and court authorities, scars that include the memory of imprisonment and the threat of destitution. He rejected the career path of his more successful contemporaries toward the soulless but profitable theater music of larger urban centers out of pure artistic integrity (“not from any Lutheran prudery but simply because the music he heard there left him cold”). Instead he propagated “mutant” musical forms that were largely misunderstood by his own audiences and bosses. He is set upon by smaller musical minds who question his lack of a university education. Thus even Bach, the supreme technician (and posthumous terrorizer of conservatory students the world over), is able to fill the Romantic role of the unschooled, or at least un-institutionalized, outsider. He stands alone as a complex psychological figure among a collection of shallow and imperious straw men: despots, bureaucrats, venal patrons, abusive pedagogues, jealous academics, frivolous popular composers (Telemann serves as the main foil here), and audiences craving easy delights. Bach alone is allowed the luxury of introspection and depth because Bach alone is tasked with having something important to say to us directly. The personal flaws of this “imperfect man” selected for our inspection are consistently of the anti-hero variety. He is, in short, every bit the visionary and martyr we’ve come to expect from artistic hagiography. The process is completed when Gardiner makes the final turn so familiar to us from our side of the 1800 wall, revealing that the ultimate primary source for Bach’s biography is the testimony of “the music itself.”

The music gives us shafts of insight into the harrowing experiences he must have suffered as an orphan, as a lone teenager, and as a grieving husband and father. They show us his fierce dislike of hypocrisy and his impatience with falsification of any sort; but they also reveal the profound sympathy he felt towards those who grieve or suffer in one way or another, or who struggle with their consciences.

Much of this is merely an extension of the call made over ten years ago by Robert L. Marshall for bolder attempts at Bach Biography. There is much resonance between Gardiner’s portrait of Bach and Marshall’s suggested method, to extend back to Bach the posthumous Freudian couch sessions practiced so provocatively (and questionably) by Maynard Solomon in his biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Both Marshall and Gardiner fixate on Bach’s experience of loss. Marshall goes so far as to posit that an obsession with death and human frailty, not to mention a deep attraction to Lutheran orthodoxy, might be explained as a retreat from the anxiety of being twice orphaned, first by parental death, and then by brotherly abandonment. It is a method that requires inflating poorly documented, sometimes partially guessed, bits of biographical detail with intense emotional consequences. Gardiner’s musical analyses flow freely from this font. Simply put, Bach’s personal experience of loss, coupled with his fervent immersion in Lutheran doctrine, led him to a uniquely honest understanding of shame, of temptation, and of the desire for redemption. Such themes, of course, never go out of fashion and were staples as well of Baroque opera and of the sacred works of Vivaldi, Telemann, and scores of other composers. But Gardiner singles out Bach for an “authentic” religious conviction in contrast to the shallowness of his more theatrical contemporaries. To revisit and rewrite Kerman’s formula, “Baroque composers depict the passions . . . except for Bach, who expresses them.” One of us after all. This coupled with Bach’s unmatched willingness to forgo the beautiful and the pleasurable in favor of uncomfortable moments of pain, rage, and revulsion separates him from those others. At its best such diagnoses invest old music with a new and contemporary psychological power, a process that leaves one conflicted, offending the historian while stirring the concertgoer. Being both myself, I’ve long since learned to stop worrying and enjoy the resulting neurotics made out of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ives, et al., and so I am fully prepared to do the same for Bach. But we should never forget who the patient on the couch really is.

Gardiner’s task is made easier by the predictability of the resulting trope. We all know the artist type that we expect to be born of such angst. The gateway from slim source material to mythological archetype is a bit like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station. It will always be there for you if you run confidently enough at it. In Music in the Castle of Heaven, this dimension of testimonial expressivity remains Bach’s special prerogative among Baroque composers, a special status essential to the book’s final and most substantial argument, that among the music of that entire era Bach’s sacred vocal works are uniquely relevant to our modern condition.

