Revisiting all my CDs in alphabetical order

A

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B

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Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 - Contrapuncti I-IX, XI, XIII and XIV / Prelude and Fugue in Bb Major on the Name BACH, BWV 898
Performer: Glenn Gould (organ and piano)
Label: Sony Classical


The Art of Fugue was always my least favorite of Bach's three big, encyclopedic counterpoint pieces. You know I love The Well-Tempered Clavier, and The Musical Offering sticks in my mind as a piece with a great sense of humor -- though it's been a long time, and I may be confusing my impressions of it with my impressions of Peter Schickele's parody, The Musical Sacrifice (!). Next to those pieces, The Art of Fugue always seemed too somber and academic, with its thirteen and a half pieces all in the same key ("and a half" because Bach died before he finished the last one), and its theme that could probably win a dull rhythm contest. Listening to it again, there are still times when I feel that way, especially in Contrapunctus VI -- ugh, French Overture style! But there are other movements that are fantastic, and that I didn't remember at all.

This CD is a compilation of various recordings. First you have Gould's recording of the first nine "Contrapuncti" on organ in 1962, then a scattershot collection of them on piano, recorded in 1967 and 1981. Since the organ recording is first, I'm tempted to attribute my high-school self's dislike of the piece to my apparently long-term dislike of the instrument, even though Gould doesn't do a lot of the things I've complained about in my recent posts on Bach organ music. I can say for certain that his piano recording of Contrapunctus I is at least seven thousand times better than his organ recording of it. Even Contrapunctus IX, which I used to love in its organ incarnation on the Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould soundtrack -- the first CD I ever had -- now seems to sparkle much more in its other form. But as I think about it, I wonder if it's not the instruments so much as the specific performances. When Gould recorded Contrapunctus I on the piano in 1981, he was more mature as a musician than he was when he recorded it on the organ in 1962. As you know, I love Gould's late recordings, and this one has the same virtue as the others: an attention to detail so fine-grained that it feels like you're looking at the piece through a microscope. He plays it astonishingly slowly, taking four minutes and 51 seconds versus the earlier recording's 2:45. Towards the end of the piece, there's a half cadence, a rest, a single chord, another rest, and then a long cadential phrase. In the later recording, he pauses so long in that first rest that it sounds as if he's simply decided to stop playing. He also hammers out the last minute of the piece with a ferocity you almost never hear in slow music, especially slow Baroque music.

And if it were just a matter of me not liking the organ, why would I prefer the organ version of Contrapunctus IV? They're both good, certainly, but when the piece gets to those endless little falling motifs, Gould uses the organ's stops to make it sound as if the piece is being played by the wind section of an orchestra. The piece also has a wonderful little recurring inflection towards the phrygian mode which reminds me of a piece on one of the first CDs I ever wrote about in this blog: Sebastiàn de Albero's sixth harpsichord sonata.

And then there's Contrapunctus XIV, the unfinished one. The mystique surrounding this piece in the scored-music world is so thick you can practically drink it, and I was so intimidated by the prospect of listening to it that I actually skipped ahead and listened to the Prelude and Fugue on the Name BACH first. For one thing, it's the last thing Bach ever wrote, and he died before he finished it. For another, even unfinished it's twelve minutes long, more than twice the length of any other piece in The Art of Fugue. (That's assuming that the two Contrapuncti missing from this CD, numbers X and XII, are about the same length as their neighbors.) And on top of that, it's gotten hooked into a late-20th-century conceptual mood-texture that I'm having a hard time finding words for, but which might be best represented by the fact that Luciano Berio chose it as the one piece from The Art of Fugue to orchestrate. Berio was a guy who once took the sketches for Schubert's Tenth Symphony -- another piece left unfinished when the composer died -- and filled in the gaps with dreamy, blurry, celesta-filled soundscapes. That is to say, he was someone who loved to play around the edges of music, the places where it drops off into nonexistence -- much like his compatriot Salvatore Sciarrino, who is one of my favorite living composers. It's actually quite appropriate that my copy of the CD is damaged, so that Contrapunctus XIII is full of skips and gaps. But as much as I'd like to find the skips conceptually beautiful, they're just irritating when they show up (just once) in Contrapunctus XIV. This is not a piece to be tampered with. In fact, Gould plays it with a reverence that I've never heard from him anywhere else. Even in that late recording of Goldberg Variations, he's in command, manipulating the music as he sees fit. Here he's hushed, as if the music has ordered him to tread lightly. And finally, the piece's greatest moment: the ending. The music simply stops. There are no missing sections in the middle as there are in Schubert's Tenth; there's a complete contrapuntal braid, cut off like Bach's life, and like Gould's life only six months after he made the recording.

I remember listening to this fugue very early on -- it must have been before I had this recording, because I remember it as being an arrangement by Canadian Brass that I had gotten out of the Needham Public Library. It was so early on, actually, that I didn't really understand what I was listening to. The piece has two different moments where the texture thins out and another fugal exposition begins, making it more like three concatenated fugues than a single one. When I heard the texture drop out as a kid, I thought that I was hearing sections where Bach had only written out one line, intending to fill in the others later but dying before he had a chance. It was only a few months ago, listening to Berio's arrangement, that I realized my mistake.

OK, this post is getting way too long, but I do need to mention two other pieces. First of all, Contrapunctus XI, with its overspilling multiplicity of sections, two of them introduced by deliberately confusing transitions all in rhythmic unison, so that you think "Wait -- is that a chorale?" The last section is so harmonically "advanced" (I hate that word, but it's the best I can think of right now) and so rhythmically insistent that it comes out sounding more like Mendelssohn than Bach. And secondly, the Prelude and Fugue on the Name BACH. An explanation for non-musicians: in German, Bb is called "B" and B is called "H" (don't ask -- long story having to do with the history of flat and natural signs and Medieval theologians thinking that the interval between F and B was Satanic), so Bach's name can actually be turned into a melody, much like Cage's and Abegg's. After the somberness of (most of) The Art of Fugue, it's a relief to listen to a major-mode piece, especially one that has that rare mix of joyousness and tranquility that only Bach can do. File this one in the same category as the first of the Six Little Preludes.

Composers: Johann Lorenz Bach (1695-1773); Johann Michael Bach (1648-1694); Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750); Johann Christoph Bach (1642-1703); Johann Bernhard Bach (1676-1749); Johann Ernst Bach (1722-1777)
Works: Prelude and Fugue in D Major (JLB) / "Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr" (JMB) / "Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein" (JMB) / Chorale with Six Variations on "Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein", BWV Anh. 78 (JSB) / Capriccio in Eb Major, BWV 993 (JSB) / Prelude and Fugue in Eb Major (JCB) / "Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz" (JCB) / "Wach auf, mein Herz, und singe" (JCB) / "Aus meines Herzens Grunde" (JCB) / Passacaglia in Bb Major (JBB) / Partita on "Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ" (JBB) / Fantasia and Fugue in F Major (JEB)
Performer: Wilhelm Krumbach (organ)
Label: Teldec Classics


A little less than a year ago, a friend and I put on a concert of our music in New York. There were a lot of performers involved, so in order to save space in the program, we decided that everyone would get only a one-sentence bio. Mine said: "Alex Temple's secret goal is to like all music."

I've become a little more jaded since then. I'm still pretty good at finding something to like even in very problematic pieces, and there's plenty of music that I love despite, or sometimes even because of, its flaws. (In the "because of" category: David Thomas's voice, and the Beatles' wonderfully idiotic "Birthday.") But there's a difference between liking something and loving something, and there's a difference between being seeing a piece's good points and actually thinking it's a good piece. When I start teaching composition, it will serve me very well to be able to find the positive aspects of my students' pieces; that way, my advice will be more "here's how you can bring out what you're trying to do more effectively" and less "you should be trying to do something else" (because what good is the latter to anyone, really?). But does that mean that I'm going to actually like every piece my students bring to me? Is that even necessary? Is it even desirable?

I keep thinking about a friend's definition of the phrase "nice guy": "easy to get on the friendship ladder, hard to get on the romance ladder." I feel that way about people in general, but I'd take it a step further. It's easier to see someone as a friend than as a romantic partner, but it's also easier to see someone as a friendly acquaintance than as a friend, and easier still to see someone as a person with some good qualities. That's how I feel about music, too: it's easy to find good qualities in a piece, but only a subset of those pieces will actually become "friendly acquaintances" -- pieces you'd actually bother to "hang out with" (listen to) more than once. Only a subset of those will become "friends" -- pieces that are really present in your life, that you'd speak highly of and "introduce" (recommend) to other people; and an even smaller subset will become "lovers" -- pieces that can give you chills, alter the way you see the world, and stick with you for years even as your life changes dramatically.

Saying that is easy. The hard part is figuring out what makes a piece fall into one category or another. As with people, I suspect it's partially to do with the piece's "objective" qualities: some people, and some pieces of music, are really just kind of boring, hard to tell apart from the next person or piece. It's also partially to do with compatibility: if you really dig spiky counterpoint, or puns, you're going to be automatically predisposed to "get along well" with spiky contrapuntal pieces, or people who play with words. But that only gets us to the level of "friendly acquaintance." Beyond that there seems to be some irreducible quality that makes certain pieces (and people) stand out above others, that makes certain musical gestures (and personality traits) feel important and unique and specific. I tried to explain this last winter in terms of questions and answers: music that gives you all the answers is less likely to stick with you than music that leaves some of its questions open. But of course, musical passages can only ask questions or give answers in a metaphorical sense -- which means that my "explanation" doesn't really explain anything, because we still don't know why some passages feel "mysterious" or "open-ended" and others don't. It's not just a matter of eschewing cliché, because a conventional gesture can turn into something new if it's used in the right way. The real answer is that I don't know, and I don't really expect to be able to solve the problem that artists have been puzzling over for centuries. What I can say, though, is that as aesthetically magnanimous as I try to be, the best I can do is to make myself enjoy pieces that I initially didn't. Making myself care about music that doesn't initially affect me is a much harder task.

