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Tag Archives: Yo-Yo Ma

Gil Shaham’s Multimedia Tour

09 Monday Mar 2015

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

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Adam Crane, Adele Anthony, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Baroque bow, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Berlin, bourrée, Café Luxembourg, Canary Classics, cello, Chicago, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, choreography, Classical Voice North America, crystal ball, dance, David Michalek, Dutch, Gendarmenmarkt, Gil Shaham, gut string, hourglass, Kyle MacMillan, Lincoln Center, luthier, Markus Laine, Munich, Nativity, New York, Orli Shaham, passion, performance practice, piano, Six Solos for Violin, skull, Slow Dancing, slow motion, Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, steel string, Stradivarius, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, tempo, Ton Koopman, Trafalgar Square, University of Illinois, vibrato, video artist, violin, Yo-Yo Ma

Gil Shaham performing "Six Solos for Violin"

Gil Shaham in Six Solos for Violin

Gil Shaham often tells his children to take risks, try new things and not be afraid of making mistakes. But the renowned violinist realized a few years ago that he had not done a very good job of following his own advice, so he decided to break out of his comfort zone and develop an innovative twenty-first-century way to present Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-1006).

“I think of this as a little bit of maybe practicing what I preach,” he said.

Shaham teamed with New York video artist David Michalek, who has created a group of short films to be projected on a screen behind the violinist as he performs the six works. The resulting multimedia collaboration will make its debut during a national tour timed to coincide with the 10 March 2015 release of Shaham’s recording of the complete Bach set on his Canary Classics label. The tour began 1 March 2015 in Chicago as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Center Presents series, continues in late March in California, and concludes 23 April 2015 with a performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I hope people come to see it with an open mind,” Shaham said. “Some of the images will surprise people. Some might shock people. But I found them to be mesmerizing and beautiful and very, very musical.”

Michalek has gained international attention for his multifaceted body of work, which includes large-scale outdoor installations, in which he projects super slow-motion films on giant screens. These projects have been shown in such high-visibility sites as Lincoln Center, Trafalgar Square, and Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Among the best-known such works is Slow Dancing, which consists of forty-three video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world. Each subject was filmed using a high-speed, high-definition camera that records one thousand frames per second compared to the standard thirty frames. Because the resulting videos last ten minutes but show only five seconds of action, the movement is barely perceptible.

The artist has continued his extreme slow-motion techniques for this project, finding thematic links to Bach’s works without trying to specifically interpret them. The challenge was to create images for music never intended for such purpose and to make sure the two mediums complemented each other. Michalek asked himself such questions as: “What does it mean to couple this kind of pure music with an image? What can an image do? What can it do advantageously? What can it do problematically?”

Some experts believe the three pairs of sonatas and partitas relate to the New Testament stories of Christ’s Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection. Rather than attempting to directly depict the first of those, for example, Michalek chose to suggest new life by filming a budding six-year-old violinist playing her instrument, zeroing in on her face and tiny fingers. “That’s all it is,” he said. “That’s the image. So, while we hear Gil onstage, playing the heights of violin music, we see a little being on screen holding the same instrument.” For another section, he created a kind of filmed still life, with a crystal ball, skull, and just the movement of sand slowing dropping through an hourglass.

Like Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the composer’s 1720 works for solo violin are considered among the most profound and expressive statements ever written for the instrument. Out of respect, Shaham postponed taking them on until about ten years ago, when he finally began performing them in public. “And then I learned what so many other musicians have said before – that there is really no greater joy than playing Bach,” he said. “When I go to my practice room, I’ll start practicing, and the time will just pass. Suddenly, it’s two hours later.”

As part of his activities while serving as the 2013-14 artist-in-residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, he performed Bach’s solo violin works as part of three chamber-music programs. Because the ensemble is one of two orchestras that operate under the auspices of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Shaham decided to take advantage of its easily accessible recording studios and engineers to record the set last summer. “It seemed like a good moment to do it,” he said.

