Looking Bach

This is a retrospective on events in my life that go back to the aftermath of 9-11 and cover 2002 to the present. Now at that time I knew plenty of J. S. Bach, but there were gaps and there were plenty of unexplored details, in fact it can be said that the hallmark of Bach, like God, is in the details.

My latest adventure with Bach begins with misadventure from years before. Around 1997 some interloper in my life stole an 18-LP budget set of all of Bach's Organ Music from the garage and sold it probably for booze. He was living under a bridge in San Francisco when last I heard. In retrospect this set was probably not of good quality, although many of the recordings were on period instruments, the recording quality left much to be desired. Even though I had a complete set of the sheet music for this in 8 pocket scores from the Bach Geselleschaft Edition, I did not really pursue the great body of work until after 9-11, which had the effect on me of withdrawing to find ground. I did find ground alright in Bach's Cantus Firmus in the organ chorales mainly, but later the preludes and fugues of the organ music.

I had begun collecting MIDI files from the Internet of Bach's music some years before, and in the time when everybody was afraid in 2001 and 2002 I looked to them for solace and found to my joy their greatness,  especially in the Orgelbuchlein and Liepzig sets. Beginning there and with a few of the Preludes and fugues, such as the Tocatta and Fugue in F BWV 540 and the "Gigue" Fugue BWV 577, I really began to concentrate on these in early 2002.

Later in 2003-4 I began collecting MP3's and because of a move purged much of my LP collection having replaced it with digital recordings, and began to build up a collection of all of Bach's Organ music, among lots of other works by Bach and others.

I had long known that to really get Bach one has to read his music as part music, usually in three or four voices,  and more. Sometimes Bach tells us how many voices. This is not to be ignored even when the music is clearly idiomatic to a keyboard, as is the Organ music and collections like the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Not being a keyboardist, or at least a very weak keyboardist, I had been able to approach this music, all of it, as part-music, learning each line as if SATB. The four-part model works very well for most of it, and having a decent memory means that you can hear how each part you read individually fits in with all the others.

This shouldn't be surprising if you remember the Swingle Singers, a French Jazz vocal group of the 1960s, who became famous for their sparingly modified vocal renderings of Bach sung as part music. In fact their version of "Num Kome Der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659 is still one of my favorite performances of that work even though I now know all the  of the Leipzig chorals in their original form.

I delight in singing each part as well as I can, and often can hear it better that way as the lines can be lost or obscured on a given organ or choice of registeration.

In 2008, I was surprised to find that this paradigm even applies to that clearly keyboard work the Well Tempered Clavier. Most keyboardists would see that music as sufficiently challenging to master under their fingers, but it was the Glen Gould performances of 1955 which I had acquired on CDs a  couple of years earlier that taught me that they could be approached in the same way as other Bach as part music and them sung each line as a part. This is even true of pieces like the D-Flat Major Prelude of Book II, which is clearly a keyboard arpeggio, in its first section, and clearly true of most of the fugues. At first I was put off by Gould's use of the modern piano instead of the Harpisichord, which is most often chosen as the instrument to perform these with, but it is clear that the modern instrument makes it easier, at least with the uniqueness of Gould's technique and manner, to reveal an analysis of each voice in the performnce. One of the best examples in the C-Sharp Minor Fugue form Book I. Gould was able to play so that he could bring forward whichever voice had control of the interest, now alto, now tenor, maybe the bass, then the saprano, according to an analytic scheme for the piece.

Now, I knew and loved many of the pieces from the WTC long before this, It was "Switched On Bach" of Walter (Wendy) Carlos from the 1970's that turned me on the the E-Flat Major Prelude and Fugue from Book I with its double fugue in the "prelude". You get two wonderful  fugues in one, in that work. But it was Giould's insights that allowed me to get nearly all the rest in 2008.

Of Course, this pursuit is never really finished. My memory isn't flawless or complete. A given performance will reveal new detail even though I have possessed the sheet-music for years. There is so much detail in the interplay of parts that a lifetime isn't enough to exhaust the possibilities.