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Tag Archives: Goethe

The Legacy of Jaroslav Pelikan

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Memorials

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Adolf von Harnack, Albanian, Alexander Schmemann, Annunciation, Bach Among the Theologians, Bible, chorale, Concordia Seminary, creed, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, Czech, Dutch, First Things, From Luther to Kierkegaard, Georges Florovsky, German, Goethe, Greek, Hebrew, History of Dogma, Islam, Jacques Paul Migne, Jaroslav Pelikan, Jaroslav Pelikan Doctor Ecclesiae, Jesus Through the Centuries, Judaism, Karl Barth, Latin, Martin Luther, OrthodoxOrthodox Church in America, Patrologia Latina, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Louis Wilken, Roland Bainton, Roman Catholic, Russian, Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Second Vatican Council, Serbian, shahadah, Shema Yisrael, Slavic, Slovak, Small Catechism, The Christian Tradition, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, Timothy George, University of Chicago, Valerie Hotchkiss, Whose Bible Is It?, Yale University

Jaroslav Pelikan

Jaroslav Pelikan

It has been nearly ten years since Jaroslav Pelikan died and a full twenty-five since he completed The Christian Tradition, his five-volume, 2,100-page history of “what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the Word of God.” Who was Jaroslav Pelikan, and why does his work remain so important for serious Christian scholarship today?

Pelikan loved to quote this line from Goethe, his favorite poet: “What you have received as heritage, take now as task and thus you will make it your own.” Pelikan’s remarkable scholarly career was rooted in his Slavic family background. Both of his parents were born in Europe. His father and grandfather were Lutheran pastors. His mother was a school teacher who learned English by reading the essays of Emerson. They bequeathed to young Jary, as he was called, both a love for learning and a desire for God.

When he was a little boy and couldn’t quite reach the dinner table, his parents had him sit on stacked-up volumes of Migne’s Patrologia, a collection of patristic writings in the original languages. He later quipped, “I thus absorbed the church fathers a posteriori!” His facility with languages was astounding—not only the classical tongues of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew but also German, Slovak, Czech, Dutch, Russian, Serbian, all the romance languages, and many more. On occasion he would stay up late at night listening to a short-wave radio to keep fresh his language skills—including Albanian, which he once found useful in a conversation with a taxi driver.

Pelikan’s deep religious faith was nurtured on Luther’s Small Catechism, the great chorales of J. S. Bach, and, above all, the Bible. Each of these – Luther, Bach, and the Bible – would play a major role in his scholarly work. Though he became an ordained Lutheran minister and once taught at Concordia Theological Seminary, Pelikan spent most of his life in the environs of the secular academy. But he never lost the rich faith he received as a small child. As he once confessed, “I was quite out of step with many in my generation, especially among theological scholars at universities, in never having had fundamental doubts about the essential rightness of the Christian faith, but having retained a continuing, if often quite unsophisticated, Slavic piety.”

A precocious Pelikan received both his seminary degree, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in 1946 at age twenty-two. His first book, From Luther to Kierkegaard, came out a few years later (1950). Soon Pelikan established himself as one of the most prolific Luther scholars of his generation. He was general editor for the 55-volume American Edition of Luther’s Works and wrote a separate volume on Luther’s biblical exposition. Pelikan always had a great interest in ecumenical affairs. His book The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (1959), written on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, offered an irenic introduction to the world’s largest Christian community.

It is said that Karl Barth drew up a plan for his “collected works” at age ten! Just so, Pelikan had a clear, detailed plan of what he called his “big book” early in his career. He would write a comprehensive history of Christian doctrine. No one had attempted such a grand project since Adolf von Harnack, the great scion of German liberal Protestantism, who published his massive History of Dogma in the late nineteenth century. Pelikan greatly admired Harnack, whose picture he kept on his study wall along with that of the great Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. Harnack, however, for all his erudition, had little sympathy with the doctrinal content of his subject and presented a version of Christianity freed from the dogmatic shackles of the past. Pelikan, working with the same historical rigor, approached his subject with much more sympathy. As he put it, “I found, not in theological liberalism and historical relativism (as so many of my predecessors, teachers, contemporaries did) but in tradition and orthodoxy, the presupposition from which to interpret any portion or period.”

Robert Louis Wilken recognized this trait in his former teacher. Shortly after Pelikan’s death in 2006, Wilken wrote in a moving tribute titled Jaroslav Pelikan, Doctor Ecclesiae: “Pelikan knew, and his scholarship demonstrated, what many Christian theologians and church leaders have forgotten, that over the Church’s long history, the orthodox and catholic form of Christian faith . . . has been the most biblical, the most coherent, the most enduring, the most adaptable, and yes, the most true.”