The album will be the fourteenth release by Canary Classics, the label Shaham founded in 2003 as a way to have the freedom to record what he wanted without the commercial pressures associated with larger labels. It has since issued recordings featuring the violinist’s sister, pianist Orli Shaham, and his wife, violinist Adele Anthony. “It’s sort of a small family business,” the violinist said. The label was begun with a simple business plan: use the proceeds from the last recording used to pay for the next. “I feel very lucky that so far we’ve been able to do that.”

A big surprise for the violinist’s longtime fans is that he has brought a lighter-sounding, period-performance approach to his playing of the Bach solo Sonatas and Partitas. “I feel like now is probably the most rewarding time ever to be studying Bach, to be playing Bach, to be listening to Bach, because we have had so much research about it, and so, for example, I love the recordings of (Dutch conductor) Ton Koopman (and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) of the Orchestral Suites (BWV 1066-8). So, I began experimenting. I guess it’s part of my mid-life crisis.”

To play these works, he reconfigures his 1699 Stradivarius with a baroque-style bridge made by New York luthier Adam Crane and gut instead of the usual steel strings, and he employs a Baroque-style bow commissioned from New York bow maker Markus Laine. At the same time, Shaham has incorporated such period-performance practices as less vibrato and faster tempos. “Some people have been surprised at my tempi, and I understand that. I certainly am playing much of this music faster than I used to, and I’m convinced for now that I’m happier with it.”

As he delved into Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas, Shaham said the spirit of experimentation in the music rubbed off on him and he began thinking about possible new ways to present this music. He realized today’s audiences do not understand many of the cultural references that would have come naturally for Bach’s contemporaries, such as what a bourrée is and how the music for it sounds.

So he wanted to provide new entry points into these works for twenty-first-century audiences. That’s when he thought of Michalek’s installation, Slow Dancing, which he saw in the Lincoln Center Plaza in 2007 and realized might be just the vehicle he was looking for. “I thought the way he shot his films was so beautiful, and especially the way he used time, the play with light and time, and I thought that could easily lend itself to music.”

The two first met at Café Luxembourg, near Lincoln Center, and quickly hit it off. It helped that Michalek was a fan of Bach and owned several recordings of the solo violin works. They later got together for further discussion at Michalek’s apartment, with the two of them sitting on the floor of the artist’s little library – Shaham breaking down the structure of the sonatas and partitas and playing examples on his violin, and Michalek showing excerpts from his other works. Soon their collaboration was firmly under way.

As an outgrowth of projects like Slow Dancing, Michalek does commissioned family portraits using a similar slow-motion technology. One day, he visited a client’s house, where one of his filmed diptychs of boys ages six and eight happened to be running at the same time that a recording of cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach solo suite was playing. To the artist, it appeared that the boys were having a response to the music he was hearing, and watching them and listening at the same time enhanced his appreciation of the music.

“It didn’t seem to damage to music,” he said. “It didn’t seem to fight with it. It was just a very simple mechanism that allowed me to get into a sort of state of active listening that I could sustain. Not that I can’t sustain it without the image. But it helped me do it differently, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a way in.’”

Michalek set about creating short slow-motion videos to accompany each section of the six Bach works. The high-definition videos will be projected behind Shaham on screens that will vary in size depending on the venues where he performs. Michalek’s technical director will travel with the violinist and oversee the presentation of the visual imagery, which has to be manually queued to the duration of the violinist’s playing.

In all, the artist shot more than two hundred fifty takes, and he spent recent weeks deciding on which ones to include in the work. Shaham finally had a chance to see the final product earlier this week, and he called it stunning. “I feel very honored to be part of David’s vision in this project,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to Bach that the power of his music transcends centuries and cultures and mediums and inspires people.”