All of which leads me to this CD. The short version of my response to it is, "Yeah, these pieces are nice and enjoyable and well-crafted, but I don't really care about most of them, and I guess there's a reason everyone listens to Johann Sebastian Bach while nobody's ever heard of Johann Michael or Johann Lorenz Bach." I could talk about the jovial monumentalism of Johann Lorenz's D Major Prelude, or the mahogany elegance of Johann Christoph's chorale prelude on "Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz," and I can't say that there's anything wrong with either piece. If they were written by students in a Baroque-style composition class, I'd give them A's for sure. But would I care if I ever heard them again? Do they mean anything more to me than some guy I once had a fun conversation with at a party? No, not really. That irreducible element is just not there.

Not that it's there in everything Johann Sebastian ever wrote, either! His variations on "Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein" are actually less engaging than the two pieces I mentioned above: for the most part they're downright boring, just endless formulaic sixteenth-note figurations with the chorale tune as cantus firmus. And yet one of the disc's most surprising, original moments, one of the few that I feel a need to keep in my life, is in this same piece. After two variations of bland generica, J.S. throws in a totally insane chromatic variation, with inner parts slithering queasily up and down by half steps while the chorale melody sits there, serene, motionless and unaffected. The very fact that it's inspiring me to use this kind of language feels like it's evidence that there's something special here.

Two other pieces really stood out for me. One is Johann Berhnard's Bb Major Passacaglia, which at first reminded me of Pachelbel's Canon -- a repeating four-bar harmonic progression, with slightly sentimental minor chords in a major-mode context, and a remarkably inventive series of variations on top. So far so good: a respectable piece that I'd probably forget about. But then, right at the end, Bernhard expands the four-bar phrase to an eight-bar one, and the second group modulates into a very juicy minor. It's the first time in four and a half minutes that we've heard anything but the same endlessly-repeated chord cycle, and it's both startling and very satisfying. It might not even be worth it to sit through the first four minutes if weren't for this payoff -- but the fact that there is a payoff is a sign that the composer actually had a reason for writing the piece, and not just "my congregation needs me to play something before the service" either.

The other piece that grabbed my ear was Johann Ernst's F Major Fantasia. Johann Ernst is of a younger generation than the other composers here: born in 1722, he's a contemporary of Johann Sebastian's most famous son Carl Philipp Emanual Bach. His style is similar to C.P.E.'s, too: a product of the late-18th-century obsession with sentimentality and harmonic convolution, the Fantasia is rhapsodic, bitingly chromatic, willfully eccentric, and oddly reminiscent of Beethoven. It announces its intentions from the very beginning, when an F major arpeggio is followed by a big, loud, low, nasty Eb. Now, it may be that this piece caught my attention simply because it's so different from the other pieces on the CD. Maybe if I heard it alongside a big pile of music by C.P.E. Bach, it would seem like just another generic instance of the empfindsamer Stil. But the fugue that follows is good enough and distinctive enough, from its snaky chromatic theme to its solid, traditionally Bachian sequential development, that I suspect that Johann Ernst Bach is just better than a lot of his similarly obscure relatives. I feel that way especially when I compare his chromatic, Baroque-style fugue to that of Johann Christoph -- the latter being a rhythmically tedious piece whose use of chromaticism seems obvious and uninspired.

I still haven't answered the big questions I started out with, and as I said, I don't know that it's possible to. But I think I have pointed to a few specific details that make certain pieces stand out, and that's worth something, anyway. And now, back to the most famous member of Bach family, and my possibly damaged recording of The Art of Fugue. See you next post!

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 / Fantasia and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 904 / Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 547 / "Great" Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542
Performer: Wilhelm Krumbach (organ)
Label: Teldec Classics


I actually bought this double CD because of Disc 2, which consists of pieces by various uncles, nephews and cousins of Bach's (literally all named Johann something). I know I listened to them at some point, but I can't remember anything about them or whether they're any good, and I'm pretty excited to listen again and find out. In the meantime, though, there's Disc 1, which is another collection of Preludes, Fantasias and Fugues by our friend Johann Sebastian.

Two of the four pieces on the CD, the D Minor Toccata and Fugue and the G Minor Fantasia and Fugue, also appear on Biggs's CD, giving me a perfect opportunity to compare the two organists' styles. Krumbach's playing sometimes has the same "shouty" quality as Sialm's, so I expected to prefer Biggs unequivocally. It turned out, though, that Krumbach's style has some advantages. First, he's rhythmically freer than Biggs in the fast passagework; and second, his loudest chords are WAY LOUDER -- like, knock-a-hole-in-the-floor loud. His playing of the D Minor Toccata and the more "improvisatory" sections of the G Minor Fantasia are accordingly more intense and more powerful. Biggs is no wuss, but it's hard to compete, intensity-wise, with an organist who's willing to hold a diminished seventh chord in one hand while resolving to the tonic in the other. (Even when Bach doesn't write that suspension himself, that is!)

In other pieces, though, Krumbach's style doesn't work at all. The G Minor Fugue is dense, inexorable and rhythmically unvarying, and this recording confirms what I said in my last post: it needs the timbral variety that Biggs gives it, or it becomes impossible to sit through. The C Major Prelude and Fugue, likewise, come out monolithic and tiring to the ear. I went back and listened to a bit of the Sialm CD for the sake of comparison, and I did find that I prefer Krumbach's monolithic tracks to hers -- but I actually think that has more to do with the specific pieces on each CD than with the two organists' styles. The D Minor Toccata and Fugue (a different one, BWV 538) on Sialm's CD is simply a boring piece, and a boring piece combined with a monolithic playing style is totally intolerable. The C Major Prelude and Fugue have a lot more variety and invention in them, and a varied and inventive piece combined with a monolithic playing style is still somewhat enjoyable, even if it's tiring to listen to after a while.

But as I said, I do like Krumbach's playing sometimes -- not only in the Toccata and the Fantasia, but also in the pieces where he does choose to vary things timbrally, like the A Minor Fugue and the D Minor Fugue. The D Minor Fugue in particular is full of registral shifts. While I was listening to it this time, I realized how unusual it is to hear a fugue with a long monophonic passage in the middle. I suspect Bach did that specifically so that while one hand was playing, the other would be free to push in and pull out stops. And Krumbach takes full advantage of that free hand, creating a sense of shifting phrase lengths by changing the timbre sometimes on the downbeat and sometimes on beat four of the (4/4) bar.

And now: Bach's obscure relatives!

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 / Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582 / Pastorale in F Major, BWV 590 / "Great" Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542 / Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543 / Prelude and Fugue in B Minor, BWV 544 / Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 545
Performer: E. Power Biggs (organ)
Label: Sony Classical


I found a little piece of paper tucked into this CD when I pulled it out for this project the other day. It's an advertisement for a card that gives you half-price fares on transportation, and the text of it is in German. I know I didn't get it in Berlin this summer, which means it must be from the previous time that I was in a German-speaking country -- namely a family trip to Switzerland when I was 13, almost 14. In other words, this is the first time I've listened to the CD in ten years. Incidentally, I'm certain that the reason I saved this ad is because of the sample card on the back. It shows a fictional woman named Jasmin Burgermeister who looks remarkably like Gillian Anderson, and I undoubtedly saved it because I thought she was cute. Somehow pictures of attractive women seemed to have an almost talismanic power when I was 13, especially because I wasn't usually that into the celebrities that everyone else thought were hot.

Anyway, that really has nothing to do with Bach organ music. So: After an anonymous commenter objected to my last post, I started wondering if I was being too hard on Esther Sialm. Early in this project, I wrote about giving everything second chances and how being a music critic was "poisonous." Here I was so impatient that I dismissed Sialm's CD pretty much instantly. (Of course I'd listened to it before, but not much, and not recently.) Had I abandoned my own principles? Was I unfair?

As it turns out, I think the answer is "not really." Listening to E. Power Biggs' playing on this CD has made it very clear to me that I was right about Sialm's problems. Biggs, unlike Sialm, constantly uses timbral contrasts to clarify and reinforce the structures of the pieces he's playing, and when I hear him do that, I can tell that there's simply no other way to make these pieces work. I'm thinking in particular of a wonderful bit in the G Minor Fugue where he suddenly switches to a watery, almost calliope-like setting just as Bach drops the bottom voices out. (Or more likely, he's already playing the upper voices on a manual with that setting, and it only becomes audible when the bottom voice drops out. Either way there's a timbral contrast to go with the textural one.) I can't think of a single piece on the Sialm CD where light and heavy registrations are used within the same piece, except the too-slow "Gigue" Fugue. Admittedly, there may be something I'm forgetting, and maybe I should listen again. And admittedly, I was unnecessarily harsh and sarcastic in my last post. But listening to that CD was a chore, and listening to this CD is exciting. That's meaningful, especially since I'm digging this one despite not even really being in an organ-music kind of mood.

Of course, I don't like every piece on here equally. In particular, I find it hard to say interested in the long, somber B Minor Prelude and Fugue. But what I want to talk about now are the highlights.

1. The G Minor Fantasia. It's got insane chromatic modulations. It's got massive piled-up dissonances made all the more weighty by the organ's ability to sustain a note indefinitely. There's one part that sounds to me like THE MACHINATIONS OF AN EVIL SOCIETY, with a creeping bassline made even more creeping by Biggs's choice of stops -- it almost sounds like there's a delay or a fade-in at the beginning of each note, although I'm not sure how that's possible. There's also a part where the music expands outward, dominant 7th chord resolving to minor tonic and then minor tonic moving out chromatically to become a new dominant 7th chord, over and over again, seemingly forever, like the music is TAKING OVER THE WORLD. YES. The accompanying Fugue is pretty solid too, and I'd forgotten about it completely until I heard it again yesterday. I remember now: it's called the "Great" Fugue to distinguish it with the "Little" Fugue in the same key, which has the distinction of being the first piece of scored music I liked ever.

2. The first movement of the F Major Pastorale. Its odd use of dominant 7th chords -- tracing scale degrees 2-3-4-3-2 -- accidentally anticipates certain blues and early rock-n-roll figurations, and there's a part where a single note flashes in and out in the treble, as part of some accompaniment figure, and that reminds me of the Dismemberment Plan's blinking guitar tones in songs like "This Is The Life" and "Gyroscope." The recording is so close in on Biggs that you can hear him pressing the keys.