As a capstone to his lifelong interest in the central texts of the Christian faith, Pelikan edited (with Valerie Hotchkiss) what could only be called a second magnum opus – Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, a four-volume critical edition with a one-volume historical and theological guide called simply Credo.

Judaism has its shema, and Islam its shahadah, but Christians, responding to Jesus’s question, “Who do you say that I am?” have produced literally thousands of statements of faith across the centuries. Pelikan’s collection includes several hundred of these, among them The Masai Creed from Kenya. This creed Africanizes Christianity by declaring that Jesus “was always on safari doing good.” It also declares that after Jesus had been “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he laid buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is the Lord.”

This creed was brought to Pelikan’s attention by one of his students, a woman who had been a member of a religious order working in a hospital in East Nigeria. Pelikan commented on his reaction to this text: “And so she brought it to me, and I just got shivers, just the thought, you know, the hyenas did not touch him and the act of defiance – God lives even in spite of the hyenas.”

Pelikan dealt with many deep and difficult subjects in his scholarly work, but he wrote in a simple, elegant style with a clarity that is compelling. He had a way of capturing profound truths in short, unforgettable statements. Among his most memorable are these: “Jesus Christ is too important to be left to the theologians”; “Everybody else is an expert on the present. I wish to file a minority report on behalf of the past”; and “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Though he never quite matched the popular appeal of his Yale predecessor, Roland H. Bainton, some of Pelikan’s books did reach a wider audience, including his Jesus Through the Centuries and Whose Bible Is It?

On 25 March 1998, the Feast Day of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Pelikan and his wife Sylvia were received into the fellowship of the Orthodox Church in America. Pelikan remarked that while some might have been shocked by his act, few who knew him well could have been surprised. As he put it, “Any airplane that circled the airport for that long before landing would have run out of gas!” Indeed, Pelikan’s tilt toward the East can be traced back to his Slavic roots, his love for the Eastern liturgy, his close friendship with the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky, and the sheer joy that permeates the pages of The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, the second volume of his history of doctrine. He spent the last years of his life serving on the Board of Trustees of Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he is still held in great affection and esteem.

I never had Jaroslav Pelikan as a classroom teacher, but I was one of his students, as everyone seriously interested in Christian history has to be. As a young student of historical theology, I once determined to read everything Pelikan had written. It is a daunting task, let me assure you: A 1995 bibliography of his works, which does not include his last prolific decade, runs to some fifty printed pages. He was a generous colleague and friend and a great encourager.

Since 1962, Pelikan had taught at Yale University and served for a while as Dean of the Graduate School there. He thrived in the world of the arts and sciences and wrote learnedly about art, politics, law, poetry, educational theory, and public ethics, as well as history and theology. But he did all of this as a scholar who was also a Christian. Jaroslav Pelikan had a love for all things human and humane, and his work still enriches every person who looks at the world with intellectual curiosity and moral imagination. But his legacy shines especially bright among those who follow Jesus Christ, belong to his church, and see the world through the eyes of the Savior’s love.

Pelikan’s Bach Among the Theologians concludes with a chapter titled “Johann Sebastian Bach – Between Secular and Sacred.” Pelikan points out here that Bach began his compositions by writing Jesu Juva (Jesus, help) and closed them by writing Soli Deo Gloria (To God alone be the glory). These are also good grace notes for one of the most diligent and faithful scholars the church has known in recent times.

Timothy George – First Things

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The Pure and the Impure

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

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

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Albert Schweitzer, Angela Hewitt, arpeggio, augmentation, “Jupiter” Symphony, bass, Beethoven, bell, Blanche Moyse, Brandenburg Concertos, Charlton Heston, Chopin, coffee grinder, counterpoint, Daniel Barenboim, David Copperfield, Debussy, Dinu Lipatti, dissonance, DNA, fugue, Glenn Gould, Goethe, Goldberg Variations, harmony, Haydn, Hollywood, inversion, iPad, Jeremy Denk, Lambaréné, Leipzig, Leopold Stokowski, London, Marlboro, melody, Mendelssohn, Moses, Mozart, Nicolas Slonimsky, organ, Pablo Casals, partita, Paul Elie, pedal, performance practice, piano, Reinventing Bach, retrograde, Romanticism, Rosalyn Tureck, rubato, Santa Barbara, score, Sonata in F minor, Spock, Steve Jobs, Sudoku, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, tempo, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Well-Tempered Clavier, violin, Wagner, Wanda Landowska, Yo-Yo Ma