Kyle MacMillan – Classical Voice North America

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Chris Thile Records Bach

01 Sunday Sep 2013

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

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Alison Krauss, Aoife O'Donovan, arpeggio, Béla Fleck, Bill Monroe, Billboard, bluegrass, Bonnaroo, Boston, Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major, Carlsbad, Chopin, Chris Eldridge, Chris Thile, Claire Coffee, Coen Brothers, Counting Crows, Debussy, Dierks Bentley, Edgar Meyer, Elton John, Elvis Costell, Eric Church, folk, Gabe Witcher, Gibson Guitar Corporation, Grammy Award, Greenwich Village, guitar, harmony, headbanger, Hollywood, How to Grow a Woman from the Ground, Indiana University, Inside Llewyn Davis, jazz, Justin Timberlake, Keith Urban, Lloyd Loar, lute, MacArthur Fellowship, Mahler, mandolin, Manhattan, Marcus Mumford, Mark O'Connor, melody, Mumford & Sons, Murray State University, Nashville, National Public Radio, New York, Nickel Creek, Nonesuch Records, Oceanside, partita, Partita No. 1 in B minor, Pavement, Punch Brothers, Radiohead, Robbie Whelan, Robert Shallenberg, rock and roll, sonata, Sonata No. 1 in G minor, Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, Stuart Duncan, suite, T Bone Burnett, The Cars, The Goat Rodeo Sessions, The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond, The Wall Street Journal, This Side, University of Illinois, violin, Willie Nelson, Yo-Yo Ma

ThilebachcropChris Thile has never been shy about genre-hopping. In his early twenties, singing and playing with the band Nickel Creek, the mandolin virtuoso covered songs by slacker-rock heroes Pavement, picking along with a fiddler and a guitarist. And a year ago, he was onstage with his band at Bonnaroo, the Tennessee summer music festival, working the crowd with acoustic string-band covers of rock songs by The Cars, Radiohead and others.

Now, he’s trying to get the same fans just as excited about classical music. For his latest record, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas Vol. 1, Mr. Thile, 32, has taken an approach of unadorned simplicity: It is just him, alone in a room with his mandolin, playing three suites – sixteen tracks in all – of works written for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, the master composer of late-Baroque church music.

Mr. Thile argues that the same crowds that headbang to Radiohead anthems should be just as able to get psyched for Bach or Mahler.

“The great musics of the world are great for very similar structural reasons: good melody, good harmony, and a balance of feminine and masculine energy. What makes one type of music classical and one bluegrass and one folk – these things aren’t what’s important,” he said at a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “My thesis statement would be – Bach didn’t write Baroque music. He wrote great music.”

At times, Mr. Thile’s new record has the same technical “wow factor” as his work with his band, Punch Brothers. On the Presto from Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor (BWV 1001) for example, Mr. Thile’s fingers trace Bach’s elegant melody lines and near-nonstop arpeggios at an off-to-the-races tempo, up and down the neck of his instrument – not unlike a bluegrass fiddle tune.

At other points, such as the Allemanda from the Partita No. 1 in B minor (BWV 1002), Mr. Thile plays in a purely Baroque vernacular, shedding any trace of bluegrass and making his mandolin sound stately and delicate, not unlike the lutes played by Bach’s Renaissance forebears.

Born in Oceanside, California in 1981, Mr. Thile grew up in Southern California listening to folk music on the local public-radio station and hearing live bluegrass bands at a pizza shop in nearby Carlsbad. He first picked up a mandolin – the eight-stringed instrument that most fans of traditional country music remember best in the hands of bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe – when he was five years old. His piano-tuner father and his mother were “folkies,” he said, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Shallenberg, was an avant-garde composer who taught music at the University of Illinois and Indiana University.

At age fourteen, Mr. Thile’s family moved to southwestern Kentucky – within a few hours’ drive from both the birthplace of bluegrass music and the cradle of pop country music, Nashville – after his father got a job at Murray State University. Mr. Thile would later attend Murray State for three semesters.

Nickel Creek, Mr. Thile’s first band, won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2003 for their Alison Krauss-produced album, This Side, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and later went gold. Mr. Thile founded his current band, Punch Brothers, in 2006 to help him record one of his own compositions, and the core of the band later backed him on his solo album How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. The group gelled around a style that recalled “new grass” of the 1970s and 1980s, which incorporated jazz and rock into the traditional string-band style, and has recorded three albums and sold more than 200,000 albums, according to its label, Nonesuch Records.