Gardiner provides us two different vantage points on Bach’s testaments. Based on his experience during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, he is the perfect guide to walk us through a diachronic survey of an entire year’s cycle. It is an ambitious analysis offering glimpses of a composer responding to the challenge of producing a new sacred composition every week – a complex of moving Rembrandtian musical portraits of humans in distress. For a few cantatas and for the two extant Passion settings he gives us extreme close-ups, visiting with each movement and scene at a level of detail that allows us to luxuriate in the conductor’s vision of his newer darker Bach. His reading of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) demonstrates the surprising zeal of a twenty-two-year-old’s commitment to Lutheran eschatology. The text and governing melody, harshly ritualistic and tribal, are by Luther himself.

No innocence could be found.
Thus it was that Death came so soon
And seized power over us –
Held us captive in his kingdom,
Alleluia!

Bach’s musical setting weeps, wails, and roars with striking realism even as it astounds in its intricate textures. The result is a grim reminder of how effective Luther’s language and Bach’s music can be at bringing abstract theological concerns down into the world of everyday mortality:

Timeframes overlap here: first that of pre-regenerate man, then those of the Thuringians of both Luther’s and Bach’s day, scarred by their regular brushes with pestilential death.

Gardiner uncovers (or injects) much that is new and worth the reader’s time. The St. John and St. Matthew Passion settings get particularly engaging analysis, fitting to their position in Gardiner’s view as the greatest example of music’s ability to mimic tragedy and to force passive listeners into a recognition of their culpability in the world they inhabit:

[they] . . . animate the conventions of tragic myth and tragic conduct . . . leading his listeners to confront their mortality and compelling them to witness things from which they would normally avert their eyes.

These close readings have a lot to offer. They are rich in technical detail for those that want that in a music book, and bold in their emotional lunges for those who will skip past the shop talk of rhythms and counterpoints. But Gardiner’s hope is for more than mere compellingness. It is for relevance. His book is a failure if it cannot frame Bach’s Passions as something more than historical artifacts of a proto-enlightenment. That is the reason he doesn’t go too far into that world before pulling up. Others have already delved farther into what Gardiner almost sheepishly calls “the delicate issue of religious belief,” questioning the ability of today’s audiences to connect to a music so deeply rooted in convictions that many of us do not share or may even outright reject. Richard Taruskin offers that if one digs far enough into the real historical Bach, one finds a worldview worth truly recoiling from, a world of enforced consensus, absolutist ideology, anti-individualism, misogyny, and small-minded bigotry: “pre-Enlightened – and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened–temper. . . . Such music was a medium of truth, not beauty, and the truth it served – Luther’s truth – was often bitter. . . . Even when Bach is not expressing actively anti-Enlightenment sentiments . . . his settings are pervaded with a general antihumanism.” This, according to Taruskin, is why “only a handful of Bach’s cantatas can be said to have really joined the modern performance repertory, and a thoroughly unrepresentative handful at that.”

Gardiner offers us some relief from that “abandon ship” position, coaxing us to dip a toe into real history, just enough to give us something more real than Pythagorean Bach or Mountaintop Bach, just enough to darken the mood a bit for audiences who like their music pathological but not demagogic. History, in Music in Castle of Heaven, is in the service of contemporary experience. It must bend to achieve Gardiner’s goal, which is to convince us that Bach’s sacred vocal music remains socially relevant. It contains, after all, vivid and relatable depictions of very human human beings at their most pathetic, guilty, ashamed, supplicating, desperate. Gardiner believes above all else that exposure to these works is good for us in a way that even Bach’s own instrumental music cannot match. Simply put, it fosters empathy:

although Bach is habitually required to deal with such towering universal themes as eternity, sin and death, he shows he is also interested in the flickers of doubt and the daily tribulations of every individual, recognising that small lives do not seem small to the people who live them.

The extent of this belief is on stark display on the CD covers to the recordings that coincide with the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Released by Gardiner’s own label, each CD features a photograph by Steve McCurry, best known for National Geographic’s famous cover photo of twelve-year-old Sharbat Gula. The CD covers all attempt to repeat the power of that iconic image, a single person staring directly at the camera and thus, challengingly, into the eyes of the listener/holder of the CD. What changes from photo to photo is ethnicity, gender, traditional clothing or makeup. Like Gula, known across America and Europe not by her name but by a reductive formula – “The Afghan Girl” – (direct object + ethnicity + gender = human), the people in the photographs are all easily reduced to interchangeable symbols of exoticness. They are ethnically and geographically diverse, with the notable absence being the white European or American that one might presume is Gardiner’s expected Bach CD purchaser. If their ethnicity does not establish their “otherness,” then their indigenous dress, makeup, or ceremonial posture certainly does – a cascade of very human humans, all very different than you. Shuffle the deck of humanity and buy the complete box set! It is easy to read this exercise as naively exploitative orientalism. But I am willing to give Gardiner the benefit of an earnest belief that these images press the same issue as the music, asking us to confront the ultimate test of empathy – distance. It is easy to feel for the person near you, or the person who most resembles you. The consequences of their suffering are clearer and closer. The true test is how compelled one is to act on behalf of someone far away, who does not resemble you, and who you will never meet. It is a bold and clumsy attempt to make a strong claim that Bach’s sacred music has powerful work to do still today, the highest order of work, of making the world a better place all the way from the private to the global:

for beleaguered humanity at all times and in all places – from instances of false accusation in private or domestic life to the outrages under regimes of torture.

Music in the Castle of Heaven seems meant to complete a triad: striking musical performances, provocative visual imagery, and now a book-length exploration of these works, step by step, psychological trauma by trauma. But this brings us back to where this essay began, prompting the question of why it requires so many pages of biographical backup? Why the need to establish that the message we receive from this astounding music is rooted in Bach’s own psyche and endorsed by his own intentions? Twenty years ago, during the great “authentic performance” debates, this same question was asked of performers like Gardiner who claimed “historical verisimilitude” as a justification for their new performance style rather than simply admitting that they played the way they wanted to because they (and we) liked the sound. Gardiner’s own rhetoric was called into question back then as an example of the poietic fallacy, the idea that the only, or most valid, meaning of a musical work is one derived from the composer’s own thought process. It is a habit that leads us to credit our own feelings to someone else – someone whose mind we cannot hope to read, but whose authority we crave – the composer or author as lawgiver. The debate is long settled so far as performance is concerned, and performers in the new style have (mostly) accepted that, as Taruskin sneakily commended them, “being the true voice of one’s time is . . . roughly forty thousand times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history.” But reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, it seems as if Gardiner, the author, learned nothing from the trials of Gardiner, the performer, or at least thought he might slip old habits by in another form.

Take for a final example his readings of Cantatas 178, 179, and 135, the texts of which center on spiritual hypocrisy (from BWV 178: “wicked men . . . conceiving their artful plots with the serpent’s guile” and from BWV 179: “Likeness of false hypocrites, We could Sodom’s apples call them, Who, with rot though they be filled, On the outside brightly glisten.”). The music is filled with strident, heavily articulated orchestral slicing, fiery long-winded chewing-outs for melodies, and unexpected harmonic thunderclaps. For Gardiner, the one thing that is missing is personal testimony:

such sustained defiance that one asks whether there is a submerged story here – of Bach operating in a hostile environment. How much more satisfying, then, for him to channel all that frustration and vituperative energy into his music. . . . This is superb, angry music executed with a palpable fury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors. One can picture the city elders, sitting in the best pews, listening to these post-Trinitarian harangues, registering their intent and starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable as these shockingly direct words – and Bach’s still more strident and abrasive music – hit home.

Perhaps. Certainly the notion reinforces Gardiner’s own Bach mythology, Bach again as prototype, this time of the outsider anti-hero – proto-Beethoven. It is attractive. But whatever satisfying defiance this music parallels in modern listeners – anger at hypocritical corporate double-speak or outraged moralizing at ignorant power-wielding political hacks – is both self-evident in the sound and already built in to our cultural moment. It does not require the backing of Bach’s imaginary diary or visions of puffed-up Leipzig burghers.

In the end, the book is an argument for these difficult works to be kept alive, sprinkled with a fear that in our age of spiritual skepticism, and our new $.99/track digital music marketplace, Bach’s shorter instrumental works (and heaven forbid Vivaldi’s brilliant and breezily accessible concerti and arias) may be better built to thrive. But the case for relevance, and the call to keep the cantatas from fading, will be made between Bach’s music, his performers, and us. The answer to the question “why should we listen to this?” does not have to coincide with the answer to the question “why did he write it?”