wolffThe only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex. And yet in our era – so consumed with both – Bach has not lost his appeal. Bach’s ongoing star quality and his endless DNA-like capacity for mutation and adaptation are the subject of Paul Elie’s passionate and grand book [Reinventing Bach]. It is a work with a cast of thousands, circling its protagonist. I got the feeling as I read along that Bach was coursing through history like a fugal superhero. There really was no end to his capabilities: repairing organs, dispensing epiphanies, keeping pace with technological transformation, driving Glenn Gould insane, healing wounds of war, being ignored in the D.C. metro, helping Steve Jobs to release the iPad. Citizens of Gotham, look to your stereos!

At this point nobody needs to be told that Bach is good. The votes are in. But mass approval is a force to be reckoned with, and the intensity of humanity’s worship of Bach has unforeseen consequences. I propose to reverse-engineer the usual praise. Rather than using our words to measure his goodness, we can use his music as a standard to measure our ideas of the good, to assess our prejudices about virtue.

An iconic place to start is the almost-too-famous opening of the forty-eight preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93). (Beethoven called this collection the Bible.) The first prelude is the foundation – let there be light! – and what you see on the page is a set of arpeggios, nothing more. For the premise of a grand project there is no grandiosity; there are only three austerities. There is no melody; each measure has the same rhythm; each measure has the same contour. In this monotonous stream of arpeggios, there is no distraction, no “surface noise,” and so we hear clearly when two notes come dissonantly close and are resolved, and we take notice when a voice leaps up, climbs, or descends in a long line: all these motions, the raw materials of musical meaning, are revealed like stage machinery that suddenly comes out from behind the scenes. The craft of voice-leading itself becomes the focus of attention and proves more riveting than the usual show.

One could go on and on with instances in which Bach, through one stratagem or another, draws our ear straight to the movement of the pitches. This element of Bach’s music – the compositional gesture directing us to “just the notes,” as if music were not just notes anyway – gets transferred into the world of Bach interpretation, into the mystique of his devotees. Here is a typical example, from a profile of the fine pianist Angela Hewitt, a Bach specialist, in The New York Times: “… the greatest compliment for Ms. Hewitt came from her father, who after listening to one of her recordings, said: ‘I didn’t hear you. I only heard Bach.’” It is a bit strange for an artist to vanish in her own profile – but this is the clichéd credo of Bach performance. You hear it all the time in Bach lessons and master classes: the student is told not to add anything of himself, to avoid the personal, to stick with the universal, to dissolve into the composer. The personal is an impurity and Bach is distilled water. Purity arrives very early in Elie’s book, on page nine: Bach is “the great exception, a site of purity in our sullied lives.” And later Elie writes a poetic passage about vanishing: “The organist is done away with. So is the church building. So are the limits of space and time, of stamina and attention. The music of Bach is all that is left….”

This is Bach as David Copperfield, making everything disappear. It is powerful and very prevalent, this desire for nothing but Bach pure, this trope of the falling away of all the specific trappings, leaving the universal essence behind. In this respect, we may compare Bach with the other father figure of “classical music”: Beethoven is great, but he is not pure. Beethoven reached toward a tortured purity in the late years, and attained a noble perfection in the middle ones (the “Archduke” Trio); but he himself never vanishes. His music seems hewn out of his will, an assertion of the individual and the artist as hero. Bach, by contrast, self-effaces. He is no hero; it is we who have made an unwilling hero out of him.

One great advantage Bach has over Beethoven is counterpoint. Late in life Beethoven obsessed over Bach, working at counterpoint and fugue feverishly – as if to purify himself, to escape from the heroic sonata forms that he had brought to their apex. In a “song without words” by Mendelssohn or a nocturne by Chopin, you usually have the opposite of counterpoint: a melody over repeated chords or a texture of arpeggios – that is, filler, something to make the chords last some time while the melody melodizes. There is a hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, between the prominent main voice and the backup band. But in “true counterpoint” no voice is the lapdog of a melody; each voice lives independently. For us humble listeners, whose lives are filled with filler, this seems like an unattainable miracle: everything counts.

