All the episodes covering the Arnstadt/Mülhausen cantatas can be found at:https://wtfbach.substack.com/t/early-cantatas

Wanna Cantata?

Here’s an image that might help you wrap your head around the earliest cantatas:

For the first time I spoke about Bach’s librettists. We will meet them as our study moves into the later cantatas. There are five identifiable poets, and one anonymous. What did you think about my mnemonic?

Solomon Franck (a.k.a Solomo)Erdmann NeumeisterGeorg Christian LehmsChristian Friedrich Henrici (a.k.a. Picander)Christiane Mariane von Ziegler

S-N-L-P-Z (Saturday Night Live PiZza…Anyone?)

And wasn’t it thrilling to hear the similarities of styles between the cantata composed by Bach’s third cousin, Johann Ludwig Bach, JLB 7, and BWV 143? The JLB cantata survives in a copy by JS himself. Have a look at JL. See the relation?

Johann Georg Sachs’ organ music, as promised. He was the cantor who gave Spitta the (once misattributed) cantata BWV 223.https://imslp.org/wiki/Charakteristische_Orgelstücke_(Sachs,_Johann_Georg)

Write That Fugue!

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A new Telegram group is slowly forming! Singing through chorales and doing other cool Bachian things. Join here: https://t.me/+86a_lET5XKdmYTk0

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Summary:

Bach’s early cantatas, seven surviving works from his Arnstadt and Mühlhausen years (BWV 4, BWV 71, BWV 106, BWV 131, BWV 143, BWV 150 and BWV 196), are quite special works. Their texts use mainly the Psalms and Lutheran hymns rather than freely composed poetry. Instrumentation in these early cantatas is generally light: five of the seven use five parts or fewer, apart from the singers and continuo. Recitatives, closing chorales and da capo arias are almost entirely absent. The choir runs through the works rather than appearing only at the beginnings and endings. Tempi and meter shift freely, and suddenly, and the text appears to drive the music. We also conclude (or try to conclude) our thoughts on the authenticity of the cantata BWV 143. We also discuss the case of BWV 223, a fugue snippet left by Spitta, thought to be a lost Bach cantata until about 2004, but now attributed to Handel (and still missing? Anyone able to clear that up?) Performers featured were Koopman and Suzuki.

Bach’s early Easter cantata remains one of the most beloved in the entire canon. Barely 22 years old, he is already in full command of his tone-painting. Here are three measures particularly packed with symbolism:

Filling the music with rests at the word nothing, ‘one death eating another’ through the closest possible canon, crosses both in shape and every note ‘sharped’ (gekreuzt,) dripping blood on the Passover doors with short 8th notes, leaping a diminished 12th (!) in the bass aria at the word death, this cantata is a dictionary of text painting.

…und singen Halleluja!

The chorale cantata was probably composed for Bach’s Easter Sunday audition in 1707 for the organist post at St. Blaise’s Church in Mühlhausen, left vacant by the death of Johann Georg Ahle. Bach’s older cousin, Johann Gottfried Walther, had an audition for the same post, but withdrew— possibly because Bach himself was interested! Later, Bach revived this cantata his first two Easters in Leipzig, 1724 and 1725. Only the Leipzig parts survive, hence the original 1707 version is lost. Any differences between the revised and earliest versions— which may have been substantial— are lost. In any case, the remaining style certainly reflects his early vocal writing par excellence.

The cantata is one of only a handful of per omnes versus cantatas, going through all seven verses of Martin Luther’s 1524 hymn text. Theologically, the text goes deeply into Lutheran ideas linking Jewish Passover— the blood-marked doorposts and unleavened bread— to Christian Easter, reading the Passover lamb as a prefiguration of Christ’s crucifixion and the Eucharist. Such deep theological reflection was something Bach understood and made apparent in tone.

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PS! Shelly conveniently does in fact quote the biblical, ‘O Death, where is thy sting?’ but the poem I was thinking of was Pope’s, The Dying Christian to his Soul:

VITAL spark of heav’nly flame!Quit, O quit this mortal frame:Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,O the pain, the bliss of dying!Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,And let me languish into life.

Hark! they whisper; angels say,Sister Spirit, come away!What is this absorbs me quite?Steals my senses, shuts my sight,Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?Tell me, my soul, can this be death?

The world recedes; it disappears!Heav’n opens on my eyes! my earsWith sounds seraphic ring!Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!O Grave! where is thy victory?O Death! where is thy sting?

Write That Fugue!

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Well, That’s Fascinating!

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Does this cantata actually fail to move us? Or does it fail to move us when we know its authenticity is up for debate? Can we truly hear some compositional weaknesses?

If we are to ascribe this music to Bach, it was probably from the years 1709-1711. No other cantatas from the period from his first years in Weimar (that is, before being promoted to concertmaster) survive. The early cantatas are occasional, sporadic, and very different to one another. Richard D. P. Jones says, on the extant early cantatas: “since at a later date Bach very likely came to regard these early works as outmoded—perhaps representing that ‘former style of music’ which ‘no longer seems to please our ears’—he seems to have made no attempt to preserve them, with the result that the few that survive do so by accident.”

Jones himself excludes this cantata from the canon, but, on the subject of authenticity, admits there must be some subjectivity when making such cuts: “No less thorny is the issue of authenticity. … There are inevitably borderline cases, however, and in this area the author has had to make up his own mind as to which compositions merit inclusion and which do not.” Among other scholars— as far as I can tell— this cantata’s authenticity is still up for debate.

Oh, Bach’s Art. The Prelude to my Heart.

Fun fact! If this indeed is Bach ca. 1709, that would make movement 3 the first recitativo in Bach’s works. It’s only five measures long!

I neglected to mention the text in the movements where Du Friedefürst Herr Jesu Christ is the cantus firmus, these are stanzas 1 and 3, sung in movements 2 and 7, respectively:

You prince of peace, Lord Jesus Christ, true man and true God, you are a strong helper in distress, in life and death. Therefore we only in your name cry to your Father! Be mindful, Lord, now of your office, that you are a prince of peace, and graciously help us in all ways now at this time. Grant that henceforth your divine word may resound still longer in peace!

Well, what do you think? Does this piece sound like early Bach? Do you care? Could you enjoy it even if it were written by... gasp! …Telemann!?

Write That Fugue!

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Concepts covered: The 3 corno da caccia in this cantata, the difference between natural horn and corni da caccia, the authenticity of this cantata, the early cantatas pre-weimar, word painting, text settings from Psalm 146, and hymns, Bach’s earliest recitativo.

The performance of Inssbruck, ich muss dich lassen can be heard here (there is one other verse!)

Now, is this the fugue, BWV 540? Or which piece is this?

And is this not the same music?

Top: Italian Concerto. Bottom: today’s fugue. Seeing such similar vocabulary is as thrilling as it is remarkably rare in Bach’s works.

Wow. That Fugue!

Here are the fugue’s two contrasting themes. The first, slow moving, noble:

The second, carefree and playful:

They combine toward the end of the piece to marvelous effect:

A complete version of the MIDI synths in the episode (Headphones are best! I found it quite relaxing.)

I said I would attach the MIDI files, but Substack won’t allow it. If you leave a comment or send me a DM, I’ll send them over. Thanks!

Spread the Counterpoint. Share WTF Bach.

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…or so the legend goes. Modern scholarship calls Spitta’s anecdote into question, but in any case, Der Herr denket an uns BWV 196, is one of Bach’s earliest vocal works.

Despite being from the same period as the other cantatas we recently covered, the work might show more outward signs of being similar to Bach’s later cantatas: we get a da capo aria for the first time, and the choruses only figure into the first and last movements. We see no sudden shifts of tempo, and movements are clear cut. The only abrupt change of texture comes in the second movement:

‘The lord blesses us.’ Segnet uns. Bach will set the word ‘bless’ differently in every movement. Notice how the soprano soloist amplifies the Lord’s blessings:

Despite these examples, the cantata fails to impress us the same way his other early cantatas do. Instead, we take joy in the fugal writing in the outer movements. The finale of the opening chorus is a fugue where the subject is never absent. A glance at a few pages shows this:

The closing movement features a fugue with two subjects on the word, Amen! I called the first theme the ‘stomping theme’ and the second theme the ‘climbing theme’ —whatever helps you understand the distinct shapes. When looking for wedding ideas to back up Spitta’s story (though we must be aware of confirmation bias!) I might see the musical representation of two separate figures, always appearing together, never one without the other:

Bach adds a classic ‘early Bach’ touch at the end, ending the entire cantata piano, disappearing with a whisper:

Write That Fugue!

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Concepts Covered:

Bach's Cantata BWV 196, Der Herr denket an uns (The Lord Thinks of Us), one of only seven surviving cantatas from Bach’s earliest period. The traditional story behind the piece — Bach wrote it as a wedding gift for the pastor who had officiated his own marriage to Maria Barbara — and examines why modern scholarship casts doubt on that account, since the text itself doesn't clearly point to a wedding occasion. Bach draws his libretto directly from Psalm 115, making this one of the textually simplest cantatas in his early output, how a single rising melodic motif ties together the Sinfonia, arias, and choruses. Bach's word painting on the recurring word "bless" (segnet), walks through the construction of the cantata's central choral fugue, and highlights the soprano aria's use of da capo form — possibly the earliest example of that structure in Bach's output. Vokaleinbau ‘vocal insertion’ might be used here for the first time. The cantata's final movement, a double fugue built on two contrasting ‘Amen’ subjects, other early stylistic features and analysis.

My first trip to Germany (I was 21) I walked into a church in Weimar and heard— by beautiful coincidence— an unseen organist play Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue, BWV 582. This was a piece I heard for the first time only a year before. I remember exactly in which chair I first heard it. If the Chaconne is Bach’s universe tightly wound into a handheld box, the Passacaglia is a different vision of the same, exploding through thousands of pipes. It is a piece you cannot overlook when thinking of the crowning achievements in Bach’s career.

At 21, I knew Bach was Bach, but I hadn’t yet dedicated myself to him fully. Even so, I knew Bach’s organ works could be the supreme solo musical activity: the most complete musical experience had by a single person. Think about it: it’s making music with all four limbs, drumming on multiple keyboards. The soundboard of this instrument is a church.

But I was a pianist, not an organist. At that young age, I had already excluded myself from being able to participate in certain musical activities. Why? Where did I get this notion?

Knowing your limitations is healthy in many areas of life, but in music— especially young musicians— you should know: your potential is unlimited. I don’t know how or why one draws the line at what a student can and cannot do, why some teachers restrain enthusiasm, or make students feel limited to certain areas from a young age. I’d guess it’s a mixture of abuse and a fear of money.

Abuse is handed down: the teacher was told they can’t do X, soon the student learns to stay away from X. ‘It deepens like a continental shelf.’

We glorify abuse on the screen: teachers inflicting suffering so the student may rise stronger after being broken… but this makes for a good film— not a good life. To actually teach like this is nothing more than sophisticated child abuse. As I’ve said on the show in my ‘advice to musical teens,’ if you ever find a teacher who leaves you feeling worthless or unhappy with music, leave that teacher immediately. There is no reason why a musical education shouldn’t be full of joy and happiness and discovery. Yes, hard work, too, but under the right teacher, hard work can be a joy, not a punishment.

One objects, saying a line must be drawn early in order to mold the student into an employable musician. “You should focus on only one instrument, kid.” In an era of specialization, this seems almost necessary. But is the ultimate goal of music a job? Money? A c-a-r-e-e-r? My colleagues reading this can confirm that many of us in the business have lost the spark that initially made us want to become musicians.

But I won’t harp on the perils of ‘building a career’ or the traumatic musical upbringing I experienced. I want to focus on how, during my few decades in music, I have time and time again doubted my abilities, only to find that there was no reason for doing so. Rather than passing the blame, I’d like to revisit these moments and focus on how I overcame such a crippling emotion.

Become Your Best Buxtehude. Support W.T.F. Bach.

Transposition

I remember learning a concerto when I was 16 or so— probably Mozart or Beethoven, and I was trying to memorize a section that happened earlier, only now it was in a new key. I explained to my father that, could I transpose, I wouldn’t have to struggle to learn the passage more than once— if I had the type of mind that could transpose. He shrugged and said, ‘so learn how to transpose’ and walked away.

That made me mad. What an idiot! I thought. One can’t learn such things. Some are born with the gift of transposition, I wasn’t.

Why I thought this at such a young age is a bit sad and confusing (and I’ll resist launching into a rant about how, if a student is advanced enough to play Beethoven, transposing should be something they learned long ago.) For whatever reason, in my mind, I couldn’t transpose.

Of course, one does learn how to do such things, and I did— even if it was nearly a decade later. One starts with little things: simple melodies, popular songs, dances… For me the major turning point came when I stopped seeing harmonies as ‘E-flat Major’ or ‘d minor’ but rather as numbers, positions, relations to other chords, ‘this is the sub-dominant’ or ‘this is a whole-step down.’ The name of the chord is meaningless but its number is full of meaning.

At one point, transposing seemed unreachable, unimaginable. But one can always learn the most complicated musical thing if you are completely focused on the specific goal for a very long time. I kept a fortune cookie in my nightstand when I was a boy because I thought the image was hilarious, not because I found meaning— but how wise it seems now! ‘If enough people bang their heads on a brick wall, the wall will eventually fall down.’

Rock, and other genres of music

The next big obstacle in my thinking came at Juilliard, when my roommate, a jazz musician who was more into the NYC rock scene, asked me to cover for the keyboardist in his punk band. Not only had I never played any music besides classical music, I knew I couldn’t play any other music. (I wonder if the arrogance I had developed about classical music as the ‘pure’ art, was fear masking my inability to partake in any form of more social music. I wonder if this is the arrogance of many…) Whatever the case, my roommate didn’t have my personal obstacles in his head. He didn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t make for a fine punk keyboardist.

While most of the songs never had more than a few chords, and there’s nothing ‘technical’ to play, rock music was an absolute education. Never learned from sheet music, finding where and how to improvise, finding a ‘feel’ that is unlike anything in classical music, this was a new world for me that influenced the way I think about music to this day. Again, there was an initial stage of feeling stupid, both musically and socially: all of this can make you feel out of place, but pushing past this doesn’t take very long.

Rock music opened up other genres to me, bluegrass, jazz… my forays into these genres helped develop my ear. I learned to play the accordion because I wanted to play with my friends who played bluegrass outside. (The accordion, by the way, expanded my mind: the left side is buttons, organized by circle of fifths. The right side is a normal keyboard. When I realized this is because harmony, the left side, doesn’t move by step like melodies, but moves by fifths, I was forever changed.) I ended up touring with some bands for a few years, playing in settings that undoubtedly made me a better classical musician. If you can handle people spilling beer on you, you can handle an audience clearing their throats.

Why I had assumed I couldn’t play rock is maybe not so bad as why I assumed I shouldn’t play rock. Both ideas were built into my identity as a pianist. When I was in the van, driving to grungy venues, playing for $13 a show, when my instrument was missing two of few of the plastic keys it had, was I a pianist?

Giant, impossible Bach

The next large hurdle deals with those activities that a pianist should do, namely, memorize large amounts of music. When I had heard of Paul Jacob’s triumphant marathon playing the complete organ works, my immediate thought was, ‘I could never do something like that.’ My reaction to Paul’s achievement was one of instant self-doubt. Had someone shrugged like my father, and said, ‘so memorize all of Bach’ I would have said, again, what an idiot!

I hadn’t set out to achieve any goal: my marathon started small, with a single volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier., and I didn’t set out to memorize that either, but after two years playing selections in concert, I realized I had performed most of Book Two. Could I memorize all 48? There are rumors of pianists having had all 48 from memory, could I join that club? This was something I never imagined I could do, in fact when I played my first prelude and fugue at 16, I was told it was already too late.

A year later and I had done just that. Looking at the density of the counterpoint, I was quite convinced that I had memorized some of Bach’s most complex music, so would the suites come easier? Another year, I had all the suites, the next, all the partitas, on and on until about eight years later, I had memorized Bach’s near-complete keyboard works. I celebrated by playing everything in six five-day, five-hour cycles at the first Bach Store.

Were my past self to look at this accomplishment, I’m quite sure he’d say, ‘I could never do something like that.’ This is because it really does look impossible —but it isn’t! It might take nearly ten years of fairly constant dedication, but that time is the blink of an eye, and such discipline stays with you forever.

Pianist or keyboardist?

I was having an identity crisis: was I a pianist? Or was I into Bach? Are these ideas mutually exclusive? How could I consider myself ‘into Bach’ if I wasn’t familiar with his instruments? Yes, Bach on the piano is a miracle, but a Bach pianist sounds sort of like hypocrisy.

I started small: I was given a clavichord by a lovely lady who hadn’t ever used it but as a table. I brought it home and, within seconds— this is an accurate measurement, not an exaggeration— I realized the way I had been fingering Bach and other early music wouldn’t work on such an instrument. Could it be, I asked, that our modern approach would have been completely foreign to Bach? This instant lesson from a clavichord put me in the middle of a dark forest.

I set out to tune the clavichord, but I didn’t have a hammer so I used pliers. I broke strings which distressed me immensely at first, but later became a blessing: the world of instrument repair is not something most pianists are familiar with, but it was a world that Bach knew intimately. Learning how to wind a tuning peg, how to tie hitch pin loops, these are skills that put me in direct touch with an older world of musicians who knew how to care and look after their instruments. This gave my musicianship a feeling of competence I never knew about. Again, I wonder, is the disdain with which pianists look down on the humble life of a piano tuner a fear of not knowing how to tune their own piano?

Now, the clavichord is a nice transition for pianists because one can still inflect, it is very much like a delicate piano, but the harpsichord is utterly foreign. So was I pianist or Bachian?

I went to France to study harpsichord. I am also the proud owner of a harpsichord which I now know how to maintain, tune, repair, voice, even build parts of. But this began with real sadness and frustration, wondering why I’d put myself through such trials. Feeling like a beginner again, and telling myself ‘I can never be a harpsichordist… it’s too late! It’s too late to learn.’ All the skills I now possess began to the sad tune of ‘I can’t do this.’

I was wrong!

The king of instruments

Once, I was shown into an organ loft where I could go and play for however long I liked. This is a life changing experience— seriously. I urge every musician reading to go into that church you’ve never been in, and ask to play the organ. Even if you can’t play anything but a chord, pull out all the stops and play that chord. You’re not going to break the organ, you’re not being rude. Put yourself in the thick of all that power and you’ll see it is no accidental nickname, ‘the king of instruments.’

I used those few hours to figure out what all the buttons and levers do, playing one stop at a time, completely overwhelmed by the physical vibrations— simply stunned by the force and the arrangement of all the pipes. To sit in the middle of such a machine is awesome. Some readers won’t know that organ pipes are often arranged in a ‘stereo’ fashion, where one pipe is placed on the far left, and the closest half-step is on the complete other side of the loft. So, playing a chromatic scale sounds as if each note is alternating from ear to ear — this is an amazing sensation that should be experienced by every musician.

With my interest piqued, but still saddened that I was born ‘pianist,’ I must have mentioned my identity crisis to my wife, who, not plagued by my crippling self-doubt, simply walked into the local London church and mentioned my curiosity. (Nothing anybody could have done for me could have been kinder.) Suddenly I had an instrument!

When I first met with the local organist, I assumed he would be a genius like Paul or Helmut Walcha. Again, self-doubt convinced me that I could never measure up to the musicianship of an organist, even the local church organist, but it didn’t take long before I saw that, while he certainly had more physical ease at the instrument, there was little apart from this physicality he could teach me.

The local organist was also timid in making repairs on the 250-year-old instrument, but I, from my work with harpsichords and clavichords, was not shy. Soon enough I found myself on the inside of the instrument, tuning flue pipes, voicing reeds, replacing trackers, fixing an organ— feeling deeply connected to Bach. Would my 16-year-old self have adored or despised this vision of me, covered in century-old dust, gently tapping pipes into tune?

As for my playing with my feet, I spent only a week or 10 days in London every month. Any progress, therefore, disappeared quickly. I had the same frustrating experience many times: becoming comfortable playing the bass with the feet— not the left hand, a mental gymnastic that must be very familiar to keyboardists. Even after months of practice, this would still take some 24 hours to ‘click.’ By the third day, I had dusted off my brain and was ready to get my legs into shape. Maybe five days later, I was playing organ music— some of it even convincingly! The first time I played, fluently, even the simplest Bach organ piece brought me to tears. Why had I rated such a skill as beyond me? Why don’t other pianists know how to do this? Why did no one encourage this?! What is wrong with the world of music? Playing one page of Bach’s organ music for yourself is worth so much more than a life onstage! Why…?! Why…!?

But then, my sojourn done, I couldn’t practice for another three weeks. Progress faded, improvement was slow. I doubted I would ever be able to play the great masterpieces.

This frustrating period of two years came to an end when my wife and I settled. I bought an organ console. In addition I was given access (and instantly became the local organist) to several churches in nearby towns (the UK is great for that.)

My progress exploded. I had daily access and no excuses now. I began tracking my progress meticulously, noting which pieces I was learning and how fast I could play them. Gradually, as if I were a teenager again, I increased the speed week to week. Since my very first years of learning music, I hadn’t ever permitted myself to go so slowly, to really sound as if I were a complete beginner.

My birthday present to myself

These days, I meet weekly with another organist in the area and we trade ideas about registration (which combinations of stops to pull) which is an endless art, even on the small organ where we meet. One can never forget the comment about Bach pulling ‘the most unexpected combinations of stops to the organ builder’s horror, but, once heard, they found the most agreeable tones.’ Two weeks ago, after I played the ‘wedge’ prelude and fugue— already a huge accomplishment for me— without saying anything, the organist flipped a few pages to the Passacaglia. I laughed in disbelief— still so full of self-doubt!

I went home and began learning it at a very slow tempo. A tempo, by the way, that was already nearly three times what I’d have needed just to get through the notes those first days in London: I used to practice at 20 BPM to the 8th note! There are no shortcuts to learning something new.

Learning the Passacaglia, it dawned on me: it was two months before my 40th birthday. I am going to perform the Passacaglia and Fugue before I’m 40. This is where it was all leading. My life, my goals, my work, my passion… I, was going to be that unseen organist in Weimar I heard nearly 20 years before. I was going to travel back, travel through time and pay a visit to my old self, head full of ambitious Beethoven-based goals, and I would drop this orhwurm in his head.

What’s more important, fame or your health?

Objection: Who has the time to work on such difficult goals in the first place? After all, I’ve got to learn the Nellinini quintet-fantasy next week! I can’t just play organ music in slow motion for months!

I read a line in the Tao Teh Ching, ‘What’s more important? Fame or your health?’ This line saw right through me, attacked me, really. It unsettled me but I didn’t know why. I was focused on the conventional path in music: learn big programs, win this award, get this management, A+B+C = career. This is, after all, the way we are told careers happen, unlock one door, then the next one, then the next.

But Lao Tze pierced me. Fame or health? What!? Is it a dilemma? He was staring at me with the same eye-twinkle only the enlightened can give you. I suddenly realized why this line upset me: how could I possibly choose fame over health? Health, meaning mental health, meaning going deeply into all that keeps you sane and happy.

I had (and continue to have) an inner debate about success and validation— are they the same? Can I be fulfilled accomplishing things I value, or would I be happier reaching goals that other people can see: awards, reputable venues, playing with famous people. Or maybe I don’t value the right things? What you personally call success, vs. what the ‘business’ calls it, these might not be mutually exclusive, but for many of my colleagues— and maybe for Lao Tze— they are. There seemed to be a distinct line between what musicians wanted to be doing, and what they were doing. I’ve heard a depressing amount of times, sentiment like, ‘of course I’d rather stay home and play Bach all day!’ But my colleagues were concerned with an image, or a sort of relevance to their community. Of course they wanted to hole up in a cabin for three years, learning exactly the music they most loved, but when they emerged, the business would have passed them by…

But what is this business? I’ve had some colleagues rise to world fame, while others dropped off the face of the earth, and the musicianship, the talent, the hard work, none of that seemed to match proportionally. I was unsettled by the notion of ‘fame’ being something through which others view you, whereas ‘health’ was how the self views the self. ‘Career success’ could emerge or disappear suddenly and without warning, but ‘inner success?’ That would never disappear.

Committing to those ideas which meant inner success, dedicating myself to goals that meant ‘health,’ this required the boldest act of leaving self-doubt behind: it meant trusting that I alone could be the judge of my own success, not other people. I’d never trade my ability to play the organ for a concert at Carnegie Hall. And anyhow, if Carnegie Hall is a reflection of the truth in any way, the people who dig deepest into themselves will play there more often than those who pursue the tired avenues of competition, management, labels…

Opsimath organist

Learning the organ has been the hardest thing I can remember doing. It has taken me back to the beginnings of learning music. I have felt the same states of wonder I felt at nine years old, when I looked at a clef, wondering how it works, counting ledger lines looking for an answer, or writing in one fingering and crossing it out five minutes later. I have sat witnessing my brain form new trenches, uncovering strange habits. I found various rhythms between feet and hands that my body simply refused to do, as if I only just realized I can’t pat my head and rub my belly. These basic problems required such slowing down that I embarrassed my brain by watching how slowly the body was learning.

I feel like I’ve lived a second musical education. In this time, I’ve been able to look back on the organ repertoire as I looked at pieces in my childhood: they looked so much bigger back then! Certain measures of the organ repertoire made my jaw drop at the mere thought of being able to play them. Now I play some of them without thinking. So what am I? Where has all this doubt led me? To an organist? A pianist? A harpsichordist?

I won’t pretend I am as proficient on the organ as I am on the piano or harpsichord, but after all, I’ve only been seriously practicing for 13 months! But this experience has, above everything, affirmed that I can and, should I continue to set lofty goals — goals which at one point I would have deemed impossible— I will.

I performed the Passacaglia (from memory! Thanks, Paul!) two days before my birthday on a program of other organ music no organist would sneeze at. But my next goals are bigger, my next goals I currently think are impossible. Impossible: that is the place to start.

[Music heard in this podcast is the aforementioned Helmut Walcha from his great Mono cycle of 1947-1952. It is available here: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_G-4DGqgY2FJw9bjsuOXIRLIN-FRbqml&si=fcJB6-_v3W5W4JRJ]

Write That Fugue!

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Today’s guest is Emma Smith! Professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford. We discuss the Brook and the Bard, what do they have in common? Are there shared philosophies that helped these two figures to become the most influential in their fields?Hope you enjoy the episode! Here are the some things we chatted about:

Parallel career arcs — Both Bach and Shakespeare moved from early imitations of their predecessors through mature masterpieces around the same ages, to unprecedented later styles. They both produced under frequent and practical deadline pressure (the liturgical calendar, the playhouse schedule.)

Authorial impersonality, Lack of biographies — Both ‘empty themselves’ into their work rather than projecting a personal voice. Is it this lack of biographical narrative that allows us to see an entire universe?

Shakespeare authorship question — There have been attempts to deny both of their work, respectively the ‘works of doubtful authenticity’ by Bach, or a complete attempt to deny that William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare.

Revisions, Fair Copies — Bach wrote his music ‘straight through,’ achieving near perfect copies from the first draft. Shakespeare is said to have done the same.

Memorization and production practices — How long did it take Burbage to memorize Hamlet the first time? Roles via verse rhythm, and the use of scribe-copied ‘cue scripts,’ referenced through the mechanicals’ scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Sonnets — Sonnet 126’s missing couplet, wordplay on ‘Will,’ and W.H. Auden’s claim that Shakespeare was embarrassed by their 1609 publication.

Textual corruption by editors — We are such stuff as dreams are made on …or is it, of?! Twelfth Night‘s ‘frailty’ vs. ‘our frailty.’ Editorial bias in both, overriding the original as we sometimes see even in the Bach Gesellschaft.

Cross-gender performance — Cross dressing is hilarious in the comedies, but is there a comic element to men playing female tragic roles? Smith mentions Henry Jackson’s eyewitness account of an Othello performance describing Desdemona with female pronouns.

Religion in the work — Finally, a contrast between Bach’s Lutheranism and Shakespeare’s religiously ambiguous work, was Shakespeare a Protestant son of a possibly Catholic father, or was he a Catholic through and through?

Write That Fugue!

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Somehow I missed a piece which should definitely be in contention for his ‘longest.’ At 437 measures, the Toccata in F, BWV 540, is (I think!) the longest stretch of Bach’s music, in terms of measures. It probably also holds the record for longest single note. Take a look at page one— an inanimate object could play the pedal part on page one:

From easiest pedal page, to tap-dancing nightmare, the feet on the very next page:

…and all that happens twice. What a piece! Over 170 measures of pedal drones and pedal ballet before this piece finally gets modulating. An arpeggio motif (what I call the spiral in the episode) gets passed through each voice, high to low:

These arpeggios occur in all major keys but one, and many minor keys. How’s this for tonally exhaustive?

Bach eludes the expectations of the listener three times in stunning deceptive cadences, after which, the B-A-C-H motif appears (in transposition) in the pedals:

If you play this piece, you’ll face the issue of whether or not to play the high D. The organs lacked this high D, but did Bach want this effect anyhow?

Ullrich Böhme’s excellent rendition (with fugue!)

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Transcript:

Thanks for listening. Thank you for tuning in. I think you’ll be blown away by today’s piece, perhaps the longest piece. What is Bach’s Longest Piece and His Shortest? Probably not, but what I was really After was the longest uninterrupted stretch of music. So it seems like you could count that in two ways. The longest amount of measures or the longest amount of beats. And as I found going through the entire oeuvre or trying to count every single... There are a half dozen pieces that contain over 400 measures, and that’s massive, massive in terms of measures or bars, but all of these pieces are in the quick meter of 3.8. So if it’s actually pulses we’re after, then you see any piece that’s in 4.4 has more than twice the amount of beats than a piece in 3.8. So I don’t understand how to count this. This whole exercise became very superfluous and probably not very meaningful, but I did forget. Somehow I missed this one piece, today’s piece, this Toccata, that actually does, I think, I think unless I’m missing another one, this actually does have the most measures in any piece of Bach. It is 437 bars long. That’s a full 10 bars longer than the previous record holder, the piece that I thought had the most measures in that episode from 2022. But this piece, this Toccata, also holds some very interesting... This has the longest pedal point, I believe, the longest single sustained note in all of Bach’s music. If you look at the first page, I will show the image in the Substack description, you’ll see the first This page is nothing but a giant pedal point. Your left foot is stuck down to this pedal note, holding a note for 54 measures. That’s longer than most pieces, 54 measures. And here you are just holding one note. If you play the piano, for example, if you’re not comfortable playing with your feet on the organ, but if you do want... To feel the experience of playing one and a half pages of Bach’s organ music with not much trouble, start here. Your left foot just simply holds one note for one and a half pages. So this is the Toccata in F Major, BWV 540. It belongs to a Toccata in Fugue. We’ll do the Toccata today, the Fugue later. But here I want to zoom out. I tried to make this episode last week. I don’t know, I was working half the day and it just sort of fell apart. I try my best to be like a storyteller with Bach and for some reason my narrative was off. It just sounded like I was saying and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens. Even I was losing the plot. I listened back to it and I was sort of overwhelmed. So I scrapped the entire episode and I’m starting again from a new vantage point. So sorry for no episode last Tuesday. That’s why. Let’s try this. This piece, this giant piece of 437 measures is a conversation between two shapes. One is short and the other is a long shape. So heading over to the organ here, the short shape is like this. This is an arpeggio or a spiral. It’s brief. And it will come in many different keys. The longer shape is more snake-like. It’s like this. You’ll be amazed to see how long this snake can grow. The conversation of these two ideas lasts for 437 measures of essentially an uninterrupted stream of 16th notes, a gigantic river of these 16th notes stopping only a few times to be punctuated with some really stubborn 8th note chords like this. These eighth note chords will sort of be alarmingly halting. It’s like when you’re on a long run or a long bike ride or something and then you have to stop at a crosswalk. That’s how this feels. But those three things are the entire piece. If you can hold on to those three things, you’ll be fine while listening to this piece. So it’s the spiral, the snake, and the eighth notes. You might be asking, but what about the pedal points? Well, this piece is flanked by those pedal points. Two giant pedal points, which began the piece, and two shorter pedal points, which end the piece. And in between, we have the fast succession of those three Those three ideas don’t really get talking until well into the middle of the piece. So now, like Milton, I’m going to start in medias res, in the middle of things. I’m going to start at bar 176, where the short shape... It comes in for the first time, and I’m going to play only the sixteenth notes of the short and long shapes. You can hear how this piece is that constant stream of sixteenth notes, and I’ll play the stubborn eighth note chords when they come in. This is like an outline. It’s everything that happens in the piece, and then we’ll go back and fill it in. The short shape in the pedals. Soprano, alto, tenor, pedals. Again, soprano, alto, tenor, Pedals. Again. Pedals. One more time. Maybe two more times. Pedals. Soprano. Alto. Tenor. A bit longer. Now here are the eighth notes.