Mr. Thile moved to New York eight years ago, and has over the years added vocals and instrumental parts to records by Top 40 country singers including Eric Church, Keith Urban, and his friend Dierks Bentley.

Last year, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship – commonly known as the “genius grant” – and in 2011 made a richly composed fusion record with a classical-bluegrass supergroup headed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, all while keeping up a punishing tour schedule with Punch Brothers and other groups. He and Punch Brothers were recently tapped to sing and play on the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, a forthcoming film by Joel and Ethan Coen, which follows a week in the life of a fictional folk singer in early-1960s Greenwich Village.

“He’s one of those people where, there’s nothing that he becomes interested in that he doesn’t go all the way in,” said Mr. Ma, the multiple-Grammy-winning cellist who has recorded and toured with Mr. Thile. “When he’s playing Bach, it’s with the utmost understanding of the human condition. He responds to the nature of the instrument, and he becomes the content. He’s organically attuned to the music.”

There is some precedent for bluegrass pickers dabbling in classical music – banjoist Bela Fleck recorded an album of the works of Bach, Debussy, Chopin and others in 2001. Mr. Ma has collaborated with classical bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O’Connor on several classical-folk fusion records.

But few bluegrass musicians have embraced classical music so thoroughly: Mr. Thile in 2009 premiered his first concerto for mandolin and orchestra, and Punch Brothers have taken to playing the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048) at concerts, interspersed amid the band’s usual melodic, progressive bluegrass songs. “You should just watch people flip!” Mr. Thile says. “I’m not saying you’ve got to like, jump up and down and scream during a Bach performance,” he says, before noting that “the classical music hall was like that, two hundred years ago, you know. You have reports of people, you know, whooping and hollering and demanding encore performances of things. . . . They were riotous!”

This month, Mr. Thile is touring with Mr. Ma, Mr. Meyer, Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddler Stuart Duncan and singer Aoife O’Donovan in support of their 2011 album The Goat Rodeo Sessions, followed by an international solo tour, on which he will play cuts from the Bach record, starting in early October.

In November, Nonesuch will release the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, on which Mr. Thile with his Punch Brothers bandmates Chris Eldridge and Gabe Witcher, as well as Justin Timberlake and Mumford & Sons‘ Marcus Mumford.

“Chris is a leading edge of a generational shift,” said T Bone Burnett, a legendary music producer who has made records with a wide array of pop and Americana acts, including Counting Crows, Elton John, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson. Mr. Burnett first heard of Punch Brothers from a mutual friend and asked them to be a part of a benefit-concert series that he organized in New York and Boston in 2010. From there, the band worked with Mr. Burnett, well-known for his work curating music for Hollywood films, on the The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond. It was Mr. Burnett who asked Mr. Thile’s band to play on the Coen Brothers’ film soundtrack, which he is producing.

Separately, Mr. Thile is searching for a home to buy in New York City with his girlfriend, the television actress Claire Coffee, and practicing on a 1924 Gibson F5 mandolin, designed by legendary instrument-maker Lloyd Loar, an heirloom instrument that he bought last year using some of the $500,000 grant he won as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s genius award (Mr. Thile declined to say how much he paid for the instrument, but original Loar mandolins can cost up to $250,000). He says that these days, money is flush enough that he doesn’t take studio work unless it is for friends.

“They’re all passion projects for me. . . . It hasn’t always been that way. When someone came at me with a high number it used to be very hard to say no,” Mr. Thile says. “Now I can’t even believe I’m in the position I’m in.”