3. The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Yes, the famous Halloween one -- it turns out that if you play it with a bit of gravitas rather than blasting the shit out of it, it's a really good piece. And it was a brilliant move on Bach's part to start the Fugue with a theme so closely related to parts of the Toccata (notes moving mostly stepwise, alternating quickly with a repeated A). The first time I (re-)listened to it, I didn't even realize the Fugue had started yet, and I was thinking, "Man, this Toccata is way longer than I remembered!"

The C Minor Passacaglia is phenomenally impressive too, of course. The fact that Bach can get eight minutes of material out of a single endlessly looping bassline is remarkable, even if he does move it out of the bass sometimes. My appreciation for that piece is more intellectual than visceral, though, and listening to a Fugue based on that same bassline right afterwards is a bit much.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Fantasy in G Major, BWV 527 / Canzona in D Minor, BWV 588 / "Gigue" Fugue in G Major, BWV 577 / Nunn komm' der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 / Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 538 / Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr, BWV 663 / Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, BWV 658 / Prelude in Eb Major, BWV 552 / Trio in C Minor, BWV 585 / Fugue in Eb Major, BWV 552
Performer: Esther Sialm (organ)
Label: Aurophon


DEAR MS. SIALM,

DO YOU NOTICE HOW THIS OPEN LETTER IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS? DOESN'T IT GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT I'M SHOUTING AT YOU? THAT'S KIND OF HOW I FEEL WHEN YOU PLAY AN ENTIRE PIECE WITH ALL THE STOPS PULLED OUT AND NO TEXTURAL VARIETY WHATSOEVER. LIKE IN THE D MINOR TOCCATA: BACH SPECIFICALLY INDICATES THAT YOU SHOULD SWITCH FROM ONE MANUAL TO ANOTHER. THAT'S A PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO INTRODUCE A NEW TIMBRE -- AND IN FACT YOU DO JUST THAT IN THE "GIGUE" FUGUE, WHERE I'M PRETTY SURE BACH DOESN'T TELL YOU TO. SO WHAT GIVES?

OK, snark aside, this really is a pretty mediocre recording. Some of that is really Bach's fault: the G Minor Fantasy and D Minor Fugue in particular seem to cyle around the same harmonies endlessly. I'm not sure why Sialm picked these particular pieces for the CD -- they're such a random selection, with a few chorales, a few fugues, a trio, a fantasy and so on, that they don't seem to be part of any systematic "complete works" project -- but she certainly could have chosen better ones. Even given that, though, I'm not at all a fan of her playing. Some pieces that sound potentially interesting, like the Eb Major Prelude with its unexpected shifts to the parallel minor, dissolve into undifferentiated blobs due to her choice of stops. And her rendition of the "Gigue" Fugue is downright awful -- way, way too slow, totally lacking in the dance-like energy a gigue is supposed to have. The timbral changes I mentioned above are pretty much the only good thing about it.

That said, there are a few pieces where she scales things back, and they're quite a bit better than the rest. In two of the chorales, "Allein Gott in der Höh' sei Ehr" and "Von Gott will ich nicht lassen," she plays most of the lines with a smooth, dark timbre but one of them with a sharp, nasal, triangular timbre. It sounds more like a synthesizer than an organ (and I think I could probably recreate it using Reason), and in the latter piece in particular it brings out a really nice chromatic line.

In the other chorale, "Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland," she does something that I actually think is wonderful. Again she uses a bright, nasal-sounding setting for one of the voices (though this one isn't quite as electronic-sounding as the others), and this time she uses it for a voice that's only present some of the time, while she uses the smooth, dark setting for the voices that are always present. The result is that the dark timbre becomes the background and the bright one becomes the foreground, and to my ears they separate as if in three-dimensional space, a shiny yellow curved pipe hovering in front of mahogany panels. It reminds me of The Unanswered Question, maybe the paradigm of multilayered music in the twentieth century. I didn't think I'd ever wind up saying that about a Bach piece.

Still, most of the CD is pretty hard to get through. I'm withholding judgment about the instrument itself until I get to the next one. It's played by E. Power Biggs, who not only has the best porn-star name of any musician ever, but is also a major world-class organist. I remember liking his playing when I was 12; we'll see what I think now.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Work: Orgelbüchlein, BWV 599-644
Performer: Simon Preston (organ)
Label: Deutsche Grammophon


My favorite thing about this CD is the final chord of each piece. I don't mean that in a "...cause it feels so good when it stops" way; I actually love the sound of these chords for acoustic reasons. Here's why. At any point in a Bach chorale prelude, there's at least one part moving; the final chords are thus the only point at which all parts are at rest, allowing you to really focus on the sound of the organ itself. What you hear when you do is beat patterns created by the tuning of the instrument, and they're almost never in the same tempo as the piece that you've just listened to (though I have heard a story about an organists picking a tempo on that sort of acoustic basis). Then, after the organist lets go of the keys, you hear the chord fading out -- and it takes a while to do so, since organs are always recorded in large rooms with a lot of reverb. Do this 45 times on a single CD and you get the strange feeling that you're listening to an alternating series of normal Bach choral preludes and timbre-oriented avant-garde miniatures.

I'm not sure why the preludes themselves don't grab my attention in the same way. I remember sitting in my composition teacher's living room in high school, listening to him play them on the piano, and I thought I remembered finding them beautiful. I could be getting confused with the time he played the Bb Minor Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, which is undoubtedly beautiful. I suspect, though, that my problem has to do with the organ itself -- an instrument I have some big problems with.

Because notes on an organ don't decay like notes on a piano or harpsichord do, it's ideal for hearing counterpoint clearly. A dissonance is always sustained at full volume until the very moment it's resolved, which can be astonishingly beautiful. But at the same time, organs are always placed in huge rooms with terrible acoustics; I remember seeing a concert of organ music in Haarlem last summer and being almost unable to tell what was going on, just because there was so much reverb. That's not so much a problem on this CD, but there is another acoustic problem. The only way to make the organ louder is to pull out more stops, which is to say, to add more timbres. Any loud passage is thus a composite of a huge number of timbres, and without the spatial separation that helps clarify the sound of an orchestra. When I listen to an organ with all the stops pulled out, it almost always sounds to me like mush.

And that's not all! Although the organ is associated mainly with religious music, you can't create any kind of dynamic nuances on it, which means it almost always sounds cold and objective -- unless it sounds enormous and overwhelming, but then, as I said, it's usually mush. There's a moment in "O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde gross" that the CD's liner notes describe as "one of the most affecting major triads (Cb) in all music." While I do find the passage harmonically shocking, I'm not even slightly moved by it. When I hear Bach do something similar on the piano (the end of the Ab Major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II), or with a choir (the end of the "Confiteor" from the B-Minor Mass), it hits me very hard -- but not here.

Come to think of it, pretty much the only time I can ever remember being emotionally moved by an organ is when it's sounded eerie -- I remember in particular the first time I ever heard Bach's "Little" Fugue in G Minor, and I still associate it with walking through the spooky darkened halls of Brookline High School, where I was taking a music appreciation class in the evenings. I get that effect mainly from the organ's quieter, "rounder" stops, and I think it's no coincidence that my favorite pieces on here, like "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ" and "Das alte Jahr vergangen ist," are the ones that Preston plays using stops that sound like oboes and recorders. But even there I feel like I'm "cheating," because part of what moves me is not the music itself but the things it reminds me of -- the electronic organ that I started composing on when I was 11, the real organ that I took a few lessons on at my piano camp when I was 13.

Preston's choice of stops may be a big factor in all this, of course. If he played the whole set with recorder-y sounding stops, I might like it better (though I might also find it boring). It's been a very long time since I listened to any organ music, and I'll be curious to see how I'm struck by other players' use of the instrument over the course of the next few CDs. I should also say: it may also be a problem that I don't know the Lutheran chorales that Bach based these preludes on. The liner notes suggest that the music is often based on something in the words of the chorales, which of course I'm not hearing. But I suspect that the organ is simply not an instrument I "get." We'll see.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Work: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 870-893
Performer: Edwin Fischer (piano)
Label: Naxos Historical


Well, hello again. First of all, I want to thank ellemennopi for asking me when I was going to start this project up again, because there's very little that makes me want to blog more than knowing that my readers are actually reading. Second, I want to thank my life for providing me with a few months of relatively unscheduled time between my return from Berlin (where all my time was taken up by German, composition, and social craziness) a few days ago and my move to New York (where all my time will be taken up by composition and having a job) in the fall. And finally, I'd like to thank my brain for finally not being burnt out on Bach anymore. It's about time!

So, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. I've idolized this piece so much that it's hard to actually say something about it, but I'll give it a try. First of all, I want to say that, aside from the pieces I've played -- all of which I'm thoroughly sick of -- I haven't really listened to The Well-Tempered Clavier in any detail since high school. What I'm realizing now is that my understanding of fugues back then was actually very shallow. I was really just interested in the expositions -- that is, the opening sections in which the voices enter one by one with the same melody. Coming back to pieces that I thought I knew, I'm discovering things that I didn't remember at all. The F# Minor Fugue, for example, has a secondary theme that comes in partway through, a sad, stately, sighing motif, which I'd completely forgotten existed. And when Bach has that theme run simultaneously with the fugue's main theme later on ... well, that sort of thing is exactly what makes the piece great, and if I didn't take note of it in high school, what was I listening to?

Edwin Fischer knows how to emphasize these great moments, and he knows how to do it with great subtlety. As I mentioned last post, he's essentially a Romantic pianist (these recordings were made in 1935 and '36); he's got a mysterious, luminous, transcendent quality to his playing, and he often brings out particular passages not by making them louder but by making them softer. There's a part halfway through the C Major Fugue, for example, where the main theme comes in in the bass, lower in register than we've heard it before. Until that moment, Fischer consistently plays the main theme staccato, but here he suddenly plays it legato, and since it's in the bass, that change smooths out the entire texture. He does something similar in the E Minor Fugue: when the music moves into a major mode a quarter of the way in, he suddenly gets much quieter and more legato. In both cases a simple structural feature inexplicably becomes something transcendent. (But then, you could say that about Bach in general.)