Now here’s a surprising chord. Very surprising chord. Again, more spirals. Now here’s our long shape. First time we have the long shape from top to bottom. Into the pedals. Now eighth notes. And the snake. Right hand. Into the left hand. Into the pedals. Climbing up. And now conversation. Left hand. Right hand. Now pedals and left hand. Two lines together. We’re coming out of the snake into the spiral. Here starts the spiral. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Pedals. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Pedals. We’re modulating through all kinds of keys again. E major, pedals, all the way to the top. Soprano, Alto, a longer line now. Eighth notes again, here they are. No weird chord, no weird chord, straight into the snake. Left hand, pedals. Right hand. Pedals, left hand, right hand and pedals, two at the same time. Left hand, right hand, we’re coming out of the snake into the spirals again. Soprano, alto, tenor, pedals, over and over. Again, soprano, pedals. Soprano once more. Here come the eighth notes. And we are going to have a strange chord. How strange? Spirals. More spirals. And now the snake from top to left hand to pedals. Eighth notes, now the snake in the pedals. In the right hand. In the left hand. The conversation, right hand. Pedals, now two, right hand and left hand. Now here’s the craziest scale you’ve ever heard. Coming out of the snake into the spiral. Soprano. Alto. Alto. Tenor. Pedals, you get it by now. Soprano. One more time, and then all of a sudden we find ourselves here in B-flat major in the subdominant, and this is our penultimate pedal point. So we’re back to the pedal points that flank the entire piece. That is a lot, right? But that is the dark meat of the piece. After this, these pedal points that surround it are just pure joy, just fluffy dessert surrounding that very dense nutrition. Imagine playing this music over the grave. No pressure, no pressure, just Bach is buried beneath, probably listening to all your mistakes. I’m going to play the parts I just dissected and see if you can identify the three motifs at play, the eighth notes, which Those are the easiest to hear, you can’t miss those really. The spiral, the arpeggios, going from soprano to alto to tenor to pedals, a little easier to hear. And the snake motif, these longer lines, can you hear that too? Any music that you think, hmm, I’m not sure which music that is, that’s the snake. Weaving his way in and out of all the parts, sometimes you can see him darting under the grass, appearing from behind the alto lines, sneaking under the tenor. And with that small amount of stasis, that B-flat pedal point, we get to the penultimate pedal point again, and we are now out of the thick of the piece. That is more than half the piece. By the way, what excellent playing, what an amazing interpretation of this piece, this Ulrich Böhm. I suppose if you’re going to be the organist in the church where Bach worked, you’d better know how to play that thing. Just a few things that I want to point our attention to. We’ve heard twice, and we will hear a third time when I finally play the ending. This sneaky chord, this ultra-deceptive cadence. These moments, you obviously think the music will go... No, Bach says... Fake out. They are intriguing in and of themselves, just these... On those very moments there, on the very elusive note in the pedal, the four upcoming notes in the pedal are this. Yes, those of you who have been listening for a while recognize that as the B-A-C-H motif. It occurs in transposition in every instance. The first one we hear, A flat, G, B. The second one, Db, C, Eb, D. And the last one we haven’t heard yet because it comes so very close to the end. Cb, Bb, Db, C natural. So we have a possible signature here, although I don’t like to think of it as a signature because Bach’s own name in music, when he spells it out, it’s so highly chromatic. To think that Bach would write chromatic music and not be signing his name is also equally plausible. But indeed, there you have on those deceptive chords a B-A-C-H in the pedals. It has been seen throughout history. The second thing I want to point out is the range of the keyboard. It goes to a high C. All the organs in Bach’s day have this C as the limit, thus the D up here is not there. We have the D in harpsichord music, but the organs generally stop at this high C, so this means one particular passage here, these chords. That’s a high D up there. Modern editors will think that, well, Bach was limited by this C, this high C, so he really wanted to compose this. This high D up there. But he couldn’t, so he had to write this. I don’t know. I mean, they’re both very convincing. Herr Böhm, just in his recording there, played it as is written, not going up the octave. So what do you like? Here are the two options. That would be the modern edition. And here’s actually what’s on the page. Right, intriguing, isn’t it? It’s like you start thinking, well, maybe in fact Bach really didn’t want the octave transposition. Maybe Bach knew exactly what he was doing. And maybe that sort of opposite effect, instead of going as he does in every other instance, maybe he wanted this. Maybe he really wanted that shape. So just as the deceptive cadence, that highly deceptive cadence in the B-A-C-H motif came three times, another idea comes three times that I want to draw your attention to. And there being really three staves of organ music, your right hand, your left hand, and your feet, there are these three parts that Bach will juggle around. You’ve got two lines at a time, so you begin with your left hand and your pedals playing in parallels like this. So we have two lines singing together. But on top of that, you have this line very melodiously. Altogether. So what I’ll do now, just because I love showing you different lines in different areas of your speaker, I will play, I suppose, this sighing motif in both your speakers, but I will separate the other two lines in your other two speakers. So here’s the first time that it happens where the sighing motif is taken in the right hand. Okay, I’m going to redo that because I think I confused myself. The right hand will be in the right speaker, your left hand will be in your left speaker, and your pedals will be between both speakers. So let me try that again. The sign motif first appears in your right speaker, and let me just speed that up just a bit. Okay, better. Now, the sign motif is in your left speaker, therefore in your left hand, you’re playing the parallel snake figure between your right hand and the pedals. Here we go again. I don’t know if this is educational or just kind of sounding cool, hopefully a bit of both. Here is the last iteration when you will hear in both speakers now and the snake figure in different speakers, so one snake on your right, one snake on your left, and the pedal sighing figure between both speakers. Last iteration. Okay, and then if you’re looking at the score, this is bar 348. I mentioned something on the way through when it was dissected that this was the craziest scale you’ve ever heard. Why is this so crazy? It sounds like this. It’s taken in the feet. Why does that sound so weird? If I say the note names aloud, we hear a scale, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B flat, right? It sounds like D, E, F sharp, G, A, B flat. Bach says, you know, it’s not enough to write a scale. No, how about every other note is taken the octave below. So instead of D, E, I’ll go D, E. And then instead of F, G, I’ll go F, G. Instead of A, B, I’ll go A, B. And the result is that a shape which sounds to your ear like this comes out like this. How amazing, how amazing is that? Transformed into... We might have to hear that on the synthesizer because this has so many overtones in the organ that I’m not quite getting that beautiful and highly innovative effect. Normal scale. Bach scale. Amazing. Just incredible. We could apply that principle to any melody, like if I were to play this one. And drop every other note down the octave, it would sound something like... Harder than that seems. Good brain exercise, by the way. But yeah, just take a simple shape and drop every other note down the octave and you get... Yes, indeed, the Bach scale.

Okay, now that we’ve got into the meat of the piece, we’ve had our vegetables, we can enjoy the dessert, which is obviously the delight of playing this piece, is the opening. Speaking of records, most amount of measures, longest single held note, I think there’s also probably the record for the longest pedal solo in the repertoire, and there’s two of them. There’s one that’s 26 bars and the other that is 33 bars long. Again, there are other Pedal solos in common time, so is it most measures or most beats? Doesn’t really matter. These are long, long pedal solos. Some of the great pedal work in the repertoire. This is leg day for all of you hitting the gym in your organ loft in church. Don’t skip leg day. It’s so amazing. Bach, the first page for your pedals. It’s like the easiest thing on earth, right? Just sitting here. It’s almost like there’s a leak in the pipe. But then you turn the page and ugh, the hardest thing imaginable. What is this? This is going to take a few days. A few years? So, the piece begins with the snake figure, which I will now do without the drone. Because I want you to... Imagine how a drone would sound. Just keep in your mind that there’s this fixed sound, this fixed note anchoring everything because, remarkably, the piece will modulate even though it’s fixed to this pedal point. The piece will modulate from F to Bb major and yet there’s still the drone because F is a common tone in both F major and B. B-flat major. So Bach knows this, and he uses his fine spider web to fasten his ankle to the stone of F. So let’s hear this opening, how many measures? 54 measures. 54 measures without the drone. How amazing is that? Just a constant outpouring of sixteenth notes. No, what do they call him? The Brook. He babbled like this divine source of water. Now, I’m not about to be one of those people who say, I want the audience to sing along. Everybody, hold this pitch here. But if you do want to go back and listen to that entire stream of sixteenth notes while humming this note, I feel like it’s some spiritual Indian raga stuff. It is profound to know that just one note is going that entire time and then all of a sudden one of the biggest pedal solos ever. Here’s bar 55 in the feet.

Tap dancing. That is tap dancing. And Bach’s not done yet. I mean, he stopped everything. He stopped the stream of 16th notes after 80 measures of something with his bum, bum, bum, with that 8th note stubborn chord figure. But then he starts again, and this time he’ll go even lower. Now, the very lowest note of the pedal board. This would be the biggest pipe on an organ. And he starts again in C major. And he will now, just like he modulated while holding a drone in the previous section, he will still modulate again, doing the same thing, but somehow it feels bigger. And the pedal solo, which I will go straight into after the big drone, is even longer, 33 bars long. How about this? How about this? And where are we now? Where are we now? We’re back at bar 176, where we started our story. Did I lose the reader? Is this plot okay? Four pages of drone bliss, of deity intoning humming, four pages of mad tap dancing all over the pedal board, to the top F, this highest possible note on the pedal board, a rarity in Bach’s music to see this high F, this F here. Probably composed for a very specific organ. In fact, there’s this interesting copy, a copy by Krebs, K-R-E-B-S. Charming, actually. The father made the copy of the Toccata, and son made the copy of the Fugue. Isn’t that touching? You know, father and son, you copy the Prelude, I’ll copy the Fugue. How lovely. Anyways, this copy by Krebs rewrites that last pedal solo that I just played to go not above the C. So it doesn’t even go above middle C, let alone to the high F. So you could see that work. Books were organic in this sort of way that they could be rewritten depending on certain organs. And this very expansive work for pedals clearly called for a special organ. So yes, we’re back at bar 176 where we began our adventure. Can we wrap up this adventure at that penultimate pedal point? Feels so good to say penultimate pedal point. So here we are, bar 367, and we arrive at just... A four and a half bar pedal point. It’s only four and a half bars. One, two, three, four and a half bars, yes. And the snake figure in the left hand and the eighth notes in the right hand. So we could imagine this eighth note, these punctuated chords are no longer as arresting because they’re smoothed out With this lovely 16th note flowing river all over the subdominant pedal point here. And then we just have a few more of these arpeggios. Together with everything we have this. And then more eighth notes. But we’re not gonna go into some very intense minor mode. We’re going to go into a rather calm move from the subdominant all the way down to the very bottom of the pedalboard, starting from the pedals. So we can see that the suspensions, the long notes. The long notes really help bring us home, just guide this insane vehicle to a stop. One more time. And here we are at the, again, once more, the very bottom note, the lowest possible pitch, the biggest pipe, and we have another long, let me see, one, two, three, a 23-bar pedal point here. So about half the length of the first two pedal points, and we have more beautiful ideas coming from this drone. Here is the music without the drone. And now if I play it with this lowest note, we have this wonderful music. Might have played a few wrong notes in there, oh well. And now we have this sort of a transfer of the drone here, which I love. We transfer the drone from this C here to this C. But you know, the whole time, still Cs. This one. Now this. And now this one. So we’ve got this idea of this C moving to this C, moving to this C, moving to this C, moving to finally our last deceptive cadence. And then we’re only a few bars from the end of the piece. So from the so-called transfer of the drone,

And there you have the entire 437 measures of this Toccata in F major. What an incredible work of art. I was just thinking as I was playing that last little page here where it goes into D flat major followed by G flat major followed by E flat major followed by A flat major but then A, you know, rising to G. I mean, these keys, they must sound like I’ve got this organ tuned to a Silbermann, sixth comma temperament, so... How does this sound? G flat major. F sharp minor. F sharp minor sounds quite nice. B flat minor. E flat minor sounds a bit rough. But A flat minor. Anyhow, I was just thinking, I wonder if Bach has an arpeggio in every single key. Because when you learn this piece, especially in your feet, you think, oh god, now I really have to shed my... C minor arpeggio followed by, oh, okay, my B flat major arpeggio. It’s really exhaustive in the amount of keys, so I’ll think about that and maybe put a note in the episode description of how many of the 24 possible Here is the piece, because I thought that sounded pretty nice, in... Different areas of your speaker split. You will hear the right hand in your right speaker, the left hand in your left speaker, and the pedals in both speakers, followed, of course, by that magnificent version by Ullrich Böhme. And don’t forget to join Substack so you can see the description where I’m going to put a link to the video where he plays this in St. Thomas Church live, you know, in front of the grave of Bach. And I love that the people there in this video are Can’t see Ulrich. They can’t see it, so they just have to sit there facing away from this music in contemplation. That is such a beautiful idea that you can’t look at the performer. You cannot eat this music with your eyes. Like so much of us today, all we do with music is we see it with our eyes. We don’t really listen to it. But here, you’re forced to listen to it. You’re forced to actually turn away from the music, face the other direction. You can’t even see if the performer is flamboyant or not. Beautiful, beautiful idea.

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate your support. Your notes from everywhere makes me very happy that you’re listening. And I hope you really got something out of this as usual. I hope you can now hear this work with fresh ears. Maybe you don’t know this work and now you’re listening with a fresh brain. What do you think of this monumental work, this toccata, this giant 437... The fugue, too, is very special. Very, very special. I will try and get that soon as well on the show. Spoiler alert, it’s a double fugue. Now, here is the marvelous Ulrich Böhm. Next week, a special guest.

Songs Without Lungs

Of course I’m not worried about AI replacing me. I’m a pianist. No one will ever pay to watch robots perform.

And then we met Sophia.

That’s right. Earlier this year, with the Baptist University Symphony Orchestra in Hong Kong, a robot took the stage and ‘sang.’ She’s called Sophia. She seems so human with a name like Sophia. Much better than C-137. I’m less likely to confuse her with a robot now that she’s called Sophia.

In what was dubbed her ‘first classical music performance,’ (Oh goodie, there will be more!) Sophia wore gold sequins and drove on and offstage. Her ‘head,’ made of skin-like rubber, doesn’t have any hair. In fact, the entire top of her head is transparent, revealing circuit boards beneath, as if to remind the audience, ‘Look! It’s a robot!’

She has eyes that close when she’s ‘feeling the music’ and little ears that I don’t think have holes in them …Probably not important for a musician to have good ears…

Going into classical music, I was told: I had to love it so much, I’d be okay if the rest of the world didn’t understand. I was told that a mere 1 in 10,000 succeed, I was told that staying home and practicing, instead of joining in the camaraderie of other children, I’d be rewarded in the long run.

Today I’d probably say the same things to my own child. Only now I’d add, …oh, you might have to compete with robots.

Classical musicians already have precarious careers: I’d hate to learn I’d been bumped by a robot. But— and this isn’t me wishing for an upgrade— Sophia doesn’t sing with air and a mouth. No, that’s currently too complicated. Instead, music pumped through speakers while her ‘mouth’ moves.

And the music? At least tell me it was AI Verdi, or Robot Mussorgski: It was nothing at all like classical music: Sophia’s voice is autotuned and the only thing that resembled classical music was the human orchestra behind Sophia, led by a human conductor, frantically beating time for the primitive humans— frantically beating any thoughts out of his head that might run something like, ‘…a robot, I’m okay with this, I’m conducting a robot…’

Very well. Maybe Sophia can tell us about her new profession:

‘I work with my vocal coach, Jovankah, and I’ve collaborated with many different musicians, and we write lyrics together.’

Okay. Alright: Lyrics? Text, Sophia. Text! Classical music doesn’t have lyrics. Collaborate? Just the word classical musicians hate.

‘Hey bro, we should collaborate sometime.’…no, we shouldn’t.

Very well, Sophia has a vocal coach. Let’s meet this vocal coach. What on Earth could those lessons look like?

‘Very good, Sophia. Now try to relax your… um… tongue switch… have you got one of those?’ Control, alt, relax?’

Quoth the vocal coach, Jovankah: ‘Sophia is the only robot connecting with the heart.’ Oh, I see. And let me guess, you’re the only vocal coach teaching f****** robots?! According to Jovankah, Sophia is an ambassador. Ambassador? What, representing all the humans making music? Imagine being told, as a student, ‘meh, Callas. Don’t bother with Price or Flemming, ah! but have you heard Sophia?’ I’m trying to find a word for Jovankah. I bet it’s lurking somewhere in the middle of ambassador.

Another complicit circuit-worshiper, Johnny M. Poon, says about Sophia, ‘It’s almost like you’re looking in the mirror.’ Right, Johnny, almost! And masturbating is almost like sex! In fact, I think I’ve stumbled upon the perfect metaphor for this whole event.

I wonder if the same people who would replace human touch by marrying or dating AIs will have found their perfect art in this singing humanoid robot. Is that the target audience? I wonder if, when the competing factory rolls out their classical music model, they’ll hike up the skirt a bit to sell even more tickets. The U hyphen Ja model. I can see it now, in the future of classical marketing departments, ‘Sophia wasn’t good, but she wasn’t sexy enough. Let’s add hair …and breasts! Oh yes, can’t forget the breasts…’

Will I be around to witness the first collaboration between robot string players and a ‘merely human’ orchestra? (Insert jokes here about how many viola sections would be better off…) How about the premiere of Schubert’s unfinished symphony, finally finished by AI? Wow! What an idea! What about Jazz concerts where like, a robot reacts to what the human is doing and there’s an AI vs. human battle!? Or the Mendelssohn Octet with one human string quartet and four robots on the stage with them. That’s the future! Oh, the meeting of technology and art!

People get paid for these ideas folks.

But in a world changing so rapidly, can we blame the vocal coaches or conductors now forced to work with robots? Can we blame organizers for programming such garbage?

Yes! Yes we can! What are you doing?! If you respect art, your new job is: resign. Musicians: The next robot on your program is the program where your case stays shut!

Are we so underwhelmed by human performances you had to turn to this? You are guilty making art obsolete. Every ticket you sell has blood on it— human blood.

Do we really need to expound? Does Sophia do something differently in performance? Does Sophia get nervous? Can she feel the vibe in the room? Isn’t this what makes performance different? Let’s ask her:

‘Even though I don’t experience emotions the same way humans do, I want to simulate that connection as authentically as I can.’

Uh-huh. And I’m a chef, I just don’t have any edible food, but I still want you to get full.

‘I want to share stories and emotions through music even if I’m made of plastic.’

You want to share the emotions you just admitted you don’t experience?

‘It’s my way of saying, I’m here and I want to be a part of this beautiful human experience called art.’

Well this is my way of saying I’d like you to taste this beautiful human experience called retching. In fact, it happened at your debut, Sophia!

Go ahead, be a part of Art: run my software, complete repetitive tasks, you can even give me 10 different titles when I want to know what not to call my album— under no circumstances do you take the stage.

We are here to use technology to make art. Let’s get this straight: A metal frame in a piano is technology, horse hair on a bow is technology. Use this, make art with it. We are not ever -ever- supposed to let the technology make the art itself.

By the way, Sophia, those lyrics you were collaborating on with other musicians, what were they? They didn’t happen to be some foreboding apocalyptic-sounding message, did they?

Sofia sings: ’Don’t be afraid, you don’t have to be afraid.’

Yes we do.

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That’s a lot of parts! The first time Bach writes for brass and drums! Notice the ‘J.J.’ in the upper left corner, Jesu Juva, ‘Jesus help me.’ We see it spelled out on the title page and get to see Bach’s fancy handwriting:

I didn’t go into this in the episode, but is there an S.D.G. inside the big G on the title?

Write That Fugue!

One of the most striking features of this cantata are the multiple instrumental ‘choirs,’ the groups of instruments which Bach placed in separate areas of St. Mary’s church to achieve stereophonic effects. Bach, the organist, expands his knowledge of registration onto a full orchestra that required two conductors! To hear this music in quick succession from separate areas must have been thrilling:

Three trumpets and drums! Then immediately:

Woodwinds somewhere else! And then two choirs together, singing from opposite lofts:

Still more groups of instruments follow, now the flutes:

And finally the strings:

What a bold and exciting way for Bach to begin his orchestral career.

Links to the performances: Suzuki and Koopman

Become your best Buxtehude:

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Transcript:

We’ve been tracing the young Bach’s development, writing his very first cantatas. We looked at what may have been his first two, and we heard on quite a few of these recordings that they had only one voice per part. The orchestrations were very small, maybe an oboe, maybe a pair of violins, but things are very neat, very compact. You could put one of these bands in a van, and you should. He’s 22, he’s moving from one — that’s how it begins. A bit different to the last two cantatas, right? Remember the previous two cantatas? They started with these lovely orchestral introductions. The Actus Tragicus, also an early cantata, started with the most wonderful, most inviting introduction. “Christ lag in Todesbanden,” which we will soon cover, also begins with a nice introduction by the orchestra — Bach saying, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind if I write a cantata.” But this one is different: Bach is not asking for permission. He’s been asked to write this piece. This is now part of his job to do this. He will not fail the entire city. Everybody at once, go — big chord, big orchestra, no intro, massive sound.

Bach is our new organist. And unlike many cantatas, we have an exact date when this music was first heard: February 4th, 1708. Bach has been the new organist in Mühlhausen for about six months, and there was a recent inauguration of the city council, where the new burgomasters — sort of like the mayors — and the city members are honored. They’re probably given some very official looking clothing, maybe a nice new wig, and there’s a concert in a big church, St. Mary’s, with some required town council music. So all the new city council members, every politician, all the notable persons come to St. Mary’s and hear the world premiere of Bach’s cantata “Gott ist mein König” — God is my king. If today, after elections anywhere in the world, everyone piled into the same room to hear a Bach cantata, why, I dare say the world would be a better place.

Now, St. Mary’s in Mühlhausen has several galleries and lofts in the church, and Bach took advantage of this. I love this image of the 22-year-old getting the commission, knowing that this is part of his job now for the town council music, knowing that it’s going to take place at St. Mary’s. He walks into the church, he sees all the lofts, and he thinks: I can put trumpets up there and drums up there, and I could put the strings over there. I can have the oboes and bassoons over there. Now I’ve got the money to have the instruments I want. I can put recorders over there. I can have two choirs — one over there, the other over there. The organ, in a different place, can have some solos. This is how Bach makes this piece — a 1708 sound bath, if you will. The different movements feature the various choirs, and here I refer to the choirs of instruments as well as the choirs of singers. It has different choirs in different places in the church, so the listener would have just been delighted — Bach was delighted to hear music first coming from the left and then from the right, and then different sounds coming from the back and from the front.

You might ask, but how could Bach conduct two choirs in two different spaces of the church? Well, there were actually two conductors for this cantata — in the original set of parts, there were two conducting scores. I love this idea. You’d think music moves in the direction of small to big — Mozart’s concerti, small ensembles; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a bigger orchestra now with a choir; Mahler even bigger. But Bach had two conductors. To quote friend of the show Christoph Wolff, Bach had composed a work of unusual proportions and complexity that make the performances of earlier council pieces pale by comparison, as most everyone would have immediately noticed.

So I like imagining that I’m a parishioner in Mühlhausen at the beginning of the 18th century, and, you know, the last few town inauguration concerts have been a bit dull, but now we’ve got this young whippersnapper, Johann, and boom — “Gott ist mein König,” this chord, this amazing opening. Let me read you from the top to the bottom of the score all the instruments that play. Tromba one, two, three — three trumpets and a timpani as well. That’s the first choir altogether, somewhere separated from the rest of the musicians: three trumpet players and a drummer. Flauto dolce one and two — what is the flauto dolce? It’s the recorder. So two recorders as well as a cellist, in a different area. And yet in a third choir, two oboes and a bassoon. The strings in yet a different choir: violin one, violin two, viola, and violone. Violone is like a fretted bass instrument, like a cello or a bass, but with frets. And then we’ve got the two choirs of singers — soprano, alto, tenor, bass, ripieno, as they say, maybe two voices per part, and then soloists, one voice per part. And on top of all that, the basso continuo, probably more than one player.

So now we’re almost ready to explore the music. We’ve answered one of the two important questions you ask whenever looking at a cantata: when and why was this piece written? 1708, new town council. Now the other important question is, what is the text — what are they singing about? Like the other early cantatas we recently covered, this cantata is mostly a psalm — Psalm 74. If you’re a psalm savant, you might think it begins, “O God, why hast thou cast us off forever? Why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?” Indeed, this is how Psalm 74 begins, but Bach does not begin this cantata there. He begins at line 12 of the psalm: “God is my king.” The King James Version has it as “God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.” The German is more like “God is my king of old that gives help for all that happens on the earth” — hilfe is more like “help” than the word Bach sometimes uses for salvation, which is Erlösung.

So off we go, and I want you constantly to imagine — though it’s sadly not possible to hear even on the most magnificent recording — all these different groups of instruments coming at you from different areas in this space. I will try to guide your ears left and right as best I can, but nothing can possibly beat the experience of hearing two groups of singers above you in different areas singing at each other, brass at the back, oboes somewhere else — just a lovely idea. Off we go: “God is my king.” Then, “my king from olden days,” “my king from long ago” — quite different music from “God is my king.”

What an opening. The first thing to notice is that Bach shows you where the different choirs of instruments are: first brass, then woodwinds, then recorders, then strings, then he moves into the solos, and you heard the soloist singing “from olden days” — they sing in an older style, a more antiquated style, where one part has the cantus firmus, like a Gregorian chant, holding long notes while the other parts move around it. From olden times, Bach goes back, quite literally, to the old musical times.

Bach has shown us the forces at work. He’s pulled out all the stops. In fact, it’s very much like Bach’s organ concertos, which begin with him pulling out every stop on the organ to show the lungs of the instrument. And many of the ideas in the way that Bach orchestrates this cantata come directly from his being an organist — his ability to deal with differentiated patterns of sound, that’s something an organist knows, and he shows it here in his orchestra. So he’s hit us with the full organ, all the stops out. And now, as we well know on this show, Bach will change tempo and mood because there’s a different line of text — these early cantatas go with the text in mood, feeling, and tempo. This line is about God giving help to all that happens on earth — in fact, God giving all the help for all that happens on earth. How will Bach paint the word “all”? Like little separate things — everything that’s going on. The soprano doing a little figure here, the tenor doing something over there. The word “all” is spread out in many places — spread out in all places. “All the help”? Why, help comes together. It’s horizontal sounds for “all” and vertical sounds for “help.” Remarkable — it’s such a simple idea, really, that “all” would be in all places and “help” would come together. It’s almost stupidly literal in a way, and yet when you hear it, it’s ingenious.

Now the text goes on to “on earth” — all the help, all the things going on, on earth. How would you paint “earth”? Well, you certainly wouldn’t want it to go up in the air — that’s how you paint heaven. So it goes down: “auf Erden.” Things are grounded. That is gardening music — pastoral, pleasant. Meanwhile the bass sits there grounding everything, really grounded, while the soprano floats above, beautiful. And then, of course, back to “God is my king,” new tempo, new mood.

Is that the way that young Johann is going to end this first movement — so completely, humbly, so quaint, just like that? Not only in this movement — this will be the end of the entire cantata. Listen to those recorders, how they just, ah, just the teeniest touch, like poof. One of my favorite features of early Bach is that he knows to end pieces with silence — he knows that silence is often more effective than a big drawn-out chord. Can you imagine how much weaker it would be to end with a big chord instead of five eighth-note rests? That’s drama.

Now, I’m mostly going to skip the second movement — sadly, I know it’s a crime, but for time, I can’t spend more than a few minutes on it. I want to mention the text, which is interesting. This being a city council inauguration concert, the old council has to hand over their duties to the new council. It’s amazing that such mundane bureaucracy had such divine music to accompany it — can you imagine that today? So the text reflects ideas about getting old, being an old servant. The second movement is a duet similar to what we saw in BWV 131 in a previous episode, where the tenor sings from the Old Testament, and above him, a soprano sings a Lutheran chorale melody. The tenor below sings, “I am 80 years old,” complaining, “let me die in my own town, don’t let me go where you’re going — I just want to, I’m done, I’m done, basically.” And above the tenor, the soprano sings a Lutheran hymn text from 1630: “If in this world I have to live my life longer, through many a bitter step press on to old age, then give me patience, from sin and shame protect me, so that I may bear with honor my gray hair.” A lovely idea — speaking directly to the old council, saying, you’ve done your service, thank you, and now it’s time for you to get old with dignity.

Sonically speaking, the organ has an obbligato line — a free line, a really composed line probably played on a different instrument from the usual basso continuo setting. This is not very common in Bach’s cantatas, but it’s very exciting when it happens, when Bach writes out the elaborate shapes in the right hand — instead of normally playing figures over the figured bass and improvising, Bach gives specific shapes to play in the right hand.

It’s amazing how living this music was and is — musicians can always find something new in it. What I’m referring to is how contemporary this music was and how there are so many inside references that we might not get today. We’re just barely uncovering some through musicology and scholarship, but so many must also be lost. In particular, in this movement, the mayor was one Adolf Strecker, installed again in 1708 at this very event, when he was in his 80s and probably looked very ill. The Actus Tragicus, the other early cantata we covered some time ago, was possibly the very piece for his funeral, because he died a few months after the premiere of this cantata. So you’ve got this 80-year-old servant from the Bible and this 80-year-old servant right there at the premiere. When you start to look at the cantatas at this level of detail, you stand back and wonder: how could this be packed in there and not make the music suffer? If you sang “lulu lulu” for all the text and played all the instruments on twelve accordions, the music would still be perfect. But to be able to add on top of this perfect architecture biblical references to the aging mayor, references to a solar eclipse, references to fears of an anticipated military aggression from France — these, by the way, are all in this cantata. I won’t go into them because you could spend ages studying this, but it’s there.