If one has any doubts, look around at how many different Bachs are coexisting today, when more than a century of shifting performance styles and emotional perspectives are all streaming together on Youtube: Romantic Bach, Modern Bach, Gothic Bach, Pythagorean Bach, ascetic Bach, Lutheran Bach, audacious virtuoso Bach. You can choose whichever you’d like today, and a different one tomorrow. They all once claimed to be “the real” Bach – proof of how the process of reception is the history that matters. Just be aware, when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, that John Eliot Gardiner’s tragic orphan-empath is only one Bach among those many. No more or less accurate to the “true” past, but perhaps more prepared to survive the immediate future.

Michael Markham – Los Angeles Review of Books

Art Installations Made of Sound

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

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

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Installations

Janet Cardiff sound installations

Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.

And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art [opened] its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show – which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her Study for Strings riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redacted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes – and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences – in the uterus, in fact.”

Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called Day Is Done, will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers – the kind you’d see in an old ballpark – across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call Taps. The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.

At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when Taps would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On 11 September 2001, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)

Day Is Done also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”

Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like Day Is Done, “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” – meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.

That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.

There’s yet another ambitious sound piece about to open in New York. On 10 September 2013, the Metropolitan Museum will present Forty Part Motet, an installation by the Canadian Janet Cardiff that may be one of the best works, in any medium, of the last decades and the first work in sound at the Metropolitan. A piece like Ms. Cardiff’s “opens people’s eyes to a different art form that they wouldn’t expect to see at the Met,” said Anne Strauss, the project’s curator. “It’s something we can provide more easily, than, say, performance art.”

We were meeting far uptown in Manhattan, in a twelfth-century chapel at the heart of the Met’s Cloisters branch, now celebrating its seventy-fifth year as a home for medieval art. The forty speakers of Cardiff’s piece will be installed in a ring in that chapel, each one transmitting the sound of a single musical part from the choral extravaganza Spem in Alium, composed around 1570 by Thomas Tallis. Ms. Cardiff’s piece manages to take one of the most imposing masterpieces of Western music and reduce it to modest human elements. As you sidle up to any one speaker, the single voice you hear seems frail and at sea, and that stands in touching contrast to the grand effect that comes when you stand in the work’s center and hear all forty parts combined. Wherever Forty Part Motet gets installed, a visitor or two often leaves in tears.

The market has noticed sound art’s achievements. “I kind of resigned myself that I would never make any money,” Ms. Philipsz said. In fact, she’s now doing fine. She sold all three copies of her first installation at Tanya Bonakdar, the New York gallery that took her on in 2007. According to the gallery director, Ethan Sklar, her piece in the show at the Modern, also in an edition of three, is priced at almost $150,000. Mr. Sklar spoke of the appeal of Ms. Philipsz’s art to “collectors and institutions who are looking for the strongest and most challenging work.”

It also doesn’t hurt, he pointed out, that there are fewer headaches in storing and shipping a Philipsz data disc than some massive sculptural piece, although her sound fills space just as impressively: “You can have an epic work that comes down to a box.”

But it is still early days in the marketing of sound art. Both the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s say that they have not sold a single sonic work, whereas they’ve begun to get good prices for major videos. Sound art’s vaguely unworldly air may actually increase its appeal.

“It’s not really commodified at this moment, which makes it approachable,” Ms. London said. “All of these works have a poetry, and a fleetingness.”

The mainstream’s embrace of sound art may mask something peculiar: that even as the field reaches new heights, it’s also in crisis. Art-trained figures like Ms. Philipsz and Ms. Cardiff, who build work around the sounds that we care most about – and who resist the whole idea of a coherent genre called “sound art” – are up against a sonic old guard, sometimes including younger figures, that one artist has referred to as the “honk-tweet” school.

Aligned with experimental music rather than visual art, the honk-tweeters are interested in strange beeps and buzzings for their own sakes. They craft what the sound artist, theorist and blogger Seth Kim-Cohen refers to as purely cochlear, rather than fully mindful, sound art.

In June, Mr. Kim-Cohen chided the survey at the Modern for including such work, which he described as the sonic equivalent of Op Art, a movement in painting “that does not demand (or merit) serious critical response,” as he has written. “Surely,” he blogged, “if the (visual) art world is now willing to embrace sound, it should do so according to the same criteria of quality and engagement that it demands of other media.”