Another thing that Fischer does, which would probably get him condemned as self-indulgent and historically inauthentic if he were performing now, is mess with tempos a lot. In particular, he sometimes starts a piece slow and gradually accelerates -- and I have to say, it really, really works. It's especially powerful in the G# Minor Fugue, which in his rendition reminds me a lot of the fugue from Beethoven's Op. 110 piano sonata (yeah yeah, I know everything reminds me of Beethoven). I listened to it with my dad yesterday and at some point I remarked, "This piece could go on forever and you wouldn't mind."

I also need to mention the Ab Major Prelude. I don't even really know what to say about it, but it's just astonishingly, impossibly beautiful. It's got a nostalgic, tender beauty that feels very post-Baroque to me, even though I've said that so many times during this project that I really should just incorporate nostalgia into my conception of Bach's style rather than consistently seeing it as a deviation.

Now, story time: a few weeks ago, I went through a brief depressive spell in which I was totally unengaged by any music at all except what I was writing. When I came out of it, I found that my experience of music was hyper-concentrated. I'm normally a very distracted person, and I've suspected for a while that 100%-perfectly-attentive listening, which some critics (most notably Adorno) consider to be the only legitimate way to listen to music, is an ideal condition that you can't expect to achieve with any real frequency. I also think it's not as necessary to strive for as it was in Adorno's time, because now that we have recordings, we can listen to pieces as many times as we want and get to know them gradually. I honestly prefer my first listen to a piece to be a survey, so that I can get a sense of the general form that things fit into before trying to fit those things into it. But after I came out of this bad spell, I found that my listening had become crystal-clear. I was listening to Arvo Pärt's Pari Intervallo, and because I was following it so closely, I suddenly understood his music for the first time: it's all about voice leading, about dissonances that could exist in Baroque music, but which lack the resolution that they would have in that style. I could almost see each note moving to the next one.

Well, my listening hasn't been quite so precise in the last couple of days, since I've just returned from Europe and am pretty jetlagged, but I did just experience a similar revelation about Bach's style. This may be incredibly obvious to every other serious student of scored music, I don't know, but I figure it's worth saying anyway. As background, let me first mention an article I once read about Schoenberg by musicologist Carl Dahlhaus. According to Dahlhaus, Schoenberg saw Austro-German music as following a progression, from Mozart through Beethoven and Wagner to himself. As time went on, formulaic, generic, and repetitive music was gradually eliminated from Austro-German composition, in favor of a constantly self-renewing syntax in which unique new material was generated at every moment. (If I remember right, this is also something Adorno said.) There's certainly some truth to that analysis, but Dahlhaus never addressed music before Mozart's time. What I realized yesterday was that Bach's music is actually all about the contrast between formualic, repetitive music (mostly in the form of sequences -- passages in which the same material is repeatedly transposed), and dense, non-repetitive, constantly self-reinventing music. This struck me most clearly during the Eb Major Prelude, when all of a sudden I heard the music snap into clarity and wondered, "Why was it less clear a second ago?" I've mentioned this distinction before, in the context of some movements in Bach's suites (Allemandes, Courantes) being more abstract and non-repetitive than others (Gigues, Bourrées, Gavottes, Minuets), but I hadn't thought about the two types of music coexisting in one piece.

As a final note, I'd like to mention that while I was in Berlin, I took a conducting course. The teacher often had one of us conduct while the others sang various instrumental parts from the score, and I found that my sight-singing ability is really not what it should be. I can sing top lines easily, but when I've got a middle part, I frequently get confused. So while listening to The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, I've been singing along with the fugues' middle voices, and while I'm still not great at it, it's a lot of fun. I especially enjoy doing it in the E Major Fugue -- a simple, mostly diatonic piece with long note-values, which I assume is meant as a tribute to the stile antico of the late 16th century. Every time the note I'm singing is a fifth above the bass I get a warm vibratey feeling. And in high school I found Bach's "retro" pieces boring. What was I thinking?

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Work: The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846-869
Performer: Edwin Fischer (piano)
Label: Naxos Historical


I've been trying to figure out for the last few days what I could possibly say that would do The Well-Tempered Clavier justice. This is a huge and dense work, and even though I've been listening to it since I first got interested in music, I still feel like I've only scratched the surface. Not only that, but until recently I didn't even have a recording of it that I liked. I've never been able to listen to Gould's: I feel like he blows through a lot of it as if he's bored and wants to get it over with. My dad has an LP set by Jörg Demus which I remember liking a lot when I was younger -- very lucid and straightforward -- but he hasn't had a chance to make CDs out of them yet, and I don't think they've ever been commercially rereleased. In high school I had CDs of Book I played by Keith Jarrett, who I found dull, and Book II played by Andras Schiff, who I found annoyingly eccentric. And actually, that brings me to the kind of weird story of how I wound up with this recording. At some point during a move between college and my parent's house, my Jarrett and Schiff The Well-Tempered Clavier CDs disappeared. I kept thinking that they'd turn up somewhere unexpected, as lost CDs often do, but it never happened; and so when The Well-Tempered Clavier started looming on the wholecollection horizon last summer, I decided to look around for a recording that I actually liked to replace them. I think I discovered this one via the clips on the iTunes music store; I can't remember exactly. But the funny part is that I discovered it right before a family trip to the Netherlands, and because I was expecting to be so prolific in this journal, I actually ordered Fischer's Well-Tempered Clavier CDs from a German distributor so that I could receive them in the Netherlands without paying an arm and a leg for shipping. Needless to say, I had no idea that I wouldn't wind up writing about them until November.

Anyway, I really do like this recording a lot, in general. It's actually the first recording of the piece ever made, from I think 1935 (I don't have the CD box on me at the moment), and it sounds very much like a product of its time, complete with terrible sound quality and beautiful tone. Fischer is a Romantic, but not of the sort who would try to schmaltz up Bach and turn him into Chopin; instead he plays the pieces straightforwardly but with a luminescence that I can only describe as "mystical." Unsurprisingly, then, the pieces he gets the most out of are the ones he can play tenderly and with a slight glow of unreality -- the C# Major Prelude, the F# Major Fugue, the B Major Prelude. When he tries to be lively and virtuosic, it sometimes dissolves into mild chaos (the Bb Major Prelude), and when he tries to be stately and intense, he sometimes comes off as heavy-handed (the G Minor Fugue). Still, it's a recording of the WTC Book I that I can enjoy pretty much all of, and that alone is something special. I still want to get a few more recordings and compile an ideal Well-Tempered Clavier from each pianist's best movements, but who knows when I'll have time to do that.

Anyway, I tend to prefer Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier to Book I, so in a sense I feel like I'm just waiting for the really juicy stuff around the corner. I'm sure I'm doing the piece an injustice by thinking that way, but I can't help it, especially because I'm anxious to get this project moving again now that I'm only very busy rather than maniacally busy. And I can say that there are a few pieces in Book I that feel formulaic, which was my original reason for preferring Book II. This is especially true of the G Minor Prelude and Fugue, which, actually, were the pieces that originally led me to that conclusion. Still, there's a lot of great stuff here, and since I have a habit of starting at the beginning even though the piece is too long to really listen to in a single sitting, I've never gotten to know a lot of the great stuff that's towards the end.

Which brings me to another thing I want to talk about in this post: a weird experience I just had with the B Minor Fugue, the very last piece in the Book. There are a few factors that accidentally combined to make this happen:
1. There's a recurring passage in the fugue in which the lower parts drop out, leaving just two, in dialogue, in the ethereal high register. This is nearly identical to a moment in the fugue from Beethoven's Op. 131 String Quartet -- not only does the texture drop out in the same way, but if I'm remembering right, the two higher parts play the same exact melody. I assume this is not a coincidence (and I've written before about Bach pieces that Beethoven seems to have been paying deliberate homage to).
2. This is one of two very early 20th-century piano recordings I've listened to extensively. The other is Artur Schnabel's recording of the late Beethoven piano sonatas. Schnabel shares both Fischer's luminous tone and his occasional sloppiness (actually, Schnabel is much sloppier), and the recording quality is similarly bad.
3. Because Fischer is of the generation he is, he has no qualms about occasionally doubling Bach's left-hand parts at the octave. He does this at one point in the B Major fugue, resulting in a texture that's pretty similar to that of the fugue in Beethoven's Op. 110 Piano Sonata.

Add up 1, 2 and 3, and what do you get? No, not 6! You get me feeling very strongly for a moment like I was actually listening to Beethoven. Kind of a strange experience, but a beautiful one.


Anyway, I could keep going all night, so I'll just mention one other thing that I didn't notice until recently: this piece is full of internal cross-references. When the E Minor Prelude breaks into double-time halfway through, it quotes the C Minor Prelude almost exactly. I never noticed that before! And not only does the A Major Fugue have a theme whose first two measures are rhythmically identical to those of the C Minor Fugue's theme (something I noticed ages ago), but the two pieces end the same way: with a long pedal point, a lot of diminished chords, and a whole series of Picardy thirds. And, of course, the same rhythm, since the endings are based on the rhythmically-mostly-identical fugue themes. Who knew? I also think that if you reduced the G Major Fugue theme to its most important notes, you'd get almost the same thing as if you did the same to the E Minor Fugue from Book II -- and I mean without transposing anything, which means that the "corresponding" notes all serve different harmonic functions. I'm not sure about that, though.