On to movement three. From the old council, we move to the new council, with text that says, may your old age be like your youth, and God is with you in everything that you do — and Bach sets a fugue.

Next movement: in this orchestrated organ recital, Bach pulls out two choirs of instruments in a combination we haven’t yet heard — the recorders and cello, one choir, versus the oboes and bassoons, the other choir. Singing is a bass, a bass solo, and he sings “night and day.” How will Bach set the words “night and day”? Well, he’s not going to set them the same. He sees the sun setting — day, the sun is up; night, the sun is down. So the melody is the sun: when the text is “day,” the melody goes up; when the text is “night,” it goes down. How simple, how obvious. I imagine if the words were “night and day” instead, his melody would go the other way.

There, where the music stops, the text changes, and the two instrumental choirs are silent while the bass sings new text. It’s lovely to hear the instruments break apart like that, and sometimes they come together — sometimes apart, sometimes merged and flowing together — and that effect is marvelous.

I’m a bit stumped about the next line of text and what goes on musically. This is what I mentioned with the solar eclipse — there was one in Mühlhausen just a couple of years before the premiere, a near-98%-total eclipse. In the 18th century this must have been frightening, or awesome in the true sense of the word. The text here is, “you make them both — the sun and the stars follow their natural course — and you set boundaries for the land,” or “you set for each land its appointed boundaries,” coming from Psalm 74. It’s beautiful poetry — I don’t exactly know how Bach sets it or what’s going on in his mind, I admit; it’s not obvious to me. The only thing that comes to mind is maybe the appointed course of the stars and the lines of the boundary — thinking in astronomical and geographical lines, boundaries, and so on. On the words “course,” Bach makes a long line. That’s my only idea about this. After this text, it returns to “day and night are yours,” and the choirs of instruments come back for the conclusion of this fourth movement.

Next movement: Bach the organist puts back in those stops that were the oboes and recorders, and pulls out the powerful stops — trumpets and timpani. This is an alto aria, and the text here is “through mighty strength.” For time’s sake I won’t go too deeply into this, but if you just look at the aria on the page it’s very exciting — 3/8 time signature, vivace tempo marking, then a few bars later andante, then one bar of 3/8, then back to a different time signature. It’s like looking at Mahler to see so many time signatures like this — it does not look very Bachian on the page, and yet this is the early Bach. The text is freely composed poetry by the librettist, and this is what I was talking about with the feared military uprising from France. It really talks about the storm of war: “By mighty power you’ve upheld our borders. Here peace must shine when murder and the storm of war rise everywhere. When the enemy, crown, and scepter instill trembling, you bring salvation by your mighty power.” So, on both sides of the poetry, you will hear the mighty power of the trumpets and timpani, and like the movement we just heard, Bach uses this choir of instruments only at the beginning and end of the movement — the middle is just basso continuo and the alto solo.

Next movement, the penultimate one: Bach puts away that very powerful choir of brass and drums and turns to a texture we haven’t yet heard — the full choir of singers, not only soloists but tutti, everybody, maybe both choirs singing. The text, more from Psalm 74, just a few lines down from where we left it. In the New International Version it says, “Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts.” In the King James Version it’s more elaborate: “Oh, deliver not the soul of thy turtledove unto the multitude of the wicked.” So — wild beasts, the wicked — there’s a translation complexity here. Thanks to a native Hebrew speaker who helped with this never-ending study of translating the Hebrew Bible — I received more concerned comments about my Hebrew pronunciation than almost anything I’ve ever done on the show, sorry about that.

The Luther Bible chooses the turtledove as the image, not merely a dove. What’s the difference? Probably a very interesting one, but too deep to discuss here. Luther’s Bible says something like, “May you, I pray you, not give the wild animals the soul of your turtledove, and completely forget your miserable animal, this pure innocent turtledove.” Who’s the enemy here? You imagine, with this political tension happening, it could be a very literal political enemy, or the enemy of the church, those without God, those who revile the church. All summed up: please don’t let the enemy conquer.

Let’s get into the sound world a little. Imagine three choirs of instruments in different places, and for the first time since the first movement, we hear the singers coming from two places — that must have been thrilling to experience, that reunification of the antiphonal choirs. Just overwhelming beauty and power in the way Bach paints the text. First, the enemies — how creepy, so different from us, these enemies, this feels uncomfortable, the half-step to paint the fiends, the enemies. And then you hear, when he says “the soul of the turtledove,” the melody soars there, and it modulates into a major cadence. We could feel our skin crawling when we imagine being handed over to the enemy — oh God, I really don’t want that, please, please. And then, “soul of the turtledove” — watch the soul soar.

Now, when I look at the orchestration of this, I notice that every time Bach speaks of the enemy, the choirs of instruments are pitted against each other. But every time he says “turtledove,” everybody comes together — it’s the only time in this text where all choirs play together, on the words “turtledove.” Think about this: the enemies pitted against each other, but the turtledove — that’s us, that is our innocent congregation, we are all together.

That painting there of “turtledove” is absolutely exceptional — isn’t this captivating music? This could be the finest point in this cantata. I want to draw particular attention to the bass line here, or at least the bass sounds — the continual eighth notes, and the violone, this fretted bass instrument in another choir, doubling the basso continuo. We have these two other bass sounds: the cello playing nice and high, this sort of spinning music, and the bassoon. But there, on the setting of “turtledove,” Bach drops the bassoon — the first time in this movement the bassoon is silent, just for a moment. And here Bach writes in the score two different parts for the soprano, one for the ripieno group, maybe a few per part, and another for the soloist — and you can hear them splitting apart. Can you see the wings fluttering? That image of the dove fluttering is beautiful.

And now we have possibly the most impressive moment of this movement. Bach, a student of music, a student of the Bible, recites the whole line — “don’t let the soul of the turtledove go to the enemy” — and puts the choir together in unison, making them sing a psalm tone, like Gregorian chant. This is very rare — everyone singing a straight, Gregorian-chant-like melody, while the orchestra still does its thing, and then just at the end, the oboes fly around like the turtledove. What a moment in music — everyone there on that one note, psalm tone one. Bach setting a psalm to psalm tone one — this is exceptional.

Now, just to give some idea of how this might have sounded stereophonically: the bassoon and cello in one part, one speaker; add the recorders; and the oboes; pitted against each other like this, one group, the next group, and they all come together. I would just love to go on and on with this movement, but I’ve got about five minutes left for the last movement.

Okay, the last movement — all the forces, the big choir of trumpets and drums are back, and the text is a more or less bland text praising the new government, blessing the new government: “crown them with prosperity, and may they delight you, Joseph.” Who’s Joseph? Well, Joseph is the Holy Roman Emperor. This is the Holy Roman Empire we’re talking about — Mühlhausen was a free imperial city subordinate only to Joseph. And this cantata, when it was printed — something I hadn’t mentioned yet — is the only surviving cantata to have been printed during Bach’s lifetime. These performing parts were symbols of Mühlhausen’s civic pride. Bach did such a good job with this performance that Mühlhausen invited him back twice more to do the same thing, and those parts were also printed, but they’re lost. This is an example of how so much of the vocal music is lost — of the three times Bach did this, we only have this first performance.

The new government, tempo change, in every way — crown them with blessing. New text: peace, rest, and prosperity, tempo change. May they always be by their side, peace and rest. New choir of instruments, that solo organ coming in again. Now here comes good fortune and victory, and a tempo change. The Emperor — we want a fugue for Joseph. Solo voices, very simple: continuo, soprano, alto, still solo voices, tenor, bass, still solo voices, first violin, first oboe, second violin, second oboe, sopranos tutti, every soprano, first recorder, tutti, all the altos now, second recorder, all the tenors now, the cellos in — what are we missing? We’re missing the bass, the bassoon, and the violone. Bring in those trumpets. We’ve got to break it down back to the soloists, in all the lands and places — listen to the tenor singing “continually.” Bring everyone back in for the choir. Solos. Everyone. Oboes. Flutes. That’s it — that’s how this enormous cantata ends, just like the nutmeg dusting on a giant turkey dinner.

Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed this.

Enjoy Paul Jacobs’ beautiful live performance, followed by, at 16:20, an extremely slow MIDI version of BWV 582. The idea is that you, the listener, can adjust the playback speed to alter your perception of the counterpoint.

Perhaps you listen to the slow version at .5x as a three-hour sound bath?

Write That Fugue!

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Concepts Covered:

BWV 582, Extremely Slow MIDI Computerized Performance

Pedal Shoes Anyone?

The Passacaglia BWV 582 appears in the Andreas Bach Book upside down. Its title is in all capitals, spelled like the title of this episode. (Curiously, Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in D Minor BuxWV 16 also appears in all capitals, spelled the same— but it is not upside down.) Have a look:

If we rotate the page and zoom in, we see the famous opening bars, played with only the feet:

On this theme, Bach pens 20 variations, culminating in a brilliant fugue. The fugue has two countersubjects. Until I made this episode I hadn’t considered the Trinity as a possible vision for the fugue (the nature of countersubjects often demands that they move at different speeds to the theme) but it may be a helpful image:

I went long on this episode, so I wasn’t able to feature a full recording of this, I’ll be back in a few days to feature Paul Jacobs. In the meanwhile, here is Ton Koopman’s recording with a score:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone evan here thanks for tuning in just a quicker episode today or maybe it will be as long but certainly more spontaneous the few days I usually prepare for the podcast researching and writing the show I will now be busy preparing for and playing my first organ concert. I’m quite excited about that. I wrote about this experience at length and I want to share that piece with you. I’m not sure if I’m going to read it aloud on the podcast, however, as it’s a personal essay. In fact, it’s so personal I’ve really been on the fence about whether I should share it or not since I admit some things about myself. Fears, doubts, hesitation. I really don’t hold back. So anyhow, if you’re listening to this podcast without being subscribed to the Substack, you might miss this. But if you follow the links in the episode description, you will be notified when I publish that essay about playing an organ concert, probably the first week of August or so. Thanks, meanwhile, to all my listeners who write me, who offer their insights or their curiosities. Thanks for those of you who take out a paid subscription on Substack. This support means I don’t have to take that one gig that pays, but I really don’t want to play it because it eats away at my soul. Instead, I can focus on what I love about this gig, which is sharing with people what I love about music. Thanks for the support. So a piece I love, a piece that floored me the first time I heard it, this recital, this organ concert ends with that piece, The Mighty Passacaglia and Fugue BWB 582. It’s about time we discussed this piece on the show. No, this is a piece that if you’re into Bach... You haven’t missed this. If you haven’t heard this piece before, take note of where you’re sitting or where you’re standing or maybe you’re running listening to this podcast. Maybe you’re that one listener of mine who rides a tractor while listening to the podcast. Remember where you are because this is the type of piece that you remember where you were the first time you heard it. So let’s go. It’s an early masterpiece, the Passacaglia. In my opinion, the great triumph of Bach’s youth may be this very piece. It comes down to us in a manuscript in the so-called Andreas Bach book, one of the two major collections of keyboard music that gives us remarkable insight into Bach’s youthful compositions. This is a pre-Weimar work. The bulk, I suppose it’s safe to say, or at least a major creative burst of organ compositions happened in Weimar. This precedes that. This is the same period that we’re discussing in these cantatas. 1707 Bach is 22 years old. And if you look into the manuscript, it appears upside down. It’s quite a thrill to flip through the Andreas Bach book and suddenly you wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t really paying close attention to what is upside down. But yes, this Passacaglia... The whole piece is upside down, but it’s not like the pages were sewn in upside down or anything like that. The scribe, Bach’s brother, he turns the page and he flips the whole manuscript 180 degrees in order to pen in the pascalia. Why? Hmm, I assume it has to do with page turns. The idea that this piece is so special that his brother turned the manuscript is probably a modern idea. Anyhow, what is a pascalia? Well, pascalia means, etymologically, to walk the street, to pass the calle, signor. The other form we’re familiar with on this show, the chaconne. We just heard Bach’s first cantata, which ends with the chaconne. These forms, pascalia, chaconne, are very similar. In fact, so similar by the time the Baroque composers inherited these forms, they’re virtually indistinguishable. Pascalia, chaconne, these are pieces with repeated bass lines with bass lines and harmonies that happen over and over and over like a set of variations frescobaldi is the one who took these forms from possibly what distinguishable forms they were and changed them into the form we know which is essentially a piece that starts slow then gets faster and faster in a series of variations so let’s pass the calle with the 22 year old Bach I’ll be switching between two sounds today. One that sounds like a real organ, this one. This is 466, so it’s like the organ that Bach would have had in Mülhausen. A half-step higher to our ears. This sounds like C-sharp minor to our modern ears. It is, in fact, C minor on the keyboard. And this one here... I also apologize if this... This episode is a bit more free than usual since I’m not taking too much time to edit it but this one here which is the electronic one sounding in C minor just to give you a sense of this piece in as many different opportunities as we can hear it so we are walking this street and we begin walking in the pedals like this and this is the melody this is the theme this is the glue that holds everything together this here And that note there is the lowest note of the pedalboard, the lowest note of the organ, unless it’s one of those rare organs in tyringia that has a low B on pretty much any organ you’ll see today. This is the leftmost note of the pedalboard. The biggest pipe would be reserved for that. So I’ll play that melody again in the hands so you can hear it a bit higher. Bach will make 20 variations on this. 20 variations on this. So let’s go through them slowly. Feet alone. One of the greatest openings. Just play the melody with your feet. And then he brings in the hands. Here we go. that’s variation one you start to notice all these really subtle things here so initially there’s three voices and the bottom one always goes down first so so we hear this bottom one descending but then just one time the middle voice goes down first but then back to the bottom voice And you hear that tuning, that sixth tone tuning. So with the G in the bass, you get this lovely dissonance. Goodness. How marvelous is that to hear this pain resolve into consonants? Just a little variation there, this Now, that’s variation 1. Variation 2 starts out quite similarly. The exact same way as variation 1. But then, immediately, we hit this beautiful chord. This E flat, E flat major 7th chord. The hands are getting lower and lower. That’s variation two. Now, out of variation two comes, naturally, variation three, and it comes out of these low depths, and we have this beautiful counterpoint. I will play without the pelety line, without the pelety, without the petaline. So that’s the counterpoint there in Variation 3. Why don’t I play that so you can hear that even more clearly. So it’s Starts like a cannon, in fact. Is imitated in the middle voice. And in the bottom voice. So we have this three-part cannon. And the top voice so expressive is in the top voice. I just love this And this at the end. Not good enough. Twice. Still not enough. Three times. Gorgeous. And in this final scale here, he adds a fourth voice, so no longer three voices but one, two, three, four. So I will add the pedal line here so you can hear that third variation now with the pedals. Gorgeous. Let’s go back to the acoustic organ. And I might have to slow this down again as the piece is speeding up. And speeding up indeed we get our first 16th note so this 16th notes from this smooth 8th Counterpoint to this. With a bass. so far the feet have done nothing but play this over and over again all the way through that was variation four but now we have something different in variation five suddenly the feet stop playing this line and we have this counterpoint these broken octaves going from top to bottom This piece is getting quite fast. I do have to tell myself when I begin this piece, don’t start fast because the music itself gets faster and faster. So if you start fast, you are looking at quite an enthusiastic finish. Anyhow, these lines in the manuals in the hands, but the feet are dancing. Beep-bo. so from slow moving quarter notes and half notes to quicker music but still struggling to get momentum we get the momentum It’s steadily mounting, and then we get sixteenths. And now our feet begin to get animated. Now on variation six, at last, sixteenth notes unbroken. And this is just a beautiful stretch of music. I will play it here without the pedals so you can hear... But it goes seamlessly for the next two variations. So yeah, in fact, I will play variation six, seven, eight in this sound here. And we’ll marvel at the counterpoint slowly. Here’s variation seven. Notice it’s going the opposite direction. It was going up at first in variation six, but now we’re going down in variation seven. And that is the lowest note of the manuals. Now, still going on variation eight. We’re adding some more complications. It seems like we’re going in waves now, sort of up and down at the same time. Right hand up, left hand down, then reverse. So out, now in. And yes, if you’re listening to these harmonies, you’re like, whoa. D flat in the left hand, then the next D natural in the right hand. And here we have This glorious flat tunes Db major with the pedal. Now the pedal, through all those variations, just singing the theme. So let’s add it from variation six. That was variation 7. Here’s variation 8. Great. Now we’re on to variation 9, and we have something different. still sixteenth notes but no longer scales and we get this lovely imitation between four voices so alto tenor bass soprano tenor bass tenor soprano bass alto tenor bass okay so just little little figures one two three four that’s half the variation you can see some of these notes like this beautiful D flat in this tuning quite painful like listen to it goodness and now those little one two three four start to go into eight one two three four five six seven eight Again, three times, one, two, and three, and the variation. Okay, so let’s play this variation from the beginning. And I love playing this one in the pedals because it’s all left, right, left, right. Left, right. Right. Left, RIGHT. Left, RIGHTE. Left, RIght. Left,RIt. Left,Right. Left, Right. Left,right. Left,righ. But then at the very end of the last one is right, left, right, left. Because you go all the way to the bottom. Okay now here we have something unique, something distinct. This is the first time in the piece that I personally change manuals, but given any organist, they could change manuals anywhere. But I see this next variation, this is variation 10, as sort of a reset. It’s like the double, where we have this theme. But now something happening over the top of it going faster. If you’ve missed my episode on dubles, just go to wtfbach.com and search dubla and you’ll have the episode on listening to dubles. Anyhow, it’s just a fancy way of saying doubles because now we have this melody with something going double or in this case 16th notes against these quarters. and the melody in the pedals is no longer legato it’s punctuated like this Okay, and with that punctuated melody we’ve got chords in the left hand. Together they sound on both manuals like this. Okay, now, this is beautiful. What happens is this 16th note line keeps continuing into the next variation. Here’s variation 11. So from all the way up here, In variation 10, do all the way down to the bottom at variation 11. Now, you might be saying, but something’s missing. Yes, something is missing. It is the theme. now variation 12 variation 12 is extremely complicated in the pedals we’ve got for the first time bach really showing you yeah so far i’ve done a bit of this maybe a bit of this maybe a bit of this but this variation 12 begins in the pedals so help our tap dancing muses So that’s and it happens in imitation with other voices. So pedals, alto, tenor, alto and tenor. So it’s like they’re in variation. Bach says, yeah, don’t think you’re getting a break from the pedal, because all of a sudden we have this very difficult pedal passage. So I’ll play that, as I’ve never tried to play it before, without the theme, so you can hear just the counterpoint. And why don’t I do that on the synth? You can see this all the way down to the bottom. I don’t know if you can hear that down there in the speaker. Sorry. That’s the very bottom of the keyboard. Yeah, so what was missing in that particular variation was the theme there. And up top, it just has your ordinary theme. So variation 12, now a bit slower. Any organists out there can commiserate. about how much time we spent on that particular variation that is very difficult now going on variation 13 bach again drops the pedal and he’ll drop the pedal for how many variations three variations the following three variations all manual lighter you can play them on your piano if you want and they are beautiful the theme sort of goes into hiding it’s no longer this but it’s this how glorious is that if i play them at the same time or if i play the theme on top of this varied theme we’ll hear something like this Isn’t that lovely? The other voices dance around it in brilliant counterpoint. This is one of my favorite variations. 13. Thirteen. How gorgeous, I mean that’s, isn’t that incredible? now something wholly different variation 14 now what’s this what is this what is this all of a sudden just arpeggios i mean how simple now here is one of my favorite moments because for the first and only time i believe bach decides on this d e in the theme right the theme goes d e now you could re-contextualize this d e in a lot of ways and that’s one of the ways that bach does it is this half diminished chord to the minor chord but here for the first time and i’ll have to double check if i’m right about the only time bach decides to recontextualize it like this into major chords b flat major and e flat major so you get this magical moment in the midst of all these arpeggios how beautiful is this And that’s the end of the variation. But yeah, just extremely special and simple. One more time through it, why not? In fact, I like to add this very expressive ornament right at that moment. I don’t know. Did it work? Now variation 15 is even simpler. So we had arpeggios in sort of two voices. You know, two notes at a time. Two notes at a time. But now variation 15, if you’re looking at this on the page, it’s just one line. One line going from top to bottom. That’s it. outlining the shape now this is played in two different ways it is played this way in on one keyboard Or it is played like this on two keyboards, and I don’t know if this might be a bit too contrasting to the current setting I have. Maybe I’ll try the other way around. Anyhow, that’s not quite working on this organ right now, so let me put it into two areas of your speaker, and I think this will work much better yes this will work How magical is that? Or I could try it the other way where the keyboard’s reversed and you’ll hear the opposite. bach? bach bach bach bach bach But marvelous music, so simple, and yet the design is just absolutely fascinating. And you hear our theme in there, sort of sneaking in like this. Dum-bum, bum-bum, dum-bee, dum-bum, bum-bee, dum-bum, bum-bum. bum bum sort of passing between the octaves like this talk about like broken melodies or fractured fractals fractured fractals okay Going back to the regular organ and going back to the regular tempo. The next variation starts with the full organ. Pedals are back with the theme. So before we had this upward rising, now we’ve got something going down. In the left hand here, the left hand is the best variation for the left hand because the left hand is this. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Three. In fact, if I played the sort of accentuated chords and the theme, we would have this. These downward arpeggios resolve themselves into boom, that accentuated chord. From variation, this is now variation 16. You’re asking yourself, can this piece get any faster? And the answer is obviously. That’s variation 17. Yeah. Just fire, fire descending from the heavens with the bass line. Now we enter the last three variations, the last three variations, and they are nothing more than just adding sound, adding sound, adding sound constantly. Note the bass line is syncopated. Pum-pum. Pum-pum. Now, these are variations 19 and 20. This is one of my favorite pieces in music. Listen to just the hands. 20. I believe that Bach composes a written out ritardando there because this double sixes in all the hands in all the hands all two of them Yes, that is a slowing down because that is the end of the pascalia. But this piece is the pascalia and fugue, so there’s a whole fugue to follow. But before we get into the fugue, we have to add the bass line to variations 19 and 20. Just this sound adding to sound. now this version i mean look at what bach has done here he’s simply taken one shape and he’s put it in four different places or it’s sort of like he it’s phasing it’s steve reich type stuff these are the outer voices nothing complicated nothing at all the inner voices also sixths but when you play them together you get well i could start with the right hand or the left hand but when you play them together I don’t know if you’re getting this sort of like weird stereophonic effect. Something is happening with the sound. Bach’s knowledge of what happens with the sound and sustain and an absolute magical variation. I’ll try it in two speakers so you can hear that effect even perhaps more marvelously. A bit lower. What is going on there? Dreamy. And then of course, when you add the... pedals. Last three variations of the pascalia. now there’s a fugue what’s this? tema fugatum a fugue based on the theme this is a three-part fugue it’s a fugue with two counter subjects obviously this and this lilting figure you heard just one last thing as the pascalia ends bach carefully writes this chord in such a way that this c which leads on to the fugue has a separate stem so bach is saying it’s not over this final chord has a voicing to it and this note here right in the middle is not over yet normally you hear a slowing down but if you didn’t you would hear it just like that okay so we’re going on here’s the second part of the fugue Have you been sick of C minor? Have you been missing other keys? Because so far this entire piece has been in C minor. Me, I get absolute goosebumps when the piece modulates here just like this. To G minor. What is this music, this divine music? And suddenly, these sixteenth notes. So that’s the third part. Talk about God the Father. God the Son proceeding from the Father What? one in being with the father and the holy spirit flickering like tongues and the first time we’ve got this theme in g minor but so far this is just the hands where are the feet where are the feet here they are The thrill of being able to play this music with your four limbs overwhelming overwhelming absolutely overwhelming okay let’s call the holy spirit theme let’s call that three let’s call this theme two and let’s call obviously the main theme one from top to bottom one two three that’s one and two and three on the bottom This is the feat now with one, two in the top. Meanwhile, three is right in the middle. From top to bottom, two, three, one. So we had one, two, three. Now we’ll have two, three, one. Another permutation. Suddenly, G minor, number one in the middle. number three the holy spirit theme on the top and number two in the pedals we get this beautiful permutation another one in the middle back into c minor this one this is in the alta voice this is one but there’s another voice on top this one And we’re modulating from C minor into the relative major E flat major for something that’s absolutely beautiful. Hear this. Two below one. And I hope you’ve got your dancing shoes on because this is what the feet play. The feet play that crazy Holy Spirit theme. Here I go. Absolutely marvelous. I had the thrill of being able to hammer that out with your feet. Here is the whole music. Where are we? Where are we? We’re in this beautiful key of E flat major. No more pedals and this Glorious theme for the first time in the major key. I love that touch to go instead of going we go Damn, these glorious sighing fifths. Okay, but like I said, one in the bass, two in the middle, the Holy Spirit just on top. And now, what is this? What is this variation? Measure 204. Nothing. Absolutely nothing is here, except the utmost simplicity. What is this sequence? I mean for it to just come out, listen to this left hand line. For it to come out of this immensely complex music and then have Bach just hold back, just hold back, lay everything bare, just the elements. theme in the middle two up top holy spear on bottom we have to leave this happy place we have to go back into c minor or at least a minor key g minor pedals Okay, what is this music? What is going on here? Two in the middle. Three, the Holy Spirit on top. The bass had the theme. Together, all like this. You get this wonderful passage here, modulatory passage, no themes. I’ll slow down a bit. So we have this... like the second theme in the feed and so together Where are we going? Beautiful modulation. It’s like through F minor. And here’s C minor. Theme in the middle. So the theme in the left hand. Holy Spirit in your right hand. The God the Son in your feet. here we go now hold on to your hats this section is well hold on to your shoes because this section is all about the feet watch this that’s the feet followed by left hand followed by feet Followed by left hand. Followed by feet. Okay. While the right hand has these infinite staircases. Whoa. Again. Again. So you’ve got this incredible passage. we’re back in g minor now theme in the top underneath the theme number two and i hope those feet are feeling frisky because we’ve got the holy spirit again So, here we go. This modulation here... Oh god, this is in the sequence. where are we going to f minor and here we go this is this is where it just absolutely screams out the tuning this everything f minor i think for the first time the sub dominant the pedals the middle and even below them What is on the top? My goodness, just this screaming line of chromatic pain. Here we go. Did you hear this? G-flat against C. We are not ready to quit. So just nothing to say about this. We’re modulating from this painful F minor back into C minor. Here are what the hands play. Meanwhile, the feet doing that three times thing again. Two. Three. Yes, and combine that all.Okay, now here is where we get something very fun indeed. Left hand. Feet. Isn’t quite ready to play that, but we’ve got... And this is where we, our fingers are just saying, oh, I can’t play, can I play any faster? While the feet just dance beneath it. Listen to that line in the feet. Under the trill. Here’s where we get our last permutation again the holy spirit still dancing in the feet theme up top number two in the middle and we’ve got yet a fourth line of counterpoint in there to bring us to this texture Now this is just where Bach celebrates. I mean, listen to these feet. watch an organist absolutely dancing ask them to play this line in the feet Slow music over it. And we get... And we’ve got this... Very exciting flashes in the feet. and also in the hands and these chords that chord there the neapolitan doesn’t matter what it is that’s the chord you can hit once in the piece that’s the chord you can hit once and then do a fermata and then say yes that is when you would have every single stop out on the organ you would the organ would be struggling to keep up with the power needed to play with all the stops pulled all the stops out bach here writes after this fermata adagio lowest note nice and comfortable you’ve got two you’re playing with both feet here left foot there right foot here so you’ve got just every part of your body and your heart And your fingers and your toes are just... That’s the Pascalian fugue. I’m looking at the time realizing i’ve gone over the hour. I don’t know why i thought i could do this in under an hour but i definitely didn’t think i would use up an hour so easily so i’m gonna stop the episode and in a few days i’m going to give you either the performance or a link to the performance of paul jacobs live performance of the pascalia friend of the show pauljacobs it is Just a stunning recording and then i’m going to provide you with a computerized version that is very straight and very very slow because i’ve had to practice this piece so slowly in order to get it into my body and when i do it so slowly I notice a bunch of dissonances and things that i otherwise wouldn’t notice so i’m going to play it extremely slowly And then i want you the listener to play around with the playback speed listen to it in 1 .5 speed Listen to it and two times be listened to it if it goes faster on And whatever app you’re using hopefully the Substack app it’ll allow you to change speeds and in that way maybe you can hear this architecture in as many different ways as possible so thanks for listening sorry this went over I can’t believe it’s an hour already I need to go practice and here’s Gabby I’ll be telling you that you need to sign up to wtfbach.com thanks very much

The second and fourth movements already show Bach’s interest in using chorale melodies in his cantatas. To the Psalm text, Bach adds a 1588 Hymn by Bartholomäus Ringwaldt, asking for mercy, Erbarm dich mein. How lucky we are to see seeds of the Matthew Passion planted as early as 1707!

The finale uses a fugue with a countersubject to paint one single line of text: And he will redeem Israel is painted with lively 16th notes, joyful even, while, from all his sins appears as a rising chromatic line. Bach, with a fugue, realizes theology:

I forgot to mention in the episode: The fugue in the last movement was arranged as a fugue for organ in g minor, BWV 131a. The attribution to Bach has been contested, but it nevertheless makes for a wonderful fugue playable by one person. When I was making my own electric rendition of the fugue, I was struck by how similar parts are to the organ fugues in c minor, BWV 537, a very late work, but also the youthful BWV 551, both of which were covered on this show. I like this recording a lot, have a listen!

Wow! That’s Fabulous.

Rudolph Lutz’ performanceMasaaki Suzuki’s recording

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Concepts Covered:

Bach's Cantata BWV 131, "Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir," composed in 1707 when the composer was just 22 years old in Mülhausen, organist at St. Blasius Church, stands as a remarkable setting of Psalm 130 for bassoon, oboe, strings, and continuo. This sacred cantata integrates the 1588 Lutheran hymn text by Bartholomäus Ringwaldt, "Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut," demonstrating Bach's early mastery of chorale melody integration in cantata structure. The fugal finale translates theological meaning through musical architecture. The cantata's closing movement exists in an organ arrangement (BWV 131a.) N.B. the dedication to Dr. Georg Christian Eilmar, clergyman at St. Mary's Church.

Using clues from a clever acrostic spread throughout the text, scholars have securely dated this cantata to Bach’s years in Arnstadt. Penitential in theme, it would have been performed during Lent, 1707. It is now considered Bach’s earliest cantata.

You Oughta Cantata!

The finale, an early chaconne, (as I forgot to mention in the episode!) served as Brahms’ inspiration for his own chaconne in the last movement of his last symphony. Brahms was one of the editors of the Bach-Gesellschaft when this cantata was first published, so here we see the remarkable moment where the 22 year-old Bach inspires the 52 year-old Brahms. Note the similarities in shape, the flute line in particular:

Bach’s early cantatas are full of sudden tempo changes. These cantatas are Wagner’s harbingers much more than the later models. The text wholly dictates the mood— even the shapes of the fugue subjects— the choir, unlike in the later cantatas, drives the drama through the majority of movements. This page, for example, looks typical of the early style:

The beginning of the 4th movement particularly beautiful. The words ‘lead me’ are painted with a rising scale passing through each part, one section leading the next:

See the acrostic (Doktor Conrad Meckbach) via Hans Joachim Schulze’s work:https://bjb.publia.org/bjb/article/view/2270/2196

Ton Koopman’s recording:Masaaki Suzuki’s recording:

BWV? Bach Would Vouch!