Robbie Whelan – The Wall Street Journal

(Re)inventions: Tallinn’s Bach Festival

30 Sunday Dec 2012

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

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Anne-Sophie Mutter, Beethoven, Brahms, Deutsche Grammophon, Falling down Stairs, Mark Morris, Mark Morris Dance Group, Mozart, Ravel, Sofia Gubaidulina, St. Nicholas Church, Stravinsky, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Tallinn, Tallinn Bach Music Festival, temperament, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Yo-Yo Ma

St. Nicolaus Church in Tallinn, Estonia

St. Nicholas Church in Tallinn, Estonia

It is easy to forget that J. S. Bach wrote dance music. But three hundred years after much of it was composed, choreographer Mark Morris remembered. On a quiet, May, Massachusetts evening – sun setting – Yo-Yo Ma joined Morris’ dance company for a rehearsal of Falling down Stairs. This choreography sees a cast dancing to the third of Bach’s Suites for Solo Violoncello (BWV 1009). The concluding seconds were unlike any the audience had experienced; it elicited a universal and audible intake of breath. As the final chord compressed and released, the most aerodynamic of Morris’ troupe sprinted, taking off from the stage’s stairs, suspended, and landed in the arms of her ensemble. Although the audience of musicians, composers, and conductors was well versed in the music, Bach – Classical music’s staple of three centuries – became an overpowering force that united even our respiratory systems.

There’s something universal and humbling about Bach’s music. It usurps its time and place and articulately speaks to listeners everywhere. Not only do aspiring musicians worldwide share in their experiences toiling over Bach, it brings together even the most unsuspecting. For instance, composers of new classical music – a fickle bunch – subscribe to the most diverse trends. Although they don’t agree on much, most accept the brilliance not necessarily of Beethoven, Mozart, or Brahms, but of Bach. In 2008, Deutsche Grammophon with German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter released two of Bach’s violin concertos [BWV 1041 and 1042] alongside the world premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens. In a promotional interview, the aging Russian composer was especially animated when she described the technical and emotional importance of Bach’s music on her own: “I’m not satisfied when I listen to pieces written solely from intuition . . . but I’m very satisfied when I listen to pieces by Bach that contain both those mathematical principals and the fiery current of intuition.”

This is what’s most compelling about Bach’s music – its simultaneous scope and humility. Composers of the Western tradition are usually associated with a specific genre of achievement, but Bach’s genius lay in his balance between two – structural integrity and artistic beauty; “mathematical principals and fiery current of intuition.” Many processes and forms in classical music are hugely impressive, but few also communicate with the same emotional capacity as Bach’s. For example, his Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93), a set of forty-eight keyboard pieces, not only shows unprecedented structural brilliance – it went so far as to codify the tuning system that composers would use for the next three hundred years – it also displays nearly unparalleled beauty of character.

Although Bach’s music receives myriad performances, it can be difficult to know what to expect at any given concert. Igor Stravinsky described French composer Maurice Ravel as the “Swiss watch-maker of music,” referring to Ravel’s painstaking attention to detail in this score. He considered every nuance in this music. Ravel wrote his only string quartet in 1903, and its score places precise limits and controls on the musicians. Although this comes as no deterrent to an audience or musicians, it does mean the quartet’s range of interpretations is limited. But Bach’s scores lie on the opposite end of this spectrum. Because relatively few parameters are defined in his scores, musicians who perform them are given nearly unparalleled artistic license to shape and mold the music as they see fit. This means the range of interpretations of Bach’s music is vast. Where you might find similar interpretations of Ravel, it’s much harder to find two performances alike of Bach.

New Year is a time of congregation, reflecting on the past, and reckoning with the future. In broad terms Bach’s music reflects these ideas – so it’s fitting that II Tallinn Bach Music Festival rings in this New Year [in Estonia]. From 1 through 7 January 2013, the festival has grown out of an organ series at St. Nicholas Church to include a range of instrumental and choral repertoire. Although Bach’s music is grounded in the past, it’s also infinitely forward thinking. It is a potent medium of congregation, too (perhaps Morris’ Falling down Stairs is the best example that combines all three). If wary of the prospect of another performance of Bach, reconsider the music’s habit of bringing people together, its profound malleability – how it’s continuously reinvented, and its capacity to communicate universally. Bach’s music has acted as a podium from which audiences, musicians, and composers have consistently inspected the past, internalized the present, and looked to the future.