P.S. I feel like this post comes off kind of joyless. My experience of listening to the piece certainly isn't joyless, even if a few pieces here and there are a little formulaic. I'm just kind of tired and don't feel like writing in all caps with exclamation points after every sentence. Edwin Fischer is more of an "ahhhhh" pianist than a "!!!!!" pianist, anyway.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
Performer: Glenn Gould (piano) - 1981 version
Label: CBS


Well, my prediction was right: the 51-minute 1981 recording doesn't feel too long, even though the 38-minute 1955 recording kind of does. And my initial impression of the later recording has been confirmed: this is a performance in which nothing is taken for granted. That's true starting from the very first variation: Gould bashes out the left hand as if he's stabbing the piano, and that may not sound good on paper, but damn, does it ever work on CD. As for the Aria that these variations are variations of... well, let me put it this way. When I only had the 1955 recording, I used to think of the Aria as an archetype of calm: I remember saying a few times that it was the only piece I could imagine listening to the morning after one of Yale's gloriously exhausting all-night new music marathons. I also used it as a symbol of calm in a banishing ritual I designed a couple of years ago. (Long story.) But now it leaves me a little unengaged in that recording, and the version of it in the 1981 recording actually sounds more like my memory of the 1955 one than the 1955 one itself does. I think this phenomenon is totally fascinating, but I've already written a whole post about it, so I won't say any more here. (You should go read that other post, though -- I think it's one of the best things I've done in this journal.)

The overall feeling is: I've been looking at this piece through a magnifying glass and just got a glimpse through a microscope. It's like the spaces between the notes have gotten bigger in every dimension. The problem is that I now feel like I don't really know the piece. That's especially true because after another listen, I realized that what I wrote about the canon at the ninth in my previous post is totally inaccurate -- it not only doesn't keep rising at the beginning, but the statements of the canon's theme alternate between the hands, whereas I remembered them as happening more or less simultaneously in both hands. I remembered them that way right after listening to it. Was it because my image of the piece was too "zoomed out"? Maybe -- though it's weird, because when I listened to the 1955 recording this morning, I could remember some of the variations easily, almost note-for-note, from all the times I'd listened to the piece in middle and high school, while others sounded pretty unfamiliar. At any rate, I now feel like I have to get to know the piece all over again. Not that I won't enjoy it -- it's just a question of finding the time to do it.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
Performer: Glenn Gould (piano) - 1955 version
Label: CBS


I've always had a bit of trouble with the theme-and-variations form. The problem is that the elements that get varied are usually melody and rhythm, while the element that's kept constant is usually harmony; after a while, hearing the same harmonic progression over and over again can really wear you down. I have this problem especially with Mozart -- I usually feel half-dead by the end of the last movement of the C Minor String Quintet, for instance. And it's only a few minutes long. (My dad has remarked for as long as I can remember that it's amazing how I can get bored in thirty seconds.)

The Goldberg Variations, though, are a whole other thing. Like Brahms' Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel -- another old, old favorite of mine -- it uses just about every trick available to shake things up. Every third variation is a canon; another one is a fughetta; another is a miniature French overture; another quotes a couple of popular German songs of the time, including one called "Cabbages and Turnips Have Driven Me Away." There are a number of variations with surprising harmonies that aren't in the theme, interpolated between more structurally important harmonies that are. There are also three in minor, the last of which is insanely chromatic and about six times longer than the others (though maybe that's because Gould plays it really slow, and most of the others really fast).

Those canons got me thinking, by the way. ( Technical paragraph, probably only of interest to musicians. )

And yet, despite all that, I do still find the piece a little too long. My attention started wandering around Variation 25 or so. In a way, that's pretty appropriate, given that Bach wrote this piece so that an INSOMNIAC COUNT COULD HAVE SOMETHING TO FALL ASLEEP TO. (Well, it turns out that may not be true: the Wikipedia article claims that the purpose was actually to cheer the Count up during his sleepless nights. That's not the story I was taught, but I have to say, it makes a lot more sense, given how upbeat most of these pieces are. Of course, it also says the story is probably apocryphal..) I think, though, that my inability to concentrate fully is mainly due to the fact that I'm eagerly anticipating listening to Gould's 1981 recording of the same piece. I haven't heard the whole thing (I just bought the CD specifically for this project), but from what I can tell, it's infinitely better. Not that this one is awful, but as I said before, Gould was something of a hyperactive nutbag in the mid-50s, and he definitely rushes through parts of the piece like he's being timed. Let me put it this way: this recording is 38 minutes long. The later recording is 51. The reason is that in the later one, at least from what I've heard, Gould takes care to make every single note matter. Here ... not so much. I'm getting even more excited to listen to it just from writing this, so I think I'll do it right now! I just hope I haven't overhyped it and set myself up for a disappointment.

You know, it's kind of funny that I'm excited about listening to a 51-minute recording of the piece partially because I think the 38-minute recording is too long.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Partita #6 in E Minor, BWV 830 / Six Little Preludes, BWV 933-938 / Prelude and Fughetta in D Minor, BWV 899 / Prelude in G Major, BWV 902 / Prelude in G Major, BWV 902/1a / Fughetta in D Minor, BWV 902 / #s 1-5 and 7 from Nine Little Preludes, BWV 923-932 / Fugue in C Major, BWV 952 / Fughetta in C Minor, BWV 961 / Fugue in C Major, BWV 953 / Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 895 / Prelude and Fughetta in E Minor / BWV 900
Performer: Glenn Gould (piano)
Label: Sony Classical


The other day I was got into my friend Judy's car, and found her playing a CD she had been obsessed with in high school but forgotten about until that day. It was some sort of fairly accessible contemporary choral music; she said she found "in the bowels of her collection." I could see how happy she was to have rediscovered it, and I could tell by the way she was singing along that she knew every note perfectly. I remember thinking that I would never be able to have that experience, because I catalogue my CDs and list my listening so obsessively. But guess what? I was WRONG! I didn't remember having listened much to this CD at all, except for the #3 from the Nine Little Preludes, and that piece I listened to mainly on the soundtrack to Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould rather than on here. But listening to the CD today, I was surprised to find that many of these pieces are, somehow, ingrained in my brain. Sometimes it's just the openings, which isn't that weird, but in a number of cases, especially in the Six Little Preludes, I know the whole pieces like I'd just listened to them yesterday. I must have listened to them over and over again, and totally forgotten about it.

It's also striking to me, given how much I've been talking lately about how there's Amazing Major Work Bach and Solid But Ultimately Forgettable Minor Work Bach, just how good many of these minor works are. There's an incredible wealth of both invention and emotion: the G Major Prelude, BWV 902, which takes an unassuming rising-arpeggio motif from the opening melody and, quite a bit later, turns it into a very noticeable repeated phrase with a palpable sense of holding back; the first of the Six Little Preludes, which is proof that no one can be as sincerely joyful as Bach while still cutting you in the heart a little, and the second, which unfolds gradually, like a snake; and the D Minor Fughetta, whose countermelodies move quickly but whose slow subject casts a strange fog over it. Listening to the latter I had a flashback to the house in Italy where, when I was 11, I first started listening to music regularly: a little room with an electric organ in it, where I wrote some of my first pieces, plus the particular emotional texture of reading through easy Bach pieces, plus an odd carpety smell, and then the network of more distant associations: peach tea, a cat named Edipo that pooped on the stairs, a collectors' series of Coke cans in non-Roman alphabets, the smell of gasoline in the garage.

And of course, there's the aforementioned #3 from the Nine Little Preludes, which Gould plays with absolutely perfect rhythmic ambiguity, so that you can flip between hearing it in 3/4 and hearing it in 6/8 at will, and with an insanely fast sixteenth-note run towards the end. It's one of the best 49 seconds of music I know. There's also a point in one of the pieces, I forget which, where Gould's usual quiet, half-moaning humming-along becomes a percussive "ta-ta-ta"-ing along, which is really bizarre but a lot of fun. Etc. etc. etc. etc.

In comparison to all that, the E Minor Partita is a disappointment. It's certainly not a bad piece, but for the most part, it doesn't engage me like these small pieces do. It's also a very, very uncharacteristic performance for Gould -- very Romantic, or at least as close as he gets to very Romantic. What's especially strange is that the liner notes quote Gould as describing this recording as "a good recording ... [n]o party tricks," while he apparently said of the G Major Partita that it was "the worst Bach recording that I've ever made ... [and] also the most 'pianistic' ... full of all sorts of dynamic hang-ups, ... crescendi and diminuendi that have no part in the structure, in the skeleton of that music, and defy one to portray the skeleton adequately." I have a feeling whoever wrote the notes confused the two Partitas, because his recording of the G Major is, as I mentioned last time, "no party tricks" to a fault, whereas I can certainly see someone objecting to his recording of the E Minor precisely for its "dynamic hang-ups." I don't think it's terrible by any means, though -- it's just very un-Gould, and, according to a certain mindset that Gould subscribed to but I don't, very un-Bach. However, I do have to say that he was clearly a much, much more solid, controlled and deliberate pianist in 1979-80, when he recorded all these preludes and fugues, than he was in 1957, when he recorded the last two Partitas. And soon I'll be writing about his two recordings of the Goldberg Variations, one from 1955 and one from 1981, which illustrate that contrast beautifully.

One thing I will say: I thought the C Minor Partita sounded like Beethoven's Pathétique? Both the Toccata and the Sarabande from the E Minor hit that piece's most characteristic suspension -- a #7 diminished seventh in the right hand over a minor tonic chord in the left -- over and over again. They do it in the same rhythmic position -- on the first quarter, with the resolution on the second -- and in a similar rhythmic context -- French-Overture-like dotted-eighths and sixteenths. If Beethoven wasn't listening to this when he wrote the Pathétique, I'll eat my hat.

GOOD THING I'M NOT WEARING A HAT.


Edit 9/13: audio clips from this and the previous CD!

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Partita #1 in Bb Major, BWV 825 / Partita #2 in C Minor, BWV 826 / Partita #3 in A Minor, BWV 827 / Partita #4 in D Major, BWV 828 / Partita #5 in G Major / BWV 829
Performer: Glenn Gould (piano)
Label: Sony Classical


...and we're back to the Glenn Gould marathon. I think this is actually one of his most sensitive Bach recordings, the First Partita especially. There's a great moment in the Corrente where he's going along being his usual spiky, staccato self, and then all of a sudden he gets to a new phrase and plays the whole thing perfectly smoothly -- it almost sounds as if he's using the pedal, though I really doubt he is. It's a beautiful moment, and a great way of delineating the structure. (See my earlier post about how Gould creates expressivity through articulation.) It's still not as good as Tomsic's recording of the piece, but not much is, so that's OK.