Bach’s insistence on the integrity of every voice (against history, against fashion) is a second form of purity, to set beside his humility. But he is not done being pure, not by a long shot: more than any other composer, Bach represents the triumph of pure logic. He is synonymous with the fugue – the music of proposition, propagation, permutation. And the fugue was hardly the most math-like of his genres. Elie describes the discovery of the “puzzle canons,” based on the “Goldberg” bass, which musicologists scrambled to solve: music as Sudoku. One of Bach’s sons related the story that his father would hear a musical idea and would instantaneously know all the operations that could be carried out on it. Think about it – a musical idea is not a catchy tune, it is something operable; calculations can be performed on it. Like a musical-mathematical savant, Bach would then wait for these things to occur: for the idea to be played backward (retrograde), or upside down (inversion), or twice as slow (augmentation), whatever; and he was gleeful when arcane combinatorial expectations were met. It is a powerful element of the Bach aura: no matter how much you tell yourself that it’s just music, you cannot resist hearing the play of numbers, the cosmic calculus.

As a rule we don’t want music to act like Spock. We want it to let go, to make us feel, to express inward states. But Bach is a multi-tasker: his logic is unassailable but is not tedious. His proofs soar. He captures the deepest feeling while remaining perfectly logical, thereby demonstrating that those imperatives are not at all opposed. On the strength of this tremendous logic, Nicolas Slonimsky labeled Bach the “supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music,” which seems like hyperbole but isn’t. Bach is much more than a logician – he is Moses, minus Charlton Heston, handing down commandments. Bach’s laws similarly tend to come in convenient even-numbered packages: the thirty-two parts of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), the forty-eight Preludes and Fugues (BWV 846-93), the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the six keyboard Partitas (825-30). They lay down prescriptions about harmony, about the treatment of dissonance, about design and voice-leading – musical morals that most people would never understand but can perceive through Bach’s vision.

Bach’s examples did not intimidate the whole nineteenth century, the way Beethoven’s did, but they were never questioned. We tend to glorify composers who break or stretch the laws: Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Stravinsky, Debussy. Bach is the exception, a composer whom we love for his rules. And having created them, he sets up shop in them, and takes inspiration from their self-evident goodness. The commandments generate freedom. Owing to this lawfulness, Bach’s choices come to feel permanent, and immune from passing style and taste; they give the illusion of being facts. All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction.

Bach has quite a hoard of virtues. The rectitude is almost annoying: selflessness married to reason married to imagination married to lawfulness married to craft. Bach is a mirror to everything we would like to be; he is almost too good to be true, to be believed. But we believe in Bach on the evidence of the notes themselves. Having invoked fact, law, and logic, I think the larger and more precise term, the umbrella term, to sum up Bach’s mystique is truth. There is a lot of talk of truth and truthiness these days – the death of truth, a post-truth era, and a proliferation of fact checkers debasing the currency in which they pretend to trade. But in Bach’s case we are talking about a certain kind of truth, a necessary truth, even a divine truth, something unarguable. Bach allows us to deny our suspicion that music may be a tissue of lies, a sensory decadence. You cannot wander far into Bach discussion without the invocation of the divine, even in connection with his secular works: cue Beethoven’s “Well-Tempered Bible,” Lipatti’s remark that Bach was “one of the ‘chosen instruments of God himself,’” and Goethe’s observation that it is “as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” Combine the feeling of divinity with the experience of Bach’s logic and system and you have an intoxicating combination, as if the Bible made perfect sense.

Closely following upon the invocation of God is the invocation of virtue: Bach is music’s claim to morality. Perhaps this last step is the most dangerous. It is a lot for music to bear, this conflation with truth, not to mention virtue. Arguments about Bach become proxy arguments about purity and authenticity. For some reason, people love to tell the story of Wanda Landowska saying to Pablo Casals, “You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.” A memorable boast (and insult), but underneath it you can feel Bach’s truth getting carved up, subjected to territorial disputes. The certitude of Bach’s command of tones seems, like a virus, to infect some artists who play him.

Consider Glenn Gould’s admiring reaction, when he heard Rosalyn Tureck:

It was playing of such uprightness, to put it into the moral sphere. There was such a sense of repose that had nothing to do with languor, but rather with moral rectitude in the liturgical sense.

This seems to me a bit of a word salad – what is the liturgical sense of rectitude? – but the gist is clear: Bach is to be played uprightly, ethically, correctly. And then read Rosalyn Tureck in turn: “Bach is more than music. It reveals to us, who will listen and perceive, the world to which the highest ideals of man aspire.” Even casting aside the slightly possessive and cultish “us,” think about it: Tureck is not making interpretative choices about the relations of musical tones, she is making choices about the highest ideals of man. Returning to Angela Hewitt’s Times profile, she says at one point that in Bach “there’s no room for fuss or superfluous gestures” and at another that her gowns “reflect my playing: not too frilly.” It’s not hard to read these code words: languor vs. rectitude, frilly, fuss, and so on. Out of Bach’s universal appeal, by some compensatory law, there arise insidious tendencies to moralism, severity, even Puritanical judgment.

