Technique is what is known in philosophical circles as an "instrumental good", i.e. something good only as a means to a true good, an "intrinsic good". For example, money has no intrinsic worth, but only value as a means to an end. Some philosophers think that the only real intrinsic goods are states of consciousness like happiness, for example. So technique, in the sense of ability to play or compose, is an instrumental good. The intrinsic good it is the means to is the expression, or rather, the state of consciousness aimed at in the ideal listener.
But things are more complicated than this. Technique sometimes is mistaken for an intrinsic good. John Lennon didn't make that mistake, that is, he didn't spend the next six months working on his finger-picking technique. Instead he dumped that technique as being simply unavailable and kept searching for the true expression of "Strawberry Fields". The odd thing, of course, is that it didn't exist yet. Hunting for "Strawberry Fields" was not like hunting for mushrooms in the woods as "Strawberry Fields" was nothing more than a sketchy idea for a possible future song. But that's what composers and song-writers do...
Getting back to the point: things are complicated because you don't know exactly the end, the intrinsic good, you are aiming for. All you have is a bunch of techniques. Which may or may not be appropriate. Finger-picking wasn't an appropriate technique so Lennon dumped it. Sometimes you have this foggy idea of something and you just try out, instinctively, different techniques until something seems to click.
Sometimes you are afraid of losing the inchoate expressive idea if you get too 'technical' with it. I suppose there is another Beatles example I could choose: the Phil Spector production version of Let it Be which buries some songs in a "wall of sound".
Sometimes a limitation in technique actually helps the expression and I'm thinking of a very unusual prelude by Bach. The E flat major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1 is a justly-admired prelude, but very atypical. A lot of Bach preludes are a single-minded exploration of an idea. But this one is like an improvisation set down on paper. It begins with a toccata-like improvisation that stops and then starts again as a loose fugal improvisation that then becomes a double fugue as it weaves in material from the first improvisation. This is anything but a tightly-written fugue as the subjects are vague, unstable. As if to contrast with the looseness of the prelude, the following fugue is tightly-written. Together they are like an illustration of the idea that technique and expression are different things and a triumph of technique is not necessarily a triumph of expression. For the truth of the matter is that the prelude is more expressive, more deeply affecting than the jollier fugue that follows.
Bach was heir to the greatest dynasty in Western art. In this prelude and fugue he lets us hear the process of composition as it sketches out different possibilities and at the same time achieves a kind of expression that would not be possible in a more fulfilled form. Have a listen to see what I mean:
5 comments:
I find it useful to distinguish, in Bach's works, among performative pieces (cantatas, passions, brandenburg, etc) and instructional ones (art of fugue, WTC). We know that much of the material in the WTC was written by Bach to teach his son the keyboard. Likewise, Bach would have found it insane to devote a whole concert to Art of Fugue (as is sometimes done now).
Andras Schiff says he starts his day by playing one piece from the WTC picked at random. He says it's like taking a shower. Bach would have approved. Preludes are warmup exercises. Now they're worshipped as finished pieces but again this was not the intention. If Bach's preludes sometimes feel improvisational, even fugal (!), or borderline incoherent, it's because they are "pre-lude" meaning "foreplay." I am sure that minutes before a recital Mr. Townsend likes to noodle on his guitar, running through some scales and chords in improvisational manner. That's very much what Bach had in mind, I believe.
Now those are some interesting thoughts! Yes, there is a distinction between music for various occasions of public performance, and music for instructional purposes. But the instructional music includes a lot of very tightly-written pieces including tightly-written preludes such as the one in C major Bk 1.
The interesting thing with the E flat major prelude is that Bach has preserved, as it were, an improvisation and it turns out to be expressively interesting.
Don't we all start the day by playing some Bach?
Bach spent decades "touching up" his keyboard exercises to make them perfectly tight and tightly perfect. But, as you rightly pointed out, in some of them the feeling of improvisation remains.
But again I think that to make sense of it all it helps to remember that Bach didn't see himself as an artist but as a scientist. His hero was not a musician but a physicist: Newton. Bach believed that music had universal rules. And just as Newton explained that the same universal law governed the fall of an apple and the orbiting of the earth around the sun, Bach thought that music, too, had its gravitational laws (all, in his views, evidence of God's glory, of course) and that it was his mission in life to find these laws. That's why the Art of Fugue was, to him, his crowing achievement, his Principia Musica, his answer to Newton's Principia Mathematica. Not because it was the best music one could hear but because it collected his universal "cosmological laws" of music. Bach was NOT a relativist!
The worst insult Bach suffered in his life was to be called a "musikant" (a manufacturer of music) by a local pundit. It would be like calling Newton a manufacturer of mathematical equations. Insults don't get lower than that...
crowing --> crowning
Parallels between Bach and Newton were made a number of times by people like Bach's student Agricola and others. Christoph Wolff's recent book on Bach collects a number of these passages. The University of Leipzig was a center of Newtonianism in Germany at the time so Bach may well have picked up the spirit of scientific enquiry. I'm not sure there is any evidence that Newton was for Bach a hero, though. Bach was certainly thought by his successors to have penetrated the deepest secrets of harmony as Newton revealed the deepest secrets of Nature...
Post a Comment