As fun as it is to discover new music, it's nice to get back to pieces that I know very well. At least, I know the first three Partitas very well, especially the First, since I've played most of it. All three are fantastic: The First is sublimely cheerful, full of those sequenced major sevenths that Bach does when he wants his cheerfulness to have a bit of a joyous bite to it, and with a rippling Giga that functions texturally more like a piece by Debussy than like anything else I know by Bach. The Second is punchy and theatrical, with an aggressive closing Capriccio and extraordinary three-part opening Sinfonia that I really think must have been an influence on Beethoven's Pathétique sonata (not just stylistically -- there are even motivic connections between the two pieces). The Third is less catchy, more trebley, more understated in its prickliness, but full of twiny black counterpoint (in the first half) and catchy dance pieces (in the second), with a chromatic Gigue almost worthy of the English Suites.

Then there are the Fourth and Fifth (the Sixth being on the next CD), which I remember disliking when I was getting into the Partitas in high school. I like them better now, but I can see what my problem was back then, too. The Fourth is over twenty minutes long, while most of the others are under fifteen, and its best material is often its subtlest. In particular, it's got a kind of extraordinary Allemande, which takes six and a half minutes without repeats (a quick glance at the iTunes music store suggests that the usual playing time is more like eleven or twelve), and which sounds like it's almost entirely through-composed. That is to say, it sounds like Bach sat down and just started writing, letting his intuition take him through an enormous variety of keys and rhythmic patterns, with only minimal reliance on recurring material. It's a remarkable series of quiet surprises, but it takes effort to listen to, especially since Gould takes it at a fairly slow tempo, and let's be honest -- I was a pretty lazy listener in high school. I mean, I used to skip the slow movements when I listened to the Bartók Piano Concerti, and that's pretty ridiculous given how good they are.

That said, I still have trouble getting into the Fourth Partita as a whole. The Allemande is as I described, the Ouverture is fun and ambitiously concerto-like, and there are some great moments in the other movements, but I always wind up feeling by the end like the piece is too "nice." I saw my friend Daniel play it in concert last year and had the same feeling -- this piece just goes on too long, given how little tension there is in it. And I know that wasn't the fault of Daniel's playing, which was better than most Bach performances I've seen.

As for the Fifth, the problem is just that Gould rushes through it like a madman. His recording of it is from 1957, earlier than any of the other pieces on this CD, and if I had to make a judgment based on this and his 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations, I'd have to say that he was kind of a hyperactive nutball in general at that point in his career. The Fifth Partita actually reminds me quite a bit of the Goldbergs, partially because I know Gould's 1955 recording of them really well and therefore associate them with that playing style, but also because both pieces are in G Major, and because the simple forms and proclamatory affect of the Fifth Partita's Tempo di Minuetta and Passepied would be completely at home in that set.

One other thing I want to mention: I have no idea why Bach called these pieces "Partitas" and not "Suites," and I've been trying to figure out if there's anything particularly "Italian" about them. Some of the movements have the Italian versions of the usual French names -- "Giga" rather than "Gigue," "Corrente" rather than "Courante," "Minuetta" rather than "Menuet" -- and some have Italian names that don't relate to the French suite form at all -- "Burlesca," "Scherzo," "Capricco," "Sinfonia." But there are also "Gigues" as well as "Gigas," "Courantes" as well as "Correntes," and there's also a "Rondeaux" (isn't that supposed to be plural?) and an "Ouverture." As for the music, there are passages that remind me of the Italian Concerto, and of actual Italian concerti by composers like Marcello, Corelli, Vivaldi and so on -- passages with fast sixteenth-note lines over simple eighth-note accompaniments, or passages that get stuck on dominant seventh or ninth chords in minor for many bars on end. But while you won't find much of that in the French Suites, you definitely will in the English Suites -- in fact, I thought of the Prelude from English Suite #2 many times as I was listening to this CD. So all in all I'm kind of at a loss.

The one exception is the Sarabande from Partita #3, whose call-and-response phrase structure, as well as its specific tunes and chord progressions, remind me enormously of my beloved Domenico Scarlatti. I know Scarlatti's style well enough that I can hear the exact places where it obviously isn't by him -- which is kind of a weird effect, as if I were looking at a piece of Scarlatti furniture through a mostly transparent Bach curtain -- but the similarity is strong enough that I almost wonder if it was a tribute. I don't know whether Bach ever heard Scarlatti's music. He never left Germany, but he could have heard it there, I suppose. No idea.


P.S. It's kind of weird to be writing about Bach Partitas when most of what I've been listening to lately is OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, repeatedly and obsessively.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: French Suite #5 in G Major, BWV 816 / French Suite #6 in E Major, BWV 817 / English Suite #3 in G Minor, BWV 808 / Italian Concerto, BWV 971
Performer: Andrei Gavrilov (piano), Stanislav Bunin (piano)
Label: EMI classics


When I ordered this pair of CDs, I was thinking of them as a replacement for Moroney's recording. The more I listen to them, though, the more I find myself thinking of them as a supplement instead. I do prefer the piano to the harpsichord, and I often prefer Gavrilov's interpretation to Moroney's, but there definitely are some advantages to the recording I've had for years. This is especially clear to me in the Fifth Suite, which you may remember me raving about a little while ago. I still like it a lot in Gavrilov's recording, but it doesn't stand out from the other suites to nearly the same extent. At first I thought that this might just be because I was having trouble engaging with other suites on the Moroney CDs, so that I found it thrilling when I found one I could engage with. But that doesn't explain much, because now that I like the whole set so much, it's not clear to me why the Fifth Suite would have been so more engaging than the rest. I don't think it's a better composition -- it has some extraordinary movements, but so do most of the other suites.

I think the real answer is that Moroney just plays the piece better. He really brings out that sudden switch to minor in the Allemande, whereas Gavrilov just lets it slide by. He also goes straight from the Gavotte into the Bourrée, and plays the Loure with a sense of ... pressure, I guess would be the best way to put it -- which makes the last four movements of the piece feel like a single train of thought that climaxes with the wonderful Gigue. Gavrilov, on the other hand, pauses between the Gavotte and the Bourrée, and does the Loure as a quiet, mysterious piece, and the Suite winds up feeling less cohesive overall. (Though I have to say, I do love how those "wrong" chords in the Loure sound when played quietly -- the effect is jazzy, almost lounge-y. They're definitely still shocking, just differently so. And by the way, it's still nearly impossible to hear the meter in the Loure, and I find that to be true even though I've now looked at the score.)

* * *

The last two pieces on this CD are, rather strangely, played by a different pianist named Stanislav Bunin. I don't find his interpretations convincing at all -- a lot of the time, he seems to be making interpretive decisions based on nothing more than whim. In the Italian Concerto, he often does strange things with the dynamics that don't seem to relate to anything structural -- moving loudly towards the end of the first movement but then playing the final chord softer, moving quietly towards the end of the second but then playing the final note louder, and, at one point in the second movement, building to a climax on a dominant chord but then scaling the volume back before the chord has been resolved. In the English Suite, he also has a habit of octave-doubling the left hand, which I don't object to on principle, except that he does it in seemingly arbitrary places, sometimes in ways that don't even line up with the phrase structure. I can't imagine why anyone would do that except either out of boredom or to show off.

He does do one thing that I like, though: he leaves no pause between the spiky, minor-mode first Gavotte and the extremely simple, drone-based, major-mode second, and he also plays the latter with an ethereal tone, and somewhat slower. Rather than feeling like two different pieces that alternate with each other, the Gavottes come across as a single piece, with the major-mode material "interrupting" the minor-mode material. With the difference in tone and tempo, the juxtaposition is kind of unsettling, and the emotional effect reminds me of late Beethoven.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: French Suite #1 in D Minor, BWV 812 / French Suite #2 in C Minor, BWV 813 / French Suite #3 in B Minor, BWV 814 / French Suite #4 in Eb Major, BWV 815
Performer: Andrei Gavrilov (piano)
Label: EMI classics


Although I've been pretty annoyed lately with my apparent inability to keep this project going regularly, it turns out that there are some advantages to it. When I ordered Gavrilov's recording of the French Suites, I assumed that by the time I got it, I would have already written about the Partitas and maybe the Goldberg Variations, and either I wouldn't wind up talking about it in wholecollection at all, or I'd have to disrupt my ordering. (Within a given composer, I've got my CDs arranged by the size of the instrumentation -- so, for Bach, that's solo string pieces, then lute pieces, then keyboard pieces, then organ pieces, then chamber music arranged by number of instruments, then orchestral pieces, pieces for soloist(s) plus orchestra, and finally choral pieces. Within a given instrument, the CDs are arranged by size and scope; since the Goldberg Variations is a bigger, more ambitious piece than any of the various suites, it has to come after them in the series.) As it's turned out, though, I have't wound up writing about the Partitas yet -- which means that can just throw Gavrilov's recording of the French Suites in right now, and they'll be in the right place.

I don't actually have a ton to say about this CD. I'm not in the mood to try to describe melodies, harmonies and contours, and I'm not getting any interesting synaesthetic-ish reactions at the moment (though I have noticed that I'm positively biased towards the CD because I love the shade of green on the CD surface). The main thing I want to say is that my prediction was absolutely correct: as soon as I got a better recording of these pieces, I liked them a whole lot better. Gavrilov's playing is beautiful: gentle and otherworldly in the Allemandes, muscular in the Courantes, spare and quiet in the Sarabandes, and so on. (I actually do have a problem with the degree to which he stereotypes each dance form, though. Why should all Courantes be loud?) As I've often mentioned before, one characteristic of a beautifully-played recording is that it's hard to turn off. Just now I was skimming through the CD to remind myself of what was what, and I often had to force myself to hit the "forward" button. This is quite a contrast to my experience listening to the Moroney recording, which often consisted of waiting for a track to be over, while trying to convince myself that I wasn't actually doing that because this is "good music" and "I like it." An important lesson learned: the actual experience of liking music is not mistakeable for something else. If you're not sure, you're experiencing something other than liking -- respecting, maybe, or recognizing that you might like the piece in another performance, another mood or another context. And in fact, here is another performance, which I'm listening to in another mood and another context (specifically, a context which does not involve listening to two other, less interesting suites first), and I actually do like the pieces, for real. In some movements I even love them.