Elie’s book is a weave of stories, emulating the play of voices in Bach’s music, and he is not shy about the moral strand: he makes connections between a devotion to Bach and a devotion to causes. The first story we encounter is Albert Schweitzer, aged and at a quandary, recording the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) in London in 1935:

Thirty years earlier he had renounced a life in music for one in medicine, training to run a clinic for poor people at the village of Lambaréné in the French Congo . . . . He had wanted to do “something small in the spirit of Jesus” – to make his life an argument for a way of being . . . . But his act of renunciation had turned into something else: a double life . . . . Might it not have been better to do something small the way Bach had done, hunkering down behind the organ in Leipzig . . . ?

Right away Elie hits us with music as a moral choice. He reminds us of Schweitzer’s reputation, and of its decline. Once dubbed “the greatest man in the world” by Life, he “now appears a problematic, compromised figure: his project paternalistic, his methods condescending . . . .” But, Elie suggests, the recording will endure, if all his good deeds will not: ten minutes of great playing outweigh a lifetime of virtue. Eventually Schweitzer’s story comes into contact with that of a successor, Pablo Casals:

His experience of war would shape the efforts of his later life into an extramusical role: the artist of conscience, who gives voice to human ideals in the face of diabolical powers . . . . [He] was now known for statements, not concerts . . . . [He] was the very image of moral independence – of the freedom of the individual to judge right from wrong and act accordingly.

I kept wishing that Elie would dig more deeply into the oddness of the odd couple he has brought together: the divinity of Bach and all his moral associations, and the super-secular microphone, an amoral, utterly neutral agent if ever there was one. Just as the art of recording begins to mature, and the story begins to get a bit decadent, leaving Africa (Schweitzer) and war-torn Europe (Casals) for film studios in Hollywood and Santa Barbara (Stokowski), we come across the most peculiar and famous of our heroes, an anti-divinity in his own right. I am referring, of course, to Glenn Gould. He arrives armed and dangerous, a crusader, in the wake of hearing Tureck:

I was fighting a battle in which I was never going to get a surrender flag from my teacher on the way Bach should go, but her records were the first evidence that one did not fight alone.

From this point on, a huge portion of the book is about Gould, which is, alas, inevitable. Figures such as Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim are relegated to cameos. Gould’s story is certainly powerful, and he deserves to be the hero of this tale: he re-invented Bach more radically than anyone else, with a tremendous impact on the world’s understanding of one of the world’s most over-understood composers. But it is really shocking to look back at all the Bachian virtues that we have enumerated, and then contemplate the Gould phenomenon. Against humility, logic, and reason, against Bach’s continuity, his bounded comforting cosmos, we have the fanatically crisp articulation, the humming, the pills, the social ineptitude, the extreme tempi, the ridiculous chair, the retreat into the studio, the media savvy, the anti-lyricism, the recordings made out of spite, the hands soaked in boiling water – this is the madman who became the face of Bach, the paragon of universal Bach. How could this happen? (As I get outraged about Glenn Gould, I realize that I, too, am falling into the moralistic trap.)

The easy answer to my question, of course, is Gould’s electrifying genius. But there is a second factor in Gould’s rise to domination in the interpretation of Bach: a backlash against an image. After Schweitzer, Casals, Landowska, and all their ethical seriousness, all their purity and their conscience, the thing that Bach lacked in the public imagination was the bizarre and the perverse. Gould filled the hole. Sometimes he found perversity in the music and teased it out, but mostly he just slathered it on; piece after piece, he made brilliant but deeply unintuitive, “unnatural” choices, and made them work through sheer force of will, refusing to vanish. He de-coupled logic and virtue.

So we want Bach’s music to be universal, transpersonal, a conduit to the divine, but we also want bizarre insane celebrities to play it. Perhaps we have decided as a civilization that truth is more maniacal, more partial, than it used to be? Elie claims that Gould, in recording the Goldberg Variations, “transcended himself: his isolation and awkwardness, his phobias and idiosyncrasies.” I would argue the opposite: that Gould immortalized his phobias, by grafting them onto Bach. This is not all bad. Gould’s phobias and manias immediately erase the distance of centuries; they dissolve the varnish that has piled up, and make Bach one with the anxieties of the present.