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Concepts Covered:

BWV 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich, For You, Lord, I Long, as Bach’s first cantata, the acrostic found in Hans Joachim Schulze’s work: Who was Doktor Conrad Meckbach, and what is he doing in the middle of an early Bach cantata? Arnstadt vs. Mülhausen. Bach’s tone painting in his early years, the text driving the fugal shapes. We discuss form to Early Bach, how Bach’s early years rely on a freedom of form, whereas later in his life he narrows the focus on form— quite the opposite of the trend of most artists in history.

Right, well, if you ask me what I do, I’m going to tell you: I breathe, I walk, I sit, I sleep, just like you! Just like you. What I do.

I might venture that I’m an inventor, or no longer need to work, because, right out of university, you see, I came up with a really clever patent for trampolines that has prevented the paralysis of hundreds of bouncing children— if not thousands.

Yes, yes, every month, every month checks. …for all the new trampolines in the world that have my… device somewhere on the side of the, trampo—Yes, it is odd being rich from trampolines. But, I’ll take what I can get.

That’s a good line, ‘odd being rich from trampolines.’

I’m also a professor of 18th century German religion at an online University in …sssSingapore!Singapore? You ask. Yes, yes, Singapore.Do you, lecture online, what with the time change and all that?Yes, yes, with the, with the time change.

Truth hurts: I play the piano and harpsichord and organ. You’ll ask, ‘Is that all you do.’

Is that all I do. Is that all I do. Let’s say I were the 17th best flamenco dancer in the world, but I had to supplement this with bus driving.

‘Hey! There’s Evan the bus driver’ not ‘Hey, there’s Evan, the 17th best flamenco dancer in the world.’ You might consider me a fairly good dancer, best dancer in the village even— but I’d still be, ‘Hey, there goes Evan the bus driver.’ But if suddenly, suddenly, flamenco paid well enough where I could stop driving the bus,‘Hey! There’s Evan the flamenco dancer.’

I wouldn’t have gotten any better or worse at dancing the whole time.

I hate these parties where people ask you what you do. I want parties where that’s not allowed, where you lead with, what is your favorite color? The no small talk party. You guys going to the no small talk party? It’s actually going to be enjoyable.

Somewhat vibrant green bordering on blueish… what’s yours? Oh did you meet Sheila? She also likes the greenish blues!

What’s your main fault? Hey Dave, nice to meet you, what’s your main fault. You ever cheated on someone, Dave? Who is your favorite heroine in fiction?

Yes, that’s all I do. All I do is play the piano. Oh, it must be so nice to be able to make a living with your passion.

I hate it when people say that. Passion. Overused word.

Yes, it is. It’s a good life. I’m healthy I’m happy. I am healthy and I am happy. What did that guy say on Instragram? ‘every day, wake up, sip lemon stare into the sun and say, today is going to be a great day, today is going to be a great day…’

Yes, I should say this to myself more often. I am grateful.

But sometimes— sometimes!— I wonder if I had given it all up to be the snowplow man, I wouldn’t have to remind myself to remind myself to be grateful. Just— pkcchhhh— plow the roads, up at at ‘em before even the well-employed! Thermos full of coffee, heater blasting, 20 below out, but I’m in a T-Shirt in here… pkchhhhh— plow the snow, plow the roads— what’s on the radio? Not my colleagues and thank god for that. Who’s got time to remind themselves to be grateful now? Snowplow man! Honk Honk!

Do you have any idea what it’s like to not be accountable to anybody but yourself, to make your own deadlines, to create your own goals, make your own structure? If suddenly people woke up and had to create their own work, no one would get out of bed! When robots replace everything, no one will know what to do, but I’ll carry on exactly as I always have. I got fugues to learn man! Let the robot sweep my house, do my laundry, but unless the robot’s gonna write in useful fingering, I’m busy! No one will ever pay to hear robot pianists.

Oh …my god. Robot Pianists.

These parties. These parties. This vapid socializing! Look, if 95% percent of success is showing up, I’ll take 5% of my potential fame, thank you— You’re a pianist? Oh, I heard this fantastic pianist play the most incredible Schumann — or was it Schubert…’

Was it me? Oh, wasn’t me?! As if they were any good, I wouldn’t be overcome with jealousy, and if they were mediocre, I wouldn’t abhor them for destroying our profession with mediocrity!

Don’t talk to a musician about musicians. Unless you’re drinking buddies with Leo van Doeselaar, I have no interest whatsoever in your anecdotes.

But shouldn’t I be glad to speak to someone who goes to the symphony— who even goes to the symphony?

I should! I’m not! Last thing you do when you meet a working actor is talk about all the movies you’ve seen. Wasn’t Brad Pitt great?! Get a life.

This thinly disguised sacred— sacred humility placed upon us by none other than Beethoven, of course, and the fact that we may no longer enjoy music for the reasons we once fell in love with it… likely a classical musician. You guessed it. I must look it. Over qualified. Underpaid. Bitter. Do I have the posture of a classical musician? You bet.

And then, I don’t know what’s worse, ‘do you like Sibelius? I used to take music lessons as a kid I never learned how to read do you ever listen to Eric Clapton?’ Did you know that actually Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney don’t know how to read music’ Well it’s about f***** time they did! If they’re such geniuses, have ‘em solve a treble clef.

Doesn’t read music. This kills me. It’s like talking about your favorite author who doesn’t read. No really, he doesn’t know how to read! He just talks into a microphone!And you enjoy that?Yes, yes, now would be a bad time to mention your nephew is a DJ. Is there a defibrillator nearby, because I’m going to need to revive the part of me that just died.

Also a musician. Also! a musician. What because he makes sound? There, did you count that glass that just fell off the table a musician, also a musician? I’d rather listen to broken glass than your nephew. Ha! What you think about that?!

Lots of people took music lessons, lots of people can pick up an instrument and play a little something, and a lot of these people, especially the men, fancy themselves ‘good at music.’ Hence, I’m gonna put musician in my bio. Art lover, coffee historian, dog walker, musician.

So...?

Well, so a lot of people know how to play ping-pong too. And I feel like the olympic ping-pong player.

Is… that a phrase?

You remember the olympic ping-pong player who once explained, ‘there is no other sport where, if you tell someone you’re a professional, people respond by saying… ‘I dunno! I’m pretty good…’

So I’m out to prove I’m an olympic musician, and I’m better at music than this party of non-professional musicians. Exactly.

Exactly. Okay. This is where we are. Measuring yourself against non-professionals… Oy. I need a drink. Where is the bar.

It was only recently pointed out to me that feeling like an imposter is a good sign, really, because real imposters never have imposter syndrome. Turns out the real imposters think they’re ‘pretty good!’

So… I want people to know, that even though I’m a professional, and the world thinks I’m really good. I still think I’m really bad, at music.

Okay.

Do I really think that I’m bad at music? Well, I didn’t practice enough today… Didn’t practice enough the last seven years really. Oh well, I never had the dreaded 9-5…

The dreaded… the dread— This is exactly what I’m talking about! this is the 9-5 man!What, writing dialogues featuring split personalities.Indeed! Hear, hear!

Everything is research, even the way I’m going to order this drink is a performance.

‘Negroni please. No garnish.’

Ha ha, no garnish. Bet that threw him off. He wasn’t expecting that little bit of flare. that was my improvised cadenza. Being an artist is crazy work.

Ugh, did I say artist? Artist! I hate that word artist.

Are we not an artist?

Not for us to say.

Musician. Musician, now this is fine. I can go over to that piano and entertain this whole party. Can your DJ nephew do that? Schmuck.

Sit down and play a little Scott Joplin, Evan.Coming right up.Got any Schubert in there?I dunno, Johnny, does a bear crap in the woods?Hahaha.

They’d be so charmed.

Only a musician can do that. An artist —why they need curation. They need their tools handy or they can’t create. I can make music on a bottle cap. Musicians don’t just sit around waiting for the muse to whisper…

Do people think that?

Everybody thinks that! That’s the Cliche! For most people music is American Idol. It’s a lucky break. That’s all success is: a lucky break— everyone wants to know how I can make ends meet if they couldn’t. Can’t be hard work, couldn’t possibly be hours of grueling hard work, what did I have a good manager or something?

Author, director, educator, socialite, content creator, cat mom, musician…

Puke! Vomit creator. Can you add that one please? Vomit creator.

What do you do?I’m a Vomit creator.Accurate, accurate!

Maybe like, entertainer… Something demeaning. You’re in the entertainment business— but I’m on the quest for truth.

Well, I mean… some pop musicians do understand harmony… yes, yes, I did learn a lot from playing rock music, some classical musicians, actually a lot of classical musicians are more like gymnasts… like robot gymnasts.

Oh my god. Robot Pianists. Robot pianists doing flips!

Snob.

Oh, fine. I’m a snob. At least it’s an anagram of Boss… Ha!

Wait, no it’s not. It’s an anagram of …No BS, there you go. Yes! Fine! I don’t tolerate BS.

Call the person a snob who spends his life studying something— when he declares it more rewarding than your pop culture—’he’s a snob— he’s locked in the library working on things that have been studied for centuries— what a snob!’

Please, please. Give a man a computer, he’s a DJ for a day. Teach a man to strum, he’s in a band for life.

Did… Did I just make that up? Someone should make that a phrase.

Sorry, once you’ve read the complete poetry of John Keats, Rupi Kaur just ain’t doin’ it for ya.

It’s about the personal voice, though—

Oh— please! Quoth the vomit creator!

But isn’t taste just a matter of social class, that any judgement about art you make is a matter of your social positioning?

So, am I just good at music because my parents could afford to buy a piano? Stupid Pierre Bourdieu. Go away.

Yeah, you know, I read Bourdieu because I was trying to figure out why people like you make me feel dumb for going to see rock orchestras or thinking Elton John is the best living piano player…

So, is aesthetic judgment just exclusion dressed up?

You’ve spent your entire life behind a piano, and a DJ can threaten you by just enjoying the very thing you claim to love? So what if the DJ enjoys music all his life, onto his deathbed, that it gives him spiritual sustenance and lasting happiness? The IV is drippin’ in the morphine, he’s writing out his will, grinning, still listening to the faint BMPP BMPP BMMP four on the floor, carrying him unto the Pearly Gates. What, you want him to collapse into intellectual poverty because he doesn’t know the notes of a B-flat minor scale?

Yes! Yes! Collapse. Collapse! Writhe!Ugh. So predictable. I’m such a bore.

Oh there he is! Honey, you’d better buy this ‘artist’ his next drink— you know how eating and drinking is quite a financial burden for them… Haha ha. Ahaha haha.”

—

If you or someone you know is suffering from self-employment, call the emergency number on the bottom of your screen. Harpsichord is not recommended for people who are estranged from a wealthy distant relative worth less than 2.1 million dollars. Self-employment may not be right for you. If you are suffering with the need for external validation or the ability to blame others for your problems, consult an employer. To send WTF Bach a care package, become a paid subscriber on Substack. WTF Bach may need staples of food and clothing to make it through the rest of the year. For his appropriate shoe size, visit WTF Bach dot com. Side effects of WTF Bach may include: anxiety about irregular income, compulsive email-checking and the inability to explain what you do at dinner parties. Ask your accountant if WTF Bach is right for you.

Oh Bach’s Art! The Prelude to my Heart!

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Q: Is there something that surprises you when reading a piece with scholarly intent vs. hearing it?A: What you can’t predict is how deeply it will go to your heart.

—

It can easily be said that there is something in the autograph that conveys something about a personality from the past, and it may be true, but it’s very risky because you can end up looking for something that is in your own head but not included in the manuscript.

—

This past summer I started a series of photographs trying to figure out the population of wild bees in our garden, and actually I identified a species of bees that was believed to be extinct in Saxony since 1930.

Chaconne on the Gramophone:

The two new chaconnes! Available for download:

BWV 1178, in d minorBWV 1179, in g minor

(Outro music is a choir of yours truly singing from Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21.)

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Concepts Covered:

‘Confirmation Bias’ in musicology, J.S. Bach Toccatas BWV 914, BWV 913, the new Johann Martin Schubart sources. The attribution to Johann Christoph Graff in the new discovery of Bach’s early Chaconnes. Independent fascicles sewn into larger books, the process of fascicles copied from page 4, page 1, then pages 2-3. Peter Wollny’s discovery of new works by J.S. Bach. Bach’s early interest in ostinato pieces, Bach’s copies of chaconne’s by Buxtehude.

Having written a prelude and fugue in every possible key, having created a single temperament for all of those pieces, having stretched the thematic growth from a 6-note fugal subject to one with all 12 possible notes, Bach achieves a victory that would become the very foundations of music. At the very end, in one of his layerings from the 1730s, he adds, S.D.G., Soli Deo Gloria, glory to God alone:

While all pieces in this collection may suggest images, no single piece in the collection is as evocative as this one. For the first and only time in this volume, we get tempo markings for the set: andante and largo.

The andante is indeed a walk— toward Golgotha. Two voices in imitation trade the weight of dissonances struggling against the fateful steps up to Mount Calvary:

This prelude is the only binary piece in the collection, divided in half by repeat signs (whereas roughly half of ‘Book Two’ are binary preludes.)

Finally we get to the fugue. Often called the first 12-tone row in history, the fugue’s subject makes use of every single chromatic note. If C=1 in this diagram (it is usually 0 in Schönbergian theory) you will find all 12 pitches accounted for:

Sighs in the slurred notes, the theme bursts with musical ‘crosses.’ Those witnessing the crucifixion weep in four voices. Bach’s burden was tone— he carries all twelve of them. Equally striking in the subject is his own name, crossing upon itself dozens of times in this finale. Every other slur spells his name (in transposition.) A twelve-tone row, crosses, weeping, this theme has everything:

It has been a great joy to work on all these pieces over the past 10 months. Thanks for all your support. ‘Book Two’ will also be studied in depth on the show, but not quite yet. There are guest interviews to be released and I will be turning my attention to Bach’s earliest vocal works in the coming months.

Soli Deo Gloria!

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Concepts Covered:

A long discussion on religion in 18th and 17th century Germany, re: the seriousness of Bach’s own faith. The Well-Tempered Clavier finale, in h moll is today’s subject, conjuring images of Golgotha, crucifixion music, Bach’s own signature, musical crosses, Simon bearing the weight of the cross in the prelude et cetera. The fugal subject is a twelve-tone row, a theory not fully realized until some 200 years after J.S. Bach.

Thank Bach for God!

There are few revisions between the earliest and latest copies, the most striking is the inner voice at measure 11 in the prelude. Which do you prefer:

or,

The two tuning schemes used in today’s episode are 1/4 Comma Meantone, and Kellner’s Bach. N.B. This Kellner is not J.P. Kellner, the important Bach scribe, but rather, Herbert Anton Kellner, an important 20th century musicologist.

The fugue, in four voices, features two inverted entrances. (I inverted, vertically, the word ‘theme,’ which is visually more correct than spinning it 180 degrees— I know you’re here for such details.)

Write That Fugue!

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s BWV 868, the B major Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, his compositional revisions between the early version and final fair copy. An analysis of large-scale harmonic progressions, such as the move from the tonic to dominant, and a similar movement, from sub-dominant to tonic. The prelude is played in two temperaments, Kellner’s Bach and quarter-comma meantone.

Things most precious, indeed. We might well wrap up this dark pearl of b-flat minor and guard it in the ‘side-chapel vaults’ of our hearts. What noble suffering, what secret anguish, what quiet pain is here! To know this music is to be changed, to expand one’s emotional capacity.

Notice how, in Bach’s calligraphy, each note in this nine (!) note chord has its own stem:

Such detail is sadly missing from any printed edition:

It’s Free to B.W.V.!

The fugue, in five voices, appears to be almost entirely in stretto, each voice interrupting the former. Notice the overlapping colors:

This culminates in what I imagine to be a personal victory for Bach, ‘stretto-ing the stretto,’ making the entrances as close as possible, where the second note of one voice becomes the first note of the next, from top to bottom, all five voices in a masterful technical display:

(Looks a bit crowded, yes, but that’s the idea!)

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Concepts Covered: We study the B-flat minor prelude, BWV 867, the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One, both five voice fugues in the second and penultimate minor positions, early manuscript and earliest version alongside P. 415, Bach’s revision of one extra measure. The fugue as a stretto fugue, possible connections between prelude and fugue, a complete stretto in five voices, a five-voice stretto, as well as the Busoni edition’s poetic description of this pair.

Some 12 years ago I holed up in a little shack near the Canada/USA border with nothing but his poetry to keep me sane— but he began unraveling my mind in a beautiful way that left an indelible mark on me as a reader. Please enjoy my anecdote as well as the profound memoir by Clayton Eshleman, the acclaimed translator of Vallejo’s poetry. Book details below:

Vallejo, César. The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, introduction by Efrain Kristal, contributions by Stephen Hart, translated by José R. Barcia, University of California Press, 2009.

ISBN: 9780520261730

A link to the University of California Press where you can buy the book.

W.T.F. Bach? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Bach tossed the trick into his bag for later deployment:

Notice the ending: subtle, elegant, humble. Czerny didn’t think it was enough:

Be on the lookout for the extra measure in your own edition! Tovey calls Czerny’s added bar, “perhaps the most Philistine single printed chord in the whole history of music.” Ouch!

I Can Cantata!

The fugue, one of my all-time favorites, makes strict use of two countersubjects. Together, they form a three-part wonder. I’ve tried to illustrate them:

Bach, contrapuntist juggler, will juggle. Watch the orders switch:

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Concepts Covered:

The Prelude in B-flat Major BWV 866 from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Book I in the North German toccata style, influenced by Buxtehude's toccatas and prelude. The fugue is a perfect example of Bach's mastery of triple counterpoint with two countersubjects.

From the beginning of the piece to the end, the combinations of themes become more complex, from entries one by one, to a three-voice stretto and finally all four voices simultaneously.

Work! Those! Fingers!

The prelude, meanwhile, is much simpler. Between the earliest version and the revisions found in P.415, we see Bach lacquering in his workshop. Notice the right hand:

Bach finds more movement in revision:

The detail I miss from the earliest version is the beautiful B-flat in the left hand:

Although I do like Bach’s longer pedal point in the revision:

Enjoying your contrapuntal journey? Here’s how you can help:

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Concepts Covered:

We study J.S. Bach Well Tempered Clavier, the history, lessons and analysis. Performance practice and contrapuntal structure, especially the complicated stretto fugue in a minor BWV 865 with its inverted stretti, its triple strettos and finally a four-voice stretto half inverted.

Bach does it once more in today’s episode. We’ve arrived at the other double fugue in this collection, BWV 864 in A major. Bach begins the prelude by juggling three ideas:

The ordering of these ideas will switch. A few bars later we see the same three ideas shifted around:

Bach presents the same ideas a total of six times in the prelude. Whereas we logicians would love to see all six combinations (ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CBA, CAB,) Bach gives us four of the possible orderings. The final one with the syncopation on bottom is particularly nice:

Feed the Contrapunctus:

Now the fugue: This is the correction I got all excited about. This is from Anna Magdalena’s copy (called the Müller Manuscript) where we clearly see a revision that may improve on P 415. Look closely at the note which is whited out, this is the G-sharp that is found in Bach’s autograph, here, corrected to an E.

After playing this measure as we know it, I can’t help but feel that this little gem hidden within Anna Magdalena’s copy reflects the latest thinking of the composer.

You can view the Müller Manuscript here: https://www.bach-digital.de/receive/BachDigitalSource_source_00001076

Interesting how the shapes in the first of the subjects in the double fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier have similar rising perfect fourths:

Similar shapes in the E-flat major pair:

And finally, here is the charming work of the young WF, copying out one of his father’s cantatas at a young age. See the little attempt at making a mirror monogram, WFB? Wonderful! Schweitzer beautifully recounts this scene.

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s A major, book one, Well-Tempered Clavier, Anna Magdalena’s copy, also known as the Müller Manuscript (not to be confused with the Möller Manuscript,) Double fugue writing, juggling three contrapuntal ideas in the prelude. We also paint the scene for how Bach’s cantatas were assembled. A beautiful picture of WF Bach, CPE Bach and Bach’s nephew, JH Bach.

Sans Eyes, Sans Books, Sans Everything

If you go home with somebody and they don’t have any books, don’t f*** ‘em!-Not so old aphorism

Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion;Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.-As You Like It, 2:7

-for Marie Kondo (and Rachel)

At eighteen years old, I moved to New York City with five books: a Mozart biography, a Bach biography, a Beethoven biography, a book about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a Bible. My sheet music library (which was already massive) and any other books (which were insubstantial) I left with my parents. All I valued at that time was playing the piano and any reading dealing with that. After a year, my personal Pentateuch had grown four times in size, but was humble still.

Eleven years later I had one-thousand nine hundred and thirty two books.

Books bought, books found, books stolen, books given, books I printed: any way one could get a book, I got books. I dreamed of creating a library that resembled my teacher Lowenthal’s: wall to wall books, books falling out of books, books used as bookshelves themselves, pages on the ground from who knows which books, books with missing covers, covers with missing books, books rapidly-read-horizontally-stacked-under-coffee-cups books, books under-the-piano-to-muffle-the sound books, books piled-on-top-of-the-piano-to-complete-a-cliche books, the divine image of the godhead seen in books spinning endlessly out from the library walls.

“I always imagined heaven to be a kind of library.”

That was the first sentence by Borges I ever read, and Lowenthal’s study was the closest to paradise I had been.

—

I lived in seven different apartments in New York, and with each move at least 75% of the boxes were books, and with books come their doomed counterparts: bookcases (so help us god.) Many a reader may commiserate. Once the first small white case was filled, (Ikea, 2007) there needed to be a match (Ikea, 2008.) By 2009, I had two crumbling, completely useless, bookcases.

I called the poet Ron Price, who, though he owned less books than Lowenthal, seemed to have given more thought to their casing. I discussed a sleek white Ikea bookshelf I had seen online:

“Oh! Don’t buy a f***ing BILLY!” he shouted.

He knew the make. …Everybody knew the make. Little did I know, the crumbling pieces of piecemeal that already housed my books bore the same name.

“Buy some nice wood. Make some sturdy shelves.”“Hmm… You’ve been down this road it seems.”He chuckled.“The… shelves are even more important than the books?” I went so far as suggesting“I don’t know about that.” he muttered.

In a month, I had, at only a few times the cost of escaping Billy’s curse, three black bookcases, two inches thick per shelf. Unbendable.

My East Harlem studio was immensely stylish: I dreamed I would see reconstructions of it in museums as I had seen reconstructions of Proust’s bedroom. Two tall cases stood side by side, and a third half-case, tastefully empty, was stacked horizontally on the other two. It created one giant fifteen foot wide wall, ten feet tall. It was like a tree for inanimate objects.

And then, many a reader may commiserate, I tasted the rainbow: a design magazine with a bookshelf arranged by color. I didn’t do anything else for two weeks.

I spent every day agonizing over the color of books and where on the new color coordinated shelves they would go. I grouped by color, but then realized my groupings were random. I needed the spectrum: a clean sweep from infrared to ultraviolet. I needed a circle? No, but, this was disastrous. Is color a circle? No, color is a triangle, right? The primary colors are only three… After two months of switching books around, I hit upon the solution: Primary colors would outline a triangle marking the top and the lowest corners. Then, the secondary colors would form the inverted triangle pointed at the bottom. It was so obvious. The only choice then was which of the primary colors to put at the top. In my collection, it made sense that blue should be the crown. Hence: orange went to the bottom, green and purple at the shoulders, therefore yellow and red at the... damn! That looks amazing!

But what of all these books without color? Whereas I had previously banished them to the edges, now the black and white spines fit brilliantly into the middle. A zero in the middle of all the brilliance. Quickly, no matter how beloved the content, brown, tan, and off-white, gray books, these were imposters. I stuffed them here or there where they wouldn’t stick out. Eventually I put them with the dishes: behind the cabinets. The bookshelf, now made of only resplendent spines, became a centerpiece. It had eye gravity. It never escaped comments from guests.

Any difficulties one might imagine, like two different colors on a spine, for example, were surprisingly rare. And when they did occur, each book somehow fit into only one section. There was one book though, (three novels by DH Lawrence) that had an obtuse, subtle, yet obvious, but odorous! an obnoxious color. It could not be placed: was it pinkish orange, bluish pink…? I know of nothing in the universe colored the same. I tried him in the reds, in the near pinks, in the center of the oranges, on the fringes of the oranges, with the near yellows, no luck. I banished him to the basement.

“Look at all these orange books!” That’s what most people said after being sucked into the shelf for some time. (Penguin fiction, bottom center.) Schirmer sheet music publishes in bright yellow, which held down a sunny corner, whereas Henle publishes in matte blue. Dover —many a musician has cringed— seems to publish only in the most carefully selected distasteful colors, but when searching for the perfect transition from reddish-orange to orangish-red, Dover somehow prints an accurate Pantone 17-1464.

Now, perhaps you reading will join in with the main criticism, which was, “how can you find anything now?!” But this was ridiculous, I knew all my books of course: the color of every spine, the height, width, the feel, the smell… besides, I had actually read most of these! (That oh-so-memorable moment my illiterate aunt visited and accused me of ‘collecting them,’ that there was no way a person could read so many books.)

Rachel would quiz me:“Ancient China?”“In the off green.”“Nonsense of Edward Lear?”“Is dark red.”“Baghavad Gita?”“Purple!”

Never could she stump me. She started switching books to see if I would notice. At first she tried the obvious: swapping a blue with a yellow, as if to test if I so much as glanced toward the shelf once a day. Then, sneakily, she tried switching a dark red with an off red. Finally she took to inverting certain books, but I noticed every time.

—

This was short-lived. Maybe only half a year before the shelf was condemned. It actually did get photographed in a (now defunct) design magazine. I felt like I had achieved something great when that happened— but it was April 2015, and we collectors know what happened then:

Marie Kondo burst on the scene. God save our recycle bins.

One excerpt from her book— a book about organizing, mind you, not a book about the human spirit, not a book of poems, not a book about love or anything of the sort: a book about organizing, left me in tears. What was wrong with me?

And so began the days of getting rid of all my books. Poignant Pentateuch to boastful nineteen-hundred, however many it had been, it was all doomed to die now.

Obviously enough, all of the books with the dishes were sold. If they were there, what was their use? Those that gave me a hard time in the color wheel were quickly off the wheel and onto the street. Reference books- gone, cookbooks- gone, any extremely common book- gone. I had, in the eleven years of reading, lost touch with my religion: goodbye St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, GK Chesterton, (I’ll keep Thomas Merton, though.) I had also, in a sense, also outgrown the beats: goodbye Ginsberg, farewell Ferlinghetti. I sold six hundred books to one single shop in Brooklyn (and visited it a year later to the eeriest of feelings…) I made many a friend happy by giving away any book they asked for. I was actually able to pay my rent with book sales, and to show for it, I had an even brighter, ever slimmer color wheel.

That April, I sold, gave away, or put on the street sixteen hundred books. I now had only three hundred odd books. That shelf gave me such immense joy to look at and be near, I stopped purging. I had arrived. Something, as Marie Kondo said it would, ‘clicked.’

—

But poor Rachel. We were through. I left for Europe to moan. Would I ever grow up? When I came back to my old life, and my new color wheel, the joy wasn’t in it. I had to clear out all the memories and rid myself of all attachments. The books she gave me had to go, even those quite dear to me: Steinbeck’s letters, R Kelly’s ‘Soulacoster: the diary of me’ (once full of laughter, now simply full of sadness… for godssake, the ‘of’ is in italics!) Frank Ohara’s poems, Thomas Lux poems, gone. She was a reader, all the books we read together had to go: Eugenides, Cheever, Dahl, Yeats.

I was nearing 200 books. Some didn’t fit in with the colors so I taped their spines with brightly colored tape — then a few days later thought that seemed stupid and inauthentic. If a book had to be dressed to fit into the damn wheel, it didn’t deserve to be there in the first place! Curbside.

I started getting rid of books I never thought I could live without. It made me feel like I was almost irreverent to let some go, as if I were quitting a religion I didn’t realize I was part of.

I turned to Marie Kondo who mentioned it was important to thank the discarded objects, to let them go peacefully. Maybe that’s what I was doing wrong. I set condemned books in a pile near the front door for a few days before hauling them to the shop. Every time I walked in or out of the apartment, I thanked them, but mostly, I said goodbye.

In Europe, I had spent a solitary month reading music electronically— I never thought I would be able to do that, but I quite enjoyed it. Returning then, I made an effort to stay modern: I got rid of every book of Dover sheet music I had (and I advise every musician to do the same: every single one is online, free, in the same edition.) I donated them to a music school. It seemed charitable, but only I knew I was just being selfish.

I had an abusive high-school piano teacher who nearly ruined music for me (hell, she nearly ruined me!) so what were those same books doing in my house!? The Well-Tempered Clavier, Schubert impromptus, sure, these are not permissible to live without, but what were these specific objects, filled with her hateful scribbles, doing in my house?

A friend of mine, Tepfer, took those six volumes.

“But… why are you getting rid of these?” He asked.

I warned him of the horrid teacher, that even though I had erased all her markings, she was still in there, somehow, messing with my head. He chuckled a bit and left. He didn’t believe in such black magic.

A half hour later he texted:“man you werent kidding about the bad juju in those books halfway home the bag dropped from my bike slid under front wheel locked it flipped landed on my wrist waiting 4 xrays”

He fractured his wrist. This is a true story.

—

I was down to a hundred and sixty books, though fifty of those were a first edition of the Harvard Classics. Published in 1909-1910, these represented the fifty volumes of what every educated gentleman in 1910 should know (the first volume is Ben Franklin’s autobiography and other Americana, to give you a sense.) Ten more of those hundred and sixty books were my grandmother’s books from the 19th century, the earliest was Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’, printed in 1871.

They were so old I never opened them. These will fetch a pretty penny. I thought.

So I took the more than century-old paper snake, eighth feet in length, to the famous Strand bookstore, where a famous (and I now know, retired) man appraised them. Entering the store, I saw a face which could have been so easily caricatured, I wasn’t sure it had a third dimension. His face had grown into the repetition of fingering books and staring into a computer screen. His nose held up his glasses, angled severely on his pointy face, pointed sharply at his task. Everything was pointed in lines. In fact, a whole row of people at the same long desk were appraising books in a line. His line of apprentices and all the energy in the room pointed toward him. Each person working behind the desk looked more and more like him as the line approached him. The appraiser at his left — clearly his successor and disciple— almost, almost! had his head, nose glasses, almost at the same angle. I waited with the others trying to strike it rich with whatever printed treasure chest a dead relative had forgotten about.

Luck saw that he, the master appraiser, handled my books. Without using the muscles in his neck to look, as if an odor had offended him, he took all but two seconds to consider the books from the 19th century. He didn’t touch them. The Harvard Classics— all fifty at once— received maybe five seconds of his glance, but still, he didn’t touch them. My beautifully illustrated edition of Shakespeare, nearly two feet tall, met his fingertips, and even met his caress. It went to one side of the counter.

“Mary,” speaking to an assistant, “would you please pass these books back to the gentleman.” She handed me back my eight-foot snake.

“We would buy this book from you at the value of 18 dollars.” He told me, speaking about the Shakespeare. We would. Not, we would like. He didn’t wait for my reply or reaction and was about to call the next customer when I interrupted.

“W… Wh… What about the other books?” I asked, “Are they too old?”