So, yeah, the French Suites are awesome. I'm glad to have discovered that, after years of unfounded prejudice against them. It'll be fun to see what happens when I know them as well as I know the English Suites, and they too start taking on personalities. (If you missed that post, take a look now.)

That said, I have two small qualms about the way these pieces come across on the piano:

1. Gavrilov plays the opening of the Sarabande from Suite #1 quietly. I wouldn't have ever thought of this if I hadn't already heard a harpsichord recording, but playing that passage quietly on the harpsichord is actually impossible. The chords are thick, and given the way harpsichords are built, more notes at a time means more volume, period. Having heard it that way, it seems clear to me that it works much better loud; Gavrilov's quiet interpretation seems too obvious. (The degree to which people, including myself, instinctively equate "slow" with "quiet" and "fast" with "loud" is always kind of startling to me -- though Gavrilov does play the Allemandes pretty fast and pretty quietly.)

2. Two posts ago, I mentioned the note that ends the first section of the Sarabande from Suite #2. On the harpsichord, it sounds like the music has suddenly moved from the relative major back to the tonic, and landed on a very bare scale degree 5. On the piano, the same note comes across as scale degree 3 in the relative major. The reason is that there's another note below it, held over from the previous measure. Because notes on the harpsichord die away so quickly, you actually can't hear that note anymore by the time you reach the last one -- but on the piano, it's still audible, and it changes the harmonic effect to something I find less powerful. But then again, Bach wrote the held note in, and I can't imagine why he would have done that if he didn't intend it to be heard, even if only in the overtones of the last note. I think the way I hear the piece on Moroney's recording is more or less an accident of the particular instrument he's using, so I shouldn't be too attached to it. (Though oddly enough, that rhythmic ambiguity I mentioned in the Second Suite's Gigue, which I thought was just the accidental by-product of Moroney's ornamentation, is present in Gavrilov's recording as well, and even more effective there. Actually, I'd say the Gigues come out really damn well on this recording in general.)

...

OK, I also just want to say that it's probably impossible for music to sound any more warm, rich, creamy, enveloping and profoundly friendly than Gavrilov's recording of the Allemande from Suite #4. That's all.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: French Suite #3 in B Minor, BWV 814 / French Suite #4 in Eb Major, BWV 815 / French Suite #5 in G Major, BWV 816 / French Suite #6 in E Major, BWV 817
Performer: Davitt Moroney (harpsichord)
Label: Virgin Classics


It's weird trying to get to know good pieces by means of not-so-good recordings. It happened with Cassado's recording of the Cello Suites, and it's happening here: the very same piece sometimes sounds great and sometimes sounds totally unengaging. I've been treating listening to this CD as kind of a preliminary exercise anyway -- I feel like I won't really get to know the French Suites until I get that piano recording I ordered, because something about the sound of the harpsichord just blocks me from connecting with the music. But even as a preliminary exercise, it feels weird, and unsettles my sense of having taste at all.

That said, when I listened to the Fifth Suite last night, I found it COMPLETELY AMAZING. I still think it stands out above the other Suites, even though it didn't sound quite as good this morning, and even though the Third Suite sounded better this morning than had before. First of all, the Fifth Suite's Allemande is extremely warm and friendly (Bach's typical G Major affect), which is particularly striking because the Allemandes in Bach's suites are often the most abstract and inward movements. It's got an extraordinary, unexpected shift to minor two thirds of the way into the first section, and, never one to be stingy with his great moments, Bach does it again in the second section. After that kind, gentle piece, the Courante is a joyful explosion. The transition from the Gavotte to the Bourrée is similarly exciting, and it's one of the few places where I actually feel like I'm listening to a suite of dances. Most of Bach's suites go Allemande - Courante - Sarabande - two of something else - Gigue, and since the Allemandes, Courantes and Sarabandes are often so abstracted from their origins that they don't feel dancelike at all, that leaves many of these suites simply feeling like "just music." But having two up-tempo dances with different rhythms follow each other ... for some reason it feels more like something that would actually happen at an actual dance. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just because the typical pairing of the "something else"s (two Bourrées, two Gavottes, two Minuets), with the first "something else" repeated after the second one, makes the ear focus on the larger ABA structure and distracts it from the dance rhythm. At any rate, the beginning of this unpaired Bourrée made me grin.

And then there's the Loure. I've never heard of a Loure before, and there isn't even a Wikipedia article on the form (!); listening to this movement, I wonder if Bach made it up. The rhythm is so stop-start and irregular that half the time I can't even tell what the meter is. And at the end of each section, Bach throws in some of the most gutsy, outrageous "wrong notes" I've ever heard from him. And then, after we've left Weirdsville, Germany, we get the happiest, catchiest, jiggiest Gigue that's ever been written. I know I've heard this particular movement a million times before, and I can't remember where (I almost feel like I know it as an organ piece, which is really strange), but I absolutely love it. And because the main theme is built around a repeated phrase, the music seems to keep getting "caught" whenever the theme comes back, especially once Bach starts developing it and shifting the repetition to other parts of the bar.

As for the Third Suite, it's started to take on a similar feeling to the A Minor English Suite: a feeling of rain driving down on cobbled streets. It's darker, though: it gives me the feeling that there's an inescapable melancholy surrounding everything, and that moments of happiness are necessarily fleeting. I can't wait to hear it on my preferred instrument.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: Suite in A Minor, BWV 818a / Suite in Eb Major, BWV 819a / French Suite #1 in D Minor, BWV 812 / French Suite #2 in C Minor, BWV 813
Performer: Davitt Moroney (harpsichord)
Label: Virgin Classics


I was originally going to start this post with an explanation of the names "English Suites" and "French Suites," saying that the latter are more or less in the French keyboard style (typical of Couperin and Rameau), while the former are more or less in the English keyboard style (typical of Handel, who, though German-born, spent much of his life in England). I just found out, though, that the titles are misnomers, that the English Suites are called that because they were (allegedly?) written for an English nobleman, and that they're actually considered better examples of the French keyboard style than the French Suites! And I was all set to blame the French keyboard style for the fact that I didn't like the French Suites as much as the English Suites! Oh well. (I am a little confused, though, because the English Suites actually do remind me of Handel's keyboard music.)

Anyway, I don't like the French Suites as much as the English Suites -- or as much as the Partitas, coming up next. I've always found them less catchy, less surprising and less distinctive. I think this is partially because they lack the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink structure of the Partitas, which means they're more similar to each other. That's also true of the English Suites, but those have introductory Preludes -- and the Preludes are consistently my favorite movements. On top of that, the only recording I have is this one, played on harpsichord rather than piano, and, as much as some people are going to hate me for saying this, I VERY much prefer Bach on the piano. So, the result is, as I seem to keep saying over and over again ... I haven't listened to this CD very much.

As it turns out, I like these pieces better than I used to. I think I'm not going to get super-into the French Suites until I get a piano recording, and I've just ordered one, with Andrei Gavrilov playing. (That choice thanks to the clips on the iTunes Music Store.) But I can definitely say right now that I like Suite #2 a lot. The Sarabande in particular is a beautiful, spare, sad piece, and it's got a perfect harmonic ambiguity: the last note of the first section sounds like the fifth scale degree of the tonic the first time around, when it's about to go back to the beginning, but the second time around, transitioning into the second section, it sounds like the third scale degree of the relative major. (If you don't know any music theory, here's a distilled version: the same note has a completely different feeling the second time than it does the first time, because what comes immediately after it changes the way the listener perceives it. Or at least this listener.) There's also a catchy Air and a sinuous, full-textured, slightly crunchy Courante.

As for Suite #1, it's part of the reason I thought I didn't like the French Suites so much. Not only is it the first of the set (and, on this CD, coming after two unnamed suites which, for the most part, are definitely of lesser quality), but I also heard someone play it (on piano) last spring when I was in an impatient mood, and found it tiresome. It's definitely got that same somber, unassuming quality as the Sixth English Suite; since both are in D Minor, I suspect that's characteristic of how Bach perceived the key. (The D Minor Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II has a similar affect as well.) But, as is often the case with somber works of art, it reveals a subtler sort of beauty if you stay with it long enough. The more I listen to it, the sadder it seems. Maybe I'm just in a melancholic mood today.

The one thing I'm not crazy about in the first two French suites is the Gigues. They've got a certain jerky rhythm characteristic of French keyboard music that I find slightly annoying -- and which, I might add, makes me even more skeptical of the claim that the French Suites are no more "French" than the English Suites. In the C Minor Suite, a particular ornament that Moroney plays creates a fun rhythmic ambiguity, but compared to the Gigues from the Second, Third, Fifth and Sixth English suites? Not even close.

This post is kind of boring, huh? I think I'm getting a little sick of the Baroque dance suite format.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: English Suite #1 in A Major, BWV 806 / English Suite #3 in G Minor, BWV 808 / English Suite #6 in D Minor, BWV 811
Performer: Murray Perahia (piano)
Label: Sony Classical


My first impression: like Andras Schiff, Murray Perahia is basically a Romantic pianist. My third or fourth impression: he's not really a Romantic pianist at all. His playing does have a certain luminosity and a certain smoothness, but he's not achieving them using the Romantic playing techniques that Schiff uses -- in particular, hitting "simultaneous" notes at slightly different times and slightly different volumes. Instead, he just records in a room with a lot of reverb (or has his engineer add a lot of reverb in the studio), uses the pedal a little too much, and overemphasizes the treble register.