Elie’s book, almost by accident, makes you compare the save-the-world mentality of Schweitzer and Casals with the avoid-the-world mentality of Gould; and gradually the artists seem less like saints than musicians with press releases. As you read about all these icons of Bach performance, you are reminded of Bach’s propensity toward high priests and priestesses. Beethoven specialists are known as great musicians, great interpreters, whereas Bach specialists tend to be viewed vatically, as mediums. I found myself connecting Casals’s moaning and Gould’s humming – for a composer who is supposed to be pure, we sure enjoy a lot of extraneous noise! – the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues, channeling, a kind of cultish signal, a sonic signature of being on the right occult frequency to communicate with the master.

This is a big book, and as someone who struggles with the difficulty of writing about music, this reader felt a lot of empathy for the writer: how do you write about Bach for hundreds of pages without musical examples? You run across a fair number of passages such as this:

With those first long strokes of the bow, a line is being drawn, a series of ultimatums issued…. He might be singing a dirge on the battleground as the smoke clears; the music stays in place as he surveys the damage – the collapsed towers, the skeletal buildings . . .

and this:

[In] this Bach suite he slips in quietly, almost accidentally, pulling the first note out of nowhere with the bow, so that the note, a low G, goes from soft to loud from the beginning of the stroke to the end. It is a sexual entry, a lover’s deft approach. All of a sudden we are in . . .

Yes, he is describing a particular performance, not Bach’s music itself, but still these passages feel like erotica written by someone whose fetishes are different from mine. I found myself in a zone too far away, reading someone’s ideas about someone else’s ideas about Bach’s ideas, and so I sat at the piano to play, with the dubious motive of purifying myself. I started in on the opening movement of the Sonata in F minor (BWV 1018) because it has an extraordinary snuck-in entrance, like the one Elie describes, and it is a perfect example of Bach’s way with truth, logic, and musical metaphor.

The piece begins with a keyboard solo. The violin is nowhere to be found, silent for a good while: this silence is a mystery to be solved. We are in a slow triple time, and the main idea of the piece is exactly three beats long. Each time that we hear the melody, another bar has gone by, another unit of time, another moment of our lives. The keyboard plays the main idea once in the top voice, then travels lower into the middle voice – it is measuring out two units of time, pacing them out. At the same time, however, the harmony is static; we are treading water. (Music is especially hospitable to nuances and paradoxes of motion and stillness.) Then comes the crucial change-up: three bars where the harmony is allowed to move. This happens because – everything in Bach happens because! – the melodic idea continues its journey downward, and ends up in the lowest voice. It’s as if something from the sky moves underground, and shifts the foundation under your feet. Bach is all about the beauties of consequences.

Now that the melody has moved down to the bass, there is room for something new in the upper voices. But Bach doesn’t have to invent something: why would he? He fills it with the most obvious thing at hand: he extracts the first two notes of the existing melody, elongates them, enchains them. He fashions a gorgeous long melody line out of them so that they interact dissonantly – even a bit painfully, you might say – with the faster melody in the bass. Bach demonstrates a thing interacting painfully with itself.

It’s as simple as A and B: two bars of consonant stasis, then three bars of dissonant flux, in which the possibilities of the idea presented in stasis are now seen in motion. This is the kind of basic contrast, a glimpse of two kinds of musical possibility, two temporal states, that Bach is able to wring our hearts with. In fact, at the end of the three moving bars the keyboard reaches the most pained and disturbing of the dissonances. And here comes the magical elided solution to the mystery of the silence of the violin: Bach leaves this last dissonance unresolved, and just at that ambiguous moment – at the end of an unsettling motion that has not quite found a resting place – the violin at last enters, playing an unmoving held note, C. Though not a resolution, this note appears in the guise of one. It doesn’t resolve the unresolved thing; it substitutes a different solution out of nowhere.

Surreptitious, lacking in fanfare, deliberately hidden, the violin holds onto this single note for two measures, like an unblinking gaze. The sustained note has no relation to time, while the keyboard, on which every note decays, keeps marking time, seemingly unaffected. After two bars of this haunting dialectic, the violin leaves the held note to play one unremarkable measure of melody, then immediately, just as unexpectedly as it entered, returns to its earlier silence. This is Bach’s perverse, reverse masterstroke. The stage was beautifully set for nearly nothing. We are left listening to the keyboard again; time resumes. It was an ephemeral moment of eternity.