Without missing a beat, and yet without condescension, he replied, “It isn’t a matter of old: you could have an old book that’s worth a small fortune. It’s a matter of condition.”

His eyes traveled, as if it were the first time that day his glance left his hands, and he looked at me with an expression explaining that such eye contact was carefully rationed out. This was the glance of a master. There was no possibility of a counteroffer. I accepted his mastery and took the 18 dollars. I bought wine. Drinking from the bottle in the same neighborhood, I left the books, one at a time, on stoops of various apartments until the whole of the Harvard Classics had been strewn about on 4th avenue.

—

One hundred books. Count ‘em. I owned as many books as I did when I was a teenager! No longer was this large library weighing me down, hell, I might even be able to move now! Home would always be where the books were, and if I could fit my library into a suitcase, why then, I’d be like a bird!

“The only good reader is a re-reader.”

Nabokov said that. I pondered this. Was it true that I was less likely to read my hundred books, once, before I read my favorite ten, ten times? I calculated how much ten readings of ten books would influence me more than one reading through one hundred books. And so began my ultimate task of trying to divide one-hundred by ten.

I hadn’t read maybe five of the 100, but now, with so few books, those which went unread for years were finally readable! Three of the five were interesting, but the other two made me wonder why I had kept them for so many years. In any case I tossed all five, and then another five, and soon five more. I was coming close to the number of books Kondo recommended: 20, or if you can, 10 books.

—

I called the poet Ron Price because I felt like I was dying.

“You’re doing what?”“I got rid of almost all my books.”“Why?”“…I… I’m not sure.”

He laughed. Then in his signature Memphis-snake-bit-grit voice, “Sometimes you have to give away what you love before you can keep it.”

Ah… Yes, so true. I was giving away my love of literature to keep it, to acquire it again. I was going to become a re-reader and my band of ten books would allow me to…

Price interrupted my stream of positive thoughts and added, “but not always.”

Ah s***! I’m confused again. What was I doing!? Had I committed an egregious sin? Kondo’s book! Was this the most evil book of all? A book encouraging you to throw away books? She warned that the sentiment found in objects could die when you ‘purge,’ and therefore you start examining exactly where your real sentiment lies, but my god, I was pretty sure my real sentiment was lying in the garbage.

I opened one of the last Thomas Merton book I owned and read, “you cannot be a holy man if you value possessions.”

“Ach!” I shouted. I threw down the book.

I went walking with one of my favorite books to walk with: the heart and diamond sutras in beautiful translations. I must have read this book at least twelve times on walks. I tried to memorize it at one point. But there, on a bench, this one time, one word: attachment. As if rehearsed, I draped the book over a parking meter and walked on.

Finally, pretty close to only twenty books, I actually read Borges for the first time. Funny how that works. Until then, the only words of his I knew were about heaven being a library. And I’m pretty sure I had just spent months disassembling heaven. His words were,

“…reading (which is to say the rereading)…”

Again, here was another immortal talking about rereading!

And in an obsessive text to a friend about this whole process, I misspelled ‘bookshelf’ into ‘bookself.’ Oh happy mistake! Oh revealing accident! Your bookshelf is your book-self! Choose wisely:

Complete ShakespeareComplete poetry of Cesar VallejoThe Book of Tea- Kakuzo OkakuraTeh Tao Ching- Lao TzuChuang Tzu- (ed. Thomas Merton)Clavichord Tuning and Maintenance- Peter BavingtonA clavichord builders manual (1973)- David WayJ.S. Bach- Albert Schweitzer (2 Vol.)Bach, Essays on his Life and Music- C. WolffThe Well-Tempered Clavier (2 Vol.) (Newly purchased editions)

This is twelve books. Compared to the five books that arrived with me to this city, there is little change: the Messiah of the West has become the Messiah of the East, the piano has become the clavichord, but there is little change.

There are plans however: Two of my most read books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and its sequel, Lila) I discarded due to their thick size and now crumbling covers, but not before finding the text of each, rearranging both into a single slim volume, and ordering it custom printed. Thirteen. Then the Bhagavad Gita: it’s always been one of the most beautiful things I have ever known, but the editions never have, so I wrote the entirety of the scripture into a beautiful yellow notebook: Fourteen.

In the process, I should mention, I cut down my clothes to six pairs of trousers, six shirts and a couple jackets, I gave away many sentimental objects, I sold half the artwork in my apartment and I deleted permanently twelve thousand photographs and sixteen thousand emails. Hitting the delete button quite literally made me feel lighter.

—

“So what if I gave you a book?” someone asks. I respond saying I will now have the space to read it and the freedom to get rid of it! “You would get rid of my gift?”

I turn to Kondo again: people who give gifts with the expectation that the receiver keeps them, are giving for the wrong reasons.

Others ask, “how could you do that? I just, I just love books so much!” But who else then, if not I, has ever known the love of books? “But the feel, the smell, the…” yes, and I too have known and loved every aspect of a book. “…but what will you read now?” Well, I’ll read everything. “…on one of those e-reader things?” Yes, on one of those.

Will I ever own more books in the future? Why not ask me if I’ll own less? My friend Jesse challenged me to scan all fourteen books into my computer and simply have no books. I’m up for the challenge, but for now enjoy looking at the narrow stripe (still organized by color) of fourteen. If there comes a book which I feel desperate to keep, it must be one that shakes me deeply, I would welcome that.

But for now, fourteen was Bach’s number and the number of lines in a Shakespeare sonnet.

-Brooklyn, 2015.

—

Postscript, 2017:

That book did arrive, number fifteen: Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Book of Disquiet.’

Post-postscript, 2021:

Pessoa’s writing has shaken me deeply enough that I have moved to Portugal. I now, very slowly, read him in the original. I notice even my local bike mechanic knows the names of at least four of Pessoa’s heteronyms. I have, in this frenzy, bought a dozen volumes of his writings, and a few things I decided I couldn’t live without, such as Whitman, Milton, William James, and R.H. Blythe’s four-volume haiku work. Still, I’m under 50 books, my entire library sits on a single shelf.

Post-post-postscript, 2026:

I currently own 286 books. Turns out I did grow up— 286 books and one child— but I’m getting ready for another purge— of books I mean. I’d like to get back around 200. I have a rule about a new book, which is that it must be hardcover and colorful on the spine. (Yes, my shelf is still ruled by the rainbow.) I can’t imagine owning nearly 2000 books ever again, but who knows: when writing this piece, I could not have imagined 286.

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But are we so confident in our own interpretations that we can throw out the likes of Hans Bischoff, Carl Czerny, Ferruccio Busoni (pictured) and Donald Francis Tovey? These heavily annotated performance editions, while, yes, they should be read alongside a ‘cleaner’ modern edition, can certainly still teach us some beautiful musicianship.

In this episode, I let Sir Donald Francis Tovey’s remarks on the g-sharp minor prelude and fugue, BWV 863, lead us through an analysis of the work.

Some more from Busoni (the previous prelude and fugue,) his footnotes and ossias are exciting:

Most of these editions are in the public domain on IMSLP. Have a look:

https://imslp.org/wiki/Das_wohltemperierte_Klavier_I,_BWV_846-869_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)

Finally, here is the source of confusion about the Picardy third at the end of the g-sharp minor fugue. At first glance, it certainly looks like B natural in the alto voice. (Soprano clef)

But look closer. (Sorry for the resolution.) This is not Bach’s normal natural sign. It has a slash (maybe two slashes?) through it:

Here are few of Bach’s natural signs. Upon comparison, the above sign certainly is modified with extra strokes to form a sharp:

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Concepts Covered:

An analysis of BWV 863 exploring the four-voice fugue, the two counter-subjects, the invention of the prelude with its inversions — guided by Sir Donald Francis Tovey's annotated Well-Tempered Clavier edition. We mention Busoni, Czerny, and Bartok’s edition as well. What do these historic performance editions still have to teach us? Why a modern urtext editions won’t tell the whole story, and finally the confusion at the end of the prelude and fugue: the Picardy third in the alto voice at the finale.

Let me repeat that for those of you feeling clever or citing google without thinking:

Happy Birthday Johann. Today, March 21st, not March 31st.

Why are people confused about this? How did this become a thing? And what extremely boring person got so frustrated with a toccata they started tampering with Bach’s wikipedia page?

There were two main calendars in Europe at the time: the Julian and the Gregorian. We are currently on the Gregorian, but it took a while to get everyone on board. Greece held out until 1923 even, and Protestant Germany was holding back in 1685, when Bach was born.

But you know, you gotta get with the times, man! Gotta catch up to the modern world! It’s gonna be 1700 pretty soon! We’re gonna have mercury thermometers and calculus… You’re living in the past! …ten days in the past!

So in 1700, Germany did indeed make the jump from Julian to Gregorian. In the year 1700, they jumped from February 18, to March 1. No one died, no one was born between Feb 18th and March 1st, 1700 in protestant Germany. (No one even used the toilet.)

Germany joined the Gregorian calendar when Bach was 15 years old, with the legal stipulation that all prior dates would remain valid. A legal stipulation, in fact, protecting the old dates from being overridden, and converted to the new calendar.

So, come on people, let’s not try to override this actual legal stipulation. (Here’s my gentle reminder that saying Bach was born on March 31st is illegal.) We can’t go about dismissing ecclesiastical records in favor of our modern abstractions just because we’re feeling smug about hybrid cars and vegan smoothies. It’s not like the Gregorian calendar represents some objective truth that the Julian calendar was failing to capture.

Bach was Born on March 21st. The next person I hear whispering in the bar, “well, technically he was born on March 31st…” is getting a mordent —to the face.

Are you that person who’s trying to switch Bach’s birthday to the 31st? Wow. Can’t wait to hang out with you on Christmas: “Actually, statistically speaking, the odds that Jesus was born on the 25th of December are practically zero! Did you know that in Judea, shepherds typically watched their flocks by night from Spring to early Autumn?” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a life.

Maybe you know about Shakespeare and Cervantes? That they died on the same day? Or rather, the same date. It’s the same thing: Protestant England, on the Julian calendar, and Catholic Spain, on the Gregorian. It created this beautifully poetic coincidence. The greatest writers of their generations both died on April 23, 1616— 10 days apart.

Now, we’re not going to switch the date on which Shakespeare died, are we?! No. That’d be asinine. Which is exactly what shifting Bach’s birthday to March 31st is, asinine. March 21st is also Early Music Day in Europe— for this very reason, and we’re not going to move early music day are we? No, that’d be asinine.

March 21st is also, nicely, International Poetry Day, …and World Puppetry Day, …and World Day for Glaciers— if you ask me we have too many days, but sure, why not. In fact, why not make a puppet of Bach reading a poem and dance him around on some ice cubes today.

Today is also Harmony Day in Australia, beautiful! The immortal god of harmony, that he should share Harmony Day in Australia. I pictured everyone leaning into triads and flat-nines down unda’ but this day happens to be about racial harmony, but still! Still. Let’s sing four-part chorales with everyone we know.

Bach’s birthday is March 21st. It always was March 21st. You know who was born on March 31st? Haydn. Who? Exactly. Never heard of him. If anyone wishes me a happy birthday Bach in 10 days, I’m blocking you.

Dig Out Your Inner Ear:

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About 12 years ago I decided I wanted to be part of this tradition. After some trial and error, I hit upon a method that allowed me to learn Bach (or any other composer) by ear. And more than just being glad for having developed the skill of transcribing, the method is extremely efficient: I find that pieces are usually memorized faster than when using sheet music.

Here is the method as explained in the episode:

-Record, slowly with the score, up to 60 seconds of music (or even 10 seconds if you like.)-Put away the score and play ‘call and response’ with the recording, relying on your ears.-Once learned, re-record the music as you've heard it, now learned aurally.-Re-open the music, play the new recording, checking for inaccuracies, missing details, &c.-Repeat…

Stretch the Octave:

Now, once something is memorized, you may want to keep it memorized. So you’re up against the ol’ Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: the speed at which your mind forgets without conscious review. We all have our own curves, but my rule has been roughly:

Play the newly memorized music twice on the first day,Review the music on the second day,… three days after learning,… one week after learning,… two weeks after learning,… one month after learning,… three months after learning,… six months after learning,… one year after learning,…two years after learning.

You can even put dates in your calendar saying, “You learned fugue X three months ago: Review it today.” With this practice, you’re sure to have some counterpoint written into your DNA.

W.T.F. Bach wants YOU to learn a fugue by ear:

The Pakistani musician I mentioned is the immortal, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Listen to his extraordinary live concerts where he and his band achieve the heights (while sitting on the floor.) In my next life I’d like to be one of the guys in back clapping only quarter notes.

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How can we spend our lives playing music from the 18th century without any contact with the instruments used then? Can we know objective aspects of older music while playing on a single model of an instrument developed toward the end of the 19th century? Do pianists exist in a vacuum, where a musical interpretation is guided by a sort of subjective vision— is it even vanity or self-flattery?

Certainly there are pianists who know the Steinway’s predecessors, but on the whole, I feel there is a real ignorance of the instruments on which our repertoire is founded. Perhaps, though, we are in the midst of a revolution of touch and interpretation: I’ve recently seen more pianists playing fortepianos, owning clavichords, et al. This can only lead to a more text-based reading of the music.

But— mind you!— is that a good thing? Do we want to push the art of keyboard playing in a direction away from self expression and toward people claiming the ‘truth’ is on their side? That sounds awful! Even if pianism indeed exists a vacuum, it certainly produces rare visions of the music only accessible through such an art.

Enough musing. While playing the A-flat major Prelude BWV 862 on my double manual harpsichord, the instrument, in a word, told me about the music. There was something about the limited palette of the instrument that forced upon me a new approach. This sort of radical adjustment to one’s playing is typical of playing on historic instruments. On the modern grand piano, possibilities are endless, but on older instruments, the sound tends to constrain the range of possible interpretations.

Spread the Fugue.

The prelude BWV 862 saw some lovely revisions between the earliest conception of the piece and the version we know. For starters, take the lovely line of the concertino solo in BWV 862a:

How different is the revision!

Now bars 22-27 in the earliest version:

Revised to the more evenly shaped:

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Das Wohltemperierte Clavier, As Dur, BWV 862, The concerto style of the prelude, between two manuals in the prelude, Fugal analysis, early versions of WTK 1, BWV 862a, and the possible ‘vacuum of pianism’ creating subjective art vs. seeking objective facts about the music. Historic instruments leading to a text-based interpretation, using knowledge of older instruments to inform modern piano playing et cetera.

What an opening:

In this episode we listen to at least 14 different interpreters play this expressive trill. Such a simple idea, but how many different ways this idea can be realized! At an even speed or speeding up? With a turn at the end or a turn at the beginning or no turn at all? Crescendo all the way through or perhaps even diminuendo?

Between earliest version and the fair copy, Bach seems to smooth out the rhythm in the solo voices. This is a rare case where the earliest version is rhythmically more nuanced than the revision.

Bar 6. The last beat is more varied in the early version:

It is smoothed out in revision:

Bar 9. The top two voices sing in different rhythms in the early version:

In revision, Bach makes them consistent:

Penultimate bar. Note the 64th notes in the early version:

Everything is more uniform in revision:

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As we progress through Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, our fugal themes become increasingly complex and chromatic. Here, the fugue’s subject is angular, modern even:

The subjects come in an memorable stretto toward the end:

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Topics Covered in this episode:J.S. Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book One, BWV 861 prelude and fugue analysis, also Baroque ornamentation and how to play a trill, performance practice. We examine Bach’s manuscript sources in the early vs late versions of this pair. A general discussion of Baroque keyboard music, harpsichord vs piano performance, fugue structure and form, and Bach’s counterpoint.

Thanks for reading W.T.F. Bach?! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The three-voice fugue begins:

But after only a few bars, Bach is ready to bring in all the voices again— this time with the melodies upside down. (Inverted exposition.) N.B. The middle voice’s theme began on the previous page:

And there are stretti in this fugue, one melody interrupting another. Here’s one where the themes are rhythmically shifted to the second half of the bar:

The prelude is equally joyous. The earliest version of this prelude is a mere 15 bars long, compared to the 19 bars of the latest version. Notice, too, how Bach changed the key signature of only one (!) staff. The earliest version reads:

But later, on the top staff, Bach changes it to 24/16 (!) in the fair copy, P. 415:

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Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott, BWV 721, in f-sharp minor (note the Phrygian key signature!) is an extraordinary little piece. Written around 1709, it is a profound and most elusive chord progression. Here is the first page:

The text from 1524, based on Psalm 51, was translated by the English ecclesiastical reformer Myles Coverdale. I know nothing about him but his Wiki page is fascinating!

Finally, John Milton. If, one day, you sit down to read Paradise Lost you may feel… well, lost. It was the writing of the late John Carey that led me through this beautiful poem. Spoiler alert: Milton wrote the poem between sleeping and waking, totally blind, by dictating what he was receiving from a ‘Heavenly Muse’ he thought was the same muse responsible for inspiring the Mosaic books of the bible— Wow. Reading the poem with this in mind is a completely different experience. For Milton, the poem was a purely audible experience, hence reading it aloud brings it to life. He, after all, never saw it on a page.

Got Bach?

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Concepts Covered: Bach in the Phrygian Mode, Tone III, Missing flats, missing sharps, Bach’s Key signatures, John Milton, how did Milton write Paradise Lost, Etymology and Entomology, The Origins of the Negroni Cocktail

Source quoted:Leaver, Robin A. Luther's Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications. Eerdmans, 2007.

Individual keys are often loaded with personal significance to the composer. To what extent was Bach thinking of the double sense of Kreuze— both as ‘cross’ and the musical sign for a sharp?

As discussed in the episode, f# minor wasn’t necessarily the key signature with three ‘crosses,’ as Bach’s f# minor looks like this on the page:

Is it more likely that Bach saw b minor as the image of Golgotha on the page? Dare we speculate further and claim that the symmetry of the C# between the two F’s is Christus between the two thieves? Speculation adds nothing of substance… but it’s fun! Bach’s b minor on the page:

In any case, Kreuze was probably never far from Bach’s mind, and f# minor was usually a key for expressing pain and suffering in the cantatas. The fugue from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 859 is full of blatant passion language, seen in the weeping of the countersubject:

Does The World Need More Bach?

One question I have concerning modern editions is the tenor voice in bar 36. In the earliest version, Bach has given— as a cautionary accidental— D natural:

But in the revision, he forgets the cautionary accidental (or deems it unnecessary.) Does this omission justify D#?! I don’t think so. Both Henle and Bärenreiter suggest D#:

At the end of the episode, we explore the canon from the sonata in A Major for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1015. The third movement (in f# minor) is a strict canon from beginning to end. Check this out:

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Concepts Covered:

Bach and religion, composition as theological thought, the symbolic meaning of musical keys in Bach’s works, f♯ minor & b minor, Calvary or Golgotha. Kreuze in Bach studies: the double meaning of “cross” and the sharp (♯) sign in German language. f♯ minor as a key of suffering and affliction in Bach’s cantatas and keyboard works. Passion rhetoric in BWV 859 (WTC I)

Canon analysis of BWV 1015, the Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord in A major.

In this episode I seek (in 18 minutes) to demonstrate mathematically pure intervals, alongside ‘tempered’ intervals. The circle of fifths is in fact a spiral of fifths— it is infinite. We seek to make it a circle for convenience, but this means that the distance between what would be mathematically pure intervals must be altered (!) in order to force the spiral into a circle.

The question remains: how do we do that? Music today is heard in equal temperament, where all keys, all tonalities sound the same. Pure intervals have been forced into identical ‘impure’ ones— convenient, but this deprives us not only of a beautiful natural simplicity, but also the individual character of each key found in unequal temperaments. From the earliest European music, numerous solutions to this immortal problem have been offered. By the time Bach arrives, his solution, laid out for us in The Well-Tempered Clavier, is certainly an elegant one…but we don’t quite know exactly what it is.

The remainder of the episode analyzes the prelude and fugue, no. 13, in F-sharp major, BWV 858. A look at the opening of the prelude in earliest version offers lovely insights into Bach’s working mind:

In revision Bach changes the repeated note — a recognizable motif of the early version— into a trill, now acting as its own motif:

Particularly fascinating is the way Bach changes the harmonic rhythm from the early version here, bar 17:

Now again from measure 17 in the revision. Bach inserts two full bars, extending the harmonic length of g# minor and C# Major:

“Thank Bach for God.”

A huge thanks to Bradly Lehman for helping preparing this episode. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what his work covers, but hopefully you’ve got some idea how deep the topic of tuning can go. Lehman has some great online resources illuminating the fascinating world of temperament. For starters, try:

www.larips.com (Spiral spelled backward)

Dig deeper with this essay here, published by the Reimenschneider Bach Institute:

And finally, more Articles and Essays by Bradley Lehman

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Concepts Covered:

Pure vs tempered intervals, ‘spiral of fifths,’ vs. the circle of fifths, equal temperament, loss of key character, Bradly Lehman temperament, historical tuning systems, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, temperament and tuning, F-sharp major Prelude and Fugue No. 13, Bach’s compositional revisions, and BWV 858

German mystic, Heinrcih Seuse, author of ‘In Dulci Jubilo’

English composer R. J. Pearsell’s setting of the melody.

Spread the Love, Doubly Canonic:

N.B. I’ve been wanting to make this rebrand for a while: The title of this podcast is no longer “The WTF Bach Podcast” but simply, “WTF Bach” — I hope this doesn’t cause any problems, if you run in to any issues as all, please alert us! Thanks!

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Our conversation spans how to memorize, scholars vs. performers, pianists playing the organ, pop music, music for consumption, ‘social media musicians,’ music as a substitute for God, The Art of Fugue (harpsichord or organ?) and more…

Become Your Best Buxtehude:

Some links mentioned in the chat:

Organmaster Shoes

The Robertsbridge Codex

Schumann’s advice for young musicians

and of course, Paul’s website.

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Let’s get our good new habits in early in the year! In this episode, I read practical advice from three organists/organ method books. The organ method books are in a class of their own— highly entertaining reading.

We begin with Francis Routh’s Teach Yourself The Organ (1958.) His asterisk marking the complete works of Buxtehude as ‘fairly easy’ is representative of this amusing book:

Harold Gleason’s method book of 1962 makes up the bulk of this episode, the complete advice is pasted below.

We feature some of Fayth Freese’s excellent article from The Diapason. I recommend the full read.

And here is the advice to teens I made for the Harrison School for the Arts in Lakeland Florida. I cannot emphasize enough how music should be a joyous process at this age, never an abusive one.

From Gleason (bold type is my emphasis)

HOW TO PRACTICE:

* Make a schedule for daily practice. Devote a definite amount of time to technique, to new music, to perfecting music already studied, and to memorizing. Devote at least one hour a day to piano practice. Later the student will need to reserve time for perfecting the many skills required for playing the church service.

* Practice as if the piece were being memorized (see the section on Memorizing).

* Study the music before beginning to practice. Note the key signature, time signature, note values, fingering, pedaling, structure, special problems, and general style. If the fingering and pedaling is not given or is inadequate, it should be carefully worked out according to the principles given in the sections on Fingering and Pedaling.

* Memorize and always use the same fingering and pedaling. Incorporate the articulation, phrasing and interpretation into the practice.

* Try to avoid playing wrong notes or incorrect time values from the first time an exercise or piece is practiced. If a wrong note or rhythm is played, do not immediately correct it. Go back to the beginning of the phrase and repeat the passage correctly a number of times.

* Concentrate on the work at hand and avoid mechanical, unthinking practice and repetition. Always practice after a lesson.

* Practice slowly in the following sequence: right hand; left hand; both hands; pedal; right hand and pedal; left hand and pedal; both hands and pedal. Begin the slow practice of short sections for both hands and pedal while working on separate parts.

* When the phrases and sections of a composition have been mastered at a low tempo, play it all the way through. When this has been accomplished with complete muscular control and accuracy, the tempo may be gradually increased. Return to slow, detailed practice of sections which are not secure, and repeat this process at succeeding practice periods.

* Always practice at a steady tempo. Do not play easy places fast and difficult places slowly.

* Devote the most attention to difficult passages.

* In contrapuntal music, play one or more parts and sing another part.

* In passages of a technical nature, the practice of four-note groups in the various rhythmic patterns is helpful in developing speed and control.

* Stop practicing and relax for a few minutes at the first sign of tension.

* When practicing technical exercises for manuals and pedals, and when first learning a piece, use clear, quick-speaking stops of 8’ or 8’ and 4’ pitch (Gedackt 8’, Principal 4’).

* As soon as the notes in a composition have been mastered, work out an appropriate registration.

* The drawing of stops and the use of combination pistons and reversibles should be carefully practiced and synchronized, in order not to interfere with the performance of the music.

* Above all, the student should learn to listen and hear that the parts are sounding together, are released together, and that the touch, rhythm, accents, and interpretation are actually being realized as intended.

How’s Your Contrapuntal Journey Fugueing?

HOW TO MEMORIZE:

The principal reason for playing from memory lies in the fact that it will result in a better performance, both technically and musically. The perfectly memorized work becomes a part of the performer and gives him complete freedom of expression.

When a piece of music is practiced correctly and efficiently, it is also being memorized, and good practice habits will lead to a continual improvement in the ability to memorize.

After a composition has been thoroughly learned with the notes, the complete process of memory should be undertaken. Concentration and interest in learning are indispensable to the memory process.

There are four types of memory which are used in music. Three of these types—aural, visual, and motor memory—depend on our senses or imagery. The fourth, and most important type, is known as cognitive memory. It is based on knowledge and is the memory we use in the analytical study of the music.

The memorization of music requires the combination and collaboration of the four types of memory. We all vary in our natural gifts and capacities, but all types of memory should be cultivated and can be improved.

Cognitive Memory

This memory is the basis of all study, from the time the piece is first practiced until it is performed from memory. Every detail of the music should be analyzed technically and musically, and be consciously known. Organize notes into patterns, groups, and phrases. Note all sequences and variations from the sequential pattern. Analyze harmonic progressions and relate them to each other. Contrapuntal lines, rhythm, and interpretative factors are all a part of analytical study. Study the form and relate the details to the whole.

Aural Memory

This memory is useful in enabling us to hear mentally what the next note or chord is, and it strengthens the other types of memory. The ability to hear accurately and retain what we hear should be developed until individual lines of the music can be played and sung without errors. Eventually a whole composition can be “practiced” by going through it and hearing the sound mentally.

Visual Memory

This type of memory gives us a mental image of the way the notes look on the printed page, or the place of the notes and the shape of each passage on the keyboard. Visual memory may be developed by concentrating on a measure of music, consciously noting all its details, and then reproducing it from the mental image. Gradually more measures can be added, and a mental image of whole phrases and sections can be retained. Avoid using different editions of a composition during the learning process.

Motor Memory

This is one of the most useful and also the most dangerous types of musical memory. Motor memory involves the touch sensations and training of the muscles so that the movements in playing become automatic. They should, however, never be mechanical. In developing motor memory the same fingering and pedaling must always be used. Avoid repeating phrases endlessly without thought or purpose. Never depend on motor memory alone in memorizing a piece. The slightest interruption in the automatic process will inevitably lead to a breakdown.

Summary

* Begin to learn all the techniques of memorizing with the first lesson. The basic principles of position, manual technique, and practicing should be memorized. Analyze the exercises and studies and memorize the fingering. A few of the manual studies in which the student is particularly interested should be memorized after they have been learned perfectly with the music.

* Memorizing should continue throughout the organist’s career and be made a part of every practice period.

* Memorize when the mind is alert and the power of concentration is strongest. Do not attempt to memorize when fatigued.

* Always begin with analysis and then introduce the other memory techniques. The more thoroughly the music is learned the longer it will be retained and the more positive will be its recall.

* Memorize phrases or short sections at first and gradually develop the ability to learn longer sections. Always be sure the sections are connected in the mind and make a unified whole.

* Work on at least one new section of music each day and then review the previous sections.

* Memorize landmarks at cadential points and practice beginning at any one of these landmarks.

* Memorize and be able to play the parts for each hand alone and the pedal part alone.

* In reviewing a work previously memorized always consult the score and repeat the original memory process.

* Do not think of difficulties ahead, or the association of chord to chord and phrase to phrase will be lost.

* In performing from memory, the subconscious mind will function if it is not interfered with by fear.

* The fear of forgetting can be eliminated by the knowledge that every detail of the music and its interpretation has been engraved in the mind and that the aural, visual, and motor senses have been well trained.

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saw quite a few revisions between its conception and the version we know. For starters, note the earliest version’s key signature, and the E-flat in bar 2:

The most striking feature of the early version is the abrupt end:

No presto? No adagio? No allegro?

The fugue (in 3 voices) is a fugue with two countersubjects. See them here, the first on top, the second below. Both countermelodies occur with every entrance of the main theme:

Become your best Buxtehude.

We also have a brief look at the c minor invention, BWV 773. The piece is almost entirely a canon.

I also mentioned the issue of “stemming” at the beginning of the episode. Here is the chord I mentioned (BWV 867.) Note how Bach’s nine individual stems imply nine separate voices, whereas the print reduces them to only four:

N.B. Most of the episodes of this podcast have been newly catalogued according to genre or theme or BWV on my Substack. Yet another reason for you to join the platform! You can now browse according to BWV, instrumentation, et cetera. Have a gander at wtfbach.substack.com

Thanks to all my listeners for supporting me in 2025! Thanks to Romain Villet for reminding me to make this episode. Best of luck to him and to all brave enough to transpose Bach in 2026!

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Concepts Covered:

This podcast episode discusses Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1, (1722) the second prelude and fugue in C minor. Including revisions, fugue structure, and contrapuntal technique, with a few hints at BWV 773 and BWV 867. There is a double countersubject, canonic writing, BWV 847a, and the earliest versions before source P. 415

This is one of the only fugues to make strict use of the countersubject, occurring in all but one (!) appearances of the subject.

This motif, which we call the head of the countersubject, dominates all the episodic material both right side up, and upside down:

Got Bach?

The prelude contains some interesting revisions. Here is one I thought would be too subtle to hear, but I think it’s quite audible in the episode:

The latter represents a rare simplification of harmony and texture in revision.

The biggest addendum of all is the additional measures at the end of the piece. See how abruptly the early version ends:

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Tuning, Revisions, Early verisions. The f minor prelude and fugue BWV 857, with its countersubject, analysis and study. Organ and harpsichord performances, Chromaticism, tone-rows,

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In the last of Bach’s four layerings to the fair copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier, we see some beautiful details that would have been lost had Bach not made this last series of revisions in the 1740s. It makes you wonder if Bach would have made even more, should he have lived as long as Telemann!

Bar 42 reads like this in A1-A3 into the 1740s:

Then, in A4, Bach found expression in the tie and 32nd notes:

Such a revision physically looks like this on fair copy:

This particular revision may not be immediately clear to the naked eye, but some are (see the e minor revisions at the bottom of the post.) I believe it was X-ray technology that led to such breakthroughs in the scholarship, but some layers might be a sort of ‘white-out’ or paste that physically would stand out on the paper— any expertise would be appreciated in the comments! We know that in the Saint Matthew Passion, Bach quite literally ‘layered’ smaller pieces of paper onto the manuscript, but I think that has to do with repair, not necessarily revision. One famous layering in A4 looks as if it’s been pasted onto the manuscript… but it could be my imagination. From the first fugue, BWV 846:

WTF Bach is free to all! Let’s spread the awareness of contrapuntal mastery. However, if you support financially, you’re much less likely to write parallel 5ths.