Jonathan Brown – The Baltic Times

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

Reinventing Bach

17 Monday Sep 2012

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Apple, Barcelona, Fantasia, Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations, Leopold Stokowski, Pablo Casals, Paul Elie, recording technology, Reinventing Bach, soundtrack, Steve Jobs, television, The Beatles, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Walt Disney, Yo-Yo Ma

In 1955 Glenn Gould, a Canadian keyboard genius noted for his interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach, made an iconic record of the composer’s Goldberg Variations [BWV 988]. It was one of the first commercial long-playing discs, the latest technology for capturing and replaying music. Soon afterwards he announced that he was giving up live performance to devote himself entirely to recording, a remarkably bold decision at a time when musicians’ reputations were made principally in the concert hall. Gould stuck to his guns, and his career continued to flourish. In 1981, just before compact discs took over from black vinyl, he made another record of the same piece to mark his fiftieth birthday the following year. The critics fell over themselves to praise it. He died a few days after it was released, having suffered ill health and psychological problems for most of his life.

[In his new book Reinventing Bach,] Paul Elie uses the story of Gould, along with those of other outstanding musicians, to argue that the age of recordings has allowed Bach’s music to be reinvented by its interpreters, as well as making it available to everybody and for all time as “an ever-expanding collection of peak experiences.” Bach’s music, he says, derives its power in part from its quality of superabundance; and its superabundance has now been compounded by recordings.

Interest in Bach has waxed and waned since his death in 1750, and sixty years ago it was in a waning phase; the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein said you “had to go to certain churches or special little concerts” if you wanted to hear his music. Mr. Elie shows how the development of ever better recording techniques since then has allowed Bach to pop up everywhere, despite a supposed decline in the popularity of classical music: as a soundtrack to Walt Disney’s animated film, Fantasia; as part of the backing in some of the Beatles’ songs; even as a jingle in would-be classy television advertisements.

Albert Einstein, a huge fan of Bach’s, advised others to “listen, play, love, revere – and keep your mouth shut.” Mr. Elie, clearly every bit as much of an enthusiast, takes the first part of this advice but not the second. His is a book of epic sweep, like a novel made up of multiple strands. One such strand is the life of Albert Schweitzer, a doctor, humanitarian and musician who devoted most of his time to providing medical services to the poor in Africa. In 1935 he made the first recording, on a wax cylinder, of Bach’s sublime Toccata and Fugue in D Minor [BWV 565] for organ (Bach’s authorship of which, ironically, has been called into question by some scholars), followed by many other Bach pieces on different media.

Another character is Pablo Casals, one of the twentieth century’s greatest cellists, who, at the age of thirteen, discovered a copy of Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello [BWV 1007-12] (until then forgotten) in a music shop in Barcelona. He proceeded to play the suites almost daily for the rest of his long life, but did not record them until forty years later. Leopold Stokowski was already a famous conductor with many recordings to his name when he talked Disney into opening Fantasia to the sound of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Yo-Yo Ma, another outstanding cellist, played Bach at the memorial for his friend Steve Jobs of Apple, who felt a strong affinity with the composer. Interspersed among all these tales of glittering twentieth-century musical figures are scenes from Bach’s own personal and professional life.

Mr. Elie deploys considerable scholarship (the more notable since his previous book, about four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God, had nothing to do with music), and he writes beautifully. He makes a strong case that within less than a century a succession of new recording media – from the wax cylinder to the 78, the LP, various kinds of tape, the CD and now the computer – have brought Bach’s music, in multiple versions, to vast numbers of new listeners at the press of a button. It is a luxury previously unavailable even to princes, who in order to enjoy live performances had to employ entire orchestras. Recording technology has made a monarch of everyone. A chapter or two into the book, you will find yourself reaching out for your Goldberg Variations.

– The Economist

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