Caleb Kelly, a scholar who recently published a book called Sound, compiling a range of essays on the art form, said he believes that pieces like Ms. Cardiff’s Motet, or the riffs on Hollywood soundtracks by the Swiss art star Christian Marclay, will still matter in a century, whereas today’s honk-tweeters (“dial twiddlers,” Ms. Philipsz calls them) will likely disappear, if they keep doing retreads of John Cage’s postwar innovations.

Sound artists like to point out that while you can close your eyes to an image you hate, you can’t close your ears to a noise. That gives them power but also puts them at risk. If a honk or a tweet does no more than annoy, visitors will vote with their feet.

Blake Gopnik – The New York Times

Bach on a Stick

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Works, Other Artists, Video Recordings

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alan Curtis, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Bob van Asperen, Brandenburg Concertos, British Broadcasting Corporation, cantata, CD, computer, Das Alte Werk, DVD, Goldberg Variations, Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord, headphones, Il Giardino Armonico, Kurt Equiluz, Mass in B minor, Milan, MP3, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, organ, passion, secular cantata, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Teldec, Ton Koopman

Bach memory stickIn 2000, Teldec issued its complete Bach edition on CD, made up of four decades of releases from its catalogue, as well as the Das Alte Werk labels. All the works were performed on period instruments and ranged from the earliest of the cantata recordings, dating from 1963, to those of some of the instrumental trios made in the late 1990s to plug the few gaps in the survey. It was an extraordinarily comprehensive achievement, which ran to 154 discs, including a DVD of a BBC documentary from its great composers series.

Now the whole set has been made available at a remarkably low price as more than three thousand MP3 files on a single memory stick, together with PDFs of essays from the original recordings, though not, as far as I could establish, the texts of the vocal works, even though there would have been plenty of space for them on the memory stick. As a concept alone, it’s pretty astonishing to be able to hold the whole life’s work of one of the greatest composers in the history of western music in the palm of one’s hand – but it would be only that, and the empty triumph of technology over artistic quality, if the results were not worthwhile both musically and technically.

On a musical level, certainly, there can be very few complaints. The core of the whole enterprise was always the pioneering set of the complete sacred cantatas: sixty CDs in the original set, on which Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt worked tirelessly with their ensembles for Das Alte Werk over more than twenty years. While those performances are sometimes a bit more strait-laced expressively than today’s much suaver period-instrument bands, there is a wonderfully uncomplicated directness about the singing and playing that is always fully engaged. Harnoncourt and Ton Koopman share the secular cantatas, while it’s the former’s performances for both the Passions – his outstanding 1970 version of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) and a slightly less convincing 1993 one of the St. John Passion (BWV 245), with Kurt Equiluz and Anthony Rolfe Johnson as the respective Evangelists – and for the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), from 1986, that are included.

Koopman also features extensively as an organist; his performances of the complete organ works are spread across sixteen CDs and recorded on a variety of instruments in the 1990s. As you would expect in such a purist set, all the remaining keyboard works are played on the harpsichord, shared between seven different soloists, including Leonhardt in his classic performance of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), Alan Curtis and Bob van Asperen. Leonhardt is the soloist, too, in the harpsichord concertos, while the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51) are represented by wonderful buoyant performances from the Milanese group Il Giardino Armonico. Among the instrumental music, Harnoncourt goes back to his beginnings as a string player in the Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) and the Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord (BWV 1027-9), while Thomas Zehetmair plays the solo-violin works.

For this set, the original recordings have been compressed at a bit rate of 320 kbps. That is apparently the maximum quality that can be handled by domestic MP3 players, and the sound seems pretty good, though inevitably can seem restricted when compared with the CD originals. Alternatively the files can be downloaded and then burnt on to CD, though, that rather defeats the object of having them on a memory stick in the first place. Plugged into a computer and played back through high-quality headphones, though, the results are certainly acceptable, even if navigating your way around the 25GB of material is sometimes hit and miss – the search facility provided with the application isn’t terribly sophisticated, and so locating a particular chorale prelude, say, could take a while.

But riffling through 154 CDs to locate a specific track wouldn’t ever be straightforward either, and in the end it is the sheer quantity of music involved that makes the task a challenge. The accessibility and the miraculous compactness of this set are bound to be its huge selling point; as a handy work of reference, certainly, it’s hard to fault.

Andrew Clements – The Guardian

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