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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.

Boulder Bach Beat

Tag Archives: mode

Modulating to Every Key

04 Friday Apr 2014

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

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Andreas Staier, chord, Couperin, Fantasia Ut re mi fa sol la, fugue, galant, Georg Böhm, harmony, hexachord, John Bull, key, La Fondation Royaumont, mode, modulation, Paris, Peter Wollny, Praeludium Fuga et Postludium in G minor, prelude, Pythagoras, Royaumont Abbey, stylus phantasticus, temperament, The Well-Tempered Clavier, tuning, Vivaldi

Royaumont Abbey

Royaumont Abbey

The exploration of the mysteries of harmony that began in the sixteenth century has much in common with the exploration of the real world with the help of the natural sciences and critical thinking. Similarly, the journeys into the most remote key areas were only possible after composers had learned to look behind the rigid system of modes and hexachords and began to see the sheer unlimited possibilities of transposition and modulation. Since these harmonic experiments were long considered a secret art, it is no surprise that they were confined to solo keyboard instruments, where chords and their progressions could be handled by the ten fingers of the two hands and where the composer and the performer were often the same person. Yet at first the keyboard with its preset and fixed tuning allowed excursions into remote key areas only to a limited degree. As a consequence, adjustments to the old Pythagorean tuning were necessary, and this led to various forms of mean-tone and irregular temperament culminating in the establishment of equal temperament in the early nineteenth century.

J. S. Bach’s monumental double cycle of The Well-tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) has always been regarded as a major landmark in the history of keyboard music and the utilization of the full spectrum of keys. The first part, containing preludes and fugues through all twenty-four major and minor keys, was completed in 1722; the second, of the same scope, followed around 1739/40. Although The Well-tempered Clavier is often associated with the use of equal temperament, we know from various documents that Bach – like most of his contemporaries – actually favored a pragmatic temperament that made playing in remote tonal areas possible but at the same time kept the variegation of the individual keys. The unique artistic value of Bach’s double cycle lies not merely in the comprehensive treatment of this key system, but rather in the idea of combining the richness of harmonies he explores with an equally comprehensive richness of musical styles and composing techniques.

Bach drew his inspiration from various models – some of which will be introduced 22-27 June 2014 during the keyboard program presented by Andreas Staier and Peter Wollny at the thirteenth-century Royaumont Abbey north of Paris. One of the earliest journeys through the key areas is taken in John Bull’s Fantasia Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which leads a simple diatonic subject set in a strictly contrapuntal fashion by means of transposition through a labyrinth of harmony. Another way of exploring the spectrum of keys is the free improvisatory style called stylus phantasticus in the seventeenth century. A fine example of this type of composing is Georg Böhm’s Praeludium, Fuga et Postludium in G minor, a piece transmitted in a manuscript copy from Bach’s circle.

Bach and his German contemporaries devoted much of their compositional efforts to adapting and merging the French and Italian national styles. Thus Bach studied and held in high esteem the works of Antonio Vivaldi and François Couperin. The combination of German, Italian and French elements eventually yielded the highly expressive and galant mixed style that became the great composer’s legacy to his sons and students.

Peter Wollny – La Fondation Royaumont

Echoes of Medieval Angst

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

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

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Atari 2600, cadence, chorale, digital game, harmony, hymn, Karen Collins, limbo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matthew Guerrieri, melody, MIT Game Lab, mode, Nick Montfort, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, Phrygian mode, scale, St. Matthew Passion, Television Interface Adapter, The Boston Globe, video game arcade

The Atari 2600

The Atari 2600

This week, 6-10 January 2014, the MIT Game Lab presents Push Button: Examining the Culture, Platforms, and Design of the Arcade, a series of lectures and workshops exploring that onetime American cultural locus, the video game arcade. The focus is on cabinet-based arcade games (the series is a prelude to a contest to develop games for cabinets installed on the MIT campus), but on Tuesday, Nick Montfort, MIT associate professor of digital media, considers how such games were translated for home video-game consoles, including one of Montfort’s own research specialties: the fabled Atari 2600, first released in 1977.

The immense success of the Atari 2600 came despite profound technological quirks – which included its musical capabilities. Sound was controlled by the Television Interface Adapter, the same chip that governed the console’s graphics, and the tuning was inconsistent and variable. Music for Atari games thus gravitated toward particular pitches and patterns, avoiding combinations that would be rendered too distractingly out-of-whack. Canadian scholar Karen Collins has analyzed one interesting commonplace: a lowered second scale degree, a distinguishing feature of the scale that Medieval composers would have recognized as the Phrygian mode.

The various Medieval modes often carried specific connotations; Phrygian could signal heightened tension, or themes of lament and death. Collins admits that Phrygian-tinged Atari game tunes were a product of programming limitations, not a conscious channeling of Medieval angst on the part of the programmers. But the old modal implications were not entirely out of place.

Take, for instance, one of the most familiar Phrygian tunes in the repertoire, the Lutheran chorale sung to the words O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. J. S. Bach famously used it throughout his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b), usually harmonizing it as to disguise its modal instability; but the final iteration of the chorale in the Passion closes with an open-ended cadence true to its Phrygian outline. In a 1994 dissertation, David S. Hill surveyed other Baroque harmonizations of the tune – setting a variety of hymn texts – and found that arrangements meant for texts emphasizing condemnation over salvation were more likely to use harmonies amplifying the Phrygian modality.

That led Hill to suggest that Bach’s choice of cadence for that final Passion chorale was theologically deliberate, producing an ending – after Christ’s crucifixion, but before the Resurrection – suffused with uncertainty. That is a limbo familiar to any arcade denizen: the game is not over, but the outcome is anything but assured. Bach and Atari games, after all, were exploring some of the same subjects: pitfalls, leveling up, the possibility of extra lives.

Matthew Guerrieri – The Boston Globe

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