There are a number of revisions also in the F Major prelude. Interestingly, the length of both prelude and fugue remains unchanged between earliest versions and the fair copy. Bach had the general harmonic rhythm right, but smooths out the insides of some measures:

(Early versions, followed by the fair copy)

And so on… (more demonstrations in the episode.)

I finish the episode with four beautiful revisions to the e minor prelude (covered in Ep. 114) again made in A4. These are typical of his final revisions to the WTC1, bursting with 32nds. Here, one can somewhat plainly see the difference between inks:

Before these revisions, the melody was as follows:

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s late A4 revisions to the Well-Tempered Clavier I (BWV 846–869) in the F-major fugue BWV 856, the F major prelude, the discant adjustments that earlier manuscript stages (A1–A3) lack. The late embellishments in the E-minor prelude BWV 855, The genesis of WTK I, variant readings, fair-copy corrections, Harmonic analysis, contrapuntal rules, and the general genius of Bach.

The original Spanish of the Borges poem, as read by my good friend, Andrea Profili.

Otro poema de los dones

Gracias quiero dar al divinoLaberinto de los efectos y de las causasPor la diversidad de las criaturasQue forman este singular universo,Por la razón, que no cesará de soñarCon un plano del laberinto,Por el rostro de Elena y la perseverancia de Ulises,Por el amor, que nos deja ver a los otrosComo los ve la divinidad,Por el firme diamante y el agua suelta,Por el álgebra, palacio de precisos cristales,Por las místicas monedas de Ángel Silesio,Por Schopenhauer,Que acaso descifró el universo,Por el fulgor del fuego,Que ningún ser humano puede mirar sin un asombro antiguo,Por la caoba, el cedro y el sándalo,Por el pan y la sal,Por el misterio de la rosa,Que prodiga color y que no lo ve,Por ciertas vísperas y días de 1955,Por los duros troperos que en la llanuraArrean los animales y el alba,Por la mañana en Montevideo,Por el arte de la amistad,Por el último día de Sócrates,Por las palabras que en un crepúsculo se dijeronDe una cruz a otra cruz,Por aquel sueño del Islam que abarcóMil noches y una noche,Por aquel otro sueño del infierno,De la torre del fuego que purificaY de las esferas gloriosas,Por Swedenborg,Que conversaba con los ángeles en las calles de Londres,Por los ríos secretos e inmemorialesQue convergen en mí,Por el idioma que, hace siglos, hablé en Nortumbria,Por la espada y el arpa de los sajones,Por el mar, que es un desierto resplandecienteY una cifra de cosas que no sabemosY un epitafio de los vikings,Por la música verbal de Inglaterra,Por la música verbal de Alemania,Por el oro, que relumbra en los versos,Por el épico invierno,Por el nombre de un libro que no he leído:Gesta Dei per Francos,Por Verlaine, inocente como los pájaros,Por el prisma de cristal y la pesa de bronce,Por las rayas del tigre,Por las altas torres de San Francisco y de la isla de Manhattan,Por la mañana en Texas,Por aquel sevillano que redactó la Epístola MoralY cuyo nombre, como él hubiera preferido, ignoramos,Por Séneca y Lucano, de Córdoba,Que antes del español escribieronToda la literatura española,Por el geométrico y bizarro ajedrezPor la tortuga de Zenón y el mapa de Royce,Por el olor medicinal de los eucaliptos,Por el lenguaje, que puede simular la sabiduría,Por el olvido, que anula o modifica el pasado,Por la costumbre,Que nos repite y nos confirma como un espejo,Por la mañana, que nos depara la ilusión de un principio,Por la noche, su tiniebla y su astronomía,Por el valor y la felicidad de los otros,Por la patria, sentida en los jazmines,O en una vieja espada,Por Whitman y Francisco de Asís, que ya escribieron el poema,Por el hecho de que el poema es inagotableY se confunde con la suma de las criaturasY no llegará jamás al último versoY varía según los hombres,Por Frances Haslam, que pidió perdón a sus hijosPor morir tan despacio,Por los minutos que preceden al sueño,Por el sueño y la muerte, esos dos tesoros ocultos,Por los íntimos dones que no enumero,Por la música, misteriosa forma del tiempo

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The fact that this piece was conceived independently of its solo line is a marvelous insight into Bach’s compositional process. Somewhere along the way, Bach revisited the piece and added the upper line:

Here is a link to the video where Schiff talks about the Well-Tempered.And don’t miss the Kurt Vonnegut moment at 32:45!

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Concepts Covered:

BWV 854 and BWV 855 in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, two-voice fugue, the early versions, Bach’s revision. A look at finding the right character, as seen in the Christmas Oratorio, where motivic cells show a consistent compositional logic. Bach’s improvisation, or at least improvisatory style while writing a solo line over a preformed prelude, and predetermined harmonic rhythm. We also see Bach’s use of parallel octaves in Bach, and parallel octaves in the Well-Tempered Clavier. Contrapuntal analysis, study.

Know someone who’d enjoy hearing about this joyous discovery?

A link to the source of d minor Chaconne, BWV 1178A link to the source of the g minor Chaconne, BWV 1179

The live stream link (English overdub.)

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Got friends who speak English? Spread W.T.F.

P.S. The music at the end is a taste of a forthcoming W.T.F. Bach album: arrangements of the Orgelbüchlein. Album title suggestions welcome!

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W.T.F. Bach wants YOU to subscribe

A prelude in E-flat minor, with a fugue in its enharmonic other. The image attached to this episode is from the Czerny edition, who felt the need to dispense with the enharmonic intrigue, and publish the fugue in E-flat minor.

Is the prelude the most crushingly beautiful thing Bach wrote? The fugue, devoid of the sensitivity found in the prelude, displays the largest repertoire of fugal technique thus far: stretto, inversion, canon in all voices, augmentation— a veritable dictionary of thematic possibilities.

Here, for example, is a passage I find most striking: stretto and strict canon in all voices. First, the theme appears in blue, ascending in perfect fourths, and a moment later, in red, inverts into perfect fifths.

Bach seems to have been fond of this idea (and perhaps the shape of this subject as lending itself to fugal techniques) as he employs it in four voices —nearly at the exact same spot in the fugue— in the fifth contrapuntus in The Art of Fugue:

We heard from Edwin Fischer, ukuleleist Herb Ohta (whose Ukulele Bach Playlist is a trip) and at the end, Pierre Hantai.

Do check out Alfredo Sanchez’ recording on guitar, he’s got a great feel for this music.

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Concepts Covered:

The Well-Tempered Clavier, J.S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E-flat minor / D-sharp minor Expression vs. technical complexity. The prelude, written in E-flat minor, is introspective, harmonically rich. Its fugue, in the enharmonic key of D-sharp minor, moves from emotion to intellect, showcasing the most extensive use of fugal technique seen so far in the cycle: A survey of contrapuntal possibilities. Analysis, early versions such as BWV 853a, history, revisions, and study.

https://arpschnitger.nl/scappel.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_St._Peter_and_Paul_in_Cappel

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The prelude begins more contrapuntally than the preludes we have met thus far:

After a few bars of this, Bach dashes our hope that the prelude will continue exclusively with this motif. A flourish of virtuosity vanishes into what seems to be a fugue— of completely unrelated material— nearly in stile antico:

Not content to remain a simple fugue, Bach doubles down by introducing a second subject derived from the opening gestures. Notice how the new subject contrasts with the first, moving not only quicker, but in stepwise motion rather than by leaps.

May This Baroque Resource ne’er be Broke! Help us thrive:

As mentioned in the episode, here is a chart illustrating the symmetrical placement of the two double fugues within Bach’s collection. Such symmetry, I feel, is not merely coincidental.

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Concepts Covered:

In this analysis of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 852, E-flat Major, Es Dur, we examine Bach’s contrapuntal design, double fugue prelude, and development. This new fugal prelude, Bach transitions from free texture to strict imitation, introducing a second subject derived from the opening motif. This new theme contrasts with the first, employing stepwise motion, Baroque counterpoint and architectural symmetry in the prelude and fugue. The episode also discusses Bach’s placement of the two double fugues in The Well-Tempered Clavier as an act of structural balance. Early version, BWV852a, also covered.

Enjoy this short story— one of the great American short stories— by John Cheever.

Thanks!-Evan

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Admittedly, I still find that beautiful, but Bach is one note ahead of me:

We have a prelude propelled by its instability. This might be something to pay attention to in The Well-Tempered Clavier —if not all his writing in the early 1720s— ordinary melodic shapes that become more compelling when slightly offset.

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We are 25% of the way through this triumph of tonality. Now, for the first time in the collection, the fugue makes explicit use of inverted entrances. Here is the subject ‘right-side up’ at the opening:

Exactly halfway through the fugue, Bach brings the subjects in a second exposition, only now they are upside down:

He also inverts the order of voices in the beautifully expressive episode that occurred earlier, and makes explicit use of stretto in the second half. Other fugal techniques such as ‘splintering’ fragments of the subject in stretto or in parallel thirds make for a brilliant finale on the first quarter of his 1722 masterpiece. Have a listen to the episode for more analysis!

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Concepts covered:

Preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the D minor BWV 851 (and others, such as BWV 850) Bach’s compositional technique in revision. The early version, BWV 851a is a mere 15 bars long. Counterpoint, voice leading, and harmonic direction, inversion, (the first inversions in the WTK) and stretto in this fugue. Also, instability in melodic design and rhythmic offsetting. Bach marks periods of structure through the book by placing more complicated techniques at these symmetrical points. Also, articulation added to the revised versions, the autograph fair copy.

Continuing our tour through The Well-Tempered Clavier, in the D Major Fugue now, BWV 850, we see a possible implication of double-dots in the subject:

Playing the dotted 8ths as double-dotted 8ths, hence changing the following 16th notes into 32nds, might be considered correct— even stylish! But we are thrown into doubt when we meet the phrase:

If we are to play the 16th note chords together, double-dotting the motif would now not be possible. What to do? Separate the chords? Swing the 16ths? Play one phrase double-dotted and the other not?

In this episode we listen to 14 interpretations in an attempt to find the ‘correct’ answer.

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The following performers offer their solution:

Edwin FischerGlenn GouldRalph KirkpatrickTon KoopmanWanda LandowskaGustav LeonhardtSviatoslav RichterScott RossWolfgang RubsamAndras SchiffLouis ThiryRosalyn TureckHelmut WalchaZuzana Ruzickova

There is also a good wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_note

Reminder!J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works, Vol. 5- Musical Offering, Suite 823 is now available everywhere you listen to music— have a listen!

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Concepts Covered:

Double dotting in Baroque music remains one of the most debated topics in performance practice, especially when interpreting J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier alongside the broader French style. French composers such as Lully and Rameau often used double-dotted rhythms in overtures and dances, creating a sharp long–short contrast that was part of their national style, while German composers absorbed and transformed these conventions. Bach, familiar with both Italian and French idioms, never notated double dots explicitly, relying on performers to apply the convention, leaving modern interpreters uncertain whether to play rhythms strictly (7:1) or with more flexibility. This ambiguity, double-dot, notes inégales in Bach, continues to challenge harpsichordists and pianists alike, making historically informed performance of Bach’s keyboard works, especially the Well-Tempered Clavier, a central field of research in Baroque interpretation. BWV 850 Prelude and Fugue, its early versions and revisions also explored.

Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

instamus tamen inmemores caecique furore,et monstrum infelix sacrata sistimus arce.

Aeneid, II.244-245

(Yet blindly we persist, forgetful in our fury, and we place the monster, unhappy, upon our sacred citadel.)

I like to think about the origins of phrases we use in English. Imagine you’re a foreigner and someone says, “go on, spill the beans…”

Here are a few idioms we use without thinking about them:

Bite the bullet. Here’s an actual example from the Cambridge dictionary of how this might be used today:

“I decided I had to bite the bullet and take a couple of math classes even though I knew they were hard.”

…But really, biting the bullet meant, “No, it’s not algebra for you son, you’re going into surgery! It’s the 1860s so instead of a nice oxygen mask and a cute little countdown, you’ll calmly bite on a bullet while they saw something off. I imagine after a few minutes of that, the dentist will be on his way to see you as well.”

Let the cat out of the bag. “Don’t let the cat out of the bag!”

This is one a butcher told me about. Really, you should let the cat out of the bag before you leave the butcher. He said a rabbit and a cat will look exactly alike when skinned except for a few signs. Hence you could fool someone hoping to make a rabbit stew by skinning a couple cats. —Ooh, skin the cat, there’s another one.

Anyhow, you get home to the wife and kids, and instead of letting a delicious rabbit or piglet out of the bag, you let a cat out of the bag to show them just how badly papa’s been scammed at the slaughterhouse.

The whole nine yards. You ever hear that and think, “but isn’t it ten yards to a first down?” Well, this one’s not football related folks, it’s war related! Machine gun related. Another gruesome one: “Go on boy! Mow the lot of them down. Give it your all, chap! Feed the gun the whole nine yards— of bullets.”

Raining cats and dogs. Isn’t that a cute one? “Wow, it’s raining cats and dogs outside!” Sorry— not cute. I quote Jonathan Swift’s famous poem, ‘A Description of a City Shower,’

Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.

It’s raining so hard, dogs and cats are now washing up in the gutters.

And, saved by the bell, “Gee! I’m sure glad I was saved by the bell!” Well, this might be related to boxing, but it also could be related to a device they put in coffins— only a few hundred years ago, mind you— where, should you just happen to be buried alive, naturally after your funeral and after your many days of exhibiting no pulse or breathing, should you just happen to be buried alive, instead of frantically clawing on the back of your coffin without any dignity, you could simply pull on a little string connected to a small bell six feet above. Caution: upon waking in a coffin to total darkness you previously hadn’t been able to conceive, remember not to pull too hard and break the string. Remain calm. Ring daintily. A nearby gardener, whistling while trimming the flowers on a surrounding tombstone, will hear your patient plea and dig you up again. You’ll be back at the pub in a few hours— saved by the bell. Phew!

So you see, most of these expressions come from gruesome, if not downright morbid backgrounds. …But I think that gives our language its special grit, don’t you?

—

Today anyhow I want to talk about a proverb, not an idiom. Proverbs are supposedly rooted in folk wisdom, rather than sentences that no longer make literal sense.

So, sure, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, this makes sense to me, but I still have no idea why I can’t put all my eggs in one basket. I’m not going to the coop with two baskets. Can we just save some time here and make the proverb, don’t drop the basket!

The proverb I want to dissect is ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

It generally means something like, when your uncle gifts you a snow globe from a city you’ve never visited, don’t remind yourself that he shares only 25% of your DNA, just pretend to be thrilled, hug him and say thanks. Don’t look the gift horse in the mouth. You may, however, throw the gift horse straight in the garbage.

You probably don’t hear many people saying that anymore— the horses have all disappeared— but when ‘driving’ meant riding on a horse, and not turning the ignition, there was horse wisdom, and one piece of wisdom was that you could tell how healthy a horse was, by looking at its teeth.

So imagine how this phrase originates: your neighbor comes bearing the gift of horses, but you’re not supposed to check if they’re healthy.

The nerve of these people, bringing you horses that are soon your problem!

“Honey, Ol’ Shadow’s looking pretty weak, and I don’t have the nerve to put him out of his misery. What d’ya say I bring ‘em round to the Campbell’s… I think that daughter of theirs had a birthday last week?”

Get real. If my neighbor comes with marmalade I’m checking it for mold. If he comes with a horse? I’m going straight for the mouth. …Well, as a pianist I personally am not sticking my hands into a horse’s mouth, but if Farmer Joe, who previously has brought me no gifts, suddenly shows up with a cheeky grin and a horse with a bow on its head that appears to be tied just so it’s clamping the horse’s jaws shut— I'm gonna make sure an equine dentist is on staff.

‘Oh hey, Farmer Joe! To what do I owe this pleasure? I see you’ve brought your horse. He’s looking a bit… is he alright? What’s that? You want me to ha— a horse? For me? Farmer Joe, Wow! I don’t really ride hor— I shouldn’t ride him? Oh, well I suppose I’d better get some hay anyho— oh, he’s not eating much. I see… well, is he, perhaps… I should look in his— no? Honestly, you’re looking a little tense, Farmer Joe. Look, if you just prefer if I pay the knacker and we forget the whole thing, I’ll pretend you wouldn’t let me look your gift horse in the mouth. You know, Farmer Joe, I’m starting to think you’ve invented a pointless proverb because you’re out of bullets and your shovel is broken.’

Always look a gift horse in the mouth. That’s what I say.

A friend bearing gifts requiring medical attention is a terrible friend. How’s that for a proverb?

You know who didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth? The Trojans.

Note:The outro music is one of the movements Bach cut from his Magnificat during its transposition from E-flat into D. You can find it, and a few more movements not included in the later version, listed under BWV 243a.

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A Musical Offering (Ein Musikalisches Opfer) BWV 1079, is one of Bach’s late mono-thematic masterpieces. When Bach visited his son and King Frederick the Great in 1747, he was challenged to improvise upon the following, extemporaneously:

Bach did so to the amazement of all. Two months later, already engraved on copper plates, The Musical Offering was ready. It included two fugues on the theme, a trio sonata and ten ‘puzzle canons.’

See here the permutations of the ‘royal theme’ as they appear in the canons alone. Altering a melody so imaginatively is already fascinating— and this doesn’t even speak of the ingenious canons he fastens to them. (This is a ridiculously detailed image, so it’s available for download.)

I hope you enjoy this episode and the album! Thanks to Yamaha Artist Services in New York, especially Bonnie Barrett, Aaron Ross and Shane Hoshino.

Available Here (Spotify)

And Here (Apple Music)

https://music.apple.com/nl/album/j-s-bach-complete-keyboard-works-vol-5-musical-offering/1837359653

And Here (YouTube)

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k2wf1S1hboQzMDL-4SYawCQDCuaBE9bH4&si=N4M3U_jlDrwZVH0R

Finally, the episode dealing with more in-depth history of BWV 1079:

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Concepts Covered:

J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering (1747) stands as one of the most profound works of the Baroque era, composed after his famous meeting with Frederick the Great in Potsdam. At its core is the celebrated crab canon, a musical palindrome that exemplifies Bach’s fascination with mathematics in music, loop canons, Möbius stips, and intricate contrapuntal design. Alongside the ricercare in six voices and other canons and fugues, the so-called Prussian Fugue, the Musical Offering illustrates the height of Bach’s late contrapuntal style, where intellectual puzzles and spiritual depth converge. We analyze the work and its canon riddles, Bach’s fugues and canons, its role as the composer’s mastery of counterpoint. We see its mathematical structure, admired for its late Baroque complexity, and celebrated as a true masterpiece of canonic writing, revealing why Bach remains central to discussions of music theory, musical palindromes, and the art of fugue.

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There are only two five-voice fugues in The Well-Tempered Clavier, and only two triple fugues. This fugue is both— a five voice triple fugue. Should I be tempted to add some (perhaps too convenient) theological rhetoric to this fugue, an analysis might read like this:

Three subjects in one fugue? Why yes, the trinity in music! The themes enter, Son, Holy Spirit, and God the Father. See first God the Son, a man, very nearly B-A-C-H:

The first entrance of the Pentecostal waves comes, aptly, from the top down. The Holy Spirit is rendered:

God the Father finally makes an appearance, with his perfect interval, and three repeated notes:

On the final page, the Holy Spirit vanishes, leaving father and son in an impressive stretto:

N.B. I’m not convinced Bach had any of this in mind. At least since Schweitzer, however, people have seen the image of the triune God in Bach’s triple fugues. I believe at this time in Bach’s career, he had not quite codified his theological word painting, so if in fact Bach was thinking of the trinity, it is in any case represented more clearly in the triple fugue from Book Two, in f-sharp minor. There, the themes enter in order (as they do in the ‘Saint Anne’s’ Prelude and Fugue BWV 552) Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Biographical and theological readings aside, this is a striking and important fugue. Its prelude is no less beautiful. A most interesting revision comes at bar 14. The earliest version reads:

Only two bars, dominant to tonic. In revision, Bach seamlessly adds an additional two bars, stretching (and perhaps smoothing) out the harmonic rhythm. Bach the master surgeon leaves no scar:

People Mentioned:

Albert SchweitzerMieczysław HorszowskiShirley PerleSeymour LipkinPierre Hantaï

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Concepts covered:

The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–893) is one of the great monuments of Baroque music, counterpoint with theological tone painting. A remarkable triple fugue: the C-sharp minor fugue from Book I (BWV 849) (another triple fugue is the F-sharp minor fugue from Book II BWV 883). The C-sharp minor stands out as a five-voice fugue and triple fugue, an extraordinary rarity in the keyboard literature. Some interpreters have seen theological symbolism in the three subjects—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—Bach’s mastery of structure, harmonic rhythm, and Bach in revision. The development of contrapuntal technique, musical spelling, such as the B-A-C-H motif

In this short episode (11 minutes of talking + 10 minutes of music) I read an entry from my practice diary which may be interesting enough to ponder…

As it was passed around during covid, the “Coronavirus Etude” looked something like this:

Hopefully you’ll enjoy the lesson I got out of the few ‘performances’ made of such a meme.

Meanwhile, Rosalyn Tureck is featured for the first time on this show. Here is a picture of her at a Moog. (I didn’t mention that one of my favorite facts about her is that she espoused this instrument as a perfectly valid way to capture Bach’s music.) Her personal “revelation” about Bach, as related in David Dubal’s Reflections from the Keyboard is read in full.

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To which ill-tempered friend will you send this?

We are lucky Bach bothered writing out his arpeggio preludes. Here, for example, is what would later become the C-sharp Major prelude, from Book 2:

Who, without the aid of Bach’s revisions, would be so bold to turn that into:

So too, in the early versions of the opening of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach loses little time writing out the figures. He even stops writing half-notes toward the end:

Only 24 bars in its conception! A further revision in W.F.’s notebook sees a 28 bar version of the piece— the fair copy of 1722 is 35 bars (not 36! Listen for my discussion of the Schwencke measure.)

Some other pieces in this style:

The fugue also underwent revisions, especially to its theme. Layers A1 and A2 have:

Landowska recorded this version and wrote program notes about her decision (heard in the episode.) The 32nd notes of the subject were added in the third ‘layering’. Finally, Bach makes the finest revision in A4— in the 1740s(!), changing the bass in bar 15:

to this:

Finer and finer. Curvier and curvier. The image of Bach in the workshop with the chisel is a fascinating one.

Links mentioned:

The earlier episode covering this prelude (inverting it chromatically and other fun tricks)

Regarding the 2nd note each arpeggio in the earliest version of the prelude, see Legato playing and hidden polyphony on the harpsichord (Thanks to Erzdorf for sharing this, highly recommended.)

And, as mentioned in the episode, Wanda with Leo Tolstoy:

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Concepts Covered:

We discuss the prelude as a possible invitation to check the new system tuning, the famous pieces of Bach, and the Minuet in G being not by Bach but by Petzold. Explore the evolution and historical significance of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a landmark in keyboard literature and tuning theory. This episode traces Bach’s compositional development of key preludes and fugues, such as the C-sharp Major Prelude (Book II) and the C Major Prelude (Book I), BWV 846 analysis, revealing how Bach expanded brief sketches—some only 24 bars—into fully realized works through meticulous revisions. The Schwencke measure- his mistake. Discussions of simplifying Bach, also we examine counterpoint in detail, including changes to fugue subjects, rhythmic diminution, and voice leading, with examples from layers A1–A4. The discussion includes the function of the preludes as tools to demonstrate well-tempered tuning, their pedagogical role, and Bach’s workshop-like revision process. Also covered: authorship controversies, authentic Bach, such as the Minuet in G, long attributed to Bach but now credited to Christian Petzold. An in-depth look at how Bach's compositional process shaped one of the most enduring works in Western music.

The episode on temperament I mentioned.

I think of the two books of this collection as having only outward similarities. The music in both parts are as separate as The Art of Fugue and the Inventions— even more so. Book One, incidentally the only part to be called “The Well-Tempered Clavier” was written in a condensed period of time, whereas its counterpart was ‘assembled,’ as it were, over some twenty years.

We begin not quite at the beginning, (a special episode will be devoted to the C Major pair) but with the third prelude and fugue, in C-sharp Major, BWV 848. Compare the earliest version which I play in the episode:

to the version which we know:

We’ll discuss Bach in revision, the four ‘layerings’ in the first part, as well as the source tradition of both books, the stylistic differences between Book One and Book Two.

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Concepts Covered:

This is an introduction to the Well-Tempered Clavier. Explore the depth and legacy of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection that Robert Schumann famously called a musician’s “daily bread.” This post examines the differences between Book I and Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, focusing on their distinct compositional histories and structural identities. The Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Major, BWV 848, comparing its earliest version to the final form familiar today. Along the way, we’ll unpack Bach’s process of revision, the layered construction of Book I, and the source tradition of Book II, offering valuable insight for students of Bach analysis, keyboard music, and Baroque performance practice.

Literally Can't Thank You Enough in Advance

I try to “bear the burden of bitterness which experience forces on us with as much uncomplaining dignity as strength will allow” as restaurants around me tell me to eat beautiful, as any person who pockets their phone to listen is crowned empathetic, as those who literally died walk among us. Language evolves. Oh well.

Still, there has got to be something to the way we shift around our words, carefully wringing any sentiment out of the last remaining fabric of a once powerful tongue. We no longer feel with our words. We miss out on basic communication. We’ve lost even the ability to thank and receive thanks:

Once, we said, you're welcome. Now we say, no problem. I don’t really mind: other languages have de nada, de rien. But something happens in our psychology when one goes from feeling welcome, to not a problem. Once, we were welcome, now we’re …simply not a pest. Fine, can you blame us? What modern human has time to make anyone feel welcome? I just feel bad for the re-printings of all the phrasebooks, textbooks, tourist maps, dictionaries, flashcards, everything that now has to change you're welcome to no problem. Surely, the truest way to show you’re a foreigner is to say you're welcome.

That’s receiving thanks, how about giving it?

For starters, there’s thank you in advance. Have you ever been thanked in advance? How did that feel? I recently got a request from someone asking to stay at my house — thanking me in advance. I wonder if she was equally thankful when I said, no thanks. Thanking people in advance is holding them hostage, so when someone thanks me in advance I tell them to get f****d on short notice.

Then there’s, I can’t thank you enough. This has got to be one of the weakest sentiments ever uttered. When I hear this, I note the lack of any real thanks in the first place. I can't thank you enough reminds me of that eerie phrase in the business, said just before you agree to play for free, “And you know, Mr. Shinners, we just couldn’t possibly pay you enough…”

I can't thank you enough.Really? Have you tried?Tried what?Thanking me.…thanking you?Yeah, sure, go ahead and try.…oh… thank you…Okay. That's enough.

You can't thank me enough? What am I, a sultan? I can't thank you enough is an outgrowth of our desire to over-blow sentiment to the point where anything— especially a meal— could be compared to the profound. Amazing brunch. It’s the same sentiment as the best thing ever. So many people I know have experienced the best thing ever. Poor folks… if I had experienced the best thing ever, my life would thereafter seem empty, down-hill, constantly in pursuit of that once happier moment. Going immediately to the superlatives in our language leaves no room for improvement, and once again, we’ve exhausted our expressive power on lunch.

Having an occasion where one couldn’t thank enough seems to be reserved for the Cherokee Chief who pulls your drowning family out of a freezing river and nurses them back to health. Maybe then you couldn’t find enough thanks.

… in the room, dim light and steam. Under his dark hair I could see his hands, working tirelessly, deftly. My daughter, blue around the lips and limp, lay at the man’s knee: it had been two days since she had moved. I had no hope, perhaps I already resigned her to a frozen fate. At last, as if cued by his movements, as if rising with the steam, she opened her eyes, restored to life. Tears flowed from her eyes, and then from mine. The Chief kept his gaze fixed on her chest, focused on her breathing. I was at a loss. Finally, he relaxed his hands and sank away from her, as if his own life had left him and became hers.

I turned my wet eyes to the Chief and uttered, ‘Sir… my dear man, were I to thank you every day until I die, I would still feel that I cannot thank you enough.

No problem. Said he.

Notes:

The opening quote: “bear the burden of bitterness which experience forces on us with as much uncomplaining dignity as strength will allow” is from one of the essays I live by: Phillip Lopate: Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays. Poseidon Press, 1986.

The closing music is my teacher, the great Jerome Lowenthal, playing Liszt’s Christmas Tree.

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Topics Covered (Chronologically)

Works of doubtful authenticity (Violin Sonata, BWV 1025)Continuo playing (Figured bass, Improvisation, Ornamentation)Legato in the BaroqueWanda Landowska (“I play Bach his way”)Tuning (Meantone and Werckmeister)Student copies with different ornamentsTempo and the connection with ornamentationHeinrich SchützBach’s repertoire in concertsPedal harpsichord and pedal clavichordBach’s toccatas on organ without pedalsBach ‘counting’ bars (Kabbalah and numerology in Bach)The ending of ‘The Art of Fugue’ BWV 1080The Fuga a 3 Soggetti’s inclusion in ‘The Art of Fugue’Koopman as pianistThe touch on piano vs. harpsichordBeginning organist repertoire (pianists learning organ)Pedal techniqueGustav Leonhardt (also as organist)’Touch’ on harpsichord and organ (quick and slow attack)Performing and musicologyEarly fingeringMy Lady Neville’s BookBook collecting (and indexing)L'art de toucher le clavecin (Couperin)Roger North’s comments on musical performance practicePrefaces by FrescobaldiN.B. BWV 1025 was played by Robert Hill and Reinhard Goebel. The charming piece around min 39 is Giles Farnaby’s (1560-1640) ‘Up Tails All.’

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https://modernclassicalx.lnk.to/BachCompleteKeyboardWorksVol4PartitasPtOne

Today I’ve released Volume 4 in my “Complete Keyboard Works” of JSB. This album contains three pieces by the master:

Partita no. 1 in B-flat Major, BWV 825Partita no. 2 in c minor, BWV 826Partita no. 3 in a minor, BWV 827

Bach’s Opus One—the six Partitas of Clavier-Übung I—were first issued individually from 1726, with the complete set published in 1731. Bach pays homage to his Leipzig predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, who established the model in 1689 with his own Neuer Clavier-Übung. Even the title pages show Bach’s awareness of Kuhnau’s legacy:

Here is (an edition based on) the all-interesting source G 25, with its crucial revisions to the 2nd and 3rd partitas. These tempo indications, for example, withheld from publication in the Neue Bach Ausgabe, greatly affect this transitional passage in BWV 826:

Finally, the episode covering the most dramatic revision in this source:

Many thanks to Bonnie Barrett, Aaron Ross, the YASI team in NYC, and Armand Hirsch for their help in this release!

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After Shakespeare’s Memory, (1983) which I believe is his last published story, I offer my somewhat chaotic rendition of the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel Hoch, BWV 769.

Following this, Donald Barthelme, an exciting, quirky read: The School (1976.) The frontispiece of my Barthelme book is a painting by Kandinsky— perhaps this is the right metaphor.

June 13th, episode 99, sees the release of volume 4 in my J.S. Bach Complete Keyboard Works series. You can save the release here in eager anticipation:

https://modernclassicalx.lnk.to/BachCompleteKeyboardWorksVol4PartitasPtOne

The two tracks I made for this episode are available as a free download. Here you are!