That description makes it sound worse than it is, though. Perahia does have a lot more sensitivity to dynamics than Gould, and in some cases this works to his advantage. In particular, it works to his advantage in the faster, spikier movements; in the slower and "nicer" ones, his insistence on smoothness can turn the music into a bit of an undistinguished mush. Here are a few examples of both:

- Perahia's version of the Prelude from Suite #3 is unquestionably better than Gould's, specifically because of the way he uses dynamics: every time he gets to one of those descending scales in the left hand, he puts a crescendo on it, and when there's a whole cascading series of them, he gets louder and louder until he lands on the final chord with a thick, satisfying thump. Gould's version is exciting, but Perahia's is thrilling.

- The Prelude from Suite #6 is a more extreme case of the same thing. In Gould's version, I found it puzzlingly dull: the main section just seemed like six minutes of fast counterpoint to no ostensible purpose. Since I'd never been a huge fan of the Sixth Suite when I only had Gould's recording, I never listened to it when I got Perahia's a couple of years later -- in fact, I wasn't a big fan of the First either, so I mostly just listened to the Third. As a result, it wasn't until last week or so that I finally listened to Perahia's version of this Prelude, and when I did I was blown away: Perahia has given purpose to all that fast counterpoint, and he's done it specifically by introducing dynamic variation. Even more specifically, he's done it by interpreting the movement as a solo keyboard version of a concerto grosso: that is, by taking parts of it to represent an orchestra and other parts to represent the smaller group of instruments that would be set off against the orchestra in an actual Baroque concerto. The contrast makes the piece incredibly exciting, and Gould pretty much completely obscures it by playing everything at the same volume. I was actually agape when I first heard what Perahia was doing. (I have to admit, it also helps that he plays it much faster, and launches into it with violent abruptness after the slow introduction.)

- By contrast, I was disappointed by Perahia's renditions of the Sarabandes from Suites 1 and 3. For the sake of comparison, I listened to Gould's versions again, and my first impression was confirmed: in both cases, I found Gould more engaging, more moving, more subtle and more original. This seemed strange to me at first, since Perahia is the subtler and more moving of the two in the fast movements. I get the impression, though, that he's afraid to be too sharp-edged when playing slow music. Gould often plays the left-hand parts staccato and ornaments them extensively, which gives the music more textural variety, and also brings out the basslines as countermelodies rather than just accompaniments. In general, actually, I think that Perahia pays too little attention to Bach's basslines on this CD. They're often hard to hear clearly, and when you can hear them they're often played boringly. (The main exception is in the Courantes of the three Suites.) But the difference isn't just in the left hand: in these two Sarabandes, Gould will sometimes even play a staccato trill in the melody, which I don't think I've ever heard another pianist do. I think what's really going on is that Gould, despite his lack of sensitivity to dynamics, is incredibly sensitive to articulation, and is using that instead to make the music expressive. And, as I realized today, that's not just an arbitrary interpretive choice: it's how you play the harpsichord, on which every note is necessarily the same volume, and for which these Suites were originally written.

This raises an important question about "historically informed performance": assuming we agree that Gould's use of harpsichord technique (albeit on the piano) makes his interpretation of these two Sarabandes better than Perahia's, why does it make it better? Is it just because the pieces were written for harpsichord and we have an obligation to the composer's intentions? Or is there something about these pieces that, even if we knew nothing of their origin, would still make it more appropriate to play them with an emphasis on articulation than with an emphasis on dynamics?

I'm actually not sure what the answer to that is. In general, I'm not a big fan of appealing to artists' intentions when it comes to performance. I once saw The Taming of the Shrew done in a Hispanic setting, for instance, and I thought it was fantastic -- the fact it was partially a product of its own time, as well as a product of its author's, didn't make it any less so. But I also can't think what it is about Bach's Suites that makes them sound better when interpreted with a Gouldish emphasis on articulation rather than a Perahia-ish emphasis on dynamics, so I'm hesitant to say that the pieces somehow demand the former. (Never mind that I think Perahia's emphasis on dynamics is what makes the Prelude from the Sixth Suite great!) That said, I can think of a different interpretive issue where I think our obligation is clearly to the piece rather than to the composer's intentions -- despite the fact that, in practice, the two obligations coincide exactly. That issue is how much emphasis to place on the bassline. Perahia's overemphasis on the melody isn't bad because Bach wouldn't have liked it; rather, it's bad because of the reason that Bach wouldn't have liked it, namely that in Baroque music, the bassline is what holds the music together. It's written like another melody, not just an accompaniment. If you mumble it, you're doing damage to the music. Of course, the bassline is important in almost all music, and you could say the same thing about, say, a Chopin waltz. But I think that in the case of Bach, obscuring the bassline does more damage.


Incidentally, Perahia totally kills the Gigue from the Sixth Suite, even though it's a fast, spiky movement. Uncharacteristically, he plays the whole thing very loud, and he hasn't got any of Gould's sharp, badass staccato; the result is a blunderingly forceful performance that makes me think vaguely of Conan the Barbarian. It's really too bad that each pianist bombs one movement of this Suite so severely, because it means that if I really want to listen to the piece and really enjoy it, I have to switch CDs at one point or another. Maybe I should get some more recordings and piece together an ideal one movement-by-movement -- though if I were going to do that with anything, it would be with The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Which reminds me, I lost my Well-Tempered Clavier CDs at some point, and I'm in the market for better recordings than the ones I had (Keith Jarrett for Book I, Schiff for Book II). Suggestions?


Listen to clips of Perahia playing English Suites 1, 3 and 6 here.

I totally forgot I was doing this!

Sound clips of English Suites 4-6 as played by Gould:
http://www.sonymusicstore.com/store/catalog/MerchandiseDetails.jsp?merchId=6979&skuId=22912

Sound clips of English Suites 1-3 as played by Gould:
http://www.sonymusicstore.com/store/catalog/MerchandiseDetails.jsp?merchId=9470&skuId=32893

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Works: English Suite #4 in F Major, BWV 809 / English Suite #5 in E Minor, BWV 810 / English Suite #6 in D Minor, BWV 811
Performer: Glenn Gould (piano)
Label: Sony Classical


This morning something shifted in the way I hear the English Suites. It was right after I had listened to the Fifth, thinking that it might be my favorite of the set. Almost every movement has a brilliant twist: the Passepied is so rhythmically ambiguous that it's pretty much impossible to hear in the 3/8 it's written in; the punchy, angular Gigue has a moment when the constant sixteenth-note motion suddenly stops for just one measure, like a hiccup; and the aggressive Prelude is so dense with wonderful details that I can't even begin to describe it, except to say that when I heard it a few days ago, for the first time in years, I was so excited that I immediately listened to it three more times.

After the Fifth Suite was over, I immediately went on to the Sixth, and I found myself disappointed. Something was missing, and I soon realized that it was wit: the Sixth is somber and mahogany-colored, with none of the Fifth's silvery flashing. And it was at that moment that it hit me: these suites have distinct personalities! I actually can't believe I never realized this before, because it seems so obvious now. I certainly knew the pieces well enough, back when I was listening to them all the time. I think I may have just been too young to hear them as wholes rather than simply collections of pieces. In fact, I just remembered a conversation I had with my first composition teacher, Rodney Lister, when I was maybe 12. I was writing a Baroque-style suite, and he asked me why the movements were all part of the same piece: what did they have to do with each other except for their key? I responded by pointing to the movements of English Suite #2, which, I said, didn't have anything to do with each other either except for their key. But I was WRONG, and as I've gone back over the suites just now, I've come to see them not only as having affects, but in many cases as being people. Like so:

The Fifth Suite is the roguish hero of a picaresque. The sudden changes of rhythm and texture, the unexpected chromatic harmonies, the flash of brightness in the Prelude when there's a sudden V/V chord -- these are the glints of the sun on his sword as he cuts a "Z" into you. In the Sarabande he stalks the cliffs of Spain, waiting.

The First Suite is a tranquil old man, an academic of some sort, maybe a cosmologist or an alchemist. The intricate patterns of the Allemande are the gears of his instruments, the subtle chords of the Sarabande the light through the window of his conservatory. In the Prelude he contemplates the motion of the planets; in the Gigue, the stately towers of the University.

The Fourth Suite is a gentleman, cheerful but always elegant. The recurring mordents in the Gigue are his chuckle, and in the Prelude you can hear him foxhunting in the English countryside. When the music turns minor it's only for a moment, and never too dark -- threatening clouds on the horizon, but they disperse before it starts to rain.

The Second Suite is a government official, well-groomed in general but harried right now. Maybe he's late for an important appointment. In the Allemande he stops some to do some sort of business, but he's too anxious to stick around for long. In the second Bourrée, he reflects on the glory of the country he serves, but the real world keeps intruding -- minor-mode counterpoint interrupting the homophonic A Major processional. The first Bourrée is the rain driving down on the cobbled streets; in the Gigue he finally gets on his horse and gallops away.

Edit 12:49: I just noticed that these are all men! What's up with that?


What I really want to know, though, is how much these images are affected by the keys the suites are in. I have very strong key-color associations, as follows:

- Suite #1 - A Major - white with hints of yellow
- Suite #2 - A Minor - black
- Suite #3 - G Minor - dark green with hints of dark blue
- Suite #4 - F Major - tan
- Suite #5 - E Minor - dark metallic gray with hints of silver
- Suite #6 - D Minor - dark brownish-red

Here's the thing: when you hear the Gigue at the end of the D Minor Suite, it seems to fit the somber, dark brownish-red mood of that piece. But the actual affect of the Gigue is sharp and angry -- which is also the overall affect of the G Minor Suite, so why don't I feel like it would fit better there? It's also kind of badass, so why don't I feel like it would fit better in the E Minor suite? Is there actually something about this Gigue that makes it sharp and angry in a somber way, or badass in a dark brownish-red way? I actually think Gould plays it that way: he takes it too slow for it to have that bouncy, jig- or tarantella-like feel that Gigues normally do. But that's his interpretation: Bach didn't indicate the tempo anywhere. Maybe Gould and I are both responding mainly to the key and the context. I know from experience that placing music in a new context can change its feel completely. A silly German dance sounds nostalgic in Mahler, and cheeseball early 60s exotica is deeply unsettling when it shows up on Mr. Bungle's California. But you don't normally think of good-old-pure-and-abstract Bach in those terms.