I hope it is clear from the preceding analysis how each boringly described parameter – two bars of this, then three bars of that, dissonance, enchaining – summons tremendous resonances: a resolution that comes from an utterly unexpected direction; a tension between different senses of time; the power of expectation; the linking of beauty and dissonance, of beauty and pain. The instruments themselves are imbued with symbolic identities, on two sides of a thought-divide. All these things are activated immediately, in a way that Mozart and Haydn can hardly dream of. Eight bars into the “Jupiter” Symphony, for example, Mozart has barely been able to sketch out a premise, whereas some eight bars into this humble violin and keyboard sonata Bach has already created a complex philosophical web. This difference is owed in part to the conventions of the classical style, of course, but also it has something to do with Bach’s specialness. Bach’s purity lies in this promiscuous symbolic reach, grabbing onto a million philosophical ladders at once.

Essays in Truth: in pieces such as BWV 1018, arching forms, in which the last perfect logical permutation clicks into place heartrendingly (one last contribution of the violin, a new counterpoint to the keyboard’s dissonant sequence), Bach draws a distinction between truth as compressed into aphorism (the truism, the talking point, the slogan) and truth as a practice. The sort of musical truths that Bach sketches out – unrepeatable, as no other composer ever came close to replicating these foundational experiments – are the opposite of the inspirational pronouncement. Unfolded over time, in an uncanny mix of narrative and repose, they are not intended to dazzle. They are intended to be lived in; they are well-made like a blade or a bell that rings true.

The conversion of this sort of Bachian verity into a slogan, a flag, or a school is unavoidable but unfortunate. Bach has been used as a weapon with which to attack the “Romantic,” whatever that word means: the pedal is an evil, rubato is indulgent, the piano is a monstrous anachronism, and so on. We use him as a litmus test, a way to define genuine or truthful expression. Elie’s epic makes some reference to a big battle of Bach performance practice enacted over the course of the twentieth century: a move from slow to fast. I have absorbed both ends of this partisan spectrum, from the wonderful gray-haired Blanche Moyse at Marlboro being helped up to the podium to conduct impressively slow cantatas, with the young singers gasping for air, to frenetic accounts of the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51) from young German bands that made me think of whizzing coffee grinders. Truth used to be something ponderous, stately, considered; now truth is play, lightness, abandon. Truth, too, is subject to fashion – which is not the same thing as Bach’s vision of truth over time.

I have to confess, this travel back and forth, from truth to slogan to doubt to reconsidered truth, is more interesting to me than Bach’s travel across technologies, and the profusion of Bach recordings. Elie places a lot of faith in recordings, and writes wonderfully about their power and their atmosphere. He suggests at one point that those who resist these new technological manifestations are attached to the past, or more precisely, to the pastness of the past. I disagree. Recordings are certainly here to stay; they are a resource, a vast library of musical thought. If I have qualms about them, it is not because I am a Luddite, but because I am attached to a ridiculously superior technology: the musical score, with all its openness, its perpetual present, its implied possibility.

A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed – but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time. After a while, set some Bach on the music stand and play it yourself. Look at the notes on the page, envision the relationships between them. Don’t just press play. Don’t be afraid; we all live too much in fear and awe of the perfectly edited recordings around us. No matter how halting, how un-transcendent, your technique is, I promise that it may be the best Bach you will ever hear.

Jeremy Denk – The New Republic

As Simple as Bach

28 Tuesday Aug 2012

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

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Alfred North Whitehead, bass, birthday, blues, cantata, cello, Charles Mingus, concerto, Copernicus, Dante, Dave Hibbard, Duke Ellington, Einstein, Galileo, Goethe, golden ratio, guitar, Herbie Hancock, improvisation, jam session, jazz, Mendelssohn, Mozart, organ, Parthenon, piano, pitch, Pythagoras, Roger Bacon, Shakespeare, Slam Stewart, string bass, Stuart Isacoff, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, temperament, The Beatles, Thomas Aquinas, trumpet, violin, Voltaire, Weimar

For the past forty years at my jam sessions, I’ve told the audience and musicians that we are professional, spontaneous co-arrangers. Describing our musical efforts simply as “jazz” doesn’t convey enough. We should someday create an organization or club or music society called “Spontaneous Co-arranging Universal Musicians,” better known as S.C.U.M.

Developing the ability or knack for spontaneous co-arranging takes time and study. There are rules and laws surrounding the music we play, and no one was more important in creating (or is it discovering?) these rules and laws than Johann Sebastian Bach. Even a general study of Bach will reveal much valuable music acumen.

Charles Mingus said, “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird – that’s easy. [I call this ‘originality through incompetence’] What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple – awesomely simple – that’s creativity.”