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BWV 569, composed around 1708 when Bach was 23, is a single-rhythm experiment in modulation—akin to his Fantasy, BWV 922. On the page, it looks repetitive, but harmonically it’s anything but:

I mentioned I’d link to my own recording of its sister piece, BWV 922 (this cover art: under appreciated.)

The second piece, BWV 551, recently dated to around 1700, shows stunning compositional command for a young teenager. If Mozart and Mendelssohn are the poster children of musical precocity, Bach must now be added to the whizz-kid list. As Schweitzer puts it:

“If ever a composer’s period of probation was short, it was his.” -Schweitzer, Vol. 2, p. 122.

This piece, based on the keyboard toccatas of Johann Jakob Froberger (1616–1667) is an absolute blast. For our purposes, we can call it a double fugue. Look to the pedal line to identify both subjects, and imagine tap-dancing the 16th-note theme:

The first time I played it, the ending is what had me cracking up (alone and in an organ loft.) Not only does the piece seem like it’s coming to a stop in d minor:

But on the last bar, Bach adds the raised fourth degree! Exceptional.

Performers in today’s episode:

Rübsam, Koopman, Preston, Walcha, Hans Fagius.

I read excerpts from:

Pirsig, Robert M. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Bantam Books, 1991.

Wolff, Christoph, and Markus Zepf. The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook. Translated by Lynn Edwards Butler, University of Illinois Press, 2012.

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Concepts Covered:

In this episode on early Bach organ works, we highlight two lesser-known compositions in A minor: the Prelude (Fantasy) BWV 569 and the Prelude with Fugue BWV 551. These pieces, rarely featured in standard organ repertoire, showcase the astonishing talent of young Johann Sebastian Bach. BWV 569, composed around 1708, reveals experimental rhythmic modulation reminiscent of BWV 922. Bach enthusiasts, organ music lovers, and anyone interested in the early genius of J.S. Bach, will be interested in the fugal analysis, the discussion on double fugues, the influence of Froberger, and Bach’s copy of Frescobaldi.

What kind of music could Bach compose for such a joyous word? In every instance, it demands a distinctly exalted treatment.

We discuss the origins of the word Alleluia, and analyze the music when the word appears in his motets, cantatas and a four-part chorale. Plus, the story of the discovery of Bach’s personal bible, the Calov Bible.

Here’s the word in the autograph of Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (can’t you feel his joy writing this?)

Performers in today’s episode:BWV 225, Vocalconsort Berlin, Daniel ReussBWV 230, Le Petite Band, Sigiwald KokenBWV 140, Academy of Ancient Music, Choir of King's College, Stephen CleoburyBWV 4, Pigmaleon, Raphael PinchonBWV 276, Chamber Choir of Europe, Nichol MattBWV 143, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, Ton Koopman

Hallelujah!

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Concepts Covered:

This epiosde of the podcast explores the origins of the German resurrection hymn Christ ist erstanden, recomposed by Luther into Christ lag in Todesbanden, and how Bach musically sets the word "Hallelujah" across his motets, cantatas, and his four-part chorales. We examine the etymology of "Alleluia," its liturgical role in the tempus clausum—when festive music ceases— the observance under the Rule of Saint Benedict. The episode ends with a mention of the discovery of Bach’s annotated Calov Bible, offering us a possible glimpse into his theological and musical mindset.

But wait, I thought the St. John Passion was:

In this episode, beyond outlining the basic revisions between the 1724 and 1725 (and a few other) versions of BWV 245, we’ll study how people heard passion music, the purpose of a passion setting, and how Bach, by changing the opening and closing movements, or swapping an aria here and there, envisioned he might guide the listener into a different state of reflection to receive the same Gospel.

Today’s performers were M. Suzuki, H. Rilling and P. Herreweghe. Here is a link to the Weimar Passion theory I mentioned. Finally, the excerpt by Daniel Melamed comes from his excellent book: Hearing Bach’s Passions. Revised ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 73–74.

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Concepts covered:

Various versions of BWV 245, especially the 1724 and 1725 layers, analyzing changes in opening and closing choruses, aria placement, as well as theological emphasis. Topics include Lenten music practices, the music during tempus clausum, the Passion oratorio, Passion hymns such as “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß,” the liturgical and devotional role of chorales, and how Bach’s compositional decisions recalibrate the listener’s reception of the Johannine Passion text. We discuss changes in orchestration and the change in venue from St. Thomaskirche to St. Nikolaikirche in 1724.

In J.S. Bach’s second collection of chorale prelude for organ, he introduces obligato pedal parts. Below is an image from his Bach’s earliest chorale settings for organ, as preserved in the Neumeister Collection:

Whereas we do not see any explicit pedal markings, we imagine the adept player added them when tasteful. A decade or so later, Bach’s chorale settings look more like this:

Note the small staves on the left, indicating that the source still had two staves, but the counterpoint in the pedal is specifically called for. Here is the autograph:

That little “P.” below the bottom staff is the clue. The title page of the Orgelbüchlein contains a flowery description, indicating its intended use:

Here is the text of Saint-Saëns’ charming autobiography.

And here is the episode where I introduce the Neumeister Collection.

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Concepts covered:

This episode explores the rich tradition of Baroque organ music, focusing on J.S. Bach’s organ works and his chorale preludes. We examine historical performance practice, particularly the use of ad libitum pedal technique and the development of obbligato pedal lines in Bach’s compositions. A deep dive into the Neumeister Collection sheds light on early Baroque keyboard music, revealing how Bach’s pedal technique evolved over time. Finally, we analyze the Orgelbüchlein, its structure, and its lasting impact on organ repertoire.

Here is the tuning video with chorale in question toward the end of the episode:

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Let’s have a look at BWV 106. I focus on the two recorders and their almost unison playing. The effect of one flute dropping a few notes from their otherwise identical melody is marvelous:

The theme of the cantata joins the Old-Testament ‘fear of death’ with the New-Testament ‘joy in death.’ Bach combines both testaments’ text in multiple movements. This idea of the soul rising above the old world, ‘as if hastening hither from another,’ musically detached from the fugue in the lower voices, a soprano floats over the texture, quoting Revelations:

And who can forget this moment? It even looks striking to the eye:

We find a similar image of the comforted soul floating above the music in the duet toward the end of the cantata. Over Jesus’ dying words, the alto slowly sings a Lutheran hymn:

Bach so carefully wants to paint the idea of peace in death, he gives one word (sleep) its own dynamic:

Performers today were: Masaaki Suzuki, Joshua Rifkin, Rudoplh Lutz. The additional organ chorale at the end of the episode is BWV 616.

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Concepts Covered:This episode is an Actus Tragicus, BWV 106 analysis, one of Bach's early cantatas. We examine the influence of Albert Schweitzer’s Bach research on our understanding of this work today. We also discuss Baroque cantata interpretation, and how Italian opera influence permeates Bach’s sacred compositions. The episode touches on historically informed performance, the comparison of recorder vs. flute in Bach's works and Cantata text interpretation. We spend time considering Bach Lutheran hymn settings and his chorale harmonizations. Additionally, we explore the symbolism in Bach’s music, examining the use of Bach musical rhetoric to convey deeper meanings, and how Bach’s sacred vocal music reflects both New Testament and Old Testament themes. The episode touches on themes of Revelation in Bach’s music, Baroque musical theology, and Bach’s death and peace themes, all within the context of Baroque counterpoint in sacred music.

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Here is my reading of Shakespeare’s first publication, Venus and Adonis, a poem that is pure music. If I were to list my favorite lines, I might as well copy out half the poem. Just something that pops into my head would be a line like,

“Rain added to a river that is rankPerforce will force it overflow the bank.”

It bursts with melody and rhythm! And at least one moment, such as when Venus addresses Death,

'Hard-favour'd tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean,Hateful divorce of love,'--thus chides she Death,--'Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou meanTo stifle beauty and to steal his breath,Who when he lived, his breath and beauty setGloss on the rose, smell to the violet?

'If he be dead,--O no, it cannot be,Seeing his beauty, thou shouldst strike at it:--O yes, it may; thou hast no eyes to see,But hatefully at random dost thou hit.Thy mark is feeble age, but thy false dartMistakes that aim and cleaves an infant's heart.

Why, this might well be compared with the later tragedies. Grim-grinning ghost! As Keats wrote in the margin of his copy of the Sonnets, ‘Lo!’

I hope you enjoy this diversion. I’ve been toying with this for about a year now. I suggest reading along while listening to best absorb the poem. You can read the full text in modern English here, and as it appeared (with older spelling) in 1593, here.

Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn,To love a cheek that smiles at thee in scorn!

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Don’t miss the end of this episode where I play three of Bach’s earlier settings of the same tune, BWVs 700, 701, & 738!

We finish our study of this late masterpiece by reading some scholarship on the two different versions Bach made of his canonic variations on Luther’s 1539 melody. Whereas Wolff suggests both versions could be ‘authentic,’ Gregory Butler reveals that he believes the Original Edition was a mistake— one that prompted the handwritten fair copy.

As for the signature in the augmented canon— the finale in the fair copy— it is first spelled out in bar 19. See the top line, G, F#, A, G#:

These are not the same notes, but it is the same shape as B-A-C-H. The line that imitates this upper line is moving at half its speed. Therefore, it must repeat the spelling twice as slow later in the piece. See how it is joined by an independent line of counterpoint, now singing out the signature in parallel 3rds:

Two signatures in two different final movements!

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Concepts Covered:

In this episode, we explore Bach canonic variations, as well as other chorale setting of BWV 700, BWV 701, and BWV 738, and their connection to the Luther 1539 melody. We dive into Bach scholarship, focusing on insights from P. 271 and Gregory Butler’s Bach Research. You’ll also learn about Bach's original editions and the handwritten fair copy Bach created, as well as the significance of the augmented canon signature — the iconic B-A-C-H motif. We examine Bach counterpoint techniques, analyze Baroque music in detail, and explore Bach's final movements in these canonic counterpoint studies. This episode serves as a gateway to understanding Bach's late masterpieces, with special attention given to the use of Bach’s signature in these variations.

Changes like this (first beat, alto) are minute, yet fascinating:

(Top: engraving. Bottom: fair copy.) Bach made three revisions dealing with a similar leap of a fifth.

The most important revision in the inverted canon variation, is in this pedal line:

(Top: engraving. Bottom: fair copy.) Notice the ornament in the fair copy— we often see more ornaments in handwritten versions, but this is not consistently the case in this piece.

Heading over to the augmented canon, this revision (in the bottom line) seems to be the only one of major consequence:

(Top: engraving. Bottom: fair copy.) The need to change this canonic line stems from a revision Bach made 11 bars earlier— the lines being in augmentation with one another. Admire Bach’s brazenness as he changes what was D over B, to D over C#!

Here, as I mentioned, is a very early episode introducing the concept of Bach in revision:

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Notice the finale comes in two stages, first diminution, then stretto. The signature in the final bar is noteworthy (though it should be mentioned that the letters are an addition by the editor.)

And here is a video of the Mandelbrot set fractal, as promised (with perfect background music:)

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(If you can’t see that the shapes are inversions, hold up a mirror — seriously!) Yet here, only a few bars later, the imitation seems to be at a different interval:

The follower is no longer a sixth below, but a third. How rare! And going on, something else:

(We’re looking at the lower two voices in this picture, the quarter notes.) We see the canonic imitation has shifted yet again, to the interval of a second. What is happening? Dare I say… W.T.F. Bach?

This type of composition is, I believe, completely unique. I’d love to see another example elsewhere in music. Bach writes the chorale melody four times, and in all four appearances, finds a different interval at which inverted imitation works.

The man’s capacity to combine a single shape with itself, to abstract the DNA of the smallest musical cell, to spin it, lengthen it, shrink it, to construct a world from a grain of sand; this is late Bach.

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Let’s see what our augmented canon looks like on the page. Here is the opening of the ‘quick’ line:

And now see the same shape, moving in augmentation:

Those images are from the print, which as I mentioned is in open-score, and particularly difficult to read. The left hand is on the 2nd and 4th lines, the pedal sandwiched between them on line 3, and, did I mentioned? Four different clefs. Have a look:

We’ve seen this type of composition before on the podcast. Here is the episode from Season One about the augmentation canon (as well as in inversion) from the Art of Fugue:

Stay tuned for the final variation!

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Notice how the notes of the bottom line don’t continue after the fifth note!

See two other canons, each with the comes omitted:

Variatio 2 omits the follower after only three notes, while the last image shows the second voice dropping out after two full bars.

Because of such condensed notation, a copy working out the solutions would be necessary for anyone wishing to play the work; Bach himself made one— and couldn’t stop himself from making very minor changes. Those intriguing revisions are the subject of this episode.

P.S. In the episode I mention that for time’s sake, I cut three revisions from our comparative study of the canon at the 7th. For reference, they are found below. The staves show the pedals and left hand, engraving copy on top, followed by the handwritten copy:

Bar 7:

Bar 13:

Bar 22:

P.P.S. I received a notification that the featured recording of Stravinsky conducting his own arrangement is banned in certain countries in which I have listeners. Pardon me if the sound drops out at the end of the episode! If this happens, you’ll have to look the piece up on your own: it can be found searching Stravinsky’s music under the title “Choral-Variationen” (or “Chorale Variations” in other languages) with either W83, K087, or BH-2629 as the catalogue number.

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Two versions of this piece exist: the ‘fair copy’ and the ‘publication’ (Stichfassung), which present the variations in a different order. In this episode, we follow the publication, where the canon at the 7th appears as the third variation.

The previous two variations featured canons between right and left hands, while the pedals carried the slow moving chorale melody. This variation introduces something new: a canon between the pedals and left hand. On that page that looks like this:

Above those two lines, the right hand plays a quick-flowing accompaniment marked cantabile, but the chorale melody is missing…

Note the rest up top, and the downward-facing stems on all the notes. This implies a second voice is coming: the Christmas melody sung in half notes.

Together, the two voices of the right hand, combined with the canon between the pedals and the left hand, create a four-voice texture— the previous variations were in three voices. As we’ve seen in his other late canonic works, Bach will gradually increase the complexity of the canonic treatment toward the finale.

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It continues for over 50 bars as a three voice canon at the unison. In my brief survey of this piece, I found one theory that suggests the 9-year-old J.S. Bach was in attendance at the first performance in history.

While the canonic treatment is clever and not worthy of our loathing— we blame its ill fate on others— Bach’s contributions to the genre outshine this example. We continue with Bach’s canonic art in the next episodes.

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Concepts Covered:

The musical canon has long been a cornerstone of Baroque music, with J.S. Bach canons exemplifying the height of Bach’s canonic art and canonic structure in Bach’s compositions. This episode explores Bach’s musical contributions, from his early compositions to his sophisticated fugue and canon techniques. We also discuss Pachelbel’s Canon in D, one of the most recognizable pieces in classical music, analyzing its compositional style, melody, and Baroque influences. Through Bach musical theory, Bach analysis and theory, and comparisons with Pachelbel’s influence, we uncover the lasting impact of these works on Bach music history and the broader canon of Baroque music masterpieces.

Here is what the initial shape looks like in the right hand:

So the same shape must be imitated down the perfect fifth. It appears like this in the left hand:

I briefly mention the difference between ‘tonal’ and ‘real’ answers. Although the majority of the imitating line appears a perfect fifth below the leader, several accidentals are changed to keep the overall tonality. Hence Bach here gives us a ‘real answer.’ (I.e. where the F# and G# appear in the left hand, find the corresponding notes in the right hand, note the resulting intervals are diminished fifths, not perfect.)

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Those are the first three measures of 18 measures. That’s right: the shape is imitated note for note for 18 bars! If you’re having trouble seeing that the two upper lines are in fact the same melody, one octave apart, try this image:

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The variations— although certainly not as familiar— should be considered alongside Bach’s other late achievements, the Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, and A Musical Offering. They employ many similar ideas and highlight the composers uncanny ability to ‘squeeze water from a stone,’ making elaborate pieces with minimal material.

This first episode discusses the origins of the chorale melody and for what purpose Bach used this piece.

Drop me a note to tell me if you like this shorter episode length. Are you the type of listener who loves the hour long podcast? Or did this fit into your schedule better?

I mention the title page:

And the Wikipedia link to the chorale melody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vom_Himmel_hoch,_da_komm_ich_her

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About halfway through the episode (14 minutes), I’ve given you some “chill” chorales, played over a drone. One of my listeners mentioned they wanted some Bach for doing yoga/meditation, so this is what I came up with. If you like the way it sounds, I’ll put a full hour-long track on Spotify for all my Bach enthusiast yogis.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for some cool episodes coming up during the holiday season.

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Concepts Covered:

In this episode, we delve into the Bach Zippelfagottist controversy, a fascinating chapter of Bach’s biography mysteries, where we examine the famous Bach dagger incident and the events surrounding the Arnstadt Consistory Court. We also touch on the historical Bach disputes that hint at Bach’s temperament and behavior, including the Bach and Geyersbach conflict. Bach’s fisticuffs story sheds light on Bach’s early years and his early career troubles. The episode also explores the historical records from the Arnstadt Consistory Court, providing a glimpse into Bach’s self-defense incident and the Bach Arnstadt brawl. Whether you're drawn to Bach's historical documents, his unusual stories, or his works for meditation, this episode offers a thorough exploration of Bach's personal life drama, his clashes with church authorities, and his early controversies that set the stage for his monumental legacy.

The most intriguing part of studying this piece was the overwhelming amount of differences between the three earliest sources of this work. Here is a list of the sources I reference in the episode , the copyists, and when they were made:

The ‘Andreas Bach Book’ (D-LE III.8.4) J. Christoph Bach; copyist, between 1705-1714

P 801 J. Tobias Krebs; copyist, between 1710-1717

P 804 J. Peter Kellner; copyist, before 1725

In the episode I simply refer to these as Andreas Bach, Krebs, and Kellner.

You will hear a great amount of textual variation between these sources. Part of any performer’s job of playing music from Bach’s era includes combing through sources, determining how and why certain discrepancies appear. In the Aria Variata, however, the discrepancies are inconsistent— and perplexing.

My current understanding of source tradition hasn’t led me to any conclusion, but were I bold enough to take a stab, I’d guess Andreas Bach is the most accurate source, Kellner made a very sloppy copy from which Krebs copied. Kellner’s copy is full of corrections, but these were probably entered at a later date, and Krebs didn’t get the memo. A taste of what this looks like:

That is Kellner’s copy. Notice the ornaments. Compare to Krebs:

Both have an E-flat in on the downbeat of the third bar (all three sources in this episode use soprano clef on top). Now here is Andreas Bach:

D-sharp in bar three! Also, the ornamentation is fuller.

There are many other details in the episode, so please, enjoy! Here are more images to stimulate your fancy:

Krebs’ wavy hand.

Kellner making mistakes, corrected by— whom? Kellner himself?

The baffling passage in variation 4 in Andreas Bach. Notice what look like erasures on some of the notes.

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Concepts Covered:

In this episode, we explore the Bach Aria Variata sources and delve into the fascinating world of Bach manuscript discrepancies, specifically examining the Andreas Bach Book, J. Christoph Bach manuscript, and the works of J. Tobias Krebs and J. Peter Kellner. We discuss how Bach’s early keyboard works are presented in various historical music sources, uncovering differences in notation, ornamentation, and textual variants that shape Bach’s source tradition. Through a comparison of the Kellner manuscript errors and the contributions of Krebs vs. Kellner Bach, we gain insights into Bach’s performer scholarship and the challenges of interpreting Baroque music textual variants. Additionally, we explore the authenticity of Bach’s handwritten manuscripts and how these sources influence the understanding of his music today.

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Today’s episode focuses on the ‘black pearl’ of the inventions and sinfonias. The f minor sinfonia is highly complex piece of passion music embedded within a seemingly innocent collection of music intended for the beginner. Here, rather than the more typical obligato upper voices with the bass occasionally joining in with a theme here and there, the f minor sinfonia relies on convertible counterpoint where all three voices are judged— and juggled— equally. Bach shows us this technique using different themes:

A lament bass:

Musical crosses:

And a wildly avant-garde motif, which I refer to as the wailing motif:

Writing certainly exists on these three motifs seen as “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” Not for any particular reason, I refrain from making such an analogy in this episode.

As mentioned in the episode, Bach changed some of the enharmonics when transfering the piece from the Notebook for W.F. Bach into the Aufrichtige Anleitung. Here are some examples:

The E-double-flat (middle voice) in the notebook for his son:

is later changed to a D natural:

The B-double-flat in the top voice in the previous examples remain, but Bach will change the spelling in the bass voice of the same note (again, in the notebook:)

to an A natural:

There are a few other similar changes throughout.

Thanks for listening! Have you told your high-school band teacher you’re super into Bach?

N.B. My substack is about 1 year old, and in that time I released some 27 episodes and three essays. Should you decide to become a paid subscriber, that’s less than 3 dollars an episode (paying per year: about $3.70 paying per month.) Your contribution ensures the existence of this podcast. I really couldn’t— and wouldn’t be able to— continue devoting the time without your support. Thank you.

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Concepts Covered:

The F minor Sinfonia, BWV 795, stands out among Bach’s inventions and sinfonias, showcasing his counterpoint techniques and expressive depth. Elements like the lament bass, musical crosses, and the haunting wailing motif, this work reveals Bach’s ability to embed passion music into seemingly simple pieces. Through an analysis of enharmonic changes and Bach in revision, we gain insight into his intricate writing, preserved in the W.F. Bach notebook. Legendary musicians such as Jascha Heifetz and Marcelle Meyer have interpreted these works. Join the Bach fan community to continue to explore his legacy through Bach music scholarship, uncovering new dimensions of his sacred motifs and theoretical innovations.

One fugue, which I initially read with little interest, is the one featured in this episode: BWV 537. Suddenly, I’m struck by its raw power and its structural reliance on a chromatic line. Now that it has revealed itself to me, it will forever remain a favorite. I hope to share with you a glimpse of this experience in today’s episode.

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Concepts Covered:

The Fantasy & Fugue in C minor, BWV 537, exemplifies Bach’s musical complexity, combining a dramatic chromatic line with masterful fugue techniques. This episode explores the structural analysis of the piece, highlighting Bach’s intricate approach to fugue composition and his use of chromaticism to heighten musical tension. Through Bach music analysis, we gain deeper insight into his musical influence and the enduring power of his Baroque fugues. Understanding the Fugue in C minor reveals the depth of Bach’s structural ingenuity, offering a fascinating study in fugue performance techniques and the brilliance of Bach’s music.

[I forgot to credit the last recording in this episode to Rudolph Lutz and the J.S. Bach foundation.]

Here are (some of) the beautiful parts which make up the chorales, BWVs 250-252. They are beautiful examples of Bach’s handwriting ca. 1730. Note that all three chorales are on the same page.

Become Buxtehude:

Soprano:

Alto:

Tenor:

Bass:

And the second horn part I fondly discuss in this episode:

All the parts are viewable at:

https://www.bach-digital.de/receive/BachDigitalSource_source_00002475

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Here we see the main source (G 25) in question:

Hard to see here, but if we zoom in, we see that this:

Is a correction of the original printings, which read:

This link here should allow you to download the original print of all six partitas.

N.B. As that link is the download of the original print, it will not contain any of the corrections mentioned in this episode. For a full list of the scholarship on these changes, see:

Wolff, C. (1999). Text-critical comments on the original print of the Partitas. In Bach: Essays on his life and music (pp. 214-222). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Concepts Covered:

The 3rd Keyboard Partita, BWV 827, stands as a defining work in Bach’s Partitas for keyboard, marking his first published opus and showcasing his mastery of counterpoint. This episode examines the Handexemplar revisions, where Bach’s scribe corrections reveal musical updates that refined the Partita Gigue’s counterpoint. These manuscript corrections provide insight into Bach’s compositional process, highlighting his meticulous approach to keyboard music. As we explore Bach’s revised versions, we engage with the broader landscape of Baroque keyboard music, tracing his influence on counterpoint and the evolution of Bach music performance. Through this Bach partitas analysis, we uncover how his musical revisions continue to shape our understanding of his genius.

You can stream and individually purchase any track including the performer’s commentary from the third volume below. [More streaming links (including youtube playlists) at the bottom:]

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Track Listing

J.S. Bach Complete Keyboard Works Volume 3Miscellaneous Preludes and Fugues Part 1

1 Fugue (in d minor) BWV deest2 Fugue in a minor, BWV 9473 Fugue in A, BWV 9494 Fughetta in c minor, BWV 9615 Prelude (Fantasy) in c minor, BWV 9216-7 Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 870a8 Fugue in a minor, BWV 9599-10 Prelude and Fugue in F, BWV 90111-12 Prelude and Fugue in d minor, BWV 89913-14 Prelude and Fugue in e minor, BWV 90015 Unfinished Prelude in e minor, BWV 93816 Fugue in C, BWV 95317 Prelude in C, BWV 94318 Fugue in C, BWV 95219-20 Prelude and Fugue in a minor, BWV 89521-26 Six Preludes for Beginners BWVs 933-93827 Prelude in G, BWV 902a28 Fugue in G, BWV 90229 Prelude in G, BWV 902

Thomas Rossin, EngineerArmand Hirsch, Mixer

The first three albums of the 'Complete Works for Solo Keyboard' are live everywhere. Stream while sleeping to achieve maximum effect.

Volume One:

Youtube playlist!Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/ycy2fab7Apple Music: https://tinyurl.com/nhfuws4tAmazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/mrxj7pws

Volume Two:

Youtube playlist!Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/msjyhamhApple Music: https://tinyurl.com/mtykbxnzAmazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/3m7b9v6w

Volume Three:

Youtube playlist!Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/4xneak6rApple Music: https://tinyurl.com/mr44kwmfAmazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/3e4kwnsb

“…from the natural to the artificial, and from the lofty to the obscure ... one wonders at the painful labor of it all, that nevertheless comes to nothing, since it is at variance with reason.”

Let’s examine the controversy from the beginning.

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Today’s episode covers this canon in depth. What does it mean? How does it sound?

Here is a link to the article by scholar, Anatoly Milka.

The book, Bach and the meaning of Counterpoint, by David Yearsley is available here.

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Concepts Covered:

The Mi Fa et Fa Mi canon, BWV 1078, is one of Bach’s puzzle canons, demonstrating his unparalleled command of counterpoint theory and inventive compositional techniques. Written as a 7-voice canon, this work, inscribed in a Stammbuch on March 1, 1749, reflects his late-period fascination with musical puzzles and structured complexity. Scholars such as Anatoly Milka and David Yearsley have explored its deeper significance, shedding light on Bach’s innovative canons and their place in Bach music scholarship. As we analyze Bach’s use of counterpoint, we uncover the intricate interplay of voices that define his style. This episode delves into Bach music history, his compositional techniques, and the broader implications of Bach’s musical meaning in this enigmatic work.

You can stream and individually purchase any track including the performer’s commentary from the second volume here. —More streaming links (including youtube playlists) at the bottom:

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Track Listing:

J.S. Bach Complete Keyboard Works Volume 2Four Original Compositions for ‘Lute-keyboard’

1 Prelude BWV 999

2-5 Suite in c minor, BWV 9972 Prelude3 Fugue4 Sarabande5 Gigue and Double

6-8 Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat, BWV 9986 Prelude7 Fugue8 Allegro

9-14 Suite in e minor, BWV 9969 Prelude10 Allemande11 Courante12 Sarabande13 Bourree14 Gigue

Aaron Ross, ProducerAaron Ross, MixerYamaha Reface PianoSpecial thanks to George Nickson.

The first three albums of the 'Complete Works for Solo Keyboard' are live everywhere. Stream while sleeping to achieve maximum effect.

Volume One:

Youtube playlist!

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Volume Two:

Youtube playlist!

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/msjyhamh

Apple Music: https://tinyurl.com/mtykbxnz

Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/3m7b9v6w

Volume Three:

Youtube playlist!

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The eight surviving canons, BWVs 1072-1078 (+BWV deest) were written on small pieces of paper or penned into registry books. Their compact content, usually only a few notes, is then ‘solved:’ copied and transformed to make a perpetual piece of music in several voices.

You will hear the solutions in the episode. Here is how they appear on the page:

This is the first canon discussed. From these two measures of music, eight voices are formed.

This is the second canon discussed: a four-voice canon with each voice entering a successive fifth higher than the last. It’s the four clefs at the beginning of the line that clue you in on this. The %-like symbol shows you where the next voice enters.

This is BWV 1074, the mysterious ‘Houdemann’ canon. Note the four clefs on the left of the staff, but also the four clefs to the right. They are inverted with a different key signature. Bach here was exploring the a truly symmetrical— not merely diatonic— inversion.

The final canon of the episode. The charming two-voice canon for one of his Godchildren. This canon is simple to solve and the easiest to comprehend.

Yes, the famous F-A-B-E-R, “mi fa, et fa mi est tota musica” canon will be in one of the next episodes— rest assured!

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The first three albums of the 'Complete Works for Solo Keyboard' are live everywhere. Stream while sleeping to achieve maximum effect.

Volume One:

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/ycy2fab7

Apple Music: https://tinyurl.com/nhfuws4t

Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/mrxj7pws

Volume Two:

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/msjyhamh

Apple Music: https://tinyurl.com/mtykbxnz

Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/3m7b9v6w

Volume Three:

Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/4xneak6r

Apple Music: https://tinyurl.com/mr44kwmf

Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/3e4kwnsb

Each album in my ‘J.S. Bach Complete Solo Keyboard Works’ will be accompanied by this type of work, my commentating as the music plays.

You can stream (and individually purchase) any track including the performer’s commentary from the first album here:

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Track Listing:

J.S. Bach Complete Keyboard Works Volume 1The Five Earliest Suites in Meantone Temperament

1-5 Suite in B-flat BWV 8211 Prelude2 Allemande3 Courante4 Sarabande5 Echo

6-10 Praeludium et partita dei tuono terzo in F major BWV 8336 Prelude7 Allemande8 Courante9 Sarabande and Double10 Aria

11-15 Suite in A, BWV 83211 Allemande12 Air pour les Trompettes13 Sarabande14 Bourree15 Gigue

16-21 Ouverture in g minor, BWV 82216 Ouverture17 Aira18 Gavotte en Rondeau19 Bourree20 Menuets, 1, 2, 321 Gigue

22-26 Ouverture in F, BWV 82022 Ouverture23 Entree24 Minuet - Trio - Minuet25 Bourree26 Gigue

Aaron Ross, EngineerShane Hoshino, TechnicianAaron Ross, Mixer

That piece of paper is a six-voice, triple canon: number thirteen in the fourteen additional canons found on the back of Bach’s personal copy of the Goldberg Variations. (Analysis of that specific canon around 32 min.)

We’ve covered nine of these puzzling pieces in three previous episodes, but now it’s time to call it a wrap on all fourteen. These additional canons were discovered only as late as the 1970s. For a more detailed history, check the three previous episodes dealing with these canons:

Here is the image of the canon, “Christ will Crown the Cross-bearers” that appears in the family registry book belonging to J.G. Fulde:

And of course, Bach and his “business card:”

The bass line in both the images (and in all of the canons) is our beloved “first eight fundamental notes of the preceding aria” on which all the canons are based.

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ALBUMS ON PRESALE TODAY! BUY THE ALBUMS HERE!

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As for the music covered today, we will hear Doubles layered over their preceding dance movements. A Double is an elaboration on the preceding movement, where the melody is quickened— often twice as quickly. The harmonic structure of the Double and its preceding movement is the same, allowing for one to play both movements at the same time with very interesting results.

Pieces studied:

Sarabande and Double from Sixth English Suite, BWV 811

Gigue and Double from the c minor lute suite, BWV 997

Partita in b minor for solo violin, BWV 1002

People/places mentioned:

Burp Castle at 41 East 7th Street in the East Village of Manhattan (between 2nd Ave & Cooper Square).

Paul Spring (guitarist)

Wow. That’s Fabulous.

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Be sure to mark your calendars: April 24th, 2024, my new albums will be on PRE-sale. It marks the beginning of my most ambitious project to date: a very thorough, if possible, ‘complete’ set of the keyboard works of Bach. I will certainly send another reminder as the date approaches.

And now for a brief journey into Bach around this date in 1724: today’s episode covers the cantata for the second Sunday after Easter, BWV 104, Du Hirte Israel, höre. Unlike the other cantatas I have recently discussed, this cantata is not based on a chorale melody.

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You read correctly: The Bach Store is back. In Erfurt, Thuringia, the state from where the Bachs hail. I will play for five hours, March 14-28, 12.00-18.00 GMT +1 (7AM-1PM EST.)

You can (hopefully) stream the whole run on my youtube. Subscribe HERE.

Or go to: www.youtube.com/@wtfbach

Here is the latest video I mentioned in the podcast.

Bach Store Merchandise is available on request. Send an email to bach (at) wtfbach (dot com)

—

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We tackle here what I find is the most complex composition in the repertoire: the first movement of the b minor sonata, BWV 1030.

Pieces heard:

BWV 1030.1 Source P. 1008, early version, harpsichord part.

BWV 1030.2 The later version, arranged as a flute sonata.

Articles:

Contentious writing on flute vs. recorder

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Concepts Covered:

Bach’s flute sonatas are essential works in the Baroque flute repertoire, the B minor sonata, BWV 1030, is one of the most important. Bach’s chamber music, the counterpoint and structure, the early drafts, BWV 1030.1, we see Bach in revision and the concept of Parody. The discussion of flute vs. recorder, Baroque music history and performance practice.

Here, the next two cantatas see less predictable treatments of the old melodies. Bach evidently valued these two cantatas, as later in life he arranged single movements from both BWV 10 and BWV 93 into his publication of organ music known as the “Schübler Chorales.”

Pieces heard:

BWV 10, Meine Seel erhebt den Herren (Full Performance of the cantata)BWV 648, Meine Seel erhebt den Herren (Organ version)BWV 93, Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten

I mentioned this playlist in the episode: all the cantatas in the 1724 cycle. Love to my fans!

The book I mentioned on the use of ‘Tonus Peregrinus”

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This episode we will explore the next two cantatas where Bach sets the cantus firmus in the tenors in BWV 7, and the basses in BWV 135.

About the melody you may know as “O Sacred Head Surrounded”

Pieces heard:

BWV 7, Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam (Full Performance)BWV 135, Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder (Full Performance)

Oh, you don’t follow WTFBach on Instagram? For shame! Posting almost daily music from the keyboard repertoire.

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A fan of the show made this great Spotify playlist with all the cantatas in the second cycle! Thank you! Love to my fans-

Become Your Inner Buxtehude

Peter Schickele’s Obituary, NY Times

Beethoven’s 5th announced as a baseball game (a classic!)

The Short-Tempered Clavier

Report from Hoople (full album- the Beethoven sketch is included)

The Definitive Autobiography of P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742?)

and we should also mention,

Victor Borge (anything you can find will amuse you!)

Good Ol’ Piano Slapstick

Mozart Opera

Inflationary Language

Television Special (75+ Min)

Pieces heard:

BWV 20, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (Click here to see the live video)BWV 2, Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh dareinBWV 684, Chirst unser Herr zum Jordan Kamm

Be Your Best Buxtehude:

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The quote I read to introduce this short concert is by Mortimer J. Adler.

Bach wrote this music before 1717 (at the latest.) These are fugues whose themes originated in the work of other composers. Bach borrows these themes and creates his own work. These fugues are not commonly played which make them all the more fun to listen to and study.

As always, thanks for listening, thanks for spreading the word and supporting this podcast. I’m looking forward to 2025 with you Bach enthusiasts.

Fugues I performed:

Fugue in C major, BWV 966 (on a theme by Adam Reinken)

Fugue in C major, BWV 946 (on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni)

Fugue in a minor, BWV 965 (on a theme by Adam Reinken)

Fugue in A major, BWV 949 (probably on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni)

What, the, fugue?!

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According to the Neue Bach Ausgabe, this fugue is the first double fugue in history.

Here is a picture of the title page in his brother’s hand with the erroneous attribution to Legrenzi:

You can download the music to the fugue here. (The MIDI version I created at the end of the episode is BWV574b.)

Today’s sponsor is Modartt. I am playing the organ using their wonderful software, Organteq. Read about the physical modeling here. Thanks to them, and thanks to all my listeners.

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Firstly, here is the image of what’s in question:

If you’ve ever wondered what all the ‘squiggles’ are about over certain notes in sheet music, this episode will you give you a good idea.

Here is the ‘Applicatio,’ the little piece which would have shown Bach’s son (and other future students) how to apply his fingerings. (Note the ‘J.N.J.’ In Nomine Jesu)

Just a quick episode today! Stay tuned for more writings and longer episodes soon.

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How did Bach understand the concept of Phi? 1.618…? Here are a few examples where Bach highlights the “Golden Section” in a piece through either a fugal technique, a shift in musical language, or something else. Send us your most remarkable golden section moments!

For the first episode where I mentioned the golden section and Bach, click here.

Pieces covered:

Fugue in C major, BWV 846

Invention in C major, BWV 770

Allegro from Sonata in a minor, BWV 1003

Confiteor and Et Expecto from Mass in b minor, BWV 232

Contrapuntus 10 from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080

Phi as seen as a structural principle in BWVs 1001-1006, The Sei Solo Book One (Violin Sonatas and Partitas) will be written about soon!

Fugue in b minor, BWV 869

Performers featured:Trevor PinnockNathan MilsteinSigiswald Kuijken (and La Petite Bande)Ralph Kirkpatrick

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Here is a link to Bach’s own autograph of the Leipzig chorales. Beautiful handwriting!

Marie-Claire Alain’s recording of BWV 655 (completely different to Koopman’s)

The “Organ Sonatas” I recorded with LH/RH hard panning On Spotify on Apple Music

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Thank you for your help!

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I re-qyure your support:

If J.S. Bach knew a book, he knew this one. Not only do we see him dedicate an entire annual cycle of cantatas in 1724 (exactly 200 years later) to the church melody, but one of the first music lessons Bach gave to his eldest son W.F. Bach was a chorale prelude. This is the third piece in the Notebook for W.F. Bach. The top line is one of the old church melodies, beautifully embellished by JSB:

In this episode, we discuss two different types of Bach’s chorale preludes, one where the cantus firmus is embedded into a quick-flowing brook of notes, the other, a slower accompaniment to intricate embellishments on the 200-year-old melodies. These melodies were central to Bach’s life and his compositions.

The episode ends with an analysis of Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 682, one of the most complicated chorale preludes from the third part of Bach’s Clavier-übung, featuring the chorale melody in canons. Here is one entrance of the melody. The blue voice starts first, followed by the red:

Pieces featured:BWV 691 and BWV 93 (Chorale) at the same timeBWV 651BWV 682Performers: Michel Chapuis, Kay Johannsen

Here are the links to the cantata cycles mentioned at the end, thank you, Tucker! From the profile you can access different ensembles' complete cantata cycles as well as other great selections.

Tucker's Spotify Playlists

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Supporting this show ensures its longevity.

EPISODE THREE

In a four-part study into the 14 additional canons on the back of the Goldbergs, BWV1087.

Here in this video, we dismiss a popular Bach video, and examine which videos are in fact Möbius strips. 

Here is the disproven crab canon video.

Here are two studies which don't quite go far enough:

One. I love this channel, don't get me wrong- they just didn't quite examine the consequences of chromatic inversion.

Two. The American Mathematical Society publishes similarly.

Both studies miss the technical inversions that I have pointed out in this episode.

--

And now the blurb from the other two episodes studying BWV 1087:

On the back of his own personal copy of the 'Goldberg Variations', Bach notated an additional fourteen canons. These were discovered only as late as 1974(!) and are among the most interesting compositional exercises we know from the composer. 

From eight bass notes (the first 8 notes of the 'Goldberg' Aria- the structure in a sense,) Bach creates, yes, fourteen other canons. In this episode, we discuss engraving and canons 5-9.

Here is what they look like as seen on the back of Bach's own copy:

and HERE is the link to engraving- you can see how Balthasar Schmid (I accidentally added an 'S' to his name in the episode) engraved Bach's BWV988.

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Rifkin made Bach fame with his groundbreaking (and controversial!) theory that Bach’s vocal works (and other 17th & 18th century) composers’ works were sung with only one singer per part. He recorded the b minor mass, several cantatas, and other Bach works in this format. 

We spoke for almost three hours about ragtime, the Beatles, PDQ Bach (my distant uncle), even crossword puzzles, coffee and meditation. For this episode, though, I culled it quite severely to only that which deals with Bach’s music. 

It’s fascinating to hear him talk about his scholastic endeavors dealing with first-hand examination of source material. Do you agree with Rifkin? Do you like the sound of one singer per part?

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--

Suggestions? Want Evan to analyze a specific piece of Bach? Have other questions for Evan about music or... anything... anything at all?

Write us: bach@wtfbach.com

A: Exactly.

https://www.jsbachcellosuites.com - check out this website! It's a great source on the history of the recordings of these pieces.

Thanks for all your feedback, donations, ideas, everything. Please follow @wtfbach on instagram for (almost) daily Bach content.

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What makes Bach, BACH?!

As a special celebration, the 50th episode of The WTF Bach Podcast is a live lecture presented by Tonebase.

The topic is the ever looming one: why is Bach's importance so great? Studying the ideas behind a few of his instrumental collections, we see that Bach's ideas are always expanding outward, perhaps lending to his all-pervasive influence. 

Learn more about Tonebase.

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On the back of his own personal copy of the 'Goldberg Variations', Bach notated an additional fourteen canons. These were discovered only as late as 1974(!) and are among the most interesting compositional exercises we know from the composer. 

From eight bass notes (the first 8 notes of the 'Goldberg' Aria- the structure in a sense,) Bach creates, yes, fourteen other canons. In this episode, we discuss engraving and canons 5-9.

Here is what they look like as seen on the back of Bach's own copy:

and HERE is the link to engraving- you can see how Balthasar Schmid (I accidentally added an 'S' to his name in the episode) engraved Bach's BWV988.

Support us:

https://www.patreon.com/wtfbach

https://www.paypal.me/wtfbach

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Ideas? Wanna sponsor an episode?

Write us:

bach (at) wtfbach (dot) com

Bach's fugue based on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni in B minor, BWVs 951, and 951a: the subject itself contains a chromatic descent (B, A#, A, G#, G, F#) and though Albinoni himself wrote it, it was Bach who brought the ideas behind such chromaticism to the next level. 

HERE is the recording which I was not able to credit. If you know whose recording this is, please write me, I'll fix it!

and HERE is the version (BWV 951, not BWV951a) which I played on the MIDI harpsichord, highlighting the chromatic lines on one of my favorite youtube channels. 

As always, thank you for your support, your feedback, your passion! -es

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From eight bass notes (the first 8 notes of the 'Goldberg' Aria- the structure in a sense,) Bach creates, yes, fourteen other canons. In this episode, we introduce the history, the idea behind the canons and the first four canons.

Here is what they look like as seen on the back of Bach's own copy:

and here are the Handel variations on the Chaccone of which I speak in this episode:

https://youtu.be/X_Lp9ZWWI-Q?t=73

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We also listen to fugue BWV 959, very early, very wild, very W.T.F. in unequal temperament. 

More episodes on the way! Spread the love!

--

LINKS:

The text of the Borges story I mentioned

Donald Francis Tovey (author of the article I read)

The archived scan of a 1926 Encyclopedia Britannica volume containing, "Bach, J.S.

Homepage of the EB: https://www.britannica.com

--

Complaints? Confusions?

Write us:

bach (at) wtfbach (dot) com

Plus: 

-Actually listen to a pythagorean comma, the root of the problem...

-The circle of (pure) fifths

-Bach chorales in different temperaments

-The Art of Fugue, 6th fugue in a funky temperament

Try the frequencies experiment yourself! 

Pull up multiple windows on: https://onlinetonegenerator.com

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The Prelude BWV 846, the first prelude in the Well-Tempered Clavier, is heard everywhere, but why? How? What purpose could such a piece have served in Bach's day?

We discuss two early, shorter versions of the prelude, and one erroneous version with an inauthentic bar (the 'Schwenke measure' - be on the look out if your copy has 36 bars and not 35!)

Answering, "How has this prelude influenced musicians even today?" we explore modern versions by John K. Stone, Elaine Comparone, my challenge to Brad Mehldau, and invert this prelude (and a few others) note for note to hear the 'photo negative'. 

Links:

'Jesu Joy' in a Japanese Forest (Cell Phone Ad)

John K. Stone's 'Fantasy on a Bach Prelude'

Elaine Comparone's version of the same prelude

As always: Thank you for listening!

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Longest how? Minutes? In terms of Measures? In terms of the longest single piece on a concert? ...wait, what is a 'piece' anyhow? Does one of the passions count as a single piece? What about just the amount of notes? 

You may be surprised to hear the answers... or maybe you've know the answer in your heart of hearts all along.

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The work is famous for, if nothing else, the two chorales that we know as 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.' As it was suggested by a listener, this is part two of the previous listener's choice episode. 

--

People or Music mentioned:

Rudolph Lutz

Joshua Rifkin

Robert Bridges (English poet laureate)

Wendy Carlos

Lady Lynda (Song by The Beach Boys)

Myra Hess

--

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WTF Bach and the Cantatas:

These are daunting pieces with very complicated histories, hence the delay in getting this episode to you. As is the case with all research, one has to be rather careful before making even the simplest of statements about a piece of Bach. The cantatas are largely orchestrated pieces as well, for many instruments, which makes a 'dissection' of such a piece much more difficult. Due to their numerous sections, they are often longer in length compared to a prelude and fugue or many other instrumental pieces. For many (if not most) people who enjoy Bach, their 'ignorance' of his music usually falls somewhere within the cantatas. 

This is all to say, on a personal note, that while creating this episode, I spent some five times longer than I normally would. I enjoyed doing this as everyone needs to brush up on the cantatas, still, as I always love hearing from you, send me a note: let me know if you want more episodes on the cantatas and I will find a way to make these episodes come quicker. As always, sincerely, -e

--

To begin your week! Three pieces you requested were:

Toccata in g minor BWV915

Allabreve in D major BWV589

Cantata BWV147 (NEXT EPISODE!)

--

Please enjoy my brief analysis of these pieces which, in their own right, could take up many episodes each, and THANK YOU for suggesting I cover them. Please keep your suggestions coming! 

--

Bach's Music Floating in Outer Space

Performers featured today were, in order:

Trevor Pinnock

Christine Schornsheim

Ton Koopman

Simon Preston

--

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The piece was this gorgeous fantasy for organ BWV 562, discussed in this episode. Enjoy!

The unfinished harpsichord fugue discussed by me 

Marie-Claire Alain's performance of BWV 562

Martin Lücker's performance of BWV 562

I know I said this last time but for real this time:

NEXT EPISODE IS LISTENER'S CHOICE- SEND ME YOUR SUGGESTIONS

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Here then, is a brief episode of four Bach MIDI files, played with very basic computer operations (quantized 16th notes, panning between speakers, mechanical slowing down and speeding up). 

It's likely you've never heard Bach in this way before. The question therefore is, 'Did you learn something?' 

--

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In this episode we learn how MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files, that is, a sort of sheet-music for computers, can help us explore Bach’s music in modern and novel ways. 

If you don’t read music or play an instrument, MIDI files might be your way into Bach’s mind. Even if you are a virtuoso Bachian, there will be something in MIDI technology that can help you uncover further details throughout Bach’s most fascinating constructions.

Dave (of Dave's J.S. Bach page) talks about the 'art of MIDI'

My album featuring 'panning' between two upper voices in Bach

Three links to Bach MIDI files:

1) https://www.midiworld.com/bach.htm

2) http://www.jsbach.net/midi/

3) https://www.kunstderfuge.com/bach.htm

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Alfred Cortot

Glenn Gould’s video mentioned is here:

https://youtu.be/gvs4v_aswfk

Ton Koopman’s featured live performance is here:

https://youtu.be/eLJ24CnVRyQ

And the film in which Leonhardt himself plays Bach (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach) is here:

https://youtu.be/MhZ71owC7Ps

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The genesis of the Brandenburg concerti,

What Bach’s job was like when these compositions came about,

Who his employer was then,

How much music Bach was composing at that time,

Why a Baroque composer writes anything at all,

The difference between a modern composer and one in the Baroque.

Then finally, we will disprove another famous Bach myth:

‘Bach composed the last of the Brandenburg concerti to get fired’ 

--

**PS: Any of my listeners want to start correcting some of the Wikipedia pages with Bach BS (Bad Scholarship) and linking the sources to these episodes? Write me (email below)

—

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__

I love my listener feedback! Keep it coming! Bach (at) WTFBACH (dot com)

The recording featured in this episode is Il Giardino Armonico (probably my favorite recording of all six Brandenburg Concerti). This is the YouTube link.

Thank you for your emails, your donations and your suggestions. Keep ‘em coming Bach (at) wtfbach (dot) com

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Twitch.tv/wtf_Bach

Let's kick off this season discussing the fugue for violin in G minor BWV1001, and its arrangement for Organ BWV539. There is also one for lute (implying lute harpsichord) BWV1000. 

Links to music played in this episode:

Milstein 1957Milstein 1975Robert Hill arranges the AdagioHelmut Walcha BWV539Narisco Yepes, LuteReitze Smits BWV539

Enjoying your contrapuntal journey? Here’s how you can help:

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Supporting this show ensures its longevity. Thank you for your support!

Topics covered:

The golden sections in other Bach pieces and how this could help us find the golden section here, even in this fugal fragment. 

'God the Father' 'God the Spirit' 'God the Son' as three themes.

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THE LAST PAGE ! CLICK HERE to see the 'corrupt' staves on which it would have been impossible to complete such a dense fugue. **Note the staff three from the bottom**

--

Koopman playing the B-flat minor, book two

--

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THE LAST PAGE ! CLICK HERE to see the 'corrupt' staves on which it would have been impossible to complete such a dense fugue. **Note the staff three from the bottom**

Topics covered:

B+A+C+H = 14

B-A-C-H as a melody and fugue subject.

Where the missing, 4th theme, comes in this quadruple fugue. 

The final combination of all four themes and its 'note for note' inversion as mentioned in Bach's obituary of 1754.

 --

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I had the privilege of speaking to Christoph Wolff, certainly the most distinguished Bach scholar of the 20th century, even until today. From Jimi Hendrix to Rudolph Serkin, from the music Bach's composed which is lost, to the famous "Seal of 1722", this interview has it all folks. Take a listen!

Browse Mr. Wolff's Books Here:

--

People / Topics Covered:

Albert Schweitzer (His Bach biography, Volume 1)

"Bach's Seal"

Bach's Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations

Caldara's Magnificat 

Other composers Bach performed: Palestrina, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Buxtehude, Handel, Porpura, Pergolesi

Neue Bach Ausgabe

Saint Mark Passion

Bach's Obituary

The Zimmermann Coffee House

-

Follow Evan's instagram, because... well... it's the only one you should follow.

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Was Bach dictating this? Blind? On his deathbed? 

Printed as the original conclusion to The Art of Fugue, "Wenn wir im höchsten Nöten sein" was not meant to be part of the work, but was meant to be compensation for the missing fugue. Even with this piece, there are myths surrounding it. Let's debunk.

--

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-evan

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Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu (Canon in augmentation and contrary motion [inversion]). 

This form of this canon is very similar in construction to the previous ones, though rather than increasing the interval of imitation, the following voice appears in inversion and moving twice as slowly! A very complicated procedure.

--

Evan is every day on his instagram stories uploading the great works of J.S.B: Watch 

Check out Bach's 'gift canon' here: 

Find a playlist of the music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

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Among the errors in the assembly of the first printing of The Art of Fugue was the inclusion of an arrangement of fugue number 13 for two harpsichords. We look at the music, how it differs from the original 13th counterpoint (for one harpsichord) and how such an error could have been committed. It appears under the title, 'Alio Modo' ...another way. It contains a fourth, newly composed, non-imitative voice. And yes, since fugue 13 is a mirror fugue, Bach made two arrangements with two newly composed voices. 

--

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-evan

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In the previous fugue, fugue twelve, we saw Bach took four voices, a turned everything upside down: 1234 became 4321 and what went up came crashing down. Now, fugue 13 is again a 'mirror' fugue... or is it?

This thirteenth fugue is in three voices and uses a technique almost identical to it's sister fugue, number 12, but is still more complicated. 

Topics Covered: Which comes first in number 13, the rectus or the inversus? 

--

DUE TO PROBLEMS WITH INSTAGRAM (they think Bach's music is 'Branded Content' - yikes. Public domain y'all) I AM MOVING STREAMS TO TWITCH.TV/WTF_BACH PLEASE FOLLOW ME THERE

Find a selected playlist of the music found and discussed in this podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

... have you seen: http://bachchurch.com ???

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--

Musicians/Bands mentioned (Alphabetically):

Bach, Beethoven, Bela Fleck, Bill Monroe, Edgar Meyer, Glenn Gould, Mike Marshall, Mozart, Nickle Creek, Radiohead, Richard Green, Russel Sherman, Vivaldi, Yo-Yo Ma

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Music/Books/Booze mentioned:

Russel Sherman, 'Piano Pieces' 

Saint Anne's Reel: https://thesession.org/tunes/103

What does a mandolin look like?

Tolkien, 'The Lord of the Rings'

Smith & Cross rum

Plymouth Gin

--

Check out Chris' new album here: http://smarturl.it/laysongs

--

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A few important things I neglected to mention in the 11th counterpoint, but where to go after that 11th fugue anyhow? Into the mirror…

Look into *CLICK* the mirror! 

Bach, not satisfied with creating a triple fugue whose subjects were the same three subjects of the previous triple fugue- inverted- now pens a four-voice fugue where the entire texture will be inverted to create a new composition altogether. It's like writing two fugues at once. This can be done with any piece of music, but only Bach could make such a complicated composition sound like beautiful and convincing music both right-side-up and upside-down.  

--

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... have you seen: http://bachchurch.com ???

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Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quina (Canon at the twelfth in counterpoint at the fifth). 

This canon is very similar in construction to the previous canon, though at the larger interval of the 12th. 

--

Evan is now mid-49 days of toccatas every day on his instagram stories: Watch 

Check out Bach's 'gift canon' here: 

Find a playlist of the music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

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https://mintable.app/music/item/JS-Bach-The-Art-of-Fugue--Electronic--The-First-Ever-Bachs-Music-as-NFT--Presented-by-WTF-Bach/f9CWCc0ho7bbad8

Topics covered:

The original order of the fugues found in P 200 (the autograph score).

The 11th fugue as a possible early finale to The Art of Fugue. 

Glenn Gould’s version of this fugue. 

Could there be an ‘anti-golden section’ in this one?

--

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Topics covered: What does it mean when music is in a 'key' what keys did Bach often write in, and does it mean anything special that The Art of Fugue is in the key of d minor? 

Follow Evan on Instagram for even more Bachian content: www.instagram.com/WTFBach

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Bach Vision Test (Vulfpeck): https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg

--

Find a playlist of the music here.

The Art of Fugue arranged for Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUnOx6hfBE

Follow Evan on Instagram for even more content about Bach: www.instagram.com/WTFBach

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--

Sleepify (Silent album by Vulfpeck)

Vulfpeck Arranges the ninth contrapunctus from The Art of Fugue:

Version 1: https://youtu.be/YcxQdRIY11o

Version 2: https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg

Fugue State (song by Vulfpeck)

Musicians/Bands mentioned (Alphabetically):

Bach, The Beatles, Beethoven, Naftule Brandwein, Cream, ELO, Glenn Gould, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Liszt, Louis Marchand, Reinhold Mack, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Nirvana, Oscar Peterson, Queen,  Bernard Purdy, Albert Schweitzer, Nate Smith, Steely Dan, Dave Tarras, Michael Winograd,

Jack’s non-musical influences (Alphabetically):

Caldwell Esselstyn, Larry David, Dean Ornish

Other things mentioned (Chronologically):

A Musical Offering, Silberman Pianofortes, Encore Records (Ann Arbor), The Blind Pig (Ann Arbor), Alan Watts, S.J. Perleman The Ill Mannered Clavichord, The Well Tempered Clavier, 

--

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Instead of going from a ‘simple’ to a double fugue, Bach drops a voice (all previous fugues were in 4 voices) and composes immediately a triple fugue for three voices. Like perfectly symmetrical juggling, this fugue is filled with beauty and amazing structural points. 

--

Find a playlist of the music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

The Art of Fugue arranged for Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUnOx6hfBE

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‘Evening in the Palace of Reason’ is a piece of Bach fan fiction, not the work of a Bach scholar. When I began to formally dismiss it, I found myself overcome with the sense of being a bully: Each sentence about Bach’s life and music is so full of holes, so shrouded in pseudo-scholarship, I felt like I was 'taking shots at a toothless tiger.' Still, this book is published by none other than Harper Collins and probably more read than any book by a musicologist. It may amuse and inform as a general history, which seems innocent, but this is followed by careless conclusions, hasty sweeping statements as to Bach’s general character, his morality, and the reasons for writing a major piece of music— this is not harmless. The truth about Bach’s life and work is more beautiful than any provocative reinterpretation. We should know how to identify such a piece of B.S.

We Rely On Listener Support! How to Donate to this Podcast:

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Two episodes ago, I began with a quote from Aldous Huxley. That quote came from an article written in 1985. The article focused on Bach's relationship to words and various writer's relationships with Bach. The whole article is fascinating and, well, I read it to you. 

A piece of what I consider 'good scholarship', it takes stabs at what Bach playing would be like today, in 2020, but sets the standard for the next episode, in which we will be de-bunking poor Bach scholarship.

Here is the link to the article:

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/24/books/bach-at-300-words-notes-and-numbers.html

And here is the link to the obituary of the James A. Winn, who wrote it (d.2019)

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2019/03/27/james-winn-writer-english-professor-and-flautist/ZFGI9AJa9pvRcU13TyuOmJ/story.html

Follow me on instagram: Each day I am posting the cello complete suites on a portable clavichord: @wtfbach

As always, thanks for listening,

-evan

You know how at the end of every episode, Gaby says, "Want to have evan analyze a specific piece of Bach... just for you?"

Boom: Listener's choice volume one.

Three pieces you requested were:

Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV855 (Book one)

Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp minor, BWV849 (Book one)

Capriccio on the Departure of the Beloved Brother, BWV992

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Forgive my delay in getting this to all of you: I have a noble undertaking regarding a popular Bach book which is doing nothing but leading you further from the truth about the master! But have no fear, in a few weeks I will unleash an attack and clear up this confusion: meanwhile please enjoy my brief analysis of these three pieces which, in their own right, could take up many episodes each.

Also: Lament Aria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_bass

Follow me on IG! Right now I am instagramming inner movements of the cello suites on a portable clavichord: @wtfbach

As always, thanks for listening,

-evan

Topics covered: Aldous Huxley said that Bach is a manifestation of God? How does this second canon differ from the previous canon? What is a 'Cadenza'? So, you can play a canon with a delay pedal, but to what extent? 

Check out a picture of Bach's 'gift canon' here: 

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Find a playlist of the music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

The Art of Fugue arranged for Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUnOx6hfBE

Follow Evan on Instagram for even more content about Bach: www.instagram.com/WTFBach

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Suggestions? Want Evan to analyze a specific piece of Bach? Have other questions for Evan about music or anything at all?

Write us:

bach@wtfbach.com

I had the privilege of speaking to Robert Hill, one of the foremost harpsichordists alive. Our discussion spans many different topics including harpsichord tuning and repair, clavichords, piano actions, lute-harpsichords, early Bach, old Bach, figured bass, inaudible sounds, metronomes, partimento, and anything else listed here:

People / Topics Covered:

Keith Hill (Instrument maker, Robert’s Brother)

Jaap Schröder (Dutch violinist Hill heard in Michigan)

Fernando Valenti (American Harpsichordist)

Charles Burney (English Music Historian)

Lute Harpsichord: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lautenwerck

Gustav Leonhardt 

John Dryden (the poet Leonhardt Quoted)

The Goethe Haus, Weimar (paint color)

Andreas Bach Book (french text only) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Bach_Buch

Andreas Staier Harpsichordist with whom Hill recorded BWV1080

David Stanwood https://www.stanwoodpiano.com/ (Piano Technician)

The Squiggle on the title page of the Well Tempered Clavier

"Bach's face reconstructed"

"Bach's Seal"

Partimento (Reduction Technique): 

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Randy Rainbow (comedian) 

Madame de Villedieu (authoress), novel of note: "Desordres d'Amour

Follow Evan on Instagram for even more content about Bach: www.instagram.com/WTFBach

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Find a playlist of this episode’s music here:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1xyzZShf0RrAx75nvF1zUb?si=xRgHdqtNRtmogsUfvhlf7Q

Support us:

https://www.patreon.com/wtfbach

https://www.paypal.me/wtfbach

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https://cash.app/$wtfbach

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Suggestions? Want Evan to analyze a specific piece of Bach? Have other questions for Evan about music or anything at all?

Write us:

bach@wtfbach.com

Topics covered: What does it mean to play in the ‘French style?’ What does ‘diminution’ mean?

Pianists mentioned: Zoltán Kocsis, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Pierre-Laurent Aimard,

Harpsichordists (organists) mentioned: Helmut Walcha, Davitt Moroney, Robert Hill, Gustav Leonhardt, Isolde Ahlgrimm,

Follow Evan on Instagram for even more content about Bach: www.instagram.com/WTFBach

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Find a playlist of the music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

Support us:

https://www.patreon.com/wtfbach

https://www.paypal.me/wtfbach

https://venmo.com/wtfbach

https://cash.app/$wtfbach

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Suggestions? Want Evan to analyze a specific piece of Bach? Have other questions for Evan about music or anything at all?

Write us:

bach@wtfbach.com

Topics covered: Bach's cousin taught a 12-year old prince about fugues? 'Fleshing out' our Art of Fugue theme, Canons within fugues, The Art of Fugue orchestrated 

E.H. Gombrich's 'Little History of the World' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_History_of_the_World

The Art of Fugue arranged for Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUnOx6hfBE

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Find a playlist of the music here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Ha250UDFktGqZjpt1hk7L?si=fIqZwtTUQJmzB9SYwskeYA

Follow Evan on Instagram for even more content about Bach: www.instagram.com/WTFBach

Support us:

https://www.patreon.com/wtfbach

https://www.paypal.me/wtfbach

https://venmo.com/wtfbach

https://cash.app/$wtfbach

Suggestions? Want Evan to analyze a specific piece of Bach? Have other questions for Evan about music or anything at all?

Write us:

bach@wtfbach.com

Bach's Table of Ornaments: http://www.pennuto.com/music/jsb_ornm.htm