So how “simple” is Bach? For $139.98, the Collector’s Music Catalog will send you everything Papa Bach ever composed – chamber works, concertos, cantatas, vocal works, keyboard works, organ works and orchestral works – all on one hundred fifty-five compact discs. Most of these can be played on any kind of instrument. To listen to and digest the entire canon would take a long, long time (The Beatles wrote three hundred tunes; Duke Ellington, nine hundred – that’s relatively few compared to Bach!). But volume does not equal quality, so volume of work aside, we should try to realize Bach’s importance to and influence on every single musician – ever – in the whole world that uses the Twelve-tone System.

How the piano looks – with eight white keys per octave and five black ones (two, then three) – and how frets are placed on a guitar are a direct result of the Twelve-tone System derived from the overtone series of any given sound. Bach realized that perfect or “just” tuning produced unpleasant or unharmonious (and, therefore, much of it unusable) combinations of tones. In order to play in different keys, and in different octaves, the tuning must be tempered or adjusted.

This required ratios between pitches to be used rather than simple math. In construction of the Parthenon, the Greeks used what they called the “Golden Ratio,” which came about through Pythagoras’ experiments with a vibrating string. The science of mathematics and the science of music both began with Pythagoras. For more about this complex subject, I suggest a book by Stuart Isacoff entitled Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization.

Johann Sebastian Bach (born March 21, 1685) is the fount from which the science (mental) and art (spiritual) of all music in Western civilization flows. That’s all of us who play jazz, classical, blues – all styles on all instruments (piano, guitar, violin, etc.) found in Western civilization. The Twelve-tone System, along with its semi-tones (i.e. Funk, tones, blues tones, in-between tones), is as complex a system as the human brain can handle to send and receive musical information – musician to musician and musician(s) to listener. So it’s safe to say that this Twelve-tone System (well-tuned) is all we’ll need for many centuries (maybe forever) to create music – to transmit art in sound and combinations of sounds (vibrations per second) in time (in motion) – not on paper or in books, but live human music.

The science part of Bach’s music is monumental. But that’s only half of it. The spiritual part is simply awesome, and understanding it takes time – lots and lots of quiet listening time. It is said that the six Bach cello suites (BWV 1007-12) may be understood only if you try to play one yourself on the cello. In today’s world that’s a tough thing – but it’s deeply rewarding, both on the surface and at the subconscious level. Today, there is a convenient and generally held view regarding popular music that just as Bach’s music was the popular music of his day, we have the popular music of our day – equally good, just another era. That isn’t really so. Bach never traveled much during his life – only a few hundred miles. Most people outside of his own town never knew much of his music. A few certainly did. Mozart did. And Goethe did.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (born August 28, 1749 – Bach died in 1750) is the greatest figure in German literature. He was a brilliant dramatist, lyric poet, novelist and philosopher. This genius in the world of letters is to Germany what Shakespeare is to England and Dante is to Italy. He was from Weimar, as was Bach, which is how he became familiar with Bach’s music. Goethe said, “[When I listen to Bach, it is] as if eternal harmony were conversing with itself – so it must have been in God’s bosom just before the creation of the world. This, too, was how the music circulated in my innermost being, and it appeared to me that I neither possessed nor needed ears, eyes even less, and for that matter, any senses at all.”

For the most part, however, Bach was all but forgotten. Bach was not a well-known celebrity of his day. He was an artist-scientist, not unlike Copernicus, Galileo or Einstein. It wasn’t until about 1829, eighty years later, that Felix Mendelssohn initiated a widespread revival of Bach’s music, an interest that is still growing today.

My buddy and a beautiful trumpet player, Dave Hibbard, told me that he got to know Slam Stewart while at S.U.N.Y. in Birmingham, N.Y. “Slam told me ‘music is our religion,’” Dave said. Slam had told me the same thing. Music is our religion. Of all the proofs of God’s existence by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Voltaire, and so many others, there is no more compelling proof of the existence of God than “love”—for all human beings (as well as for animals, like my dog, Chloe). The greatest logical proof of this can be found in music. Perhaps the most brilliant mind among the modern philosophers belonged to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who said, “Music comes eons before religion.” Herbie Hancock once noted, “Jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit, because in jazz, we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment.”

No one has to believe what we musicians believe – but they do have to respect our right to that belief, just as they would respect any other religion. I think it’s entirely possible that a thousand years from today J. S. Bach will be regarded as more beneficially important to the human race than Jesus, Moses, Buddha or any of the formal religions.

John Bany – Chicago Jazz Magazine

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